Just in time for the Grammy Awards, Apple has unveiled three new ads for Apple Music, featuring new singles from Ariana Grande, Khalid and Florida Georgia Line.
Apple actually created similar ads with Animoji lip synching to Childish Gambino and Migos before last year’s Grammys.
As The Verge points out, if you watch to the end of the videos and pay attention to the small print, you’ll notice that these Memoji were “professional animated.” So don’t feel too bad if your lip synching Animoji videos don’t look quite as good.
While it’s true that it’s going to take some time before most of us will actually be able to enjoy the benefits of 5G, that doesn’t mean you can’t sit back and enjoy the fireworks right now. AT&T’s adoption of the “5G Evolution” label has already been controversial among industry followers and fellow carriers alike, for watering down the meaning of next-gen connectivity — and now Sprint is looking to do something about it.
The carrier filed suit against what it called “false advertising and deceptive acts” relating to AT&T’s 5G E. The suit notes, rightly, that Sprint, AT&T and other major carriers are all jostling to be first to market, “but calling its network 5G E […] does not make it a 5G network.” In fact, the network is more akin to advanced LTE.
AT&T called itself “[the] first U.S. mobile company to introduce mobile 5G service in a dozen markets by late 2018” courtesy of the label, in a much maligned attempt to plant its flag. It’s similar to tactics used by the carrier ahead of the rollout of LTE. AT&T has largely waved away criticism, stating that it’s happy that such moves have gotten it into the heads of the competition.
That may be true, but anyone who’s watched the industry with even passing interest knows that real network advances take time, and this sort of branding goes a ways toward muddying up consumer understanding.The suit goes on to claim that the 5GE label violates state and federal false advertising laws and does damage to competitors like Sprint, who are invested in the slower roll out of true 5G.
These days, geeks have endless entertainment options. If you’re a geek, you don’t have to put up with mainstream TV any more. Instead, you can enjoy content made by tech geeks for tech geeks, and there’s no better place to do this than on YouTube.
In this article we focus on the best geeky YouTube channels for tech geeks. Whether you want to learn new facts, hear the latest tech news, or just revel in geekiness with your fellow geeks, you should enjoy the content on offer.
If you love working with computers and are interested in their inner workings, you need to subscribe to the Computerphile YouTube channel.
Computerphile dives into tons of computer-related topics, such as security vulnerabilities, processing power, security, and more. Videos feature a variety of hosts, so you can enjoy many different perspectives and fields of expertise.
Computerphile holds years’ worth of videos like this, so you’re bound to discover something new every time you land on the channel. It’s a great way to explore a specific topic more deeply or just examine the geeky side of everyday events.
Science Studio might sound like a channel about chemistry, but that’s not the case. Instead, you’ll find a lot of videos about building computers, computer components, and PC gaming here.
Browse around and you can watch reviews and updates on the latest graphics cards and CPUs, guides to building your own PC, and a few Craigslist PC ad reactions to vary things up. There’s lots of data and proper testing, so it’s not just someone ranting about their opinion. Anyone who plays games on PC will definitely find something to enjoy on this channel.
You’ve probably seen videos by Techquickie floating around YouTube’s suggestions. While they’re usually aimed at mainstream audiences, there’s still something here for tech geeks too.
Hosted by Linus Sebastian, head of the also-popular Linus Tech Tips channel, Techquickie dives into all sorts of tech topics in just a few minutes. Hardcore geeks will likely already know some of what it covers, such as video file format differences and what mesh Wi-Fi is.
But for less experienced geeks, or even experienced folks who want to learn a little about new topics, there’s a lot to glean here. Videos examining why YouTube channels die, why Intel doesn’t make smartphone CPUs, and similar are interesting even for those who work with tech regularly.
Techquickie’s videos are easily digestible, fun to watch, and you’ll come away learning something new about an area you’re interested in. What’s not to love?
If you’re looking for frequent updates on tech news in video form, this is the channel for you. TwiT, short for “This Week in Tech,” has a variety of tech-related content. Some of them are how-tos and demos, which hardcore geeks won’t need.
But what makes this channel stand out compared to the others here is the news coverage. TWiT has regular shows and features segments from them on the channel. Scrolling through the playlist provides dozens of short clips from the most recent shows, so there’s always something new to watch.
Give this one a look if you’re interested in tech commentary and various perspectives on the many facets of technology.
The Tech Geeks Try Stuff channel delivers exactly what it promises. These are tech geeks (who just happen to work for MakeUseOf) trying new stuff. In Season 1, the “tech geeks” tried crazy foods from around the world. In Season 2, our titular heroes try to win challenges, answer trivia questions, identify foods, and more besides.
Play along with the challenges and see how much you know, or watch the tech geeks’ reactions as they try wild treats. It’s a ton of fun, and it should give you an insight into the people who write and edit MakeUseOf.
It’s Time to Get Geeky on YouTube
These geeky YouTube channels highlight different parts of being a geek.
Whether you want to dive deep into technical topics, learn how to build a PC, learn more about PC gaming, learn about aspects of tech you’re not as familiar with, get commentary on the news, or just watch tech geeks break out of their shells, there should be something here for you.
If you’re setting up a video chat you can now have Skype automatically blur the background for you. This means you remain in focus, while everything around you gets subtly blurred. Yes, the days of tidying up your room before Skyping someone are over.
Blurring the Line Between Microsoft Teams and Skype
On the Skype Blog, Microsoft explains how background blur in Skype is similar to background blur in Microsoft Teams. Teams being Microsoft’s Slack clone. Background blur arrived on Microsoft Teams in September 2018, and is now available on Skype.
Skype’s background blur feature uses artificial intelligence to detect the human form in the frame. It then keeps you in focus at all times while making everything else blurry. And this should work even if you have long hair or the tendency to move your hands around.
“You’re about to video call your parents and your laundry is all over the place, or you’re about to have a meeting with a potential investor and your business plan is on a whiteboard behind you, or you’re being interviewed on live television and your adorable child comes marching into the room.”
When would this come in handy? As you can see above, Microsoft paints a picture of various scenarios where enabling background blur could prove useful. That last example was a reference to the time a BBC interview with Professor Robert Kelly was interrupted.
How to Enable Background Blur on Skype
To enable background blur on Skype, simply click the video camera icon at the bottom of your screen. This will open your video settings, and you should see the option to “Blur my background”. Toggle that to “On” and your background will become blurred.
Background blur is available now on most desktops and laptops running the latest version of Skype (not Skype Classic). However, there’s a chance it won’t always work as expected, with Microsoft stating, “we cannot guarantee that your background will always be blurred.”
Encryption is an important part of the whole securing-your-data package, but it’s easy to underestimate the amount of complexity it adds to any service or device. One part of that is the amount of processing encryption takes — an amount that could be impractical on small or low-end devices. Google wants to change that with a highly efficient new method called Adiantum.
Here’s the problem. While encryption is in a way just transforming one block of data reversibly into another, that process is actually pretty complicated. Math needs to be done, data read and written and reread and rewritten and confirmed and hashed.
For a text message that’s not so hard. But if you have to do the same thing as you store or retrieve megabyte after megabyte of data, for instance with images or video, that extra computation adds up quick.
Lots of modern smartphones and other gadgets are equipped with a special chip that performs some of the most common encryption algorithms and processes (namely AES), just like we have GPUs to handle graphics calculations in games and such.
But what about older phones, or cheaper ones, or tiny smart home gadgets that don’t have room for that kind of thing on their boards? Just like they can’t run the latest games, they might not be able to efficiently run the latest cryptographic processes. They can still encrypt things, of course, but it might take too long for certain apps to work, or drain the battery.
Google, clearly interested in keeping cheap phones competitive, is tackling this problem by creating a special encryption method just for low-power phones. They call it Adiantum, and it will be optionally part of Android distributions going forward.
The technical details are all here, but the gist is this. Instead of using AES it relies on a cipher called ChaCha. This cipher method is highly optimized for basic binary operations, which any processor can execute quickly, though of course it will be outstripped by specialized hardware and drivers. It’s well documented and already in use lots of places — this isn’t some no-name bargain bin code. As they show, it performs way better on earlier chipsets like the Cortex A7.
The Adiantum process doesn’t increase or decrease the size of the payload (for instance by padding it or by appending some header or footer data), meaning the same number of bytes come in as go out. That’s nice when you’re a file system and don’t want to have to set aside too many special blocks for encryption metadata and the like.
Naturally new encryption techniques are viewed with some skepticism by security professionals, for whom the greatest pleasure in life is to prove one is compromised or unreliable. Adiantum’s engineers say they have “high confidence in its security,” with the assumption (currently reasonable) that its component “primitives” ChaCha and AES are themselves secure. We’ll soon see!
In the meantime don’t expect any instant gains, but future low-power devices may offer better security without having to use more expensive components — you won’t have to do a thing, either.
Oh, and in case you were wondering:
Adiantum is named after the genus of the maidenhair fern, which in the Victorian language of flowers (floriography) represents sincerity and discretion.
Encryption is an important part of the whole securing-your-data package, but it’s easy to underestimate the amount of complexity it adds to any service or device. One part of that is the amount of processing encryption takes — an amount that could be impractical on small or low-end devices. Google wants to change that with a highly efficient new method called Adiantum.
Here’s the problem. While encryption is in a way just transforming one block of data reversibly into another, that process is actually pretty complicated. Math needs to be done, data read and written and reread and rewritten and confirmed and hashed.
For a text message that’s not so hard. But if you have to do the same thing as you store or retrieve megabyte after megabyte of data, for instance with images or video, that extra computation adds up quick.
Lots of modern smartphones and other gadgets are equipped with a special chip that performs some of the most common encryption algorithms and processes (namely AES), just like we have GPUs to handle graphics calculations in games and such.
But what about older phones, or cheaper ones, or tiny smart home gadgets that don’t have room for that kind of thing on their boards? Just like they can’t run the latest games, they might not be able to efficiently run the latest cryptographic processes. They can still encrypt things, of course, but it might take too long for certain apps to work, or drain the battery.
Google, clearly interested in keeping cheap phones competitive, is tackling this problem by creating a special encryption method just for low-power phones. They call it Adiantum, and it will be optionally part of Android distributions going forward.
The technical details are all here, but the gist is this. Instead of using AES it relies on a cipher called ChaCha. This cipher method is highly optimized for basic binary operations, which any processor can execute quickly, though of course it will be outstripped by specialized hardware and drivers. It’s well documented and already in use lots of places — this isn’t some no-name bargain bin code. As they show, it performs way better on earlier chipsets like the Cortex A7.
The Adiantum process doesn’t increase or decrease the size of the payload (for instance by padding it or by appending some header or footer data), meaning the same number of bytes come in as go out. That’s nice when you’re a file system and don’t want to have to set aside too many special blocks for encryption metadata and the like.
Naturally new encryption techniques are viewed with some skepticism by security professionals, for whom the greatest pleasure in life is to prove one is compromised or unreliable. Adiantum’s engineers say they have “high confidence in its security,” with the assumption (currently reasonable) that its component “primitives” ChaCha and AES are themselves secure. We’ll soon see!
In the meantime don’t expect any instant gains, but future low-power devices may offer better security without having to use more expensive components — you won’t have to do a thing, either.
Oh, and in case you were wondering:
Adiantum is named after the genus of the maidenhair fern, which in the Victorian language of flowers (floriography) represents sincerity and discretion.
Encryption is an important part of the whole securing-your-data package, but it’s easy to underestimate the amount of complexity it adds to any service or device. One part of that is the amount of processing encryption takes — an amount that could be impractical on small or low-end devices. Google wants to change that with a highly efficient new method called Adiantum.
Here’s the problem. While encryption is in a way just transforming one block of data reversibly into another, that process is actually pretty complicated. Math needs to be done, data read and written and reread and rewritten and confirmed and hashed.
For a text message that’s not so hard. But if you have to do the same thing as you store or retrieve megabyte after megabyte of data, for instance with images or video, that extra computation adds up quick.
Lots of modern smartphones and other gadgets are equipped with a special chip that performs some of the most common encryption algorithms and processes (namely AES), just like we have GPUs to handle graphics calculations in games and such.
But what about older phones, or cheaper ones, or tiny smart home gadgets that don’t have room for that kind of thing on their boards? Just like they can’t run the latest games, they might not be able to efficiently run the latest cryptographic processes. They can still encrypt things, of course, but it might take too long for certain apps to work, or drain the battery.
Google, clearly interested in keeping cheap phones competitive, is tackling this problem by creating a special encryption method just for low-power phones. They call it Adiantum, and it will be optionally part of Android distributions going forward.
The technical details are all here, but the gist is this. Instead of using AES it relies on a cipher called ChaCha. This cipher method is highly optimized for basic binary operations, which any processor can execute quickly, though of course it will be outstripped by specialized hardware and drivers. It’s well documented and already in use lots of places — this isn’t some no-name bargain bin code. As they show, it performs way better on earlier chipsets like the Cortex A7.
The Adiantum process doesn’t increase or decrease the size of the payload (for instance by padding it or by appending some header or footer data), meaning the same number of bytes come in as go out. That’s nice when you’re a file system and don’t want to have to set aside too many special blocks for encryption metadata and the like.
Naturally new encryption techniques are viewed with some skepticism by security professionals, for whom the greatest pleasure in life is to prove one is compromised or unreliable. Adiantum’s engineers say they have “high confidence in its security,” with the assumption (currently reasonable) that its component “primitives” ChaCha and AES are themselves secure. We’ll soon see!
In the meantime don’t expect any instant gains, but future low-power devices may offer better security without having to use more expensive components — you won’t have to do a thing, either.
Oh, and in case you were wondering:
Adiantum is named after the genus of the maidenhair fern, which in the Victorian language of flowers (floriography) represents sincerity and discretion.
Ticketing app Gametime is taking its last-minute approach about as far as it can go, with the launch of a new feature called LastCall. This allows users to purchase tickets through Gametime until 90 minutes after an event has started.
Why would you want to do that? Well, prices usually drop precipitously after the event starts — for example, Gametime said that 48 hours before a game, the median price for a Major League Baseball is (coincidentally?) $48, but it’s dropped to $13 by 90 minutes after the first pitch.
Founder and CEO Brad Griffith acknowledged that most fans probably aren’t interested in just showing up for the fourth quarter or ninth inning of a game, or for the last song in a concert. On the other hand, if you could get a big discount and still catch most of the event, then it might be worth it.
Meanwhile, if you’re a team or a venue with empty seats, or if you’re a ticket-holder who realizes at the last minute that you can’t attend, then it’s good to have one last shot at selling those tickets.
In fact, it sounds like this is one of those “announcements” that’s partly acknowledging what’s already happening, both in the Gametime app and elsewhere. Griffith said the company is “doubling down” on this seriously-last-minute category of tickets, adding that it’s “constantly working through” what it’s actually including under the LastCall umbrella.
“The key element is the research that we’ve done, how it relates to the growth of this phenomenon” he said.
That research includes a survey of 287 event attendees, some who use Gametime and some who don’t. Apparently 27 percent said they’ve already purchased tickets after an event’s start time, and 62 percent of those late buyers were either Generation Z or millennials.
“We’re starting to see a bifurcation of windows, where the on-sale is still healthy, is strong, and the middle is maybe cratering in terms of transaction volume,” he said. “And then last-minute is vibrant and growing and fast. That is where we aim to do our best work.”
If you can’t beat or join them…force feed ’em? That appears to be Instagram’s latest strategy for IGTV, which is now being shoved right into Instagram’s main feed, the company announced today. Instagram says that it will now add one-minute IGTV previews to the feed, making it “even easier” to discover and watch content from IGTV.
Uh.
IGTV, you may recall, was launched last year as a way for Instagram to woo creators. With IGTV, creators are able to share long-form videos within the Instagram platform instead of just short-form content to the Feed or Stories.
The videos, before today, could be viewed in Instagram itself by tapping the IGTV icon at the top right of the screen, or within the separate IGTV standalone app.
Instagram’s hope was that IGTV would give the company a means of better competing with larger video sites, like Google’s YouTube or Amazon’s Twitch.
Its users, however, haven’t found IGTV as compelling.
As of last fall, few creators were working on content exclusively for IGTV and rumor was the viewing audience for IGTV content remained quite small, compared with rivals like Snapchat or Facebook. Many creators just weren’t finding it worth investing additional resources into IGTV, so were repurposing content designed for other platforms, like YouTube or Snapchat.
That means the bigger creators weren’t developing premium content or exclusives for IGTV, but were instead experimenting by replaying the content their fans could find elsewhere. Many are still not even sure what the IGTV audience wants to watch.
IGTV’s standalone app doesn’t seem to have gained much of a following either.
The app today is ranked a lowly No. 228 on the U.S. App Store’s “Photo and Video” top chart. Despite being run by Instagram – an app that topped a billion monthly users last summer, and is currently the No. 1 free app on iOS – fewer are downloading IGTV.
After seeing 1.5 million downloads in its first month last year – largely out of curiosity – the IGTV app today has only grown to 3.5 million total installs worldwide, according to Sensor Tower data. While those may be good numbers for a brand-new startup, for a spin-off from one of the world’s biggest apps, they’re relatively small.
Instagram’s new video initiative also represents another shot across the bow of Instagram purists.
As BuzzFeed reporter Katie Notopoulos opined last year, “I’m Sorry To Report Instagram Is Bad Now.” Her point of concern was the impact that Stories had on the Instagram Feed – people were sharing to Stories instead of the Feed, which made the Feed pretty boring. At yet, the Stories content wasn’t good either, having become a firehose of the throwaway posts that didn’t deserve being shared directly on users’ profiles.
On top of all this, it seems the Instagram Feed is now going to be cluttered with IGTV previews now. That’s. Just. Great.
Instagram says you’ll see the 1-minute previews in the Feed, and can tap on them to turn on the audio. Tap the IGTV icon on the preview and you’ll be able to watch the full version in IGTV. When the video is finished, you’re returned the Feed. Or, if you want to see more from IGTV, you can swipe up while the video plays to start browsing.
IGTV previews is only one way Instagram has been developing the product to attract more views in recent months. It has also integrated IGTV in Explore, allowed the sharing of IGTV videos to Stories, added the ability to save IGTV Videos, and launched IGTV Web Embeds.
If you can’t beat or join them…force feed ’em? That appears to be Instagram’s latest strategy for IGTV, which is now being shoved right into Instagram’s main feed, the company announced today. Instagram says that it will now add one-minute IGTV previews to the feed, making it “even easier” to discover and watch content from IGTV.
Uh.
IGTV, you may recall, was launched last year as a way for Instagram to woo creators. With IGTV, creators are able to share long-form videos within the Instagram platform instead of just short-form content to the Feed or Stories.
The videos, before today, could be viewed in Instagram itself by tapping the IGTV icon at the top right of the screen, or within the separate IGTV standalone app.
Instagram’s hope was that IGTV would give the company a means of better competing with larger video sites, like Google’s YouTube or Amazon’s Twitch.
Its users, however, haven’t found IGTV as compelling.
As of last fall, few creators were working on content exclusively for IGTV and rumor was the viewing audience for IGTV content remained quite small, compared with rivals like Snapchat or Facebook. Many creators just weren’t finding it worth investing additional resources into IGTV, so were repurposing content designed for other platforms, like YouTube or Snapchat.
That means the bigger creators weren’t developing premium content or exclusives for IGTV, but were instead experimenting by replaying the content their fans could find elsewhere. Many are still not even sure what the IGTV audience wants to watch.
IGTV’s standalone app doesn’t seem to have gained much of a following either.
The app today is ranked a lowly No. 228 on the U.S. App Store’s “Photo and Video” top chart. Despite being run by Instagram – an app that topped a billion monthly users last summer, and is currently the No. 1 free app on iOS – fewer are downloading IGTV.
After seeing 1.5 million downloads in its first month last year – largely out of curiosity – the IGTV app today has only grown to 3.5 million total installs worldwide, according to Sensor Tower data. While those may be good numbers for a brand-new startup, for a spin-off from one of the world’s biggest apps, they’re relatively small.
Instagram’s new video initiative also represents another shot across the bow of Instagram purists.
As BuzzFeed reporter Katie Notopoulos opined last year, “I’m Sorry To Report Instagram Is Bad Now.” Her point of concern was the impact that Stories had on the Instagram Feed – people were sharing to Stories instead of the Feed, which made the Feed pretty boring. At yet, the Stories content wasn’t good either, having become a firehose of the throwaway posts that didn’t deserve being shared directly on users’ profiles.
On top of all this, it seems the Instagram Feed is now going to be cluttered with IGTV previews now. That’s. Just. Great.
Instagram says you’ll see the 1-minute previews in the Feed, and can tap on them to turn on the audio. Tap the IGTV icon on the preview and you’ll be able to watch the full version in IGTV. When the video is finished, you’re returned the Feed. Or, if you want to see more from IGTV, you can swipe up while the video plays to start browsing.
IGTV previews is only one way Instagram has been developing the product to attract more views in recent months. It has also integrated IGTV in Explore, allowed the sharing of IGTV videos to Stories, added the ability to save IGTV Videos, and launched IGTV Web Embeds.
In light of a recent tragedy, Instagram is updating the way it handles pictures depicting self-harm. Instagram and Facebook announced changes to their policies around content depicting cutting and other forms of self harm in dual blog posts Thursday.
The changes comes about in light of the 2017 suicide of a 14 year old girl named Molly Russell, a UK resident who took her own life in 2017. Following her death, her family discovered that Russell was engaged with accounts that depicted and promoted self harm on the platform.
As the controversy unfolded, Instagram Head of Product Adam Mosseri penned an op-ed in the Telegraph to atone for the platform’s at times high consequence shortcomings. Mosseri previously announced that Instagram would implement “sensitivity screens” to obscure self harm content, but the new changes go a step further.
Starting soon, both platforms will no longer allow any “graphic images of self-harm” most notably those that depict cutting. This content was previously allowed because the platforms worked under the assumption that allowing people to connect and confide around these issues was better than the alternative. After a “comprehensive review with global experts and academics on youth, mental health and suicide prevention” those policies are shifting.
“… It was advised that graphic images of self-harm – even when it is someone admitting their struggles – has the potential to unintentionally promote self-harm,” Mosseri said.
Instagram will also begin burying non-graphic images about self harm (pictures of healed scars, for example) so they don’t show up in search, relevant hashtags or on the explore tab. “We are not removing this type of content from Instagram entirely, as we don’t want want to stigmatize or isolate people who may be in distress and posting self-harm related content as a cry for help,” Mosseri said.
According to the blog post, after consulting with groups like the Centre for Mental Health and Save.org, Instagram tried to strike a balance that would still allow users to express their personal struggles without encouraging others to hurt themselves. For self harm, like disordered eating, that’s a particularly difficult line to walk. It’s further complicated by the fact that not all people who self harm have suicidal intentions and the behavior has its own nuances apart from suicidality.
“Up until now, we’ve focused most of our approach on trying to help the individual who is sharing their experiences around self-harm. We have allowed content that shows contemplation or admission of self-harm because experts have told us it can help people get the support they need. But we need to do more to consider the effect of these images on other people who might see them. This is a difficult but important balance to get right.”
Mental health research and treatment teams have long been aware of “peer influence processes” that can make self destructive behaviors take on a kind of social contagiousness. While online communities can also serve as a vital support system for anyone engaged in self destructive behaviors, the wrong kind of peer support can backfire, reinforcing the behaviors or even popularizing them. Instagram’s failure to sufficiently safeguard for the potential impact this kind of content can have on a hashtag-powered social network is fairly remarkable considering that the both Instagram and Facebook claim to have worked with mental health groups to get it right.
These changes are expected in the “coming weeks.” For now, a simple search of Instagram’s #selfharm hashtag still reveals a huge ecosystem of self-harmers on Instagram, including self-harm related memes (some hopeful, some not) and many very graphic photos of cutting.
“It will take time and we have a responsibility to get this right,” Mosseri said. “Our aim is to have no graphic self-harm or graphic suicide related content on Instagram… while still ensuring we support those using Instagram to connect with communities of support.”
T-Mobile doesn’t want to compete with other carriers or teleco’s by developing its own “skinny bundle” of streaming TV channels, the company said today on its earnings call with investors, noting the market was already oversaturated on that front. Instead, the mobile operator’s strategy will focus on helping customers pick and choose which paid TV subscriptions they want to access — a move that very much sounds like T-Mobile is going the “Amazon Channels” route with its mobile streaming plans.
According to T-Mobile President Mike Sievert, today’s customers have a number of choices for streaming TV thanks to the massive expansion of OTT (over-the-top) services that are now available.
“It’s subscription-palooza out there. Every single media brand either has or is developing an OTT solution, and most of these companies don’t have a way to bring these products to market,” he said. “They’re learning about that. They don’t have distribution networks like us; they don’t have access to the phone like we have.”
Instead, the exec explained that T-Mobile wants to help customers access paid subscriptions that already exist, by simplifying aspects of that process such as search, discovery and billing.
“We don’t have plans to develop an nth undifferentiated skinny bundle,” Sievert continued. “There are plenty of those. We think there’s a more nuanced role for us to play in helping you get access to the great media brands out there that you love, and to be able to put together your own media subscription — and smaller pieces five, six, seven or eight dollars at a time,” he said, adding that T-Mobile would begin this work in 2019.
The cord cutting-focused news site The Streamable was first to report T-Mobile’s news.
T-Mobile’s announcement comes at a time when the carrier’s mobile TV plans have been more of a focus, as everyone is trying to figure out what the carrier is up to.
Recently, a Cheddar report said T-Mobile would be launching a free mobile TV service in the weeks ahead. But that turned out to be just a “snackable content app” for T-Mobile’s Metro brand, MetroPCS, and only on two phones to start.
T-Mobile’s decision to go with an Amazon Channels-like offering, where consumers build their own “skinny bundles” by mixing and matching paid subscriptions, is not an uncommon choice. This is the same direction that many in the industry are heading, as of late.
However, the mobile operators aren’t necessarily going that route. AT&T, for instance, has been leveraging its Time Warner acquisition to launch multiple streaming services. Meanwhile, Verizon (disclosure: TechCrunch parent) saw its some of its streaming TV ambitions dashed with go90’s failure last year.
As the over-the-top streaming TV market is still a sliver of the larger pay TV space, it still remains to be seen which strategies and services will ultimately win over consumers. But companies are placing their bets now, experimenting, and sometimes failing then starting again.
Separately, T-Mobile today discussed its Layer3 home TV service, which was expected to launch nationwide in late 2018. That service is now planned for the first half of 2019, the company said.
Earlier this week, Slack announced that it has filed the paperwork to go public at some point later this year. The big question is, will the company exit into the public markets as expected, or will one of the technology giants swoop in at the last minute with buckets of cash and take them off the market?
Slack, which raised over $1 billion on an other worldly $7 billion valuation, is an interesting property. It has managed to grow and be successful while competing with some of the world’s largest tech companies — Microsoft, Cisco, Facebook, Google and Salesforce. Not coincidentally these deep-pocketed companies could be the ones that come knock, knock, knocking at Slack’s door.
Slack has managed to hold its own against these giants by doing something in this space that hadn’t been done effectively before. It made it easy to plug in other services, effectively making Slack a work hub where you could spend your day because your work could get pushed to you there from other enterprise apps.
As I’ve discussed before, this centralized hub has been a dream of communications tools for most of the 21st century. It began with enterprise IM tools in the early 2000s, progressed to Enterprise 2.0 tools in the 2007 timeframe. That period culminated in 2012 when Microsoft bought Yammer for $1.2 billion, the only billion dollar exit for that generation of tools.
I remember hearing complaints about Enterprise 2.0 tools. While they had utility, in many ways they were just one more thing employees had to check for information beyond email. The talk was these tools would replace email, but a decade later email’s still standing and that generation of tools has been absorbed.
In 2013, Slack came along, perhaps sensing that Enterprise 2.0 never really got mobile and the cloud and it recreated the notion in a more modern guise. By taking all of that a step further and making the tool a kind of workplace hub, it has been tremendously successful growing to 8 million daily users in roughly 4 years, around 3 million of which were the paying variety, at last count.
Slack’s growth numbers as of May 2018
All of this leads us back to the exit question. While the company has obviously filed for IPO paperwork, it might not be the way it ultimately exits. Just the other day CNBC’s Jay Yarrow posited this questions on Twitter:
Is there any reason for Microsoft not to buy Slack for $20 billion? Seems like a perfect fit and at $20 billion could be a bargain.
Not sure where he pulled that number from, but if you figure 3x valuation, that could be the value for a company of this ilk. There would be symmetry in Microsoft buying Slack six years after it plucked Yammer off the market, and it would remove a major competitive piece from the board, while allowing Microsoft access to Slack’s growing customer base.
Nobody can see into the future, and maybe Slack does IPO and takes its turn as a public company, but it surely wouldn’t be a surprise if someone came along with an offer it couldn’t refuse, whatever that figure might be.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation just unveiled a brand new project — an actual store. If you live in Cambridge in the U.K., you can now buy a bunch of sweet Raspberry Pis to tinker and develop some cool stuff.
The Raspberry Pi has always been about making coding more accessible. And a physical retail space fits the bill. The foundation has developed a lineup of insanely cheap computers with an ARM-based processor, a bunch of ports, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
The latest flagship model, the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ costs only $35. But if you want something smaller and cheaper, there are other models for various needs.
Maybe you just need a tiny computer for some internet-of-things project. You can opt for the Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ for $25 in that case. It has a bit less RAM and fewer ports, but it works pretty much like any Raspberry Pi. There’s also power-efficient models that cost less than $10 — the Raspberry Pi Zero models.
I never really thought about Raspberry Pi stores. But the introduction video makes a strong case in favor of such a store. The product lineup is getting a bit complicated and it’s always good to be able to talk to someone about your projects.
Moreover, the foundation can use this store as a showcase for some cool examples. You can also buy goodies, such as mugs and plushy toys. Those white-and-red keyboard and mouse look cool too.
It wasn’t that long ago that cities across the U.S. were vying for Google Fiber, the company’s high-speed internet service. Since the launch of the project in Kansas City in 2012, Google Fiber launched in about a dozen more cities, most recently Huntsville, San Antonio and Louisville in 2017. But you can now strike Louisville from that list because Google today announced that it will shut off its fiber network there on April 15.
The reason for that is simple, Google says (but these things never really are). It says it tried a few new things when it launched in the city, including putting the fiber lines into shallower trenches. That didn’t work very well.
“We’re not living up to the high standards we set for ourselves, or the standards we’ve demonstrated in other Fiber cities,” the company writes today. “We would need to essentially rebuild our entire network in Louisville to provide the great service that Google Fiber is known for, and that’s just not the right business decision for us.”
It’s a rare admission of defeat for Google Fiber, though it’s no secret that the company isn’t exactly bullish on the prospect of the service anymore. Louisville was supposed to be somewhat of a comeback for Google Fiber, which like so many Google services is now under more pressure to generate a profit. Clearly, that didn’t work out. If this were still a major growth and focus area for Google, it would have done exactly what it isn’t doing in Louisville: rebuild the entire network.
Customers in the city will get free access to the service until it shuts down.
Google today announced that it is open sourcing ClusterFuzz, a scalable fuzzing tool that can run on clusters with over 25,000 machines.
The company has long used the tool internally and if you’ve paid particular attention to Google’s fuzzing efforts (and you have, right?), then this may all seem a bit familiar. That’s because Google launched the OSS-Fuzz service a couple of years ago and that service actually used ClusterFuzz. OSS-Fuzz was only available to open source projects, though, while ClusterFuzz is now available for anyone to use.
The overall concept behind fuzzing is pretty straightforward: you basically throw lots of data (including random inputs) at your application and see how it reacts. Often, it’ll crash, but sometimes you’ll be able to find memory leaks and security flaws. Once you start anything at scale, though, it becomes more complicated and you’ll need tools like ClusterFuzz to manage that complexity.
ClusterFuzz automates the fuzzing process all the way from bug detection to reporting — and then retesting the fix. The tool itself also uses open source libraries like the libFuzzer fuzzing engine and the AFL fuzzer to power some of the core fuzzing features that generate the test cases for the tool.
Google says it has used the tool to find over 16,000 bugs in Chrome and 11,000 bugs in over 160 open source projects that used OSS-Fuzz. Since so much of the software testing and deployment toolchain is now generally automated, its no surprise that fuzzing is also becoming a hot topic these days (I’ve seen references to “continuous fuzzing” pop up quite a bit recently).
That nasty FaceTime bug is now a thing of the past. You can now download and update your iPhone and iPad to re-enable Group FaceTime again. iOS 12.1.4 is a bug fix release and doesn’t contain any new feature other than this one.
Shortly after people found out that you could eavesdrop on somebody’s microphone or camera by starting a fake Group FaceTime call, Apple disabled Group FaceTime altogether. If you’re running iOS 12.1.3 or earlier, you simply can’t start or join a FaceTime call with more than two persons.
The company has been working on a fix to re-enable Group FaceTime without the nasty bug. And that update is now available.
“We have fixed the Group FaceTime security bug on Apple’s servers and we will issue a software update to re-enable the feature for users next week,” Apple said in a statement last week. “We sincerely apologize to our customers who were affected and all who were concerned about this security issue. We appreciate everyone’s patience as we complete this process.”
Back up your iPhone or iPad to iCloud or your computer first using iTunes. You can then head over to the Settings app. Tap on ‘General’ then ‘Software Update’ to download and install the patch. The update is still propagating on Apple’s servers so it could take a few minutes before you see it.
LG’s never been much on waiting for a big show to announce its latest offering. Mobile World Congress is still weeks away, and the company just dropped what’s likely to be the biggest new feature of its upcoming flagship, the G8 ThinQ.
Clunky naming conventions aside, the handset once again finds LG focusing its efforts on imaging, with a time-of-flight sensor built-in to the front-facing camera array (sensor pictured above, incidentally). Here’s LG on what that means,
While other 3D technologies utilize complex algorithms to calculate an object’s distance from the camera lens, the ToF image sensor chip delivers more accurate measurements by capturing infrared light as it is reflected off the subject. As a result, ToF is faster and more effective in ambient light, reducing the workload on the application processor thereby also reducing power consumption.
For the end-user, that means the camera will be more capable of advanced face recognition than what most Android handsets currently offer. The addition of depth sensing brings more advanced biometric authentication, closer to what you get with the iPhone. The feature also goes a way toward validating earlier leaks of the phone, which bring a larger top notch.
As for the rest of the details — LG’s got to save something for MWC, I guess.
