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Microsoft will remove Cortana from its Android launcher in April

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Microsoft says it will discontinue Cortana services in the application by the end of April. “This next step in Cortana’s evolution will bring enhanced, seamless personal productivity assistance as a free update to the latest version of Windows 10 coming this spring,” the company said.

It’s not overly surprising to see Microsoft remove Cortana from its launcher app. While a lot of people like the launcher, the assistant was never its main appeal. What’s more, we knew Cortana’s days on Android were numbered when the Cortana app stopped working last month in countries like Canada, Australia and the UK. In those places, Microsoft has already removed the assistant from its launcher app as it tries to carve a different niche for the AI.

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NASA’s Psyche asteroid mission will use a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket

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Scientists want to visit the unique metal asteroid, because they believe that it could actually be the exposed nickel-iron core of an early planet that broke apart due to violent collisions. The mission’s findings could shed light on the formation of our solar system and offer a window into the “violent history of collisions and accretion that created terrestrial planets.”

NASA says launching the Psyche spacecraft will cost it approximately $117 million, and according to SpaceNews, it’s the agency’s first mission that will fly on top of a Falcon Heavy as its primary payload. If everything goes according to plan, the Psyche spacecraft will start its journey in July 2022 from Launch Complex 39A at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.



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‘Quiplash 3’ is coming to Jackbox’s Party Pack 7 this fall

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Since the original version of Quiplash launched in 2015, it has become the Jackbox’s most popular game. It was the first of the company’s offerings to feature an audience participation component, allowing up to 10,000 people beyond the main three to eight players to join in the fun.

In Quiplash and Quiplash 2, you and your friends use your phones and go to Jackbox’s browser-based portal and enter a room code to join the game. In each of the three rounds, you have to come up with funny answers to two prompts. Then, your quips are pit against each another player who received the same question. Everyone else in the room (or tuned in through the room code) votes for their favorite. The option with the most votes wins a thousand points. If you’ve played Cards Against Humanity this will sound similar, except Jackbox is a console-based game and requires that one of the players has bought it and can host it on a big shared screen.

All generations of the Party Pack are available across a wide variety of platforms, including the Switch, PC, PlayStation, Xbox and a few smart TVs. CEO Mike Bilner told Engadget Quiplash 3 will be the only sequel in Party Pack 7. “The remaining four games that will be in pack seven will be brand new IP,” he said, and that the new bundle will likely arrive on all existing platforms “with the potential for more”. If you’re looking for new activities to do with your friends at your next gathering and don’t want to wait till the fall, you can already buy the first six sets on your preferred platform. Happy parties!

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2020 Game Developers Conference cancels due to coronavirus

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After one big name participant after another (Facebook, Sony, Microsoft, Amazon) announced it would not send people to the show over concerns about the spread of coronavirus, GDC 2020 organizers have announced the event is off. It was scheduled to take place between March 16th and 20th, and in a statement, they said “we fully intend to host a GDC event later in the summer.”

This announcement comes just hours after officials announced a second case of the virus in California with an unknown origin. After Mobile World Congress, this week we’ve already seen Facebook’s F8 developer event and the Geneva Motor Show drop off of the schedule, and it seems unlikely that they will be the last ones.

Those who were planning on attending should have received an email with answers to some of their questions about refunds for passes and hotels booked within the convention’s block. Right now the plan is for “many” of the presentations that would have been given to be submitted via video and made available for free viewing online. The Independent Games Festival and Game Developers Choice Awards, as well as some of those talks, will stream on Twitch during the week the event would have taken place.

In an effort to support indie developers who may be impacted financially, the IGDA has teamed up with GameDev.world on a fundraiser that will include “a Pay-What-You-Want games bundle, a public game jam, and free online live talks and Q&A translated in the worlds’ largest languages.”

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British Airways is testing autonomous electric wheelchairs at JFK

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While it won’t be breaking any speed records, each unit can avoid obstacles and other people with the help of anti-collision technology. It can also navigate the terminal without assistance from airport staff. Before boarding, you can visit as many places as you want using the built-in display. After dropping you off at your departure gate, the wheelchair makes its way back to its docking station, where it waits for its next passenger.

British Airways Whill Wheelchair

If the wheelchair looks familiar, it’s because it appears to adapt Whill’s Model Ci design. We got the chance to test the vehicle at CES 2018, driving it across the show floor at a brisk five miles per hour. At the time, Whill said it would sell the Model Ci for $4,000, which should give an idea of how much British Airways has invested in this trial.

Before rolling out the vehicle at additional airports, British Airways says it plans to conduct further trials at Heathrow airport. Both trials are part of an ongoing five-year, £6.5 million (approximately $8.3 million) effort by the airline to improve its customer experience.

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Galaxy S20 Ultra review: Impressive but impractical

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Faster screens

Although watching 8K videos on the S20 Ultra is silly, it’s still a lovely canvas. The cityscapes I shot looked crisp and colorful on the Ultra’s 6.9-inch screen, even in sunlight. I also enjoyed watching a couple of 4K HDR videos and endless Instagram posts about my friends’ exciting lives. Plus, the Ultra’s almost all-screen front made the viewing experience more immersive and inviting.

One of the highlights on the S20 series is their 120Hz displays, which allows them to refresh much faster than other phones. So far, only the Razer Phone 2, the ASUS ROG Phone 2 and the Sharp AQUOS Zero 2 hit those rates. The Pixel 4 and OnePlus 7T Pro go up to 90hz. It’s a growing trend, but certainly not a widespread feature yet.

To be clear, the S20 Ultra will only refresh that that rate at 1080p. If you want a higher 1440p resolution, you’re stuck with 60Hz. The main benefit of a 120Hz screen is much smoother videos or games at that frame rate, though those are still relatively scant. But another bonus is that thumbing through pages on your phone will also look more fluid. Since so much of my activity online involves scrolling — whether it’s my Instagram or Twitter feeds or a random Reddit binge — I thought this would be a huge improvement. But as much as I appreciated the smoother display, I didn’t miss it when I went back to my Pixel 3. The Pixel 4, with its 90Hz screen, was more than fast enough for me.

Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra review

5G in the real world today

Speaking of fast, the S20 series supports both sub-6 and millimeter wave 5G, and the latter promises serious speed improvements. Of course, I was also slightly concerned about the difficulty in maintaining a connection because they’re notoriously easy to disrupt. If your hand completely covers the antenna, for example, you might lose your signal.

I was hoping that technologies like beamforming and beam-tracking would make mmWave signals more reliable, but it was embarrassingly easy to interrupt them in New York. Our review unit was running on Verizon’s network, but the Ultra will support 5G on all carriers. Since Verizon only offers mmWave 5G right now with no sub-6, and those waves don’t propagate as far, coverage is still quite limited. I had to hunt down nodes through an online map to go chill out within line of sight of one of them to test these supposed super fast downloads.

On a Verizon phone, the 5GUWB icon that indicates a mmWave connection only shows up when an active data download is happening on the network. So, even though I saw the icon switch between 5GUWB and LTE as I walked up and down a block in Brooklyn that had a node on the corner, it wasn’t a good indicator of coverage.

When I did manage to latch on to a signal, though, the rewards were huge. I hit up to 800 Mbps download speeds, according to Speedtest, when connected to a 5G node in Manhattan. A 4K video that took me 13 minutes to download over 4G LTE came through in just 13 seconds on mmWave. Uploads, on the other hand, were only about 50 Mbps, but that’s because Verizon is still using LTE for all uploads. That means posting your Instagram Stories or YouTube videos on the carrier won’t be any quicker.

Battery life and performance

One of the biggest concerns about technologies like mmWave 5G or a screen with a high refresh rate is their impact on battery life. To allay our concerns, Samsung stuffed a whopping 5,000mAh cell into the Ultra. I set my screen to 120Hz and used the S20 Ultra for a ton of photo taking and Instagramming, along with the usual slew of messaging, and the battery lasted about a day and a half. On our battery test, the S20 Ultra lasted 11 and a half hours, which is surprisingly shorter than the Pixel 4 XL. It does line up with the S10+ and outlast the iPhone 11 Pro Max in general use, though.

I mostly used the S20 Ultra for messaging, Instagram and Twitter as well as taking a ton of photos and videos. The Snapdragon 865 chipset held up well in general, and the phone only stalled once when I was trying to switch camera modes while a video was still saving. To push the S20 Ultra harder, I played a round of Call Of Duty Mobile while recording the screen, and then quickly tried to edit the video. Unsurprisingly, the phone managed all that without a hiccup.

Since it is a Galaxy S flagship after all, the Ultra also offers features from older stablemates like an in-display fingerprint sensor, reverse wireless charging and Bixby Routines — you know, in case you found that useful. You’ll also get the standard set of pre-loaded apps from Samsung, Google and Microsoft, but for some reason Netflix and Facebook also come installed. That’s fine, most people use these apps. But for those who don’t, or if you’re against Facebook on principle (like I am), bad news: you can’t uninstall either. Your only option is to disable them, which removes them from your app drawer and silences notifications. Still, that’s a relatively minor gripe.

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Facebook removes Discover tab in Messenger to simplify chat

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The change should reach your devices sometime in the next week.

Facebook didn’t explicitly outline the reasons behind the decision, but it has ongoing plans to make Messenger faster and lighter rather than an a do-it-all front end. The decision to axe Discover certainly helps achieve that goal. It’s also an acknowledgment that all-encompassing apps like WeChat and Gojek might fare well in places such as China and Indonesia, but don’t get much traction in North America and Europe.

There’s also a financial incentive. Now that Facebook displays ads in Stories, it’s not so dependent on the Discover tab to profit from Messenger. It might rake in more cash simply by encouraging people to check their Stories more often — other businesses probably won’t like it, but Facebook clearly sees it as an acceptable tradeoff.

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Apple blocks Clearview AI’s iPhone app

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Won’t someone just let Clearview AI invade our privacy in peace? After having its full client list stolen and leaked on the internet, the controversial facial recognition startup is now in hot water with Apple. The iPhone maker has blocked Clearview’s iPhone app over violating the rules of its enterprise software program, TechCrunch reports. Clearview was relying on an enterprise certificate to let users install its software outside of the App Store, but that goes against Apple’s rules, which limits certificate access to people within a company.

If this situation sounds familiar, it’s because Apple also blocked certificates from Facebook and Google for unauthorized app distribution. In those cases, though, Apple’s move also killed internal apps that both companies relied on. With Clearview’s situation, its core app, which is used by customers for its advanced facial recognition tool, is now inaccessible to iPhone users.

Just like how Gizmodo discovered Clearview’s Android app, TechCrunch says it discovered the iOS version on a public Amazon S3 storage share. While neither site was actually able to log into the apps — they still require an active username and password for Clearview’s service — the fact that they were so easily accessible doesn’t instill much confidence. Then again, we already had our doubts after Clearview’s massive client list breach.

The company’s CEO, Hoan Ton-That, told TechCrunch: “We are in contact with Apple and working on complying with their terms and conditions.”

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YouTube’s appeal process is largely ineffective

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YouTube creators have been asking for more transparency around the video removal appeals process. This is the first time YouTube has shared appeals data, but the info probably isn’t going to make creators too happy. For months, the YouTubers Union has been calling for the appeals process to be overseen by a third-party council, and this new info could fuel its argument.

“Our team is focused on accurately and consistently enforcing our policies, and one of the ways we hold ourselves accountable and measure our success is by making sure that users can easily appeal our decisions and monitoring the rate at which they do,” a YouTube spokesperson told The Verge.

YouTube removed fewer videos last quarter than it has in any quarter since it started sharing the data in 2017. The majority of those videos, 5.3 million, were flagged automatically. Most were removed before they attracted any views, and 52 percent were pulled for spam or misleading content. Just over 2 million channels were removed for repeat violations.

While cleaning up the platform is a good thing, the fact that YouTube shoots down the vast majority of appeals is not — especially if you’re a creator who relies on the platform as a source of income.

Update 2/28/2020 5:10PM ET: Google’s full statement is provided below.

“It’s important to us that we consistently enforce our policies. We rely on a combination of humans and technology for precisely this reason – technology helps us to quickly find content that potentially violates our policies at scale, and we then send this content for review by our highly-trained review teams who can appreciate context and nuance when applying our policies. This data shows those decisions are accurate in most cases.

That said, no system is perfect and that’s why we make it as easy as possible for users to appeal any video removals. We point users to their creator dashboard where they can review and, if necessary, appeal a video removal in every email we send notifying them of their strike and additionally in the in-product notification they must click through to continue using YouTube after receiving a strike.”

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IBM and Microsoft support the Vatican’s guidelines for ethical AI

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The pledge, presented to Pope Francis today, calls for AI that safeguards the rights of all humans, especially the underprivileged, and for new regulations in areas like facial recognition. It asks tech leaders to “humanise technology and not ‘technologise’ humanity,” Novena News reports.

“The Vatican is not an expert on the technology but on values,” Francesca Rossi, IBM’s global AI ethics leader, said in a statement. “The collaboration is to make the Vatican and the whole society understand how to use this technology with these values.”

The pledge is part of a larger workshop on ethical AI led by the Pontifical Academy for Life in the Vatican this week. The Academy hopes governments, NGOs, industry leaders and other associations will join the “Rome Call for AI Ethics,” along with tech companies like IBM and Microsoft.

It’s unclear what this means in the long run, but this is an interesting symbolic move for IBM and Microsoft as they pledge to make ethical AI. Last year, Facebook backed an independent AI ethics research center, and Google has formed an external council to guide “responsible development and use.”

The European Union has released its own guidelines for ethical AI development, and Canada and France are tackling the issue. Meanwhile, the White House has cautioned against over-regulating AI.

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