Jul 31
“On this day our Queen and saviour was born.”
Jul 31
It will soon be a lot harder for Internet users in Russia to access anything outside of government-sanctioned or region-locked sites and services. Vladimir Putin has just signed into law a bill that makes it illegal to use Internet proxy services, including VPNs or virtual private networks. While the law is primarily aimed at curbing anti-government activities, it also puts … Continue reading
Jul 31
Hey, good morning!
Welcome to the new week. Over the weekend, we talked about our new robot friends, HTC’s return to flagship smartphone form and fines for walking while texting — if you’re in Honolulu.
Jul 31
As a rule, self-driving car tests tend to be limited to the country where they started. But that’s not how people drive — what happens when your autonomous vehicle crosses the border? Continental and Magna plan to find out. They’re planning to pilot…
Jul 31
There are reality shows for all kinds of things these days, whether it be cooking, for finding love, fighting, and etc. Sometimes there are even reality shows that don’t really seem to have any specific purpose other than to introduce drama. However if you’re a gamer, perhaps there is one upcoming reality show that you should check out.
Dubbed “The Next Gamer”, this is a reality show based around League of Legends that will be launching in Australia. Basically this will see 10 players stay in a house in Sydney where they’ll live with each other, and also battle it out for a contract with one of Australia’s best League of Legends teams.
The series is expected to air on YouTube and for gamers who think that they have what it takes to be part of the show, you can actually apply online via its website. The auditioning process will basically select 40 players who have applied and they are expected to battle it out against each other over the next 5 days, before that list is whittled down to the top 10.
According to the page’s description, “In a live finale The Next Gamer team will face an OPL to prove their worth. The gamer that has shown they have what it takes to go pro will go home with $10,000 in prize money and a six month contract with the one of Australia’s best League of Legends teams.”
Reality ‘League Of Legends’ TV Show Launching In Australia , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.
Jul 31
It’s really anyone’s guess as to what the iPhone 8 could look like, but as we are leading up to September which is when the iPhone 8 is expected to be announced, it seems that the rumors are starting to settle on a final design, one of which was leaked not too long ago. Of course the thing about leaks is that you can never be 100% sure, at least until now.
In a tweet by developer Steve Troughton-Smith, it seems that Apple themselves might have leaked not only the design of the iPhone 8 itself, but also one of its highly-rumored features. Basically had released the first build of the firmware for the upcoming HomePod, and thanks to the digging by developers, they uncovered an icon which is supposed to represent the iPhone, and it looks very familiar to the leaks that we’ve been seeing so far.
But wait, there’s more: images of the new iPhone form-factor are also present. 😅 A lot of people at Apple are going to have a nasty Monday… https://t.co/BdmasKVVgI
— Steve T-S (@stroughtonsmith) July 31, 2017
The firmware also went ahead and referenced the existence of an infra-red face unlocking tool, which like we said is one of the reported new security features of the iPhone 8. We have heard that Apple could be looking to introduce a facial scanning feature, and this reference seems to “confirm” that, but exactly how it works remains to be seen.
So far most facial unlocking systems seem to be easily fooled by photographs, so we’re not sure if Apple has managed to figure this one out yet. It has been rumored that Apple could be replacing Touch ID with facial scanning, but in all honesty we doubt that will happen, especially since Touch ID was recently introduced to the MacBook Pro with Touch Bar.
Did Apple Just Confirm The iPhone 8’s Design And Facial Scanning Feature? , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.
Jul 31
When it comes to photography on our smartphones, most smartphones these days are more than capable of snapping a good photo under good lighting, like in the day or if a place is brightly lit. However low-light photography is where the challenge is that, and there aren’t many phones out there that are up to the task.
However that might not be the case for the upcoming LG V30. According to a report from Slashgear (via PhoneArena), they have heard from a source that LG is apparently priming the LG V30 to be a great phone for night photography. How will they do this? By introducing a camera with a wider aperture of f/1.6.
At the moment the smartphone with the widest aperture belongs to the Samsung Galaxy S8 at f/1.7, and for those who are unfamiliar with photography, basically a wider aperture (a lower f-number) means that more light can come in, thus reducing the time the shutter remains open, which in turn helps with non-blurry low-light photos. Now the different of f/0.1 might not seem like much, but in the photography world it does, which is why sometimes the price difference between a f/1.4 lens and a f/1.2 lens can be in the hundreds of dollars.
Take this with a grain of salt for now, but recent leaks have hinted that the LG V30 could pack a dual camera system. The handset is currently scheduled for an official launch at IFA 2017 and could be released towards the end of September.
LG V30 Rumored To Be Great For Low-Light Photography , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.
Jul 31
If you were to watch a reality cooking show like Hell’s Kitchen for the first time, you might be a bit confused by the cooking terms and shorthand that chefs use to communicate with each other. To you it might sound like gibberish, but to them it makes perfect sense, and that’s exactly the kind of situation that Facebook accidentally created with its AI efforts.
So much so that Facebook was forced to shut it down after their AI started inventing its own language to communicate with each other. It might sound like the plot to sci-fi movie where robots take over the world, but it’s precisely what happened. According to Dhruv Batra, visiting research scientist from Georgia Tech at Facebook AI Research, this happened after the researchers made a mistake during the programming phrase, where they did not include rewards for the AI to stick to English.
According to Batra, “Agents will drift off understandable language and invent codewords for themselves. Like if I say ‘the’ five times, you interpret that to mean I want five copies of this item. This isn’t so different from the way communities of humans create shorthands.” That being said, it is more dramatic than what it seems.
The reality is that the program was shut down because Facebook was developing the AI that were capable of talking to people, and obviously creating its own language means it failed on that front. However it does have traces of what some prominent figures in the tech industry fear, like Tesla and SpaceX’s Elon Musk, who has expressed concern over AI leading to a Terminator-like future, and who recently criticized Facebook’s CEO of having a “limited understanding” of the dangers of AI.
Facebook Shuts Down Its AI After Invents Its Own Language , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.
Jul 31
Encryption can be seen as something of a double edged sword, where it keeps the bad guys out from snooping through out stuff, but at the same time it also keeps the good guys out from potentially uncovering key details and evidence in crimes and terrorist plots, and depending on your views, encryption can be seen as a either a good or bad thing.
Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg is clearly in the former camp, where she thinks it’s a good thing. Speaking to Desert Island Discs, Sandberg was quoted as saying that encryption features like those found in WhatsApp, are there for a reason, and that removing them would effectively be playing into the hands of terrorists and helping them.
According to Sandberg, “The goal for governments is to get as much information as possible, and so when there are message services like WhatsApp that are encrypted the message itself is encrypted but the metadata is not. Meaning that when you send me a message we don’t know what that message says but we know that you contacted me.”
“If people move off those encrypted services and go to encrypted services in countries that won’t share the metadata the government actually has less information, not more. And so as technology evolves these are complicated conversations. We are in close conversations working through the issues all around the world,” Sandberg also highlights how Facebook has over 4,500 people working around the clock to stop extremists from hacking their site, with more being hired later this year.
The call to decrypt services like WhatsApp isn’t new and we have seen other companies such as Apple being subjected to similar requests. In fact recently it was reported that the Australian government is looking to convince Apple that a backdoor to its software is necessary.
Facebook’s COO Says Removing Encryption Would Help Terrorists , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.
Jul 31
The HBO host then put the conspiracy theorist’s strategy to the test.
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