The team over at XDA Developers brings an unofficial port of Android to the Nintendo Switch, complete with Joy-Con support. To be more specific, Switch owners with consoles purchased prior to summer 2018 are now able to boot LineageOS 15.1 directly from an SD card. This version of Lineage includes all Android features, support for Google Play services, and is capable of running native Nvidia Shield apps. Read more for a hands-on video and additional information.
If you’ve always wondered what it was like to edit images using the earliest versions of Adobe Photoshop, then wonder no more, as the “Computer Clan” shows us. They fired up Adobe Photoshop 0.63 Beta from 1988 on an old Macintosh powered by a 32MHz 68030 processor with 8MB of RAM. On a related note, did you know that Photoshop was developed in 1987 by two brothers Thomas and John Knoll? They later sold the distribution license to Adobe Systems Incorporated in 1988. Read more for the video and additional information.
Ever wonder how celebrities, or yourself, would look about 30-years in the future? The FaceApp aging feature should do the trick, and recently it’s become a social media hit, with many using it on well-known actors, like Tom Holland and Chris Evans. How does it work? It uses AI-powered neural network technology to automatically generate highly realistic transformations of faces in photographs. That’s right, the app can transform a face to make it smile, look younger, look older, or even change gender. Read more to see a few popular celebrities decades in the future.
Photo credit: George Kao | Jonathon Leitschuh
Security researcher Jonathan Leitschuh discovered a zero-day vulnerability for the Zoom video conferencing app on Macs and publicly disclosed it today. Simply put, any website can open a video-enabled call on a Mac with the Zoom app installed because the software automatically installs a web server on OS X systems that accepts requests regular browsers wouldn’t. A website would simply be able to “forcibly join a user to a Zoom call, with their video camera activated, without the user’s permission.” This also means that even if you uninstall Zoom, the web server can reinstall the software without requiring manual approval. Read more of a screenshot of what one person encountered when trying it.
If you wanted to see if an image is fake, or wanted to make one yourself, it usually starts with some kind of photo editing software. MIT’s GANpaint Studio is a tool that aims to make things a lot easier, thanks to artificial intelligence. For those who don’t know, a generative adversarial network (GAN) is a type of artificial intelligence machine learning technique made up of two nets that are in competition with one another in a zero-sum game framework. How does it work? Simply tell the tool where you want the object and it uses neural networks to insert one to match scene. Read more for a video demonstration and additional information.
Photo credit: CNET
Apple’s new iPhone software will not be released until later this year, but those who have enrolled in the company’s beta program can try it out early, starting today. Available to developers since early June, iOS 13 public beta introduces several new features, such as Dark Mode, “Sign in with Apple” for signing into apps as well as websites, and critical updates to pre-installed apps (Messages, Maps, and Reminders). Read more for another hands-on preview video and the link to sign up for the beta program.
Adobe Fresco is an upcoming addition to Creative Cloud Suite for the Apple iPad family, and it’s currently available for private beta testing, with a full launch planned for later this year. Designed for professional artists, this app grants them access to tools normally only found on the company’s desktop software. It combines raster, vector and dynamic brushes into a single app, while letting artists sync their brushes in Photoshop CC. Read more for a first look video and additional information.
It’s nearly impossible to detect a professionally altered image these days, but Adobe teamed up with UC Berkeley researchers to train an AI to detect facial manipulation in images edited with Photoshop. A convolutional neural network (CNN) was trained to spot changes in images made with Photoshop’s Face Away Liquify feature, or the function used to change people’s eyes, mouth and other facial features. The neural network was 99% accurate detecting altered images, and for comparison, real people who saw the same photos only spotted the differences 53% of the time. Read more for a video and additional information.
Li Kaixiang, a software development engineer for Chinese e-commerce website JD.com, has been inundated with projects, but didn’t want to leave his girlfriend hanging. So, he decided to create an AI-powered chatbot to answer and send messages automatically. The screenshot you see above is one sample conversation that the chatbot had recently, and while not perfectly human-like, it gets the job done. Read more for the original message that was posted to Weibo in Chinese.
Finally, Apple has officially unveiled iOS 13 at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose. In addition to Dark Mode, Face ID unlocks are touted to be 30 percent faster, while downloads will be 50 percent smaller and updates 60 percent smaller. This enables apps to launch about twice as fast. Now back to Dark Mode, this new interface has been seamlessly integrated across iOS, including widgets and even the keyboard, complete with a swipe-able keypad, similar to those found in Android. Read more for additional pictures and information.