Discount student tickets available for TC Sessions: Mobility 2020

“Revolutionary” may be an over-used adjective, but how else to describe the rapid evolution in mobility technology? Join us in San Jose, Calif., on May 14 for TC Sessions: Mobility 2020. Our second annual day-long conference cuts through the hype and explores the current and future state of the technology and its social, regulatory and economic impact.

If you’re a student with a passion for mobility and transportation tech then listen up. We can’t talk about the future if we’re not willing to invest in the next generation of mobility visionaries. That’s why we offer student tickets at a deep discount — $50 each. Invest in your future, save $200 and spend the day with more than 1,000 of mobility tech’s brightest minds, movers and makers.

As always, you can count on a program packed with top-notch speakers, panel discussions, fireside chats and workshops. We’re in the process of building our agenda, but we’re ready to share our first two guests with you: Boris Sofman and Nancy Sun.

Sofman is the engineering director at Waymo and former co-founder and CEO of Anki. Sun is the co-founder and chief engineer of Ike Robotics. You can read more about Sofman and Sun’s accomplishments. We can’t wait to hear what they have to say about automation and robotics.

Keep checking back, because we’ll announce more exciting speakers in the coming weeks.

You’ll also have plenty of time for world-class networking. What better place for a student to impress — and possibly score a great internship or job? You might even meet a future co-founder or an investor. That knocking sound you hear is opportunity. Open the door.

Hold up…you’re not a student but still love a bargain? We’ve got you covered, too. You can save $100 if you purchase an early-bird ticket before April 9.

Be part of the revolution. Join the mobility and transportation tech community — the top technologists, investors researchers and visionaries — on May 14 at TC Sessions: Mobility 2020 in San Jose. Get your student ticket today.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Sessions: Mobility 2020? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Read Full Article

Why can't we talk about periods? | Jen Gunter

Why can't we talk about periods? | Jen Gunter

"It shouldn't be an act of feminism to know how your body works," says gynecologist and author Jen Gunter. In this revelatory talk, she explains how menstrual shame silences and represses -- and leads to the spread of harmful misinformation and the mismanagement of pain. Declaring the era of the menstrual taboos over, she delivers a clear, much-needed lesson on the once-mysterious mechanics of the uterus.

Click the above link to download the TED talk.

The 8 Best Mobile Apps to Learn Mandarin Chinese

Learning a language is a great way to engage your brain, connect with new people, and find out about different cultures. There are plenty of excellent language-learning apps available, but not all of them help you learn Mandarin Chinese.

Chinese is a notoriously difficult language to learn. This is in part because it uses complicated written characters and aural tones that sound strange to a Western ear. Fortunately, plenty of specialized apps exist to help you out.

Here are the best mobile apps to help you learn Mandarin Chinese for free.

1. Duolingo: Everybody’s Favorite Language App

Let’s get this one out of the way first. If you’re at all interested in learning languages, you’ve probably already used Duolingo. It’s one of the best language-learning apps available with courses for over 30 languages, including Mandarin Chinese.

Work through different levels to build up from your first words to semi-complex sentences. As you learn, you gain points and compete against your friends for the best scores every week.

The big downside to Duolingo is that it teaches every language using almost the exact same syllabus. Other apps on this list make it easier to grasp the grammar and written characters because they’re designed specifically for learning Chinese.

Download: Duolingo for iOS | Android (Free, subscription available)

2. HelloChinese: Designed Specifically for Chinese

HelloChinese might be the best app to get started learning Mandarin Chinese. Like many of the apps on this list, you work up through different levels, building on your knowledge and improving your understanding of the language as you go.

HelloChinese starts with an explanation of how to read pinyin—the written form of Mandarin that uses letters instead of Chinese characters.

From there, play award-winning games to expand your vocabulary, learn grammatical rules, and construct sentences. By the time you complete the app, you should be conversational in Mandarin.

Download: HelloChinese for iOS | Android (Free, subscription available)

3. LingoDeer: Learn to Read and Write

LingoDeer is an excellent option if you want to learn how to speak, read, and write in Chinese. This well-structured app uses minimal English to get you thinking in Mandarin Chinese as soon as possible.

Practice writing Chinese characters, expand your vocabulary from beginner to conversational, and listen to native speakers in slow motion to help perfect your pronunciation.

LingoDeer also gives you a breakdown of your performance after each lesson. This makes it easy to see your progress and highlight any weak spots, which you can work on using Review mode.

Download: LingoDeer for iOS | Android (Free, subscription available)

4. Memrise: Translate Objects Using Your Camera

Once upon a time, Memrise was a flashcard-based app, but these days you can use it to follow a gamified learning syllabus instead. One of the great parts about Memrise is that it periodically encourages you to review what you’ve already learned, helping shift those words to your long-term memory.

Memrise is packed with clips of native speakers so you can improve your listening skills while learning how to pronounce words and phrases clearly.

You can also use the camera on your device to get translations of objects around you, helping to bridge the gap between Memrise and the real world.

Download: Memrise for iOS | Android (Free, subscription available)

5. Skritter Chinese: Learn to Write Chinese Characters

Learning to read and write Chinese characters is incredibly important in your journey. First of all, the same characters are used across Mandarin and Cantonese, so knowing them boosts the number of people you can communicate with. Second, reading or writing Chinese is extra useful if you meet anybody with a regional dialect that you can’t understand.

Skritter is the best app available for learning to write in Chinese. It teaches you over 10,000 characters, which combine to make over 400,000 words. And Skritter guides your hand through writing these characters one stroke at a time.

If you don’t want to pay anything, you’re limited to a seven-day free trial. But that’s plenty of time to get some basic characters under your belt.

Download: Skritter Chinese for iOS | Android (Free trial, subscription required)

6. Anki Flashcards: Expand Your Vocabulary Even More

AnkiMobile and AnkiDroid act as counterparts to the Anki desktop app, which is one of the best flashcard apps available. These fully-featured mobile counterparts let you add Chinese decks to your account so you can work through vast vocabularies and expand your knowledge.

Decks of flashcards can include audio and images to aid you in memorizing new words. You can then sync your decks over the cloud, making it easy to review them on any device.

AnkiDroid is totally free, just like the open-source desktop app, but only works on Android devices. If you have an iPhone, you need AnkiMobile instead, which comes at a premium fee to support further app developments.

Download: AnkiMobile Flashcards for iOS ($24.99)
Download: AnkiDroid Flashcards for Android (Free)

7. HSK Online: Work Through the Standardized Levels

Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi (HSK) is a standardized test used to measure your skill in Chinese. It consists of various levels, with increasingly large vocabularies ranging from the basics at HSK 1 all the way up to fluency at HSK 6.

Many of the other apps on this list copy from the HSK vocabulary list to decide what to teach you. So why not get that information from the source itself?

You may need to know some basics to get started, but The HSK Online app offers curated lesson plans to improve your listening, reading, and writing skills. Work through the HSK levels from the beginning, or test yourself to find out what level you’re already at.

Download: HSK Online for iOS | Android (Free, subscription available)

8. Pleco Chinese Dictionary: Fill In All the Gaps

No matter how long you spend learning Mandarin, you’re still going to come across characters and words you don’t already know. When that happens, Pleco Chinese Dictionary will quickly become your favorite app.

Pleco gives you the definition and pronunciation of words you don’t know and even shows you how to use them in a sentence. You can break a word down to understand its root and even look at the individual character components that make it up.

Find what you’re looking for by typing pinyin, drawing characters, or searching for the word in English. With an in-app purchase, you can even use the camera on your smartphone to scan Chinese characters from the real world!

Download: Pleco for iOS | Android (Free, in-app purchases available)

Keep Learning Languages Away From Your Phone

One of the best ways to cement your learning is to fully immerse yourself with the new language. This is one of the major downsides of using an app. Even if it’s the best app in the world for learning Mandarin Chinese, it’s easy to switch off that part of your brain the second you put your phone away.

Luckily, there are plenty of innovative ways to introduce Mandarin Chinese to other elements of your life as well. Why not find out how to learn languages while watching Netflix, so you can keep practicing Chinese while catching up on your favorite shows?

Read the full article: The 8 Best Mobile Apps to Learn Mandarin Chinese

Read Full Article

2 Ways to Remove a Page Break in Microsoft Word

A page break is an invisible marker that splits one page in Microsoft Word from the next. This formatting mark enables text to flow smoothly from one page to the next. When you want to print the document, the printer uses the page break to know where the first page has ended and the second has begun.

Unlock the "Essential Microsoft Office Shortcuts" cheat sheet now!

This will sign you up to our newsletter

Enter your Email

Read our privacy policy

In short, a page break controls the layout of your document and allows you to place your content on the right page.

For instance, you can use a page break to position a table or an image on a new page instead of crowding it in the previous one.

So, let’s learn how to add a page break and then how to remove a page break in Word.

There Are Two Types of Page Breaks

There are two types of page breaks and a few other types of document breaks in Word. Today, we will just talk about page breaks.

Automatic page breaks are added by Word when you move from one page to the next.

Manual page breaks can be added anywhere in the document by you to break the document and advance to the next page.

You can’t remove automatic page breaks, but you can adjust where they occur. You control the position of manual page breaks because you are adding them yourselves.

How to Add a Page Break

Once you start using page breaks, you will find that this almost hidden feature in Word makes it easier to format your document.

To add them manually in your document:

1. Place your cursor where you want one page to end and the next to begin.
2. Go to Ribbon > Insert > Page Break (in the Pages group)

You can also press Ctrl + Enter to quickly insert a page break with the keyboard shortcut.

Click on Home > Paragraph Group > Show/Hide button to display the hidden page break marker in your document.

How to Remove a Page Break in Word

You can insert a manual page break anywhere in a Word document and force the text to begin at the top of the next page. But how do you delete them?

Here are three quick ways to delete page breaks in Word.

Method 1: Remove Page Breaks With Delete

1. Open your Word document.
2. Go to Home > Click the Show/Hide button to display all non-printable hidden marks like page breaks, spaces, and non-breaking spaces in the document.
   
3. Double-click to select a page break and press Delete to remove it.
   
4. You can now click the Show/Hide button again to hide the other formatting marks in the document.
5. Alternatively, instead of double clicking, you can also place your cursor just before the page break marker and hit Delete.

How to undo a deleted page break? Press Ctrl+Z to undo the removal or add it again as explained above.

Method 2: Use Find and Replace to Remove the Page Break

1. Press Ctrl+ H to open the Find and Replace box.
2. Select the Replace tab. Click on the Find what text box and then click the More button to open all the other options.
3. Next, click Special and choose Manual Page Break on that menu.
4. Finally, leave the Replace box blank and click Replace All to remove every page break in the document in one go with a blank space.

Also: Turn Off Track Changes to Delete Manual Page Breaks

You cannot delete manual page breaks when Track Changes is turned on. To turn off Track Changes:

1. Go to the Review tab in the Ribbon.
2. Click Track Changes > Track Changes in the Tracking group.
3. From the drop-down menu, select Track Changes to turn tracking off.
4. Alternatively, you can also press Ctrl + Shift + E to turn off Track Changes.

Manage an Automatic Page Break to Control Your Layout

You can’t remove automatic page breaks. But you can control their position with the Pagination options in Word. This enables you to change the settings for how Word treats paragraphs across page breaks and also manage the space between paragraphs.

You can find the Pagination option by going to Ribbon > Home > Paragraph > Paragraph Settings (click on the tiny arrow) > Line and Page Breaks tab.

You can also right-click anywhere on the page and select Paragraph from the menu.

Select the paragraphs you want to apply the settings to. Then, put a checkmark against one or all the options in the Line and Page Breaks settings:

• Widow/Orphan: “Widow” refers to the last line of a paragraph at the top of a page. “Orphan” is the first line at the bottom of a page. Place a checkmark on this option and Word places at least two lines of a paragraph at the top or bottom of a page.
• Keep with next: This option prevents breaks between paragraphs you want to stay together. For instance, you can keep a heading and the block of text below it together instead of having the heading on one page and the text on another.
• Keep lines together: This prevents page breaks in the middle of paragraphs and helps to bind lines together.
• Page break before: This option adds a page break before a specific paragraph and enables you to display it on a new page.

These settings are also important if you cannot understand the reasons for a layout and even with the Show/Hide button on.

The Importance of Page Breaks

If you don’t use Page Breaks at every available opportunity, you probably go to the Enter key to shift content down or the Backspace key to move things up and finetune your layout.

This can solve the problem but create new ones when you have to add or delete more content as the new lines make everything shift again from their original position. And you have to readjust everything again (and again).

Use a page break instead. Page breaks and the different options as you saw above help to keep blocks of paragraphs together.

For instance, a table header and the table can be together instead of getting separated across pages.

Page breaks aren’t the only rules you should follow for well-designed Word documents. You can use Column breaks, Section breaks, and Text wrapping to organize your content in Word. These options can be found under Layouts > Breaks on the Ribbon.

Are Page Breaks Puzzling You?

Page breaks can be annoying too when you don’t understand how they work. Learn how to view them with the Show/Hide button and then go about getting rid of the wrong page break.

But get into the habit of using them right off the bat and you won’t have a problem creating professional reports and documents in Word.

Read the full article: 2 Ways to Remove a Page Break in Microsoft Word

Read Full Article

The 5 Best Free VR Games for Oculus

A good VR setup doesn’t come cheap, and then you have to buy the games to play on it. However, you don’t need to pay for VR games, as there are plenty of free virtual reality games worth playing. In this article, we list the best free VR games for Oculus.

1. Oculus First Contact

What better way to get started with your VR adventure than a free introductory game? While Oculus does a great job getting you accustomed to VR on first boot, Oculus First Contact is the perfect follow-up for any new VR adventurer.

First Contact is a collection of fun VR toys for you to play with while you get your bearings in the digital world. Once you’re done with it, keep the game around for any curious friends or family that want to give VR a test drive.

Download: Oculus First Contact (Available on Oculus Quest, Rift, and Rift S)

2. Rec Room

If you want to make new friends in virtual reality, be sure to check out the free multiplayer games that Oculus has to offer. Rec Room allows you to build an avatar and meet up with likeminded people to hang out and chat.

If you’re not the chatty type, you can instead hop into one of the games running at any given time. Rec Room has paintball and laser tag for the action-lovers, while more passive players will enjoy bowling and charades.

Rec Room doesn’t allow users to upload their own content. You play games and explore rooms that are designed by the developers, and create avatars using pre-made parts.

This may be a dealbreaker for some, but it does mean the game is suitable for a younger audience. You don’t have to worry about someone uploading inappropriate content for everyone to see.

Download: Rec Room (Available on Oculus Quest, Rift, and Rift S)

3. VR Chat

In a similar vein to Rec Room, VR Chat brings people together in the virtual world. However, unlike Rec Room, VR Chat focuses more on socializing than playing games.

While there are fun games to be found in the VR Chat rooms, you’ll see a lot of activity in hangout rooms, bars, and karaoke clubs. This makes VR chat one of the top free VR games for socializing, whether it’s with friends you’ve made or people you’ve yet to befriend.

VR Chat has more customization options than Rec Room. While Rec Room has you pick from preset avatar pieces, VR Chat lets you import models. As such, you’ll see a lot of popular video game characters and original avatars walking around, alongside worlds created by talented modelers.

Unfortunately, if you’re using the Oculus Quest, your options are limited if you don’t use the Oculus Link. This is because the Quest has low system specifications, so it can’t handle the output that some VR worlds and avatars demand.

You’ll find that there are worlds and avatars built with the Quest in mind, but everything else displays a default avatar or doesn’t show up at all. As such, if you like VR Chat, consider using Oculus Link to see all the content.

Download: VR Chat (Available on Oculus Quest, Rift, and Rift S)

4. Bait!

If you’re not one for socializing online with strangers, don’t worry. Bait! is a great single player experience and ideal for someone who wants to relax and take it easy in virtual reality. For a free game, it’s very generous with the amount of content it gives you.

You can fish in several locations with different kinds of rods, and there’s plenty to see and do. It’s also one of the best Oculus Go games, which doesn’t have a lot of free games to choose from.

What’s great about Bait! is how relaxing it is. There are no enemies to fight or obstacles to dodge. You do get challenges and quests, but there’s no rush to complete them.

This makes Bait! not only a fantastic way to get started with VR, but also a fun game to show friends and family if they want to try a game.

Download: Bait! (Available on Oculus Quest, Go, and Gear VR)

5. Tea For God

Tea For God is a unique entry. At the time of writing, you won’t find Tea For God on the official Oculus store. That’s because it’s a work-in-progress, and Oculus doesn’t allow early access games on their official store.

Once Tea For God is completed, the developer fully intends for it to be sold on the store; for now, however, you can get a taster and watch as the game evolves.

If you use an Oculus headset that connects to your PC, you can grab Tea For God from its itch.io page. If you own an Oculus Quest, you can sideload it using a program called SideQuest.

VR developers use itch.io and SideQuest to upload free beta versions of their games, so be sure to explore those websites for more free offerings.

Tea For God has you explore a giant labyrinth and shooting robots by walking around your play space. There is no need for a controller to walk around, and the game doesn’t use the “click to teleport” movement method either. This makes Tea For God a natural-feeling VR game, and a great entry if you’re worried about motion sickness.

If you’re looking at your small play space and wondering how you’d fit a giant labyrinth in it, don’t worry. The way Tea For God fits a sprawling labyrinth in your home is by using impossible spaces.

For instance, you start a run by climbing into a large metal box sitting in a room. When you look to your right, you find a corner and a corridor that would be physically impossible to achieve in regular space. This allows Tea For God to create vast levels within the boundaries of your play space.

If you want to learn how to make room for Tea For God, here’s how to set up the perfect VR room for maximum enjoyment.

Download: Tea for God for Oculus | Oculus Quest

The Best Free VR Games Are Worth Playing

After shelling out for a VR headset, the last thing you want to do is spend even more money on games. Thankfully, you can download these, the best VR games for Oculus, without paying a penny.

If you want to play something more artistic, try the best VR apps for creative immersion.

Image Credit: Oculus Rift/Oculus

Read the full article: The 5 Best Free VR Games for Oculus

Read Full Article

How to Force Quit an App on Your Mac

Have you ever found yourself working with an app or playing a game on your Mac when it suddenly freezes? You try to close it and can’t, or you try to “quit” it and it won’t respond.

Unlock the free "Most Useful Mac Keyboard Shortcuts" cheat sheet now!

This will sign you up to our newsletter

Enter your Email

Read our privacy policy

Luckily, you can force quit an app on your Mac and then reopen it. Here are several ways to force quit an unresponsive app on your Mac.

Why Do Apps Freeze or Stop Responding?

There are many issues that can cause a Mac app to become unresponsive. Here are just a few:

Insufficient RAM: RAM stands for Random Access Memory, which is essentially short-term storage. Your computer uses RAM to store your open applications, but you only have a limited amount. So if you have many apps open at once, it can slow everything down and in some cases, cause apps to stop responding as they should.

If you think this might be your problem, try closing some of your open apps or reboot your Mac to clear the RAM. You might also think about upgrading the RAM on your Mac if this seems to be a consistent problem.

Problems with the app: Unfortunately, not all apps are created equal and some run into bugs that can cause them not to work properly.

You can reduce situations like this by downloading apps directly from the Mac App Store rather than third-party websites. This does not guarantee that an app will be bug-free, but the chances are better than good since Apple vets all apps on the App Store.

See how to fix problems with a specific Mac app for more info.

Incompatible apps: Many times, if an app is incompatible with your Mac, it won’t stay open or refuses to open at all. However, there are other times when it might completely freeze.

The best way to avoid incompatibility issues is to make sure that you keep your apps updated. If the developer hasn’t released an update in a while, check again later, especially if you recently updated macOS.

How to Force Quit an App on Mac

Now that you know some of the reasons you might be having trouble with an app, it’s time to move onto how to force quit that app if you need to. macOS gives you many different ways to do this.

Force Quit an App From the Dock

You can easily quit an app from your Mac Dock by right-clicking and picking Quit. But you can also force quit an app from the Dock.

When you right-click the app, hold down your Option key. You’ll see that Quit will change to Force Quit in the shortcut menu.

Force Quit an App From the Menu Bar

The next easiest way to force quit an app is by using your menu bar. Open the Apple menu at the top-left of your screen and then select Force Quit.

This will open the Force Quit Applications window. Select the app and click the Force Quit button.

Force Quit an App With a Shortcut

Rather than using the menu bar, you can use a keyboard shortcut to open the Force Quit Applications window.

Press Cmd + Option + Escape. Select the app and click Force Quit.

Force Quit an App With the Activity Monitor

The Activity Monitor on your Mac shows the processes that are running on your computer. If you’ve used a Windows machine before, Activity Monitor on Mac is like the Task Manager on Windows.

Open the Activity Monitor using one of these quick methods:

• Launch Spotlight with Cmd + Space and enter Activity Monitor in the search box.
• With Finder open, click Go > Utilities from the menu bar and then double-click Activity Monitor.
• Open the Applications folder in Finder, select the Utilities folder, and click Activity Monitor.

Once the Activity Monitor opens, click the CPU tab at the top. You’ll see a list of the processes running with their details. Select the app in question and click the Stop (X) button at the top-left, then choose Force Quit.

How to Force Restart or Shut Down Your Mac

If you’re still having problems quitting the app, other apps have also become unresponsive, and your Mac seems slow to respond overall, it may be best to shut down and restart your Mac.

The best way to restart or shut down your Mac is to use the menu bar. Click Apple menu > Restart or Shut Down.

When the dialog box appears asking if you want to reopen your windows when logging back in, uncheck that option. You don’t want to reopen the unresponsive app(s) at startup.

Force Restart Your Mac

If your Mac isn’t responding to the menu bar actions, you can force it to restart. To force restart your Mac, hold down the Cmd and Control keys along with the Power button until the screen goes blank and your Mac restarts, then release them.

Force Shut Down Your Mac

If all else fails, you can press and hold the Power button until your Mac turns off. Unfortunately, this method is equivalent to pulling the plug, so it can result in the loss of unsaved items that you have open. So only use this method if your Mac is completely unresponsive.

Check Your Mac’s Login Items

You can have certain apps open up when you first log into your Mac. But if one of those troublesome apps is on the list, this can cause issues from the get-go.

To review the apps that start when you log in, follow these steps:

1. Open your System Preferences using the icon in your Dock or by clicking Apple menu > System Preferences from the menu bar.
2. Choose Users & Groups.
3. Select your user account on the left and switch to the Login Items tab.
4. You’ll see a list of all items that automatically open when you log in. To remove one from the list, select it and click the minus button at the bottom of the list.

Force Quit and Start Again

Hopefully, forcing an application to close isn’t something that you’ll have to do often. But at least you now know a few different ways to force quit an app on your Mac if necessary.

If you have consistent problems with the same app freezing or being unresponsive, it might be time to uninstall that program from your Mac and find a replacement.

Read the full article: How to Force Quit an App on Your Mac

Read Full Article

Privacy experts slam UK’s “disastrous” failure to tackle unlawful adtech

The UK’s data protection regulator has been slammed by privacy experts for once again failing to take enforcement action over systematic breaches of the law linked to behaviorally targeted ads — despite warning last summer that the adtech industry is out of control.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has also previously admitted it suspects the real-time bidding (RTB) system involved in some programmatic online advertising to be unlawfully processing people’s sensitive information. But rather than take any enforcement against companies it suspects of law breaches it has today issued another mildly worded blog post — in which it frames what it admits is a “systemic problem” as fixable via (yet more) industry-led “reform”.

Yet it’s exactly such industry-led self-regulation that’s created the unlawful adtech mess in the first place, data protection experts warn.

The pervasive profiling of Internet users by the adtech ‘data industrial complex’ has been coming under wider scrutiny by lawmakers and civic society in recent years — with sweeping concerns being raised in parliaments around the world that individually targeted ads provide a conduit for discrimination, exploit the vulnerable, accelerate misinformation and undermine democratic processes as a consequence of platform asymmetries and the lack of transparency around how ads are targeted.

In Europe, which has a comprehensive framework of data protection rights, the core privacy complaint is that these creepy individually targeted ads rely on a systemic violation of people’s privacy from what amounts to industry-wide, Internet-enabled mass surveillance — which also risks the security of people’s data at vast scale.

It’s now almost a year and a half since the ICO was the recipient of a major complaint into RTB — filed by Dr Johnny Ryan of private browser Brave; Jim Killock, director of the Open Rights Group; and Dr Michael Veale, a data and policy lecturer at University College London — laying out what the complainants described then as “wide-scale and systemic” breaches of Europe’s data protection regime.

The complaint — which has also been filed with other EU data protection agencies — agues that the systematic broadcasting of people’s personal data to bidders in the adtech chain is inherently insecure and thereby contravenes Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which stipulates that personal data be processed “in a manner that ensures appropriate security of the personal data”.

The regulation also requires data processors to have a valid legal basis for processing people’s information in the first place — and RTB fails that test, per privacy experts — either if ‘consent’ is claimed (given the sheer number of entities and volumes of data being passed around via RTB which mean it’s not credible to hit GDPR’s ‘informed, specific and freely given’ threshold for consent to be valid); or ‘legitimate interests’ — which requires data processors to carry out a number of balancing assessment tests to demonstrate they actually meet the standard.

“We have reviewed a number of justifications for the use of legitimate interests as the lawful basis for the processing of personal data in RTB. Our current view is that the justification offered by organisations is insufficient,” writes Simon McDougall, the ICO’s executive director of technology and innovation, developing a warning over the industry’s rampant misuse of legitimate interests to try to pass off RTB’s unlawful data processing as legit.

The ICO also isn’t exactly happy about what it’s found adtech doing on the Data Protection Impact Assessment front — saying, in so many words, that it’s come across widespread industry failure to actually, er, assess impacts.

“The Data Protection Impact Assessments we have seen have been generally immature, lack appropriate detail, and do not follow the ICO’s recommended steps to assess the risk to the rights and freedoms of the individual,” writes McDougall.

“We have also seen examples of basic data protection controls around security, data retention and data sharing being insufficient,” he adds.

Yet — again — despite fresh admissions of adtech’s lawfulness problem the regulator is choosing more stale inaction.

In the blog post McDougall does not rule out taking “formal” action at some point — but there’s only a vague suggestion of such activity being possible, and zero timeline for “develop[ing] an appropriate regulatory response”, as he puts it. (His preferred ‘E’ word in the blog is ‘engagement’; you’ll only find the word ‘enforcement’ in the footer link on the ICO’s website.)

“We will continue to investigate RTB. While it is too soon to speculate on the outcome of that investigation, given our understanding of the lack of maturity in some parts of this industry we anticipate it may be necessary to take formal regulatory action and will continue to progress our work on that basis,” he adds.

McDougall also trumpets some incremental industry fiddling — such as trade bodies agreeing to update their guidance — as somehow relevant to turning the tanker in a fundamentally broken system.

(Trade body, the Internet Advertising Bureau’s UK branch, has responded to developments with an upbeat note from its head of policy and regulatory affairs, Christie Dennehy-Neil, who lauds the ICO’s engagement as “a constructive process”, claiming: “We have made good progress” — before going on to urge its members and the wider industry to implement “the actions outlined in our response to the ICO” and “deliver meaningful change”. The statement climaxes with: “We look forward to continuing to engage with the ICO as this process develops.”)

McDougall also points to Google removing content categories from its RTB platform from next month (a move it announced months back, in November) as an important development; and seizes on the tech giant’s recent announcement of a proposal to phase out support for third party cookies within the next two years as ‘encouraging’.

Privacy experts have responded with facepalmed outrage to yet another can-kicking exercise by the UK regulator — warning that cosmetic tweaks to adtech won’t fix a system that’s designed to feast off unlawful and insecure high velocity background trading of Internet users’ personal data.

“When an industry is premised and profiting from clear and entrenched illegality that breach individuals’ fundamental rights, engagement is not a suitable remedy,” said UCL’s Veale. “The ICO cannot continue to look back at its past precedents for enforcement action, because it is exactly that timid approach that has led us to where we are now.”

ICO believes that cosmetic fixes can do the job when it comes to #adtech. But no matter how secure data flows are and how beautiful cookie notices are, can people really understand the consequences of their consent? I'm convinced that this consent will *never* be informed. 1/2 https://t.co/1avYt6lgV3

— Karolina Iwańska (@ka_iwanska) January 17, 2020

The trio behind the RTB complaints (which includes Veale) have also issued a scathing collective response to more “regulatory ambivalence” — denouncing the lack of any “substantive action to end the largest data breach ever recorded in the UK”.

“The ‘Real-Time Bidding’ data breach at the heart of RTB market exposes every person in the UK to mass profiling, and the attendant risks of manipulation and discrimination,” they warn. “Regulatory ambivalence cannot continue. The longer this data breach festers, the deeper the rot sets in and the further our data gets exploited. This must end. We are considering all options to put an end to the systemic breach, including direct challenges to the controllers and judicial oversight of the ICO.”

Wolfie Christl, a privacy researcher who focuses on adtech — including contributing to a recent study looking at how extensively popular apps are sharing user data with advertisers, dubbed the ICO’s response “disastrous”.

“Last summer the ICO stated in their report that millions of people were affected by thousands of companies’ GDPR violations. I was sceptical when they announced they would give the industry six more months without enforcing the law. My impression is they are trying to find a way to impose cosmetic changes and keep the data industry happy rather than acting on their own findings and putting an end to the ubiquitous data misuse in today’s digital marketing, which should have happened years ago. The ICO seems to prioritize appeasing the industry over the rights of data subjects, and this is disastrous,” he told us.

“The way data-driven online marketing currently works is illegal at scale and it needs to be stopped from happening,” Christl added. “Each day EU data protection authorities allow these practices to continue further violates people’s rights and freedoms and perpetuates a toxic digital economy.

“This undermines the GDPR and generally trust in tech, perpetuates legal uncertainty for businesses, and punishes companies who comply and create privacy-respecting services and business models. 20 months after the GDPR came into full force, it is still not enforced in major areas. We still see large-scale misuse of personal information all over the digital world. There is no GDPR enforcement against the tech giants and there is no enforcement against thousands of data companies beyond the large platforms. It seems that data protection authorities across the EU are either not able — or not willing — to stop many kinds of GDPR violations conducted for business purposes. We won’t see any change without massive fines and data processing bans. EU member states and the EU commission must act.”

Read Full Article

Xiaomi spins off POCO as an independent company

Xiaomi said today it is spinning off POCO, a sub-smartphone brand it created in 2018, as a standalone company that will now run independently of the Chinese electronics giant and make its own market strategy.

The move comes months after a top POCO executive — Jai Mani — and some other founding and core members left the sub-brand. The company today insisted that POCO F1, the only smartphone to be launched under the POCO brand, remains a “successful” handset. The POCO F1, a $300 smartphone, was launched in 50 markets.

Manu Kumar Jain, VP of Xiaomi, said POCO had grown into its own identity in a short span of time. “POCO F1 is an extremely popular phone across user groups, and remains a top contender in its category even in 2020. We feel the time is right to let POCO operate on its own now, which is why we’re excited to announce that POCO will spin off as an independent brand,” he said in a statement.

Xiaomi created POCO brand to launch high-end, premium smartphones that would compete directly with flagship smartphones of OnePlus and Samsung. In an interview with yours truly in 2018, Alvin Tse, the head of POCO, and Mani, had said that they are working on a number of smartphones and also thinking about other gadget categories.

At the time, the company already had 300 people working on POCO, and they “shared resources” with the parent company.

“The hope is that we can open up this new consumer need …. If we can offer them something compelling enough at a price point that they have never imagined before, suddenly a lot of people will show interest in availing the top technologies,” Tse said in that interview.

It is unclear, however, why Xiaomi never launched more smartphones under POCO brand — despite the claimed success.

In the years since, Xiaomi, which is known to produce low-end and mid-range smartphones, itself launched a number of high-end smartphones such as the K20 Pro. Indeed, earlier this week, Xiaomi announced it was planning to launch a number of premium smartphones in India, its most important market and where it is the top handset vendor.

“These launches will be across categories which we think will help ‘Mi’ maintain consumer interest in 2020. We also intend to bring the premium smartphones from the Mi line-up, which has recorded a substantial interest since we entered the market,” said Raghu Reddy, Head of Categories, Xiaomi India.

That sounds like an explanation. As my colleague Rita pointed out last year, Chinese smartphone makers have launched sub-brands in recent years to launch handsets that deviate from their company’s brand image. Xiaomi needed POCO because its Mi and Redmi smartphone brands are known for their mid-range and low-tier smartphones. But when the company itself begins to launch premium smartphones — and gain traction — the sub-brand might not be the best marketing tool.

Besides, Xiaomi has bigger fishes to worry about.

In our recent Xiaomi’s earnings coverage, we noted that Chinese electronics giant was struggling to expand its internet services business. Xiaomi posted Q3 revenue of 53.7 billion yuan, or $7.65 billion, up 3.3% from 51.95 billion yuan ($7.39 billion) revenue it reported in Q2 and 5.5% rise since Q3 2018. 

On top of that, the smartphone business revenue of Xiaomi, which went public in 2018, stood at 32.3 billion yuan ($4.6 billion) in Q3 last year, down 7.8% year-over-year. The company, which shipped 32.1 million smartphone units during the period, blamed “downturn” in China’s smartphone market for the decline.

Read Full Article

Bad Map Projection: South America

Bad Map Projection: South America

‘PigeonBot’ brings flying robots closer to real birds

Try as they might, even the most advanced roboticists on Earth struggle to recreate the effortless elegance and efficiency with which birds fly through the air. The “PigeonBot” from Stanford researchers takes a step towards changing that by investigating and demonstrating the unique qualities of feathered flight.

On a superficial level, PigeonBot looks a bit, shall we say, like a school project. But a lot of thought went into this rather haphazard looking contraption. Turns out the way birds fly is really not very well understood, as the relationship between the dynamic wing shape and positions of individual feathers are super complex.

Mechanical engineering professor David Lentink challenged some of his graduate students to “dissect the biomechanics of the avian wing morphing mechanism and embody these insights in a morphing biohybrid robot that features real flight feathers,” taking as their model the common pigeon — the resilience of which Lentink admires.

As he explains in an interview with the journal Science:

The first Ph.D.student, Amanda Stowers, analyzed the skeletal motion and determined we only needed to emulate the wrist and finger motion in our robot to actuate all 20 primary and 20 secondary flight feathers. The second student, Laura Matloff,uncovered how the feathers moved via a simple linear response to skeletal movement. The robotic insight here is that a bird wing is a gigantic underactuated system in which a bird doesn’t have to constantly actuate each feather individually. Instead, all the feathers follow wrist and finger motion automatically via the elastic ligament that connects the feathers to the skeleton. It’s an ingenious system that greatly simplifies feather position control.

In addition to finding that the individual control of feathers is more automatic than manual, the team found that tiny microstructures on the feathers form a sort of one-way Velcro-type material that keeps them forming a continuous surface rather than a bunch of disconnected ones. These and other findings were published in Science, while the robot itself, devised by “the third student,” Eric Chang, is described in Science Robotics.

Using 40 actual pigeon feathers and a super-light frame, Chang and the team made a simple flying machine that doesn’t derive lift from its feathers — it has a propeller on the front — but uses them to steer and maneuver using the same type of flexion and morphing as the birds themselves do when gliding.

Studying the biology of the wing itself, then observing and adjusting the PigeonBot systems, the team found that the bird (and bot) used its “wrist” when the wing was partly retracted, and “fingers” when extended, to control flight. But it’s done in a highly elegant fashion that minimizes the thought and the mechanisms required.

PigeonBot’s wing. You can see that the feathers are joined by elastic connections so moving one moves others.

It’s the kind of thing that could inform improved wing design for aircraft, which currently rely in many ways on principles established more than a century ago. Passenger jets, of course, don’t need to dive or roll on short notice, but drones and other small craft might find the ability extremely useful.

“The underactuated morphing wing principles presented here may inspire more economical and simpler morphing wing designs for aircraft and robots with more degrees of freedom than previously considered,” write the researchers in the Science Robotics paper.

Up next for the team is observation of more bird species to see if these techniques are shared with others. Lentink is working on a tail to match the wings, and separately on a new bio-inspired robot inspired by falcons, which could potentially have legs and claws as well. “I have many ideas,” he admitted.

Bat Bot is the biomimetic flying soft robot we deserve

Read Full Article