All Things Tech

Times are changing for the Smart car, with Daimler’s smallest model on track to go all-electric, and now it’s previewing the next generation of urban runaround. The new 2020 Smart EQ fortwo won’t make its official debut until the Frankfurt Motor Show in September, but that hasn’t stopped the German automaker from teasing us with some design sketches. It’s not … Continue reading from SlashGear https://ift.tt/2NTCtBF

Apple has begun an Apple Watch screen replacement program, after finding that the glass displays of certain models can unexpectedly crack around the touchscreen. The new replacement scheme comes after some Apple Watch owners reported spreading cracks around the rounded edge of the wearable’s display. “Apple has determined that, under very rare circumstances, a crack may form along the rounded … Continue reading from SlashGear https://ift.tt/32k9NFS

The VRGO Mini is looking to raise $24,350 on Kickstarter. It's a balance board-like controller that you sit on, giving you more movement options in VR. Read More from VentureBeat https://ift.tt/32gMvAy

A new 15% tariff on Chinese imports will go in effect just after midnight Sunday, placing levies on hundreds of household goods and consumer tech, including a bevy of Apple products. The tariffs, put in place by President Donald Trump as part of an escalating tit-for-tat trade war with China, were entered into the Federal Register on Friday. Apple, the largest U.S. technology company by market cap, has its products assembled in China by Foxconn and then ships them to consumers all over the world. The Apple Airpods, Apple Watch and accompanying Apple Watch bands and the Apple Homepod are all products subject to the higher tariffs beginning Sunday. The iPhone doesn’t appear to be impacted this round, but could be subject to tariffs that begin Dec. 15. Apple is hardly the only electronics company — most of which have final assembly in China — to be affected by the tariffs. TVs, speakers, digital cameras, lithium-ion batteries and flash drives are just a few of consumer electronics th...

Developers are adopting open source conversational AI and leaving behind closed-source alternatives to build more solutions in-house. Read More from VentureBeat https://ift.tt/2ZG6OG2

If Facebook was serious about keeping fake news from affecting elections, it would filter out political posts rather than monetize them. Read More from VentureBeat https://ift.tt/2Zwfxyv

Python is a versatile, powerful language but sometimes it’s not the best choice, especially if you’re doing work in embedded systems with limited memory. Sometimes you can get away with MicroPython for these cases, but the best language is likely C or assembly. If you’re really stubborn, like [amirgon], and really want C and Python to play well together, you can make use of his new tool which can bring any C library to MicroPython . As an example of how this tool is used, a “Pure MicroPython” display driver for ILI9341 on the ESP32, which means that everything was implemented in MicroPython. [amirgon] wanted to see how the Python driver would compare to one that’s already been written in C, and use it to showcase MicroPython binding. This tool also automatically converts structs, unions, enums and arrays to Python objects, and provides a means to work with pointers which is something that Python doesn’t handle in the same way that C requires. [amirgon] hopes that this tool will encou...

There’s no doubt that Apple’s self-polished reputation for privacy and security has taken a bit of a battering recently. On the security front, Google researchers just disclosed a major flaw in the iPhone, finding a number of malicious websites that could hack into a victim’s device by exploiting a set of previously undisclosed software bugs. When visited, the sites infected iPhones with an implant designed to harvest personal data — such as location, contacts and messages. As flaws go, it looks like a very bad one. And when security fails so spectacularly, all those shiny privacy promises naturally go straight out the window. The implant was used to steal location data and files like databases of WhatsApp, Telegram, iMessage. So all the user messages, or emails. Copies of contacts, photos, https://t.co/AmWRpbcIHw pic.twitter.com/vUNQDo9noJ — Lukasz Olejnik (@lukOlejnik) August 30, 2019 And while that particular cold-sweat-inducing iPhone security snafu has now been patch...

“The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance” returns viewers to the world of Thra — a distant, magical planet ruled over by the sinister, long-lived Skeksis, who have lied their way into ownership of the titular crystal and dominance of the elf-like Gelflings. The series is a prequel to Jim Henson and Frank Oz’s 1982 film “The Dark Crystal” — but two out of your three hosts at  the Original Content podcast haven’t seen the original movie, so our opinions weren’t colored by nostalgia. Like the Henson/Oz film, “Age of Resistance” relies on sophisticated puppetry to bring a complex fantasy world to life. It’s genuinely dazzling, with sprawling cities, steampunk machinery and all manner of fantasy creatures all fully realized, and often captured in fast-moving scenes of kinetic action. On the other hand, for some of us, the puppetry wasn’t quite up to the task when the show got darker and more serious. It’s hard to care about family drama and romance when your lead characters have limited...

Netmarble has a knack for coming up with mobile game hits, including titles such as Lineage 2: Revolution, Marvel Future Fight, and BTS World. Read More from VentureBeat https://ift.tt/2PwIwhR

Reddit users have had trouble accessing the service on mobile and desktop for most of Saturday morning, prompting an official response from the company: it is experiencing a partial outage across multiple aspects of its service. The outage, according to Reddit, is due to ‘an incident’ with Amazon Web Services that is impacting the social platform. It’s unclear when the … Continue reading from SlashGear https://ift.tt/2NO5OgN

Late on Friday, Epic Games suddenly disabled its controversial BRUTE mech suit, returning its battle royale game to the version players prefer and have been demanding since the vehicle arrived with Season X. The removal is only temporary as noted by the alert in the game’s lobby, but has persisted for more than 14 hours by this point with no … Continue reading from SlashGear https://ift.tt/2Zz9ied

From afar, Olli resembles many of the “future is now!” electric autonomous shuttles that have popped up in recent years. The tall rectangular pod, with its wide-set headlights and expansive windows nestled between a rounded frame, gives the shuttle a friendly countenance that screams, ever so gently, “come along, take a ride.” But Olli is different in almost every way, from how it’s produced to its origin story. And now, its maker, Local Motors, has given Olli an upgrade in hopes of accelerating the adoption of its autonomous shuttles. Meet Olli 2.0, a 3D-printed connected electric autonomous shuttle that Rogers says will hasten its ubiquity. “The future is here; it’s just not evenly distributed,” Local Motors co-founder and CEO John B. Rogers Jr. said in a recent interview. “That’s something I say a lot. Because people often ask me, ‘Hey, when will I see this vehicle? 2023? What do you think?’ My response: It’s here now, it’s just not everywhere.” Whether individuals will adopt ...

Olive oil at its finest quality is a product that brings alive the Mediterranean cuisine of which it is a staple. Unfortunately for many of us not fortunate enough to possess our own olive grove, commercial olive oils are frequently adulterated, diluted with cheaper oils such as canola. As consumers we have no way of knowing this, other than the taste being a bit less pronounced. Food standards agencies use spectrophotometers to check the purity of oils, and [Daniel James Evans] has created such a device using a Raspberry Pi. A spectrophotometer shines white light through a sample to be tested, splits the light up into a spectrum with a prism or diffraction grating, and measures the light level at each point in the spectrum to gain a spectral profile of the sample. Different samples can then be compared by overlaying their profiles and looking at any differences. This build shines the light from an LED through a sample of oil, splits the result with a diffraction grating, and capture...

Quiet supersonic jets may one day fly over land to offer faster commercial and passenger flights. Before that can happen, however, the FAA will need to establish new rules regarding these typically noisy flights. To help usher in that era, NASA plans to test Lockheed Martin’s X-59 QueSST, an experimental supersonic jet that produces a ‘thump’ instead of a ‘boom,’ … Continue reading from SlashGear https://ift.tt/2HywoGr

Hello and welcome back to Startups Weekly, a weekend newsletter that dives into the week’s noteworthy startups and venture capital news. Before I jump into today’s topic, let’s catch up a bit. Last week, I wrote about a new e-commerce startup, Pietra . Before that, I wrote about the flurry of IPO filings . Remember, you can send me tips, suggestions and feedback to kate.clark@techcrunch.com or on Twitter  @KateClarkTweets . If you don’t subscribe to Startups Weekly yet, you can do that  here . What’s new? Peloton revealed its S-1 this week, taking a big step toward an IPO expected later this year. The filing was packed with interesting tidbits, including that the company, which manufacturers internet-connected stationary bikes and sells an affiliated subscription to its growing library of on-demand fitness content, is raking in more than $900 million in annual revenue. Sure, it’s not profitable, and it’s losing an increasing amount of money to sales and marketing efforts,...

A popular opioid painkiller called tramadol has been linked to an increased risk of developing hypoglycemia, a condition in which one’s blood sugar is unusually low. The study comes from the University of California San Diego, where researchers analyzed in excess of 12 million adverse effect and event reports published by the FDA from 2004 to early 2019. Tramadol is … Continue reading from SlashGear https://ift.tt/2Lhyrjr

Military headphones, at least the older ones, are like few other sound reproducers. They are an expression of function over form, with an emphasis on robustness over operator comfort. Electrically they most often have high-impedance drivers and annoyingly proprietary connectors for whichever obscure radio system they were a part of. [John Floren] has a HS-16A headset , the type used by the US military during the Vietnam war. It’s an antiquated design with a dual spring steel headband and on-the-ear ‘phones with no muff for comfort, and a quick bit of research finds that they can be had brand new in their 1960s packaging for somewhere around $20. Their connector is a pair of odd metal pins, and rather than doing what most of us would do and snipping the wire to fit something more useful, he hunted high and low for a TE Connectivity receptacle that would fit them. A short extension and a jack plug allowed him to use these slightly unusual cans. This isn’t a special hack, but it’s still...

Jaroslav Beck recently stepped down from his role as CEO of the company behind Beat Saber to “fully focus on our music roadmap and future opportunities.” Read More from VentureBeat https://ift.tt/2MPLQCj

Netflix, HBO and Amazon Prime are all bracing themselves for an incoming storm. That storm is Disney Plus, an upcoming streaming that’s sure to shake the market. Launching 12 Nov in the U.S., Disney’s take on Netflix launches with a massive catalogue of films and channels, at a competitive price that’s sure to tempt you into cancelling your other accounts. … Continue reading from SlashGear https://ift.tt/2LizeAL

Last Thursday two lowly masters grad students, Aaron Gokaslan and Vanya Cohen managed to replicate the secretive OpenAI model and cheekily named their version OpenGPT-2 . The code can be downloaded from this Google Colab page and apparently no prior experience in language modeling is required to use it. More useful might be the skills required to persuade Google to part with $50,000 worth of free cloud compute time for the training! Research firm OpenAI released a new, ever more powerful, version of their GPT language model with 1.5 billion parameters, trained on a data-set of 8 million web pages and although it’s most entertaining use is to produce gibberish, it will inevitably also be able to produce coherent text sometime very soon. For us mere mortals, there’s a cut down version of the model hosted in the cloud and a webpage that we can visit, type in a short phrase to prompt the system, and print out a few paragraphs of fake news. We tried it with the following: “You can use a...

Radios are, by and large, not powered by steam. One could make the argument that much of our municipal electricity supply does come via steam turbines, but that might be drawing a long bow. Regardless, steampunk remains a popular and attractive aesthetic, and it’s the one that [Christine] selected for her radio build . The build cribs from [Christine’s] earlier work on a VFD alarm clock, using similar tubes and driver chips to run the display. FM radio and amplification are courtesy of convenient modules. Tubes are fitted for aesthetic purposes, artfully lit with a smattering of color-changing LEDs. Perhaps the neatest touch is the use of valve handles to control tuning and volume. A stepper motor turns a series of gears, as is mandatory for any true steampunk build, and there’s even an electromagnetic actuator to make the Morse key move. To run it all, a pair of Arduino Megas are charged with handling the I/O needs of all the various systems. It’s a fancy build that shows how far th...

[Diyguypt] may be an altruist to provide the means for people who can’t manipulate chess pieces to play the game. Or he may just have his hands too busy with food and drink to play. Either way, his voice command chessboard appears to work, although it has a lot of moving parts both figuratively and literally. You can check out the video below to see how it works. The speech part is handled by an Android phone and uses Google’s voice services, so if you don’t want Google listening to your latest opening gambit, you’ll want to pass this one up. The phone uses an app that talks to the Arduino via Bluetooth, which means the Arduino needs a Bluetooth module. The Arduino controls what amounts to an upside-down 3D printer. Instead of a hot end pointing down, the mechanism has an electromagnet pointing up. A small washer in the base of each chess piece makes it susceptible to the magnet’s motion. The electromagnet is required to let go of a piece before a move to a new position. It is poss...

Fans have raged since news arrived earlier this month that Netflix had canceled The OA after two seasons. The cancellation arrived despite a large number of fans and consistently high ratings, ultimately spurring a number of protests and petitions asking Netflix to change its mind. Sadly, it seems the show is officially and permanently over. The OA is a streaming … Continue reading from SlashGear https://ift.tt/2PrFGug

So your aluminum Series 2 or Series 3 Apple Watch is suddenly cracking around the edges… but you don’t remember bumping it on anything, or being particularly rough with it. Surprise! It might not be your fault at all. Apple says that they’ve determined that “under very rare circumstances”, the displays on aluminum Series 2 and 3 are developing cracks that can wrap around the rounded edges. The good news? If Apple determines your display crack is caused by this newly discovered issue, they’ll replace the screen for free. The bad news? It’s not the kind of thing they can fix at the Genius Bar, so getting it patched up means shipping the Watch to Apple and being without it for 5+ days. (It sounds like the kind of cracks they’re looking for are pretty specific — they’re looking for cracks that developed around the rounded edges, as pictured above. So if you really just dropped something on the watch and the display got obliterated, you probably aren’t gonna be able to pull a fast one ...

Happy (almost) Labor Day to all the hardworking members of the early-startup community — entrepreneurs, founders, investors, engineers and everyone in between. We know how hard you work to build your dream, so we’re cutting you a break and extending our early-bird pricing on passes to Disrupt San Francisco 2019 through 11:59 p.m. (PST) on September 6 . One extra week to save up to $1,300. Don’t fritter away this absolute last opportunity to save big bucks on our flagship event, where you’ll find more than 10,000 attendees, 400 media outlets and a passel of eager investors. Get your early-bird tickets now . Disrupt events always feature incredible speakers, and we’ve got an amazing agenda lined up for you this year. Let’s take a look at just some of the discussions and interviews you’ll enjoy over the course of three Disruptive days. Reigniting the Space Race: Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith intends to return the U.S. to crewed spaceflight, with a goal of doing so this year with its fi...

Didi Chuxing will begin picking up ride-hailing passengers with self-driving cars in Shanghai in just a few months, according to company CTO Zhang Bo (via Reuters ). The plan is to roll out autonomous pick-ups in Shanghai first, starting in one district of the city, and then expand the program from there – finally culminating in the deployment of self-driving vehicles outside of China by 2021. Like Uber’s autonomous test vehicles, Didi’s cars will be staffed with a human driver on board during the initial launch period, which awaits a few remaining licenses before it can actually begin serving human passengers. Self-driving rides will be free for customers, and Zhang said that more than 30 different vehicles will be offered for self-driving trips as part of the pilot. After its initial pilot launch in Shanghai, Didi will look to expand its offerings to Beijing and Shenzhen as well, with hopes to be live in all three cities by 2020. Didi is the largest ride-hailing company in China...

We’ll start with more Black Hat/DEFCON news. [Meh Chang] and [Orange Tsai] from Devcore took a look at Fortinet and Pulse Secure devices, and found multiple vulnerabilities. ( PDF Slides ) They are publishing summaries for that research, and the summary of the Fortinet research is now available. It’s… not great. There are multiple pre-authentication vulnerabilities, as well as what appears to be an intentional backdoor. CVE-2018-13379 abuses an snprintf call made when requesting a different language for the device login page. Snprintf is an alternative to sprintf , but intended to prevent buffer overflows by including the maximum string length to write to the target buffer, which sounds like a good idea but can lead to malicious truncation. The code in question looks like snprintf(s, 0x40, "/migadmin/lang/%s.json", lang); . When loading the login page, a request is made for a language file, and the file is sent to the user. At first look, it seems that this would indee...

The Volocopter 2X air taxi vehicle is now the first electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) craft to fly at an international airport, fully integrated into the same airspace as other commercial passenger craft. It performed this key milestone flight at Helsinki International Airport, in a demonstration mission that showed it successfully integrated with both traditional air traffic management, and air traffic management systems designed specifically for aircraft with no pilot on board controlling the vehicle manually. The test is intended to show that air traffic management systems which are designed for both traditional piloted flight and autonomous aircraft, including air robotaxis, can operate in concert with one another, even in areas with dense sky traffic – including over cities in future. Volocopter, which recently unveiled a new version of its eVTOL which it intends to be the version that goes into commercial service once it launches for paying customers, ran tests at ...

The cartoony shared social VR experience with multiple venues is coming to the increasingly popular standalone VR headset next month. Read More from VentureBeat https://ift.tt/32kEQ4l

The direct-to-consumer trend in fashion has been one of the most interesting evolutions in e-commerce in the last several years, and today one of the trailblazers in the world of footwear is picking up some money from a list of illustrious backers to bring its concept to the masses. Atoms , makers of sleek sneakers that are minimalist in style — “We will make only one shoe design a year, but we want to make that really well,” said CEO Sidra Qasim — but not in substance — carefully crafted with comfort and durability in mind, sizes come in quarter increments and you can buy different measurements for each foot if your feet are among the millions that are not exactly the same size — has raised $8.1 million. The company plans to use the funding to invest in further development of its shoes, and to expand its retail and marketing presence. To date, the company has been selling directly to consumers in the US via its website — which at one point had a waiting list of nearly 40,000 peo...

Hello and welcome back to  Equity , TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week we were back in the SF studio, with Kate and Alex on hand to chat venture, business, startups, and IPOs with Iris Choi . Choi is a partner at Floodgate , and one of the very few folks who have ever been invited back on the show. Despite Floodgate being an early-stage firm, Choi was more than willing to dig into the week’s later-stage topics, starting with the Peloton IPO filing. Kate was stoked about the offering (her piece here , Alex’s notes here ). Peloton, a fitness, media, hardware (and more) company, is a lot different than your run-of-the-mill enterprise SaaS exits. Next Alex ran the team through a list of impending IPOs that we care about. There are a number of venture-backed companies looking to go public before the stock market falls apart. More on each when they price. After the S-1 march, we turned to personnel news, namel...