SpaceX launches Falcon 9 with first broadband internet satellites

Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. launched a Falcon 9 rocket carrying a customer payload plus its own broadband demonstration satellites in the company’s first mission since millions tuned in earlier this month for its Falcon Heavy debut.
The Thursday launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base on California’s central Coast carried a radar-imaging satellite for Spain’s Hisdesat Servicios Estrategicos SA. The PAZ satellite will orbit the planet 15 times a day and collect information - including ship tracking and weather data - for government and commercial customers.
The rocket also carried a pair of SpaceX’s own broadband satellites as a secondary payload.

Microsat-2a and -2b are the first prototypes for the company’s planned constellation of satellites - dubbed Starlink - intended to offer broadband internet around the world.
“If successful, Starlink constellation will serve least served,” Musk said in a Tweet Wednesday. SpaceX’s fourth launch in what is expected to be a record year took off from the California pad at around 6:17 a.m. local time. SpaceX is targeting roughly 30 total launches this year, including flying its new Falcon Heavy rocket again in June.

Google employees lose nearly 250 Gbikes a week: Report

Technology giant Google loses between 100 and 250 of its colourful employee bicycles a week from its campus, the media reported.

Google maintains roughly 1,100 free, two-wheelers with yellow frames, red baskets and green and blue wheels, known as Gbikes, for its employees to get around its sprawling campus.

However, according to company estimates, its bikes consistently go missing from its campus-between 100 and 250 a week, typically costing $100 to $300.

The bikes have shown up at local schools, in neighbours' lawns, at the bottom of the town creek and on the roof of a sports pub.

"The disappearances often aren't the work of ordinary thieves, however. Many residents of Mountain View, a city of 80,000 that has effectively become Google's company town, see the employee perk as a community service," the Wall Street Journal reported on January 5.

A decade ago, Google started Silicon Valley's first corporate bike programme, which was adopted by at least 16 others across the US, including at Apple, Facebook, and Walmart, the report said.

The company recently equipped about a third of its 1,100 bikes with GPS trackers, which revealed that the two-wheelers take an average 12 trips and travel six miles a day.

It now also has a team of 30 Google contractors and five vans who are tasked with retrieving Gbikes. They carry waders and grappling hooks for pulling bikes out of a creek.
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Social media corroding civil discourse: Obama tells Prince Harry

Former US President Barack Obama told Britain's Prince Harry he was concerned social media was "corroding civil discourse", in what he said was his first interview since leaving the White House, aired on Wednesday.

"One of the dangers of the internet is that people can have entirely different realities," he told the prince, who was guest editing BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

"They can be cocooned in information that reinforces their current biases. Things aren't as simple as they've been portrayed in whatever chat room you've been in," he added.

"The question has to do with how do we harness this technology in a way that allows a multiplicity of voices, allows a diversity of views, but doesn't lead to a Balkanisation of society and allows ways of finding common ground."

The interview was recorded in Toronto, Canada, in September on the sidelines of the Invictus Games, the athletic tournament created by Harry for wounded former soldiers.

Despite admitting concern over the future of the US, Obama, who did not mention his successor Donald Trump by name, said he felt a sense of "serenity" on leaving the White House.

"There was a sense that we had run a good race," he added.

On his new routine, Obama told the prince: "I wake up later, it's wonderful to be able to control your day."
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Apple offered FBI help to unlock Texas shooter's iPhone: Report

Refuting the claims of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the aftermath of Texas church shooting, Apple reportedly said it offered to help the investigating agency in opening the attacker's encrypted iPhone.

The Cupertino-based giant said it reached out to the bureau "immediately" to offer assistance in getting into the gunman's iPhone and expedite its response to any legal process, The Verge reported late on Thursday.

The FBI had said that it has been unable to access the encrypted iPhone used by Devin P Kelley, who killed 26 people at a rural Texas church.

"Law enforcement is increasingly not able to get into these phones," Christopher Combs, a special agent at the investigating agency was quoted as saying.

The iPhone Kelley was carrying is said to have crucial information about his activities that led to the shooting.

The FBI and Apple have had strained relations after the December 2015 San Bernardino, California, terror attack when the company had refused the agency's request to help it unlock on the phones of the attacker despite a court order.

In a statement, CEO Tim Cook had said the court order sought and obtained by the FBI would pose a serious threat to data security.
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BadRabbit' cyber attacks hit airport, metro in Ukraine

The chief of Ukraine's cyber police said Ukraine was attacked on Tuesday by malware called BadRabbit, adding that the country was barely affected.

Earlier the airport in the southern city of Odessa said it had tightened security measures after being hit by a cyber attack, while the metro system in the capital Kiev reported a hack on its payment system.

Asked whether the malware BadRabbit was used in the attacks, Cyber Police Chief Serhiy Demedyuk said by text message "yes, correct".
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Nepal's central bank issues alert as hackers target major pvt bank

Cybercriminals reportedly hacked into the electronic fund transfer system of a major private sector bank in Nepal, prompting the country's central bank to issue an alert, officials said on Tuesday.

According to the officials of the Nepal Rastra Bank, the country's central bank, hackers tried to make illegal payment worth millions of rupees from the bank accounts of NIC Asia Bank Ltd using the SWIFT electronic money transfer system.

The NRB, they said, has asked foreign central banks not to make any payments sought.

"It has been found that transactions of NIC Asia Bank have been carried out from various banks in six countries by hackers using SWIFT, an international banking network," said Rajendra Pandit, deputy spokesperson of the NRB.

"We have already requested the central banks in those countries to stop processing payments to the parties requested by the hackers. Even payments which have already been made are likely to be retrieved," Pandit said.

The hackers reportedly broke into the SWIFT system of the NIC Asia Bank and siphoned off an undisclosed amount last week during the Diwali holidays.

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For Elon Musk, Google's 'Clips' camera doesn't 'seem' innocent

Google's artificial intelligence (AI)-based "Clips" camera has not impressed Tesla founder Elon Musk, a famed critic of AI.

"Clips" does image recognition and AI processing on-device, deploying machine learning to automatically click best pictures for you.
Musk, who thinks AI could trigger World War III and poses a far greater threat than North Korea, has now tweeted against "Clips" and its prowess.

Musk took to Twitter with reference to a video of "Clips" posted by The Verge.

"This doesn't even 'seem' innocent," he tweeted.

Google declined to comment specifically on Musk's tweet, CNET reported on Monday.

The $249 "Clips" is a lightweight, hands-free camera that helps people capture spontaneous moments.

"We've put machine learning capabilities directly into 'Clips' so when you turn it on, the camera looks for good moments to capture. Clips looks for stable, clear shots of people you know," Google said.

The camera shoots short-motion photos that last several seconds. The clips sync wirelessly and in seconds from the camera to the Google Clips app for Android or iOS.

"Finally, all the machine learning happens on the device itself. And just like any point-and-shoot, nothing leaves your device until you decide to save it and share it," Google added.
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How Blade Runner 2049 prepares us to welcome robots for real

The idea of dangerous, inhumane artificial intelligence taking over the world is familiar to many of us, thanks to cautionary tales such as the Matrix and Terminator franchises.

But what about the more sympathetic portrayals of robots? The benevolence of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator character in the later movies of the franchise may have been the exception in older portrayals of AI, but human-like machines are often represented more positively in contemporary films. Think of Ex Machina, Chappie or A.I. Artificial Intelligence.
This shift is very likely representative of a wider shift in how we think about these technologies in reality. Blade Runner 2049, long-anticipated sequel to the original 1982 Blade Runner film, is a part of this shift.

The ability of science fiction to inspire technological innovation is well-known. A lot of science fiction writers are scientists and technologists (Arthur C Clarke and Geoffrey Landis are two examples), and ideas from science fiction have sparked more serious scientific research (touch screens and tablet computers are common examples). But science fiction serves other purposes too. It can be a tool for exploring the social and ethical implications of technologies being developed now – a fictional laboratory for testing possible futures. It can also prepare us to deal with certain technologies as they arise in the real world.
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Google to release Clips camera, GoPro stock dips by 6 percent

Google's announcement that it was planning to launch a smart video camera as part of its push into hardware sent shares of action camera maker GoPro Inc down more than six percent on Wednesday.

Google Clips will be the first standalone camera from the search and advertising company, which has expanded its hardware business over the last year.
Its signature feature draws on machine learning technology to automatically begin recording when notable actions are detected. Those could include a child cracking a smile or a dog entering the frame.

It was one of a suite of new products unveiled by Alphabet Inc's Google on Wednesday. Its move into smartphones, speakers and laptops has put the search giant into competition with Apple Inc and Amazon.com Inc .

Clips, which Google said is "coming soon," takes on compact cameras such as GoPro's Hero5 Session and Snap Inc's Spectacles as each strives to make the process of recording video simpler and more mobile.

GoPro stock closed down 6.3 percent at $10.39. Shares of Snap, which derives revenue mostly from ad sales on its social media app, dropped 0.75 percent to $14.53.
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Trump overtakes Pope to become Twitter's most followed world leader

President Donald Trump has passed Pope Francis to become the most-followed world leader on Twitter, a social media tracker says.

Twitplomacy says Trump, with about 40 million followers, over the weekend took the top spot on its tracked list of about 890 accounts of leaders like heads of state and government. The pope's followers in all languages are slightly fewer.

Twitplomacy founder Matthias Luefkens, head of digital with Burson Marsteller EMEA, acknowledged that many followers could be dormant accounts or "bots." The list also doesn't count ex-leaders like Barack Obama, who has 95 million-plus followers.

Trump has frequently announced government policy or made controversial statements on Twitter.

Luefkens said today that Trump's tweets get many "interactions" and he expects the US leader might trumpet the achievement: "He does like his crowd size.
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Here is why Mark Zuckerberg can't be blocked on Facebook

The Facebook profiles of Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan cannot be blocked because they have reportedly been blocked so many times that the social media giant is stopping it happening.

When people do not want to see your posts, they will either unfriend you, stop following you or they will block you.

If you press the block button on both of their profiles, a message saying "Block Error" will be returned -- meaning that there "was a problem while blocking Mark Zuckerberg or Priscilla Chan" and you should "try again".

Zuckerberg writes a lot about updates to Facebook and news about his personal life or statements on current events on his personal page.

According to a report in The Independent, those posts then seem to benefit from help from the Facebook algorithm and are interacted with, pushing them onto people's news feeds.

Blocking the Facebook founder and his wife was a useful way of keeping those posts from appearing before it was banned.

The ban has been in place since 2010 and even led to a now-defunct website that exists only to point out that it's impossible to block Zuckerberg, the report pointed out.
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YouTube gets new design, brings more features to app

YouTube, the online video streaming portal, has updated its mobile app for intuitive user experience. The YouTube app update applies Google’s Material design that brings host of new features and redefined the existing ones of the app.

Here are the key new features added to the app:

Design: The navigation tabs are moved to the bottom and now features two new tabs – Library and Account. The header is coloured in white so that the content can take the lead.

Gestures: The app supports double tap gestures on the left or right side, which fast forward or rewind 10 seconds of a video. In the coming months, accoridng to the YouTube official blogpost,  the app will get more gesture support that will allow users to jump between videos with a swipe of your hand -- swipe left to watch a previous video or swipe right to watch the next one.

Speed control: The app now supports playback speed control. You can either slowdown or fast-forward the videos at whatever speed you prefer.
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Google launches ARCore to bring augmented reality closer to Android users

In a bid to bring the augmented reality (AR) experience closer to Android users, Google has released a new software development kit (SDK) called ARCore.

The platform, which is now available for developers to experiment with, will render augmented reality capabilities to existing and future Android phones, Google said in a statement late on Tuesday.

The company built on the fundamental technologies used in Tango, another AR platform by Google, but ARCore is scalable across the Android ecosystem as it doesn't require any additional hardware.

The new AR platform has been rolled out to Google Pixel and Samsung S8 which run on Android 7.0 Nougat and above.

Google is working with manufacturers like Samsung, Huawei, LG, ASUS and other major smartphone makers for quality and performance checks.

ARCore, which works with 'Java/OpenGL', 'Unity' and 'Unreal' technologies mainly focuses on three features -- motion tracking, environmental understanding and light estimation.

The tech giant has also built 'Blocks' and 'Tilt Brush' applications for creation of 3D content for use in AR apps.

Last month, Apple had unveiled its ARKit platform focussing on augmented reality applications at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference, to allow developers to build apps that could place virtual content on top of real-world scenes.
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Facebook starts rolling out shows for 'Watch' to take on YouTube

Facebook has started to roll out funded shows on "Watch" -- a redesigned video platform for creators and publishers.

According to a report in Digiday late on Tuesday, Business Insider's lifestyle brand Insider is debuting two new shows -- "The Great Cheese Hunt" and "It's Cool, But Does It Really Work?".

News and issues publisher Attn will premiere "We Need to Talk" on Thursday and "Health Hacks" starring Jessica Alba on Friday.

Meanwhile, food video giant Tastemade is debuting four shows, including "Safe Deposit", "Struggle Meals", "Food to Die For" and "Kitchen Little", over the next week.

In an apparent bid to take on Google-owned YouTube, Facebook rolled out "Watch" earlier this month.

The social media giant last year launched "Video" tab in the US which offered a predictable place to find videos on Facebook.

"Now we want to make it even easier to catch up with shows you love. We're introducing 'Watch', a new platform for shows on Facebook. 'Watch' will be available on mobile, on desktop and laptop and in our TV apps," Daniel Danker, Director of Product at Facebook, had said.
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Self-driving cars are coming, but are we ready?

It’s been 60 years since the cover of Popular Mechanics magazine gave us the promise of flying cars. But our personal mobility options remain, today and for the foreseeable future, earthbound. Will the promise of self-driving cars be as elusive? In short, no. The dream of taking a road trip in which we pay more attention to a new book or movie than we do to the driving task is well within reach.

Still, we’re not there yet. And people are just beginning to ask a very important question: How might our nation’s roads and highways, and the driving done by we humans ourselves, need to change as autonomous vehicles become more ubiquitous? As researchers at the Texas A&M Transportation Institute who study many of the implications of self-driving cars, we find the answer in two important sets of realities – those we know, and those we don’t know.

Starting slowly, and in cities
For starters, we know that self-driving cars won’t become commonplace overnight. The vast majority of cars on the road now have no automation features or only very limited automation, like cruise control. You can find a few self-driving cars being tested on public roads now if you know where to look. But you won’t likely find many in a dealer showroom for at least 10 years.

Another factor that will further delay the widespread use of autonomous cars is that many people hang on to their cars as long as possible. The number of highly automated cars as a share of everything on the road will grow over time, but only relatively slowly.
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Now, iPhone users can secretly make emergency call using their fingerprints

In a bid to enhance security measures on iPhone, Apple has patented a technology that would allow users to secretly call 911 using their fingerprints.

According to the patent published by the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the feature would allow users to call emergency services when a conventional method may not be practical, CNN reported on Tuesday.

The feature would look for a sequence of fingerprints or applied pressure to trigger a 911 call which could be programmed to bypass the screen-lock authentication and may also send user's location to the authorities.

"The user may programme the electronic device to recognise input entered with a particular sequence of fingers, such as 'pinky-ring-pinky', as a command to make an emergency call," the patent was quoted.

This will keep the potential attacker unaware of device owner's action and additionally, the feature could pull live audio or video directly from the iPhone.

The patent also includes a method that could erase or hide sensitive information of the user, the report added.

The patented technology, if realised, could be very helpful in improving individual's safety.
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WhatsApp down in China: Could meet the same fate as FB, Twitter, YouTube

Netizens in China have reporter disruptions in service by Whatsapp, leading to the scare that the Facebook-owned chat app may be on its way to being entirely blocked.

Several users have reported that the app is no longer properly accessible unless they use a virtual private network to send their internet traffic outside the country and around its great firewall, reports the Independent.

Meanwhile, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang said he had no information on the issue when asked by reporters on Tuesday.

WhatsApp is known for helping those seeking a greater degree of privacy from government snooping than domestic app WeChat, which closely monitored and filtered.

The development comes at a politically charged time in China, as while Chinese censors have boosted efforts to eradicate all mention of Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate who died Thursday in government custody.

Besides blocking Twitter, Facebook and YouTube over possible threat to national security, Chinese authorities are now turning their focus to encrypted messaging apps.
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Apple patent case: Qualcomm CEO expects 'out of court' settlement

Global chip maker Qualcomm that recently filed a new patent infringement lawsuit against Apple now expects 'out of court' settlement with the Cupertino-based iPhone maker.

According to a Fortune report on Tuesday, Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf said during the Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen, Colorado, that "those things tend to get resolved out of court and there's no reason why I wouldn't expect that to be the case here."

He was comparing the dispute with Apple to earlier fights Qualcomm has had with other tech companies that were settled out of court.

Mollenkopf, however, added he didn't have any specific news announcing a settlement was on the way.

"I don't have an announcement or anything so please don't ask," he told the gathering.

Earlier in July, Qualcomm asked the US authorities to ban imports of some iPhone and iPad models.

Qualcomm filed a complaint with the US International Trade Commission, accusing Apple's iPhones and iPads of infringing six of its mobile patents.

Qualcomm said all iPhones and iPads that contain competing mobile communications chips should be barred from the country.
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WhatsApp down: China users report disruption amid censorship fears

Users of WhatsApp in China and security researchers have reported widespread service disruptions amid fears that the popular messaging service may be at least partially blocked by authorities in the world's most populous country.

WhatsApp users in China reported today on other social media platforms that the app was partly inaccessible unless virtual private network software was used to circumvent China's censorship apparatus, known colloquially as The Great Firewall.

WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook and offers end-to- end encryption, has a relatively small but loyal following among users seeking a greater degree of privacy from government snooping than afforded by popular domestic app WeChat, which is ubiquitous but closely monitored and filtered.

Questions over WhatsApp's status come at a politically fraught time in China. The government is in the midst of preparing for a sensitive party congress while Chinese censors this week revved up a sprawling effort to scrub all mention of Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate who died Thursday in government custody.

A report this week by the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab detailed how Chinese censors were able to intercept, in real time, images commemorating Liu in private one-on-one chats on WeChat, a feat that hinted at the government's image recognition capabilities

It appeared that pictures were also the focus of the move to censor WhatsApp. Late today, users in China could send texts over WhatsApp without the use of VPNs, but not images.
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China bans 73 illegal live streaming sites and 1,879 porn sites in H1 2017

China has closed 73 illegal live streaming platforms in the first half of 2017 and imposed life bans on 1,879 live streamers for providing pornographic content.

From January to June, more than 120,000 accounts were cleared and 38,179 accounts that violated regulations were blocked by the country's anti-pornography office, said the National Office Against Pornographic and Illegal Publications today.

Local anti-pornography offices have also helped police to investigate more than 10 cases of live streaming platforms with pornographic content, including one platform named Laohuzhibo, or "Tiger," in east China's Zhejiang Province.

The platform launched overseas operations in March this year and recruited female live streaming presenters to spread pornography. As of May 3, the platform had received fees of 7.28 million yuan (USD1.08 million) from users and had more than 1,000 female presenters streaming pornography.

Two principal suspects, surnamed Fang and Qi, were arrested and 22 people have been put into detention. Police are still looking for three fugitives.
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