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Ring’s Traffic Stop feature is about bringing more accountability to policing

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On Thursday, Ring, the home security subsidiary of Amazon, released a new dashcam embedded with a novel feature called “Traffic Stop” that could help bring more accountability to policing. That could be a powerful thing, especially as tens of millions of people have poured onto the streets in cities across the country to demonstrate against systemic racism, white supremacy, and police brutality. It could also be a privacy nightmare.

The Ring Car Cam, which will cost $199, has two cameras: one pointed out the front windshield and one that points toward the car’s interior. The camera can send alerts whenever an event such as a break-in, towing, or accident is detected, and owners can tap into the cameras’ feeds to see what’s happening. The Car Cam relies on either Wi-Fi or LTE for connectivity.

But the most interesting feature is Traffic Stop. All a driver needs to do is say “Alexa, I’m being pulled over” to trigger the cameras to start recording and save their footage to the cloud. At the same time, a notification will be sent to a list of emergency contacts specified by the user during initial setup, informing them of the traffic stop.

Essentially, what Ring has created is a tool for “traffic stop counter-surveillance,” said Elizabeth Joh, a professor of law at UC-Davis and an expert on policing, technology, and surveillance.

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“In policing, technology is all about power,” Joh told The Verge. “Redistributing that power can be an important means of police accountability.”

There’s nothing particularly new about using dashcams as a means of recording traffic stops, but the novelty of Ring’s Traffic Stop feature is that it automates the process, Joh said.

“We’ve always been able to pull out our phones… and try to record it,” she said. “But by embedding it in the landscape of our cars, by simply just saying ‘I’ve been pulled over,’ makes that recording much more likely.”

That’s especially meaningful when you consider that police body cameras can be unreliable, hard to obtain, or subjective in what they capture. “Easily recording a traffic stop from a driver’s perspective is going to be able, in theory, to give us an important part of what’s happening in these encounters that sometimes go badly wrong,” Joh added.

And if people are willing to share the footage from their traffic stop with academic researchers, that can be incredibly useful for better understanding excessive force and police violence during traffic stops.

But there are also privacy implications. After all, it’s a camera that sits on your dashboard and sends video, audio, and perhaps GPS information to the cloud. Passengers in vehicles equipped with the Ring Car Cam may not be able to consent to being filmed before the device starts recording. And Ring as a company has been criticized for sharing data with police departments without informing their customers.

“What if the prompt is used for bad purposes?” Joh asks. “Say you’re not actually being pulled over or someone just wants to record you. And if the traffic stop video has embarrassing information, it’s in the cloud.”

She added, “There are good questions about who has access to that information. And I’m not just talking about the police, but somebody who works at Ring. Do they just get to watch it?” (A spokesperson for the company did not respond to a request for comment.)

Ring has said the most important thing about the Car Cam is access to the footage. While many dashcams include a removable SD card, Ring’s camera automatically uploads the footage to the cloud, giving customers more immediate access to what was recorded.

“The most important thing in these situations is to make sure that you have the video and so we’ll be streaming the video from the Car Cam to the cloud in real time,” Ring’s head of mobile products, Nathan Ackerman, told CNET.

As for who else should have access to that footage, Ring is still working through those questions. “We’re working through some of the ins and outs of exactly when the [emergency contacts] get notified, whether they can jump in and view the live stream or if it’ll be available after the fact,” Ackerman said.

These will be important questions for Ring to answer, especially if it hopes to win over people who are aware of the company’s controversial partnerships with police departments.

“I think for privacy-minded and civil liberties-minded consumers, they’re going to be really skeptical about whether or not Ring has some other purpose or agenda in mind in making this video capturing really easy,” Joh said. “But maybe that’s beside the point, because if Ring doesn’t do it, I think it was inevitable that another technology company was going to do it.”

Source: – The Verge

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Apple announces Worldwide Developers Conference dates, in-person event – CityNews Toronto

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Apple has announced their annual developers conference will take place June 10 through June 14.

The big summer event will be live-streamed, but some select developers have been invited to attend in-person events at Apple’s campus in Cupertino, California, on June 10.

The company typically showcases their latest software and product updates — including the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, AppleTV and Vision Pro headset — during a keynote address on the first day.

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Contributing to a drop in Apple’s stock price this year is concern it lags behind Microsoft and Google in the push to develop products powered by artificial intelligence technology. While Apple tends to keep its product development close to the vest, CEO Tim Cook signaled at the company’s annual shareholder meeting in February that it has been making big investments in generative AI and plans to disclose more later this year.

The week-long conference will have opportunities for developers to connect with Apple designers and engineers to gain insight into new tools, frameworks and features, according to the company’s announcement.

The Associated Press

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iPhone 16 Rumors Point to Action Button and New, Vertical Camera Layout – CNET

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The upcoming iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro are still months away from their expected launch this fall, but a new set of images published online may give us a better sense of their potential features. Among the revelations, the iPhone 16 may include an action button, similar to the one on last year’s iPhone 15 Pro, and it may have redesigned cameras in a vertical stack.

AppleInsider published a series of photos it says show dummy 3D prints of the upcoming iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro from an unnamed leaker. Aside from the action button and reworked cameras on the iPhone 16, AppleInsider also said its source found the iPhone 16 Pro to be “slightly larger” than its predecessor. Analysts had earlier said they expect the Pro model screens will grow somewhat.

Read more: iPhone 16: All the Major Rumors on Apple’s Next iPhone

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The new details suggest that a series of expected hardware updates are likely for this year’s new iPhones. Apple typically announces new iPhones around September, and the company tends to offer incremental upgrades to each new phone, introducing, over the period of several years, better cameras, screens and battery life, features that end up seeming like major upgrades when people get around to buying a new phone

Last year, Apple added a new titanium frame, action button and USB-C charging to its iPhone 15 Pro, which starts at $999. For its entry-level iPhone, Apple followed its well-worn strategy of trickling pro features down to the mainstream, adding the iPhone 14 Pro’s well-received Dynamic Island to the $799 iPhone 15, along with USB-C charging.

AppleInsider didn’t indicate whether its leaker had divined a reason for the iPhone 16’s shifted camera placements, but the two lenses will now reportedly be stacked one on top of the other, instead of diagonally. Apple has previously said it uses stacked lenses on the iPhone 15 Pro for spatial video capture, a key new technology the company highlighted as part of its $3,499 Apple Vision Pro headset, released in February.

Though AppleInsider’s leaks appear to confirm many previous rumors, not all renders and 3D prints are accurate, something the rumor blog notes itself in its report. Apple didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about the veracity of the leaks.

Watch this: What Google Gemini AI on the iPhone Could Look Like

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I Took 600+ Photos With the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max. Look at My Favorites

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Leaked iPhone 16 dummy units hint at larger sizes and new buttons

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The iPhone 15 Pro Max, with a 6.7-inch screen
(Image credit: Future)

We’re already counting down to the arrival of the iPhone 16 series – most probably sometime in September – and a leak showing dummy units of the upcoming phones has revealed a few of the changes we can expect to see later this year.

These dummy units are usually based on supply chain information, and have various business uses – like helping case manufacturers get their wares ready for new phones before they’re launched, for example. In this case, the images were posted to Chinese social network Weibo, as spotted by MacRumors.

Perhaps the most interesting reveal from these blocks of plastic and metal is that they show the previously rumored increase in size for the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max displays – up to 6.3 inches (from 6.1 inches) and 6.9 inches (from 6.7 inches) respectively.

That’s not a huge jump of course, but it does mean more screen space for apps and media. The bezels are apparently shrinking down to accommodate the larger screens, which means the increase in the physical size of these handsets is only a slight one.

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On the button

iPhone 16 dummy units leak

The next iPhones might look a bit like this, but less blue (Image credit: Weibo)

Further reveals from this leak match up with what we’ve heard before: that all four models are going to get the Action button that replaced the Ring/Silent switch on the 2023 Pro models, as well as a brand-new Capture button for getting more creative with photos.

Also of note is the redesigned rear camera module that we think is coming to the back of the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus. The new vertical, pill-shaped look has been leaked already, but this is more evidence that it’s on the way – taking us back to a design that’s more reminiscent of the iPhone 12, which came out in 2020.

As always with such rumors, be somewhat cautious about reading too much into the look of these dummy units. That said, as more and more similar leaks pile up, it becomes more likely that they’re based on accurate information.

The next big Apple date for your calendar is WWDC 2024 – its Worldwide Developers Conference starts on June 10, at which time we should hear much more about what’s coming this year with iOS 18 and Apple’s other software platforms.

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Freelance Contributor

Dave is a freelance tech journalist who has been writing about gadgets, apps and the web for more than two decades. Based out of Stockport, England, on TechRadar you’ll find him covering news, features and reviews, particularly for phones, tablets and wearables. Working to ensure our breaking news coverage is the best in the business over weekends, David also has bylines at Gizmodo, T3, PopSci and a few other places besides, as well as being many years editing the likes of PC Explorer and The Hardware Handbook.

Leaked iPhone 16 dummy units hint at larger sizes and new buttons

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