Technology

In recent days, word about Nvidianew Turing architecture started leaking out of the Santa Clara-based companyheadquarters. So it didn&t come as a major surprise that the company today announced during its Siggraph keynote the launch of this new architecture and three new pro-oriented workstation graphics cards in its Quadro family.

Nvidia describes the new Turing architecture as &the greatest leap since the invention of the CUDA GPU in 2006.& Thata high bar to clear, but there may be a kernel of truth here. These new Quadro RTx chips are the first to feature the companynew RT Cores. &RT& here stands for ray tracing, a rendering method that basically traces the pathof light as it interacts with the objects in a scene. This technique has been around for a very long time (remember POV-Ray on the Amiga). Traditionally, though, it was always very computationally intensive, though the results tend to look far more realistic. In recent years, ray tracing got a new boost thanks to faster GPUs and support from the likes of Microsoft, which recently added ray tracing support to DirectX.

&Hybrid rendering will change the industry, opening up amazing possibilities that enhance our lives with more beautiful designs, richer entertainment and more interactive experiences,& said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. &The arrival of real-time ray tracing is the Holy Grail of our industry.&

The new RT cores can accelerate ray tracing by up to 25 times compared to NvidiaPascal architecture, and Nvidia claims 10 GigaRays a second for the maximum performance.

Unsurprisingly, the three new Turing-based Quadro GPUs will also feature the companyAI-centric Tensor Cores, as well as 4,608 CUDA cores that can deliver up to 16 trillion floating point operations in parallel with 16 trillion integer operations per second. The chips feature GDDR6 memory to expedite things, and support NvidiaNVLink technology to scale up memory capacity to up to 96GB and 100GB/s of bandwidth.

The AI part here is more important than it may seem at first. With NGX, Nvidia today also launched a new platform that aims to bring AI into the graphics pipelines. &NGX technology brings capabilities such as taking a standard camera feed and creating super slow motion like you&d get from a $100,000+ specialized camera,& the company explains, and also notes that filmmakers could use this technology to easily remove wires from photographs or replace missing pixels with the right background.

On the software side, Nvidia also today announced that it is open sourcing its Material Definition Language (MDL).

Companies ranging from Adobe (for Dimension CC) to Pixar, Siemens, Black Magic, Weta Digital, Epic Games and Autodesk have already signed up to support the new Turing architecture.

All of this power comes at a price, of course. The new Quadro RTX line starts at $2,300 for a 16GB version, while stepping up to 24GB will set you back $6,300. Double that memory to 48GB and Nvidia expects that you&ll pay about $10,000 for this high-end card.

In a wonderfully clear example of &dark patterns& designed to mislead users and retain control over their data, Google continues tracking your location even when you turn off Location History and are told that &the places you go are no longer stored.& Google says it tells users, but its disclosure is the bare minimum and users are discouraged from further interference with data collection.

A report from the AP lays out the details, but the information will come as no surprise to anyone who has tried to fully expunge their location data, or who read the &dark patterns& report from June.

The problem is quite simple. When you turn off (technically &pause,& a choice of words in itself troubling) &Location History,& a major Google account-level setting, you are told: &With Location History off, the places you go are no longer stored.&

Yet many apps and services Google provides when Location History has been turned off, in fact, do record and store your location.

To be fair, this is explained, after a fashion, when you turn off location history (here): &This setting does not affect other location services on your device, like Google Location Services and Find My Device. Some location data may be saved as part of your activity on other Google services, like Search and Maps.&

Although it makes sense that checking the weather would require location data, it makes less sense that the data would be collected systematically, in direct contradiction with what the user has been told. Itnot exactly a deception on Googlepart, but rather what appears to be a deliberate understatement of the companyother location tracking practices.

Not listed: that a precise location is recorded every time you interact with some apps and services.

That &some location data& as part of your search history is precise and organized, good enough to reconstitute a personmovements over a few days, as indeed the AP reporters did; with Location History off, there was in fact a detailed history of locations stored with Google.

Google protests that you can turn off this location data collection as well — itjust under a separate setting called &Web and App Activity.& Why is it there Why are there multiple places Why is the user not told that in order to truly turn off location history, there is a second setting that must be adjusted as well Why is it assumed that the user will understand that location is also stored under separate headings of search and other services It hardly need be said that this is completely inadequate as far as informing the user of how their data is being handled.

Further, it falls squarely under the concept of dark patterns. The user is duped into thinking that their locations are no longer being recorded by Google, down to a warning from the company that some services might not work correctly if Location History is disabled. Meanwhile location is still recorded silently and without notifying the user, for example, that such and such an action will produce a location record that will be saved, and giving them a chance to delete it or recall the action.

The deletion of these points, by the way, is one of Googleother defenses: you can go delete them at any time. But deleting location history points was one of the main points of criticism for Google in the dark patterns paper, which found that hardly any of their testers could figure out how to do it. There are separate controls for different types of location collection, isolated from each other and each unaffected by the otherdeletion or restriction, but it is not explained why, or why for example some can be deleted in bulk but others must be done one by one.

This kind of confusing and underhanded, not to say malicious, practice is far from uncommon among tech companies, but this is a particularly indefensible one. Continuing to maintain a history of locations when a user has deliberately indicated their preference to have no such history recorded is simply ridiculous.

In a statement to TechCrunch, Google explained:

Location History is a Google product that is entirely opt in, and users have the controls to edit, delete, or turn it off at any time. As the story notes, we make sure Location History users know that when they disable the product, we continue to use location to improve the Google experience when they do things like perform a Google search or use Google for driving directions.

Iteasy to imagine a handful of minor UI or alert changes that would fully inform users of what is being recorded and when. A notification when a location is generated, for instance, or a link to the separate location tracking setting would be sufficient. But it is telling that not only is the interface the way it is, but the system has been designed the way it is: silently recording location in spite of user preference, with no way to opt out without compromising the service. These are both deliberate choices, and the more such choices are exposed and questioned, the better off users will be.

Now that the Note 9all good and official, ittime to move onto the next major smartphone. The Google Pixel 3 leaks haven&t quite hit the fever pitch we saw with Samsungdevice ahead of launch — though therestill time. After all, it seems likely the latest version of Googleflagship Android handset won&t officially be official until October.

Even so, we&ve already seen a handful of credible links, including a full unboxing last week, so we&re starting to develop a pretty good picture of what we&re in for with the device.

For starters, therewhat looks to be a pretty sizable top notch. That Google would embrace the notch this time around is no surprise, really. In additional to being all the rage on practically every non-Samsung flagship, Google made a big deal of making Android Pie notch-friendly.

It seems to follow, then, that the company would embrace the polarizing design decision. That said, even by todaynotch-embracing standards, this is a big one. If anything, it seems that notches are actually getting bigger since Essential helped kickstart the trend by adding one to its first phone.

Speaking of embracing trends, Google dropped the headphone jack for the Pixel 2, after mocking Appledecision to do so a year prior. From the looks of it, the company is helping ease the transition with a pair of USB-C headphones, forgoing the necessity for a dongle (there does, however, still appear to be one in the box). Of course, you&ll still have to figure out a way to listen to music while charging the phone.

The design language is very similar to the companyPixel Buds, complete with loops for keeping them in place. Itprobably going too far to call them wired Pixel Buds, with all of the functionality that entails (translation and the like), but the company does appear to be taking some cues from the lukewarmly received wireless earbuds.

The Google Pixel XL, meanwhile, appears to be going really large this time out. The new 6.4-inch Note 9got nothing on whatreported to be a 6.7-inch display. We&re getting to the point where these things are basically tablets with calling capabilities. Of course, Samsunggot the benefit of years of product design that have made it possible to sneak a large display into a relatively small footprint. Without actually holding the new device, ithard to say how unwieldy it really is.

Other bits and bobs include a Snapdragon 845, which is basically aprerequisite for any flagship smartphone to be taken seriously. The XLis also rumored to have a 3,430 mAh battery — actually a downgrade over last yearmodel, in spite of yet another massive bump in screen size.