A team of researchers has demonstrated for the first time a single-molecule electret – a device that could be one of the keys to molecular computers.

Smaller electronics are crucial to developing more advanced computers and other devices. This has led to a push in the field toward finding a way to replace silicon chips with molecules, an effort that includes creating single-molecule electret – a switching device that could serve as a platform for extremely small non-volatile storage devices. Because it seemed that such a device would be so unstable, however, many in the field wondered whether one could ever exist.

Along with colleagues at Nanjing University, Renmin University, Xiamen University, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Mark Reed, the Harold Hodgkinson Professor of Electrical Engineering & Applied Physics demonstrated a single-molecule electret with a functional memory. The results were published Oct. 12 in Nature Nanotechnology.

Most electrets are made of piezoelectric materials, such as those that produce the sound in speakers. In an electret, all the dipoles – pairs of opposite electric charges – spontaneously line up in the same direction. By applying an electric field, their directions can be reversed.

“The question has always been about how small you could make these electrets, which are essentially memory storage devices,” Reed said.

The researchers inserted an atom of Gadolinium (Gd) inside a carbon buckyball, a 32-sided molecule, also known as a buckminsterfullerene. When the researchers put this construct (Gd@C82) in a transistor-type structure, they observed single electron transport and used this to understand its energy states. However, the real breakthrough was that they discovered that they could use an electric field to switch its energy state from one stable state to another.

“What’s happening is that this molecule is acting as if it has two stable polarization states,” Reed said. He added that the team ran a variety of experiments, measuring the transport characteristics while applying an electric field, and switching the states back and forth. “We showed that we could make a memory of it – read, write, read, write,” he said.

Reed emphasized that the present device structure isn’t currently practical for any application, but proves that the underlying science behind it is possible.

“The important thing in this is that it shows you can create in a molecule two states that cause the spontaneous polarization and two switchable states,” he said. “And this can give people ideas that maybe you can shrink memory down literally to the single molecular level. Now that we understand that we can do that, we can move on to do more interesting things with it.”

Source: Researchers Create a Single-Molecule Switch – a Step Toward Ever-Smaller Electronics | Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science

A new study using lasers suggests that face shields and masks outfitted with an exhaust valve aren’t particularly great at protecting others from tiny respiratory droplets containing contagious germs like the coronavirus that causes covid-19. These aerosols can spill through and around these types of face equipment, the study found, weakening their potential to keep users from spreading an infection to others

Mask wearing has been embraced by public health experts as one of the most impactful ways to reduce the chances of someone giving covid-19 to other people. To a lesser extent, masks seem to also lower the risk of wearers catching the coronavirus from others. And despite a noisy contingent of skeptics, particularly in the U.S., much of the public in countries around the world have adapted to wearing masks in situations where they’re around people outside their household.

But there are many different kinds of face coverings that have become popular. Two in particular are plastic face shields and N95-respirator masks that come with exhaust valves. N95 respirators filter inhaled air from the outside, significantly reducing the potential for catching a respiratory infection, while the valves are intended to make breathing out easier. Shields are less cumbersome on the user’s breathing but have large gaps on the bottom and sides that, presumably, would let germs enter and escape fairly easily. Medical professionals typically wear face shields in addition to masks and other protective equipment, as a way to prevent sneezed or coughed droplets from a patient from landing in their eyes and other parts of their face.

In this new study, published Tuesday in the journal Physics of Fluids, both face shields and valve masks were shown to be pretty bad at stopping the flow of aerosols.

Engineers at Florida Atlantic University created a sort of light show to visualize what happens to our exhalations while using these coverings. They lit up the area around a mannequin’s mouth with lasers, outfitted the dummy with either an exhaust-valve mask or face shield, then pumped a mixture of water and glycerin through its mouth, creating a synthetic fog with a similar consistency to the aerosol droplets emitted by a person while coughing and sneezing. In the dark, the lasers were able to eerily illuminate the path of these droplets as they left the mannequin’s mouth.

The results were plain to see. The face shield did blunt the initial forward burst from the mouth, but the aerosolized droplets were then easily dispersed to the sides and even behind the shield in still high concentrations. Though the concentration of droplets dissipated as they moved further from the mannequin’s mouth, they would likely still be able to cover a lot of ground before they evaporated under the right conditions, such as indoor places with little air flow. Exhaust-valve N95 masks were even less effective at blocking the forward movement of droplets, with the valve serving as an easy escape hatch.

The team also tested several brands of surgical and N95 masks. Though these masks weren’t foolproof either at blocking aerosols, with some masks performing worse than others, they were still overall more effective in limiting aerosol concentration than either the shield or valve masks.

“Overall, the visuals presented here indicate that face shields and masks with exhale valves may not be as effective as regular face masks in restricting the spread of aerosolized droplets,” the authors wrote. “Thus, despite the increased comfort that these alternatives offer, it may be preferable to use well-constructed plain masks.”

Source: How Face Shields and Valve Masks Fail to Stop Infectious Droplets, as Shown by Lasers

NB The study link itself has videos too

Engineers at Purdue University have created a printing process by which you can coat paper or cardboard with “highly fluorinated molecules.” This then makes the coated paper dust, oil, and water-repellent, meaning you can then print multiple circuit layers onto the paper without smudging the ink. According to a paper the engineers published in Nano Energy, these “triboelectric areas” are then capable of “self-powered Bluetooth wireless communication.” That’s science-speak to say that paper printed and coated in this way doesn’t require external batteries as it generates electricity from contact with a user’s finger.

You can see a demonstration of how the tech works in these two videos. In the first video, Purdue engineers have a paper keypad that’s been treated with the aforementioned “omniphobic” coating. The paper keypad is then doused in some neon-green solution. In the second video, you can then see a person use the paper keypad to actually type on a laptop with a disabled keyboard.

In a third video, Purdue’s team printed a forward, back, mute, and volume bar on the back of a piece of paper. In it, you can see someone controlling audio playback by dragging their finger along the volume bar, as well as skipping forward and back in the music queue—some real David Blaine street magic-level shit.

While the tech itself is pretty cool, another neat aspect is that because it works on paper and cardboard, it would be relatively inexpensive, flexible, and quick to make. That makes it a good candidate for things like smart packaging.

“I envision this technology to facilitate the user interaction with food packaging, to verify if the food is safe to be consumed, or enabling users to sign the package that arrives at home by dragging their finger over the box to properly identify themselves as the owner of the package,” Ramses Martinez, an assistant professor at Purdue’s School of Industrial Engineering and one of the authors of the paper, said in a statement.

This isn’t the first time engineers have figured out novel uses for paper in electronics. A few months ago, researchers at the University of Missouri also created a paper-and-pencil medical wearable that could monitor things like heart rate, respiratory rate, glucose levels, body temperature, and sweat composition. In 2015, researchers from the University of Michigan created a stretchy conductor made of paper cut using the Japanese art of kirigami.

Purdue’s innovation is particularly interesting as it eliminates the need for external power sources, which makes applications like smart packaging less theoretical. That said, it’ll probably be a while before you can print your own paper Bluetooth keyboard.

Source: Engineers Have Figured Out How to Make Interactive Paper

Wow, I really really hate that this is a possibility. You spent money on hardware – not some monthly subscription service – where it’s really nice that they add more than just security updates but then: BANG! They kill the hardware, rendering it little more than scrappable junk. Suddenly, it won’t do any of the things it did only yesterday.

From the Bridge Release Notes:

This is sick behaviour. If you’re buying into a cloud product, you can expect it if the company goes titsup, but not if this is an offline, local device.

Widespread internet outages knocked down Cloudflare, the PlayStation Network, Xbox Live, Amazon, Hulu, and a slew of other sites on Sunday morning, and it’s apparently all because of a single internet service provider: CenturyLink.

Given that Cloudflare’s online security services are designed to keep websites up and running, when it went down, so did dozens of the popular sites and services that rely on it, including Discord, Feedly, and League of Legends. Cloudflare began seeing “an increased level of HTTP 5xx class errors” early Sunday morning, according to the company’s status page. It later tweeted that issues with a “third-party transit provider” were affecting all of Cloudflare’s data centers that use that provider.

CenturyLink confirmed on Twitter that its technicians were working to fix an IP outage, which was resolved shortly before noon.

“We are able to confirm that all services impacted by today’s IP outage have been restored. We understand how important these services are to our customers, and we sincerely apologize for the impact this outage caused,” the company tweeted.

DownDetector showed reports of internet connectivity problems coming in from across the U.S. and western Europe on Sunday morning. Cloudflare chief tech officer John Graham-Cumming told CNN that “the extent of the problem required manual intervention” in addition to its automated bug detection systems.

It’s not the first time most of the internet’s gone dark because of issues with CenturyLink’s services. A nationwide blackout in 2018 took down Verizon mobile data, ATMs, and, most worryingly, the 911 emergency line in several parts of America. In response, Federal Communications Commission chairman Ajit Pai announced a federal investigation into CenturyLink.

“When an emergency strikes, it’s critical that Americans are able to use 911 to reach those who can help,” Pai said at the time. “The CenturyLink service outage is therefore completely unacceptable, and its breadth and duration are particularly troubling.”

As annoying as this morning may have been, I suppose we can be thankful that the outage wasn’t that bad at least.

Source: Cloudflare Blames CenturyLink for Sunday’s Internet Blackout

Under-display cameras do a neat trick, allowing manufacturers to build all-screen phones without complex pop-up selfie cameras. Now, Xiaomi has unveiled its third-generation of under-display cameras and promised that the technology will be coming to the mass market “next year.”

Cameras that live under the screen present two problems: creating a dark “hole” on the display above the camera while making selfie photos look hazy and dull. Xiaomi said its third-generation tech can “perfectly disguise the front camera under the phone’s screen without ruining the edge-to-edge display effect.” In other words, you get a seamless full-screen display with nary a punch hole, cutout or other blemish in sight, while matching regular front cameras for photo quality.

Xiaomi developed its own pixel grid arrangement that allows light to pass through the gap area of sub-pixels. At the same time, each single pixel has a complete RGB subpixel layout with no sacrifice in pixel density. All of that means that the display pixel density above the camera is the same as elsewhere on the screen, showing the “same brightness, color gamut and color accuracy.” Xiaomi also optimized the camera algorithm, claiming it performs the same as conventional front cameras.

Source: Xiaomi’s under display camera tech is coming to phones next year | Engadget

A review at the Android Police site calls Pine64’s new Linux-based PinePhone “the most interesting smartphone I’ve tried in years,” with 17 different operating systems available (including Fedora, Ubuntu Touch, SailfishOS, openSUSE, and Arch Linux ARM): There’s a replaceable battery, which is compatible with batteries designed for older Samsung Galaxy J7 phones. It’s good to know that even if PinePhone vanished overnight, you could still purchase new batteries for around $10-15…

There’s a microSD card slot above the SIM tray, which supports cards up to 2TB in size. While it can be used as extra storage, just like the SD slots in Android phones and tablets, it can also function as a bootable drive. If you write an operating system image to the SD card and put it in the PinePhone, the phone will boot from the SD card. This means you can move between operating systems on the PinePhone by simply swapping microSD cards, which is amazing for trying out new Linux distributions without wiping data. How great would it be if Android phones could do that?

Finally, the inside of the PinePhone has six hardware killswitches that can be manipulated with a screwdriver. You can use them to turn off the modem, Wi-Fi/Bluetooth, microphone, rear camera, front camera, and headphone jack. No need to put a sticker over the selfie camera if you’re worried about malicious software — just flip the switch and never worry about it again…. For a $150 phone produced in limited batches by a company with no previous experience in the smartphone industry, I’m impressed it’s built as well as it is…

I look forward to seeing what the community around the PinePhone can accomplish.
A Pine64 blog post this weekend touts “a boat-load of cool and innovative things” being attempted by the PinePhone community, including users working on things like a fingerprint scanner or a thermal camera, plus a community that’s 3D-printing their own custom PinePhone cases. And Pine64 has now identified three candidates for a future keyboard option (each of which can be configured as either a slide-out or clamshell keyboard): I feel like we have finally gotten into a good production rhythm; it was only last month we announced the postmarketOS Community Edition of the PinePhone, and this month I am here to tell you that the factory will deliver the phones to us at the end of this month… I don’t know about you, but I think that this is a rather good production pace. At the time of writing, and based on current sale rates, the postmarketOS production-run will sell out in a matter of days…

Source: Reviewer Calls Linux-based PinePhone ‘the Most Interesting Smartphone I’ve Tried in Years’ – Slashdot

a researcher from Meiji University in Japan who’s invented what’s being described as a taste display that can artificially recreate any flavor by triggering the five different tastes on a user’s tongue.

Years ago it was thought that the tongue had different regions for tasting sweet, sour, salty, and bitter flavors, where higher concentrations of taste buds tuned to specific flavors were found. We now know that the distribution is more evenly spread out across the tongue, and that a fifth flavor, umami, plays a big part in our enjoyment of food. Our better understanding of how the tongue works is crucial to a new prototype device that its creator, Homei Miyashita, calls the Norimaki Synthesizer.

It was inspired by how easily our eyes can be tricked into seeing something that technically doesn’t exist. The screen you’re looking at uses microscopic pixels made up of red, green, and blue elements that combine in varying intensities to create full-color images. Miyashita wondered if a similar approach could be used to trick the tongue, which is why their Norimaki Synthesizer is also referred to as a taste display.

There have been many attempts to artificially simulate tastes on the tongue with and without the presence of food, but they tend to focus on a specific taste, or enhancing a single flavor, such as boosting how salty something tastes without actually having to add more salt. The Norimaki Synthesizer takes a more aggressive approach through the use of five gels that trigger the five different tastes when they make contact with the human tongue.

The color-coded gels, made from agar formed in the shape of long tubes, use glycine to create the taste of sweet, citric acid for acidic, sodium chloride for salty, magnesium chloride for bitter, and glutamic sodium for savory umami. When the device is pressed against the tongue, the user experiences all five tastes at the same time, but specific flavors are created by mixing those tastes in specific amounts and intensities, like the RGB pixels on a screen. To accomplish this, the prototype is wrapped in copper foil so that when it’s held in hand and touched to the surface of the tongue, it forms an electrical circuit through the human body, facilitating a technique known as electrophoresis.

Electrophoresis is a process that moves molecules in a gel when an electrical current is applied, allowing them to be sorted by size based on the size of pores in the gel. But here the process simply causes the ingredients in the agar tubes to move away from the end touching the tongue, which reduces the tongue’s ability to taste them. It’s a subtractive process that selectively removes tastes to create a specific flavor profile. In testing, the Norimaki Synthesizer has allowed users to experience the flavor of everything from gummy candy to sushi without having to place a single item of food in their mouths.

In its current form the prototype is a bit bulky, but it could be easily miniaturized to a device as compact as the vapes everyone is already carrying around and regularly using. But instead of simulating the experience and flavors of smoking, it could recreate the satisfying feeling of eating a piece of chocolate, or drinking a milkshake, without having to ingest a single calorie.

Source: ‘Taste Display’ Brings Fake Flavors to Your Tongue

ThinkPad’s keyboards have a fiercely loyal following, and for $100 you can keep using the design that time forgot with this detached wireless version that will work any other laptop or computer.

The ThinkPad TrackPoint Keyboard II is now available on Lenovo’s website, and it looks like a piece of hardware that dates back over 25 years to the early ‘90s. In 1992, IBM, the company that created the ThinkPad laptop, introduced the TrackPoint which was a small rubber nub embedded in the middle of the keyboard that was used to move the cursor around. There are those who hated it, but more than enough that loved it for Lenovo (who purchased IBM’s PC division in 2005) to continue to offer the TrackPoint on its current laptop lineup, alongside a touchpad.

But you won’t find a touchpad on the ThinkPad TrackPoint Keyboard II—it’s TouchPoint only, with a trio of mouse buttons located just below the space bar. There’s nothing stopping you from using a mouse alongside it, but the small nub means you can still navigate a cursor-driven user interface if you don’t have a lot of desk space at your disposal or you are using the keyboard on your lap.

It connects to other devices using an included wireless USB dongle or Bluetooth, meaning it can be used with mobile devices as well. But unlike previous versions, it can’t be tethered to another device with a cord. Its USB-C port is used for charging only, which really only has to be done about every two months, depending on usage. Keyboard snobs might still want to pass on this one, however, because hidden beneath the contoured chiclet-style keys you’ll find scissor-switches instead of a more complex mechanical switch.

Source: ThinkPad’s Iconic Nub Comes to Your Desktop

It seemed like a bit of a risk when Mazda decided to not offer a touchscreen in the new Mazda 3. But Mazda may have just been ahead of the trend, as Honda has also abandoned some reliance on the new Honda Jazz’s touch controls because they just aren’t “intuitive.”

Despite nearly a decade of dominating conversations about automotive design and not, for some reason, the risks of distracted driving, touchscreens are finally being seen for what they really are: annoying.

Honda’s decided the air conditioning controls on the new Honda Jazz, also known as the Honda Fit in the U.S. though we won’t get this new generation, are too good for a complicated, distracting touchscreen.

Here’s why, from Autocar:

Jazz project leader Takeki Tanaka explained: “The reason is quite simple – we wanted to minimise driver disruption for operation, in particular, for the heater and air conditioning.

“We changed it from touchscreen to dial operation, as we received customer feedback that it was difficult to operate intuitively. You had to look at the screen to change the heater seating, therefore, we changed it so one can operate it without looking, giving more confidence while driving.”

And here’s the part where anyone who has reviewed a car in the last decade goes and screams into their pillow with frustration, because that’s exactly the sort of feedback automakers have been getting from focus groups, customers and reviewers for about as long as these touchscreen systems have been in cars.

Touchscreens are worse than touch controls for one very obvious reason: A touchscreen requires two human senses—touch, obviously, and sight. But with enough experience, the genius of the human brain is capable of motor memory, so touch dials and buttons will eventually only require the memory of where it’s located and a finger to touch it. Eyes can stay on the road.

Honda did this earlier by bringing the volume knob back on the 2019 Civic.

The problem is people want cool technology in their cars. They want to feel like their hard-earned loan is going toward something nice and fancy and smarter than them. This is why some people like the Tesla tablet—they think its efficient to put literally thousands of functions all in one very distracting toy. That’s not very safe. It’s safer to put the toys away and just turn a knob to be more comfortable.

Simplicity is the greatest efficiency, and I’m pretty jazzed for a touchscreen-less future. It’s like music to my ears.

Source: Honda Follows Mazda By Ditching Some Touchscreen Controls For Not Being ‘Intuitive’

From 2019, after a deadly 2017 crash between a destroyer and an oil tanker: The US Navy will replace its touchscreen controls with mechanical ones on its destroyers

Scientists have crafted a tiny flexible electrical device capable of generating terahertz waves that can penetrate walls and microscopic cells, potentially paving the way for new imaging techniques – and fast switching in chips.

Terahertz radiation lies in the electromagnetic spectrum where microwaves and infrared meet. These so-called T-waves, ranging from 0.3 to 3THz according to the ITU, have interesting properties: they can travel through clothing, wood, walls, and even human skin, for one thing.

However, they can be tricky to produce, depending on the application, as you often need expensive and clunky equipment. Now, a team of researchers led by the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland believe they’ve created something that not only emits high-power terahertz radiation but is both compact and cheap. Which is useful for miniaturization and productization.

The gizmo detailed in a paper published in Nature this week works by producing so-called nanoplasma.

Here’s how it works: two tiny metal plates are placed 20 nanometres apart and a voltage is applied. Electrons migrate towards one of the plates to create a nanoplasma. When enough negative charge has accumulated and the voltage across the plates reaches a critical threshold, the electrons instantly flock to the other plate.

“The very high electric field in the small volume of the nanoplasma leads to ultrafast electron transfer, resulting in extremely short time responses,” the paper explained. This back and forth motion of the electrons on each plate continues, and the device emits a high-intensity pulse of terahertz waves.

“We achieved an ultrafast switching speed, higher than 10 volts per picosecond (10^-12 s), which is about two orders of magnitude larger than that of field-effect transistors and more than ten times faster than that of conventional electronic switches,” the academics said.

The tiny nanoplasma devices were fabricated on bits of Kapton tape pasted onto a sapphire substrate, where a thin layer of gold or tungsten was stacked on top of titanium.

“High-frequency semiconductor devices are nanoscale in size,” said Elison Matioli, co-author of the study and an electrical engineering professor at EPFL.

“They can only cope with a few volts before breaking out. High-power devices, meanwhile, are too big and slow to generate terahertz waves. Our solution was to revisit the old field of plasma with state-of-the-art nanoscale fabrication techniques to propose a new device to get around those constraints.”

“High-frequency, high-power and nanoscale aren’t terms you’d normally hear in the same sentence,” he added.

The fast switching speeds could help deliver ultrafast chips that could be used in wireless communication, sensors, or even biomedical imaging.

Source: Want to see through walls? Electroboffins build tiny chip in the lab that vibrates at just the right frequency to do it • The Register

Ireader C6 is a full color e-reader and will be released soon

the company has just announced they are working on a new color e-reader that is capable of displaying 4,096 colors and will be released on March 26th.

The iReader C6 will feature a six inch capacitive touchscreen display with 300 PPI and it is employing the new E INk Print-Color e Paper technology. It has a front-lit display system with 24 LED lights, so you will be able to read in the dark.

Underneath the hood is a quad-core high-speed processor, 1GB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage.  It has integrated speakers and weighs 150 grams, is 6.9 millimeters thick, is light and comfortable, and  can be held with one hand.

iReader disclosed that they have completed mass production on this device and it will be available on JD.com on March 26th.

Source: Goodreader.com

iFlytek is working on a color e-reader

Details are light, but the company has developed a color e-reader that will be available soon.

The color e-reader is currently called the iFlytek Ebook and it features a 6 inch display with 300 PPI for black and white mode and 212 PPI for color. You will be able to read in the dark via their front-lit display system with 24 LED lights. It has 4,096 colors, which will make manga, comics and other materials shine, it is employing the E INK Just Print tech.

It has integrated speakers and 4 voices for their TTS engine, so it can read aloud ebooks to you. The other hardware specs like processor, RAM and internal storage is currently unknown. There is also no word on what operating system it is running, but it looks like it will be sold on JD.com and other Chinese e-commerce sites.

Source: Goodreader.com

NFC is usually only used to for quick text transfers, like a tap-and-pay transaction at a register or a quick data transfer from an NFC sticker. A company called “Waveshare” is really pushing the limits of NFC, though, with a 7.5-inch e-ink display that gets its data, and its power, from an NFC transfer. The $70 display doesn’t have a battery and doesn’t need a wired power connection. E-paper (or e-ink) displays have the unique property of not needing power to maintain an image. Once a charge blasts across the display and correctly aligns pixels full of black and white balls, everything will stay where it is when the power turns off, so the image will stick around. You might not have thought about it before, but in addition to data, NFC comes with a tiny wireless power transfer. This display is designed so that NFC provides just enough power to refresh the display during a data transfer, and the e-ink display will hold onto the image afterward.

NFC data transfers max out at a whopping 424 kbit/s. While that’s enough for an instant transfer of credit card data or a URL, the 800×400 image the display needs will take several seconds. Waveshare says the display takes five seconds just to refresh, and that doesn’t count the data transfer, which will vary depending on how complex your image is. The video shows a start-to-finish refresh that takes 10 seconds. If you want to use a phone, an Android app will convert your image into several different black-and-white styles and beam it to the display. Sadly, there’s no iOS app yet. iOS apps didn’t have the ability to write to NFC devices for the longest time. Writing to NFC was added with the launch of iOS 13, which only happened a few months ago.

Source: 7.5-Inch E-Ink Display Is Powered Completely By NFC – Slashdot

 

Researchers at the University of California San Diego developed a wearable technology that can hide its wearer from heat-detecting sensors such as night vision goggles, even when the ambient temperature changes–a feat that current state of the art technology cannot match. The technology can adapt to temperature changes in just a few minutes, while keeping the wearer comfortable.

The device, which is at the proof-of-concept stage, has a surface that quickly cools down or heats up to match ambient temperatures, camouflaging the wearer’s body heat. The surface can go from 10 to 38 degrees Celsius (50 to 100.5 degrees Fahrenheit) in less than a minute. Meanwhile, the inside remains at the same temperature as human skin, making it comfortable for the wearer. The wireless device can be embedded into fabric, such as an armband. A more advanced version could be worn as a jacket.

Source: This wearable device camouflages its wearer no matter the weather

Residents donning surgical face masks while venturing outside their homes or meeting strangers have found themselves in an unfamiliar conundrum. With their faces half-covered, some are unable to unlock their phones or use mobile payments with their faces.

“Been wearing a mask everyday recently and I just want to throw away this phone with face unlock,” said one frustrated user who posted on Weibo using an iPhone.

“Under the current circumstances, for the past two days, I’ve been basically wearing a mask all the time except while sleeping. In times like this, the iPhone’s Face ID doesn’t really work that well,” another user wrote, adding that she hopes Apple will bring back fingerprint unlock.

It’s more than just handset troubles, though. In China, facial recognition is being deployed from train stations and airports to stores and hotels. Some people say they now have trouble entering gated communities protected by facial recognition systems.

“Just came in through the community gate. I was standing under the facial recognition [camera] but it didn’t recognize me,” one user said. “Around two minutes later, I realized I was wearing a mask.”

[…]

For some people, though, facial recognition has become such an integral part of life that older technology now seems annoyingly inconvenient.

“I’ve gotten used to WeChat Pay’s facial recognition,” said one user. “I’ve been wearing masks these days. Not really used to changing to passcode payment.”

“Fingerprint payment is still better,” another wrote. “This facial recognition, I don’t even dare pull down my mask. And passcode comes so slow. All I want is to pay and quickly run.”

Source: Facial recognition fails in China as people wear masks to avoid coronavirus – Face ID fails users as the China coronavirus outbreak sparks widespread adoption of surgical masks | Abacus

Google is making it easier for developers to purchase the latest version of its smart glasses, with the company saying on Tuesday that the Glass Enterprise Edition 2 is now available from some hardware resellers.

“We’ve seen strong demand from developers and businesses who are interested in building new, helpful enterprise solutions for Glass,“ Google said in a blog post, adding that the new headset was already being used by people with jobs in logistics, manufacturing and field services.”

Source: Google Says Developers Can Now Purchase Latest Smart Glasses – Bloomberg

About 35 years after the MIDI 1.0 Detailed Specification was established, instrument manufacturers voted unanimously on January 18th to adopt the new MIDI 2.0 spec. So what’s changing for audio interfaces? The “biggest advance in music technology in decades” brings two-way communication, among many other new features while remaining backwards compatible with the old spec.

Companies like Roland, Native Instruments, Korg and Yamaha are part of the MIDI Manufacturers Association behind the update, and we’ve already seen Roland’s A-88MKII keyboard that will be ready for the spec when it goes on sale in March.

And it’s about time for a new standard, while the 5-bit DIN cables used in the 1980s couldn’t handle high resolution audio, the MIDI 2.0 spec is ready for any digital connector you’d like to use, and will start by targeting USB ports. That allows for far more accurate timing, and far more resolution by upgrading messages from seven bits to as much as 32-bit.

It should also make instruments easier to use, with profiles that will automatically set up gear for its intended use and a feature called Property Exchange that uses JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) to send over more detailed configuration info. You’ll spend less time shuffling through presets and more time simply making music, plus some of these features can be used even on older MIDI 1.0-spec hardware. As Reverb.com notes, there’s still room for improvement on things like networking multiple devices, but it represents a massive upgrade over the old standard, and will be useful for anyone trying to make a Grammy-winning album, whether it’s in their bedroom or a fully-kitted studio.

Source: MIDI 2.0 overhauls the music interface for the first time in 35 years | Engadget

PC hardware maker NZXT has just announced the latest additions to its line of liquid CPU coolers, the Kraken X-3 and Z-3. The X-3 has a bright LED ring and rotates so the logo can be repositioned. The Z-3 comes with a 2.36-inch, 24-bit color LCD screen capable of displaying images, computer data, or animated GIFs, because maybe that is a thing people want.

The animated GIF of the CPU cooler displaying animated GIFs atop this post? With the Kraken Z-3 installed on my PC, I could display that GIF of a CPU cooler displaying GIFs as a GIF on my CPU cooler. I could put some anime there. Or maybe some looping pornography. Then I would turn my computer to the side with the glass window facing away from me and never see it again. I need a better way to display the glowing and flashing things inside of my PC. Maybe a mirror or something.

I’ve found NZXT liquid cooling quite reliable in the past. The idea of that reliability combined with this frivolity tickles me to no end. Look, they’ve even made a little trailer showing it off.

The Kraken X-3 and Z-3 are available for purchase in the U.S. starting today. The X-3 is available in 240mm, 280mm, and 360mm sizes for $130, $150, and $180. The Z03, AKA the one with the GIFs, costs $250 for the 280mm and $280 for the 360mm size. That means the ability to have an animated GIF on your CPU cooler costs $100.

Worth it.

Source: New Liquid CPU Cooler Plays Animated GIFs, Because Why Not

Spectrum customers who are also users of the company’s home security service are about a month away from being left with a pile of useless equipment that in many cases cost them hundreds of dollars.

On February 5, Spectrum will no longer support customers who’ve purchased its Spectrum Home Security equipment. None of the devices—the cameras, motion sensors, smart thermostats, and in-home touchscreens—can be paired with other existing services. In a few weeks, it’ll all be worthless junk.

While some of the devices may continue to function on their own, customers will soon no longer be able to access them using their mobile devices, which is sort of the whole point of owning a smart device.

On Friday, California’s KSBY News interviewed one Spectrum customer who said that he’d spent around $900 installing cameras and sensors in and around his Cheviot Hills home. That the equipment is soon-to-be worthless isn’t even the worst part. Spectrum is also running off with his money.

The customer reportedly contacted the company about converting the cost of his investment into credit toward his phone or cable bill. The company declined, he said.

Source: Spectrum Kills Home Security Business, Refuses Refunds for Owners of Now-Worthless Equipment

Motherboard on Thursday revealed that a “secretive” U.S. government vendor whose surveillance products are not publicly advertised has been marketing hidden cameras disguised as seemingly ordinary objects—vacuum cleaners, tree stumps, and tombstones—to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, among other law enforcement agencies, and the military, in addition to, ahem, “select clients.”

Yes, that’s tombstone cams, because absolutely nothing in this world is sacred.

 

The vendor, Special Services Group (SSG), was apparently none too pleased when Motherboard revealed that it planned to publish photographs and descriptions of the company’s surveillance toys. When reached for comment, SSG reportedly threatened to sue the tech publication, launched by VICE in 2009.

According to Motherboard, a brochure listing SSG’s products (starting at link from page 93) was obtained through public records requests filed with the Irvine Police Department in California.

Freddy Martinez, a policy analyst at government accountability group Open The Government, and Beryl Lipton, a reporter/researcher at the government transparency nonprofit MuckRock, both filed requests and obtained the SSG brochure, Motherboard said.

In warning the site not to disclose the brochure, SSG’s attorney reportedly claimed the document is protected under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), though the notice did not point to any specific section of the law, which was enacted to regulate arms exports at the height of the Cold War.

ITAR does prohibit the public disclosure of certain technical data related to military munitions. It’s unlikely, however, that a camera designed to look like a baby car seat—an actual SSG product called a “Rapid Vehicle Deployment Kit”—is covered under the law, which encompasses a wide range of actual military equipment that can’t be replicated in a home garage, such as space launch vehicles, nuclear reactors, and anti-helicopter mines.

ITAR explicitly does not cover “basic marketing information” or information “generally accessible or available to the public.”

Source: FBI Surveillance Vendor Threatens to Sue Tech Reporters for Heinous Crime of Doing Journalism