Here’s how to use a smart display to warm hearts and liven up your decor this season.
Source: CNET
Hand-held gimbals have largely been the realm of pro videographers. But DJI is looking to change things up with an ultra-portable take on its popular Osmo line. The Osmo Pocket is a four-inch-tall version of the drone maker’s camera stabilizer that can either be plugged into an iPhone or utilized as a standalone.
At $349 it’s not exactly cheap — in fact, it’s about twice what the Osmo Mobile 2 is currently going for on Amazon. That’s due in part to the inclusion of a one-inch touchscreen that lets you shoot and preview videos without an external camera. Of course, it can also be used in tandem with an iPhone or Android device via a Lighting or USB-C dongle.
I suspect that pricing is going to inhibit the product’s ability to reach a more mainstream audience — especially with all of the things users can currently accomplish with just an iPhone. But the Pocket incorporates DJI’s impressive technologies and shot modes to accomplish some pretty cool videos.
The device can actively recognize and track an image with a few taps. There are also FaceTrack, time-lapse, FPV, selfie and panorama features built in. For quick, production-quality shots, there are a number of different shot modes, similar to the ones found on the company’s Mavic drones. Story Mode features 10 templates, and Pro Mode gives the shooter a wide range of controls over the final shot.
The gimbal does three-axis stabilization to keep shots steady, while the camera can shoot 12-megapixel images and 4K video up to 60fps.
I had the opportunity to play around with the device a bit this week, ahead of today’s announcement, and found it to be fairly intuitive. We’ll get more time with the gimbal in the near future, and hopefully get some more insight into precisely what justifies the $350 price tag. For now, it seems prohibitively expensive for a product that’s clearly trying to sneak out just in time for the holidays.
It’s a hefty price tag for a product that will admittedly make for some very cool Instagram stories — but I’m more than happy to be proven wrong here. The company is going to offer up a bunch of different accessories to make the Osmo a bit more diverse, including a waterproof case and action camera-style mount, so it can double as something akin to a GoPro. There’s a wireless charging case, as well, which extends the battery by around two hours.
The Osmo Pocket is available through DJI for pre-order today and starts shipping December 15.
Source: TechCrunch
For YouTubers and video influencers, this tiny face-tracking video camera might be the best thing since, well, the previous Osmo—and rival the GoPro.
Source: Wired
Researchers warn that utilities hackers don’t need to cause blackouts to do damage.
Source: Wired
The new $113,200 911 continues the evolution of the famed model with a refined design, pepped up performance, and a trick for detecting slick streets.
Source: Wired
Earlier this year, the U.S. government tried to force Facebook to secretly recode its Messenger app to allow the feds to listen into an encrypted, real-time voice call on suspected members associated with the notorious MS-13 gang.
It was only when reporters revealed that when Facebook declined, the feds pushed the court to hold the company in contempt. The case collapsed, but details of the case remain under seal and out of the public eye.
Now, the ACLU wants to know how the feds tried to pull it off.
The rights and civil liberties group filed a motion in California on Wednesday to ask the judge to unseal the case to reveal exactly what the government asked that was enough to convince the court to demand Facebook dismantle Messenger’s encryption in the first place. The motion also wants to know what legal grounds the Justice Department had to compel Facebook to undermine the security in its own product — and for what reason the court pushed back.
Jennifer Granick, the ACLU’s surveillance and cybersecurity counsel, said the public “deserves to know why the government thought it could dismantle measures that protect their right to privacy online.”
“The outcome of this legal dispute between Facebook and the Justice Department has the potential to affect the private communications of millions of Americans who use communication services such as Messenger, WhatsApp, Skype, and Microsoft Outlook,” she said.
It’s the latest in several attempts in recent years to compel a company to rework its products to help the government conduct surveillance. But because Facebook won its legal challenge in private, experts warn that other companies facing similar efforts to undermine their products will not be able to use Facebook’s legal precedent in their own defense.
“In a world constantly changing due to rapid advances in technology, the American legal system must keep pace,” said Kara Brandeisky and Kristin Mulvey, two law students at New York University’s School of Law, who helped write the motion. “That can’t happen if we don’t even know what the law says about our right to privacy and security.”
The ACLU’s motion was joined by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Stanford’s Riana Pfefferkorn.
Facebook declined to comment. A spokesperson for the Justice Department also declined to comment.
Source: TechCrunch
Inspired by do-it-yourselfers, Amazon is offering a radio controlled car that learns to drive by repeated trial and error.
Source: Wired
Amazon’s AWS today launched Amazon Forecast, a new pre-built machine learning tool that will make it easier for developers to generate predictions based on time-series data. While predictions are pretty much the most standard use case for machine learning, building them still takes some skill. Amazon, of course, has already built plenty of these models for its own needs, so now it is essentially turning them into a product.
“With just three clicks, you can give us the information and get a forecast,” AWS CEO Andy Jassy said in today’s AWS re:Invent keynote. “It’s super simple and when we benchmarked with customers in the private beta and ourselves, it’s providing up to 50 percent more accurate forecasts than what people were doing on their own before at one-tenth of the cost of traditional supply chain software.”
Amazon, in its retail business, built a number of models to handle its own data. This is essentially the same technology that Amazon uses to forecast demand on its retail site. Users provide the company with all of their supply chain data and then give the service the variables that could have impact on the forecast.
Behind the scenes, AWS looks at the data and the signal and then chooses from eight different pre-built algorithms, trains the model, tweaks it and provides the forecast.
AWS is also making it easy to integrate this service with SAP’s and Oracle’s supply chain tools, as well as Amazon’s new Timestream database service.
The service isn’t necessarily cheap, but it will surely save developers a lot of time.
Source: TechCrunch
Amazon today announced AWS DeepRacer, a fully autonomous 1/18th scale race car that aims to help developers learn machine learning. Priced at $399 but currently offered for $249, the race car lets developers to get hands-on – literally – with a machine learning technique called reinforcement learning (RL).
RL takes a different approach to training models than other machine learning techniques, Amazon explained.
It’s a type of machine learning that works when an “agent” is allowed to act on a trial-and-error basis within an interactive environment. It does so using feedback from those actions to learn over time in order to reach a predetermined goal or to maximize some type of score or reward.
This makes it different from other machine learning techniques – like Supervised Learning, for example – as it doesn’t require any labeled training data to get started, and it can make short-term decisions while optimizing for a long-term goal.
The new race car lets developers experiment with RL by learning through autonomous driving.
Developers first get started using a virtual car and tracks in a cloud-based 3D racing simulator, powered by AWS RoboMaker. Here, they can train an autonomous driving model against a collection of predefined race tracks included with the simulator, then evaluate them virtually or choose to download them to the real-world AWS DeepRacer car.
They can also opt to participate in the first AWS DeepRacer League at the re:Invent conference, where the car was announced. This event will take place over the next 24 hours in the AWS DeepRacer workshops and at the MGM Speedway and will involve using Amazon SageMaker, AWS RoboMaker, and other AWS services.
There are 6 main tracks each with a pit area, a hacker garage, and two extra tracks developers can use for training and experimentation. There will also be a DJ.
The League will continue after the event as well, with a series of live racing events starting in 2019 at AWS Global Summits worldwide. Virtual tournaments will also be hosted throughout the year, Amazon said, with the goal of winning the AWS DeepRacer 2019 Championship Cup at re:invent 2019.
As for the car’s hardware itself, it’s a 1/18th scale, radio-controlled, four-wheel drive vehicle powered by an Intel Atom processor. The processor runs Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, ROS (Robot Operating System), and the Intel OpenVino computer vision toolkit.
The car also includes a 4 megapixel camera with 1080p resolution, 802.11ac WiFi, multiple USB ports, and battery power that will last for about 2 hours.
It’s available for sale on Amazon here.
Source: TechCrunch
Personalization has long been at the forefront of Amazon’s business strategy. Today, it’s finally expanding to the company’s cloud storage arm, Amazon Web Services.
AWS has announced the launch of Amazon Personalize, a fully-managed service that puts personalization and recommendation under the control of developers.
AWS developers were already able to create recommendation models on Amazon SageMaker, but AWS’ latest update makes creating them much simpler and requires little machine learning experience. A new process called AutoML, which automates complicated ML tasks, “performs and accelerates the difficult work required to design, train, and deploy a machine learning model,” the company says.
AWS chief executive officer Andy Jassy unveiled the new feature, as well as several others, on stage at the company’s annual re:Invent conference this morning.
“One of the core tenets of our business is that with no physical boundaries we can have millions of items available,” Jassy said. “We worried if we didn’t find a way to give people signal through the noise, the catalog size would be overwhelming, so we built personalization … Necessity was the mother of invention for us.”
Dive deep into the new service here.
Source: TechCrunch