The Azerbaijan Grand Prix in the country’s capital city Baku is a relatively young course after joining the list of F1 tracks in 2016. As a result this is a course built with modern tech know how and machine planning to get the best possible city-based race circuit. We know exactly how and when to watch all the best bits of the Azerbaijan Grand Prix so read on to find out how to live stream ALL the action.

This could be the big race where Mercedes and Lewis Hamilton’s poor season start takes a turn for the better as he is expected to take his first win in 2018, having attained pole position in 2017. You may remember this was the course last year where Sebastian Vettel deliberately drove into Hamilton during a safety car restart. So expect tensions to be high this time around.

And they’ve finally started showing their form, taking the top two fastest times in the third free practice. But with Red Bull’s Daniel Ricciardo at the top of the podium for Shanghai and fastest yesterday, his form is not to be ignored as he’s definitely one to watch out for in Baku. And it was Hamilton’s Mercedes teammate Valtteri Bottas who topped the lot in the first free practice.

Thanks to the football World Cup we’ve had a reshuffle of the F1 season this year, which means it’s going to be much colder in Baku than last year. This should make for some interesting decisions by the teams which will need to rethink strategy anew when it comes to tyres.

Thankfully, it’s much more simple to watch the Azerbaijan Grand Prix from the comfort of your own TV, and on pretty much any device. Read on to find out how to live stream F1 coverage for free –  anywhere in the world.

How to live stream F1 in the UK for free:

If you’re in the UK then Channel 4 is the way to go for today’s free-to-air coverage. And the station’s All4 platform is free and straightforward to access on a range of devices including tablets, mobile phones, personal computers and Smart TVs.

Rather not have to sign in? Then the alternative way to access Channel 4 is by going to TVPlayer.com. It’s a free, legal, online streaming service based in the UK which offers hundreds of channels – and you don’t even need to sign in to stream F1 live.

Formula One 2018 is also being shown on Sky Sports F1. Live streaming of all F1 races is available online to Sky customers with a subscription to Sky Sports F1, as well as access to a mobile device with the Sky Go app. 

So if you already have a Sky subscription and prefer its coverage to Channel 4’s, then job’s a good. If you want the Sky coverage but don’t want to splash out on a full Sky contract you could always purchase a day, week or month pass using Now TV. A daily pass costs £7.99, and is available on more than 60 devices, including TV, mobile phones, and games consoles, and you can register up to four of them.

How to watch Azerbaijan Grand Prix in the US for free:

In the US, NBC Sports will be showing live coverage of every race weekend throughout the season. You’ll need an NBC cable subscription to get access, but once you do, you’ll get access to NBC’s Formula One Live Extra platform, which gives you live coverage and highlights on your smart TV or mobile device.

But if you don’t want to pay for an NBC subscription, there’s a way you can watch for free. By downloading and installing a VPN, you can effectively trick your computer into thinking that it’s in the UK. That way you can enjoy the free Channel 4 coverage without having to give your money to NBC.

It’s really easy to get started with a VPN – here’s how to do it:

How to live stream the Azerbaijan Grand Prix anywhere else in the world:

Not in the UK or US? Don’t fear…what goes for US viewers goes for you wherever you are in the world. You can live stream F1 from any country on Earth by using a VPN. Just follow the three steps above and you’ll be in the cockpit in no time at all for the Azerbaijan Grand Prix.

Stay safe during the Azerbaijan Grand Prix

Photos courtesy of Formula1.com

http://www.techradar.com/news/how-to-watch-the-azerbaijan-grand-prix-online-f1-live-stream-for-free

If you spend much time chatting to a digital assistant on a smart speaker or your phone, you’ll be interested in a new study that put nearly 5,000 questions to Google Assistant, Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and Cortana from Microsoft.

The test by digital agency Stone Temple found that Google’s AI-powered bot was the smartest of the bunch overall, taking on close to 80 percent of queries fired at it and coming up with the right answer more than 9 times out of 10 for the questions it tried to respond to. According to the study, Google Assistant is slightly smarter on a phone than it is on a smart speaker.

In terms of questions where an answer was actually attempted, Cortana sits in second place with Alexa in third. Siri languishes in fourth place, with Apple’s digital assistant only having a go at a little over 40 percent of the questions it was given.

Gains from 2017

Siri fared better in answer accuracy – it may only have attempted a response for 4 out of 10 queries, but of the answers it gave, 8 out of 10 were accurate. That still wasn’t enough to lift it out of fourth place though, as all the other assistants still performed better.

Stone Temple actually ran the same test last year, with Google Assistant once again coming out on top. However, both Alexa and Cortana have made big strides forward when it comes to number of attempted answers compared with 2017, so there’s not much breathing space for complacency for Google Assistant.

Some of the questions the apps struggled with were “who is the voice of Darth Vader?” and “how to make sand?”, so it would appear these bots aren’t quite ready to take over the world yet. You can see the full report over at the Stone Temple blog.

Via Gizmodo

http://www.techradar.com/news/google-assistant-is-the-smartest-assistant-according-to-a-new-study

It’s fair to say there’s a certain amount of fear around smart speakers at the moment, as these tiny devices that we put on our coffee tables and bookshelves have the potential to listen in on our every conversation. 

It harks back to the fear at the center of George Orwell’s dystopian classic 1984. Perhaps even further back, to something more primal, to the monster under the bed, the unseen but seeing. 

It’s easy to draw the 1984 parallel because, like the ever-present screens in the sci-fi masterpiece, our smart speakers (and even more similar smart displays) are swiftly working their way into every corner of our lives.

No matter the protestations from the companies that are making these speakers that claim they are only listening for ‘wake’ words, and only send information back to their servers when they’ve been decidedly activated, we still cling to the fear that Amazon (or Google, or Microsoft, or Apple) is spying on us. 

Follow the data

It doesn’t help that there are freaky news stories like Echo devices laughing for no reason, the Echo being hacked, and even news that it’s being manipulated to be a spying device by just using a normally-produced skill. 

But here’s the thing – and try to keep an open mind when reading this – it’s more likely that they’re not spying on you, than they are. The problem is that these companies will never be able to prove to you that they aren’t spying on you, because it is almost impossible prove a negative.

That whole ‘can’t prove a negative’ thing is the exact reason that in most judicial systems around the world, the burden of proof lies always with the claimant. 

I could accuse you, dear reader, of dressing up as a giant tuna fish, and without providing footage of yourself at every moment of your life, you can’t prove that you don’t. That’s an unfair burden.

As the claimant, the burden of proof lies with me to provide pictorial evidence of your fishy endeavors in order to make my accusation stand. And so far, no one has managed to prove that smart speakers are spying on you. 

The recent news that security firm Checkmarx created a skill that allowed it to turn Echo speakers into spy devices (below) actually does more to disprove than prove the theorem. 

In the skill, Checkmarx took advantage of a vulnerability (which has now been fixed) that used Alexa’s ‘I didn’t quite get that’ feature, where it can keep listening after a request. The team muted the line from Alexa, so the speaker continued recording without audibly telling you that it was. 

The team then adjusted the recording length so that this second ‘secret’ recording could last an indefinite amount of time (although it would automatically cut out after a couple of minutes). 

The first thing worth noting is that it wasn’t totally secret, as the Echo speaker would still have its ‘listening’ light on. The second is that this would only give you a couple of minutes of information after the interaction with a maliciously coded skill that the user would have to want to use.

The third, is that the attacker would only be able to receive a written transcription of the conversation. Amazon does have the ability to receive recorded audio (stay calm), but the sheer amount of server space needed to process recorded audio from the millions of Echo speakers around the world would make constant spying an absolute technical impossibility. 

There was a patent filed by Amazon that would circumnavigate this issue by using emotive words as triggers, so every time you say you ‘like’, ‘love’, or ‘hate’ something, your Echo would be able to monitor what that was and tailor your ads based on those preferences. 

While worrying, this is only a patent not a statement of intent, and if you took every creepy patent (those are three separate links) at face value, you’d have some pretty big questions about all the companies you give your custom to. 

Put down the pitchfork

Now, that’s not to say that the requests you make of Alexa don’t get logged and your data used by the company, but that’s your choice. It’s the same thing as you giving your data to Facebook every time you share a video, or Google every time you search for unicorn onesies. 

I want to make it clear that I’m not saying smart speaker spying definitely isn’t happening, or that it’s not possible for it to happen with the advancements in quantum computing and AI we’re currently seeing, but just that if you’re currently working from the assumption that they are spying on you just because you’re afraid of it, then you should probably challenge that assumption. 

Via Wired

http://www.techradar.com/news/listen-up-alexa-isnt-spying-on-you-and-this-spying-skill-only-proves-it