Maximum PC - USA (2019-06)

(Antfer) #1

maximumpc.com JUN 2019 MAXIMUMPC 13


AMAZON HAS BEEN employing thousands
of people to listen to recordings of other
people talking to Alexa. They review up to
a thousand recordings a day, transcribing
the intended commands of people all
around the world as they try to get Alexa
to do what they ask. Approximately 10
percent of the recordings have been
made when Alexa has been accidentally
activated. Workers have heard all sorts
of private details, from the mundane to
a suspected assault. Inevitably, some
recordings get passed around, either for
clarification or because they’re amusing.
Surprised? You shouldn’t be. Alexa’s
translation service is powered by AI,
which needs training, and the best way to
do this is with a little help from humans.
Understandably, Amazon has kept quiet
about this “snooping.” It claims it only
uses a small sample of recordings taken
after Alexa has been activated, they are
chosen at random, and no identifying data
is revealed. However, the recordings do
have an account ID, and the device serial
number, along with a first name, so not
exactly anonymous.
Apple and Google are busy doing the
same thing for their voice assistants.
And this isn’t the first time Amazon has
been caught being careless with people’s
private lives; it did a similar thing with
recordings made by “smart” doorbells.
When you invite Alexa into your home,
you sign away the right not to be recorded,
and used in a AI training session. You
can opt out if you have the smartphone
version, by choosing not to “Help Develop
New Features” in the privacy settings.
This should stop anything being passed
on, but the wording is non-specific. –CL

Does Alexa do more than
obey your commands?

AMAZON IS


LISTENING TO


YOU, LITERALLY


New Ryzen


Pro Chips
While we wait for AMD’s Zen 2
core, the company is filling out
its second-gen range. There are
four new Pro mobile chips using
the Picasso core, a 12nm Zen+
micro-architecture coupled with
Radeon Vega graphics. All have
a commendably low TDP of 15W.
The best is the Ryzen 7 Pro 3700U,
which boasts four cores, eight
threads, and runs at a base clock
of 2.3GHz, with a boost to 4GHz.
Below this comes a Ryzen 5 Pro
3500U, similar but slower, and a
Ryzen 3 Pro 3300U, which loses
the multithreading. At the bottom
we have an Athlon Pro 300U, with
two cores, although this does get
multithreading back. Nothing on
pricing as we write. –CL

Microsoft


Browser


Goes Chrome


Microsoft has built its new Edge
browser around the open-source
Chromium code. Beta testers have
been impressed. It has integrated
Microsoft’s technology neatly,
and looks like something halfway
between Edge and Chrome. It
supports Chrome extensions, as
well as having its own. It’s also
fast, something Edge struggled to
be, and all the problems around
visiting Google sites are gone.
It has kept a good deal of Edge’s
power efficiency, and touchscreen
abilities, too. It has also replaced
or removed over 50 Google
Services. Not quite the best of both
worlds yet, but it’s promising. –CL

Xbox Goes Disc-Free


MICROSOFT’S NEW Xbox One S All-Digital Edition has something missing: a disc
drive. Other than that, it’s an Xbox One S. The $249 box comes with Minecraft, Forza
Horizon 3, and Sea of Thieves pre-installed, but pretty much obliges you to pay full
price for digital downloads (no more borrowing or buying used). An Xbox Games Pass
at $9.99 a month will get you a decent library of games, and you’ll need another 10
bucks for an Xbox Live Gold subscription for the full multiplayer experience. The Xbox
Game Pass Ultimate is due later this year at $14.99 a month, which includes both.
Going disc-free isn’t a surprise—digital sales are now over 80 percent of all games
sales. There isn’t the money in making the console hardware either; getting people on
a subscription is where the real payoff is. Microsoft is also working on a pure game
streaming service, akin to Google’s Stadia: project xCloud.
Meanwhile, we await the next generation of consoles, the Xbox Two and
PlayStation 5, or whatever they’re called when they arrive next year. Microsoft plans
two new boxes, one a traditional console, the other designed to stream games, with
some processing done locally, but the bulk of the game running on a cloud server.
Sony’s new machine gets a custom set of silicon from AMD based around a Zen 2
Ryzen chip, coupled to a Navi GPU, which will support ray tracing. There’s also a
bespoke SSD system, which means minimal loading times. It all sounds good so far.
This pair will probably be the last generation of “traditional” consoles, where you
can buy a hard copy of a game and actually own it. We should know a lot more about
both after this year’s E3 show. It’s gearing up to be another head-on fight. –CL


We are listening, and we may be letting
somebody else listen, too.
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