It’s no surprise the popularity of smartphones has affected camera sales, but the latest figures from Statistica are pretty eye opening, nonetheless: shipments of cameras have actually fallen from 121M in 2010 to just 25M in 2017. That’s a nearly 80-percent drop.



As cell phones are showing signs of improvement at catching pictures a seemingly endless amount of time, companies like Apple, Samsung. Huawei have taken the game up. Here we see cell phones openly rivaling the other cameras. And so digital cameras have totally disappeared from the scene.

Discussion

Source: [H]ardOCP – Smartphones Are Killing the Camera Industry

Assuming regulators can prove the company violated Europe’s new General Data Protection Regulation privacy law, Facebook is expected to lose $1.63B over this week’s data breach incident, in which tokens could be stolen and used to access not only Facebook accounts, but any other account tied to its log-in process (e.g., Instagram). “The main question regulators will face is whether Facebook invested enough in security to avert a breach.”



It marks one of the first major tests of how regulators will apply the breach-notification and data-security provisions of the new European law, dubbed the General Data Protection Regulation, that went into effect earlier this year. It might also be a sign that the law’s threat of massive fines are already changing how firms handle big breaches — forcing them to disclose them faster and more publicly than before.

Discussion

Source: [H]ardOCP – Facebook May Face .63 Billion EU Fine for Breach

Legal professionals are warning the Apple Watch could open owners up to criminal liability due to a new feature that automatically dials 911 if it senses the wearer has fallen and no action is taken. Due to the “community caretaking” exception to the Fourth Amendment, police could legally enter someone’s home without a warrant after receiving an emergency alert. They would then be free to scope the surroundings out for potential criminality.



This is the notion that law enforcement officers can enter a private space if they reasonably believe that someone needs emergency assistance. It’s similar to the “exigent circumstances” exception, which allows police to come in if they believe someone is in imminent danger or physical evidence is being destroyed. In such a situation, the watch would alert first responders, and police officers could enter her home. They might spot a few joints on her coffee table, and the wearer might be subsequently charged with felony drug possession.

Discussion

Source: [H]ardOCP – Invite Police Officers into Your Home with Apple Watch’s Auto-911 Feature

Ex-subscribers are encouraged to keep their eyes peeled for e-mails from MoviePass, as the troubled company is reactivating canceled accounts unless an opt-out is received. MoviePass is reportedly inviting select users to take part in a test for reviving unlimited movies per month, but consent does not appear to be part of the equation.



If they don’t opt out by October 4th, 9PM ET, then the credit card MoviePass has on file will automatically be charged $10 on a monthly basis again. That part could be easy to miss for those who only skim their emails, especially if they know that they already unsubscribed long ago. In the case of Caroline Moss, who was one of the recipients, she had already deleted the app and canceled her recurring subscription via credit card last month.

Discussion

Source: [H]ardOCP – MoviePass Is Reactivating Canceled Accounts in New “Test”

Using a smartphone while riding a bicycle is dangerous, says the Netherlands: the Dutch, whose legislators have already banned the use of phones while driving a motor vehicle, is extending that current law to bikes. Cyclists were initially excluded because of their lower speeds.



While research suggests the number of cyclists who need emergency care after an accident involving a mobile phone may not be particularly high, less serious accidents have become increasingly common, particularly among young people. One in five bike accidents involving people aged 12 to 25 last year involved a smartphone, according to one estimate.

Discussion

Source: [H]ardOCP – Dutch Cyclists Face Mobile Phone Ban

Microsoft is another company humans can blame when the robopocalypse begins: the company has announced that the Robot Operating System (ROS), a flexible framework making it easier to build complex robots, is coming to Windows. The software will be demonstrated courtesy of a ROBOTIS Turtlebot 3 at ROSCon 2018 in Madrid, Spain.



With ROS for Windows, developers will be able to use the familiar Visual Studio toolset along with rich AI and cloud features. We’re looking forward to bringing the intelligent edge to robotics by bringing advanced features like hardware-accelerated Windows Machine Learning, computer vision, Azure Cognitive Services, Azure IoT cloud services, and other Microsoft technologies to home, education, commercial, and industrial robots.

Discussion

Source: [H]ardOCP – Microsoft Brings Robot Operating System to Windows 10

The Tech Report posted a story yesterday suggesting NVIDIA might have grown a conscience and was quietly updating their drivers with FreeSync support. With that being an exciting prospect, the report quickly took off, but the editor later realized it was fake news: Windows 10 was merely adding V-Sync to the games being tested, which were running in borderless windowed mode.



After further research and the collection of more high-speed camera footage from our G-Sync displays, I believe the tear-free gameplay we’re experiencing on our FreeSync displays in combination with GeForces is a consequence of Windows 10’s Desktop Window Manager adding some form of Vsync to the proceedings when games are in borderless windowed mode, rather than any form of VESA Adapative-Sync being engaged with our GeForce cards.

Discussion

Source: [H]ardOCP – No, GeForce Cards Are Not Suddenly “Playing Nice” with FreeSync Monitors

In 2003, an era before YouTube and streaming, a Matrix fan film aptly dubbed “The Fanimatrix” could only affordably be distributed via a then-novel technology, BitTorrent. Incredibly, the torrent created on September 28, 2003 is still going strong 15 years later, and according to TorrentFreak, it’s the oldest active torrent on the internet.



With no budget left they had to find something cheap, or free. Frost, who was working as a network administrator at the time, went looking for a solution and stumbled upon a new technology that could help. Something called “BitTorrent.” “It looked promising because it scaled such that the more popular the file became, the more the bandwidth load was shared. It seemed like the perfect solution,” Frost says, looking back.

Discussion

Source: [H]ardOCP – World’s Oldest Torrent Still Alive after 15 Years