Month: June 2018

Oppo

Will pop-up cameras be the next big thing in smartphones? After the announcement of the Vivo Nex, we've got another mostly screen device with a hidden front camera: the Oppo Find X. The good news is that this one is coming to North America, so some day we might have a chance to try out this crazy idea in person.

As smartphones dedicate more and more of the front of the device to screen pixels, the normal front-of-phone components like the camera, earpiece, and brightness sensors are starting to feel the squeeze. The big trend for 2018 is to copy Apple and go with a notched design, which pushes the display all the way up to the corners of the device, but then cuts out a chunk out of the display for the components. It's hard to see these non-rectangular screens as anything other than a temporary solution, and OEMs are already coming up with ways to work around a notch design.

Enlarge / Robots doing robot things.

Today is the second week of our experiment connecting a podcast to the written pages here at Ars. Specifically, we're running episodes of my tech- and science-heavy podcast (called After On) in installments. You can access these episodes via an embedded audio player or by reading accompanying transcripts (both of which are below). The podcast is built around deep-dive interviews with world-class thinkers, founders, and scientists. Episodes generally run 60 to 120 minutes, which we carve up into two to four daily segments for Ars. (The first part of last week's episode is available here.)

This week, my guest is the world-renowned roboticist and AI pioneer Rodney Brooks. Rodney co-founded iRobot. Best known for its Roomba vacuum cleaner, the company makes many other product as well—such as robots that defuse IEDs and other deadly contraptions in war zones. Rodney later founded Rethink Robotics, makers of the dexterous and creepily human-ish Sawyer and Baxter robots. Rodney’s celebrated academic career spanned decades, including many years running the AI and robotics lab at MIT. He was even the subject of a major documentary by legendary filmmaker Errol Morris.

I first posted the full episode to my podcast’s feed on March 19th, and we’ll run the show in three installments here on Ars. In our opening installment today, Rodney talks about getting tech news by steamship as a kid (yes, really)—living on the southern fringe of the inhabited world, with nothing on the (very) far side of the water but Antarctica. From there, we trace his journey to Stanford, then MIT, and through his creation of three companies—one of which had fourteen failed business models before finally hitting paydirt.

Enlarge / Therapeutic coffee? (credit: Getty | Steve Christo - Corbis)

In the distant future, your morning cup of joe may not just perk up your brain—it may perk up your genes, too. At least, that’s the optimistic outlook of some synthetic biologists in Switzerland.

A team led by Martin Fussenegger of ETH Zurich in Basel has shown that caffeine can be used as a trigger for synthetic genetic circuitry, which can then in turn do useful things for us—even correct or treat medical conditions. For a buzz-worthy proof of concept, the team engineered a system to treat type 2 diabetes in mice with sips of coffee, specifically Nespresso Volluto coffee. Essentially, when the animals drink the coffee (or any other caffeinated beverage), a synthetic genetic system in cells implanted in their abdomen switches on. This leads to the production of a hormone that increases insulin production and lowers blood sugar levels—thus successfully treating their diabetes after a simple morning brew.

The system, published Tuesday in Nature Communications, is just the start, Fussenegger and his colleagues suggest enthusiastically. “We think caffeine is a promising candidate in the quest for the most suitable inducer of gene expression,” they write. They note that synthetic biologists like themselves have long been in pursuit of such inducers that can jolt artificial genetics. But earlier options had problems. These included antibiotics that can spur drug-resistance in bacteria and food additives that can have side effects. Caffeine, on the other hand, is non-toxic, cheap to produce, and only present in specific beverages, such as coffee and tea, they write. It’s also wildly popular, with more than two billion cups of coffee poured each day worldwide.

Enlarge / This is the message you can expect to get when trying to log in to Nintendo's network to play pirated software. (credit: Wololo)

When hackers revealed an unpatchable exploit allowing deep system access in all existing Switch consoles back in April, some industry watchers worried that this would lead to widespread piracy for copyrighted games on the system. Additional work by longtime Nintendo hacker SciresM, though, lays out the relatively robust protections Nintendo has in place to detect systems playing pirated games online and to permanently ban those consoles from Nintendo's network.

SciresM's lengthy Reddit post goes into a good level of technical detail on how Nintendo authorizes games and systems when connecting to the Nintendo network. The core of the protections comes from a unique encrypted client certificate stored in the "TrustZone" core of every Switch unit.

That certificate is used to identify the specific hardware being used to log in to Nintendo's servers, meaning a banned console will stay banned from the network permanently. That's a change from the 3DS, where users could use a fake token to get around a console-level network ban (at least until another ban came down, that is).

Jonathan Gitlin

By this point you may well have heard of Rimac Automobili, if for no other reason than that The Grand Tour's Richard Hammond almost killed himself (again) when he crashed-then-immolated one of Rimac's Concept One electric hypercars. Based in Croatia, this engineering firm has been developing some seriously clever electric vehicle technology, both for its own use in road and race cars, as well as supplying technology to the likes of Aston Martin, Koenigsegg, and Jaguar.

On Wednesday morning, we learned that Porsche has now bought a 10-percent stake in Rimac and will be setting up a development partnership with the smaller company. "By developing the purely electric two-seater super sports cars, like the 'Concept One’ or ‘C Two,' as well as core vehicle systems, Rimac has impressively demonstrated its credentials in the field of electromobility," said Lutz Meschke, deputy chairman of the executive board and member of the executive board for finance and IT at Porsche. "We feel that Rimac’s ideas and approaches are extremely promising, which is why we hope to enter into close collaboration with the company in the form of a development partnership."

Enlarge

Google's cross-platform Flutter SDK is hitting yet another release milestone on the way to version 1.0. Flutter is moving out of beta and releasing "Flutter Release Preview 1." Google says the release preview status "signals our confidence in the stability and quality of what we have and our focus on bug fixing and stabilization."

Flutter is Google's second swing at a mobile SDK (the first being a little platform called "Android"). Flutter's claim to fame is that it's cross-platform—Flutter apps run on Android and iOS—and it's really fast. Flutter apps sidestep the app platforms of Android and iOS and instead run on the Flutter rendering engine (written in C++) and Flutter framework (written in Google's Dart language, just like Flutter apps). When it's time to ship a Flutter app off to Google's and Apple's respective app stores, the requisite Flutter engine code gets bundled up with the app code, and the Flutter SDK spits out Android and iOS versions of your single code base. Each version comes complete with built-in app themes for Android or iOS, so they still feel like native apps. Along with Android and iOS, Flutter is also the platform used for apps in Google's experimental Fuchsia OS.

With the release of preview 1, the Flutter team is focusing on "scenario completeness" for a Flutter app. There's an improved video player package, support for older 32-bit iOS devices like the iPhone 5C, and support for Firebase Dynamic Links. The Flutter team is also improving the documentation and tooling for embedding Flutter code into an existing Android or iOS app.