Microsoft unveils its own motion controllers for mixed reality

Microsoft says “a customer who pairs a Windows Mixed Reality headset with motion controllers will have a rich and immersive experience across creativity tools, productivity, games, and entertainment.” Microsoft’s new Windows Mixed Reality motion controllers track movement in the mixed reality user’s field of view using the sensors in the paired headset. So external, mounted sensors are no longer needed. The controllers, Microsoft says, are “inside-out” and support “6 degrees of freedom” motion.

Microsoft doubled down on its commitment to what it called “mixed reality” today at its Build developer conference, revealing motion controllers that work closely with VR headsets from Acer. With a $399 bundle containing all you need coming later this year, it could be one of the more affordable ways out there to get into the VR game. Microsoft has still not announced the release dates for these development kits but interested users can now pre-order the development kits from the company’s website.

Developers have two headsets to choose from  a $300 Acer one and a $329 HP one, both of which you can order today. But if you’re smart, you’ll wait a little bit for the bundle coming this holiday season that includes a pair of controllers for $399 all day. That makes it cheaper than either Oculus or Vive  especially so with the latter.

Both HP and Acer’s Windows Mixed Reality headsets come with some common features including two high-resolution liquid crystal displays with a 1440×1440 pixels resolution, front hinged displays, 95-degree horizontal field-of-view, display refresh rate up to 90Hz (native), built-in audio out and microphone support through 3.5mm jack, single cable with HDMI 2.0 (display) and USB 3.0 (data) for connectivity, and inside-out tracking. Additionally, the HP headset comes with double-padded headband and easy adjustment knob, as per Microsoft.

Microsoft announced that Acer will sell its Windows Mixed Reality headset and motion controller bundle priced at $399 (roughly Rs. 25,700) this holiday season.

HP rolling out a fix for flaw that caused some PCs to log every keystroke

Few laptop models of HP were said to have been affected by a security flaw due to a version of Conexant audio driver that were not meant to be shipped with the machines and had a built in keystroke logger. HP has now said that it rolling out a fix for this flaw.

 
What is Keylogger? A keylogger is a piece of software for which the case of dual-use can rarely be claimed. This means there are very few situations where you would describe a keylogger that records all keystrokes as ‘well-intended’. A keylogger records when a key is pressed, when it is released, and whether any shift or special keys have been pressed. It is also recorded if, for example, a password is entered even if it is not displayed on the screen. 

The fix for the HP keystroke logging security flaw has been issued with a Windows update released on Friday for the following 2016 HP PC models – EliteBook, ProBook and Zbook. Owners of the aforementioned HP devices and owners of 2015 models are advised to download the update right away.

Is HP itself a victim of a backdoored software that third-party vendors have developed on behalf of HP?
The responsibility in this case is uncertain, because the software is offered by HP as a driver package for their own devices on their website. On the other hand, the software was developed and digitally signed by the audio chip manufacturer Conexant.

Conexant is a manufacturer of integrated circuits, emerging from a US armaments manufacturer. Primarily, they develop circuits in the field of video and audio processing. Thus, it is not uncommon for Conexant audio ICs to be populated on the sound cards of computers of various manufacturers. Conexant also develops drivers for its audio chips, so that the operating system is able to communicate with the hardware. Apparently, there are some parts for the control of the audio hardware, which are very specific and depend on the computer model – for example special keys for turning on or off a microphone or controlling the recording LED on the computer. In this code, which seems to be tailored to HP computers, there is a part that intercepts and processes all keyboard input.

Actually, the purpose of the software is to recognize whether a special key has been pressed or released. Instead, however, the developer has introduced a number of diagnostic and debugging features to ensure that all keystrokes are either broadcasted through a debugging interface or written to a log file in a public directory on the hard-drive. This type of debugging turns the audio driver effectively into a keylogging spyware. On the basis of meta-information of the files, this keylogger has already existed on HP computers since at least Christmas 2015. 

According to Axios, HP did not access and share the data that was stored in the files and key logging codes but having them could have posed a security threat for the customers. HP says this fix will remove the key-logging codes and the files that stored the keystrokes. Owners should also delete all the backups that they may have created before updating their Windows versions as they may contain multiple copies of their keystroke data.

HP Vice President told Axios in a statement that the keystroke logging code was a debugging code that must have been left unintentionally by Conexant, the company that made the audio driver for HP’s PC models, and it “should never have been included on shipping PCs.” He further explained that the company never had any intention to include that software or record user’s keystroke data. “It was something that was there in development process and should have been removed,” he added.

Notably, a security firm known as Modzero has earlier intimated HP and Conexant about the keystroke logging flaw, however, HP’s Nash said that the company had already been in a process of working on the fix before Modzero’s notification.

Reliance Jio upcoming Jio Fiber home broadband Service

After triggering a tariff war for mobile internet, Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani was mentioned  to launch high-speed fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) broadband service. when the Jio operations were officially launched in September last year, and was again mentioned in an earnings call in April.

 The company has been teasing the service, but has not revealed many details of JioFiber broadband yet. So it comes as a surprise when the Reliance Jio customer care team officially revealed the names of the cities in which JioFiber trials are being run.

Reliance Jio customer care team said the JioFiber Preview Offer is being launched in Mumbai, Delhi-NCR, Ahmedabad, Jamnagar, Surat, and Vodadara. It added the company is in the process of rolling out the home broadband service to other cities in the country, but did not specify any names. A Twitter user in September had said the preview offer is available in Pune as well.

 

India Today Tech today broke some exclusive information on Reliance’s upcoming broadband JioFiber plans. It said that under JioFiber Preview Offer, consumers will not have to pay for first 3 months service.

The home broadband service has been listed on the Jio.com website on the Quick Recharge page, but there are no details on the page as of now.There is no word on the launch date and price of Reliance Jio home broadband service. Jio is already the leading provider of broadband connections in India, according to TRAI data.

we updated Soon !

ClusterCS : Control Panel for remote management of any cloud VPS and dedicated servers

First things, what is ClusterCS? ClusterCS is a remote web server management tool which means it’s a system that connects remotely to your server and installs necessary packages and settings for your domains to run smoothly.

ClusterCS is a SaaS Web Server Management Panel that allows companies and individuals to remotely manage their cloud VPS and dedicated servers.This control panel is designed to work with any cloud instance, dedicated server or VPS, set up advanced domain access rules, and build high availability web clusters with just a few clicks.With ClusterCS, you have a platform that unifies all your servers and instances into a single location, making it easy for you to manage them. And it doesn’t matter where your servers are located. ClusterCS also guarantees faster load speeds and provides you with comprehensive insight and performance metrics for detailed statistics and analytics.

If you are managing lots of websites, databases, and emails, you will certainly love ClusterCS. The control panel enables you to take charge of an unlimited number of sites, databases, and emails. There is no need to worry about storage limitations and issues. Automatic backups keep your sites safe and secure. 

A good control panel can and should help improve your website’s loading speed. By offering Nginx and Lighttp support and by creating your own traffic and caching rules, ClusterCS will improve the loading times on your website much better than a regular Apache-based hosting solution.

ClusterCS comes with a very beautiful and neat interface that allows for easy operation and navigation. Setup is very fast and easy and all it takes is a single push of a button to get everything started. Site owners will definitely appreciate that ClusterCS is built to run on any VPS or dedicated server and how the system bring their costs down significantly. 

With ClusterCS, developers don’t have a hard tome building development environments. The Advanced Domain Access Rules Manager helps developers achieve full optimization of the site’s performance. With advanced MySQL query reports, it is easy for users to identify performance issues and create the necessary steps to resolve them. Developers also love how they can try different serving architectures in seconds

For system administrators, ClusterCS enables them to full manage multiple instances efficiently as well as create high availability clusters. Powerful automation eliminates the risks of human errors and on top of that, the system is capable of monitoring its platform and restart the services should any issue arise.

 

ClusterCS Features

 

 

1. With ClusterCS you can manage all of your servers, no matter where they’re located

As long as you have RHEL 6, CentOS 6 or Amazon Ami, it doesn’t matter if you have dedicated servers colocated in a datacenter or use VPSs from Amazon, Digitalocean or any other provider.

2. You can tweak the settings from an easy to use interface

The control panel offers pre-configured install settings that will set up everything fast, in around 10 minutes*, with no intervention from you. ClusterCS lets you easily configure your server settings by clicking the Manage button. You can the configure your available services and even change PHP versions,  configure Apache modules and so on.

3. You see resource usage stats for all the relevant info

ClusterCS also shows you performance metrics for your server (including historical data). To name a few of the tracked metrics server load, number of connections, Mysql slow queries, server storage.

ClusterCS Pricing Plans

 ClusterCS is available in four enterprise pricing plans, including a free option for 5 domains.

Free	1 Server/VPS 5 Domains 6H stats Ticket Reply up to 48 hours
Site – $7/month	1 Server/VPS Unlimited Domains 7 Days stats Ticket Reply up to 2 hours
Web Agencies – $60/month	10 Servers/VPS Unlimited Domains 30 Days stats Ticket Reply up to 15 minutes
Sys Admin – $800/month	100 Servers/VPS Unlimited Domains 90 Days stats Ticket Reply up to 15 minutes

 

So if you want Speedy Websites, High Availability, Redundancy, Self Healing, Disaster Recovery, Large Scale Clusters, then ClusterCS will be you best time saver friend.

 

For more info visit ClusterCS.com 

Android O Features Revealed in Developer Preview

This year, the first Android O developer preview arrived on March 21, 2017, Google released the first developer preview of Android “O”, available for the Nexus 5X, Nexus 6P, Nexus Player, Pixel C, and Pixel smartphone devices.

The Android O release will ultimately become Android 8.0. Google has already shared a timeline for the rollout of each preview build with the second developer preview due out in mid-May, likely during Google I/O, the third in mid-June and the fourth in mid-July. The public version of Android 8.0 will be out for supported Pixel, Nexus and Android One devices sometime in Q3, most likely in late August or early September.

At this point, a couple of new Android O features, along with improvements to existing Android Nougat features, can be found in the developer preview. Here’s a taste of what’s to come with the next version of Android. 

Background limits

Android O puts a big priority on improving a user’s battery life and the device’s interactive performance.

It says it’s increased the automatic limits on what apps can do in the background in a number of key areas (broadcasts, background services, location updates). These changes will make it easier to create apps that have minimal impact on a user’s device and battery. Background limits represent a significant change in Android, so we want every developer to get familiar with them.

Notification channels

Android O also introduces notification channels, which are new app-defined categories for notification content. Channels let developers give users fine-grained control over different kinds of notifications — users can block or change the behavior of each channel individually, rather than managing all of the app’s notifications together.  

Android O also adds new visuals and grouping to notifications that make it easier for users to see what’s going on when they have an incoming message or are glancing at the notification shade.  

 PIP mode for handsets and tablets

 
A feature that’s currently available on Android TV, PIP mode is now coming to other Android devices with the O update. This is most useful for video playback as the app will now be able to put themselves in PIP mode and you can specify the aspect ratio and type of controls (like play/pause) you want the app to have in this state. Other than this, there’s a new app overlay window and multi-display support for launching an app on a remote display.

Autofill APIs
 

Password managers are lifesavers for many and in Android O, Google is adding platform support for these apps. In a similar way, one selects a keyboard to use, you’ll soon be able to pick an autofill app that the system will default to. The new Autofill Framework will manage the communication between the app and an autofill service. 

Adaptive icons

 
Apps can now have adaptive launcher icons which can display a variety of shapes depending on the device. According to Google, “a launcher icon can display using a circular shape on one OEM device, and display a squircle on another device. 

Each device OEM provides a mask, which the system then uses to render all icons with the same shape.” The system also has the ability to animate interactions with the icons and these can be used in shortcuts, Settings, sharing dialogue and in the overview screen, besides the launcher.

Wide color gamut in imaging apps

The makers of imaging apps can now make better use of the delicious new displays built by manufacturers; particularly those handsets with panels supporting a wide gamut color.
“To display wide gamut images, apps will need to enable a flag in their manifest (per activity) and load bitmaps with an embedded wide color profile (Adobe RGB, Pro Photo RGB, DCI-P3, and so on),” Google advises developers.

High-resolution audio support and new Connectivity features
 
Android O now also supports high-quality Bluetooth audio codecs such as Sony’s LDAC codec. That means if you have LDAC-equipped Bluetooth headphones you’ll get much better quality in Android 8.0. But the fun isn’t just restricted to LDAC, Android O also has support for aptX and aptX HD as well as SBC and AAC.  AAudio is a new native API that’s designed specifically for apps that require high-performance, low-latency audio. Apps using AAudio read and write data via streams.

Improved keyboard navigation
 
With Google Play apps now on Chrome OS, Google in streamlining the use of a keyboard on such devices in Android O. According to Google, this should ensure “more reliable, a predictable model for “arrow” and “tab” navigation that aids both developers and end users.” 

Other changes

Google is enhancing WebView which will now enable multiprocess mode by default and a new API which allows apps to better handle errors and crashes. Android O now supports several new Java Language APIs, including the new java.time API. The Android Runtime is said to be much faster than before, with improvements of up to 2x on some application benchmarks.

So, are you excited for Android O? Let us know what you think Android O will be called in the comments below.

Qualcomm announced Snapdragon 630 and Snapdragon 660 as mobile platforms

Qualcomm will market the Snapdragon 630 and Snapdragon 660 as mobile platforms and not processors. Qualcomm bringing some premium experiences, Improved connectivity, enhanced imaging, faster charging, and even machine learning features, in addition to the usual CPU and GPU improvements, help make these 600-series parts particularly interesting.

The Snapdragon 630 and Snapdragon 660 platforms are based on a 14nm FinFET process and provide 4K video capture and playback capabilities, along with 8GB maximum memory and Vulkan API support. Additionally, the Snapdragon 660 mobile platform supports displays up to QHD (2K) resolution, whereas the 630 supports FHD/QXGA (1080p).Qualcomm is ready to bring even higher performance to its new 600-series platforms. Both the Snapdragon 660 and Snapdragon 630 get the same Snapdragon X12 LTE modem that appeared in last year’s flagship Snapdragon 820/821 SoCs. This is a Category 12/13 modem capable of up to 600Mbps throughput on the downlink (3x20MHz CA, 256-QAM) and 150Mbps on the uplink (2x20MHz CA, 64-QAM).

Announcing the new mobile platforms, Kedar Kondap, Vice President, Product Management, Qualcomm Technologies confirmed that the Snapdragon 660 mobile platform is now shipping while the Snapdragon 630 mobile platform will begin shipping towards the end of this month.

Kondap also added that the new platforms bring Kryo CPU, X12 modem, and machine learning algorithm for the first time to the 600-tier mobile platforms. Commercial devices powered by Snapdragon 660 can be expected to be unveiled by end of June while Snapdragon 630 devices can be expected to be announced in Q3. Both platforms also feature Bluetooth 5 support, which doubles the amount of data that devices can transfer compared to the previous iteration.

Both the Snapdragon 660 and 630 platforms also support Qualcomm’s suite of RF front-end components too, including TruSignal adaptive antenna tuning with carrier aggregation, which dynamically optimizes signal quality to deliver better voice and data, and envelope tracking technology, which improves battery life and lowers skin temperature by improving power amplifier efficiency. There’s also support for high-power user equipment (HPUE) that helps extend network coverage, and is currently being used by Sprint.

 The latest 600-tier chipsets also bring the Qualcomm Spectra 160, touted as a premium camera ISP which supports improved photographic image quality for “more natural skin tones, superior low light photography,” as well as better power efficiency and higher throughput for dual camera smartphones. The Spectra 160 will enable chipset to support features like smooth optical zoom, bokeh effect, dual pixel autofocus, and improved camcorder video stabilisation.

Another significant addition to Snapdragon 660 is Qualcomm’s Hexagon 680 DSP, which made its debut last year in the Snapdragon 820 SoC and features Hexagon Vector eXtensions (HVX) specifically designed for advanced photo and video processing, virtual reality, and computer vision workloads. This DSP can work on two vector threads in parallel, each containing four 1024-bit SIMD pipelines (a typical ARM CPU core contains two 128-bit SIMD NEON vector pipelines for comparison), allowing each HVX context to work on 4,096 bits/cycle compared to 256 bits/cycle for a single CPU core. The Hexagon 680 also contains four threads for scalar instructions too, each with 4 VLIW pipelines. Using up to two scalar threads and two vector threads in parallel allows concurrent execution of audio and imaging tasks.

The Snapdragon 660 supports Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Neural Processing Engine SDK, along with TensorFlow and Halide frameworks on the Hexagon 680 DSP, bringing advanced machine learning and computer vision capabilities to the 600-tier for the first time.

Both the Snapdragon 630 and 660 mobile platforms will come with Qualcomm Quick Charge 4.0 which can offer up to 5 hours of talk time in 5 minutes of charging and up to 50 percent battery life in just 15 minutes of charging. Qualcomm stresses that both new platforms support Qualcomm Mobile Security for providing security focused hardware-based protection, user authentication and device attestation on the mobile device. 

Both of the new Snapdragon 660 and 630 platforms include features and capabilities previously seen only in the premium 800-tier, and also add new technologies like Bluetooth 5 and LPDDR4 RAM support (up to 8GB), which reduces power consumption and improves bandwidth compared to LPDDR3. The Snapdragon 660 sounds particularly compelling, because it appears to deliver a very similar experience to last year’s Snapdragon 820 but, presumably, at a lower price point.

 Snapdragon 660 can be expected by June & Snapdragon 630 powered devices can be expected by Q3 2017

The Snapdragon 660 and 630 platforms are pin and software compatible, and they both use the same 14nm LPP FinFET process from Samsung. The Snapdragon 660 is available to partners now and should appear in devices during the second quarter, while the Snapdragon 630 is expected to appear in devices during the third quarter.

MSI Z270 Gaming Pro Carbon Review

MSI’s Z270 Gaming Pro Carbon is the company’s take on a mid-range motherboard with features that will appeal to gamers. Noteworthy inclusions are a comprehensive set of RGB LEDs spread across the board, a design which caters for dual-GPU gamers, and the company’s smart M.2 Shield cooling plate.

 
Intel’s Z270 chipset has some interesting CPUs to go along with it, and it seems many have the potential to reach 5 GHz for daily use, something many enthusiasts have only dreamed of until now. Of course, you do need that capable board to match that overly capable CPU, and MSI’s Z270 GAMING PRO CARBON is fortunately more than just one of those boards.

The Z270 platform also gives us some welcome enthusiast-friendly features, like the ability to split the processor’s sixteen Gen3 PCIe lanes across multiple slots for multi-GPU graphics configs. The Z270 also offers full control over the processor’s various knobs and dials, allowing overclockers to tweak to their hearts’ content.

It’s worth pointing out that both the new Kaby Lake processors as well as previous-generation Skylake CPUs can be used in the new Z270-based boards, thanks to the two chips sharing a common LGA1151 socket. We’ve also seen motherboard makers release firmware updates for existing 100-series boards to support Kaby Lake CPUs, so a new 200-series motherboard is not a requirement for running the latest and greatest silicon.
With that general introduction out of the way, one of the first 200-series motherboards we’re looking at is MSI’s Z270 Gaming Pro Carbon.

The Z270 Gaming Pro Carbon fits into MSI’s “Performance Gaming” product segment. Like the rest of the Carbon models, it features a rear I/O cluster shroud and heatsinks with carbon-fiber-patterned accents. The plastic shroud is held on by two screws, so if you’re not a fan of the look, you can simply remove those screws, disconnect the LED cable, and leave the shroud in the box.
The full-sized ATX board sports a very blacked-out look, with only a smattering of silver highlights along the expansion slots and across the heatsinks decorating the matte black PCB. If it weren’t for the Audio Boost logo on the EMI shield covering the codec and the nickel accents from the nearby caps, the board would be living in a monochromatic world.

The back of the board shows that all the heatsinks are held firmly in place with screws rather than push-pins. Screws not only ensure better heatsink contact with the components beneath, but they also give the board a more premium feel. We can also see certification logos for SteelSeries gaming peripherals, Nahimic audio software, CrossFire, and SLI. If you were hoping to show those logos off in your build, you’re probably going to be out of luck.
The underside of the board also gives us a good look at the RGB LEDs running along the left hand side and down the isolated audio section. These provide the ground effects for MSI’s lighting system, which the company calls Mystic Light. As four out of five gaming hardware designers know, the presence of LEDs will make your processor’s transistors switch faster and with more vigor. For those folks willing to risk running their systems dark, all of the lighting can thankfully be disabled.

 The two VRM heatsinks conceal the Pro Carbon’s 11 digitally-controlled power phases. Just as with Intel’s Skylake processors, Kaby Lake once again puts the responsibility of CPU voltage regulation in the motherboard maker’s hands. Given that Kaby Lake shares the existing LGA1151 platform with Skylake, this should come as no surprise. We’ll have to wait for a future generation of processors to see if the fully-integrated voltage regulator (FIVR) that was introduced with Haswell chips and improved upon in Broadwell CPUs will be seen again.

Specifications Of MSI Z270

CPU Support:	7th/6th Gen Intel Core i3/i5/i7 processors, Intel Pentium/Celeron processors
Power Design:	CPU Power: 10 phase Memory Power: 2 phase
Chipset:	Intel Z270
Integrated Graphics:	Dependent on installed CPU
Memory:	4x DIMM, Max. 64 GB; supports 3866 MHz+(OC)
BIOS:	AMI UEFI BIOS
Expansion Slots:	3x PCIe 3.0 x16 slots 3x PCIe 2.0 x1 slot 2x Ultra M.2 slot (32 Gb/s)
Storage:	6x SATA 6 Gb/s port (Intel Z270)
Networking:	1x GigaLAN Intel I219-V
Rear Ports:	1x PS/2 mouse / keyboard port 4x USB 3.0 port 1x USB 3.1 Type-A port 1x USB 3.1 Type-C port 2x USB 2.0 ports 1x LAN port 1x Optical audio port 5x Audio jacks
Audio:	Realtek ALC1220 Audio Codec
Fan Headers:	6x 4-pin
Form Factor:	ATX Form Factor: 12.0-in x 9.6-in, 30.5 cm x 24.4 cm
Exclusive Features:	DDR4 Boost VR Ready VR Boost Mystic Light Mystic Light Sync Twin Turbo M.2 Steel Armor M.2 Shield Intel Optane Memory Ready Lightning USB 3.1 Gen2 Audio Boost 4 with Nahimic 2 GAMING LAN with LAN Protect Military Class 5 Guard-Pro

Huawei & Google have teamed up to take on the Raspberry Pi with the ARM-based HiKey 960 development board

Every flagship phone released these days has performance challenging that of a ultraportable laptop, at least in pure processing speed, and Huawei has just made the relatively obvious choice to sell its smartphone SoC (system on a chip) as a tiny little Linux computer.

The HiKey 960 is powered by an octa-core HiSilicon Kirin 960 SoC with 4 Cortex-A73 cores clocked at 2.4GHz, and 4 Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1.8GHz, coupled with a Mali-G71 MP8 GPU that’;s able to 4K graphics, and 3GB of LPDDR4 RAM. It sports activities 32GB of UFS 2.1 flash storage and a microSD card slot.
 The board has 40-pin and 60-pin connectors for attaching hardware like cameras, but I’m especially interested in the PCIe M.2 slot, which should make it easy to add a faster SSD to augment the 32GB of onboard storage.
 
For connectivity, the HiKey 960 has a HDMI 1.2a port (full-HD), Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n/ac (dual-band), Bluetooth v4.1, two USB3.zero Kind-A ports, one USB2.zero Kind-C OTG port, and a PCIe m.2 connector.
The HiKey 960 board was launched by Huawei, a core member of Linaro – an open source collaborative engineering organisation developing software for the ARM ecosystem – and its 96Boards initiative. Other members that contributed to the development of the platform are ARM, Google, Archermind, and LeMaker.

The HiKey 960 is officially supported as an Android reference board. Linaro in a statement said, “Initial software support for the board is provided in the AOSP source tree based on the Android Common Kernel using the Linux 4.4 kernel release. Linaro and Huawei are also working on the Linux 4.9 based Android Common kernel.” PC World notes you can load up to Android 7.1 Nougat on board currently, and points to Google’s instructions on how to do it.

The statement added that while all AOSP developers will find the board useful, hardware-focused developers will find it more beneficial, with avenues like mobiles, digital signage, point of sale, robotics, and others. Notably, Google this week also announced the release of the Google Assistant SDK, which will allow developers to build the voice assistant service into their products. The Google Assistant SDK was claimed by the search giant to be “ideal for prototyping on Raspberry Pi devices”, giving us a Google Home style use-case for the HiKey 960.

The ideal use case for the HiKey is for developers working on ARM-based software, like Android apps. Currently most development is done on traditional x86 hardware, and then cross compiled to ARM, and this can help bridge the gap between development and testing.[left-sidebar]

The next version of uTorrent will be part of our web browser

BitTorrent, created by Bram Cohen, has been running on millions of computers for many years. The truth is that for some time now there has been no change that could be considered significant but now things are going to change substantially.

Bram Cohen plans to bring its most popular BitTorrent client, which to date has functioned as a standalone tool, to our web browsers, so that it would become an active part of this type of software so widespread and used nowadays.

Specifically it is said that the next revision of this application will exchange all kinds of files and will already be running in the default web browser that users have configured on their systems.

It is clear that for all this, the firm itself will carry out a major renovation of the interface as well as a modification of the user experience, all with a multitude of improvements.
In fact, we must bear in mind that today, the main client of the company working with this protocol is uTorrent and it has about 150 million active users per month.

As we have said before and is something that has already been commented on several occasions, despite the popularity of this tool, the truth is that the arrival of new features and functionalities has been quite stagnant in recent years.

The most important changes were made five years ago when uTorrent released the long-awaited 3.0 version.
However and based on recent statements made by the creator and founder of BitTorrent Inc, Bram Cohen, this will all change in very near future. Specifically in a recent interview he has promised some interesting updates for the user which will directly affect uTorrent.

“We’re very, very sensitive. We know people have been using uTorrent for a very long time and love it. So we’re very, very sensitive to that and gonna be sure to make sure that people feel that it’s an upgrade that’s happening. Not that we’ve just destroyed the experience,” Cohen was quoted as saying in the report.

The thing is that the firm BitTorrent Inc. is coming out of a somewhat complicated period in which they have lost large amounts of money but apparently the thing has been calming in recent months, which means that the company is getting back on
track.

We will have to wait and see how the new version of the uTorrent client shapes up and is received by the users when it will be rolled out widely by the company.

Facebook’s new Surround 360 video cameras let you move around inside live-action scenes

Facebook announced the Surround 360, a 360-degree camera that can capture footage in 3D and then render it online via specially designed software.

But it wasn’t for sale. Instead the company used it as a reference design for others to create 3D 360 content, even going as far as to open source it on GitHub later that summer.

Facebook made a few announcements regarding 360-degree videos. Apart from promoting 360-degree videos on its social media platform, Facebook is also actively trying to create a standalone 360-degree video camera. At last year’s F8 conference, Facebook unveiled its first Surround 360 camera which was open-sourced for developers to build their own version.

Facebook is calling the big model the x24, because it now has a 24-camera array arranged in an orb instead of the 17 cameras the original flying saucer-shaped Surround 360 called for. The small model is the x6, with just six cameras but in a far more manageable package.

 Instead of just releasing the design schematics for these cameras online, as it did last year, Facebook is now teaming up with a select group of hardware partners to manufacture and sell finished products later this year. It’s unclear if these products will be Facebook-branded in any way, but the company is still stressing that it has no plans to sell the cameras directly.

The second-gen Surround 360 looks more spherical than the spaceship-like previous model. The new Surround 360 comes in two different sizes. The big one, called x24, features 24 cameras arranged around the sphere, while the smaller model, x6, contains 6 cameras. Apart from the overall design change, the cameras now support 8K captures with six degrees of freedom (6DOF).

This 6DOF tech has existed in the past, usually reserved for extremely high-end Hollywood special effects and editing tools, yet other companies in the camera and VR space are working on bringing costs down and making content more accessible.

Camera maker Lytro is perhaps the best known, with a rig of its own that uses light field technology to capture the geometry of the light in a live-action 360-degree scene. It’s a different approach than Facebook’s, which relies more on computer vision, but it achieves a similar effect.

In January 2016, Facebook introduced dynamic streaming, a 360-degree streaming technology that uses geometry-mapping techniques to stream close to 6K 360 videos to mobile handsets. Dynamic streaming can send the highest number of pixels to a particular field-of-view.In order to get the highest quality in a 360-degree video, Facebook has developed three technologies.

The gravitational view-prediction model uses physics and heat maps to better predict where to next deliver the highest concentration of pixels. It also improves resolution on VR devices by up to 39 percent. An AI model can intuit the most interesting parts of a video to support prediction for streaming to VR and non-VR devices. Lastly, a new encoding technique, called content-dependent streaming improves resolution on non-VR devices like your smartphone by up to 51 percent.

Facebook on Day 1 of the F8 conference announced a suite of developer tools for Facebook Camera which will offer users options like photo frames, interactive effects, and masks using augmented reality technologies. To add to its AR efforts and to further compete against Snapchat, the company also announced that Giphy will be available widely in Facebook Live, Camera, and Messenger for iOS and Android.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Day 2 announced a team called Building 8 which is trying to work on some pretty radical new ideas. One of them involves typing with the mind while the other means to to hear with the skin. The social media giant wants is looking at creating “silent-speech interfaces” based on sensors with the aim of of typing 100 words-per-minute straight from your brain. Such a technology would allow you to send messages by thinking instead of typing.

The Building 8 team also wants to let people “hear” through their skin, although this technology is still a few years away to be fully realised. The team says that it is theoretically possible to “feel” vibrations of words through the skin. Facebook executive and former DARPA director Regina Dugan said that the company has developed a basic system that could let you feel vibrations that correspond to words, but will still still be years before such technology works as imagined.