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It’s easier to mindlessly blast away a room full of video game baddies when they look at you with dead eyes and zombie-like facial expressions. It’s a completely different challenge when they appear to be expressing actual emotions and pain, made all the more believable with this new advanced facial animation tool for…
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Following news that Russian-linked operatives bought Facebook ads during the 2016 presidential election to sow divisiveness amidst the American public, Twitter announced on Thursday that it had uncovered a similar scheme afoot within its own social network.
Of the 450 accounts released by Facebook as part of its investigation, Twitter was able to match 22 of those to accounts on its own site. All 22 were immediately suspended. What’s more, Twitter found another 179 accounts linked to or associated with the original 22 that had no ties to any of the 450 Facebook ones.
Twitter VP for Public Policy Colin Crowell reportedly met with members of both the Senate and House Select Committees on Intelligence to discuss Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election. "One congressional investigator has said that the Facebook accounts from the International Research Agency are likely just the ‘tip of the iceberg,’" a congressional aide, speaking on anonymity, told the Washington Post.
And rather than pull a Facebook and have to continually backtrack (and eventually sort of apologize for) against increasing government pressure, Twitter went into these hearings by proactively sharing a roundup of three Russia Today accounts that targeted the US market with ads during the 2016 election. According to Twitter, the RT accounts spent $274,100 to promote 1,823 ads directed at followers of major media outlets and sought to promote RT’s own coverage of trending news events.
Twitter also shared information regarding election voting scams like the "text-to-vote" one targeted at potential Clinton voters (narrator: you can’t vote via text message). While Twitter did not reportedly see any links to Russia, the company did notice that many of the scams appeared to be automated.
Moving forward the company promised to continue its efforts to eradicate spam, bots and compromised accounts from its platform. "We’ll be rolling out several changes to the actions we take when we detect spammy or suspicious activity," a Twitter rep wrote in a release. "Including introducing new and escalating enforcements for suspicious logins, Tweets, and engagements, and shortening the amount of time suspicious accounts remain visible on Twitter while pending confirmation." Great, next maybe they can tackle that niggling problem of all the nazis and trolls.
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A rocket built for traveling throughout our solar system could revolutionize travel on Earth, according to Elon Musk. Using a "BFR" flying at a max speed of 18,000 mph, he says we could fly anywhere on Earth in under an hour. Musk revealed the plan during tonight’s speech at the 68th International Astronautical Congress 2017 in Adelaide, Australia, where he also showed SpaceX’s plans for lunar and Mars missions. These "Earth to Earth" trips could make "most" long journeys in under half an hour and, according to Musk, have a cost per seat that is "about the same as full fare economy in an aircraft."
The BFR (yes, it stands for what you think it stands for) is SpaceX’s next rocket after the Falcon Heavy that Musk said the company hopes will launch by the end of this year. Unlike all of its previous rockets, this one will be fully reusable, and capable of refueling in space, which is key for his plans to do things like resupply the ISS, land on the moon, and start sending missions to Mars by 2022.With refueling in space, the BFR can make trips to the Moon’s surface without needing any fuel production there, enabling the creation of "Moon Base Alpha."
Overall, the concept is smaller and uses fewer engines than the Interplanetary Transport System Musk described last year, with added flexibility that makes it suitable for more tasks. The new BFR is 106 meters tall with a 9-meter diameter, down from the 122-meter height and 17-meter diameter described last year. The booster rocket uses 31 Raptor engines (down from 42), and there are six Raptor engines on the spacecraft itself (down from nine). Those changes also make it cheaper, which helps answer the other question left open from last year — how would SpaceX pay for this? The master plan is to build up enough of the company’s previous rockets to store a backlog, then turn its capabilities fully to the BFR and only build one rocket for all applications.
The BFR will have space for 150 tons of cargo, compared to Falcon Heavy’s 30 tons, and will still be fully reusable. Its nose is big enough, Musk said, to launch a mirror that has ten times the surface area of current Hubble telescope without folding it at all, or to go around scooping up out of service satellites. With multiple engines, its built to be as reliable as an airplane, capable of landing even if it loses an engine, unlike the current Falcon 9, and is so precise that it won’t even need landing legs.
Those are sizable promises, but Musk and SpaceX have big plans to match for the BFR, seeing it as a cost-efficient way to change travel on Earth and beyond.
BFR will take you anywhere on Earth in less than 60 mins https://t.co/HWt9BZ1FI9
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 29, 2017
Source: SpaceX (YouTube), SpaceX
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The crowdfunding ecosystem has given us a few gems from time to time, but for the most part, we try to stay away from it. There’s simply too many horror stories. However, Anker, an established company well known in the electronics industry, has a new product up on Indiegogo, one that we think is actually pretty sweet.
Made by Nebula, a branch of Anker, the device is called Capsule. It’s a compact pico projector, about the size of a soda can. While pico projectors aren’t all that exciting, this one features a 360-degree speaker, Bluetooth connectivity, and comes with Android 7.0+ out of the box. It’s a Smart Bluetooth video projector, to sum it up nicely.
According to the Indiegogo listing, “Nebula Capsule delivers up to 2.5 hours of continuous video or 40 hours of non-stop music on a single charge. That’s quite a bit of music bumping or video watching. Additionally, Capsule has Quick Charging equipped, meaning it charges quickly once depleted.
With Android “Nougat†installed, you simply download your apps, project them, or utilize WiFi connectivity, HDMI input, and USB OTG to connect to virtually any device to display whatever you want.
For pricing, all of the cheap early bird specials are gone, but there are still perks available that get you a discount. As of right now, the least expensive is $249, which is 28% off the final price. Shipments are expected to go out in December and it looks like they’re shooting for Christmas time. Anker set a goal of $50,000, but backers have already shot way past that with the project sitting at around $140K at this moment.
Watch the video below, then follow the link to Indiegogo to learn more.
Nebula Capsule is a Compact Projector With 360° Speaker Powered by Android is a post from: Droid Life
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Google’s Family Link, a service first introduced in March to help you control your family’s Android device usage, is out of its invitation-only phase and now open to all in the US. If you have a device ready for your kid to use, this might be something to consider looking into, especially if you want some extra controls over the amount of use your kid gets with it and the types of content being consumed.
To recap, Family Link lets you first create a Google account for your kid. You then get control over that account, so you can control which apps are being installed, see how much time your kids are spending on their devices, set screen time limits, and even remotely lock them for bedtime.
Family Link is free to use.
To get started, head over to the Family Link site. You can download the Family Link app here.
Google’s Family Link Now Open to Everyone in US is a post from: Droid Life
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In recent years, Aston Martin has become the vehicle of choice for fictional secret agent James Bond. And now the British carmaker is taking its 007 reputation into the deep end.
On Thursday—in Monaco, of course—Aston Martin announced it is partnering with Triton Submarines LLC to build a limited edition, luxury submarine that will have even the wealthiest of the wealthy playing catch-up with the Jones’s.
The endeavor is codenamed Project Neptune and it will build upon Triton’s experti
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Donald Trump (left) and Howard Stern (right) as seen at a November 4, 2005 New York Knicks game.
A Washington, DC startup that recently posted an audio archive of years’ worth of Howard Stern’s interviews with Donald Trump, all before he was elected president, has been hit with a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notice and a cease-and-desist letter.
On Wednesday afternoon, roughly 48 hours after it was put up, the audio trove has been removed from YouTube and SoundCloud. For now, the transcripts remain on Factba.se, a website created by the startup FactSquared.
Factba.se published a total of around 15 hours’ worth of audio—exclusively of the minutes when Trump was on The Howard Stern Show—gathered from nearly 25 years of shows, starting in 1993 and ending in 2015.
“We were in the process of putting [the audio files] on our own server, but then FedEx showed up and that was the official stop,” Bill Frischling, the CEO of FactSquared, told Ars. “So we had a good conversation with our attorneys today, and we’re going to be reaching out to [SiriusXM’s attorneys] pretty darned soon. We’ve already exchanged brief notes, everybody is hoping to get it resolved amicably. Our goal is to preserve the record. At least right now, this is the only public version of a massive, quarter-century trove of interviews.”
Under the DMCA, intellectual property holders (such as SiriusXM, which airs The Howard Stern Show) can send a takedown notice asserting a violation of copyright. Most large companies, including Google (the owner of YouTube) will comply with such requests.
Because FactSquared only published the portions of the Stern Show that involved Trump—and not wholesale copies of shows—the startup could make a solid fair use claim under US copyright law. Fair use is the portion of the law that allows portions of copyrighted works to be re-published without the copyright holder’s permission, subject to particular conditions, including news commentary, satire, and others.
“Based on the facts you’ve presented, Factba.se would appear to have a strong fair use argument,” Jonathan Band, who helped author the DMCA back in 1998, told Ars by e-mail. Band is a law professor at Georgetown University.
“What [Factba.se] would need to do is submit a counter-notice to YouTube/SoundCloud under the DMCA, asking for the content to be restored. YouTube/SoundCloud likely would then repost the content if SiriusXM didn’t file suit against Factsba.se for infringing copyright by posting the content in the first place.”
Attorney Kit Walsh of the Electronic Frontier Foundation agreed.
“Factba.se would have a very strong fair use case based on the newsworthiness of the recordings and the analysis that they did,” she told Ars. “The recordings are the data that underlies their findings, and reproducing the recordings is essential to the credibility of their analysis and the ability of others to reproduce and build upon that analysis.”
However, law professor Eric Goldman of Santa Clara University told Ars that the situation might not be as clear cut. He called this particular set of facts a “hard case for fair use.”
“What would make it easier [is] if there was more commentary or context around the material,” Goldman said, explaining that simply posting the transcript and some basic keyword searches and analysis may not fall under the commentary portion of fair use.
If Factba.se had done what other news sites have already done—written entire articles about revelations from this trove—it could be an easier claim.
“I think they could qualify for a fair defense,” Goldman added. “I think it’s still possible, but it’s harder than another set of circumstances.”
Similarly, Wendy Seltzer, an attorney to the World Wide Web Consortium and founder of the Lumen Database (formerly Chilling Effects, which keeps track of DMCA notices), said that she was pretty convinced that it is a fair use case.
“People aren’t substituting away from the current show to these transcripts,” she told Ars. “They’re reading or listening to these excerpts for a fundamentally different purpose. The purpose and character of the use is for informing oneself about the news and not for the same entertainment purpose or newsworthy purpose at the time as when they were originally published or broadcast.”
Frischling also said he be would happy if SiriusXM or Howard Stern simply published the audio on their own websites.
Earlier this year, FactSquared had solicited Reddit and other Stern fan sites to obtain copies of all the shows on which Trump had ever appeared, largely as a public service. Bootleg Stern recordings freely circulate on BitTorrent, among other online venues.
While other media outlets had referred to some snippets, no one had made available the full archive before. It wasn’t until early September that someone anonymously e-mailed a Dropbox link with all of the audio files of the entire shows where Trump appeared. Frischling’s company’s software transcribed, analyzed, and linked this cache in an entirely new way.
“If you take that and look at that, Howard Stern had spoken with Trump more than anybody else, over a wider period,” Frischling added. “A quarter century, same person, same relationship, quarter century. Stern is a phenomenal interviewer. He gets people to say things that they’ve never said before.”
While FactSquared offers similar types of text, audio, and video analysis to corporate clients, the Trump archive was freely made available.
SiriusXM did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment.
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