Outdoor discos to kitsch schnitzel ads: Twitter account relives the Soviet era Cold war 2.0: how Russia and the west reheated a historic struggle

In a one-minute video snippet unearthed by the new online project Soviet Visuals, hundreds of people wearing sailor hats and 80s shell suits dance at an outdoor disco in the Russian city of Ufa.

Shared as part of the project’s bid to celebrate the culture and aesthetics of the Soviet Union, the video was retweeted more than 1,500 times.

The Soviet Visuals project chimes with a growing trend for imagery from the USSR, as everyone from the British Science Museum to London’s inaugural Design Biennale celebrates Soviet nostalgia, with fashion labels offering Lenin-inspired lines and Soviet-style cafes in Russia serving traditional food in traditional surroundings.

The project, which started on Twitter and now has a Facebook and Instagram account, is curated by Varia Bortsova, who was born in Moscow in 1990, a year before the union dissolved.

Bortsova says that many of the images she shares allow younger people, who didn’t experience life under communism, to enjoy the Soviet aesthetic.

And while a disco clip may be a surefire online success, Bortsova says the community also responds well to more controversial topics – especially anything that touches on the Soviet disdain for religion and the American enemy.

While religion was never outlawed by the USSR, the state’s ideological opposition was evident in many of its propaganda products, such as one image of an anti-religion book tweeted by Bortsova in early October.

Another picture from a 1933 book shows a church and its clergymen being mown down by a massive tractor adorned with a hammer and sickle. A poster, meanwhile, decrees that it is “the sacred duty of honest people to save the the children from the darkness of the church”.

With Russia currently embroiled in an international row over its military intervention in Syria and allegations that the Kremlin has been trying to influence the US presidential elections by hacking into the Democratic party’s emails, relations between the west and the Russia are at a post-cold war low.

So, says Bortsova, when the account shares images that showcase the historical propaganda war between the Soviets and western governments, “people make a connection to what is happening today”.

Bortsova says that one of her favourite finds is a poster of Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin claiming that he can find no evidence of God in space.

“The space race was so key to the regime’s propaganda that you’d __have a vacuum cleaners, fridges, radios all shaped like spaceships,” she says.

The project also chronicles the fashion and trends behind the iron curtain in the 70s and 80s, where denim was a coveted item and western brands were almost impossible to purchase.

And while some of the sports-luxe outfits from the Ufa disco wouldn’t be out of place on this year’s catwalks (or in east London’s pubs), photos of models dressed in satin kimonos posing with Father Christmas __have a distinctly Soviet feel.

As does this Estonian TV advert for chicken schnitzel, in which models writhe around in leopard-print outfits in what appears to be a foil-lined studio:

Bortsova says that Soviet Visuals is not about promoting the Soviet regime. She adds that her followers from the post-Soviet world are “nostalgic, but in a good way”.

Soviet Visuals’ Twitter account has now amassed 50,000 followers, with many in the community keen to unearth and share their own Soviet memories with the account.

One man even got in touch to see if he could set up his own Twitter feed sharing historical images from Azerbaijan. “I said, of course he could,” Bortsova laughs. “This is not the Soviet Union.”

Password not accepted: are biometric checks the answer? Banks' online security is failing customers, says Which? Hacker collects 272m email addresses and passwords, some from Gmail

I’m old enough to remember a life in which you could confidently expect your skill for guessing passwords to be redundant by about the age of nine. That was when your mate down the road finally overcame his love of spy games and his obsessive desire not to allow you past his front door or into his garden shed without you first establishing his favourite crisp flavour. Unfortunately, however, it seems that mate, who subsequently spent his lunch hours in the school’s windowless computer room, up to his knees in punch cards, has long since taken over the world.

Last week, I again found myself in that familiar circle of hell reserved for tired and impatient and forgetful people very close to a deadline. I had already spent way too long trying to remember that week’s combination of password and user name in order to enter a Gmail account – my Gmail account – which I was unaccountably excluded from and to which I needed access in order to open a document that I had to rewrite. Having finally come up with the password – complete with recent mutations of ampersands and exclamation marks and upper and lower case letters and barnacles of numeric additions (first phone number? gym locker combo?) once created on a cheerful whim and now half-forgotten at painful leisure – I was faced with an unexpected conundrum. Six blurred photographs of street scenes flashed up on my screen along with this unwarranted question: “Which of these images contains a shopfront?”

Google’s virtual jobsworth of a security guard clearly wanted to know who exactly it was dealing with (and to collect some more free data for its picture-recognition software). Was I a robot mind myself, intent on hoovering up barnacled passwords? Or was I indeed a tired and impatient and forgetful human being very close to a deadline? In the past, I guess, one or two goes at a Captcha graffiti might __have sufficed, but as machine intelligence has become smarter, a more nuanced capacity was apparently required to establish my human credentials. We might not be good for much these days in Google’s eyes, but we can certainly recognise a shopfront when we see one.

I peered at the photographs on the screen, as if they were exhibits in a William Eggleston show. Some of them were straightforward enough, but one or two undeniably gave me pause. In the background of one picture in particular some warehouse type buildings clearly had floor-to-ceiling glazing but no obvious signage. What to do? Surely the creators of this test wouldn’t expect this level of pictorial analysis – or perhaps that was exactly what they required? If I looked really hard at a certain angle I thought I could make out some shadowy furniture in the window of the warehouse in question. But still it looked more like some kind of out-of-town storage facility than a conventional shop. Taking my life in my hands, I plumped for the “x” indicating “no” and pressed enter. Another six images flashed up, no less complex in their composition than the first set. And again the question: “Which of these images contains a shopfront?” And so the morning ebbed.

Even for the man who is credited with creating the 'user name and password' protocol, the tool has become a curse

A couple of years ago, I visited the headquarters of Google in Palo Alto and talked to Amit Singhal, then head of search, about his vision for the future of our interaction with our uncanny machines. He suggested that the ultimate goal was really something like what you saw in the Star Trek episodes he grew up watching in a village in India. He imagined a near future in which the interface between man and computer would be entirely intuitive and transparent.

“The endgame of this is we want to make it always as natural a thought process as possible,” Singhal said. “We are maniacally focusing on the user to reduce every possible friction point between them, their thoughts and the information they want to find.” I thought of that conversation when I was at San Francisco airport later that day, trying to summon a booking confirmation on my phone and faced with the need to first answer the following questions that might __have been posed by my mate up the road: “Who was your favourite teacher at school?” and “What was the first album you bought?” Frictionless wasn’t the first word that came to mind.

In a recent survey of European workers using IT in their jobs, it was suggested that they spend about 36 minutes a day on “login events”. A number that prompts the thought: they must have got lucky. Over the past decade or two of our digital lives, each of us has built up an average legacy of more than 100 sites and apps requiring passwords for access. As the fraudsters and hackers have got more skilled, so the bar for entry has been set ever higher. The recent added complication that on a “password change event” you cannot choose a password you have used in the past 12 months is another cruel blow to our garbled private mnemonics. In the past year, 55% of people admit to abandoning a login due to a forgotten password and about the same number suggested they had given up on paying for something they wanted to buy online because of the complications of the authentication process.

Even for the man who is credited with creating the “user name and password” protocol, the tool has become a curse. That man is an emeritus professor of MIT, Fernando Corbató, now aged 90. In the early 60s, Corbató was in charge of a massive prototype time-sharing computer at the university called CTSS. The computer was the pioneer of many of the features of digital technology we have come to love – email, instant messaging – and one that we do not. Because of the shared nature of CTSS it was decided that researchers should have their own accounts so that their work did not overlap. A simple name and password code was devised to create a degree of privacy.

In 2014, Corbató gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal in which he acknowledged that he had inadvertently made a “sorry that password has not been recognised” monster. “Unfortunately, it’s become a kind of a nightmare with the world wide web,” he said. “I don’t think anybody can possibly remember all the passwords that are issued or set up. That leaves people with two choices. Either you maintain a crib sheet, a mild no-no, or you use some sort of program as a password manager.”

What did Mr Corbató do? the WSJ wondered.

“I have to confess, I used to use a crib sheet,” he said. “I don’t think I’m guarding any great secrets. Three typed pages. Probably 150 passwords over the years.”

This 50-year-old technology has long been showing its age – despite the levels of complexity there are major password breaches reported weekly – but it has proved hard to replace. Currently, there are many companies competing to create a new form of universal open sesame that will make all those password reminders redundant. Google, Facebook and Apple are inevitably leading this effort, though many businesses are reluctant to hand over their authentication processes to the data-loving giant, which gives an opportunity to innovative companies with a focus only on security.

Gigya, based in Palo Alto, provides a platform that manages 1.4bn user identities globally for customers including banks, retailers and the BBC. Most of the login processes they manage are still password-based, but more and more use a form of “social registration” – “Can we use your Facebook or Google details to find out who you are?” – and some use biometric gateways: fingerprints, facial and voice recognition.

Richard Lack, director of sales, expects this latter category to grow exponentially in the next five years. In its somewhat polemical report on the “death of the password” (a demise predicted more often than that of the English novel), Gigya suggested that “more than 770m biometric-enabled applications will be downloaded each year by 2019, as compared with 6m in 2015”.

“We do all hope the password dies quite soon,” Lack says. “And the research supports the fact that most consumers hope that too – 52% would rather have biometric security.” (And, as we all now know, 52% these days means that the people have spoken in unprecedented numbers: biometric means biometric). “A few banks are starting to use it,” Lack says. “HSBC and First Direct are allowing touch ID to log into your account and also some voice recognition. But for the better part we are still using complex passwords.”

Where does the resistance lie?

“I think security is the drag anchor,” Lack suggests. “With most of our customers there is usually a security team that is extremely anxious about adopting new technology. The irony is that, as we know, passwords are far from secure now. The average user has fewer than three passwords and those can very often be easily guessed. They use them on average across 120 online accounts. If a password is guessed on one, then effectively a hacker can completely unlock your digital life.”

A couple of recent changes may accelerate the march of biometrics. The new European directive on payment services mandates that any online payment will require two-factor authentication (usually password plus SMS code), though lobbyists for retailers are currently challenging that. The other engine of change is the fact that two years ago the Apple touch recognition interface was made available to anyone who wants to use it. The first adopters have been banks because they have huge costs on call centres, specifically for password resets. “Touch is anyway far more secure than anything that has gone before,” Lack argues. “We expect all banks to adopt biometrics in the next couple of years.”

The other advance is in using network effects for identity management – a pooling of your identity data: “On the horizon is the capacity that when security is breached in one place the network immediately knows about it,” Lack says. “It’s like an immune response. Where one customer detects that I have had three failed password attempts it notifies everyone else in the cloud and says this user needs to step up authentication or have their account locked. That’s a massive benefit for security teams. That will drag them toward cloud-based security and biometric authentication.”

It does sound like a major step forward for security teams, if somewhat less so for users who will presumably suddenly be shut out from their online lives, although perhaps only until they have swiped a finger.

The company ThreatMetrix has been working in this latter area for a decade and 30,000 websites and apps use its technology, which is invisible to the customer. Its solutions director, Stephen Moody, says: “The challenge is that you can’t really have a central store of biometric data because of the privacy implications. It needs to remain anonymous. In our view, the key additional security measure you need is what we call ‘ongoing behavioural analysis’, which secures all the weak points in registration.”

To this end, ThreatMetrix has built an anonymised network called the “digital identity network”, which already sits on websites and mobile apps and is enabled by cookies. This network monitors every account transaction you make, anonymously. “We don’t know who you are but we tokenise various aspects of your behaviour and we correlate that together,” Moody says.

What kind of aspects of behaviour?

“Simple things. For example, when I go about the internet I use several devices. Maybe a couple of laptops, two phones, and I tend to use these machines to connect to the internet in different ways and from different locations. I have a VPN at work, I have Sky broadband at home. So over time I have a clear pattern of behaviour. Do I tend to have flash-enabled or is it turned off? The system looks at all that and correlates it with my different email addresses for example, work and home, the credit cards I have associated with those accounts and so on. Every time we see an event, we are saying, ‘Does this interaction look consistent with what we know of this person’s behaviour? Do you usually log on to your bank account in this way from this location?’ If you do, you get a positive trust score. If not, there will be an alert.” Over time, your anonymous security profile will only get stronger, Moody suggests, making it easier and easier to know for sure it is you doing what you are doing.

Phil Dunkelberger is the CEO of a company called Nok Nok. Speaking on the phone from California, he inevitably asks me: “If I say Nok Nok, you say?”

“Who’s there?” I reply dutifully.

Nok Nok has added an extra twist to these future scenarios. It is Dunkelberger’s belief that your phone will increasingly become your gateway to much of the internet. If you have it on your person and you are biometrically logged in, that will be enough to enable forms of access without password issues.

“One of the companies we work with allows you to use your phone to open the electronic lock as you move inside the perimeter of the building they have ‘geo-fenced’. You don’t have to log in to anything, as long as you have your phone with you. It logs you in to machines, the assembly line. You have a strong authenticator. The biometric is the phone itself. If at any point the system suggests it doesn’t think it is you, it can prompt you to swipe your finger. It’s like keeping your front door keys with you.”

The other most requested service Nok Nok has is for face or “selfie recognition”, says Dunkelberger, “partly because the whole world is selfie mad”. The technology has overcome the teething problem of people bypassing the security test by simply holding up a photograph of a face for recognition access. “We have this thing we call liveness,” Dunkelberger says. “You are asked to blink your eyes and nod your head and the software can read that. It works well in good lighting. It’s more challenging in a shadowy area, but the cameras are getting better. That is coming. Yesterday on the east coast I was in five places that were asking, ‘When can we have picture modality?’” The answer, he says, was soon.

In the meantime, we are left with the last knockings of passwords that accumulate their unusual characters by the day. Or, maybe for some of us, perhaps they do not. Every year, SplashData compiles a list of the millions of stolen passwords made public in the past 12 months, then sorts them in order of popularity. And every year the top two passwords remain unchanged: “123456” always comes in at number one and “password” stubbornly retains its runner-up spot. Not far behind is a login that sounds quite a lot like a cry for help: “letmein”. You can add exclamation marks as required.

Sun, surf and low rents: why Lisbon could be the next tech capital Startups abandon Tech City as commercial rents soar

Lisbon’s 25 April bridge, a naggingly familiar span of red metal suspended between the Tagus and a bright blue October sky, has long borne a symbolic weight to rival the tonnage of cars and trains that passes over it every day.

When it was completed, 50 years ago, the bridge was named after Portugal’s dictator, António de Oliveira Salazar. In 1974, four years after his death, it was rebaptised to commemorate the day on which the Carnation revolution erupted to unshackle the country from almost half a century of authoritarian rule.

Today the Ponte 25 de Abril, with its useful and more than passing resemblance to the Golden Gate bridge, is being invoked to represent yet another shift in the capital’s long and turbulent history – as it tries to reinvent itself as Europe’s leading tech hub.

Even if the comparisons with San Francisco are fanciful – and, frankly, extend little beyond the fact that each has a red bridge, hills, trams and good surfing – Lisbon has moved significantly closer to fulfilling its ambitions by winning the race to host this year’s Web Summit.

The event, held in Dublin for the past seven years, has been described as “Glastonbury for geeks” or, to the more serious minded, “Davos for geeks”. But however gleefully geeky the conference may be, it is also a lucrative and highly influential affair.

The Lisbon conference will see up to 50,000 people descending on the city to meet, network and listen to speakers ranging from the founder of Tinder to the director general of the World Trade Organisation, and from the technology chief of Facebook to the footballer-cum-investor Ronaldinho.

Web Summit 2016, which runs from 7-10 November, is estimated to be worth €200m (£180m) to Lisbon’s economy. Equally, if not more, valuable is the boost it will give the city’s reputation.

Cheap rents, a thriving cultural scene, ludicrous levels of sunshine and a high quality of life may __have drawn young talent from all over the world over the past few years, but the country is still overshadowed by the 2007-2009 financial crisis and recent political upheaval, and economic growth has been slower than expected.

Little wonder, then, that the government is not averse to the San Francisco comparisons. Manuel Caldeira Cabral, Portugal’s economy minister, spent Wednesday afternoon listening to the concerns of dozens of young startups at an event in the Electricity Museum, which overlooks the Ponte 25 de Abril. He smiles at the parallels.

“I think California is sunny and it has a bridge just like ours,” he said. “The idea we want to promote is that we also __have an economy based on knowledge and an entrepreneurial community that is growing.”

While the government is building financial instruments to boost the startup scene and attracting companies from the UK, US, Netherlands and Germany, said Caldeira Cabral, Lisbon was playing a key role in the country’s economic regeneration.

“We’re attracting them for a lot of reasons: because we have a financing system, a very competitive fiscal setting for startups; but also because of the lifestyle and quality of life that entrepreneurs find here.”

Like many of her compatriots, Ridhi Kantelal, a 26-year-old entrepreneur, had left Portugal to study and work abroad. But a visit to a hardware hackathon in her home town persuaded her to leave her job as a strategy consultant in London and return home and build Noxidity, a startup that uses smart sensors to predict the corrosion of industrial machinery.

“I realised how much great tech talent there is,” she said. “Normally in London at a hackathon, out of 50 people, you’d get 10 developers and the rest would be business people. Here, out of those 50, only two would be from a business background and one of them would have an engineering background. Everyone else would be an engineer.”

She says Lisbon’s appeal extends beyond its human capital. “Everyone speaks English, there’s great tech talent, and the cost of living is so much cheaper than London. On what I was paying for rent in London, I can live here and afford one or two trips to London every month. The weather is nice, the food is nice and the people are nice.”

But it is not only returning exiles who are being drawn to Lisbon. Former Downing Street adviser and tech entrepreneur Rohan Silva, who now runs the creative space and cultural venue Second Home, has succumbed to Lisbon’s charms so entirely that he is opening a Lisbon branch in December.

You can get up from your desk at lunchtime and be at the beach in 15 minutes – that’s much more LA than San Francisco

Rohan Silva

The epiphany came, as such things often do, at 4am after a long night’s drinking last summer. “It was just a very human response of, ‘Wow! This place is really cool. You can stay out all night and drink without any hassle.’ The creative scene is just great.

“What it really reminded me of, without sounding very old, was 2010 when I started the Tech City initiative – for the same reason. There was this little scene emerging and it just felt incredibly vibrant and really interesting, and that something big could happen. ”

He takes issue with the San Francisco comparisons, which he dismisses as “rubbish” and a little myopic. “Lisbon is way, way more interesting than San Francisco because it’s not a one-industry town. I think the parallel is much more LA, actually, in terms of lifestyle and vibe.”

To underline the point, Silva says that members of Second Home in Lisbon will enjoy the services of a beaten-up old VW camper van that will whisk them from their offices to their surfboards. “You can get up from your desk at lunchtime and be at the beach in 15 minutes – and that’s much more LA than slightly nerdy San Francisco.”

He contrasts Lisbon’s creative and technological ascendancy with London, where young people are thwarted by the high cost of living, the lack of housing and the erosion of the city’s nightlife. “It’s very, very hard to be a 23-year-old graphic designer or a 25-year-old coder and live in the kind of places where people want to live in London. We’ve made that much too difficult and also with music venues and clubs closing in London, it is, in various ways, at risk of being less fun.”

João Vasconcelos, Portugal’s industry secretary and a former executive director of incubator Startup Lisboa, is also sceptical about glib labels. “Everyone is trying to define what’s happening in Lisbon right now. For some it’s Berlin with sun; for others it’s the new Silicon Valley. It’s none of those: this is Portugal and this is Lisbon.”

For him, the city’s resurgence is part of a long tradition of building international ties, a tradition interrupted by dictatorship, revolution and, more recently, by economic crisis.

“We have a 500-year history of dealing with different cultures and different people: you’ll find Portuguese-speaking countries on all continents and Portuguese citizens living on all continents,” he said. “It’s something we’ve been doing – and doing well – since the 16th century. And we’re doing it again with startups and entrepreneurship.”

Many of the startup people who gathered on Wednesday to talk to the government welcome its efforts to build the tech economy but feel more could be done. Joana Rafael of Sensei, an analytics startup, says Portugal’s archaic and bureaucratic labour legislation needs to be overhauled, and tax breaks offered to entrepreneurs.

“As a startup, it would be good to get benefits when you hire highly qualified human resources in terms of social security and salary taxation,” she said. “We are investing in creating a product that has no revenue for the first stages of its development, so that would be an awesome support instead of just relying on public funding.”

Francisco Mendes, who was unemployed during the economic crisis, is now the co-founder of Beeverycreative, which makes small, low-price desktop 3D printers. He is cautiously optimistic that, with the right support, Lisbon and Portugal could be on the verge of a profound transformation.

“We are quite small but there’s energy and new thinking and new technology here and it’s really happening,” he said.“We are not Silicon Valley in size, but maybe in dynamism we’re like it was 20 or 30 years ago.”

For now, Lisbon’s hilly, cobbled streets retain their shabby charm and the paint is still peeling from many of its old and beautiful buildings. But the cranes swinging through the skies above are beacons of change.

Kantelal’s optimism is tempered by realism, a quiet patriotism, and an eye on the future. “I don’t think Lisbon will be San Francisco. It’s going to have an identity of its own. – and hopefully it will never become as expensive as San Francisco.”

WhatsApp asked by European regulators to pause sharing user data with Facebook

WhatsApp has been warned by the pan-European privacy watchdogs over its sharing of information with Facebook and asked to pause the transfer of personal data.

The gathered European Union data protection authorities, collectively known as the Article 29 Working Party, said they had serious concerns over WhatsApp’s recent privacy policy change and the sharing of user phone numbers with its parent company Facebook.

Article 29 said that it had “requested WhatsApp to communicate all relevant information to the Working Party as soon as possible and urged the company to pause the sharing of users’ data until the appropriate legal protections could be assured” in a letter sent to the messaging service.

A WhatsApp spokesperson said: “We’ve had constructive conversations, including before our update, and we remain committed to respecting applicable law.”

The data protection authorities also wrote to Yahoo over its massive data breach that exposed the email credentials of 500 million users in 2014, as well as its scanning of customers’ incoming emails for specific information provided by US intelligence officials.

Article 29 requested information on all aspects of the data breach, that Yahoo must notify users its “adverse effects” and commanded it to cooperate with all “upcoming national data protection authorities’ enquiries and/or investigations”.

In a statement regarding the company’s email scanning for US intelligence agencies Article 29 said: “Yahoo was invited to provide information on the legal basis and the compatibility with EU law of any such activity.”

The Working Party will discuss the Yahoo and WhatsApp privacy cases in November.

The letters come as European nations express concern over WhatsApp’s changes and Yahoo’s mishandling of its hack and the revelations over US intelligence operations.

Germany recently ordered Facebook to stop collecting WhatsApp user data, and to delete any that it had already acquired, while the United Nations warned that Yahoo’s actions raised serious human rights concerns.

• WhatsApp to give users’ phone numbers to Facebook for targeted ads
  

Werner Herzog: 'My fake selves have some unifying sensory organ' Into the Inferno review – Werner Herzog peers into the depths of the volcano Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World review – Herzog's sombre look at the digital revolution

The man sitting opposite could be a pugnacious newcomer pitching for a job. He lays out his credentials just in case I don’t know and recounts scenes from his films which I already know off by heart. He claims he performs a magic with cinema which no one else can. They should put him in a straitjacket, his work is that wild. Building to a climax, he says: “I want to throw my arm around your shoulder and take you to the realm of complete poetry and fantasy.” I think he’s speaking metaphorically. Then again, maybe not.

It’s tempting to cast Werner Herzog as the last of cinema’s old-style swashbucklers; the sort of intrepid adventurer who makes movies in the way other men might go prospecting for gold or sail off in search of the Northwest Passage. It’s a view the man himself does little to discourage. Pour him some coffee and he’ll pour out his war stories. He’ll mention (surely for the umpteenth time) how he once hauled a steamship over a mountain in Peru (for 1982’s Fitzcarraldo). Or how he hypnotised his entire cast (1976’s Heart of Glass). Or how he’s supposedly the only film-maker to __have shot on all seven continents. He’d be utterly exasperating if he weren’t so entertaining, if his films weren’t so good, and if all his tall tales were not by and large true.

His latest documentary, Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World, sends Herzog travelling to the lawless frontier of the virtual world. He comes cantering through the badlands of online forums, robot laboratories and hacker conventions, firing questions as he goes. The trip is typically idiosyncratic, brazenly subjective. Out of the blue, for instance, the director spins an exuberant fantasy of a futuristic Chicago that is completely abandoned except for a few Buddhist monks. On another occasion, wandering the campus at UCLA, he can’t resist providing a review of the decor: “The corridors here look repulsive.”

I would be cautious about assigning qualities like good or bad to the internet. We don’t do it with electricity, do we?

Off camera, too, the man has an authoritative snap that verges on the comic. He’s as capricious as a medieval king. His precise German accent lends every pronouncement an Old Testament thunder. His sentences swing from chuckling amusement to inexplicable fury. I __have the sense he’s at his happiest when his thoughts have free rein. He can’t be doing with interruptions or pesky attempts to pin him like a butterfly. “Your premise is partially true,” he tells me at one point, “and fundamentally wrong.”

Herzog insists he has nothing against the internet, per se. It’s just that it is currently experiencing a boom time, “like American cars in Elvis time”, and that we need to learn how to use it responsibly. One woman in his film – a bereaved mother who experienced horrific online abuse – regards social media as the embodiment of all evil. Herzog sympathises with her but doesn’t see it that way. “I would be cautious about assigning qualities like good or bad to the internet. We don’t do it with electricity, do we?”

In the past, Herzog’s movies have taken him up the Amazon river (Aguirre, Wrath of God), across the Antarctic (Encounters at the End of the World) and through the bear-infested woods of Alaska (Grizzly Man). I’ve just watched his other new documentary, the excellent Into the Inferno, in which he hunkers down at the edge of a belching volcano. Time and again, his work depicts a natural world which is beautiful and terrible and ultimately uncaring. I wonder if the virtual world is really any different.

I have a presence on the internet. It’s fake. Somebody answers. There are voice impersonators.

Herzog frowns at the notion. “No,” he says. “Because it is not independent of us. When we speak of the horrors of the internet, it’s not the internet we are talking about – it’s humans. And human nature manifests itself in a way we have never seen before, because it’s anonymous and it’s on a massive scale. But it is not like nature, that is not it at all. It is human beings using the tool of the internet.”

The director turned 74 in September. He accepts that this makes him a stranger in a strange land. He’d rather speak face-to-face than pick up a smartphone. He’d rather walk to the shop as opposed to using satnav. But he admits that technology has its uses. Herzog is based in LA and so he will often email his brother, who lives in Vienna. Alternatively he might use Google for what he refers to as “superficial research”. Just the other day he was looking up neolithic menhirs in Brittany; sending pictures to a friend. He says: “The menhirs break into very interesting shapes.”

And yet while Herzog may be keen to hold the internet at arm’s length, the internet – for its part – rushes to embrace him. His distinctive persona has inspired a rash of Twitter handles and Facebook profiles and a chatbot that advises the user to immediately read a book called The Catalogue of Dwarves by the Poetic Edda.

“Yes,” he says. “I have a presence on the internet – one that I have not encouraged. It’s fake. Somebody answers. There are voice impersonators. So I have had to get acquainted with this very quickly. Representation of self is drastically changing. And of course on Facebook it’s all embellished, stylised selves anyway. But my popularity on the internet has to do with the fact that all of these fake selves somehow recognise each other and have some unifying sensory organ for authenticity.” He chuckles. “So I have no problem with all the impostors. It would be silly to complain. I think I have enough self-irony to understand what’s going on.”

I suggest that in his later years he has become a kind of self-sustaining brand: the archetypal European arthouse director. Most of the people who follow his representatives online have probably never actually sat through one of his films. “No,” he says. “Not true. People actually see my films more now. I get emails from 12 year olds asking about The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser.”

Shot back in 1974, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser is the haunting, fact-based tale of a young outcast, raised in chained isolation before being adopted by 19th-century bourgeois society. Possibly it even reflects Herzog’s own experience. He spent his childhood in the German Alps, without a telephone or running water. Alighting in Munich as an adolescent, he stole his first camera from the local film school. Even today, he seems to pride himself on a primitive purity, a naked curiosity about the world and its people. It’s as if he believes that each production he shoots is the very first film ever made.

He agrees that this mindset is a hangover from his youth. “I had no experience of cinema until I was 11. I didn’t even know cinema existed because I grew up in the mountains of Bavaria, very remote. So I always, from a very young age, had the feeling I had to invent cinema. Even today I feel like the inventor of cinema. Now you have to take that with a grain of salt, because of course I’m not the inventor of cinema. But nonetheless…” He trails off.

The only thing I also wanted to be was a ski-jumper. That was over in a second when my friend had a near-fatal accident

I ask what the catalyst was; what initially made him want to direct. He says he honestly can’t think; most likely the profession chose him. “I love what I do. And I have never been able to learn anything else. A decent profession. The only thing I also wanted to be was an athlete. I wanted to be a ski-jumper. But that was over in a second when my best friend at the time had a near-fatal accident.”

Does he still ski for pleasure? “No,” he says. “Because I had a very serious accident of my own some years ago. And the injuries I suffered are somehow still present.” For some reason this strikes him as funny; he can’t stop giggling. “I shouldn’t fall hard on my left shoulder, for example. I would come apart at the seams. You watch. I would explode!”

The evidence suggests that he’s exploded already. As well as the two documentaries currently doing the rounds, he has an ecological thriller (Salt and Fire) set for imminent release. His workrate, if anything, appears to be speeding up. And that’s reckoning without his vibrant online presence: the Twitterbots and avatars which speak their master’s voice to the world.

“I am becoming, like, an internet meme!” Herzog exclaims at one point and his amusement is such that it makes him choke on his coffee. He’s like a student mastering an exotic language, or a child taking his first steps in a brand new pair of shoes.

• Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World is out now; Into the Inferno is available on Netflix.
  

The Clevo P870DM2 / Mythlogic Phobos 8716 Laptop Review: DTR With GTX 1080

Sometimes there is no substitute for performance. Most of the laptop market is focusing on thin and light designs, with companies attempting to outdo each other by shaving a millimeter or two off of their laptop z-height compared to the competition. But in the Desktop Replacement (DTR) category, there are no such concessions. Clevo is one of the few laptop makers that is in the DTR market, and thanks to the assistance of Mythlogic, we __have the Mythlogic Phobos 8716 DTR for review today. As a Clevo, the model would be P870DM2.

Let’s cut right to the chase. The Mythlogic Phobos 8716 is a beast of a laptop, and really should rarely be used in your lap. It is designed for someone who needs the ultimate performance, but still needs something more portable than a full desktop. This is a 17.3-inch display packed into a chassis that is 47.2 mm thick (1.86”) and weighs in at 5.5 kg (12.13 lbs) with a single GPU. And yes, you can opt for two GPUs, which ups the weight and moves you into the land of ridiculous.

Mythlogic offers a couple of choices of CPU and GPU, but all the CPUs are desktop parts, from the Intel Core i5-6400 65-Watt processor up to the Intel Core i7-6700K 91-Watt processor (as we __have in the review unit). This is the same unlocked quad-core as you would find in any high performance desktop. On the GPU side, the base model is a mere GTX 1070, or step up to the GTX 1080, or either card in SLI. If you get dual GTX 1080 GPUs, be prepared to have two AC outlets handy for the dual 330-Watt AC Adapters. Mythlogic also supports overclocking on all of the components. There are four SODIMM slots for up to 64 GB of DDR4 memory as well. This is well and truly a desktop class computer packed into a (somewhat) portable chassis.

The display options also need mentioning too. The standard panel is a 1920x1080 IPS display with a 120 Hz refresh rate. That should be a very significant upgrade for almost anyone, up from the ubiquitous 60 Hz  laptop displays. They are also offering a 2560x1440 AHVA 120 Hz panel with G-SYNC option, and a 3840x2160 60 Hz AVHA panel which also includes G-SYNC.

Mythlogic Phobos 8716 / Clevo P870DM2
	As Tested: 6700K, 16GB (2x8) 2400 DDR4, 1x1080, 256GB Samsung 950 Pro m.2, 120Hz FHD, $2980 USD
CPU	Intel Core i5-6400, 4C/4T, 2.7-3.3 GHz, 6MB Cache, 65W TDP
	Intel Core i5-6500, 4C/4T, 3.2-3.6 GHz, 6MB Cache, 65W TDP
	Intel Core i5-6600, 4C/4T, 3.3-3.9 GHz, 6MB Cache, 65W TDP
	Intel Core i5-6600K, 4C/4T, 3.5-3.9 GHz, 6MB Cache, 91W TDP
	Intel Core i7-6700, 4C/8T, 3.4-4.0 GHz, 8MB Cache, 65W TDP
	Intel Core i7-6700k, 4C/8T, 4.0-4.2 GHz, 8MB Cache, 91W TDP
GPU	NVIDIA GTX 1070 8GB, 2048 CUDA Cores , 1442 - 1645 (Boost) MHz Also available as 2 x SLI
	NVIDIA GTX 1080 8GB, 2560 CUDA Cores, 1556 - 1733 (Boost) MHz Also available as 2 x SLI
Memory	4 SODIMM Slots, 64 GB Max, up to 3000 MHz
Display	17.3" 1920x1080 IPS 120Hz Optional 2560x1440 AHVA 120 Hz w/G-SYNC Optional 3840x2160 AHVA 100% Adobe RGB w/G-SYNC
Storage	2 x 9.5mm 2.5” SATA 2 x m.2 Slot (SATA or 4xPCIE)
I/O	5 x USB 3.0 Ports (1 x powered USB port, AC/DC) 2 x USB 3.1 / Thunderbolt 3 Port (Type-C) 1 x HDMI 2.0 output Port (with HDCP) 2 x DisplayPort 1.3 output Ports SD Card Slot 1 x Headphone Jack 1 x Microphone Jack 1 x Line-in Jack 1 x S/PDIF (digital) (Shared with headphone jack) 2 x Killer E2400 RJ-45 LAN (10/100/1000Mbps)
Dimensions	428 x 308 x 47.2 mm 16.85 x 12.12 x 1.86 inches
Weight	5.5 kg / 12.13 lbs (single GPU)
Battery	82 Wh, 330W / 230W W AC Adapter
Wireless	Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC8260 2x2:2 with Bluetooth 4.1 Killer Wireless-AC 1535 2x2:2 with Bluetooth 4.1
Price	$2255 - $5000+

There is no shortage of ports, with five USB 3.0 ports, two USB 3.1 Type-C ports with Thunderbolt 3, HDMI 2.0, two DisplayPort 1.3, and separate audio jacks for the headphone, microphone, and line-in. It also features a Killer E2400 Ethernet adapter, and that wired connection can be paired with either the Killer 1535-AC wireless to support Killer’s DoubleShot Pro, or Intel’s Dual Band Wireless-AC 8260 card if you prefer their solution.

With a starting price of $2255, the Mythlogic Phobos could never be considered inexpensive, but on the performance per dollar metric, there are few laptops that offer this kind of performance period, let alone for the price.

Angela Merkel: internet search engines are 'distorting perception'

Angela Merkel has called on major internet platforms to divulge the secrets of their algorithms, arguing that their lack of transparency endangers debating culture.

The German chancellor said internet users had a right to know how and on what basis the information they received via search engines was channelled to them.

Speaking to a media conference in Munich, Merkel said: “I’m of the opinion that algorithms must be made more transparent, so that one can inform oneself as an interested citizen about questions like ‘what influences my behaviour on the internet and that of others?’.

“Algorithms, when they are not transparent, can lead to a distortion of our perception, they can shrink our expanse of information.”

An algorithm is the formula used by a search engine to steer a request for information. They are different for every search engine, highly secret and determine the significance or ranking of a web page.

Merkel has joined a growing number of critics who __have highlighted the dangers of receiving information that confirms an existing opinion or is recommended by people with similar ideas.

“This is a development that we need to pay careful attention to,” she told the conference, adding that a healthy democracy was dependent on people being confronted by opposing ideas.

“The big internet platforms, through their algorithms, __have become an eye of a needle which diverse media must pass through [to access their users],” she said.

There has been increasing concern about so-called filter bubbles and echo chambers – the result of an internet search in which an algorithm supposes the information someone would like to see based on previous searches, as well as information it might have about their location or preferences – in the light of the growing strength of populist movements in Europe, the Brexit vote in the UK and the rise of Donald Trump in the US. This month, President Barack Obama’s former social media adviser Caleb Gardner highlighted the danger of filter bubbles – a phrase invented by the internet activist Eli Pariser.

“More likely than not, you get your news from Facebook,” Gardner told students at Northwestern University in Illinois. “Forty-four per cent of US adults get news on the site, and 61% of millennials … if that doesn’t frighten you, you don’t know enough about Facebook’s algorithm. If you have a parent who’s a Trump supporter, they are seeing a completely different set of news items than you are.”

Merkel will have an eye on next year’s federal election in which she is expected to stand for a fourth term. The concern that the phenomenon of narrow debate which has been seen during the US presidential campaign might be replicated in Germany is one shared across Germany’s established parties.

Merkel called the issue a “challenge not just for political parties but for society as a whole”. If it was unclear what mechanisms were being used, it could “lead to a distortion of how people perceive things”, she said.

Thomas Jarzombek, the digital policy spokesperson of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, told Spiegel Online he did not think she was advocating that companies such as Google and Facebook should disclose company secrets, “but we do need more information from these operators as to how their algorithms function generally speaking”.

A cross-party working group is compiling recommendations urging more openness by internet platforms, including making details on how their algorithms collect, choose, evaluate and present information available to users. Its recommendations will be sent to Brussels, for the EU digital commissioner Günther Oettinger to work them into guidelines by next year. Oettinger told Spiegel Online: “Merkel has touched on an important topic.” But he said questions about search engines’ transparency had to “first undergo a more in-depth examination”.

The Guardian The Sporkful: does your race affect the restaurant you choose?

Should potato salad be called a salad? Do places make smaller sandwiches for women? Is vanilla ice-cream too vanilla? WNYC’s The Sporkful (iTunes) asks the most thought-provoking questions without pretence. “It’s not for foodies, it’s for eaters,” says host Dan Pashman, who brings a big bowl of enthusiasm and humour to the table.

The Sporkful is about so much more than food, as the new four-part series, Who Is This Restaurant For? demonstrates. Race, culture and dining out are explored, and Pashman politely recommends you listen to all four episodes in order. Take his advice and you’ll come out with more questions than answers, in a good way. When you go into a sushi restaurant, do you expect to see Japanese staff? Is it wrong to assume that white people won’t get the best food in an Indian restaurant?

Facing your prejudices around dining out is tough and the final instalment is where The Sporkful hits hard, with the extremely likable comedian W Kamau Bell talking about why he doesn’t wear hoodies in restaurants. As one half of an interracial marriage, he jokes about going out to dinner with his wife. “If we’re going to a nice place, and they’re super busy and super uptight, I’ll go: ‘Honey, why don’t you go and use some of your white people skills to get us a table?’”

“The more mixed a place is, the better I feel about it,” he admits. “The room is warmer, it’s friendlier, it’s smarter. The food’s probably better because they __have to serve a lot of different palates.”

But one horrifying incident comes out when he tells the tale of a visit to a “fancy coffee shop” in Berkeley. He stopped to talk to his wife, who was sitting outside with their baby and her friends. The staff told him to go away because they thought he was trying to sell something. In fact, he was showing his wife a book he’d just bought. “It just reminded me that wherever you go, you’re still black,” he says. “Mark Zuckerberg can walk in dressed in a hoodie and jeans, whereas if I walk in dressed that way, it means something completely different.” Hearing that he feels like he needs to come across as ultra-friendly (and smaller) to feel comfortable in a restaurant is hard to swallow. As ever, in talking about food The Sporkful opens up a warm and friendly discussion of so much more.

If you like this, try: Spilled Milk

Pauline Hanson tells government to back broadband cable for Norfolk Island Norfolk Island leader calls for royal commission into 'Australian takeover' Norfolk islanders hope Pauline Hanson will take up some of their grievances

Pauline Hanson has asked the Turnbull government to underwrite a plan to connect Norfolk Island to a new fibre optic cable stretching between Australia and New Zealand.

She said the new $300m Hawaiki cable linking the United States, Hawaii, Australia and New Zealand, would pass within 100 km of Norfolk Island.

She wants the government to back a proposed 90km fibre optic spur that would connect the island to that cable.

“There still exists a very small window of opportunity for Norfolk Island to connect if the Australian government is able to assist it either financially or through an underwriting agreement, such as the precedent set by the Norfolk Island/Air New Zealand underwriting agreement, which secures air travel to and from the island,” Hanson said in a letter to the communications minister, Mitch Fifield.

“I am aware of private sector interest and capacity to fund the connection of the cable, however they are seeking some guarantee that the connection will be supported, rather than excluded by the NBN on the island.”

Hanson said initial evaluation of the underwriting option indicated a “possible win-win” for Norfolk Island and Australia because the connection would enable greater economic development for the island, helping it to generate local revenues and reduce financial dependence on Australia.

She made her request after a “fact-finding” trip to the island last week, where she was briefed on the island’s communications facilities.

Documents supporting her letter claim the NBN’s Sky Muster Satellite, which the island relies on, cannot deliver on the promise of video streaming nor the low latency network connectivity required for interactive and business use.

“To exhaust the Norfolk Island capacity of SkyMuster using HD TV would take just 25 simultaneous users,” the document says.

“Assuming the average family of five, parents and kids watch different shows, this bottleneck would be reached very quickly, with a take-up and usage during peak times by less than 13 families on the island.”

The document was written by Ken McDonald, an engineering consultant who is based in Mornington Victoria but who has a home and office on Norfolk Island.

McDonald says his expertise is in the design of high speed real time software-based control systems for the telecommunications industry.

At the last census in 2011, Norfolk Island’s total population (excluding visitors or tourists) was 1,796.

Hanson’s trip to the island occurred just days after she was given a position on the joint standing committee for the National Broadband Network.

The Turnbull government removed veteran Nationals senator John Williams from the committee to make room for her.

Last week Hanson called on Malcolm Turnbull to sack the government-appointed administrator of Norfolk Island, Gary Hardgrave, accusing him of misleading the Australian parliament, a claim he dismissed as “nonsense”.

Hardgrave was appointed by the government to oversee the island’s transition from being an external Australian territory to becoming a part of the commonwealth.

Hanson toured the island last week on the invitation of Norfolk Island People for Democracy, a group opposed to the Australian government’s revoking of the island’s autonomy and who are fighting to __have the decision overturned.

YouTube star Hannah Hart interview – Chips with Everything tech podcast

Google's Alphabet defies expectations with 20% revenue rise Google Fiber to cut jobs and halt expansion of US internet service

Google’s parent Alphabet defied expectations to report a 20.2% rise in quarterly revenue on Thursday, while retail giant Amazon slightly missed predicted predicted forecasts due to spending on preparations for the holiday season.

Indicating an end to its record-breaking profits streak, Amazon reported profit of $252m or 52 cents per share, though analysts had predicted 85 cents per share. Revenues reached $32.71bn but are predicted to reach between $42bn and $45.5bn for the busy fourth quarter.

Alphabet meanwhile continues to dominate the fast-growing mobile advertising market, along with Facebook. The company has benefited from robust sales of advertising on mobile devices and on YouTube, and also said it would repurchase about $7bn of its Class C stock.

Shares of Alphabet, which is the world’s second largest company by market value, were up 1.6% in after-hours trading.

Google’s ad revenue rose 18.1% to $19.82bn in the third quarter, accounting for 89.1% of Google’s total revenue, compared with 89.8% of revenue in the second quarter.

Paid clicks rose 33%, compared with a rise of 29% in the second quarter. Paid clicks are those ads on which an advertiser pays only if a user clicks on them.

Cost-per-click, or the average amount advertisers pay Google, fell 11% in the latest period after dropping 7% in the second quarter.

Analysts on average had expected a decline of 7.9%, according to FactSet StreetAccount.

Per-click costs __have been falling as people shift to mobile devices from desktops. Because of the limited space, advertising on mobile devices is generally cheaper.

Research firm eMarketer has estimated that Google will capture $52.88bn in search ad revenue in 2016, or 56.9% of the global market.

Google’s Other Revenue, which includes the company’s increasingly important cloud business, jumped 38.8% after rising 33% in the second quarter.

The cloud business competes with services offered by market-leader Amazon, Microsoft and IBM.

Alphabet’s Other Bets generated revenue of $197m, but reported an operating loss of $865m. In the year earlier period, revenue was $141m and the loss was $980m.

Other Bets includes broadband business Google Fiber, home automation products Nest, self-driving cars as well as X, the company’s research facility that works on “moon shot” ventures.

The company’s consolidated revenue rose to $22.45bn in the three months to 30 September from $18.68bn a year earlier. Net income rose to $5.06bn. Alphabet’s shares __have risen 5.1% since the start of the year.

Vine video-sharing app to be shut down by Twitter Goodbye, Vine: the most memorable six-second videos of all time

Twitter is killing off its social media video-sharing app and platform Vine as it trims its headcount and costs. The social network said the Vine mobile app would be discontinued “in the coming months”.

Twitter said in a blog post: “Nothing is happening to the apps, website or your Vines today. We value you, your Vines and are going to do this the right way. You’ll be able to access and download your Vines. We’ll be keeping the website online because we think it’s important to still be able to watch all the incredible Vines that __have been made.”

The app, which had 100 million people watching videos every month and 1.5bn daily video loops, launched video on Twitter. Sporting occasions, where goals, celebrations and highlights were shared in short looping clips through Vine, brought the app to a mainstream audience.

But user numbers __have dwindled in recent years in their 10s of millions, while Twitter has integrated video sharing directly into its main mobile apps and experience, while also trying its hand at live video with Periscope.

Vine founder Rus Yusupov reacted to the news, appearing to express regret at having sold the company to Twitter:

In June this year, Vine sought users to beta test a longer video feature, but it is clear that Twitter is no longer interested in supporting separate apps, only its core mobile apps and social network. The company recently made Periscope videos viewable directly within the main Twitter app.

Earlier on 27 October, Twitter announced hundreds of layoffs. The company’s quarterly results report revealed its revenue was a better-than-expected $616m and its earnings per share were ahead of analyst estimates, $0.13 to $0.09.

The company’s most important metric, its number of monthly active users, was also up: to 317 million from 313 million the previous quarter. Of those users, 83% were on mobile devices.

Twitter stock, down by more than 25% this year, rose slightly in pre-market trading.

Twitter typically announces quarterly results after the market has closed in New York, though the company is headquartered on the west coast; on Monday, the firm rescheduled its earnings call to 4am California time on Thursday.

• Twitter lays off hundreds but quarterly results better than expected
  

Microsoft Windows 10 Event Live Blog (starts 10am ET)

09:51AM EDT - We're readying up for a Live Blog of the Microsoft event in NYC. Panos Panay is expected to take to the stage, with Major Nelson from the Xbox team in tow (we believe) for some new announcements. The presentation is set to start at 10am ET, and we'll fire up the Live Blog as it starts!

09:54AM EDT - Less than 10 minutes to go

09:55AM EDT - Apparently MS are doing hospitality right for press attending the event direct. Power, USB power, ethernet cables and USB-to-Ethernet adaptors.

09:55AM EDT - That sets a high bar

09:56AM EDT - Last year, the event WiFi was continually breaking - so there are provisions this time for the media

09:56AM EDT - Some rumors abound that there will be hardware announced

09:57AM EDT - We've heard lots about potential specifications, but there's been a lot of chatter and not all of it entirely clear. Will wait until the announcements on stage for confirmation

10:01AM EDT - For anyone wanting to watch the stream direct, http://news.microsoft.com/microsoft-event-2016/#MTbRsTKvwepxdAGW.97

10:01AM EDT - And it begins, with a video

10:02AM EDT - 'New experiences'

10:02AM EDT - 'Blind mode to help programming for accessibility'

10:03AM EDT - 'everyone can participate'

10:03AM EDT - Terry Myerson on stage

10:04AM EDT - 'Each of us gets to reap the benefits of technology'

10:04AM EDT - 'We challenge our employees to deliver on our mission to empower every person and every organization'

10:04AM EDT - 'Every user is multidimensional, multilayered'

10:05AM EDT - 'You might invent, you might create art, you might be a professional'

10:05AM EDT - 'We're inspired by every user with our products'

10:06AM EDT - A couple of case studies about the varied Win10 user base

10:07AM EDT - Pearson is using Hololens to train students

10:07AM EDT - 'We want Windows to be the place where you work and where you play'

10:08AM EDT - 'We've been continually updating Windows to protect your data and your identity'

10:08AM EDT - '200 billion hours logged on Windows 10'

10:09AM EDT - '15 months and 400 million users'

10:09AM EDT - Announcing next Win10 version, free for every Win10 device, in the Spring

10:09AM EDT - 'Win10 Creators Update'

10:10AM EDT - Three main areas

10:10AM EDT - #1 Mixed Reality - VR, AR, Holo

10:10AM EDT - #2 Gaming - In-game broadcasting and 4K

10:10AM EDT - #3 Social Connectivity

10:11AM EDT - 'Empowering everyone to be a 3D creator'

10:11AM EDT - 'Today, productivity is mainly 2D - spreadsheets, emails'

10:11AM EDT - 'Next generation is growing up with 3D'

10:11AM EDT - 'Moving and editing in 3D'

10:12AM EDT - 'Help users with 3D to accelerate creating and education'

10:12AM EDT - Basically, Minecraft is a big reference point

10:13AM EDT - Another video about creating/art in 3D

10:14AM EDT - Megan Saunders on stage

10:14AM EDT - 'We create to tell stories and solve problems'

10:14AM EDT - 'If we can unlock 3D creativity, we can unlock a new era of innovation'

10:14AM EDT - 'A new era of computing that enables everyone to achieve more'

10:15AM EDT - Announcing, '3D for Everyone'

10:15AM EDT - Another video

10:15AM EDT - A class handing out Surface Pro units to each student...

10:16AM EDT - I'm pretty sure there was a youtuber in the video for a second

10:17AM EDT - Scanning and importing 3D objects into an artistic program

10:17AM EDT - '80% of 12-24 believe creativity is one of the most important things'

10:18AM EDT - 'We want to enable them to connect their ideas to their screens'

10:18AM EDT - 'We want to make 3D creation as simple as taking a photo'

10:19AM EDT - 'Today is limited to taking photos and videos'

10:19AM EDT - Windows 3D Capture experience

10:19AM EDT - 'An app that lets you walk around something and it'll capture points of the object and save it as a model'

10:19AM EDT - Using HP Elite x3

10:20AM EDT - Now MSPaint

10:20AM EDT - 100m users every month

10:20AM EDT - 'Paint was the first digital arts package most people used'

10:20AM EDT - Announcing with the update: Paint 3D

10:21AM EDT - Common scenario in Paint is cropping

10:21AM EDT - Turing a crop into a 3D memory

10:21AM EDT - The scanned sandcastle is now an object in Paint 3D

10:22AM EDT - Moving objects into the right depth of the image

10:22AM EDT - Remix3D.com - a community for Paint 3D

10:23AM EDT - Take objects out of minecraft and place into Paint 3D or 3D print them

10:23AM EDT - Import objects from SketchUp

10:24AM EDT - 'Boards' allow saving objects across the community into groups

10:25AM EDT - Adding various objects to the 3D scence

10:25AM EDT - Doodle takes any 2D sketch and turns it into 3D

10:26AM EDT - Creating personal 3D emojis

10:26AM EDT - All the 2D pens and pencils work on any 3D object

10:27AM EDT - Sticker tool takes any 2D image and stamps it onto a 3D image

10:27AM EDT - Direct publishing to the community / facebook

10:28AM EDT - '3D accelerates comprehension'

10:28AM EDT - 'Over the next year, 3D will be implemented into most MS applications'

10:28AM EDT - Powerpoint demo

10:29AM EDT - Added 'Insert 3D model' to Powerpoint

10:29AM EDT - 'With 3D, can change perspective and scale/orientation on the fly'

10:29AM EDT - Also, animation

10:30AM EDT - also, 3D transitions

10:30AM EDT - mix and match 2D/3D content

10:31AM EDT - 'Taking 3D content and breaking it from the screens with Hololens'

10:32AM EDT - 'Edge will fully embrace 3D'

10:32AM EDT - 'Edge and Hololens will allow for mixed reality'

10:33AM EDT - 'Sandcastle back on stage as a hologram'

10:33AM EDT - Houzz users can use Hololens to preview products in their home before they buy

10:34AM EDT - 'Knowing that the chair will fit'

10:34AM EDT - A set of VR accessories coming to the PC

10:35AM EDT - 'VR spaces'

10:35AM EDT - '2D in a VR environment

10:36AM EDT - Changing the VR space to Rome with HoloTour

10:37AM EDT - This space is interactive

10:38AM EDT - Terry back on stage

10:38AM EDT - 'MS' partners will be shipping VR headsets'

10:39AM EDT - each headset will be 6DOF

10:39AM EDT - starting $299

10:39AM EDT - '3D for everyone'

10:39AM EDT - Now gaming

10:40AM EDT - Video of League of Legends championship

10:40AM EDT - 'Gamers are spending 2x time watching people over playing themselves'

10:41AM EDT - 'Microsofts long term commitment to gaming'

10:41AM EDT - Win10 is geared towards eSports and broadcasting

10:42AM EDT - Jenn McCoy from the Xbox Team on stage

10:42AM EDT - Three announcements for gamers

10:43AM EDT - Game Broadcasting in W10

10:44AM EDT - 'Broadcasting can be intimidating to set up'

10:44AM EDT - 'Creator's Update brings Broadcasting direct into Windows'

10:45AM EDT - Win+G then click to broadcast to Beam

10:45AM EDT - 'Virtually no lag'

10:46AM EDT - 'Xbox Live tells my friends I'm broadcasting'

10:46AM EDT - Now custom tournaments

10:47AM EDT - Announcement: With the update, players can create custom tournaments with Arena on XBL

10:48AM EDT - 'Arena does the tracking for you'

10:49AM EDT - The service will take the admin out of the equation

10:49AM EDT - Doesn't matter which device is used

10:50AM EDT - 'Xbox One S outsold other consoles in prominent markets for 3 months'

10:50AM EDT - Running Forza on a 4K HDR display... just running

10:50AM EDT - Reiterating Xbox Anywhere

10:51AM EDT - Using Xbox One S to watch 4K content

10:51AM EDT - Announcement: Bitstream audio passthrough with Dolby Atmos support on BluRay is coming with the Update

10:52AM EDT - Terry back on stage

10:52AM EDT - 'Magic happens when we collaborate'

10:52AM EDT - 'People today are confined with the specific app they use'

10:53AM EDT - Allison O'Mahoney on stage

10:53AM EDT - 'People are at the center of Windows'

10:53AM EDT - 'What started with email is now a patchwork of apps and services'

10:54AM EDT - 'Growing social networks comes at a cost - complexity'

10:54AM EDT - 'Most interactions are with a few key individuals'

10:54AM EDT - 'What would it mean to prioritize the important people when we collaborate'

10:55AM EDT - A faster way to share with a few key people, basically

10:55AM EDT - Creator's update allows users to drag content to an icon on the screen to share it to a person

10:56AM EDT - 'Windows apps will understand the context of important people'

10:57AM EDT - 'It's all too easy to miss communications from the important people'

10:57AM EDT - Update will bring multiple communication programs together and prioritize the important people

10:57AM EDT - E.g. Skype, Mail, XBL, Skype for Business

10:58AM EDT - 'cut through the noise so you never miss a moment'

10:59AM EDT - Win10 introduces shoulder taps

10:59AM EDT - Basically, sharing emoji with important people

10:59AM EDT - Remember when MSN had the 'buzz' feature? Feels like that a bit

11:01AM EDT - That's it for the Creator's Update. Due Spring, early builds for insiders this week

11:01AM EDT - Now onto hardware and devices

11:02AM EDT - 'It's all about the creators at any price point in any form factor'

11:02AM EDT - 'Achieving potential

11:02AM EDT - 'Opportunities arise with new form factors'

11:03AM EDT - 'Device and software has to work perfectly'

11:03AM EDT - Panos Panay on stage

11:04AM EDT - Video about inspiration through creation

11:05AM EDT - 'Creating Surface on a Surface'

11:05AM EDT - 'The products are meant to be seamless in your life'

11:06AM EDT - 'Surface Pro 4 versatility'

11:07AM EDT - Surface Pen is like a Basketball - intuitive

11:07AM EDT - 'Users who grew up on pen and paper are creating again with Surface'

11:08AM EDT - 'The 'which device do I need' question has disappeared with the 2-in-1'

11:08AM EDT - Last year was the Surface Book

11:09AM EDT - Surface has highest user satisfaction from any laptop device

11:09AM EDT - *Surface Book

11:10AM EDT - 'Kids don't need paper and pencil to share'

11:11AM EDT - 'Gamers want more frame rate'

11:11AM EDT - 'Engineers don't want lag'

11:11AM EDT - Everyone asks for battery life

11:12AM EDT - 'Took Surface Book i7, then added more, in the same chassis'

11:12AM EDT - video

11:13AM EDT - Has 2x graphics power

11:13AM EDT - so GTX 1060?

11:13AM EDT - 1.9 TFLOPs

11:14AM EDT - Updated CPU

11:14AM EDT - More than just dropping in a new processor

11:14AM EDT - Surface Book needs to be proud to hold

11:14AM EDT - Added second fan to give better performance longer

11:15AM EDT - More batteries too

11:15AM EDT - 16hr battery life

11:15AM EDT - Per weight, most powerful laptop

11:15AM EDT - Oct 26th $2399 preorder, Avail november

11:16AM EDT - Surface Pro 4 from $899, Surface Book from $1499

11:16AM EDT - New product

11:17AM EDT - Time to announce, the....

11:17AM EDT - 'it takes everything one step further'

11:17AM EDT - 'Looks familiar, but feels different'

11:17AM EDT - Surface Studio

11:18AM EDT - An all-in-one ?

11:18AM EDT - 28-inch

11:18AM EDT - LCD display

11:18AM EDT - 270W

11:18AM EDT - Quad core i7

11:18AM EDT - 32GB DDR4, GTX 980M, 2TB PCIe SSD

11:19AM EDT - also, Surface dial, like a BMW thing

11:20AM EDT - 'Thinnest LCD'

11:20AM EDT - 'Build for professionals'

11:20AM EDT - Basically aimed square at the iMac

11:20AM EDT - 3:2 Aspect Ratio

11:21AM EDT - Fully Alu enclosure

11:21AM EDT - 12.5mm thin touch screen

11:22AM EDT - 13.5 million pixels (4500x3000)

11:23AM EDT - 'TrueColor'

11:24AM EDT - Color calibrated

11:24AM EDT - Different color modes for DCI-P3 and sRGB

11:25AM EDT - switch on the fly

11:25AM EDT - 192 PPI

11:27AM EDT - Can scale two full 8.5x11 pages on the screen

11:27AM EDT - 'True Scale: one inch on the display is one inch in real life'

11:28AM EDT - Hardware in the base

11:28AM EDT - Also, quiet acoustics

11:28AM EDT - and visually quiet

11:29AM EDT - Chrome arms are designed to 'disappear' from the look

11:29AM EDT - Three fans

11:30AM EDT - Xbox controller protocol

11:30AM EDT - No TB3, No USB 3.1

11:30AM EDT - Cable is fixed into the device

11:31AM EDT - Linear microphone array on the top of the display

11:33AM EDT - Surface Studio HD Camera

11:33AM EDT - Auto exposure

11:33AM EDT - Windows Hello

11:33AM EDT - 'We think you're going to love it'

11:33AM EDT - 'Performance is unmatched'

11:33AM EDT - So

11:33AM EDT - Price?

11:33AM EDT - CPU?

11:34AM EDT - 'Studio is category defining product'

11:34AM EDT - *a

11:37AM EDT - Now a video

11:39AM EDT - Pen support

11:39AM EDT - 'Turns a desk into a studio'

11:40AM EDT - 'Moving effortlessly between typing and drawing/annotating or other apps'

11:40AM EDT - 'Zero-gravity hinge that is weightless'

11:40AM EDT - 'Counter spring system for any angle'

11:41AM EDT - Surface Pen now

11:41AM EDT - Real time editing with the pen

11:42AM EDT - 'Putting it down to paper, it's a full sheet of paper on display with Truescale'

11:42AM EDT - Can lean right up to the screen

11:42AM EDT - 'Being able to write at full speed'

11:43AM EDT - 'So you feel the ink leaving the pen instantly'

11:44AM EDT - Interesting image on display

11:44AM EDT - Now Surface Dial

11:45AM EDT - Integrated global controls

11:45AM EDT - Dial on the display

11:45AM EDT - Like BMW's console thing?

11:47AM EDT - Madefire CEO on stage, creates 'Emotion books'

11:48AM EDT - 'It's important to __have a digital workflow'

11:49AM EDT - 'Before it was writing in word, printing, draw, scan, rewrite, reprint, etc'

11:49AM EDT - 'Studio makes it seamless'

11:51AM EDT - Even from here, there's *some* lag in photoshop

11:53AM EDT - Demo of an emotion book on Madefire

11:54AM EDT - Panos on the stage again

11:55AM EDT - Video about uses

11:57AM EDT - In the video, the Dial gives the users a claw grip. That could cause cramp over time?

11:58AM EDT - Preorder today from $2999

11:58AM EDT - Available limited quantities in Q4

11:59AM EDT - Satya Nadella on stage

11:59AM EDT - 'Taking software, hardware and birthing new computer experiences'

11:59AM EDT - 'Creating a new platform of opportunity'

12:00PM EDT - 'Last 10 years __have had a lot of new and innovative devices'

12:00PM EDT - 'Most innovation has been slanted towards consumption'

12:01PM EDT - 'At MS, our mission is to empower everyone to achieve more'

12:01PM EDT - 'Finding the balance between consumption and creative expression'

12:02PM EDT - 'The future about computers and computing is about this generation, the Minecraft generation'

12:02PM EDT - 'We're building Windows for each of us'

12:03PM EDT - 'Surface is creating new categories to turn the desk into a studio'

12:03PM EDT - 'Windows with Office, Windows with Gaming, as cloud supported AI accelerated experiences'

12:08PM EDT - Now an outro video. Looks like that's a wrap after two hours...