Category: Technology

Jamie Siminoff, who founded Ring and created the video doorbell that started it all, is stepping down as the company’s CEO. In a blog post, Siminoff explained that invention is his true passion and that he’s focusing on creating new products for the company as its Chief Inventor instead. 

Apparently, the rest of the Ring team has known about his transition plans and his search for a new chief since June last year. From March 22nd, the company will be led by former Discord COO Elizabeth Hamren. The new CEO will also head up the Blink, Amazon Key and Amazon Sidewalk divisions. 

Siminoff shared how Ring’s first video doorbell was created in his garage and how it grew into a company that offers products across several categories, like cameras, alarms and even security drones. In 2018, Amazon acquired the company in a bid to take Nest head on, allowing Ring to scale up its production and reach customers it wasn’t able to before. 

Over the past few years, though, Siminoff also had to deal with the fallout over Ring’s close relationship with law enforcement. The company came under fire from lawmakers and privacy advocates after it was revealed that it had formed partnerships with over 600 police forces across the US. To be specific, it allowed authorities to keep homeowners’ videos indefinitely and to share them with anyone they want. Ring ultimately changed the way it handled video requests from law enforcement agencies in 2021, when it required them to make public requests within 12 hours of an incident if they want a copy of users’ surveillance videos. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ring-founder-jamie-siminoff-is-stepping-down-as-ceo-114056547.html?src=rss 

Space agencies and private companies around the world have been scheduling their own lunar missions over the next few years, and that could be quite complicated to coordinate when they all use different time zones. During a meeting at the European Space Agency’s ESTEC technology center in the Netherlands last year, space organizations discussed the “importance and urgency of defining a common lunar reference time.”

In a new announcement, ESA navigation system engineer Pietro Giordano said a “joint international effort is now being launched towards achieving this.” There are a few challenges: They will have to decide whether to keep lunar time synchronized with Earth’s or not because clocks on the Moon run faster based on the satellite’s position. Each day on the Moon is, in Earth terms, 29.5 days long.

– Mat Smith

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Jack Dorsey launches his Twitter alternative, Bluesky

It’s out now in closed beta.

Jack Dorsey’s new Twitter alternative, Bluesky, is available in closed beta on the App Store. The invite-only app joins the list of Twitter substitutes, including Mastodon, as Twitter clings on through staff attrition and precarious stability. Bluesky began in 2019 as a Twitter-funded side project. Dorsey, who co-founded Twitter and was still CEO when the initiative started, saw it as a more open alternative to an increasingly centralized Twitter. Then, Bluesky spun off as its own company in 2021.

You’ll have to enter your email address to join the waitlist. The Bluesky app reportedly borrows heavily from Twitter. However, it includes minor differences like “What’s up?” in place of “What’s happening?” along with a simplified process of creating a post (which can also include photos) by selecting a plus button. So… yeah. It’s all pretty Twitter-esque.

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Sony 2023 Bravia XR TVs hands-on

Bigger, brighter and even more better looking.

One major company was missing from this year’s CES barrage of TVs: Sony. Now it’s finally ready to show off its latest flagship sets. Its 2023 line of Bravia XR TVs are all powered by the company’s Cognitive Processor XR, so they all include support for stuff like Sony’s XR Clear Image tech, which allows for adaptive noise reduction, auto HDR tone mapping and more. Sony is also trying to take as much of the guesswork out of setup as possible by making its TVs in the standard video or cinematic modes look great right out of the box. Read on for the full round-up of both the LED and OLED families.

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Meta apparently plans to launch its first true AR glasses in 2027

The company reportedly shared its AR/VR roadmap with employees.

Meta has shared its latest augmented and virtual reality hardware roadmap with employees, and according to The Verge, it’s planning to launch its first full-fledged AR glasses in 2027. While the company intends to release other AR glasses before then, the device it’s launching in four years is the same one Mark Zuckerberg believes could become Meta’s “iPhone moment.” The glasses, which will reportedly project avatars as high-quality holograms superimposed on the real world, are expected to be quite expensive.

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Airbnb is banning people ‘likely to travel’ with prohibited users

The company’s policies lean heavily on the side of homeowners.

Airbnb is banning users who may be associated with people the company deems a safety risk. Although the short-term rental company faces an impossible balancing act of making owners feel secure without discriminating unfairly against renters, its appeals process – a critical step in catching overreaches – appears to err on the side of perceived homeowner security.

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This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-morning-after-the-moon-needs-its-own-time-zone-121559989.html?src=rss 

A lot of users were obsessed with keeping up Snapstreaks after they launched, even maintaining streaks in the hundreds with several friends. Their popularity may have waned a little, because life can get in the way, but Snap has launched an experimental feature that could make it easier to keep things on track if you miss a day. Now, you can simply tap Restore to pretend that painful experience never happened. 

The catch is that, users will only get one free Snap Restore. As TechCrunch notes, if they want to prevent more Snapstreaks from going to waste, they’d have to buy more Restores from the app for $1 each in the US. In its announcement, the company also said that it’s introducing a new way for Snapchat+ subscribers to freeze their Streaks for long periods “soon.” While it didn’t expound on how the feature will work, Snap said it will allow users to put “things on pause when they know they’re going off the grid.”

These feature announcements come shortly after Snap added an OpenAI chatbot similar to ChatGPT to its app. The chatbot shows up as a regular user profile, probably to make it look more like a virtual friend, though Snap admits it could “be tricked into saying just about anything” and has even apologized for its “many deficiencies” in advance. At the moment, the chatbot is exclusively available to Snapchat+ users paying $4 a month for the service, but the company has plans to make it more widely available. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/snapchat-streak-restore-095639485.html?src=rss 

Dozens of Google Japan employees have organized under the Tokyo Managers’ Union. It’s the first labor union at Google Japan, according to Meiji University Assistant Professor Ken Yamazaki, who also posted a copy of the group’s statements from a press conference. Apparently, the employees chose to organize out of fear that they could be abruptly laid off, especially since some of them are in Japan on work visas. 

Their concerns stemmed from the tech giant’s announcement back in January that it’s cutting 12,000 jobs — that’s six percent of the company’s overall workforce — around the world. They said their counterparts in the US were terminated with just an email sent in the middle of the night, and that the Japanese office’s employees were left anxiously awaiting for the ax to fall over the past few weeks. The workers said they joined a labor union in response to that announcement and to news about the fate of the company’s employees in other countries. 

For a dismissal to be legal in Japan, a company has to prove that it has reasonable grounds to terminate an employee. However, some companies terminate employees without good reason by claiming to have problems with the worker. The group is hoping that joining a union would protect them from sudden termination. In the US, one of the divisions most affected by the job cuts was the company’s Area 120 in-house incubator, which works on experimental apps and products. The division used to develop 20 projects simultaneously, but that’s now down to three after most people in the team lost their jobs.

When Google announced it was going to let 12,000 workers go, Chief Executive Sundar Pichai said he was “deeply sorry” and that he takes “full responsibility for the decisions that led [the company] here.” He admitted that the tech giant went on a hiring spree over the last few years, but that Google “hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today.” According to the company’s latest earnings report, its revenue for the fourth quarter of 2022 grew one percent from the year before, but its quarterly net income was down 34 percent year-over-year. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/google-workers-in-japan-joined-labor-union-064417794.html?src=rss 

Tesla’s production capacities are in store for a significant growth spurt, CEO Elon Musk told the crowd assembled at the company’s Austin, Texas Gigafactory for Investor Day 2023 — and AI will apparently be the magic bullet that gets them there. It’s all part of what Musk is calling Master Plan part 3.

This is indeed Musk’s third such Master Plan, the first two coming in 2006 and 2016, respectively. These have served as a roadmap for the company’s growth and development over the past 17 years as Tesla has grown from neophyte startup to the world’s leading EV automaker. “There is a clear path to a sustainable energy Earth by 2050 and it does not require destroying natural habitats,” Musk said during the keynote address. 

“You could support a civilization much bigger than Earth [currently does]. Much more than the 8 billion humans could actually be supported sustainably on Earth and I’m just often shocked and surprised by how few people realize this,” he continued. He promised that the company would release a “detailed whitepaper with calculations & assumptions,” via Twitter during the event.

The Master Plan aims to establish a sustainable energy economy by developing 240 terraWatt hours (TWH) of energy storage and 30 TWH of renewable power generation, which would require an estimated $10 trillion investment, roughly 10 percent of the global GDP. Musk notes, however, that figure is less than half of what we spend currently on internal combustion economy. In all, he anticipates we’d need less than 0.2 percent of the world’s land area to create the necessary solar and wind generation capacity. 

“All cars will go to fully electric and autonomous,” Musk declared, arguing once again that ICE vehicles will soon be viewed in the same disdain as the horse and buggy. He also teased potential plans to electrify aircraft and ships. “As we improve the energy density of batteries, you’ll see all transportation go fully electric, with the exception of rockets,” he said. No further details as to when or how that might be accomplished were shared.

“A sustainable energy economy is within reach and we should accelerate it,” Drew Baglino, Tesla’s SVP of Powertrain and Energy Engineering, added.

Following Musk’s opening statement, Tesla executives Lars Moravy and Franz von Holzhausen took the stage to discuss the company’s “production hell” and the challenges of building the Cybertruck out of stainless steel. However, the lessons learned from that, Moravy argued will help Tesla build its Gen 3 vehicles more efficiently, and do so within a far smaller factory footprint. von Holzhausen announced to a rousing round of applause that the Cybertruck will arrive later this year, a significantly closer date than Musk’s previous public estimate that production wouldn’t begin until next year. 

Unfortunately, there will be no new vehicle reveal at this event, von Holzhausen said. That announce will happen “at a later date.”  

Developing…

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/elon-musk-lays-out-his-vision-for-teslas-future-at-the-companys-investor-day-2023-215737642.html?src=rss 

The United States Postal Service isn’t pinning all its electrification hopes on next-gen mail delivery vehicles. The service has signed a contract to buy 9,250 Ford E-Transit electric vans, with the first units arriving in December. The handover should be complete by the end of 2024, Ford adds. The USPS is also placing its early orders for over 14,000 charging stations for its facilities across the country.

The USPS already plans to buy at least 60,000 of its Next Generation Delivery Vehicles (NGDV) by 2028, with 75 percent of them being electric. The Ford vans are part of an additional plan to buy 21,000 “off-the-shelf” EVs. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy says this helps the USPS quickly act on a strategy that improves mail service and working conditions while keeping costs down for the self-sufficient agency. The total vehicle investment is expected to cost $9.6 billion, including $3 billion in funding thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act.

The charging network may not grow as quickly. The USPS expects to provide chargers to at least 75 locations within the next year, but doesn’t estimate how it will expand in following years.

The overall EV push represents a sharp break from the initial plans. The USPS originally expected that most of its NGDV orders would be for gas-based trucks. The Biden administration fought that approach, claiming that the USPS under DeJoy ignored Environmental Protection Agency advice, rejected public hearings and relied on “biased” estimates. The service challenged the administration before relenting and shifting most of its purchases to electric models.

The transition will play an important part in the government’s plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions for itself and the country at large. The USPS represents the largest federal vehicle fleet — its EV purchases will have a significant impact relative to other agencies.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-usps-is-buying-9250-ford-electric-vans-213034903.html?src=rss 

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and DALL-E 2, announced several significant changes today. First, it’s launching developer APIs for ChatGPT and the Whisper speech-transcription model. It also changed its terms of service to let developers opt out of using their data for improvements while adding a 30-day data retention policy.

The new ChatGPT API will use the same AI model (“gpt-3.5-turbo”) as the popular chatbot, allowing developers to add either unchanged or flavored versions of ChatGPT to their apps. Snap’s My AI is an early example, along with a new virtual tutor feature for the online study tool Quizlet and an upcoming Ask Instacart tool in the popular local-shopping app. However, the API won’t be limited to brand-specific bots mimicking ChatGPT; it can also power “non-chat” software experiences that could benefit from AI brains.

The ChatGPT API is priced at $0.002 per 1,000 tokens (about 750 words). Additionally, it’s offering a dedicated-capacity option for deep-pocketed developers who expect to use more tokens than the standard API allows. The new developer options join the consumer-facing ChatGPT Plus, a $20-per-month service launched in February.

Meanwhile, OpenAI’s Whisper API is a hosted version of the open-source Whisper speech-to-text model it launched in September. “We released a model, but that actually was not enough to cause the whole developer ecosystem to build around it,” OpenAI president and co-founder Greg Brockman toldTechCrunch on Tuesday. “The Whisper API is the same large model that you can get open source, but we’ve optimized to the extreme. It’s much, much faster and extremely convenient.” The transcription API will cost developers $0.006 per minute, enabling “robust” transcription in multiple languages and providing translation to English.

Finally, OpenAI revealed changes to its developer terms based on customer feedback about privacy and security concerns. Unless a developer opts in, the company will no longer use data submitted through the API for “service improvements” to train its AI models. Additionally, it’s adding a 30-day data retention policy while providing stricter retention options “depending on user needs” (likely meaning high-usage companies with budgets to match). Finally, it’s simplifying its terms surrounding data ownership, clarifying that users own the models’ input and output.

The company will also replace its pre-launch review process for developers with a mostly automated system. OpenAI justified the change by pointing out that “the overwhelming majority of apps were approved during the vetting process,” claiming its monitoring has “significantly improved.” “One of our biggest focuses has been figuring out, how do we become super friendly to developers?” Brockman said to TechCrunch. “Our mission is to really build a platform that others are able to build businesses on top of.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/openai-will-let-developers-build-chatgpt-into-their-apps-204737530.html?src=rss 

You’ll have to wait a bit longer to see Bigby Wolf’s next chapter. Telltale Games has announced that it’s delaying The Wolf Among Us 2, the sequel to its 2013 Fables comic adaptation, until next year. The company said it’s “committed to protecting the health of our team” in a statement on Twitter, a clear sign that it’s trying to avoid the burnout that reportedly plagued the previous iteration of Telltale. 

In an interview with IGN, Jamie Ottilie, the new Telltale CEO, also says the team needs time to switch over from Unreal Engine 4 to 5. That’ll involve redoing much of the company’s existing work, and together with hiring and production difficulties, it would make it tough to hit a 2023 release date. “Making games is difficult and they need time to be right,” he told IGN. “And it doesn’t do any of us any good to ship something that’s not ready.”

The Wolf Among Us 2 was originally announced in December of 2019, and for obvious pandemic-related reasons, development has been slower than Telltale originally predicted. The company still has its adaptation of The Expanse coming later this year, and in many ways that’s a more important title for its future. As much as we’re eager to see the continuation of The Wolf Among Us, Telltale also needs to build out new properties to survive.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-wolf-among-us-2-delay-2024-200813483.html?src=rss 

Energy weapons are real. Military and weapons researchers have developed microwave guns and lasers that can be used to disable soldiers or shoot down drones — but a new report from the CIA and other intelligence agencies say that these kinds of weapons probably aren’t responsible for the condition known as Havana Syndrome.

When US personnel overseas began suffering from unexplained headaches, nausea and hearing problems in 2016, many were quick to suspect foul play by a foreign adversary. A panel of experts concluded that the anomalous health incidents that came to be known as Havana Syndrome could plausibly have been caused by “pulsed electromagnetic energy,” prompting some of those afflicted with the condition to blame their symptoms on a mysterious new energy weapon, possibly wielded by Russian operatives. Now, seven intelligence agencies say that panel got it wrong.

The Washington Post reports that even after reviewing about 1,000 cases across the world, the CIA and half a dozen agencies concluded that it was unlikely that the symptoms were caused by a foreign adversary. Not by energy weapons, not from electronic surveillance, and not from unintentional exposure to radio waves or ultrasonic beams. Analysts simply couldn’t find any common pattern that linked the anomalous health incidents together that could suggest an intentional attack, noting that in some cases there wasn’t even a direct line of sight from which an energy weapon could have been used.

So, what does cause Havana Syndrome? Officials say that the majority of the cases they reviewed could be linked to pre-existing medical conditions. Environmental factors, like poor building ventilation, could also contribute to some of the symptoms — but the report simply couldn’t find a link to an intentional, external factor.

The report seems pretty confident that Russia isn’t using an experimental energy weapon to cause nausea, hearing loss and headaches, but officials say that new information could change that assessment: If intelligence reports reveal that a foreign government has developed technology capable of causing these symptoms, they’ll take another look and reassess.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/us-intelligence-report-says-havana-syndrome-probably-wasnt-caused-by-energy-weapons-194301622.html?src=rss 

Rivian’s new battery option is coming alongside some less-than-pleasant news. The EV brand is recalling 12,716 R1T pickups and R1S SUVs from the 2022 model year over an airbag deployment problem. A supplier’s flawed seatbelt sensors can prevent the front passenger airbag from deploying properly. The car won’t necessarily notify occupants, ether.

The firm tells Engadget safety is its “top priority,” and that the free repair shouldn’t take more than 30 minutes. In its report with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), Rivian says it isn’t aware of any injuries stemming from the issue. The company estimates that one percent of vehicles covered in the recall may be affected, and that it stopped building R1T and R1S models with the “suspect” sensor on September 15th of last year.

The recall is tiny compared to those at rivals like Tesla, which (among other issues) had to update more than 1 million cars due to pinching windows. However, Rivian only produced 24,337 cars in all of 2022. Roughly half of its yearly output is subject to this notice, in other words. As Electrekobserves, this also comes months after a 13,000-unit recall over a potential steering control fault, and nearly a year after another airbag sensor glitch prompted a 502-car recall.

This isn’t likely to significantly hurt Rivian’s finances. However, the timing isn’t ideal. Rivian just announced its second round of layoffs, and has already taken other steps to shave costs as it deals with a tough economy. The fledgling automaker still needs to ramp up demand as it seeks profitability, and recalls like this don’t help its cause.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/rivian-recalls-more-than-12700-evs-over-airbag-deployment-flaw-201518265.html?src=rss