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Today, Microsoft announced that it’s investing $1 billion in the Elon Musk-founded company OpenAI. The two companies will work together to bring supercomputing technologies and AI to Microsoft Azure. And OpenAI will run its services exclusively in Microsoft’s cloud. Ultimately, the partners hope to build artificial general intelligence (AGI), a technology that some say will match or exceed human intellect.
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Star Trek: Picard will stream on CBS: All Access in the US, air on Space/Crave in Canada, and be available on Amazon Prime in the rest of the world. It’s likely going to have cost Jeff Bezos’ mega-retailer a pretty penny, since CBS has proved to be a tough negotiator. Star Trek Discovery, after all, was paid for in full by Netflix, which also got the right to distribute the show outside of the US and Canada. It would be a surprise if Amazon didn’t also foot the bill for some, or all, of Picard’s glossy production.
From the looks of the Comic-Con preview and the trailer, Picard may not be the friendliest show to reel in new audiences. The trailer features a septuagenarian Picard, broken after the failed evacuation of Romulus and the death of Lt. Cmdr Data. He’s approached by a mysterious woman who says that she feels “safe” around him before being (apparently) kidnapped. Picard then recruits a ragtag bunch of people to rescue her, presumably from the clutches of the Borg, who also feature in the 2:22 clip.
Any show can gloss over its backstory, and a Comic-Con trailer would, naturally, be designed to appeal to the faithful. But it’s hard not to notice that, to understand almost anything from the trailer, you’d need to be elbows-deep in Trek lore. The evacuation of Romulus comes from the off-screen backstory from Star Trek (2009), Data’s death from Star Trek: Nemesis (2002). And if the Borg are involved, you’ll also need more than a passing knowledge of Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987 – 1994).
It’s not that Picard’s source material is old, per se, but that these are hardly the sort of moments people remember that fondly. Jonathan Del Arco, who plays the “saved” Borg Hugh, appeared in two episodes of TNG, and was notable enough to be on the Comic-Con panel. Similarly, there are trailer shots of Brent Spiner playing the Data prototype B-4 (from 2002’s Nemesis) and Jeri Ryan’s Seven of Nine. That’s a character who appeared in the back half of Star Trek: Voyager in an attempt to pep up the show’s flagging ratings.
In fact, the bulk of this new show’s backstory comes from the period when Trek was on a downward slide. Nemesis was a box-office flop, making $67.3 million on a budget of $60 million, alienating mainstream audiences and killing the Star Trek franchise at theaters. Voyager, too, saw its audience slide from double digits at the start of its first season to limping along with around 3 million by the end. The pitch for Picard seems to be aimed squarely at the demographic who stuck around when Trek circled the drain, and that wasn’t a lot of people.
All in all, it’s a ballsy move from showrunner Michael Chabon, the Pulitzer-prize winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and (bits of) Spider-Man 2, who is in charge of Picard. Rather than glossing over Star Trek’s darkest days, he’s chosen to embrace them.
That’s also a big departure from the last three times Star Trek has been revived, which opted to ditch the 50-plus year continuity. JJ Abrams’ Star Trek (2009) explicitly takes place in an alternate “Kelvin” timeline, while Enterprise (2001) and Discovery are both (originally) set in the days before the classic series.
It meant that all three could claim to be friendly to newbies, although many of Star Trek’s tentpole features are embedded into the culture. Even if you haven’t heard of Kirk, Spock, Vulcan hand signals and ‘boldly going’, the pitch was that you were never going to get too lost here.
On the other hand, Netflix has demonstrated that good-quality TV will be binged by people who love nothing more than ’90s nostalgia. It has the complete “prime” Star Trek timeline series — the shows made from 1966 through 2005. So it’s a cruel irony that the show that would most reward a whole-series binge (or, at least, edited highlights) is on a rival streaming service.
Even in the US, Amazon only has five Star Trek movies in its library, although it does include First Contact and Nemesis. Both of those are likely to be in the very long list of required viewing in the run-up to Picard’s debut if it’s as dense as the trailer makes it out to be.
As a non-US viewer, I can sympathize with fans who feel that they’re being unfairly milked here. The first season of Picard will last 10 episodes, which means UK viewers will be paying at least £17.97 ($22.50) for three months’ worth of Prime Video. It’s not clear if the show will ever make it to broadcast TV, although the signs don’t look particularly good. So the question is: are there enough people in the Trek faithful to make this sort of show work?
I hope so.
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If regulators approve the deal, it should close late in the third quarter or early in the fourth quarter of 2019. Reverb CEO David Kalt will step down from his leadership role once Etsy names a new executive.
Etsy hasn’t made many acquisitions in its day (there were ‘just’ five between 2009 and 2016), but this could be one of the more significant examples. Although Reverb isn’t huge compared to its soon-to-be-parent with 1 million active buyers and 380,000 sellers, it’s also attempting to corner an underserved niche. Should Etsy complete the buyout, it could easily become the go-to destination for anyone wanting to buy their first flute or sell an old guitar.
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It’ll launch up to 33 percent faster and you’ll be able to hop into a call with your colleagues or collaborators up to 10 times more quickly, which should save you time. It’ll also hog up to 50 percent less memory, easing the strain on your machine so you can perhaps have even more browser tabs open.
Meanwhile, if your internet connection keeps cutting in and out, the latest version of the app will let you keep reading through your channels and messages without connection error messages blocking you from doing so. Slack will let you know with a notification once it’s been updated.
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It’s well-established that Koryolink enables spying on users, although the new details suggest the system is more elaborate than previously thought. While it’s known that the network is highly restrictive for locals (who can’t make international calls or reach the internet) and loosened for visitors (barred from local calls and the state intranet), the government elite use domestically-made encryption to ensure their conversations can’t be monitored. Huawei was asked to test how well the encryption worked, while Panda provided supporting software.
Everyone else, meanwhile, is subject to potential eavesdropping through Huawei-supported interception gateways that let law enforcement intercept calls, texts, data and even faxes. The surveillance system was initially due to cover up to 2,500 targets, but was slated to scale up to 5,000 targets. It’s unclear how large the system is now, although North Korea has since deepened its control to block unapproved apps and take random screenshots to record users’ activity.
Huawei told the Post that it “has no business presence” in North Korea, although the emphasis was clearly on the present tense. The spokesman wouldn’t say whether Huawei had previously done business in the country, and wouldn’t confirm or deny the legitimacy of the documents detailing the North Korean connection. Huawei no longer maintains Koryolink, which has largely been dwarfed by the ZTE-supported Kang Song network.
The concern isn’t just that Huawei was supporting a oppressive dictatorship, but that it may have flaunted laws and sanctions while doing so. Experts believe that Huawei’s 3G gear for Koryolink used at least some US components. As Panda was banned from receiving US-origin equipment in 2014, Huawei may have violated the American export ban if any of its gear included at least 10 percent American content. The tech giant was apparently determined to keep its North Korean work quiet, having codenamed the country “A9” (Iran and Syria received similar codenames) to avoid obviously damning evidence.
The US Commerce Department has declined to comment. Privately, though, one State Department official told the Post that the documents backed a “general concern” that Huawei couldn’t be trusted due to its apparent eagerness to avoid and break the law. The company is already facing US charges for allegedly stealing trade secrets and violating sanctions. It’s unclear how the revelations might change things, if at all, but they certainly won’t help Huawei’s claims of innocence. If anything, they may reinforce the efforts of some US politicians to maintain sanctions no matter what the President wants.
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Airbnb wants to make it easier to find work-friendly listings, and its solution is fairly simple. Before, the company would ask if you were traveling for business at checkout. Now, it’s offering an Airbnb for Work toggle that you can select at the beginning of your search. The feature will bring up listings that are more relevant for business trips.
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Titled Sound & Fury, the film will be released this fall together with a new album of the same name. The film will be set to Simpson’s music, with each song acting as the soundtrack for a different short anime segment.
The rock and country singer hasn’t released a full album since 2016’s A Sailor’s Guide to Earth, but he was recently heard providing the theme song for Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die.
The anime is produced by Simpson and is directed by Jumpei Mizusaki. Mizusaki is known for his animation work on the Mega Man games and for directing the DC animated film Batman Ninja.
Other crew members on the project include Takashi Okazaki, creator of the manga Afro Samurai, who will be the character designer, and additional directors Masaru Matsumoto, Michael Arias, Henry Thurlow, Arthell Isom, and Koji Morimoto.
The announcement was made at San Diego Comic Con this weekend. Simpson described the inspiration for the project as serendipitous: “We went in without any preconceived notions and came out with a really sleazy, steamy rock n roll record. It’s definitely my most psychedelic. And also my heaviest. I had this idea that it’d be really cool to animate some of these songs, and we ended up with a futuristic, dystopian, post-apocalyptic, samurai film.”
Simpson isn’t the only musician making films for Netflix. Recently Radiohead’s Thom Yorke announced his new album ANIMA will also be released alongside a short film.
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As explained by UploadVR, the idea is that you’d wear one Tasbi unit on each wrist, letting you get a sensation when you pick up objects, push buttons or touch a surface. Apparently, even though your fingers aren’t touching anything, Tasbi is smart enough to make you think you are. Sadly, Tasbi doesn’t do hand / finger / skeleton tracking, and so would have to be combined with a computer vision sensor.
It remains to be seen if Tasbi would work for everyone, and Facebook promises to publish its research paper on the device in the near future. But it’s heartening to know that companies are looking at ways to bridge one of the biggest divides between us and what we see on screen. Although, in the near future, it’s likely that we’ll be using gloves, similar to those made by Bebop, to feel things that aren’t there.
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Elon Musk made the announcement on Twitter shortly after the 2019 Hyperloop Pod competition.
Next year’s @Hyperloop competition will be in a 10km vacuum tunnel with a curve
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) 22 July 2019
The Hyperloop competition is a student engineering challenge where teams are invited to design and build a prototype vehicle to travel in the potential Hyperloop network. The vehicles must be self-propelled and achieve maximum possible speeds without crashing.
At this year’s competition, in which a team from Technical University of Munich (TUM) reached a top speed of 288 miles per hour before damage occurred and an emergency stop had to be performed, Musk mentioned the possibility of expanding the competition to include tunneling as well.
“We’ll consider a tunneling competition,” Musk said at a Q&A about the competition, TechCrunch reports. “I think a tunneling thing would be pretty exciting. Because as I just articulated the primary challenge is how do you tunnel effectively, especially how do you put in the reinforcing segments and get the dirt out effectively — it’s harder than it seems.”
In 2017, the TUM team won the competition with a small electric vehicle that achieved 200 miles per hour, and Musk said he believed that speeds of up to 500 or 600 miles per hour were possible. The same team won again in 2018, this time getting up to 290 miles per hour.
Tunneling has been one of the big issues for the Hyperloop project. Between problems getting permits to dig and the need to reinforce the tunnels to stop them collapsing, building the infrastructure for the project has been as much of a challenge as designing the vehicles.
Even digging a six mile test tunnel will take a lot of time, so it remains to be seen whether Musk and co. will be able to build a tunnel of that length in time for next year’s competition. We don’t know exactly when the next competition will be held, but based on previous years we can expect it in summer 2020.
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The most interesting part here is the accessories. The ROG Phone II still comes bundled with a clip-on fan (this still uses the phone’s side port), but this new and improved AeroActive Cooler II is apparently four times quieter, and it can reduce the surface temperature by up to 5 degrees Celsius lower. Another included accessory is the skeletal Aero Case, which leaves the phone’s glowing logo exposed, and it also lets you mount the clip-on fan over it.
What’s brand new here is the ROG Kunai Gamepad, and ASUS clearly took a page out of Nintendo’s book here. Say you have the phone propped up on a desk or you’re casting to a TV, you can clip the two controllers together via a holder, in which you can toggle between Bluetooth, USB and 2.4GHz RF connection (there’s a USB dongle receiver for this) to control the phone. If you’re on the go, you can attach the controllers to the phone via a bumper (though the Black Shark 2 was the first to mimic the Switch this way); and you can even take the ultimate form by mounting this setup onto the new TwinView Dock II — just be mindful of the whopping 639g total weight.
ASUS’ new dual-screen TwinView Dock now mounts on the bottom side instead of the top, partly for better weight distribution and also partly for accommodating the device’s extra length. The built-in touchscreen uses the same 120Hz AMOLED panel as the phone, though the built-in battery has been downgraded from 6,000mAh to 5,000mAh — which is fine since you’re still getting a larger 11,000mAh total capacity when docked.
The dock also packs a cooling fan, RGB lights, volume keys, a USB-C port and a headphone jack, but in order to drastically reduce weight, ASUS has removed the old SD card slot, extra speakers, trigger buttons and haptic vibrators here — most of these are taken care of by the phone itself.
The other accessories are optional and, well, less interesting. Some markets will again offer the full kit in a limited edition carry-on suitcase. There’s the same Mobile Desktop Dock that’s compatible with both ROG Phone models, and this lets you share your PC monitor, keyboard, mouse and LAN connection with the phone — just hit the dock’s button and you can instantly switch over to some serious mobile gaming. You can also get the same old Pro Dock (basically a USB dongle with several essential PC sockets), plus a WiGig Display Dock Plus for casting your mobile screen to a TV over high quality, low latency wireless connections.
Of course, all these fancy features are meaningless if no games support them. ASUS announced three major titles — Asphalt 9, Shadowgun War Games and Rockman X Dive — that will come with optimizations as well as exclusive content tailored for the ROG Phone II. These optimizations are mostly to do with boosted frame rate, fine-tuned haptic vibration, Kunai Gamepad support and TwinView Dock II support (except for Rockman). ASUS will need to gather more support from games if it wants all its companion peripherals to make sense.
But back to the phone itself, which has also been given some substantial upgrades. The ROG Phone II features a 6.59-inch FHD+ (2,340 x 1,080) AMOLED panel, with its maximum refresh rate bumped from the earlier 90Hz up to an even smoother 120Hz. And yes, you have the option to scale back down to 90Hz or 60Hz to save battery. While it’s true that the Razer Phones already had a 120Hz display, they were using LCD instead of AMOLED — the ROG Phone II has a much nicer, more vivid screen.
As for battery, ASUS has thrown in a generous 6,000mAh cell this time, which is a big jump from the earlier 4,000mAh. Hence the new 9.48mm thickness and 240g weight. Neither figure bothered me during my hands-on, but it may be a different story after prolonged usage. T
The bundled ROG HyperCharge adapter pumps in 30W of power using just a regular USB-C-to-USB-C cable, and while it takes about two hours to fully charge the phone, it can already reach 4,000mAh in just 58 minutes, which should already last you a day.
ASUS claims that, compared to the OnePlus 7 Pro’s Warp Charge technology, its own implementation apparently offers longer battery life — the cells don’t swell as quickly, and likewise with their capacity degradation. That’s something we’ll have to check out for ourselves. Still, some may complain about the lack of wireless charging here.
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