TechsTicsInfo

Google’s smart speaker got a little smarter this week, with the addition of a multitasking feature. The new capability makes it possible for the device to accomplish two different missions at the same time. It was rolled out with little fanfare and first noted by CNET. We’ve since confirmed the addition with Google. It’s a bit surprising that the company rolled it out to Home units with no mention. It’s a handy addition to what’s essentially been a single-minded device. The company has been promising to add Routines since the Pixel 2 event a few months back, essentially creating pre-determined scenes that tie a bunch of actions to a command (something that’s been supported by both Siri and Alexa for a while).  This is something else, though. Rather than having to preload all of that via an app, you can simply ask it to perform two jobs simultaneously. Only two, though. Not three or four — that would be flying a little too close to the sun. ...

Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption WATCH: Are drones the answer to providing high-speed broadband access to rural communities? A drone has helped bring superfast broadband services to an isolated Welsh village. Cable company Openreach used the drone to avoid having to lay cable across "challenging" terrain that included woods, a river and steep hills. The drone was flown across a section of forest near Pontfadog, Wrexham, to help sling wires between telegraph poles. The community's 20 homes now have access to ultrafast broadband that can run at speeds of up to 1Gbps. Video buffer "It's a bit different to connecting an apartment block in London, that's for sure," said Openreach chief engineer Andy Whale. "If we tried running the cable through woods it was also very likely we'd get it caught up in branches and other natural obstructions, so we figured the best option was to fly it in over the top of the tree canopy and...

After raising $160 million for the Global fund as part of its partnership with (RED), Apple is marking tomorrow’s World AIDS Day by offering up a bunch of opportunities to donate. The easiest of the bunch is the company’s promise to donate $1 to the fund for every transaction made with Apple Pay at the company’s retail stores, on its site or in-app. In honor of the occasion, 400 of the company’s stores will turn their logos red for the week, and the App Store will offer content devoted to the event. All of the proceeds from in-app purchases made on Candy Crush Saga, Candy Crush Jelly Saga and Candy Crush Soda Saga, meanwhile, will also go to benefit the fund. Apple’s fundraising makes up more than a fifth of the $500 million (RED) has raised for the Global Fund since starting. The partnership has raised $30 million this year thus far, and provided the equivalent of 475 million days of medication since starting, according to the company. “Connecting th...

Facebook has been under fire for its practices and policies that enable advertisers to exclude “multicultural affinity” groups from the audiences they reach via the social network. Now, in light of a ProPublica investigation and pressure from the Congressional Black Caucus, Facebook says it’s committed to taking a closer look at its advertising policies, its COO Sheryl Sandberg wrote in a letter to CBC Chairperson Cedric Richmond. Until Facebook figures out how to ensure advertisers don’t use its tools in a discriminatory way, Facebook will temporarily disable the option that lets advertisers exclude multicultural affinity groups from their audience. As Sandberg wrote in her letter to the CBC, multicultural affinity groups “are made up of people whose activities on Facebook suggest they may be interested in ads related to the African American, Hispanic American, or Asian American communities.” Multicultural marketing, Sandberg said in her letter, is c...

Will the government fulfil its manifesto promise that every home and business in the country will have high-speed broadband by 2020? The company that it will have to rely on to make that happen - Openreach - is warning it could risk missing the target unless the government decides soon how it will allow it to do the work. Openreach has come up with a unique way to try and deliver that broadband. You can listen to the Today programme daily from 6-9am and on Saturdays 7-9am.

7Seas Connect is glad to announce the release of its enhanced callback service iCallMe. The new enhanced Callback service offers a new set of features including Speed dialing, balance and minutes announcements and tag on call. 7seas Callback service is a great way to save on international calls for customers traveling overseas or customers living outside of the United States and wish to make international calls for much less. Why use our Callback service? Accessible from any phone: No need to switch or contact your phone service provider. You have the freedom to use our service from any phone you desire at anytime. Minimize your international calling cost: With our low rates and premium quality, you will be paying less for all your international calls, yet enjoying our premium voice quality. Available from anywhere in the world: Whether you are traveling overseas or living outside of the United States, you now have the freedom to call from anywhere to anywhere in the world even if your...

Shortly after the announcement of the iPhone X in September, my colleague Natasha Lomas noted the similarities between the phone and how WebOS operated on the Palm Pre. She ended her article, noting “in the iPhone X it’s clear you’re looking at a little ghost of the Pre.” It seems that Qualcomm’s legal team was taking note; they cited that line in a complaint alleging that Apple ripped off Palm’s patented interface. In the latest escalation of the nearly year-long legal battle, Qualcomm filed three complaints Wednesday in U.S. District Court alleging violations on 16 different Qualcomm patents by Apple, some related to RF transceivers and power-saving measures, some related to multi-touch displays and some related to the innovations of Palm. Why does Qualcomm care about Palm? Well, in 2014 Qualcomm bought a bunch of Palm patents from HP, some apparently related to the company’s design choices for WebOS and the Pre. In the complaint, Qualcom...

Google might fold Nest back into the Google, well, fold. The company is considering integrating Nest, which is a separate company under mutual parent Alphabet at the moment, back into Google’s hardware business. The re-integration, first reported by Wall Street Journal, is a move that Google is considering as a way to help it build out its smart home capabilities vs. Amazon, which is expanding its hardware offerings in that regard. Nest’s lineup works with Google Assistant, but also with Amazon’s Alexa; bringing it back into Google’s core hardware team could help develop better integration with Assistant and the company’s other mobile and networking devices, building a more extensive competitive hedge. Now that Google is developing out its Google hardware business in earnest, it also makes a bunch of sense to bring this together in terms of branding and making sure that consumers are clear about the relationships and advantages inherent in Google’s gr...

Image copyright Ford Image caption Wearable technology helps workers doing repetitive physical tasks If you've watched the Iron Man film franchise, you'll know that a powered suit gives inventor Tony Stark superhuman strength to fight the bad guys. But away from the the fictional world of blockbusting movies, robotic exoskeletons offer more prosaic and useful help for humans. The military has been in on the act for years, using them to help soldiers carry more weight for longer periods of time. Meanwhile manufacturers have been busy creating robotic suits to give mobility to people with disabilities. But now exoskeletons are becoming an important part of the scene in more conventional workplaces, mainly because of their unique offering. "Exoskeletons act as a bridge between fully-manual labour and robotic systems. You get the brains of people in the body of a robot," says Dan Kara, research director at ABI Research. "But there's more to it than th...

Google Assistant is about to get a bit more home-savvy. The voice assistant will be gaining local discovery skills that will help you locate home services nearby. The company specifically detailed that Assistant would be gaining insights to help users locate “nearby services like an electrician, plumber, house cleaner and more.” Saying something like, “Hey Google, I need a plumber,” will soon help you clarify your problem, pull up results for local services that can help you out of your jam and dial them up for you. The blog post focused heavily on home services, though the move fits more broadly into Google’s broader strategy of helping Assistant cater results more locally for users. When it comes to real-world stores and services that have yet to be app-disrupted, there’s still a long way for voice assistants to go. The new functionality will be rolling out to U.S. users this week starting today, and results will be screened in certain cities b...

Image copyright Getty Images Rogue states and terrorists will get their hands on lethal artificial intelligence "in the very near future", a House of Lords committee has been told. Alvin Wilby, vice-president of research at French defence giant Thales, which supplies reconnaissance drones to the British Army, said the "genie is out of the bottle" with smart technology. And he raised the prospect of attacks by "swarms" of small drones that move around and select targets with only limited input from humans. "The technological challenge of scaling it up to swarms and things like that doesn't need any inventive step," he told the Lords Artificial Intelligence committee. "It's just a question of time and scale and I think that's an absolute certainty that we should worry about." The US and Chinese military are testing swarming drones - dozens of cheap unmanned aircraft that can be used to overwhelm enemy targets or defend...

There are now two Dianes running the show at Google Cloud. The company announced that Diane Bryant has been hired as the COO of the division. She joins Diane Greene, who came on board as Senior VP of Google Cloud in November 2015. Greene appeared to be excited about the prospect of her joining the team. “I can’t think of a person with more relevant experience and talents. She is an engineer with tremendous business focus and an outstanding thirty-year career in technology,” Greene wrote in a company blog post announcing the appointment. Google would not comment further beyond the blog post on the nature of her role or if Bryant would be reporting to Greene or vice versa. Bryant, who is also on the Board of United Technologies, most recently ran Intel’s Data Center Group, which itself generated a whopping $17 billion in revenue last year. That experience with data center technology and her great success in generating big bucks at Intel could be one of the reasons ...

Image copyright Reuters Elon Musk's infrastructure firm, the Boring Company, will compete to build a new transport link in Chicago. Mayor Rahm Emanuel is exploring options for a high-speed link between O'Hare Airport and the city centre, and is considering an underground link. Mr Musk tweeted that the Boring Company would submit a proposal for a "high-speed loop" in Chicago. He added that the plan would involve "electric pods" travelling in underground tunnels. Mr Musk has previously outlined his vision for a tunnel network under Los Angeles, in which cars would park on a high-speed sledge and be whisked along underground tracks. Elaborating on his idea for Chicago, he said: "Electric pods for sure. Rails maybe, maybe not." Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Existing train journeys between down town and the airport take about 40 minutes The Boring Company has been constructing test tunnels on the premises of SpaceX, a...

If you’ve stopped paying attention to LG in the last couple of years, you’ll learn everything you need to know from the first paragraph of its latest press release that highlights a “sweeping realignment to better address the challenges ahead.” The company’s in a tough spot. It makes good and innovative phones, but just can’t seem to make a dent in a crowded mobile industry. So the Korean phone maker is doing what any struggling hardware company would — shaking up its leadership. The aforementioned sweeping realignment includes the appointment of a new CEO of mobile — Hwang Jeong-hwan, who has been working in the company’s R&D department for a number of years, having worked on LG’s earliest smartphones. The company’s also getting a new CTO, Park Il-pyung, who served in that role at Harman and more recently worked as the head of LG’s Software Center. But the company has learned that promoting product people isn...

Last month, Microsoft announced its intentions to bring its Edge Browser to iOS and Android, as it works to broaden its reach on third-party mobile devices. After being made available in preview form for roughly a month, the app officially hits iOS and Android’s respective app stores starting today. The followup to the once ubiquitous Internet Explorer has been blossoming on Windows 10 devices (most notably the Surface line, where it’s learned some neat tricks) for a while now. The new mobile version of the app offers many of its familiar desktop/tablet features, including Favorites, Reading Lists and New Tab Pages. The company’s also added a couple of pieces since making the browser available in preview form. Roaming Passwords are now on-board, giving users the ability to sync passwords cross platform on mobile and desktop. There’s also dark theme. That’s basically what it sounds like, offering a black desktop instead of the default white/gray one, which s...

Instagram announced this morning that it now has 25 million active business profiles, up from 15 million in July. The company throws out a lot of different statistics (back in September it said it had 800 million monthly active users, 500 million daily active users and 2 million advertisers), but this one’s significant as a measure of how many businesses see Instagram as an important way to connect with customers. Instagram also says that more than 80 percent of Instagram accounts follow a business, with 200 million users visiting a business profile every day. The growth is impressive since Instagram only launched these business profiles — which allow for more functionality in the profile itself, as well as access to additional analytics — about a year and a half ago. Vishal Shah, director of product for Instagram Business, said that nearly 50 percent of business profiles don’t link to an outside website, suggesting that they see Instagram as their primary o...

Image copyright Science Photo Library Image caption Advertisers could choose to exclude groups such as wheelchair users, ProPublica found Facebook has temporarily turned off a system that let advertisers choose which ethnic and minority groups saw their ads. It said it would investigate how the feature was being used by advertisers. News organisation ProPublica discovered that the system could be abused by posting discriminatory ads on the social network. Facebook said it would look for a way to change the system so it could not be used "inappropriately". Legal action Last year, ProPublica first discovered the ethnic discrimination via advertising was possible. US laws prohibit discrimination in the way ProPublica demonstrated - in adverts relating to housing, for example - was possible. Last week, ProPublica tried again to post discriminatory ads that were not shown to people who were: African-American Jewish Hispanic interested in Islam part of other ethnic or m...

Customers using AWS’ Amazon DynamoDB to store data have two new services to help make their applications work better and more quickly in more regions around the world. The first is a Global Tables feature that allows AWS customers to automatically replicate tables across different AWS regions. Tech companies are already global businesses, but sometimes their data isn’t as distributed as their customer base. The Global Tables feature solves that problem so data that was initially generated in the U.S. doesn’t have to be replicated in the Eurozone. To access the global tables feature, customers don’t need to change any code. They simply send write requests (and eventually consistent read requests) to a DynamoDB endpoint in any specified region. DynamoDB will initiate multi-master writes and ensure the last write to an item is the one that takes precedence. The other new feature related to Amazon DynamoDB is a one-click full backup capability. Any applicat...

Image copyright Reuters Image caption Betting shops and racecourses saw the biggest rise in people asking for help to stop gambling More gamblers are opting to "ban" themselves amid a rise in online betting, new figures have revealed. Firms received almost 50,000 requests from customers asking to close their accounts last year - an increase of 7,000 on the previous year. It comes as operators prepare to offer a national scheme offering gamblers the ability to opt out from all forms of betting. The Gambling Commission revealed almost £4.7bn was bet online in 2016-17. It warned operators that with "such growth comes a responsibility" to prevent harm. From spring 2018, online gamblers who want to stop will be able to "self-exclude" by registering with a single website. Currently gamblers have to contact each company they hold an account with and request to be excluded. The move is intended to help people who may have opted out of gambling with one...

Amazon is hosting AWS Re:INVENT today, its developer conference for all things AWS. And the company just announced a promising new service called Amazon Transcribe. The service is now available as a preview and goes beyond many automated transcribing services. Now that video and audio have overtaken the web, it has become harder to parse information inside those media formats. One way to do it is to transcribe the audio part and turn it into text. Text is indexable, searchable and opens new possibilities. With Amazon Transcribe, the company has built a speech recognition engine. It lets you turns an audio file stored on your Amazon S3 account into grammatically correct text. Amazon Transcribe works in English and Spanish for now. But the company promised that many more languages will be added in the coming weeks. The secret sauce behind Amazon Transcribe is that the service can intelligently format and add punctuation. The service can also recognize multiple speakers and adds timestamp...

Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Bitcoin's value has fluctuated widely during its nine-year existence The value of one bitcoin has gone past $10,000 (£7,493). The virtual currency reached the benchmark for the first time, just days after it passed $9,000. It caps a remarkable rise in value for the crypto-currency, which was trading below $1,000 at the start of the year. Some experts believe the asset still has far to soar, but others say it represents a speculative bubble with nothing tangible at its core that could burst any time. The total value of all the bitcoins in existence has now surpassed $167bn. What's behind the Bitcoin gold rush? Bitcoin first reached $1,000 in late-2013 and then dipped significantly before starting a volatile climb to its current value. It is not entirely clear what has driven the sudden rise in value, especially because the past few weeks have been marked by action by some financial regulators to limit its use. New heights ...

As one of its last announcement on a day chock-full with new tools and features, Amazon previewed a new security device for the internet of things. Called IOT Device Defender, the new service will monitor policies around devices to look for anomalies in device activity and support customized rules and auditing policies that a customer would want to put in place. The service will also provide real-time detection and alerts based on variations from the normal device behavior defined by the rules provided by customers.   Finally, the new service will provide tools like contextual information so customers can investigate and mitigate the damage from any breaches. Information like device information and device statistics are available through customized alerts, and users can remotely reboot a device, revoke its permissions, reset it or push security fixes through the coming Amazon service.   Featured Image: NicoElNino/Getty Images

Image copyright Tatay / Google Play Image caption Duterte Fighting Crime 2 remains on Android's Google Play store Video games that put the player in the shoes of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte as he kills criminals have been removed from Apple's app store. Popular games with titles such as "Duterte knows Kung Fu: Pinoy Crime Fighter" have disappeared from the company's digital shop. A drug users' advocacy group said it had been campaigning for their removal. Thousands of people have been killed by police during the president's crackdown on drug-related crime. The Asian Network of People Who Use Drugs (Anpud) had previously written an open letter to Apple's CEO Tim Cook to remove the games, which it said were "promoting murder, extrajudicial killings, violence, and the war on drugs in the Philippines". "We did not receive a direct response from Mr Cook or Apple," the group said in a statement. "However, most of...

One more bit of news out of tonight’s Alexa State of the Union Keynote at AWS Re:Invent in Vegas. Amazon is finally bringing its voice service to Oceania. After several months of rumblings, the company announced today that Alexa will be arriving in Australia and New Zealand at some unspecified point in early 2018. In the meantime, it’s opening up its tools for developers, in order to get some skills on the market in time for its arrival. The addition of the two island nations is the latest in a good deal of recent expansion for the smart assistant. Late last year, Amazon brought the Echo and the Echo Dot to U.K. and Germany, the latter of which marked the first non-English language for the smart speaker. In October, the products arrived in India, and earlier this month, the company launched the new Echo, Echo Plus and Echo Dot in Japan. Ten days later, the Echo ecosystem expanded its footprint in North America, when it finally arrived in Canada. The Australian and New Zealan...

Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Classified Pentagon data was left exposed for years on a publicly accessible server Classified Pentagon data was mistakenly left exposed on an unsecured public cloud server, cyber-security researchers have discovered. The 100GB of data is from a failed joint intelligence-sharing programme run by the US Army and National Security Agency in 2013. The information was left on an unlisted but public Amazon Web Services storage server. It is likely to have been accessible to anyone on the internet for years. The exposed data was discovered by cyber-security company UpGuard on 27 September. A virtual-disk snapshot of a computer hard drive was found in an Amazon Web Services S3 cloud-storage account configured for public access. The hard drive had been part of a failed cloud-based intelligence-sharing platform developed by Inscom, the US Army's Intelligence and Security Command, in May 2013. Sensitive details leaked The files include s...

Apple has just released a security update for macOS High Sierra and you should update right now (Apple will automatically push the security patch later today). This update fixes yesterday’s very concerning vulnerability that let anyone log into your Mac without your password. In order to install the update, open the Mac App Store and click on the “Updates” tab. Interestingly, the release notes say “install this update as soon as possible.” Apple has worked long hours to fix yesterday’s flaw as soon as possible. But it shouldn’t have happened in the first place. The security flaw affected all Macs running the latest version of High Sierra (at least version 10.13.1 — 17B48). On the login screen or in the preference panel, you could bypass all security screens by entering the root username and no password. Multiple persons at TechCrunch tested the flaw and could replicate it effortlessly. After that, you can see everything on the computer eve...

Taking to yet another front the battle with Google, Apple and Microsoft for dominance in speech recognition and natural language processing, Amazon announced a new translation service as part of its AWS extravaganza. As part of Amazon Web Services, Translate will provide text translations for supported languages (Google and Microsoft have been offering these services for years). Amazon is pitching the new translate service as a way for businesses to expand products and services using its text translation tool. In a deep dive into how the service works, Amazon explained that the technology was based on language pairing models represented in neural networks. The model consists of an encoder component which reads sentences from the source language and creates a representation that captures the meaning of the text provided. The model also has a decoder component that formulates a semantic representation used to generate a translation of the text from the source language to the tar...

Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Google faces its first mass legal action in the UK Google is being taken to court, accused of collecting the personal data of millions of users, in the first mass legal action of its kind in the UK. It focuses on allegations that Google unlawfully harvested information from 5.4 million UK users by bypassing privacy settings on their iPhones. The group taking action - Google You Owe Us - is led by ex-Which director Richard Lloyd. He estimates affected users could be paid "a couple of hundred pounds each". The case centres on how Google used cookies - small pieces of computer text that are used to collect information from devices in order to deliver targeted ads. The complaint is that for several months in 2011 and 2012 Google placed ad-tracking cookies on the devices of Safari users which is set by default to block such cookies. 'Abuse of trust' The Safari workaround, as it became known, affected a variety of devic...

By putting best friends first and dividing them from professional publishers, Snapchat hopes to conquer Instagram and revive its own growth with a big redesign that begins rolling out Friday. And it looks great. Snapchat is finally personalizing, highlighting the most relevant content so it’s easier to consume. “We are separating the social from the media, and taking an important step forward towards strengthening our relationships with our friends and our relationships with the media,” Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel wrote in an Axios op-ed this morning. Rather than sorting content by how popular it is with everyone else like Facebook or by reverse chronological order like Snapchat used to, Snap will mold itself to what each person watches most, like Netflix. Even if Snapchat struggles to add more users amidst Facebook’s competition, its new algorithms could get loyalists spending even more time and seeing more ads in the app. A small percenta...

Even YouTube is adding Stories. The popular format introduced by Snapchat, then adopted by Instagram, Skype, Facebook, Messenger and even some dating apps, is now making its way to YouTube as a new feature the company is calling “Reels.” To be clear, Reels is YouTube’s spin on Stories, not an exact copy. And Reels won’t live at the top of the app, as Stories do on Instagram – instead, they’ll appear in a brand-new tab on a creator’s channel. The launch of the Reels beta was mentioned briefly in an announcement today about the expansion of YouTube Community tab to all creators with over 10,000 subscribers. We asked YouTube for more details on Reels, which will soon be introduced into beta for a handful of creators for feedback and further testing. The company tells us the idea with Reels is to introduce a new video format on YouTube that lets creators express themselves and engage fans without having to post a full video. Instead, creators make n...

Image copyright Getty Images Image caption The hacker is accused of accessing webmail accounts on behalf of Russian spies A Canadian man has pleaded guilty to charges related to a 2014 hack attack at Yahoo, which affected 500 million user accounts. Described by US law officials as a "hacker-for-hire", Karim Baratov admitted hacking web-mail accounts on behalf of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). The number of hacked accounts is disputed. His lawyers also say he did not know he had been working for Russian agents. Three other individuals have been charged over the hack but have not been arrested because they live in Russia, which has no extradition treaty with the US. Prosecutors have said two of them are FSB officers. According to court documents issued by the Northern District of California's US Attorney's Office, Baratov's role in the hack was to access the individual web-mail accounts of users whose data had been stolen in the Yahoo at...