‘Hamilton’ creator Miranda joins the fight against ticket bots

Hate that ticket bots robbed you of a chance to see that big concert or musical? So does Lin-Manuel Miranda. The Hamilton author is teaming up with Senator Charles Schumer to promote a proposed federal bill, the Better Online Ticket Sales Act (BOTS Act, geddit?), that would fine bot users $16,000 for every ticket they sell. That’s far harsher than in Schumer’s own New York state, where a recently passed law tops out at a $1,000 total fine and no more than a year in prison. Miranda is coming aboard as proof that these bots can do real damage — scalpers made roughly $15.5 million from Hamilton alone, and jacked prices from $189 to as much as $2,000. It’d also start a task force that would detect these bootleggers.

As the star explained at a press conference, a bill like this is likely necessary. There’s “no disincentive” for bot owners right now, and it’s “not fair” to shut out the majority of people who can’t afford to pay outrageous rates to see a show. That’s especially true for a show like Hamilton, he says, since the bots are excluding the common Americans that the musical is trying to reach.

The celebrity move isn’t exactly subtle, but it could be important. While Schumer’s bill is bipartisan, he’s introducing it in September — right at the height of the presidential election frenzy. Miranda might just make the bill stand out amidst the noise and give it a better chance of becoming law.

Via: The Verge

Source: Charles Schumer

Apple Stores Offering Exclusive Jaybird Freedom Earbuds in Rose Gold and Space Gray

Starting this week, Logitech-owned Jaybird’s Freedom Wireless Bluetooth Headphones are available for purchase in two new exclusive colors from the Apple Online Store and Apple retail locations.

Designed to match Apple’s line of iPhones, iPads, and Apple Watches, the two exclusive colors include a Space Gray and Rose Gold. The Space Gray Freedom earbuds feature Space Gray highlights on the remote and the earbuds themselves with a black cord and accents, while the Rose Gold earbuds feature a Rose Gold remote and earpieces with a white cord and accents.

Launched earlier this year, the Jaybird Freedom Wireless Bluetooth Headphones have previously been available directly from Jaybird and from third-party retailers in Carbon (black/gray), Gold (gold/white), Blaze (red/silver), and Ocean (blue/silver). The standard colors are not available from Apple Stores.

Jaybird has been designing Bluetooth earbuds since 2007 and the Freedom Wireless Bluetooth Headphones represent the culmination of years of design refinements. The earbuds are the smallest Jaybird has produced yet, thanks to a clever decision to move many of the audio components from the earbuds themselves to the remote control.

Jaybird’s earbuds are wireless and connect to devices over Bluetooth, so they’re able to work with iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches, Macs, and more. They’ll be compatible with the upcoming iPhone 7, which rumors suggest will not have a headphone jack. We went hands-on with the Jaybird earbuds earlier this year and while we loved the comfort, the small size, and the battery life, the large remote was a little difficult to deal with.

The Rose Gold and the Space Gray Jaybird Freedom Wireless Bluetooth Headphones, priced at $199.95, are available starting today from the Apple Online Store and many Apple retail stores.

Tags: Apple retail, Jaybird
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Huawei P9 Plus video review

What you need to know about Huawei’s true 2016 flagship.

You’ve read our Huawei P9 review, but it turns out the P9 isn’t the top tier device for Huawei in 2016. There’s a bigger, badder P9 Plus available in parts of Europe and Asia, with a 5.5-inch screen, a heftier 3,400mAh battery, 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. But there’s more to the P9 Plus than mere specs, as we’ll explore in our video review.

Check out the video below to find out why the Huawei P9 Plus isn’t just a good phone by the standards of the Chinese manufacturer — it’s actually a great handset all-round.

Report reveals identity of NSA and PRISM surveillance target

It’s been over three years since former NSA contractor Edward Snowden released a trove of documents detailing the extent to which the American government was able to spy on its citizens. A big part of those revelations was PRISM, a system that allowed the government to expediently request and collect data from a variety of huge internet companies including Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft and more. Today, a new report from The Intercept contains details on the first person to be identified as a target of PRISM.

Tony Fullman of New Zealand was targeted in 2012 by the NSA in cooperation with the New Zealand Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB). The NSA was able to intercept his Facebook chats and Gmail messages and passed them along to the GCSB, which itself did not have the authority to monitor Fullman’s communications. Fullman was apparently targeted because New Zealand believed that he was planning an act of terrorism, but it turns out that intelligence was incorrect. That didn’t stop the New Zealand government from raiding his home and revoking his passport, however.

It appears that Fullman was on the country’s radar because of his involvement in a “thumbs up for democracy” campaign that was opposed to the authoritarian ruler of Fiji Frank Bainimarama. Between May and August 2012, the NSA kept tabs on Fullman’s communications with other Fiji pro-democracy activists. Fullman himself was born in Fiji before emigrating to New Zealand and eventually becoming a naturalized citizen. But he had spent a few years in Fiji again starting in 2009 before eventually moving to Australia in 2012.

A visit back to New Zealand in July 2012 appears to have kicked off the NSA and New Zealand’s surveillance of Fullman. While in New Zealand, he met with a number of members of the Fiji Movement for Freedom and Democracy, a meeting that caught the eye of the New Zealand government. The country tapped some phones and heard a conversation in which it believed that it heard of a plot to violently overthrow Fiji’s ruler Frank Bainimarama.

When he returned to Australia later that month, Fullman’s house was raided and his passport revoked. He took on legal counsel to fight the charges of planning a violent action to overthrow a government. And from July through August, his communications were monitored via PRISM; the NSA also went back and retrieved some of his communications from May of 2012.

However, the FBI’s surveillance revealed nothing, and neither Fullman nor any of the Fiji campaigners ever faced charges. But The Intercept spoke with Fullman and learned that he still gets pulled out of airport security lines frequently and he’s had trouble finding employment since news reports often link him to the supposed assassination plot. He was never notified by the government that his private communication was monitored by New Zealand with the help of the NSA, a move which might have been illegal.

“To be betrayed by your own country, it’s really hard,” Fullman told The Intercept. “It puts a sour taste in your mouth.” Fullman continues to live in Australia and doubts he’ll return to New Zealand after the treatment he went through. For more on his saga, the full report from The Intercept is well worth a read.

Source: The Intercept

Apple Seeds Sixth Beta of macOS Sierra to Developers

Apple today released the sixth beta of macOS Sierra, the newest operating system designed for the Mac, to developers. macOS Sierra beta 6 comes one week after the release of the fourth beta and two months after the software was first unveiled at Apple’s 2016 Worldwide Developers Conference.

Developers can download today’s beta update through the Apple Developer Center. It should also be available over-the-air shortly using the Software Update mechanism in the Mac App Store.

macOS Sierra is a major update that brings Siri to the Mac for the first time, allowing users to conduct voice searches to quickly find files, look up information, and more. New Continuity features offer an “Auto Unlock” option for unlocking a Mac with an Apple Watch and a “Universal Clipboard” for copying text on one Apple device and pasting it on another.

Deeper iCloud integration allows files stored on the desktop or the Documents folder of a Mac to be accessed on all of a user’s devices, and Photos features deep learning algorithms for improved facial, object, and scene recognition. There’s also a Memories feature for displaying photo collections, and Messages has rich links, bigger emoji, and “Tapback” response options.

Apple Pay is coming to the web in macOS Sierra, with payments authenticated through an iPhone or Apple Watch, and new features like multiple tabs, Picture in Picture multitasking, optimized storage, and revamped emoji are also available.

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macOS Sierra is currently available to developers and public beta testers, and it will see a wider public release this fall. For full details on all of the new features included in macOS Sierra, make sure to check out our macOS Sierra roundup.

Related Roundup: macOS Sierra
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Postage stamp-sized device can disinfect water in minutes

In many parts of the world, people have to boil water or leave it for long periods under the sun to make sure it’s clean enough to drink. Problem is, the former consumes fuel they can use for cooking or heating, while the latter takes too much time. A tiny device that’s developed by Stanford University and SLAC National Laboratory could change that. While it’s only half the size of a postage stamp, it can harness the the power of the sun to kill 99.99 percent of germs in as fast as 20 minutes. You simply have to drop it into the container of water you want to cleanse and leave it outside for a bit.

The device, which looks like a tiny rectangle of black glass, can cleanse water faster because it taps into the visible part of the solar spectrum that contains 50 percent of the sun’s energy. When you leave bottles out in the sun, you’re depending on UV rays that only contain four percent of the sun’s energy to annihilate germs. In the team’s tests, it managed to destroy most of the germs in 25mL of water with a bacterial concentration of 1,000,000 per mL within 20 minutes. That’s under a light source that only had visible light without UV, which means the process could be even faster under actual sunlight.

Stanford’s creation has a layer of molybdenum disulfide, commonly used as a dry industrial lubricant, that’s a few atoms thick. When that layer is hit by sunlight, many of its electrons fly out. Both those electrons and the holes they leave behind make chemical reactions possible. It also has a layer of copper that acts as a catalyst to trigger the reaction needed to produce hydrogen peroxide — the disinfectant that does the actual work.

The researchers warn that while it could make lives easier, it’s not capable of removing chemical pollutants. They also have to conduct more tests, because thus far, it’s only been proven to kill three types of bacteria. To ensure people can actually use it in real life situations, the scientists still need to prove that it can clean overly contaminated water with a bigger variation of microorganisms.

Source: SLAC

Audi cars will start talking to city traffic systems this fall

If you’ve ever been stuck at a red light that seems to last an eternity, you’ll be happy to know that Audi announced that it’s going to start work with municipalities to tell its cars when a light is about to turn green. The automaker says this is the first step in a Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I) partnership with cities that will be launching this fall.

The Audis won’t be talking to the traffic lights directly, instead the vehicles will use their built-in LTE connection to get information from a participating city’s central traffic control system. Using that data and GPS, the cars will be able to show on the dashboard when an upcoming signal will turn green.

The system does not use the upcoming DSRC V2V (vehicle to vehicle)/ V2I (Vehicle to Infrastructure) standard. Instead it uses partner Traffic Technology Services to establish a data relationship with the municipalities. As a vehicle enters a “zone” it requests a one-time unique token to establish communication with the infrastructure to request the stop light phase.

As for DSRC, Audi product and technology communications senior specialist, Justin Goduto said it’s not quite ready for widespread deployment yet. Audi wants to move forward now. “For the time being using this methodology gives us true integration to the infrastructure,” Goduto said.

The technology needed to get all that green light information is available in 2017 Audi Q7, A4 and A4 Allroad vehicles built after June 1, 2016. Drivers will also need to subscribe to Audi Connect Prime. As for the cities, the automaker isn’t ready to announce where the V2I infrastructure will roll out first. But it hopes the system will be working in five to seven metropolitan areas by the end of the year.

How a robot wrote for Engadget

John McCarthy, the late computer scientist who first coined the term Artificial Intelligence, famously said “as soon as it works, no one calls it AI any more.” What was once cutting-edge AI is now considered standard behavior for computers. As I write this article, my computer is continuously performing millions of tasks, caching files, managing RAM and balancing CPU loads. The algorithms behind many of these operations would have been considered “AI” years ago. Now it’s just software.

Last year, I looked into how well neural networks — programs that behave like a scaled-down version of your brain’s neurons — can write. My plan was to create a bot that could write articles for Engadget. As I discovered, we’re not yet at the point where such applications can think and write like humans, but they can do a reasonable job of writing readable sentences. As I noted at the time, some companies are using less “advanced” methods to produce content automatically. One such company is Automated Insights, whose tools are used by a number of companies to auto-generate reports, and also by the Associated Press to write articles about sports and finance.

I’ve been using one of Automated Insights products, Wordsmith, trying again to make a computer write like Engadget. It’s easy to argue that Wordsmith isn’t “AI.” It doesn’t use machine learning and neural networks, but it does work. And thanks to that fact, I’ve been much more successful in my mission to automate the art of the tech blog.

Wordsmith

At its core Wordsmith is a bit like Mail Merge: It all starts with data. That means you’re limited to writing about quantitative, number-driven topics. I plugged in a simple chart containing some key data on smartphones released this year, with the view to having the app write an article about the latest big tech announcement, Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7. I wanted to create a Blogbot that could compare its specs to the rest of the smartphone market.

While training the neural network to write, I had to feed it around a million words published on Engadget. Wordsmith doesn’t require this sort of input, but it can’t create articles from nothing. Instead, you write a basic template article, and then start adding variables. So I started with a simple opener:

Company​ has just ​announced​ the ​Product, its latest ​flagship​. How does the new model ​stack up against its rivals? It’s time to ​check the spec sheets​.

They were the perfect first words for Blogbot: It would be difficult to write a more tech-bloggy paragraph. Rather than being specific with company and product names, I instead left them blank, and linked the data from my spreadsheet. It’s these data points that allow you to create a template that can be used again.

With the basic data linked, it was time to build in some variation. The simplest way to do this is using the included synonym tool to add more words and phrases that can be swapped in at random. Replacing certain sections of an article won’t create the level of variety needed for publication, though. You can also highlight entire paragraphs and play around with the ordering and phrasing. After a little tweaking, I ended up with this:

Wordsmith would now create a paragraph from one of three basic structures, each of which have at least four phrases that will be picked from a further list of synonyms. With a small amount of work, the system was able to pick from around 50,000 different options.

I applied the same principles to the rest of the template, and was left with a surprisingly functional, if a little dull, article. Here’s a randomized output:

Now that the ​dust has settled​ on ​Samsung​’s ​Galaxy Note 7​ ​announcement​, how does it ​fare against its rivals​? ​​It’s time to run the numbers.

Many will be interested in the Galaxy Note 7 just because of its “S Pen” stylus, but that’s not where the story ends. Elsewhere, the Galaxy Note 7 has a Snapdragon 820 processor paired with 4GB of RAM, which is just what you’d expect from a premium device in 2016. Its 5.7-inch display is larger than the rest of the pack while its 1440 x 2560 resolution is what you’d expect from a flagship. The Galaxy Note 7 has 64GB of internal storage and an expandable microSD slot. The rear-facing camera is a 12-megapixel unit, which is lower resolution than most sensors in this price range, but Samsung claims it takes great pictures anyway thanks to its larger pixels and fast autofocus.

Rest assured we’ll have a full review of the Galaxy Note 7 before long, but here’s a table of numbers to tide you over for now:

By the time I got to this point, I’d added complexities to the template. The middle paragraph not only pulls all of its data automatically from a spreadsheet, but it also makes comparative statements. For screen size, anything two percent away from the average will get one of several phrases that basically say if it’s “larger” or “smaller” than other phones. If Samsung cheaped out on a 1080p display, Wordsmith would highlight that using slightly negative phrasing. In the example above, it’s also pulled out that the camera sensor is a lower resolution than competing handsets, and given Samsung’s explanation for that.

All of the “training” I gave Blogbot amounts to simple conditional “If-then” programming, but you can go surprisingly deep with those basic principles. It wasn’t really necessary for this project, but instead of randomizing the paragraphs, you could make the structure selection conditional too. This proves useful in financial articles: If a company has fallen short of expectations, a writer will pull out that fact first and explain why. Here’s an example, published by the Associated Press.

Gotcha

Synonyms inside synonyms inside synonyms.

After almost five years writing for tech publications, I am both very adept and very tired of writing product posts. When I started out, I quickly trained my brain to pull together a non-descript opener, some paragraphs with facts and figures, and a functional closing sentence with something like a release date and a price. With that knowledge, it was very simple to put together Blogbot, which now writes at an acceptable standard. To mark the start of AI Week, I actually published the excerpt above under the not-particularly-good pseudonym Toby Golby (read it backwards without the “y”s) together with the chart containing the data that helped Worsmith write. It’s not a good article, but it’s definitely an article. And aside from the headline and formatting, it’s all Wordsmith.

Here’s the problem, though: Those sort of articles aren’t what I, or any writer at any publication, hope to write. Yes, we still want to give readers the facts and figures that they care about, but we also want to provide context on why they matter, and the bigger picture in general. Just as I’d mastered the art of the basic product post, my editors had pointed out that it wasn’t good enough. And it never has been. Back when it was a simple tech blog, Engadget alumni like Ryan Block, Joshua Topolsky and Tim Stevens always strived to deliver analysis and opinion with the news. Today, the same is true: If you’re reading about a new phone, you’ll also get background on where the company’s at right now, the phone’s position in the market, and whether this is what it needs to succeed.

With more data Wordsmith could be a better blogger, but that would require more maintenance.

In its current state, Blogbot can’t do that. To achieve context I’d need to write out small facts about each company we cover, perhaps mark them as positive or negative, and even then it would be tough to guarantee that the news of the day doesn’t negate the content of those canned phrases. So yes, with more data, there’s a chance it could be a better blogger, but the amount of maintenance it requires would make the exercise pointless.

Automated Insights is a long way off from being able to actually automate the kind of insight I’d need to be able to set Blogbot off to write for Engadget its own. Right now, though, it’s working on numerous feature improvements that will reduce the amount of time it takes to get a workable template up and running. The first is a simple tool that’ll automatically suggest synonyms for words. Another feature already heavily into development will use machine learning to scan sentences and rearrange them to increase variance. Training a computer to grasp the meaning of a sentence and then rearrange the words without breaking it is no mean feat.

This imposing blank page is the first thing you see when starting a template.

There are even loftier long-term goals. Perhaps the most ambitious also involves machine learning reading the data and automatically generating templates. “The synonym stuff is coming soon, the other stuff is harder,” James Kotecki, Head of Communications at Automated Insights, told me.

Building these new AI elements into Wordsmith comes with “the classic computer science problems you’d expect,” Kotecki continued. Making a computer understand that numbers increasing in data charts isn’t always positive — that figure could represent debt — is tough. “It’s going to be a multiyear thing, as all machine learning things are. Just as we haven’t perfected automatic driving or computer vision or even natural language processing, it’ll take some time for this field of computer science to keep developing.”

What next?

Like most writers, I’d rather be interviewing people (and messing around with AI) than hammering out news articles. But while Engadget has expanded beyond the confines of the “tech blog,” gadget news is still a big part of our DNA. I want to continue to push Wordsmith, and other automated writing tools, to see if such applications can become useful enough to be a permanent member of the news team.

What’s super interesting about Wordsmith, versus the pure machine learning route, is it’s very much working now. It’s capable of reading a financial statement and writing an article of it, or generating a thousand property and car advertisements almost instantly. But Wordsmith, as it is, isn’t quite ready for my usecase. Sure, I published an article it wrote, and nothing exploded, but having it handle the myriad topics we cover every day would be impossible. As more features are added, though, it’ll only become more viable.

Wordsmith, as it is, isn’t quite ready for my usecase

Adding in the more “modern” AI elements that make use of machine learning piece by piece appears to be working well in other fields. While Google is going all out on a building a self-driving car, Tesla is slowly rolling out the pieces to customers when they’re ready, and other manufacturers like Nissan are doing the same thing.

Really the missing piece of the puzzle for me right now is recognition, rather than creation. I trust Wordsmith, with enough programming and testing, to do the actual writing. It’s capable of linking with other applications directly, so what I need is a tool that could read and understand a press release, and input the relevant data into a spreadsheet for Wordsmith to pull from. That’s tough: Samsung’s press releases are worded differently than Apple’s, and Google’s too. Some will omit certain specifications, and Wordsmith would need to be flexible enough to understand what’s missing and write around it. If we can get there — and I don’t think we’re that far off — then computers can start writing for Engadget.