Amazon-owned Ring has come under fire in recent years for its lax approach to privacy and cooperation with police departments around the US. As 2020 dawns, the company has promised to re-emphasize its commitment to privacy, and it appears to be following through. The newest version of the Ring mobile app includes a “control center” that offers more control over what happens to your data, including the option to disable police video requests.
Ring got its start with doorbell cameras but has since expanded into other types of cameras and home security. Following the Amazon acquisition in 2018, Ring forged its first partnerships with police departments. Ring offers a “Neighbors” app where users can share video footage in the spirit of a neighborhood watch, but police departments working with Ring can also request video from community members. While Ring has said that police don’t get precise location information or user data, it has occasionally gone so far as to give police maps of active cameras.
The new Ring app doesn’t fundamentally change the way the company’s cameras work, but it should put some people’s minds at ease. The Control Center offers a quick overview of your security and privacy settings. For example, whether you have two-factor authentication enabled, how many devices are logged into your account, and the number of shared users. You can also un-share your camera feeds or log-out all devices from this interface. This should give people some recourse if they suspect someone may have hacked their camera.
The police controls are available under the “Community Control” section of the new settings. Up at the top, you can disable the video requests. Naturally, Ring suggests you leave them enabled. When police request video from an area, you still have the option of refusing. Disabling the requests altogether ensures you’ll never get those notifications.
Technically, disabling police requests won’t matter if you don’t live in a jurisdiction that works with Ring. There are somewhere north of 400 police departments that do, though. You can see nearby police departments that have access to Ring in the video requests section of the app. That’ll tell you whether disabling requests will do you any good.
The new Ring app is now available on Android and iOS. Ring also promises future improvements to the Control Center with more fine-tuned privacy options.
Super Bowls used to mean Tom Brady hoisting another trophy along with ads of polar bears drinking Coke on not-yet-melting polar ice caps, that and the Budweiser Clydesdales. Now the most memorable – sorry, memorably good – commercials are cars and tech. Car ads have always been part of the 54 Super Bowls, but in the dotcom boom years “tech ad” meant money frittered away. Remember Pets.com? Agillon? Epidemic.com? All goners. Maybe automakers did a better job because there really are differences among cars. And the tech guys have learned from the money-wasting days at the turn of the century.
Here are the best car and tech ads of Super Bowl 54 (that’s LIV for traditionalists) along with some that didn’t click quite as well, and the best non-tech ad. We’re linking to ads from places (mostly, automaker sites on YouTube) that don’t have ads in front of them because why should you pay (with your time) to see an advertisement in order to see an ad?
The Best Ads: Hyundai Sonata, Jeep Gladiator
Hyundai Sonata Smaht Pahk. Two car ads stood out. The Hyundai Sonata spot for Smaht Pahk was the winner because it was funny, it made fun of a socio-economic group you can always make fun (people from Boston, especially since New England departed the playoffs early), and most of all because it is going to sell Hyundai Sonatas. The Sonata is the most important new car of 2020 (see our review), it is the Extreme Tech Car of the Year, and it’s loaded with standard safety features, virtually all of which are on the base, $26,000 Sonata SE. The top-line Sonata Limited, $34,000, includes Remote Smart Parking Assist, now being called Smart Park. Hop out, press the keyfob, and the Sonata pahks itself at Hahvahd Yahd, and backs out when you return. If you have a narrow garage in Back Bay or Chahlston, you don’t have to squeeze in and out inside the garage.
Too many Super Bowl commercials are ad agency spitting matches using client money to prove who’s more clever, with less thought given to whether the ad sells the product. The “Smaht Pahk” ad will do just that: Get customers to consider Sonata, and realize a mainstream car includes important new technology.
Jeep / Groundhog Day. This is the other spot that rose above the rest. Bill Murray reprised the 1993 movie Groundhog Day, this time in a Jeep Gladiator, the truck of the year in several autowriter / magazine competitions. It’s funny, it’s nostalgic, and if you don’t know Jeep makes a pickup truck in Punk’n Metallic orange paint and the doors and top come off (you do it yourself), now you do.
The concept of Groundhog Day the movie is weatherman Bill Murray is caught in an endless time loop that restarts each day when he wakes at 6 am to Sonny and Cher’s I Got You Babe, and has to again cover Groundhog Day in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. It’s faithfully recreated in the ad, except no Andie McDowell this time. And to Jeep’s good fortune, the 2020 Super Bowl was played on Feb. 2, Groundhog Day. Appreciating this spot probably helped if you’re old enough to remember the movie from when it was in theaters. But if not, you should, since it’s in the National Film Registry for being deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
Amazon Before Alexa. Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi ponder what life was like before Amazon Alexa. The spot borders on slapstick: An 1800s upper-class woman in the parlor tells the maid, “Alexxa, turn the temperature down, two degrees,” the maid takes a log off the fire, tosses it through the window to the sound of shattering glass and a man’s muffled scream. A man in an 1800s city asks the newsboy, “Alex, what’s today’s news?” and he responds, “It doesn’t matter. It’s all fake.” Then in a 1970s Oval Office scene, a Nixon-esque voice commands, “Alicia, remind me to delete those tapes.” In the next room, an admin says loudly, “Yes, Mister President,” then softly, “I ain’t deletin’ …”
Conservatives are probably fuming if they conclude the “fake news” line makes fun of rather than echoes the current administration (hmm, who runs Amazon?), and liberals find it fair recompense for sitting through a patriotism-heavy, pre-game show that did conclude with a touching moment when four 100-year-old World War II veterans took part in the pre-game coin toss, led by Charles McGee, a pilot with the Tuskegee Airman that battled both the Germans and racism.
Google / Loretta. An old man reminisces about his life with Loretta through old pictures Google calls up, along with a clip from their favorite movie, Casablanca. If there’s a “when they cry, they buy” ad, this is it. It’s going to make everybody wish their parents scanned or at least saved and ID’d their favorite photos for you to scan. Not in the commercial but important to know is that face recognition is getting so good – too good, in China – that the thing that used to hard to do, figuring out who that is in a 50-year-old photo, can now be done automagically.
Old Luxury (Going Away Party) / Genesis. Hyundai’s Genesis division rolled out its first SUV, the GV80, using young and hip Chrissy Teigen and John Legend as they make their escape from old people, oddly shaped dogs, and an old-world mansion into the GV80. From the staircase, she looks down and says, “To old luxury: You had a good run but now it’s time to choose you up a little bit … I give you young luxury.” Teigen then gestures to the open courtyard doors and points to the GV80 that – oops – hasn’t yet pulled up (“Where were you?” she asks driver Legend. “It was supposed to be a thing and you made it not a thing.”)
Never mind that Audi did essentially the same ad – “Old Luxury” (even the same name) – in a 2011 Super Bowl commercial. In this case, yuppie inmates inhabit a faux luxury prison (a mansion in LA) filled with affluent Boomers / Millennials. They unlock the cell bars and make their way toward a waiting car. A guard releases the dogs (showy hounds). When that doesn’t work, he’s ordered, “Hit ’em with the Kenny G,” and as Songbird plays, some refuse to leave while others do. Two escapees make it the courtyard, a Mercedes pulls up (you see the tri-star hood emblem) and one says, “Lancaster, no, it’s a trap,” and Lancaster replies, “Nonsense, my father owned one.”
But the theme works, and has for ages, going back at least to 1988 and “Not your father’s Oldsmobile.” Actually, it doesn’t always work. America’s oldest car brand, the brainchild of Barney Olds, was killed off in 2004.
The Other Car / Tech Ads
Porsche did a creditable job with “The Heist”: The Porsche Taycan EV sports car is spirited out of the Porsche Museum in Stuttgart. Once the heist is discovered, the guards argue / squabble over who drives which museum Porsche to track down the Taycan. That gives the viewer a chance to appreciate Porsche’s storied history and possibly begin to realize the Taycan is a continuation of Porsche history, not a bunch of greenies gone mad. The voices were a bit muffled, especially if you were watching the game with noisy friends, and works much better played on a PC with closed captions running.
A Toyota Highlander ad showed the car does indeed have a lot of room as the driver – 20 years ago this would have been a soccer mom commercial – picks up various people in comic distress from various scenes, ending with her son.
A third Hyundai group (Hyundai, Genesis, Kia) ad was for the upcoming Kia Seltos but more about the inspirational story of Oakland Raiders rookie Josh Jacobs and hard times growing up. It left some people wonder what Seltos is. Answer: The same platform as the subcompact and well-established Hyundai Kona, a bit roomier inside, and shipping this quarter.
T-Mobile and Verizon touted 5G service, which is still a ways off. T-Mobile used Anthony Anderson’s real-life, sassy, talky mom. Verizon essentially said that without 5G, emergency responders won’t get their job done as well.
Microsoft, whose Surface tablets are universally used (mandated) by the NFL, told the story of Katie Sowers, an assistant coach of the San Francisco 49ers. It’s a true story of perseverance and success, but the story was already being told in the two-week run-up to the Big Game.
Audi had an eTron Sportback spot run late in the evening after the kids were in bed, so they missed Maisie Williams singing “Let It Go” from Frozen.
GMC touted the rebirth of the Hummer as an EV in an ad with LeBron James. The Hummer is a ways off, so maybe it was okay to be low-key and laid back. This was not a call to action for hand-raisers.
Scout, the golden retriever owned by Weathertech founder David MacNeil, had his cancer cured at the University of Wisconsin vet school. MacNeil took a 30-second spot lauding the Badger vets and encouraging donations. Wisconsin hasn’t gotten this much PR since this mentions by Wisconsin alum / Wall Street Journal sportswriter Jason Gay in his column. Nice touch – who doesn’t like retreivers? – and if MacNeil wants to spend six mil in hopes of getting at least that much in donations to Wisconsin, more power to him. Pets cure a lot of human ailments by being there for you.
Tom Brady made it to the Super Bowl (as one of the game’s 100 best players of the NFL’s 100 years) and also was a spokesmodel for a Hulu spot. Amazon promoted its drama Hunters. Quibi pushed its short video service that launches this spring (nothing more challenging than 10 minutes) and hopes you’ll start saying “I’ll be there in a Quibi.”
Best in Show (Non-Tech): Lil Nas X
The hands-down winner among non-tech or car ads was the Wild West dance moves showdown between Lil Nas X and Sam Elliott with Old Town Road playing in the background. (The guy strumming the guitar at the end was Billy Ray Cyrus.) Doritos footed the bill and reaped the rewards, as long as remembers remember it was Doritos and not Bud Light or Axe body wash. And yes, when Lil Nas rides off on a horse with cascading speakers, it pays homage to Sheriff Cleavon Little and the Gucci saddlebags in Blazing Saddles.
Fast and Furious 9: Everybody’s still trying to match Bullitt.
There also were ads that continued through the show, especially Tide Pods, the claim being that if you get a stain on your shirt before the game starts, you can much later wash – remember, wash, not eat detergent pods – and the stain comes out, at which point in the last ad, the guy gets his now-clean shirt stained again. There were plenty of ads for upcoming movies – Fast & Furious 9 (photo), Minions, Black Widow, No Time to Die – and the trailers’ special effects made people glad, or annoyed, they have surround sound speakers.
Fox ran a lot of promos for future programming, including one for the Daytona 500 where stock cars appeared to come onto and arc across the field. Conspiracy theorists will see hidden hands at work when a Super Bowl broadcast on Fox News (actually, Fox Sports, but don’t let facts get in the way) runs the Donald Trump commercial midway through the first period when everyone is watching and the Michael Bloomberg spot didn’t get airplay until late in the extended halftime. Fortunately, Kansas City and San Francisco made it close until the final minutes; three late Kansas City scores made for a 31-20 win. So most viewers stuck around all three hours of the game and J Lo / Shakira halftime.
A few ads got remade at the last minute to downplay or factor out death or helicopters (RIP, Kobe). So the death-and-resurrection of Mr. Peanut spot was pretty bland.
BlackBerry has struggled to find a place in the modern smartphone era, and it turned to TCL to do the heavy lifting a few years ago. TCL has manufactured devices like the KEYone and KEY2 under the BlackBerry brand, but there won’t be any more BlackBerry phones from TCL. The company just announced that its licensing agreement ends on August 31, 2020.
To understand how BlackBerry and TCL got to this point, you have to look at the first few product cycles after the iPhone launched. BlackBerry stubbornly stuck with its traditional feature set as the iPhone grew by leaps and bounds. The company tried its hand at touch-screen devices like the BlackBerry Storm, but that was a flop. The company chugged long, losing market share quarter after quarter until it had to abandon its custom BlackBerry OS.
BlackBerry’s initial switch to Android was an entirely in-house affair with devices like the Priv. The deal with TCL, announced in December 2016, took all the hardware development off BlackBerry’s plate. This partnership gave us the KEYOne, Motion, KEY2, and most recently the KEY2 LE. That may be the last BlackBerry-branded smartphone for a while, or possibly ever. As of August 31, TCL no longer has the rights to use BlackBerry’s name or technology. TCL certainly won’t be launching any new phones with just a few months left in the contract, but it will also have to end sales of the ones it already released.
TCL made this announcement on Twitter but hasn’t followed up with any of the replies asking for more information. Will Blackberry itself start making phones again? Will it partner with another manufacturer? We just don’t know. The only piece of good news is that TCL will continue offering software support for the devices it has released, although updates on TCL BlackBerry devices have never been stellar. The KEY2 is still on Android 8.1 Oreo, which is now two generations out-of-date.
Most of the BlackBerry devices from TCL had a physical keyboard with those perfectly beveled keys that made BlackBerry devices so desirable in the past. However, that came with a smaller display and a somewhat more awkward form factor for watching videos and taking photos. People have become accustomed to larger screens, and on-screen keyboards have gotten surprisingly capable with features like text prediction and swipe input. Thumb-typing with physical keys used to be the gold standard for mobile text entry, but now it’s slower than on-screen methods. Without the keyboard as a selling point, there may not be a place for BlackBerry phones.
Intel’s decision to buy startup Habana Labs in December for $2B set tongues to wagging about what it might mean for Nervana, the previous AI startup Intel acquired in 2016. Roughly a month later, the other shoe has dropped: Intel has announced it will cancel the NNP-T and NNP-I products it had previously planned to ship by the end of 2019 and pivot instead to focus on Habana.
There’s been little chatter about why this happened, but Karl Freund of Moor Insights and Strategy caught wind of the news. According to him, Intel will support the NNP-I for “previously committed customers,” but will cease all development on the NNP-T AI training design.
The NNP-T was designed at TSMC and intended for that company’s 16nm FinFET process and fit into 150-250W power envelopes. The NNP-I, which will apparently be supported to some small degree, is a 10-50W part that paired two Ice Lake CPU cores with 12 inference compute engines (ICE).
The thinking here is that Nervana’s hardware must not have been particularly performance competitive with what Intel’s competitors have or are bringing to market. Intel has an array of products targeting various AI, deep learning, and compute markets with Mobileye, Movidius, its upcoming Xe architecture, and its FPGA business. Habana Labs has been shipping its Goya Inference Processor since Q4 2018 and the Gaudi AI Training Processor sampled “to select customers” in the second half of 2019. Intel’s decision to essentially shut down further work on Nervana’s architecture would appear to speak for itself.
This is the second AI/machine learning effort Intel has shut down, after Xeon Phi, but I’m not sure how much I’d read into that. Xeon Phi was an effort to create a new x86-based product that could compete with GPUs in double-precision workloads. Intel’s 10nm issues prevented the company from pushing Xeon Phi to lower nodes, but the roots of the architecture date back to Intel’s failed Larrabee GPU experiment, not any kind of determined effort to build an AI/ML processor.
Canceling Nervana’s products undoubtedly hit those product teams hard, but we’re still very early in the AI game, and a lot of companies are currently working on first-gen accelerators. The fact that Goya was in-market and Gaudi was sampling before Intel bought the company provides some assurance that the CPU manufacturer won’t have to spend a huge amount of time bringing an initial part to market.
AI and machine learning have been pretty Nvidia and Intel-centric up until now, and that trend seems likely to continue for the near-term future. AMD’s presence in these markets — and its ability to compete effectively via translation projects like ROCm, compared to native support for Nvidia CUDA — have both been modest in comparison to its largest rivals.
To be fair to AMD, that’s not an accident. When analysts have asked whether AMD would be explicitly targeting the emerging AI/ML space, AMD’s executives have generally said that they would do so in a limited way and with specific products when it made sense to do so. AMD isn’t making any effort to target CPUs like the Epyc 7742 for AI workloads the way Intel focused on adding AVX-512 support to Xeon.
2020 will be a significant year for the AI/ML market. The first consumer iteration of Intel’s GPU will hit markets this year. While these will obviously be intended for mainstream systems, you can bet analysts will have an eye towards any data center-friendly features or capabilities that might make an early appearance. Nvidia’s next-generation 7nm GPUs are expected to drop this year, as is AMD’s Navi 20. It’s not crazy to think Navi 20 could tip up in new server, workstation, or data center GPUs from AMD as well this year.
In short, pivoting towards Habana and away from Nervana doesn’t necessarily mean Intel is falling behind — not so long as Habana’s performance and roadmap are better aligned with Intel’s customers than what it was fielding previously.
It looks as though the rumors about Intel’s upcoming Comet Lake desktop packing 10 cores and top frequencies above 5GHz that we reported on last August are true, at least at the very top of the stack. The Core i9-10900K has appeared in the 3DMark database with 10 cores, 20 threads, and a top Turbo Boost clock of 5.1GHz. All-core boost has been rumored to be as high as 4.9GHz, though that hasn’t been confirmed.
If the CPU supports Intel Turbo Boost 3.0 and Thermal Velocity Boost, it could actually burst into the 5.2-5.3GHz range under certain circumstances. Comet Lake desktop CPUs will require a new motherboard socket, LGA 1200, though previous coolers from the LGA 115x family will supposedly be forwards-compatible.
That “supposedly” might need a bit more of an asterisk than it did in years past. While the official TDP on Comet Lake is only increasing moderately — from 95W on the 9900K to 125W on the 10900K — the CPU’s actual power draw under full load may be more like 300W. The high power consumption and difficulty smoothing the CPU’s power spikes could potentially cause the CPU’s introduction to be delayed according to reporting earlier this month. Most enthusiasts should be fine, but small/quiet cooler enthusiasts may want to watch for actual power draws and temps on specific CPUs before assuming previous coolers will automatically be compatible.
Early rumors make it sound as if the Core i9-10900K has a bit in common with AMD’s Piledriver-based FX-9590. Knowing it would be years before it could launch Ryzen, AMD made the best it could of a tough competitive situation, threw previous desktop TDP targets to the wind, and launched a 250W CPU. Bringing the clock up compared to the FX-8350 may have blown power consumption through the roof, but it also helped Piledriver hang a bit better against Intel at the time.
Intel’s Comet Lake architecture is better than Piledriver ever dreamt of being, but we may be seeing Intel confront a similar problem. The company has wrung a great deal of performance out of its 14nm node from 2015 – 2020, but there’s not much improvement left to find. The solution? Crank up the power and take the CPU as far as it can go under the relaxed restrictions.
Running the Core i9-10900K at its full potential will probably take a cooler capable of dissipating 200-300W. Such coolers exist, in both the traditional air-cooled and the closed-loop liquid cooler market.
Between clock and core count we’d expect the Core i9-10900K to beat AMD’s 8-core CPUs and tangle things up with the 12-core 3900X. Desktop customers tend to care at least a little about power consumption, but they’re much less sensitive to it as an issue than your typical laptop customer, for obvious reasons.
General relativity makes numerous predictions about gravity, time, and the very nature of the universe. So far, all the predictions we’ve been able to test have held up to scrutiny, but the effects are usually subtle and difficult to visualize. Astronomers have spotted a distant star that further confirms general relativity in a more obvious fashion — it’s dragging space-time along with it.
Einstein’s general theory of relativity predicts that massive objects can tug at the fabric of the universe as they move through space, which is called “frame-dragging.” Scientists collected the first experimental evidence of frame-dragging almost 20 years ago, but the effect is minuscule. For example, the Gravity Probe B satellite used gyroscopes to measure tiny angular changes caused by Earth’s frame-dragging. The effect worked out to just one degree every 100,000 years. The effects on a star system called PSR J1141-6545 are much more noticeable, even from 10,000 light-years away.
Researchers from the OzGrav ARC Centre of Excellence at Swinburne University of Technology discovered PSR J1141-6545 almost 20 years ago. The system consists of a pulsar (a rotating neutron star) orbiting a white dwarf. A white dwarf is the collapsed core of a dead star that was too small to form a black hole or neutron star. This one is about the same size as Earth but thousands of times more massive, and that means the effect of frame-dragging should be much more intense. The pulsar orbits the white dwarf every five hours, and the radar wave beams of the pulsar sweep past Earth. This combination of factors makes PSR J1141-6545 an ideal real-world laboratory in which to study frame-dragging.
The team has gone back multiple times over the years to observe PSR J1141-6545. Because the radio beams from the pulsar sweep Earth 150 times per minute, scientists can accurately track the system’s orbit. Not only is the pulsar racing around the white dwarf, but the effects of frame-dragging cause the pulsar’s orbit to tumble in space. This twisted region of space-time can only be explained by frame-dragging.
Einstein noted that many of the predictions in general relativity would never be directly observable, but even he couldn’t foresee the incredible advances in astrophysics. We can detect gravitational waves from millions of light-years away, take pictures of black holes, and even watch as a star twists space-time in knots.
Studying the quantum state of the universe is a challenging endeavor in part because objects only have detectable quantum properties on the smallest of scales. The larger something is, the harder it is to get it into a well-defined quantum state unobscured by environmental effects. A team of US-Austrian researchers has developed a new technique that could make quantum mechanics easier to study thanks to a floating silica bead.
The basic problem when studying quantum states is that larger objects have more interaction with the environment, and that masks quantum properties. Pushing matter into a quantum state usually requires complex resonators that control atoms with specific wavelengths of light. These systems only work at extremely low temperatures verging on absolute zero, which prevents outside energy from affecting the particles. With the right controls, scientists can coax clouds of atoms to form exotic materials like Bose-Einstein condensates.
It is therefore rather remarkable that the team from MIT, the University of Vienna, and the Austrian Academy of Sciences managed to coax a solid object into the quantum regime. The researchers placed a small silica bead about 200 nanometers across in a vacuum chamber and then used a laser (sometimes called optical tweezers) to suspend it in the air. With gas, laser cooling via atomic transition is a well-understood method of removing energy to get atoms into a quantum ground state. With the solid levitating bead, the team had to use a new experimental method called cavity cooling by coherent scattering.
With millions of atoms packed together, the silica bead is observationally free of quantum properties under normal conditions. The cavity cooling method relies on a test chamber with dimensions similar to a specific wavelength of light. That limits the wavelengths that can exist within the chamber.
Over time, the bead loses energy to environmental photons, which have more energy than the optical tweezers inside the cavity. Eventually, the bead stops vibrating, and the center reaches around 0.00001 degrees Celsius away from absolute zero, allowing it to develop observable quantum properties. At this point, the surface of the bead is actually quite hot at roughly 572 degrees Fahrenheit (300 degrees Celsius), and the rest of the experiment is room temperature.
The team says this setup allows the glass bead to enter a quantum ground state 70 percent of the time. It may be possible to reach even higher success rates with improved vacuum hardware. They also discuss cooling the hardware to improve efficacy. Further study of solid quantum state objects could yield fascinating results, but we’re just at the dawn of this new era.
and home security. Following the Amazon acquisition in 2018, Ring forged its first partnerships with police departments. Ring offers a “Neighbors” app where users can share video footage in the spirit of a neighborhood watch, but police departments working with Ring can also request video from community members. While Ring has said that police don’t get precise location information or user data, it has occasionally gone so far as to give police maps of active cameras. 
