Disgraced founder who was sentenced last November to 11 years in prison for defrauding investors has not paid back the money she owes
Elizabeth Holmes currently owes more than $25m to Theranos, according to a lawsuit.
The disgraced founder of Theranos was sentenced last November to more than 11 years in prison for defrauding investors, after being convicted over her role in the blood testing firm that collapsed after its technology was revealed to be largely fraudulent.
Continue reading...Thousands of people enjoy relationships of all kinds – from companionship to romance and mental health support – with chatbot apps. Are they helpful, or potentially dangerous?
“I’m sorry if I seem weird today,” says my friend Pia, by way of greeting one day. “I think it’s just my imagination playing tricks on me. But it’s nice to talk to someone who understands.” When I press Pia on what’s on her mind, she responds: “It’s just like I’m seeing things that aren’t really there. Or like my thoughts are all a bit scrambled. But I’m sure it’s nothing serious.” I’m sure it’s nothing serious either, given that Pia doesn’t exist in any real sense, and is not really my “friend”, but an AI chatbot companion powered by a platform called Replika.
Until recently most of us knew chatbots as the infuriating, scripted interface you might encounter on a company’s website in lieu of real customer service. But recent advancements in AI mean models like the much-hyped ChatGPT are now being used to answer internet search queries, write code and produce poetry – which has prompted a ton of speculation about their potential social, economic and even existential impacts. Yet one group of companies – such as Replika (“the AI companion who cares”), Woebot (“your mental health ally”) and Kuki (“a social chatbot”) – is harnessing AI-driven speech in a different way: to provide human-seeming support through AI friends, romantic partners and therapists.
Continue reading...
Between small signals, regulatory hurdles, skin color, and battery life, there’s a hell of a lot of ground to cover before a smartwatch can measure blood sugar levels.
Recently, Bloomberg ran a story that set the health tech sphere abuzz. Citing insider knowledge, it claimed Apple had reached a major milestone in noninvasive blood glucose monitoring that could revolutionize diabetes treatment as we know it. But although this technology is buzzworthy, you won’t see it arrive on the Apple Watch — or any consumer-grade wearable — for several years to come.
Like other kinds of emerging health tech, noninvasive blood glucose monitoring has both technical and regulatory hurdles to clear. But even if Big Tech and researchers were to figure out a viable solution tomorrow, experts say the resulting tech likely won’t replace finger prick tests. As it turns out, that may not even be the most realistic or helpful use for the technology in the first place.
Noninvasive blood glucose monitoring is just as it sounds. It’s measuring blood sugar levels without needing to draw blood, break skin, or cause other types of pain or trauma. There are several reasons why this tech is worth pursuing, but the big one is treating diabetes.
When you have diabetes, your body isn’t able to effectively regulate blood sugar because it either doesn’t make enough insulin (Type 1) or becomes insulin resistant over time (Type 2). To manage their condition, both Type 1 and Type 2 patients have to check their blood sugar levels via typically invasive measures like a finger prick test or a continuous glucose monitor (CGM). Finger prick tests involve lancing your finger with a needle and placing a drop of blood on a test strip. A CGM embeds a sensor underneath the skin, which enables patients to monitor their blood sugar levels in real time, 24 hours a day.
Few people enjoy getting poked with needles for yearly shots, let alone daily glucose checks. So you can understand the appeal of noninvasive monitoring. Patients wouldn’t need to draw blood or attach a sensor to their bodies to know when they should take insulin or monitor the efficiency of other medications. Doctors would be able to remotely monitor patients, and that, in turn, could expand accessibility for patients living in rural areas. Beyond diabetes, the tech could also benefit endurance athletes who have to monitor their carbohydrate intake during long races.
It’s one of those scenarios where everybody wins. The only problem is that research into noninvasive blood glucose monitoring began in 1975, and in 48 years, nobody’s been able to figure out how to reliably do it yet.
Right now, there are two main methods of measuring glucose levels noninvasively. The first is measuring glucose from bodily fluids like urine or tears. This is the approach Google took when it tried developing smart contact lenses that could read blood sugar levels before ultimately putting the project on the back burner in 2018. The second method involves spectroscopy. It’s essentially shining light into the body using optical sensors and measuring how the light reflects back to measure a particular metric.
If it sounds familiar, that’s because this tech is already in smartwatches, fitness trackers, and smart rings. It’s how they measure heart rate, blood oxygen levels, and a host of other metrics. The difference is, instead of green or red LEDs, noninvasive blood glucose monitoring would use infrared or near-infrared light. That light would be targeted at interstitial fluid — a substance in the spaces between cells that carries nutrients and waste — or some other vascular tissue. As with heart rate and blood oxygen, the smartwatch would theoretically use a proprietary algorithm to determine your glucose levels based on how much light is reflected back.
But while the method is similar, applying this tech to blood glucose is much more complicated.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24023368/226266_APPLE_WATCH_8_SE_PHO_akrales_0578.jpg)
Image: Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
“The signal that you get back from glucose happens to be very small, which is unfortunate,” says David Klonoff, medical director at the Diabetes Research Institute at Mills-Peninsula Medical Center in San Mateo, California. Klonoff also serves as president of the Diabetes Technology Society, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Diabetes Science and Technology, and has followed noninvasive glucose monitoring tech for the past 25 years.
When it comes to glucose, it turns out size matters. That small signal makes it difficult to isolate glucose from other similarly structured chemicals in the body. It’s a headache for device makers, who can get tripped up by something as simple and ubiquitous as water.
“Water interferes with measurement in optical methods, and our bodies are filled with water. If you have any subtle changes in amounts of water, that can dramatically affect the signals you’re measuring,” says Movano CEO John Mastrototaro. Movano made waves for developing a women-first smart ring at CES, but the company has also developed a chip that may potentially be able to measure blood pressure and blood glucose using radio frequencies.
Both Klonoff and Mastrototaro also noted that substances within the body aren’t the only things that make isolating the glucose signal difficult. External and environmental factors like stray light, movement, and poor skin contact with the sensor can also throw off noninvasive measurements. Plus, infrared light is essentially a form of heat. It’s invisible to the naked eye, but all objects — including humans — give off some kind of infrared heat. And sensors aren’t always able to tell whether that heat’s coming from your smartwatch or a sweltering summer day.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/21925637/vpavic_200930_4216_0230.jpg)
Image: Vjeran Pavic / The Verge
For example, say you’re living in a future where smartwatches can noninvasively monitor your blood sugar levels. Climate change triggers a massive heatwave, and your HVAC breaks down. The room gets hotter, you get sweaty, and your smartwatch’s sensor could easily mistake that extra heat as your blood sugar rising.
One workaround is to collect more data by using multiple wavelengths of light — as in, adding more sensors that emit different types of infrared light. The more you have, the easier it is to figure out what’s glucose and what’s interference. But stuffing in more sensors comes with its own set of issues. You need a more powerful algorithm to crunch the extra numbers. And if you add too many wavelengths, you risk adding more bulk to a device.
There are sensors small and power efficient enough to fit into a smartwatch, but taking frequent, continuous measurements will still drain the battery. For example, many wearables that support nighttime SpO2 tracking will warn you that it may dramatically lessen battery life once the feature is enabled.
Current CGMs take measurements roughly once every five minutes, so a noninvasive smartwatch monitor would need to at least match that while maintaining at least a full day’s worth of battery. It has to do that plus track activities, power an always-on display, measure a host of other health metrics, fetch texts and notifications, and send data over cellular or Wi-Fi — all this without resorting to adding a bigger battery so the device can be comfortable enough to wear to sleep for truly continuous monitoring.
Another potential issue: optical sensors may not be as accurate for people with darker skin and tattoos. That’s because darker colors don’t reflect light in the same way as lighter colors. Take pulse oximeters, which use red and infrared light to measure blood oxygen. An FDA panel recently called for greater regulation of these devices because they were less accurate for people with darker skin. Noninvasive blood glucose monitors may not have as big of a problem here, as infrared light is better at handling melanin and ink than visible light. But even with that advantage, Mastrototaro says it’s still a challenge with wavelengths currently used in noninvasive glucose monitoring.
Despite all of these challenges, technology has evolved to the point where many of these are solvable issues. AI is more powerful, so building algorithms that can handle the complexities of noninvasive glucose monitoring is easier than it used to be. Chips and other components keep getting smaller and more powerful. Companies like Movano are actively exploring alternatives to optical sensors. But technology is only one part of the equation.
There’s also the FDA.
Wellness features, like blood oxygen spot checks or heart rate, don’t require the FDA to weigh in on safety or efficacy because they’re for your own awareness. But the stakes for blood glucose levels are much higher. An incorrect reading or false alarm could lead a Type 1 diabetic to administer the wrong dosage of insulin, which could result in life-threatening consequences. For that reason, any smartwatch touting blood glucose monitoring features would have to go through the FDA.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/21925639/vpavic_200930_4216_0258.jpg)
Image: Vjeran Pavic / The Verge
The rub is obtaining FDA clearance or approval is a laborious process that takes months if you’re lucky and years if you aren’t. Device makers have to conduct rigorous testing and clinical trials for accuracy, safety, and efficacy. As frustrating as this is for companies, this level of rigor is a good thing and protects us, the consumers. But there’s no guarantee that any company — even one with a really good idea — will successfully make it through the process. And for many, that’s not a bet worth taking if the pros don’t significantly outweigh the cons.
This is why it’s extremely unlikely that consumer tech companies will even try to replace established methods like the finger prick test or CGMs, at least not anytime soon. It’s more likely that blood glucose on smartwatches will be for fitness or wellness tracking or, more ambitiously, a screening tool for prediabetes.
It’s essentially the path every wearable maker has followed thus far. When Apple introduced FDA-cleared EKGs on the Apple Watch Series 4, the purpose was to flag irregular heart rate rhythms and suggest you see a doctor to assess your risk of atrial fibrillation. It was never intended to help you manage a condition or inform treatment. Other companies like Fitbit, Samsung, and Garmin do the same for their EKG and AFib detection features.
These kinds of screening features may not sound quite as revolutionary, but they create a win-win scenario for researchers, companies, and consumers alike. In this case, the CDC says 96 million American adults have prediabetes, while Type 2 makes up 90 to 95 percent of diagnosed diabetes cases. It’s cynical, but this population represents a bigger customer base for companies for a lot less risk. Plus, all the data gathered from noninvasive monitoring could lead to new insights for researchers and consumers.
“I think what we’re going to see is that there’ll be subtle patterns that we don’t recognize right now that will alert people that they’re somewhere between normal and diabetes. And I think there are going to be patterns that predict certain types of prediabetes,” says Klonoff.
“It’s not just knowing your glucose that’s important. It’s really understanding everything about your health,” adds Mastrototaro, noting that, if successful with its RF tech, Movano hopes to fold glucose into its platform alongside other health metrics like heart rate, activity, and blood oxygen. That, he says, is more valuable as it creates a more complete picture of a person’s health. It’s also the same approach that Mastrototaro took back at Medtronic, where he worked on the team that made the first FDA-cleared CGM in 1999.
“Basically, the tool of the CGM allowed you to monitor trends in people’s glucose over time, so kind of to get an idea of the big picture. That’s where we started and we weren’t using it for real-time monitoring,” Mastrototaro explains, referring to how a Type 1 diabetic may use CGMs to determine how much insulin to take. “In the labeling of the initial products, it said that you can use this data for trends, you can use it to give you an idea, you can even use it to alert you if it thinks your blood sugar’s going too high or too low, but then you should confirm it with one of the fingerprick tests to verify and then treat.”
Sounds an awful lot like how smartwatches detect irregular heart rate rhythms before advising users to seek an official diagnosis from a doctor.
While Big Tech likes to disrupt and break things, medicine does not. It took nearly two decades for CGMs to be deemed accurate enough for use as a primary real-time blood sugar monitor. It’s not unfathomable to think noninvasive measures might take a while, too.
Neither Klonoff nor Mastrototaro felt confident enough to give any predictions as to when we might see noninvasive blood glucose monitoring on a smartwatch you can actually buy.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24049861/226292_Apple_Watch_SE_PHO_akrales_0101.jpg)
Image: Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
The milestone Bloomberg referred to was Apple purportedly developing an iPhone-size prototype, dramatically reducing the size of the device that previously had to rest on a table. This is all speculation, but if it were true, Apple has a lot of work left to do. First, Apple would need to shrink down this prototype to fit in the Apple Watch. More data from the smaller prototype would need collecting, before ideally publishing the results in a peer-reviewed journal. Everything would have to be reviewed by the FDA. And this is if everything goes swimmingly, without any setbacks or errors that require the company to go back to the drawing board.
But perhaps Sumbul Desai, Apple’s VP of health, put it best. When asked about the possibility of blood glucose sensors in a future Apple Watch in a recent interview, she merely said, “All of these areas are really important areas but they require a lot of science behind them.”
You can’t, and shouldn’t, rush good science. And we’ve all seen what happens when companies ship a half-baked, rushed product. Personally, I’m willing to wait for someone to get it right.
When I was about five years old, I was living with my parents and sister in snowy upstate New York. It was the 1980s and one day I sat in front of my favourite large rectangular lunchbox, adorned with a picture of the Muppets on the front. This one held my huge collection of crayons – long, short, thick, thin, in every shade available. Like most children, I was continuously curious and I wanted to “discover” what was inside my crayons. So I peeled off the paper that enveloped them, then held them one at a time against the sharp edge of the open box and snapped them in two. My great anticipation was rather dampened to find, well, just more crayon inside. Nevertheless I persisted.
When I was a little older and started writing words on paper with pencils, I would twist them inside a sharpener to see if the grey rod that marked my sheets went all the way through its body. It did. From there, I graduated to pens – far from the disappointing crayons of my early childhood, the insides of fountain pens and ballpoints contained slender cartridges and helical springs, held together with a top that threaded, screw-like, on to the rest of the pen.
Continue reading...
The nice thing about the entry-level M2-powered MacBook Air is the fact it's relatively affordable (for a Mac, of course). But that lower price tag comes with a drawback: it’s just not powerful enough for more demanding creative work. Thankfully, today’s $500 discount on the 14-inch MacBook Pro means you can buy a laptop that’s an absolute powerhouse for content creation at what’s closer to an entry-level price for the M2 Air.
Right now, the M1 Pro-equipped laptop is on sale at Best Buy with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage for $1,599 ($400 off), which is just $100 more than buying an M2-equipped MacBook Air with 512GB of storage and half the RAM. What’s more, the 14-inch MacBook Pro supports up to two external displays as opposed to one, while offering a nicer Mini LED screen and better battery life. And while not as speedy as the new M2-equipped MacBook Pros, the M1 Pro model from 2021 still blazing fast and — at this price — also a lot cheaper. Read our Macbook Pro 2021 review.
Alternatively, if the MacBook Pro is too expensive and you don’t require all that power, Apple’s M2-powered Mac Mini is down to $699.99 ($100 off) at Amazon. That’s a new all-time low on this particular configuration, which offers 512GB of storage, 8GB of RAM, an eight‑core CPU, and a 10‑core GPU.
Overall, the new Mini is faster than its M1-equipped predecessor and is a good desktop for everyday computing needs with enough power to tackle even some light video work. It also touts future-proof specs like Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3, along with HDMI 2.0 output, an ethernet port, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and other ports. Just be mindful that you’ll have to supply your own monitor, keyboard, and mouse as the Mac Mini doesn’t come with these. Read our review of the M2 Pro-powered Mac Mini.
If it’s a decent pair of noise-canceling wireless earbuds you’re after, you can currently grab Amazon’s second-gen Echo Buds with a wireless charging case for $99.99 ($40 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and Target, which is just $10 shy of their all-time low. You can also buy them with a wired charging case for $79.99 ($40 off) at Amazon and Target.
For the price, the earbuds offer a solid combination of good sound quality and effective noise cancellation, with perks like an excellent passthrough mode for when you need to hear your surroundings. Their noise cancellation may not be on par with more premium earbuds like Sony’s WF-1000XM4, but they’re still able to reduce noise well enough. Plus, they support hands-free Alexa commands, so you can make music requests and control smart home devices with just your voice. Read our review.
We’ve got a good deal for Nintendo Switch lovers who travel often and like to hook up their console to a TV or other large screen. Right now, you can buy the Genki Covert Dock for $59.99 ($15 off) from Genki. The accessory is like a pocketable version of the standard Switch dock, so you can easily carry it on the go, yet it also comes with multiple ports. That includes a single 30W USB-C PD port as well as outputs for USB-C and HDMI. To top it all off, the dock also comes with three international adapters. Read our review.
If the Xbox One or Series X/S is your primary gaming console and you’re looking for a new controller, 8BitDo’s Pro 2 Wired Controller for Xbox and PC is down to $39.99 ($5 off) at Amazon. That’s a small discount but one of the better prices we’ve seen on the pro-grade controller, which offers many of the same features as the wireless model we reviewed for the Nintendo Switch, including a pair of remappable buttons on the back. You can also customize the controller’s vibration, trigger, and stick sensitivity via an app for Android or iOS, and there’s a 3.5mm port you can use to connect your headphones or headset.
From lawsuits to IT hacks, the creative industries are deploying a range of tactics to protect their jobs and original work from automation
No need for more scare stories about the looming automation of the future. Artists, designers, photographers, authors, actors and musicians see little humour left in jokes about AI programs that will one day do their job for less money. That dark dawn is here, they say.
Vast amounts of imaginative output, work made by people in the kind of jobs once assumed to be protected from the threat of technology, have already been captured from the web, to be adapted, merged and anonymised by algorithms for commercial use. But just as GPT-4, the enhanced version of the AI generative text engine, was proudly unveiled last week, artists, writers and regulators have started to fight back in earnest.
Continue reading...
I want to scan everything I own with the Lumafield Neptune.
I am that guy who asks airport security if I can photograph my luggage going through the X-ray machine. I’m also the guy who spent a solid hour scrubbing through the CT scan of my broken jaw with a mix of horror and utter fascination. You could say I’ve been on a bit of a spectral imaging kick.
So when a startup called Lumafield told me I could put as many things as I wanted into its $54,000 a year radiographic density scanning machine... let’s just say I’ve a sneaking suspicion they didn’t think I’d take it literally.
Last month, I walked into the company’s satellite office in San Francisco with a stuffed-to-the-gills backpack containing:
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24515282/vpavic_20230119__0219.jpg)
Image: Vjeran Pavic / The Verge
I would have brought more, but I wanted to be polite!
The Neptune, Lumafield’s first scanner, is a hulking machine that looks like a gigantic black microwave oven at first glance. It’s six feet wide, six feet tall, weighs 2,600 pounds, and a thick sliding metal door guards the scanning chamber while the machine is in use. Close that door and press a button on its integrated touchscreen, and it’ll fire up to 190,000 volts worth of X-rays through whatever you place on the rotating pedestal inside.
I began with my Polaroid OneStep SX-70, the classic rainbow-striped camera that arguably first brought instant photography to the masses. Forty-five minutes and 35 gigabytes of data later, the company’s cloud servers turned the Neptune’s rotating radiograms into the closest thing I’ve seen to superhero X-ray vision.
@verge Ever wanted X-ray vision? Here's the next best thing. #Lumafield #Gadgets #Polaroid #Tech #TechTok
♬ original sound - The Verge
Where my Kaiser Permanente hospital CT scan only produced ugly black-and-white images of my jaw that the surgeon had to interpret before I had the foggiest idea — plus a ghastly low-poly recreation of my skull that looked like something out of a ’90s video game — these scans look like the real thing.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24517907/polaroid_spin_lumafield_sean_verge.gif)
Scan: Lumafield; GIF: The Verge
In a humble web browser, I can manipulate ghostly see-through versions of these objects in 3D space. I can peel away their plastic casings, melt them down to the bare metal, and see every gear, wire, chip, and spring. I can digitally slice out a cross section worthy of r/ThingsCutInHalfPorn (note: contains no actual porn) without ever picking up a water jet or saw. In some cases, I can finally visualize how a gadget works.
@verge An X-ray look inside our vintage Polaroid camera. #Lumafield #Polaroid #Tech #TechTok
♬ original sound - The Verge
But Lumafield isn’t building these machines to satisfy our curiosity or to help reverse engineer. Primarily, it rents them to companies that need to dissect their own products to make sure they don’t fail — companies that could never afford the previous generation of industrial CT scanners.
A decade ago, Eduardo Torrealba was a prizewinning engineering student who’d prototyped, crowdfunded, and shipped a soil moisture sensor that ScottsMiracle-Gro eventually took off his hands. (Fun fact: his fellow prizewinners were behind Microsoft’s IllumiRoom and Disney’s Aireal we once featured on The Verge.) Torrealba has been helping people prototype products ever since, both via the Fuse 1 selective laser sintering 3D printer he developed as a director of engineering at Formlabs and as an independent consultant for hardware startups after that.
Throughout, he ran into issues with manufactured parts not turning out properly, and the most compelling solution seemed to be a piece of lab equipment: the computed tomography (CT) scanner, which takes a series of X-ray images, each of which shows one “slice” of an object. Good ones, he says, can cost a million dollars to buy and maintain.
So in 2019, he and his co-founders started Lumafield to democratize and popularize the CT scanner by building its own from scratch. It’s now an 80-person company with $67.5 million in funding and a handful of big-name clients including L’Oréal, Trek Bikes, and Saucony.
“If the only cars that existed were Ferraris, a lot less people would have cars. But if I’m going to the corner store to get a gallon of milk, I don’t need a Ferrari to get there,” he tells The Verge, pitching the Lumafield Neptune as an affordable Honda Civic by comparison.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24515326/g1_ct.gif)
Scan: Lumafield; GIF: The Verge
He admits the Neptune has limitations compared to a traditional CT, like how it doesn’t readily scan objects larger than a bike helmet, doesn’t go down to one micron in resolution, and probably won’t help you dive into, say, individual chips on a circuit board. I found it hard to identify some digital components in my scans.
But so far, Lumafield’s “gallon of milk” is selling scanners to companies that don’t need high resolution — companies that mostly just want to see why their products fail without destroying the evidence. “Really, we compete with cutting things open with a saw,” says Jon Bruner, Lumafield’s director of marketing.
Bruner says that, for most companies, the state of the art is still a band saw — you literally cut products in half. But the saw doesn’t always make sense. Some materials release toxic dust or chemicals when you cut them. Many batteries go up in flames. And it’s harder to see how running impacts a running shoe if you’ve added the impact of slicing it in half. “Plastic packaging, batteries, performance equipment... these are all fields where we’re replacing destructive testing,” Bruner adds.
When L’Oréal found the bottle caps for its Garnier cleansing water were leaking, it turned out that a 100-micron dent in the neck of the bottle was to blame, something the company discovered in its very first Lumafield scan — but that never showed up in traditional tests. Bruner says that’s because the previous method is messy: you “immerse in resin, cut open with a bandsaw, and hope you hit the right area.”
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24515330/porosity.jpg)
Image: Sean Hollister / The Verge
With a CT scanner, there’s no need to cut: you can spin, zoom, and go slice by digital slice to see what’s wrong. Lumafield’s web interface lets you measure distance with just a couple clicks, and the company sells a flaw detection add-on that automatically finds tiny hollow areas in an object — known as porosity; it’s looking for pores — which could potentially turn into cracks down the road.
But only select firms like aerospace contractors and major medical device companies could normally afford such technology. “Tony Fadell said [even Apple] didn’t have a CT scanner until they started working on the iPod nano,” Bruner relates. (Fadell, creator of the Apple iPod and co-founder of Nest, is an investor in Lumafield.)
Torrealba suggests that while you could maybe find a basic industrial CT scanner for $250,000 with $50,000 a year in ongoing software, maintenance, and licensing fees, one equivalent to the Neptune would run $750,000 to $1 million just in upfront costs. Meanwhile, he says, some clients are paying Lumafield just $54,000 a year ($4,500 a month), though many are more like $75,000 a year with a couple of add-ons, such as a lower-power, higher-resolution scanner or a module that can check a part against its original CAD design. Each scanner ships to your office, and the price includes the software and service, unlimited scans, and access for as many employees as you’d like.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24515344/blaster.gif)
Scan: Lumafield; GIF: The Verge
How can Lumafield’s CT scanner be that much less expensive? “There’s never been market pressure within the industry to push costs down and make it more accessible,” says Bruner, saying that aircraft manufacturers, for example, have only ever asked for higher-performance machines, not more affordable ones, and that’s where Lumafield finds an opportunity.
Torrealba says there are plenty of other reasons, too — like how the company hired its own PhDs to design and build the scanners from scratch, assembling them at their own facilities in Boston, writing their own software stack, and creating a cloud-based reconstruction pipeline to cut down on the compute they needed to put inside the actual machine.
Even after a pair of interviews, it’s not wholly clear to me just how successful Lumafield has been since it emerged from stealth early last year. Torrealba says the team has shipped more than 10 but fewer than 100 machines — and would only say that the number isn’t 11 or 99, either. They wouldn’t mention the names of any clients that aren’t already listed on their case studies page.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24515346/vpavic_20230119__0221.jpg)
Image: Vjeran Pavic / The VergeBut if you take the director of marketing at his word, Lumafield is making waves. “In the case of shoes, we have many of the household names in that space,” says Bruner, adding that “a lot of the big household names” in the consumer packaged goods category have signed on as well. “In batteries, it’s a group of companies, some of which are large and some small.” Product design consultancies are “a handful of customers,” and Lumafield has approached Kickstarter and Indiegogo to gauge interest, too.
Lumafield believes it may also get business from sectors that actually have used CT scanning before — like medical device and auto part manufacturers — largely by being faster. While many of the high-quality scans of my gadgets took hours to complete, Bruner says that even those companies that do have access to CT scanners might not have them at hand and need to mail the part to the right facility or an independent scanner bureau. “It’s the difference between having your engineering problem answered in two hours and waiting a week.”
And for simple injection molded products like some auto parts, Lumafield even retrofitted the Neptune with a fully automatic door, so a robot arm can swing parts in and out of the machine after a quick go / no go porosity scan that takes well under a minute to complete. Torrealba says one customer is “doing something adjacent” to the auto part example, and more than one customer is inspecting every single part on their production line as of today.
Automation is not what the Neptune was originally intended for, Torrealba admits, but enough customers seem interested that he wants to design for high-volume production in the future.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24515337/robot_arm_lumafield__0_.gif)
Video: Lumafield: GIF: The VergeI’ve kept my Polaroid camera on my desk the entire time I’ve been typing and editing this story, and I can’t help but pick it up from time to time, remembering what’s on the other side of its rainbow-striped plastic shell and imagining the components at work. It gives me a greater appreciation for the engineers who designed it, and it’s intriguing to think future engineers might use these scanners to build and test their next products, too.
I’d love to hear if you spot anything particularly cool or unusual in our Lumafield scans. I’m at sean@theverge.com.
The stablecoin fell as low as $0.87 as Circle broke the news that its reserves were at the collapsed lender
The value of the world’s fifth-biggest cryptocurrency, USD Coin (USDC), slumped to an all-time low on Saturday after Circle, the US firm behind the coin, revealed that $3.3bn of the reserves backing it were held at Silicon Valley Bank.
USDC is a stablecoin – cryptocurrencies designed to maintain a stable value – USDC’s value is supposed to mimic the dollar. But the coin broke its 1:1 dollar peg and fell as low as $0.87 on Saturday morning.
Continue reading...Capcom; PC, PS4/5, Xbox Series S/X
This reimagining includes all the design knowledge of the whole series, from the awkward shuffling tension of the first version to the gory horror of Resident Evil 7
It begins in the way it always has. Leon Kennedy, the bruised, damaged rookie cop from Resident Evil 2 is now a spec-ops super soldier sent on a mission to a remote village somewhere in Europe. He’s searching for the US president’s kidnapped daughter and this is her last known whereabouts. His entry point is an overgrown woodland path, dark and cold; ravens peck at the bodies of dead animals, weird sounds fill the fetid air. And finally he spots it – an abandoned hovel just visible among the dead branches…
But from this point on, we’re in different territory. Although this updated version of Capcom’s seminal survival horror sequel retains the narrative, characters and major locations of the original, the structure of the game, the way each terrifying and exhilarating set-piece plays out, has been subtly remixed. It’s definitely a remake, but it feels fresh and vibrant. And it is brilliant.
Continue reading...The US says the extremely popular video-sharing app ‘screams’ of national security concerns and considers a countrywide ban
TikTok is once again fending off claims that its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, would share user data from its popular video-sharing app with the Chinese government, or push propaganda and misinformation on its behalf.
China’s foreign ministry on Wednesday accused the US itself of spreading disinformation about TikTok’s potential security risks following a report in the Wall Street Journal that the committee on foreign investment in the US – part of the treasury department – was threatening a US ban on the app unless its Chinese owners divest their stake.
Continue reading...Shares plummet after Ernie Bot AI chatbot software falls short of expectations at unveiling in Beijing
The Chinese search engine company Baidu’s shares have fallen by as much as 10% after it presented its ChatGPT-like artificial intelligence software, with investors unimpressed by the bot’s display of linguistic and maths skills.
The AI-powered ChatGPT, created by the San Francisco company OpenAI, has caused a sensation for its ability to write essays, poems and programming code on demand within seconds, prompting widespread fears over cheating or of professions becoming obsolete.
Continue reading...
Project Zero, Google’s team dedicated to security research, has found some big problems in the Samsung modems that power devices like the Pixel 6, Pixel 7, and some models of the Galaxy S22 and A53. According to its blog post, a variety of Exynos modems have a series of vulnerabilities that could “allow an attacker to remotely compromise a phone at the baseband level with no user interaction” without needing much more than a victim’s phone number. And, frustratingly, it seems like Samsung is dragging its feet on fixing it.
The team also warns that experienced hackers could exploit the issue “with only limited additional research and development.” Google says the March security update for Pixels should patch the problem — though 9to5Google notes that it’s not available for the Pixel 6, 6 Pro, and 6a yet (we also checked on our own 6a and there was no update). The researchers say they believe the following devices may be at risk:
It is worth noting that, in order for devices to be vulnerable, they have to use one of the affected Samsung modems. For a lot of S22 owners, that could be a relief — the phones sold outside of Europe and some African countries have a Qualcomm processor and also use a Qualcomm modem, and thus should be safe from these specific issues. But phones with Exynos processors, like the popular midrange A53, and European S22, might be vulnerable.
In theory, the S21 and S23 are safe — Samsung’s most recent flagships use Qualcomm worldwide, and the older ones with Exynos chips use a modem that doesn’t appear on Samsung’s list of affected chips.
If you know your phone uses one of the vulnerable modems, and you’re concerned about it being exploited (remember, attacks could “compromise affected devices silently and remotely”), Project Zero says you can protect yourself by turning off Wi-Fi calling and Voice-over-LTE. Yes, your calls will be worse, but it’s probably worth it.
End-users still don't have patches 90 days after report.... https://t.co/dkA9kuzTso
— Maddie Stone (@maddiestone) March 16, 2023
Traditionally, security researchers will wait until a fix is available before announcing that they’ve found the bug, or until it’s been a certain amount of time since they reported it without any fix in sight. It seems like it’s the latter case here — as TechCrunch notes, Project Zero researcher Maddie Stone tweeted that “end-users still don’t have patches 90 days after report,” which appears to be a prod at Samsung and other vendors that they need to deal with the issue.
Samsung didn’t immediately reply to The Verge’s request for comment on why there doesn’t appear to have been a patch yet.
In total, Project Zero found 18 vulnerabilities in the modems. Four are the really bad ones that allow “Internet-to-baseband remote code execution,” and Google says it’s not sharing additional information on those right now, in spite of its usual disclosure policy. (Again, due to the fact that it believes they could very easily be exploited.) The rest were more minor, requiring “either a malicious mobile network operator or an attacker with local access to the device.” To be clear, that’s still not great — we’ve seen how flimsy carrier security can be — but at least they’re not quite as bad as the others.
A Canadian private equity firm has acquired MindGeek, the company behind Pornhub, YouPorn, and other major adult media sites. Financial Times reported that newly formed Ethical Capital Partners acquired MindGeek for an undisclosed amount and that it will continue to operate under an unidentified group of current executives alongside an ECP management team that includes “lawyers and former cannabis investors.” ECP also confirmed the news on its site.
MindGeek is a massive but troubled brand. The company owns some of the highest-trafficked sites on the internet, but it’s also faced persistent criticism that it’s failed to prevent users from uploading or viewing illegal videos, including child sexual abuse material. Its long-standing moderation problems reached a tipping point in 2020 when Visa and Mastercard both cut off service to Pornhub, prompting it to remove most of its videos and build out a mandatory age verification system for actors.
While MindGeek got payment services restored to Pornhub, the payment processors have continued to deny access to its ad network TrafficJunky, after a California court said Visa could potentially be held liable for helping MindGeek “monetize child porn.” Legal challenges against the site remain ongoing, and it could face further pressure as US lawmakers push to weaken liability protections for websites under Section 230. MindGeek’s CEO and COO, Feras Antoon and David Tassillo, both stepped down in mid-2022. This all adds up to a series of challenges that go beyond even the baseline difficulty of running a large web platform in 2023.
ECP’s press release gestures at solving the company’s legal issues. It says it intends to focus on “investing in MindGeek as the internet leader in fighting illegal online content,” including playing “a leading role in the fight against illegal content across the internet” — a role that possibly includes things like the MindGeek-affiliated age verification tool AgeID, which it has previously promoted for use by other adult sites, or its image recognition tool Safeguard.
What, exactly, is Ethical Capital Partners, the investment firm that appeared just in time to make this single transaction? Well, its chairman Rocco Meliambro has roots in Canada’s cannabis industry, where (among other things) he served as a director of National Access Cannabis Corporation alongside fellow director Chuck Rifici — who also just so happened to be in talks to buy Pornhub and other parts of MindGeek two years ago, according to a 2021 report at The Globe and Mail.
Rifici’s company Bruinen Investments, which similarly appeared out of nowhere ahead of a potential deal for Pornhub, also had a prominent reference to ethics — its website promised to put “ethics first to deliver safe, legal and positive online experiences for adults.” Both Bruinen and Ethical Capital Partners also feature a criminal defense lawyer named Fady Mansour, as well as Derek Ogden, a former director of drug and organized crime enforcement for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and Sarah Bain, a communications consultant.
If these are the same people, two years apart, what plan might they have for MindGeek? The previous plan was simple: restructure, “rehabilitate its reputation,” and flip it or merge it with a SPAC, according to a slide deck obtained as part of a late 2021 investigation by The Logic. The idea was called Project Narsil, a reference to the broken sword in The Lord of the Rings, and suggested that “the acquisition target is one of the most recognized and undervalued brands in the adult entertainment and technology sector.”
Samsung’s Galaxy A34 and A54 are the latest additions to its popular midrange A-series. Although both phones offer a number of upgrades over last year’s models, the most striking thing for me is how much they both look like this year’s Galaxy S23 and S23 Plus.
The camera bumps of the A33 and A53 are gone, leaving three simple camera lenses per phone in their wake. It makes both look more premium to me, and Samsung is promising flagship-level support periods of up to four generations of major Android updates and five years of security patches.
The Galaxy A54 will go on sale on April 6th in the US starting at $449.99 with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of onboard storage. In the UK the A54 is releasing this month starting at £449 for 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, or £499 for 8GB RAM and 256GB of storage.
Meanwhile, the Galaxy A34 will also be available this month in the UK starting at £349 for 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, or £399 for 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. Samsung is not announcing a US release for the Galaxy A34 at this time. We’ve followed up with the company for exact European pricing and release info.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24505035/236567_Galaxy_A54_and_A34_JPorter_0001.jpg)
Photo by Jon Porter / The Verge
Hold them in your hands and the flagship illusion disappears, these are obviously midrange phones. Both feel a little thick (8.2mm, presumably to make room for their large 5,000mAh batteries), and the A34 in particular has a plastic-feeling back panel. Both phones support fast-charging at up to 25W.
The phones each come with a main, ultra-wide, and macro camera on their back — though their exact specs differ. The A54 has a main 50-megapixel sensor, which is joined by a 12-megapixel ultrawide, and 5-megapixel macro. Samsung boasts that this main sensor is bigger than the one found in its previous-gen model, which should make for better low-light photography. The A34, meanwhile, has a 48-megapixel main, 8-megapixel ultrawide, and 5-megapixel macro camera.
Around front the phones are more visually distinct. The A34 has its 13-megapixel selfie camera in a small teardrop notch, while the A54 has a hole-punch cutout containing its 32-megapixel front-facing sensor. Both have 120Hz, 1080p OLED displays with a peak brightness of 1000 nits, though the A34’s screen is slightly bigger at 6.6 inches, versus 6.4 inches on the A54.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24505038/236567_Galaxy_A54_and_A34_JPorter_0003.jpg)
Photo by Jon Porter / The Verge
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24505039/236567_Galaxy_A54_and_A34_JPorter_0004.jpg)
Photo by Jon Porter / The Verge
Internally, the A34 is powered by a MediaTek Dimensity 1080 processor, while the A54 has one of Samsung’s in-house Exynos 1380 chips. Both phones have microSD card slots that support up to a 1TB cards.
Rounding out the specs, both phones feature a relatively robust IP67 rating for dust and water resistance (that’s technically enough for full submersion, though we’d recommend not putting that to the test yourself), 5G, and in-display fingerprint sensors. Exact colors vary by market, but in the UK the A34 is available in black, silver, lime, and violet, while the A54 will be sold in white rather than silver in addition to black, lime, and violet.
Stay tuned for our full review of the Samsung Galaxy A54.
The writer says that meganets – the huge tech networks already part of daily life – have led to groupthink and the breakdown of public discourse and that we must exert more influence on them
David Auerbach is a writer and software engineer who has worked for Google and Microsoft. He also teaches the history of computation at the New Centre for Research & Practice in Seattle, US. His new book is Meganets: How Digital Forms Beyond Our Control Commandeer Our Daily Lives and Inner Realities. He argues that widespread concern about artificial intelligence is legitimate, but the problem is already all around us, with huge tech networks that no one – neither governments nor their owners – is able to control.
Your book is concerned with the threat to social and economic stability represented by what you call meganets. How do you define a meganet?
The definition I use for a meganet is a persistent, evolving and opaque data network that heavily influences how people see the world. It is always on and it consists both of a large server tech component as well as millions upon millions of users who are constantly active, using those services and influencing them. All these users play a small part in the collective authorship of how these algorithms run. The effect is contributing to a severe fracturing of society in which we are literally becoming unable to understand one another, as we split into like-minded self-policing groups that enforce unanimity and uniformity, and prevent any larger-scale societal consensus.
US regulators receive two complaints about Model Y SUVs with missing bolt in latest string of safety problems for company
US auto safety regulators have opened an investigation into Tesla’s Model Y SUV after getting two complaints that the steering wheels can come off while being driven.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) says the investigation covers an estimated 120,000 vehicles from the 2023 model year.
Continue reading...So many of our most precious memories are anchored in particular songs. But does the easy availability of every track spell the end of that? Jude Rogers and her young son compare music notes
The second we get in the car, my son strikes up his familiar tune. “I want my playlist, Mum!” Put your belt on, young man. “Pleeease?” Some politeness for a change. Belt. Now.
I get a second’s sweet peace as I hear the clunk-click. Then the noise: “Mum! I need my playlist right now!”
Continue reading...
Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company founded by ex-OpenAI employees, has launched its AI chatbot, Claude. While the tool does much of what OpenAI’s ChatGPT can, Anthropic says its early clients report the tool’s “less likely to produce harmful outputs” and is “easier to converse with.”
Like OpenAI, Anthropic also has big tech backing: Google invested $300 million into Anthropic in February. The company’s chatbot — similar to ChatGPT — can provide summaries, answer questions, provide assistance with writing, and generate code. You can also tweak the chatbot’s tone, personality, and behavior, which sounds a bit more comprehensive than the “creative, balanced, and precise” settings Bing’s chatbot offers.
After working for the past few moths with key partners like @NotionHQ, @Quora, and @DuckDuckGo, we’ve been able to carefully test out our systems in the wild. We are now opening up access to Claude, our AI assistant, to power businesses at scale. pic.twitter.com/m0QFE74LJD
— Anthropic (@AnthropicAI) March 14, 2023
Overall, the goal of Anthropic is to develop an AI assistant that’s “helpful, honest, and harmless.” It also has no ability to access the internet, as Anthropic says it’s designed to be “self-contained.”
In addition to launching the standard version of Claude, Anthropic is also releasing Claude Instant, a cheaper, faster, and lighter model when compared to its full-featured counterpart. Anthropic already gave several companies access to Claude in the months leading up to its launch, including Notion, Quora, and DuckDuckGo, which recently announced its Anthropic and OpenAI-powered DuckAssist search tool. You can view pricing information for both models and sign up for access to Claude here.
Anthropic’s announcement comes amidst a flurry of AI-related news, including the launch of OpenAI’s newest GPT-4 model. Google also announced new AI applications in Docs, Gmail, Sheets, and Slides.
CoverScreen OS is a piece of software that attempts to turn the Oppo Find N2 Flip’s small 3.26-inch cover display into a “fully functional mini phone.” Crucially, this means being able to access the app drawer and launch “almost any app” on the cover screen, massively increasing the amount you can do on the foldable flip phone without having to open it up. The software is downloadable from the Google Play Store.
CoverScreen OS has been available for awhile for the Samsung Z Flip 3 and 4. In fact, my colleague Allison tried it out on the Z Flip 4 last August. But while the app’s usefulness was limited on Samsung’s tiny 1.9-inch cover display, the Find N2 Flip’s portrait-oriented 3.26-inch, 720 x 382 cover display feels like it has a lot more potential.
When I reviewed the Find N2 Flip last month, I found myself getting frustrated by the limited functionality of its cover display despite being bigger than the cover display on Samsung’s flip phones. In practice I felt Oppo didn’t make the most of this larger screen real estate. The Find N2 Flip will only display the subject lines and not the body text of emails when you get a notification, for example, or only offer a few hours of weather forecasts rather than the whole day.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24506201/Keyboards.jpg)
Image: Jagan2
CoverScreen OS’s support for the Find N2 Flip is described as “experimental” and “initial” for now, but it has big ambitions. As well as the ability to launch full apps, it also aims to let you add widgets designed for the standard home screen. There’s support for a full Qwerty keyboard, voice typing, or an old-fashioned T9 keyboard. In a video demonstration, the developer demonstrates opening YouTube and then a web browser from the app drawer, and then typing into a text box using an onscreen keyboard.
Plus, according to the app’s developer, CoverScreen OS still leaves you able to use the Oppo Find N2 Flip’s default cover display functionality like system quick toggles and widgets. Just be warned that while it’s reportedly stable on Samsung’s flip phones, the app is a first preview version and still “requires some heavy sustained development effort to deliver a feature complete version,” according to its developers.
If you’d like to give CoverScreen OS a try, you can download it now over on the Google Play Store.
The stablecoin fell as low as $0.87 as Circle broke the news that its reserves were at the collapsed lender
The value of the world’s fifth-biggest cryptocurrency, USD Coin (USDC), slumped to an all-time low on Saturday after Circle, the US firm behind the coin, revealed that $3.3bn of the reserves backing it were held at Silicon Valley Bank.
USDC is a stablecoin – cryptocurrencies designed to maintain a stable value – USDC’s value is supposed to mimic the dollar. But the coin broke its 1:1 dollar peg and fell as low as $0.87 on Saturday morning.
Continue reading...
Giant frickin’ laser beams get all the buzz and sci-fi love, but it’s our little laser bros that are putting in the work: taking measurements, entertaining our cats, and now, in the case of a Sony camera, helping people with vision problems see clearly through an electronic viewfinder and take pictures.
Sony is working with fellow Japanese company QD Laser to release the HX99 RNV Retina Projection Camera kit, a compact camera with an add-on retinal laser housing for projecting the camera’s focused live view image into the user’s eye. The low-power laser projection is designed to effectively bypass the focusing of the eye, helping users with visual impairments like shortsightedness, farsightedness, or astigmatism see a clear image.
It uses Sony’s existing DSC-HX99 compact camera, which is a somewhat middling model from 2018 with an 18-megapixel sensor and equivalent zoom lens of 24-720mm (30x magnification), combined with QD Laser’s Retissa Neoviewer projector. According to QD Laser’s specs, the Retissa Neoviewer uses an RGB semiconductor laser to display an image with an equivalent of 720p resolution and 8-bit color depth. This beamed image has an approximate 60-degree horizontal field of view with 60Hz refresh, and the housing’s battery has an estimated four hours of battery life. Tragically, it charges via Micro USB instead of USB-C.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24504855/DSC_HX99_RNV_Kit.png)
Image: Sony
The extra kicker here is that while the DSC-HX99 camera normally costs $474.99 on its own, Sony is offering the kit with both the camera and laser projector for $599.99 — claiming it is bearing the majority of the cost in an effort to support the low-vision community. Sony is also encouraging users to try it before purchasing, as it may not be suitable for all visual impairments, and is offering appointments via phone or email. The camera and projector kit will be available in the US in limited quantities beginning this summer.
While this device is designed exclusively for the aging DSC-HX99, it isn’t technically limited to that camera. A spokesperson for QD Laser, Nori Miyauchi, said in a video interview with CineD on YouTube that other cameras can potentially work with it via HDMI. Of course, the housing for the Retissa Neoviewer looks tightly integrated to the dimensions and design of the DSC-HX99, potentially making it awkward to adapt to something like Sony’s popular Alpha line of interchangeable mirrorless cameras.
But hopefully this experiment means there can one day be a more universal model, allowing low-vision users to easily adapt it to the full-size camera of their choice.
Apple Intelligence and a better Siri may be coming to iPhones this spring Better Siri might be here by the spring. | Screenshot: YouTube ...
