13 February 2018

3 Sites That’ll Get You in the Mood for Valentine’s Day


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Love is in the air. Valentine’s Day is upon us once again and it’s time to show your loved one how much you care by taking them out for some overpriced food in an over-filled restaurant. If you’re feeling extra brave, you could even try throwing a prank in there. Then again, Valentine’s Day is about more than commercialism and fancy chocolates. Believe it or not, there is a deeper, more emotional side to the day! If you’re struggling to find the true meaning of Valentine’s Day, the web can help. Here are three sites to get you in the...

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Despite controversy, Logan Paul hasn’t done anything to be kicked off of YouTube


 Despite the controversy surrounding YouTube celebrity Logan Paul (thanks to a string of videos exploiting an apparent suicide and tasering a rat), the young media personality hasn’t done anything to warrant being kicked off of the platform that made him a star. That’s according to chief executive Susan Wojcicki, who defended her company’s treatment of Paul’s video… Read More
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YouTube is expanding Red to more countries


 YouTube Red will expand its subscription service to as many as 100 countries, according to YouTube chief executive Susan Wojcicki . Speaking at Recode’s Code Media conference in Huntington Beach, Calif., Wojcicki said that YouTube will be looking to expand its Red service “to many more countries”. The subscription service first launched in October 2015 as a $9.99 subscription… Read More
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Foxconn is working with RED to make cheaper and smaller 8K cameras


 Foxconn, AKA Hon Hai Precision Industry, AKA the company that made your iPhone, is working with digital cinema pioneer RED to create affordable 8K cameras, the company announced. Chairman Terry Gou told reporters in Taipei, the Nikkei’s among them, that the goal is to reduce both the price and the size of such camera systems by two thirds. Read More

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Facebook is creating a news section in Watch to feature breaking news


 Facebook is going to create a new news section in its video streaming platform Facebook Watch to feature breaking news stories. The move, which Campbell Brown, the company’s year-old head of news partnerships, announced onstage at the Code Media conference in Huntington Beach, is part of a broader evolution of Facebook’s news strategy. Read More
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Facebook works it out with Apple to test news paywalls on iOS


 Facebook will begin allowing news publishers to run paywalls inside Facebook’s iOS app starting March 1st. Facebook first started testing paywalls on Android in October, but at the time it couldn’t come to an agreement with Apple about how subscription revenue would be taxed. Today on stage at Code Media, Facebook’s head of news partnerships Campbell Brown said that… Read More
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Users Petition Snapchat to Remove the New Update


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Snapchat is insanely popular, and regarded as teenagers’ favorite social network. If you’re under the age of 35, Snapchat is probably your thing. Or at least it was until the new Snapchat update started rolling out last week. Now, Snapchat users are revolting. The new Snapchat update is the biggest one the company has ever undertaken. And the biggest change is the separation of stories from brands, publishers and influencers, and stories from friends. Which has led users to beg Snapchat to revert back to the old version. Snapchat Users Are Revolting Snapchat has been rolling out the new update...

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New book vividly reveals Snapchat’s sexty dorm-room origin


 “He wouldn’t have to worry about sending a hookup a picture of his junk! And girls would be way more likely to send him racy photos if they disappeared.” That’s just a taste of juicy details found in “How To Turn Down A Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story”, a new book coming out tomorrow from former TechCrunch reporter Billy Gallagher. It illuminates how… Read More
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New book vividly reveals Snapchat’s sexty dorm-room origin


 “He wouldn’t have to worry about sending a hookup a picture of his junk! And girls would be way more likely to send him racy photos if they disappeared.” That’s just a taste of juicy details found in “How To Turn Down A Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story”, a new book coming out tomorrow from former TechCrunch reporter Billy Gallagher. It illuminates how… Read More

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7 Great Open-Source Security Apps You’re Not Using


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Security issues continue to make the news at an alarming rate. It almost seems like a majority of companies have now been affected in some way. Data leaks, accounts hacked en masse, and fundamental security vulnerabilities are worryingly common. To protect yourself against the ever-increasing online threat, you need to use a range of security apps. For a casual home user, it might be as simple as an antivirus suite and a malware tool. As the complexity of your network increases, so too does your need for more complex security apps. In this article, we’re going to look at some...

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Essential reportedly only shipped 88,000 phones in 2017


 Essential knew it had a hard road ahead of it. Andy Rubin and company acknowledged as much when they launched a handset aimed at taking on the likes of Apple and Samsung. Given that the company hasn’t issued anything in the way of official numbers thus far, a new batch of numbers from IDC are the best we have to go on at the moment — and things don’t look great. Read More

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Everything You Need to Know About WPA3 and Wi-Fi Security


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The Wi-Fi Alliance is almost ready to deliver WPA3 to consumers and service providers. The new standard of Wi-Fi security will build upon the aging WPA2 standard, ushering in a new period of Wi-Fi security. What does WPA3 improve? Will your router use it? And when will WPA3 become available? Let’s take a look. What Is WPA? WPA stands for Wi-Fi Protected Access. Your home network likely uses WPA2, the second iteration and more preferred of the WPA standard. Why? Because it’s the strongest protection available — or at least, it was. Unfortunately, WPA2 was compromised using a key installation...

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Apple could be rethinking its release cycle for iOS and macOS


 According to a new report from Bloomberg, Apple is switching things up for this year’s major updates. Instead of meeting a tight deadline and ticking all the boxes on the checklist, development teams will be able to push back some features if they’re not polished enough. Axios and Bloomberg previously reported that Apple was focusing on stability with iOS 12. You can still expect… Read More

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Amazon may be developing AI chips for Alexa


 The Information has a report this morning that Amazon is working on building AI chips for the Echo, which would allow Alexa to more quickly parse information and get those answers. Getting those answers much more quickly to the user, even by a few seconds, might seem like a move that’s not wildly important. But for Amazon, a company that relies on capturing a user’s interest in… Read More

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Introducing the HDR+ Burst Photography Dataset




Burst photography is the key idea underlying the HDR+ software on Google's recent smartphones, and a fundamental computational photography technique for improving image quality. Every photo taken with HDR+ is actually a composite, generated by capturing and merging a short burst of full-resolution photos. HDR+ has helped the Pixel and the Pixel 2 earn DxO's highest mobile camera ranking for two years in a row. The new portrait mode on the Pixel 2 also relies on HDR+, both for its basic image quality and to improve the quality of its depth estimation.

Today we're pleased to announce the public release of an archive of image bursts to the research community. This provides a way for others to compare their methods to the results of Google's HDR+ software running on the same input images. This dataset consists of 3,640 bursts of full-resolution raw images, made up of 28,461 individual images, along with HDR+ intermediate and final results for comparison. The images cover a wide range of photographic situations, including variation in subject, level of motion, brightness, and dynamic range.
Using bursts to improve image quality. HDR+ starts from a burst of full-resolution raw images (left). Depending on conditions, between 2 and 10 images are aligned and merged into an intermediate raw image (middle). This merged image has reduced noise and increased dynamic range, leading to a higher quality final result (right).
Better Images with Burst Photography
Burst photography provides the benefits associated with collecting more light, including reduced noise and improved dynamic range, but it avoids the motion blur that would come from increasing exposure times. This is particularly important for small smartphone cameras, whose size otherwise limits the amount of light they can capture.

Since HDR+ was first released on Nexus 5 and 6, we've been busy improving the system. As described in our recent SIGGRAPH Asia paper, HDR+ now starts from raw images, which helps improve image quality. This also means that the image processing pipeline is fully implemented using our software. Next, we eliminated shutter lag, which makes photography feel instantaneous. The HDR+ photo you get corresponds to the moment the button was pressed. Finally, we improved processing times and power consumption, by implementing HDR+ on accelerators like the Qualcomm Hexagon DSP and the new Pixel Visual Core.
Mosaic of thumbnails illustrating the size and diversity of the HDR+ dataset. Putting a computational photography system like HDR+ into production, where users capture millions of photos per day, means that odd photographic corner cases must be handled in a robust way.
Using the Dataset
The scale and diversity of the HDR+ dataset also opens up the opportunity to apply modern machine learning methods. Our dataset has already been incorporated in a recent research paper which uses a neural network to approximate part of the HDR+ pipeline, constrained to a representation suitable for fast image processing. Several more papers that apply learning to the HDR+ dataset are currently under review.

Inspired by the Middlebury archive of stereo data, our hope is that a shared dataset will enable the community to concentrate on comparing results. This approach is intrinsically more efficient than expecting researchers to configure and run competing techniques themselves, or to implement them from scratch if the code is proprietary. The HDR+ dataset is released under a Creative Commons license (CC-BY-SA). This license is largely unencumbered, however our main intention is that the dataset be used for scientific purposes. For information about how to cite the dataset, please see the detailed description. We look forward to seeing what else researchers can do with the HDR+ dataset!

Acknowledgments
Special thanks to the photographers and subjects of the HDR+ dataset.

What Is Data Analysis and Why Is It Important?


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Data analysis is the process of evaluating data using analytical and statistical tools to discover useful information and aid in business decision making. There are a several data analysis methods including data mining, text analytics, business intelligence and data visualization. How Is Data Analysis Performed? Data analysis is a part of a larger process of deriving business intelligence. The process includes one or more of the following steps: Defining Objectives: Any study must begin with a set of clearly defined business objectives. Much of the decisions made in the rest of the process depends on how clearly the objectives of...

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What to expect from Mobile World Congress 2018


 The world’s largest phone show is set for Barcelona later this month, and it’s shaping up to be an interesting one — particularly in the wake of what amounted to an extremely lackluster CES last month. We’re still a couple of weeks out from the actual event, but the rumors have already started flying. Read More

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12 February 2018

Facebook is pushing its data-tracking Onavo VPN within its main mobile app


 Onavo Protect, the VPN client from the data-security app maker acquired by Facebook back in 2013, has now popped up in the Facebook app itself, under the new banner “Protect” in the navigation menu. Clicking through on “Protect” will redirect Facebook users to the “Onavo Protect – VPN Security” app’s listing on the App Store. We’re… Read More

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Facebook starts pushing its data-tracking Onavo VPN within its main mobile app


 Onavo Protect, the VPN client from the data-security app maker acquired by Facebook back in 2013, has now popped up in the Facebook app itself, under the new banner “Protect” in the navigation menu. Clicking through on “Protect” will redirect Facebook users to the “Onavo Protect – VPN Security” app’s listing on the App Store. We’re… Read More
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Why I Ditched Firefox for GNOME Web on Linux


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You could think of Firefox as Linux’s internet Explorer or Safari. On Windows and macOS, you have to install Mozilla’s browser yourself. On Linux, Firefox comes pre-installed. That’s not a bad thing. Firefox is one of the best web browsers available. But that doesn’t mean that it’s the best for everyone. Firefox doesn’t integrate well with certain Linux desktop environments, which is the primary reason why I don’t use it. I don’t like every app to have a consistent look and feel except for the one I use the most. You may have other reasons for wanting to install something...

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