Google tests a cleaner look for Search
Google has begun to test a new Material Design layout for its desktop search results. The company introduced Material Design in 2014 at its annual I/O conference during its Android Lollipop unveil, promising to spread the new grid-based look across Android, Chrome OS and the web. It’s… taken a while to get there, and arguably the most important of Google’s web properties — YouTube and Search – still haven’t made the switch. Last month, Google began testing a fresh look for its video streaming site, and now, we’re beginning to see that familiar grid of floating cards show up in google.com search results.
The change isn’t exactly monumental: Google Search has always returned results in a grid, so the basic layout is functionally identical to the current one. The biggest change is a visual one: the background in the test is a light gray, and individual search results are boxed in white with a small drop shadow to imply elevation.
Another major change is to the informative modules that Google shows for certain terms. Typing “Run The Jewels,” for example, would bring up a list of search results accompanied by a card displaying information on the musicians and upcoming events on the right. In the new layout, this card is shown inline, before the regular search results. Given this is just a limited test, there’s every chance this behavior will change if Google makes the Material Design layout the default.
Small changes elsewhere include new iconography for the magnifying glass in the search box, and switching out the settings cog for the three vertically aligned dots. Both the changes will be familiar to Android users. The google.com homepage has also been modified in line with the new aesthetic.
The test seems to have begun fairly recently, and on a small scale: There have been a few mentions of the new layout on Twitter and Reddit over the past week, and it’s only showing up in one Engadget editor’s search results. The company frequently trials new features and layouts on a small group of its users, seemingly at random. Many of the changes never make their way out of the testing phase. We’ve reached out to Google to ascertain its plans for the new design.
Google’s new iOS app turns Live Photos into GIFs
Cinemagraphs — those artsy hybrids of animated gifs and film stills — used to require a good deal of work to set up and create. That changes today with Google’s latest iOS app Motion Stills, which uses Apple’s Live Photos feature along with Google’s own video stabilization to freeze the background of your photos and create dramatic looping gifs or video snippets.
The Motion Stills app combines a couple pieces of technology Google already featured in Photos, like video stabilization and auto-creating gifs from bursts of photos. According to Google, the new Motion Stills algorithm “uses linear programming to compute a virtual camera path that is optimized to recast videos and bursts as if they were filmed using stabilization equipment, yielding a still background or creating cinematic pans to remove shakiness.” In other words: you’ve got a virtual tripod or steadicam rig built right in.
In addition to keeping your shots steady, the algorithm does a lot of heavy lifting to identify moving objects in the foreground to keep them isolated from movement in the background. And for a handy bonus, it will also pick an optimal loop point to cut off those embarrassing moments when your video ends with you putting your phone back in your pocket.
The app works its magic on your phone, so you won’t need a data connection to create your latest masterpiece, but you will, of course, need a signal to share it to your social network of choice. Motion Stills is available on the App Store.
Google Fiber finally adds AMC to its TV lineup
While most of us are still waiting for Google Fiber to reach our town, many of the people who have its TV service were waiting for something else: AMC. Now, after nearly four years of waiting and an overwhelming number of requests on Google’s forums, they have it on channel 288. While adding the channel post-Mad Men and Breaking Bad feels a little late, AMC does have The Walking Dead and Better Call Saul, to go with newbie series Preacher and Feed the Beast.
Source: Google Fiber (G+), Google Fiber Forum
Marshmallow is now on 10 percent of Android devices
The latest version of Android just hit a big, big milestone. Google’s early June developer stats have revealed that Marshmallow is now on just over 10 percent of Android devices, representing a huge jump from just 2.3 percent in March. Notably, only some of that surge can be credited to people upgrading from Lollipop. While the not-quite-current version’s adoption did go down (to 35.4 percent), the biggest declines in usage were for Jelly Bean and KitKat. In essence: many of those moving to Marshmallow may well have been replacing devices that were 3 or more years old.
The timing isn’t coincidental, as you might have gathered. In the three months since we last looked back, numerous smartphone makers have delivered Marshmallow phones in force. The Galaxy S7 is the big kahuna, but you can also point to phones like the HTC 10, LG G5 and Sony’s newer Xperias as factors. If you bought a brand new device this spring, especially if it was reasonably high-end, it might have been hard to avoid Marshmallow.
To us, the big unknown is how well Marshmallow will fare by the time its successor rolls around in a few months, around Marshmallow’s first anniversary. Lollipop took a year and a half to become the dominant Android flavor. Although Marshmallow isn’t necessarily going to repeat history, its year-one figures should give you a good idea as to whether or not it’s doing as well as its predecessor.
Source: Android Developers
Google Debuts ‘Motion Stills’ App for Creating GIFs and Movies from Live Photos
Google today announced the launch of a new app called Motion Stills, which is designed to create unique GIFs from Live Photo images captured with the iPhone 6s, iPhone 6s Plus, and iPhone SE.
According to Google, the app was built by the Google Research Team and uses the company’s video stabilization technology to freeze the background into a still photo or create cinematic panoramas. Multiple clips can also be combined into a montage.
GIFs created by Motion Stills can be shared via apps like Messages or on social media networks.
We pioneered this technology by stabilizing hundreds of millions of videos and creating GIF animations from photo bursts. Our algorithm uses linear programming to compute a virtual camera path that is optimized to recast videos and bursts as if they were filmed using stabilization equipment, yielding a still background or creating cinematic pans to remove shakiness. […]
Short videos are perfect for creating loops, so we added loop optimization to bring out the best in your captures. Our approach identifies optimal start and end points, and also discards blurry frames. As an added benefit, this fixes “pocket shots” (footage of the phone being put back into the pocket).
There are several other apps designed to create GIFs for Live Photos, so Google’s offering isn’t unique, but it is notable that Google is offering an iOS-only app that works with an iOS-only feature. Google says the information it learns from Motion Stills will perhaps be used to introduce new capabilities into Google Photos in the future.
Aside from making Live Photos viewable on iOS and Mac devices running the latest operating systems and implementing an API for developers to incorporate Live Photos viewing into their apps, Apple has not designed any tools that allow users to manipulate and edit their Live Photos or convert them into videos or GIFs.
Google’s new Motion Stills app is available now and can be downloaded from the App Store for free. [Direct Link]
Tags: Google, Live Photos, Motion Stills
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The UK gets its first driverless car insurer
As cars have gained more assistive driving features, questions have been raised over how driverless vehicles will be insured. If someone has an accident while being piloted by an autonomous car, is the driver or the car itself to blame?
While governments, car makers and search giants attempt to figure that out, specialist UK insurer Adrian Flux has today launched what is believed to be one of the world’s first dedicated driverless vehicle policies. It’s done so to allow drivers to place more faith in assistive controls and force policymakers to implement changes around how and when driverless cars could be held liable.
The insurance company’s policy is basically a standard agreement with four additional areas of coverage for autonomous vehicles. The first covers owners if they are involved in an incident that is the result of an update or security patch not being applied with 24 hours of it becoming available, while another will indemnify a policyholder if those systems then fail altogether. Should a car fail to relinquish control in the event of a manual override or the car gets hacked, Adrian Flux says it will cover that too.
Right now, the policy is designed for people who already utilize driverless features in their existing car, things like automatic braking or assistive lane changing. The company also notes that it would also cover drivers utilising Autopilot in the Tesla Model 3.
Last month, the UK government announced the new Modern Transport Bill during the Queen’s Speech. Ministers said that while a Code of Practice already exists for the public testing of autonomous cars, new laws must be passed to help integrate driverless cars on public roads. This includes figuring out how they are insured and will cover passing liability from the driver to the car itself (and possibly the manufacturer).
US regulators already consider Google’s self-driving car to be its own driver, even if it has a human passenger. This small win could help the search giant, and many other car companies, push through red tape that is currently slowing down the roll out of autonomous vehicles. Volvo is hopeful: it says that by 2020, “no one should be killed or seriously injured in a new Volvo car.”
Adrian Flux accepts that as the UK’s autonomous landscape shifts, it will have to amend its policies to keep pace. But it’s not the only company working in this space. Global insurer AXA has already partnered with two of the UK government’s three self-driving car projects to understand the unique challenges faced by driverless cars and their owners and adapt existing models to fit them.
While we’ll likely see cheaper premiums for people who drive autonomous cars, there are still a number of boxes left to tick. Adrian Flux insists its policy will “help drivers use the autonomous technology in their cars with more peace of mind and protection,” but the extra publicity won’t hurt either.
Via: Computer Weekly
Source: Adrian Flux
Tech firms say FBI wants browsing history without warrant
Tech companies and privacy advocates are warning against new legislation that would give the FBI the ability to access “electronic communication transactional records” (ECTRs) without a warrant in spy and terrorism cases. ECTRs include high-level information on what sites a person visited, the time spent on those sites, email metadata, location information and IP addresses. To gain access to this data, a special agent in charge of a bureau field office need only write a “national security letter” (NSL) that doesn’t require a judge’s approval.
It’s worth noting that ECTRs don’t amount to a full browsing history. If a suspected terrorist were reading this article, the FBI would only see they read “engadget.com” and how long for, rather than the specific page links. Additionally, the ECTRs won’t include the content of emails, search queries, or form content, but will feature metadata, so the FBI would know who someone is messaging and when.
Nonetheless, this data is extremely important to the bureau. FBI Director James B. Comey told the Senate Intelligence Committee in February that the agency’s inability to make requests affects its work in “a very, very big and practical way.” He also said that the new legislation essentially fixes “a typo” in the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) that has led tech firms to refuse to provide the bureau with ECTRs. The proposals are being considered this week by the Senate Judiciary Committee as an amendment to the ECPA.
Tech companies and privacy advocates are not happy with the proposed changes. The “ECTR coalition,” which includes tech giants like Facebook, Foursquare, Google and Yahoo and non-profits like the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, has signed an open letter warning against the legislation. In it, they argue that the expansion of the NSL powers would reveal “incredibly intimate” details of an individual’s life. “This information could reveal details about a person’s political affiliation, medical conditions, religion, substance abuse history, sexual orientation and … even his or her movements throughout the day.”
The letter also highlights the FBI’s past use (and abuse) of NSLs. It states that the FBI issued over 300,000 letters over the past decade, and also claims that the “vast majority” included gag orders that stopped companies disclosing the requests. It then points to a 2007 audit by the Office of the Inspector General (IG) that found “the FBI illegally used NSLs to collect information that was not permitted by the NSL statutes.”
The IG also found the bureau had stored that data indefinitely, and it was used in cases not relevant to an FBI investigation. Finally, NSLs were used to collect “tens of thousands” of records at once, rather than being carefully targeted. The letter ends urging the senate to “oppose efforts to include such language in the ECPA reform bill.”
Source: ACLU
Google Contacts lists verified Maps info for businesses
Google has updated its Contacts web app to become much more useful, especially to people visiting new places. So long as you save a business’ official phone number that matches its info on Google Maps, its Contacts card will automatically show its Maps-verified name, official address, website URL and operational hours. 9to5google spotted the new feature and also noted that the card comes with a shortcut that links to the business’ Maps listing, as well.
Google launched the preview version of the redesigned Contacts web application over a year ago to pool “together all… the people you talk to most in Gmail.” It has remained largely the same ever since. According to 9to5google, all users will get Maps integration within the next three days. We don’t have access to it yet, but the publication has posted this example:
[Image credit: 9to5google]
Source: 9to5google
Google’s Deepmind AI will play Go against the world number one
After it beat Korean grandmaster Lee Sedol by four games to one earlier this year, Google’s AlphaGo has become the Go player to beat. Even while the series was still being played, 18-year-old Chinese Go champion Ke Jie remarked that he could beat Google’s Deepmind computer. Now he has his chance. At the 37th World Amateur Go Championship in Chinese city of Wuxi this weekend, a spokesman for the Chinese Go Association revealed that representatives have been in contact with the team behind AlphaGo and will set up a match before the end of the year.
It’s an interesting turn of events, particularly after Ke once said he didn’t want to play Google’s Deepmind computer because it would learn his playing style. “I don’t want to play against AlphaGo because I can tell from its performance that it is weaker than me,” he told Chinese media. “I don’t want it to copy my patterns and learn from me.”
Those emotions changed when 33-year-old 9th dan professional Lee Sedol was finally defeated by AlphaGo. The win is considered a huge milestone for artificial intelligence given the complexity of the Chinese board game.
Although Ke is also a 9th dan player and currently the world’s number one (beating Sedol on his way to a championship win earlier this year), the Korean is considered the Roger Federer of Go and was chosen for the Deepmind showdown based on his experience. Ke now has the chance to prove he’s not all talk and cement his reputation as the game’s best player.
Source: GB Times
Huawei manager says it’s making another Nexus device
It’s now been seven months since Huawei began selling its first (very well made) Nexus smartphone and consumers are already looking at what Google has planned for its 2016 refresh. The search giant typically keeps its manufacturing partners close to its chest, so it’s fallen on the Chinese company to start teasing a future device on its behalf. In an interview with Gear Burn, Charlene Munilall, General Manager of its South African consumer business group, has suggested that Huawei is building another Nexus device, telling the gadget site “we’re doing the Nexus again this year, by the way.”
Huawei was one of two Nexus smartphone partners last year, with LG supplying the Nexus 5X. Google has said it will do the same thing this time around to cater for fans who like the option of a core Nexus handset or something more high end. Huawei could be placed to fill one of those spots, but early rumors have suggested that HTC is on board to make both Nexus smartphones, which are reported to be codenamed Marlin and Sailfish.
If that is the case, there is also the possibility that we’ll see a Huawei-made tablet. Google may want to follow up the release of the Pixel C — the first tablet that it designed completely in-house — with another Surface-like slate, and Huawei could be the one to provide it. That is if Huawei’s regional executive isn’t speaking out of turn, of course. We’re still a few months away from a potential Google event but we’ve reached out to the companies involved to clarify the manager’s statement.
Via: Pocket Lint
Source: Gear Burn
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