Day: January 22, 2019

Remember the report at the end of last year that described the eventual death of Hangouts, the one that caused the Hangouts boss at Google to throw a bit of a Twitter fit? And then remember when Google followed up to confirm the general theme of that report, that yes, Hangouts would eventually die and people who be able to move over to the newer Hangouts Chat? Today, the company behind Hangouts has given us some beginning-of-the-end dates to mark on the calendar.

Here’s what you need to know. Hangouts (which Google refers to now as “classic” Hangouts) will begin a retirement phase in October 2019 for G Suite customers. Most of you are not G Suite customers and that date won’t affect your use of classic Hangouts. G Suite customers are those who pay Google for corporate-esque access to their services. If you access Gmail with a @gmail.com address, you aren’t a G Suite customer.

For consumer users (most of you) of classic Hangouts, Google doesn’t have a beginning-of-the-end date to share at this moment. Just know that you won’t need to think about switching over to Hangouts Chat until G Suite users have. My guess is that that’ll happen in 2020. Google plans to share a date with us later on.

For G Suite users worried about October coming up quickly and wondering if Google is ever going to make Hangouts Chat a good app, we have additional news there. Google plans to begin implementing features from classic Hangouts into Hangouts Chat between April and September 2019.

What are those features? Specifically, you’ll see the following move over to Hangouts Chat before the October 2019 shutdown:

• Integration with Gmail
• Chatting with external users
• An improved video calling experience
• Making calls with Google Voice

To recap, classic Hangouts will begin to retire in October of this year for G Suite customers. Before that happens and Google forces G Suite users from classic to Hangouts Chat, they’ll add a handful of features that are necessary. For most classic Hangouts consumer users, you probably have another year before you need to worry about whether or not you’ll need to ditch Hangouts for something new or prepare to switch to Chat.

// G Suite Updates

Run a hand down your forearm, or press your fingers together—now imagine someone else taking the same actions. The two sensations feel different, even though the touch is the same. The reason why makes intuitive sense: someone else is touching you, and you have no direct information about whether the touch will continue or change. It’s why most people can’t tickle themselves, because there’s no element of surprise. But a new study from researchers at Sweden’s Linköping University reveals that there’s more going on than suspense.

“I think that the tactile sense and interpersonal touch is something that’s very important for us humans, but it’s not studied very much,” says principal study author Rebecca Böhme. Touch is the first way humans know other people: even before birth, later-stage fetuses feel the inside of their birth parent’s womb. Even later in life, she says, social and interpersonal touch is a key part of how we navigate the world. From shaking hands to picking up a child, touching other people—and feeling them touch us back—tells us about our relationships and surroundings.

But our brains process social touch and self touch at different speeds and intensities. The new study helps to illuminate some parts of this process. Böhme and her colleagues conducted a series of three tests on different groups of experiment participants to learn about what’s going on in the nervous system and the brain during self touch and touch from others.

In the first test, they placed subjects in an MRI and found that fewer areas of the brain were activated, and at a lower intensity, during self touch than when experimenters touched the subjects. In the second test, they asked subjects to touch their own arms and simultaneously poked them with a plastic filament. Then, researchers asked the subjects whether they perceived the filament and where they felt their own touch most—in the hand doing the touching or the arm receiving the touching. In the third test, experimenters placed an electrode on subjects’ thumbs and used it to track how quickly the brain processes information from self touch and touch by others.

They found that the perception of self touch was lower priority for the brains of their test subjects than the perception of touch by other people. That wasn’t too surprising. What did come as a surprise was the level of difference between the touch signal from others and from self touch. “This extreme difference was not something I expected,” Böhme says.

This study demonstrated that test subjects’ brains clearly understood the difference between self-touch and touch by others, and weighted those two experiences differently. “Me” versus “not me” is defined by touch.

But not everybody experiences touch the same way. Some people with psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia or autism seem to feel self touch more acutely than most neurotypical people. Böhme says that repeating the experiments conducted in this study with people who have psychiatric disorders is where she hopes to take this line of research next. “There’s lots of science indicating that [touch] might at least be involved in psychiatric disorders,” she says. A better understanding of how touch is perceived by the brain might help people manage their conditions and have a better quality of life.

Posted by

Shane McGlaun |

Tue, Jan 22, 2019 – 9:06 AM

If you are one of the masses that uses Google Maps on your smartphone or tablet for GPS, some updates are rolling out. Reports indicate that in many parts of the country Google Maps now has speed limits that show on the app to help you not get a ticket. I can confirm that the speed limits showed up for me in the Colorado Springs, Colorado area this week.

The app is also reportedly updated to show drivers where speed cameras are located in some areas. The speed limits feature has been in testing for a few years in the San Francisco Bay and Rio de Janeiro areas. It took a long time for that functionality to roll out to other users.

Speed limit indicators are something that other apps, like Waze, and other GPS devices have offered for a long time. With the speed limits added, users will get popups if they are over the posted limit reports Cult of Mac. Thankfully, it appears as if you can go up to five miles per hour over the limit and not get hit with popups.

At least in my cruising down the highway marked 75mph at a speed of 79-80 mph I saw no notifications. These are certainly welcome features that will make Maps better for those who use it.

Faced with impossible circumstances forced by the longest shutdown in U.S. history, hundreds of government workers have turned to GoFundMe to help pay for things like medicine and groceries. Now, GoFundMe has initiated its own relief fund to help ease the burden for workers without pay.

The company partnered with Deepak Chopra on the campaign and will distribute the funds to a number of nonprofits actively working to cover federal workers’ basic needs, including #ChefsForFeds and the National Diaper Bank Network. GoFundMe CEO Rob Solomon that additional organizations will be added to the list of recipients.

“Instead of engaging in ideological debates while people suffer during the government shutdown, we could all help with creative solutions however small to help those affected,” Chopra told Gizmodo by email. “This is the least we can do.”

The campaign had already reached nearly 90 percent of its goal of $50,000 as of Sunday afternoon, with Chopra and GoFundMe having donated a combined $20,000 to kickstart the campaign. According to GoFundMe, the campaign’s goal will be increased once its initial target is reached.

“I wish we did not have to start a GoFundMe to help federal workers,” Solomon said in a statement. “Unfortunately we do. And because we live in an imperfect world, we have a simple choice: We can feel helpless while tragedy unfolds, or we can take action.”

As the shutdown stretches into a month, more than 800,000 government workers who have been furloughed or forced to work without any pay have taken desperate measures to provide for themselves and their families. In addition to well over 1,000 personal GoFundMe campaigns asking for assistance while the shutdown presses on, Craigslist has also been flooded with posts by individuals selling their property to make ends meet.

“Employees of the most powerful nation in the world are being forced to work without pay and line up at diaper or food banks,” Solomon said. “It makes no sense.”

Democrats over the weekend shot down what President Donald Trump presented as a “compromise” over his demands for funding for his border wall, with Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Saturday tweeting: “What is original in the President’s proposal is not good. What is good in the proposal is not original.”

On Sunday, Pelosi called on Trump to “re-open the government” following his hours-long Twitter rant about the rejected proposal.

[Huffington Post]

Netflix and eight other streaming services including pending Disney acquisition Hotstar and Jio Cinema have signed a “code of best practices” stating they will voluntarily self-regulate their content in India, CNN Business reported on Friday. According to CNN, the agreement (posted to Indian tech site MediaNama) includes provisions targeting content that “disrespects the national emblem or national flag,” “intends to outrage religious sentiments,” or “encourages terrorism or other forms of violence against the State.”

CNN wrote that the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), the telecom lobbying group which published the document and is seeking some form of official endorsement from government ministries on it, did not return requests for comment. But it also wrote that Netflix confirmed to them that they had signed the agreement, as well as denied that it had agreed to censor its content:

Netflix (NFLX) confirmed that it had signed the code, but the company downplayed suggestions that it amounts to censorship.

“The self-regulation code is a set of guiding principles for participating companies like us,” it said in a statement to CNN Business on Friday. “It ensures an environment that protects the artistic vision of content producers so that their work can be seen by their fans.”

In a tweet, the IAMAI wrote that “to equate the self-regulation code with censorship is grossly misleading.”

However, the Indian government has recently proposed amending Section 79 of the IT Act (a law which functions similarly to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and provides immunity to web platforms for user-generated content). As Wired wrote, the proposed amendments target online misinformation by “effectively forcing internet companies to censor a broad swath of user content,” as well as forcing secure messaging services like WhatsApp to “decrypt encrypted data for government use”:

Under the new rules, platforms would be required to deploy automated tools to ensure that information or content deemed “unlawful” by government standards never appears online. The Indian government has yet to define what it considers unlawful, but critics warn that it could create incentives for internet companies to flag, and potentially remove, more content than necessary, to avoid publishing something illegal. The unlawful definition likely would encompass everything prohibited under Indian law, which includes hate speech against certain protected groups, defamation, child abuse, and depictions of rape, among many others.

The use of automated tools to remove infringing content is particularly controversial, as there are numerous examples of platforms that have tried and failed to do so. Blogging site Tumblr, for example, banned porn in 2018, and its automated filters immediately began removing swathes of innocuous content from the site.

The proposal to force secure messaging apps to break their own encryption at the behest of the government—which could compromise the security of users—is motivated by reports that rumors circulating on WhatsApp led to numerous lynchings, Wired wrote.

“If there are heinous crimes being committed of people being lynched, the government’s investigating agencies would like to know who the people behind this are,” an anonymous government official told the Economic Times. “Heinous crimes cannot be allowed to happen in the garb of (social media) platforms saying that they are encrypted.”

It’s not clear whether the proposals are directly connected to Netflix’s decision to sign the code. But according to BuzzFeed News, sources at Netflix said that the self-regulation agreement was an attempt to “avoid official government censorship” and pre-empt criticism that streaming networks are not legally regulated in the same manner as Indian cable TV companies—which are subject to Ministry of Information and Broadcasting censorship and obscenity laws.

The Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) has come out strongly against the proposed changes to Indian laws, writing they are “taking India close to a Chinese model of censorship.” On Jan. 17, they also published a letter to IAMAI urging them to rethink the code, which they said “creates a de-facto censorship mechanism which will only become more pervasive in time” and will work to the “detriment of the entire online video streaming sector.”

“We reasonably anticipate that the adoption of this code and endorsement by Government will in time develop into a censorship system for online content streaming which will serve no objective public policy goal, and may not even decrease the liability exposure of companies,” the IFF added.

[CNN Business]

Uber—the company that had to pull its self-driving cars off the road for most of 2018 following a lethal accident that allegedly came after warnings of routine accidents—is hiring for a program that may work on self-driving “micromobility” devices, TechCrunch reported on Sunday.

Details are, as TechCrunch noted, “scarce,” but there’s a lot of speculation that Uber is investigating autonomous versions of the scooters and bikes of the short-term rental type that have already taken over many major cities. The Telegraph reported that Uber has begun hiring for the Micromobility Robotics team, which it wrote had the goal of developing scooters and bikes that can drive to charging stations themselves, or possibly to go and pick up riders after the prior passenger disembarks.

TechCrunch noted that a Google form uploaded by Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group was soliciting applicants:

The New Mobilities team at Uber is exploring ways to improve safety, rider experience, and operational efficiency of our shared electric scooters and bicycles through the application of sensing and robotics technologies.

Self-driving scooters would be a big game-changer for Uber. It already has a fleet of electric bikes and scooters under its Jump division, but like competitors Bird and Lime (the latter of which Uber owns a minority stake in) the logistics of using a small army of contractors to pick up the scooters after rides are already a major money-burner. Moreover, the companies haven’t been great about managing them. Both Bird and Lime were restricted from doing business in San Francisco after launching without permits and leaving scooters everywhere, and locals in West Coast cities reportedly waged a sort of guerilla vandalism campaign against them in 2018.

As TechCrunch noted, Uber Jump recently unveiled a series of upgrades to give some of its bikes “self-diagnostic capabilities and swappable batteries,” designed to minimize downtime. Self-driving scooters are an obvious way to further streamline the business.

On the other hand, given that Uber and its competitors have already run into major safety issues with self-driving cars, it’s hard not to be somewhat worried about an army of self-driving scooters hitting the roads and sidewalks of U.S. cities, intermixing with pedestrians and vehicular traffic. Reports have suggested human-piloted ones available right now have generated a growing number of injuries, and there have been serious glitches with some models. (Jalopnik’s Bradley Brownell took some Bird scooters for a ride in early 2018, finding that some had faulty brakes.) Nor would anyone probably feel alone in that concern: A poll conducted in January 2018 found just 27 percent of respondents would feel comfortable in a self-driving car.

That said, Uber hasn’t confirmed that this is what the Micromobility Robotics team will actually be doing, and given that hiring has only just begun, it’s a safe bet that self-driving scooters won’t be hitting the road anytime soon. Perhaps autonomous bikes and scooters would also raise eyebrows among transportation regulators that already have a sour taste in their mouth from the fiasco in 2018. Then there’s another issue: Unless these bikes and scooters are capable of picking themselves up when left sideways on the ground, this won’t eliminate the need for all those contractors.

Uber did not respond to a request for comment from Gizmodo for this story, but we’ll update if we hear back.

[TechCrunch/The Telegraph]