Daily Tech Headlines – July 22, 2016
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| Daily Tech Headlines – July 22, 2016 | |
| Number | 32 |
| Broadcast Date | JULY 22, 2016 |
| Episode Length | 7:18 |
| Hosts | Tom Merritt |
Nvidia’s 4th big video card in two months, Google improves comics, Facebook soars in the air.
Headlines
- At a Stanford University AI meeting Nvidia announced its GTX Titan X video card will arrive August 2nd for $1200 in the US and Europe. The Pascal-architecture card can do 11 teraflops of FP32 performance, a 24% jump over the GTX 1080, and 60% over the previous Titan X. It's new GP102 chip has 3,584 CUDA cores running at a at a 1.417GHz base clock and 1.531GHz boost clock. It also has 12 GB of GDDR5X memory (no HBM2 here) running at an effective 10GHz and attached to a wide 382-bit bus, resulting in a 480GB/s of memory bandwidth. It draws the same max TDP of 250 Watts. It can connect by DisplayPort 1.4, HDMI 2.0b, and dual-link DVI. This is NVidia's 4th new card release in 2 months.
- Pokémon Go launched in Japan Friday with McDonald's as a sponsor hosting gym locations. You can fill in the rest of the blanks about excited people and accidents.
- Edward Snowden and Andrew “Bunnie” Huang have developed a device to detect whether a cell phone is making radio transmissions when the owner's think the radios are turned off. The introspection engine is a tiny computer attached to the smartphone through a battery case. It has its own screen and is planned to make a noise of radio is detected and possibly have a kill switch to cut the phone's power. It will be open source for software and hardware. The pair have figured out how to tap into 12 test points in an iPhone 6. The next step is to build a prototype. Snowden and Huang will present their research at the MIT Forbidden Research event Thursday.
- Facebook Connectivity Lab announced Thursday that it flew a full-scale version of Aquila, its solar-powered high altitude UAV meant to provide Internet from the air, on June 28th. The Aquila has the wingspan of a Boeing 737 though its body is much smaller. The intended 30-minute test was successful enough to go for 90 minutes. Facebook intends future tests to fly faster, higher, and longer, and above 60,000 feet. The eventual goal is to fly UAVs for three months at a time over remote areas providing coverage over a 30-mile radius in remote areas. Challenges involve battery weight and government approval for the flights.
- Fusion reports police in Michigan asked Michigan State professor Anil Jain to reproduce a murder victim's fingerprint from a prerecorded scan in order to unlock a phone. Researchers have achieved success with this method before but its believed it will be the first time for it to be used in an active investigation. The Verge reports that Rose Eveleth who wrote the Fusion story says 3D printing was necessary because the victim's body was too decayed to be used.
- EFF filed suit on behalf of Johns Hopkins computer science researcher Matthew Green and hacker / inventor Andrew "bunnie" Huang, seeking confirmation that the DMCA"s rules against circumventing copy protection is restrictive, over-broad, and a violation of the First Amendment.
- Google introduced a feature called Bubble Zoom for people who buy comics from from the Play Books store. Google used machine learning to teach algorithms to recognize speech and thought bubbles. Readers tap a bubble to enlarge it and tap or use the volume button to move between bubbles. Bubble Zoom is enabled in Marvel and DC collected volumes to start with more titles and publishers to come. And of course it's only on Android.
- ReCode reports its sources say Verizon is close to closing a deal to buy Yahoo's core business for $5 billion. CNBC reports the deal would include real estate as well but not Yahoo's intellectual property portfolio.
- Android Police passes along Consumer Reports note that Samsung has identified and corrected a manufacturing problem that caused some Samsung Galaxy S7 models to have faulty water resistance. Alls S7 devices should now meet the IP68 standard of 30 minutes of submersion in up to 5 feet of water. Some S7s failed water resistance tests of that standard by Consumer Reports and CNET. Previously manufactured S7s will remain on shelves under a one-year warranty.
- Looks like Huawei has made it to the big time as a phone maker. Samsung is suing Huawei and a department store for 6 counts of patent infringement in a Beijing court claiming 161 million yuan ($24.14 million) in damages. Samsung asked for the Mate 8 and Honor smartphones to cease production and sales. In May, Huawei filed suits against Samsung in the US and China.
- Sony confirmed to GameSpot that its PS4 was the top selling game console in the US for June according to the NPD Group. Microsoft did not release its sales numbers. Nintendo only announced a 39% increase in 3DS sales over May. Overall console sales dropped 42% year over year in the US from $313.1 million to $181.5 million. Game software dropped 20% year over year. Overwatch was the best selling game in the US in June.
- Razer opened preorders for the HDK 2 VR headset made under the opensource VR initiative at www.razerzone.com/store/hdk2. The headset costs $399 and ships August 12th. If you oder before July 28th you get two free games, Descent: Underground and Radial G.
- Reuters reports Apple confirmed it plans to open its first store in Taiwan. The company posted retail job openings on its website Friday including "a leader for personnel training plans for the Taiwan Apple Store." Apple's Greater China revenue which includes Hong Kong and Taiwan fell 26% year over year last quarter. Apple attributed the decline mostly to Hong Kong.
- The Philipines has stopped accepting new applications for Uber and Grab drivers due to a backlog. 29,000 applications are pending mostly for Uber with 6,000 of them split between Grab and u-Hop. The company is reviewing its policies on fares including Uber's surge pricing. Conventional taxis are not allowed to fluctuate prices.
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| Preceded by: "Daily Tech Headlines – July 21, 2016" |
Daily Tech Headlines – July 22, 2016 |
Followed by: "Daily Tech Headlines – July 25, 2016" |