Alessandra Nivola talks about being Kraven’s villain. Get a look at the new Hellraiser. Jerry and Morty get slimed in new, mysterious Rick and Morty season 6 art. Plus, another look at Supernatural spinoff The Winchesters, and Vincent D’Onofrio keeps teasing his return to the Marvel universe. Spoilers get!
“Now THAT is how it’s done,” one supporter wrote of the president’s answer to obscenity-yelling protesters in Philadelphia.
Meta will continue to use Qualcomm’s chips in its Quest line of virtual reality headsets and the two companies are teaming up to build “customized” chipsets, Qualcomm announced at IFA 2022. “We’re working with Qualcomm Technologies on customized virtual reality chipsets — powered by Snapdragon XR platforms and technology — for our future roadmap of Quest products,” said Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in the press release.
Meta’s Quest 2 is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon XR2, so it’s essentially continuing with the status quo. However, it looks like the two companies will be working closely on developing the next generation of chipsets, with Qualcomm saying that “both companies’ engineering and product teams will deepen technical collaboration to deliver next-generation platforms and core technologies.”
Early this year, Qualcomm announced that it was teaming up with Microsoft as well on custom chips for AR glasses, with Microsoft promising “lightweight” and energy-efficient wearables. Qualcomm said that it was “working with Microsoft… [to develop] custom AR chips,” so it appears to be working with both rivals on roughly the same thing.
Meta is more invested in the metaverse, however, essentially staking its fate on the idea of meeting others in VR for business, socializing, gaming and more. By having a say in the design, it could effectively make its ideas easier to implement. “Unlike mobile phones, building virtual reality brings novel, multi-dimensional challenges in spatial computing, cost, and form factor,” Zuckerberg said. “These chipsets will help us keep pushing virtual reality to its limits and deliver awesome experiences.”
Meta recently jacked up the price of the Quest 2 headset from $300 to $400, even though it’s now nearly two years old. That’s no doubt due in part to the scarcity and higher prices of chips and components. It may be hoping to bring those down for the next generation, otherwise very few users will be able to access those, um, glorious virtual playgrounds.
Good TVs are always in high demand, so finding deals can be a fruitless quest. If you’re on the lookout for one, Amazon is running a one-day sale right now on LG, Samsung and Sony sets, including OLED and other desirable models at all-time low prices. For instance, LG’s 55-inch A1 OLED is just $797 instead of $1,300 for the biggest savings we’ve seen yet. Sony’s A80J 65-inch OLED model is $1,399 or 44 percent off (a new low), and Samsung’s 55-inch Frame TV with Quantum HDR is priced at just $980, also an all-time low.
Buy Samsung, Sony and LG TVs at Amazon
LG’s 2021 line of A1 OLED TVs first appeared at CES 2021, offering support for Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos, Filmmaker mode, Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa and AirPlay 2. You can expect a color accurate picture with deep blacks, though some things are missing like a 120Hz display and HDMI 2.1. Still, at $797, the 55-inch A1 will deliver everything else you might want in an OLED TV.
Sony’s A80J OLED TV also popped up at CES 2021, offering Sony’s “Cognitive Processor VR” to improve picture quality on individual elements of a picture. It also delivers 120Hz 4K thanks to an HDMI 2.1 input, along with features like Dolby Vision, Google TV, Google Assistant and Alexa support. Again, it’s available at an all-time low price of $1,400, or 44 percent off the regular price.
Finally, if you want a low-profile TV that also doubles as a picture frame and smart device, Samsung’s 55-inch Frame TV is priced at $980, another all-time low. It can rotate between portrait and landscape modes and display up to 1,400 works of art, while offering features like 4K upscaling, HDR, Alexa and Samsung’s Tizen smart TV interface.
There are plenty of other good deals as well, including Sony’s 85-inch X91J priced at $1,800 (36 percent off), LG’s 65-inch NanoCell 90 series TV at $717 (49 percent off) and more. It’s best to act soon, though, as it’s strictly a one-day sale.
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Humans are going back to the Moon and this time they’re seeking to stay. NASA’s Artemis program promotes a sustainable vision of people living on and around the lunar surface, prompting some truly innovative ideas about how we might make that happen.
Lila Snyder, CEO, Bose with Cristiano Amon, president and CEO, Qualcomm on stage at IFA 2022
Qualcomm President and CEO, Cristiano Amon, delivered the opening keynote of IFA 2022 in Berlin. During his hour-long speech, he highlighted the key innovations of Qualcomm’s latest compute platform, the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1.
One of the key pillars of high-end Qualcomm technology is Snapdragon Connect, the “best in class 5G, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth”.
Amon’s vision for Snapdragon Connect is to ”build the foundation of the cloud-connected society for the gigabit society, making use of every single spectrum and use intelligence to deliver completely new experiences of connectivity”.
Snapdragon sound is another key pillar of the Qualcomm platform. “In addition to modem and AI, we see that sound now matters more than ever[…] we have been focusing on building the best audio experience possible with Snapdragon sound,” said Amon.
According to Amon, Snapdragon sound is dedicated to delivering high-resolution audio, lossless Bluetooth music streaming, lag-free audio experiences, and noise cancellation.
Qualcomm’s latest consumer research shows that for 85% of people, crystal-clear calls are key purchase drivers when they are looking for wireless headphones and 58% said lossless or high-resolution audio is the number one purchasing driver for earbuds, a trend that is growing for three years straight.
Cristiano Amon and Lila Snyder, CEO, Bose, announced a partnership between Qualcomm and Bose, which means that Qualcomm S5 Audio SoC will provide robust connectivity, ultra-low power, and advanced processing to future Bose products.
Toward the end of the keynote, jointly with Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, Cristiano Amon announced a multi-year broad strategic agreement to deepen technical collaboration between both companies’ engineering and product teams for the development of custom Snapdragon XR chips for the future Meta Quest VR headsets and other Meta devices.
“By partnering with Meta, we are bringing together two of the world’s metaverse leaders to revolutionize the future of computing for billions of people in the coming years,” said Cristiano Amon, president and chief executive officer, Qualcomm.
You can watch the full keynote here.
Qualcomm Partners with Meta and Bose
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A rescue team helped bring the Australian shepherd back up to his owners after a fall into a California ravine.
Japan has a high level of adoption when it comes to advanced technologies and is a world leader in various areas, such as robotics. However, it’s also resistant to certain facets of modernization and tend to stick to old-fashioned solutions — fax machines, for instance, are still widely used. And apparently, so are floppy disks. The country’s newly appointed Minister of Digital Affairs, Taro Kono, has tweeted that he’s declaring “a war on floppy disks.”
Apparently, there are still around 1,900 government procedures in Japan that require the use of disks, including floppy disks, CDs and MiniDiscs, to submit forms and applications. “Where does one even buy a floppy disk these days?” he asked during a news conference. Indeed, the younger generation might not know what any of those look like anymore. Kono said his agency will work on amending regulations that require their use, so people can submit forms and applications online instead.
Digital Minister declares a war on floppy discs.
There are about 1900 government procedures that requires business community to use discs, i. e. floppy disc, CD, MD, etc to submit applications and other forms. Digital Agency is to change those regulations so you can use online.— KONO Taro (@konotaromp) August 31, 2022
The US government had been using floppy disks as recently as 2019, as well, and it was to receive nuclear launch orders from the President. It wasn’t until that year that the government transitioned to a “highly-secure solid state digital storage solution.”
Kono doesn’t intend to stop with floppy disks either and has announced his plans to phase out the use of more outdated technologies. “I’m looking to get rid of the fax machine, and I still plan to do that,” he said. The minister doesn’t have to worry about ending pager services, at least: The last pager provider in the country closed up shop a mere three years ago in September 2019.
Every time you microwave a bowl of spaghetti, an Italian grandmother rolls over in her grave.
Police and law enforcement agencies, even in small areas with fewer than 100,000 residents, have been using a low-cost phone tracking tool called Fog Reveal, according to AP and the EFF. AP has published a report detailing authorities’ use of the tool since at least 2018 for various investigations, including to track murder suspects and potential participants in the January 6th Capitol riot. The tool, sold by Virginia company Fog Data Science LLC, doesn’t need a warrant and can be accessed instantly. To get geofence data, authorities usually have to issue a warrant to companies like Google and Apple, and it could take weeks for them to get the information they need.
Fog Reveal, AP explains, uses advertising identification numbers, which are unique IDs assigned to each mobile device, to track people. It gets its information from aggregators that collect data from apps that serve targeted ads based on a user’s location and interest, such as as Waze and Starbucks. Both the coffeehouse chain and the Google subsidiary denied explicitly giving their partners permission to share data with Fog Reveal.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation obtained access to documents about Fog through Freedom of Information Act requests, which it then shared with AP. EFF special adviser, Bennett Cyphers, describes the tool as “sort of a mass surveillance program on a budget.” Its prices reportedly start at only $7,500 a year, and some agencies even share access with other nearby departments to bring costs down further. Looking at data from GovSpend, which monitors government spending, AP found that Fog managed to sell around 40 contracts to nearly two dozen agencies. Authorities have already used it to search hundreds of records from 250 million devices.
While Fog Reveal only tracks people using their advertising IDs that aren’t connected with their names, authorities are able to use its data to establish “patterns-of-life” analyses. They can, for instance, establish that a specific ad ID belongs to a person who typically passes by a Starbucks from home on the way to work. Further, Fog gives authorities access to the movements of an ad ID going back to at least 180 days. Fog managing partner Matthew Broderick even recently admitted that the tool “has a three year reach back.”
Authorities used the tool to varying degrees of success over the past years. Washington County prosecutor Kevin Metcalf said he has previously used Fog without a warrant for circumstances that required immediate action, such as to find missing children and to solve homicide cases. He said about privacy concerns surrounding Fog’s use: “I think people are going to have to make a decision on whether we want all this free technology, we want all this free stuff, we want all the selfies. But we can’t have that and at the same time say, ‘I’m a private person, so you can’t look at any of that.”
The EFF, of course, doesn’t share his sentiment. It called Fog “a powerfully invasive tool” and is encouraging people to disable ad ID tracking on their phones.
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