Month: February 2019

Enlarge / A girl watches a video on youtube. (credit: Getty |ALAIN JOCARD)

Tips for committing suicide are appearing in children’s cartoons on YouTube and the YouTube Kids app.

The sinister content was first flagged by doctors on the pediatrician-run parenting blog pedimom.com and later reported by the Washington Post. An anonymous “physician mother” initially spotted the content while watching cartoons with her son on YouTube Kids as a distraction while he had a nosebleed. Four minutes and forty-five seconds into a video, the cartoon cut away to a clip of a man walking onto the screen and simulating cutting his wrist. “Remember, kids, sideways for attention, longways for results,” he says and then walks off screen. The video then quickly flips back to the cartoon.

Man giving kids wrist-slitting tips in the middle of a cartoon found on YouTube.

“I am disturbed, I am saddened, I am disgusted,” the physician wrote. “But I am also relieved that I was there to see this video with my own eyes, so that I could take the appropriate actions to protect my family.” Those actions included deleting the YouTube Kids app and forever banning it from the house.

Enlarge / The Azure Kinect Development Kit. (credit: Microsoft)

While HoloLens 2 is undoubtedly the aspirational star of Microsoft's augmented reality (AR) offerings, the company isn't putting all its eggs in that particular basket. Alongside the new HoloLens headset, the company also announced the Azure Kinect development kit: a new version of the Kinect sensor technology.

Though Kinect first shipped as a gaming peripheral, the accessory immediately piqued the interest of researchers and engineers who were attracted to its affordable depth sensing and skeleton tracking. While Kinect is no longer a going concern for the Xbox, the same technology is what gives HoloLens its view of the world, and is now available as a device purpose-built for developing scientific and industrial uses for the technology. The Azure Kinect Developer Kit (DK) bumps up the specs substantially when compared to the old Xbox accessory; it includes a 12MP RGB camera, 1MP depth camera, and 360-degree microphone array made up of seven microphones. It also contains an accelerometer and gyroscope. Early customers are using it for things such as a service to detect when hospital patients fall over, automation of unloading pallets in warehouses, and software that compares CAD models to the physical parts built from those models.

The original Kinect used only local compute power; indeed, one of the many criticisms made of it was that the Xbox devoted a certain amount of processing power to handling Kinect data. The new hardware still depends on local computation, with things like skeleton tracking handled in software on the PC the hardware is connected to. But the Azure name is not just there for fun; Microsoft views the Kinect as a natural counterpart to many Azure Cognitive Services, using the Kinect to provide data that's then used to train machine-learning systems, feed image- and text-recognition services, perform speech recognition, and so on.

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  A shot of Hand ID from LG's G8 video. [credit: LG ]

I can just imagine a group of Saturday Night Live writers sitting around after the iPhone X launch. "Hey guys," one of them says, "How can we make fun of Face ID?"

" I know!" says another, "Let's do 'Hand ID,' we'll say the phone can read your palm like a psychic."

"That sounds great!" says a third. "I'll cue up a laugh track."