Google acquires GraphicsFuzz, a service that tests Android graphics drivers

Google has acquired GraphicsFuzz, a company that builds a framework for testing the security and reliability of Android graphics drivers. The news, which was first spotted by XDA Developers, comes on the same day Google announced the release of Android 9 Pie.

A Google spokesperson confirmed the news to us but declined to provide any further information. The companies also declined to provide any details about the price of the acquisition.

The GraphicsFuzz team, which consists of co-founders Alastair Donaldson, Hugues Evrard and Paul Thomson, will join the Android graphics team to bring its driver-testing technology to the wider Android ecosystem.

“GraphicsFuzz has pioneered the combination of fuzzing and metamorphic testing to yield a highly automatic method for testing graphics drivers that quickly finds and fixes bugs that could undermine reliability and security before they affect end users,” the team explains in today’s announcement. The company’s founders started their work at the Department of Computing at Imperial College London and received funding support from the U.K. Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the TETRACOM EU project.

While this is obviously not the splashiest of acquisitions, it is nevertheless an important one. In the fractured Android ecosystem, graphics drivers are one of the many pieces that make a phone or tablet work — and when they don’t, it’s often immediately obvious to the user. But broken drivers also expose a phone to security exploits. GraphicsFuzz uses the same kind of fuzzing technique, which essentially throws lots of random data at a program, that’s also becoming increasingly popular in other areas of software development.

from Android – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2nibIbw
via IFTTT

15 names that would have been better than Android Pie

Let’s say, hypothetically, that you make a mobile operating system, and somewhere along the line, you decided whimsically to name major updates after alphabetical dessert foods. What a fun idea!

Sure, some letters will prove harder than others. “K” and “O” are admittedly tough, but that’s nothing that little bit of clever cross-branding can’t fix. Who doesn’t love a good Kit-Kat or Oreo? (Don’t @ me.) Others, however, will be simple. In fact, some letters will be such an embarrassment of riches. “P” is one such letter. There are a ridiculous number of options for the consonant.

So, naturally, Google went with the most boring one possible.

Pie. Freaking Android Pie. It sounds more like a rejected Philip K. Dick manuscript than mobile operating system. If this was Android 3.14, maybe, sure. The nerd jokes are just way to strong not to go all-in. But Slices jokes aside, Android 9.0 Pie feels like a missed opportunity. It seems possible that a licensing deal fell through last minute, leaving the company to settle on cake’s lesser cousin.

Sure, it’s too late to make suggestions, and honestly, Google never really listens to us in the first place, but here are a few belated replacements for the half-baked Pie.

Popsicle: This one seemed to be the front runner. In fact, the company appeared to tease in an early release of wallpaper. Popsicle would have been the perfect, colorful name for a summer OS release. Of course, there are two issues here. First, believe it or not, the name is still a trademark. Second, the name is hardly universal outside of North America. Those cold things on a stick are alternately (and incredibly delightfully) known as ice pops, freezer pops, ice lollies, ice blocks, icy poles ands ice drops, according to the always-correct editors of Wikipedia.

Pez: Another trademarked name, of course, holy moly, imagine the marketing on this one.

Pop Rocks: Ditto, but totally worth is for all the free packets of Pop Rocks we’d be getting from Google events for the next year.

Popcorn: Okay, kind of boring and a borderline dessert food at best, but still more fun than Pie.

Pecan, Pumpkin Pie: A little alliteration goes a long way.

Parfait: A delicious, refreshing summer treat, Also, everyone loves France! (Again, don’t @ me.) 

Pop-Tart: Or, if you prefer to keep it in the States, nothing says “America” quite like a mass produced, foil wrapped frosted breakfast pastry from Kellogg’s.

Peppermint Patty: A delicious treat and an iconic supporting Peanuts cast member? Yes, please.

Pudding: Sweet, gelatinous, sometimes found in pop-form. If that doesn’t say mobile operating system, what does?

Poundcake: Cake is better than Pie. I’m not backing down on this one.

Pancake: Okay, more of a breakfast food, but crepes count, right?

Phish Food: Google’s been taking jam band enthusiasts for granted for far too long. And besides, Ben & Jerry never met a cross promotion they didn’t like.

Pastry: Simple, elegant, slightly better than Pie.

Peanut Brittle: Okay, fine, maybe Pie’s better than this one. You win this round, Google. 

There’s also Petit Four, though these bite-sized French cakes actually served as the internal code name for Android 1.1.

from Android – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2OfLWQi
via IFTTT

Say hello to Android 9 Pie

The nickname for Android 9 is “Pie.” It’s not the most inspired of Android names, but it’ll do. What really matters at the end of the day are the new features in Pie — and there are plenty of those.

If you are a Pixel owner, you’ll be happy to hear that Pie will start rolling out as an over-the-air update today. The same goes for every other device that was enrolled in the Android Beta (that includes any Sony Mobile, Xiaomi, HMD Global, Oppo, Vivo, OnePlus and Essential devices that got the betas) and qualifying Android One devices. Everybody else, well, you know the drill. Wait until your manufacturer launches it for you… which should be the end of the year for some — and never for quite a few others.

Overall, Pie is a solid upgrade. The only real disappointment here is that Pie won’t launch with Android’s new digital wellness features by default. Instead, you’ll have to sign up for a beta and own a Pixel device. That’s because these new features won’t officially launch until the fall (Google’s hardware event, which traditionally happens in early October, seems like a good bet for the date).

Let’s talk about the features you’ll get when you update to Android 9 Pie, though. The most obvious sign that you have updated to the new version is the new system navigation bar, which replaces the standard three-icon navigation bar that has served Android users well for the last couple of iterations. The new navigation bar replaces the three icons (back, home, overview) that are virtually always on screen with a more adaptive system and a home button that now lets you swipe to switch between apps (instead of tapping on the overview button). You can also now swipe up on the home button and see full-screen previews of the apps you used recently, as well as the names of a few apps that Google thinks you’ll want to use. A second up-swipe and you get to the usual list of all of your installed apps.

In day-to-day use, I’m not yet 100 percent convinced that this new system is any better than the old one. Maybe I just don’t like change, but the whole swiping thing does not strike me as very efficient, and if you leave your finger on the home button for a split-second longer than Google expects, it’ll launch the Assistant instead of letting you swipe between apps. You get used to it, though, and you can get back to the old system if you want to.

Google’s suggestions for apps you’ll like and want to use when you swipe up feel like a nice tech demo but aren’t all that useful in day-to-day use. I’m sure Google uses some kind of machine learning to power these suggestions, but I’d rather use that area as an extended favorites bar where I can pin a few additional apps. It’s not that Android’s suggestions were necessarily wrong and that these weren’t apps I wanted to use, it’s mostly that the apps it suggested were already on my home screen anyway. I don’t think I ever started an app from there while using the last two betas.

But that’s enough grumbling, because it’s actually all of the little things that make Android 9 Pie better. There’s stuff like the adaptive battery management, which makes your battery last longer by learning which apps you use the most. And that’s great (though I’m not sure how much influence it has had on my daily battery life), but the new feature that actually made me smile was a new popup that tells you that you have maybe 20 percent of battery left and that this charge should last until 9:20pm. That’s actually useful.

Google also loves to talk about its Adaptive Brightness feature that also learns about how you like your screen brightness based on your surroundings, but what actually made a difference for me was that Google now blends out the whole settings drawer when you change the setting so that you can actually see what difference those changes make. It’s also nice to have the volume slider pop up right next to the volume buttons now.

Talking about sound: Your phone now plays a pleasant little sound when you plug in the charger. It’s the little things that matter, after all.

The other new machine learning-powered feature is the smart text selection tool that recognizes the meaning of the text you selected and then allows you to suggest relevant actions like opening Google Maps or bringing up the share dialog for an address. It’s nifty when it works, but here, too, what actually makes the real difference in daily usage is that the text selection magnifier shows you a larger, clearer picture of what you’re selecting (and it sits right on top of what you are selecting), which makes it far easier to pick the right text (and yes, iOS pretty much does the same thing).

And now we get to the part where I wish I could tell you all about the flagship Digital Wellness features in Pie (because pie and wellness go together like Gwyneth Paltrow and jade eggs), but we’ll have to wait a few days for that. Here’s what we know will be available: a dashboard for seeing where you spend time on your device; an app timer that lets you set limits on how long you can use Instagram, for example, and then grays out the icon of that app; and a Wind Down feature that switches on the night-light mode, turns on Do Not Disturb and fades the screen to grayscale before it’s bedtime.

The one wellness feature you can try now if you are on Pie already is the new Do Not Disturb tool that lets you turn off all visual interruptions. To try out everything else, you’ll have to sign up for the beta here.

Another feature that’s only launching in the fall is “slices” (like slices of pie…). I was looking forward to this one as it’ll allow developers to highlight parts of their apps (maybe to start playing a song or hail a car) in the Android Pie search bar when warranted. Maybe Google wasn’t ready yet — or maybe its partners just hadn’t built enough slices yet, but either way, we won’t see these pop up in Android Pie until later this year.

And that’s Android 9 Pie. It’s a nice update for sure, and while Google loves to talk about all of the machine learning and intelligence it’s baking into Android, at the end of the day, it’s the small quality of life changes that actually make the biggest difference.

15 names that would have been better than Android Pie

from Android – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2LV10Go
via IFTTT

MOV.AI raises $3M in seed funding to create an ‘Android for Robotics’

We all know what Android for smartphones is. A free, (almost) open source operating system for smartphones. But right now there is no equivalent of the “Android for robots.” Instead there are many, many proprietary systems. A new startup plans to address this problem in order for the robotics market to really take off, and for it to have a good slice fo the pie.

MOV.AI plans to create an ecosystem where developers, integrators and manufacturers collaborate to develop the first industry-grade O/S for autonomous intelligent collaborative robots. This could potentially produce smarter robots on a large-scale for operation and production lines.

It’s now raised $3M in seed funding in a round led by Israel-based Viola Ventures and SF-based NFX.

MOV.AI describes itself as an ‘ROS compatible operating system’. That means it enables industry-grade deployment of fleets of autonomous robots. The idea is that this will decouple the hardware from the software (a problem in robot-land), and simpler R&D, thus making robot automation affordable for any player, large or small.

This ROS will aim to cover easier mapping, robust and autonomous navigation, obstacle avoidance, cloud-based software-distribution, compliance with safety and cybersecurity’s best practices and modern end-user interface.

The main target audiences of MOV.AI are manufacturers of material handling equipment, automation integrators, and other collaborative robot manufacturers.

Limor Schweitzer (pictured), founder and CEO of MOV.AI says: “At MOV.AI, we have made it our mission to contribute to a world where intelligent robots perform most of the common physical tasks, which will free humankind to be more creative and productive, and enable faster market scalability. In other words we will be able to transform human operated mobile machines into autonomous robots that work safely together with people and other robots in any environment at all scalable levels”.

Ronen Nir, general partner at Viola Ventures says: “We believe that the impact and potential value of MOV.AI’s ecosystem will gain traction as more large customers, distributors and developers come on board.”

MOV.AI says is currently piloting projects with large automation integrators and industrial operators.

from Android – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2AMtflL
via IFTTT

Apple has removed Infowars podcasts from iTunes

Apple has followed the lead of Google and Facebook after it removed Infowars, the conspiracy theorist organization helmed by Alex Jones, from its iTunes and podcasts apps.

Unlike Google and Facebook, which removed four Infowars videos on the basis that the content violated its policies, Apple’s action is wider-reaching. The company has withdrawn all episodes of five of Infowars’ six podcasts from its directory of content, leaving just one left, a show called ‘Real News With David Knight.’

The removals were first spotted on Twitter. Later, Apple confirmed it took action on account of the use of hate speech which violates its content guidelines.

“Apple does not tolerate hate speech, and we have clear guidelines that creators and developers must follow to ensure we provide a safe environment for all of our users. Podcasts that violate these guidelines are removed from our directory making them no longer searchable or available for download or streaming. We believe in representing a wide range of views, so long as people are respectful to those with differing opinions,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch.

Apple’s action comes after fellow streaming services Spotify and Stitcher removed Infowars on account of its use of hate speech.

Jones has used Infowars, and by association the platforms of these media companies, to broadcast a range of conspiracy theories which have included claims 9/11 was an inside job and alternate theories to the San Bernardino shootings. In the case of another U.S. mass shooting, Sandy Hook, Jones and Infowars’ peddling of false information and hoax theories was so severe that some of the families of the deceased, who have been harassed online and faced death threats, have been forced to move multiple times. A group is suing Jones via a defamation suit.

from Apple – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2MqA7pW

Virus shuts down factories of major iPhone component manufacturer TSMC

Apple touts the cybersecurity of its iPhone, but less can be said for the exclusive manufacturer who makes the processor for the iPhone.

Semiconductor foundry TSMC, or Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, was hit by a virus late Friday night, which forced it to shut down several factories according to Debbie Wu at Bloomberg. The virus and the shutdown were confirmed by TSMC representatives.

It is not clear at this time which factories were hit, or whether those factories were producing the iPhone’s main processor. Apple is expected to unveil new iPhones this fall, and supply chain disruptions in the critical month of August could have significant adverse consequences for the rapid availability of the new phone before the key Christmas holiday.

TSMC has grown to become the largest independent semiconductor foundry in the world, with profits last year of $11.6 billion. The company has benefitted from partnerships with smartphone companies like Apple, which produces the designs for its own A-series chips and then contracts out their manufacturing to foundries.

TSMC is a critical partner for the launch of the new iPhone. It announced earlier this year that it had begun volume production of 7mm chips, which will drive performance while limiting energy usage.

The origins of the virus are not known, although a statement by the company to Bloomberg said that it wasn’t introduced by a hacker.

Cyberattacks are nothing new to the island nation, which has increasingly faced sophisticated cyberattacks, mostly originating from China, which holds deep antipathy for Taiwan’s president Tsai Ing-wen. Taiwan’s government websites have sustained 20 million cyberattacks per month, with the bulk believed to be originating from China. Jess Macy Yu at Reuters reported earlier this summer that Chinese cyberattacks had grown more successful, even as their total volume has declined. Taiwan’s local elections will be held later this year in November, and the number and intensity of attacks is expected to increase as the date approaches.

Alongside Foxconn, TSMC is one of Taiwan’s most important and profitable companies, and is an obvious target both due to its wealth and scale, as well as its centrality in the increasingly fraught cross-straight relations between China and Taiwan. China has made becoming the world leader in semiconductors a national priority, and companies like TSMC are deeply competitive with mainland foundries.

That’s the paranoid context for many tech executives in Taiwan, and while the culprit of this particular virus is not yet publicly known, eyes and fingers are already beginning to point in one direction.

More information about the attack is expected to be available next week.

from Apple – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2KsPHj4

The greedy ways Apple got to $1 trillion

For being the richest company ever with $243 billion in cash, Apple sure cuts corners in the stingiest ways. The hardware giant became the first trillion-dollar company week. Yet it’s tough to reconcile Apple earning $11 billion in profit per quarter with it still screwing us over on cords and keyboards. The “it just works” philosophy has slipped through the cracks of the money-printing machine.

We still turn to Apple because it makes the best core products. But the edges of the customer experience have frayed like the wires of a Lightning cable. The key to Apple’s fortune is obviously selling high margin iPhones, not these ways it nickels and dimes us. But the company has an opportunity to raise its standards after this milestone, though, and win back the faith that could push it to a $2 trillion market cap.

1. Frayed Charging Cables

Apple gives you that tingly feeling in the worst way. Can it not build Lightning cables and MacBook chargers a little sturdier? If you avoid losing one long enough to put in some serious use, it inevitably ends up splittling where the cord meets your iPhone or exits the laptop power supply. Whether it’s wrapping them in electrical tape or the spring of a retractable pen, people have come up with all sorts of Macgyver methods to make their Apple chargers last. It got so bad that Apple was sued into offering a MacBook charger replacement program, but that expired years ago. If these are what allow us to play with the fancy devices it invents, shouldn’t they get the same quality of industrial design?

Image via Sophia Cannon

2. Buried iTunes Subscriptions Cancellation

Want to cancel your Apple Music subscription or some other service you got roped into with a free trial? It’s SUPER easy. First, click the totally unlabeled and generic circle with a blotch in it that’s supposed to be a profile picture icon. You should see a “Manage Subscriptions” option…but you don’t. Instead, you’ll have to know to tap “View Apple ID”. Once you auth in with the same face or thumbprint that opened your phone in the first place you’ll find the option to cut them off. And as thank you for this convenience, you’ll get to pay 30 percent extra on some subscriptions if you pay through Apple. It’s clearly exploitative dark pattern design.

3. Keyboard Claptrap

The MacBook keyboard is the on-ramp to the information superhighway, yet a single grain of sand can cause a pile up. Renowned Apple pundit John Gruber called it “one of the biggest design screwups in Apple history”. The new butterfly key design Apple rolled out in 2016 can get jammed by dust, requiring a lengthy disassembly process often requiring a professional to fix. Suddenly your work grinds to a halt. Apple wouldn’t always cover this repair, even under warranty. It took a lawsuit and tons of public backlash for Apple to offer free fixes, and that still typically leaves you without a laptop for a few days. I’m typing this article on a cracked-screen 2013 MacBook Pro because I refuse to upgrade until they make the keyboard design more resilient.

4. Killing Affiliate Fees Blogs Rely On

Apple benefits from a legion of blogs obsessing over its hardware and software, hyping up everything it sells. Just this week it returned that favor by announcing it will cut off one of their core sources of revenue. Websites would previously earn a 7 percent commission from Apple in exchange for affiliate link clicks leading to purchases on the App Store. But over the past few years, Apple has begun to sell ads inside the App Store too, competing for advertisers with those external blogs. It’s also built up its own editorial team that curates what’s featured, and apparently doesn’t want competition in being a king-maker. So in October Apple is shutting down the affiliate program that app review sites like TouchArcade and AppShopper depend on, potentially spelling their doom.

5. Dongle Hell

What’s the opposite of “it just works”? Paying extra to lug around a slew of gangly cord connectors you need just to plug things into your laptop or phone. Dongles are the emblem of Apple’s abandonment of the user experience. A Thunderbolt 2 to Thunderbolt 3 dongle runs $50 while it will cost you $9 to plug in any pair of headphones from the past half-century once you’ve inevitably lost the Lightning dongle you’re allocated. Apple loves pushing us towards its vision of tomorrow, like Bluetooth headphones (that it sells) and USB-C fast-chargers (that it sells). But ditching headphone jacks and old school USB ports makes Apple’s latest devices incompatible with sanity. Even its own commercial shows musician Grimes struggling with her dongles. Sorry you can’t pass me the aux cord. I’m from the future.

Image via Notebookcheck

[Featured Image via Instructibles]

from Apple – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2ADJFgb