Month: February 2018

Enlarge / The Pixelbook Pen. (credit: Valentina Palladino)

Google has joined the Universal Stylus Initiative (USI), a group of over 30 companies committed to supporting an "industry standard, non-proprietary, active stylus protocol." The group was founded in 2015 with the idea that a single standard would allow consumers to buy an active stylus once and use it across multiple devices from different manufacturers.

The USI 1.0 spec determines how the stylus sends data to the connected screen, including information like pressure levels, button presses, and eraser operation. The stylus can also store preferences such as pressure levels and ink color.

A standard is only as good as the members supporting it, and in addition to Google, the group does have some touch component vendors like Wacom and Synaptics on board. The only actual devices builders, though, seem to be Lenovo, Sharp (Foxconn), and Dell. That's not an impressive list.

Enlarge / Here goes nothing...literally.

On Wednesday, the beleaguered credit reporting agency Equifax launched a new service to protect people from the risks of identity theft that the company vastly magnified with a breach of over 145 million people's credit records last year. The service, called Lock & Alert, is fronted by a mobile application and a Web application. It is intended to allow individuals to control access to their credit report on demand.

"Lock & Alert allows You to lock and unlock your EIS credit report ('Equifax credit report')," the services' terms of service agreement states. "Locking or unlocking your Equifax credit report usually takes less than a minute."

Except when it doesn't.

Enlarge (credit: Apple)

Since Apple's HomePod became available for preorder last week, there has been confusion about the music it can play. Apple recently added an "audio sources" section to HomePod's tech spec webpage that lays out exactly where you can play music from using the smart speaker. These are the supported sources:

• Apple Music (subscription required)
• iTunes Music purchases
• iCloud Music Library with an Apple Music or iTunes Match subscription
• Beats 1 Live Radio
• Podcasts
• Content via AirPlay to HomePod from iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Apple TV, and Mac

It's not surprising that nearly all of these sources draw music from Apple's ecosystem. HomePod was always going to prioritize Apple-approved music before all other types, but that will make it harder for users who don't dwell in Apple's ecosystem to use HomePod regularly.

Siri voice commands should work with all music sources except content accessed via AirPlay. It appears Siri has limited integration on HomePod right now, and in terms of music, Apple will likely keep Siri controlling only music that the company provides. AirPlay appears to be the best way for users to stream music that isn't controlled by Apple, such as Spotify or Pandora, to a HomePod speaker (it's still unclear if HomePod can be used as a Bluetooth speaker). When the AirPlay 2 protocol launches later this year, users will be able to stream audio to multiple HomePods and other AirPlay 2 compatible speakers.

Enlarge (credit: Flickr user Eric and Mary Ellen)

There’s a link between more education and a richer, healthier life. This isn’t just conventional wisdom: it has been repeatedly established by research study after research study.

But how does this link work? Does education itself cause the boost in health—perhaps by making people richer? Do healthier children get ahead in school? Or does some other cause, like a wealthy background or greater cognitive ability, make people both more educated and healthier?

It’s a complicated question to untangle, but a paper in Nature Human Behaviour this week uses data from a natural experiment to get some answers. They found that, regardless of their economic status, teenagers who were forced to stay in school a bit longer because of legal changes were healthier in later life than similar teenagers who only just missed the new regulations.

Enlarge / GM plans to release this modified Chevy Bolt with no steering wheel in 2019 for use in the Cruise driverless taxi service.

California officials Tuesday released annual statistics showing the amount of driverless car testing in the state between December 2016 and November 2017. Just like last year, the numbers show Waymo, Alphabet's driverless car division, comfortably in the lead. But unlike last year, Waymo now has a serious challenger: Cruise, the driverless car division of General Motors.

Just like last year, Waymo's driverless cars logged hundreds of thousands of miles on California roads. And both this year and last, its cars were able to go more than 5,000 miles between "disengagements"—situations where a safety driver has to take the wheel.

But last year, Waymo didn't have any serious competition. Cruise only logged 10,000 miles in 2016 and a safety driver had to take the wheel every 35 miles, on average. Other companies did even worse. This year, things are different. Cruise vehicles drove a respectable 131,000 miles. And safety drivers only had to intervene once every 1,250 miles.