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Uber’s latest test books rides with a phone call, not the app

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An Uber operator will take your details, give you a price estimate and order a car for you. As such, you won’t need a smartphone to hitch an Uber ride. You’ll at least need a cell phone though, as Uber will text you details about the car and driver, and when you should expect the car to arrive. It’ll also send you a receipt after you reach your destination.

If you already have an Uber account, you can choose from payment options that are already on file. Otherwise, you can sign up the first time you call. You’ll only need to provide some basic information, including your name, zip code and payment details. Uber will store that data in the same way as it would if you provided it through the app.

While a phone booking option might seem somewhat antiquated for a company that has long focused on letting people book cars quickly, it’s a plus for accessibility. Uber says it designed the feature mainly for older people, some of whom told the company they preferred talking to a human instead of using an app to book a ride. However, anyone in the pilot areas who’d rather order a car over the phone can do so.

Uber isn’t charging an extra fee for the service, though you’ll still have to cover your usual messaging, call and data expenses. The ride options you can choose from include UberX, Uber Comfort, Uber Black, Black SUV, Uber Assist and wheelchair-accessible vehicles. Though the phone booking service is only available in Arizona for now, Uber plans to expand it elsewhere in the coming months.

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Facebook Dating’s Valentine’s Day launch in Europe is canceled

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Facebook Dating is the company’s rival to Tinder and OKCupid, harnessing the combined power of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp to help people connect. That includes the ability to use Instagram stories as dating pictures and to list secret crushes just in case they feel the same way. Facebook had initially said, back when it rolled out in the US, that it would be coming to Europe in “early 2020.”

Europe’s comprehensive privacy law, the GDPR, requires companies to look at the potential effects of how they process data. Broadly speaking, if a business wants to do some hot-and-heavy data mashing, necessary for running a dating website, it needs to demonstrate that it’s thought it through. That involves handing over an impact assessment to the local regulator, essentially to show the processing is safe and lawful.

Since Facebook’s (and Google’s) European HQ is based in Dublin, the Irish Data Protection Commission is the local supervisory authority. That means that it needed to be told about the plans for Facebook Dating well in advance of the product’s rollout in Europe. The law doesn’t give a specific period of time for such disclosures to be made, but Article 36 suggests between eight and fourteen weeks.

By comparison, Facebook made its notification on February 3rd, saying that it would commence rolling out Facebook Dating on the 13th. That’s significantly shorter than the expected period of time for such an initiative. “Our initial concerns were around the fact that [Facebook] had only told us on the 3rd, and intended to roll out ten days later,” Graham Doyle, Deputy Data Protection Commissioner at Ireland’s Data Protection Commission, told Engadget.

Officials were further concerned when Facebook appeared to not have the required impact assessment, the key legal document that showed Facebook was complying with the law. “We didn’t receive any documentation with the notification of intent to roll it out,” said Doyle, who added that the paperwork couldn’t be a token gesture. Instead, regulators would expect a lengthy bundle of documents demonstrating that Facebook Dating was GDPR compliant. Facebook’s statement, below, disagrees, saying that it shared the impact assessment when requested.

In a statement, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission said that “no information/documentation was provided.” On Monday, February 10th, officials visited Facebook’s Dublin HQ to gather relevant documentation to try and resolve the situation. Two days later, on February 12th, and Facebook announced that it had suspended the roll-out of Facebook Dating.

In a statement, a Facebook spokesperson said: “It’s really important that we get the launch of Facebook Dating right so we are taking a bit more time to make sure the product is ready for the European market. We worked carefully to create strong privacy safeguards, and complete the data processing impact assessment ahead of the proposed launch in Europe, which we shared with the IDPC when it was requested.”

As the local regulator for all of Facebook’s European operations, the Data Protection Commission has a duty to keep its eye on the network. It currently has 11 current investigations into Facebook group companies, including eight on the social network itself, two concerning WhatsApp, and one on Instagram.

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Apple brings code-teaching app Swift Playgrounds to the Mac

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The app’s transition from tablet to desktop (and MacBook) has been enabled by Catalyst, Apple’s framework for making iOS software run on macOS. It’s not entirely the same app as it was on the tablet, and now Swift Playgrounds works with the mouse, enabling click-and-drag for you to build your programs. And, with iCloud integration, games and projects that you start on the iPad can be finished with macOS, and vice versa.

As well as widening the number of people who can play the title, the move also shows Apple’s commitment to making Catalyst work. As Computerworld points out, the move comes a couple of weeks after Apple allowed developers to begin building universal apps for both iOS and macOS machines. In March, users will be able to buy an app on either app store and use it on both platforms, hopefully juicing macOS development.

*And adults, don’t write in.

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Sony Pictures signs on for ‘Crossfire’ movie based on the popular FPS

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While the Crossfire name won’t register as one of the most popular shooters for some US gamers — no, it’s not related to the board game with the tiny metal balls — the free-to-play tactical first person shooter is extremely popular in China and South Korea. In operation for over ten years, it claims a player base of over 650 million plus lifetime revenue of over $10 billion, and producer Neal Moritz (Fast & Furious series, S.W.A.T., Preacher, The Boys) has been developing a film adaptation since 2015. Now Variety has announced that Sony Pictures will partner on the flick with Korean game developer Smilegate and China’s Tencent Pictures.

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Canon’s EOS Rebel T8i reaffirms its commitment to DSLRs

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It still features 45 cross-type autofocus points for optical viewfinder shooting, but now supports face-detect autofocus in that mode. If you go to live view, you can shoot at 7.5 fps using Canon’s accurate Dual Pixel AF system. On the video side, it can handle 4K video at up to 24p, but only using the contrast detect autofocus. If you want Dual Pixel phase-detect AF for video, you’ll be limited to 1080p shooting at up to 60 fps.

Other features including a fully-articulating 1.04-million dot display that’s ideal for selfies/vlogging, a single UHS I card slot and battery that’s rated for 700 shots per charge. The EOS Rebel T8i will arrive “soon” at $750 for the body only, or $900 with the EF-S 18-55mm f/4-5.6 IS STM kit lens.

Canon EOS Rebel T8i DSLR

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Canon’s powerhouse EOS R5 will be its first mirrorless camera with 8K video

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All that will be possible thanks to a “newly developed CMOS sensor,” Canon said. That will also open up faster shooting speeds, letting you capture bursts at 12 fps with the mechanical shutter and 20 fps using the silent electronic shutter. That will “facilitate shooting of athletes at sporting events and other fast-moving subjects,” said Canon in a read-between-the-lines reference to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

The EOS R5 will pack in-body stabilization that will work in concert with lens stabilization, again addressing what was considered to be a serious miss on the first EOS R model. Lastly, you’ll get dual card slots, likely of the high-speed variety, though Canon didn’t specify what kind. It also didn’t mention what type of video codecs and data rates would be available, whether it would crop video, or the sensor resolution. With 8K on tap, however, the latter will be at least 33 megapixels.

Finally, Canon said that it’s working on a total of nine RF lenses to be released this year, including 1.4x and 2x telephoto extenders and an RF100-500mm f/4.5-7.1 L IS USM lens that sounds ideal for sports shooting on the cheap. There’s no word on availability or price, but Canon will first flaunt the EOS R5 at the CP+ Camera and Photo show held in Tokyo from February 27th to March 1st.

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Senate bill would place a moratorium on feds using facial recognition

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They suggest that the group would be made of members appointed by the president, as well as House and Senate leaders, to address issues like making sure US citizens have “reasonable anonymity” and don’t “live in a constant state of surveillance,” or that its use disproportionately impacts protected classes of individuals.

In a statement, ACLU Senior Legislative Counsel Neema Singh Guliani said “While a good first step, the bill’s exceptions — including allowing police to use this technology with only a warrant — fails to fully account for the realities of this mass surveillance tool. With these exceptions, this bill won’t stop police from using error-prone and biased algorithms to target, interrogate, and even arrest people. It won’t ensure that defendants are provided their constitutional right to challenge these tools in court. And it won’t fully mitigate the threat that this technology poses to protesters exercising their First Amendment rights.”



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Bloomberg: India may soon make controversial social media rules official

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That means the provisions in earlier drafts still remain, including one that would require platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok to help the government trace the origins of a post within 72 hours even without a warrant or a judicial order. In addition, they have to disable the poster’s access to the platform within 24 hours, remove any content when asked and preserve their records for at least 180 days to help government investigators.

They also have to establish a brick-and-mortar operation within India, as well as appoint a “grievance officer” who’ll serve as the government’s liaison. Bloomberg says officials are still finalizing the language, though, so the details may still be altered even if the rules don’t undergo major changes.

If the rules become official, they’ll cover all social media and messaging applications, though it’s unclear if the Indian government could also ask the companies for foreign users’ identities. As privacy advocates warn, platforms would have would have to break their own end-to-end encryption and spy on their users to adhere to the new guidelines. When the rules were first proposed, The Internet and Mobile Association of India, which represent Google, Facebook and Twitter, called them arbitrary and a “violation of the right to privacy recognized by the Supreme Court.”

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Pokémon Home is now available on Nintendo Switch, iOS and Android

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The app is free to download, but if you want all to take advantage of all of its features, you’ll need to subscribe to Home’s Premium plan. The subscription will set you back $3 every 30 days, $5 every 90 days or $16 once a year. While you can use the app for free through the Basic plan, it limits you to storing only 30 Pokémon. You also can’t transfer any monsters you may have on some of the older 3DS (as well as DS and Game Boy Advance) games because the Basic plan doesn’t support Pokémon Bank.

Even if you don’t plan to use Home much, it’s worth downloading. The first time you launch the app on iOS and Android, you’ll get one of the Kanto starters — Charmander, Squirtle or Bulbasaur — for free. On Switch, meanwhile, you’ll get a free Pikachu. Oh, and there’s a wacky new Professor Oak to guide you through using the app.

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AI can automatically rewrite outdated text in Wikipedia articles

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The machine learning-based system is trained to recognize the differences between a Wikipedia article sentence and a claim sentence with updated facts. If it sees any contradictions between the two sentences, it uses a “neutrality masker” to pinpoint both the contradictory words that need deleting and the ones it absolutely has to keep. After that, an encoder-decoder framework determines how to rewrite the Wikipedia sentence using simplified representations of both that sentence and the new claim.

The system can also be used to supplement datasets meant to train fake news detectors, potentially reducing bias and improving accuracy.

As-is, the technology isn’t quite ready for prime time. Humans rating the AI’s accuracy gave it average scores of 4 out of 5 for factual updates and 3.85 out of 5 for grammar. That’s better than other systems for generating text, but that still suggests you might notice the difference. If researchers can refine the AI, though, this might be useful for making minor edits to Wikipedia, news articles (hello!) or other documents in those moments when a human editor isn’t practical.

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