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CBS delays streaming ‘Star Trek’ debut until May 2017

CBS said its new Star Trek series would debut in January, but since it’s September and we still haven’t even heard about the cast, that date seemed to be in doubt. Today CBS confirmed a delay, essentially swapping debut windows between Star Trek: Discovery and its upcoming spinoff of The Good Wife , which will both be available exclusively in the US on the streaming CBS All Access service (outside the US and Canada, it will be on Netflix ). Star Trek: Discovery will launch in May 2017, while the new The Good Wife show will launch with a CBS TV broadcast in January, before jumping to All Access streaming. There’s also a new streaming edition of Big Brother called Over the Top that will launch on September 28th. Executive producers Alex Kurtzman and Bryan Fuller said in a statement that “We aim to dream big and deliver, and that means making sure the demands of physical and post-production for a show that takes place entirely in space, and the need to meet an air date, don’t result in compromised quality. Before heading into production, we evaluated these realities with our partners at CBS and they agreed: Star Trek deserves the very best, and these extra few months will help us achieve a vision we can all be proud of.” If it aims to convince more skeptical viewers to sign up — and maybe grab that $4 commercial-free option — a delay to make sure everything is working could be a good idea. Source: CBS

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CBS delays streaming ‘Star Trek’ debut until May 2017

Robots can perform surgery inside your eyeballs

Doctors at Oxford University made medical history recently by successfully completing the first robot-assisted intraocular surgery. Robert MacLaren, Professor of Ophthalmology at the university, and his team managed to gently peel off a 1/1000th millimeter membrane from the inside of a patient’s eye. To do so, the team relied on a cutting-edge medical device known as the Robotic Retinal Dissection Device, or R2D2. The R2D2, developed by Dutch medical robotics firm Preceyes BV, is designed to perform keyhole surgery, entering and exiting the eyeball through a single, sub-millimeter hole. What’s more, it’s built to be exceedingly steady, especially given the tight tolerances within which it works. It employs a series of seven, independently computer controlled motors to navigate within the eye and can move as little as 1/1000th of a millimeter at a time. This is done to eliminate any semblance of tremors in the surgeon’s hands — including even the most minute tics like those generated by the doctor’s own heartbeat. “Current technology with laser scanners and microscopes allows us to monitor retinal diseases at the microscopic level, but the things we see are beyond the physiological limit of what the human hand can operate on, ” Dr. MacLauren told the BBC. “With a robotic system, we open up a whole new chapter of eye operations that currently cannot be performed.” In this case, the surgical team was tasked with exorcising a tiny growth of membrane that had contracted around the patient’s retina and distorted his vision to resemble the hall-of-mirrors scene from Enter the Dragon. The existing method calls for doctors to time their movements between heartbeats but with the help of the joystick-controlled R2D2, that procedure can be completed in a fraction of the time. For the record, this is not how it’s supposed to go. The R2D2 is still undergoing clinical trials. In fact, this was the first of 12 such tests, each being more complex than the last. However, should the device gain government approval, it could become, as MacLauren states, “a vision of eye surgery in the future.” Source: Oxford University

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Robots can perform surgery inside your eyeballs

YouTube Gets Its Own Social Network With Launch of YouTube Community

The earlier reports were right when they said YouTube was working on launching its own social networking service for content creators. Instead of the “YouTube Backstage” branding, YouTube has decided to call their social networking service “YouTube Community, ” which allows content creators to use text, GIFs, and images to better engage viewers. Given the controversy surrounding YouTube in regard to demonetizing videos that are not deemed “friendly to advertisers, ” many YouTube creators have been or are thinking about leaving the site and joining competing services. These new tools are designed to help keep creators from departing to competing platforms. TechCrunch reports: YouTube has been testing the new service over the past several months with a handful of creators in order to gain feedback. It’s launching the service into public beta with this group of early testers, and will make it available to a wider group of creators in the “month’s ahead, ” it says. Access to this expanded feature set is made available to the creators and their viewers by way of a new “Community” tab on their channels. From here, creators can share things like text posts, images, GIFs and other content, which the audience can thumbs up and down, like the videos themselves, as well as comment on. Viewers will see these posts in their “Subscriptions” feed in the YouTube mobile application, and can also choose to receive push notifications on these posts from their favorite creators, YouTube says.” Only time will tell whether or not this new move will be better received than YouTube’s Google+ integration… Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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YouTube Gets Its Own Social Network With Launch of YouTube Community

Geohot will sell a semi-autonomous driving kit this year

Legendary iPhone and PlayStation hacker George Hotz (aka “Geohot”) isn’t wasting time translating his DIY self-driving tech into something you can buy. His Comma.ai startup plans to release a semi-autonomous driving kit, Comma One, before the end of 2016. The $999 upgrade combines its camera with your car’s existing front radar (read: it won’t work with every vehicle) to relieve you of some control during your drive. It’s “about on par” with Tesla’s Autopilot , Hotz claims, and reportedly good enough to take you from Mountain View (conveniently, Google’s HQ) to San Francisco without touching the steering wheel or any pedals. The secret, Hotz adds, is that Comma One gets data from its video feed. “Even Tesla isn’t doing that, ” he says. And importantly, it’s using commodity components that should help it get to market quickly. The entrepreneur notes that many would-be rivals don’t even have hardware to show, let alone a concrete plan to ship products. It’s easy to remain at least a bit skeptical. Comma.ai is moving very quickly, and Hotz is quick to admit that the Comma One would only arrive this year in “very limited quantity” at best. You’ll probably have to wait until 2017 to retrofit your car, and it’s hard to say how well Comma One will work when it’s ready. If it comes anywhere close to the hype, though, it’ll be a big deal — it’s a readily available, vaguely affordable add-on that will give you a taste of the self-driving future without forcing you to buy a new car . Source: TechCrunch

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Geohot will sell a semi-autonomous driving kit this year

ClixSense Suffers Massive Data Breach, 6.6 Million Users Compromised

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Digital Trends: ClixSense, a site which pays users to view ads and take surveys, was the victim of a massive data breach compromising around 6.6 million user accounts. Usually when there’s a data breach of this size, the information stolen contains usernames, passwords, and some other personal information, but due to the nature of ClixSense and the service it provided, home addresses, payment histories, and other banking details have also been compromised. According to the message posted to PasteBin along with a sample of the stolen data, social security numbers, dates of birth, and some internal emails from ClixSense may also have been compromised. Ars Technica reported this morning that about 2.2 million people have had their data posted to PasteBin over the weekend, reportedly just a taste of the 6.6 million user accounts that have been stolen. The hackers responsible stated in their PasteBin post that they intend to sell the user information they gathered, without disclosing a specific price. PasteBin has since removed the posts and the sample of the compromised user account information. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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ClixSense Suffers Massive Data Breach, 6.6 Million Users Compromised

Every PlayStation 4 Gets HDR This Week With System Update 4.00

Sony announced today it is rolling out a new system updated — dubbed Shingen — to all the PlayStation 4 to bring High Dynamic Range (HDR) support. The new update, in addition, also brings Spotify integration, LAN data migration transfer, and tweaks to interface. From a CNET report: Other refinements to the system’s interface include a redesigned content info screen — the thing you see when pressing down after highlighting a game on your home screen. Similarly, the What’s New screen has been updated with a new layout. 4.00 also adds support for HDR to all play PS4s, something Sony announced last week. This will be an option located in the Video Output Settings menu for existing PS4s and the new slim PS4, as well as the PS4 Pro. Those who get a Pro when it launches in November will also find support for several new features added in this update. As we learned recently, the system features 1080p streaming for Share Play and Remote Play (but only to PC/Mac and Xperia devices, not Vita), as well as 1080p/30 FPS streaming to Twitch and 1080p 30/60 FPS streaming to YouTube. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Every PlayStation 4 Gets HDR This Week With System Update 4.00

Amazon Prime gives you Audible streams for free

Amazon Prime members get a pretty decent bunch of benefits for their $99 a year subscription, and the list of goodies just got a bit longer. The online retail giant now offers its subscribers free access to Audible Channels , a collection of talk show-type streams and audiobooks that would normally cost $5 a month. Prime members can download the Audible app for iOS, Android and Windows 10 to access Channels, which will include ad-free programming and content from The Wall Street Journal , The New York Times , Charlie Rose , Harvard Business Review and The Onion , among others. It’ll also include 20 curated playlists around comedy, meditation and news, as well as a rotating selection of more than 50 audiobooks. In addition to free two-day shipping and now, free Audible content, a Prime subscription also gets you free access to Amazon’s video streaming service , a ton of ebooks, photo storage, early entry to certain deals and a somewhat limited selection of music. But the company could be boosting its library of songs , and that, together with the Audible offering, could really enhance the amount and quality of its content. Source: BusinessWire

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Amazon Prime gives you Audible streams for free

Fury Road before the visual effects were added

They put out a compilation of scenes from Mad Max: Fury Road as they were shot, with no CGI or no artsy color grading. It makes me love the film even more: I want a minimalist cut of the whole thing like this, with the only CGI work being what’s absolutely necessary to make things work (painting out other cameras and wires, adding key explosions, the waterfall…) and CGI-heavy scenes like the sandstorm interior completely removed. One thought, though: this would probably make Fury Road’s sustained, stylized violence (which is rather different from the startling, crude violence of the first two Mad Max movies) less palatable. You’d be surprised how many people already have a problem with it, even if they love the series. It would be an interesting editing challenge. [via io9 ]

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Fury Road before the visual effects were added

Adblock Plus now selling ads

Adblock Plus is to begin reselling the ads it blocks, replacing websites’ original ads with ones under its control—and which it takes a fat cut of the revenue from. The program is meant to be friendly to publishers — it is, after all, letting them display some ads instead of none whatsoever. But there’s still obvious reason for publishers to be unhappy. Acceptable ads [AdBlock Plus’ in-house advertising] are likely to be less valuable than the ads a publisher could otherwise display, limiting what a website can earn. And in setting up its own marketplace, Adblock Plus continues to position itself as a gatekeeper charging a toll to get through a gate of its own making. This was always the gameplan. AdBlock Plus marketed itself as about blocking ads, but it’s really about providing a temporary improvement in user experience to convince readers to insert it as a middleman between them, publishers and advertisers. Once secure, AdBlock Plus can let advertising (and the user experience) creep back to the profitable way it was before, but with it charging rent to everyone. If you block ads, at least block them with something that isn’t taking a shit on both of us: get rid of it and try uBlock Origin . If you don’t like ads but would like to support Boing Boing, buy a t-shirt or an inexpensive gadget from our store. Correction : an earlier version of this post referred to AdBlock Plus as AdBlock. They are different products from different vendors.

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Adblock Plus now selling ads

HP To Buy Samsung’s Printer Business For $1.05 Billion

HP has agreed to a deal with Samsung to acquire their printer business for $1.05 billion, a deal that will be the largest print acquisition in HP’s history. USA Today reports: “The acquisition of Samsung’s printer business allows us to deliver print innovation and create entirely new business opportunities with far better efficiency, security, and economics for customers, ” said HP president and CEO Dion Weisler in a statement. The Samsung deal would give HP access to 6, 500 printing patents as well as 1, 300 researchers and engineers “with advanced expertise in laser printer technology.” While this deal is being negotiated, Samsung’s mobile phone business has been navigating a recall of its Galaxy Note 7 smartphones over issues with batteries catching fire and exploding. One of the most recent accidents reported involved a six-year-old boy in New York, who was using the device when it “suddenly burst into flames.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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HP To Buy Samsung’s Printer Business For $1.05 Billion