Gmail App Now Lets You Send and Request Money

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The Gmail app on Android could be your new payment hub, assuming you are a fan of Google Wallet and need to send cash to people on the regular through email. Just like you have been able to on the web for some time, Google is adding an option in the Compose menu to send cash without much work. 

Once the feature hits your Gmail account, you’ll send money with Google Wallet sort of like you do an attachment. As you hit the option to “Send money,” you’ll walk through how much to send and with which account, before the task then attaches to the email you are sending. You can include memos, send cash to people who don’t even have Gmail, and let the person receiving money direct the funds to their bank account, instead of Wallet.

The two GIFs below show you exactly how this will work. Anyone get the option yet?

Via: Google

Gmail App Now Lets You Send and Request Money is a post from: Droid Life

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AT&T’s “truly unlimited” prepaid plan has no hotspot, max speed of 3Mbps

Getty Images | Linda Jo Heilman

AT&T on Friday promised a “truly unlimited plan” for its prepaid phone customers, but the new offering limits video quality to standard definition, caps overall speeds at 3Mbps, and prohibits mobile hotspot use.

For $60 a month, GoPhone (AT&T’s prepaid brand) now offers a plan without traditional data caps and overage charges. “We’re excited to offer a truly unlimited plan for our AT&T GoPhone customers,” AT&T VP Bob Bickerstaff said in the announcement. But the plan is always limited to an overall speed of 3Mbps, and video is limited to 1.5Mbps (about 480p), AT&T said. The cost is $65 a month for customers who don’t sign up for automatic payments.

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Magnetic storage reaches the atomic level

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It’s quite a bit smaller than these relics.

Data storage needs to keep up with our desire to snap pictures, download clips from the Internet, and create new digital documents. Since the early stages of computer technology, magnetic storage has been the method of choice to handle digital data. It has stayed that way because of our ability to continually shrink the area used to hold a single magnetic bit.

But we’re closing in on the limits of this approach, as clusters of three to 12 atoms have been used as a functional system. Last week, however, scientists demonstrated the ability to magnetically store data in a single atom.

The basics of magnetic storage

Magnetic storage requires the magnetization of a ferromagnetic material to record data. These materials rely on the atom’s electrons, which themselves behave like tiny magnets. The electrons carry a magnetic dipole moment that is determined by the direction the electron spins and the shape of the path the electron travels (quantum mechanical spin and orbital angular momentum, to be technical). There are only two directions the electron can spin, either “up” or “down.”

Although this system is dynamic, its two stable equilibrium states, “up” or “down,” provide what’s often referred to as magnetic bistability. Having a bit stored indefinitely usually involves a cluster of atoms all set to the same state. This provides a bigger signal, ensuring the bit is maintained even if any given atom doesn’t behave stably.

So, while there were many advances in the miniaturization of magnetic bistability, there were some obvious questions about the limits it could reach.

A single-atom approach

In this investigation, scientists worked with holmium atoms (Ho) supported on magnesium oxide (MgO). Although many Ho atoms formed clusters on the surface, the researchers identified single atoms located atop oxygen to use as a magnetic storage material.

Using a scanning tunneling microscope, the researchers applied current pulses to the Ho atoms to switch the direction of the magnetic moments, demonstrating the ability to control the magnetic behavior of individual Ho atoms. They were then able to read the magnetic patterns by placing another magnetic material in close proximity, which enabled electrons to tunnel from one magnet to another (tunnel magnetoresistance).

Magnetic storage requires the ability to read and write information, but it also requires information to be retained over time. To gauge the storage retention time, the scientists observed how long a Ho atom would remain in a single state after being switched using a pulse of current. They found that the bits would last for hours before starting to randomize.

The researchers performed a clever trick to test that what they were seeing was truly due to the magnetic moment of the Ho atom. They used the microscope tip to place a single iron atom near the Ho atom. In this experimental set-up, the iron atom functions as a local magnetometer, since it has an external out-of-plane magnetic field that’s influenced by nearby magnetic materials. When the scientists applied current pulses to the Ho atom, they saw corresponding shifts in the magnetic field of the iron atom, demonstrating that the individual Ho atoms did in fact possess two distinct magnetic orientations.

Finally, the researchers explored the ability of an array of two Ho atoms to store two bits of information, again using a nearby Fe atom to locally read the magnetic state. They were also able to use other advanced techniques to remotely read the magnetic states.

These experiments demonstrate that high-density magnetic storage at the atomic level is possible, though significant research is still needed to further develop this technology and understand the practical feasibility. After all, something that’s only stable for a few hours would require a very different approach than past magnetic media.

Nature, 2017. DOI: 10.1038/nature21371 (About DOIs).

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The CIA uses board games to train officers—and I got to play them

AUSTIN, Texas—"You have got to be kidding me."

Alarms and flashing lights have begun blaring in a hotel meeting room, much to the chagrin of CIA Senior Collection Analyst David Clopper. The officer, along with a team of his colleagues, is in the middle of demonstrating his department’s training materials, and he has to account for these materials before leaving the room. In some cases, this might require picking up a few stacks of paper, or some pamphlets and flyers.

Clopper, on the other hand, has to pick up dozens of 10-sided die, over 100 colored gems, and hundreds of custom-printed cards that describe hypothetical crises across the globe. That’s nothing compared to the mess of cards on the other side of the room, which, moments ago, were being used to track and capture the elusive drug kingpin El Chapo.

They were this close.

Uh-oh, Venezuela’s causing trouble again!

The two groups of South By Southwest attendees split up in this conference room hesitate to get up. They were testing out the weirdest training exercise the CIA has ever publicly revealed: board games. These aren’t off-the-shelf games; instead, CIA officers designed and assembled these elaborate tabletop games to reflect the realities of the CIA’s day-to-day operations.

  • Don’t expect to see CIA training game Collection in board game shops anytime soon.

  • Each acronym on the board represents a real-life intel collection agency.

  • I didn’t get a shot of a card that explains what each role in the game is, but this explains how the dice-rolling process works when you attempt to gather intel for a particular campaign.

  • These are some of the campaigns you may be saddled with during a game of Collection. "Venezuela Causing Trouble is easily our favorite.

  • Almost every "crisis expansion" card ratchets up one of the three "fire" meters on the board, but these can also make collection agencies ramp up their efforts accordingly. Kind of like in real life, when shit hits the fan and agencies start actually taking your phone calls and getting things done in response.

  • You’re going to want the "collector response" numbers as high as possible, because in the board game, these represent which dice rolls will count as intel successes.

Clopper recalls one day in 2008 when his "boss’s boss" called him into a meeting and asked him to develop new internal training exercises. Normally, these exercises test whether recent lessons and seminars have been absorbed by officers, and they usually involve "teams, flip charts, and briefings," Clopper says. "Incredibly boring." But Clopper had now been at the CIA long enough to reshape its exercises, his boss said, and he got excited: "I’m a gamer. I enjoy games, video games, tabletop games. Could we bring games into learning?"

He used SXSW to present three board games made for his training exercises over the span of a four-year period, one of which is still in development. The first is the one we got the most hands-on time with during SXSW: Collection. If that dry-as-a-desert name isn’t a good indicator, rest assured—this is not a game meant for retail or for the highest ratings at BoardGameGeek.

Collection compares favorably to the popular cooperative game Pandemic. In Clopper’s game, a group of players must work together to resolve three major crises across the globe. The object is for players, who each represent different types of CIA officers, to collect enough relevant intel to resolve all three crises. If any one of the three impending disasters boils over (as represented by three increasing "fire" meters), the team loses. Every game must have at least three players to fill the roles of "political advisor," "military advisor," and "economic advisor." Those three are only able to collect intel in their specific fields, while additional players (up to seven on a team) have their own specialties.

The difficulty comes from the low number of actions each player can do per turn, along with how quickly the fire meter ratchets up. Players can take two actions per turn: move your agent around the globe, foster new relationships in your current location, or attempt to acquire intel. The latter move is a dice roll. Those rolls are bolstered by having more relationships in a certain zone, by having fellow agents in that same zone (if they offer a specific "colocator" bonus), by having bonus cards, and by how good your relationship is with a specific agency.

Let me be blunt: These boosts and bonuses are not doled out in ways that game designers would call "fair." This game is hard. That’s how Clopper likes it.

"This game is really about value of collaboration," Clopper says. "We saw [game sessions] where people took the time to talk to one another, talk about your [individual] capability, how we can work together, or thought ahead, strategized, ‘I go first, you go next.’ They tended to win. The tables where someone would go on their own and do what they wanted, or do their own thing, or didn’t collaborae until too late, they couldn’t catch up to the crises. It was a simulation of what we do, but also teaching the importance of working together."

Thanks to detailed cards about department descriptions, our civilian test group was able to squeak some fun out of this game by role-playing. I enjoyed knowing that one of my turns revolved around me working as a political analyst in collaboration with the CIA’s Department of Operations. I peppered my table-talk with descriptions of my very "clandestine" efforts.

Magic: The (covert intel) Gathering

  • One of Clopper’s other game designs, which we didn’t get to demo.

  • Clopper’s unfinished game about satellite grid creation and management. Should your team use fewer satellites and make them more powerful? Use more to account for failures? Either way presents different challenges (which is great for training scenarios, the CIA says).

Another Clopper game game, Collection Deck, focuses less on collaborative work and more on the sheer act of collecting intel. It also differentiates between "things that are secret and not secret." This collectible card game plays like Magic: The Gathering, Clopper says. Multiple players work to resolve intelligence problems (represented by cards laid on the table) while dealing with out-of-nowhere issues (represented by "reality check" cards that players can use against each other).

"You try to use a card representing an overhead satellite—you want to use that to take a picture," Clopper says. "Another player throws down a ‘ground station failure’ card. Now you can’t use that one."

The game was built to simultaneously deliver context about intelligence-gathering methods and to help officers understand how real-world hiccups can get in the way while in the act. "People would come up to me after [a session] and say, ‘David, I learned bout something I didn’t know existed before,’" Clopper says. "’I think we can use this on a real intelligence problem I’m tracking.’ It’s a game, but it had real mission impact."

His unfinished project, tentatively titled Satellite Construction Kit, will have players cooperate to manage resources, budget, and time to build and maintain connected satellites. While managing costs and deciding whether to build redundancies in this satellite network, Clopper says players will deal with challenges like the Department of Defense demanding certain capabilities, or Congress slashing your budget by 10 percent. "That never happens," Clopper says with a laugh about the latter.

  • This is one of two giant, confusing boards for Kingpin: The Hunt for El Chapo.

  • Facial reconstruction surgery? That’s intense, guys.

  • CIA officers refused to answer Ars’ questions about where these photos came from.

  • Sadly, I didn’t get to play this one and explore exactly the game’s mechanics or how chits get shuffled around the board.

  • At least I got some photos before the fire alarm went off.

The other board game at the event, which I didn’t get to test thanks to that unfortunate fire alarm, has a far cooler name: Kingpin: The Hunt for El Chapo. This one was co-developed by CIA Intelligence Educator Volko Ruhnke, who happens to have designed his fair share of publicly available board games, as well. "I have two Golden Geeks," he brags.

Kingpin, which was made in collaboration with the Defense Intelligence Agency, is used "to train analysts who might work with law enforcement and other partners around world to find a well-armed, well-defended, well-protected bad guy," Ruhnke says. "It’s a game about finding a fugitive from justice who, if not found sooner than later, will likely do harm to innocent people and harm US interests."

This is a two-team versus affair, Ruhnke says, because analysts need to be aware of how their targets work. "It’s a real brain-on-brain affair," he says. "The fugitives we’re analyzing, they’re analyzing right back." While I, unfortunately, didn’t get to explore all of the methods that each team uses to react to the other in this game, I did spy a "facial surgery" option on the board for Chapo’s side—which goes to show that Ruhnke’s game has made room for a vast range of response possibilities.

Bonkers data models like these are better represented in board-game form, the CIA argues.
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Bonkers data models like these are better represented in board-game form, the CIA argues.

Sam Machkovech

Ruhnke says that board games are particularly useful in helping officers and analysts synthesize giant criss-crossing charts’ worth of data to understand complex real-world situations. He points to modern insurgency and counter-insurgency engagement in Afghanistan as an example. First, he presents a bonkers-confusing chart while listing off its myriad elements and actors on all sides. Then he shows an image of people playing a board game.

"People playing a game, together they’re experiencing the designers’ mental model of insurgency in Afghanistan and sharing that model," he says. "They are learning it, very quickly, because they’re inside, operating in it. Pushing levers, pulling cords, seeing what happens. Stories are very sticky, and they’ll remember their own stories. " He also insists that this is a great way for outside perspectives to critique an office’s biased model of how insurgency may play out and receive more dynamic feedback. "The greatest power of simulation games is that players have to operate these games themselves and know the rules."

Cheaters never win (but they help the CIA)

The officers on hand at SXSW were kind enough to let me take photos of their boards. However, they wouldn’t let me do the same with manuals, and I couldn’t take photos of the officers next to the board games (even though they were photographed at a panel the day prior). "It’s not the government’s IP, per sé," Clopper says. He is still exercising caution about what is and isn’t publicly shared, or exactly how it is represented.

With that in mind, as I briskly walked out of the hotel with fire-alarm alerts ringing in my ears, I couldn’t help but wonder: Had we seen too much? Had the officers noticed a few SXSW attendees with particularly thick foreign accents and decided enough had been disclosed? Had we, as unwitting board game players, suddenly found ourselves as part of a meta game?

The whole thing certainly made me think of another CIA officer’s comments during a SXSW panel—in which game-based exercises wound up teaching CIA staffers more than they expected. One game about global map management included giant touch-panel screens, which required an IT staffer to routinely visit two competing teams and keep the systems working. In one session, the "blue" team soundly won—an unusual result, considering the game was specifically built for the other "red" side to have better odds. A post-game debrief with both teams of players didn’t turn up any interesting details… but a throwaway comment by the IT pro to the educators spilled the truth.

"That game was awesome," he said, which surprised the staff. Turns out, the blue team had recruited the IT pro to snoop—and did so in such a way that didn’t make him think he was assisting any cheating. The blue team managed to keep its debrief stories straight to hide the sneaky move. The game’s runners laughed it off, because the insight proved useful.

"That’s real human behavior," CIA Chief Strategy Officer Rachel Grunspan says. "If you design a game right, you’ll see a lot of complexity organically emerge. That’s what you want."

Listing image by Sam Machkovech

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AMD’s Zen goes mainstream with Ryzen 5: 4 cores, 8 threads, from $169

The first chips with AMD’s new Zen architecture were the high-end, enthusiast-oriented Ryzen 7 parts. It’s now the mainstream’s turn, with AMD announcing Ryzen 5.

There are four Ryzen 5 parts launching on April 11. At the top end is the R5 1600X: 6 cores, 12 threads, with a base of 3.6GHz and a turbo of 4.0GHz, for $249. Below that is the $219 1600. It has the same core and thread count but cuts clock speeds to 3.2/3.6GHz. At the bottom end are a pair of 4-core, 8-thread parts: the $169 1400 at 3.2/3.4GHz, and the $189 1500X at 3.5/3.7GHz.

The chips will continue to use the AM4 socket and will be compatible with all the same chipsets and motherboards as the R7s.

Just as was the case with the Ryzen 7, AMD is offering many more cores and simultaneous threads than Intel does for similar money. Whether driven by a different ideology or the practical realities of having to go head to head with a much larger competitor, AMD doesn’t limit features such as simultaneous multithreading or unlocked multipliers to certain expensive chips; all the Ryzen 5s include these features, just as all the Ryzen 7s also do. The 6 core parts use two 4-core Core Complexes with one core from each disabled, and the 4-core parts are just a single CCX.

So the top $249 processor is competing with Intel’s Kaby Lake i5-7600K, a 4-core, 4-thread processor running at 3.8/4.2GHz, and the bottom-priced R5 1400 is going up against the i3-7350, a 2-core, 4-thread part running at a fixed 4.2GHz.

Just as with Ryzen 7, the Ryzen 5 parts are going to give up quite a bit of single threaded performance relative to the Kaby Lakes; they have lower clock speeds and execute fewer instructions per cycle. But the presence of those extra cores means that in many workloads, the Ryzen will be able to hold its own, or even pull ahead, making the decision of which processor to buy more complex than it has been in the past; Kaby Lake may win for some workloads, especially older games that lean heavily on one or two compute-bound threads. But other workloads, including an increasing number of modern game engines, show much greater ability to distribute their work across multiple cores, and for those applications, the Ryzen will be a compelling option.

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Google reduces JPEG file size by 35%

Harry Langdon/Getty Images

Google has developed and open-sourced a new JPEG algorithm that reduces file size by about 35 percent—or alternatively, image quality can be significantly improved while keeping file size constant. Importantly, and unlike some of its other efforts in image compression (WebP, WebM), Google’s new JPEGs are completely compatible with existing browsers, devices, photo editing apps, and the JPEG standard.

The new JPEG encoder is called Guetzli, which is Swiss German for cookie (the project was led by Google Research’s Zurich office). Don’t pay too much attention to the name: after extensive analysis, I can’t find anything in the Github repository related to cookies or indeed any other baked good.

There are numerous ways of tweaking JPEG image quality and file size, but Guetzli focuses on the quantization stage of compression. Put simply, quantization is a process that tries to reduce a large amount of disordered data, which is hard to compress, into ordered data, which is very easy to compress. In JPEG encoding, this process usually reduces gentle colour gradients to single blocks of colour and often obliterates small details entirely.

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Intel’s first Optane SSD: 375GB that you can also use as RAM

A 3D XPoint wafer.

Intel

Intel announced today the first Optane-branded product using its new 3D XPoint memory: the catchily named Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X. It’s a 375GB SSD on a PCIe card. Initial limited availability starts today, albeit with no price attached, with broad availability in the second half of the year. In the second quarter, a 750GB PCIe model, and a 375GB model in the U.2 form factor will be released, and in the second half of the year, a 1.5TB PCIe card, and 750GB and 1.5TB U.2 stick, are planned.

3D XPoint is a new kind of persistent solid state memory devised by Intel and Micron. Details on how the memory actually works remain scarce—it’s generally believed to use some kind of change in resistance to record data—but its performance characteristics and technical capabilities make it appealing for a wide range of applications.

When it was first announced in 2015, Intel claimed it would be 1,000 times faster than NAND flash, 10 times denser than DRAM, and 1,000 times better endurance than NAND, though without saying “faster at what” or “what kind of NAND” or anything like that. With the shipping product, these comparisons are now clearer, as one of Intel’s slides make clear: 3D XPoint has about one thousandth the latency of NAND flash (or about ten times the latency of DRAM), and tens times the density of DRAM.

The raw specs for the P4800X leaked in February. To summarize: it’s a datacenter-oriented part, built for applications with high read/write loads, looking for low latency. The sequential transfer rates of 2400MB/s read, 2000MB/s write, are good, but some of the fastest NAND flash can pull slightly ahead. Where the P4800X excels is its ability to sustain high I/O loads, courtesy of those low latencies.

Intel

SSD manufacturers often quote huge numbers of I/O operations per second (IOPS), but there’s always a footnote: the figures are typically generated with queue depths of 32, which is to say, the drive is bombarded with read or write requests (depending on what is being measured) so that there are always 32 outstanding operations. With these deep queues, NAND flash SSDs can achieve 3-400,000 IOPS.

The P4800X can do 550,000 read IOPS and 500,000 write IOPS, but critically, Intel says it achieves this even at low queue depths. The spec sheet figure has a queue depth of 16, and the company says that a queue depth of about 8 tends to be about the limit seen in the real world.

Moreover, Intel says that the latency of each I/O operation remains low even under heavy load. 99.999 percent of operations have a read or write latency below 60 or 100 microseconds (respectively) with a queue depth of 1, rising to 150 or 200 microseconds with a queue depth of 16. Under a comparable load, Intel’s own P3700 NAND SSD can only serve 99 percent of operations with a latency below about 2,800 microseconds.

Likewise, under sustained write workloads, the P4800X retains its low latency for reads, whereas the read latency of the P3700 NAND steadily deteriorates as the write bandwidth increases.

This already makes the Optane drive interesting for applications like caching, but Intel is aiming at more than just that. 3D XPoint is byte addressable; that is to say, each individual byte can be overwritten. This sets it apart from NAND flash. NAND is typically arranged in pages of 512, 2048, or 4096 bytes. Pages are arranged into blocks, typically of 16, 128, 256, or 512 kilobytes. Reading and writing takes place at page granularity, but each page can only be written once. To write it again, it must first be erased, and erasure takes place not at page granularity, but at block granularity. Spinning hard disks can perform reads and writes at the granularity of a sector, typically either 512 bytes (or 512 bytes plus some extra bookkeeping space), or 4096 bytes (or 4096 plus some extra). With 3D XPoint, the reads and writes can occur on individual bytes.

Intel

Unlike flash, which physically wears out due to the stress placed by erases, 3D XPoint writes are non-destructive. This gives the drives much greater endurance than NAND of a comparable density, with Intel saying that Optane SSDs can safely be written 30 times per day, compared to a typical 0.5-10 whole drive writes per day.

The low latency and high endurance make Optane a good fit for applications like caching and database servers. But taking further advantage of these two properties, Intel has developed a new way of using Optane. The P4800X can be used as a regular PCIe attached SSD, but Intel has developed something it calls “Memory Drive Technology” that allows the P4800X, when used in conjunction with an appropriate chipset and processor (which means you’ll have to use a Xeon processor), can be used as if it were RAM. Optane’s latency and bandwidth are both lower than that of DRAM, but the density is higher. Pricing hasn’t been announced yet, but one assumes that it will also be cheaper than RAM too (because if it isn’t, Memory Drive doesn’t have a ton of value).

Intel

Memory Drive Technology uses a middleware layer that boots before, and is transparent to, the operating system, and it combines regular DRAM with the SSD to make a single large pool of volatile memory. For most workloads, this will be slightly slower than if the same amount of DRAM were being used, but the cost should be substantially lower, and the power consumption modestly improved. Intel even claims that some workloads will go faster; although Optane “memory” is slower than regular RAM, the middleware layer that manages the memory can move data around so that it is closer to the processor that is using it, which can assist when using NUMA configurations.

The biggest benefit may be from substantially increasing the amount of physical memory in a server: 2 socket Xeon systems can hold up to 3TB of RAM, but 24TB of Optane, and 4 socket systems support up to 12TB RAM, but 48TB Optane. This could be a huge boost for applications that need truly enormous quantities of memory.

If using the PCIe bus to attach storage and then use it as memory seems a bit awkward, next year Intel plans to release Optane DIMMS.

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