Unencrypted

Unencrypted ep.6: How technology is changing photography (ft. Ian McNaught Davis)

Ian is one of the most accomplished photographers I know and not only because of his masters in photography that he achieved abroad, but rather the fact that he has been a photographer in an active war zone. Scratch that, you can’t officially call Ukraine a war zone yet.

We’re talking on the morning of the Made By Google event where the big G took the wraps off of the Pixel 7 and 7 Pro. The headline photography feature is this thing called Face Unblur where the AI engine inside the new Tensor 2 processor and Google’s own machine learning smarts will try its best to make any blurry picture in your Google Photos library sharper.

The camera system – including the Image Signal Processing pipeline – will also go in at the pixel level and upscale individual bits of image file to make zoomed photos clearer.

Apple does something similar with the iPhone semantic rendering and Deep Fusion, which used to only kick in during medium to low lighting conditions. As of the iPhone 14 Deep Fusion enters the fray far earlier in the pipeline to enhance textures and details.

They call this new pipeline the Photonic Engine

While we may seem a long way away from pinhole camera obscura type setups where there’s an artist tracing over the scene projected in a dark room, we kind of aren’t.

The artist is just Artificial Intelligence and these systems are being recomposed in near real time on the pixel level. What you see and what your smartphone captures are wildly different ideas of reality and our memories are now truly at the mercy of what the technology manufacturers decide is their particular style.

To truly understand photography you need to look at the word “photograph” or, literally, light – photo. drawing – graph.

It gets even trippier when you consider photographic terms like exposure also refers to the amount of time you expose the sensor or image to light.

Aperture is the literal lens opening.

Of course Leonardo Da Vinci was involved with some sketches of camera obscura with glass lenses integrated into the pinhole design, but astronomer Johannes Kepler claims the credit for inventing the word photograph in 1604.

Fast forward to 1827 and a chemical experiment results in View from a Window at Le Gras. That process took eight hours to create, which is still shorter than the time it took my parents to have some of my baby pictures developed at a chemist.

Crazy, right? Our species used to hand creative control over our memories to complete strangers.

Cameras have gotten really good and it seems like we’re on the cusp of a major technology leap. But for now the magic is happening in the processing and companies like Vivo and Oppo are building extra bits of silicon to do the photographic heavy lifting. But that’s a story for another day.

Unencrypted is made possible by the good people at Addvirtt, the technology company democratising premium virtual display advertising for Africa. Visit addvirtt.com to request a demo.

Additional music by DSTechnician

British pound volatility, the imminent Credit Suisse liquidity crisis and the European gas situation contributed to a 3 percent gain for Bitcoin. The premier crypto has arrived at the $20 000 level again and things could go either way.

The shares of one of the widely tracked crypto funds Greyscale Investment’s bitcoin trust - a darling of institutional investors who want exposure to bitcoin without holding any - has dropped into the discount zone, and is now trading 36.2 percent below its net asset value as the institutional appetite for bitcoin slows.

Rising energy costs is squeezing bitcoin miners with the hash rate peaking at all time high levels. Big time mining firms carry fixed costs and this trend is putting pressure on profit margins.

Public miners are on shaky ground right now and a sharp decline in bitcoin price could topple many operations if revenues can’t cover debts.

Ethereum underperformed against its elite coin peers for the fourth week running.

September was a rocky month for financial markets with 8 and 9 percent respective declines in S&P 500 and Nasdaq, but gold and bitcoin have remained firm - prompting many hacks to sharpen their “digital gold” pencils.

Elsewhere in the tech sphere:

Reviewers are saying that you probably should wait before copping an Intel ARC Graphics card. Drivers are the primary force behind the caution and its a problem that the silicon giant can’t brute force its way out of.

Son of African soil Elon Musk is pushing ahead with his $44 billion Twitter purchase at 54.20 per share.

But all eyes turn to Google with the firm updating its Nest product range and many of its core apps ahead of the Pixel 7 launch event - this software scramble doesn’t divert enough attention for the thick bezels on the upcoming pixel watch, though.

Talking about android land, Xiaomi took the covers off of the 12T and 12T Pro - the latter is equipped with the 200MP Samsung ISOCELL HP1 camera sensor and is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1

The 12T (non-Pro), however, opts for the Mediatek Dimensity 8100-Ultra and the 108MP HM6 camera sensor from Samsung. Interestingly that Dimensity SoC brings a superior Bluetooth radio with a 5.3 connection over the 5.2 one in the Pro model.

In the Apple world embargoes have lifted on iPhone 14 Plus reviews and it predictably has the best battery life on any iPhone. There’s only a R1200 price difference between the Plus and the Pro in South Africa, though, so you’re gonna really want to need that extra endurance to skip on Dynamic Island and the camera improvements.

That’s James McCall, chief sustainability officer at HP. Yes, I’m back in the desert, but this time I’m taking about ocean bound plastics. Specifically the stuff HP is using in 99 percent of its new devices.

You see, plastic manufacturing is actually a bit of a scam.

On 18 July 2017 the sovereign nation of the People’s Republic of China filed a notification of technical barriers to trade with the World Trade Organisation.

This is a routine process and the WTO gets dozens of these a week.

No stress, right?

Wrong.

Because the items listed under the standardized codes were all targeted at things that have polymer in its name. Namely, plastics.

Pretty much all plastics cannot be sent to china for recycling.

And ever since then the world has been in an arms race to make plastic recycling profitable.

The uncomfortable truth of plastic recycling is that new plastic products cannot be made only out recycled plastic.

The other truth is that most plastic is not easily recyclable.

You know that triangle arrows with a number inside? That’s not a recycling sign, it’s a polymer ID code.

South Africa only has the technical capacity to recycle three of the seven polymers within our borders.

Well, to be fair we can process the others, but it gets tricky.

The codes you should look out for as perfect recycling targets are one, two and four.

One (PET) is pretty much all detergent bottles, juice bottles and those blue plastic water bottles.

Two (PE-HD) covers milk and shampoo bottles, almost all plastic bottle tops, and all your household container – off brand Tupperware stuff. And plastic crates.

Four (PE-LD) is all your packaging bags like milk sachets, bread packets, the plastic covering the 18 pack of toilet paper and the frozen vegetable bags – this is the main stock that our bin bags get made out of.

The tech industry, however, is targeting something called ocean bound plastics.

Samsung gets even more specific and uses fishing nets, for instance.

HP sources its recycled plastic stock from an organization called The Plastic Bank. They’re based in Port Au Prince in Haiti, a nation that didn’t have a functional waste disposal system until a couple of years ago and the waste was just dumped wherever.

These guys are fighting crushing poverty and this crazy rubbish problem at the same time.

A wrinkle in the grand plan of plastic recycling is that in Haiti the cost of recycled plastic goes down in lock step with the cost of natural gas.

In other countries there’s a similar problem where its just easier and cheaper to keep making virgin plastic from oil – it’s a biproduct of fuel refining after all.

Samsung partners with a number of smaller organisations across the Indian ocean.

But back to China.

The about turn in its recycling stance is all about the drag processing the world’s plastic waste was having on the healthcare system.

Even when countries sort the waste and then ship it, the energy intensive recycling process is also terrible for the environment and overall human safety.

So as it stands only about 10 percent of our plastic that we use actually gets recycled. It’s a bummer and a major economic waste, but it is better than nothing. So kudos to Samsung and HP for leading in respective industries.

You know what would be great, though? If these technology giants started making fewer products more thoughtfully. Devices crafted out of more premium materials that are easily recycled numerous times – think metal and glass – and last a really long time.

But that’s a story for another day

Bitcoin retreats from $20300 in wake of USD surge and BoE debt counter. XRP was an early winner, but QNT had a spectacular Wednesday. Public BTC miners have lost money. Amazon Kindle Scribe is an e-ink tablet with a stylus - which begs the question: WHO ASKED FOR THIS? Apple does about turn to bring Stage Manager to non-M1 iPads, but it may be a Pro only update when iPadOS 16 finally breaks cover.

Binance is the world's biggest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume and has aggressively entered South Africa. Lindsey Schutters spoke to the local Binance business head Hannes Wessels about the plans for Mzansi and how Binance is going to move crypto into the mainstream.

We didn't expect him to have an answer on the second question, but he did. And it's going to blow the roof off of crypto use on the continent.

Unencrypted is brought to you by https://www.addvirtt.com the sports advertising technology company - step out of the frame and into the action.

This week in crypto is brought to you by luno.com

Not many tech commentators gave Huawei a chance after the company was hit with sanctions that stripped it of its ability to source from US intellectual property. With no access to Google Mobile Services or even 5G connectivity, and unable to manufacturer its own silicon chips, Huawei fought back with a software response.

We will never see the HarmonyOS brand in South Africa, but that doesn’t mean we won’t benefit from the interconnected ecosystem advantages that it brings. And this is how Huawei is mounting its comeback.

Unencrypted is brought to you by https://www.addvirtt.com

Akhram Mohamed’s quotes come courtesy of the Reframed podcast, you can listen to me ranting about supply chains over there https://open.spotify.com/episode/03dKzZXkS8qPqHKcCaP0l0?si=D5jA_2EARUyfyoyvv559wA

This week in crypto is brought to you by luno.com

This week in crypto is brought to you by Luno.com

Samsung didn’t give much details on how they are reproducing HiFi audio in the Galaxy Buds2 Pro, they’re just trusting that you buy the product and the story.

This week Gavin Dudley, editor of TECH magazine, joins Unencrypted to unpack and demystify Bluetooth audio.

Unencrypted is brought to you by https://www.addvirtt.com

And recorded at https://www.atkarena.com