Новости за 11.08.2017

The morning after one of Uber’s biggest investors sued former CEO Travis Kalanick for fraud, a set of other investors said they wanted that investor out, marking another wild turn for the company’s leadership.

The 75th World Science Fiction Convention (commonly known as WorldCon) is being held this weekend in Helsinki, Finland. The convention is where the annual Hugo Awards are presented, and today, the convention announced the latest recipients.

This week, Entertainment Weekly published its Fall Movie Review, and The Last Jedi takes center stage. Along with the covers, the site published a series of articles along with a batch of new pictures that give us our best look yet at the upcoming film.

Google has found itself embroiled in controversy after a sexist memo, claiming that women are less biologically suited to be engineers than men, went viral throughout the company and was later released to the public.

You’ll have two extra weeks to file your thoughts with the FCC on its plan to get rid of net neutrality. The proposal’s comment period was originally scheduled to end next week, on August 16th, but the commission just pushed the date out to August 30th.

Canadian cinematographer Robert McLachlan is a Game of Thrones veteran. He’s shot eight episodes of the show, including “The Dance of Dragons,” where Daenerys faces assassins from dragonback in the Daznak fighting pit, and “The Rains of Castamere,” the episode with the Red Wedding. And most recently, he shot “The Spoils of War,” episode 4 of season 7, where Daenerys takes her dragons into battle in Westeros for the first time. The episode was tremendously complicated, as a behind-the-scenes video reveals ... Читать дальше...

Razer recently introduced a gaming mouse that's a nearly perfect competitor to my favorite mouse of all time, Logitech's G900. The Razer Lancehead is a high-end, ambidextrous wireless gaming mouse, with the option to seamlessly switch to wired. Also, Razer made a whole video comparing it to the G900's wireless performance. So the fight is definitely on, and I feel honored that these companies are spending so much time and money on building the perfect mouse for left-handers like me.

Motorola's Moto X line is back. Android Authority reports today that the lineup, which hasn't seen a new phone since 2015, will definitely be updated this year with a new device called the Moto X4. We thought this might be the case when a photo leaked last month. Android Authority says an anonymous source provided all the phone's specs.

If you’ve been hearing or reading a lot about blockchain but you still aren’t entirely certain how to define it, you’re not alone. It’s something that Jack Dorsey, the chief executive officer and chairman of Square (and CEO of Twitter), describes as the “next big unlock,” something that, he notes, is normally applied to accounting terms but has the potential to “be applied to so much more.”

Asus accidentally pushed new phone listings live on its French website this week, thereby leaking its own products. That's a bummer for the company, but good news for those of us who hate surprises. The leaks include the ZenFone 4, the ZenFone 4 Selfie, the ZenFone 4 Selfie Pro, and the ZenFone 4 Max. I'll break down the specs for each below, along with their listing. (Thanks to Android Police for gathering these screenshots.)

SoundCloud today announced that it has closed the investor round necessary to keep it going for the foreseeable future. As part of the agreement, Alex Ljung will step aside and former Vimeo leader Kerry Trainor will become SoundCloud’s new CEO, with Mike Weissman as COO. Ljung will stay on to “fully focus on the role of the chairman and the long-term.” Billboard reports the exact amount of the investment is $169.5 million, which, says Ljung, makes this infusion “the largest financing round in... Читать дальше...

It’s been a busy week for streaming services, and Amazon is closing things out with a huge announcement: the company has closed an overall deal with The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman, along with signing a first-look agreement for his production company Skybound Entertainment. In one fell swoop, it makes Amazon Prime Video the exclusive home for any new shows from the minds behind The Walking Dead, Fear the Walking Dead, and Cinemax’s Outcast.

This week on The Vergecast, Nilay, Lauren, Dieter, and Paul begin by discussing the controversy over the Google engineer who was fired over writing a 10-page viral memo about diversity. The story illustrates a deeper problem in Silicon Valley, which Lauren has discussed in her podcast recently, so the cast talks about the science of the claims, the responsibly of Google, and what it means in the larger tech industry.

You can probably guess

Continue reading…

Microsoft is teasing what it describes as big and bold changes to its Xbox Live Achievements. In a podcast interview with Windows Central, Xbox Platform VP Mike Ybarra says Microsoft is working on something that “fundamentally changes the concept” of Xbox Achievements. “We are working towards a bigger, more meaningful change about somebody's gaming accomplishments in history, as a gamer on Xbox,” says Ybarra. “We can do a lot more to reflect and let people show their gaming history and their status.”

If you’ve ever wanted to see the critically acclaimed musical Hamilton on Broadway, but can’t afford the notoriously expensive tickets, there’s now an app that allows users to potentially win two seats to the musical for just $10 each. The HamApp, as it’s lovingly called by creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, is being released today on iOS and Android.

We're about a month away from new iPhones being unveiled, and that means all kinds of mock-ups and dummy models and supposed part leaks have been coming out. And one kind of odd thing that's popped up several times over the last week has been a new iPhone color: it's somewhere between orange and bronze and pink; it's objectively pretty ugly; and I think I really love it.

Orphan Black, the Canadian science fiction show that revolves around human cloning, will end on Saturday, August 12th after five darkly funny, gory seasons. The show began with a former British street urchin, Sarah Manning (Tatiana Maslany), watching as someone with her exact facial features commits suicide by jumping in front of a train. From there, the show unravels to be about large biotech corporations, conspiracies, and above all, morally questionable science.

David Baron has been chasing eclipses for almost 20 years. His first total solar eclipse — when the Moon fully blocks the Sun from sight, turning day into night — was in 1998, in Aruba. The experience convinced him to travel the world to catch more eclipses. “I really didn’t know what a big deal it would be,” says Baron, a science writer. “It was so moving, almost psychedelic. I just decided I wanted to experience it again.”

Space is in my blood. Growing up as the daughter of two NASA engineers, the conversation at dinner was always about rockets, astronauts, and propulsion systems. Fast-forward a decade, and I’ve come full circle. Now I report on spaceflight full time, but I’ve only ever watched from the sidelines.

In very welcome news, Netflix’s wrestling comedy GLOW has been renewed for a second season, and will feature 10 new episodes. The series, set in 1980s Los Angeles follows struggling actress Ruth Wilder (Alison Brie) who becomes a wrestler on a weekly series in a final bid for stardom. GLOW, or Gorgeous Ladies Of Wrestling, was inspired by a female wrestling league and accompanying TV show of the same name from the late ‘80s.

Gold accents are a tricky thing to get right in tech products, but I’d argue Audio-Technica has nailed them in its classically inspired navy blue and gold combo on the new MSR7 Special Edition cans. I’ve been a longtime fan of the regular MSR7s — which go a bit light on the bass, but are otherwise the most clear, pristine, and faithful listen I can obtain from a reasonably priced pair of portable headphones — so this new upgrade has me intrigued.

Islamic State allegedly used PayPal and fake eBay transactions to channel money to an operative in the US, The Wall Street Journal reports. The man who allegedly received the money was American citizen Mohamed Elshinawy, arrested last year in Maryland. The FBI claims that Elshinawy, in his early 30s, sold computer printers on eBay as a front in order to receive the payments through PayPal.

Google chief executive officer Sundar Pichai, speaking at a coding event for girls happening at Google’s campus today, emphasized the importance of engineers “building products for everyone in the world” and said that in order to do that, “we need to have people internally who represent the world in totality.”

Microsoft says it respectfully disagrees with Consumer Reports’ findings on its Surface range of laptops and tablets. Consumer Reports has removed its “recommended” badge from Microsoft’s entire lineup of Surface PCs because the hardware was found to be less reliable than other PC brands. In a surprise report, Consumer Reports surveyed 90,000 tablet and laptop owners and found roughly 25 percent of Surface users have encountered issues by the end of the second year of ownership.