Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Emerging Tech
  3. Legacy Archives

PS3 Unofficially Gets BBC iPlayer

Add as a preferred source on Google

Only a few days have passed since the BBC announced it had made a deal for the Wii to carry its flagship iPlayer video-on-demandservice. There was great fanfare about the merger, and it was certainly innovative.   But no longer unique. Developers claim that within a day they were able to create a patch that lets PS3 owners access iPlayer and use the games console to stream content to their televisions.   Intended purely as a demonstration of how easy it was to do, thehack “does nothing more than mask your PS3’s user-agent string and makes half a dozen changes to make the JavaScript and CSS function correctly on the PS3.”   The hackers have urgedtoe BBC to release a proper version of the software for the PS3, but the company claims the problem doesn’t like with it. It would like to have access for all games consoles, but both Sony and Microsoft have been reluctant since they’d have no control over content.

DT Staff
Digital Trends has a simple mission: to help readers easily understand how tech affects the way they live. We are your…
A new startup wants to fix the military’s working-dog shortage with cloning and gene editing
Promising pitch, plenty of unanswered questions about the dogs.
a new startup wants to fix the militarys working dog shortage with cloning and gene editing warhound featured image

Military working dogs charge into places the rest of us would flee. So, I understand why anyone would want to breed tougher, healthier dogs for the job.

Warhound, a new startup from Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, has stepped out of stealth with $200 million to clone and gene-edit working dogs for American troops, police departments, and emergency services (via TechCrunch).

Read more
AI can describe a picture, but it still struggles to understand blind users
A University of Maryland study finds that Be My AI often buries useful answers in lengthy descriptions, leaving blind users to work harder to get the information they need.
Blind Man using walking stick

AI can describe a picture, identify objects, and answer questions about what a camera sees. But when a blind user needs a quick answer, getting an entire spoken essay about the scene isn't exactly helpful. Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have found that AI-powered visual assistance can leave blind users doing too much work to get the information they actually need.

The study, titled Say It My Way: Exploring Control in Conversational Visual Question Answering with Blind Users, examined how people interact with Be My AI, an AI-powered feature of the Be My Eyes app. The researchers found that users often received lengthy descriptions that didn't adequately address their immediate goals, forcing them to ask follow-up questions or find ways to steer the AI towards a more useful answer.

Read more
Etsy cracks down on AI slop listings. Everyone else needs to take note.
Now every platform must decide what counts as handmade.
Etsy featured image

Platforms tend to shrug off AI clutter until it threatens what they sell. For Etsy, that thing is trust in the maker.

To protect that, Etsy has banned AI-generated how-to guides and listings made entirely by bots. Most sellers must show at least one unretouched photo of the item (via Etsy Seller Handbook).

Read more