At Microsoft's annual Surface press event today, the company announced the Surface Earbuds to rival Apple's AirPods and Amazon's newly announced Echo Buds. What's unique about the Surface Earbuds is that, unlike the other two wireless earphones, they can be used with Alexa, Bixby, Google Assistant, Siri, or any other competitor -- not just with Cortana. VentureBeat reports: Like the Surface Headphones, the Surface Earbuds don't do anything until you pair them. Surface Earbuds communicate over Bluetooth 5.0 with an Android, iOS, or Windows 10 device. Once paired, you can tap and hold either of the buds to trigger the default assistant on your device. To use a different virtual assistant with the Surface Earbuds, just change the default assistant on the paired device.

"Out of the box, it just works," said Surface Earbuds product lead Mohammed Samji. "On PC, it launches Cortana. On iOS, it will launch Siri, unless you've changed it. And I think it might vary depending on the distribution of Android, but all the ones I've tested, the first time I do it, Android asks me what I want as my default." Surface Earbuds still offer a better experience with Cortana (although without the "Hey Cortana" wakeword), Samji made sure to emphasize. Surface Earbuds can do everything with Cortana that the Surface Headphones can do, like chit-chat, interact with your email, check your calendar, get your daily update, and create to-dos. Samji said his team created a more streamlined flow for all this Cortana functionality. It's called Surface Audio. One of the biggest new abilities with the Surface Earbuds is gestures. "Surface Earbuds' gestures include double tap (go in and out of the call, or play/pause), swipe up and down (control volume), or even swipe forward and back (switch tracks in music, switch slides in PowerPoint)," reports VentureBeat. "Specifically on Android, there's also a triple tap to launch Spotify under your phone's lockscreen -- you can triple-tap again to have Spotify to choose another song using its ML."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Meet AdBlock Radio, an adblocker for live radio streams and podcasts. Its creator, Alexandre Storelli, told Motherboard he hopes to help companies "develop alternative business models for radio and podcast lovers that do not want ads." "Ads exploit the weaknesses of many defenseless souls," Storelli told Motherboard. "Ads dishonestly tempt people, steal their time and promise them a higher social status. Blocking them will be a relieving experience for many."

Most audio ads exploit "auditory artifacts" to produce an ad that can't be ignored or tuned out because it feels louder than it actually is -- this has gotten so bad that there has actually been a "sonic arms race" where ads have been made increasingly louder over the years. "Adblock Radio detects audio ads with machine-learning and Shazam-like techniques," Storelli wrote about the project. He said he's been working on it for more than three years and that it uses techniques such as speech recognition, acoustic fingerprinting, and machine learning to detect known ad formats. It uses a crowdsourced database of ads and "acoustic fingerprinting," which converts audio features into a series of numbers that can be combed by an algorithm. Storelli has made Adblock Radio open-source and given detailed instructions on how to build on it, integrate it into user devices, and deploy it in a way that pressures radio stations (and podcasts) to self-regulate the quality of their ads.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Sega and Sports Interactive have announced that Football Manager 2020 will be sold in new eco-friendly package that uses much less plastic, and they're pushing for the rest of the entertainment industry to follow suit. The new packaging replaces the now-standard plastic DVD case used for most game discs with a folded, reinforced cardboard sleeve made of 100% recycled fiber. The shrinkwrap surrounding that package has also been replaced with a low-density LDPE polyethylene that's highly recyclable. Even the ink on the cardboard has been changed out for a vegetable-and-water-based version (so it's technically vegan if you're desperate for a snack).

The new packaging does cost a bit more to produce -- about 20 (British) cents per unit (or 30 percent), according to an open letter from Sports Interactive Studio Director Miles Jacobson. But those costs are somewhat offset by reduced shipping and destruction costs for excess units, he added. And as Spanish footballer Hector Bellerin says in a video accompanying the letter, "if there's no Earth, there's no money to spend." All told, Jacobson says the new packaging will save 55 grams of plastic per unit, or 20 tonnes across a print run of over 350,000. That's an extremely tiny dent in the estimated 335 million tons of plastic that is produced annually worldwide. But Jacobson hopes it could add up to a sizable dent if the entire industry follows suit for the tens of millions of discs it produces each year. "We're not the biggest game in the world," Jacobson said. "Imagine what happens if every other game, every film company, every music company switches to this packaging... So I'm throwing down the gauntlet here to ALL entertainment companies who use plastic for their Blu Ray, DVD and CD packaging."

Amazon Music HD is a new tier of Amazon's music service that offers lossless versions of audio files for streaming or downloading at a price that aggressively undercuts Tidal, the main competition for this kind of audio. "Amazon will charge $14.99 a month for the HD tier, or $12.99 if you're an Amazon Prime customer," reports The Verge. "Tidal's Hi-Fi plan costs $19.99 monthly." From the report: Amazon says it has a catalog of over 50 million songs that it calls "High Definition," which is the term it's applying to songs with CD-quality bit depth of 16 bits and a 44.1kHz sample rate. It also has "millions" (read: less than 10 million, more than one million) of songs it's calling "Ultra HD," which translates to 24-bit with sample rates that range from 44.1kHz up to 192kHz. Amazon Music HD will deliver them all in the lossless FLAC file format, instead of the MQA format that Tidal uses.

Amazon's VP of Music, Steve Boom, tells me that Amazon chose the HD and UltraHD terminology because it found it was more comprehensible to a mass audience than the current terminology for audio quality. And "mass audience" is exactly what Amazon is going for; it doesn't want Amazon Music HD to be a niche player like Tidal and other lossless music platforms like HDtracks or Qobuz. Boom says that "It's a pretty big deal that one of the big three global streaming services is doing this -- we're the first one." In response to today's news, Rock legend Neil Young said (with no hyperbole whatsoever): "Earth will be changed forever when Amazon introduces high quality streaming to the masses. This will be the biggest thing to happen in music since the introduction of digital audio 40 years ago."

Red Hat developer Matthias Clasen has announced the release of GNOME 3.34, bringing many performance improvements and better Wayland support. Phoronix reports: Making GNOME 3.34 particularly exciting is the plethora of optimizations/fixes in tow with this six-month update. Equally exciting are a ton of improvements and additions around the Wayland support to ensure its performance and feature parity to X11. GNOME 3.34 also brings other improvements like sandboxed browsing with Epiphany, GNOME Music enhancements, GNOME Software improvements, and a ton of other refinements throughout GNOME Shell, Mutter, and the many GNOME applications. More details can be found via release announcement and release notes.

UK MPs have called for the government to regulate the games industry's use of loot boxes under current gambling legislation -- urging a blanket ban on the sale of loot boxes to players who are children. From a report: Kids should instead be able to earn in-game credits to unlock look boxes, MPs have suggested in a recommendation that won't be music to the games industry's ears. Loot boxes refer to virtual items in games that can be bought with real-world money and do not reveal their contents in advance. The MPs argue the mechanic should be considered games of chance played for money's worth and regulated by the UK Gambling Act. The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport's (DCMS) parliamentary committee makes the recommendations in a report published today following an enquiry into immersive and addictive technologies that saw it take evidence from a number of tech companies including Fortnite maker Epic Games; Facebook-owned Instagram; and Snapchap. The committee said it found representatives from the games industry to be "wilfully obtuse" in answering questions about typical patterns of play -- data the report emphasizes is necessary for proper understanding of how players are engaging with games -- as well as calling out some games and social media company representatives for demonstrating "a lack of honesty and transparency," leading it to question what the companies have to hide.

Spotify knows a lot about its users -- their musical tastes, their most listened-to artists and their summer anthems. Now it will also want to know where you live or to obtain your location data. It's part of an effort to detect fraud and abuse of its Premium Family program. From a report: Premium Family is a $15-a-month plan for up to six people. The only condition is that they all live at the same address. But the streaming music giant is concerned about people abusing that plan to pay as little as $2.50 for its services. So in August, the company updated its terms and conditions for Premium Family subscribers, requiring that they provide location data "from time to time" to ensure that customers are actually all in the same family. You have 30 days to cancel after the new terms went into effect, which depends on where you are. The family plan terms rolled out first on Aug. 19 in Ireland and on Sept. 5 in the US. The company tested this last year and asked for exact GPS coordinates but ended the pilot program after customers balked. Now it intends on rolling the location data requests out fully, reigniting privacy concerns and raising the question of how much is too much when it comes to your personal information.

When an artificially intelligent chatbot that used Twitter to learn how to talk unsurprisingly turned into a bigot bot, Taylor Swift reportedly threatened legal action because the bot's name was Tay. Microsoft would probably rather forget the experiment where Twitter trolls took advantage of the chatbot's programming and taught it to be racist in 2016, but a new book is sharing unreleased details that show Microsoft had more to worry about than just the bot's racist remarks. Digital Trends reports: Tay was a social media chatbot geared toward teens first launched in China before adapting the three-letter moniker when moving to the U.S. The bot, however, was programmed to learn how to talk based on Twitter conversations. In less than a day, the automatic responses the chatbot tweeted had Tay siding with Hitler, promoting genocide, and just generally hating everybody. Microsoft immediately removed the account and apologized.

When the bot was reprogrammed, Tay was relaunched as Zo. But in the book Tools and Weapons by Microsoft president Brad Smith and Carol Ann Browne, Microsoft's communications director, the executives have finally revealed why -- another Tay, Taylor Swift. According to The Guardian, the singer's lawyer threatened legal action over the chatbot's name before the bot broke bad. The singer claimed the name violated both federal and state laws. Rather than get in a legal battle with the singer, Smith writes, the company instead started considering new names.

Top spots in App Store search results are some of the most fought over real estate in the online economy. The store generated more than $50 billion in sales last year, and the company said two-thirds of app downloads started with a search. But as Apple has become one of the largest competitors on a platform that it controls, suspicions that the company has been tipping the scales in its own favor are at the heart of antitrust complaints in the United States, Europe and Russia. From a report: Apple's apps have ranked first recently for at least 700 search terms in the store, according to a New York Times analysis of six years of search results compiled by Sensor Tower, an app analytics firm. Some searches produced as many as 14 Apple apps before showing results from rivals, the analysis showed. (Though competitors could pay Apple to place ads above the Apple results.) Presented with the results of the analysis, two senior Apple executives acknowledged in a recent interview that, for more than a year, the top results of many common searches in the iPhone App Store were packed with the company's own apps. That was the case even when the Apple apps were less relevant and less popular than ones from its competitors. The executives said the company had since adjusted the algorithm so that fewer of its own apps appeared at the top of search results.

The Times's analysis of App Store data -- which included rankings of more than 1,800 specific apps across 13 keywords since 2013 -- illustrated the influence as well as the opacity of the algorithms that underpin tech companies' platforms. Those algorithms can help decide which apps are installed, which articles are read and which products are bought. But Apple and other tech giants like Facebook and Google will not explain in detail how such algorithms work -- even when they blame the algorithm for problems. [...] On Aug. 21, Apple apps ranked first in 735 of roughly 60,000 search terms tracked by Sensor Tower. Most of the tracked searches were obscure, but Apple's apps ranked first for many of the popular queries. For instance, for most of June and July, Apple apps were the top result for these search terms: books, music, news, magazines, podcasts, video, TV, movies, sports, card, gift, money, credit, debit, fitness, people, friends, time, notes, docs, files, cloud, storage, message, home, store, mail, maps, traffic, stocks and weather. In July this year, the company pushed some changes to its app store algorithm to handicap its apps to help other developers, it told The New York Times.

dryriver writes: Growing up in the 1980s/90s I don't remember being embroiled in many "heated arguments" with youths my own age. There were small differences of opinion on various things -- whether a band is a great or not, whether a book is worth reading or whatever -- but nothing anywhere near the heated opinion battles that can be seen in every corner of the Internet today. It doesn't matter what the topic is -- music, games, films, religion, tech, history, science, politics -- people are battling each other on the internet.

And today's youth don't live in little "go to school, then go back home to your parents" cocoons anymore. You can watch them bashing each other over the head on the Internet in every computer games, software, pop culture, gaming hardware or other forum on the Internet. So the question is, when these kids grow into adults someday, will the Internet have given them the intellectual tools to understand others, and respect differences of opinions with others? Or are we looking at adults in the year 2040 or so who are very much still in "Internet combat mode" in their real world interactions?

To pose the question more bluntly: Will the Internet generation growing up today become "Generation Tolerance" or "Generation Fight", and how will the world change if the latter comes true?

Microsoft's 2019 summer interns have created Microsoft: the Musical, an 8-minute video whose director describes it as "a Tony Awards-style musical theater opening number."

Long-time Slashdot reader Your Average Joe shared the Verge's article about the video: 150 full-time employees and interns at Microsoft have volunteered their mornings, weekends, and nights to create a Microsoft musical video. The video was shot in various buildings at Microsoft's corporate campus in Redmond, Washington and it features interns and staff members singing and dancing about how it's "all happening here."

It starts off with a section about co-founder Bill Gates, before some classic lines like "all around the world our products are well known, except for when we tried to make a phone!" The musical even briefly acknowledges the company missing a beat with Vista, and features former CEO Steve Ballmer's famous "developers, developers, developers" chant.
The video's description on YouTube says the music is "coming soon" to Apple's iTunes store as well as Spotify.

Directed by one of Microsoft's data science interns, it opens with a narrator remembering that "There once was a lad whose eyesight was bad, but his vision was crystal clear. He looked a line that was clearly defined and declined to align by its rigid design." (Was that a reference to the antitrust case Microsoft settled in 2001?) A later lyric emphasizes that "more than plain old gadgets is the gall that makes the magic..."

The narrator then introduces a woman with a book as Bill Gates, explaining to her that "These days, Bill Gates is more of an idea."

I think it's appalling that there's absolutely no mention of recently-deceased Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. (Although they found room for a tongue-in-cheek reference to "Clippy's strength of will.") But among other things, this whole video project really begs the question: what else did they leave out about Microsoft?

The Sony Walkman is back. The electronics maker will release a new version of its revolutionary portable music player, it announced Friday at IFA 2019, a leading annual consumer electronics trade show in Berlin. From a report: First released in 1979, the Sony TPS-L2 Walkman was the first truly portable personal cassette player and changed the way we listen to music. Sony has since released various iterations of its Walkman, but it's gone the extra mile with this special 40th anniversary edition. The Sony NW-A100TPS Walkman has a 40th anniversary logo printed on the back, and it comes with a specially designed case and package that pay homage to the original TPS-L2 Walkman. It also has a unique cassette tape interface for those who want to take a trip down memory lane. It runs Android and offers battery life of up to 26 hours. It is built for the future, with a USB-C port for connections. Its cost and release date haven't officially been announced.

Revenue made from streaming services in the United States grew by 26 percent in the first six months of the year, according to trade group Recording Industry Association of America, as reported by The Wall Street Journal. That makes for a revenue of $4.3 billion, according to research conducted by the group, which represents approximately 80 percent of the music industry's overall revenue. The Verge reports: Although this included both paid subscriptions and ad-supported streams, the report also found that paid subscriptions grew by 31 percent, accounting for 62 percent of the industry's total revenue. Spotify has more than 100 million subscribers, and Apple Music boasts 56 million paid subscribers. The record industry in the U.S. saw an 18 percent increase in revenue -- hitting $5.4 billion -- in the first six months of 2019. It's not just streaming that's helping the industry see a boost, though: physical media sales also jumped. Both vinyl and CDs saw increases in sales, growing 5 and 13 percent, respectively. CD sales made up roughly $485 million of the industry's revenue over the first six months of the year, and vinyl sales brought in an additional $224 million.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Apple Music doesn't work on traditional Linux distributions like Ubuntu or Fedora. It does, however, work on Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android. Chromebook users can take advantage of the Apple Music Android app from the Play Store. Traditional Linux users, however, are sadly left out of the party. This week, this changes, as Apple Music finally comes to the web -- in beta. This is something many other streaming music services, such as Spotify and Google, already offer. Better late than never, eh? This means traditional Linux users can finally enjoy Apple Music by simply visiting a website.

An anonymous reader shares a report: If you've spent much time thinking about the political divide in the United States, you've hopefully noted how bloody weird it is. Somehow, just about every topic that people want to argue about splits into two camps. If you visualize the vast array of topics you could have an opinion about as a switchboard full of toggles, it seems improbable that so many people in each camp should have nearly identical switchboards, but they do. This can even extend to factual issues, like science -- one camp typically does not accept that climate change is real and human-caused. How in the world do we end up with these opinion sets? And why does something like climate change start an inter-camp argument, while other things like the physics behind airplane design enjoy universal acceptance?

One obvious way to explain these opinions is to look for underlying principles that connect them. Maybe it's ideologically consistent to oppose both tax increases and extensive government oversight of pesticide products. But can you really draw a straight line from small-government philosophy to immigration attitudes? Or military funding? A new study by a Cornell team led by Michael Macy approaches these questions with inspiration from an experiment involving, of all things, downloading indie music. That study set up separate "worlds" in which participants checked out new music with the aid of information about which songs other people in their experimental world were choosing. It showed that the songs that were "hits" weren't always the same -- there was a significant role for chance, as a song that got trending early in the experiment had a leg up.

dryriver writes: The Amiga was a remarkable machine at the time it was released -- 1985. It had a multitasking capable GUI-driven OS and a mouse. It had a number of cleverly designed custom chips that gave the Amiga amazing graphics and sound capabilities far beyond the typical IBM/DOS PCs of its time. The Amiga was the multimedia beast of its time -- you could create animated and still 2D or 3D graphics on it, compose sophisticated electronic music, develop 2D or 3D 16-Bit games, edit and process digital video (using Video Toaster), and of course, play some amazing games. And after the Amiga -- as well as the Atari ST, Archimedes and so on -- died, everybody pretty much had to migrate to either the PC or Mac platforms. If Commodore and the Amiga had survived and thrived, there might have been four major desktop platforms in use today: Windows, OSX, AmigaOS and Linux. And who knows what the custom chips (ASICs? FPGAs?) of an Amiga in 2019 might have been capable of -- Amiga could possibly have been the platform that makes nearly life-like games and VR/AR a reality, and given Nvidia and AMD's GPUs a run for their money.

What do you think the computing landscape in 2019 would have looked like if the Amiga and AmigaOS as a platform had survived? Would Macs be as popular with digital content creators as they are today? Would AAA games target Windows 7/8/10 by default or tilt more towards the Amiga? Could there have been an Amiga hardware-based game console? Might AmigaOS and Linux have had a symbiotic existence of sorts, with AmigOS co-existing with Linux on many enthusiast's Amigas, or even becoming compatible with each other over time?

Spotify today extended the free-trial period for its Premium service from one month to three, tripling the amount of time listeners can take full advantage of the streaming giant's offerings without paying for them. From a report: According to the announcement, the offer is "always-on/not limited time," and will roll out across Spotify Premium plans globally: Individual and Student (where available) starting today, as well as Family (where available) and Duo (where available) in the coming months. The announcement notes that the free trial is open only to users who haven't already tried Premium (and is "not available on Headspace, non-recurring products and most carrier billing (except for individual in JP, AU, DE, CH and Student in JP)."

Long-time Slashdot reader shanen writes: Imagine you had a perfect chair for using your computer. Also a perfect chair for watching TV. And a chair for listening to music, a chair for reading, a chair for napping, a work chair that keeps you awake, and a perfect chair for dinner. Also a massage chair and a diagnostic chair that checks your temperature, pulse, and blood pressure. Is your house full of chairs yet? Wait! what about your spouse's perfect chairs? Need a bigger house?

What if you had one chair that could be all nine of those chairs? What if you could teach the super-smart modular chair to be more chairs, too? That's what I want, plus the voodoo chair controller to manipulate and teach the slightly deformable triangular modules (in two or three sizes) that would form all of the virtual chairs for the current real chair.

Anyway, this story ticks me off because I sent that idea to a couple of companies, including IKEA. I'm still waiting. Not holding my breath.
That article shows Ikea promising a new "smart homes" unit -- but with no mention of investments in wondrous smart chair technologies.

So the original submission ends by asking how we can bring about such a smart chair revolution?

option8 ((Slashdot reader #16,509) writes: TL;DR: Mining Bitcoin on a 1MHz 8-bit processor will cost you more than the world's combined economies, and take roughly 256 trillion years.
"But it could happen tomorrow. It's a lottery, after all," explains the blog post (describing this mad scientist as a hardware hacker and "self-taught maker", determined to mine bitcoin "in what must be the slowest possible way. I call it 8BITCOIN....")

There's also a Twitch.TV stream, with some appropriate 8-bit music, and the blog post ends by including his own bitcoin address, "If you feel like you absolutely must throw some money at me and this project."

"Upon doing some research, I found that, not only were other 8-bit platforms being put to the task, but other, even more obscure and outdated hardware. An IBM 1401 from the 1960s, a rebuilt Apollo Guidance Computer, and even one deranged individual who demonstrated the hashing algorithm by hand. It turns out, those examples all come from the same deranged individual, Ken Shirriff."

YouTube is making a change to its copyright enforcement policies around music used in videos, which may result in an increased number of blocked videos in the shorter term -- but overall, a healthier ecosystem in the long-term. From a report: Going forward, copyright owners will no longer be able to monetize creator videos with very short or unintentional uses of music via YouTube's "Manual Claiming" tool. Instead, they can choose to prevent the other party from monetizing the video or they can block the content. However, YouTube expects that by removing the option to monetize these sorts of videos themselves, some copyright holders will instead just leave them alone. "One concerning trend we've seen is aggressive manual claiming of very short music clips used in monetized videos. These claims can feel particularly unfair, as they transfer all revenue from the creator to the claimant, regardless of the amount of music claimed," explained YouTube in a blog post.

To be clear, the changes only involve YouTube's Manual Claiming tool which is not how the majority of copyright violations are handled today. Instead, the majority of claims are created through YouTube's Content ID match system. This system scans videos uploaded to YouTube against a database of files submitted to the site by copyright owners. Then, when a match is found, the copyright holder owner can choose to block the video or monetize it themselves, and track the video's viewership stats.