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For a couple of years, Instagram users have been able to pull GIFs from Giphy to use as animated stickers in Stories. When your friend posts something that you just have to respond to and words or a static image just won’t cut it, you might want to reply with a GIF of your own. And guess what? You can do just that following the app’s latest update.
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When determining if the media has been deceptively altered, Twitter will consider factors like whether a real person has been fabricated. It may flag content if visual or auditory info (like dubbing) has been added or removed. It will also judge the context and whether the deepfake is likely to impact public safety or cause serious harm.
We know that some Tweets include manipulated photos or videos that can cause people harm. Today we’re introducing a new rule and a label that will address this and give people more context around these Tweets pic.twitter.com/P1ThCsirZ4
— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) February 4, 2020
Beginning March 5th, Twitter may label Tweets with “deceptively altered or fabricated content.” It may also show a warning to people before they retweet or like the manipulated media, reduce the visibility of the tweet, prevent it from being recommended or provide additional explanations through a landing page.
These changes are the result of an effort to combat deepfakes. Twitter promised these rules late last year, and it drafted guidelines based on user feedback. The platform has already banned porn deepfakes, and as the 2020 election nears, it’s likely Twitter wants to prevent political deepfake scandals and misinformation campaigns.
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The focus on internet-only service makes sense when Google recently dropped its 100Mbps tier. Why pay for old-school TV when you have a gigabit connection that can stream video without so much as a hiccup? YouTube TV appears to be thriving with 2 million customers, and Google Fiber customers are a prime candidate for the service.
At the same time, this is an acknowledgment that Google Fiber’s TV offering hasn’t fared all that well. Estimates suggested that Fiber had just 84,232 TV subscribers at the end of 2016, and that number isn’t likely to have climbed higher when Google declined to offer TV in newer markets like Louisville and San Antonio. By contrast, there were over 500,000 broadband customers — many users had no interest in traditional TV, at least not from Google. The switch to internet-only service for new sign-ups lets Google cut costs and focus on raw data service.
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While we don’t know exactly how the X-T4 will improve on the already excellent X-T3, Fujirumours suggests the camera will feature Fuji’s newest X-Trans APS-C sensor. It will also reportedly include in-body stabilization — a feature that among the company’s X-series cameras has so far been exclusive to the X-H1 — as well as support for 10-bit internal 6K video capture at 60 frames per second. It could also include a fully articulating screen to make the camera an even better fit for vloggers.
In any case, make sure to visit Engadget on the 26th to get all the latest information about the X-T4.
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Memac Ogilvy characterized this as a “new path to creativity” and bragged that there was “nothing stopping ” KFC from bringing chicken to its customers. However, we suspect many subscribers didn’t take it the same way. After all, you pay that Premium fee in part to avoid ads — while these approaches didn’t interrupt your listening, they effectively dodged Spotify’s usual approach to ads.
We’ve asked Spotify for comment. The ads aren’t present now, but it’s not clear if Spotify was fine with them in the first place. If it was, it could set a precedent for other advertisers determined to market to Spotify Premium customers — much to the chagrin of fans who just want to browse music without seeing any sales pitches.
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Images that are edited in apps like Photoshop may look convincing to the human eye, but there are many artifacts that can be more easily detected by a computer. For example, the clone tool creates repeated patterns in an image that may be virtually undetectable to the untrained eye, but — to a computer — are clear indications of manipulation. Assembler specifically looks for these common giveaways, as well as signs from more advanced forms of image manipulation, like deepfakes.
According to Jigsaw CEO, Jared Cohen, Assembler is still in its early stages of development, and will only be available to journalists and fact checkers. Other image analysis software — such as FotoForensics — exists, but Assembler seems to be much more advanced. As fake news shows no signs of abating, Assembler could become a key tool for journalists and researchers.
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The new season debuts February 27th. There’s a fair amount of hype for the show, both because of the relatively lengthy two-year wait and because of the show itself. It’s arguably Netflix’s tentpole ‘deep’ sci-fi show (Lost in Space being lighter fare) with a healthy audience, and now it has to go up against rivals like Amazon’s The Expanse. If Netflix intends to keep sci-fi fans, this new season of Altered Carbon could play a crucial role.
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Dyson’s portable air purifier features two speakers assemblies — both have a filter, an impeller that creates airflow, and a motor that drives the impeller. The clean air travels down a nozzle and to a front strap. This strip has an outlet that releases air toward your nose and mouth.
With a 12,000 RPM impeller and a motor on each side of your head, it seems likely that these units will feature active noise cancelling (ANC). Whether or not the noise of the motor and impeller will be a distraction to nearby commuters and coworkers isn’t clear. Those same elements of the product bring up the question of battery life — the headset probably won’t last nearly as long as standard wireless headphones. When it comes to the looks of the wearable air purifier, the front strip that directs air toward your nose and mouth may turn out to be more of an unwanted attention-getter than a standard antiviral mask.
This is just a patent, so a commercially available product isn’t guaranteed. However, Dyson has been working on a wearable air purifier for over a year, so it seems like this could end up becoming a reality. Furthermore, it does indicate the need for wearable air purification. This may not be something you’d wear every day, but on flights or in polluted areas, it could help avoid illness or damage to the lungs — and it could be something that flies off the shelf during media-hyped events like the current coronavirus outbreak.
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In its final form, Geforce Now is a subscription service with a free and a paid tier. The free option allows folks to connect to NVIDIA’s servers and play for one hour at a time. After an hour, these players will need to reconnect, and potentially wait for a spot to open up on the servers. In the paid tier, players will be pushed to the front of the line when logging on, they’ll stay online for up to four hours and they’ll have exclusive access to NVIDIA’s RTX platform. At launch, the upgraded option is called a Founders membership, and it costs $5 a month for the year, with three free months to kick things off.
NVIDIA is clear that the $5-per-month rate is a discount on the full subscription price, but it hasn’t said what the Geforce Now premium tier will cost post-sale.
“It will be higher than that,” an NVIDIA spokesperson told Engadget at CES in January. “We haven’t decided what number it’s going to be yet. But this is kind of the next level for Geforce Now. So this, we’re going to be focused on for the next probably three to six months, and then we’ll worry about what comes after that.”
One of NVIDIA’s big promises with Geforce Now is that players will actually own the games they buy, rather than paying to access a library that disappears if they end their subscription. If a player leaves the service for good, all the games they purchased will still be accessible through Steam, the Epic Games Store or other existing platforms. DRM-free, baby.
DRM-free, baby.
This is in contrast to Google Stadia, which hosts players’ games entirely in the cloud. With Stadia, players have to purchase (and repurchase) every game they want to play via Google’s storefront, and this library isn’t downloadable. If you lose access to Stadia, you lose those games. Microsoft xCloud employs a similar system, though the service is still in preview.
“I think our strategy of the games is quite different,” an NVIDIA representative said. “It’s connecting to your existing accounts in the cloud, so PC games in the cloud. We’re not creating a new game store where you have to re-buy your content and it’s locked to our platform. This is your existing PC games on your Steam that you already own. So if you have a large Steam account, this seems like a natural choice for you really.”
Geforce Now is supported in 30 countries, with nine data centers in North America and six in Western Europe, which NVIDIA says are all capable of delivering 20-millisecond latency. In Korea, Japan, Russia and other locations, NVIDIA has partnered with telecommunications companies to deliver a claimed latency of 10 milliseconds to these players.
Even in the paid tier, NVIDIA limits gaming sessions to four hours, and this feature serves a few purposes. For one, it ensures that the people connected to the cloud are actually using it to play games.
“We just found 99 percent of people aren’t playing longer than that,” a spokesperson said. “One of the things that we try to control is non-gaming use, like people mining and things like that that really aren’t gaming. …And we found that at that point, at four hours, most people need a bio-break or something. So it’s not really interrupting their gameplay.”
NVIDIA developers expect free-tier players will have to wait longer during primetime gaming hours, like at eight or nine o’clock at night, though they hope even then it won’t be a huge delay. However, if this wait time pushes more players to upgrade to the paid tier, all the better for NVIDIA and the service overall.
“Ideally it wouldn’t be a long wait and we’re going to try to manage it that way,” a representative said. “But you know, this revenue stream will help us grow the capacity of the servers. Right? We need the revenue stream to grow the capacity so people don’t have to wait. So it sort of depends on a certain percentage of people becoming new paid members.”
More than 300,000 people have tested Geforce Now over the years, and these existing accounts will automatically be transitioned to the free tier, with the option to upgrade at the discounted rate. Geforce Now offers hundreds of games from more than 50 publishers, with a lineup of more than 30 free-to-play titles — yes, including Fortnite.
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PlatinumGames‘ colourful action adventure was originally released in 2013 for the Wii U. Now it’s getting the modern console treatment and will be coming to PS4, Switch and PC thanks to a hugely successful crowdfunding campaign that looks set to hit a whopping $1.5 million. Given the tight delivery timeframes — PlatinumGames says it’ll ship in April 2020 — it’s likely that development is already in the bag, and that this is more of a game sale than anything else.
That being said, there’s the opportunity to get your hands on some interesting rewards. Pledge more than 1,000 yen (about $9), for example, and you have the option to be blocked on Twitter by Platinum co-founder Hideki Kamiya, whose sensitive blocking trigger finger is well known among the gaming community.
Xbox gamers may well be disappointed to be left out of proceedings, but that’s not to say they won’t ever have the chance to play the remastered version. In the Kickstarter FAQs, Platinum says that getting the game to Switch, Steam and PS4 was already a “challenging endeavor” but if the campaign is successful enough they definitely plan on porting the game on additional platforms. Given the huge numbers the campaign has already seen in its short time online, then, an Xbox One version is not an impossibility.
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