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Dropbox’s 100GB file-transfer feature is out of beta

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Transfer allows Dropbox users to send a copy of files. Recipients won’t need a Dropbox account to receive Transfers, and alterations made by recipients won’t change the original file. Dropbox says it’s “designed for times when you need to turn over large collections of final files to clients and other people outside your company.”

Dropbox

As you’d expect, which account you have will determine the file sizes that you can send. The basic account offers 100MB transfers. With a Plus or Business Standard account you can transfer 2GB worth of files in one shot, and Professional, Business Advanced, Enterprise and Education accounts top out at 100GB per Transfer.

Transfers will automatically expire after seven days. However, if you have a Professional, Business Advanced, Enterprise or Education account, you can set the transfer to expire after seven, 30, 60 or 90 days.

Dropbox has added a few other features since the beta. For instance, you can start a transfer from the Dropbox desktop and iOS apps, as well as dropbox.com. And you can access transfers that people share with you on the iOS app. You can also customize the background and logo that recipients will see when they accept your transfer. Dropbox is rolling out the new feature to all users beginning today.

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NVIDIA’s RTX GPUs give a speed boost to Adobe’s AI features

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As it does with games, RTX GPUs will also allow Adobe Dimension users to speed up rendering of 3D environments (an example is shown above) that use dynamic lighting, reflections and soft shadows. “We’re also adding interactive ray tracing that will enable artists to render fantastic 3D photorealistic scenes that take their environments to the next level,” said ADobe’s 3D and AR director of engineering, Ross McKegney.

The RTX tricks will also speed up the latest version of Adobe’s Substance Alchemist, a tool that helps artists create realistic textures for 3D objects. That app will take advantage of AI deep learning built into RTX GPUs, NVIDIA notes. “Material creation that used to take an artist hours of painstaking masking and editing to remove lighting can now be done by AI in seconds,” according to Adobe.

Finally, NVIDIA unveiled its latest Studio Driver, promising to boost performance in compatible Creative Cloud apps like Adobe Premiere and After Effects. It’ll also boost other apps like Autodesk Arnold, Cinebench and Redcine-X Pro. The new driver and features for Adobe’s apps are now available.

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8chan returns without its most notorious community

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The new site doesn’t currently include /pol/, the 8chan board where shooters posted their manifestos. It’s not yet clear if that’s by choice, but the absence is conspicious. The community was frequently seen as a haven for racism and other extremist ideologies, and it’s arguably the main reason why companies like Cloudflare and Tucows stopped supporting 8chan.

It’s uncertain if this will be the definitive replacement for 8chan. There has been a peer-to-peer mirror and other sites hosting former 8chan users. However, 8kun said in mid-October that it had received over 200 board migration requests, and was pushing to get all of the top 25 boards.

Despite the earlier shutdown, 8chan’s creators are still dealing with its legacy. Congress has grilled Jim Watkins over his practices, for instance. However, it’s evident that the site managers are trying to turn a corner while maintaining as few restrictions as possible. The question is whether or not a prominent disclaimer (and the possible absence of /pol/) is enough. It’s one thing to say you’ll remove illegal content, it’s another to follow through in a timely fashion. If 8kun only pulls pro-violence content after an incident takes place, it may face the same fate as its predecessor.



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Garmin’s Venu is a great fitness wearable pretending to be a smartwatch

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The Venu is a 43mm-wide crossover watch, designed to sit in the grey area between fitness watches, where Garmin is strong, and smartwatches, where it isn’t. It’s a Vivoactive 4 with a nicer-looking body and a higher-res display, which is the main selling point. Where the Vivoactive 4 has a 260 x 260 low-power display, the Venu has a 390 x 390 AMOLED touchscreen.

It’s a gorgeous screen, and the live faces are especially pretty. Each pane you swipe through have been given a polish. But the watch doesn’t make the most of it, because the Venu is running Garmin’s stock OS, which is designed for watches with lower-resolution displays. Garmin hasn’t sought to take advantage of the better display to make the information denser, or more useful.

So, like a regular running watch, you have to cycle through any number of cards to get to the stat you need. And, because it’s a fitness watch first, you can get plenty of fine-grain data about your body and your day. Including heart rate, stress, steps, stairs, calories, breaths per minute, pulse oximetry, weather, calendar, phone notifications and hydration levels.

If all of these are added to the carousel, then finding a specific card, like the hydration tracker, is a nightmare. I tried to keep tabs on how much water I’d drank but gave up after half a day, in frustration. If Garmin had compressed some of this data on to a couple of screens and used the touchscreen more, this wouldn’t have happened.

Garmin Venu

The further you push into smartwatch territory, the more the Venu falls short of what you would expect, especially at this price. Paired with an iOS device, the most you’ll get are notification previews of what’s on-screen, same as with most other wearables. And, if you try and install third-party apps onto the system, you’d better buckle in and hope for good weather and plenty of luck.

I tried to install Spotify onto the watch in order to use offline music and, well, I haven’t been able to yet. There’s a default app you can install, but it doesn’t work, so you have to visit the Garmin Connect store and download one there. Installing and deleting both, twice over, and a couple of restarts, and I finally got access to my playlists via the watch. But actually playing them, or downloading them to my watch, hasn’t happened — something that other users are struggling with. I’ve spoken to Garmin about this, and am waiting for a response.

But I don’t just come here to bury the Venu, I come to praise it as well. When you steer clear from the smartwatch elements, it’s a great device. The GPS is whip-fast to find a signal and, because it’s Garmin, the activity tracking is spot on. Due to the time of year, I’ve been using my rowing machine a lot, and love the amount of data you get from the Venu.

And I can’t speak highly enough about the Venu’s battery life, which is staggering. It has managed to last six full days on a single charge. You’ll burn through the battery faster with an always-on display mode, but it’s not really designed for that. Personally, I don’t want a watch that I need to recharge on a daily basis, and so the Venu’s longevity is an asset.

Fundamentally, the Garmin Venu is a fitness watch that’s playing at being a smartwatch, and so fails to stand equal to devices from rivals. For its $399 asking price, you can get a number of other wearables that have better integrations with app ecosystems, music players and mobile payments. If, however, you treat it as a prettier version of the Vivoactive 4, then it stands a little stronger on its own merits. Just don’t go in expecting a credible alternative to smartwatches from Apple or Samsung.

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Adobe Illustrator is coming to the iPad in 2020

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The details are scarce for now, and even Adobe admits the process is “still in the early stages.” The company did say that it’s “reimagining the Illustrator experience,” which includes leveraging the “unique capabilities” the iPad offers — things like touch and the Apple Pencil. Adobe says what you create in Illustrator on the iPad will be available on your desktop thanks to Creative Cloud’s storage, similar to how Photoshop and it’s other mobile apps work. The company says you can also expect to work in Illustrator “with no loss of detail and precision,” and that for “many” of the designs you create, you can start and finish on the iPad.

Like it did for Photoshop, Adobe is redesigning the interface to save you time, and make the software “easier and more natural to use.” Lastly, you’ll be able to employ a lot of the features that make tablets convenient, including the camera. The company says you’ll be able to snap a picture of a sketch and Illustrator will help you turn it into vector art.

Illustrator for iPad is currently in private beta, but you can sign up here to learn more and request early access.

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The Morning After: Russia’s ‘sovereign internet’ law takes effect

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Its policy is about to get an early test.
Facebook will let politicians run false ads during UK elections

Facebook’s loose policy of allowing politicians to run false ads is going to get tested in short order. The social network won’t fact-check candidates’ ads in the weeks ahead of the forthcoming UK elections on December 12th. It will bar candidates from linking to debunked or pro-violence material and will still scrutinize groups like Leave.EU, but voters will have to rely on skepticism beyond that regarding fresh false claims and misinformation.

Sounds rather important.
Tesla Autopilot now recognizes traffic cones

Tesla is quietly rolling out an Autopilot update that lets its electric cars detect and display cones on the road. If you’re using Navigate on Autopilot, your EV will even plan lane changes to avoid cones so you don’t have to take control around construction work.

That said, and a caveat that gets repeated a lot in these early days of autonomous cars, you may not want to put all your trust in the feature just yet. Some early users have warned that Autopilot doesn’t always recognize the cones, potentially leading to dangerous lane changes — say, steering you into oncoming traffic or construction. Tesla did remind drivers that they’re “required to pay attention at all times,” though, so it knows this isn’t a substitute for keeping your eyes open.

There have already been 260 requests for special licenses.
US will grant Huawei trade ban exemptions ‘very shortly’

The Commerce Department has been tackling hundreds of requests to work with Huawei: “More than we would’ve thought,” according to Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross. While some will pick up approval, companies should assume they won’t get one, apparently. How about Google? Huawei can’t offer new phones with a version of Android using Google apps so long as the blacklisting remains in effect, and its ability to update existing phones will go away when temporary licenses expire. That’s largely why its latest phone landed without Android services.

Critics warn that it could lead to Russia’s own Great Firewall.
Russia’s ‘sovereign internet’ law takes effect

Russia’s “sovereign internet” law, which President Vladimir Putin signed back in May, took effect on November 1st. As the BBC explains, it gives the country’s government power to block access to content from within or outside Russia “in an emergency.” Of course, it’s up to the government to decide what constitutes an emergency. The official aim is to prevent cyber attacks and keep its internet running if the West suddenly decides to cut Russia off from the web.

The inspection equipment that internet providers will now be required to install can both track and reroute traffic. It’s a grand undertaking and will be difficult to implement. David Belson, senior director of Internet Research & Analysis at Internet Society, said there are “hundreds of networks coming together [in Russia] to exchange traffic” and that “it’s challenging — if not impossible — to completely isolate the Russian Internet.”

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Wikipedia references now include book previews hosted by the Internet Archive

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So far, 130,000 references have been linked to 50,000 digitized books that are hosted by the Archive. To see an example of the new digital referencing in action, you can head to the Wikipedia page for Martin Luther King, Jr. If you look at the reference for Adam Fairclough’s book To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference & Martin Luther King Jr at the bottom of the page, you’ll see it’s a clickable link. Clicking takes you to the Internet Archive’s digital version of the book, open to the page from which the reference was taken.

When you open a digital book hosted by the Archive, you can see a few pages of preview to check the reference information. If you want to read more, you can borrow a digital copy of the book through the Controlled Digital Lending program.

The linking of references to digital books is done both by users and by robots, and has been performed in the English, Greek and Arabic versions of Wikipedia. The Internet Archive says it intends to continue working with Wikipedia communities to scan more books and link them to references. This isn’t the first time the two sites have worked together, as the group previously helped fix 9 million broken links on the encyclopedia using its Wayback Machine archive.

“Together we can achieve Universal Access to All Knowledge,” said Mark Graham, Director of the Wayback Machine project. “One linked book, paper, web page, news article, music file, video and image at a time.”

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Chinese hacking group targeted governments in six countries

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As uncovered by enterprise security company Positive Technologies, the Calypso APT (or Advanced Persistent Threat) group has been active since 2016 and has targeted state institutions in India, Brazil, Kazakhstan, Russia, Thailand and Turkey.

The attacks worked by hacking the perimeter of an organization’s systems, then using special utilities and malware to gain access to the internal network. Once inside, the hackers could move through the system in one of two ways: either by exploiting Remote Code Execution vulnerabilities or using stolen credentials.

With this method, the attack group was able to successfully damage government organizations in every country they targeted. Positive Technologies attributed the group’s success to its use of widely available public tools: “These attacks succeeded largely because most of the utilities the group uses to move inside the network are widely used by the specialists everywhere for network administration. The group used publicly available utilities and exploit tools, such as SysInternals, Mimikatz, EternalBlue and EternalRomance.”

Positive Technologies believes the Calypso APT group to be Chinese-speaking due to its use of PlugX malware, a favorite tool among Chinese groups, as well as the Byeby trojan. In addition, it uncovered some real IP addresses of the hackers which were linked to Chinese providers.

More details about the specifics of the attacks can be found in the Calypso APT report.

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SpaceX completes crucial tests of its Crew Dragon parachutes

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That’s a pretty big milestone, as it beats a goal that CEO Elon Musk had set last month. “We certainly want to get … at least on the order of 10 successful tests in a row before, before launching astronauts,” he said. “So that seems like where the behavior of the parachutes is consistent, is across 10 successful tests.”

The parachutes now look substantially different from the ones SpaceX first tested. Instead of nylon on the straps, they now use “Zylon” a stronger polymer material developed by Stanford University. The chutes also have a new stitching pattern to more evenly distribute the loads.

In a meeting with NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine, Musk said that Crew Dragon could be ready for its first crewed “Demo-2” test flight in Q1 of 2020. Before that happens, however, SpaceX still has to perform static fire tests of the Crew Dragon abort engine. During the last such test in April, an anomaly caused an uncrewed capsule to explode.

If that goes to plan, SpaceX would then perform an in-flight abort test demonstrating that astronauts would be able to escape alive in the event of an explosion or other launch problem. During that test, an uncrewed Crew Dragon capsule will launch atop a Falcon 9 rocket at Kennedy Space center. Shortly after liftoff, the capsule’s SuperDraco thrusters are supposed to blast it a safe distance from the rocket.

If all that works (and that’s a big “if”), NASA and SpaceX could start running the crucial Demo-2 tests to the international space station with test-flight crew aboard. Those could take place as early as next year, Musk said in October.



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Russia is making more Soyuz spacecraft to help NASA’s ISS missions

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The other Soyuz vessel would be used for a space tourist flight due in late 2021, although this would help free resources for other missions.

Not surprisingly, Russia used the order as a chance to criticize American planning. The country reportedly warned the US that it should have asked for more seats in advance in case its target of a spring 2020 commercial flight didn’t pan out. It takes “at least” two years for Energia to make a Soyuz spacecraft, Rogozin said.

This isn’t necessarily a sign of serious trouble for the US. SpaceX is still hoping for a Crew Dragon trip in early 2020, and Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner might not be far behind. However, the extra construction suggests there may not be a rapid transition toward all-American launches — the two countries might have to cooperate for a while yet.

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