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The market for fitness bands competing with Whoop is beginning to fill out, and the latest one I’ve gotten my hands on is the Polar Loop. (I recently reviewed Amazfit’s Helio Strap and Garmin’s screenless tracker, which turned out to be a sleep-only specialty device.) 

My full review of the Polar Loop will have to wait until I have more data, but right away I noticed some significant physical differences between the Polar Loop and its competitors.

Below is a size comparison of the Whoop MG (left), the Polar Loop (center), and the Amazfit Helio Strap (right). The three devices are lined up in declining order of both price and size: the Whoop is the smallest and costs anywhere from $199/year to $359/year depending on which tier of membership you choose. The Polar Loop is $199.99 as a one-time purchase with no subscription, and the Amazfit Helio Strap is $99.99, also with no subscription. 

Left to right: Whoop MG, Polar Loop, Amazfit Helio Strap
Credit: Beth Skwarecki

I’m not sure if the Loop will be able to justify being double the price of the Helio, at least on functionality (but we’ll see how I feel after I put it through its paces). In its defense, though, I will say it seems that the Polar team put a little more effort into styling than Amazfit did, and in one respect perhaps a bit more than Whoop. The Whoop device only comes in black, although you can cover it with bands of any color. The Polar Loop, meanwhile, comes in black if you buy it with a black or brown strap, and in a pale grayish color if you buy it with the greige strap. 

Credit: Beth Skwarecki

The shiny accent under the band is a nice touch. Like both the Whoop and the Helio, the Polar Loop covers its device with a fabric strap. Its design looks simpler to replicate, though: just thread a 21-millimeter strap through the slots and you have a Polar Loop strap. 

Meanwhile, the Whoop has its own unique shape of band and clasp (and the current 5.0/MG Whoop takes a different band than the 4.0 generation). The Helio can take any 22-millimeter watch strap, but only if you’re OK with the blank plastic face of the device showing. The third-party strap market looks more promising to me for the Loop than for its competitors. And while Polar probably doesn’t love to think about it that way, I consider plentiful, affordable strap selection to be a plus for any wearable.

Microsoft has disabled the Israeli Defense Ministry’s access to certain services and subscriptions, after finding evidence that the ministry used the tech company’s cloud services to surveil Gaza citizens. WSJ adds: The software company made the move after an internal investigation indicated Israel’s Defense Ministry used Microsoft’s Azure cloud services for surveillance, according to a person familiar with the matter. The company probe is ongoing. “As employees, we all have a shared interest in privacy protection, given the business value it creates by ensuring our customers can rely on our services with rock solid trust,” Microsoft President Brad Smith said in a blog post Thursday on Microsoft’s company website.

Smith said Microsoft’s investigation was guided by the company’s “longstanding protection of privacy as a fundamental right.” Microsoft opened the probe after the Guardian, the British news organization, reported in August that Israel used Azure to store data on Gaza civilians and surveil them. The issue has been the source of protests at the company.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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On a post on its blog this morning, Spotify announced it is doing something to combat the glut of AI-generated music on its streaming platform. According to the company, bad actors and content farms that “push ‘slop’ into the ecosystem” are going to be dealt with. Spotify says it has already removed over 75 million such tracks in the last year, and bigger changes are coming.

Over the next few months, Spotify says it will crack down on musical impersonators, implement a new spam filtering system, and work with others in the music business to develop an industry standard for AI disclosures in music credits.

How Spotify’s AI music policy will work

According to Spotify, the availability of AI tools has allowed the easy creation of musical deepfakes—AI impersonations of existing artists, in other words. The company says it will remove tracks that “impersonates another artist’s voice without their permission—whether that’s using AI voice cloning or any other method.”

The ban includes both tracks for which the person uploading is explicitly presenting themselves as another artist and tracks labeled as an “AI version” of another artist—unless the track was made with the original artist’s permission, of course.

Spotify is also targeting mass uploads, duplicates, SEO hacks, artificially short track abuse, and other spammy abuses of its platform. The company’s new spam filter will be rolled out this fall and will identify uploaders and tracks engaging in these tactics, then “tag them and stop recommending them.” The end goal, according to Spotify, is to prevent bad actors from generating royalties that could be otherwise paid out to professional artists and songwriters.

Spotify’s working on an AI music labeling standard

Spotify has also pledged to help develop an overarching industry standard for disclosure of how artificial intelligence is used in the production of music. Labeling AI in music credits is a much more complex issue than Spotify’s other new initiatives: all kinds of technology are used in music production, and there’s a huge continuum between a track that’s generated entirely from a prompt and using auto-tune on a slightly off-pitch vocal.

Spotify says the effort requires “broad industry alignment” so it’s working with companies like Labelcamp, NueMeta, Revelator, and SonoSuite through music industry standardization company DDEX to develop an industry standard for AI labeling.

There’s still more to be done, though

Spotify’s new initiatives don’t ban AI music, or require it to be labeled. The company says it wants to treat all music “equally, regardless of the tools used to make it,” which seems to leave space for Spotify to continue promoting obviously AI-generated music playlists like “Jazz for Study” and “Lo Fi Chill” that consist mainly of “artists” like The Midtown Players, ourchase, and The Tate Jackson Trio that have all the signs of being AI-creations, but are officially “verified” by Spotify.

To be fair to the music streaming service, I did a similar search for AI playlists and musicians a few months ago, and it’s marginally more difficult to find now than it was then, but until Spotify stops filling its own playlists with AI-generated glurge, its pledge to fight “AI slop” rings hollow.

Anker has opened up pre-orders for the Soundcore Nebula X1 Pro home theater system after teasing the product at IFA. This is being done via the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter and prices start at $3,000, which is an early bird discount from the eventual $5,000 price tag.

The Nebula X1 Pro is something of an all-in-one home theater system, as it includes a 4K projector, a soundbar, a subwoofer and satellite speakers. It boasts a unique design, with the subwoofer floating inside a spring-type assembly system to avoid transferring vibrations. The soundbar speakers fold out to the left and right of the projector and two wireless satellite speakers allow for surround sound.

The system supports Dolby Atmos and offers IP43 protection from light rain and dust. This makes it a great projector for outdoor get togethers, which is assisted by a retractable power cable, a telescopic handle and rolling wheels on the bottom.

The motorized lens allows for an easy setup and the speakers can be used to stream audio without any accompanying video. It even comes with a pair of wireless microphones for getting the crowd pumped up before movie night. In other words, this is a portable party machine.

This is a refinement of the pre-existing Nebula X1 projector, which we absolutely loved. We said that it offers “the clearest, most vivid image quality” that we ever experienced with a projector. That also costs $3,000, but features a less expansive speaker system. The audio quality with the original projector was “very respectable” but will likely pale in comparison to a full Dolby Atmos system with satellite speakers and the like.

The Nebula X1 Pro has already sailed past its funding goal, so it’s definitely coming. Deliveries are expected to go out this December.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/home/home-theater/anker-opens-pre-orders-for-its-nebula-x1-pro-projector-system-184635440.html?src=rss

Cloudflare announced plans Thursday to launch NET Dollar, a U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin designed to enable autonomous AI agents to conduct instant financial transactions. The company says the stablecoin will support microtransactions and pay-per-use models as AI agents take over tasks like booking flights and ordering groceries. BrianFagioli comments: A U.S. dollar-backed cryptocurrency from Cloudflare feels unusual to me, and I’m still surprised by it. The decision shows just how much the Internet is shifting in response to artificial intelligence.

CEO Matthew Prince said, “For decades, the business model of the Internet ran on ad platforms and bank transfers. The Internet’s next business model will be powered by pay-per-use, fractional payments, and microtransactions — “tools that shift incentives toward original, creative content that actually adds value.” He added that by using its global network, Cloudflare aims to “help modernize the financial rails needed to move money at the speed of the Internet.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The proposed federal budget would see drastic cuts made to most of the agencies that fund science. The sheer magnitude of the cuts—including a 40 percent slashing of money going to the National Institutes of Health—would do severe harm to biomedical researchers and the industries that serve or rely on them. And, ultimately, that is likely to do harm to all of us.

In today’s issue of Science, some researchers have attempted to put numbers on those indirect effects that fall within that “ultimately” category. They’ve identified which grants wouldn’t have been funded had similar cuts been made earlier in this century and tracked the impact that likely had on drug patents. Their conclusion: Development of roughly half the newly approved drugs relied on work that was funded by a grant that would need to be cut.

From grants to drugs

It’s uncertain whether the proposed budget cuts will go through. At the moment, Congress is looking to fund most science agencies at levels similar to their current budgets. Should cuts eventually happen, then it’s also difficult to predict how they’ll be spread among the more than 20 institutes that make up the NIH (a number that the administration also wants to see reduced via consolidation). So, the researchers make a big simplifying assumption: Every institute within the NIH will take a 40 percent hit to its budget.

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