Sriram Subramanian, Professor of Informatics at Sussex University and cofounder of Ultrahaptics, added: n our device we manipulate objects in mid-air
Sriram Subramanian, Professor of Informatics at Sussex University and cofounder of Ultrahaptics, added: n our device we manipulate objects in mid-air
Led by Hongrui Jiang, professor of electrical and computer engineering at UW-Madison, the researchers designed lenses no larger than the head of a pin and embedded them within flexible plastic.
scientists say Scientists say they have invented a new battery that could fully charge a smartphone in just one minute.
which they hope could replace the lithium models commonly found in laptops and mobile phones. And as well as the nprecedented charging timesof their aluminium prototype,
physical sales of music as well as permanent downloads on sites such as itunes kept falling. The drops contributed to the overall picture for the global music industry revenue of $14. 97bn in 2014, down a modest 0. 4%from a year earlier.
Moore said that the IPFI planned a renewed campaign to press Youtube and other sites to license music consistently.
Youtube, owned by search engine giant Google, enjoys so-called afe harbourstatus under US law that lets it avoid liability for copyright infringement as it is considered an internet service provider.
The IFPI, in data released in the report, said that more than half of all internet users accessed music through video sites such as Youtube in the past six months.
The rule ompletely distortsthe market as ervices like Spotify and Deezer have to take proper licenses Moore said.
#Europe is targeting Google under antitrust laws but missing the bigger picture Google it today and youl see that the European commission has turned up the heat in its long-running probe into anti-competitive behaviour by the web most popular search engine.
EC competition chief, Margrethe Vestager, issued formal objections alleging that Google abuses its dominant position in the market of eneral internet search In particular,
the EC claims that Google artificially boosts its own products in returning Google comparison shopping results in its service oogle Shopping
even if those products aren the best or cheapest the ost relevant as the Commission puts it for consumers.
Since taking office in November 2014 Vestager has made the Google inquiry a top priority, signalling a willingness to consider court battles
and hefty fines if Google and other digital giants don fall into line with European competition law.
In this, she has displayed a distinct shift from her predecessor, Joaquín Almunia, whose multiple attempts to achieve private settlement with Google fell apart a year ago,
before descending into a political and economic boxing match. Vestager announcement comes amidst increasing restlessness by European policymakers that omething must be doneabout Google.
Identifying with precision the source of that anxiety, and the appropriate focus of action, is rather more challenging.
It focuses on the first and clearest of a number of complaints filed in 2009-10 by various Google competitors-from other giants, such as Microsoft, to small, struggling or defunct web businesses.
These complaints range from the EC current focus on Google prioritisation of its own products within vertical search services (currently,
to issues with Google scraping and fencing of datasets, often exclusively and at unmatched scale.
matched with the self-reinforcing effect of Google market share (the more people search, the better search becomes),
and it accelerates Google towards addressing some real competitor concerns, even if some of those competitors are interested now more in backward compensation rather than forward innovation.
You can Google your way out of a power vacuum Let return to the market in
which Google is dominant: eneral internet search This is a market that didn exist 20 years ago.
And it is a market that cannot be underestimated. It is the marketplace of human knowledge, queries, anxieties, ideas, journeys, hopes, sorrows and dreams.
The sociopolitical problem with search engines and, in particular, the search engine, is worthy of deep Foucaultian analysis. Search engines are sanctioned not officially maps,
Google is our contemporary maker and breaker of truth, commerce and the stuff of life.
he writes. issing results are an nknown unknown users for whom certain information is suppressed do not even know that they do not know the information.
The irony of the situation is that Google knows so much about us, and we know so little about it.
and it is only peripheral to the real problem: power. At best, the European commission initiative may require some marginal reconfiguration of Google algorithms and presentation of results,
and possibly some payouts, with no equivalent benefit in engendering the flourishing of new innovation.
The total opacity of search and its interventions make manipulation invisible from the point of view of users.
All users see is the supposedly objective final results, not the interventions by the gatekeeper.
one of the fiercest critics of mass surveillance and tech monopolies, have a proposal for Google to make its search algorithms
While Google will likely claim that its algorithms are so complex that even its own engineers do not understand their Heath Robinsonesque machinations,
the bold French proposal recognises that Google search did not simply emerge of its own accord.
Algorithms are human creations, and they need to serve human needs
#France launches major anti-racism and hate speech campaign The french government has launched a major campaign to contain the country steep rise in racism
and fight atred online assivity on the internet is said over, Hollande. Teacher training will be reinforced, headteachers will be encouraged to report incidents
and pupils will be taken to visit memorial sites. There will also be tougher penalties for crimes deemed to have been fuelled by racism and antisemitism.
the site of a brutal antisemitic attack last year in which a young Jewish couple were held hostage in their home,
Autonomous intersection management Once computers are in full control of our cars, do need we even traffic lights at intersections?
That the idea behind AIM autonomous intersection management at the artificial intelligence laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin.
and people grow to trust the software controllers, people will also get used to the idea of cars going through the intersections.
When a computer doing the driving, even with all the cars going through without stopping, it going to be a lot safer than it is today. re we there yet?
Computers aren driving our cars yet and won be for some time, but there are some connected car projects that already claim to be easing the flow of traffic.
but also used anonymised data from third party navigation apps, including smartphone maps. e have agreements with a number of smartphone manufacturers,
so they provide us with real time GPS feeds wherever their smartphones are, says Nick Cohn, senior traffic expert at Tomtom.
It also gathers data from telematics units installed in fleet vehicles as well as in-dash systems
When a driver hits a patch of congestion a red zone of a smartphone or satnav map it may be because of data that was collected,
whether it through satnav or simply the smartphones in our pockets better data in means we get better data out on the road.
Andy Stanford-Clark, distinguished engineer in IBM global internet of things team, pointed out that we can now pull in all sorts of data:
but when merged together in the internet of thingscloud processing platform, we can make sense of them
it is still not possible to engineer a way of turning the lights green as you pull up. t easy to change the traffic lights, ssays IBM Standford-Clark. ut...
That why most light sequences are set via a longer term algorithm, taking into account other parts of the road network.
buses, etc-that a standard feature in some software and has been for years, says Stevens. owever,
and software migrates to the cloud and is configurable over-the-air then the number of ttack surfaces (to use the jargon) increase,
They have smartphones, so there otential to do something with that, said Tomtom Cohn. think it be great as a pedestrian and a cyclist if
says IBM Stanford-Clark. The best way to achieve it may not be via smart, reactive traffic lights,
Until computers take over driving, at least
#Instagram for doctors: how Figure 1 is crowdsourcing diagnoses Where do doctors turn when even they don know what wrong with you?
The internet? A Canadian startup wants to make the answer an Instagram for doctors. Figure 1 is an app that allows iphone
and Android-owning doctors to share images of diseases, injuries and everything in between. Launched in 2013,
the app was born from the idea that sharing images of what confounds doctors with other doctors across the world can help point them in the direction of the right answer.
Over 10,000 texts, Whatsapps and emails with images of curious and classic cases are being sent in the US each day
or phones, says Landy. ow we want to help people share images, enabling more eyes on more cases,
nurses or other medically trained personnel can become erified In the same way Twitter blue tick verifies that a user is who they say they are,
000s of doctors a week across 40 countries and at some stage Landy expects to be verifying all users who join,
The patient also has to sign a consent form either digitally on screen with their finger or via paper copies.
and forms part of their adoption of social media and the new smartphone and tablet tools that are increasingly being used in hospitals,
and computer programming to handbuild a machine which guides yarn in set patterns over layers to create the 3d shapes such as those used on the soles of the navy shoes he created.
Above those tubes is a mechanised eederwhich winds the fabric for example cotton around them in shapes dictated by a set pattern programmed into a computer.
I could press a button on a machine after an algorithm which runs over the ball of your foot and the underside of your foot
Wizard, which will now be available on ios (Apple operating system) as part of the Peak app,
with in-game tasks including users moving through rooms and identifying items in boxes and character locations.
Kepler says it will still undergo a rigorous environmental impact assessment during the planning process to ensure that it poses no significant risk to marine life and to other users of the sea.
#Google is now Alphabet (well, sort of: the internet reacts Google reign of terror is over! Well, not quite:
the preeminent search engine isn going to go the way of Askjeeves and Altavista, the company is simply rebranding itself with a new holding company called Alphabet,
whose largest and wholly owned subsidiary will be...Google. Desperately googling Alphabet? No need. Let Larry page and Sergey Brin,
Google cofounders, explain: e liked Alphabet because it means a collection of letters that represent language, one of humanity most important inventions,
and is the core of how we index with Google search. s well as being ne ofhumanity most important inventions,
Alphabet is also a really great name for a sinister uber-corporation in a dystopian sci-fi novel,
an internet domain registry company that owns a range of suffices including. college. His latest client?
The new parent company of Google, which can be found at abc. xyz. Daniel reacted with the appropriate gravitas:
If youe Microsoft, you can at least reassure yourself that you now also have a funky new URL.
To give Google credit where credit is did due, they at least manage to mock the megalomaniacal nature of their own announcement,
throwing in a link to Hooli. xyz, clearly a reference to the Google-esque Hooli from HBO Silicon valley.
though, spare a thought for the owner of twitter. com/alphabet, who must have been having an interesting 24 hours.
The internet has been reacting with confusion, horror and mockery to the announcement, as you would expect.
One user managed to explain the complex ownership structure of the Alphabet/Google nexus in Simpsonian terms:
Finally, it worth mentioning that Google have announced also a radical shake-up to their corporate management structure,
handing control of its core search engine business to Sundar Pichai, pictured below
#Ashley Madison CEO Noel Biderman resigns after third leak of emails The chief executive of extramarital affairs website Ashley Madison has left the company after a third leak of emails
and suggestions that he had affairs despite earlier denials. ffective today, Noel Biderman, in mutual agreement with the company, is stepping down as Chief executive officer of Avid Life Media Inc (ALM)
said an unattributed statement on the Ashley Madison website. ntil the appointment of a new CEO,
In July details of more than 37m accounts were stolen from the website whose tagline is: ife is short.
and dedicated employeesand that it remained teadfast in our commitment to our customer base That customer base personal information was spread far and wide across the internet earlier this month,
a Twitter user (or, as Krebs speculates, users) called Thadeus Zu posted a link to the hack before anyone else
and appears to have had special knowledge of the data breach before anyone else did. The third and latest data dump, posted at the site that first released the user database,
appears to be a download of emails from Biderman personal Gmail account. The second torrent released by an entity calling itself the Impact Team contained emails that seemed to be from Biderman work account
and its release had done already damage to his personal reputation: the executive told the New york daily news in 2014 that he had cheated never on his wife,
but the hacked documents suggested otherwise e
#New San francisco restaurant replaces humans with ipads Those sick and tired of having to deal with their fellow humans all the time have a new respite a fully automated restaurant in San francisco. Customers at Eatsa in the Financial District will order from an ipad,
sending the order to the kitchen. When the meal is ready, it appears in a small glass compartment.
the Chinese have been experimenting with ordering via tablet for years in order to reduce labor costs and prices.
burglar alarms upgraded for the smartphone age As history has it, the young Isaac newton found inspiration for the theory of gravity by watching apples fall to the ground.
the home alarm seemed ripe for an overhaul for the internet age. e were surprised...that the technology had moved not really on since the 80s,
he said. assumed that there would be loads of easy smartphone connected alarm systems and there were not. e found that a lot of people who own an alarm don bother to set it either
Using smartphones to identify the various residents of the house or flat, the device learns their movements
The five cofounders of Cocoon have used smartphones and machine learning to filter out this noise and isolate the waves
which may signal a threat. The device learns over three days how residents come in and out and live.
Through an app on the phones of the residents, the device understands their movements and then builds up a model or rainaccording to the company of what happens
It knows when people are outside of the home as the phones will not be present.
The alert of an intruder can be sent to the smartphone of the residents and a camera on the device
There are potential problems. f you have no smartphone, the product is not for you. We think that the vast majority of the population do,
What if someone forgets their phone? f that happens then the system will not be armed. It will think that they are at home in the same way
The company argues that many children who do not have smartphones may be with their parents anyway. ou can really buy a phone that is not a smartphone any more.
It is only if you have not had a new phone for five years that it is not Android or ios,
It is aimed very much at optical switching rather than building processors, and according to the researchers, the optical transistors have a tunable dielectric permittivity compatible with all telecoms infrared (IR) standards. e are pretty far away from building anything resembling an processor.
In fact our transistor is only simulation at the current time, "said doctoral candidate Nate Kinsey, in conversation with El Reg."
Kinsey cautions that something as advanced as a processor is at least two decades away, so while a 1, 000-fold increase in processor power sounds a lot,
it not when considered over the kind of timescales we are talking e
#Brit boffins build'tractor beam'out of sound Researchers from Spain and The british city of Bristol have found a way to move objects using sound.
#HTC One Max stored fingerprints where any app could see them HTC failed to lock down fingerprints captured by one of its phones,
a nearly two-year-old phone with a fingerprint reader, kept the fingerprints that it scanned in an unencrypted, world-readable file;
Fireeye's report suggests that other phones with fingerprint readers may have similar problems, though it only names the One Max.
The report also notes that certain phones failed to fully secure their fingerprint sensor, potentially allowing apps to step in
"and failed to review software for security flaws. This was back in February of 2013
The One Max was never a particularly popular or successful phone, and it isn't known
#Google is reorganizing and Sundar Pichai will become new CEO In a blog post today,
Google cofounder Larry page announced a massive restructuring of the company, instituting Sundar Pichai as CEO and shifting himself and cofounder Sergey Brin to a larger holding company called Alphabet.
As CEO and President of Alphabet, Page and Brin will oversee Google as well as affiliated companies like the life extension project Calico and a drone delivery venture called Wing.
Alphabet will also direct Google's early-stage funding operations, dubbed Capital and Ventures. Under the new organization, each of those operations will have its own CEO and leadership
while Pichai and Google retain control of search, ads, maps, the Google Play Store, Youtube, and Android.
The reorganization also involves significant financial restructuring, as detailed in an associated SEC filing. All Google shares will now be traded as shares of the larger Alphabet holding company, news that drove the company's share price up more than four percentage points in the wake of the announcement."
"Wee long believed that over time companies tend to get comfortable doing the same thing,
the former CHROME OS and Android chief who has played an increasingly central role in Google's day-to-day operations."
and our board that it is time for Sundar to be CEO of Google, "Page said in the post."
"I feel very fortunate to have talented someone as as he is to run the slightly slimmed down Google
it's an extension of a shift that's been ongoing within Google for some time, with Brin and Page increasingly interested in ambitious projects launched through Google X or outside funding.
Alphabet formalizes that division, separating Google's traditional products from the more ambitious ventures that critics have accused of distracting from the company's core strengths.
It remains to be seen how the new divisions will play out in practice, but the intention seems to be renewed a focus on both Google's current products
and the moonshots that aim to replace those products as Alphabet's focus in the decades to come."
In addition to the streams, Apple says the album also sold half a million downloads through itunes a solid performance that was not quite enough to push it to number one in the US charts.
and it premiered a day early on Apple's streaming service, before full release on itunes on July 7th.
only available for stream on Apple Music and digitally through itunes. Beats cofounder Jimmy Iovine was positive about the results,
hip-hop's current kings are already old hands at disseminating their music to a huge and internet-literate fanbase.
Both artists used Twitter, Instagram, and other social networks to build suspense for their newest records,
and released them on multiple streaming services, securing more listeners than Compton could with its Apple-first approach a
#Google has a new logo Google is introducing a new logo today. Just a month after unveiling a major restructuring of the company,
Google is updating its image, too. The new Google logo is still a wordmark, but it's now using a sans-serif typeface,
making it look a lot more modern and playful. The colors are also softer than they used to be.
The logo bears a bit more resemblance to the logo of Google's new parent company, Alphabet, as well.
As Google's video introducing the new logo notes the wordmark has been evolving ever since it was created in 1998.
when Google first cleaned up the lettering and settled on its four colors. Since then, the logo has just been flattened out more and more,
Google is also changing the tiny"g"logo that you see on browser tabs. It's now going to be an uppercase"G"that's striped in all four of Google's colors.
Google says that the new design will be rolling out across all of its products soon in fact
it's already on Google's homepage, with a cute animation that wipes away the old logo and draws in the new one.
So why did Google decide to make the change? In a blog post, Google discusses how much technology has changed how we interact with its products and with the internet at large.
It doesn't really settle on a specific reason that a redesign was needed, but it says that this logo should better reflect the reality that Google is no longer a site you visit on a desktop computer it's a huge collection of sites, apps,
and services that you visit on PCS, Chromebooks, smartphones, and anywhere you can find a web browser.
Google writes that its new logo is meant to reflect"this reality and show you when the Google magic is working for you,
even on the tiniest screens.""Making the logo look good on small screens seems to have been a major consideration.
The new, simpler lettering is supposed to scale better to smaller sizes, making the wordmark more distinct and easier to read.
It's also supposed to be easier for Google to display on low-bandwidth connections:
Google says that it's made a version of its logo that's"only 305 bytes,
compared to our existing logo at 14,000 bytes.""Given that one of new Google CEO Sundar Pichai's big goals is to bring the internet and Google,
of course to areas of the globe that don't already have it, that small difference is definitely going to be an important one r
#Qualcomm's new Quick Charge will take batteries from 0 to 80 percent in 35 minutes Fast charging is an increasingly widespread and popular addition to modern smartphones.
Almost every new Android handset features some sort of solution for giving it a rapid injection of energy,
and one of the most popular varieties among them is Qualcomm's Quick Charge. It's an option built into the company's current line of Snapdragon processors,
and it's getting an upgrade to version 3. 0 with the 2016 family, headlined by the Snapdragon 820.
A new Intelligent Negotiation for Optimum Voltage (INOV) algorithm will allow portable devices to"determine what power level to request at any point in time for optimum power transfer
while maximizing efficiency.""Together with a series of other advancements, this will result in 38 percent more efficient charging than the second-generation Quick Charge,
and a doubling of charging speed from the original Quick Charge 1. In practical terms,
says Qualcomm, this will mean that the typical smartphone can be recharged from a flat battery all the way to 80 percent in 35 minutes.
Qualcomm also notes that it's implemented"additional steps to help protect battery cycle life,
They are available to Qualcomm's hardware partners today and will be making their debut in devices coming in 2016 6
who chose the occasion to launch a new web destination called Makerbase. Dash described it as cross between Wikipedia and Internet Movie Database,
but for the app economy. Innovators can add themselves to Makerbase or others can add them to the current database of projects.
#How do you laugh on Facebook? LOS ANGELES-How do you express laughter in a Facebook post?
By saying LOL, Haha or Hehe? The folks at Facebook recently crunched the numbers of the billions of daily posts to see how its members expressed their humor,
and they found that 15%use laughter of some kind in a post. At one point, the acronym surely would have been LOL,
Facebook looked at posts in May to come up with these conclusions and also researched specific cities,
A quick note that the desktop version of Facebook doesn offer many opportunities to attach digital laughs,
you need to go to the Facebook Messenger mobile app, where not only are there tons of way more emoji syymbols available for your posts,
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