AdBlock and AdBlock Plus are available for Microsoft Edge
Back in March, Microsoft started testing a version of its new Edge browser on Windows 10 with support for extensions. Now, one of the most-requested features is covered with the introduction of AdBlock and AdBlock Plus extensions for Edge. The feature list appears to be mostly intact from its Chrome and Firefox iterations, with the ability to block varying levels of ads or whitelist certain sites (like… Engadget.com for example).
AdBlock for Edge https://t.co/9VC1sGE3bk Adblock Plus for Edge https://t.co/MRSvQZoxlW
— WalkingCat (@h0x0d) May 6, 2016
Not everyone uses extensions for their browsing experience, but for those of us who rely on them every day, it’s impossible to consider switching to a browser without a healthy library of optional add-ons. You’ll need to be in the preview program to test out the extension-enabled browser, and if you are, just check the video below to find out how to install them.
Via: Walking Cat (Twitter)
Source: AdBlock (Windows Store), AdBlock Plus (Windows Store)
ICYMI: VR manipulation and drone delivery for 3D tissue
Today on In Case You Missed It: Virtual reality researchers found a way to trick the brain into believing objects exist in the real world that only exist in the virtual one, by warping perception in a way you have to watch the video to believe.
Ehang, the personal drone we all drooled over at CES in January, announced a partnership with a 3D-printed tissue company that may be more aspirational than real, but would be incredible if it really happens. And Moog, the synthesizer company, put out an iPad app that recreates the real thing for $30 instead of the thousands the real hardware would cost you.
Guinness World Records just recorded something every medical nerd would appreciate. It’s 4,000 people on a beach, forming the world’s largest human DNA helix. As always, please share any great tech or science videos you find by using the #ICYMI hashtag on Twitter for @mskerryd.
Microsoft’s Windows Store for Business now sells apps in bulk
Microsoft has made it easier for IT administrators to buy apps for all the Windows 10 devices their companies own. Windows Store for Business, which gives these admins a way to distribute applications company-wide, now sells apps in bulk. Companies can easily snap up multiple copies of an app using a credit card, so long as the developer has enabled Organizational licensing for their creation. Bulk selling is available for all developers in the 35 countries where Windows Store for Business is available. It’s also only the first in the list of new features Microsoft plans to launch for the store. Some of its future updates will introduce invoicing, volume discounts and organizational in-app purchases.
Source: Windows Blog
Windows phones will know where your fingers are before they touch
Windows phones could soon learn a new trick from their Kinect cousins: the ability to see. Microsoft Research released a new video late last month that demonstrates the prototype “pre-touch sensing” system. It uses a self-capacitive touchscreen to recognize both the user’s grip around the outer edge of the phone and their hovering fingers immediately above it. With that sensor data, the phone understands how you’re holding it and can anticipate interactions based on its orientation, whether it’s being held in one hand or two, the number of fingers involved and how far they are from the screen.
There’s no word on when or if Microsoft will actually bring this technology to market. Microsoft’s smartphone line looks to be on its last legs, marking a decade-long decline for the company.
Source: The Next Web
Russian provider casts doubt on email hacking claims
Yesterday, Reuters reported that tens of millions of email addresses and account passwords were stolen in an apparent data breach — but as is often the case, there’s more to this story than meets the eye. According to Motherboard, which spoke with both Hold Security (the company that received the data in question) and security expert Troy Hunt, it’s not at all clear that the email providers were hacked. It’s even possible this data isn’t legitimate.
For starters, Motherboard received a statement from Russian email provider Mail.ru, which accounted for 57 million accounts in the data release. The provider claims that after doing a sample check of the data, none of the email and password combinations work. This casts plenty of doubt on the legitimacy of the entire data set.
Furthermore, Alex Holden (CEO and founder of Hold Security) admitted that the data appeared to come from “a collection of different breaches.” Between this and the doubt that Mail.ru has cast on the legitimacy of the data, it’s entirely possible that the data in this “hack” is either quite old or didn’t come from the email providers directly — or both. Troy Hunt of “Have I Been Pwned” (a site that maintains a repository of data breeches) said to Motherboard: “You know how much effort we go to in trying to figure out if breaches are legit or not, it feels like that hasn’t happened here.”
As always, it’s good to practice good password hygiene and change them up frequently (and seriously, two-factor authentication!), but it’s also worth maintaining some perspective — if a company has large as Microsoft, Google or Yahoo was hit with a data breach affecting tens of millions of its customers, it would likely have made that knowledge publicly available. Absent any firm confirmation from those companies — as well as Mail.ru’s statement — it seems most users should be safe at the moment.
Source: Motherboard
Windows 10 upgrades will cost $119 after July 29
If you’ve been dragging your heels on upgrading to Windows 10, now is the time to take action. Free upgrades to the new OS from previous versions of Windows will end on July 29, Microsoft reiterated today. The company initially said the offer would only last one year, and indeed that date marks Windows 10’s first anniversary. After July 29, you’ll have to shell out $119 to upgrade to Windows 10 Home (or to put it on a new device).
The free upgrade offer was a bold gambit for Microsoft — previously, nothing could get in the way of that tasty OS revenue. But, after Windows 8 failed to entice developers and consumers, the company needed to do something drastic. And it seems to have paid off: Microsoft says Windows 10 is now running on 300 million devices around the world (that’s up from 200 million in January). Among other notable stats, Cortana has answered more than 6 billion questions so far, and people have spent over 63 billion minutes in the Edge browser just in March.
I don’t blame you for being hesitant about upgrading. It’s generally paid off well to wait for Microsoft to squash out bugs and optimize its operating systems. But I found Windows 10 to be pretty solid at launch, and it’s only gotten better over the past year.
As I argued prior to Windows 10’s launch, the upgrade offer wasn’t just a smart way to get people running the latest OS, it was also a way to build up the overall Windows 10 ecosystem for developers. While there aren’t too many killer native apps for the platform yet, it’s certainly much more vibrant than what we saw around Windows 8.
Below, watch Microsoft’s Bryan Roper (who we’ve affectionately named Fedora Eminem) explain why you should upgrade:
Source: Microsoft
Microsoft retreats back to the low-end with the Lumia 650
Since Microsoft took control of Nokia’s Lumia smartphone brand, it hasn’t exactly been cranking out the most compelling of hardware. The recent(ish) Lumia 950 and 950 XL are the closest it’s come to new flagships, but today the company’s retreated back into its comfort zone with the low-end Lumia 650. The new device’s boxy frame is wrapped in an anodized aluminum border and measures only 6.9mm (0.27 inch) thick, but there’s little to get excited about under the hood.
Up front you’ll find a 5-inch, 720p OLED display with Gorilla Glass protection, and beating away inside the 4G-ready handset is a quad-core 1.3GHz Snapdragon 212 processor. Other key specs include 16GB of internal storage (expandable up to 200GB with the right microSD card), NFC support, a 2,000mAh battery, an 8-megapixel main camera and 5MP front-facer with wide-angle lens.
The device runs Windows 10 Mobile out of the box — though it’s not powerful enough to support the Continuum portable desktop feature — and comes in single- and dual-SIM variants with your choice of black or white get-up. The Lumia 650 is launching in select European countries this week (February 18th) with a recommended price of $199/circa £150, and an omission of any plans for other regions doesn’t bode well for wider availability, at least in the near future.
It’s no great secret that Lumia sales have been falling off a cliff for over a year now, and Microsoft hasn’t managed to drum up a great deal of interest in the latest iteration of its mobile OS. Rumor has it the Lumia 650 will be Microsoft’s last handset bearing the Lumia brand name, and that the company will be looking at lessons learned from its Surface devices to turn around its mobile slump.
Source: Microsoft
Game algorithm could help win elections
There’s a particular strain of game theory, Colonel Blotto, that many believe could predict the outcomes of everything from elections to sports matches. It asks two sides to distribute soldiers over a battlefield, and hands wins to whoever has the most soldiers in a given area. However, it has one glaring problem: there hasn’t been a way to get a firm solution. Well, computer scientists have finally found that last piece of the puzzle. They’ve developed an algorithm that can solve the Colonel Blotto game, making it useful as a strategic tool whenever there’s a one-on-one situation.
The trick was to scale things back. Rather than try to account for every possible strategy, the code limits itself to “representative” strategies that are likely to cover the bases. While this might not be best for very specific conditions (and won’t work at all for three or more sides), it’s genuinely effective at handling general situations.
If adapted for real life, the algorithm could be helpful across the board. A political candidate could have a better sense of how much campaigning they need in given areas, and a company could decide whether or not it’s devoting enough attention to key parts of its product. This isn’t going to produce surefire predictions, of course — you need to know what criteria to consider in the first place, and it can’t account for the wildcard factors that might creep up. All the same, it could provide some direction when human analysis and educated guesses aren’t enough.
Source: EurekAlert
Skype has Valentine’s Day video cards for you to send your loved one
Animated emoji with music composed by Paul McCartney is’t the only way Skype wants you to connect for Valentine’s Day this year. Today, the company is announcing a new series of video message Valentine’s Day cards that you can send to anyone you want. Just as it did over the holiday season last year, these video message cards let you record a quick message and add a variety of themed video filters over the top. While you’ll make the recording in Skype itself, you can send these any way you want. You can save the video to your phone and share with any of the services you have installed as well as just send it as a standard Skype message.
Microsoft said it was surprised at how popular the cards it made for Christmas were, so it decided to tackle the next big holiday on the calendar. If Valentine’s day cards do as well as the holiday season cards did, wouldn’t surprise us to see more themed cards roll out as the year goes on. You can go and create your own card and share it starting today using Skype on your mobile or on your computer.
Source: Skype
Microsoft’s wacky AI app matches you with a dog breed
Artificial intelligence (AI) is getting pretty good at identifying people, but before it starts looking for Sarah Connor, Microsoft’s Garage team is having fun with it. Last time, the group released an app that (poorly) guessed your age, and the latest app, Fetch, determines what dog breed you’d be based on your photo. It sometimes makes canny matches, but on the other hand, three different pictures of the same person (below) yielded three different breeds of dog — an Afghan hound, a Cairn terrier and a Beagle, so it’s lacking in consistency.
On the other hand, the app is excellent at identifying actual dogs. It correctly identified our family Bull Terrier “Harpo,” even though he was wearing a cone of shame. It also correctly identified a part German Shepherd as such. “We use one of the hottest machine learning techniques available, called deep neural networks,” said Microsoft Research director Mitch Goldberg. “You don’t train it on a particular dog breed. You give it numerous images, and it, in the training process, determines what’s unique in each of the dogs.”
Inputting other animals, including humans, into the app was a hoot, of course. The app related our friend’s pet duck to a Bull Terrier as well, no doubt because of its similar “beak.” Our scraggly cat, meanwhile, was a Malamute that’s “problematic with other dogs,” which is true because it’s, well, a cat. A few of us at Engadget took a spin and found that the dog breeds did line up with our personalities, though we’re suspicious that like horoscopes, it may have been telling us what we want to hear. To see all the results, check the gallery below.
Via: Gizmodo
Source: Microsoft
AIVAnet 