Microsoft is now giving people a chance to settle arguments about whether they have a doppelganger once and for all with a The service, launched Friday, lets people upload a pair of photos to the web and get back a similarity score that ranges from completely unrelated to “OMG, clones!!!” It’s powered by Microsoft’s Project Oxford Face API, which lets developers handle image recognition problems, like determining whether people are related, by using the company’s Azure cloud platform. This is another novel use of Microsoft’s image recognition technology, which the company first put on display with the
It's mostly games and entertainment this week, but that's a nice change of pace.
Computex. Fallout 4. Steam Machines. Steam That, plus our first look at The Kickstarter project for inXile's
Owners of fixed-code garage door openers might want to consider upgrading them because a researcher has developed a technique that guesses the numbers in seconds. To showcase the new attack, which he dubbed Open Sesame, security researcher Samy Kamkar With a fixed-code garage door opener, the remote control, or “clicker” always transmits the same 8 to 12-bit binary code. For a 12-bit code, there are 4,096 possible combinations—strings of 1s and 0s.
Facing life in prison, Ross Ulbricht is appealing his seven convictions for operating Silk Road, the illegal drugs online marketplace. Ulbricht’s lawyer, Joshua Dratel, has not decided yet what issues the appeal will be based on, according to Dratel’s office. Last week, Judge Katherine Forrest, who oversaw the jury case at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York,
In the past few years, we’ve seen a wave of new inexpensive Windows tablets and laptops, starting with the release of Windows 8. But as you may have found out the hard way, these lower-end tablets and laptops usually offer little internal disk space: as low as 32GB and even 16GB in newer models. Since Windows and basic software can easily take up double-digits’ worth of gigabytes or more, there is typically little or no room left for extra applications, games, photos, documents, and other personal files. Though you can usually pop in a MicroSD card or a flash drive to get more disk space, you won’t find a way in the graphical interface to have the modern-style Windows Store apps—which can consume a ton of disk space—install onto removable storage. However, it is possible with a registry hack in both Windows 8 and 8.1, giving you another way to help conserve your internal disk space.
As promised last week, Google has made a major change to the Android TV app store, letting users browse every app instead of a tiny, curated collection. Google says there are now 600 “new” apps in the Google Play Store for Android TV, though in reality many of these apps aren't new. They've just been hidden from the main storefront, so the only way to find them was to search by name. The latest Play Store update lets you browse the full store without searching. Just scroll to the bottom of the screen, and select any category from the Apps or Games menus. You'll have to wade through a fair amount of junk, niche tools, and apps of questionable value, but there are some interesting finds if you're willing to hunt around. (I'm intrigued, for instance, by
Yahoo says it’s all about Yahoo says it can no longer service the built-in mail app for iOS 4 and earlier. Anyone running that system will have to turn to Yahoo Mail’s web app. The company says it is doing this “in order to maintain focus on the security, speed, and functionality of Yahoo Mail on the latest systems.”
Wireless carriers say you don't actually want unlimited data, and they're totally spot-on.
Let’s face it: some of the tasks we do every day are pretty mundane. Maybe even downright boring. Yet, we still have to do them. Whether it’s checking email and making sure we’ve responded to all of the appropriate messages, or remembering to write that daily report every single day, there’s a lot of stuff do to. But staying motivated to complete even the most tedious of tasks doesn’t have to be a chore in itself. Here are three apps that make it downright fun. It may not look like much, but that simple green dot is the start of what should be a very long chain, representing plenty of completed tasks.
Expectations are a big part of watching movies. The right kind of expectations can turn a movie into a success, but the wrong kind can turn viewers away. Thanks to streaming, we can return to certain movies again and again, even decades later, and watch them with fresh eyes. The reasons can be myriad. It could be because a beloved actor isn’t playing the right kind of part, because a screenplay has been adapted from a beloved book, or because it’s a remake of a beloved movie. Sometimes a once-lightweight entertainment can turn into a classic, and a marginalized indie movie can turn into a favorite. Here are nine movies that deserve a second shot; for some, it might be a first shot.
Acer couldn’t keep the mystery around the launch of its highly-anticipated Acer Predator 8-inch gaming tablet bottled up for too long. The tablet could launch sometime in September, with a big event planned for Europe, said a representative at the Acer booth on the Computex show floor this week. The tablet was first shown on stage in April at a lavish event at the World Trade Center in New York. At the time, Acer CEO Jason Chen said during an interview that the tablet details were being finalized and more details would be shared at launch. However, no specific launch date was provided. But
Microsoft gave its privacy policy and service agreement a facelift Thursday, and offered users a new central clearinghouse to manage privacy settings for all the data the company keeps about them. The newly-minted
Google and Adobe The new functionality, enabled by default in the latest beta release of Chrome, will automatically pause bits of Flash content the browser determines “arent central to the webpage.” Important items, like the main video on a page, will play uninhibited. If Chrome pauses content that users want to see, they can click on it to resume playback. The change should make webpages with that sort of content load faster and reduce the amount of battery they use.
