Новости за 24.03.2017

When I was little, my father drove a gold-colored Volvo 245 Turbo wagon. It had a cavernous cargo area that was regularly used to haul arcade video games, and to my four-year-old ears, the turbo whine sounded like a police car siren. That wagon eventually bit the dust, most likely from mechanical issues with the turbo. After a dalliance with a Subaru, it was eventually replaced with a gold Volvo 850 wagon — and that was the car I drove most often after I got my driver’s license.

Spider-Man: Homecoming is due out this summer, and I’m pretty excited. Tom Holland proved himself to be an incredibly solid Peter Parker in Captain America: Civil War, and even though it’s the third solo Spidey reboot in 15 years, Marvel Studios’ influence (and a good dash of Robert Downey, Jr.’s charm) has me cautiously optimistic that this new take on the character will be a welcome addition to what’s becoming a fun year in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

More companies are pulling advertising from YouTube over Google’s inability to ensure ads won’t appear next to hateful and offensive content. The Wall Street Journal reports that YouTube videos centered around racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic views are still scooping up ads from brands like Coca-Cola, Amazon.com, and Microsoft. This is even after reports last week exposed the issue and led to mass advertising boycotts in the UK and now the US, prompting Google to promise companies it would... Читать дальше...

The idea of using technology to directly cool Earth’s climate — most often called geoengineering — has always been equal parts bold and crazy. But it’s getting slightly more plausible every day. At an event in Washington, DC today, Harvard professor David Keith announced his new plan for testing his solar radiation management ideas, partnering with an Arizona launch site and a high-altitude balloon company called World View Enterprises. The plan is to launch a series of hover-gondolas to spray tiny particles of ice into the stratosphere... Читать дальше...

In what might be this week’s worst new idea, Reuters reports that AMC is working on an ad-free subscription video service that would be exclusively available to cable TV customers. In other words, it’d be a paid service that would be separate from your normal cable bill but require a cable account to even sign up for.

YouTube has had automated captions for its videos since 2009, and now it’s expanding the feature to include captions for sound effects. The video service uses machine learning to detect sound effects in videos and add the captions [APPLAUSE], [MUSIC], and [LAUGHTER] to millions of videos.

Throughout the history of cinema, few monsters have remained as iconic as King Kong. Originally debuting in a 1933 film, the massive primate has been re-created multiple times using a variety of visual effects techniques: the painstaking stop-motion animation of the original film, the man-in-a-suit goofiness of King Kong vs. Godzilla, Andy Serkis’ motion-capture performance in Peter Jackson’s 2005 reboot. But when it came time for Kong: Skull Island, director Jordan Vogt-Roberts turned to Industrial... Читать дальше...

One of the great gifts Ridley Scott’s 1979 horror classic Alien brought to the world was a space monster that felt like it had a little science behind it. It’s standard for the creatures in creature-features to get scarier as the movie goes along, but Alien writers Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett came up with a particularly plausible reason for their xenomorph antagonist to keep evolving into more threatening forms: its species has a life cycle, with stages inspired by insects. The new space-thriller... Читать дальше...

Tesla CEO Elon Musk today shared the first video of what he calls a “release candidate” version of Tesla’s upcoming Model 3 electric car. We’ve seen Model 3 prototypes before, and this five-second clip doesn’t really show us anything new — but Musk enjoys feeding the hype train.

How to decipher a North Korean missile test in just 72 hours

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T-Mobile is trying to help its subscribers dodge more spammy calls.

The carrier is going to begin warning subscribers when an incoming phone call appears to be from a scammer. If a scam call is detected, the caller ID will display as “Scam Likely,” giving subscribers a heads up before they answer or the chance to just ignore it outright.

T-Mobile will also let subscribers block all suspected scam calls so those calls never reach their phones in the first place. But subscribers will... Читать дальше...

The spacefaring races of the Mass Effect games can travel at faster-than-light speeds, allowing them to get to distant planets in seconds, far-off stars in minutes, and even entirely new galaxies in years. But that's still not fast enough for some players of BioWare's latest space opera, who have complained that the animation that takes your ship between Andromeda's worlds is interminably slow.

The Vergecast returns to New York! Nilay, Dieter, Natt, and Megan are here to update you with the news of the week. Apple has a new iPhone... kinda! And a new iPad... kinda! Natt got a look at the Android O developer preview, and Megan played Mass Effect: Andromeda. There’s a lot of stuff in between that so listen!

I’ve lost count of the number of fish heads I’ve lopped off. For the past 10 minutes, I’ve been standing in one spot, pulling a dead fish from a conveyor belt, slicing off its head, and then grabbing another. But while my hands have been occupied with the monotony of manual labor, my mind has been elsewhere, delving into a fantasy realm as a means to fight off the boredom. The longer the work day goes, the more elaborate the fantasy gets. Soon it’s hard to tell which is more important, the dream or the reality. Читать дальше...

For hours now, I’ve been staring at Zelda amiibo on eBay, and I’m starting to think I have a problem. Within The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Nintendo has hidden scores of secret in-game weapons and outfits for players to collect, but only if they have the requisite RFID-equipped figurine, of which there are 14. By scanning each one of these figurines on your Switch controller a maximum of once per day, you have a random chance of obtaining one of upward five exclusive items per amiibo.

Tech giants are already touting virtual reality and augmented reality as the next huge frontiers for digital entertainment, and it’s provided plenty of fodder for science fiction creators — look no further than Black Mirror’s “Men Against Fire.” A new short film from London filmmaker Magali Barbé looks at how lonely this future can be.

The Trump administration has issued a permit to go ahead and build the controversial Keystone XL pipeline. The $8 billion project has been the subject of a years-long fight between environmental advocates and those who claim the pipeline will create much-needed new jobs. Today’s decision overrules the Obama administration’s 2015 decision to kill the project.

According to a report from ET News, Samsung is planning to release 22 more curved TV sets to global markets. This comes as a surprise considering that both Sony and LG gave up on curved televisions this year, while reviewers and consumers alike have mostly found the design feature to be a gimmick.

Wells Fargo customers will soon be able to use their smartphones, rather than their cards, to withdraw money from the bank’s ATMs. The company announced that as of Monday next week, it was upgrading all 13,000 of its cash machines across the United States with smartphone functionality, requiring that customers provide only their PIN and an eight-digit code (generated from the Wells Fargo app) to access their accounts.

Amazon is adding two new smartphones to its “Prime exclusive” line of phones: the Alcatel A30 and the recently announced Moto G5 Plus. The two phones are sold unlocked and at a subsidized price, in exchange for displaying personalized offers and ads on the lock screen, similar to what Amazon does with lower-cost Kindle models.

Google is removing the ability to send and receive SMS messages from its Hangouts service in May, according to an email sent to its G Suite administrators. The email, posted in its entirety on Reddit, says that Google will cut the option from the app on May 22nd, and will prompt users to find a new default messaging service beforehand.

Twitter is considering offering a paid subscription to power users, including brands and news organizations, The Verge has confirmed. Twitter users today began tweeting screenshots of the survey and a mock-up of what the premium version of Twitter could look like, with new analytics, alerts about breaking news, and information about what an account’s followers are tweeting about. The advanced features would be contained within Tweetdeck, the company’s app for professionals. The core service would remain free. Читать дальше...

For all of its customization benefits, Android has never been well known for having the most user-friendly settings options. Case in point: setting a custom ringtone for devices running the AOSP version of Android has, in the past, involved plugging your phone into your computer to drag and drop song and sound files onto the phone for use later, or to move downloaded files to the proper location on the phone using a file manager.

Donald Trump welcomed members of the American Trucking Association to the White House today to listen to truckers and CEOs talk about healthcare. Later, the leader of the free world got in the cab of a truck and pretended to drive it. He pulled the horn and made some funny faces that were probably intended to look cool and tough.

At the Scale: The Future of Tech and Entertainment conference in Santa Monica, California, Disney CEO Bob Iger spoke on a variety of topics, from his tenure at Disney, the next installments of the Star Wars franchise, and that the company is looking at what comes after 2019’s Episode IX.