Sunday, August 8, 2021

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China sues Tencent over WeChat's 'youth mode'

Posted: 07 Aug 2021 02:18 PM PDT

WeChat may be a staple of Chinese digital life, but that isn't stopping the country's government from clamping down on the messaging giant's behavior. Reutersreports that Beijing prosecutors have sued Tencent over claims We Chat's restricted "youth mode" violates laws protecting children. The lawsuit didn't explain how the mode allegedly violated the law.

Youth mode prevents younger users from accessing payments, finding nearby friends and playing certain games. It's effectively a parental control tool for a "super app" that can handle many daily tasks in China.

Tencent hasn't commented on the lawsuit. It recently set stricter limits for young Honor of Kings players, capping their play time to just an hour a day on weekdays.

The suit might be part of a broader crackdown. China's state media blasted the game industry and online platforms just this week, and officials have previously demanded better protections against online threats to kids. The country has also focused much of its recent attention on reining in tech giants like Tencent, Alibaba and Didi, slapping them with antitrust fines and temporary app bans — the suit may be an extension of that effort.

Riot moves in-person 'League of Legends' championship due to COVID-19 surge

Posted: 07 Aug 2021 01:37 PM PDT

The eSports world is coming to grips with a resurgent COVID-19 threat. As The Vergenotes, Riot Games has moved the last two matches of the League of Legends Championship Series (LCS) from Newark, New Jersey's Prudential Center to the LCS Arena in Los Angeles. The US spread of the new coronavirus' Delta variant has made it impractical to hold the large in-person event "in good conscience" even with vaccines in use, Riot said.

The LCS Arena is a "safer" location that will protect the health of Worlds representatives before they go to China, Riot said. While it wasn't surprised that other events would carry on, the Series didn't need to put people at risk just to offer its "core competitive product." LoL teams have played against each other in person at LCS Arena over the summer, but even those were derailed in favor of virtual competition after people associated with two teams tested positive for COVID-19.

The developer promised events at Prudential Center in the future, and said it would offer full refunds. More details would be coming soon, Riot added.

Other eSports leagues, such as the Call of Duty League, have pressed forward with in-person events in spite of the virus surge. However, Riot's decision suggests that at least some organizers are having a change of heart. We wouldn't be surprised if others followed suit, at least until vaccine use climbs and cases (hopefully) drop again.

Even a social network for doctors is struggling with vaccine misinformation

Posted: 07 Aug 2021 12:19 PM PDT

Even an online medical community can't completely avoid COVID-19 vaccine misinformation. Gizmodoreports that CNBChas found a deluge of bogus anti-vaccine claims on Doximity, an industry networking tool for doctors. While shared stories are from well-established news outlets and scientific publications, the comments are apparently rife with misinformation on vaccine safety, mask effectiveness and natural immunity, among other issues.

The commenters are using their real names and have verified medical credentials.

Doximity told CNBC it had rules barring material that contradicts public health guidelines, including anti-vaccine material. It added that it had a "rigorous" comment review process where physicians screened content. The company didn't explain the glut of anti-vaccine comments, however, or say when it might remove them.

The findings highlight the problems with content moderation. Many social sites and internet giants have rules barring anti-vax content, but enforcement has been an ongoing problem due to either a lack of resources or users circumventing the rules. Doximity's problem is just a more egregious violation — this is a small, closed group full of people who are supposed to go through a tougher screening process. It's clear there's a while to go before Doximity and other sites can truly keep users sharing accurate information.

Apple Watch Series 6 Product Red drops to $300 at Woot

Posted: 07 Aug 2021 10:04 AM PDT

Now is a prime opportunity to get an Apple Watch Series 6 at a good price, provided you're not picky about the color. Woot is offering the 40mm Product Red edition with GPS (that is, no cellular) for just $300, or a clean $100 below the usual price. This isn't the absolute lowest price we've seen, but it's still a solid deal that delivers a high-end smartwatch at a reasonable price.

Buy Apple Watch Series 6 at Woot - $300

Series 6 is still a very capable smartwatch months after launch. It's ultimately a refinement of Series 5 with a blood oxygen monitor and slight boosts to performance and battery life, but that still leaves you with a great always-on display, useful health features and a rich app ecosystem. WatchOS 8 will expand that functionality, too, with improvements to everything from mindfulness to messages.

As before, the catch is simply the timing. Series 7 is likely close at hand, and might include a new design with updated performance and wireless technology. If you're more interested in having the latest hardware than saving money, you may want to wait a few weeks. You'll likely pay much less for Series 6, though, and it's a much better value at this price than the Apple Watch SE.

Just be aware that Woot's return policy is stricter than Amazon's. You have to return products within 30 days, and Woot reduces the refund amount by the cost of shipping. This Apple Watch is likely a safe bet, but you'll want to quickly determine whether or not you intend to keep it.

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

NASA's Perseverance rover fails to collect its first Mars rock sample

Posted: 07 Aug 2021 08:39 AM PDT

NASA's Perseverance rover just had a rare misstep. The space agency has revealed that the robotic vehicle failed to collect Mars rock samples during its first attempt. While the percussive drill, coring bit and sample tube processing worked "as intended," a probe indicated that the tube was empty — not exactly what scientists were expecting when everything else checked out.

Scientists are still investigating what happened and may not have an answer for a few days. Perseverance project manager Jennifer Trosper said the team suspected the rock might have reacted in an unexpected way during the coring process. The equipment is likely fine, in other words.

The Martian surface has created problems more than once. The Phoenix Lander had trouble gathering "sticky" soil in 2008, for instance, while Curiosity and InSight have also had trouble cracking into rocks and the surface itself.

This initial setback won't necessarily jeopardize Perseverance's mission. However, NASA will want to keep incidents like this to a minimum. The rover was sent to Mars in no small part to collect samples that would eventually return to Earth and help scientists look for signs of past life. The fewer samples NASA gets, the fewer chances it will have to explore Mars' history.

Hitting the Books: How our lying eyes trick the brain into seeing motion during movies

Posted: 07 Aug 2021 08:30 AM PDT

Visual media has come a long way since the first proto-human cave dwellers used the flickering of torch light to bring the hand-drawn art on their walls to life. Today, the pixel — despite its humble, low-resolution origins — sits as the current pinnacle of digital display technology. In his new book, Biography of the Pixel, Pixar co-founder Alvy Ray Smith examines the fascinating history and development of picture elements (hence "pix"-"el") from their often-contested start in the labs of pioneering computer researchers like Alan Turing to their ubiquitous presence in modern life. In the excerpt below, Smith takes a look at the bad old days before digital displays to explain the science behind our brain's' ability to perceive motion through the rapid flashing of static images. 

Biography of the Pixel cover art
MIT Press

Excerpted from 'A Biography of the Pixel' by Alvy Ray Smith (MIT Press, 2021)

How Movies Were Really Done

What did the inventors of cinema do (or not) to make the system they gave us so non-ideal? First, they didn't give us instantaneous samples as required by sampling. Film frames are fat. They have duration. The camera shutter is open for a short exposure time. A moving object moves during that short interval, and so smears slightly across the frame during the film exposure time. It's like what happens when you try to take a long-exposure still photo of your child throwing a ball and his arm is just a blur. This turns out to be a saving grace of cinema as it was actually practiced.

Second, they made it so each frame is projected twice (at least) by the projector. Ouch! That's not sampling at all. Why did the inventors do that? Simple economics demanded it: 24 frames per second costs half as much film as 48 frames per second. But the eye needs to be refreshed about 50 times per second, or the retinal image fades between frames. Actually, 48 is close enough to 50 to work in a dark theater. How do you get 48 from 24? You show each frame twice! If you show just 24 frames per second, the screen appears to flicker. Hence the "flicks" from the early days of cinema before higher frame rates were adopted.

The third thing the original inventors did was to shut off the light between projected frames. This meant that 48 times per second, nothing (blackness) was projected into the eye — inside the pupil, onto the retina. It's convenient for movie machines — both the camera and projector part — to "shutter" to blackness like this between frames. It allows time for the mechanical advancement of the next film frame into position. In a camera, it keeps the film from recording the real world during the physical advancement of the film. In a projector, it keeps the moving film out of eyesight as it's physically advanced.

When you ask how a movie projector works, some people say something like this: There's a top reel of film which is the source of film, and a bottom take-up reel. The film moves from reel to reel and passes between the light source of the projector and its lens, which magnifies the frame-size image up to screen size. In other words, the film moves continuously past the light source. But that doesn't work. The eye sees exactly what's there, and with this scheme the eye would see one frame sliding away as the next frame slides in from the opposite side. It would see the sliding. And that won't work.

What a projector actually does is exactly this: It brings each frame into fixed position with the light source blocked. That's the function of the shutter. Then the shutter opens and the illuminated frame projects onto the screen. Then the shutter closes. Then it opens again, and the illuminated frame is projected a second time onto the screen. Then the shutter closes and the next frame slides into position, and so forth.

We've just described the discrete, or intermittent, movement of film through a projector, as opposed to unworkable continuous movement. The same idea holds for a camera. The physical device that implements this action is called, in fact, an intermittent movement. This is the key notion in cinema history that is comparable to the conditional branch instruction in computer history. The mad rush to the movie machine turned on who first got a projector to work correctly, and that hinged on who got an intermittent movement working properly. It's a defining notion.

To recap: An actual film-based movie projector doesn't reconstruct a continuous visual flow from the frame samples and present this to the eye. Instead, it sends "fat samples" — thick with time duration and smeared motion — directly to the eye's retina. It sends each frame twice, and it sends blackness between. It's up to the brain to reconstruct motion from these inputs. How does that work?

Somehow the eye-brain system "reconstructs the visual flow" that's represented by the fat visual samples it receives. Of course, it really does no such thing. Light intensities come in through the pupil as input. But the output from the eye to the brain, through the optic nerve, is an electrochemical pulse train. Neuronal pulse trains aren't visual flows. It could be that the retina actually does reconstruct a visual flow and then converts it to pulse trains for brain consumption. The responses of some of the neurons in the eye certainly suggest the spreader function, complete with a high positive hump and negative lobes. But brain activity is beyond the scope of this book. Let's concentrate instead on the customary explanations of the perception of motion from sequences of still snapshots.

Perception of Motion

The classic explanation is hoary old persistence of vision. It's a real characteristic of human vision: once an image stimulus to the retina ceases, we continue to perceive the image there for a short while. But persistence of vision explains only why you don't see the blackness between frames in the case of film-based movies. If an actor or an animated character moves to a new position between frames then — by persistence of vision — you should see him in both positions: two Humphrey Bogarts, two Buzz Lightyears. In fact, your retinas do see both, one fading out as the other comes in—each frame is projected long enough to ensure this. That's persistence of vision. But it doesn't explain why you perceive one moving object, not two objects at different positions. What your brain does with the information from the retinas determines whether you perceive two Bogarts in two different positions or one Bogart moving between them.

Psychophysicists have performed experiments to determine the characteristics of another real brain phenomenon, called apparent motion. The experiments don't explain how the brain perceives motion, but they do describe the limitations of the phenomenon. A small white dot on a black background is presented to a subject's retina. Then that dot is removed, and another dot is presented in a different position. The experimenters can vary two things, the spatial separation of the two dots and the time delay between position change. The brain perceives one dot here and another dot there, but only if the distance and delays are long enough. If the distance and delays are short, the brain perceives that the dot moves from one position to the other. It's apparent motion because no actual motion is presented to the eye. The brain perceives what it doesn't see.

Motion Blur

Persistence of vision is such that we still perceive the first image when the second one arrives. That sounds a lot like frame spreading. A frame of short duration spreads out in time and adds to the next frame also spread out in time. It's as if the retina does the image spreading and the adding of successive spread frames. Something like this must be going on because we perceive a continuous visual field although the film projector doesn't present one. You can think of the shape of the persistence function of the eye as the shape of the frame spreader that's built into us human perceivers. Another reason we can assume that the eye-brain system must be doing a reconstruction, one that implicitly uses the Sampling Theorem, is because we perceive exactly the errors we would expect if that were the actual mechanism—such as wagon wheels spinning backward.

Classic cel animation — of the old ink-on-celluloid variety — relies on the apparent-motion phenomenon. The old animators knew intuitively how to keep the successive frames of a movement inside its "not too far, not too slow" boundaries. If they needed to exceed those limits, they had tricks to help us perceive the motion. They drew actual speed lines, which showed the brain the direction of motion and implied that it was fast, like a blur. Or they provided a POOF of dust to mark the rapid descent of Wile E. Coyote as he stepped unexpectedly off a mesa in hot pursuit of that truly wily Road Runner. They provided a visual language that the brain could interpret.

Exceed the apparent motion limits — without those animators' tricks — and the results are ugly. You may have seen old school stop-motion animations — such as Ray Harryhausen's classic sword-fighting skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts (1963) — that are plagued by an unpleasant jerking motion of the characters. You're seeing double, at least — several edges of a skeleton at the same time — and correctly interpret it as motion, but painfully so. The edges stutter, or "judder," or "strobe" across the screen. Those words reflect the pain inflicted by staccato motion.

Live-action movies are sequences of discrete frames just like animations. Why don't these movies stutter? (Imagine directing Uma Thurman to stay within "not too far, not too slow" limits.) There's a general explanation that works. It's called motion blur, and it's simple and pretty. A frame that's recorded by a real movie camera is fat with duration. It's not a sample at a single instant like a Road Runner or a Harryhausen frame. Motion blur is what you see in a still photograph when the subject moves and the shutter isn't fast enough to stop the motion. In still photographs, it's often an unintended result, but it turns out to be a feature in movies. Without the blur all movies would look as jerky as Harryhausen's skeletons—unless Uma miraculously stayed within limits. The motion blur of moving objects in a fat frame gives clues to the brain about what is moving and what is not. The direction of a blur gives the direction of motion, and its length indicates the speed. Somehow, mysteriously, the brain converts that spatial information — the blurs — into temporal information and then perceives motion with the help of the apparent motion phenomenon.

Audi off-road hybrid completes endurance test ahead of Dakar Rally

Posted: 07 Aug 2021 06:29 AM PDT

Audi is hard at work preparing the RS Q E-Tron for the 2022 Dakar Rally in hopes that it can earn the distinction of being the first electrified vehicle to win the grueling competition. In fact, the vehicle has just completed an eight-day endurance test near the Spanish city of Zaragoza. The Volkswagen subsidiary tested the off-road SUV on unpaved ground back in July. But this was the first time it put the vehicle through its paces in actual conditions it's expected to encounter during one of the toughest rallies in the world. 

Three teams with two drivers each participated in the event, dividing the eight days and 1,056 miles of intensive testing between them. On the gravel roads that stretched for up to 11 miles, the RS Q E-Tron reached a speed of 112 mph. The drivers admitted that there's still some fine-tuning to be done, but they were impressed with the vehicle's performance. Arnau Niubó Bosch, Audi's development engineer, explained that the test "was focused on getting in as much driving as possible and detecting weak spots." For the SUV's next test in September, Audi will take it into the dunes for the first time.

As we previously mentioned, the RS Q E-Tron has an electric drivetrain with two modified Formula E motors. It has an energy converter with a TFSI engine to charge its battery while driving and braking, since one wouldn't find charging stations in the middle of a rally. That means it's not a zero-emissions vehicle, though Audi says the converter is energy efficient. 
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