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Microsoft is said to be creating a new Mixed Reality Studio and bringing together a number of its AR/VR/MR assets into a new organization. Microsoft is moving around a bunch of its augmented reality/mixed reality/virtual reality assets as one of its regular reorgs. The details of this latest shuffle  come courtesy of Brad Sams at Petri.com. Apparently, Microsoft has created a new Mixed Reality Studio that replaces its former Evoke Studio and other of its AR/VR/MR products, including Paint 3D, Mixed Reality Viewer and Remix3D. (Microsoft refers to these AR/VR/MR software assets as EDM, or "Every Day Magic," Sams says.) Evoke Studio was formerly the domain of Corporate Vice President Chris Pratley and was part of VP Kudo Tsunoda's Windows App Studios unit. Pratley was in charge of a team of artists, data scientists, and others working on "new digital memory and video storytelling" for Windows 10 and other platforms that involved mixed reality, deep learn...

Under the expanded partnership, Salesforce also names IBM a preferred cloud services provider, and IBM names Salesforce as its preferred customer engagement platform. IBM and Salesforce announced Friday an  expansion  of their strategic partnership that brings more data integration to companies so they can better interact with customers.Under the extended partnership, IBM will build a Watson app for Salesforce's Quip Live Apps, launching AI tools on the collaborative document platform. Salesforce introduced Live Apps in November 2017 to be embedded directly into any Quip document. IBM will utilize its Watson platform within Quip documents to "increase the effectiveness of sales teams across the lifecycle of an opportunity." Further, IBM Watson and Salesforce Service Cloud Einstein will be brought together and deliver AI-driven recommendations so companies can create personalized interactions based on the latest call or message they had with a cus...

Instead, the law ministry proposes the setting up of a government committee to assess the impact of "online falsehoods" in the country and how it should respond. Singapore is considering plans to set up a special ministerial committee to assess the impact of "online falsehoods" and recommend how it should respond, potentially backtracking on a previous proposal to introduce legislation. The country's Ministry of Communications and Information and Ministry of Law released a "green paper" detailing the   need to establish   a "select committee", comprising several MPs. This would be presented in parliament on January 10, which then would decide on whether one should be created to "study the problem of deliberate online falsehoods" and offer recommendations on how the country should respond. Select committees are seldom formed in Singapore, where they are  described as "ad hoc"  and serve to review details of bil...

A serious security memory problem in all Intel chips has led to Linux's developers resetting how to deal with memory. The result will be a more secure, but -- as Linux creator Linus Torvalds says -- slower operating system. Long ago,  Intel made a design mistake in its 64-bit chips   -- and now, all Intel-based operating systems and their users must pay the price. Linux's developers saw this coming early on and patched Linux to deal with it.  That's the good news. The bad news is it will cause at least a 5-percent performance drop. Applications may see far more serious performance hits. The popular PostgreSQL database is estimated to see at least  a 17-percent slowdown. How bad will it really be? asked Linux's creator Linus Torvalds, who said: "There's no one number. It will depend on your hardware and on your load. I think 5 percent for a load with a noticeable kernel component (e.g. a database) is roughly in the right ballpark. But if you do...

Organizations in the region are under pressure to increase their digital portfolios, says IDC research. Spending related to digital transformation in Latin American markets should reach $57 billion within the next two years, according to research by analyst firm IDC. This represents about 40 percent of all information technology spend, as companies in the region accelerate the delivery of projects related to digitizing products, services and back-office functionality. Noteworthy progress will be seen in the retail, banking and insurance sectors, whereas the public sector will be lagging behind. In terms of specific technologies that will be commonly seen in the digital transformation projects led by Latin firms, about a third of such initiatives will be using artificial intelligence (AI) technology, says IDC, with half of all apps powered by AI. In addition, customer service bots will deal with more than half of all consumers in the region, according to the research. A ...

Near-infrared image trickery can allow an attacker to bypass Window 10 Hello face authentication. Security researchers are urging Windows 10 users to update their systems to prevent attackers from using a printed headshot to bypass Windows Hello facial authentication. Researchers from German pen-testing firm SYSS reported that Windows 10 systems that have not yet received the recent Fall Creators Update are vulnerable to a "simple spoofing attack using a modified printed photo of an authorized person". The attack works against multiple versions of Windows 10 and different hardware.The researchers tested the spoofing attack against a Dell Latitude with a LilBit USB camera and against a Surface Pro 4 running various versions of Windows 10, going back to the one of the first releases, version 1511. SYSS claims the spoofing attack was successful on a Surface Pro 4 running version 1607 of Windows 10, the Anniversary Update rolled out in summer 2016, even with Microsoft...

Google will turn its attention to ARCore that doesn't require special hardware. Google  announced  Friday it will stop supporting Project Tango, its first augmented reality platform for developers, on March 1, 2018. The end of Project Tango comes as Google focuses on ARCore to build AR apps and games for Android devices. "As we focus on bringing augmented reality to the entire Android ecosystem with ARCore, we're turning down support of Tango. We thank the incredible community of developers who made such progress with Tango over the last three years. We look forward to continuing the journey with you on ARCore," a Google spokeswoman. Project Tango was launched in 2014 to enable mobile devices to detect their position relative to their world around them without using GPS. A developer phone and tablet were launched by Google to spur app development for 3D mobile sensing experiences. Lenovo also launched a Project Tango-based phone, ...

Both Houses have passed legislation extending anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing regulation to digital currency exchanges. The Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (Austrade) will be monitoring cryprocurrency exchanges after the Australian Senate passed the  Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Amendment Bill 2017  on Thursday. The amendment bill, which was introduced in August, was approved by the House of Representatives on Wednesday, and took the Senate one day to pass. Under the amended legislation, digital currency exchange providers will be required to enroll with Austrac and register on the Digital Currency Exchange Register, the government agency now maintains. Exchanges will also need to adopt and maintain a program to identify, mitigate, and manage the money laundering and terrorism financing risks they may face. Similar to a bank, the exchange must also identify and verify the identities of their cu...

The browser maker has collected nearly 500 hours of speech to help voice-recognition projects get off the ground. Mozilla has released its Common Voice collection, which contains almost 400,000 recordings from 20,000 people, and is claimed to be the second-largest voice dataset publicly available. The voice samples in the collection were obtained from Mozilla's  Common Voice  project, which allowed users via an iOS app or website to donate their utterances. It is hoped that creating a large public dataset will allow for better voice-enabled applications. "One reason so few services are commercially available is a lack of data," Mozilla senior vice president of emerging technologies Sean White said in a  blog post . "Startups, researchers, or anyone else who wants to build voice-enabled technologies need high-quality, transcribed voice data on which to train machine-learning algorithms. Right now, they can only access fairly limited data sets." At...

Some 87 percent of IT decision makers in Singapore say machine learning will speed up decision-making process as well as facilitate automation in security operations. Just 32 percent of organisations in Singapore currently tap machine learning, although 52 percent believe such tools' ability to make complex decisions is imperative to the success of their business. A further 87 percent said greater automation brought about by machine learning would speed up decision-making process, while 80 percent said it would improve accuracy of such decisions, revealed a  survey by ServiceNow . Conducted by Oxford Economics, the study polled 500 CIOs across 11 countries, including 91 from three Asia-Pacific markets: Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand. Ten percent of the global sample were from Singapore. ServiceNow touted machine learning as software that analysed and improved its own performance without direct human intervention, enabling it to make increasingly complex decisions...