Google is rolling out a beta of Privacy Sandbox for Android starting today. The program is the company’s attempt to blend user privacy with targeted advertising, something the search giant has worked on for years in its planned shift away from cookie-based web tracking.
One of Privacy Sandbox’s pillars is the Topics API, which pulls a list of your top interests based on usage. It then compares them to a database from the Interactive Advertising Bureau and Google’s data. Partner publishers can ping the API, which responds with a list of interests to help serve relevant ads without sharing overly intrusive information. Google says stored interests are “kept for only three weeks, and old topics are deleted.” In addition, the data and processing are done on-device “without involving any external servers, including Google servers.”
The beta is the first time Privacy Sandbox has been available publicly on Android. Google is still working on Privacy Sandbox for Chrome (here’s the timeline), which it has been letting developers test for about a year. It says it received feedback from hundreds of companies, which has helped shape its approach.
Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) alert.
Apple
Privacy Sandbox is Google’s answer to Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT), which the iPhone maker introduced in iOS 14.5. The feature requires user consent to track them across other apps and websites. Google dismisses ATT as a “blunt approach” since it doesn’t offer an alternate way for app developers and advertisers to replace the lost income from cookie-based targeting.
Privacy vs. advertising is an arms race. When platforms like iOS block the old ways of profiting from ads, advertisers can (and do) resort to fingerprinting: collecting seemingly innocent device information that, when pieced together, may identify you nearly as well as cookies. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to detect and prevent. Google hopes Privacy Sandbox will strike the right balance between privacy and advertiser / developer revenue.
Google says the Privacy Sandbox beta will roll out gradually, starting with “a small percentage of Android 13 devices” and expanding from there. You’ll see a notification on your device inviting you to join the beta if selected. After accepting, you can visit the new Privacy Sandbox section in your device’s Settings menu to view tracked topics and opt out individually. Additionally, the menu lets you leave the program.
Samsung is running another round of discounts on storage devices, bringing several of the company's better SSDs and microSD cards to, or at least near, their lowest prices to date. Most of the discounts are available across Amazon, Best Buy and Samsung's own online store.
Among the highlights, the 2TB Samsung T7 Shield is back down to $150. That's about $25 below its usual street price and ties the lowest price we've seen for the ruggedized version of our favorite portable SSD. For a higher capacity, the 4TB model is down to a new low of $280, while the 1TB variant is $10 above its all-time low at $90. The standard T7, meanwhile, is also down to $90 for a 1TB model.
On the microSD side, the company's Evo Select card offers a good balance between price and performance. The 128GB version of that U3- and V30-rated card is down to $14, which is only $3 less than its usual rate but within 50 cents of its all-time low. If you need more space for your Switch, GoPro or what have you, the 512GB model is down to $48 — about $3 more than its previous low.
As for non-portable SSDs, the 980 Pro is technically older but remains a decent value for those looking to build a high-performing gaming PC. Its 1TB and 2TB models are down to $100 and $160, respectively, both of which represent all-time lows. The 980 Pro also meets Sony's requirements for expanding the storage of a PlayStation 5, though you'd need to add a heatsink alongside it. If you're buying for the PS5 specifically, it might be worth getting the version of the 980 Pro that comes with a heatsink built-in. That model's 1TB and 2TB variants are on sale for lows of $110 and $180. For a less intense PC build, the 970 Evo Plus is an older PCIe 3.0 drive but should still be fast enough for most needs. That one is down to $80 for 1TB, which is a roughly $20 discount and an all-time low.
In 1992, Matt Moneymaker had an experience that would change his life. Some local farmers had told him about a number of mysterious sightings deep in the forests of Ohio. Without the internet or social media, Moneymaker did what you did back then: He placed classified ads in the hope that these witnesses might come forward and share their story and, crucially, the location where it had happened.
“I went to the area where they had seen one, and I found tracks. And we heard their sounds, and I was at that point very, very, very committed to getting some video footage of these things” he told Engadget. Those things? Bigfoots. “From those classified ads, I got a bunch of calls and was able to plot them on a map. And then I actually talked to some of the witnesses who introduced me to other people in the area.”
In the thirty years since that lo-fi expedition, Bigfoot research has advanced significantly. Today your typical “squatcher” (as they informally call themselves) is more likely to carry a GPS and night vision goggles than a compass and binoculars. Because in a world of satellite broadband, 100-megapixel cameras and full-color night vision, blurry photos are starting to look a little quaint. Squatchers need to up their game, and they know this.
Allison Babka for CityBeat
Moneymaker is no stranger to the hunt. He is the President of the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO), but is perhaps best known as one of the main investigators on Animal Planet’s Finding Bigfoot. The show attracted millions of viewers and made its protagonists celebrities in the squatching world. But Moneymaker now hopes technology, not cable TV exposure, will be the tool that bags him the proof needed to silence the skeptics once and for all.
“Scientists will say that all these sightings of Bigfoot are just actually… they’re bear sightings, and people are mistaking them for bigfoots, and it's just, that never happens.”
This was one of the first things Moneymaker explained to me during our interview and it turned out to be eerily prescient. Just days later, a new study did the rounds claiming that most Bigfoot sightings were likely just bears. The related paper was technically published just before we spoke, but most media didn’t pick up the story until after.
As Moneymaker tells it, the reverse is true. “The very first thing their mind wants to compute is ‘it's a bear’” he said, adding “rather than, ‘this just couldn’t be a bear, this is walking on two legs and has long arms like a man and doesn't have pointy ears and a snout.’” Needless to say, for squatchers, they didn’t need a scientific paper to tell them that skeptics will assume most sightings were actually something ursine.
So how does a serious squatcher like Moneymaker think we’ll eventually put the matter to rest? The answer isn’t on the forest floor, it’s in the skies.
Last September, Moneymaker was invited to take part in the Bigfoot Basecamp Weekend in Ohio. It was here that he demonstrated his latest tech concept for finding these elusive creatures. At its core is a Mavic 2 Enterprise Advanced drone by DJI combined with Dronesense’s search and rescue software with a little dash of people power. Effectively, the same setup one might use to find a lost hiker, just with claws instead of Cliff bars.
Allison Babka for CityBeat
It’s important to note here that the Mavic 2 EA isn’t quite the Mavic 2 you see being flown by enthusiasts, wedding photographers and real estate professionals. The EA version is the same platform, but with more sensors and about three times the cost. Or half the cost of the equivalent Matrice series. The important feature on the Mavic 2 EA (and also the newer Mavic 3T) is the high-resolution thermal camera.
The revolution here isn’t so much the technology, as drones and thermal cameras are not new, it’s the price. “Thermal on a drone for $6,500? That's revolutionary. You know, that's a huge difference in terms of it being accessible and available to common non-governmental entities” Moneymaker said.
The live audience was originally there to be entertained. But according to Moneymaker, it turned out to be another part of the equation.
“We had an open speakerphone with the pilot, who was a few miles away. The audience was able to watch all this on a very big screen. [...] And on a very big screen, you can see more heat targets. So the audience was able to help direct him toward heat blips, and he was able to move his drone closer.”
As the event was a successful proof of concept, I asked Moneymaker why they don’t do them more often. “Using one at the Basecamp event was probably the first time that a thermal drone had been used systematically at a Bigfoot area. And so we're gonna go back and do it again in October” he said, before reminding me that squatchers rarely get funding and rely on sponsors. “I guess the point is, we'd love to go out and do that right now. We're trying to line up a benefactor to help us do that.”
Unfortunately, no Bigfoots were found on this occasion, but representatives from the local government seemed impressed enough that they pitched Moneymaker an idea. “[They] were really interested in tourism development around paranormal things. They had success developing things for Ghost Hunter tourism, that it brought people to little places, forgotten places that nobody ever had a reason to visit.”
The inspiration for using a drone with a thermal camera came from the Netflix show Night on Earth. Specifically the behind the scenes episode Shot in the dark. Much of the footage in that series wasn’t thermal, instead likely shot with something like Canon’s ME20F-SH which runs well into double-digit thousands for the body alone. But it was enough to spark the idea.
Still spinning from the Netflix series “Night on Earth”. WATCH IT!! Just two episodes and one is the behind-the-scenes cut, which is even more interesting. Thermal-drone technology now exits to do vast sweeping counts of large mammals with a line of drones. It can be used by BFRO
If you’re thinking about dabbling in a bit of squatching and have a modest budget, Moneymaker recommends investing in a good handheldthermal imager. The BFRO has even tried developing its own. The next thing he recommended was the best drone you can afford. At least with these two items you have aerial visibility during the day and the handheld for night. Make sure the thermal imager can record, as military style scopes don’t always offer that and visual evidence is obviously key here.
If you were thinking about night vision goggles, Moneymaker recommends getting an IR illuminator. “Even third-generation military night vision, if you have an in very dark conditions and you don't also have an infrared illuminator then you're not going to see very far.”
Between budget-stricken squatchers and other enthusiasts there isn’t a huge number of folk out there actively looking for Bigfoot, which is why most sightings are accidental. Logic would follow, then, that as phone cameras have proliferated the opportunity to catch a Bigfoot on camera has grown along with it. Not so, says Moneymaker.
“That's totally naive and ignorant. Because most sightings happen when these things are running across the road in the middle of the night in front of a car. That's your common Class A sighting. So unless you have a dashcam running, which most Americans do not, then you're not going to get it.”
Data for US dashcam use isn’t helpful, given the amount of population living in non-Bigfoot areas, but in Canada, it’s estimated that one in ten vehicles have at least one camera.
Moneymaker’s more enthusiastic about potential sightings from an unlikely source: Law enforcement. “I think there’s more potential that footage is going to come in, in the course of a law enforcement call and investigation than from us, because there's just more of them.”
And he’d be right. According to the drone center at Bard University, over 1,500 state and local agencies across the country are regularly using drones. That said, of that number only around 500 are using a model that supports a thermal camera. Even then, there’s no guarantee that they have one installed. This is at the state level, but we can be fairly confident that federal agencies are not using any DJI products at all, making sightings by the FBI, for example, extremely unlikely.
Perhaps a more accessible technological tool is social media. The BFRO has a strong presence on Facebook which allows it to receive potential sightings from anywhere. Before, cases were logged on the BFRO website, but the advent of Facebook started putting these posts in front of people that might otherwise not have been looking for Bigfoot news. Now, sightings can be shared around a local area swiftly and other witnesses come forward that might otherwise have kept it to themselves.
But there’s a negative aspect, too: Social media is famously an incubator for hoaxes, misinformation and outright lies and when your subject matter is already considered by many to be on the fringes, trust can be squandered just as quickly as it’s built. Or at the very least it makes it hard to know what’s sincere and what’s just for clout. Moneymaker says it’s not uncommon to see compilations of mostly fake videos with the occasional real sighting mixed in.
And there’s perhaps an even more formidable foe lurking in the shadows: AI image creation. All those Dall-E pictures you’ve seen recently may seem like fun, but in the right hands, the same tools can create some remarkably realistic pictures. For example, the one below, created by Instagram user Bitsquatch who is very upfront that these are not intended to be interpreted as real in any way, he only does it for fun.
“What I'm trying to do is just sort of visualize some of these classic Bigfoot type stories and some of the legends and the kind of the, the greatest hits so to speak” Bitsquatch said in an interview on an episode of the Bigfoot Society podcast.
“When I first started doing this, I was gonna send some messages to the various Bigfoot podcasts to say, ‘hey, be on it, be on the lookout, because it'd be pretty easy to fake an image’” he added. “Trail cam images, for instance, are very easy to create. I've never posted one. But the few I did, were like, wow, that that could definitely pass as the real thing.”
For the squatching community, that means they’ll have to work even harder to have any evidence taken seriously. That, compounded by the lack of funding is forcing people like Moneymaker to get more creative.
“One of the ways we're hoping to be able to support this is with a monetized live feed of the searches, like you would have a monetized feed to a concert. That's a lot of times now what the younger generation does, they'll have a Twitch feed. So we could potentially apply that to what we're doing.”
If all this seems like a lot of dedication for something that the mainstream has very little time for, that’s because it is. But then, tell that to the team of scientists that recently captured footage of a black-naped pheasant pigeon. First documented in 1882, the bird had long since been assumed extinct.
A team of researchers from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the American Bird Conservancy spent weeks on a rugged, remote island off the coast of Papua New Guinea, enduring extreme conditions. The hunt was proving fruitless, despite private funding and a high level of local knowledge. But, two days before the end of the expedition, the elusive bird was caught on a camera trap. It was a chance encounter that would change all of their lives, putting to bed 140 years of belief that the creature was nothing more than a myth.
Despite pumping the brakes on some growth plans and recently saying it would lay off more than 18,000 people, Amazon is still looking to expand its empire. The company intends to “go big” on its brick-and-mortar grocery store business, CEO Andy Jassy told the Financial Times.
Amazon bought Whole Foods in 2017 for $13.7 billion, but the company is far from dominating the grocery market like it has so many other sectors. The company's physical store division accounts for 3.4 percent of overall business and has grown only around 10 percent since the Whole Foods acquisition.
“We’re just still in the early stages,” Jassy told the Financial Times. “We’re hopeful that in 2023, we have a format that we want to go big on, on the physical side. We have a history of doing a lot of experimentation and doing it quickly. And then, when we find something that we like, doubling down on it, which is what we intend to do.”
Many of the layoffs Amazon recently announced were in its grocery division. It has closed several of its Fresh supermarkets and put plans to open new ones on hold as it tries to find a format and formula that works. Jassy noted that many Fresh locations opened in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and as such Amazon hasn't "had a lot of normalcy."
The physical retail business has struggled on other fronts. Almost a year ago, Amazon said it was closing all of its bookstores, 4-star shops and pop-up locations across the US and UK. The aim at the time was to focus more on the grocery side of things as well as physical clothing stores. However, Amazon took a $720 million hit last quarter due to slowing down its grocery expansion plans.
The marquee show on Apple TV+ is coming back after a year and a half. Apple has revealed that the third season of Ted Lasso will premiere March 15th, with a new episode (12 total) arriving every week. The teaser trailer below doesn't shed much light on the story, but those who've followed so far know there's a lot to resolve after the end of season two.
Season three has AFC Richmond fighting not just to prove itself after promotion to the Premier League, but against one of its former allies — Nate is now working for Rebecca's ex Rupert at West Ham United. Roy Kent has to fill Nate's shoes, while Ted, Rebecca and Keeley have to grapple with both personal and professional challenges. It's safe to presume the series' optimistic-but-not-naive tone will carry forward.
Much is riding on this new chapter. Ted Lasso remains Apple's best-known production, having earned multiple awards. It's potential proof the company can produce a quality show with a substantial run. With that said, Apple isn't quite so dependent on the comedy as it once was. Apple TV+ is gathering momentum with a number of well-received titles that include Severance, Slow Horses and the Oscar-winning CODA. The service is still small compared to streaming heavyweights like Amazon and Netflix, but it's no longer an untested rookie.
The European Union is one step closer to banning sales of new gas-powered cars. The European Parliament has voted in favor of a Council agreement requiring that all new passenger cars and vans produce zero emissions by 2035. The move also revises some 2030 targets. Officials will now require that at least 25 percent of car sales (and 17 percent of vans) are zero-emissions models if a company wants to qualify for incentives between 2025 and 2029. The incentive will go away in 2030.
The new rules task the European Commission with keeping an eye on real-world achievements. It will have until 2025 to develop a way to report data on the emissions of the "full life-cycle" of cars sold in the EU, and will track the gap between emission limits and real consumption data starting in 2026. From the end of 2025, the Commission will publish updates every two years to gauge progress toward zero-emissions transportation.
The Council still has to endorse the text before it can be published in the EU Official Journal and take effect. The measure loosens the pre-2035 transition rules for niche automakers that produce fewer than 10,000 new cars or 22,000 new vans per year, and those making fewer than 1,000 cars per year will still be exempt.
That final approval is largely a formality, however, and the EU's years-long move toward a gas car sales ban has already had its intended effect. Manufacturers like GM, Stellantis, Volvo and VW already plan to stop all combustion engine car sales in the region (and sometimes worldwide) by 2035 or earlier, while marques like Renault have committed to electrifying most of their lineup as soon as 2025. The shift is well underway — it's just a question of which companies finish first.
Amazon-owned Zoox has started offering driverless robotaxi rides in California after receiving a testing permit from the DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles), the company announced. Unlike the autonomous vehicles from Cruise and Waymo, Zoox's vehicles are purpose built for driverless taxi rides, so they have no steering wheel or pedals.
On February 11th, shortly after receiving the permit, Zoox conducted the "first run of its employee shuttle service in Foster City, California, marking the first time in history a purpose-built autonomous robotaxi without traditional driving controls carried passengers on open public roads," it wrote in a press release.
To get to that point, the company completed what it called "rigorous" testing with the vehicles on private roads. It also ran its L3 test fleet (hybrid Toyota Highlanders with safety drivers) over a million autonomous miles on data-gathering missions in San Francisco, Las Vegas and Seattle.
Zoox has been developing its unique vehicles since it launched nine years ago, and was acquired by Amazon in a $1.2 billion merger in the summer of 2020. Its robotaxis, introduced later that year, are relatively tiny at 3.63 meters (11.9 feet) long, have passenger bench seats that face each other, four-wheel steering and can drive in either direction. That makes them highly maneuverable, but they can also travel at speeds up to 75 MPH and run 16 hours on a charge thanks to the immense 133kWh battery packs.
Zoox will now offer full-time employees robotaxi rides between its Foster City offices during business hours. "As the company continues to advance its progress and secure additional government clearances, it will expand its service to the general public," the company wrote.
A group of Tesla workers in New York has sent company chief Elon Musk a letter stating their intention to unionize, according to Bloomberg. It could end up being the first Tesla union if successful, seeing as previous attempts fizzled out before organizers could petition for a vote. The employees involved in the campaign are in charge of labeling data for Tesla's Autopilot technology at the company's Buffalo, New York facility. Bloomberg says the group is asking for better pay, job security and a better work environment that eases the production pressures placed on them.
Workers told the news organization that they've been skipping bathroom breaks, since Tesla keeps a close eye on their every move. Apparently, the company monitors their keystrokes to see how long they spend on each particular task and how much time they spend working per day. They also said that the company shut down an internal chatroom where they can air their grievances, such as the how Tesla handles snow days. It was after that happened that the group started talking about unionizing. They're now planning to distribute Valentine-themed materials at the facility with links to a website where employees can sign union cards.
The employees are working with Service Employees International Union affiliate Workers United, which unionized Starbucks cafes across the US. While Workers United has a good track record, the group still faces a tough road ahead, considering Elon Musk is known to be a staunch critic of unions. In 2017, he fired back against allegations of poor working conditions at Tesla's Fremont factory and criticized the United Auto Workers (UAW) for inciting the company's workers to unionize. He said UAW's allegiance is in "giant car companies, where the money they take from employees in dues is vastly more than they could ever make from Tesla."
Last year, he also challenged UAW to hold a union vote, claiming that Tesla's (non-unionized) factory workers have the highest compensation in the auto industry. And let's not forget one of his perhaps most infamous tweets regarding unionization. In 2018, he tweeted that there's nothing stopping Tesla's workers from unionizing, but then he added: "why pay union dues [and] give up stock options for nothing?" The NLRB asked Musk to delete his post, deeming it as a threat that employees would be giving up company-paid stock options if they join a union. The tweet in question is still live, and Tesla is still appealing the labor board's ruling.
An artificial intelligence agent recently flew a Lockheed Martin VISTA X-62A training aircraft for over 17 hours. VISTA (which stands for Variable In-flight Simulation Test Aircraft) normally uses software to simulate the performance characteristics of other aircraft. On this flight during a testing period in December, however, it mimicked a human pilot. US Air Force Test Pilot School (USAF TPS) Director of Research Dr. M. Christopher Cotting said in a statement, "VISTA will allow us to parallelize the development and test of cutting-edge artificial intelligence techniques with new uncrewed vehicle designs."
This is the first time AI has been engaged in such a way on a tactical aircraft, Lockheed says. It’s like they’ve never seen the 2005 box-office bomb, Stealth…
– Mat Smith
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Bigscreen is best known for its namesake virtual social platform – which I’ve never heard of either – but it's now getting into VR headsets. The Beyond is a PC-only wearable it claims is both the "world's smallest" VR headset and extremely light at just under six ounces with a strap. Despite that weight, it includes two 5K (5,120 x 2,560) 90Hz OLED displays and six-degrees-of-freedom tracking. But some difficult choices have been made, too: You have to scan your face using an iPhone app (sorry, Android fans) to produce a custom-fitted design and buy custom prescription lenses if you normally wear glasses. Built-in headphones are only available with an optional "audio strap," all to keep the headset as compact as possible.
Jeff Bezos' spaceflight company revealed it can produce solar cells and transmission wire using simulated Moon regolith. Blue Origin’s Blue Alchemist technique uses molten electrolysis to separate the lunar soil's aluminum, iron and silicon from oxygen to build solar cells, cover glass and aluminum wire using only sunlight and the reactor's silicon. While the concept of using regolith to build outposts isn't new, it’s normally focused on large-scale habitat materials rather than power supply solutions.
After far too many delays to count, Dead Island 2 has a new release date once more. This time, however, publisher Deep Silver is pushing the game up by a week. Instead of arriving on April 28th as previously planned, the game will now hit consoles and PC on April 21st. “You asked for it, you got it. Dead Island 2 went gold and it’s coming out a week early,” the company announced.
A revamped Creator Fund could also boost pay for influencers.
A report from The Information suggests TikTok is developing a paywall feature so producers can charge $1 (or a price of their choice) for video access. While it's unclear exactly how the system would work, this would help influencers profit directly from their hottest clips. The social network is also considering a revamp of its Creator Fund amid complaints about low payouts. TikTok may require a much larger follower count (100,000 versus 10,000) but could pay eligible creators more as a result.
Picks for your FPS, MMO and general playing needs.
A good mouse will give you greater control over your cursor; add a few more buttons and you can customize it to make your clicking and pointing more comfortable. In competitive games, the best gaming mouse won’t magically make you unstoppable, but faster response time and extra inputs should make for a more pleasurable and responsive experience.
Samsung has announced that its Galaxy Watch 5 temperature sensor will finally be put to use. The company has teamed up with the fertility app Natural Cycles to bring its temperature-based period tracking algorithm to a smartwatch for the first time. The feature will be available in 32 countries across Europe, North America and Asia.
Galaxy Watch 5 users will get access to "advanced cycle tracking through the Cycle Tracking feature," recently approved by Korea's equivalent to the FDA, Samsung said. Much like Apple's Watch Series 8, it will provide retrospective ovulation estimates and help people better understand their cycles, the company told The Verge.
Since 2018, Natural Cycles has allowed women to track their temperature and menstrual cycle to check fertility, and the company has said it's 93 percent effective at preventing unwanted pregnancies. The app has already been approved by the FDA and European regulators to be used on wearables. The company tested it with Oura rings, but the algorithm apparently hasn't been used on a smartwatch until now.
Temperature readings are key for those trying to achieve or avoid pregnancy, as basal body temperature tends to increase slightly two to three days after peak fertility. With Oura's temperature sensors, Natural Cycles was able to cut out the need to take readings from a thermometer, and it will presumably do the same with the Galaxy Watch 5.
The feature will be integrated into Samsung's Health app, so you won't require a separate app to use it. It'll arrive to Galaxy Watch 5 and Watch 5 Pro users "within the second quarter" in 32 markets, including most of Europe, Korea, the UK and the US.
