Archives 2023

EasyPark has confirmed it was hit in a cyberattack that saw customer data breached and revealed online.

The company, which runs apps to help people find parking spots, said in an alert to customers that it discovered the breach on December 10 2023.

Samsung is working on a smart fridge with AI capabilities which the company is planning to launch in 2024. The South Korean tech giant is planning to unveil the AI-enabled fridge at CES 2024 that will be equipped with some interesting features. In a blog post, Samsung claims that the upcoming refrigerator will include an internal camera that can identify individual food items.The company will also launch a connected app that will be able to suggest recipes based on what users have in stock.
With the 2024 Bespoke 4-Door Flex Refrigerator with AI Family Hub+, users can mirror the display of their Galaxy phones to the 32-inch Family Hub touchscreen. The display on the fridge will even have separate apps for TikTok and YouTube videos.
Bespoke 4-Door Flex Refrigerator 2024: New AI features
To compare, the internal camera or the Family Hub app integration was also available in the 2023 model which also included an AI-powered camera and could generate recipes. However, the 2024 model is being upgraded with more features.
The Samsung Food app (which users can access directly on the fridge via the Family Hub) can connect to their Samsung Health profile and create recipes based on their dietary needs.

The upcoming smart fridge also includes an “Image to Recipe” feature (which works better with Vision AI) that can recognise meals and food items from photographs and generate recipes.
The 2024 model also has a customisation feature that will tailor recipes according to various dietary preferences. This includes gluten-free, pescatarian, dairy-free, vegan, fusion and others.

Users can also manually enter expiration dates of different food items on the Family Hub touchscreen. The fridge will also post notifications on the app just before individual items expire.
However, the upcoming model still has some limitations. For example, Samsung says that its Vision AI feature can identify up to 33 food items. So, users shouldn’t expect the system to identify exotic food items.

The smartphone camera sensor market is mostly dominated by Sony and Samsung. However, in this market, the South Korean tech giant is still behind the Japanese company. According to a report by Counterpoint Research, Sony dominates the image sensor market with a market share of 54%. Samsung has a 29% share of the market, while SK Hynix barely managed to enter the top-five rankings with a 5% market share.Samsung is now reportedly planning to use AI to take on its Japanese rival. The company is now trying to develop and launch mobile camera sensors with on-device AI capabilities.
How Samsung may add AI to its smartphone camera sensors
According to a report by Business Korea, Samsung is adding AI into its camera image sensor business. Earlier this year, the South Korean firm unveiled its third 200MP camera sensor. At this time, the company announced the Zoom Anyplace technology, which is powered by AI.
Samsung’s Zoom Anyplace technology offers simultaneous 4K video recording of the full frame and a zoomed-in part of that frame.
Apart from this, the company is also planning to incorporate even more AI features into its camera sensors. The long-term business plan of Samsung is to create sensors that can replicate human senses. By 2027, the company’s roadmap includes the development of camera sensors that can capture even invisible things by 2027, the report notes.

Samsung’s System LSI President Park Yong-in recently talked about focusing on the goal of leading the ‘Proactive AI’ era. This includes mastering Generative AI, high-performance algorithms and technologies as well as long-range communication solutions.

SK Hynix has also revealed that it is incorporating an AI processing chip into its camera sensors. This technology will lower the latency and improve image quality while reducing power consumption. The company has been using an AI accelerator in the image sensor to test features like face and object recognition.
As the demand from autonomous cars, IoT, robotics, and XR (Extended Reality) devices increased, the camera sensor market has returned to the growth phase after the pandemic.

Google Cloud has patched a vulnerability that may have allowed malicious actors with access to a Kubernetes cluster to elevate their privileges and wreak havoc. 

“An attacker who has compromised the Fluent Bit logging container could combine that access with high privileges required by Anthos Service Mesh (on clusters that have enabled it) to escalate privileges in the cluster,” the company said in an advisory.

Merry Christmas, one and all, and a Happy New Year! 2024 looms large, but if you’re planning on spending the new year weekend glued firmly to the couch, then our pick of the best new movies and TV shows to stream should help you see out 2023 with a bang.

Leading the charge this weekend is Emerald Fennell’s controversial new thriller Saltburn, which recently landed on Prime Video following a headline-grabbing theatrical run. Elsewhere, Ncuti Gatwa makes his standalone debut as the titular Time Lord in Doctor Who: The Church on Ruby Road on Disney Plus, while a new Money Heist spin-off, Berlin, is now streaming on Netflix.

iPhone maker Apple has been promoting gaming on its devices in 2023. In a recent interview with Inverse, the company has offered an in-depth view at its work to turn the Mac into a powerful gaming platform. The interview comes as Apple has put major focus on gaming throughout the year on the Mac and iPhone.
What Apple has to say to about gaming on Mac
At the interview, Mac product marketing manager at Apple, Gordon Keppel said the company’s in-house silicon has helped in gaming related developments.
Keppel said: “Apple silicon has changed all that. Now, every Mac that ships with Apple silicon can play AAA games pretty fantastically. Apple silicon has been transformative of our mainstream systems that got tremendous boosts in graphics with M1, M2, and now with M3.”
Meanwhile, Leland Martin, a software marketing manager at Apple, added that Apple Silicon has also simplified the development process for gaming companies on the Mac.

Martin said: “If you look at the Mac lineup just a few years ago, there was a mix of both integrated and discrete GPUs. That can add complexity when you’re developing games. Because you have multiple different hardware permutations to consider. Today, we’ve effectively eliminated that completely with Apple silicon, creating a unified gaming platform now across iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Once a game is designed for one platform, it’s a straightforward process to bring it to the other two. We’re seeing this play out with games like Resident Evil Village that launched first [on Mac] followed by iPhone and iPad.”

How Game Portal Toolkit can help game developers
During the interview, Apple managers also said that the company has put a major focus on gaming across all of its platforms in 2023. This includes the latest devices including Macs and iPhone 15.
For example, Apple launched the Game Porting Toolkit as part of macOS Sonoma. This toolkit makes it significantly easier for developers to bring games from other platforms to the Mac.
In the interview, Martin explained how Apple has already seen a boost in interest from developers due to the Game Porting Toolkit. He said: “We’ve definitely seen interest from developers and publishers like Kojima Productions (Death Stranding: Director’s Cut coming out in early 2024) and Annapurna Interactive Games (Stray) on how to take advantage of both parts of the Game Porting Toolkit. When you download the toolkit, there’s really two parts to it. There’s that emulation environment and that’s helped demonstrate today’s game — you drop in an existing Windows game and see how well it could run on the Mac. The second part is the Metal shader converter and that’s there to help developers convert their tens of thousands of shader code into Metal. And they’ve praised how incredibly useful this is and how it’s saved them a bunch of time in their development timeline.”

Chinese online retailer JD.com has won an anti-monopoly lawsuit against its rival Alibaba. According to a report by the news agency Reuters, the High People’s Court of Beijing has ruled that Alibaba Group Holding Limited and its subsidiaries had abused China’s market dominance and has asked the company to pay one billion yuan (nearly $140 million). The Chinese court also noted that Alibaba adopted monopolistic practices known as “choosing one from two” that caused JD.com severe damages.
JD.com took to its official WeChat account to publish a statement that read: “This ruling is not only a fair decision for JD’s resistance against the ‘choose one out of two’ monopoly, but a landmark moment in upholding market fairness and competition order through the rule of law. It will be a significant moment in China’s anti-monopoly legal process.”
The report cites an Alibaba spokesperson saying they were aware of the ruling and “respect the court’s decision”.
What is “choosing one from two” e-commerce practice in China
Alibaba and JD.com, the two e-commerce giants in China had criticised each other for a practice called choosing one out of two. Under this practice, brands and merchants had been allegedly told that if they wanted to operate on either platform, they had to do it exclusively.

In 2021, Alibaba was fined a record $2.75 billion in an antitrust probe by Chinese regulators. The probe also stated that the company had abused the country’s market dominance.

Alibaba is also facing multiple lawsuits in the US. These lawsuits claim that the Chinese e-tailer allows merchants to sell fake products on its platforms. One such lawsuit alleges that several merchants were selling counterfeit versions of the popular children’s toy Squishmallows on Alibaba.
The lawsuit also alleges that Alibaba knew about these fake products and helped the sellers to infringe on the original company’s copyrights and trademarks.

Apple’s first-ever mixed reality headset Vision Pro is speculated to be the company’s most-important product of the coming year. The AR/VR headset is reportedly in mass production and is expected to hit the shelves by “late January or early February 2024.” Rumours suggest that the Cupertino-based tech giant has already started working on the next-gen Vision Pro as well as an affordable version of the same. A new report claims that Apple is planning to use more advanced displays in the second-gen Vision Pro headset.
How Apple is planning to improve Vision Pro’s display
According to a report by The Elec, market research firm Omdia claims that Apple’s second-generation Vision Pro headset will feature more advanced micro-OLED displays that are likely to offer higher brightness and improved efficiency.
In 2027, Apple is reportedly planning to upgrade the Vision Pro to an RGB OLEDoS display. This will be a notable improvement over the WOLED display with the colour filter that has been used in the first-generation model.

RGB OLEDoS technology produces light and colour directly from nearby RGB sub-pixels on a single layer. This puts an end to the need for a colour filter.
This will result in the headset’s display to offer significantly higher brightness compared to WOLED. The colour filter OLEDoS ones depend on filtering white light through an RGB colour layer and are also markedly more efficient than WOLED and colour filter technology.
Why Samsung is important for the improved displays
The South Korea-based tech giant is currently the only company that is capable of supplying RGB OLEDoS displays. Currently, several firms are making MicroOLED panels with colour filters, but their production capacity is quite low. However, only the US-based firm eMagin makes RGB OLEDoS panels for military usage. Earlier this year, Samsung Display acquired eMagin.
Apple may use one such OLEDoS panel for its next-generation Vision Pro headset. Samsung is also reportedly preparing higher production capacities and is expected to get orders from Apple in the coming years.

In a significant stride towards unravelling the mysteries of the cosmos, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is poised to launch the X-ray Polarimeter Satellite (XPoSat) on January 1. Representing India’s maiden dedicated polarimeter mission, XPoSat aims to explore the intricate dynamics of luminous astronomical X-ray sources thriving in extreme conditions.

Scheduled for liftoff at 9:10 AM, XPoSat will ride the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) into a low earth orbit. Carrying two cutting-edge payloads, this mission promises groundbreaking revelations that will augment our comprehension of the vast astronomical expanse.

The primary payload, POLIX (Polarimeter Instrument in X-rays), is designed to measure polarimetry parameters, including the degree and angle of polarisation, within the medium X-ray energy range. Complementing this, the second payload, XSPECT (X-ray Spectroscopy and Timing), will furnish crucial spectroscopic information.

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The significance of this mission lies in its potential to provide transformative insights into the enigmatic emission mechanisms from celestial entities such as black holes, neutron stars, active galactic nuclei, and pulsar wind nebulae. These phenomena, rooted in complex physical processes, have long baffled scientists despite the invaluable data obtained from existing space observatories.

India’s XPoSat mission aims to capture the elusive degree and angle of polarisation, introducing two key elements to the process of unravelling these celestial puzzles. “The polarimetric observations, along with spectroscopic measurements, are expected to break the degeneracy of various theoretical models of astronomical emission processes. This would be the major direction of research from XPoSat by the Indian science community,” stated ISRO regarding the mission.

XPoSat Mission Objectives

1. Measurement of X-Ray polarisation in the energy band of 8-30 keV emanated from X-Ray sources.

2. Long-term spectral and temporal studies of cosmic X-Ray sources in the energy band of 0.8-15 keV.

With an anticipated mission life of approximately five years, the payloads aboard XPoSat will diligently observe X-ray sources during their transit through Earth’s shadow, particularly during the eclipse period.

XPoSat Payloads:

POLIX: An X-ray Polarimeter developed for astronomical observations in the energy band of 8-30 keV. This pioneering payload is a collaborative effort between the Raman Research Institute (RRI), Bengaluru, and the U R Rao Satellite Centre (URSC). It marks the first payload in the medium X-ray energy band dedicated to polarimetry measurements.

XSPECT: An X-ray Spectroscopy and Timing payload aboard XPoSat, designed to provide rapid timing and excellent spectroscopic resolution in soft X-rays.

As India takes this momentous step into the celestial unknown, XPoSat stands poised to unravel the intricacies of the cosmos, offering a new frontier for scientific exploration and discovery.

When will Wednesday season 2 debut on Netflix? Ordinarily, with the wildly popular horror-comedy series renewed for another outing in early 2023, it would be well on its way to being with us.

But 2023 wasn’t a normal year. Alongside many other movies and TV shows, production on Wednesday‘s sophomore year was delayed by the Hollywood writers and actors strikes. With welcome resolutions reached between all parties, though, filming will finally begin on one of the best Netflix shows‘ next installment in early 2024.