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Patent applications by the big camera players always get people excited, as they give a glimpse of what tech and features may end up making it into a future release – and if two applications filed by Canon end up bearing fruit, we may be seeing wirelessly chargeable cameras and the return of its gone-but-not-forgotten eye-controlled focus feature before long.

Wireless charging has been making its way into smartphones for a good few years, but it’s still absent from conventional cameras. In fact, the only recent development in this area for cameras – and frankly, it’s not even that recent, just not quite universal yet – is the option to charge some models though their USB port as an alternative to using a dedicated battery charger.

But a patent, first spotted by Canon Watch and titled ‘Power transmission apparatus for wirelessly supplying power to power reception apparatus’, appears to show Canon looking at bringing this feature to its products. 

Canon, of course, manufacturers many products other than cameras, and the patent itself doesn’t mention the words ‘cameras’, ‘mirrorless’, ‘forthcoming Canon EOS Rx’ or anything else as specific. Instead, it cites the apparatus in question as potentially being “imaging apparatus, a reproducing apparatus, or a communication apparatus such as a mobile phone or a smartphone”.

The eyes have it

Meanwhile a separate patent, this time spotted by Canon News, indicates that the company may be looking to resurrect its eye-controlled focusing feature from its film SLRs.

Eye-controlled autofocus was a feature Canon first introduced in its EOS A2E, also known as the EOS 5 and EOS5 QD, although it’s most commonly associated with the subsequent EOS 3, which boasted a more comprehensive 45-point AF system.

(Image credit: Canon)

The system worked by detecting the rotation of the user’s eye, which was subsequently used to determine the user’s line of light, and thus where the camera should be focusing. 

The feature hasn’t been a part of any recent Canon compacts, mirrorless cameras or DSLRs, despite many photographers clamoring for its return. But the system described in the patent is illustrated by a diagram that shows what appears to be a mirrorless camera, which gives us some indication as to where it may appear, if it surfaces at all.

That fact that these two patents exist only means so much right now, just as the patent for a viewfinder-less entry-level Nikon mirrorless camera may amount to nothing. But it’s reasonable to assume that wireless charging will make its way to a broader range of products in the future – and if eye-controlled autofocus also rears its head, it will no doubt make a lot of Canon users very happy.

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The owner of the 8chan message boards says “a large community of one million people are now looking for a home”, after the site was driven offline.

On Monday, cyber-security company Cloudflare withdrew its protection services from 8chan and minutes later the site was unavailable.

Critics say 8chan users spread hate speech and celebrated mass shootings.

In a YouTube video, 8chan owner Jim Watkins said he worked with law enforcement and complied with the law.

He described 8chan as a “blank page” where people could write their thoughts, even if they may be offensive to others.

Why is 8chan offline?

Cloudflare said it had withdrawn its services because 8chan had “repeatedly proven itself to be a cesspool of hate”.

Losing Cloudflare’s protection made 8chan vulnerable to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. The website was bombarded with traffic that overwhelmed its servers, rendering it inaccessible.

In response, 8chan switched to BitMitigate, a cyber-protection service owned by a web hosting company called Epik.

BitMitigate also provided protection to the neo-Nazi site the Daily Stormer.

But then BitMitigate itself was driven offline.

Both Epik and BitMitigate relied on infrastructure provided by another company, Voxility.

And Voxility decided to remove Epik and BitMitigate from its network.

“Hate speech is totally against our service policy,” a spokeswoman told BBC News.

“This is a firm stand from Voxility… we all should work for a safer internet,” she said.

Where will users go?

One 8chan admin said he was working to increase the site’s availability on the dark web, although users will need the right software and know-how to access 8chan this way.

Mr Watkins said he was working to get 8chan back online but being driven offline had “forced a lot of people to find other places to talk”.

Some users migrated to the Reddit-inspired message board Voat, although this website also faced DDoS attacks on Tuesday and disabled account registration.

In his video, Mr Watkins acknowledged Cloudflare and Voxility were private companies entitled to reject his custom.

But his supporters say moves to “de-platform” controversial websites will further efforts to decentralise the internet.

The controversial social network Gab has already made moves in this direction.

Gab describes itself as a platform for free speech and has become popular with neo-Nazis and far-right personalities banned from sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

And the company has made the code that powers its platform open source, so anybody can take it and host their own version of Gab.

There are also projects such as ZeroNet, which is designed to decentralise web hosting.

Instead of storing information on a web server, ZeroNet shares data among thousands of users – similar to the way films are shared via torrents.

A copycat version of 8chan has already appeared on ZeroNet. And in theory any messages posted cannot be removed by administrators or law enforcement, because the content is shared across so many different devices.

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August is officially here, and that means it’s back to school for prospective students around the world. To help ease your pain (and wallets), Best Buy is discounting its best-selling MacBook laptops for a limited time. You can save up to $400 on select models that include the latest MacBook Air.

A standout deal is the 2019 MacBook Air that’s on sale for $899.99. That’s a $200 discount and the best price we’ve seen for the powerful laptop. The 13.3-inch MacBook Air features a 1.6GHz dual-core 8th-generation Intel Core i5 processor, 8GB of RAM, and packs 128GB of storage. The latest MacBook includes a Retina display with a 2,560 x 1,600 resolution that results in vibrant, bold colors.

The ultra-thin laptop weighs just 2.75 pounds, perfect for students to carry from class to class. The laptop also conveniently offers Touch-ID and provides an impressive all-day battery life of 12 hours.

This is a fantastic price for a newer model MacBook Air and an excellent deal for students or anyone in need of a new high-quality laptop. We don’t know how long Best Buy will have the MacBook on sale, so you should take advantage of this back to school deal while you can.

You can see our roundup of the best laptops under $500: the best budget laptops around. We’ve taken a look at the other models of MacBook deals too. You can also shop the best back to school accessories for your new MacBook and find out the 10 things you should know before you buy a MacBook for students.

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Google has officially shut down its travel-planning app Google Trips, and shifted its features into Maps and Search.

Trips’ departure was announced in June, and today Google has officially ended support for the app. If you didn’t manage to back up your notes and destinations in time, don’t worry – you can still access them through Search when you’re logged into your Google account.

Feeling lost? Google has published a guide to help. To find activities in Search, simply type ‘things to do’ or visit the revamped Google Travel site. 

The Google Travel site also lets you make and browse travel reservations. You’ll soon be able to add and edit notes here, as you could in the app, letting you jot down memos like essentials to pack and any special documents you need to take.

Swiping up on the ‘Explore’ tab in Google Maps will also reveal things you can do at a certain destination. You can save places to visit at a future date, and soon you’ll be able to see future reservations as well.

Tripping through time

Google Trips only graced our screens briefly, having launched in 2016 as a tool for taking the stress out of planning a holiday, building an itinerary, finding activities, and even storing your boarding passes. It stored as much data as possible on your phone before you left home, reducing the risk of expensive roaming charges.

It was a handy tool, and thoughtfully designed, so it’s good to see that its best features have been integrated into Google’s main services where more people will be able to find and use them. Bon voyage, Trips – it’s been fun.

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We’ve been chomping at the bit for more news on The Last of Us: Part 2. When will it release? What’s the story going to be? Where the heck is Joel? And will the long-awaited sequel be coming to the PS5?

While concrete details are still thin on the ground, voice-over veteran Troy Baker (aka Joel from The Last of Us) did tease fans about upcoming title at Manchester Comic-Con (via Resetera).

“There is nothing about this game, nor the reveals, that hasn’t been 100% carefully crafted and methodically curated,” Baker told fans. “All I can tell you is that as much as you’re clamoring for it, you’re not ready.”

Baker’s comments suggest it may be a while before we get our hands on The Last of Us 2, or even hear more about it (which we hope isn’t the case). 

Sony has remained pretty tight-lipped about the title since it was announced, and even skipped E3 2019. 

We think it looks likely that the Last of Us: Part 2 will launch alongside the PlayStation 5, which is due to launch at the end of 2020. Baker’s comments teasing that the sequel is a while off, alongside Sony’s radio silence, suggest that 2020 will be Sony’s big year rather than 2019. 

Either way, it sounds like the continuation of Ellie and Joel’s story is going to tug at our heartstrings…

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Luxembourg’s data privacy watchdog says it is in discussions with Amazon about voice recordings made of customers who have used the firm’s Alexa smart assistant.

The regulator is the lead supervisory authority for the company in the EU, meaning that it co-ordinates investigations into the business on behalf of the other member states.

At this point it has not launched a formal privacy probe.

Amazon declined to comment.

But a spokesman for the National Data Protection Commission (CNPD) said that citizens could “file a compliant with our authority or his/her national supervisory authority” if they had concerns.

“Unfortunately, at this stage, we cannot comment further about this case as we are bound by the obligation of professional secrecy,” he added.

Concern about Alexa recordings came to light in April after the news agency Bloomberg spoke to staff who had transcribed clips for the firm.

It said the recordings had sometimes been triggered by Amazon’s smart speakers mishearing the command that is supposed to restrict when audio is transmitted back to the firm. It reported they had included everyday conversations as well as instances of suspected sexual assault.

Amazon says it uses human reviewers to improve its voice recognition tech’s accuracy as well as to develop new features.

While some of this work is done in Amazon’s own offices, it has emerged that some outsourced contractors have been encouraged to do the transcriptions from home.

In June, Amazon’s Alexa chief Dave Limp told the BBC that only a fraction of 1% of Alexa recordings were checked by humans.

But he acknowledged that the firm’s terms and conditions could have been “more specific” to make clear that the audio could be subject to human review.

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At the end of last week, the firm added an option in Alexa’s smartphone app to allow users to have their recordings excluded from the relevant database.

“The voice recordings from customers who use this opt-out are also excluded from our supervised learning workflows that involve manual review of an extremely small sample of Alexa requests. We’ll also be updating information we provide to customers to make our practices more clear,” it said in a statement.

A spokeswoman told the BBC that this move was not related to the CNPD’s actions.

Last week, Apple revealed it had also halted all human review of recordings made via its Siri virtual assistant, while Google said it had suspended similar checks made of audio captured via its Assistant across the EU.

The lead supervisory authority for these two companies is Ireland’s data watchdog.

It told the BBC that it was in contact with both firms.

“The Data Protection Commission is engaging with both Google and Apple to establish further details on the processing of personal data in the context of the manual transcription of audio recordings collected by these companies’ digital assistants, and to establish how the companies concerned believe that such processing of data is compliant with their GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation] obligations, further to which we will be making our assessments and conclusions,” a spokeswoman told the BBC.

“We note that both companies have ceased this processing, Google from mid-July and Apple in recent days.”

How to opt out of Alexa recording reviews:

• Open the Alexa app
• Select Settings via the menu bar
• Tap Alexa Privacy
• Press the text Manage How Your Data Improves Alexa
• Unselect both the “help improve Amazon services and develop new features” setting as well as the ‘use messages to improve transcriptions” option for each household user

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Acer is a household name in the PC gaming space with its high-end Predator series and the budget-friendly Nitro series. At an event in Mumbai today, Acer expanded its Indian product lineup with 8 new gaming laptops, streaming devices and monitors.

Acer now boasts of a fairly diverse portfolio consisting of laptops at various screen sizes, latest Intel processors, Nvidia RTX or GTX graphics cards and prices ranging between INR 59,999 and INR 4,49,999. 

 Acer Predator Triton series 

(Image credit: Aakash Jhaveri)

The top of the line model is the Acer Predator Triton 900 which brings a futuristic hinge that can be rotated independently of the display and can thus be propped at any angle facing either of the sides. That’s a 17.3-inch 4K IPS panel with support for G-Sync that can be floated over the keyboard for a immersive experience, traditional notebook mode and even a stand mode for using it as a  touchscreen or for content creation.

Internally, the Acer Predator Triton 900 is powered by an 8-core 9th Gen Intel Core i9 processor that can Turbo up to 5GHz along with the new Nvidia RTX 2080 GPU and up to 32GB of DDR4 RAM. There are two 512GB M.2 NVMe SSDs in a Raid 0 configuration, a full-sized mechanical keyboard with a NumPad with per-key RGB lighting and additional macro keys and a custom-engineered 4th gen AeroBlade cooling technology while still being reasonably slim at 0.94-inches.

Next up is the Acer Predator Triton 500 which aims to be a compact gaming powerhouse bringing an 8th Gen Intel Core i7 processor and Nvidia RTX 2080 Max-Q GPUs to a form factor that is just 0.25-inches thick and weighs about 2 kgs. The display is a 15.6-inch panel with a FullHD resolution and 144Hz refresh rate. Pricing starts at INR 1,65,999.

 Acer Predator Helios series 

(Image credit: Aakash Jhaveri)

The Acer Predator Helios 300 comes in a 15-inch and a 17-inch skew, with FullHD resolution at 144Hz, Intel Core i7 and an Nvidia RTX 2070 Max-Q GPU and up to 32GB of RAM. Pricing starts at INR 99,999 for the smaller variant and INR 1,14,999 for the bigger one. 

The Acer Predator Helios 700 has the most futuristic design of the lot, with an entire keyboard that slides out allowing for better air circulation and uncovering two additional air intakes. Not just that, it also houses two AeroBlade fans, five copper heat pipes, a vapour chamber and CoolBoost. Internally, the Helios 700 has a 9th Gen Intel Core i9, Nvidia RTX 2070 or 2080 graphics, and up to 64GB of RAM. The base variant is priced at INR 2,49,999 and will be available next month onwards.

 Acer Nitro series 

The Nitro series is one of the most well-known budget gaming series. Consisting of the Nitro 7, the Nitro 5 15” and the Nitro 5 17”, these laptops are powered by the latest-gen Intel processors and Nvidia graphics and up to 32GB of RAM and storage varying  between HDD and SSD options. Pricing starts at INR 59,999 for the Nitro 5 and INR 84,999 for the Nitro 7.

The event also saw the launch the Nitro Stream, the AOPEN curved gaming monitor and the Nitro VG0 and the Nitro VG1 gaming monitors, which start at a competitive INR 7,999.

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