Elon Musk said Tuesday during an awards ceremony in Germany that Tesla’s European gigafactory will be built in the Berlin area.
Musk was on stage to receive a Golden Steering Wheel Award given by BILD.
“There’s not enough time tonight to tell all the details,” Musk said while on stage. “But it’s in the Berlin area, and it’s near the new airport.”
Developing ….
Who shot first? Han? Greedo? Who cares. MACLUNKEY!
Disney+ launched this morning, and with it comes a mostly inexplicable change to one of cinema’s most debated scenes — the encounter between Han and Greedo at the Mos Eisley Cantina. For reasons unknown to anyone but George Lucas right now, a super brief but newly inserted clip has Greedo shout what the Internet has decided is “MACLUNKEY!” before taking his failed shot at Han.
The change was first noted by StarWarsVisComp, a wonderful Twitter account that tears apart the countless different editions of Star Wars and highlights their endless (and sometimes quite subtle!) differences.
Before you go and get too mad at Disney for changing things for the sake of changing things: apparently this edit came from George Lucas — the uncontested champion of post-release cinematic change himself — with the new clip purportedly being inserted years ago during a 4K restoration that didn’t see the light of day until now.
Comparison clips have already started hitting YouTube:
And yes, for the curious: the “Maclunkey” line really is in the Disney+ release. If you’ve got Disney+, you can find it at around the 50:52 mark in A New Hope.
So what’s a Maclunkey? No one knows. As Uproxx points out, the rest of the dialog throughout the conversation is captioned. But Maclunkey? That’s left to the viewer’s interpretation.
Until we get further explanation, I like to think that it’s the Rodian/Huttese equivalent of “Eh, screw it.” Found a stain on your shirt ten minutes after getting to work? Maclunkey. Gonna take a cheap shot at the baddest smuggler in the galaxy without bothering to, you know, aim? Maclunkey. Edited a new bit of alien dialogue into your classic film but forgot to come up with a translation before it shipped? Maclunkey!
Looks like the seed money that Maclunkey Toilet Pucks
gave to Disney+ is really paying off. #maclunkey https://t.co/ttgwz1BZLV
— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) November 12, 2019
When Samsung announced the Space Monitor, I knew in an instant that it was going to be something I had to try out in person. Now that I’ve had time to do so, I’m happy to say it’s much as advertised, a streamlined and solid monitor with a smart new design — but not necessarily one for everybody.
Samsung Space Monitor
Pros:
Cons:
Price: $400 (27-inch); $500 (32-inch)
We don’t review a lot of monitors at TechCrunch — none, really. This was more of a curiosity to me. I’m interested in design and monitors are usually ugly at best. But I was impressed with Samsung’s approach here and wanted to see if it worked in real life.
The big advance of the Space Monitor is its very low-profile mount, which grips the edge of your desk on the wall side and can be folded up flat against it. It can rotate up and down, the monitor tilting to taste — not so far as the Surface Studio but with that same general range of motion.
The monitor itself comes in two varieties: a larger 32-inch 4K one and a smaller 27-inch one at 2560×1440. I reviewed the smaller one, as the large one has a lower refresh rate and I really don’t have any use for 4K in my workflow.
The ideal situation for this thing is a relatively small work space where having the monitor actually sitting on your desk kind of invalidates all the space around it. With the Space Monitor, the stand is flush with the wall, clearing up the area below and in front of it even when it’s folded outwards. It’s easier than piercing the wall for a free-floating display
The performance of the monitor, as far as I am able to tell, is good but not great. The colors are vibrant and the default settings are solid, if perhaps a little warm (easily adjusted, of course). The refresh rate goes up to 144 Hz, which is more than enough for gaming, and can easily be tweaked to 120 for those of us who are very picky about video pulldown and other deep frame rate stuff.
One thing that isn’t impressive is the viewing angle. I feel like the sweet spot for this monitor is far narrower than on the Dell Ultrasharp IPS panel I’ve used for years. If you’re not sitting directly in front of it, you’re going to get color and brightness falloff at the edge you’re farthest from.
The bezel is narrow, a bit more than a quarter inch, a little thicker on the bottom side. It’s also nearly flush on the top and sides so you don’t feel like the bezels protrude towards you. All in all it’s a very handsome and understated design, as these things go. It’s worth noting that Samsung appears to have fudged the press imagery a bit and the microscopic bezel you see in official images is not actually what you get.
Installation isn’t quite as easy as just setting something down on your desk, but if you have a compatible desk, it’s literally as easy as sliding the clamp on and tightening it. A custom cable (optional, but convenient) combines HDMI and power into one, and fits into a groove on the back of the stand, eliminating clutter.
But you’ll want to take a good look at your desk to make sure it is compatible. I didn’t, and had to jury-rig a solution.
Basically, unless your desk is more or less solid and has a ledge that the clamp can close down on, you might have a problem. My desk is solid and about an inch and a half thick, but has a sort of wall that juts down about two more inches. I removed and reattached the bottom part of the clamp so it could just barely be slipped around the wall, but then the screw wouldn’t reach the bottom surface of the desk, so I had to fill the gap with a book. (It’s okay, I’ve got lots.)
The stand is plenty stiff and the monitor stays exactly where you’ve put it, but it is a little wobbly — understandable given that it sits at the very tip of a 14-inch-long arm. I only really noticed when I was typing very hard or bumped the desk, when I noticed it wobbled more and longer than the Dell on its traditional stand.
Now, if you’ve looked closely at the way this monitor and stand is set up, you may have noticed something else: this thing can’t rotate. Yes, unfortunately, the nature of the Space Monitor means that it must always be parallel to the desk edge it’s attached to, and can only move directly perpendicular to it. There is also no way to slide the monitor up and down, or rather to do so you must also move it towards or away from you.
For some this is unacceptable. And although it’s fine for me as a primary monitor, it would never work as a secondary one, like the Dell I now have angled toward me adjacent to the Samsung.
That does significantly limit its use cases, and the spaces in which it works well. But I still feel it’s a great option for some. If you have limited space and plan to primarily work from the sweet spot directly in front of it, this is a solid monitor big enough for productivity, movies, and games.
For those seeking a low-profile, space-saving alternative to the usual monitors, the Space Monitor is a great option. But for multiple-monitor setups or people who shift the angle a lot, it probably isn’t the best. At $400 it has strong competition from the usual suspects, but for some people the slight increase in image quality or the ability to slide the monitor up and down isn’t worth losing the desk space or having a clunky design. The Space Monitor is available now, at Samsung’s site or your usual electronics retailer.
Electrification in the automotive industry isn’t just about consumer cars: There are plenty of commercial and specialist vehicles that are prime candidates for EVs, including in the healthcare industry. Take the new UCLA mobile surgical lab developed by Winnegbago, for instance – it’s a zero-emission, all-electric vehicle that will move back and forth between two UCLA campuses, collecting, sterilizing and repairing surgical instruments for the medical staff there.
Why is that even needed? The usual process is sending out surgical instruments for this kind of service by a third-party, and it’s handled in a dedicated facility at a significant annual cost. UCLA Health Center estimates that it can save as much as $750,000 per year using the EV lab from Winnebago instead.
The traveling lab can operate for around eight hours, including round-trips between the two hospital campuses, or for a total distance traveled of between 85 and 125 miles on a single charge of its battery, depending on usage. It also offers “the same level of performance, productivity and compliance” as a lab in afixed location building, according to Winnebago.
Aside from annual savings on operating costs, UCLA also got some discounts towards the purchase of the lab from a few grant programs, including the Hybrid and Zero-Emission Truck and and Bus Voucher Incentive Project (an admitted mouthful, but it does have its own acronym luckily – HVIP). These programs all encourage the adoption of electric vehicles through financial incentives that help defray the upfront costs, which is yet another good reason for industries like health care to look at EVs as a way to not only reduce costs long-term, but up-front as well.
Consumer expectations are higher than ever as a new generation of shoppers look to shop for experiences rather than commodities. They expect instant and highly-tailored (pun intended?) customer service and recommendations across any retail channel.
To be forward-looking, brands and retailers are turning to startups in image recognition and machine learning to know, at a very deep level, what each consumer’s current context and personal preferences are and how they evolve. But while brands and retailers are sitting on enormous amounts of data, only a handful are actually leveraging it to its full potential.
To provide hyper-personalization in real time, a brand needs a deep understanding of its products and customer data. Imagine a case where a shopper is browsing the website for an edgy dress and the brand can recognize the shopper’s context and preference in other features like style, fit, occasion, color etc., then use this information implicitly while fetching similar dresses for the user.
Another situation is where the shopper searches for clothes inspired by their favorite fashion bloggers or Instagram influencers using images in place of text search. This would shorten product discovery time and help the brand build a hyper-personalized experience which the customer then rewards with loyalty.
With the sheer amount of products being sold online, shoppers primarily discover products through category or search-based navigation. However, inconsistencies in product metadata created by vendors or merchandisers lead to poor recall of products and broken search experiences. This is where image recognition and machine learning can deeply analyze enormous data sets and a vast assortment of visual features that exist in a product to automatically extract labels from the product images and improve the accuracy of search results.
While computer vision has been around for decades, it has recently become more powerful, thanks to the rise of deep neural networks. Traditional vision techniques laid the foundation for learning edges, corners, colors and objects from input images but it required human engineering of the features to be looked at in the images. Also, the traditional algorithms found it difficult to cope up with the changes in illumination, viewpoint, scale, image quality, etc.
Deep learning, on the other hand, takes in massive training data and more computation power and delivers the horsepower to extract features from unstructured data sets and learn without human intervention. Inspired by the biological structure of the human brain, deep learning uses neural networks to analyze patterns and find correlations in unstructured data such as images, audio, video and text. DNNs are at the heart of today’s AI resurgence as they allow more complex problems to be tackled and solved with higher accuracy and less cumbersome fine-tuning.
Time to reset your “days since last major chip vulnerability” counter back to zero.
Security researchers have found another flaw in Intel processors — this time it’s a new variant of the Zombieload attack they discovered earlier this year, but targeting Intel’s latest family of chips, Cascade Lake.
Intel calls the vulnerability Transactional Asynchronous Abort, or TAA. It’s similar to the microarchitectural data sampling vulnerabilities that were the focus of earlier chip-based side-channel attacks, but TAA applies only to newer chips.
The new variant of the Zombieload attack allows hackers with physical access to a device the ability to read occasionally sensitive data stored in the processor. The vulnerability is found in how the processor tries to predict the outcome of future commands. This technique, known as speculative execution, makes the processor run faster, but its flawed design makes it possible for attackers to extract potentially sensitive data.
Zombieload was discovered by the same researchers who found Meltdown and Spectre, a set of flaws that could be used to pick out secrets — like passwords — from the processor. It was believed later chip architectures, like Cascade Lake, were toughened against speculative execution attacks, while Intel rolled out software patches to reduce the attack surface.
Neither of the other vulnerabilities in the same family as Zombieload — notably Fallout and RIDL — work on Cascade Lake, they added.
But the researchers said that Intel’s efforts to change the chip design in Cascade Lake are “not sufficient” to protect against these kinds of side-channel attacks.
The same researchers warned Intel about the vulnerability in April — as it did with the other flaws they discovered that were patched a month later. Intel took until this month to investigate, the researchers said.
Intel released patches again for its vulnerable chips on Tuesday, acknowledging that its newest chips are vulnerable to the newest Zombieload variant. But the chip making giant recognizes that the mitigations “may not completely prevent the inference of data through a side channel using these techniques.”
The chip maker said there have been “no reports” of real-world exploits of the vulnerabilities.
Square. Venmo. PayPal. Apple Pay. Google Pay.
There’s really no shortage of ways to give people money via your phone, but that — nor growing calls that the company is already getting too damned big — isn’t stopping Facebook.
Facebook has just announced Facebook Pay, a single payment system that ties into all of the things under the FB umbrella — Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, and, of course, Facebook proper (for sections like Marketplace). Add a payment method once, and it’ll work across any of the Facebook apps you enable it for.
Facebook says that Pay should start rolling out this week, albeit only on Facebook/Messenger at first, and only for folks in the US. The company says it should work with most major credit/debit cards and PayPal, and they’re being careful to note that this is separate from its whole cryptocurrency wallet effort.
Does anyone need this? Probably not. It removes some friction from the Facebook Marketplace process and will probably find a natural user base there — but, honestly, when it comes to paying a friend back for dinner or paying for that used guitar, there’s an absolutely monstrous mountain of alternatives here.
Facebook has faced a barrage of concern over an apparent bug that resulted in the social media giant’s iPhone app exposing the camera as users scroll through their feed.
A tweet over the weekend blew up after Joshua Maddux tweeted a screen recording of the Facebook app on his iPhone. He noticed that the camera would appear behind the Facebook app as he scrolled through his social media feed.
Several users had already spotted the bug earlier in the month. One person called it “a little worrying”.
Some immediately assumed the worst — as you might expect given the long history of security vulnerabilities, data breaches and inadvertent exposures at Facebook over the past year. Just last week, the company confirmed that some developers had improperly retained access to some Facebook user data for more than a year.
Will Strafach, chief executive at Guardian Firewall, said it looked like a “harmless but creepy looking bug.”
The bug appears to only affect iPhone users running the latest iOS 13 software, and those who have already granted the app access to the camera and microphone. It’s believed the bug relates to the “story” view in the app, which opens the camera for users to take photos.
One workaround is to simply revoke camera and microphone access to the Facebook app in their iOS settings.
Despite the apparent widespread concern from users on social media, Facebook did not respond to repeated requests for comment from TechCrunch. That said, Facebook vice president of integrity Guy Rosen tweeted this morning that it “sounds like a bug” and the company was investigating.
“I guess it does say something when Facebook trust has eroded so badly that it will not get the benefit of the doubt when people see such a bug,” said Strafach.
Earlier this year, Google’s in-house incubator launched CallJoy, a virtual customer service phone agent for small businesses that could block spammers, answer calls, provide callers with basic business information, and redirect other requests like appointment booking or to-go orders to SMS. Today, CallJoy is rolling out its first major update, which now enables the computer phone agent to have more of a conversation with the customer by asking questions and providing more information, among other improvements.
Originally, CallJoy could provide customers with information like the business hours or the address, or could ask the customer for permission to send them a link over text message to help them with their request. With the update, CallJoy’s phone agent can answer questions more intelligently.
This begins by CallJoy asking the customer, “can I help you?,” which the customer then responds to, as they would usually. Their answer allows CallJoy to offer more information than before, based on what the caller had said.
For example, if a caller asked a restaurant if they had any vegetarian options, the phone agent might respond: “Yes! Our menu has vegetarian and vegan-friendly choices. Can I text you the link to our online menu?”
This isn’t all done through some magical A.I., however. Instead, the business owner has to program in the sort of customer inquiries it wants CallJoy to be able to respond to and handle. While some, like vegetarian options, may be common inquiries, it can be hard to remember everything that customers ask. That where CallJoy’s analytics could help.
The service already gathers call data — like phone numbers, audio and call transcripts– into an online dashboard for further analysis. Business owners can tag calls and run reports to get a better understanding of their call volume, peak call times, and what people wanted to know. This information can be used to better staff their phone lines during busy times or to update their website or business listings, for example. And now, it can help the business owner to understand what sort of inquiries it should train the CallJoy phone agent on, too.
Once trained, the agent can speak an answer, send a link to the customer’s phone with the information, or offer to connect the caller to the business’s phone number to reach a real person. (CallJoy offers a virtual phone number, like Google Voice, but it can ring a “real” phone line as needed to get a person on the line.)
Another feature launching today will allow business owners to implement CallJoy as they see fit.
Some business owners may prefer to answer the phone themselves and speak to their customers directly, for example. But they could still take advantage of a service like this at other times — like after hours or when they’re too busy to answer. The updated version now allows them to program when CallJoy will answer, including by times of day, or after the phone rings a certain number of times, for example.
The business owner will also receive a daily email recap of everything CallJoy did, so they know how and when it was put to use.
The product to date has been aimed at small business owners, who can’t afford the more expensive customer service phone agent systems. Instead, it’s priced at a flat $39 per month.
A spokesperson for CallJoy says the service has signed up “thousands” of small businesses since its initially invite-only launch in May 2019.
Google’s Area 120 incubator is a place for Google employees to try out new ideas, while still operating inside Google instead of leaving for a startup. It’s considered a separate entity — some the apps produced by Area 120 don’t even mention their Google affiliation in their App Store descriptions, for instance. CallJoy, however, has received more of a spotlight than some. It’s even being featured on Google’s main corporate blog, The Keyword, today. However, if CallJoy makes the leap to Google — something that hasn’t been decided yet — it wouldn’t be the first Area 120 project to do so.
Area 120’s Touring Bird recently landed inside Google as did learn-to-code app Grasshopper and others.
We understand that joining Google is something that’s still on the table for CallJoy, but it’s not at the point of making that switch just yet.
We’ve heard the criticisms that there were fewer black women speakers than white men at Grace Hopper Celebration in the past, but event organizers heard our complaints and created an entire conference pathway and new grants for “women of color from underrepresented groups and women from untapped pathways.”
We feel better now that our panels include hijabi and transgender women. The work done by women of color and others to broaden our understanding of diversity and inclusion in these spaces cannot go without recognition.
But at the end of it all, my question after a long day of panels and handshakes is, why? What are we really doing here? What ideas are we planting and fostering behind our massive paywall? Are we breaking down barriers for future generations, or simply congratulating ourselves for reaching the upper echelons of women who have vaulted them? Are we pushing to change toxic systems, or asking women to change themselves to navigate them?
Who are we benefiting and elevating with our efforts?
What we can say about the majority of corporate women is that we are currently wealthy and educated. What we can say about many corporate women in the American tech sector is that we are white or Asian-American, heterosexual, abled and a plethora of other dimensions of privileged. Through most of our women in tech events, we self-select into a space where others are educated like us, or aspire to be educated like us, and erect barriers to the tune of thousands of dollars and up to a week off from work/school. Conferences tout scholarships to offset the cost of attendance for the up and coming generation of tech women, but often times those students are required to show existing proclivities to STEM.
Extending resources to students who already have exposure to STEM biases our outreach to those with privilege already; low-income schools in California are four times less likely to offer AP computer science A courses than high-income schools, according to an independent study done by the Kapor Center. Unfortunately, it’s hard to make a case to allocate resources any other way when these events rely on corporate sponsorship and attendance and a business case must be made for return on investment (re: tech talent pipeline).
The following is a (non-comprehensive) list of recommendations for improving the way we build power as women in tech:
Attending a conference costs more than its ticket price, so increasing accessibility must be more comprehensive than offering scholarships. Some examples of questions to ask ourselves as organizers: will attendees with mobility needs spend more than others for their travel and lodging? Are students who receive financial aid more fearful about taking days off?
At first glance, these questions seem like they can be addressed by throwing money at the problem — more scholarships for disabled and lower-income attendees, easy! But trying to level the playing field in this manner is an exercise in futility; bringing a few lucky underprivileged people into our space does little to address the underlying hierarchy. A better way to look at it is to ask how we can make the benefits available to those of us with privilege equally accessible to those with less.
Smaller, regional events usually cost less to host and attend and spread value more widely. New speakers can practice leadership, attendees can network with professionals in their local area, and students can receive more attention and mentorship. Resources move into local communities and nonprofits instead of into recruiting pipelines for tech giants. Some examples of regional conferences targeting minorities but with more granular goals are CodeNewbies, AfroTech and Take Back Tech. These are the efforts we need to support if we want to effectively grow power in our communities that don’t already have it.
If every takeaway from your event is how women can change their actions, then it might be a shallow event. Women and others are not held down because we cry at work, or because we take maternity leave, but because of how those around us perceive those things. Challenging ourselves to change our perceptions is more difficult but ultimately more valuable than stifling our authentic choices and personality to be more convenient.
It’s important to ask ourselves why we, a group of traditionally mistreated professionals, are gathering. Why are we sharing our stories of vulnerability and to what end are we building our collective strength? Marginalized people coming together helps consolidate our power so that we can change the system we’re in. It’s a form of collective action — when dozens of women want maternity leave, their employer is more inclined to provide it than when one woman asks alone. When multiple women talk to each other and realize they’ve been harassed by the same co-worker, they feel empowered to do something about it. We organize and gather so we can change injustices.
Conversations where the whole room may not agree with you can be more impactful than the ones that earn you the most laughs and nods. Challenge your audience; discomfort is where we grow. If you’re holding an event for allies, make them earn the title of ally. Catch yourself when you fall to the instinct of making everyone feel good when your goal is to make a difference.
Let’s not forget who the greatest winners are after a Women @ Qualcomm weekend, a Microsoft Women in Technology Event or Grace Hopper Celebration — the event organizer.
They recruit from the highly qualified pool of attendees while cultivating positive PR for valuing diversity, gaining much more overall than any one individual, though a single person may stand to gain from the opportunity. Companies have made a major push for students and employees from underrepresented groups to stay in the “tech talent pipeline.” As from any affirmative action, there are positive outcomes from that, but there are also studies that find that the pipeline has not addressed deeper issues with workplace cultures, power asymmetries, and harassment.
Put another way, companies often recruit diversity in ways that bring value to themselves without taking responsibility for the quality of life of those within the pipeline. It’s important to remind ourselves that these are not purely philanthropic goals for corporations and that recruitment and retention are to their benefit. At the very least, we’re entitled to substantive policy change in exchange for our labor.
Grassroots and community-led change is better than corporate-led change if our goal is to empower and further the opportunities for women. We must create opportunities for leadership and support efforts that truly build our strength. We should be fearless in asking for real change. By all means, do the work within the companies and within the mainstream conferences if that empowers you, but be wary of the ways that you might be keeping power in already powerful communities and keep your goals in sight. Don’t be afraid to ask why, even for things that seem to have the best of intentions. Even well-meaning systems can perpetuate harmful power dynamics if those of us within them aren’t constantly questioning and pushing back.