Facebook Portal (2019) Review & Rating - PCMag.com

Facebook Portal (2019) Review & Rating - PCMag.com
As Tariffs Linger, Bruised Ports Eye China Nervously - Bisnow
9 creepy tech gadgets spookier than a Halloween movie - Mashable
New EU VAT Rules For Online Commerce: Sales From Outside The EU - Tax - United States - Mondaq News Alerts
FEMA Funds Drone Compliance Initiative for National Fire Protection Association - Unmanned Aerial

Posted: 31 Oct 2019 10:01 AM PDT

Facebook's new $179 Portal checks off a lot of the wish-list items we had for last year's model. The video-calling smart display now lets you make WhatsApp calls and shows Instagram photos, and it works well with Amazon's Alexa. But given the company's perpetual political drama, putting a dedicated Facebook camera in your living room might still be too much for many people. That equation changes when we talk about putting it in your office, though, and Facebook may have (accidentally) made one of the better corporate telepresence devices you can buy.

Models, Design, and Setup

The Facebook Portal now comes in four forms. We tested the $179, 10-inch Portal, which looks like a digital picture frame (and acts like one, most of the time). There's also a $129, 8-inch Portal Mini, which has pretty much the same capabilities but is smaller. Last year's 15.6-inch, $279 Portal+ remains on the market, and it's the best choice for a small conference room. Not on sale yet, but coming soon, there's a $149 Portal TV set-top box that will turn any TV into a big-screen for Alexa and video calls.

The Portal is handsome in black or white, nicely built, and easy to set up. The attached kickstand contains the power cord, which plugs into the wall with a dedicated power adapter. The 10-inch model measures 7.03 by 10.23 by 5.56 inches (HWD). There's a 13-megapixel camera on the front, as well as a 10-inch HD screen. Between the front tweeters and the rear woofer, it boasts a total of 10 watts of audio power.

You set it up by attaching it to a 2.4GHz or 5GHz Wi-Fi network and entering your Messenger or Whatsapp account details—you need a Messenger or Whatsapp account to make it work. The default home screen shows your Messenger contacts. You can flag some as favorites, which also affects the photos you see in the digital picture frame mode.

As a digital picture frame, the Portal can show your Facebook photos, your Instagram photos, Facebook photos from your favorite contacts, and photos you upload directly through a smartphone app. You don't have to use all, or any, of these categories. It can also get a little nudgey about pushing you to talk to people it identfies as currently online, another option you can turn off.

Video Calling

You can call any Messenger or Whatsapp contacts by saying, "Hey Portal, call (contact)," or selecting them from an on-screen contact book. They don't have to have a Portal; they can be on a phone. You can also do multi-party calls here. With Messenger, you can add up to six people; with Whatsapp, you can add up to three. You can't cross the Messenger/Whatsapp barrier.

The Portal's coolest feature is still the Smart Camera, which I think of as a personal Ken Burns effect. The camera pans and zooms to find you as you move around your room, fitting you rather than you having to fit the camera. If one person in a group is talking, the camera will often focus on them, and then switch angles when they're done for a cinematic effect. No other smart display does this.

The Portal then layers fun AR features on top of your chats. You can get a mustache, have a lazy cat sitting on your head, or turn into a dragon or werewolf, all in service of fun. Cooperative AR games challenge you and your interlocutor not to smile, or try to get you to catch falling cats by moving your heads. It's all silly and childish, but that's fine by me as so much of the device's pitch is about connecting kids with their faraway relatives.

The four mics are also designed to capture any audio in your room, which is great when you're the only thing making noise in a room, but not so great when you aren't. The mics make a faraway speaker sound much closer; they also make people speaking elsewhere in the room pretty audible. I had no problem with the Portal hearing my voice, whether for a voice call or for issuing an Alexa command, from a 30-foot distance in a quiet room.

I called two friends with Messenger on their phones, one other Portal in the same office, and an official Portal at Facebook. Those all went fine except for the call to Facebook, which had Bluetooth problems and audio lag versus the video image. Facebook says those things shouldn't be happening and suggested I was having hardware problems, but I wonder if it has more to do with network problems between my corporate network and Facebook's.

The Portal has a page of "apps." They include Facebook Watch, which contains a lot of mediocre video you don't want to watch; an Android-standard web browser; a small collection of Facebook games including Words With Friends; iHeartRadio, Pandora, and Spotify; and Story Time, the Portal's interactive app where you can tell a story to a child you're making a video call with.

The browser lets you create a YouTube link that summons the desktop YouTube page, so you can log in with your Google account and show YouTube videos. There's no email or calendar connectivity, and you can't make regular phone calls or send or receive text messages (even in Messenger or Whatsapp).

Alexa Support

I'm not a big fan of devices with multiple voice assistants, and Portal has this problem. It's a solid Alexa device, but it also has a much less successful "Hey Portal" voice assistant. "Hey Portal" is supposed to trigger apps and answer simple queries like time and weather, but honestly, the only thing it's good for is starting video calls because Alexa can't do that. "Hey Portal" queries are also, unless you opt out, actually recorded and reviewed by human Facebook contractors to improve the company's voice recognition.

Move over to a different tech giant's software, though, and you'll have a fine old time. The Portal acts as an Alexa smart device, so you can ask for Alexa functions or skills and see the results reflected on the screen. You can request tunes from Amazon Music by playlist or song, you can check stock prices from TD Ameritrade, or you can ask for recipes from AllRecipes. Smart home skills that show camera images on a smart display work, too. The Portal is, in a lot of ways, like an Echo Show.

There are a few hiccups in the Alexa implementation. Skills that use "tell skill to do action" syntax have to be broken into two parts: "open skill" and then "ask skill for action." You also don't get Amazon's Drop In calling or the ability to ask for Amazon video content on the screen.

As a speaker, this is not designed to be an audio masterpiece. There's bass but it's muddy. Facebook optimized for room-filling volume without harshness or distortion, and it got that, but comfortable voices on a video call aren't as demanding as broad-spectrum music. Classical and electronic music both lack richness through the Portal, but at least they didn't sound harsh. At maximum volume it doesn't distort, and it's too loud to sit comfortably close to.

Options when you aren't using the main speaker are a bit weak. There's no wired headphone jack, and I had uneven experiences when using a Bluetooth headset—a video call to Facebook became choppy and distorted over the headset, although I didn't experience that with music or with other calls.

Oh, Facebook

But let's not forget that this is Facebook's Portal.

Facebook has made a pivot to "privacy" in the past year, pledging to encrypt Messenger connections and reinforcing that WhatsApp stays encrypted. But there is still deep suspicion of a company whose revenue is based on behaviorally targeted advertising and which has done a notoriously poor job of preventing its public News Feed from becoming overrun by false, politically radicalizing content.

Following the negative news stories about Facebook, about how it uses and abuses data, feels like a full-time job. Some hot recent headlines: Facebook may have misled much of the media industry and wasted tens of millions of marketing dollars by demanding a "pivot to video" based on inflated video viewing data for two years. 47 state attorneys general are now investigating Facebook for antitrust violations. There's also something about Breitbart, and probably something about Donald Trump.

Over and over, Facebook staff reminded me of how the Portal is "built for privacy." WhatsApp calls are end-to-end encrypted. Messenger calls will be, too, in January. The camera switch "electrically disconnects" the camera so Facebook can't turn it on even if it wants to. You can set the device to not send "Hey Portal" queries to Facebook, and you can set it to ask for authentication over and over again.

As we were writing this review, security researcher Jane Wong discovered a flaw where sending an "arbitrary Facebook server request" can add public albums from non-friends to a Portal. Facebook says it fixed this bug within 24 hours. That's good, but most Americans' trust in Facebook is shattered even as they're still addicted to it. Until the company rebuilds that trust, it's going to have a hard time getting people to agree to put a Facebook screen in their house.

Best for Workplaces

The most exciting aspect of the Portal, in my view, is that it will work with Workplace accounts starting in December. That makes it a terrific, easy-to-use solution for remote workers conferencing in.

Workplace is Facebook's enterprise product, and it has so far managed to avoid the various issues Facebook's consumer product has run into. Companies pay to use it, companies own their data, and that data doesn't leak into and hasn't been used in the broader consumer product.

With the ability to do seven-party group video calls, the 15.6-inch Portal+ could be every remote worker or remote small office's best friend. Turn it on to be "in the office," and turn it off to be "not in the office." Use it for music when you're not taking meetings. Move around your home office freely while taking a meeting. Don't mess around with PC-based solutions that crash, or with the nightmare that is configuring a Poly. It's a terrific corporate connectivity solution.

Comparisons and Conclusions

In an imaginary world where Facebook is uncontroversial and benign, an Alexa-compatible smart display that shows your Instagram photos, plays YouTube videos, and does Whatsapp video calling would be a slam dunk.

But Facebook isn't uncontroversial and benign. It's under investigation by 47 states and its executives are perpetually in some sort of political hot seat. Any given year it appears to be leaking or lying to someone. It freaks people out. It freaks me out, and I'm on it all the time. One of the Amazon Echo Show models, or even the Google Nest Hub Max, just seems less troubling.

If your company uses Workplace, on the other hand, the Portal is among the best telepresence options we've seen, and one we recommend. It's all a rather interesting dichotomy, much like Facebook itself.

As Tariffs Linger, Bruised Ports Eye China Nervously - Bisnow

Posted: 30 Oct 2019 07:56 PM PDT

Bisnow/Shawna De La Rosa

The Seattle port is adjacent to SODO.

The trade war with China has hit the Northwest Port Alliance hard.

Activity at the ports, which include Seattle and Tacoma, has plummeted. In August, imports were down $2B, or 11%, year over year. Exports to China in the same time frame are down 20.32%, or $509M.

"The U.S. has put tariffs on imports and China has retaliated equally," said Eric Schinfeld, The Northwest Seaport Alliance's senior manager of federal and international government relations. "We have seen a significant impact in both directions. Exports to China have been hurt more than imports from China."

The port, which employs about 2,000 but affects some 45,000 Puget Sound jobs, has a major impact on the local economy. It is also a portal to the rest of the nation.

The port alliance is the fourth-largest container shipping port in the country. Goods that move through Puget Sound come from and go on to places like Chicago and the East Coast.

"This will have a national impact," Schinfeld said.

Many imports and exports go through Sea-Tac, which is also seeing a serious decline. At Sea-Tac, imports from China have dropped 45% from one year ago, which translates into $376M.

So far, Seattle's commercial real estate economy continues its strong, healthy pace despite the China trade war. It has yet to be affected, thanks to the continuing influx of high-tech firms and the critical mass of a highly skilled workforce. Developers erect high-end apartments and condos, while retailers gobble up the ground-floor space below. Office vacancies are still low.

"Right now, our economic story for this area is phenomenal," Holland Partner Group Executive Managing Director Tom Parsons said. "Investors are coming to Seattle from all over the world. There is a lot of venture capital coming in due to the critical mass of the tech community."

Is it all about Amazon? Yes and no, said Parsons, who will be a panelist at Seattle's State of the Market event Nov. 6. But the long-term consequences remain to be seen. Businesses have spent years developing these trade relationships, Schinfeld said.

"Now China may not be buying Washington apples," he said. "They may be buying apples from New Zealand. Those customers don't just come back after the trade war ends. They have signed long-term contracts. It could take years to recover those contracts."

On the construction front, this translates into higher material costs, Schinfeld said. And while it's good news that the planned tariffs didn't go into effect on Oct. 15, the next round of tariffs set to go into effect on Dec. 15 may hurt worse.

"Those are on the direct consumer goods and consumers will literally see an impact on price tags," he said.

Another issue of concern is the impact on the international travel from China. "The international visitor is considered a major [piece] of the Seattle economy," he said.

The city also attracts international attention from investors, many from China, Parsons said. Poor relations could hit commercial real estate.

"There are a number of companies expanding here coming from the Bay Area," he said.

Holland Partner Group is keeping its eye on foreign relations while making gains on the domestic front: The company recently broke ground on the 2019 Boren project in South Lake Union. The 44-story residential tower will include 410 high-end apartment units. As part of the development process, Holland gave $5M to the city's affordable housing program through the Housing Affordability and Living program.

"These contributions need to be made," he said. "The key is to make use of those funds in the most efficient and effective way to convert it into affordable housing as fast possible. The city needs to relieve as much of the burden of the process on the affordable housing developers so they can build it."

9 creepy tech gadgets spookier than a Halloween movie - Mashable

Posted: 31 Oct 2019 07:20 AM PDT

A mysterious voice coming from inside the house. A watchful eye you never knew was there. These scenarios may sound spooooooky, but they aren't paranormal.

These days, the plots of horror flicks can sound a lot like modern technology. We don't have to look to ghost stories or scary movies for tales of shadowy characters or the past never really dying. Tech products and hackers are our modern day Freddy Kruegers. Minus the, ya know, murder.

In honor of Halloween (and cybersecurity knowledge!), here are the spookiest tech gadgets and features.

The least human-to-human thing about FaceTime is that when you video chat with someone, you're not really making eye contact. Apple decided to do something about that problem of human connection with... artificial intelligence.

In July, Apple introduced a feature to FaceTime called Attention Correction. It uses AI to subtly alter the way a user's eyes appear to the person they're talking to, and make it look like they're actually making eye contact.

It hasn't exactly worked out: some users report that the effect is "creepy." Uh, yeah! We don't remember asking for a disembodied intelligence to move our eyes around for us! This feature has big time "eyes in the painting following you around" vibes.

Well that's fucking creepy - Attention Correction Feature in iOS 13 Beta Enables Appearance of Eye Contact During FaceTime Calls [Updated] https://t.co/0qx59KT4gP

— newtman (@newtman) July 3, 2019

Apple *may* have gotten the message. One week after releasing Attention Correction in an iOS 13 beta, it removed the feature in the next iteration. However, it touted Attention Correction at its September hardware event, so the strange AI feature could still rise from the dead.

In 2018, the world woke up to the fact that strapping a GPS to our wrists was *maybe* not such a great idea. That realization occurred when a Twitter user pointed out that they could find U.S. military bases by searching fitness app Strava's "heat map."

These devices and apps are collecting, aggregating, and analyzing data about where real people are at all times. If you don't have your privacy settings toggled to give you the utmost privacy (Strava rolled out significant changes in September 2018), people could deduce a lot about you just from viewing GPS tracker data — which, in some cases, is public online. No thanks!

You're not just being followed IRL.... there are a lot of eyeballs watching you in the digital realm, too. Advertisers are able to track your activity around the internet when websites place a line of code, also called a pixel, on their sites. That's why ads for, say, some shoes you've been checking out, will sometimes appear on the next site you visit, and then eternally follow you around the internet forever more. Are you being haunted by the ghosts of would-be purchases past? You betcha.

One day, notifications started appearing on my iPhone: traffic is heavier than usual. It will take you 25 minutes to get to [my home address]. Helpful? Maybe. Creepy: good god yes.

If you don't have Location Services disabled, Google and Apple maps keep track of where you're going, and sometimes prompt you to name these places, or even suggest destinations. Both are getting better about giving you the ability to delete your location and route data. But let's be real: they know where you were last summer.

For anyone who's seen Face/Off, this is an obvious one. Facial recognition cameras don't just take pictures of your face, they create data that corresponds to your unique 3D proportions. Databases with 3D renderings of the world's faces is a little too House of Black and White for me.

When it comes to using biometric data for security, like with Face ID, companies like Apple say that this data is decoupled from your identity. Tell that to John Travolta, Tim!

9 creepy tech gadgets and features spookier than a Halloween movie

There are a lot of smart security products out there, but none have reached the same Minority Report-ish heights of mass surveillance that Ring has. Multiple reports linking Ring to police surveillance and crime prevention have shown the role it might play in the law enforcement of a surveillance state. Plus, the ability to constantly be watching outside your home, no matter where you are? How Jeff Jeffries of you, Amazon.

The past coming back to haunt you is the trope of too many horror films to name. Now, all the terrible photos and bad decisions you made on social media will eternally come back to life whenever a sentient algorithm decides to take you for a walk down memory lane.

If the killer always enters through an opened window or a door left unlocked, consider Bluetooth the back door into your digital life. Recent research has shown how hackers are able to exploit Bluetooth to gain access to your phone, intercept messages, and even play audio. Toggle that bluetooth off and don't let them in the house!!

With Alexa, Google Home, HomePod, and Portal, it's easy to turn any home into a haunted house.

All of the big tech companies scrambled recently when reports showed that workers were listening in on audio collected in the home, sometimes containing intimate information; they have now revised policies to give users more choice over data collection.

There was also the incident when Alexa randomly recorded audio from its owner, and sent it to someone in their phonebook; a conversation just started playing out of the speaker out of nowhere! Who the HECK is in the house?!

Privacy missteps aside, the overall idea of a digital butler (that we've imbued with human qualities) that's always listening, waiting to be awoken to serve our needs, is the creepiest watchful presence of all.

Additional reporting from Jack Morse

New EU VAT Rules For Online Commerce: Sales From Outside The EU - Tax - United States - Mondaq News Alerts

Posted: 30 Oct 2019 08:01 AM PDT

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FEMA Funds Drone Compliance Initiative for National Fire Protection Association - Unmanned Aerial

Posted: 30 Oct 2019 09:13 AM PDT

The National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) has received just shy of $1 million in Fire Prevention and Safety Grant money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to develop a free public safety drone compliance program that will include educational training and a searchable knowledge base to track fire service drone programs and usage.

NFPA says fire departments have rapidly expanded the use of drones as more communities have realized the lifesaving impact that aerial technology can have in response to structural fires, wildland firefighting, search and rescue efforts, hazardous material responses, natural disaster efforts, and any other events that would benefit from increased situational awareness.

Although drone safety policies and standards continue to evolve, says NFPA, many U.S. fire departments are without the proper information, knowledge and experience needed to establish and maintain a legally sound public safety program that is compliant with federal regulations and the standards produced by ASTM International, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and NFPA.

Without proper understanding of how to integrate drones into public safety efforts, fire departments may deploy drones inaccurately; may inappropriately gather information during an incident; and may interfere with manned and unmanned flight operations in the area. All these missteps needlessly expose fire departments to liability, explains NFPA.

The NFPA drone project will generate guidance, learnings and best practices that U.S. fire departments need to establish a compliant, successful drone program by focusing on the following steps:

Assessing the current level of understanding, policies and standards on public safety drone usage;
Developing a drone program framework, including resources, education and an accessible portal that allows departments to comply with current regulations and standards;
Tracking fire service drone programs and their relevant use cases; and
Freely disseminating essential information and training so that departments can establish regionally and nationally compliant public safety drone programs.

The new initiative will follow NFPA's Emerging Technologies training development and dissemination model that has been in effect since 2010.

"As we have seen with NFPA alternative fuel vehicle and energy storage system training, the fire service is eager to learn about emerging technologies that may present new hazards, or in this case, help to mitigate and monitor safety challenges," says Christian Dubay, NFPA's vice president and chief engineer. "The new educational resources and portal will help fire departments across the country confidently establish and maintain public safety drone programs."

In 2018, NFPA released NFPA 2400, Standard for Small Unmanned Aerial Systems to help the fire service address organizational deployment, professional qualifications, system selection, and care and maintenance for public safety drone programs.

Deliverables from the new research project are expected to be completed by September 2021.

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