this is bbc news. the headlines: the us has dismissed reports that russia is withdrawing from ukraine's border and instead accuses moscow of sending more soldiers. washington says russia's presence has increased by as many as 7,000 troops — labelling moscow's claims of a reduction "false". landslides and flooding in the brazilian city of petropolis have killed more than 90 people. many more have been made homeless. nearly a month's worth of rain fell in a matter of hours, causing mudslides that buried homes and flooded streets. rescuers are searching for survivors. presidentjoe biden�*s senior medical adviser on coronavirus, dr anthony fauci, has said it's time for americans to start moving back towards normality. dr fauci acknowleged covid—19 infections would likely rise as restrictions were lifted and said tough choices lie ahead. now on bbc news,

it's time for click. this week... imitates arnold schwarzenegger: i need your clothes, your boots and your motorcycle. blimey! the terminator�*s on zoom! robert de niro�*s waiting and he's talking italian. and... # just one cornetto! can you hear me? hello? yes, can you hear me? are you muted? no, are you frozen? all i'm getting is me back. i can hear me. 0k, hang on. sorry! hang on! what have you done? have you dropped the phone? yeah, sorry.

i can hear you now. hello? you've got me? yes, there we go. good, i've got more used to talking to you like this than in real life now. yeah, and i'm more used to talking to you while you're walking up and down wherever you're going. did you know that a fifth of all zoom meetings last year took place while people were walking and running? and i reckon that's all you. all me — just think of the steps! but many people have been doing it a bit more horizontally. don't know what you're talking about! but listen, love �*em or hate �*em, these platforms really have kept us together during these tough times, haven't they? and i don't think they're going away any time soon. it is some way towards seeing people properly but, of course, it's not the same — especially with strangers. it can be a bit awkward. yeah, you think of the people that have joined the click team in the last couple of years. i mean, for a long time, they did not know how tall we were, they'd only ever seen us from the waist up, they couldn't enjoy our sparkling company in person! lara chuckles but this is something that the big tech companies are addressing, and some of them are coming up with completely new ways to collaborate online.

here comes 0sman iqbal with more. hi! one thing is certain — the future of work is hybrid. which means we need to start working out how to best collaborate between the real and virtual worlds. for nearly two years now, i've seen my colleagues on this screen. but that's so 2021! because, brace yourself... ..for holograms. this is cisco�*s webex hologram. ijust need to put on this headset and a life—sized cullenjennings, who is based over 4,000 miles away,

will appear in my study. hello there, cullen! hey, good to see you, 0z! how are you doing? i'm very well! so, it turns out that it's pretty hard to record a 3d hologram for tv. those black pixels around cullen weren't actually there during the call. you can go grab it here too as well and move it around. just reach out and grab it. 0h, get out! right, i've got it! i've got it in my world! i don't know if this will ever came across on screen. in a way, i should be amazed by the hologram. see that — see that is cool, that is! but really, it was the passing of those cad objects — that's the thing that really blew me away. it's one of the areas i think this will be used a lot is when you are trying to do these design reviews, understand what people are building, see something, see a part that you were designing and those types of issues. we are betting on the hologram as being the next big kind of immersive medium of communication. just for ease, to kind of help you out, make it a bit smaller. there you go. 0op. what the hologram does is exactly the opposite of what others are working on,

for example, with avatars, but what you want to do is make it very photorealistic, you want to make it very lifelike. wasn't expecting that. there we go. oh, that's terrifying! and what the technology that we're talking about and that we're working on does is fundamentally levels the playing field, so that an individual in a village in bangladesh has the same opportunity as someone in the heart of central london. say hi to auntie! oh, my gosh! i love you! and with other concepts like google�*s project starlight in the works, holograms may be with us sooner than we think. but for most of us, video calls will remain as our standard way of communicating, so nvidia have been using artificial intelligence to solve those day—to—day problems. and staring at a screen during an endless meeting is definitely an issue, so gaze correction can make it appear like you're always looking straight ahead — something that seems minor but is actually really important. let's say you're in an interview and you want to sneakily read some notes. or even in a not—too—interesting meeting, you can just look like

you are paying attention. right. left. so it could look great or it could look weird. does it look like i'm looking at the screen now? is that weird? chuckles. another obsession sweeping through the tech world is the photorealistic avatar. this handsome chap can even track my expressions in real time. it freaks me out a bit, but let's see what the team thinks. have you ever seen max headroom from the �*80s? i have not. i recommend you check it out because you're basically him. but those rugged good looks may be intimidating for some. i guess if everyone has — if the whole world has plastic surgery, i suppose you start to feel like you maybe need to have plastic surgery or something. i don't know!

yeah, i'd rathertalk to real people, i think. call me traditional! and while not as sci—fi, one vitally important thing that nvidia claims they perfected is removing all the background noise when we're talking on calls, no matter where we are. siren wails inaudible the company to let me train this in the wild. fire engines, 0k? anotherfire engine. background noise central london — construction, motorbikes, cars. no background noise central london — construction, motorbikes, cars. bus engine hums: all right, richard, there is a big bus going by — can you hear me? ok. no bus noise: all right, richard, there is a big bus going by — can you hear me? no, i can hear only you! you keep saying there is all this noise but i don't hear it. ..the smart gallery creates

individual video feeds... but the big question is what is zoom doing? their focus is now on using hardware to create hybrid video—calling solutions, like installing cameras in meeting rooms to enable in—person and remote participants to interact. right, and that is our mindset at zoom. it's like, you know, you can come up with a marketing video that talks about the metaverse and says, you know, the world is all going to be holograms some day, but what are you doing for me today? chuckles i have real problems right now that i need help - with and i just want to be able to talk to my colleagues around the world, whether i'm in the office or i'm at home. can you help me with that? you know, rewind back a few years ago and it was — mindset was "i have to be in the room to be effective" and remote people are second—class citizens, it's very challenging to break in, it's very challenging to be heard. "they may just forget about me up on the wall." and now, it's reversed again, so how do i maintain my individuality when i'm

in a group meeting space? where am i? where are you ? over here. come with me. but maybe we don't need avatars and virtual reality to get back that real—life office feeling. it could be as simple as this retro—looking platform, gather, where you can wander around and bump into colleagues. so, in the right virtual setting, maybe the chaos of office life can live on. half of my team have disappeared. can i interrupt this meeting to point out we've just found there's a rooftop bar. crosstalk hello! so am i allowed to get off the board? cheers, lara. cheers! i have to say the digital drinks do not taste as good as the real thing, do they? true, but it's a nice virtual view — take a look at that. yeah! it's beautiful, isn't it?

and what's great about this table is that it's an intimate two—person setting that only you and i can hear, even while our producer kittyjust randomly wanders around nearby. which is great for all of that amazing click gossip — not that there actually is any. but sometimes, it's not about what you say, but how you say it, and that's particularly true when it comes to actors. so, i've been taking a lot and how cinema has been getting an ai upgrade. fassen wii’ zusammen. ein mann in vorgestern geferiert haben klaut drei millionen dollar... no, robert de niro has not learned fluent german. kriminelle familien in dieser stadt in verbindung bringt und. .. this is the work of uk start—up flawless ai, whose artificial intelligence can recreate lip sync when dubbing, meaning movies can effectively be reshot in different languages without losing the nuance of an actor's performance. all of this journey really started for me is when i worked

on a film called heist and then, i saw a foreign dub of the movie and i was listening to it, and i spoke a bit of the language that it had been dubbed into, and i was kind of horrified because the dialogue that we'd spent years working on, like, had been changed, the performance was completely different, the kind of scene itself was fundamentally altered. the technology digitally captures the acting, transforming it into a 3d computer model. after training the al to learn a specific actor's facial and vocal performances, a modified version is created that can precisely match the facial expressions to an entirely different language.

speaks japanese robert de niro was saying an �*ooh' 20 _ minutes later in the film, but that ooh is need for — that mouth viseme is needed for a foreign performance. it's able to take his actual word that he says it and plays it in the right spot, so that it's actually him saying it. and aside from allowing film—makers to translate their films accurately, there's also the benefit to the audience — who, let's face it, can be put off by poor dubbing. it's a miracle you ever get to fighting at all! and with the streaming giants bringing us more international content than ever, this new technology could be timely. disney, netflix, amazon — all these guys, they've created global content distribution businesses, but without global content, and we've created a tool that gives them global content. it relies notjust on capturing facial expressions of an actor, but someone speaking the same lines in another language.

combining both creates a 3d model for that specific actor, merging their face with the lip movements of the dubber. so we create a dataset for each of the performers and then, essentially, that dataset contains their idiosyncratic style — it looks like they would have performed it because it is their performance. flawless a! says we'll be seeing the first films using this tool within the next year — so maybe soon we'll be watching programmes with no idea what language they were originally made in. dubbing sometimes is a barrier to enjoy that content. we don't really have the same empathetic understanding of other cultures because we don't access their material, we don't hear their stories, we don't see it from that point of view, so we have this very kind of walled—off version of the view of the world. hello! it's your 90—second tech news round—up. meta warned it could pull instagram and facebook in europe if it's unable to process local user data on us servers. the uk government said that adult websites will be legally required to verify the age

of users under new internet safety laws. and nvidia's $31 billion deal to acquire the uk chip firm arm from softbank is off. the company's cited regulatory challenges. robot caterers showcased their agility at the beijing winter olympics. yes, cooked dumplings arejust one of the dishes served to visitors on site. winter sports fans can also use comcast�*s vr app to tune into 150 hours of interactive action from home. drones have been helping to clean up a belgian port. this fleet uses machine learning to scan and detect floating waste, so companion trawlers can clean rubbish efficiently. and finally, ai gets everywhere these days, even science fiction book covers!

sadly, these are not real. they look great, though! they have been generated using an the online database imagenet and machine learning tools trained on millions of images. lewis hackett, the british artist behind the project, also used natural language processing to generate the titles and said these techniques can help with idea creation. i'd totally read counting mars or green grass is the colour of the wind! when i was 13, i was speaking to somebody online. they said that they were

a woman a few years older than me, and we started speaking and i thought that we were making friends with each other. as the conversation progressed, she was asking me lots of questions about myself — whereabouts did i live, what were my hobbies, who were my friends? and she told me that i was pretty, i was beautiful. um, she told me that i could be a model. and then a few hours into the conversation, she asked me to send a topless photo. so i sent her a topless photo. and everything changed at that point. she wasn't nice and complimentary any more — she was threatening, and she said that if i didn't send more photos, she was going to make sure that everybody saw the photo that i had already sent. the next morning, a man came to my house. he sexually assaulted me in my bedroom and he took more photos of everything that happened. luckily, i didn't see him again after that day. six months down the line, the police contacted me and said that they'd found the photos and my information on this man's computer. rhiannon now works for the marie collins foundation, an organisation which supports children who've suffered sexual abuse via the internet or mobile technologies. it's one of a number of groups, including bernardos and the nspcc, that have advised and are backing a uk government campaign called no place to hide.

the campaign encourages the british public to pressure companies like meta — formerly facebook — not to bring end—to—end encryption services to their messaging services like facebook messenger and instagram direct messenger. formerly the ceo of the national cyber security centre, ciaran martin thinks the government's got it wrong on this issue. encryption has been a source of tension between government and the tech industry. end—to—end encryption is a specific form where, unlike in previous forms of encryption, there is no actual key. so, historically, you could go to a provider of a communication service, whether it's post or high—end internet communications, you can serve a warrant and say "we need access to this." with end—to—end encryption, the company can say, "there is no way of giving you that access." so privacy campaigners and many in the tech industry will say this is a very good thing, because that means that hackers, hostile foreign governments and so forth, cannot get at these types of communications.

meta owns whatsapp, which already uses end—to—end encryption. it had planned to introduce similar features by default to facebook and instagram's messenger services. however, it's pushed back its encryption plans until 2023 after campaigning by child welfare groups. we now see more grooming offences on instagram than any other platform on the market. so, we've got a situation where the highest risk platform, instagram, is now proposing to put on a blindfold and, at a stroke, eliminate its ability to even see what's happening on its site. to complicate matters, the government campaign has provoked the uk information commissioner's office to say: we find ourselves in a position where two public bodies are on opposing sides of the argument — the information commissioner's office and the national crime agency. the nca points to the case of convicted sex offender david wilson. he posed as teenage girls

online, blackmailing 52 boys into sending him indecent images of themselves. wilson was jailed for 25 years for his crimes. it was facebook itself that passed on wilson's details to the nca. the information commissioner's office says that law enforcement doesn't need access to encrypted messages — that it already has sufficient powers. well, to give you some sort of an idea, as a result of the information that we receive from the tech companies, we're currently arresting 500 suspects a month between the nca and uk policing, and safeguarding 650 children. so the input we get from the tech companies, through the material that they're finding on the internet and sending to us, is quite substantial. if we run the whole of the debate through the prism of one very important, very emotive idea, then we're

likely to get solutions which are not proportionate, and not actually going to solve the real problem. do you think that there's a solution to this problem that will keep privacy and child safety advocates happy? me, in particular, as a survivor of online grooming and child sex abuse, with images being created, i particularly want privacy. i don't want those images to be circulated around the internet. it's not privacy versus protecting children — we can have both of these things, and we need to be moving towards that. it's become a very binary debate. you're either on the privacy side you're on the child safety side. and we need to start building bridges and moving closer together, and working towards a solution that works for both.

that was rhiannon mcdonald talking to marc cieslak. and if you're concerned about any of the issues raised in mark's report, bbc action line has links to organisations that can help. now, earlier, we talked about how movies may be changing, and it got me thinking — you know what makes watching any movie more enjoyable? ice cream! 0h, of course! and it's no surprise that it's nick kwek who volunteered for this story. he's been to america to check out some technology that will make freezing your own at home easier. mm. 0k, admittedly this is a pretty sweet gig — see what i did there? the average american gobbles over 20 litres of ice cream per year,

compared to the paltry seven for us brits. so i've come to the suburbs of boston to set the record straight. i'm actually here to see a new type of appliance reminiscent of those coffee pod machines advertised by george clooney. wouldn't change a thing. now, the way this works is that each pod has its own unique qr code, and when i put it into the machine, a camera scans it and tells the machine what the product is — if it's a cocktail, a coffee, an ice cream — how long it should freeze it for, and to what consistency. we're all set up for all kinds of stuff in the same space. andrea invited me to the test kitchen to conjure up my very own flavour. oh. it's good. yeah? yeah. imean...

what would you do to make it better? you can't improve this. you can't improve it? this is going straight to the shops. we're done. the ones that have been a struggle or challenge has been the smoothies, because we want them to be healthy. we're adding nutraceuticals, which are like food ingredients that have benefit — nutritional benefit — creating a combination that tastes good, that's healthy, that's shelf—stable is a challenge. cold snap aims to overhaul the frozen treat industry — from how food's made, to how it's stored, to how it's shovelled down my throat. the way ice cream is made today is it's frozen in the factory, kept frozen in the grocery store, you rush it home, you keep it frozen in your freezer. all the while, you're putting energy and cost into that pint of ice cream before you consume it. there's a lot of carbon emissions associated with that that's going up into the atmosphere. our technology, with cold snap, we just freeze it when we need it, and so we think we can reduce the carbon emissions associated with making ice cream by, like, anywhere from 50% to 75%. it could mean less waste, but will come with a hefty price tag of around $2,000 — or £1,500 — but is initially entered the commercial sector. cheers. everything has been designed from scratch, right down

to the unique caps on the pods. we wanted absolutely no ice cream touching the machine. we wouldn't be able to use a regular soda can style, so we developed our own top. the aluminium cans are important, because they can be recycled. but they also allow for good heat transfer, so the liquid inside can be chilled quickly on demand. by being able to churn the ice cream and draw air into the can as it's freezing, you can actually create the ice cream. at the risk of stating the obvious, the technology actually affects the taste of the ice cream. we're intentionally making the ice crystals smaller than anything you can buy on the market today. so in addition to being 14% buttermilk fat, we control the ice crystal size, and you essentially get a very dense, thick, creamy dessert. i guess you can say the proof is in the pudding? but is this one machine too far in the age of convenience? do we really need this? then again, do we really need ice cream and frozen cocktails? oh, it's been a tough day. oh, it's enough to make you feel hungry, isn't it? oh. it is, and conveniently, we can eat something now, because that's all we have time

for this week. ah, brilliant. don't forget check us out on social media. we live on youtube, facebook, instagram, and twitter — @click. thanks for watching. see you soon. bye bye. a stormy end to our week — the first of the storms, storm dudley, arrived during wednesday afternoon and into the evening. and as we went through the latter stages of the day, wind gusts were quite widely around 70 mph, gusting in excess of 80 mph through capel curig. now, it looks likely that we'll continue to see some rain and snow, as well, over the next few hours, even snow falling at lower levels across the highlands — so there will be some accumulations, there will be some

icy stretches to look out for first thing. so we keep the potential for some rain and some snow over the next few hours, further south across england and wales. quite breezy still, but the winds will start to ease down, and it will stay largely fine and dry here. but temperatures will hold up above freezing — so first thing tomorrow morning, around 4—7 celsius, noticeably colder into the far north. now, as we start off thursday, then it looks likely that we'll continue to see some showers slowly easing and, as we go through the day, still windy, but not as strong as they have been. a good deal of dry weather on thursday, with some sunshine coming through. temperatures in the north between 5—7 celsius — not quite as mild in the south, with 12 celsius the high here. but we have to draw your attention to what's happening during thursday into friday — this is storm eunice. now, this will intensify quite dramatically, this area of low pressure, and will cause some issues. now, in several areas across scotland and northern ireland, it's not the wind, it's the snow. we are likely to see some heavy wet snow falling on power lines that could have an impact, 10—30 centimetres of snow. as i say, the winds not quite as strong here,

we're looking at gusts of winds around 25—35 mph. but the snow will start to tot up. now further south of that, the snow will ease and it'll be largely dry with some sunshine — but look at the gusts of wind. we are likely to see widely gusts in excess of 70—80 mph inland, and on extreme west—facing coasts, we could see wind strength around 90 mph gusts, potentially up to 100 mph. so the met office has issued an amber warning. be prepared for some significant disruption, dangerous, damaging gusts of wind. and, even as we head into the weekend, we keep plenty of isobars on the chart — showers on saturday being replaced by longer spells of rain.

this is bbc news. our top stories... the white house says russia's claim of withdrawing forces surrounding ukraine is false and that in fact it's sent in thousands more troops. heavy rains trigger landslides in brazil, killing more than 90 people. rescuers launch a desperate search for survivors. america's top covid advisor says it's time to inch back to normality, despite the risks that still remain from the virus. they are trying to balance the fact that the world and the united states and particularly certain parts of the united states are just up to here with covid, theyjust really need to somehow get their life back. and, more bad news for britain's royalfamily. police investigate one of prince charles' charities

over cash for honours claims.