Новости за 13.06.2017

Today, Google announced an expansion to its Play Store with its new Android Excellence program. Curated by Google’s editorial team, Android Excellence features rotating collections of apps that deliver a superb Android user experience, utilize many of Google’s “best practices,” and “have great design, technical performance, localization, and device optimization.” Broken down into two categories of apps and games, Android Excellence appears in Google’s newly revamped Editor’s Choice section.

If all the small enhancements to the iPad Pro 10.5 aren't speaking to you, good deals on the original 9.7-inch Pro have arrived. As spotted by 9to5Toys, Best Buy is offering a one-day-only deal on the 32GB 9.7-inch Pro right now: $449.99, which is $150 off the typical $599.99 asking price.

For years, experts have warned of vulnerabilities in the network that routes phone calls and cellular service — but those attacks may be more widespread than anyone realized. For more than a year, a Tor Hidden Service has been offering ongoing access to telecom’s private SS7 network for as little as $500 a month. Combined with known vulnerabilities, that access could be used to intercept texts, track the location of an individual phone, or cut off cellular service entirely.

Manfrotto is most well-known for its tripods and other camera accessories, but today it’s further expanding beyond that market with the launch of four new camera-oriented backpacks and messenger bags. All the Bumblebee-line bags are fabricated out of a rain-proof material that reflects sunlight. They also include a stretchable band specifically designed to hold a gimbal, but it can be used to hold a lens, too. The backpacks cost more than the messenger bags and start at $229.99. The cheapest messenger... Читать дальше...

The latest cinematic iteration of The Mummy takes off when antiquities thief Nick Morton (Tom Cruise) unearths an ancient Egyptian tomb — in Iraq. Ignoring the portents of impending doom (and the fact that stealing antiquities is illegal and also wrong), Morton and his Army buddies unearth a sarcophagus. Inside lies the mummy Ahmanet, an undead pharaoh’s daughter who was mummified alive and is royally pissed off about it. She comes back to life, psychically imprints on Morton, and wreaks havoc on London. Читать дальше...

Expectations were high for Sony’s E3 showcase this week. Last year, Sony arguably stole the show with games like Detroit: Become Human, Days Gone, God of War, Spider-Man, Horizon Zero Dawn, a new Call of Duty, The Last Guardian, and a VR thing for Final Fantasy XV, to name a few.

There’s been a lot of hype around the solar eclipse on August 21st. Thousands are traveling to the locations, like Tennessee or Wyoming, to see the Sun go completely dark for the first time since 1918. For those of us staying put, there’s the Eclipse Megamovie Simulator, which will let you see how the eclipse will appear in your area.

Far Cry 5’s announcement rode in on a wave of controversy. Where past games took players to far-off lands where the player murdered the locals, Far Cry 5 is set in a small Montana county. The enemy is a group of largely white Americans. Its heroes are a ragtag group of resistance fighters, fighting against a cult — a group whose imagery is drenched in patriotic Americana and Christian symbols.

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick will take a leave of absence from the ride-hail company to grieve for his mother who just died in a boating accident, according to a company-wide email that just went out. Kalanick’s decision comes as the investigation in a pervasive culture of sexism and harassment at Uber has reached its conclusion.

Freelance writer and academic Anthony Oliveira, known by the Twitter handle @meakoopa, has been suspended from Twitter, prompting a backlash from followers who contrast the decision with what they see as Twitter’s continued failure to combat the rise of the violent alt-right and the prevalence of anti-LGTBQ hate speech on its platform.

Facebook has signed a deal to revive reality competition show Last State Standing, according to The Hollywood Reporter. American Ninja Warrior producer A. Smith and Co.’s Arthur Smith is behind the series, which will feature one contestant from each of the 50 states competing in games for a chance to win $50,000. A premiere date, episode count, and rollout plan are still undetermined, but production on the show has reportedly begun in Los Angeles.

Sprint just launched a new promotion that’s a very good deal but also seems like the ultimate Hail Mary throw of desperation. The company is offering an entire year of free service — including unlimited data, talk, and text — to customers who switch to the carrier and bring over an eligible phone. Current postpaid subscribers at Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile are eligible for the deal, and it also covers family plans. Here’s the page that explains the offer, and I’m not really seeing any alarming fine print or gotchas. Читать дальше...

A group of 30 entertainment companies, including power players like Netflix, HBO, and NBCUniversal, have joined forces today in an effort to fight online piracy. The new group is called the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE), and the partnership, while somewhat thin on specifics, will allow the content creators involved to pool resources to conduct research and work closely with law enforcement to find and stop pirates from stealing movies and TV shows.

Amazon’s Echo is great. It’s a speaker for music, a digital assistant with Amazon’s excellent Alexa voice control, and a useful smart home controller. But why buy an Echo from Amazon when you could build one yourself? Here’s how:

As of today, Verizon is officially the owner of Yahoo. Yahoo’s assets are now being mashed up with those of AOL, which Verizon bought in 2015, into a horribly named new division called Oath. Oath will contain sites like HuffPost, Yahoo Sports, TechCrunch, and Engadget, as well as apps and services like Alto and Brightroll. Tumblr will also fall under the Oath umbrella.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration just awarded the Tesla Model X a 5-star safety rating in every category and subcategory after conducting the first independent crash test of the electric vehicle since its launch in 2015. Tesla was quick to trumpet the rating, noting the Model X was the first SUV to receive the federal government’s highest safety rating across the board.

If you want a truly massive 4K TV in your house — and you have a nearly limitless budget to make it happen — there’s only one option for you: the C Seed 262. This monstrosity comes in at 262 inches, a staggering size that makes a 100-inch TV look tiny in comparison.

Arizona-based company World View Enterprises has an ambitious goal: send humans to the upper edges of the atmosphere using high-altitude balloons. It’s a dream that’s still years away from being a reality, so in the meantime, the company is aiming to send something a bit smaller to the edge of space: fried chicken.

Franklin Robotics, a Massachusetts-based robotics company with a team that includes the inventor of the Roomba, just launched a Kickstarter campaign for its newest robot. This time it’s not a carpet-cleaning or floor-cleaning bot, but one designed to kill the weeds in your garden.

Election systems across 39 different states showed traces of attacks by Russian hackers after an examination during last year’s election, according to a new report from Bloomberg. In some cases, the attackers even gained access to state-level voter roll data, compromising records on as many as 90,000 voters.

Instagram is releasing its Archive feature to all users today, after testing it with a smaller group of people last month.

Microsoft unveiled its new Xbox One X console earlier this week, promising “true 4K” gaming on “the world’s most powerful games console.” While many are debating what those promises truly mean and whether we’ll see the majority of games in Native 4K or checkerboard rendering, Microsoft’s Xbox chief Phil Spencer believes the Xbox One X is “a true 4K console.” In an interview with Eurogamer, Spencer explains the Xbox One X name, a lack of first-party game announcements, and the all-important $100... Читать дальше...

Project Fi is Google’s specialized wireless service designed primarily for Google’s own phones. It doesn’t get much attention because, in order to use it, your main phone pretty much has to be either a Google Pixel or a Nexus device. It hasn’t kept up with the trend of unlimited data that other carriers are doing now, but it does have a refreshingly simple business model.

France and the UK are considering imposing fines on social media companies “that fail to take action” against terrorist propaganda and violent content, under a joint anti-terror campaign announced Tuesday. UK Prime Minister Theresa May will discuss the proposed measures with French President Emmanuel Macron ahead of her visit to Paris today.

For the first time, Apple CEO Tim Cook has confirmed that the iPhone-maker is building the technology to power self-driving cars. In an interview with Bloomberg, Cook said that the firm is currently “focusing on autonomous systems” — rather than, say, a car stamped with the Apple logo — and that this could be used for many different purposes.