Tag Archives: author_name|Mariella Moon

YouTube Premium’s new features include picture-in-picture for YouTube Shorts

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YouTube has recently launched a bunch of new features for Premium subscribers, including a quick way to skip the more boring parts of a video. When users double tap on a video, it will now skip ahead to what YouTube has marked as the more interesting portions of it based on a combination of AI and viewership data. The capability is now live in the US for Android users, though it's rolling out to iOS users in the coming weeks, as well. On Android, Premium subscribers can now also watch Shorts while checking their emails, browsing social media or doing things on other apps in general with the new picture-in-picture capability. 

Paying users will get access to the video hosting website's latest experimental features, as well. One of YouTube's newest test features is smart downloads for Shorts, which automatically saves the service's short-form videos on users' devices that they could then watch offline. In addition, Android users now have access to a conversational AI experience that can answer their questions and suggest related content without having to stop watching whatever's playing on their screens. It's only limited to users in the US at the moment, however, and only for English videos that display an "Ask" button. Finally, Premium subscribers can access YouTube's redesigned watch page for the web that apparently makes it easier to find related content. 

YouTube Premium removes ads from videos and gives subscribers access to offline viewing, Music Premium and other perks. In February, the Google-owned video sharing platform reported that it hit 100 million subscribers for both Premium and Music offerings, but it's been trying to get more people to pay for its services. Aside from introducing new perks, it's also waging a war against ad blockers and recently started preventing ad-blocking apps on mobile from accessing its videos. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/youtube-premiums-new-features-include-picture-in-picture-for-youtube-shorts-150029102.html?src=rss

Steam Deck gets a built-in game recorder

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While there's a bunch of third-party apps and services you can use to record your Steam games, you now have a native option that's built right into the Steam client. Valve has launched its own game recorder in beta, and yes, it also serves as a native recorder on the Steam Deck. You can either set the feature to start recording in the background the moment you keep playing or set it to only start (and stop) recording when you press a hotkey. If you choose to record in the background, you can specify the maximum of amount of storage recordings can take. Steam will overwrite old recordings once you hit the limit. 

A Replay capability will allow you to watch previous footage in the Steam Overlay, so you can see what you did wrong in case you lose a boss fight or take a wrong turn that gets you lost. You can even drop markers beforehand to make it easy to find clips you think you'd want to watch later. The new feature also makes it easy to send clips from your Steam Deck to your PC or mobile device if you want to share them with friends or to upload them online. 

Valve says the feature will only capture footage of your games and not your desktop, but it can include audio from voice chat programs. It will also work for most games, even non-Steam titles, as long as they support Steam Overlay. Since the feature is still in beta, though, you'll have to join a beta program to be able to access it. Go to Beta Participation in Interface under Settings to choose a beta program and then activate the Game Recording option that shows up in the Settings menu. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/steam-deck-gets-a-built-in-game-recorder-120019196.html?src=rss

This cute pink blob could lead to realistic robot skin

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Someday, we may have humanoid robots so real, they have skin that looks and feels, heals and moves just like ours. A team of scientists from the University of Tokyo and Harvard University are looking into how to make that happen, and the process includes creating some pretty curious, partly terrifying and partly adorable experimental machines with skin. In their paper published in Cell Reports Physical Science (via TechCrunch), the researchers explained that current molding techniques used to create skin equivalents that can fit 3D structures like robotic fingers perfectly do not have a mechanism that can "fix the skin to the underlying subcutaneous layer." For their study, they used a technique they're calling "perforation-type anchors," which is inspired by skin ligaments, as a solution to that problem. 

Diagram showing layers of the skin.
University of Tokyo

Simply put, skin ligaments keep our skin attached to the tissue and muscle underneath, so it doesn't get loose and go all over the place like fabric on a mannequin whenever we move. The team intends for its perforation-type anchors to take the place of those ligaments in machines. To demonstrate the method's effectiveness in attaching synthetic skin to a "3D objects with intricate contours," the researchers molded fabricated skin equivalent onto a fake head. 

They also created a robotic face covered with a dermis equivalent that can smile. When the machine produces a "sliding motion" to mimic the movement of our face when we smile, the fabricated skin deforms to create a smiling expression. While the result could come across as creepy for some, we think the cute pink blob looks like the Moisturize Me meme after it's been thoroughly moisturized, or a very ruddy and shiny Thomas the Tank Engine. 

A pink, smiling blob.
University of Tokyo

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/this-cute-pink-blob-could-lead-to-realistic-robot-skin-130019452.html?src=rss

Rabbit R1 security issue allegedly leaves sensitive user data accessible to anybody

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The team behind Rabbitude, the community-formed reverse engineering project for the Rabbit R1, has revealed finding a security issue with the company's code that leaves users' sensitive information accessible to everyone. In an update posted on the Rabbitude website, the team said it gained access to the Rabbit codebase on May 16 and found "several critical hardcoded API keys." Those keys allow anybody to read every single response the R1 AI device has ever given, including those containing the users' personal information. They could also be used to brick R1 devices, alter R1's responses and replace the device's voice. 

The API keys they found authenticate users' access to ElevenLabs' text-to-speech service, Azure's speech-to-text system, Yelp (for review lookups) and Google Maps (for location lookups) on the R1 AI device. In a tweet, one of Rabbitude's members said that the company has known about the issue for the past month and "did nothing to fix it." After they posted, they said Rabbit revoked Elevenlabs' API key, though the update broke R1 devices for a bit. 

In a statement sent to Engadget, Rabbit said it was only made aware of an "alleged data breach" on June 25. "Our security team immediately began investigating it," the company continued. "As of right now, we are not aware of any customer data being leaked or any compromise to our systems. If we learn of any other relevant information, we will provide an update once we have more details." It didn't say if it revoked the keys the Rabbitude team said it found in the company's code. 

Rabbit's R1 is a standalone AI assistant device designed by Teenage Engineering. It's meant to help users accomplish certain tasks, like placing food delivery orders, as well as to quickly look up information like the weather. We gave it a pretty low score in our review, because we found that its AI functionality often didn't work. Further, users can simply use their phone instead of having to spend an extra $199 to buy the device.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/rabbit-r1-security-issue-allegedly-leaves-sensitive-user-data-accessible-to-anybody-120024215.html?src=rss

Julian Assange pleads guilty to espionage but defends himself in court

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Julian Assange has formally pleaded guilty to violating the Espionage Act at a federal courthouse in Saipan, the capital of Northern Mariana Islands. The WikiLeaks founder was released from prison on June 24 after reaching a plea deal with the US government and quickly boarded a plane at Stansted Airport to make his way to Saipan. While the deal required Assange to plead guilty to "conspiring to unlawfully obtain and disseminate classified information relating to the national defense of the United States," he still defended himself in court. 

According to The Washington Post, Assange argued that he should've been protected by the First Amendment as a journalist. "Working as a journalist, I encouraged my source to provide information that was said to be classified in order to publish that information," he said. "I believe the First Amendment protected that." He also said that he believes the First Amendment and the Espionage Act are in contradiction of each other, but he accepts that his actions were in "violation of an espionage statute" and that it would be "difficult to win such a case given all the circumstances." 

A lawyer for the US government, however, accused him of encouraging personnel with high security clearances to expose classified military information and threaten national security. If you'll recall, WikiLeaks published classified information related to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which was obtained by whistleblower and former Army intelligence officer Chelsea Manning, under his leadership. 

Lawyers from both sides argued about the time Assange served in prison, but around three hours after the proceeding started, Chief Judge Ramona V. Manglona declared that the 62 months he spent in Belmarsh Prison was reasonable and on par with the time served by Manning. Assange will not spend any time in US custody, but he has to leave the US Northern Mariana Islands immediately. The same private jet that flew him from London to Saipan flew him back to Canberra, Australia, because he wasn't allowed to fly commercial, according to his wife Stella Assange. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/julian-assange-pleads-guilty-to-espionage-but-defends-himself-in-court-030516412.html?src=rss

Google rolls out Gemini side panels for Gmail and other Workspace apps

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Google is making Gemini more easily accessible in its Workspace apps, if you're a paying customer. The company is rolling out Gemini side panels for Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drive and Gmail, and it has also launched Gemini for the Gmail app on Android and iOS. When Google announced the Gemini side panels at I/O this year, it called the feature “the connective tissue across multiple applications with AI-powered workflow."

The side panel in Docs will help you refine and rephrase what you're writing, summarize information, suggest improvements and create new content based on other files. In Sheets, it can help you create tables, generate formulas and demystify various Sheets functions by teaching you how to do certain tasks. The side panel in Slides can help you generate custom images and summarize presentations, while in Drive, it can summarize several documents at once without you having to open any of them. 

Meanwhile, Gemini can summarize email threads in Gmail for you, suggest responses, help you draft new emails and help you find information from within your inbox or from your Drive files. Gemini in Gmail for Android and iOS can summarize your email threads, as well. There's no side panel in the mobile apps, of course, but you'll find a button near the top of your email that you can tap to generate a summary. Sometime next month, Gemini will offer contextual smart replies, which are one-tap response options based on the contents of your conversations. Gmail Q&A will also be available next month and will be able to find information from your emails when you type in questions like "What time does Chloe’s recital start on Saturday?"

You'll be able to use these features if you're paying for Google One AI Premium, or if you have access to Gemini add-in for Business, Enterprise, Education and Education Premium. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/google-rolls-out-gemini-side-panels-for-gmail-and-other-workspace-apps-123038034.html?src=rss

Julian Assange has been released from prison in a plea deal with the US

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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been released from prison and has agreed to plead guilty to violating the Espionage Act. The WikiLeaks account on X, formerly Twitter, has announced his release after being granted bail by the High Court in London. It also tweeted a video that appears to show Assange boarding a plane at Stansted Airport. The WikiLeaks founder and former editor-in-chief is expected to appear in a courtroom in the US Northern Mariana Islands on June 26 in order to finalize his plea deal with the US government. 

According to a letter from the US Department of Justice obtained by The Washington Post, Assange is specifically pleading guilty to "conspiring to unlawfully obtain and disseminate classified information relating to the national defense of the United States." He will also be returning to Australia, his country of citizenship, right after the proceedings. CBS News reports that Justice Department prosecutors recommended a sentence of 62 months, and seeing as Assange already spent more than five years in a UK prison, he won't be spending any time behind bars in the US. 

Assange was the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks when the website published US classified information, obtained by whistleblower and former Army intelligence officer Chelsea Manning, about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2010, Sweden issued an arrest warrant for Assange over allegations of sexual assault by two women. Swedish authorities dropped their investigation into the rape allegations in 2017. 

Assange sought asylum at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London after losing his appeal against the warrant, and he lived there for seven years until he was evicted. Lenín Moreno, the president of Ecuador at the time, explained that his asylum was "unsustainable and no longer viable" because he displayed "discourteous and aggressive behavior." London's Metropolitan Police Service removed Assange from the embassy and arrested him on behalf of the US under an extradition warrant.

In WikiLeaks' announcement of his release, it said Assange left Belmarsh maximum security prison "after having spent 1,901 days there." The organization said that the "global campaign" by "press freedom campaigners, legislators and leaders from across the political spectrum" enabled "a long period of negotiations with the US Department of Justice" that led to the plea deal. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/julian-assange-has-been-released-from-prison-in-a-plea-deal-with-the-us-044226610.html?src=rss

AI companies are reportedly still scraping websites despite protocols meant to block them

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Perplexity, a company that describes its product as "a free AI search engine," has been under fire over the past few days. Shortly after Forbes accused it of stealing its story and republishing it across multiple platforms, Wired reported that Perplexity has been ignoring the Robots Exclusion Protocol, or robots.txt, and has been scraping its website and other Condé Nast publications. Technology website The Shortcut also accused the company of scraping its articles. Now, Reuters has reported that Perplexity isn't the only AI company that's bypassing robots.txt files and scraping websites to get content that's then used to train their technologies. 

Reuters said it saw a letter addressed to publishers from TollBit, a startup that pairs them up with AI firms so they can reach licensing deals, warning them that "AI agents from multiple sources (not just one company) are opting to bypass the robots.txt protocol to retrieve content from sites." The robots.txt file contains instructions for web crawlers on which pages they can and can't access. Web developers have been using the protocol since 1994, but compliance is completely voluntary. 

TollBit's letter didn't name any company, but Business Insider says it has learned that OpenAI and Anthropic — the creators of the ChatGPT and Claude chatbots, respectively — are also bypassing robots.txt signals. Both companies previously proclaimed that they respect "do not crawl" instructions websites put in their robots.txt files. 

During its investigation, Wired discovered that a machine on an Amazon server "certainly operated by Perplexity" was bypassing its website's robots.txt instructions. To confirm whether Perplexity was scraping its content, Wired provided the company's tool with headlines from its articles or short prompts describing its stories. The tool reportedly came up with results that closely paraphrased its articles "with minimal attribution." And at times, it even generated inaccurate summaries for its stories — Wired says the chatbot falsely claimed that it reported about a specific California cop committing a crime in one instance. 

In an interview with Fast Company, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas told the publication that his company "is not ignoring the Robot Exclusions Protocol and then lying about it." That doesn't mean, however, that it isn't benefiting from crawlers that do ignore the protocol. Srinivas explained that the company uses third-party web crawlers on top of its own, and that the crawler Wired identified was one of them. When Fast Company asked if Perplexity told the crawler provider to stop scraping Wired's website, he only replied that "it's complicated." 

Srinivas defended his company's practices, telling the publication that the Robots Exclusion Protocol is "not a legal framework" and suggesting that publishers and companies like his may have to establish a new kind of relationship. He also reportedly insinuated that Wired deliberately used prompts to make Perplexity's chatbot behave the way it did, so ordinary users will not get the same results. As for the inaccurate summaries that the tool had generated, Srinivas said: "We have never said that we have never hallucinated."

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai-companies-are-reportedly-still-scraping-websites-despite-protocols-meant-to-block-them-132308524.html?src=rss

The new Apple Pencil Pro is on sale for the first time since launch

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The Apple Pencil Pro is currently on sale for $119 on Amazon, or $10 lower than its original price. While that's not a massive discount, it's the first time the new iPad accessory has gone on sale since it came out in mid-May. If you've been looking to get the model as soon as possible, this is a great chance to at least get it at a lower price than usual. The Apple Pencil Pro comes equipped with a sensor that can recognize squeezes, which can bring up tool palettes, activate shortcuts and do other actions. A haptic engine then delivers tangible feedback to serve as confirmation for each gesture and action you perform. You can also change the orientation of the shaped pen and brush tool by rotating the barrel of the stylus. 

The Apple Pencil lineup can be a bit confusing, seeing as you now have four models to choose from that work with different iPad models. Apple's Pencil Pro works with latest iPads, namely the 11- and 13-inch iPad Air (M2), and the 11- and 13-inch iPad Pro (M4), so it's the one to get if you're also buying one of the company's newest tablets. To note, the new stylus retains the second-gen Pencil's shape and matte finish, though it's a bit lighter. And it still pairs and charges magnetically with compatible iPads. In addition, the new Apple Pencil works with the company's Find My network. If it's not attached to an iPad, and you misplace it, you can simply log into Apple's Find My and track it down.

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This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-new-apple-pencil-pro-is-on-sale-for-the-first-time-since-launch-113052630.html?src=rss

SpaceX starts selling the Starlink Mini for $599 in select locations

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SpaceX has started offering some users a new Starlink kit that's small enough to fit in a backpack, so users can take it wherever they want to and get access to the company's satellite internet service. The Starlink Mini will cost users $599 up front, according to the emails SpaceX has sent out. That's $100 more than the standard dish kit, and users will need to have an existing standard service plan because they can only tack on the Mini Roam service for an additional fee of $30 a month. As TechCrunch notes, a Starlink residential customer will have to pay $150 every month in all if they also get the Mini. 

The smaller dish may not cost that much forever, though. SpaceX said in its message that it's working to make Starlink more affordable as a whole, and that it's only offering a limited number of Mini kits "in regions with high usage" for now. A few days ago, company chief Elon Musk talked about the Mini on X (formerly known as Twitter) and called it a "great low-cost option." He also said that it will cost "about half the price of the standard dish to buy and monthly subscription."

In SpaceX's message, it said the Starlink Mini dish comes with a built-in Wi-Fi router, so it's not only smaller than the standard version, it also needs fewer components to access the internet. It also consumes less power, has DC power input and is capable of download speeds that go over 100 Mbps. In addition to the dish itself, the kit will ship with a kickstand, a pipe adapter, a power supply and a cord with a USB-C connector on one end and a barrel jack on the other. 

As the company mentioned in its message, it's only rolling out to select areas with high usage at the moment. But Michael Nicolls, VP of Starlink Engineering, said on X that the company is ramping up production of the Mini and that it will be available in international markets soon. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/spacex-starts-selling-the-starlink-mini-for-599-in-select-locations-041258500.html?src=rss