Slashdot Mirror

schwit1 shares a report from VentureBeat: Google has been hit by a $57 million fine by French data privacy body CNIL (National Data Protection Commission) for failure to comply with the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) regulations. The CNIL said that it was fining Google for "lack of transparency, inadequate information and lack of valid consent regarding the ads personalization," according to a press release issued by the organization. The news was first reported by the AFP. What the CNIL is effectively referencing here is dark pattern design, which attempts to encourage users into accepting terms by guiding their choices through the design and layout of the interface. This is something that Facebook has often done too, as it has sought to garner user consent for new features or T&Cs.

It's worth noting here that Google has faced considerable pressure from the EU on a number of fronts over the way it carries out business. Back in July, it was hit with a record $5 billion fine in an Android antitrust case, though it is currently appealing that. A few months back, Google overhauled its Android business model in Europe, electing to charge Android device makers a licensing fee to preinstall its apps in Europe. Google hasn't confirmed what its next steps will be, but it will likely appeal the decision as it has done with other fines. "People expect high standards of transparency and control from us," a Google spokesperson told VentureBeat. "We're deeply committed to meeting those expectations and the consent requirements of the GDPR. We're studying the decision to determine our next steps."

From a report: Last summer, Justin Sun, the 28-year-old CEO of Tron acquired BitTorrent, the 15-year-old file-sharing company that is one of the biggest decentralized networks in existence for $140 million. He wanted to take advantage of blockchain, the decentralized ledger that is both secure and transparent, and combine it with the decentralized file-sharing app, offering crypto rewards to those who share their computers for file sharing. And this week, Sun appeared on stage with former basketball star Kobe Bryant at the NiTron Summit, which drew more than 1,000 attendees. Tron has also created a $100 million fund to convince game developers to make games that use Tron's protocol and its TRX cryptocurrency. The promise is to create a crypto network that is both fast -- at 2,000 transactions per second -- and reliable.

I interviewed Sun backstage at the NiTron Summit, where he said he wanted his company to become the major blockchain platform that could one day be the decentralized alternative to the centralized internet networks of Google, Facebook, and Apple. But to make that happen, Sun has to get mainstream people like the 100 million BitTorrent users to trust cryptocurrency, even after a coin market slide that has wiped out billions in value, including taking Tron's TRX market value down from near $20 billion to $1.6 billion today.

China may be slowing iPhone sales worldwide, but Chinese people are driving Apple's App Store business. From a report: China accounted for nearly 50 percent of all app downloads in 2018, pushing the global downloads count to reach a record 194 billion, according to research firm App Annie. China, which is the world's largest smartphone market, also accounted for nearly 40 percent of worldwide consumer spend in apps in 2018, App Annie said in its yearly "State of Mobile" report. (Note: Google Play Store is not available in China.) Global consumer spend in apps reached $101 billion last year, up 75 percent since 2016. And 74 percent of all money spent on apps last year came from games. The battle between Silicon Valley companies and Chinese tech giants generated more than half of total consumer spend in the top 300 parent companies in 2018, the report said. The top company for global consumer spend was China's Tencent, which owns stake in several startups, companies, and games -- including last year's sleeper hits PUBG and Fortnite.

China may be slowing iPhone sales worldwide, but Chinese people are driving Apple's App Store business. From a report: China accounted for nearly 50 percent of all app downloads in 2018, pushing the global downloads count to reach a record 194 billion, according to research firm App Annie. China, which is the world's largest smartphone market, also accounted for nearly 40 percent of worldwide consumer spend in apps in 2018, App Annie said in its yearly "State of Mobile" report. (Note: Google Play Store is not available in China.) Global consumer spend in apps reached $101 billion last year, up 75 percent since 2016. And 74 percent of all money spent on apps last year came from games. The battle between Silicon Valley companies and Chinese tech giants generated more than half of total consumer spend in the top 300 parent companies in 2018, the report said. The top company for global consumer spend was China's Tencent, which owns stake in several startups, companies, and games -- including last year's sleeper hits PUBG and Fortnite.

Mozilla has announced that it is closing Firefox Test Pilot, an experimental program it launched three years ago. Firefox Test Pilot allowed users to try out potential new built-in Firefox features and offer feedback to the browser maker. The company says the program was used by an average of 100,000 daily users. A report adds: It's worth noting here that Test Pilot is separate from the various beta versions of Firefox, which are early iterations designed to fine-tune features intended for the prime-time Firefox. Test Pilot, on the other hand, is more about Mozilla dipping its toes in the water to see whether a new feature is worth pursuing at all in the main version of the app, or even as a standalone product. Ultimately, it allows Firefox developers to take bigger risks with their ideas.

Facebook's $19 billion bet on WhatsApp in 2014, when the messaging app had 450 million active users, is beginning to pay off. From a report: In recent months, WhatsApp has surpassed Facebook's own marquee app in popularity, according to industry estimates. In September of last year, WhatsApp for the first time had more monthly active users worldwide on Android and iPhone platforms than the Facebook app, research firm App Annie said today in its annual State of Mobile report. App Annie did not share specific figures but told VentureBeat that WhatsApp has maintained its lead over the Facebook app since September.

An anonymous reader writes: Riot Games, the maker of the enormously popular League of Legends multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) PC game, has issued a new set of company values on its web site. They're the result of some soul searching after the company was accused by many of its own employees last year of having a sexist "bro" culture. The company said that these new values replace the company's Manifesto from 2012 and reflects conversations with more than 1,700 Rioters about "what we want our company to be."

An anonymous reader writes: Riot Games, the maker of the enormously popular League of Legends multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) PC game, has issued a new set of company values on its web site. They're the result of some soul searching after the company was accused by many of its own employees last year of having a sexist "bro" culture. The company said that these new values replace the company's Manifesto from 2012 and reflects conversations with more than 1,700 Rioters about "what we want our company to be."

Android Studio 3.3 is now available to download through stable channel, Google said Monday. The top new features of Android Studio 3.3 include a navigation editor, profiler tracking options, improvements on the build system, and lazy task configuration. However, the big focus with the new version was on "refinement and quality," the company said. Further reading: VentureBeat.

VLC has reached a rare milestone: It has been downloaded more than 3 billion times across various platforms, up from 1 billion downloads in May 2012. VentureBeat reports of the milestone and the new features coming to the media player: VLC today rolled out a minor update -- v3.0.6 -- that adds support for HDR videos in AV1, an emerging video format. But in the coming months, VLC has bigger things planned. First up is a major update to VLC's Android app in about a month, which will introduce support for AirPlay. This will enable Android users to beam video files from their Android phones to the Apple TV. [Jean-Baptiste Kempf, the president and lead developer of VLC's parent company VideoLan] then plans to update the VR app, which will enable native support for VR videos. He said his team reverse-engineered popular VR headsets so that developers no longer need to rely on the SDKs offered by vendors. The app will also receive support for 3D interactions and stereo sound, and add a virtual theater feature.

After that, a major update will be pushed to VLC across all popular platforms. The update, dubbed version 4.0, will offer playback improvements in scaling and video quality of HDR video files. But that's not all. Kempf says he plans to bring VLC to more platforms. He said he is thinking about bringing the media player to Sony's PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and Roku devices. Kempf participated in Slashdot's interview a couple of years ago, offering some insight into how he's able to keep VLC sustainable (since VideoLan is a nonprofit that runs entirely on donations) and the various projects that were in the works at the time, among other things.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Google today announced that Chrome's ad blocker is expanding across the globe starting on July 9, 2019. As with last year's initial ad blocker rollout, the date is not tied to a specific Chrome version. Chrome 76 is currently scheduled to arrive on May 30 and Chrome 77 is slated to launch on July 25, meaning Google will be expanding the scope of its browser's ad blocker server-side. Google last year joined the Coalition for Better Ads, a group that offers specific standards for how the industry should improve ads for consumers.

In February, Chrome started blocking ads (including those owned or served by Google) on websites that display non-compliant ads, as defined by the coalition. When a Chrome user navigates to a page, the browser's ad filter checks if that page belongs to a site that fails the Better Ads Standards. If so, network requests on the page are checked against a list of known ad-related URL patterns and any matches are blocked, preventing ads from displaying on the page. Because the Coalition for Better Ads announced this week that it is expanding its Better Ads Standards beyond North America and Europe to cover all countries, Google is doing the same. In six months, Chrome will stop showing all ads on sites in any country that repeatedly display "disruptive ads."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Google today announced that Chrome's ad blocker is expanding across the globe starting on July 9, 2019. As with last year's initial ad blocker rollout, the date is not tied to a specific Chrome version. Chrome 76 is currently scheduled to arrive on May 30 and Chrome 77 is slated to launch on July 25, meaning Google will be expanding the scope of its browser's ad blocker server-side. Google last year joined the Coalition for Better Ads, a group that offers specific standards for how the industry should improve ads for consumers.

In February, Chrome started blocking ads (including those owned or served by Google) on websites that display non-compliant ads, as defined by the coalition. When a Chrome user navigates to a page, the browser's ad filter checks if that page belongs to a site that fails the Better Ads Standards. If so, network requests on the page are checked against a list of known ad-related URL patterns and any matches are blocked, preventing ads from displaying on the page. Because the Coalition for Better Ads announced this week that it is expanding its Better Ads Standards beyond North America and Europe to cover all countries, Google is doing the same. In six months, Chrome will stop showing all ads on sites in any country that repeatedly display "disruptive ads."

Google Assistant has announced the introduction of real-time translations with Google Home speakers and third-party smart displays like those from JBL, Sony, and Lenovo. Interpretations will initially be available in 27 languages. From a report: Plans are to later bring real-time interpretations to mobile devices, but no date has been set, a company spokesperson told VentureBeat. Real-time interpretation with Google Assistant is the latest conversational AI milestone from Google, following the release of Duplex and Call Screen for Pixel phones in late 2018. But just like the first response to Duplex, you should taper your expectations. Initial demos by VentureBeat found Interpreter Mode to be quick in its response, but each exchange could last no more than 15 seconds, a limitation that makes Interpreter Mode helpful but not yet capable of handling the longer exchanges that often occur in a typical conversation.

Pingdom, a popular website monitoring and performance management service, will soon stop welcoming non-paying users. In an email sent to users today, Pingdom announced that it will be ending its free tier on February 6. From a report: The move, which has unsurprisingly upset many users, comes five years after Pingdom was acquired by SolarWinds, an Austin, Texas-based firm. In its email, Pingdom said it intends to focus its resources and investment on the next phase of its product development. Founded in 2007, Pingdom attracted over 500,000 users from 200 countries in seven years, before it was acquired. Several major companies, including Google, Spotify, Microsoft, Twitter, Slack, Evernote, Mailchimp, Github, Square, Instagram, and others became its clients.

2019 will be "the year of 5G", Qualcomm says. The company today announced that over 30 5G devices, mostly smartphones, will launch in 2019. From a report: According to Qualcomm, the company has won almost all of the chip contracts underlying 5G deployments for 2019 -- a claim that appears to track with announcements we've heard from individual OEMS, but may be challenged by 5G modem making rival Intel at its own CES press conference this week. [...] During Qualcomm's 5G Summit in December, both Verizon and AT&T announced that they will be releasing Samsung-developed 5G smartphones in 2019 -- notably using Qualcomm 5G modems.

New Trump administration policies aimed at curbing China's access to American innovation have all but halted Chinese investment in U.S. technology startups, as both investors and startup founders abandon deals amid scrutiny from Washington. From a report: Chinese venture funding in U.S. startups crested to a record $3 billion last year, according to New York economic research firm Rhodium Group, spurred by a rush of investors and tech companies scrambling to complete deals before a new regulatory regime was approved in August. Since then, Chinese venture funding in U.S. startups has slowed to a trickle, Reuters interviews with more than 35 industry players show. U.S. President Donald Trump signed new legislation expanding the government's ability to block foreign investment in U.S. companies, regardless of the investor's country of origin. But Trump has been particularly vocal about stopping China from getting its hands on strategic U.S. technologies.

The new rules are still being finalized, but tech industry veterans said the fallout has been swift. "Deals involving Chinese companies and Chinese buyers and Chinese investors have virtually stopped," said attorney Nell O'Donnell, who has represented U.S. tech companies in transactions with foreign buyers. Lawyers who spoke to Reuters say they are feverishly rewriting deal terms to help ensure investments get the stamp of approval from Washington. Chinese investors, including big family offices, have walked away from transactions and stopped taking meetings with U.S. startups. Some entrepreneurs, meanwhile, are eschewing Chinese money, fearful of lengthy government reviews that could sap their resources and momentum in an arena where speed to market is critical. This comes at a time when Chinese investors have visibly become more active in emerging markets such as India.

If the late 2018 deal that brought Apple Music to Amazon Echo speakers wasn't surprising enough, Samsung today announced a similar partnership with Apple for 2018 and 2019 Samsung Smart TVs: support for iTunes movies, iTunes TV shows, and AirPlay 2 will be coming in spring 2019. From a report: The deal is all but unprecedented for Apple, which has historically restricted playback of iTunes videos solely to its own devices, including Apple TVs, iPods, iPhones, iPads, and Macs, with no support for competing media players such as Roku, or various smart TV platforms. That said, PCs running iTunes have been able to play iTunes videos, and the company has allowed third-parties to license both AirPlay and AirPlay 2 for years. According to Samsung, a firmware update to 2018 Smart TVs will add a new iTunes Movies and TV Shows app in more than 100 countries. AirPlay 2 will become available on Samsung Smart TVs in 190 countries around the world. There are lots of unanswered questions about this iTunes deal. The Verge: Is Apple going to allow Samsung's smart TV tracking to snoop on iTunes viewers? Smart TVs are notorious for tracking what people watch, but Apple's entire brand is privacy. What usage data will Samsung see from the iTunes app?

Samsung smart TVs run Tizen, Samsung's wacky custom operating system. Is Apple building a Tizen iTunes app? Is there a Tizen team inside Apple? Or is Samsung building this app? Who will be in charge of updating it and fixing bugs? Smart TV apps are not known for being updated well or very often.

"General Motors is partnering with DoorDash to enable on-demand food deliveries via driverless cars," reports VentureBeat.

An anonymous reader quotes their report: The duo announced that a pilot delivery program will kick off in San Francisco in "early 2019," and will involve both meals from restaurants and groceries.... Back in 2016, GM splashed out more than $1 billion to buy Cruise Automation, a startup that developed an autopilot system for existing cars. In the intervening months, the company has been doubling down on its autonomous car efforts, last year announcing a driverless car with no steering wheel or pedals, with plans to launch the vehicle sometime in 2019. Elsewhere, GM also revealed that it is investing $100 million into facilities for building self-driving cars, while Honda recently put $2 billion into GM's Cruise for a 5.7 percent stake....

GM and DoorDash haven't revealed the full extent of the pilot or what the next stage will be, but it did say that "select merchants" that are already using DoorDash in the San Francisco area are on board. The underlying purpose, it said, is to "test and improve" the efficiency of autonomous deliveries in the area. "We see autonomous vehicles playing a major role in the future of delivery as consumer behaviors continue to shift online, and we are confident Cruise's leading technology will help us scale to meet growing consumer demand," noted DoorDash CEO Tony Xu.

Early last year, Netflix allowed some iOS users in more than two dozen markets to bypass the iTunes payment method as part of an experiment. The streaming company is now incorporating the change globally, curbing a $256 million revenue stream for Apple. "According to new data compiled by Sensor Tower, Netflix grossed $853 million in 2018 on the iOS App Store," reports TechCrunch. "Based on that figure, Apple's take would have been around $256 million, the firm said." The new policy change allows Netflix to avoid paying the 15% levy that Apple charges on in-app subscriptions. From a report: "We no longer support iTunes as a method of payment for new members," a Netflix spokesperson told VentureBeat. Existing members, however, can continue to use iTunes as a method of payment, the spokesperson added.

The company did not share exactly when it rolled out the change globally, but a support representative VentureBeat spoke with pegged the timeframe as late last month. Additionally, the support rep added that customers who are rejoining Netflix using an iOS device, after having canceled payment for at least one month, also won't be able to use iTunes billing. The move, which will allow Netflix to keep all proceeds from its new paying iPhone and iPad customers, underscores the tension between developers and the marquee distributors of mobile apps -- Apple and Google.

Hyundai has become the latest car company to explore serious open source alternatives for developing its in-car services. From a report: Ahead of CES 2019, the South Korean automotive giant today announced that it has joined the Linux Foundation and the nonprofit's seven-year-old Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) effort as it looks to contribute to -- and reap benefit from -- software developed by over 140 companies. For Hyundai, open collaboration is crucial as it pursues a "connected car vision," Paul Choo, VP and head of Infotainment Technology Center at Hyundai, said in a statement. Car companies have traditionally taken three years or longer to develop in-vehicle services, such as infotainment systems. The bottleneck usually lies in the quality of code their in-house programmers create. According to a case study published by AGL, a connected car uses some 100 million lines of code, which is about 11 times more than the number that went into the F-35 fighter jet. Getting on AGL's bandwagon would also help Hyundai speed up development of its in-car technologies.

Rather than serving up platitudes about innovation, the man charged with saving former unicorn Evernote says his priority this year is addressing the long list of user complaints. From a report: Despite some progress, Evernote continued to struggle last year, cutting 15 percent of its staff and losing many top executives.So what doesn't work? Lots of stuff, much of it very basic, new CEO Ian Small says: "Frankly, it's a bit disingenuous for me to try to get our most dedicated users all fired up about inventing the future of Evernote when exactly those same people are the ones who know best that sync doesn't always work right. Or that Evernote on Windows is a bit tired, and is missing features that are found on the Mac version. Or that each version of Evernote seems to work slightly differently, and exhibits its own unique collection of bugs and undesirable behaviors. Or that Evernote on mobile devices sometimes feels like a pared-down version of a powerful desktop app, instead of a mobile-first view into a powerful cloud-enabled productivity environment." Small says these problems have lingered for years and were well-known, but he didn't want to get into why they weren't fixed sooner. Instead, he promises the main focus of 2019 will be dealing with these and numerous other issues.

Samsung is starting the year off with a push to expand the reach of its chips. The company today announced Exynos Auto V9, its first auto-branded processor under the Exynos umbrella, as it looks to gain traction in the in-car infotainment space. From a report: The company says the Exynos Auto V9 chip is designed to power in-vehicle infotainment systems, with support for multiple displays. The South Korean tech company said it has partnered with Audi to power the car maker's next generation in-vehicle system, which is expected to hit the road by 2021. As for the specs, the Exynos Auto V9 is based on 8-nm process technology and features the first generation variant of the recently unveiled Cortex-A76 CPU cores (which clocks up to 2.1 GHz), and ARM Mali G76 GPU.

The announcement highlights Samsung's growing ambition to diversify its chips business as revenue from its mobile division drops. In Q3 of last year, revenue from Samsung's mobile division was down by 10 percent. At the same time, the company's decades-old chip business is growing rapidly.

Samsung is starting the year off with a push to expand the reach of its chips. The company today announced Exynos Auto V9, its first auto-branded processor under the Exynos umbrella, as it looks to gain traction in the in-car infotainment space. From a report: The company says the Exynos Auto V9 chip is designed to power in-vehicle infotainment systems, with support for multiple displays. The South Korean tech company said it has partnered with Audi to power the car maker's next generation in-vehicle system, which is expected to hit the road by 2021. As for the specs, the Exynos Auto V9 is based on 8-nm process technology and features the first generation variant of the recently unveiled Cortex-A76 CPU cores (which clocks up to 2.1 GHz), and ARM Mali G76 GPU.

The announcement highlights Samsung's growing ambition to diversify its chips business as revenue from its mobile division drops. In Q3 of last year, revenue from Samsung's mobile division was down by 10 percent. At the same time, the company's decades-old chip business is growing rapidly.

An anonymous reader writes: More than three years after its release, Windows 10 has passed Windows 7 in market share. That means more desktop computers are now running Microsoft's latest and greatest operating system than any other OS, according to Net Applications. The milestone is a nice way for Microsoft to end 2018, even though the company surely was hoping it wouldn't take this long for Windows 10 to overtake Windows 7.

Some Firefox users yesterday started seeing an ad in the desktop version of the browser. It offers users a $20 Amazon gift card in return for booking your next hotel stay via Booking.com. VentureBeat reached out to Mozilla, which confirmed the ad was a Firefox experiment and that no user data was being shared with its partners. From a report: The ad appears at the bottom of Firefox's new tab page on the desktop version with a "Find a Hotel" button that takes the user to a Booking.com page. The text reads: "Ready to schedule that next family reunion? Here's a thank you from Firefox. Book your next hotel stay on Booking.com today and get a free $20 Amazon gift card. Happy Holidays from Firefox! (Restrictions apply)." A second version reads: "For the holidays, we got you a little something just for using Firefox! Book your next hotel stay on Booking.com today and get a free $20 Amazon gift card. Happy Holidays from Firefox! (Restrictions apply.)"

An anonymous reader shares a report: Netflix is further distancing itself from Apple's 15% iTunes tax bracket. Earlier this year, the streaming giant enabled iOS users in more than two dozen markets to bypass the iTunes payment method as part of an experiment. The company now tells VentureBeat that it has concluded the experiment and has incorporated the change globally. "We no longer support iTunes as a method of payment for new members," a Netflix spokesperson told VentureBeat. Existing members, however, can continue to use iTunes as a method of payment, the spokesperson added. Additionally, the support rep added that customers who are rejoining Netflix using an iOS device, after having canceled payment for at least one month, also won't be able to use iTunes billing. The move, which will allow Netflix to keep all proceeds from its new paying iPhone and iPad customers, underscores the tension between developers and the marquee distributors of mobile apps -- Apple and Google.

Three decades ago, David Rumelhart, Geoffrey Hinton, and Ronald Williams wrote about a foundational weight-calculating technique -- backpropagation -- in a monumental paper titled "Learning Representations by Back-propagating Errors." Backpropagation, aided by increasingly cheaper, more robust computer hardware, has enabled monumental leaps in computer vision, natural language processing, machine translation, drug design, and material inspection, where some deep neural networks (DNNs) have produced results superior to human experts. Looking at the advances we have made to date, can DNNs be the harbinger of superintelligent robots? From a report: Demis Hassabis doesn't believe so -- and he would know. He's the cofounder of DeepMind, a London-based machine learning startup founded with the mission of applying insights from neuroscience and computer science toward the creation of artificial general intelligence (AGI) -- in other words, systems that could successfully perform any intellectual task that a human can. "There's still much further to go," he told VentureBeat at the NeurIPS 2018 conference in Montreal in early December. "Games or board games are quite easy in some ways because the transition model between states is very well-specified and easy to learn. Real-world 3D environments and the real world itself is much more tricky to figure out ... but it's important if you want to do planning."

Most AI systems today also don't scale very well. AlphaZero, AlphaGo, and OpenAI Five leverage a type of programming known as reinforcement learning, in which an AI-controlled software agent learns to take actions in an environment -- a board game, for example, or a MOBA -- to maximize a reward. It's helpful to imagine a system of Skinner boxes, said Hinton in an interview with VentureBeat. Skinner boxes -- which derive their name from pioneering Harvard psychologist B. F. Skinner -- make use of operant conditioning to train subject animals to perform actions, such as pressing a lever, in response to stimuli, like a light or sound. When the subject performs a behavior correctly, they receive some form of reward, often in the form of food or water. The problem with reinforcement learning methods in AI research is that the reward signals tend to be "wimpy," Hinton said. In some environments, agents become stuck looking for patterns in random data -- the so-called "noisy TV problem."

Three decades ago, David Rumelhart, Geoffrey Hinton, and Ronald Williams wrote about a foundational weight-calculating technique -- backpropagation -- in a monumental paper titled "Learning Representations by Back-propagating Errors." Backpropagation, aided by increasingly cheaper, more robust computer hardware, has enabled monumental leaps in computer vision, natural language processing, machine translation, drug design, and material inspection, where some deep neural networks (DNNs) have produced results superior to human experts. Looking at the advances we have made to date, can DNNs be the harbinger of superintelligent robots? From a report: Demis Hassabis doesn't believe so -- and he would know. He's the cofounder of DeepMind, a London-based machine learning startup founded with the mission of applying insights from neuroscience and computer science toward the creation of artificial general intelligence (AGI) -- in other words, systems that could successfully perform any intellectual task that a human can. "There's still much further to go," he told VentureBeat at the NeurIPS 2018 conference in Montreal in early December. "Games or board games are quite easy in some ways because the transition model between states is very well-specified and easy to learn. Real-world 3D environments and the real world itself is much more tricky to figure out ... but it's important if you want to do planning."

Most AI systems today also don't scale very well. AlphaZero, AlphaGo, and OpenAI Five leverage a type of programming known as reinforcement learning, in which an AI-controlled software agent learns to take actions in an environment -- a board game, for example, or a MOBA -- to maximize a reward. It's helpful to imagine a system of Skinner boxes, said Hinton in an interview with VentureBeat. Skinner boxes -- which derive their name from pioneering Harvard psychologist B. F. Skinner -- make use of operant conditioning to train subject animals to perform actions, such as pressing a lever, in response to stimuli, like a light or sound. When the subject performs a behavior correctly, they receive some form of reward, often in the form of food or water. The problem with reinforcement learning methods in AI research is that the reward signals tend to be "wimpy," Hinton said. In some environments, agents become stuck looking for patterns in random data -- the so-called "noisy TV problem."

Google is relatively new to the hardware game -- at least compared to rivals Apple and Samsung. But it's not just what's outside that matters. An analysis, by Engadget : The Pixel 3 is the best example. Physically, the phone is a more premium version of the Pixel 2. But aside from that, nothing about the Pixel 3's design makes me yearn for the phone. In fact, the 3 XL even has one of the biggest screen notches in the market, which some people find hideous. And yet, the Pixel 3s were still one of our favorite phones of the year, and ended up on our best gadgets list. But if you can stomach the notch, or don't mind using the smaller phone, then boy, will you be blown away by Google's software. Let's start with my favorite -- Call Screening.

On the Pixels, you can have Assistant field calls for you without having to answer the phone or even say a single word. It's easy to dismiss this feature as simply a glorified voice messaging system, but it's so much more than that. Assistant will ask your caller what they want, transcribe what they're saying in real time and suggest actions for you. Say you realize it's your doctor calling. You could ask them more questions, dictate a real time reply, or use a preset action like hang up or promise to call back. Can your voicemail do that? I don't think so.

[...] Nowhere is the importance of software exemplified as effectively as it is in Google's imaging algorithms, which are so powerful they helped the Pixel 3 nab the smartphone camera crown in our tests. Not only can the phones capture clear, colorful pictures with just a single rear camera, but the Pixels produced the nicest Portrait mode effects using pure software alone. And with the magical Night Sight mode, Google easily kicked Apple and Samsung's butts in low light photography, turning dark, noisy pictures into shots that look like they were taken in daytime. [...] Counter-point: DxOMark's Pixel 3 camera score shows AI isn't enough.

Technology giants rely heavily on Wikipedia's extensive database to source information for their platforms. So it's only fair that they show interest in the long-term sustainability of the online encyclopedia. This week, Facebook made its support official. From a report: The Wikimedia Foundation announced late Thursday that Facebook has contributed $1 million to Wikimedia Endowment, a fund to financially support the online encyclopedia and other Wikimedia projects. "We are grateful to Facebook for this support, and hope this marks the beginning of a long-term collaboration to support Wikipedia's future," Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said in a statement.

In an opinion piece published in June, Wikimedia Foundation executive director Katherine Maher urged companies to better support the service. "As companies draw on Wikipedia for knowledge -- and as a bulwark against bad information -- we believe they too have an opportunity to be generous," she wrote. "At Wikimedia, we already love and deeply appreciate the millions of people around the world who make generous charitable contributions because they believe in our values. But we also believe that we deserve lasting, commensurate support from the organisations that derive significant and sustained financial value from our work." Further reading: Wikimedia Endowment Gets New $1 Million Backing From Amazon.

Several readers have shared a report: The Indian government has authorized 10 central agencies to intercept, monitor, and decrypt data on any computer, sending a shock wave through citizens and privacy watchdogs. Narendra Modi's government late Thursday broadened the scope of Section 69 of the nation's IT Act, 2000 to require a subscriber, service provider, or any person in charge of a computer to "extend all facilities and technical assistance to the agencies." Failure to comply with the agencies could result in seven years of imprisonment and an unspecified fine. In a clarification posted today, the Ministry of Home Affairs said each case of interception, monitoring, and decryption is to be approved by the competent authority, which is the Union Home Secretary.

Explaining the rationale behind the order, India's IT minister, Ravi Shankar Prasad, said that the measure was undertaken in the interests of national security. He added that some form of "tapping" has already been going on in the country for a number of years and that the new order would help bring structure to that process. "Always remember one thing," he said in a televised interview. "Even in the case of a particular individual, the interception order shall not be effective unless affirmed by the Home Secretary."

The Internet Freedom Foundation, a nonprofit organization that protects the online rights of citizens in India, cautioned that the order goes beyond telephone tapping. It includes looking at content streams and might even involve breaking encryption in some cases. "Imagine your search queries on Google over [a number of] years being demanded -- mixed with your WhatsApp metadata, who you talk to, when, and how much [and add] layers of data streams from emails + Facebook," it said. "To us this order is unconstitutional and in breach of the telephone tapping guidelines, the Privacy Judgement and the Aadhaar Judgement," it asserted.

Several readers have shared a report: The Indian government has authorized 10 central agencies to intercept, monitor, and decrypt data on any computer, sending a shock wave through citizens and privacy watchdogs. Narendra Modi's government late Thursday broadened the scope of Section 69 of the nation's IT Act, 2000 to require a subscriber, service provider, or any person in charge of a computer to "extend all facilities and technical assistance to the agencies." Failure to comply with the agencies could result in seven years of imprisonment and an unspecified fine. In a clarification posted today, the Ministry of Home Affairs said each case of interception, monitoring, and decryption is to be approved by the competent authority, which is the Union Home Secretary.

Explaining the rationale behind the order, India's IT minister, Ravi Shankar Prasad, said that the measure was undertaken in the interests of national security. He added that some form of "tapping" has already been going on in the country for a number of years and that the new order would help bring structure to that process. "Always remember one thing," he said in a televised interview. "Even in the case of a particular individual, the interception order shall not be effective unless affirmed by the Home Secretary."

The Internet Freedom Foundation, a nonprofit organization that protects the online rights of citizens in India, cautioned that the order goes beyond telephone tapping. It includes looking at content streams and might even involve breaking encryption in some cases. "Imagine your search queries on Google over [a number of] years being demanded -- mixed with your WhatsApp metadata, who you talk to, when, and how much [and add] layers of data streams from emails + Facebook," it said. "To us this order is unconstitutional and in breach of the telephone tapping guidelines, the Privacy Judgement and the Aadhaar Judgement," it asserted.

Earlier this year, business communication service Slack began to block users in Syria, Iran, and select other embargoed countries to comply with U.S. regulations. This week, the company has broadened the scope of the ban by blocking some users if they have moved from or visited any of the sanctioned nations in recent years. From a report: The company began to face a backlash early today after several users complained that their Slack accounts had been deactivated and that they never received a formal warning from the company. Part of the problem, as Sarah Shugars, a PhD candidate at Network Science Institute at Northeastern University, pointed out, is that some users have been blocked even if they have been living in the United States for a number of years.

Earlier this year, business communication service Slack began to block users in Syria, Iran, and select other embargoed countries to comply with U.S. regulations. This week, the company has broadened the scope of the ban by blocking some users if they have moved from or visited any of the sanctioned nations in recent years. From a report: The company began to face a backlash early today after several users complained that their Slack accounts had been deactivated and that they never received a formal warning from the company. Part of the problem, as Sarah Shugars, a PhD candidate at Network Science Institute at Northeastern University, pointed out, is that some users have been blocked even if they have been living in the United States for a number of years.

An anonymous reader shares a column: AT&T may be meeting its self-imposed deadline to launch "5G" service in 12 cities this week, but based on what the company has said -- and not said -- I can only conclude that its 5G network isn't actually ready for prime time. Yet. The problem is straightforward: As of today, 5G's only benefit over 4G is speed, and AT&T has gone silent on the speed of its 5G network. Verizon promised 300Mbps to 1Gbps speeds before launching its 5G home broadband network in October, then exceeded its minimum guarantees.

By contrast, AT&T made no commitment to network speeds (or latency) in its 5G launch press release, nor does it offer performance estimates in its consumer 5G web pages. Seeking to quantify the network's performance, I reached out to the normally responsive AT&T to ask about a report that its 5G+ network would have real-world speeds of 140Mbps, despite theoretical peak speeds that have alternately been pegged at 979Mbps or 1.2Gbps, depending on source. There was no response.

An anonymous reader shares a column: AT&T may be meeting its self-imposed deadline to launch "5G" service in 12 cities this week, but based on what the company has said -- and not said -- I can only conclude that its 5G network isn't actually ready for prime time. Yet. The problem is straightforward: As of today, 5G's only benefit over 4G is speed, and AT&T has gone silent on the speed of its 5G network. Verizon promised 300Mbps to 1Gbps speeds before launching its 5G home broadband network in October, then exceeded its minimum guarantees.

By contrast, AT&T made no commitment to network speeds (or latency) in its 5G launch press release, nor does it offer performance estimates in its consumer 5G web pages. Seeking to quantify the network's performance, I reached out to the normally responsive AT&T to ask about a report that its 5G+ network would have real-world speeds of 140Mbps, despite theoretical peak speeds that have alternately been pegged at 979Mbps or 1.2Gbps, depending on source. There was no response.

AT&T said Tuesday its network is now live in parts of 12 cities across the United States, with the first mobile 5G device arriving on Friday, December 21. From a report: According to an AT&T spokesperson, the company's 5G network is already up and running in parts of the previously promised dozen cities: Atlanta, Charlotte, Dallas, Houston, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, Louisville, Oklahoma City, New Orleans, Raleigh, San Antonio, and Waco. However, the first consumer device that will be able to access that network, Netgear's Nighthawk 5G Mobile Hotspot, will become available just ahead of the Christmas holiday.

The company also revealed that it will be using the name "5G+" for the part of its network that will use millimeter wave spectrum and technologies, and it said the Nighthawk 5G Mobile Hotspot will run on that 5G+ network. [...] AT&T's 5G pricing is also interesting. Like Verizon, AT&T is offering an initial promotion that makes the hardware and 5G service cheap up front, with new pricing set to follow later. Early adopters from the consumer, small business, and business markets will be able to "get the mobile 5G device and wireless data at no cost for at least 90 days," AT&T says, with new pricing beginning in spring 2019. At that point, the Nighthawk 5G Mobile Hotspot will cost $499 outright, with 15GB of 5G service priced at $70 per month, which AT&T calls "comparable" to its current $50 monthly charge for 10GB of 4G data.

An anonymous reader shares a report: According to the yearly report published by Stockholm-based phone number-identification service Truecaller, spam calls grew by 300 percent year-over-year in 2018. The report also found that telecom operators themselves are much to blame. Between January and October of this year, Truecaller said, users worldwide received about 17.7 billion spam calls. That's up from some 5.5 billion spam calls they received last year.

One of the most interesting takeaways from the report is a sharp surge in spam calls users received in Brazil this year, making it the most spammed country in the world. According to Truecaller, an average user in Brazil received over 37 spam calls in a month, up from some 20 spam calls during the same period last year. According to the report, telecom operators (at 32 percent) remained the biggest spammers in Brazil. The report also acknowledged the general election as an event that drove up spam calls in the country. As in Brazil, Indians were bombarded by telecom operators (a whopping 91 percent of all spam calls came from them) and service providers trying to sell them expensive plans and other offerings.

Spam calls received by users in the U.S. were down from 20.7 calls in a month to 16.9, while users in the U.K. saw a drop in their monthly dose of spam calls from 9.2 to 8.9. [...] Truecaller also reported that scam calls subjecting victims to fraud attempts and money swindling are still a prevalent issue. One in every 10 American adults lost money from a phone scam, according to a yearly report the firm published in April this year.

"Blockchain developer" is the top emerging job in the U.S. -- according to data published in LinkedIn's 2018 U.S. Emerging Jobs report. From a report: [...] Using data gleaned from the LinkedIn Economic Graph, which serves as a "digital representation of the global economy" by analyzing the skills and job openings from across 590 million members and 30 million companies, LinkedIn found that "blockchain developers" has grown 33-fold in the past four years. In this case, "emerging jobs" refers to the growth of specific job titles on LinkedIn profiles in the period between 2014 and 2018. It's worth noting here that "blockchain" didn't appear anywhere in the top 20 emerging jobs in 2017, while "machine learning engineer" topped the list last year -- it's in second place this year.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings loves to identify sleep as the biggest competition of its service. "Sometimes employees at Netflix think, 'Oh my god, we're competing with FX, HBO, or Amazon, but think about it. If you didn't watch Netflix last night: What did you do? There's such a broad range of things that you did to relax and unwind, hang out, and connect -- and we compete with all of that," he once said. "You get a show or a movie you're really dying to watch, and you end up staying up late at night, so we actually compete with sleep," he added. Turns out, Hastings does not need to look that far for competition.

From a report: Despite Netflix and Amazon investing billions of dollars in producing original content, they are struggling to make inroads in emerging markets. YouTube, on the other hand, is growing rapidly, becoming a daily habit for even new internet users. In India, for instance, YouTube reaches 245 million unique users each month, or 85 percent of all internet users in the country, the company told VentureBeat. About 60 percent of all YouTube traffic in India comes from outside of its six major cities. [Globally, YouTube has 1.9 billion monthly active users.]

As consumption on YouTube grows, creators are also finding loyal audiences. In India alone, YouTube now has more than 600 channels with more than 1 million subscribers, up from 20 channels in 2016. Record label T-Series, which is fighting with PewDiePie for the title of most-subscribed YouTube channel, took 10 years to get to its first 10 million subscribers. In the last two years, it has grown to 60 million subscribers. Globally, YouTube says the number of channels with more than 1 million subscribers has grown by 75 percent this year.

Globally, YouTube told VentureBeat that 75 percent of the platform's watch time occurs on a mobile device. The average watch time for a mobile user is 60 minutes per day. Or in other words, this is the time a user could have spent watching Netflix. According to eMarketer's estimates, an average user would spend about 86 minutes per day watching digital videos on streaming services this year.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings loves to identify sleep as the biggest competition of its service. "Sometimes employees at Netflix think, 'Oh my god, we're competing with FX, HBO, or Amazon, but think about it. If you didn't watch Netflix last night: What did you do? There's such a broad range of things that you did to relax and unwind, hang out, and connect -- and we compete with all of that," he once said. "You get a show or a movie you're really dying to watch, and you end up staying up late at night, so we actually compete with sleep," he added. Turns out, Hastings does not need to look that far for competition.

From a report: Despite Netflix and Amazon investing billions of dollars in producing original content, they are struggling to make inroads in emerging markets. YouTube, on the other hand, is growing rapidly, becoming a daily habit for even new internet users. In India, for instance, YouTube reaches 245 million unique users each month, or 85 percent of all internet users in the country, the company told VentureBeat. About 60 percent of all YouTube traffic in India comes from outside of its six major cities. [Globally, YouTube has 1.9 billion monthly active users.]

As consumption on YouTube grows, creators are also finding loyal audiences. In India alone, YouTube now has more than 600 channels with more than 1 million subscribers, up from 20 channels in 2016. Record label T-Series, which is fighting with PewDiePie for the title of most-subscribed YouTube channel, took 10 years to get to its first 10 million subscribers. In the last two years, it has grown to 60 million subscribers. Globally, YouTube says the number of channels with more than 1 million subscribers has grown by 75 percent this year.

Globally, YouTube told VentureBeat that 75 percent of the platform's watch time occurs on a mobile device. The average watch time for a mobile user is 60 minutes per day. Or in other words, this is the time a user could have spent watching Netflix. According to eMarketer's estimates, an average user would spend about 86 minutes per day watching digital videos on streaming services this year.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings loves to identify sleep as the biggest competition of its service. "Sometimes employees at Netflix think, 'Oh my god, we're competing with FX, HBO, or Amazon, but think about it. If you didn't watch Netflix last night: What did you do? There's such a broad range of things that you did to relax and unwind, hang out, and connect -- and we compete with all of that," he once said. "You get a show or a movie you're really dying to watch, and you end up staying up late at night, so we actually compete with sleep," he added. Turns out, Hastings does not need to look that far for competition.

From a report: Despite Netflix and Amazon investing billions of dollars in producing original content, they are struggling to make inroads in emerging markets. YouTube, on the other hand, is growing rapidly, becoming a daily habit for even new internet users. In India, for instance, YouTube reaches 245 million unique users each month, or 85 percent of all internet users in the country, the company told VentureBeat. About 60 percent of all YouTube traffic in India comes from outside of its six major cities. [Globally, YouTube has 1.9 billion monthly active users.]

As consumption on YouTube grows, creators are also finding loyal audiences. In India alone, YouTube now has more than 600 channels with more than 1 million subscribers, up from 20 channels in 2016. Record label T-Series, which is fighting with PewDiePie for the title of most-subscribed YouTube channel, took 10 years to get to its first 10 million subscribers. In the last two years, it has grown to 60 million subscribers. Globally, YouTube says the number of channels with more than 1 million subscribers has grown by 75 percent this year.

Globally, YouTube told VentureBeat that 75 percent of the platform's watch time occurs on a mobile device. The average watch time for a mobile user is 60 minutes per day. Or in other words, this is the time a user could have spent watching Netflix. According to eMarketer's estimates, an average user would spend about 86 minutes per day watching digital videos on streaming services this year.

Google is pulling support for Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich more than seven years after it was first introduced. The company announced in a blog post that Google Play services will no longer provide updates for the APIs (14 and 15) used by applications running on ICS. VentureBeat reports: Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS), as Android 4.0 to 4.0.4 is more affectionately known, was a landmark operating system in many ways, ushering in a whole new set of interface guidelines -- with a more minimalist design, not to mention groundbreaking features such as near-field communication (NFC), lockscreen support for camera and music controls, and facial recognition smarts for unlocking devices.

App developers who currently offer minimum support of API level 16 (Android 4.1 Jelly Bean) and over won't have to do anything as a result of these changes. However, if their apps currently support API level 14 or 15, they will encounter a build error when updating to a newer SDK version. Google is now recommending that all developers target API level 16 as the bare minimum, which means those still using Ice Cream Sandwich on their Android device won't even see the app update in Google Play, let alone be able to download it.

With the news earlier today that Microsoft is embracing Chromium for Edge browser development on the desktop, VentureBeat decided to see what the other browser companies had to say about the decision. From the report: Google largely sees Microsoft's decision as a good thing, which is not exactly a surprise given that the company created the Chromium open source project. "Chrome has been a champion of the open web since inception and we welcome Microsoft to the community of Chromium contributors. We look forward to working with Microsoft and the web standards community to advance the open web, support user choice, and deliver great browsing experiences."

Mozilla meanwhile sees Microsoft's move as further validation that users should switch to Firefox. "This just increases the importance of Mozilla's role as the only independent choice. We are not going to concede that Google's implementation of the web is the only option consumers should have. That's why we built Firefox in the first place and why we will always fight for a truly open web." Mozilla regularly points out it develops the only independent browser -- meaning it's not tied to a tech company that has priorities which often don't align with the web. Apple (Safari), Google (Chrome), and Microsoft (Edge) all have their own corporate interests.

Opera thinks Microsoft is making a smart move, because it did the same thing six years ago. "We noticed that Microsoft seems very much to be following in Opera's footsteps. Switching to Chromium is part of a strategy Opera successfully adopted in 2012. This strategy has proved fruitful for Opera, allowing us to focus on bringing unique features to our products. As for the impact on the Chromium ecosystem, we are yet to see how it will turn out, but we hope this will be a positive move for the future of the web."

As India inches closer to its general elections, Facebook announced today that it is bringing transparency to political ads on its platform in the country early next year. From a report: This would make India the fourth market -- after the U.S., Brazil, and the U.K. -- where Facebook offers users a disclaimer on political ads. Facebook began offering users in the U.S. information about the buyer of a political ad as part of a series of changes last year to fight misinformation and foreign meddling in elections. [...] Facebook said Thursday that it will also maintain an online searchable Ad Library, as it has in other markets, which will document all the ads related to politics from a particular advertiser alongside other information such as range of impressions, demographics that saw the ad, and the budget that went behind an individual ad. India, which is Facebook's largest market, could be the biggest test yet for whether the company has learned from its recent mistakes.

An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft today embraced Google's Chromium open source project for Edge development on the desktop. The company also announced Edge is coming to all supported versions of Windows and to macOS. Microsoft wants to make some big changes, which it says will happen "over the next year or so." The first preview builds of the Chromium-powered Edge will arrive in early 2019, according to Microsoft.

And yes, this means Chrome extension support.

Russia's Yandex has launched its first ever smartphone as the company seeks to leverage its dominant position in apps and services into hardware sales. Yandex, which runs the most popular search engine in Russia, hopes its Yandex.Phone will bind users closer to its suite of products, from food delivery and taxi hailing apps to marketplace and music streaming platforms, as competition rises for online services. From a report: The Yandex.Phone is a 5.65-inch Android-powered phone that will cost 17,990 rubles ($270) when it goes on sale tomorrow. In terms of specifications, Yandex.Phone is a fairly mid-range device, sporting a Qualcomm Snapdragon 630 processor, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of expandable storage, and a 16-megapixel / 5-megapixel dual rear camera.

In place of Google Assistant, which is standard on most Android phones, the company is also pushing its own intelligent assistant, Alice. This isn't the first piece of Yandex hardware to sport Alice since it was unveiled in 2017 -- earlier this year, Yandex launched a $160 smart speaker that also included the virtual assistant. It's not entirely clear what the default apps on the phone will be, but judging by the official photos it seems pretty clear Yandex is positioning its own services at the forefront of the device and favoring its own search engine. That said, Google's apps are also bundled.

An anonymous reader writes: At its Microsoft Connect(); 2018 virtual event today, Microsoft announced the initial public preview of Visual Studio 2019 -- you can download it now for Windows and Mac. Separately, .NET Core 2.2 has hit general availability and .NET Core 3.0 Preview 1 is also available today.

At the event today, Microsoft also made some open-source announcements, as is now common at the company's developer shindigs. Microsoft open-sourced three popular Windows UX frameworks on GitHub: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Forms, and Windows UI XAML Library (WinUI). Additionally, Microsoft announced the expansion of the .NET Foundation's membership model.

An anonymous reader writes: At its Microsoft Connect(); 2018 virtual event today, Microsoft announced the initial public preview of Visual Studio 2019 -- you can download it now for Windows and Mac. Separately, .NET Core 2.2 has hit general availability and .NET Core 3.0 Preview 1 is also available today.

At the event today, Microsoft also made some open-source announcements, as is now common at the company's developer shindigs. Microsoft open-sourced three popular Windows UX frameworks on GitHub: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Forms, and Windows UI XAML Library (WinUI). Additionally, Microsoft announced the expansion of the .NET Foundation's membership model.

An anonymous reader writes: At its Microsoft Connect(); 2018 virtual event today, Microsoft announced the initial public preview of Visual Studio 2019 -- you can download it now for Windows and Mac. Separately, .NET Core 2.2 has hit general availability and .NET Core 3.0 Preview 1 is also available today.

At the event today, Microsoft also made some open-source announcements, as is now common at the company's developer shindigs. Microsoft open-sourced three popular Windows UX frameworks on GitHub: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Forms, and Windows UI XAML Library (WinUI). Additionally, Microsoft announced the expansion of the .NET Foundation's membership model.