Samsung Galaxy S6 Active appears in leaked press renders, black and white camo options shown

Yesterday photos of the Samsung Galaxy S6 Active were leaked out onto the webs. The photos were fairly good quality and gave us a good idea of what the device looks like in the wild. If those were still a little too grainy for you, famed tipster @evleaks is now showing off the device in a pair of leaked press renders.

There’s no question the phone certainly looks rugged enough and in attempt to attract more outdoorsy types, features a camouflage paint job in both black (blue-ish), and white (with silver accents). We have to admit, we kinda liked yesterday’s all black model a little better than these, but to each his own. No word if AT&T will throw in a free can of Monster energy drink every device sold.

Android M introduces black status icons for light colored themes

Android M will have a lot of cool new features, but one of the smaller ones Google didn’t mention was for app developers. Roman Nurik has revealed a new windowLightStatusBar flag that will tell the system to make icons and text in the status bar a translucent black color instead of the usual white.

This flag will be useful for apps which use light-colored tint for their status bar where white icons might be hard to read. It’s small, but developers who remain mindful of these small details tend to earn loyal userbases, so be sure to use it if your app needs it!

[via Google+]

Google Photos developer apologizes for incorrectly identifying black couple as ‘gorillas’

In what can only be described as one hell of an awkward experience, Google Photos could be accidentally racist. Well, as much as a computer algorithm can be. In what appears to be a pretty big oversight by its developers, Google Photos — which recently added a new feature that can identify faces, objects, or even animals from stored photos — seems to have incorrectly tagged a black couple as gorillas. Yikes.

The person who made the discovery was quickly contacted by a Google developer on Twitter who sincerely apologized for the mix up, removing the “gorillas” tag from the service entirely until they can sort things out. As far as avoiding this mess in the future, Google developer Yonatan Zunger had this to say:

“We’re also working on longer-term fixes around both linguistics (words to be careful about in photos of people [lang-dependent] and image recognition itself. (e.g., better recognition of dark-skinned faces). Lots of work being done, and lots still to be done. But we’re very much on it.”

This isn’t the first time computers have been accused of semi “racist” mistakes. Not too long ago HP came under fire after their computer webcams couldn’t identify black people, and there was even a camera that asked if Asians were blinking.

It’s clear Google’s recognition software still needs some fine tuning. It’s only in the situation above that things get weird. Nobody really gets offended when Google Photos incorrectly tags your cat as a dog. Well, not unless you’re a cat.

[Twitter | via Ars Technica]