Новости за 31.03.2017

As the internet gets flooded with April Fools’ Day jokes — good or lame — it can be hard to keep track of the ones that are worthy of your attention. Google, in particular, is known for rolling out a ton of different pranks. Most of them are actually pretty fun since they are localized to each Google product or regional team.

Here's to the crazy ones. Mad Catz just filed for bankruptcy, after decades of serving the gaming peripheral market. The company bet big on Rock Band 4, which didn't pan out as well as it had hoped, and now the company has been shut down, with its assets up for auction. Mad Catz might be best known for its "little brother controllers." You know, the cheap third-party controller you give to your little brother to play Mario Kart which inevitably fails in his hour of need while you drift your way past him to victory. Читать дальше...

April 1st — a day colloquially known as “April Fools’ Day” or “the worst holiday ever” — isn’t even until tomorrow, but because the month of April starts on a Saturday this year, all the #brands are already out in force to pollute the internet celebrate the occasion with a bunch of tiresome fun pranks meant to thirstily self-promote their products bring some levity into our day-to-day lives.

Google’s annual offering of April Fools’ Day jokes has begun, and the latest is the somewhat clever idea of “Google Gnome,” a Google Home customized for the outdoors that is a little more existentially dour than your average smart assistant.

Ghost in the Shell isn’t the most VR-heavy cyberpunk franchise — it’s more known for its examination of synthetic bodies. Nonetheless, if you have a Gear VR or Oculus Rift (or just want to visit the Ghost in the Shell Facebook page) you can now watch the virtual reality accompaniment to the live-action adaptation, which premieres today.

Her book finds art in a hopeless place

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Twitter has changed the default profile picture for new accounts from an egg on one of seven different background colors to what they described to Fast Company as a “gumdrop-headed human.” They claim the human is genderless, and that is technically true, but society insists that the default gender is male and for my purposes right now in this blog (and at no other time) — so do I.

Netflix is bringing Final Fantasy 14: Daddy of Light to a worldwide audience this fall. The show is about the father-son bond formed over a mutual love of Final Fantasy 14, Square Enix’s massively multiplayer role-playing take on the Final Fantasy series. News was spotted today by The Verge’s sister site and daddy enthusiast Polygon.

Snapchat Stories are now searchable. The company announced today that users can use the search bar at the top of the app’s main page to find whatever they want in a story. That means you can type “puppy,” and stories featuring puppies will be available to watch, or if you want to watch a Chicago Cubs game, you could type that, too, and story footage from the game will come up. The stories just have to be added to Snapchat’s Our Story group montage to be searchable.

Twitter announced today that the company is changing the default avatar for new accounts from the infamous multicolored eggs to a new default profile photo that depicted a gray, genderless image of a person with a vaguely gumdrop-shaped head.

Apple’s next iPhones may feature True Tone displays, according to a note from Barclays, as reported by MacRumors. Currently, Apple’s True Tone display is only available on the 9.7-inch iPad Pro.

Comcast and AT&T published blog posts this morning responding to the backlash they’ve been receiving since Congress voted to revoke a strong set of internet privacy rules that would have prevented internet providers from using or sharing their customers’ web browsing history without permission. The companies take very different approaches when responding, but the takeaway from both is that they think customers should stop worrying.

Welcome back! We have a great show for you today. No really! If you listen to this podcast, you know Samsung announced the Galaxy S8 this week, so Nilay and Dieter bring in senior editor and friend of the show, Dan Seifert, who recently took a trip to South Korea to tour Samsung’s headquarters.

Congress shot down the FCC’s internet privacy rules this week, and in doing so, created a world of confusion over what Americans should expect when it comes to online privacy. The gutted rules would have explicitly prohibited internet providers like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T from sharing your web browsing history with other companies, and they would have put firm restrictions around how your data could be used. But this week’s joint resolution effectively turned back the clock to before the rules were proposed... Читать дальше...

Dom’s ride from Fate of the Furious will soon play soccer. Developer Psyonix revealed a new downloadable content pack coming to racing-meets-soccer game Rocket League, which will introduce a Dodge Ice Charger — the same one Dom Toretto drives in the movie — along with new wheels and decals. It’ll be available for $1.99 starting April 4th. The eighth Fast and Furious movie, meanwhile, will be in theaters on April 14th.

Netflix’s first animated film is coming. It’s called America: The Motion Picture, and as reported by Deadline it’s “an R-rated revisionist history tale about the founding of the country.”

Tomorrow is April 1st, which means a whole slew of dumb jokes and groan-worthy fake-outs will be headed your way — but so will an entirely new selection of choices from your favorite streaming services. And unlike most months, April seems to be an equal opportunity grab bag no matter which service you prefer.

A pair of hospitals in the Swiss city of Lugano have been testing the use of drones to transport laboratory samples. Since mid-March, logistics company Swiss Post has operated more than 70 tests flights between the two hospitals, and announced today that it plans to establish a regular service by 2018.

Apple, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft say they will continue their efforts to combat climate change, Bloomberg reports, even after President Donald Trump signed a sweeping executive order that will undo a series of climate regulations put in place by the Obama administration.

SpaceX had one more victory this evening in its historical reuse of a rocket: it also landed the nose cone on top of the rocket that surrounds the payload to keep it safe, called a fairing. This is a first for SpaceX.

SpaceX made history today by successfully launching and landing a used Falcon 9 rocket for the first time ever. It’s something CEO Elon Musk has talked about since he founded the company 15 years ago. But the company arrived here so fast that it’s almost hard to remember it only started attempting these daring landings just over two years ago. So here’s a GIF recap — click the links for more info on each:

After more than two years of landing its rockets after launch, SpaceX finally sent one of its used Falcon 9s back into space. The rocket took off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, this evening, sending a communications satellite into orbit, and then landed on one of SpaceX’s drone ships floating in the Atlantic Ocean. It was round two for this particular rocket, which already launched and landed during a mission in April of last year. But the Falcon 9’s relaunch marks the first time an orbital rocket has launched to space for a second time. Читать дальше...

Today, I attempted to soundtrack my office life. As you might expect, sometimes the life of a blogger isn’t all that thrilling — but maybe it would be if I had a perpetual soundtrack playing in the background. Moodelizer, a new iOS app that launched earlier this month but is officially being announced today won’t soundtrack your whole life, but it’ll provide you with music to play during any moment you want to record. An Android version is expected later this year.