Geek News

3D printing can already turn your amazing ideas into tangible objects, but a new technique out of MIT CSAIL could lead to even better results. The method, called ColorFab, gives you the ability to create objects that can change colors after you print them out. You can use it, for instance, to create a phone case or a pair of earrings that matches your red dress today and will also match your blue pantsuit tomorrow. ColorFab's magic lies in the CSAIL team's custom-made ink, which has base dyes and light-adaptable or "photochromic" dyes. The light-adaptable dyes bring out the color in the base dyes when exposed to UV light. Under visible light, the colors disappear, and the ink turns transparent. To use ColorFab, you'll have to upload your 3D model to its interface and then pick a color pattern. The parts of the object that can transform have a pixelated design, and you can choose which pixels to activate (change color) or deactive (switch back to transparent)...

How would you protect the US against Chinese cyberattacks? Would you push for stricter security standards , or new encryption technology ? The Trump administration's national security team has another idea: a government-controlled 5G network. Axios has obtained documents showing that the team is pushing for a centralized, secure 5G network within 3 years. This would create a secure communications avenue for self-driving cars, AI, VR and other budding technologies. Just how it would be built is another story, however. The officials are currently split between either having the government build the network itself or let telecoms build it as part of a consortium. The document claims it would be the modern equivalent to Eisenhower's National Highway System and create a "new paradigm" for the wireless industry by the end of Trump's term. At the same time, it notes that the private consortium would cause "less commercial disruption." The private option mi...

Apple aired two Animoji ads at the Grammys tonight, highlighting the face ID technology in the iPhone X that can make custom 3D versions of animated emoji based on your facial expressions. One ad, called “Amigos,” features a dog and a poop emoji singing along to “Stir Fry” by hip hop trio Migos, while carrots, broccoli, and cucumber emoji fly by. The other ad features Childish Gambino’s “Redbone” being sung by an alien emoji and unicorn backup singers, which spiral out into a psychedelic universe of cascading cat, panda, robot, and unicorn emoji. Both Migos and Childish Gambino have been nominated for multiple Grammys, including Gambino’s Awaken, My Love! up for album of the year and Migos’ Culture up for best rap album. The ads play... Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts "http://ift.tt/2FrosUi"

Intel may have been working with many tech industry players to address the Meltdown and Spectre flaws , but who it contacted and when might have been problematic. Wall Street Journal sources have claimed that Intel initially told a handful of customers about the processor vulnerabilities, including Chinese tech companies like Alibaba and Lenovo, but not the US government. While the chip giant does have to talk to those companies to coordinate fixes, the Chinese government routinely monitors conversations like this -- it could have theoretically exploited the holes to intercept data before patches were available . An Intel spokesman wouldn't detail who the company had informed, but said that the company couldn't notify everyone (including US officials) in time because Meltdown and Spectre had been revealed early . Lenovo said the information was protected by a non-disclosure agreement. Alibaba has suggested that any accusasions of sharing info with the Chinese government wa...

Location data in fitness apps is frequently a good thing, since it helps you remember and optimize your routes. However, it's also producing an unexpected security risk: it's revealing details of secret military bases. UCA analyst Nathan Ruser has discovered that Strava's publicly available activity map includes the fitness routes of soldiers and agents in sensitive locations, including American bases in Afghanistan and Syria, the UK's Mount Pleasant airbase in the Falkland Islands, a suspected CIA base in Somalia and even Area 51 . It's mostly American and British troops who show up, but Russian bases have also been outlined by the Strava data. While many of these locations are well known, they may give away info that governments might not want public, such as the likely location of living quarters and the most frequently-trafficked paths. In Afghanistan , the activity data extends beyond bases and hint at patrol or supply routes. Strava has reminded users th...

Last year, a Reddit user known as “deepfakes” used machine learning to digitally edit the faces of celebrities into pornographic videos , and a new app has made the process much easier to create and spread the videos online . on Friday, chat service Discord shut down a user-created group that was spreading the videos, citing their policy against revenge porn. Discord is a free chat platform that caters to gamers, and has a poor track record when it comes to dealing with abuse and toxic communities . After it was contacted by Business Insider , the company took down the chat group, named “deepfakes.” A company spokesperson told BI that the group violated its rules against non-consensual pornography, and that such violations warrant “an... Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts "http://ift.tt/2rMpdFf"

Dig into the personalities of chat bots and you'll find that they're about as shallow as they were in the days of Eliza or Dr. Sbaitso. They respond with canned phrases and tend to be blithely unaware of what you've said. Facebook wants to fix that. Its research team has tested a new approach that gives bots more consistent personalities and more natural responses. Facebook taught its AI to look for patterns in a special 164,000-utterance data set, Persona-Chat, that included a handful of facts about a given bot's persona. An AI trying to mimic a real person would have five biographical statements to work with, such as its family and hobbies, with each of them revised to say the same things in a different way. Train existing chat bots from that and you get AI that 'knows' what it likes, but still maintains the context of a conversation and speaks relatively fluently. The emphasis, of course, is on "relatively." Sample conversations from Facebook...

Strava is the maker of a fitness-tracking app that uses a phone’s GPS to track when and where a user is exercising, with an aim of being a type of social network for athletes. Last November, the site released a heat map showing the activity of its users from around the world, containing information from a billion activities across three trillion latitude and longitude points. The result is a pretty-looking image of people working out, but one analyst points out that the map makes it very easy for someone to figure out the locations of military bases and the routines of their personnel. Nathan Ruser, a member of the Institute for United Conflict Analysts, pointed out on Twitter that it’s easy to look at the map and cross-reference it... Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts "http://ift.tt/2rPhtCA"

Samsung has hinted that the Galaxy S9 might include more advanced face recognition , but we're now getting clues as to what's involved. SamCentral 's sleuthing in the settings APK for the Galaxy Note 8's Oreo beta has discovered a hidden Intelligent Scan feature that uses both camera-based face detection and the iris scanner in tandem for "better accuracy and security" and improved results in "low or very bright" lighting. Given that the iris scanning on the S8 and Note 8 can be finnicky, this could deliver a much more consistent experience when you're unlocking your phone or accessing secure info. Just how it works isn't immediately apparent. A video included with the feature suggests that both the iris scanner and camera are active at the same time regardless of the conditions, but it's not certain whether this means combining their data or using one as a backup for the other. The iris scanner might take precedence at night, for ...

For some ATM thieves, swiping card data involves too much patience -- they'd rather just take the money and run. The US Secret Service has warned ATM makers Diebold Nixdorf and NCR that "jackpotting" hacks, where crooks force machine to cough up large sums of cash, have reached the US after years of creating problems in Asia, Europe and Mexico. The attacks have focused largely on Diebold's front-loading Opteva ATMs in stand-alone locations, such as retail stores and drive-thrus, and have relied on an combination of malware and hardware to pull off heists. In previous attacks, the thieves disguised themselves as technicians to avoid drawing attention. After that, they hooked up a laptop with a mirror image of the ATM's operating system and malware (Diebold also mentioned replacing the hard drive outright). Security researcher Brian Krebs understands American ATMs have been hit with Ploutus.D, a variant of "jackpotting" malware that first launched in ...

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By Grant Clauser This post was done in partnership with Wirecutter , reviews for the real world. When readers choose to buy Wirecutter's independently chosen editorial picks, it may earn affiliate commissions that support its work. Read the full article here . After spending more than 20 hours attaching many antennas to multiple TVs in two different testing locations (one suburban and one urban), watching way too much daytime programming, and compiling objective data from a signal-strength meter, we think the new 35-mile-range Antennas Direct ClearStream Eclipse is the indoor HD antenna with the best combination of features for most users. It matched or outperformed larger models in pulling in TV signals, required less (basically zero) assembly, and was easy to hide. The omnidirectional antenna is double-sided (black on one side, white on the other), equipped with a detachable 12-foot coaxial cable, and designed to stick to your wall without any hardware or tape, so finding th...

Airbnb has announced that it’s investing $5 million in its Experiences program, and will expand the initiative to include 200 cities in the United States this year. Experiences is part of an push by Airbnb to expand beyond offering just short-term rentals in recent years. In 2016, the company launched Airbnb Trips , which provides activities for tourists in addition to a place to stay. The initiative began in three areas: Experiences, Places, and Homes, and indicated that it would be adding Flights and Services in the future. The company says that it currently offers more than 4,000 experiences across the world — 1,000 of which are in the US — in 50 cities around the world, which range from surfing trips in Los Angeles, to nature... Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts "http://ift.tt/2rKFKtl"

Following an extensive report published yesterday by The New York Times about the industry that provides fake followers to social media users, New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman announced that he has opened an investigation into the company featured in the article, Devumi. The use of automated bots and accounts on sites such as Facebook and Twitter have been thrust into the public consciousness in recent months as major social media sites have confirmed that such tools were deployed during the 2016 Presidential election, and after bots were used for online public commenting periods , and other events . Last November, Schneiderman revealed that his office was investigating comments left by fake accounts on the FCC’s website that... Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts "http://ift.tt/2DJUYjX"

It was a week of lost and found fortunes in the tech world. The Feds charged My Big Coin Pay over its $6 million cryptocurrency scam, Netflix is poised to take home as many a four golden statues for Mudbound , Bungie's in hot water again over tweaking its Faction token payouts and Google will be holding onto its $20 million XPrize payout thankyouverymuch. Numbers, because how else would you evenly divvy up the spoils? $6 million : That's how much real money the Commodity Futures Trading Commission alleges that My Big Coin Pay, purveyors of the My Big Coin cryptocurrency, managed to bilk from its victims in a brazen Ponzi scheme before getting caught by the Feds. $0 : That's how much cryptocurrency trading site Robinhood will charge its users to trade bitcoin and etherium between themselves. What's more, the service will enable users to transfer up to $1000 from their bank accounts to buy new units of their preferred cryptocurrency. 2 : That's how many clone...

Self-driving car manufacturers dread lawsuits over crashes due to questions of liability, and GM is about to learn just how problematic they can be. Oscar Nilsson has sued GM after a December collision between his motorcycle and one of the company's self-driving Chevy Bolts . According to his version of events, he was trailing the Bolt when it started changing lanes. He tried to pass the autonomous car, but it "suddenly" swerved back into his lane, knocking him to the ground and injuring both his neck and shoulder. GM, not surprisingly, disagreed with the interpretation in a statement. It pointed to the San Francisco Police Department's collision report, which didn't lay blame but said that Nilsson merged into the Bolt's lane "before it was safe to do so." There have certainly been disputes over the involvement of self-driving technology in crashes -- just ask Tesla . Those incidents involved semi-autonomous cars where the human driver was alwa...

Despite the death of its personal AI assistant M, Facebook hasn’t given up on chatbots just yet. Over the past couple of years, it’s slowly improved what its artificial agents can do, but their latest challenge is something that can confound even the smartest human: making small talk. You’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise because of their name, but chatbots can’t really chat. As researchers from Facebook’s FAIR lab explain in a pre-print paper published this week, they fail at this task on a number of levels. First, they don’t display a “consistent personality,” sticking to the same set of facts about themselves throughout a conversation; second, they don’t remember what they or their conversational partners have said in the past; and... Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts "http://ift.tt/2Fq76Hj"

Bob Baddeley visits The Ben Heck Show team to bring voice control to the Raspberry Pi. Bob and Ben take us through setting up communication between an Amazon Echo Dot and the Raspberry Pi, with Amazon doing the legwork in the cloud. What other interesting projects could this inspire? And what have you made that uses Amazon's Alexa? Let us know over on the element14 Community . via Engadget RSS Feed "http://ift.tt/2nkRT2H"