Science will be the master of man

It’s about that time. From July 17 through July 21, Comic-Con International descends on sunny southern California, filling San Diego’s historic Gaslamp Quarter with superheroes, zombies, time travelers, starship pilots, and some of the biggest names in Hollywood. So far, Comic-Con 2019 is shaping up to be a more subdued affair than in years past, with major studios and high-profile films like Sony and Wonder Woman 1984 respectively opting to skip the event. Still, it’s Comic-Con. One thing you can be sure of is that big names and even bigger surprises are bound to pop up over the long weekend. If you want to keep track of all of SDCC’s biggest movie and TV news, these are the panels that you need to follow. Thursday, July 18 Terminator: Dark Fate (11:00 a.m.) The Terminator franchise has received a few reboots over the past few years. Terminator: Dark Fate might be the one that finally sticks. Not only is James Cameron back in a creative role (he’s … [Read more...] about Comic-Con 2019 preview: The biggest movie and TV panels you won’t want to miss

Besides announcing the big winners and unveiling new projects, this year’s Game Awards will also include a slew of yet-to-be-released game demos that will be free on PC, including Spiritfarer, Digital Trends’ E3 Best Visuals award winner. Developed by Thunder Lotus, Spiritfarer has players control Stella, a ferry master who builds a ferry boat and embarks on a journey to explore the world while also befriending and caring for animal spirits before finally releasing them into the afterlife. Spiritfarer blew us away at this year’s E3 because of its unique lighting effects and highly detailed, hand-drawn 2D art style. While no official release date has been announced, Spiritfarer will arrive sometime next year for PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. Game Awards host Geoff Keighley explained in a Medium post earlier this week that for the first time in the show’s history, it will debut The Game Festival. A consumer-focused and digital-only event, … [Read more...] about Play Spiritfarer, our E3 Best Visuals award winner, for free with 12 others

Did you know you can make a deepfake video from the comfort of your own home, or on your phone? Download one of the plethora of face-swap or deepfake apps casually available from your local app store and you too can influence an election. Okay, not really, and we definitely don’t endorse that. But in the hype and concern around deepfake technology, and its very real misuse, the simple truth is that this technology isn’t going away. In fact, it’s going to become as commonplace as Photoshop, especially if the app developers working on deepfake tech have anything to say about it: We could soon see hyper-targeted ads with our own faces on them. Roman Mogylnyi, the CEO of RefaceAI, a startup based in Ukraine, said they have been working with machine learning since 2011, and pivoted to making their own apps based on deepfake tech in 2014. ReFaceAI has already released a photo-deepfake app called Reflect, and is on the verge of releasing both their own video-deepfake … [Read more...] about Why deepfakes will soon be as commonplace as Photoshop

Amazon Ring fixed a security vulnerability in its Ring doorbell last month that could have potentially allowed hackers access to homeowners’ networks through Wi-Fi passwords. In December 2019, Ring faced more security issues when a family from Tennessee claimed that a man hacked into their Amazon Ring security camera. The hacker reportedly used it to talk to an 8-year-old girl in her bedroom. Turns out the whole thing may not have been hacking, but just poor password use by the owner. When Digital Trends reached out to Ring about the most recent incident, a representative had this to say: “Customer trust is important to us and we take the security of our devices seriously. Our security team has investigated this incident and we have no evidence of an unauthorized intrusion or compromise of Ring’s systems or network. Recently, we were made aware of an incident where malicious actors obtained some Ring users’ account credentials (e.g., username and password) from … [Read more...] about How to prevent your Ring smart cameras from being hacked