Devin Coldewey
Devin Coldewey is a Seattle-based writer and photographer. He first wrote for TechCrunch in 2007. He has also written for MSNBC.com, NBC News, DPReview, The Economist/GE’s Look Ahead, and others.
His personal website is coldewey.cc.
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Latest from Devin Coldewey
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Verbal common sense will prevent AIs from harvesting kings and unlocking oranges
If I hand you an apple, you know from experience that it isn’t something you can drive. And the tree it came from can’t be woven, or its seeds bandied. You know that’s nonsense, but AIs don’t have the benefit of years spent navigating the world, and as such have no real idea as to what you can do with what — but a little common sense could be coming their way. Read More
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Does Siri sound different today? Here’s why
Did you notice that Siri sounds a little more sprightly today? Apple’s ubiquitous virtual assistant has had a little virtual work done on her virtual vocal cords, and her newly dulcet-ized tones went live today as part of iOS 11. Read More
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O-Robotix spruces up its SeaDrone underwater robo-craft
At last year’s Disrupt NY, SeaDrone made it to the Battlefield finals with its simple, robust and affordable underwater drone. With a few customers and a year of feedback under their belts, the engineers behind the robo-sub are putting out a version 2.0 with a few improvements. Read More
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WT2 real-time translation earpieces look to crowdfund first run
This summer the TC team took a brief trip to Shenzhen, where I met Wells Tu, whose company TimeKettle has made an earpiece that translates spoken Chinese to English and vice versa in near real time. Having created a functioning prototype (it isn’t vaporware; we tried it, as you can see above) he and the team are now heading to Kickstarter to raise the money for their first run of the… Read More
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Red Sox may have used a Fitbit, not an Apple Watch, to snag Yankees signs
In a major upset for Apple’s smartwatch brand, it appears that it was a Fitbit, not an Apple Watch, that the Red Sox used as a medium for their sign-stealing in a recent ball game. The news comes from “a major league source” speaking to Boston Globe sports reporter Nick Cafardo. It’s unclear at this time whether the source himself or herself is major league or if they… Read More
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Global Learning XPRIZE awards $1 million each to final five teams
The Global Learning XPRIZE, an international competition to create educational software, has reached its penultimate stage: 5 teams out of an initial pool of nearly 200 have been selected to receive $1 million and compete for the $10 million grand prize. Read More
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Who is to blame for algorithmic outrage?
This week we saw a few high-profile demonstrations of the ability to target advertising to unsavory groups generated or suggested by major internet companies. Upon being alerted of these bafflingly obvious abuses, the companies’ responses all struck the same notes: “this is against our rules, we have no idea how it happened, and it’s fixed now.” Were you as unconvinced… Read More
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Facebook halts ad targeting of profile details abused by users
In a swift response to the news that advertisers were able to target anti-Semitic phrases on Facebook, the social network has shut down “self-reported targeting fields” in the ad system until further notice. Read More
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Facebook’s generation of ‘Jew Hater’ and other advertising categories prompts system inspection
Facebook automatically generates categories advertisers can target, such as “jogger” and “activist,” based on what it observes in users’ profiles. Usually that’s not a problem, but ProPublica found that Facebook had generated anti-Semitic categories such as “Jew Hater” and “Hitler did nothing wrong,” which could be targeted for… Read More
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The Cassini Orbiter’s greatest images and discoveries
The Cassini-Huygens mission launched from Cape Canaveral on October 15, 1997, and tomorrow, just a month shy of 20 years later, one of the most prolific purveyors of beautiful planetary science crashes into Saturn in a bittersweet “Grand Finale.” With its fuel nearly exhausted, this is its final and most dramatic experiment. Read More
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Senator Franken asks Apple for privacy guarantees around Face ID data
A friendly letter from Senator Al Franken (D-MN) to Apple requests that the latter provide a few more details on the tech behind its Face ID system, which allows users to unlock their iPhone X using facial recognition. It’s very far from a nastygram; the Senator pretty clearly just wants to cover a bit more ground than Apple had time for in its presentation yesterday. Read More
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Nintendo offers new Super Mario Odyssey details and demo of Square’s intriguing ‘Project Octopath Traveler’
Nintendo announced a few items today to hold gamers over until the holiday season — and to appease would-be SNES Classic buyers. It announced a few details of its most anticipated upcoming games and even a demo (remember those?) of a throwback title from Square Enix that caught everyone’s eye way back at the Switch launch event. Read More
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No, a chatbot can’t automatically sue Equifax for $25,000
Making the rounds today is a chatbot that claims it will let you sue Equifax for thousands of dollars in small claims court without using a lawyer. The Verge boldly stated you can claim up to $25,000 dollars, and the chatbot says that it’s the “first case of a fully automated lawsuit.” While it would be cool to fill out a form and get a check a few months later, this… Read More
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Animoji are dumb and I detest them
Apple today announced the digital equivalent of a singing telegram, a perversion of the emoji concept that embodies the worst of both the company’s exclusionary philosophy and the worst of CG animals and excreta. Animoji are dumb and I loathe them. Here’s why. Read More
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Modular, self-healing robot swarms are definitely a great idea
Robots are going to have to work together if they want to destroy us, their soft, fallible masters. But the current paradigm of having a Skynet-like (or rather, Zerglike) overmind control a set of semi-autonomous drones is too easy to beat — take out the brain and the rest fail, right? Not if they’re all the brain, which is the idea demonstrated in a wonderful new paper in Nature. Read More
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Zoom, artificial bokeh and other phone camera features now figure in DxOMark’s tests
Testing cameras is what DxOMark does, but while many DSLRs and mirrorless systems have remained more or less the same for the last decade, one can hardly say the same for mobile phones. Dual lenses, optical zoom and more are now marquee features and as such need special testing setups and scoring benchmarks — which is what DXOMark just added to the mix. Read More
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iPhone X basically has a Kinect on the front to enable Face ID
It remains to be seen whether Apple’s Face ID will be as convenient as Touch ID (it already failed on stage), but at the very least we can’t accuse Apple of not dedicating enough hardware to the task. The front of the new iPhone X has a full-on depth-sensing system much like that of the original Kinect. The prominent cutout on top hides more than a selfie camera — it has a… Read More
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The cellular-enabled Apple Watch has the SIM built in
Apple has hidden an interesting twist inside the new Apple Watch: a built-in SIM card that isn’t a SIM card. It’s an eSIM, or embedded subscriber identity module. They’ve been talked about for years, but this is the first use of one in a mass market consumer device. Read More
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Congress demands answers from Equifax
A strongly worded letter from the Democrats of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce questions Equifax on pretty much every aspect of its disastrous breach, from how such an immense security lapse happened in the first place to the company’s apparently non-functional notification site. Read More
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This tiny sensor could sleep for years between detection events
It’s easy enough to put an always-on camera somewhere it can live off solar power or the grid, but deep in nature, underground, or in other unusual circumstances every drop of power is precious. Luckily, a new type of sensor developed for DARPA uses none at all until the thing it’s built to detect happens to show up. That means it can sit for years without so much as a battery top-up. Read More
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