The price of communal living at New York’s WeLive, the lavish space operated by co-working giant WeWork, is about to go up. Read more…
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Absurd ‘Co-Living Space’ WeLive Is Jacking Up Its Prices
The price of communal living at New York’s WeLive, the lavish space operated by co-working giant WeWork, is about to go up. Read more…
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Absurd ‘Co-Living Space’ WeLive Is Jacking Up Its Prices
When Tesla announced that every car they produce is now coming out of the factory with full self-driving hardware, I was a little stunned. I figured the relatively easy highway stuff was one thing, but that navigating towns, cities and crosswalks would be another. Nevertheless, while it’s true that they’ll have to wait for legislators to get their acts together before rolling it out, Tesla has achieved fully self-driving cars that can navigate within complex environments. In this real-world demonstration video, a guy takes a ride to work (to a Tesla facility, naturally) while his car does all of the driving. It navigates a town environment, tons of traffic and twisty roads while avoiding pedestrians: While we’re only shown three camera views, Tesla’s system uses eight cameras that provide a 360-degree view. The camera footage is combined with sonar and radar to provide a “neural net” that “provides a view of the world that a driver alone cannot access, seeing in every direction simultaneously and on wavelengths that go far beyond the human senses.” One temporary setback is that Tesla’s updated system doesn’t yet have the “experience” generated by their last-generation system. This means that, temporarily, new Tesla owners will actually have less capabilities than first-gen owners. As the company explains: Before activating the features enabled by the new hardware, we will further calibrate the system using millions of miles of real-world driving to ensure significant improvements to safety and convenience. While this is occurring, Teslas with new hardware will temporarily lack certain features currently available on Teslas with first-generation Autopilot hardware, including some standard safety features such as automatic emergency braking, collision warning, lane holding and active cruise control. As these features are robustly validated we will enable them over the air, together with a rapidly expanding set of entirely new features. As always, our over-the-air software updates will keep customers at the forefront of technology and continue to make every Tesla, including those equipped with first-generation Autopilot and earlier cars, more capable over time.
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POV of Tesla Driving While Equipped with Autopilot Full Self-Driving Hardware
Google is rolling out Android 7.1.1 for Pixel and Nexus smartphones, including the Nexus 6, Nexus 5X, Nexus 6P, Nexus 9, Pixel, Pixel XL, Nexus Player, Pixel C and General Mobile 4G (Android One). You can download it over-the-air when it becomes available “over the next several weeks” or flash it yourself. Engadget details some of the new features found in Android 7.1.1: As for what you can find from a feature perspective, Google has added support for its “image keyboard” that lets you easily find and send pictures and GIFs without leaving your messaging app of choice. Google says it’ll work inside of Hangouts, Allo, and the default Messaging app. Ironically enough, the feature has been available in the Gboard iOS keyboard that Google launched in the spring, but it’s good to see it coming to more Android phones now. Android 7.1.1 also includes Google’s latest set of more diverse emoji, specifically focused on showing a “wider range of professions” for women. And it also contains the excellent app shortcut feature that originally launched on the Pixel — if you press and hold on an app’s icon, a sub-menu of shortcuts will show up. You’ll be able to quickly send a message to a specific contact or navigate to a saved location using these shortcuts, for example. They’re very much like the “force touch” shortcuts found on the iPhone, but that doesn’t make them any less useful. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Google Is Rolling Out Android 7.1.1
Millions of accounts associated with video sharing site Dailymotion, one of the biggest video platforms in the world, have been stolen. From a ZDNet report: A hacker extracted 85.2 million unique email addresses and usernames from the company’s systems, but about one-in-five accounts — roughly 18.3 million– had associated passwords, which were scrambled with the bcrypt hashing function, making the passwords difficult to crack. The hack is believed to have been carried out on October 20 by a hacker, whose identity isn’t known, according to LeakedSource, a breach notification service, which obtained the data. Dailymotion launched in 2005, and is currently the 113rd most visited website in the world, according to Alexa rankings. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Netflix announced last week that it is getting offline video downloads support. The company has since shared that it is using VP9 video compression codec to ensure that the file sizes don’t weigh a lot. An anonymous reader shares an article on Slashgear (edited): For streaming content, Netflix largely relies on H.264/AVC to reduce the bandwidth, but for downloading content, it uses VP9 encoding. VP9 can allow better quality videos for the same amount of data needed to download. The challenge is that VP9 isn’t supported by all streaming providers — it is supported on Android devices and via the Chrome browser. So to get around that lack of support on iOS, Netflix is offering downloads in H.264/AVC High whereas streams are encoded in H.264/AVC Main on such devices. Netflix chooses the optimal encoding format for each title on its service after finding, for instance, that animated films are easier to encode than live-action. Netflix says that H.264 High encoding saves 19% bandwidth compared to other encoding standards while VP9 saves 36%. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Netflix Keeping Bandwidth Usage Low By Encoding Its Video With VP9 and H.264/AVC Codecs
Muckrock has been sending Freedom of Information requests to state police forces to find out how they’re using “cell-site simulators” (AKA IMSI catchers / Stingrays ), and they hit the motherlode with the Virginia State Police. (more…)
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Virginia State cops have blown a fortune on useless cellphone spying gear
Virgin Galactic It has been a long road back from a fatal 2014 accident for Virgin Galactic, the splashy spaceship company founded by Sir Richard Branson to bring the masses into space. After its VSS Enterprise crashed into the Mojave Desert during a test flight, killing vehicle co-pilot Michael Alsbury, the company has had to redesign some key safety systems and rebuild its spacecraft. It revealed the VSS Unity in February. Since then Virgin Galactic has completed a series of ground tests and mating to the “mothership” aircraft, Eve. Following captive carry tests in September, the company performed its first glide test on Saturday, when VSS Unity was released at an altitude of about 15km. The spacecraft reached a velocity of mach 0.6 during its 10-minute descent back to the ground in California. It then made a safe landing at test facilities in Mojave. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Virgin Galactic returns to flight with its VSS Unity spacecraft
It looks like those rumors of Amazon convenience stores were true. The online shopping giant unveiled Amazon Go today , its spin on brick and mortar retail. It uses computer vision and a whole bunch of sensors to let you walk into a store, sign in with your Amazon app and leave without stopping for a checkout line. Amazon is calling it a “Just Walk Out Shopping” experience, a self-descriptive name if there ever was one. The company is starting out with a store in Seattle, but it’s clearly meant to serve as a model for other locations and retail stores. Developing…
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Amazon Go is a grocery store with no checkout lines
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwvjZGKwKvY In Does The Online Card Payment Landscape Unwittingly Facilitate Fraud? , a new paper in IEEE Security & Privacy , researchers from the University of Newcastle demonstrate a technique for guessing secruity details for credit-card numbers in six seconds — attackers spread their guesses out across many websites at once, so no website gets enough bad guesses to lock the card or trigger a fraud detection system. (more…)
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Crooks can guess Visa card details in six seconds by querying lots of websites at once
Cell-site simulators can intercept phone calls and even provide locations (using GPS data). But Virginia’s state police force just revealed details about their actual use of the device — and it’s not pretty. Long-time Slashdot reader v3rgEz writes: In 2014, the Virginia State Police spent $585, 265 on a specially modified Suburban outfitted with the latest and greatest in cell phone surveillance: the DRT 1183C, affectionately known as the DRTbox. But according to logs uncovered by public records website MuckRock, the pricey ride was only used 12 times — and only worked seven of those times. According to Virginia’s ACLU director, “each of the 12 uses cost almost $50, 000, and only 4 of them resulted in an arrest [raising] a significant question whether the more than half million dollars spent on the device and the vehicle…was a wise investment of public funds.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Virginia Police Spent $500K For An Ineffective Cellphone Surveillance System