All posts by Naomi Smith

Naomi is a UK-based Journalist, writer and online content creator with around six years experience. She has a master's degree in investigative journalism and experience working as a beat reporter, primarily covering aviation law, regulation and politics. She has written for online publications on a variety of topics, including politics, gaming and film.
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How to watch the final season of Game of Thrones in the right way

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Courtesy of BagoGames on Flickr under a CreativeCommons 2.0 generic license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

The eighth and final season of Game of Thrones has been hit by a number of controversies in recent weeks but not in the way you might expect. Forget gratuitous sex scenes (the awkwardness of that Gendry and Arya scene notwithstanding), unnecessary violence and incestuous relationships that we’ll never be able to erase from our minds, however hard we might try.

This season, the controversies have mostly come in the form of coffee-cup-gate and cinematography so dark that we thought winter might have already come but couldn’t see well enough to know for sure. Viewers eagerly awaited the epic third episode of the season, The Long Night aka The Battle of Winterfell but later complained that the picture was too dark with some saying they struggled to see anything at all. In response, the episode’s cinematographer Fabian Wagner defended the show’s lighting choices, informing fans via an interview with Wired that they just weren’t tuning their televisions properly.

“A lot of the problem is that a lot of people don’t know how to tune their TVs properly,” he reportedly said. “A lot of people also unfortunately watch it on small iPads, which in no way can do justice to a show like that anyway.”

According to Wagner, some of the darkness viewers experienced was due to the night-time shoot, while the rest was produced through on-set lighting choices. He told Wired that “another look would have been wrong” and asserted that “everything we wanted people to see is there”. The showrunners had “decided this had to be a dark episode” because there had been so many battle scenes over the years that “to make it truly impactful and to care for the characters, you have to find a unique way of portraying the story”.

“With a lot of hype comes a lot of criticism,” he added. “People love to find something to talk about, and so that’s totally fine.”

Visually, Game of Thrones has grown increasingly dark since season five the latest episode was notably hard to discern, a criticism that is often launched at fantasy and science-fiction shows alike, such as Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D and the non-cancelled Teen Wolf reboot. The show’s subject matter has always been dark itself but avid viewers have noted that the shift in lighting techniques has accompanied increasingly dark plotlines and themes.

The final episode of the season promises to be almost as dark as episode three and equally as “cinematic”, to borrow Wagner’s description. With that in mind, here are some tips to make sure that your viewing experience is as comfortable as it can possibly be without moving the whole thing into your local cinema. And before we get there, maybe go back and watch The Battle of Winterfell in the way it was intended.

Turn off the lights

There’s a reason why your local cinema or theatre turns off the lights when the action starts. It’s not just about focusing the mind and increasing the likelihood that you’ll drop popcorn in your lap at every single jump scare. Darker pictures like Game of Thrones look best when the room is also dark as any light reflecting off the screen can make it harder to see and even wash out the lighter scenes. Try watching at night or turning off the lights and drawing the curtains. If you must have a light on, make sure that it’s behind the television so that it doesn’t hit the screen directly and turn it down as dim as possible. This one comes with a warning that its not brilliant for your eyes so if you’re going to do this, it’s not suitable for binge watching.

Choose the right viewing mode

The majority of televisions come with a selection of picture modes that effect everything from screen brightness and color to black level and image processing. Most will allow you to adjust each of these aspects separately but if that sounds too complicated and time consuming, it’s likely that they also have some presets, including a cinema or movie mode (aka calibrated on Vizio sets). This will help you to get peak picture quality when you’re watching television in a dark room. Compared to standard or vivid modes, this might appear duller and less impactful to begin with but it’s the best option for color realism and can be tuned for dim rooms. That means lower light output, solid contrast and correct shadow detail.

Roughen things up a bit

One of the least cinematic effects that movie mode will keep intact – for some unfathomable reason – is the so-called “soap opera effect”, which basically introduces smoothing which makes motion… um… smoother and less film-like. Not every television has the video processing that causes this effect but higher end models usually do, alongside plenty of the most popular midrange sets. Unfortunately, finding the setting that controls the soap opera effect is a bit like looking for a needle in a haystack as each manufacturer typically buries it deep in the settings menu and calls it something different to every other manufacturer. Check out this helpful guide to finding it and turning if off of you want to preserve the 24-frame cadence that helps Game of Thrones look like a full-on box office movie each week.

Explore your options

If you’re feeling really adventurous, there are tons of other settings to explore. And you will have to explore if you want to change them because they won’t all improve the image to your eye and adjusting them for one scene could make others look even worse. If everything goes wrong, the reset function is your best friend. Trying playing with the backlight – which you’ll want to be lower in a darker room – and local dimming – which most LCD televisions will feature; this works to increase contrast and improve black levels. Just don’t change the contrast manually, that’s something best left to the experts as setting it too high can render bright details completely invisible. Not a good look.

Tech

Artificial Intelligence at Google’s I/O 2019

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Image by 377053 from Pixabay

Artificial intelligence (AI) plays a key role at almost every technology conference these days and Google annual developer conference, held over three days between 7 May and 9 May in San Francisco this year, was no different.

I/O 2019 saw the ubiquitous search engine provider announce updates and launches across its portfolio, including the latest beta release of Android Q, Google’s cross-hardware operating system; the Pixel 3a and Pixel 3a XL smartphones; augmented reality in Google Search; Duplex on the web; enhanced walking directions in Google Maps; and more.

On the AI-focused side of things, the company announced the winners of its $25 million AI Impact Challenge, some six months after it was first launched. Coming from twelve different nations, the winners will use a Google grant of up to US$2 million each to apply machine learning to fight some of the world’s biggest challenges.

The company also unveiled three separate accessibility projects designed to help people with disabilities, including Project Euphoria, to assist people with speech impairments; Live Relay, to help those with hearing challenges; and Project Diva, which aims to help people give Google Assistant commands without using their voice.

Elsewhere, Google told attendees that Google Assistant will soon become ten times faster than its current speed with “on-device” machine learning and plans to introduced a turbocharged version of the Assistant to Pixel phones later this year.

It claimed that the updated version won’t require repeatedly triggering with a repeated hotword – e.g. “hey Google” – and will be able to complete tasks like transcription, file searches, and selfie-snapping offline, without an internet connection, thanks to smaller speech recognition model than that of the current version.

For voice app creators, Google announced a number of upgrades to its Actions on the Google platform, allowing developers, for example, to tether an action to “how to” questions using a newly introduced “how-to markup language”. This means that Google Assistant-powered apps should theoretically be better equipped to respond to commonly asked questions with relevant text, images and instructional videos.

Google Lens, the company’s visual search and computer vision tool, will soon be able to surface top meals in a restaurant when users point their smartphone camera at a menu, using its ability to recognize all manner of real-world objects. Google said that Lens will also soon be able to read translated text aloud if users point their camera at printed content and will be able to help spilt a bill or calculate a tip following a meal.

It also revealed that it has plans to expand Google Duplex, a verbal chat agent that can make appointments for you over the phone (it started rolling out to smartphone users last year), to the web, where it will be able to handle relatively complex matters such as car rental bookings for you.

The company’s cloud unit announced that it would be making pods with 1,000 tensor processing unit (TPU) chips available in public beta. Google has be developing its own TPUs — programmable, custom chips designed to power extreme machine learning tasks — for some time, and researchers and developers can use them to train AI models.

Unsurprisingly, Google also focused on the role of AI and machine learning as it relates to privacy, detailing its work in federated learning, a distributed AI approach that looks to facilitate model training by aggregating samples that are sent to the cloud for processing only after they’ve been anonymized and encrypted. The company claims that it’s Gboard keyboard for Android and iOS already uses federated learning to improve next-word and emoji encryption across “tens of millions” of devices.

On the second day of I/O, Google published a list of privacy commitments regarding its hardware products, detailing how personal data is used and how it can be controlled. The document notes, for example, that the new Nest Hub Max, which uses an on-device facial recognition feature to spot familiar people and surface contextually relevant information, doesn’t send facial recognition data to the cloud.

Tech

YouTube, Facebook and Twitter grilled over abuse faced by British MPs

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YouTube, Facebook and Twitter executives have been grilled by members of the British Parliament at a committee hearing over how the social networks handle online abuse levelled at parliamentarians, the BBC reports.

Members of Parliament (MPs) are said to have argued that such hostility undermined democratic principles, with Twitter representative Katy Minshall admitting that it was “unacceptable” that the site had relied wholly on users to flag abuse in the past.

She insisted that the social network’s response to abuse had improved but acknowledged that there was more to be done.

Harriet Harman, chair of the Human Rights Committee, said there was “a strong view amongst MPs generally that what is happening with social media is a threat to democracy”, and SNP MP Joanna Cherry cited specific tweets containing abusive content that were not removed swiftly by Twitter, one of which was only taken down on the evening before the committee hearing.

“I think that’s absolutely an undesirable situation,” Minshall, Twitter’s head of UK government, public policy and philanthropy, said.

In response, Cherry argued it was in fact part of a pattern in which Twitter only reviewed its decisions when pressed by people in public life.

When MPs questioned how useful automated algorithms are for identifying abusive content, Facebook’s UK head of public policy, Rebecca Stimson, admitted that their application is limited with the platform’s algorithms only correctly identifying around 15% of pieces of offensive content as in breach of the site’s rules.

“For the rest you need a human being to have a look at it at the moment to make that judgement,” she explained.

Labour MP Karen Buck suggestd that algorithms might not identify messages such as, “you’re going to get what Jo Cox got” as hostile, referring to the MP Jo Cox who was murdered in June 2016.

“The machines can’t understand what that means at the moment,” Stimson agreed.

Both Stimson and Minshall said that their respective social networks were working to gradually improve their systems, and to implement tools to proactively flag and block abusive content, even before it’s posted.

The committee said it was shocked to learn that none of the companies had policies of reporting criminal material to law enforcement, except in rare cases when there was an immediate threat.

Committee chair Yvette Cooper pressed Facebook’s public policy director, Neil Potts, on whether the company was reporting identities of those trying to upload footage of the Christchurch shooting to the authorities in New Zealand.

Potts said the decisions were made on a “case by case” basis but that Facebook does not “report all crimes to the police”, and that “these are tough decisions to make on our own . . . where government can give us more guidance and scrutiny”.

Representatives of both Twitter and Google, YouTube’s parent company, admitted neither of their companies would necessarily report to the police instances of criminal material they had taken down.

Tech

British drone owners may be charged annual fee under new proposals

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The UK Civil Aviation Administration (CAA) has launched a consultation on introducing a license fee of £16.50 per year to cover the costs of Britain’s new drone registration scheme with a final decision expected by the regulator in July 2019.

In 2018, the country’s government decided to mandate a drone registration and education scheme to “strengthen the accountability of drone users and their awareness of how to fly their drones safely”, a requirement that is now enshrined within UK law.

A number of other countries already have – or are developing – similar schemes and the CAA expects that it will soon become a requirement under “wider international law”. For example, new EU rules will mean each member state has to hold a national register of drone users. France has a free registration scheme, and similar schemes in the US and Ireland cost US$5 and €5 respectively.

The UK’s scheme will require all those operating drones and model aircraft (that weigh between 250 grams and 20 kilograms) in UK airspace to register by the end of November 2019 and to take an online safety test with a fine of £1000 for noncompliance.

The CAA said it had been developing the technology needed to implement the registrations scheme since summer 2018 with input from the Department of Transport (DoT) and unnamed stakeholders.

The government has provided a “significant amount of taxpayer funding” to cover costs of developing the scheme up until the beginning of October, the CAA said, but after that the cost of running the scheme will be “borne by those who use it under the user pays principle”.

This is because the CAA as a statutory body is required to recover its costs from the entities it regulates. The agency uses the same funding model for its other regulatory functions, including regulation of pilots, engineers, general aviation, airlines and airports.

The charge covers IT hosting and security costs; CAA personnel and helpdesk; identity verification; a national education and awareness campaign; and costs of further upgrades to the initial drone registration service. The amount is based on an assumption of 170,000 registrations over the initial 18 month period.

The CAA said it would review the drone charge after its introduction and implement any changes from April 2021, including considering whether a three year rather than annual renewal period would be more appropriate. It believes that the proposed charge “represents a balance between keeping the charge for registration low and ensuring that the scheme covers its costs”.

Respondents to the consultation are being asked to provide answers to three key questions:

1. What is your view on the CAA’s proposed charge, in terms of the level and structure of the charge?

2. Do you have alternative ideas about how the CAA could cover the costs of running the registration scheme?

3. Are the CAA’s estimated volumes appropriate for the make-up of drone operators in the UK, based on existing sources of data and your own observations?

The CAA is asking drone users, model aircraft operators, relevant industry stakeholders and members of the public to submit answers to the consultation using the CAA Drone Registration Scheme Consultation online submission form. The consultation closes on 7 June 2019.

The FVP UK association of recreational radio control drone and model aircraft pilots, which represents at least 4000 flyers, described the charge as “absolutely outrageous” and alleged that “you get absolutely nothing to show for it”.

In a call to action posted on its website, the association said it was “excessive and a barrier to participation in the hobby”, and suggested that the registration scheme would be “detrimental to the future of unmanned aircraft flying in the UK”.

It would place requirements upon operators and owners that are “are excessive and more onerous than those for manned aviation”, it claimed, alleging that the consultation reveals that “key policy decisions” had been added in the absence of publicly promised consultations or further discussions.

Tech

Microsoft announces partnership with US Department of Veterans Affairs

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On 30 April, multinational technology company Microsoft Corporation announced that it had entered into a collaboration with the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to “enhance opportunities for education, recreation and therapy for Veterans with mobility limitations”.

The partnership, which was formalised on 18 April, will introduce the Xbox Adaptive Controller — a video game controller designed for those with limited mobility — into select VA rehabilitation centres around the country as part of therapeutic and rehabilitative activities aimed at “challenging muscle activation and hand-eye coordination, and greater participation in social and recreational activities”.

The VA and Microsoft said they jointly “identified an opportunity” at 22 VA medical centres across the United States “to introduce or reintroduce gaming to Veterans with spinal cord injuries, amputations, and neurological or other injuries”.

Microsoft is donating its Xbox Adaptive Controller, game consoles, games and other adaptive gaming equipment as part of the collaboration. Designated VA staff will engage with veterans using the equipment, and share feedback with Microsoft on “therapeutic utility” and veterans’ experiences using the technology.

The company has a “long-standing strategic partnership” with the VA, having worked with them for over 20 years to provide care and service to veterans.

According to Microsoft, gaming is a popular pastime of military personnel. The company opined that across to the Adaptive Controller for the Xbox, Microsoft’s flagship games console, provides veterans with the “opportunity . . . to experience gaming’s various benefits”.

These allegedly include staying in contact with friends and family around the world, building esprit de corps through competitive or cooperative gameplay, and providing stress relief.

Controllers will not only be available to veterans at the facilities participating in the project, alongside other equipment, they will also be accessible at events hosted by the VA’s Office of National Veterans Sports Programs and Special Events, such as the National Veterans Wheelchair Games.

Sixteen centres have confirmed their participation in the programme to date, including the Central Alabama VA Health Care System (HCS) and the James A Haley Veterans Hospital in Tampa, Florida,  with at least six additional centres projected to join the project in the future.

“This partnership is another step toward achieving VA’s strategic goals of providing excellent customer experiences and business transformation,” VA Secretary Robert Wilkie said in a statement. “VA remains committed to offering solutions for Veterans’ daily life challenges.”

“We owe so much to the service and sacrifice of our Veterans, and as a company, we are committed to supporting them,” added Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. “Our Xbox Adaptive Controller was designed to make gaming more accessible to millions of people worldwide, and we’re partnering with the [VA] to bring the device to Veterans with limited mobility, connecting them to the games they love and the people they want to play with.”

Tech

Netflix management eyes mobile growth

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In online streaming giant Netflix’s Q1 earnings call, Chief Product Officer Greg Peters reportedly told investors and journalists that while the company dominates in the streaming services market, it isn’t the leading choice for entertainment when it comes to people using their phones.

“I think the most important headline message [is] how much time we don’t win on the mobile experience,” he said. About 97.5 percent of the time “around the world, people are using other different entertainment services, other ways to enjoy their time on their mobile phone.”

Peters believes that mobile can be a way for the company to add subscribers and said he wants the company to leverage its existing relationships to make that happen.

“It’s a great place for folks to find out about Netflix, to sign up for the service, even if they’re signing up for the service on mobile and then they’re watching on other devices like the TV, which we see as a common paradigm,” he added.

“It works really well with our partners, because whether it’s handset partners, which we can work to sort of preload our application on, or actually the mobile operators, which we can work on increasingly doing things like bundling Netflix as part of their standard offering, which you see us doing more and more around the world.”

Netflix expects growth in its home market – the United States – to slow; after adding around 1.75 million subscribers in the US in Q1, it forecasted closing Q2 only have added 300,000 more, due to increased churn after its recent hike in prices.

While the eventual launch of 5G mobile internet in the US – and other parts of the world – should herald an increase in subscribers for the company as it will facilitate faster and more reliable streaming for millions of customers.

There’s nothing more irritating that paying for a stream and then waiting hours for it to buffer or being forced to watch in standard definition because your bandwidth just isn’t big enough. Watching streaming video on a smartphone without Wi-Fi can be very frustrating at the moment.

In the meantime, there are other avenues that Netflix can pursue in its attempt to break into the mobile market. For example, it could make more deals like its current partnership with T-Mobile, where the wireless carrier actually pays for its customers to get the streaming service.

It seems very likely that other carriers around the world might be interested in bundling the streaming service with their mobile plans and/or using it as a carrot to dangle when trying to encourage customers to sign up to their services.

Netflix has also recently been testing a new US$3.63 mobile-only subscription plan in select countries. In India, the only test country that the notoriously private company was willing to divulge to the press, that’s half the cost of Netflix’s basic streaming plan, which covers all devices.

Tech

UK Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson fired over Huawei leak

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UK Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson was reportedly fired from his position on 1 May 2019 following an inquiry into a leak from a top-level National Security Council (NSC) meeting.

The leak in question concerned an alleged plan to allow embattled Chinese telecommunications manufacturer Huawei limited access to help build the UK’s new 5G network recently reported in the country’s national news.

Williamson, who had been defence secretary since 2017, is said to have “strenuously” denied leaking the information after Prime Minister Theresa May told him in an evening meeting that she had information that provided “compelling evidence” that he was responsible.

In a letter confirming his dismissal, she reportedly said: “No other, credible version of events to explain this leak has been identified.”

Responding via a letter to May, Williamson said he was “confident” that a “thorough and formal inquiry” would have “vindicated” his position, adding that while he appreciated being offered “the option to resign”, to do so would be to accept that he, his civil servants, military advisors or staff were responsible, which he maintained “was not the case”.

The inquiry into the leak began after British newspaper the Daily Telegraph reported on the Huawei decision and subsequent warnings within the cabinet concerning possible risks to national security over a deal with the company.

The NSC is comprised of senior cabinet ministers and its weekly meetings are chaired by the prime minister. Other ministers, officials, and senior figures from the country’s armed forces and intelligence agencies (MI5, MI6 and GCHQ) are invited when needed.

It is intended to be a secure forum in which secret intelligence gathered by the aforementioned agencies can be shared with ministers, all of whom will have signed the Official Secrets Act.

There has been no formal confirmation of any role for Huawei in the UK’s development of a 5G network and the office of the prime minister reportedly said that a decision in the matter would be made at the end of spring. Huawei has denied that there is any risk of spying or sabotage if it is included in the UK’s plans.

The company was founded by Chinese businessman Ren Zhengfei in 1987 with a meagre investment of US$5,600. It has since become the world’s biggest telecoms equipment firm, with $107 billion in revenue and customers in 170 countries and regions in 2018.

Besides producing cutting edge smartphones, Huawei is at the forefront of the revolutionary 5G technology. It’s growing geostrategic importance has placed it at the centre of a brewing tech cold war between the US and China with several major countries banning the company’s new technology from domestic infrastructure over allegations of spying and ties to China’s communist party.

Naturally, Ren denies that Huawei has any links to the Chinese government and attributes the company’s growth to unparalleled customer service.

Tech

Samsung Electronics Expands AI Lab in Canada

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Samsung Electronics announced on 2 May the expansion of its ‘Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT) artificial intelligence (AI) Lab Montreal’ in Canada. The lab will help the company to “strengthen its fundamentals in AI research and drive competitiveness in system semiconductors”.

The AI Lab is located in Mila – the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms – a research centre in the field of deep learning founded by Professor Yoshua Bengio at the University of Montreal. SAIT AI Lab Montreal has an open workspace with the aim of working closely with the AI research communities in Mila.

The lab will focus on unsupervised learning and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) research to develop “disruptive innovation and breakthrough technologies, including new deep learning algorithms and next generation of on-device AI”.

To drive the effort, the AI Lab has !actively recruited leaders in deep learning research”, including Simon Lacoste-Julien, Professor at the University of Montreal, who recently joined as the leader of the lab.

Also read: Where are Samsung Phones Made? It’s More than One Country

In addition, Samsung is planning to dispatch R&D personnel in its Device Solutions Business to Montreal over time, and to utilize AI Labs as a base for training AI researchers and for collaborations with other advanced AI research institutes.

Bengio is one of the world’s greatest experts on deep learning, machine learning, and AI. SAIT has collaborated with him on deep learning algorithm research since 2014, successfully publishing three papers on academic journals.

SAIT has actively pursued research collaboration with other top authorities in the field, including Yann LeCun, Professor at New York University and Richard Zemel, Professor at University of Toronto. Bengio and LeCun, along with computer scientist Geoffrey Everest Hinton won the 2018 Turing Award which is known as the “Nobel Prize in computer science”.

“Samsung’s collaboration with Mila is well established already and has been productive and built strong trust on both sides,” Professor Bengio said in a statement. “With a new SAIT lab in the midst of the recently inaugurated Mila building and many exciting research challenges ahead of us in AI, I expect even more mutually positive outcomes in the future.” “SAIT focuses on research and development – not only in next generation semiconductor but also innovative AI as a seed technology in system semiconductors,” added Sungwoo Hwang, Executive Vice President and Deputy Head of SAIT. “SAIT AI Lab Montreal will play a key role within Samsung to redefine AI theory and deep learning algorithm for the next 10 years.”

Tech

BlizzCon to return to California in November 2019

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Game developer Blizzard Entertainment announced on 25 April that BlizzCon, its annual convention, will return to the Anaheim Convention Centre in California this November.

Featuring a wide range of attractions and activities, BlizzCon brings attendees together for a weekend of gaming, in-depth developer panels, world-class esports competitions, cosplay and “opportunities for community creativity to shine in the spotlight”.

This year, the convention is expanding to include “more active hall space” at the convention centre, and a “fun and casual get-together” called BlizzCon Pregame Festivities that will fun outside of the centre on the day before the show starts.

BlizzCon is also offering a new ticket option in 2019 – the BlizzCon Portal Pass – that offers holders an array of perks, including access to exclusive events, priority entry to the show, preferred parking, separate registration and security lines, a dedicated lounge and more.

The Portal Pass is one of three ticket options alongside the core BlizzCon Pass which will offer holders the same full general-admission access as it has in previous years.

Convention-goers also have the option to attend the annual BlizzCon Benefit Dinner, where they can meet and chat with developers, artists, and other folks from Blizzard the night before the show at a laid-back charity dinner.

Dinner attendees also get full general-admission access to the show and all of the perks provided with the Portal Pass. Net proceeds from the dinner will go to benefit CHOC Children’s, whose stated mission is to nurture, advance, and protect the health and well-being of children.

“BlizzCon has served as a home away from home for the Blizzard community, a place where online friends can meet up in real life and new friendships are formed,” J. Allen Brack, president of Blizzard Entertainment, said in a statement. “We’re looking forward to welcoming everyone to the show this year, reconnecting, celebrating, and sharing some of our latest developments.”

BlizzCon 2019 will take place on 1 and 2 November with tickets going on-sale in two waves: Saturday 4 May and Wednesday 8 May. Further details, including different ticketing options, attendee perks, the collectible statues, and more can be found at www.blizzcon.com.

In addition to applicable taxes and fees, pricing is US$229 for the BlizzCon Pass, US$550 for the BlizzCon Portal Pass and US$750 for the BlizzCon Benefit Dinner. Prospective convention attendees can make advance hotel reservations now and receive special BlizzCon rates by booking through the BlizzCon hotel website.

Crypto

Blockchain and the UK

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Depending on who you ask, blockchain is either totally overhyped or its going to save the world, your business and your country’s economy in one fell swoop. It’s also wildly overcomplicated, confusing and often misunderstood.

Put as simply as possible, blockchain is a series of digital information (the blocks) stored in a public database (the chain).

Blocks are made up of three things: information about transactions; information about the people or entities involved in a transaction, using a unique digital signature devoid of any identifying information; and information that distinguishes blocks from other blocks so that identical transactions aren’t mixed up with one another.

When a new block is added to the blockchain, it becomes publicly available for anyone to view and users can sign up to connect their computer to the blockchain in order to receive automatic updates when a new block is added.

Each computer in the blockchain network holds a copy of the blockchain, creating thousands of copies and making the information incredibly hard to manipulate.

Cryptocurrency protocols are often built on blockchain – they are essentially electronic cash systems that are fully peer-to-peer, without the involvement of a trusted third party, such as banks or governments who are usually involved in such systems.

Despite the continued inaccessibility of the technology, companies and countries alike have already started finding new, innovative applications for blockchain. Here are just a few of the ways that blockchain is being used in the UK.

Innovate UK

In 2018, the UK government’s “innovation agency” pledged a total of £19 million to fund innovative ideas for new products, processes and services in the fields of “emerging and enabling” technology, including distributed ledgers or blockchain, and health and life sciences.

The government specified that the projects must have the potential to transform a wide range of markets and generate significant economic growth, and provide business growth, productivity or an export opportunity for at least one small or medium-sized enterprise (SME) and be applied in more than one industry, sector or market.

Alongside blockchain, the government also considered projects looking at bio films and energy harvesting, big data and cybersecurity, robotics and sensors, and satellite communications and Earth observation, among many other topics.

Isle of Man Global Hub

Earlier this year, the Digital Isle of Man, an advisory body based on the self-governing British Crown dependency located in the Irish Sea, launched a global hub for the development of blockchain initiatives.

The body also opened the Blockchain Office to “guide blockchain businesses through current and future regulatory landscapes”, and Isle of Man Sandbox, a “testbed” for innovative new blockchain projects.

The Office’s main function is to “facilitate a dialogue between business and local and international regulators”, and to “help blockchain platforms design and future-proof their concepts” in-line with regulation. It will also provide guidance and marketing support, and encourage collaboration.

Meanwhile, the Sandbox is intended to be “a collaborate space” for companies to “live-test” their product, service or delivery mechanism in an environment where risk to “ordinary financial consumers” and the financial systems are contained.

Also read: Best Crypto Exchanges to Trade Bitcoins, Altcoins

“The response . . . has been tremendous, with a number of premium blockchain businesses and emerging starts-ups approaching the Office for early participation,” Lyle Wraxall, CEO of Digital Isle of Man, said in a statement issued by the island’s government. “There are no signs of interest slowing, and we look forward to collaborating with these innovative pioneers…”

Cryptoassets Taskforce

The UK government convened a Cryptoassets Taskforce in May 2018 to research and outline the country’s policy and regulatory approach to cryptoassets and distributed ledger technology in the financial services sector as part of the government’s overarching FinTech Sector Strategy.

The taskforce consisted of Her Majesty’s Treasury, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the Bank of England, and released its final report in July of the same year.

It commits the authorities to take actions to “maintain the UK’s reputation as a safe and transparent place to do business in financial services”, ensure high regulatory standards and protect consumers in financial markets, guard against potential future threats to financial stability, and allow innovators in the financial sector who “play by the rules to thrive”.

FCA Innovate

This is a sandbox initiative set up by the United Kingdom’s Financial Services Authority (FCA) which allows companies to request support and also test out their service within a regulatory sandbox. Although the project is not explicitly focused on blockchain, 40 percent of the firms selected for the initiative’s fourth cohort were blockchain based.

For example, Fineqia is a blockchain-based digital platform that enables companies to issue and administer debt and equity securities, including bonds backed by cryptoassets, and 20|30 is a distributed ledger-based platform that allows companies to “raise capital in a more efficient and streamlined way”.

Tech

Amazon to enter Hong Kong cloud market amid competition with Chinese rivals

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Amazon Web Services (AWS), the online retail giant’s cloud services arm, announced on 24 April the opening of its new Asia Pacific region in Hong Kong.

Users will be able to “leverage” the new region to “run their applications locally, serve end-users across Hong Kong with lower latency, and leverage advanced technologies from the world’s leading cloud with the broadest and deepest suite of cloud services to drive innovation”.

Previously, local AWS customers in Hong Kong were forced to store their cloud data in other locations in the Asia Pacific area, such as Singapore or Tokyo.

AWS regions are comprised of “availability zones” that the company defines as “technology infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations with enough distance to significantly reduce the risk of a single event impacting business continuity, yet near enough to provide low latency for high availability applications”.

Each zone has “independent power, cooling, and physical security” and is connected using “redundant, ultra-low-latency networks”, the company said.

The new Asia Pacific region will have three availability zones, allegedly allowing customers to “achieve even greater fault-tolerance” and enabling organisations to “provide lower latency to end users” in Hong Kong and across the Asia Pacific area.

AWS notes that local customers in Hong Kong will be able to store content in the region “with the assurance that [it] will not move without [their] consent”.

Companies use cloud computing to buy, sell, lease, and distribute software and other digital resources on-demand over the internet, while journalists use the cloud to securely store information. These resources are managed inside data centres.

“Hong Kong is globally recognized as a leading financial tech hub and one of the top places where startups build their businesses, so we’ve had many customers asking us for an AWS Region in Hong Kong,” Peter DeSantis, Amazon Web Services’ Vice President of global infrastructure and customer support, said in a statement. “The dynamic business environment that exists in Hong Kong – among start-ups, enterprises, and government organizations – is pushing them to be one of the foremost digital areas in Asia.”

“By providing an AWS Region in Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, we hope this enables more customers to be more agile, innovate, and transform their end-users’ experience for decades to come,” he added.

Nicholas W. Yang, Secretary for Innovation and Technology for the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government, said: “We are delighted to see the official launch of the AWS Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) Region, and it comes at a time when we are embracing digital transformation and developing into an international innovation and technology hub.”

Yang described data as the “new currency of the digital economy and a new fuel for innovation”, adding that AWS’ new region will be “an integral component to foster technology advancements, allowing for greater innovation and further facilitating [Hong Kong’s] digital transformation”.

“The opening of the AWS Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) Region also enhances our . . . position as a data hub and puts Hong Kong in a strong position to lead the next wave of innovation in data-related technologies,” he concluded.

The launch comes as competition in Hong Kong heats up with the company’s Chinese rivals, Alibaba Cloud – a subsidiary of  and Tencent Cloud, opening their own operations in the city in 2014 and 2017, respectively.

A recently released report found that Alibaba Cloud was the market leader for infrastructure services in the Asia Pacific area in 2018, commanding nearly 20 percent of the market, compared to 11 percent for AWS and Microsoft’s 8 percent.

The company, a subsidiary of e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding, is currently the world’s third-largest cloud services provider and reportedly holds the biggest share in China’s cloud market.

Last month, The Wall Street Journal reported that China was considering a “liberalization pilot” in one of its free trade zones to allow foreign cloud computing providers to operate without a local partner to provide cloud services that comply with Chinese law as they are currently required to do.

Gadgets

What are “deepfakes” and why should you care?

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Seeing is believing, right? Wrong, apparently. The concept of doctored photographs and video isn’t a new one; it’s been a very real problem for literal decades, and a key plot device used by many a thriller or television cop show as a red herring to misdirect viewers to frame one character for the crimes of another.

But now the advent of halfway decent artificial intelligence has allowed some people to take this to a whole new level with so-called “deepfakes”, convincingly mapping someone’s face onto someone else’s body within a video.

In April last year, Buzzfeed published a demonstration featuring celebrated actor and director Jordan Peele. Using FakeApp – the same tool notoriously used to create fake celebrity sex videos – Buzzfeed took an old video of former US President Obama and seamlessly swapped in Peele’s mouth as he did an impression of Obama.

A portmanteau of “deep learning” and “fake”, a “deepfake” is essentially a technique used for human image synthesis using artificial intelligence. It combines and superimposes existing images and videos onto source images or videos using a machine learning technique known as a “generative adversarial network”.

This means that videos can be created that show someone doing or saying something that never happened in reality, such as depicting a celebrity in a compromising sexual act in which they didn’t actually take part, or manipulating the words or gestures of a politician to make it seem as if they said something they didn’t.

Deepfake porn first surfaced on the internet in 2017 – particularly on Reddit – and has been banned by a number of sites, such as Reddit, Twitter, and Pornhub. The videos were quickly debunked but the Reddit community fixed bugs in the fake videos, making them increasingly realistic to the point that it became difficult to distinguish the fakes from true content.

In the United Kingdom, producers of deepfakes can be prosecuted for harassment but there have been calls to make the technique a specific crime; in the United States, a variety of charges have been levelled against deepfake creators, including identity theft, cyberstalking, and revenge porn.

Besides the Buzzfeed demonstration, deepfakes have also been used to misrepresent well-known politicians on video portals or chatrooms. The face of the Argentine President Mauricio Macri was replaced by the face of Adolf Hitler and Angela Merkel’s face was replaced with Donald Trump’s.

This is a level above simple photoshopping; it’s live action, can be generated using free software, and the technology is evolving quickly. In the Buzzfeed video, Peele is essentially acting as a puppeteer for Obama’s face where not long ago deepfakes were limited to transferring simple facial expressions and mouth movements from an actor to the fake video.

Now, the software can account for wide-ranging head and eye movements without a great deal of obvious distortion. Combining fake video with fake audio makes it easy to imagine a future in which fake videos are almost completely impossible to distinguish from reality.

The potential for abuse is theoretically severe: what if a fake video of a world leader inspires a riot, fells the market, or starts an outright war? What if it could be used to rewrite our memories of the past by seeding the public with false memories?

The human mind is incredibly malleable and can be easily manipulated, given the right circumstances, knowledge, and tools. Studies have shown that we are highly susceptible to forming false memories (people have been known to misremember entire events that never happened) and that tendency could be kicked into overdrive on the internet, where false ideas spread like wildfire.

Studies have shown that people are more likely to say that they remember a faked photograph when it fits with their political worldview, potentially allowing bad actors to use manipulated images or videos to prey on our political biases to change our understanding of world events, past and present.

However, the Buzzfeed video was created last April and in that time, the predicted wave of political deepfakes hasn’t materialized, even in this increasingly polarized political environment, making the panic around deepfakes and AI-assisted propaganda seem like a somewhat overblown false alarm.

The technology is cheap, easily available, and technically straightforward; countries like Russia and China, for example, absolutely have the motive and resources to produce a deepfake. And we now know from the Mueller report that Russia has been using various underhanded techniques to manipulate US politics.

But they haven’t turned to deepfakes as yet, perhaps in part because the videos are easy to track because the existing deepfake architectures leave predictable artifacts on doctored video. These are easy for a machine learning algorithm to detect, some of which are publicly available, and Facebook has been using its own proprietary system to detect fake video for a while now.

It’s also not clear how effective fake videos are for this kind of political misinformation campaign; most operations that we’ve seen so far, such as a widely shared 2016 piece of fake news that claimed Pope Francis had endorsed Donald Trump, are designed to muddy the water rather than provide convincing evidence for a claim.

It’s possible that the deepfake revolution just hasn’t arrived yet – we’ll have to see. The technology gets better and better with every passing year, and the next version could solve whatever problems are currently holding it back. Time will tell.

Gadgets

“Malicious software attack” takes The Weather Channel off air

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Atlanta-based network The Weather Channel, a well-known cable channel source of meteorological data across the US, was knocked off-air for over an hour on the morning of 18 April by what it described in a tweet as a “malicious software attack”.

In replies to the tweet, many Twitter users questioned why anyone would want to hack the network in the first place as it appears an unlikely target.

The network’s morning show, “AMHQ,” which had been due to start at 6 am ET, was unable to go on air and viewers instead saw default taped programming, until the AMHQ show returned to the air at 7:39 am ET with a commercial break. At 7:43 am, the show’s anchors announced the reason for their absence.

“The Weather Channel, sadly, has been the victim of a malicious software attack today,” anchor Jim Cantore reportedly said.

“Yes, and it has affected our ability to bring you your weather information,” added anchor Stephanie Abrams. “So we just wanted to say thank you again for your patience and we want to get right to today’s severe weather.”

The network said it was able to use “backup mechanisms” to quickly restore live programming and informed viewers that federal law enforcement was “actively investigating the issue”, apologizing for “any inconvenience” to viewers as it works to resolve the matter.

This incident demonstrates that media companies are just as vulnerable to hacking as any other industry that has embraced modern technology. Television broadcasts are increasingly delivered via IP video distribution networks and cloud-based media processing, opening them up to the same threats that other IT-enabled businesses routinely face.

The danger is that hacks of this sort have the potential to disrupt much more than the morning weather forecast as they could open the airwaves up to retaliatory attacks against news organizations, protests, and censorship of certain content as well as hijacking feeds to push out certain messages or extortion efforts.

Business

Some of the Tech Leaders on the 2019 TIME 100 list

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First published in 1999, the TIME 100 list is a yearly listicle of the most influential people in the world as assembled by the popular American news magazine Time. Originally the result of a debate among American academics, politicians, and journalists, the list is now a highly publicized annual event.

While inclusion on the list is often seen as an honor, the magazine has always made it very clear that entrants are recognized for changing the world, regardless of the consequences of their actions. Here are a few of the tech leaders who made the list in 2019…

 

Mark Zuckerberg

No list of powerful people would be complete without Facebook’s CEO. The social media giant has seen its fair share of scandals over the last year or so but there’s no denying that Zuckerberg is one of the most influential people in the world. Facebook has millions of users spread around the entire globe – as do Instagram, which the company bought in 2012, and WhatsApp, which it acquired two years later in 2014.

Marillyn Hewson

Hewson is the current chairman, president and chief executive officer of aerospace and defense company Lockheed Martin. She got her start at the company in 1983 as a senior industrial engineer and was named the 20th most powerful woman in the world by Forbes Magazine in 2015. Since becoming CEO she has doubled the company’s market cap and broken countless barriers in an industry long dominated by men, supporting STEM education as well as trade and export expansion.

Ren Zhengfei

The Chinese businessman founded Huawei in 1987 with a meager US$5,600 investment and his stewardship of the company has transformed it into the world’s biggest telecoms equipment firm, with $107 billion in revenue and customers in 170 countries and regions in 2018. Besides cutting edge smartphones, Huawei is at the forefront of revolutionary 5G technology which will fuel the driverless cars and smart factories of the future.

Huawei’s growing geostrategic importance has placed it at the center of the brewing tech cold war between the US and China with several major countries banning the company’s new technology from domestic infrastructure over allegations of spying and ties to China’s communist party. Ren denies links to the Chinese government and attributes the company’s growth to unparalleled customer service.

Sheperd Doeleman

Earlier this year, scientists captured the first ever photograph of an actual, real life black hole. This milestone in humanity’s exploration of the galaxy was made possible by the Event Horizon Telescope, created by Harvard astronomer Sheperd Doeleman and his team of 200 researchers. Their project linked radio telescopes around the globe to create a single “telescope” that spanned the entire Earth, allowing them – and us – to see, first time in human history, a lensed ring of light surrounding a black hole fifty-five million light years away.

We’ve seen evidence of black holes before – such as stars rotating in the center of the galaxy at speeds too fast to be explained by ordinary distributions of matter; X-rays emitted by matter accreting onto the black holes; as well as gravitational waves – but direct evidence, like a photograph, has a much more powerful resonance. This triumph of technology allowed us to see something no one had ever seen before – and promises much more to come in the future.

He Jiankui

Scientist He Jiankui demonstrated to the world that while human embryo editing is relatively easy to do, it’s incredibly hard to do well – or ethically. Despite a global consensus in the scientific community that CRISPR-Cas9 is still too experimental and dangerous for use on human embryos, he recklessly applied it to permanently change the genomes of twin girls to give them immunity to the HIV virus.

His work in China was one of the most shocking misapplications of any scientific tool in history. It not only shattered scientific, medical, and ethical norms, it was also medically unnecessary because while the girls’ father is HIV-positive, it’s rare for parents to pass it to their children and potent drugs can now control the infection if they do. The potential for gene editing to improve our lives is huge but its potential to harm – with unintended, unknown side effects – has yet to be determined.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

Tech

Facebook in trouble over insecure Instagram passwords

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Facebook’s mastery of the “news dump” is only getting more and more impressive as the social network attempts to weather a series of scandals that would most likely have brought other companies to their knees some time ago.

On the Thursday before Easter – aka a major holiday weekend in the USA – and a mere hour before the hotly anticipated Mueller report was released to the public, Facebook updated a months old blogpost entitled “Keeping Passwords Secure” with a couple of lines of italicized text.

The update read: “Since this post was published, we discovered additional logs of Instagram passwords being stored in a readable format. We now estimate that this issue impacted millions of Instagram users”.

You may remember that the original post revealed to the public in March that Facebook had stored passwords for hundreds of millions of its users and “tens of thousands” of Instagram users (Instagram is owned by Facebook) as plain text in a database that could be accessed by over 20,000 of the company’s staff.

Most passwords are encrypted for storage so that no one can read them, even if the file they are kept in is compromised (e.g. by hackers). Storing them in a plain text format, however, means that every Facebook employee hypothetically had access to the affected accounts.

Back in March, Facebook claimed it was a system issue that had subsequently been fixed. However, the updated blogpost informed readers of a significant increase in affected users, although a company investigation reportedly found no evidence that the information had been abused.

Facebook said that it would notify all users who had been affected by the lapse in security, and experts have recommended that all users change their passwords and set-up two-factor authentication for their accounts.

A year of scandal

The company is already under investigation by US government agencies – such as the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission – for its data-collection and privacy practices in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Last March, journalists revealed that Facebook had shared users’ data with an outside app developer without their permission back in 2014. The developer then sold the information to Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics firm that would go on to work with Donald Trump’s 2016 US presidential campaign.

At the time, it was not against Facebook’s rules for the app developer to collect the information but they were not allowed to sell the data. The incident raised serious data privacy concerns and left Facebook trying to explain (and, in some cases, justify) its data collection practices – which have since been changed.

Facebook and the art of the “news dump”

The social media network didn’t just wait for one of the biggest events in recent political history – and one that was certain to divert journalists’ attention in a big way – to alert users of the widened scope of the security breach, it chose to bury the news in an old press release.

This kind of timing trick is known as a “news dump”, a tactic typically employed by communications departments in both private sector firms and governments, to bury negative news about topics such as hacks, mishandling of customer data, and bad behavior of executives, politicians, or other high profile individuals.

There are a few versions of this tactic, the most common of which is releasing news on a Friday afternoon after the markets close, so that investors have time to digest the news without stock taking a hit, and journalists are heading out for the day.

Sometimes, companies will also hold on to bad news, only sharing it when an unrelated, massive story breaks and has the public’s – and journalists’ – attention. Facebook’s favored method is releasing bad news just before a holiday – as they did in this case.

For example, the company released its tool allowing users to see if they have been exposed to Russian propaganda on the Friday before Christmas 2017, and on the night before the US midterm elections last October, it put out a report saying it had failed to do enough to prevent its use to fuel bloodshed and political division in Myanmar.

For an organization fighting claims of impropriety and careless handling of information, the use of new-burying techniques seems risky at best, and threatens to further damage the company, especially if the tactic stops working. Instead of protecting Facebook’s reputation, it risks making it look more suspicious.

Gadgets

“Chimerica” – new Channel Four drama tackles fake news head on

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Staring American actor Alessandro Nivola, Chimerica is a four-part television adaptation by Lucy Kirkwood of her own multi-award winning play following the life of fictional war photographer Lee Berger, whose life begins to unravel after his latest Pulitzer-worthy shot is revealed to be a fake.

We first meet Berger as a young man (played by Ty Simpkins) covering the infamous protests thirty years ago in China’s Tiananmen Square, where he photographs an unidentified figure stood in front of the advancing tanks the morning after the Chinese military opened fire on its own people to end the anti-government protests.

This was a real photograph taken by photojournalist Jeff Widener and the unknown man it depicted was nicknamed “tank man” by the world – there were others who stood in front of the tanks, of course, but he was the only one to be photographed.If you’ve seen the utterly arresting image, then you understand the impact it had on the world. It was not only the most striking image to come out of the protests, it served as a reminder of the personal responsibility that we all bear to stand up to evil in all its many forms.

Back in the fictional world of Chimerica, we reunite with Berger many years later in 2016 as he secures another, equally heart-stopping shot – and front page of the New York daily newspaper at which he works – of a soldier in Syria, his gun held to a woman’s head as she sits in the aftermath of an explosion, holding her bloodied son.

His editor (played by the incomparable F. Murray Abraham) is understandably delighted, there’s talk of a Pulitzer prize and on the flight to his next assignment, he meets and hooks up with British marketing executive Tess (played by Sophie Okonedo). Berger seems on top of the world so, naturally, this is the point at which everything starts tumbling down around his ears.

This is 2016 and the campaign for the US Presidency is in full swing, complete with ever-present fake news rhetoric as then-candidate Trump builds a successful bid for the top job in American politics out of a carpet of lies, groundless assertions, grandiose claims and attacks on the free press to the extent that NYU professor Jay Rosen recently described it as a “hate movement” against the media.

A student journalist forces Berger to admit that the much-lauded Syrian photograph was doctored – and the narrative becomes about the possibility of redemption. Does the end – getting the war in Syria front page coverage – justify the means?

How does a journalist – or any professional whose business is the provision of accurate information – come back from that kind of breach of trust? How does he regain the trust of the public and his colleagues?

This is a question that the news media as a whole has been grappling with on a daily basis over the last few years as it has become increasingly self-evident that the public no longer trusts traditional journalism, which makes it difficult – if not impossible – for reporters to successfully do their jobs in a way that has real impact.

Coupled with an administration that constantly lies to the press, subverting our most ingrained instincts – to contact the White House’s press office for a statement on its actions and to accept that statement as authoritative truth, for example – journalism has reached a crisis point, only made worse by a widespread lack of funding as audiences become increasingly reluctant to pay for news they consume.

Berger’s solution to his own problem is to set off on a search for “tank man”, whose identity has long been the subject of rumors and speculation, and his trips to Beijing bring him back in touch with an old friend who was a protester in the square and whose wife was killed in the massacre.

In the scenes set in China, we see erasure of history at every turn, exemplified by a waitress who doesn’t know that anything even happened in Tiananmen Square, whose knowledge of current affairs is severely limited because the people of her country only have access to government-approved websites.

Meanwhile, Tess informs him that their relationship is strictly a “work thing”, and that she really doesn’t understand the ethical and moral consequences – or sheer scale – of his choice to doctor the photograph.

Described by The Guardian newspaper as “strikingly intelligent”, Chimerica is explores big ideas without sacrificing either plot or character as it delves through layers of deception, delusion and misunderstandings. It acknowledges the fundamental truth that the personal is political and vice versa, exploring the lies that we tell and the untruths that we accept because society needs us to in order to keep going.

You can watch Chimerica for free online with Channel Four’s on-demand streaming service All4.