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In an interview with Vanity Fair, the director divulged that Apple is pretty draconian about how its gadgets are portrayed in movies. “I don’t know if I should say this or not,” Johnson says, giggling. “[Apple lets] you use iPhones in movies […] [but] bad guys cannot have iPhones on camera.” [Read: Here are the 9 titles Netflix purged due to government censorship] “This is very pivotal if you’re ever watching a mystery movie,” the director also said....

Billed as a “Nation Pack” featuring playable forces from the Netherlands and Czechoslovakia, the impact the latest DLC has on gameplay and overall enjoyability feels incredibly understated. And that’s all thanks to the inclusion of the title’s first linear campaign. But, before we get there, let’s talk about what Armored Brigade is and why I’m so keen to sing its praises. Simply put, Armored Brigade is a single-player cold war sandbox....

To overcome these challenges, Google’s AI team has built a new lightweight model called VoiceFilter-lite. In 2018, the team unveiled the first VoiceFilter model which used the company’s voice match tech. It’s used in Google Assistant to analyze your speech and sound when you enroll for a service. A lot of times recognizing voices efficiently — technically, achieving better source-to-distortion ratio (SDR) — takes a model with a large size, prominent CPU power, and battery consumption....

In a whopping 5,800-word paper published earlier today, four RBA analysts argued there’s “little likelihood of a material take-up of cryptocurrencies for retail payments in Australia in the foreseeable future,” reports the Sydney Morning Herald via AAP. To the RBA, cryptocurrencies suffer from a “scalability trilemma,” a trade-off that inevitably sees a digital asset fail in one of three areas: scalability, security, or decentralization. “As long as the Australian dollar continues to provide a reliable, low-inflation store of value, and the payments industry continues to work on the efficiency, functionality, and resilience of the Australian payments system, it is difficult to envisage cryptocurrencies presenting a compelling proposition that would lead to their widespread use in Australia,” said the authors....

Holiday pro tip no. 23: Don’t forget about the chargers. As tech items come flying out of their boxes during this gift-giving season, many new gadget owners get caught flat footed by their power needs. While many of today’s devices come with basic charging equipment (but not all), it never hurts to get a nice charging upgrade along with your new phone or tablet. Because there’s nothing worse that a cheap, unreliable, slow charging device....

The London-based firm announced it had let go most of its staff after talks to secure additional funding fell through. The Financial Times noted OneWeb had previously sought up to $2 billion to see it through its commercial launch — before COVID-19 impacted economies worldwide. [Read: 5G isn’t going to save you from cable broadband anytime soon] “While [OneWeb] was close to obtaining financing, the process did not progress because of the financial impact and market turbulence related to the spread of COVID-19,” said the company in a statement....

Excessively high costs, prolonged testing periods, and safety issues have undoubtedly played their part. But a new threat has emerged as well, as journalist Patrick McGee illustrated in the Financial Times on Monday. In a very insightful piece, McGee pointed to the rapidly developing Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), which, according to experts, might show a better path to fully driverless tech. The ADAS players are following a bottom-up approach, gradually scaling up the levels of automation....

Binance launched in early 2017, becoming the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange desk (by trading volume) by April 2018. Binance Coin is primarily a “utility token” in that it’s used to pay for services and fees when trading other cryptocurrencies or digital assets on the Binance exchange itself. Using BNB often grants the trader discounts over using other payment methods on the exchange. Even though BNB is native to Binance, it can also be traded on other market places like Bancor, IDEX, and Gate....

And the answer? A Super Bowl commercial. Yep, for this year’s game, BMW has dressed up the Terminator as Zeus to promote the automaker’s new EV: the iX. The one-minute spot is called “Zeus and Hera” and takes us to, of course, Mount Olympus. Still, America’s better than Greece and, eventually, the couple decides to retire in Palm Springs, California (Arnold’s fav place). But, folks, Zeus isn’t really enjoying the earthly life....

The researchers explored evolving social biases in the $2.1 billion film industry by analyzing movie dialogues from the last 70 years. They first selected 100 popular Bollywood films from each of the past seven decades, along with 100 of the top-grossing Hollywood movies from the same period. They then applied Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to subtitles of the films to examine how social biases have evolved over time. “Our argument is simple,” the researchers wrote in their study paper....

Researchers at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) achieved the feat using an implant that decodes full sentences from brain activity. They tested the system on a man in his late 30s, who suffered a brainstem stroke in his teens that left him unable to talk. He now communicates by using a pointer attached to a baseball cap to poke letters on a screen. The man, who asked to be referred to as BRAVO1, was the first participant in a clinical trial of the new tech....

But while most of us just bitch and moaned while forking over our hard-earned cash to Cook and co., one country decide to take action: Brazil. In October, Procon-SP, the consumer interest agency for Sao Paulo state, asked Apple to provide justification for not including the charging brick in iPhone boxes. It wasn’t satisfied with the tech giant’s environment-saving answer and said that the brick was an important part of the phone’s package....

Last year, Cambridge Analytica ignited a firestorm when it came to light it’d used Facebook user information to help compile voter profiles. Said Facebook user information was harvested by former professor Aleksandr Kogan via a “research app” without said users’ consent. That’s the short version anyway. This turned into a big debacle for Facebook when it came to light that the company new Cambridge Analytica had the data and didn’t make much of an effort to ensure it was secure or deleted....

The speaker features premium fabric and a beautiful circular design that will make you want to replace your living room centerpiece with it. Plus, its two 75mm woofers and two 20 mm tweeters produce room-filling sound to get the party started. What’s more, you can simultaneously connect two devices, so you don’t have to fight with your mate over the playlist. It also has built-in noise and echo cancellation, so you can take calls without any disturbance....

You don’t have to worry about the bass, as Beats by Dr.Dre is popular for handling some pretty sick drops. It also comes with Apple’s proprietary W1 chip, so it can connect to your devices in a jiffy. It also has Beats’ own pure ANC technology, so you isolate yourself from all the noise of an awful world. The battery life of these headphones is pretty good too. You can go on for 40 hours with a single charge without ANC on, and 22 hours with the feature enabled....

In the past, I’ve used the Eufy RoboVac 11C, which was sufficiently powerful to grab dust and stray dog food kibbles from the floor, while having a small enough profile to maneuver around my (somewhat cluttered) house. Well, on July 1, Anker will release a follow-up robot vacuum cleaner, called the Eufy RoboVac 11S Max. What’s different? Firstly, the way the vacuum collects and traps dust has been radically redesigned....

Developers routinely train facial recognition algorithms on images from websites — without the knowledge of the people who posted them. A new online tool called Exposing.AI can help you find out if your photos are among the snaps they’re scrapped. The system uses information from publicly available image datasets to determine if your Flickr photos were used in AI surveillance research. [Read: How this company leveraged AI to become the Netflix of Finland] Just enter your Flickr username, photo URL, or hashtag in the website’s search bar and the tool will scan through over 3....

The system developed by the University of Science and Technology of China and the China Earthquake Administration analyzes vast volumes of seismic data to automatically predict impending earthquakes. It’s currently being tested in the provinces of Yunnan and Sichuan in the southwest of China, the South China Morning Post reports. The mountainous region is the location of most of the country’s earthquakes, including China’s last major seismic disaster, a magnitude 8 earthquake that killed almost 90,000 people after hitting Sichuan in 2008....

For now, the feature is solely available in Google’s experimental versions of the browser, Chrome Canary and Chrome Dev, as Google9ot5 has spotted. From the looks of it, though, the feature is still in early development — and it doesn’t always work as intended. It’s also limited to mobile only for the time being. Those who want to give searching the web in dark mode can try either of these two approaches:...

The social audio app is now out of beta and open to anyone who wants to join. The company has also unveiled a new logo and website design. Up-front: Clubhouse had used an invite system since its launch in March 2020. To join, you had to get an invite from an existing member. In a blogpost, the company’s founders said this allowed them to add users in waves without (often) breaking, but that they always wanted the app to be open: Quick: Clubhouse’s policy shift comes amid growing competition....