Windows bugs

As has been the running theme for the past few weeks, several bugs in Windows were discovered once again, but many were fixed too.

We'll start with an issue related to Kerberos authentication failures for Windows Server instances with the Domain Controller (DC) role. This was introduced due to this month's Patch Tuesday and led to various error messages when signing in, printing, and connecting using Remote Desktop. However, the good news is that Microsoft has already resolved the issue via out-of-band (OOB) updates that need to be manually downloaded and installed via the Update Catalog. The company has also advised customers to revert any other changes they may have made to work around the problem.

Next up, we also learned of a Direct Access bug affecting Windows 10, 11, Server 2019, and Server 2022. Direct Access is a feature that allows Windows users to access corporate networks without traditional VPN connections, providing a constant connection to organizations whenever there is working internet. However, you may experience problems using Direct Access if you temporarily lose internet connection. For now, Microsoft has applied a Known Issue Rollback (KIR) patch.

Another problem patched this week was related to Nvidia GPU usage readings being extremely off on Windows 11 version 22H2. Several users had reported GPU usage readings of around 100% even though the hardware was completely idle. The culprit was a bug in the Desktop Window Manager (DWM), which has been patched in the GeForce 526.98 driver update.

Finally, there was also a bug in Windows 10 that caused the Taskbar to suddenly disappear with the system becoming unresponsive. However, there is some good news here too as Microsoft has rolled back the problematic code modifications through KIR.

Taskbar refinements and other Windows goodness

After a relatively long wait, the Dev Channel received a new release in the form of build 25247 this week. This is a significant update that restores seconds-level precision to the clock in the Taskbar system tray, as previously rumored. There are tons of other changes too, including the ability to access Windows Studio Effects from Quick Settings, Energy Recommendations in Settings, better theming and process filtering in Task Manager, and lots more.

The Start menu in this build will also recommend websites to you, but you can bet that this "feature" will be very controversial. Perhaps something that will be more palatable to Insiders will be a minor design revamp for certain sections of the Settings menu, along with more details for Win32 apps. Some of our readers are already complaining about the rumored return of the "never combine" Taskbar capability and dark mode switching via Action Center not making the cut in this build.

There were a few other builds released in the past few days too. Build 25246 was rolled out to the Windows Server 2022 Insider Preview. As usual, there is no dedicated changelog but there is one known issue. Microsoft detailed all the changes present in the latest Windows Holographic release, namely version 22H2, too.

Meanwhile, the Windows 11 Release Preview netted build 22621.898 (KB5020044). Although it has a pretty lengthy changelog, a notable item is a warning in the Settings app when you are running out of OneDrive storage, along with recommendations to purchase more of it. Windows 10 nabbed KB5020030 with builds 19042.2311, 19043.2311, 19044.2311, and 19045.2311 as well. It fixes several annoying bugs which include issues related to Microsoft Store update failures, printers, and DST, and also makes some changes to the Taskbar.

Other relatively smaller updates include jump lists for the Microsoft Store and a Windows Subsystem for Android (WSA) November update with improvements to camera, Chromium 106, and support for MPEG2 decoding. And as it does from time to time, Microsoft has once again reminded customers that with Windows 8.1 support ending in a couple of months, now is the right time to upgrade to Windows 11.

Games in Microsoft Teams

Microsoft turned quite a few heads a couple of days ago by revealing that games are coming to its Teams software. Naturally, these are casual games like Minesweeper, Solitaire, and Wordament, not AAA titles. These games are being made available through the Games for Work app and Microsoft hopes that they can be used as a means to break the ice between hybrid and online teams, and also increase bonding within a team.

While we are on the topic of Teams, it is perhaps also worth highlighting that Microsoft has announced a lower-cost Teams Shared Device license for enterprise customers who don't want all the functionalities or premium price tag associated with the Teams Rooms license.

Microsoft 365 customer utilizing the Office mobile app heavily will also want to know that Microsoft is killing off two functionalities, namely "Transfer Files" and "Share Nearby" during its revamp of the app. Both the capabilities will find themselves on the chopping block on December 31, 2022 but the Redmond tech giant has emphasized that there are already better workarounds so there is no cause for concern.

In the same vein, Microsoft has also announced that following the deprecation of Basic Auth in Exchange Online, the next legacy feature it is killing off is the ability to authenticate over the Autodiscover protocol for Exchange Online. The staggered process for disabling it has already kicked off.

On the flip side, a software returning from the dead is SwiftKey for iOS. The app was scheduled for removal from the App Store on October 5 for undisclosed reasons but it seems like Microsoft has now changed its mind again with the company saying that it is "investing heavily in the keyboard". It's a bit weird, to say the least, considering both announcements have been accompanied by very little explanations.

Git gud

On the gaming front, we mostly have news about deals and promotions due to Black Friday being around the corner. Microsoft has a new Xbox Series S - Gilded Hunter Bundle and several other Xbox items discounted via the Unwrap Thrills sale. And if you decide that now is the right time to get an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription, you'll also get a three-month free trial for Apple TV+ and Apple Music.

Speaking of Xbox Game Pass, several new titles have hit the service, including Pentiment, Dune: Spice Wars, Somerville, Darktide, and more have hit Xbox Game Pass. Meanwhile, Games with Gold subscribers can grab Dead End Job for free. On the other hand, the Xbox Free Play Days promotion has NBA 2K23, Naruto to Boruto: Shinobi Striker, and Deep Rock Galactic available at massive discounts.

The Xbox November update is live too. It's a pretty significant update with enhanced Discord voice capabilities, sale notifications, upgrades to cloud gaming, and much more. Meanwhile, you can also expect an invite to Xbox' Alpha and Alpha Skip-Ahead ring in the coming days - if you fall in Microsoft's good graces, that is.

On an ending note, Minecraft has received the Soccer Celebration DLC while Rare is overhauling Sea of Thieves' PVP encounters with on-demand action. And if you're a PC purist, you might want to check out this Weekend's PC Game Deals curated personally by our News Editor Pulasthi Ariyasinghe.

Dev Channel

• Visual Studio 2022 now has multi-repository support

• Microsoft is strengthening its anti-harrassment workplace policies

• The Surface app has been updated

• Microsoft and Lockheed Martin are collaborating on innovation in AI, 5G and more

• Windows App SDK 1.2 is now live

• Rufus 3.21 Beta is out with improved Windows support

• Microsoft has updated Surface Duo and Duo 2 with new firmware with the AT&T version getting Android 12L

   

Under the spotlight

A few days ago, I penned an editorial debating the merits and drawbacks of Microsoft implementing ads/recommendations/tips in Windows 11. If this topic sounds interesting to you, give it a read here.

Meanwhile, News Reporter Taras Buria authored a guide on the process for enabling Suggested Actions with Chrome in Windows 11 Dev Channel build 25247.

And as usual, forum member Adam Bottjen wrote a Tech Tip Tuesday guide in which he explained how you can make the mouse cursor on your Windows PC bigger and easier to find, which is a nifty tip to know if the default appearance of the cursor bothers you.

Finally, Neowin co-founder Steven Parker published his first impressions of the GEEKOM IT11 MiniPC ahead of his full review. It's a pretty interesting machine with a Black Friday discount and if you have any questions in your mind about the hardware and its performance, be sure to ask Steven in the comments section so he can answer them in his full review in the next few days.

Logging off

Our most interesting news item in the past week has quite a startling revelation too. According to a recent study, around 50% of macOS malware comes from a single app. The app in question is MacKeeper, which ironically advertises itself as a way to "keep your Mac clean and safe with zero effort". However, as researchers have discovered, this also makes it a great attack vector for malicious actors due to the extensive permissions it has over the system on which it is installed. As always, this is also a reminder to download content only from trusted and verified sources, and to keep your machine up to date so it is more secure against security threats.

Microsoft Weekly: Windows bugs, Taskbar improvements, and games in Teams

Enter Galactica, an LLM aimed at writing scientific literature. Its authors trained Galactica on "a large and curated corpus of humanity’s scientific knowledge," including over 48 million papers, textbooks and lecture notes, scientific websites, and encyclopedias. According to Galactica's paper, Meta AI researchers believed this purported high-quality data would lead to high-quality output.

Starting on Tuesday, visitors to the Galactica website could type in prompts to generate documents such as literature reviews, wiki articles, lecture notes, and answers to questions, according to examples provided by the website. The site presented the model as "a new interface to access and manipulate what we know about the universe."

While some people found the demo promising and useful, others soon discovered that anyone could type in racist or potentially offensive prompts, generating authoritative-sounding content on those topics just as easily. For example, someone used it to author a wiki entry about a fictional research paper titled "The benefits of eating crushed glass."

Even when Galactica's output wasn't offensive to social norms, the model could assault well-understood scientific facts, spitting out inaccuracies such as incorrect dates or animal names, requiring deep knowledge of the subject to catch.

As a result, Meta pulled the Galactica demo Thursday. Afterward, Meta's Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun tweeted, "Galactica demo is off line for now. It's no longer possible to have some fun by casually misusing it. Happy?"
 

The episode recalls a common ethical dilemma with AI: When it comes to potentially harmful generative models, is it up to the general public to use them responsibly, or for the publishers of the models to prevent misuse?

Where the industry practice falls between those two extremes will likely vary between cultures and as deep learning models mature. Ultimately, government regulation may end up playing a large role in shaping the answer.

Where the industry practice falls between those two extremes will likely vary between cultures and as deep learning models mature. Ultimately, government regulation may end up playing a large role in shaping the answer.

Source

Earlier this month, at Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works facility in Palmdale, California, the F414-GE-100 engine was installed. This marks a major milestone as the X-59 approaches the completion of its assembly.

The F414-GE-100 engine from General Electric Aviation measures 13-foot-long and packs 22,000 pounds of propulsion energy and will power the X-59 as it flies at speeds up to Mach 1.4 and altitudes around 55,000 feet.

A GE Aviation F414-GE-100 engine is installed in NASA’s quiet supersonic X-59 aircraft, at Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works facility in Palmdale, California. The 13-foot-long engine packs 22,000 pounds of propulsion energy and will power the X-59 to speeds up to Mach 1.4. Installation of the engine marks a major milestone as the X-59 nears assembly completion, taxi tests, and first flight. Credit: NASA/Carla Thomas

 

“The engine installation is the culmination of years of design and planning by the NASA, Lockheed Martin, and General Electric Aviation teams,” said Ray Castner, NASA’s propulsion performance lead for the X-59. “I am both impressed with and proud of this combined team that’s spent the past few months developing the key procedures, which allowed for a smooth installation.”

The X-59 team will follow the aircraft’s assembly with a series of ground tests and ultimately, first flight in 2023.

NASA’s X-59 is the centerpiece of the agency’s Quesst mission. The aircraft is designed to reduce the sound of sonic booms, which occur when an aircraft flies at supersonic speeds, to a quiet sonic “thump.” This will be demonstrated when NASA flies the X-59 over communities around the U.S. starting in 2025, with the goal of providing the data necessary to open the future to commercial supersonic flight over land, greatly reducing flight times.

Source

Windows Insiders can download a new Microsoft Store version (22210.1401.X) with jump list support. If you are unfamiliar with the feature, jump lists are contextual menus that appear on the screen when you right-click an icon on the taskbar. Jump lists provide access to popular actions in apps, pinned items, and recent files. Now the Microsoft Store has received these capabilities.

The latest Microsoft Store version lets you right-click the icon to open a specific category (Apps, Gaming, Movies, Library) and launch recently added apps. Not a groundbreaking improvement by any means, but still a welcomed addition that makes the Microsoft Store a little more convenient.

Jump list support joins other enhancements Microsoft introduced for its storefront not so long ago. Earlier this month, Microsoft added an improved and optimized search UX and the ability to discover software bonuses that come bundled with your computer.

Microsoft Store gets jump list with recent apps and categories

The smart home should be a natural evolution of our homes, bringing better appliances, better systems, and better experiences. But so far, it’s been complicated, confusing, and expensive. Walled gardens have stifled innovation as developers focus on getting their devices to work with three or four or more different platforms rather than spending their time creating better products and new features. Consumers spend too much energy figuring out which product works with which and then troubleshooting those connections, before often giving up on the whole thing. This has led to a slower smart home adoption than many expected.

 

What the smart home needs, and has needed for a long time, is a universal connectivity standard — a basic level of common plumbing in our homes for everything to flow through. Just as we chose VHS over Betamax in the ’80s (and Blu-ray over HD-DVD in the early 2000s) for a better home theater experience, so we need to choose a smart home standard. 

 

The problem is there aren’t two or three standards to choose from. There are many, and none of them work very well on their own. Zigbee, Z-Wave, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth have all tried and failed to become the primary radio protocol of the smart home. But none have gained enough traction or offered enough flexibility to fit into all corners of the smart home.

 

That’s where Matter comes in.

 

 

Buy a gadget, plug it in, and it will work with the rest of your smart home. Set up that new device with your favorite smart home app, and control it with your voice assistant of choice, no matter who made it. This may sound like some distant smart home nirvana, but this is the promise of Matter. The simple smart home could be just around the corner. 

 

An open-sourced connectivity standard created by over 200 companies, Matter is a communication protocol that leverages existing technologies — Thread, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and ethernet — to allow all of your devices to communicate with each other locally, without the need for a cloud. 

 

What makes Matter more than just another smart home standard is momentum; most of the industry is on board. Organized by the Connectivity Standards Alliance (or CSA, formerly the Zigbee Alliance), Matter is being developed by Amazon, Apple, Google / Nest, and Samsung, alongside many other smart home and smart home-adjacent companies, including Lutron, iRobot, Signify (Philips Hue), Ikea, and more. 

 

Driven by a shared need to fix the problems of the smart home, these companies are working together to figure out how to make this standard be the one that sticks. Can Matter finally bring an end to the confusion perfectly encapsulated by Randall Munroe’s classic xkcd “Standards” comic?

 

Image: Comic by xkcd

 

“This is a Renaissance [for the smart home]” says Tobin Richardson, president and CEO of the CSA. “Most of the industry, if not all the industry have agreed that [Matter] is going to be the way this will happen.” They are seemingly all on board with the fact that Matter is the solution to the smart home’s biggest problems — simplicity, interoperability, reliability, and security.

 

The final Matter specification, SDK, and certification program arrived in the fall of 2022, and the first Matter-certified devices should come out in December. That’s over a year later than promised when Matter first launched in 2019, but better late than never.

 

If you have already boned up on what Matter is and why it… matters, and you just want to know what devices you can buy and when, head over to our “What matters about Matter” article, where we look at how the different smart home platforms are implementing Matter and which devices are Matter-ready or will be updated to support Matter soon. Otherwise, read on to learn about how Matter is going to fix the smart home.

What is Matter, and why is it different?

Matter is a unified connectivity technology for the smart home. It is not a smart home platform like Apple HomeKit, Google Home, and Amazon’s Alexa. Matter doesn’t automate or control your home; it simply provides the pipes and language for devices to communicate. 

 

Its unique feature is it’s an IP-based technology, meaning it uses the same mechanisms to communicate as the internet. So, there is no dependency on bridges or hubs, and yes, you will (eventually) be able to get rid of most of those white boxes hooked up to your router.

 

To simplify adoption, Matter will start as an application layer on top of existing IP technologies, including ethernet, Wi-Fi, Thread, and Bluetooth (for onboarding devices). This means Matter is not reinventing the wheel; it’s adding better technology to the highways our smart homes are driving on.

 

A Matter network map shows how devices will connect to each other, to the internet, and to other protocols using Wi-Fi, Thread, and Matter controllers.

Image: Z-Wave Alliance

 

Once in your home, Matter devices can operate entirely locally, talking to each other over Thread and Wi-Fi and not going through the cloud. That means if your internet goes down, your smart home will still work. Devices will still need to communicate with the internet for out-of-home control and firmware and security upgrades, either directly or through a Matter controller device (i.e., a smart speaker, smartphone, or bridge). Local control is a significant step in maintaining privacy in the smart home, a big concern for people when considering installing smart home devices. 

 

Smart home company Eve built its entire business model on local control. “Our privacy platform is ‘what’s at home stays at home,’” Jerome Gackel, Eve Systems CEO, tells me. “With Matter, you do not need a cloud — you can have one, but it’s not a requirement.” Its commitment to avoiding cloud control is why Eve devices have been iPhone- and HomeKit-only thus far. But with Matter, Eve can move to the other platforms while remaining entirely local.

What is Thread, and why is it better?

Thread is one of the key technologies of Matter. It promises to make the smart home more robust. Like Z-Wave and Zigbee, Thread is a low-power mesh networking protocol.

 

Thread — and Weave, the precursor to Matter — was first developed in 2014 by Nest and six other companies, including Silicon Labs, ARM, Samsung Electronics, and Yale Security. Thread’s big selling points are speed and reliability. A motion sensor will turn your lights on in a millisecond compared to a second, and your network won’t go down because you accidentally unplugged the hub, as — with enough devices deployed — a Thread network can self-heal. 

 

 

Unlike Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, Thread was specifically developed as a smart home protocol. Other protocols used in the smart home to date have been co-opted into that role, meaning they have practical and usability issues. Wi-Fi is too power-hungry for battery-powered devices. Bluetooth has range limitations. Zigbee and Z-Wave require dedicated hubs, which are cumbersome to set up and maintain and can be a single point of failure.

 

Thread began in Nest’s earliest days, pre-Google. “Every single Nest thermostat since the beginning has shipped with a Zigbee radio inside, a connection for a long-distance, low-power protocol,” says Tony Fadell, founder of Nest. The idea was to future-proof a device likely to stay in the home for 10 to 20 years. “We wanted it to be able to talk to the future smart home,” he says. 

 

But Zigbee wasn’t progressing fast enough for the Nest team, so they worked with Silicon Labs and others to develop Thread, which, in technical terms, is a Zigbee hardware stack with a software layer on top. “We knew what needed to happen — we needed a home IP-based mesh network with low-power range,” says Fadell. “The key is it’s IP native.” Low-power radios in the smart home have needed a hub or bridge to talk to the internet, but that problem went away by making Thread IP native. “That is what is so powerful about it,” says Fadell.

 

Eve was one of the first smart home companies to adopt Thread, and today, it has launched new Thread versions of almost all of its relevant products, having shifted over from Bluetooth. “Thread has really changed the reliability of our product, especially in terms of automation,” says Eve’s Gackel. “The difference between our Bluetooth product and Thread product experience has really increased customer satisfaction.” 

 

Thread devices can be battery-powered or wall-powered, and the latter can be a Thread border router, a bridge between a Wi-Fi and Thread network. But a border router isn’t a typical white plastic box type of bridge that plugs into your router. The tech will be built into any device with an always-on power source and can be placed anywhere in your home. 

 

A smart plug, smart speaker, fridge, TV, thermostat, and Wi-Fi access point can all be Thread border routers. “As you add more border routers in the home, you get better range and reliability,” explains Kevin Po, senior product manager at Google and a member of the CSA board. Case in point, the aesthetically pleasing Nanoleaf Shapes and Elements light panels are also Thread border routers, with a smidge more pizazz than a white plastic box.

 

A border router is like a mail carrier: it routes the different packets of information. Unlike a smart home hub, it doesn’t know what’s in those packets or control them. If a smart speaker wants to know the state of a lock, the border router can tell it without ever knowing the state itself. “From an end-to-end security perspective, that routing aspect provides a lot of benefits,” says Po.

 

This image illustrates how Thread border routers connect a thread network to the internet.

Image: Thread Group

 

While Z-Wave and Zigbee will continue to be part of the smart home — existing hubs will continue to work with the platforms they already work with, and could be bridged to Matter — it seems possible these technologies will be phased out in the residential setting. “It would certainly seem, if everything is executed as promised, that it will make sense to move towards Matter products,” says Mitch Klein, executive director of the Z-Wave Alliance. “That’s a big ‘if,’ however, and there are other questions in terms of security.”

 

Because Matter devices can speak straight to the internet, that potentially exposes them to hacking or malware, says Klein. Matter’s security approach is “strong, agile (to address the evolution of things like encryption types over time), and proactive, with a community of members who do threat modeling and mitigation,” says Richardson of the CSA. IP control is central to the function of Matter, and Richardson argues that the approach is one of resilient security while still getting the benefits of an IP-connected world.

How will devices work in a Matter smart home?

The Matter home will need a Wi-Fi access point and a Matter controller. If it has the right hardware, a Matter controller can also be a Thread border router that works with your preferred smart home ecosystem — such as an Amazon Echo speaker, an Apple HomePod Mini, a Google Nest Hub, or a Samsung SmartThings hub. Ultimately. we might have all three devices in one (Google and Eero both have Wi-Fi routers that are also Thread border routers and could be Matter controllers.)

 

While devices will work across platforms, automations and routines will not. “If you are using Apple HomeKit, you will need a HomeKit hub,” explains Gackel. “A Google hub will not run HomeKit automations.”

 

A Matter home will be able to incorporate any smart home device that is Matter certified. (The Matter logo on a product will indicate that it’s compatible.) You will also be able to set up any Matter device with your controller app, similar to how Apple’s HomeKit works today. All this means that when you buy a new product — such as a lightbulb or door lock — if it has a Matter logo, you won’t need to worry about what it works with; it will just work. 

 

 

It will also be simpler to set up. Alongside scanning a QR code as you do with HomeKit today, Amazon’s Frustration-Free setup has been added to the Matter spec, explains Chris DeCenzo, principal software development engineer at Amazon Lab126. It’s designed to enable a “zero-touch” experience, where you take the device out of the box, plug it in, and it connects to your home automatically, says DeCenzo.

 

This doesn’t mean there won’t be manufacturer apps, just that you won’t have to use them for setup. You will need them to access device-specific features that aren’t available in Matter, such as energy monitoring for a smart plug, dynamic lighting scenes for smart lights, and options like adaptive lighting in Apple Home. You will also likely need them to update firmware, although this may happen through Matter. 

 

Despite the coming together of the big four smart home companies and the general excitement of the early Matter push, the reality is the smart home will still be a divided one. Matter may provide a basic standard of interoperability and portability, but companies will still seek competitive advantages. 

 

For example, nothing in the Matter spec requires a Matter controller to support all device categories. Amazon is only supporting three device types at launch: smart plugs, smart bulbs, and smart switches. When video doorbells become part of Matter (security cameras are part of the next phase), Amazon could choose not to support them at all. Amazon’s Ring doorbells already work in the Ring app and with its Echo devices, meaning the company may see no need to develop another doorbell camera controller.

 

There’s also nothing compelling companies to upgrade products that they don’t want to. Google has said it will update its newest Nest Smart Thermostat to Matter but has not said if any of the three generations of the Nest Learning Thermostat or the Thermostat E will follow suit. 

 

Amazon released a slew of new smart home products in 2021, including a thermostat, air quality monitor, and smart switches, with no mention of Matter compatibility. DeCenzo tells me this doesn’t mean it won’t come, but that’s not exactly a guarantee that it will. “It’s hard for a device maker to make any absolute statements about something they’re going to support that isn’t here today,” he says. “Matter was just an idea when these devices were being developed.”

 

Apple has updated its entire platform to support Matter but hasn’t commented on whether it will adopt the Matter TV and Streaming Video player specification to allow Matter controllers to cast content from smartphones to televisions, similar to how AirPlay works. 

 

On the one hand, companies are committing to Matter, but with the other hand they’re still holding cards close to their chest. While it was legitimately tricky to say how you would develop your products for a specification that hasn’t been finalized yet, now that Matter is here these companies need to make their intentions clear to avoid making the smart home even more confusing.

How will companies differentiate themselves in Matter?

Before Matter, compatibility was a huge selling point for devices. You bought a smart lock largely because it worked with your ecosystem of choice. With Matter, that reason should go away.

 

Now, companies will need to innovate on top of the standard to create reasons for you to choose their devices over the competition. “What Matter does is change the game, so companies aren’t competing on connectivity and interoperability, and it’s just there,” says Michelle Mindala-Freeman, head of marketing at Connectivity Standards Alliance. Instead, they will need to compete on features, which could make for a better experience for us, the users.

 

This would appear to put the big four smart home platforms on an even playing field. If all devices talk to each other, you’re no longer locked into Google’s ecosystem because your preferred door lock only works with Google. While this would seem counter to Google, Amazon, etc. selling more devices, what it does is make it easier for each company to innovate and move forward with their respective visions of the smart home.

 

Ultimately, if the hardware is commoditized, the value becomes in the service layer your ecosystem of choice adds to your experience. Matter’s specifications are designed to be simple: that door lock will lock and unlock. “Above that, it’s up to the device makers, the platform companies and such to understand how to best innovate,” says Po.

 

 

If you want more advanced features — such as adaptive lighting or touch-to-unlock — you will go to a platform or manufacturer that supports those. “It will make for a more competitive environment,” says Kevin Kraus, of Yale Residential, part of Assa Abloy. “If you want a fully-featured door lock, you’re likely to buy a Yale lock. But let’s say you’ve got a shed, and you just need something that locks and unlocks, then you might go for something less sophisticated.”

 

Matter should push manufacturers to innovate, too. “We need to focus more on the added value of our products,” said Florian Deleuil of Netatmo in an interview. “Otherwise, it could end up being difficult to distinguish our product from that of cheaper and less innovative suppliers.” 

 

While it will be more competitive, the thinking is that the market will be much larger. Matter will help the smart home go from niche to mass. “If this is successful, everyone sells more,” says Z-Wave’s Klein. “Market penetration increases, the stagnation of the smart home in terms of growth is going to increase, and new product categories will open up.” 

 

Today, you might choose a washing machine because it has an excellent design, a special cycle for athletic wear, and offers good energy and water efficiency. You don’t choose it because it works with Alexa or syncs with your fridge. Going forward, that’s probably how you’ll choose your next smart device. “Both industrial design, the overall physical user experience, and the feature sets that they virtually interact with will drive purchase decisions, not just who it works with,” says Klein. 

 

Matter will also provide wider choice. Today, you may be limited to devices that work with the platform you have set up. With Matter, that restriction should go away. The smart home future — where all devices communicate with each other to help your home run more efficiently, intelligently, and seamlessly — will finally emerge.

 

But will it Matter?

Right now, the smart home industry is aligned on supporting Matter. But Matter is still in its infancy. And while it was born from an unprecedented industry coalition that makes it the most promising development in the smart home since Alexa arrived on the scene, co-parenting can be hard.

 

Fadell, who is as excited about the validation of his Thread gamble as a kid at Christmas, is also slightly skeptical. He worries that proprietary moves by companies looking to differentiate products could harm Matter’s overall promise.

 

“Everything can talk to everything in Matter, but that doesn’t mean the experiences will be the same. I can speak French, but am I really French? No,” says Fadell. “It’s the same thing here. If you’re in the Apple ecosystem, sure you may work with other systems in certain ways — but inside Apple, with all the Apple tools, it will be a better experience, and it’s going to stay that way.”

 

Yes, you will be able to use an Apple speaker to control an Amazon device, but is Apple going to go out of its way to make sure Amazon’s products work well with its platform? “Unlikely,” says Fadell.

 

Ultimately, Matter isn’t the solution we — as consumers — have been waiting for. On day one, it’s not going to produce the ambient, self-aware smart home that can respond to your every need without a lick of set-up on our part. 

 

What it is is the solution smart home developers need so that they can start building products and services for that smart home we’re waiting for. “If Matter only changes a couple of things, we will still have a fundamental new technology that works,” says Fadell. “And if it’s adopted — well, let’s see what happens then.” 

 

Updated Friday, November 18th, 3:45PM: This article was first published in October 2021, we’ve updated language and links throughout to reflect that the Matter specification has now launched.

 

Matter’s plan to save the smart home

Matter is a common language for smart home devices designed to simplify everything about the smart home, from purchase to setup and everyday use. Its biggest promise is making smart devices work with each other across platforms and ecosystems, no matter who made them. No more checking for the “works with” HomeKit, Google Home, or Alexa badges — Matter devices work with all of them. It’s also entirely local, so gadgets should respond more quickly. Yes, Matter should make your smart light bulb work just as fast as your non-smart light switch. 

 

All this means you won’t have to pick a platform when adding Matter devices to your home. You can control your smart lighting, smart locks, etc., simultaneously with Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, and even Bixby, should you want to. You can also easily switch your gadgets between platforms.

 

This article is a breakdown of the basics around Matter and how it will work in your home. Including which products and platforms will work with the new standard and when. For more on the technology behind Matter, check out this deep dive into the new standard: Matter’s plan to save the smart home. 

 

As new information comes out, we’ll keep this article updated.

What is Matter and when can I use it?

Matter is an interoperability standard designed to solve many of today’s smart home headaches. 

 

Developed and run by the Connectivity Standards Alliance, Matter is supported by a long list of companies. From platform owners like Apple, Google, and Amazon and major manufacturers such as Samsung and LG to smaller accessory-focused players like Nanoleaf, Eve, and Wyze, there’s an unprecedented industry coalition behind Matter. Which is why it’s probably going to work.

 

Matter isn’t a new protocol; it’s a specification for how devices should talk to each other. It runs over existing protocols: Thread for low-power, low-bandwidth devices such as light bulbs and sensors and Wi-Fi or ethernet for higher bandwidth devices like streaming media players and cameras (when they arrive).

 

A key feature of the specification is that all devices can run locally in your home; they do not require an internet connection to work or to work together, although cloud connectivity is an option and allows for out-of-the-home control and integration with cloud services.

 

Matter officially launched in the fall of 2022 but hasn’t arrived yet; we’re waiting for platforms and devices to be updated to support the standard. That’s starting to happen, but early 2023 is when you can realistically expect to use Matter in your home.

What do I need to use Matter?

This diagram explains how devices will communicate across the different protocols supported by Matter.

Image: Thread Group

A Matter controller

To add and control Matter devices, you need a Matter controller. Unlike proprietary hubs and bridges from companies such as Philips Hue and Lutron Caseta, Matter controllers are not brand-specific. As long as it’s a Matter controller, it can control a Matter device — no matter who made it. (It doesn’t get old) 

 

Many different types of devices can be Matter controllers: smart speakers, voice assistants, apps, or hubs with apps. Its primary role is to manage communications, control, automations, and remote access (when enabled). Because of this, your Matter controller is ideally a device that is always in your home, always powered, and has a direct connection to your home network. 

 

Matter controllers are built into the latest versions of Android and Apple’s operating systems, and all the flagship smart speakers and devices will become Matter controllers: including the Apple HomePod Mini, Apple TV 4K, Amazon Echo and Google Nest Hub speakers and displays, and Samsung SmartThings hubs. 

 

It’s worth noting that Matter controllers aren’t necessarily Matter devices. You probably won’t be able to control an Amazon Echo Show with your Google Nest Hub Max or a Samsung Family Hub fridge with your Apple TV.

A Thread border router

Matter works over Wi-Fi, ethernet, and Thread. Matter controllers take care of Wi-Fi and ethernet devices, but if you have Thread devices, you need a Thread border router to talk to the Matter controller. Helpfully, some Matter controllers are also Thread border routers.

 

The Thread logo

Illustration by Grayson Blackmon / The Verge

 

Thread is a low-power, low-latency wireless protocol that creates a self-healing mesh network. This means the more devices you have on it, the better the range and reliability will be. Similar to the Zigbee protocol, Thread works on the same 2.4GHz spectrum and is designed for the same low-power devices: sensors, light bulbs, plugs, and shades.

 

But Thread is IPv6 based, which means it can talk to the internet directly, whereas Zigbee devices require a hub, and often a proprietary one. Thread also has lower latency and is an open protocol — Zigbee has become hopelessly fragmented. Like Matter controllers, Thread border routers are platform agnostic, so any Thread device can connect to them.

 

Thread border routers don’t need a hardwired internet connection. They just need continuous power and Wi-Fi. This means that, unlike traditional bridges and hubs, they can be almost anything from a smart light or smart speaker to a fridge, television, or thermostat. In the long run, it’s likely that your next Wi-Fi router will contain a Thread border router, so you won’t have to worry about this at all.

 

Today, existing devices from Apple, Eero, Google, and Samsung have Thread border routers that will support Matter. Amazon’s fourth-gen Echo speaker and Google Home displays will gain the capability next year. (More details below.)

Which smart home platforms will support Matter?

The four big platforms — Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Apple Home, and Samsung SmartThings — all support Matter. This means you can use any of their apps, smart speakers, hubs, and smart voice assistants as Matter controllers to manage your connected devices. 

 

Because of a Matter feature called Multi-Admin — which lets you control the same Matter devices with multiple platforms — you don’t have to use one of the big four to control your devices. Several companies have already said their apps will become Matter controllers, including the TP-Link Tapo app, the Aqara app, and the Wiser app. And there will likely be more options soon. 

 

You do need to use an app. Matter doesn’t have its own app. It isn’t a platform; it’s just the language the devices speak to each other. You’ll need to pick an app to manage that language and tell your smart thermostat to turn down and your lights to turn off when you lock your door. With Matter, these types of automations will run across devices from different companies that weren’t previously compatible.

 

So, yes, you will be able to control the new Nest Thermostat with Apple’s Siri or an Eve smart plug with Amazon Alexa. Plus, you can use the Apple Home app on your iPhone to turn on the living room light, and your partner can use the Google Home app on their Android phone to turn on the same lights.

 

Here is a rundown of what each of the smart home platforms has said it is doing to support Matter:

 

The Echo Dot with Clock will be a Matter Controller over Wi-Fi.

Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge

Amazon Alexa Matter support

A total of 17 Echo devices — including all of the current lineup — will become Matter controllers via an over-the-air firmware update in late 2022. At first, they will only support Matter-over-Wi-Fi — and just three out of the first Matter device types: smart plugs, smart bulbs, and smart switches. 

 

Amazon has said it will update the Alexa app to support Matter, with Android support in 2022 and iOS in 2023. Its flagship fourth-generation Echo smart speaker will also become a Thread border router “early next year.” Amazon’s Echo Studio, Echo Show 10, and Echo Plus speakers also technically have the capability to be border routers, but Amazon has not announced if those will be updated.

 

Amazon’s mesh Wi-Fi network company, Eero, has committed to supporting Matter, too. Most of its existing routers can already act as Thread border routers and will be upgraded to support Matter early next year. (See the full list below.)

Google Nest and Google Home Matter support

Google will update all its Nest smart speakers and displays to be Matter controllers. Newer products with Thread built in — such as the Nest Wi-Fi, Nest Wi-Fi Pro, Nest Hub Max, and second-gen Nest Hub — will also be border routers. There is no public timeline for this update yet, but according to the CSA website, the Google Home framework has been Matter certified.

 

Google also plans to update the Android platform to allow Android smartphones to onboard and control Matter devices.

 

The new Apple TV 4K Wi-Fi + Ethernet is a Matter controller and Thread border router.

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

Apple Home Matter support

As of iOS 16.1, Apple’s HomePod, HomePod Mini, and 2021 and 2022 Apple TV 4K models are already Matter controllers. The HomePod Mini, Apple TV 4K Wi-Fi + Ethernet (2022), and Apple TV 4K (2021) are also Thread border routers. All Apple’s operating systems — watchOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, and HomePod software — are now Matter certified, too.

 

The Apple Home app and Siri voice assistant on Apple devices support Matter. The company has said all existing HomeKit APIs will automatically work with Matter-enabled accessories. 

 

“We believe all smart home accessories should work together to provide the most choice and interoperability for customers without compromising security and privacy,” Apple spokesperson Jacqueline Roy told me. “This is why we helped create and contribute to the new Matter standard so that all smart home accessories will have the same level of security, privacy, and ease of use that Apple customers enjoy today with HomeKit accessories.”

Samsung SmartThings Matter support

Samsung’s v2 and v3 SmartThings hubs have been updated to work as Matter controllers, and the v3 hub and Aeotec SmartThings hub are now also Thread border routers.

 

Samsung says its Galaxy smartphones and tablets, newer smart TVs and monitors, and its Family Hub refrigerators will get updated to support Matter-over-Wi-Fi. 

 

The $35 SmartThings Hub Dongle will get Matter and Thread early next year. It already supports Zigbee and can be plugged into a smart TV or fridge to add full support for SmartThings-compatible Zigbee and Thread devices.

 

SmartThings hubs will not bridge existing devices into Matter. So your connected Zigbee and Z-Wave devices won’t show up in other Matter ecosystems — only in SmartThings.

Will I need to replace my existing smart devices?

Matter is designed to include devices already in our homes, and while some existing Thread devices that companies said might get upgraded to Matter now won’t, there are potential upgrade paths for many gadgets.

 

• Zigbee devices can be bridged to Matter through their existing hub (both Philips Hue and Aqara have pledged to do this).
• Some Wi-Fi devices can get Matter compatibility with an over-the-air firmware update.
• Theoretically, some Zigbee devices could get device-level Matter-over-Thread support, though no such updates have been announced.

 

Aqara’s existing hubs, including theM2 Hub (left), G2H camera hub (center), and M1S hub (right), will be updated to bridge connected Aqara devices into Matter.

 

Current devices that can’t be upgraded to Matter will continue to work with the platforms they already work with. They will coexist with Matter devices on those platforms and can be used alongside them in routines and automations.

 

Bluetooth-only devices that don’t rely on bridges, such as Eve’s earlier line of security and sensor products or GE Cync’s Bluetooth mesh bulbs, can’t be updated to work with Matter since Matter doesn’t support Bluetooth except for device setup. Eve has already rolled out new Thread-enabled versions of almost its entire range of Bluetooth products. 

 

Because the Matter specification was delayed several times and only finalized in late 2022, several manufacturers — including Nanoleaf, Belkin WeMo, and Schlage — shipped Thread products that they expected to update with Matter support, only to find that the hardware couldn’t handle the software requirements of the final version.

 

Instead, all those companies have announced plans to launch new Matter-enabled products next year. It’s a good idea not to buy any Thread products going forward until they have Matter support.

What about Z-Wave and Zigbee?

To date, we haven’t heard of any Z-Wave hubs that will expose their Z-Wave devices to Matter. Jaeyeon Jung, Samsung Electronics corporate vice president and head of SmartThings’ mobile experience business, told me there is a significant technical complexity to doing this. “Looking at each legacy device and coming up with a way to convert each to Matter would be a huge process,” she said. “We still have to look at all the technical details to see if that would be possible.”

 

The Z-Wave Alliance is promoting solutions to bridge existing Z-Wave devices into Matter. Chipmaker Silicon Labs has developed both software and hardware solutions to enable this. But none of these have yet made their way into products you can buy.

 

For now, if you have Z-Wave or Zigbee devices, stick with whatever hub you are already using or switch to SmartThings or Home Assistant if you want Matter and your current platform won’t support it.

Will I still need hubs and bridges to run my smart home?

Yes. If you have devices that work through a bridge today, you will need to keep your bridges and hubs to continue using these devices. This applies to things like Philips Hue lighting products, Aqara sensors, Z-Wave and Zigbee devices going through a hub like Samsung SmartThings or Hubitat, or Ikea smart home devices on its older Trådfri gateway.

 

In an ideal world, you should not have to buy any more bridges or hubs. “Matter is going to be cheaper for device makers. It’s going to be cheaper for a lighting company, for example, to make an IP-based bulb [than continue to build bridges],” says Chris LaPré, head of technology for the CSA. “In the long run, Matter will take over, and eventually, you’ll just get rid of all the bridges.” 

 

However, Signify — which owns Philips Hue — has said it will continue to use a bridge with its Zigbee-based lighting products and has no plans to make any of its other products directly Matter enabled.

 

The Matter logo should appear on new Matter-compatible devices.

Image: Connectivity Standards Alliance

Which products will work with Matter?

There are no Matter products on shelves yet, and most companies that have announced Matter devices say they will start shipping in Q1 of 2023.

 

New products that are compatible with Matter should have the Matter logo on them (it looks a bit like a stick person wearing bikini bottoms). Many manufacturers are adding Matter support to existing devices with over-the-air firmware updates. (More on this in a bit.) 

 

The first device types supported in Matter are:

 

• Light bulbs and light switches
• Plugs and outlets
• Door locks
• Thermostats and other HVAC controllers (mini-splits, etc.)
• Blinds and shades
• Sensors (motion, contact)
• Bridges
• Televisions and streaming video players

 

The following device categories will be included in a future update to Matter, according to the CSA:

 

• Wireless Access Points (routers / modems)
• Garage door and gate controller sensors
• Home security cameras
• Home appliances
• Robot vacuums
• Environmental quality sensors and controls (such as indoor air quality monitors and air purifiers)
• Smoke and CO detectors
• Ambient motion and presence sensing 
• Energy management

 

The HomePod Mini is both a Matter controller and a Thread border router.

Photo by Jennifer Tuohy / The Verge

Devices that work with Matter now

Matter controllers with Thread border routers

• Apple HomePod Mini
• Apple TV 4K Wi-Fi + Ethernet (2022)
• Apple TV 4K (2021)
• Aeotec SmartThings Hub
• Samsung SmartThings Hub v3

Matter controllers

• Apple HomePod
• Apple TV 4K Wi-Fi (2022)
• Apple Home app on devices running iOS 16.1 or newer
• Samsung SmartThings app (Android)
• Samsung SmartThings Hub v2

 

The Eve Motion motion sensor will get a firmware upgrade on December 12th to support with Matter.

Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge

Devices that will work with Matter later in 2022

Matter controllers

• Amazon Alexa app (Android)
• Echo smart speaker (third-gen and newer)
• Echo Dot (third-gen and newer)
• Echo Dot with Clock (third-gen and newer)
• Echo Studio
• Echo Show 8 (second-gen and newer)
• Echo Show 10 (third-gen)
• Echo Show 5 (second-gen and newer)
• Echo Input
• Echo Flex
• Echo Plus (v2)

Bridges

• Aqara Hub M2 — will bridge over 40 existing Aqara devices 
• Schneider Electric Wiser Gateway — will bridge over 200 existing Wiser Zigbee devices

Lighting and plugs

• All Wiz lighting products manufactured since Q2 2021

 

New products

 

• TP-Link smart bulbs, switches, plugs, and hubs — 10 new products from these categories
• Eve Energy smart plug (December 12th / Thread)
• Meross Matter Smart Wi-Fi Plug Mini (December 31st)

Sensors

New products

 

• Eve Motion motion sensor (December 12th / Thread)
• Eve Door & Window contact sensor (December 12th / Thread) 

 

The Philips Hue Bridge will bring Matter to existing Hue devices, though the devices themselves will not be updated.

Image: Philips Hue

Devices that should work with Matter by Q1 of 2023

Matter controllers

• Aqara app
• Wiser app
• Tuya Smart life app* 
• Alexa app (iOS)

 

*Tuya Smart is an IoT development platform service provider that supports over 446,000 developers with schematics for over 1,100 smart home products from robot vacuums to smart lights. It already has Matter certification for a number of light bulbs and smart plugs. Brands that use Tuya include Teckin, Gosund, Nooie, Lidl, and Iotty

Apps that will support Matter 

• Eve app (iOS and Android)
• Samsung SmartThings app (iOS)

Bridges

• Philips Hue Bridge — all connected Hue lighting products will bridge into Matter (except Hue Sync Box and Tap Dial Switch)

Wi-Fi routers

• Eero 5
• Eero 6 Plus
• Eero Beacon
• Eero PoE Gateway
• Eero PoE 6
• Eero Pro 6
• Eero Pro 6E
• Eero Pro
• Comcast xFi Gateway
• Google Nest Wifi Pro
• Google Nest Wifi

Lighting and plugs

New products

 

• Nanoleaf Matter Essentials A19 light bulb (coming 2023 / Thread)
• Nanoleaf Matter Essentials GU10 light bulb (coming 2023 / Thread)
• Nanoleaf Matter Essentials Light Strip (coming 2023 / Thread)
• Schneider Electric Smart Plug 
• Yeelight Smart Light

Sensors

New products

 

• Aqara Door and Window Sensor P2 (coming 2023 / Thread)
• Aqara Motion and Light Sensor P2 (coming 2023 / Thread)

 

The Google Nest Wifi Pro will receive a Matter update sometime in 2023.

Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge

Devices that should work with Matter sometime in 2023

Matter controllers with Thread border routers

• Google Nest Hub (second-gen)
• Google Nest Hub Max
• Google Nest WiFi Pro
• Google Nest WiFi Router / Point
• Samsung SmartThings Hub Dongle

 

New products

 

• Aqara Hub M3 (coming 2023)
• Homey Pro hub (coming 2023)
• HOOBS Pro

Matter controllers

• Brilliant smart home panel
• Google Home app
• Google Nest Audio
• Google Nest Mini
• Samsung Galaxy devices 
• Samsung Family Hub fridge
• Samsung Smart Monitors
• Samsung smart TVs
• LG smart TVs (webOS 22)
• TP-Link Tapo app 

 

New products

 

• Mui Board 2.0

Bridges

• Aqara Hub M1S / M1S Gen 2
• Aqara Hub E1
• Aqara Camera Hub G3
• Aqara Camera Hub G2H Pro

Lighting and plugs

• Eve Flare Lamp (Thread, coming soon)
• Eve Light Switch (Thread)

 

New products

 

• Connected by Wiz products (i.e., Philips Smart lighting)

Sensors

• Eve Room (Thread)
• Eve Weather (Thread)
• Eve Water Guard (Thread)

 

New products

 

• Netatmo Smart Security Sensor (Thread)

Appliances

• Whirlpool
• Samsung
• LG

Others

• Eve MotionBlinds (Thread)
• Eve Shutter Switch (Thread, coming soon)
• Eve Aqua (Thread)

 

The Yale Assure 2 smart lock will get Matter via an upcoming Matter-over-Thread networking module.

Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge

Devices that should work with Matter at some pointReturn to table of contents↴

Controllers

• Flic Hub and Flic Buttons

Bridges

• Ikea Dirigera Hub
• Bosch Smart Home Controller
• Nabu Casa Home Assistant Yellow

Door locks

• Level Lock (all models) (Thread)
• Yale Assure Lock 2 (Thread module)

New products

 

• Future August smart locks
• Future Schlage smart locks

Thermostats

• Google Nest Thermostat (Thread)
• Eve Thermo (Thread)

Lighting and plugs

New products

 

• Yeelight Pro
• Yeelight Cube
• Cync A19 smart bulb
• Cync light strip
• Sengled Wi-Fi A19 bulb
• Belkin Wemo Smart Plug (Thread)
• Belkin Wemo Smart Light Switch (Thread)
• Belkin Wemo Smart Dimmer (Thread)

Other

• Somfy 
• Home Assistant

How easy will it be to add a Matter device to your smart home?

Adding a Matter device to your smart home should be very simple and similar no matter which device you’re adding or which platform you’re adding it to. I’ve seen some demos, and it’s a lot like adding a device to Apple’s Home platform today. 

 

Matter uses numeric and QR setup codes and Bluetooth Low Energy to add a device to your network. Open the device maker’s app or your smart home platform app, scan the QR code or manually enter the numeric code written on the device, and follow the prompts.

 

NFC pairing will be an option for some devices, letting you tap the device with your phone. And some platforms will support auto-detection, so your phone will just see there is a device ready to be paired and prompt you to add it. 

 

Once your device is set up in one platform, you can add it to other apps and platforms using Matter’s multi-admin feature. The process to share is similar to onboarding, only you don’t have to have the device in hand, as the app creates a pairing code for you.

Is Matter private and secure?

Smart home adoption has been slow as people are concerned about their privacy and security. The CSA says keeping devices secure is a core tenet of Matter.

 

“We are secure by design, we take a zero-trust approach, we use specific industry-standard encryption technology, and every device gets authenticated before it joins the network,” says Michelle Mindala-Freeman, head of marketing at CSA. “Every message is secured on the network, and Matter supports secure over-the-air updates.” 

 

In terms of your home’s data, that relationship remains between you and the individual manufacturers, says Mindala-Freeman. However, Matter’s privacy principles outline data privacy protections, including minimizing how much data is shared in any Matter interaction and defining the purpose of data sharing when requested. As a bonus, because Matter has trust built into the system, you won’t have to continually input your passwords to connect ecosystems, explains the CSA’s LaPré. 

 

The significant advantage of Matter devices — direct IP control that lets them speak straight to the internet — is also seen as a possible security concern. The CSA says Matter’s security approach delivers security that is “strong, agile (to address the evolution of things like encryption types over time), and proactive, with a community of members who do threat modeling and mitigation,” says Tobin Richardson, president and CEO of the CSA.

 

The approach is one of resilient security while still getting the benefits of an IP-connected world “rather than security by obscurity,” he says. Until devices are out in the wild, confirming this approach’s proficiency is hard, but the intent checks all the right boxes.

Which smart home device categories won’t work with Matter?

The new Ring Alarm Pro from the Amazon-owned company does not support Matter over Thread, says the company.

Image: Ring

 

Smart security cameras don’t currently work with Matter, but the CSA has said they will be part of a future update. How that will work in practice is unknown. Apple contributed the framework of its HomeKit smart home platform to Matter, so it’s possible that its HomeKit Secure Video may also be part of that contribution. We’ll have to wait and see.

 

Smart sensors are part of Matter, but home security systems are not — yet. Many smart homes run with an alarm system as the main hub, so the lack of integration here could be a deal-breaker for some.

 

Mitch Klein, executive director of the Z-Wave Alliance — a technology used widely in home alarm systems for door / window sensors, motion sensors, and other devices — explains that there will be significant challenges to porting that technology to Matter. “Securing UL approval for security devices is exceptionally difficult, and Matter has numerous challenges here,” he says. “UL is a benchmark and often an insurance requirement. All professionally-installed security systems insist on UL approval.” 

 

Speaking of cameras and alarm systems, one of the biggest smart home companies in both these spaces — Ring — hasn’t offered any indication it will support Matter. I asked how / if Ring Alarm might integrate into Matter last year, and a spokesperson stated: “Ring Alarm Pro does not support Matter over Thread.”

 

Whole home audio streaming (the tech from speaker companies like Sonos and Bose) is not currently supported, and we don’t know how Alexa, Apple, and Google’s current multiroom music streaming solutions will integrate with Matter. There is a Matter casting feature in the specification, but so far, there haven’t been any implementations of it announced.

 

Update November 16th, 2022, 3:45PM ET: This article was originally published in October 2021. Following the launch of Matter this month and the beginning of the availability of products. We have revised much of it to keep it current.

 

What matters about Matter, the new smart home standard

For the first time, high-energy muon particles generated in the atmosphere have made it possible for researchers to examine the structures of storms in a manner that conventional visualization methods, like satellite imaging, cannot. This new method’s level of detail could help researchers simulate storms and associated weather effects. This could also result in earlier warning systems that are more accurate.

It’s difficult to miss the many news reports about severe storms that have occurred in various regions of the globe and are often attributed to climate change. Although weather forecasting and early warning systems have always been important, the current increase in storm activity appears to make them especially so. A team of scientists led by Professor Hiroyuki Tanaka of Muographix at the University of Tokyo has developed a novel method for identifying and analyzing tropical cyclones by using a quirk of particle physics that occurs over our heads all the time.

The redder areas are low-pressure warm air, and the green areas are higher-pressure cooler air. The cyclone in this image is about 15 kilometers tall. A line drawing approximating the shape overlays the visualization data. Credit: 2022 Hiroyuki KM Tanaka

 

“You’ve probably seen photographs of cyclones taken from above, showing swirling vortices of clouds. But I doubt you’ve ever seen a cyclone from the side, perhaps as a computer graphic, but never as actual captured sensor data,” said Tanaka. “What we offer the world is the ability to do just this, visualize large-scale weather phenomena like cyclones from a 3D perspective, and in real-time too. We do this using a technique called muography, which you can think of like an X-ray, but for seeing inside truly enormous things.”

Muography produces X-ray photographs of large objects such as volcanoes, pyramids, bodies of water, and, for the first time, atmospheric weather systems. Scintillators are special sensors that are linked together to form a grid, similar to the pixels on your smartphone’s camera sensor. These scintillators, however, don’t see optical light. They see muons, which are produced in the atmosphere when cosmic rays from deep space collide with the atoms.

These are the sensors used to detect the weakly interacting muon particles. Each scintillator sensor is extremely dense to maximize the chances that a muon will interact with it. Arranged in a grid, the sensors can form a crude image of whatever the muons passed through to reach the sensor. Credit: 2022 Hiroyuki KM Tanaka

 

Muons are special because they pass through matter easily without scattering as much as other types of particles. But the small amount they do deviate by as they pass through solid, liquid, or even gaseous matter, can reveal details of their journey between the atmosphere and the sensors. By capturing a large number of muons passing through something, an image of it can be reconstructed.

“We successfully imaged the vertical profile of a cyclone, and this revealed density variations essential to understanding how cyclones work,” said Tanaka. “The images show cross sections of the cyclone which passed through Kagoshima Prefecture in western Japan. I was surprised to see clearly it had a low-density warm core that contrasted dramatically with the high-pressure cold exterior. There is absolutely no way to capture such data with traditional pressure sensors and photography.”

The detector the researchers used has a viewing angle of 90 degrees, but Tanaka envisages combining similar sensors to create hemispherical and therefore omnidirectional observation stations which could be placed along the length of a coastline.

These could potentially see cyclones as far away as 300 kilometers. Although satellites already track these storms, the extra detail offered by muography could improve predictions about approaching storms.

“One of the next steps for us now will be to refine this technique in order to detect and visualize storms at different scales,” said Tanaka. “This could mean better modeling and prediction not only for larger storm systems but more local weather conditions as well.”

Source

The organization managed to increase total revenue to $600 million, an increase of more than $100 million compared to the year 2020. Search engine royalties, especially paid by Google but also other search engine companies, increased by more than $80 million in the year to $527 million.

While that is impressive growth, subscription and advertising revenue grew even more. Last year, Mozilla earned $24 million from subscriptions and advertising. In 2021, revenue grew to $56 million.

Mozilla's main revenue sources grew considerably. In fact, 2021's revenue is second only to 2019's revenue, but only because of a one-time payment Mozilla received in the year from Yahoo.

The organization managed to reduce expenses significantly in 2021 next to that. Total expenses were $339 million in 2021, a reduction of more than $100 million when compared to 2020's $438 million.

Software development expenses were reduced from $242 million to $199 million, general and administrative expenses from $137 million to $81 million, and branding and marketing from $37 million to $30 million.

Taken together, Mozilla managed to increase its net assets by almost $200 million to $1.164 million in 2021.

Still highly dependent on Google

Revenue depends to a large degree on search engine deals. While revenue from subscriptions and advertising is growing faster, it still makes up only a small amount of Mozilla's total revenue.

About 87% of Mozilla's total revenue comes from royalties. The organization renewed its search engine contract with Google in 2020 for three years. Details were not disclosed and since Firefox's user base seems to stagnate, it could be that Mozilla got better rates from Google. There are other possibilities, including more searching activity by Firefox users.

Subscription and advertising revenue grew by 133% in 2021. Information about individual services is not provided in the financial statement. Mozilla established several services in the past couple of years, including Firefox VPN, Pocket Premium and Hits, Firefox Relay and others. Advertising revenue is included in the section as well.

Analysis and Outlook

Mozilla managed to increase revenue by over $100 million in 2021. The 20.97% increase in revenue can be attributed to the new 2020 search engine deal with Google, and Mozilla's focus on increasing subscription and advertising revenue.

The organization is still dependent on search engine deals, and it looks as if this is not going to change anytime soon. The dependency is reduced every year though, and newly established services such as Firefox Relay Premium, may accelerate the trend in the coming years.

The search engine contract with Google ends in 2023 and there is a good chance that it will be renewed again in that year.

Mozilla's future is looking bright, financially.

You can check out the financial report for 2021 here.

Source

No one, not even José del R. Millán, was expecting Subject 1 to have a breakthrough when he did. The 26-year-old, who has tetraplegia with no mobility below the neck, had to be hospitalized part-way through Millán’s study for an unrelated complication, and he had gone through more than 20 training sessions to operate a brain-controlled wheelchair without much to show for it.

Yet, he surprised everyone including Millán when something clicked into place and he was able to control the wheelchair during his last training sessions. He even navigated it through a cluttered room in a German clinic with near-perfect accuracy.

“We would have never been able to predict the breakthrough for Subject 1,” Millán, a computer engineering and neurology researcher at The University of Texas at Austin, told The Daily Beast. “Everybody was super excited when we observed that kind of performance.”

< Watch the video at the source page. >

Subject 1’s breakthrough is one of the major findings of a new study published on Friday in the journal iScience, that sheds new insight into the learning curve associated with technology that connects the human mind with machines—also known as brain-computer interfaces (BCI).

The study details the training trajectories and performance of three people with tetraplegia as they used a BCI wheelchair controlled with their minds. They wore a cap with electrodes on their head that allowed a computer to translate certain brain waves into commands for the wheelchair—the device would then move or turn based on the translated commands.

Subjects 1 and 3 got the hang of the wheelchair over time and navigated through the corridor handily. Meanwhile, Subject 2 did not improve over the course of training and could not steer the wheelchair as easily.

These differences extended beyond just driving skills. By the end of the training, the people who improved had produced brain signals that an algorithm could more accurately translate into commands for the wheelchair. They also more quickly produced a command over time.

Additionally, connectivity—a measurement that reflects how well different regions of the brain can communicate—changed significantly over the course of the training for Subjects 1 and 3, while it did not change for Subject 2.

This variability is important for researchers to understand and to share, so as not to cherry-pick positive findings, Millán said.

“We wanted to record the case of Subject 2 to show that there is no magic bullet,” he said. “We need to have several options, and we also need to understand that the same intervention given to two people will not have the same effect.”

Most BCI studies thus far have looked at abled populations who are not the intended users of the assistive technologies in question, which is why it was critical to enroll participants who had disabilities into the study, Millán said.

“I think a major contribution is looking at people with tetraplegia, because it’s not easy to work with them,” W. Hong Yeo, a biomechanical engineering researcher at Georgia Tech who was not involved with the research, told The Daily Beast. In general, he added that recruiting participants for a BCI study can be difficult due to the time-intensive nature of the training process and people’s squeamishness with electrode caps and sticky adhesive gel. People with tetraplegia often have complex health conditions that can require hospital stays, and may not be interested in participating in exploratory or taxing research.

Millán hopes to study the root cause behind BCI learning curves to eventually speed up the learning process. By figuring out, for instance, what factors led to Subject 1’s breakthrough, he hopes that his research will lead to better assistive technologies for people with restrictive disabilities.

Source

After haggling with the author Stephen King (don’t worry about it), Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, decided that Twitter users would have to pay $8 a month to keep their blue verification check marks. Previously, these check marks were free and indicated an account was authentic—that’s the real New York Times, the real President Joe Biden, the real Slim Jim, and so on. They’re sort of a status symbol, in the sense that check marks make users stand out, and the process for getting one is opaque and mysterious. And they kind of confer importance by suggesting that a person or an entity or a brand with a check might be someone who someone else would attempt to impersonate. People sometimes talk about verification badges as being signifiers of “clout.”

Musk renovated the blue-check-mark system with the stated intention of making it, like, more egalitarian or something: Anybody could have a check if they paid a fee, and then they would have the glory of the check mark, even if it would no longer indicate anything other than the user having paid a fee. This devolved into chaos about as quickly as you would imagine. A blue check appeared next to an account pretending to be George W. Bush, which tweeted, “I miss killing Iraqis” with a sad-face emoji. A blue check appeared next to an account masquerading as the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, which tweeted, “We are excited to announce insulin is free now.” (The verification program is now on pause until after Thanksgiving.)

For those disgusted or confused by Musk’s antics, there is an alternative: Just go back to Tumblr, where the antics are better.

The famous microblogging website for freaks is constantly rumored to be at death’s door, but things are on the upswing there—and people are paying attention, thanks to the company’s inspired response to Twitter’s tumult. Last week, it started offering users the option to purchase, for a onetime fee of $7.99, not one but two “Important Blue Internet Checkmarks” to display next to their username. “Why, you ask? Why not?” the announcement explained. (The page for purchasing the check marks discloses that they “may turn into a bunch of crabs at any time.”) This was a good joke from the jump, but it got better when users realized they could buy more than two check marks. Someone bought 10. Because this is Tumblr, the check marks quickly became the subject of fan art—“the Important Blue Internet Checkmarks are gay and married actually,” etc. Tumblr is also selling blue-check-mark pins in its shockingly good merch store.

“We’re always looking across the industry for innovation,” Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of Automattic, which owns Tumblr, told me when I asked about the Important Blue Internet Checkmarks. Then he apologized: “I’m not good at being funny.” Anyway, he went on, you can buy up to 24 check marks. “But we are making no promises. For a technology company, maintaining the check marks is very difficult.” (Joking again.) “The check marks might transform into something else in the future,” he warned. (Referring to the threat of crabs.) He wouldn’t give specific numbers but said there are now “hundreds of thousands” of Important Blue Checkmarks on Tumblr.

According to Mullenweg, iOS downloads of the Tumblr app were up 62 percent the week after Musk took control of Twitter. (Although, to keep things in perspective, Tumblr is still much, much smaller than Twitter.) The mobile app has a pretty chic new logo. The discovery features are finally useful. And, at the beginning of the month, Mullenweg announced that the company had figured out a way to allow nudity on the site again (though it will not be bringing back actual porn), putting an end to a four-year-long ban and possibly starting Tumblr down a path to regaining the trust of users who were dismayed when it began removing, among other things, posts that showed “female-presenting nipples,” in a bloodbath of poorly considered automated takedowns.

Whoever is currently running Tumblr’s Twitter account has also been making the most of the Musk era by welcoming fleeing Twitter users “home” to Tumblr and asking current Tumblr users not to scare them away: “We need everybody to pretend to be normal for a little bit.” (Mullenweg would not say who runs Tumblr’s Twitter account, but he told me that the company Slack has “kind of turned into a writer’s room.”)

Now, maybe you see this as sort of an obvious and opportunistic publicity play by a competing social-media service. Maybe it even seems crass to you—a little grave-dancy. But Tumblr’s users and staff know something about unexpected business deals with ominous implications. (The site was acquired by Yahoo in 2013; Yahoo was then acquired by Verizon; Verizon squished Yahoo and AOL together to form something called Oath; it then sold Tumblr to Automattic at a fire-sale price—a twist after rumors circulated that it might sell the site to Pornhub.) They also know something about sudden changes and broken features and never-ending suspense over when or whether a site may disappear completely. You can hardly blame them for enjoying the fact that something has gone wrong elsewhere.

If you're leaving your nest and migrating to Tumblr, visit https://t.co/DXQh76XBJW to check the availability of your username! pic.twitter.com/4KVlATavKX

— tumblr dot com the website and app (@tumblr) November 11, 2022

Tumblr diehards do not want the site to be a landing pad for the normies. As Ryan Broderick reported in his newsletter, Garbage Day, last week, they have busied themselves posting “cringe” in order to ward off returning Twitter users—it’s kind of a “Keep Austin Weird” campaign. (Of course, the Twitter “normies” are coming from a website where people sincerely argue that it’s classist to shower and sexist to be afraid of the woman monster in Barbarian who rips arms off—so they’re not that normal either.) But some Tumblr users prefer to be welcoming. “All of us were new to the site at one point,” Nat Ku, a 20-year-old Tumblr user, told me in an email. “If someone wants to switch from twitter to tumblr, celebrity or otherwise, good for them. Who cares? That’s their business. We’re all equally insufferable anyway.”

    yeah bc like 12 new ppl joined
    give it a sec 😇 https://t.co/baoExnLB3z

    — tumblr dot com the website and app (@tumblr) November 6, 2022

Today, Tumblr has a reputation as a refuge from the louder and busier social-media landscape, and those who still spend time there—or who returned to the site, as many did at the start of the pandemic—love it for being somewhat creepy and overlooked. If Musk ruins Twitter, maybe it too could have a second life as something most people are always forgetting about—in a good way.

A year ago, many would have placed their bets on Tumblr having far less time left on Earth than Twitter, but that’s life online for you. Any platform that you invest years of your interest and creativity in—that you become reliant on for community and news and stimulation and something to complain about—is about as stable as the winds of capital and the whims of those who hold it. Although it feels like the end of days on Twitter right now—which is to say, everyone is acting hysterical—there’s something a little exciting about it. It’s beautiful and painful. Now, a Tumblr user might say, you know how it feels.

“I hope both Twitter and Tumblr are around 100 years from now,” Mullenweg told me. “These are important parts of the internet, and they need good stewardship to stay around for future generations.” He said he learned the hard way that running a social network is extremely difficult—in more ways than running any other large-scale internet service or tech company—and that he is rooting for anyone who tries it. “You’ll never hear me bad-mouth Elon,” he said, after I honestly kind of tried to get him to. That said, if you’re wondering what to do now that Twitter is getting more upsetting by the day: “Everyone at Tumblr has been burning the midnight oil the past few weeks to keep up with user demand.”

Kaitlyn Tiffany is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Everything I Need I Get From You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It.

Source

Death is in the air on Twitter.

On the platform Thursday evening, where #RIPTwitter was the top trend worldwide, users wrote what they feared might be their last posts, offering apprehensive goodbyes and listing the other (more stable) social media platforms where they can still be found.

They were reacting to the dire news emanating from inside Twitter. Scores of remaining employees at the social media company on Thursday appeared to reject owner Elon Musk's ultimatum to work "extremely hardcore," throwing the communications platform into utter disarray and raising serious questions about about how much longer it will survive.

Inside the company's Slack, I'm told that a mass resignation effectively occurred after Musk's 5pm deadline for employees to arrive at a decision passed. Hundreds of staffers appear to have called it quits, accepting Musk's offer to exit in exchange for three months of severance.

Employees flooded the "#social-watercooler" channel with the salute emoji (a screen grab of which I obtained and you can see above), indicating that they had chosen not to sign Musk's pledge. A similar series of events unfolded in the Slack channel earlier this month as Musk eliminated roughly 50% of the company’s then 7,500-person workforce.

A former Twitter executive, who recently exited the company, described the situation to me as a "mass exodus." Asked about the situation, the former executive told me, "Elon is finding out that he can’t bully top senior talent. They have lots of options and won’t put up with his antics."

"They will struggle just to keep the lights on," the former executive added.

That assessment was universally shared by the other half dozen current and former employees whom I spoke with on Thursday. It was already bad enough after Musk executed mass layoffs at the company earlier this month. So bad, you'll remember, Twitter asked some of the people it had let go to come back just days later. The state-of-play has only become more dire since then.

In fact, Twitter management was in panic mode hours before the deadline passed, people familiar with the matter told me, explaining that senior leaders were "scrambling" to convince talent to stay at the company.

Musk himself seemed to finally realize grim state of affairs, sending an all-staff email relaxing his previously uncompromising anti-remote work position. "Regarding remote work, all that is required for approval is that your manager takes responsibility for ensuring that you are making an excellent contribution," Musk said in the email.

It didn't appear to do much good.

Two employees who I spoke to on Thursday whom had decided to reject Musk's ultimatum were quite clear in why they were doing so. "I don’t want to stick around to build a product that’s being poisoned from the inside and out," one said, adding later that he felt god about making a decision "in line with what I stand for."

A recently laid off employee who remains in touch with former coworkers added to me, "People don’t want to sacrifice their mental health and family lives to make the richest man in the world richer."

And Twitter seemed to grasp the mess on its hands Thursday evening, sending an email to staff notifying them it has once again shuttered all of its offices and suspended employee badge access, presumably to protect its systems and data.

Twitter's already decimated communications department didn't respond to requests for comment. But Musk nodded to the situation in a tweet.

"How do you make a small fortune in social media?" Musk asked. "Start out with a large one."

THE SIDEBAR

• "I know of six critical systems (like ‘serving tweets’ levels of critical) which no longer have any engineers," an ex Twitter employee told WaPo. "There is no longer even a skeleton crew manning the system. It will continue to coast until it runs into something, and then it will stop." (WaPo)

• Platformer's Zoë Schiffer: "The designers leading Elon Musk’s Blue verified project are out, along with the lead web engineer. Many Twitter employees who maintained critical infrastructure have resigned. This is going to look like a very different company tomorrow." (Twitter)

• "Multiple 'critical' engineering teams inside Twitter have now either completely or near-completely resigned, Alex Heath reported, citing sources, adding that "the team that maintains Twitter’s core system libraries" is also gone. (The Verge)

• News of Twitter mayhem was the top story on The NYT's homepage Thursday night. (NYT)

• The chaos at Twitter has caught the attention of lawmakers, with seven Democratic senators asking the FTC to probe the company. (Reuters)

• The latest restriction on Musk's paid checkmark scheme: new Twitter accounts won’t be able to buy Blue verification for 90 days. (The Verge)

• A group of 180 organizations have called on Musk to combat anti-Semitism on the social media platform after "unrelenting harassment." (Mediaite)

• Meanwhile, at Musk's other businesses... This NYT headline: SpaceX Employees Say They Were Fired for Speaking Up About Elon Musk (NYT)

Source

The hashtag "RIPTwitter" is trending and lots of the site's users are scrambling to download their data.

They're also sharing alternative places to find them (consumer champion Martin Lewis, who has 2m Twitter followers, has set himself up on Mastodon, although he admits he doesn't know how to use it yet).

Twitter's new boss Elon Musk, never one to ignore a trend, tweeted a meme of a gravestone with the Twitter logo on it.

    pic.twitter.com/rbwbsLA1ZG
    — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 18, 2022

Staff have been leaving in their droves - half the workforce was laid off by Mr Musk one week after he completed his purchase of the platform, and many more are choosing to leave since he sent an email demanding "hardcore" working conditions and long hours from his remaining employees.

Quite a few of those departing, according to their Twitter bios, are engineers, developers and coders - the people who work on the guts of what makes Twitter function.

Let's take the two biggest vulnerabilities that could knock the blue bird off its perch very swiftly.

Could it be hacked?

The first and most obvious would be a catastrophic hack.

Twitter, like all big websites (including this one, the BBC), will be constantly under attack from bad actors - even at state level - wanting to cause mischief. World leaders, politicians and celebrities all have personal Twitter accounts with millions of followers - a low-hanging fruit for a hacker wanting a lot of people to see their scam, as we have seen before.

Or they might just want it to disappear, so they bombard it with web traffic to see if it gets overwhelmed and shuts down that way. Attempts like this will be happening all the time - it's a constant battle.

Cyber security is, or at least should be, an important part of any 21st century company's day-to-day operations. Last week Twitter's head of cyber security, Lea Kissner, left. It's not known if they were replaced. (Twitter also has no communications team, so there's no easy way to ask.)

Twitter's security is likely to be pretty robust. You can't run a site used by 300 million people every month that's held together with a bit of string. But that robustness requires continuing maintenance.

Think about your own phone, or laptop, and the regular security updates you have to install. That's because new vulnerabilities are regularly unearthed, new chinks in the armour that you didn't know you had, and it's the job of the provider to send you the fix.

Servers under threat

The second potential disaster is that the servers are knocked out - either by someone with a grudge, or by mistake during a routine bit of maintenance that's not properly supervised.

Without servers, there is no Twitter (or Facebook, or Instagram or indeed our digital world.)

Servers - powerful computers - are like the physical bodies of these platforms. They exist in data centres. These are effectively warehouses full of computer servers which are central to the operations of online businesses. The world runs on servers.

As you can imagine, all of those machines generate a lot of heat. Data centres have to be kept cool, and they require a constant source of electricity.

The servers themselves also require maintenance and replacement, as data gets migrated between them. All of that has the capacity for something to go wrong. It would be sudden and dramatic if it did.

The nuclear option

Elon Musk knows all this, of course. Let's not assume that he doesn't. However he may choose to play the buffoon.

We don't know who is currently keeping watch.

But something happened to me yesterday that made me think perhaps there are more people at Twitter watching than we think.

I told the story about an astronomer who was locked out of her account after wrongly falling foul of automated moderation tools. Nobody at Twitter or Mr Musk's other firms responded to me, or made contact with her. But her account was indeed restored later that day.

Somebody, somewhere inside Twitter, was paying attention. Perhaps there are still enough of them who are doing just that.

There is of course a third option - the nuclear one - which is that Musk declares Twitter bankrupt, and it gets wound down. Although right now he seems to be enjoying his status as Chief Twit.

You can follow Zoe Kleinman on Twitter (@zsk), as well as on Mastodon (@zsk@mastodonapp.uk).

Source

Study: AirPods Pro are *this close* to being full-fledged hearing aids

Even before Twitter cut some 4,400 contract workers on November 12, the platform was showing signs of strain. After Elon Musk bought the company and laid off 7,500 full time employees, disinformation researchers and activists say, the team that took down toxic and fake content vanished. Now, after years of developing relationships within those teams, researchers say no one is responding to their reports of disinformation on the site, even as data suggests Twitter is becoming more toxic.

The issue is particularly acute in Brazil, where a runoff presidential election between right-wing incumbent Jair Bolsonaro and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took place just days after Musk’s takeover. Observers and activists had warned for months that Bolsonaro’s supporters might not accept the results of the election should he lose, and could resort to violence. When Bolsonaro supporters began questioning the election results online, researchers found that Twitter had apparently fired all the people who should be monitoring the platform.

“At this moment, we have nobody to reach out to,” says Nina Santos, a researcher at the Brazilian National Institute of Science & Technology in Digital Democracy. “All the people that we were talking with are no longer there.” Santos says that until Musk’s takeover, Twitter had been “quite responsive” in taking down rule-breaking content that could undermine trust in the election or spread disinformation, compared to Meta and Google. The entirety of Twitter’s Brazil team was included in the 7,500 people laid off earlier this month.

Although Lula was declared the winner of the election, Santos says she still sees tweets questioning the result or calling for mobilization against the government. All of these, she says, are dangerous. Twitter’s current policy states that the company will “label or remove false or misleading information intended to undermine public confidence in an election or other civic process.” Christopher Bouzy, founder and CEO of Bot Sentinel, a project to fight disinformation and harassment on Twitter, was also monitoring the Brazilian elections, as well as the US midterms. Like Santos, he noticed that tweets claiming the Brazilian election was stolen remained up on Twitter.

Disinformation also flooded Twitter during the US midterms, particularly around the race in Maricopa County, Arizona, the state’s largest county and a consistent target of right-wing election deniers. Bouzy, who was monitoring thousands of right-wing accounts, says he had “no idea who to contact” at the company to get tweets containing disinformation taken down. “Twitter is a shit show,” he says.

On November 15, more than 70 civil society organizations across the globe wrote to Musk demanding he take action to stop hate speech becoming more prevalent on Twitter. In the weeks leading up to the US midterms, the nonprofit advocacy group Free Press released a report highlighting how all social platforms were allowing election disinformation to persist. Nora Benavidez, the group’s senior counsel and director of digital justice and civil rights, says that although many platforms, including Twitter, are not always responsive to researchers and activist organizations, mass layoffs have made this even more difficult.

“Me and other people who have tried to reach out have gotten dead ends,” Benavidez says. “And when we’ve reached out to those who are supposedly still at Twitter, we just don’t get a response.”

Even when researchers can get through to Twitter, responses are slow—sometimes taking more than a day. Jesse Littlewood, vice president of campaigns at the nonprofit Common Cause, says he’s noticed that when his organization reports tweets that clearly violate Twitter’s policies, those posts are now less likely to get taken down.

The volume of content that users and watchdogs may want to report to Twitter is likely to increase. Many of the staff and contractors laid off in recent weeks worked on teams like trust and safety, policy, and civic integrity, all of which worked to keep disinformation and hate speech off the platform.

Melissa Ingle was a senior data scientist on Twitter’s civic integrity team until she was fired along with 4,400 other contractors on November 12. She wrote and monitored algorithms used to detect and remove political misinformation on Twitter—most recently, that meant the elections in the US and Brazil. Of the 30 people on her team, only 10 remain, and many of the human content moderators, who review tweets and flag those that violate Twitter’s policies, have also been laid off. “Machine learning needs constant input, constant care,” she says. “We have to constantly update what we are looking for because political discourse changes all the time.”

Though Ingle’s job did not involve interacting with outside activists or researchers, she says members of Twitter’s policy team did. At times, information from external groups helped inform the terms or content Ingle and her team would train algorithms to identify. She now worries that with so many staffers and contractors laid off, there won’t be enough people to ensure the software remains accurate.

“With the algorithm not being updated anymore and the human moderators gone, there’s just not enough people to manage the ship,” Ingle says. “My concern is that these filters are going to get more and more porous, and more and more things are going to come through as the algorithms get less accurate over time. And there’s no human being to catch things going through the cracks.”

Within a day of Musk taking ownership of Twitter, Ingle says, internal data showed that the number of abusive tweets reported by users increased 50 percent. That initial spike died off a little, she says, but abusive content reports remained about 40 percent or so higher than the usual volume before the takeover.

Rebekah Tromble, director of the Institute for Data, Democracy & Politics at George Washington University, also expects to see Twitter’s defenses against banned content wither. “Twitter has always struggled with this, but a number of talented teams had made real progress on these problems in recent months. Those teams have now been wiped out.”

Such concerns are echoed by a former content moderator who was a contractor for Twitter until 2020. The contractor, speaking anonymously to avoid repercussions from his current employer, says all the former colleagues doing similar work whom he was in touch with have been fired. He expects the platform to become a much less nice place to be. “It’ll be horrible,” he says. “I have actively searched the worst parts of Twitter—the most racist, most horrible, most degenerate parts of the platform. That’s what’s going to be amplified.”

Twitter’s Moderation System Is in Tatters

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The AI tool, developed by researchers at University College London (UCL) and Queen Mary University of London, assesses not only if a bailout is the best strategy for taxpayers, but also suggests how much should be invested in the bank, and which bank or banks should be bailed out at any given time. It is detailed in a new paper to be published today (November 17) in the journal Nature Communications.

Using data from the European Banking Authority, the algorithm was tested by the authors on a network of 35 European financial institutions judged to be the most important to the global financial system. However, it can also be used and calibrated by national banks using detailed proprietary data unavailable to the public.

Dr. Neofytos Rodosthenous (UCL Mathematics), corresponding author of the paper, said: “Government bank bailouts are complex decisions that have financial, social, and political implications. We believe the AI approach we have developed can be an important tool for governments, helping officials assess specifically financial implications – this means checking if a bailout is in the best interest of taxpayers, or whether it would be better value for money to let the bank fail. Our techniques are freely available for banking authorities to use as tools in their decision-making process.”

Co-author Professor Vito Latora (Queen Mary University of London) added: “Governments and banking authorities can also use our approach to retrospectively review past crises and gain valuable learnings to inform future actions. One could, for example, review the UK government bailout of the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) during the financial crisis of 2007-9 and reflect on how this could potentially be improved (from a financial standpoint) in the future in order to primarily benefit taxpayers.”

In a bank bailout, government investment in a bank increases the bank’s equity and reduces its risk of defaulting. This cost in the short term may be justified to the taxpayer if it leads to lower taxpayer losses in the long term – i.e., it prevents bank defaults that are more damaging to government finances.

In their study, the researchers created a mathematical framework for comparing different bailout strategies in terms of predicted losses to taxpayers. Considered factors include how long the financial crisis is expected to last, the likelihood of each bank defaulting and the effect of a default on other banks in the network, as well as taxpayers’ stakes in the banks.

Using a mathematical control process, called Markov Decision Process, the researchers incorporated into this framework the effect of a government intervention at any given point in time.

They then developed a bespoke AI algorithm to assess optimal bailout strategies, comparing no intervention to different types of intervention – that is, varying levels of investment in one bank or many banks – at different time points during a crisis. An AI technique is needed as modeling such a system is highly complex, as the future behavior of all banks in the system can be infinite.

In their case study using data from the European Banking Authority, they showed that government bailout would be optimal only if the taxpayers’ stakes in the banks were greater than some critical threshold value, determined via the model. The optimal policy drastically changed once the percentage loss had gone above this threshold.

Moreover, it was shown that government bailout tended to be more favorable the greater the network’s distress (defined in terms of a percentage reduction in the banks’ equity), the longer the crisis lasted and the bigger the banks’ exposures to other banks were (that is, how much they had lent other banks and therefore stood to lose if these banks failed).

According to the investigators, the research showed that once a bank had received a bailout, the best strategy for taxpayers was if the government continued to invest in that bank to prevent default. This could lead to a lack of incentive for the rescued bank to guard against risk, potentially increasing risk-taking.

Lead author Dr. Daniele Petrone said: “Banks have so far weathered the current economic storm triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic. Their resilience has been bolstered by regulatory measures introduced following the global financial crisis of 2007-9 and by accommodating central banks’ monetary policies that have avoided bankruptcies across industries. However, no one can predict the effect on the financial system as central banks reverse previous policies, such as increasing interest rates due to inflation concerns, and so bailouts are still a possibility.”

Source

The new delay pushes back the release from the original February 3, 2023 date to April 28, 2023. As per the development team, the extra 12 weeks are being used to make sure "we can launch a game we're proud to launch."

"The irony of delaying Dead Island 2 is not lost on us, and we are as disappointed as you undoubtedly are," said the developer today in an announcement on Twitter. "The delay is just 12 short weeks and development is on the final straight now."

While originally announced in 2014, multiple developer swaps had the game in limbo until Dambuster picked up the reins in 2019, which lead to the recent gameplay unveiling. It will be an open-world sandbox RPG experience, with plenty of gore, where players enter HELL-A, a zombie-infested version of Los Angeles. The player character is an infected survivor but is somewhat immune to zombification, with it giving them enhanced abilities instead.

Dead Island 2 delay pushes back the zombie RPG's launch again

A few weeks ago, some early adopters of Nvidia's new flagship RTX 4090 GPU began reporting that the cards' power connectors were overheating and melting their plastic casing, sometimes causing damage to the outrageously fast and expensive GPUs.

 

For Nvidia's part, the company is still looking into the failures. "We continue to investigate the reports, however we don't have further details to share yet," according to an Nvidia rep talking to KitGuru earlier this week. But the YouTubers at the Gamers Nexus channel have been conducting their own in-depth research, and in short, they believe that the problems are mostly being caused by improperly seated power connectors. "Foreign-object debris" inside the connector can also cause problems, but Gamers Nexus believes this kind of damage is much rarer.

 

The failure that Gamers Nexus was able to re-create in its labs involved connecting the 12VHPWR power connector to an RTX 4090 without inserting it fully and then bending the cable to one side, making the connection even worse. After just a few minutes of testing, the loose connection's high power resistance generated heat above 250° Celsius, causing smoke and visible bubbling as the connector melted in its socket.

 

Gamers Nexus describes the problem as "a combination of user error and design oversight." That is, the cables are melting because they haven't been inserted all the way. But the lack of a tactile "click" sound or a more robust retention mechanism makes this kind of error more likely with the 12VHPWR connector than with the older 6- and 8-pin PCIe power connectors. The size of the 4090 and 4080 cards is also exacerbating problems. The cards can be tight fits even in relatively roomy ATX PC cases—you may need to bend the cable one way or another to get your case to close back up, and this kind of bending can cause the loose connection that contributed to overheating and melting in Gamers Nexus' testing.

 

Notably, the failures can affect any cable or adapter using the 12VHPWR connector—this goes for both kinds of adapters that Nvidia and its partners have been using for 4090s so far, as well as "native" 12VHPWR cables that run directly to a power supply with no adapter in between. Earlier analysis suggested that adapters from a particular manufacturer could be more failure-prone than others, but Gamers Nexus didn't find that it made a difference. This also means, presumably, that 12VHPWR adapters shipping with the RTX 4080 cards could have the same issues, too.

 

For now, the best thing you can do is make absolutely sure that your power connector is firmly seated—if it is, you should be able to yank on it pretty firmly without actually pulling it out (we were able to test this firsthand). You should also be careful to avoid any kind of harsh bending of the power cable in any direction. We'll keep an eye out for an official statement from Nvidia, to see if it has further recommendations or plans for any kind of recall or replacement for affected cards.

 

New test shows loose RTX 4090 power connectors cause overheating and melting

Nvidia and Microsoft team up to build massive AI cloud computer

Andi is search for the next generation using generative AI. Instead of just links, Andi gives you answers - like talking with a smart friend.

Home Page: https://andisearch.com/

Andi uses language models and Generative AI combined with live data to generate answers to questions, and to explain and summarize information combined from the best sources.

Search is broken because of SEO spam, ads, and surveillance capitalism. Andi cuts through the clutter to get you straight to the knowledge you need. It presents results visually in a way that's easy to understand, and protects you from ad tech and distraction.

Andi is bringing a cutting-edge Generative AI Search Engine to the world, backed by Y Combinator, the world's most successful startup accelerator.

Search the Internet with help from a smart AI assistant

Andi is a new type of search engine with an intelligent AI assistant that gives you simple answers to complex questions directly, and gives you tools to stay productive and safe online.

1. Ask complex questions and get direct answers - a "synthesis engine" that combines the best sources to give you a simple answer.
2. Tools to fight spam and bad content
3. Free from ads and tracking
4. Visual results and a distraction-free reader view for articles

Conversational Search

Andi is conversational. It's like messaging a smart friend who answers questions and sends you useful links. It uses a simple chat interface, with a panel to show the full results. It's radically different to any other search engine you've used.

Answering your questions

Question answering is on of Andi's most powerful features. Andi's complex question answering using Generative AI is a ground-breaking experimental technology that often looks like magic. Andi is the first version of what some people are calling "synthesis engines" - a new type of search engine that can answer questions directly, explaining and summarizing information from multiple sources.

Andi can do fast keyword searches like other search engines. But it can also do much more.

You can ask Andi questions like you would a friend who happens to be a smart research expert. The more specific your question and the details you include, the better it will do.

Unlike regular keyword searches, Andi will spend a lot more time to research these question (up to 10+ seconds) and find the exact answer or information if it can, and present it along with the full search results.

You can ask complex or even multi-part questions. Andi does best answering when you ask in regular plain language (not "googlese"). The more specific the question and the more detail you provide, the better the answer will be. Better questions = much better answers.

Try some examples:

• What is the gdp per capita of china vs new zealand?

• how much of the world's electricity supply now comes from wind turbines and solar panels?

• What indicator predicts a recession, and is the US heading for one?

• Why is elon musk considering creating a new social media platform?

• How many refugees have fled ukraine now?

• How did Paul Graham's spam filter work and what technology did it use? Explain to me like a programmer

• How did Paul Graham's spam filter work and what technology did it use? Explain to me simply

Andi's support for different languages with question answering is only very basic right now. We have lots of work to do on internationalization and localization. But just include a question mark ("?") at the end if you'd like to ask Andi to try in another language.

Free from spam, ads and tracking

Andi is free and anonymous. It's ad-free and fights spam. It's private and gives you control. And it gives you only the best and most relevant results. It's a next generation search engine.

• Block distractions - Find what you need and read it safely without ads or tracking.
• Take control of how you view search results.
• Get only pure results - Commercial considerations never affect results or recommendations.
• Trust your search app - We're working to earn your trust. We never sell or share your data. We protect your privacy.
• No ads or spam - No ads, no ad-tech, no tracking. We fight spam.
• Free and anonymous. We don't log or store your searches. We're free and open to everyone.
• Freemium business model - free anonymous searching for everyone forever without limitations, and paid pro and business plans in future. We may add anonymous referral link attribution.
• We will share any revenue with content makers. Money doesn't affect results in any way.

Release status

Andi is a new product in early testing. In tech industry terms, it's not quite a beta version yet, but it's a fairly stable alpha 😂

It's come a long way from our early prototype, but it's not a commercial release intended for full production use yet. But it is pretty cool!

It is undergoing rapid development, and things will break from time to time, although we're trying to reduce the breaking changes now. 😇

Andi already does well at answering questions, finding knowledge, and performing computation or calculations. We have a lot of work to do on shopping and product review searches (still too much spam). Location and place searches are basic but improving. We don't handle maps or directions yet. Image and video searching are basic.

Andi is mostly English-US focused currently. Better international support is on our roadmap.

We don't look at your GPS without permission. By default, we use your IP address for searches like "coffee near me", unless you enable location settings, and even then we only use it to the nearest zip code. We don't store or log your IP address, and we convert it to the closest town or city before using it for lookups. We never give your location details to anyone else.

Our mission - Keep You safe and productive with search you can trust

Save time, protect you, and keep you focused

Andi's mission is to keep you productive and safe, fix search, and unbreak the Internet. We help you find what you need, and nothing you don't. We protect you from distractions, tracking, and creepy privacy-invading ad-tech.

If we can find it, we'll get you the information you ask for directly rather than pointing you to it.

We want to help fund great content and journalism. We will share search revenue with content producers. Any content creator can join our network.

The entire web has been enslaved to the service of advertising and tracking, and invading people's privacy. Our mission is to put people first, and give the web back to you. We're making search you can trust.

Our philosophy

Get you what you need without the clutter and ads. Give you control over how you view and read it.

Traditional search engines overwhelm you with information and give you no control over how you consume it. Andi gets to the point.

We initially provide the minimum necessary information to answer a question or query, and then give you the ability to view or see more if you need it easily.

So if you ask for the time in New York, we'll tell you the time in New York, rather than presenting a screen full of ads and website links.

How we make money

We plan to fund Andi through a freemium business model, with free anonymous search for everyone for ever, and paid plans for professionals and businesses, including APIs and using Andi for corporate information, with supplemental revenue from anonymous referral link attribution. We're focused on building the product right now, and will figure out the details once we're further along.

We are committed to staying 100% advertising free. Commercial considerations or partnerships will have zero impact on our search results or recommendations. Our recommendations are always made based on the best results we can find for our customers, and are never subject to commercial influence.

By sharing search revenue with content producers and media companies that join our network, our mission is to provide funding to great content and reduce media's reliance on invasive ad-tech. Contact us at info@andisearch.com to get involved!

Our Privacy Promise

We promise not to share your data with anyone else in any way, shape or form. We promise to never store or look at what you search. Private means that only you have access to what you search or read, or where you go online or offline.

We only collect and retain sufficient data to help our customers use the service effectively, when they want to create an account or be remembered between devices and sessions, and to improve the service we provide by understanding how people use the app.

Read more about how we protect our customers' privacy

Who We Are

Andi is a startup project being built in Miami by a small team. Angela Hoover is co-founder and CEO, and Jed White is co-founder and CTO. Andi is our chat bot assistant who is here to help you search.

If you'd like to know more or get involved, please feel welcome to reach out to us at info@andisearch.com.

You can also join our Discord channel or we're on twitter as @MiamiAngela and @jedwhite

Or just leave us some Feedback with your email address and we'll reach out to you.

Home Page: https://andisearch.com/

Source

Yesterday, AMD shared some more performance details on its RX 7900 series including benchmarks for the 7900 XT, and there were more digs at Nvidia. With the RTX 4080 review embargo now lifted, we can finally compare and estimate the performance of the RX 7900 XTX and 7900 XT to see how the two cards measure up against Nvidia's RTX 4090 and RTX 4080, and in this article, we have done just that.

As you can see in these benchmark charts from AMD, the company has only provided data for a very few games, four for rasterization and another four that includes ray tracing. We looked up reputed reviews online and decided to settle on review data from sites, TechPowerUp and TechSpot, to help us with this estimation by combining the data.

Since benchmark results can vary greatly between different game scenes, we decided to use those third-party data which were nearer to the AMD-provided figures. This makes sense since the nearness of scores implies the workload is also similar, and hence our estimated results should be closer to the actual results. And in cases where the AMD data was in the middle of the two third-party numbers, we used the average of both scores.

Rasterization

First up, we have the rasterization-only results, and we were able to approximate three out of the four titles. All performance figures you see below are at 2160p(4K). Alongside the AMD RX 7900 XT, 7900 XTX, Nvidia RTX 4090, and 4080, we have also included the RTX 3090 Ti, which was the fastest 4K gaming GPU last generation. And the 6950 XT is also there too since it was on AMD's slides and acts as the baseline GPU.

Ray-tracing

After the raster-only results, we have the numbers for ray tracing included. They are indicated as "RT" which is short for ray tracing in the tables below.

As one would expect, AMD's second-gen ray tracing performance is still nowhere close to Nvidia's third-generation capabilities on the RTX 40-series. In fact, in one instance out of the three, even the RTX 3090 Ti manages to trounce the RX 7900 XTX by a healthy margin.

Though, there is a lot to like about the upcoming AMD cards too. The RX 7900 XTX seems to be comfortably outperforming the RTX 4080 in rasterization while being $200 cheaper. In one case, even the 7900 XT manages to beat the 4080. However, bear in mind that these are first-party numbers we are using here for AMD, and it's just three games that may well be cherry-picked.

RX 7900 XTX, 7900 XT vs Nvidia RTX 4090 vs RTX 4080 performance preview using AMD's own data

Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) scientists have invented a new type of insect-repellent delivery device. The active ingredient is first “encapsulated” and shaped into the appropriate shape, such as a ring, which may then be worn and releases an agent meant to repel mosquitoes for an extended period of time. The team published their findings in the International Journal of Pharmaceutics.

The researchers used “IR3535” an insect repellent developed by MERCK, to create their prototypes.

“Mosquito sprays containing IR3535 are very gentle on the skin and have been used all over the world for many years. That’s why we’ve been using the agent for our experiments”, says Professor René Androsch from the MLU.

It typically comes in the form of a spray or lotion and provides protection for several hours. However, Androsch and his colleagues are searching for methods to release the agent over a much longer length of time, such as encapsulating it in a wearable ring or bracelet.

Insect repellent was carefully inserted into a biodegradable polymer using a specialized 3D printing technology, and the mixture of substances was successfully shaped in various ways. “The basic idea is that the insect repellent continuously evaporates and forms a barrier for insects”, explains the lead author of the study, Fanfan Du, a doctoral candidate at MLU.

The rate at which the insect repellent evaporates depends on many different factors, including temperature, concentration, and the structure of the polymer used. After conducting various experiments and simulations, the team predicts that the insect repellent needs well over a week to evaporate completely at a temperature of 37°C (98,6 °F, i.e., body temperature).

While the researchers have proven that it is absolutely possible to develop a wearable insect repellent, the rings and other forms created for the study are only prototypes. According to Androsch, further research needs to be carried out to determine how well the rings function under actual conditions. The encapsulation material could also be further optimized.

Source

An alternative positioning system that is more robust and accurate than GPS, especially in urban settings has been developed by researchers of Delft University of Technology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and VSL. The working prototype that demonstrated this new mobile network infrastructure achieved an accuracy of 10 centimeters. This new technology is important for the implementation of a wide range of advanced location-based applications, including autonomous vehicles,

quantum communication, and next-generation mobile communication systems. The results will be published today (November 16) in the journal Nature.

Illustration of the hybrid optical-wireless network for robust decimeter-level positioning in urban environments. Credit: TU Delft/Stephan Timmers

 

These days, much of our vital infrastructure relies on global navigation satellite systems such as GPS (United States) and Galileo (European Union). Yet these navigation systems that rely on satellites have significant limitations and vulnerabilities.

When received on Earth, their radio signals are weak, and accurate positioning is not possible when the radio signals are reflected or blocked by buildings.

“This can make GPS unreliable in urban settings, for instance,” says Christiaan Tiberius of Delft University of Technology and coordinator of the project, “which is a problem if we ever want to use automated vehicles. Also, citizens and our authorities actually depend on GPS for many location-based applications and navigation devices. Furthermore, so far we had no back-up system.”

A project entitled SuperGPS was started with the goal of developing an alternative positioning system that makes use of the mobile telecommunication network instead of satellites and that could be more accurate and reliable than GPS. “We realized that with a few cutting-edge innovations, the telecommunication network could be transformed into a very accurate alternative positioning system that is independent of GPS,” says Jeroen Koelemeij of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. “We have succeeded and have successfully developed a system that can provide connectivity just like existing mobile and Wi-Fi networks do, as well as accurate positioning and time distribution like GPS.”

Researching a navigation system with 10-centimeter accuracy. Credit: TU Delft/Frank Auperlé

An atomic clock

One of these innovations is to connect the mobile network to a very accurate atomic clock, so that it can broadcast perfectly timed messages for positioning, just like GPS satellites do with the help of the atomic clocks they carry on board. These connections are made through the existing fiber-optic network.

“We had already been investigating techniques to distribute the national time produced by our atomic clocks to users elsewhere through the telecommunication network,” says Erik Dierikx of VSL. “With these techniques, we can turn the network into a nationwide distributed atomic clock – with many new applications such as very accurate positioning through mobile networks. With the hybrid optical-wireless system that we have demonstrated now, in principle anyone can have wireless access to the national time produced at VSL. It basically forms an extremely accurate radio clock that is good to one billionth of a second.”

Furthermore, the system employs radio signals with a bandwidth much larger than commonly used. “Buildings reflect radio signals, which can confuse navigation devices. The large bandwidth of our system helps sort out these confusing signal reflections, and enables higher positioning accuracy,” Gerard Janssen of Delft University of Technology explains. “At the same time, bandwidth within the radio spectrum is scarce and therefore expensive. We circumvent this by using a number of related small-bandwidth radio signals spread over a large virtual bandwidth. This has the advantage that only a small fraction of the virtual bandwidth is actually used and the signals can be very similar to those of mobile phones.”

Source

Based on a new incident added to the company's status page, the outage affects users across the United States, EMEA (Europe, the Middle East, and Africa), and Japan.

The incident started on Tuesday, 12:43 PM PST, and Okta's support team is still adding updates after isolating and unsuccessfully attempting to resolve the issue.

"We have deployed a fix across all cells. After deploying the fix, we are still seeing a number of issues. We are still actively investigating these issues to isolate a fix. We are also actively monitoring the systems," the company said in a recent update.

While Okta says the issues have been mitigated on some of the impacted cells, admins in those cells still report experiencing SSO authentication issues.

Some affected users report seeing errors saying "Sorry, but we're having trouble with signing you in. The requested federation realm object <domain> does not exist."

Others are also seeing "Could not communicate with Office 365 to validate your credentials, received error: 400 Authentication Error: Password has expired." errors.

Workaround available

While looking for a solution to address the underlining problem causing this ongoing worldwide outage, Okta has also shared steps needed to work around the Microsoft O365 federated Single Sign-On issue.

The workaround requires impacted customers to validate that they have the correct federated domains in the Okta Admin Dashboard.

To do that, you have to go through the following steps if you're using a single domain:

1. Log in to the Okta Admin Dashboard
2. Go to the Applications Page
3. Select the Microsoft O365 application
4. Click "Edit" and validate you've selected the correct domain
5. Click "Save"

For multiple domains, you will also have to Click "Fetch and Select" and select the Domains individually after choosing to edit the Sign On settings.

If you don't know the domains you're supposed to select, Okta recommends reaching out to customer support for assistance.

Source

Intel claims it has developed an AI model that can detect in real time whether a video is using deepfake technology by looking for subtle changes in color that would be evident if the subject were a live human being.

FakeCatcher is claimed by the chipmaking giant to be capable of returning results in milliseconds and to have a 96 percent accuracy rate.

There has been concern in recent years over so-called deepfake videos, which use AI algorithms to generate faked footage of people. The main concern has centered on it potentially being used to make politicians or celebrities appear to be voicing statements or doing things that they did not actually say or do.

“Deepfake videos are everywhere now. You have probably already seen them; videos of celebrities doing or saying things they never actually did,” said Intel Labs staff research scientist Ilke Demir. And it isn't just affecting celebrities, even ordinary citizens have been victims.

According to the chipmaker, some deep learning-based detectors analyse the raw video data to try to find tell-tale signs that would identify it as a fake. In contrast, FakeCatcher takes a different approach, involving analyzing real videos for visual cues that indicate the subject is real.

This includes subtle changes in color in the pixels of a video due to blood flow from the heart pumping blood around the body. These blood flow signals are collected from all over the face and algorithms translate these into spatiotemporal maps, Intel said, enabling a deep learning model to detect whether a video is real or not. Some detection tools require video content to be uploaded for analysis, then waiting hours for results, it claimed.

However, it isn’t beyond the realm of possibility to imagine that anyone with the motives to create video fakes might be able to develop algorithms that can fool FakeCatcher, given enough time and resources.

Intel has naturally enough made extensive use of its own technologies in developing FakeCatcher, including the OpenVINO open-source toolkit for optimizing deep learning models and OpenCV for processing real-time images and videos. The developer teams also used the Open Visual Cloud platform to provide an integrated software stack for Intel’s Xeon Scalable processors. The FakeCatcher software can run up to 72 different detection streams simultaneously on 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable processors.

According to Intel, there are several potential use cases for FakeCatcher, including preventing users from uploading harmful deepfake videos to social media, and helping news organizations to avoid broadcasting manipulated content. ®

Source

When asked by a Twitter user if Twitter will let people change their names once they verify, Musk replied with "With [the] new release, changing your verified name will cause loss of checkmark until name is confirmed by Twitter to meet Terms of Service."

Musk was also asked if legacy checkmarks for non-corporate/government officials are going away. He replied with "All unpaid legacy Blue checkmarks will be removed in a few months."

Twitter’s verified checkmark was originally only used to authenticate high-profile accounts like politicians, famous personalities, journalists and other public figures. It was then made available to everyone for $8 a month under the new Twitter Blue subscription after Musk took ownership of the platform. This was his move to make the service become more profitable and give "power to the people."

But last Friday, Twitter paused the subscription service after people exploited their verified checkmarks to impersonate companies and politicians and post inappropriate content. For instance, a fake Nintendo of America account posted a picture of Mario giving the dirty finger, while a fake LeBron James account tweeted a request for a trade.

Source: Elon Musk on Twitter

Elon Musk: Twitter Blue verification service will relaunch on November 29