Feb 11
Two Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee say the CIA has a secret, undisclosed data repository that includes information collected about Americans.
Feb 11
Clone Jesus rises in a new look at the incredibly titled dEVIL. Morgan Freeman joins Rusty Cundieff’s new sci-fi adventure. Jamie Lee Curtis shares more from the Halloween Ends set. Plus, good news for Superman & Lois, and the CW teases what’s to come on the rest of its DC shows. Spoilers get!
Feb 11
While we saw Amazon’s new smart thermostat go on sale earlier this week, now you can get the more advanced Google Nest Thermostat for less, too. The smart home gadget is down to $99 at Amazon right now, which is 24 percent off its normal price and close to its all-time low. All colors have been discounted and you can get the device with a trim kit for only $114, or 21 percent less than usual.
Buy Nest Thermostat at Amazon – $99Buy Nest Thermostat + trim kit at Amazon – $114
Normally $130, the Energy Star-certified Nest Thermostat came out in 2020 as an affordable alternative to Google’s Nest Learning Thermostat. The standard model doesn’t have the luxury materials or the hi-res display that the Learning model does, but the biggest selling points remain the same. A device like the Nest Thermostat can help you save on energy costs by optimizing the temperature in your home. Google’s device has a feature called Savings Finder that learns about your home system and offers suggestions to conserve energy. You can also set your own schedule so you can, for example, keep your home warmer when you’re there and cooler when you’re out.
You can control the Nest Thermostat through the Google Home app, making it easy to make adjustments on the fly and even when you’re away from home. The device also works with the Google Assistant and Amazon’s Alexa, so you can control it with your voice, too. Depending on your style, you may prefer the look of the Nest Thermostat to that of its Learning cousin, too. It’s slimmer with a mirrored display and it has a touch-sensitive edge that you can use to adjust temperatures manually. Amazon’s sale is one to consider if you’ve been itching to make your home a bit smarter without spending too much money.
Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.
Feb 11
Tailoring is fancy, sufficiently fancy that you may go your entire life and never once experience the art. It’s expensive, having garments custom-made to suit your body shape, even if there are a legion of benefits in doing so. Mass-produced clothes, meanwhile, are never going to do the job if you’ve got a body that diverges from what’s expected or treated as “normal.”
There are two real problems: Measurement, and manufacturing, issues that the fashion industry is wrestling with right now. A Taiwanese company, TG3D, has at least discovered a way to solve the first part of the equation with little more than an iPhone. It has developed a method of using FaceID to scan the geography of your body to give you a suite of measurements in minutes.
I first encountered TG3D back in 2018, when the company was showing off its wares at Computex in Taipei. The system then required you to step into a booth the size of a changing room, which housed pillars full of infrared cameras. When activated, the system would scan your body and help you determine the ideal sizes for trying on clothes.
Since then, the company has been working to shrink this technology down to something that requires a lot less investment. Any FaceID-equipped iPhone can now offer a similar, albeit less accurate, scanning solution, enabling users to test sizes for off-the-peg clothes. Co-founder Rick Yu explained that the project was designed for ready-to-wear fashion, to “solve [the issue of] huge returns.”
Returns are, after all, a key problem for e-commerce fashion brands, since buyers can’t be sure that their preferred size will actually fit them. “A lot of consumers buy three different sizes and return the other two,” which is bad for both the planet and most retailers’ bottom lines. If you know ahead of time what you need to order, the wastage and expense should decrease.
I tested the system and found that, much like it did in 2018, it reminded me how much timber I need to drop from my waistline. All you need to do, however, is stand your phone up on a flat surface – and it does need to be perfectly flat, so grab a book or some sticky tack. Then, just stand in view of the camera, ideally just in your underwear and, when ready, start turning around on the spot with your arms away from your sides. All in all, the scanning process takes less than a minute, and the analysis only takes a further two or three.
Once you’ve previewed your avatar to check it is more or less in the right shape, you can then send it off to the cloud to be properly analyzed. You may notice that, in use, your face, hands and feet are replaced with something blank and generic. This, says Yu, was an intentional move to protect user privacy given that you’ll be partially-clothed during the scanning process.
The data produced by FaceID isn’t, by itself, accurate enough to produce a fully-measured avatar, however. Once captured, it’s sent to TG3D’s server to be analyzed, “we have an AI engine that identifies the landmarks,” explained Yu. “We identify the landmarks, we position the landmarks and then based on [that], we extract up to 250 measurements automatically,” he said.
Daniel Cooper / TG3D
Much of this data, and the conclusions generated from it, have been curated through years of interviews with tailors and pattern makers. “These measurements that make sense to them,” said Yu, when I asked for an explanation for some of the more arcane terminology. Yu explained that the margin of error using the iPhone system is, at most, 1.3 inches.
Yu also explained that the data can be exported in a variety of formats, so as well as being used for tailoring, there are other solutions in play. For instance, an avatar file could be exported in a .OBJ file which can be used for 3D modeling and sculpting. And, naturally, it’s also possible to capture this data and create an avatar for any potential metaverse that could require it.
TG3D’s solution isn’t the only thing on the market, and plenty of other companies are operating in this space looking for a magic bullet. Shopify, for instance, was recently granted a patent for a body-measuring concept to help folks choose garments. Amazon’s Echo Look had a fairly rudimentary system to judge a fit based on how well it flattered your body. MTailor offers a scanning service by analyzing a video clip its users upload for similar results.
All of this is going to be vital in order to help reduce fashion’s already problematic waste problem. The industry reportedly consumes 10 percent of the world’s total greenhouse emissions and 20 percent of its water. That’s both down to sourcing and manufacturing through the waste involved in the buying and returns process when it reaches our homes.
But the consequences of this overproduction and overconsumption are piling up. One fairly pernicious example is blighting the Atacama desert in Chile. Garments made in South Asia will first be sold in Europe and the US, before the unsold sock is sent to South America for resale. Anything that remains unsold is dumped in huge piles, left to rot in the daylight with the price tags still on. This isn’t the only example of this, however, and there are toxic waste piles piling high in Ghana right now.
Measurements are only half the problem, and manufacturing still remains a huge issue with the industry today. Attempts by companies to automate this process have not been successful – Adidas’ Speedfactory concept, for instance, was abandoned back in 2019.
Yu, whose technology has most prominently been used by H&M in its flagship Stockholm store to create custom jeans with partner Unspun, also waxed lyrical about the future of fashion. He showed me the concept of an online retailer that was entirely virtual. A user can plug their body scan into the outfits on screen and get instant previews of how they would look in them. But this could happen before the garment is even made, ensuring that only what’s good gets produced.
For now, I can be confident that my iPhone, at least, knows my inside leg measurement. The next step is for every fashion brand to work out how to stop my thighs rubbing the seat of my jeans to dust.
Feb 11
Clips of soldiers flicking national flags at the 2022 Games have racked up millions of views online.
Feb 11
There’s no better way to ensure you end up on the invite list for the best summer parties and BBQs then by impressing your neighbors with the perfect Super Bowl bash in February. Good food and snacks are of the utmost performance, but with the right gadgets you can take your Super Bowl party to the next memorable…
Feb 11
Twitch wants everyone to have nicer, more family-friendly usernames. The video streaming website has updated its policy to prohibit usernames that have hate speech, threats of violence and personally identifiable information in them. It will now also ban usernames with references to “sexual acts, arousal, fluids or genitalia,” as well as references to hard drugs. Those with some kind of reference to weed, alcohol or tobacco don’t have to worry about a thing, though — those three are A-OK and don’t fall under the new “hard drugs” rule.
“Although we’ve removed many reported, offensive usernames under our current policy, we believe establishing a stronger standard is needed to cultivate a diverse, inclusive global community on Twitch,” the Amazon-owned streaming platform said in its announcement.
Twitch is giving all users until March 1st, 2022 before it starts enforcing its new guidelines. That way, creators will have time to think of a new handle and fix their branding without their disrupting their streaming activities. After the deadline passes, Twitch will suspend users if their names are clearly “hateful, harassing, violent or typically representative of malicious behavior.”
It will, however, give people with references to sex and hard drugs in their names a chance and will only require them to reset their handles. Same goes for instances wherein it’s not clear if a handle violates the new policy. The website built a tool that allows people to reset their names without losing their account history, subs, follows and bits, and people can continue their activities as usual after they use it. While Twitch is giving users the freedom to make changes on their own, it said a machine learning feature will keep an eye on any new handle people try to create to make sure it doesn’t violate its policy, as well.
Feb 11
Kaishu Hirano Didn’t Win Halfpipe Medal And STILL Stole The Show With This Feat
Posted in: Today's ChiliThe Japanese snowboarder struck a magnificent pose at the top of his soaring flight over the Beijing Winter Olympics.
Feb 11
The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has accepted Google’s latest plan to replace third-party cookies from the Chrome Browser. The regulator said that Google made legally binding commitments to address its concerns that the “Privacy Sandbox” would weaken competition and harm consumers.
Early in 2021, the CMA announced that it would investigate Google’s plan to replace third party cookies with “trust tokens.” It said that Google’s plan “could undermine the ability of publishers to generate revenue and undermine competition in digital advertising, entrenching Google’s market power.” It added that it received complaints from publishers and tech companies which alleged that Google may be “abusing its dominant position.”
While this is an important step, we are under no illusions that our work is done. We now move into a new phase where we will keep a close eye on Google as it continues to develop these proposals.
The CMA said that Google has promised to use a “more transparent process than initially proposed.” It will now engage with third parties and publish test results, and must address any issues raised by the CMA or third parties. It will also not remove third-party cookies “until the CMA is satisfied that its competition concerns have been addressed.”
In its own blog post on the matter, Google said it would “design, develop and implement Privacy Sandbox with regulatory oversight and input from the CMA and the ICO.” It promised to apply the commitments globally, not just in the UK, as “we believe that they provide a roadmap for how to address both privacy and competition concerns in this evolving sector,” Google wrote.
Last year, Google delayed the rollout of third-party cookies until mid-2023, rather than the 2022 timeline it originally set. It admitted at the time that it “needs more time across the ecosystem to get this right.” Google had originally proposed a cookie alternative called “FLoC” (Federated Learning of Cohorts) but announced last month that it was testing a replacement called Topics API.
Feb 11
Aaron Rodgers Wins MVP Award
Posted in: Today's ChiliThe Green Bay Packers quarterback was hailed for his play on the field, despite the controversy over his misleading COVID vaccination comments.
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