Plus Apple deals a blow to GrayKey, our Kickstarter of the week, and sending ultra sonic commands to Alexa.

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• iOS 11.4 Disables Lightning Connector After 7 Days, Limiting Law Enforcement Access — The iOS 11.4 update, currently being beta tested, includes a USB Restricted Mode that introduces a week-long expiration date on access to the Lightning port on your iOS devices if your phone hasn't been unlocked, which has implications for law enforcement tools like the GrayKey box
• Steam Link App to Bring Steam Games to iOS & Android-Based Phones, Tablets and TVs — The Steam Link app will be available for Apple’s iPhone, iPad, and TV devices as well as various smartphones, tablets and STBs running Google’s Android.
• Google Photos will add more AI-powered fixes, including colorization of black-and-white photos — Now the company is making it even easier to fix photos with a new version of the Google Photos app that will suggest quick fixes and other tweaks – like rotations, brightness corrections, or adding pops of color, for example – right below the photo you’re viewing.
• Exclusive: Android P is Google’s most ambitious update in years - The Verge — Android P, due out later this year, will have a new dashboard that tells you how often, when, and for how long you are using every app on your phone. It will also allow you to set limits on yourself. You could give yourself a half-hour of Instagram per day, for example. Once your 30 minutes is up, the icon will go from its usual eye-catching gradient to a dull grayscale.
• Google Grapples With ‘Horrifying’ Reaction to Uncanny AI Tech — At its I/O conference on Tuesday, Alphabet Inc.’s Google previewed Duplex, an experimental service that lets its voice-based digital assistant book appointments on its own. It was part of a slate of features, such as automated writing in emails, where Google touted how its artificial intelligence technology saves people time and effort. In a demonstration on stage, the Google Assistant spoke with a hair salon receptionist, mimicking the "ums" and "hmms" pauses of human speech. In another demo, it chatted with a restaurant employee to book a table. The audience of software coders cheered.
• Alexa and Siri Can Hear This Hidden Command. You Can’t. - The New York Times — The technique, which the Chinese researchers called DolphinAttack, can instruct smart devices to visit malicious websites, initiate phone calls, take a picture or send text messages. While DolphinAttack has its limitations — the transmitter must be close to the receiving device — experts warned that more powerful ultrasonic systems were possible.
• SpeakEasy by Como Audio with the Google Assistant Built-in by Tom DeVesto — Enjoy music and more with voice command. SpeakEasy™ is Como Audio's newest hi-fi music system with the Google Assistant built-in.

Plus we have a question for you, and more!

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• Microsoft Build 2018 // Vision Keynote - YouTube
• Microsoft announces Your Phone app for Windows 10 and Timeline coming to iPhone | VentureBeat — These updates are part of Microsoft’s Continue on PC functionality, which, as its name suggests, lets you send a task from your Android or iOS device to your Windows 10 PC. The feature first arrived with the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update in October, and Microsoft has been slowly broadening it ever since.
• Google I/O 2018: 8 things to expect from this year’s keynote - The Verge — Google’s annual developer conference will be a jam-packed affair about the future of Android, AI, and the smart home
• Android P will finally restrict apps from monitoring your network activity — A years-old privacy flaw will finally be coming to an end on Android. It’s an issue you’ve probably never heard of, but one that you should absolutely be concerned about. Currently, apps on Android can gain full access to the network activity on your device—even without asking for any sensitive permissions. These apps can’t detect the content of your network calls, but they can sniff any outgoing or incoming connection via TCP/UDP to determine if you are connecting to a certain server.
• Making every phone smarter with Federated Learning - YouTube — Federated Learning works through collaborative learning, using de-identified, aggregated information from many devices to improve machine learning models.
• NSA triples metadata collection numbers, sucking up over 500 million call records in 2017 | TechCrunch
• 4 Things to Be Worried About in the NSA’s New Transparency Report | American Civil Liberties Union
• NSA_transparecy_report.pdf
• Tesla Will Lock Out Contractors on Monday Unless Employees Vouch For Them — The company CEO is planning to cut off access to the company to any contractor who doesn’t have a Tesla employee to vouch for the quality of their work.
• Senate vote on the Congressional Review Act May 9th — Upcoming Senate vote on the Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution to block the Ajit Pai’s repeal is going to define the battle field that we’re fighting on possibly for the next decade.
• SquirrelBot — SquirrelBot is a Telegram bot that saves links that you send it for viewing later. Currently, it only saves Youtube videos and formats them for easy viewing in Kodi. On the roadmap are handling videos from other websites and saving arbitrary links in a personal RSS feed.

Plus tech headlines, and more.

Sponsored By:

• Ting: Take $25 off a device, or earn $25 in service credits if you bring a compatible one! Promo Code: Visit LAS.ting.com

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• Oculus Rift is effectively bricked right now — First discovered in the Oculus Forums, the cause of this Oculus Runtime Service error is an expired certificate. Because Oculus failed to renew this certificate, the Oculus Runtime Service is being viewed as invalid. The only way to fix this is for Oculus to release an updated version of OculusAppFramework.dll with a new certificate. Once that happens, your Oculus services should return to normal operating speed.
• Android P Developer Preview arrives with new notification panel, notch support — However, device support for this release is pretty limited: you'll need a Google Pixel phone to play. The developer preview works on the Pixel 1, Pixel 1 XL, Pixel 2, Pixel 2 XL, and that's it. Pour one out for the Nexus 5X, Nexus 6P, and Pixel C tablet, which were all part of the Android O developer preview but didn't make it to Android P. I actually confirmed this with Google—those three devices won't be getting Android P.
• Android P drops support for Nexus 5X, Nexus 6P, and the Pixel C tablet
• Slack Gateways
• SCALE 16x JB Telegram Group