The secret environmental cost hiding inside your smart home device

Conceptual illustration showing a home in the hallway of a large server room. There is a haze coming from the servers to imply the environmental footprint of having a smart home. — Illustration by Nico H. Brausch for The Verge

Vijay Janapa Reddi runs a lab at Harvard University where he and his team attempt to solve some of the computer world’s greatest challenges. As a specialist in artificial intelligence systems, the technology he studies even follows him home, where his two daughters love to talk to their Amazon Alexa.

“They put a person inside that black box,” Janapa Reddi likes to joke with his four-year-old.

Janapa Reddi may be teasing when he tells his daughter a person is squeezed into their machine, but isn’t that where we’re headed? Smart home devices may never host a miniature human being inside of them — this isn’t that one episode of Black Mirror — but as the AI ecosystem evolves, voice assistants will quickly begin to feel hyperrealistic....

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Pandora Stories lets artists add commentary to their own playlists

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Android Addition Opens FIDO Password Killer to Billions

The FIDO Alliance hammered another nail into the passwords coffin with the announcement that devices running Android 7.0 or higher will be compatible with FIDO2. Certification of Android 7.0+ means devices running those versions of Google's mobile operating system will support FIDO2 out of the box or through a software update. FIDO2, introduced last year, provides a FIDO Web authentication standard that combines the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Authentication specification with FIDO's Client-to-Authenticator protocol. from TechNewsWorld https://ift.tt/2GQVG4f

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