Новости за 04.04.2017

Alcatel unveiled its Flash phone today. It has four cameras. You know about phones with rear-facing, dual-camera systems. Even the iPhone has one. Old news. You’ve maybe even heard of dual front-facing cameras, like the one on the Oppo F3 and the LG V10. Again, old news. Well, how ‘bout this, you who have seen it all: dual rear-facing cameras and dual front-facing cameras together on the same phone. Yes, that means four total cameras. What do you think? Too much camera for one device, or just the right amount? Читать дальше...

Twitch is now a place where you can both watch and buy games. Earlier this year the streaming service announced plans to launch a digital PC games store, and today it’s open for business. Users will be able to purchase select games directly from Twitch channels and game pages, both on the site and the company’s newly launched desktop app. The company says there will be around 50 titles available this week, including For Honor, Telltale’s Walking Dead series, Firewatch, Psychonauts, and more.

This week, Tesla passed Ford and General Motors in market capitalization to become the most valuable American carmaker. Tesla’s stock price is on a tear, up nearly 42 percent since the beginning of the year to more than $300 per share, and the company is currently valued around $53 billion.

The first season of FX’s Legion ended last week. Created by Fargo showrunner Noah Hawley, the show is set in Marvel’s X-Men universe, and it provided some closure to a handful of storylines while blowing things up just enough to lay the groundwork for a second season. Right until the end, it’s a tight, quirky, well-acted, visually arresting series that’s unlike just about anything on television, including its superhero show kin.

Microsoft is planning to unveil its Xbox Project Scorpio specifications later this week. Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry has confirmed it will run an “exclusive Xbox Scorpio reveal” on Thursday at 9AM ET, following speculation. Microsoft reportedly invited Digital Foundry to its campus recently to observe the internals of Project Scorpio and witness Forza Motorsport 7 running at 4K resolution.

Before we can move forward with talking about Sally, the robot salad maker, please get out all your giggles about the other kind of salad tossing. We’re talking about the literal version here. Get your mind out of the gutters.

NBC just ordered six episodes of a new prime-time series about science and technology, Variety reports. The series, bluntly called The Awesome Show, will be hosted by Nerdist founder and Talking Dead host Chris Hardwick.

The finalists for the 2017 Hugo Awards were announced this morning, and the ballot includes a refreshing number of women and authors of color in what has been a historically white male-dominated field.

Verizon has confirmed that it plans to group all of the combined AOL and Yahoo brands together underneath a new name: Oath. The internet had a lot of fun with that one yesterday. But the company is also trying to clarify a few things today, according to an email I received from a spokesperson. For one, there will be no Oath Mail. Yahoo Sports isn’t becoming Oath Sports. The Yahoo and AOL names aren’t actually going anywhere., you see. At least not in the near term.

Microsoft released its own Selfie app for the iPhone more than a year ago, and now it’s experimenting with another iOS camera app. Sprinkles, released curiously on April Fools’ Day and spotted by TechCrunch, is the latest experimental app from Microsoft. It’s exclusively available on the iOS App Store, and it’s designed to automatically add stickers, emoji, or captions to photographs.

Rupert Sanders’ Ghost in the Shell isn’t exactly a remake, a reboot, or a full-blown adaptation. The live-action film, which hit theaters last Friday, does borrow liberally from Masamune Shirow’s original manga series and the seminal 1995 Mamoru Oshii anime film that adapted it. But Sanders’ version charts its own path, while peppering in a best-of collection of moments and visuals from across the Ghost in the Shell canon.

As Boeing and SpaceX develop spacecraft to take NASA astronauts to and from the International Space Station, the two companies are also coming up with ways to keep crew members safe in case future launches of these vehicles don’t go according to plan. Both companies have designed built-in abort systems into their spacecraft, which can carry the vehicles up and away from a malfunctioning rocket. But now Boeing has another option in case emergencies aries at the launchpad: an astronaut zip line.

SureFlap, the British company that makes smart pet gadgets is preparing to launch a smart pet door that can be controlled by an app on your phone, according to TechCrunch. The company currently has a couple of smart pet doors, but they only open for microchipped or RFID-collared pets.

Eugen Rochko was annoyed with Twitter. The company had made a series of changes that he thought eroded the value of the service: limiting how big third-party applications could grow, for example, and implementing an algorithm-driven timeline that made Twitter feel uncomfortably similar to Facebook. Most people in Rochko’s situation fired off an angry tweet or two and moved on. Rochko set about rebuilding Twitter from scratch.

Norway’s famous doomsday seed vault is getting a new neighbor. It’s called the Arctic World Archive, and aims to do for data what the Svalbard Global Seed Vault has done for crop samples — provide a remote, impregnable home in the Arctic permafrost, safe from threats like natural disaster and global conflicts.

Recently published CIA exploits uncovered the ability for intelligence agencies to hack into Samsung smart TVs, but it appears the flaws in Samsung’s ecosystem run much deeper. Motherboard reports that security researchers are preparing to unveil as many as 40 zero-day exploits for Samsung’s Tizen operating system. Samsung uses Tizen on a range of TVs, smartwatches, and phones, and the vulnerabilities will allow attackers to hack the devices remotely.

Mercedes-Benz’ parent company Daimler has teamed up with Bosch, one of the world’s largest supplier of automotive components, in order to speed the development of self-driving cars. The two companies want to make fully-automated and driverless cars “a reality on city streets” by the start of the next decade. Although details about the collaboration are scarce, the firms say the project will “take the comprehensive vehicle expertise of Daimler [and] combine it with the systems and hardware expertise of Bosch.” So... Читать дальше...

In a bid to curb the tide of low-quality video games hitting Steam in recent years, Valve will ask users of its digital distribution platform to sift through recent releases to find and highlight hidden gems. The company’s new program will recruit “Steam Explorers,” asking them to play through queues of Steam games, and giving them the chance to flag any they find promising. The more flags a game gets, the more visible it will be on the platform.

When Sonos unveiled its $699 Playbase speaker last month, the company was pretty straightforward about why the product exists: most people don’t mount their TV to the wall. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’d never buy Sonos’ Playbar (or any soundbar for that matter), but it probably hurts the odds substantially — so much so that Sonos felt compelled to make a second speaker for your TV. And that speaker is the Playbase.

In a major blow to consumer privacy, President Trump signed a resolution today reversing an Obama-era rule that restricted what internet providers could do with their customers’ data.

The White House has assured the National Archives and Records Administration that it will be keeping every single one of President Donald Trump’s tweets, including his Twitter musings that contain misspellings and the ones he later on deletes. According to ABC News, archive head David S. Ferriero informed two Democratic senators last week that the Trump’s tweets are being preserved for posterity, so future generations can revel in the president’s peculiar and unprecedented use of Twitter as an art form and governing tool. Читать дальше...

Before every episode of The Vergecast I sit down, read through a bunch of news, and take a bunch of notes. It’s one of the most enjoyable parts of my week, and I started thinking it might be fun to do every day on the site. So, every chance I can, I’m sitting down and writing some notes on the news as though I’ll be talking about it later. Are you into this? Am I into this? I don’t know. But it’s fun to do! Give me some feedback and we’ll keep mutating this into something good.

Earlier today, news broke that Verizon is merging venerable tech and media brands Yahoo and AOL into a company called Oath. Since then, many people have been asking a simple question: “Why Oath?” Now, I can’t answer this question, any more than I could explain why Tribune Publishing became Tronc. But I’ve narrowed it down to two possibilities: Verizon is either launching a subtle viral ad campaign for the 2017 film adaptation of Dave Eggers’ The Circle, or it’s starting a heavy metal band. I’ll... Читать дальше...

The Yahoo CEO is on her way out, says sources, which is no surprise really.

Connected hearing aids are nothing new, but today a company called ReSound introduced the iPhone-compatible LiNX 3D, which can be adjusted remotely. This means doctors can access their patients’ hearing aids and make minor adjustments without the person having to revisit their office. The hearing aids also pair with an app for iOS, watchOS, and Android. Through the app, patients can talk to their doctors or learn more about the hearing aid they’re wearing.