Month: June 2020

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  Google's Depth API in action. This whole gallery is gifs. [credit: Google ]

The latest version of ARCore, Google's augmented reality developer platform for Android phones, now includes a depth API. The API was released as a preview back in December, but now it's live for everyone in ARCore 1.18.

Previously, ARCore would map out walls and floors and scale AR objects accordingly, but the Depth API enables things like occlusion—letting AR actors appear to be behind objects in the real world. The other big feature enabled by depth sensing is the ability to simulate physics, like the ability to toss a virtual object down the real-life stairs and have it bounce around realistically.

3D sensing

While Apple is building more advanced hardware into its devices for augmented reality, namely the lidar sensor in the iPad Pro, ARCore has typically been designed to work on the lowest common denominator in camera hardware. In the past that has meant ARCore only uses a single camera, even when most Android phones, even cheap ~$100 Android phones, come with multiple cameras that could help with 3D sensing. (Qualcomm's deserves some of the blame here, since its SoCs have often only supported running a single camera at a time.)

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | metamorworks)

House Democrats yesterday unveiled a $100 billion broadband plan that's gaining quick support from consumer advocates.

"The House has a universal fiber broadband plan we should get behind," Electronic Frontier Foundation Senior Legislative Counsel Ernesto Falcon wrote in a blog post. House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) announced the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act, saying it has more than 30 co-sponsors and "invests $100 billion to build high-speed broadband infrastructure in unserved and underserved communities and ensure that the resulting Internet service is affordable." The bill text is available here.

In addition to federal funding for broadband networks with speeds of at least 100Mbps downstream and upstream, the bill would eliminate state laws that prevent the growth of municipal broadband. There are currently 19 states with such laws. The Clyburn legislation targets those states with this provision:

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Today's Dealmaster is headlined by a handful of deals on recommended USB-C charging accessories. The most notable discount of the bunch is Aukey's PB-Y13—a portable battery we've highlighted in our guide to the best USB-C accessories—down to $19 with the code "WD3S7ONL" at checkout. This is a slim power bank with an 18W USB-C Power Delivery port that's powerful enough to charge most recent smartphones at maximum speeds, as well as two USB-A ports, one of which supports Qualcomm's Quick Charge 3.0 standard. It normally retails for $30.

Beyond that, RavPower's RP-PC105 is a compact wall charger with a 61W USB-C PD port (alongside a standard USB-A port); it's travel-friendly but still strong enough to charge many 13-inch laptops with the appropriate cable. Using the code "4P3W38GE" brings it down to $20 from its usual $30. And if you need a sturdy USB-C cable, we can vouch for Anker's PowerLine, which is down to $9 from its usual $12 with the code "0S2GVA7N" at checkout. It can deliver up to 60W of power and comes with a lifetime warranty.

If you're all set on the USB-C charging front, though, we also have deals on Control, Ticket to Ride: Europe, Sonos speakers, noise-cancelling headphones, and more. Have a look for yourself below.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty)

Distributed denial-of-service attacks—those floods of junk traffic that criminals use to disrupt or completely take down websites and services—have long been an Internet scourge, with events that regularly cripple news outlets and software repositories and in some cases bring huge parts on the Internet to a standstill for hours. Now there’s evidence that DDoSes, as they’re usually called, are growing more potent with two record-breaking attacks coming to light in the past week.

DDoS operators hack thousands, hundreds of thousands and in some cases millions of Internet-connected devices and harness their bandwidth and processing power. The attackers use these ill-gotten resources to bombard sites with torrents of data packets with the goal of taking the targets down. More advanced attackers magnify their firepower by bouncing the malicious traffic off of third-party services that in some cases can amplify it by a factor of 51,000, a feat that, at least theoretically, allows single home computer with a 100 megabit-per-second upload capacity to deliver a once-unimaginable 5 terabits per second of traffic.

These types of DDoSes are known as volumetric attacks. The objective is to use machines distributed across the Internet to send orders of magnitude more traffic volume to a circuit than it can handle. A second class— known as packet-per-second focused attacks—forces machines to bombard network gear or applications inside the target’s data center with more data packets than they can process. The objective in both types of attacks is the same. With network or processing capacity fully consumed, legitimate users can no longer access the target’s resources, resulting in a denial of service.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty)

Distributed denial-of-service attacks—those floods of junk traffic that criminals use to disrupt or completely take down websites and services—have long been an Internet scourge, with events that regularly cripple news outlets and software repositories and in some cases bring huge parts on the Internet to a standstill for hours. Now there’s evidence that DDoSes, as they’re usually called, are growing more potent with two record-breaking attacks coming to light in the past week.

DDoS operators hack thousands, hundreds of thousands and in some cases millions of Internet-connected devices and harness their bandwidth and processing power. The attackers use these ill-gotten resources to bombard sites with torrents of data packets with the goal of taking the targets down. More advanced attackers magnify their firepower by bouncing the malicious traffic off of third-party services that in some cases can amplify it by a factor of 51,000, a feat that, at least theoretically, allows single home computer with a 100 megabit-per-second upload capacity to deliver a once-unimaginable 5 terabits per second of traffic.

These types of DDoSes are known as volumetric attacks. The objective is to use machines distributed across the Internet to send orders of magnitude more traffic volume to a circuit than it can handle. A second class— known as packet-per-second focused attacks—forces machines to bombard network gear or applications inside the target’s data center with more data packets than they can process. The objective in both types of attacks is the same. With network or processing capacity fully consumed, legitimate users can no longer access the target’s resources, resulting in a denial of service.

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  It's unclear how this Keanu-ization plays out, but the first-person hands mirror those of Keanu standing above you. [credit: CD Projekt Red ]

As this summer's E3-like wave of trailers and hype continues, Cyberpunk 2077 is next to take center stage with a new gameplay trailer and developer walkthrough. Sadly, the devs at CD Projekt Red weren't as forthcoming on Thursday with gameplay as we'd hoped, but today's news at least explores one gameplay mechanic lifted from the series' pen-and-paper origins: "braindancing."

The first-person adventure game, slated to launch this November, will dive into characters' histories by using an augmented reality interface. It surprisingly resembles the critically acclaimed game Remember Me (or, to a lesser extent, the Batman Arkham series). Players will freeze and swipe through time while examining the timeline of a given moment (which you access in the game's lore because of a recovered "recording implant"). View things from the implanted person's perspective, then check for security cameras and other content within your environs for more context.

CDPR devoted a substantial amount of its presentation to how this narrative-focused mechanic works, while the sizzle trailer was more bombastic, with only a hint to where the braindance mechanic may take you: into the shoes of Keanu Reeves. The sequence ends with the famed actor's Cyberpunk character mirroring your motions before vanishing. How exactly that will play out—either reliving his character's experiences or actually playing as his character—remains to be seen.