Month: March 2016

Android N's new split-screen mode on a tablet.

4 more images in gallery

Google I/O is happening on May 18-20, but forget Google I/O—the developer preview of the next version of Android is launching right now. Google has posted the Android N Developer Preview for the Nexus 6P, Nexus 5X, Nexus 6, Pixel C Nexus 9, and the Nexus Player.

Before you get too invested in the interface on display here, it's worth noting that the Android M Developer Preview has gone through several designs (like the weird letter-indexed app drawer) and features (day/night mode) that have not made it to the Developer Preview. In fact, the whole point of this super-early preview seems to be to gather as much feedback as possible. "The sooner we hear from you, the more of your feedback we can integrate," Google says.

As we saw in the Android M Developer Preview, Google has been working hard on matching Windows and iOS by building a native side-by-side app mode in Android. For Android N, the feature is apparently ready for prime time. The gallery above shows off the feature, which works on tablets and phones—it looks a lot like what is currently shipping on Samsung phones. The one question mark is how to actually turn it on and control it. On Samsung phones and in the Android N app preview, for instance, buttons on the recent app screen would trigger split-screen mode. There are no such buttons in the screenshots.

(credit: Wikipedia)

The UN's international civil aviation organisation (ICAO) has announced new provisions to help prevent future aircraft disappearances. The new provisions were unveiled yesterday, March 8, on the second anniversary of the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight 370 (MH370).

The amendments to the Chicago Convention, which lays down a bunch of aircraft, airspace, and airport rules for almost every member of the United Nations, are all within Annex 6 (the section that deals with the "operation of aircraft"). The three most significant tweaks are:

• Aircraft must carry "autonomous distress tracking devices" that can "transmit location information at least once every minute in distress circumstances."
• The cockpit voice recorder (CVR) must be able to store at least 25 hours of recording, "so that they cover all phases of flight for all types of operations."
• Aircraft must be "equipped with a means to have flight recorder data recovered and made available in a timely manner."

Currently, due to a variety of different solutions used by airline operators and the limited reach of ground-based radar, aircraft can't be reliably tracked in real time—plus, when they do disappear, we can't reliably find the flight data recorder (FDR) or CVR. Civil airline operators will have five years (until 2021) to adopt these measures.

(credit: IBM/Hilton)

Just arrived to your hotel, desperate for some munch at a decent restaurant nearby, and not really into speaking with human beings? Connie the robo-concierge is here to help. American hotel multinational Hilton has teamed up with tech giant IBM to trial a robotic concierge powered by IBM’s AI software Watson.

The bot has been christened “Connie” after the chain’s founder, Conrad Hilton, and it is currently assisting residents at Hilton McLean hotel, in Virginia. From its station next to the reception desks, Connie helps guests navigate around the hotel and find restaurants or tourist attractions in the area—but it is not able to check them in just yet.

Connie’s physical support is Nao, a French-made 58cm-tall android that has become the go-to platform for educational and customer care tasks, thanks to its relative affordability (about £6,000 or $9,000). But the concierge’s brain is based on IBM’s flagship AI program Watson—the Jeopardy!-winning system engineered to understand people’s questions and answer them in the best way possible.

Simulation games have always felt lonely to me, almost empty. For all of their enticements, their promises of endless adventure, they invariably fall short. Somewhere, somehow, something breaks the immersion, laying bare the machinery behind the curtains. It's never the virtual life advertised, just a simulacrum of a dream.

So, when the first mentions of farm-life simulator Stardew Valley bloomed on Twitter, I raised an eyebrow. It's been described as Harvest Moon crossed with Animal Crossing and Zelda, a love letter to the pastoral classics. But I'd been there, done that, and while I adored my time with Starbound—my last farming-type flirtation—it left me feeling as though I was a child with a diorama of talking action figures, rather than an extraterrestrial colony leader.

Nonetheless, circumstances led to the acquisition of the game, and I went ahead with it, sceptical at first, only to become completely infatuated by the end of the first growing season. Where other titles barrage you with features, with new twists, and new iterations on the latest big new idea, Stardew Valley asks you, both as your pixelated avatar and as the player, to breathe.

(credit: Richard Ying et Tangui Morlier)

French parliamentarians have adopted an amendment to a penal reform bill that would punish companies like Apple that refuse to provide decrypted versions of messages their products have encrypted. The Guardian reports: "The controversial amendment, drafted by the rightwing opposition, stipulates that a private company which refuses to hand over encrypted data to an investigating authority would face up to five years in jail and a €350,000 (£270,000) fine."

This is only the bill's first reading, and the final fate of the amendment is uncertain. Earlier this year, the French government rejected crypto backdoors as "the wrong solution." "Given the government’s reluctance to take on the big phone companies in this way, it remains to be seen whether the thrust of the amendment can survive the lengthy parliamentary process that remains before the bill becomes law," The Guardian writes.

Amendment 90 (original in French) is just one of several proposals that sought to impose stiff penalties on companies that refused to cooperate with the authorities. As the French site Numerama notes, even harsher proposals were rejected. For example, Amendments 532 and 533 suggested imposing a fine of €1,000,000 (£770,000) on companies that refused to decrypt messages.

Here’s a conversation starter that wouldn’t have gotten you very far 10 years ago: “Let’s talk about earthquakes in Oklahoma.” But the Sooner State has experienced an amazing boom in (mostly very minor) seismic activity over the last decade as a result of industrial wastewater disposal in deep injection wells.

Wastewater in many of the wells is altering fluid pressures in the old igneous and metamorphic basement beneath the state’s sedimentary bedrock. Those pressure changes have facilitated movement on small, ancient faults that would otherwise have stayed locked together.

Oklahoma has started trying to rein this in, acting before there are more potentially damaging earthquakes like the magnitude 5.6 quake in 2011 and a magnitude 5.1 event earlier this year. The effort includes a pair of new rules, enacted in the last few months, to cut back on the amount of wastewater being injected into these disposal wells. As The New York Times reported, a new rule announced Monday basically caps injections in a portion of the state including Oklahoma City to 60 percent of the volume from 2014, when over 1 million barrels of wastewater were being handled per day in this area. Last month, a similar cap was placed on injections in the northwestern part of the state.