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PlayStation Vue is raising prices for all of its plans (updated)

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Since the costs of content increase yearly, the price hike is somewhat expected; PlayStation Vue raised its prices in a similar fashion last summer. Other streaming providers like YouTube TV, Netflix and AT&T’s DirecTVNow raised their rates earlier this year. Hulu coped with the higher costs of content by lowering the price of its basic service but increasing the cost of its live TV bundles.

For the rest of 2019, PlayStation Vue subscribers will have to pay $50 per month for the Access plan, $55 per month for the Core plan, $65 per month for the Elite plan and $85 per month for the Ultra plan. While the price increase may be nominal for some subscribers, for others it could be a good excuse to jump ship. Cord Cutters News reported today that PlayStation Vue was able to renew most of its content deals. Last month the company was stalled in renewal talks with AMC, Discovery, NBC Universal and Turner. So if you decide to stick with PlayStation Vue, you can be rest assured there will no blackout periods.

Update 7/1 6:55PM ET: Sony appears to have renewed its content deals with networks.

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NASA will livestream the total solar eclipse over South America tomorrow

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If you happen to be in the path of the eclipse, we’ll remind you not to look directly at the sun. In 2017, one woman had permanent vision loss because she looked at the sun for six seconds, and at least one $11,500 Canon lens melted. Fortunately, eclipse glasses offer a safe viewing method, and thanks to Astronomers Without Borders, at least some of the glasses used in 2017 were sent to school children in South American in advance of tomorrow’s event.

This total solar eclipse will provide scientists with a unique opportunity to study solar radiation, which impacts everything from space weather to astronauts’ health and the durability of spacecraft. Those are all factors that could impact NASA’s plans to return crews to the Moon in 2024 and to prepare for crewed missions to Mars.

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MIT made an AI that can detect and create fake images

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Named GANpaint Studio, the tool is available as a free demo. Rather than manually add a tree to an image, you can tell the tool where you want the object and it will add one that matches the scene. You can erase objects too, like stools from an image of a kitchen. It’s still a work in progress, but the team hopes GANpaint Studio might one day edit video clips. If, for instance, an essential prop were left out of a film scene, editors could use AI to add it in later.

As they were building GANpaint Studios, the researchers were surprised to discover that the system learned simple rules about the relationships between objects — like that a door does not belong in the sky. Because GANpaint Studio uses a GAN — a set of neural networks developed to compete against each other — it has to expose it’s internal reasoning for decisions like preventing a cloud from appearing in the grass. That insight could help researchers better understand how neural networks learn context and what we think of as common sense.

While GANpaint Studio makes it easy to create fake images, it could also help computer scientists learn to spot them. “You need to know your opponent before you can defend against it,” said Jun-Yan Zhu, who co-authored a paper on the tool. The researchers will present their work at a conference next month. In the meantime, you can give GANpaint Studios a spin.

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Spotify ends direct music uploads for indie artists

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Spotify will stop accepting new songs through the upload program at the end of July, and those who’ve already released material will need to find new providers beyond that point.

It’s not shocking that Spotify would close the initiative. It was theoretically more convenient, but there wasn’t much point unless a musician was content with remaining exclusive to Spotify. Artists who wanted to reach Apple Music, Deezer and other services would have to go through a third-party distributor regardless — why make extra work by using Spotify’s feature? This shouldn’t greatly affect your access to the music in question, but it does indicate that Spotify and its rivals will have to try other strategies if they’re going to position themselves as havens for indie tunes.

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Apple offers free repairs for faulty 2018 MacBook Air logic boards

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Apple is reportedly notifying affected customers by email.

We’ve asked Apple for comment. The low-key nature suggests this isn’t a widespread problem, but the timing is less than ideal. It comes days after Apple recalled some older MacBook Pros over battery issues, and weeks after the company made MacBook keyboard repairs a higher priority. Still, it’s good to know that Apple is tackling these issues directly instead of leaving customers to wonder (and in some cases pay out of pocket).

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‘Alan Wake’ developer may bring the cult classic to more consoles

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It seems Remedy is interested in bringing the mystery adventure to more platforms after it was previously only available on Windows PC, Xbox 360 and Xbox One (via backwards compatibility). “The only thing we want to clarify, now that Remedy owns the publishing rights, is that we could bring Alan Wake to different platforms if we so choose,” a Remedy spokesperson told Eurogamer.

For now, Remedy says, it’s focused on its upcoming mindbending adventure, Control, which will be available August 27th. After that game arrives, though, we might hear more about the future of Alan Wake.

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Five ‘Star Trek’ movies come to Amazon Prime on July 31st

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There’s more Star Trek available for streaming — although it might not be on the service you were expecting to use. Amazon is adding five pre-Abrams Star Trek movies to Prime Video in the US on July 31st. Two of them come from the cast of the original series (Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country), while the rest are from the Next Generation crew (First Contact, Insurrection and Nemesis). It could be a good way to brush up on Jean-Luc Picard’s history ahead of his new streaming series.

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HTC Vive will help more companies jump into VR

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Take Ovation, for example: It’s a public speaking training tool that uses the Vive Pro Eye’s gaze-tracking to detect where exactly you’re looking. After running through a demo, it told me I was staring at the teleprompter, instead of looking at the audience. (In fairness, I wasn’t prepared to recite a speech during a VR demo.) You’re also able to choose a variety of venues, from a tiny conference room to a large lecture hall. It’s the sort of thing that could help anyone anxious about public speaking — after all, the best way to overcome those fears is to practice in realistic environments. It’s a genuine enterprise use we might be seeing more of.

Dan O’Brien, HTC Vive’s general manager of the Americas, and the head of Vive Enterprise Solutions, says VR needs to be treating just like any new technology headed to businesses. That means making sure their software works properly behind firewalls, and ensuring they work together with workplace mainstays, like Microsoft Office and Autodesk. He also pointed to HTC and Sprint’s upcoming 5G hotspot as another business-friendly move, since it’ll make it easy to deploy VR almost anywhere with gigabit speeds. That might just sound like marketing fluff, but for IT departments tasked with delivering VR solutions, it could be a lifesaver.

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Brave web browser is really fast at blocking ads

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Nowadays, a large number of browsers including Opera, Brave and even Microsoft’s Edge run on Google’s Chromium engine. As such, Google gets to dictate terms, and launched the Manifest V3 proposal. That would help speed up browsing by blocking an API called webRequest, but would also have the effect of making most third-party ad-blockers unusable. That in turn would have a positive effect on Google’s ad business, of course.

Brave (along with Opera and Vivaldi) declared that it would stick with webRequest in defiance of Google, however, so that it’s own ad-blocker would continue to work. In order to address the concerns about speed, it decided to rebuild its ad-blocker with the aim of making it more efficient using Mozilla’s Rust language instead of C++. The results are now available to try out on the company’s Dev and Nightly channels.

Taking inspiration from the popular ad-blockers Ghostery and uBlock Origin, Brave rebuilt its algorithms and boosted speeds by up to 69 times. That in turn reduced request classification times down to 5.6 microseconds (millionths of a second). “Although most users are unlikely to notice much of a difference in cutting the ad-blocker overheads, the 69x reduction in overheads means the device CPU has so much more time to perform other functions,” Brave said. In other words, it should make ad-free browsing a lot faster and less punishing on your computer.

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‘Stranger Things 3’ and its low-fi tech

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Just how well this scales to thousands of satellites is another matter.
SpaceX is still in control of all but three of its internet satellites

Remember when SpaceX hurled 60 internet satellites into space? Well, they’re mostly doing okay. The company is still in contact with 57 of them, with the other three likely to fall into Earth’s atmosphere and burn up. SpaceX’s Starlink wants an array totalling 12,000 of the lil’ things out there in orbit — to that end, it’ll want to beef up the success rate.

It can tell you what’s showing across a host of services.
Amazon gives Fire TV devices a section devoted to live television

Fire TV devices can tap into plenty of live television services, and Amazon wants to be sure you know what’s on, regardless of which services you prefer. A new dedicated Live tab will showcase whatever’s playing across a host of apps, whether it’s free, like Pluto TV, a cable substitute, like PlayStation Vue, or an over-the-air broadcast picked up through a Fire TV Recast. The new tab will reach all American Fire TV users over the course of this week. It’s not a channel guide (there’s already an equivalent for Amazon Prime Channels users), so it won’t quite replace the browsing experience you might be used to from conventional TV.

Walkie-talkies and radios play an even bigger role in the show’s new season.
‘Stranger Things 3’ pays respect to the power and perils of tech

While there’s still no Google Maps or emojis (how did we survive?!), the Stranger Things gang get some more low-tech help in the third season. No proper spoilers here, we promise.

It may rework the interface, among other improvements.
Apple is apparently working on News+ improvements after lackluster start

Apple News+ might be one of the company’s quieter services, or maybe it hasn’t quite latched on to enough readers yet. According to Business Insider sources, publisher revenue isn’t even close to what Apple promised. In a bid to fix that, there are, reportedly, plans to make it all more intuitive, with clearer labelling for paid articles.

It’s not exactly in the clear, however.
Trump to lift some restrictions on Huawei as part of China truce

Huawei may get a partial reprieve from the US trade ban. President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping have reached a truce that will remove some restrictions on Huawei technology in the US. It’s not certain exactly what will change, but Trump suggested the US would allow hardware that didn’t have a “great national emergency problem.” Who knows precisely what that means? Well, it could suggest that devices that aren’t infrastructure related, like phones and laptops, could appear in US stores in the future.

But wait, there’s more…

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