Technology

San Francisco, Dec 25 (IANS) Apple has halted sale of its Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales at its retail stores in the US and when Apple Stores reopen after Christmas, these two Watches will not be available for purchase.

Apple pulled its latest flagship smartwatches due to an import ban imposed by the US International Trade Commission (ITC) over a patent dispute with medical device maker Masimo.

Following the removal of the Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 from Apple’s online store last week, the two devices are also no longer available at its physical locations.

“When Apple Stores reopen on December 26, the Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 will not be available to purchase,” reports 9to5Mac.

According to reports, Apple Stores will now promote Watch SE, which remains available because it lacks the blood oxygen sensor.

The ITC ruled in October that the blood oxygen sensor in the Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 infringes on two Masimo patents.

Following the ITC decision, the case was sent to the Joe Biden administration for a 60-day Presidential Review Period but he has so far chosen not to act.

“The Presidential Review Period officially ends after December 25, so it is still possible that President Biden will choose to intervene and veto the ITC decision at the last minute,” according to the report.

Apple has said that it will “continue to take all measures to return Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 to customers in the US as soon as possible.”

Apple will file an appeal of the ITC’s final decision with the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on December 26.

The long-running patent dispute between Apple and medical technology company Masimo is around the Watch’s blood oxygen sensor (SpO2 sensor) technology.

--IANS

na/dpb

San Francisco, Dec 24 (IANS) Scammers have used a wallet draining service called "MS Drainer" to steal nearly $58.98 million in crypto from about 63,210 victims over the past nine months, as per a new report.

According to blockchain security platform Scam Sniffer, the scammers used Google or X (formerly Twitter) ads to target victims with fake versions of popular crypto sites including Zapper, Lido, Stargate, DefiLlama, Orbiter Finance, and Radiant.

Wallet drainers are blockchain technologies that enable scammers to transfer cryptocurrency from a victim to the attacker without the victim's knowledge, typically by manipulating the token approval process.

The researchers first became aware of MS Drainer in March. At the time, the SlowMist security platform team helped with the investigation.

In June, on-chain sleuth ZachXBT provided further evidence, uncovering a phishing scam called “Ordinal Bubbles” that was linked to the drainer, the report mentioned.

"After several friends around us clicked on search ads by mistake and were phished, we analysed the situation of malicious Google search ads and found that a fake Radiant ad was using them," the researchers said.

They discovered nine different phishing ads on Google, 60 per cent of which used the malicious programme.

The researchers discovered 10,072 bogus sites that used MS Drainer. The activity of the drainer peaked in November and has subsequently dropped to almost zero.

Further investigation found that the MS Drainer developer used an odd marketing strategy. Unlike most wallet drainers, which take a percentage of scammers' income, this one was advertised on forums for a flat price of $1,499.99. If a fraudster desired further features, the developer sold them additional "modules" for $699.99, $999.99, or comparable sums.

"As users, we should be extra cautious when seeing advertisements, always be skeptical before signing anything, and always verify whether we might be in the middle of a phishing attempt," the researchers suggested.

--IANS

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The micro-blogging startup Pebble (formerly T2), is shutting down and the company said they have run out of time to make Pebble happen, reports TechCrunch.

The app reached 3,000 daily active users, out of 20,000 registered users.

The daily user figure dropped to 1,000 following its rebranding from T2.

“I think the competitive landscape evolved faster than we had thought. I didn’t think that quite as many people -- established organisations and newcomers -- would try to do the same thing that we were doing and in very similar ways,” said Pebble Co-founder and CEO, Gabor Cselle.

Today, the market for X alternatives is crowded with platforms like Instagram’s Threads, open source-based platform Mastodon, Jack Dorsey-backed Bluesky and more.

“We weren’t growing fast enough to convince investors of a breakout,” Cselle wrote in a Pebble post.

“With many alternatives in space, the challenge was even greater. We needed more investment and time to fully realize Pebble,” he added.

As Pebble shuts down, early adopters will have the option of exporting their Pebble posts as a zip file.

Pebble won’t direct users back to X or any other social network.

Pebble is also returning a small amount of the funds left over to its investors, the report mentioned.

Meanwhile, X under Musk is witnessing around 500 million posts per day.

In a bid to retain users on its platform, X has paid nearly $20 million (more than Rs 166 crore) to creators so far, according to its CEO Linda Yaccarino.

According to her, the company will be profitable by early 2024, adding that the platform may now have 200-250 million daily active users.

--IANS

na/ksk

The beauty of the Two Sigma problem theory lies in its immediate intuitiveness. Across nations and societies, personal tutoring is a clear preference for anyone who can afford it. In India, the concept of a revered 'Guru' who enlightens his disciples with knowledge through super-personalised attention finds numerous references in both history and mythology. As the Industrial Revolution proliferated, coinciding with the invention of the printing press, education moved from being a noble person's privilege to a more accessible bridge to opportunity. It marked the introduction of the classroom method, which continues to be omnipresent centuries after its introduction.

Indian classrooms, in particular, have continued to be characterized by large average sizes - predictable for a country with over 250M actively enrolled students and much less than 1/100th the number of high-calibre teachers. Even among the most recent attempts at delivering education, aka ed-tech, one-to-many interactions dominate all viable business models. Bloom's notes highlighted this challenge very well: he concluded that one-to-one tutoring is "too costly for most societies to bear on a large scale" and challenged education researchers to find methods of group instruction as effective as personal tutoring.

We at Accel in India believe that the long-standing two-sigma problem might finally have gotten a promising solution from technology: Generative AI. If we pan out a bit to observe what LLMs are good at - analysing a tonne of unstructured information and creating personalised answers - their applicability to powering learning tools becomes quite apparent. Unsurprisingly, many students are among the most regular users of ChatGPT, and global ed-tech giants like Duolingo and Khan Academy have already seen remarkable feedback on their recently launched AI tutor features.

We predict that, over the next few years, Generative AI will be applied to Indian education extensively in the following three ways:

Hyper-personalisation: While AI-based recommendation systems have long powered surfacing relevant content to users (ed-tech included), generative AI goes one step beyond by not just recommending but creating highly contextual content. Customised learning paths for every student are poised to be a reality as the marginal cost of creating new content further descends to near zero.

In the short to medium term, many emerging personalisation features will become omnipresent in ed-tech: AI-generated micro lectures, 24*7 available QnA bots, personalised test feedback, and instant practice problems, to mention a few. In the long term, AI-generated customised learning paths can help us move from the current top-down, relatively rigid design of pedagogy in India to a more fluid one - with more weightage to original expressions (e.g., AI-art) and intersectional topics (e.g., computational chemistry vs chemistry and computer science).

New intuitive interfaces: Many, if not most, of today's popular digital learning applications look similar: live/recorded video lectures, a comments-like section for QnA, and practice problems/tests. However, in a world where computers come with inbuilt capabilities to understand our language, many assumptions around the suitable learning interface should be (and are being) questioned. The best ed-tech interfaces of this decade will create original designs that combine multi-modal input capabilities (chat, voice, image, symbols) with immersive, generative UI spanning audio, video, text, and 3D.

AI for teacher productivity: Within a few quarters of LLMs going mainstream, we've already seen 'co-pilots' pop up for many professions - the most notable being software development. The 85M+ global teacher population will likely be one of the following early adopters for specialised teaching co-pilots. From helping craft classroom lessons to auto-grading assignment submissions, such applications can free up teachers' busy work to help them focus more on nurturing student relationships, a significant driver for delivering learning outcomes.

We believe that Generative AI offers a once-in-a-generation level of transformative potential for education that will continue to manifest itself for many years into the future. We are particularly excited about the chance to create a more equitable world with accessible quality education. Secondly, we hope that unlocking true personalisation in education with AI will lead us to celebrate every learner's individuality rather than suppressing it, culminating in more original thinkers who propel humanity forward.

(Anagh Prasad is an investor at Accel. He can be reached at aprasad@accel.com)

--IANS

anagh/vd

A combination of Crash Detection and Apple's Emergency SOS via satellite on an iPhone helped to guide rescuers to the driver, reports AppleInsider.

The man's car went over a cliff and dropped 400 feet before crashing to a halt.

"He was 400 feet down in a canyon with virtually no way out," said Steve Goldsworthy, the Rescue Operations Leader of Montrose Search and Rescue.

"So, who knows when, or if, we would've located him."

"The location that we got from the iPhone activation was spot on," Goldsworthy added.

Goldsworthy further explained, "It was basically his phone on its own, calling for help on his behalf."

"I believe that if we didn't have that good location information in a timely manner, he probably would've bled out," said Mike Leum, one of the

members of Montrose Search and Rescue.

In January, it was reported that the Emergency SOS via satellite feature on iPhone had helped to save two women who were stranded in Canadian Province 'British Columbia' (BC).

The women found that a highway was closed because of an accident while they were returning to Alberta, Canada, so they chose to take the Holmes Forest Service Road after using Google Maps to find an alternate route.

They eventually arrived at the spot where the grader had stopped, but the road was only partially ploughed.

"Then it was basically a wall of snow and when they tried to get through it, they got stuck," explained Dwight Yochim, senior manager with BC Search

and Rescue.

"There's no cell service there but one of them happened to have the new Apple phone that has the SOS in it and activated the SOS and to my

knowledge, that's the first use of the SOS in British Columbia,” Yochim added.

Later, the rescue team found them, pulled their vehicle out and got them turned around and back on the way.

--IANS

aj/uk

Using medical telexistence (MediTel) technology, which allows for a highly realistic sensation of existence in remote places without actual travel, a team at the University of Sheffield, UK, successfully created a mobile, robotic-controlled uncrewed ground vehicle (UGV).

The UGV boasts of virtual reality (VR) capability and can enable medics and operators to assess critical casualties in hazardous environments, allowing them to perform a remote triage while also ensuring their safety.

The first-of-its-kind, fully integrated medical telexistence solution was developed in just nine months. It features two robotic arms which can effectively remotely operate medical tools to perform a critical initial assessment of a casualty within 20 minutes, including: temperature, blood pressure and heart rate checks; carry out a palpation of the abdomen and administer pain relief through an auto-injector -- all while streaming real time data to the remote operator.

"Our MediTel project has demonstrated game-changing medical telexistence technology that has the potential to save lives and provide remote assessment and treatment of casualties in high-risk environments such as humanitarian disasters," said David King, Head of Digital Design at the varsity's Advanced Manufacturing Research Center (AMRC).

His team developed a complete solution to perform a triage of casualties in hazardous environments. They are now looking to build on the project's success by seeking further funding and partners to realise the potential of MediTel medical telexistence technology to revolutionise how people could be medically triaged in dangerous incidents where it is unsafe.

The team noted that the future vision of MediTel would be to explore the development of the technology into a large-scale integrated medical emergency platform, capable of rapidly being deployed to humanitarian disasters with multiple casualties and enabling remote medics to provide critical lifesaving treatment.

--IANS

rvt/pgh

According to Brownlee, the feature is available under Accessibility> Speech> Personal Voice. With this feature, iPhone can create a voice that sounds like the user in just 15 minutes. TechCrunch reported that the iOS 17 public beta includes improvements to Messages, new StandBy mode, and improvements to Maps, widgets and dictation.

Similar to Mail, users can now filter the search using different criteria in Messages.

Moreover, users can leave the app and continue listening to an audio message or view a transcription of the message when they receive a batch of audio messages and want to listen back to a particular part.

With the new update, users can also swipe on a bubble to reply to a particular message in a conversation. iOS 17 also includes the ability to leave voicemails in FaceTime. They appear directly in the call history list.

“When you start playing a song or a video, iOS now automatically suggests nearby AirPlay-enabled devices,” the report said.

--IANS

aj/dan

When a user tweeted, "Deleted all dating apps. Decided to try to meet someone the old-fashioned way: God making a woman out of my rib."

Musk replied, "Try meeting someone on this platform. Many have."

Several users expressed their thoughts and experiences on Musk's suggestion.

While one user said, "Yep. Met my fiance @BMT094 on here," another posted, "You can learn more about a person from their Twitter than any dating app could ever teach you."

In May, in response to a tweet suggesting a dating app 'Twinder', Musk said, "Interesting idea, maybe jobs too."

After Meta launched Threads last week to compete with Twitter, Musk has been promoting the micro-blogging platform.

"You will get more laughs from this app than everything else combined," Musk had said.

He also posted, "You are free to be your true self here."

On the other hand, Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino tweeted, "There's only ONE Twitter. You know it. I know it."

--IANS

aj/prw

The new Tab M10 will be available in two variants -- 4GB+128GB and 6GB+128GB to buy from Lenovo's official website and online and offline stores starting July 15.

"This ultra-portable tablet is engineered for digital nomads and nature buffs who lead hybrid lifestyles. It provides high-speed connectivity with 5G, even during peak hours, and doubles up like a daily companion that adapts to the versatile and evolving digital needs of modern tablet users and households," Sumati Sahgal, Head of Tablets and Smart Devices, Lenovo India, said in a statement.

Equipped with Snapdragon 695 5G chipset, this new tablet can stream, video call friends, download quickly, and allow for light gaming on the cloud virtually anywhere.

Weighing around 490 grams, this device can be well-suited for on-the-go consumers, plus it offers a 7700mAh battery with up to 12 hours of uninterrupted video streaming, according to the company.

Moreover, the tab comes included with added security features like facial recognition technology that recognises the users' faces and logs them in with a glance.

It also offers an Immersive Reading Mode that allows for easy switching between colour and monochrome modes while reading from the digital library.

--IANS

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"We're expanding our creator monetisation offering to include ads revenue sharing for creators. This means that creators can get a share in ad revenue starting in the replies to their posts. This is part of our effort to help people earn a living directly on Twitter," the company said on the 'Creator Ads Revenue Sharing' page.

The programme will be available in all the countries where Stripe supports payouts.

"We are rolling out to an initial group who will be invited to accept payment," the platform added.

On Twitter, many creators shared how much money they received from the micro-blogging platform via the new programme.

While one creator got $37,050, another creator received $11,820.

One creator even got $69,420 through the ads revenue programme.

Twitter-owner Elon Musk clarified that the payouts are "not exactly per impression."

"What matters is how many ads were shown to other verified users."

"Only verified users count, as it is otherwise trivial to game the system with bots," he added.

Musk had also said last month, "First block payment totals $5M."

--IANS

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