Новости за 15.08.2017

The Toronto International Film Festival announced more of its 2017 lineup today, and high on the list is a film directed by comedian Louis C.K. I Love You, Daddy, which was made entirely in secret and shot on 35mm film, marks his return to feature film directing, 16 years after his film Pootie Tang. That movie crashed and burned upon release, though in the years since, it has gained some kind of reputation as a cult movie.

Facebook’s Marketplace may soon expand outside of peer-to-peer sales. Today, Marketplace has begun showing a new Daily Deals tab on the mobile app for select users, sourcing deals from eBay. The new partnership allows users to browse eBay deals inside the Facebook app, but they must go to eBay’s site to check out. The Daily Deals feature is rolling out to select users for now.

The UE Boom 2 and Megaboom speakers are some of the best Bluetooth speakers around, and now they’re getting even better with a new software update that adds support for Amazon’s Alexa assistant.

If you missed Undertale when it was released on PC in 2015, now is a great time to fix that. The critically acclaimed game is out today on PlayStation 4 and Vita for $14.99.

Facebook is rolling out a slight redesign to the News Feed today, which overhauls the main interface of the site for a cleaner look. What that actually translates to in practical terms is getting rid of the blue accents and headers across most of the interface, which the company claims will make navigating easier and more consistent.

Spoilers ahead for Orphan Black’s series finale.

Orphan Black's fifth and final season just wrapped up, and while the show faded from the limelight over the past few years, the finale managed to draw its many threads together. At its heart, Orphan Black has always been two shows: one is a science fiction conspiracy thriller packed with secret organizations (The Dyad Institute, Neolution, the Proletheans, Topside, and Project Castor, just to name a few), bizarre biology, and cadres of clones. Читать дальше...

This morning, the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer dropped off the internet, the result of sustained campaigning by the Southern Poverty Law Center and other groups. In the wake of a killing and widespread violence at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, web services company GoDaddy announced it was dropping the Daily Stormer as a client, leaving the site without a registrar. After a brief stay at Google, the site dropped off the web entirely. As of press time, requests to dailystormer.com are simply timing out... Читать дальше...

Facebook is rolling out a few camera features it began testing earlier this summer, and the most exciting one is the ability to create GIFs.

Faraday Future has gone through a lot lately. The electric car startup has struggled to get its factory project off the ground, lost executives, and seen its main investor — Chinese conglomerate LeEco — nosedive.

Instagram comments will now be organized into threads, just as they are on parent company Facebook. Starting today, replying to a comment on Instagram will begin a new thread, which should make conversations easy to follow. The feature will roll out globally on Android and iOS “in the coming weeks,” Instagram said.

In Baby Driver, Ansel Elgort stars as a getaway car driver with an arsenal of good playlists. What it does not feature is the Snapchat hot dog. Luckily, one wonderful and talented human has fixed this for everyone’s benefit.

GoFundMe says it’s banning fundraising efforts on behalf of the man who allegedly drove his car into protesters at the recent Charlottesville white supremacist rally. GoFundMe communications director Bobby Whithorne tells Reuters that the platform has removed several fundraising campaigns for James Fields, who is accused of killing anti-racist protester Heather Heyer and injuring 19 others. “Those campaigns did not raise any money and they were immediately removed,” he says. Whithorne says that... Читать дальше...

A new report from Liftoff, a Silicon Valley-based mobile app marketing and retargeting firm, says that subscription-based apps may do better if developers charge a higher price for services, rather than setting prices too low to lure users in initially.

Sling TV is today rolling out desktop streaming of its live TV service. Subscribers can now watch using Google’s Chrome browser on Windows and macOS without any extra plugins, extensions, or add-ons. The Chrome version of Sling TV offers live programming for all the channels in your monthly package and also on-demand content.

Beginning today, Google’s Allo can now be used on web browsers, but you can only install it by scanning a QR code on your Android phone. iPhone users are left out for now.

In what schools of the future may look like, UPS will begin training student delivery drivers using virtual reality headsets starting in September at nine of its teaching facilities. Those in training will wear headsets like the HTC Vive that will show a simulation of the road and hazards. The simulations were created in-house and the training modules will test students in identifying pedestrians, parked cars, and oncoming traffic.

Smartphone app Natural Cycles, the first app certified as a form of contraception in Europe, is setting its sights on the US next.

More than half of America’s industrial robot population is concentrated in just 10 states in the Midwest and South. This is according to a new report, published by the Brookings Institute, which maps the distribution of these machines in the US. The report defines industrial robots as “automatically controlled, reprogrammable machines,” and estimate that the US is home to 233,305 of them — engaged in tasks from welding cars to processing poultry.

Over the last few years, our smartphones have become the cameras we use most — even for photographers. But that hasn’t stopped companies big and small from trying to upset the order of things. Ubiquiti Labs — a new part of Ubiquiti Networks, which has (until now) mostly made mesh Wi-Fi products — is the latest to try to take the simplicity and, well, ubiquity of “mobile photography” to the next level with a new $399 wearable camera called FrontRow.

Samsung plans to unveil a new fitness smartband, the Gear Fit2 Pro, at the company’s Unpacked event on August 23rd, according to VentureBeat. The latest fitness tracker has added water resistance up to 165 feet, and it can sync to the Speedo On app, which lets you swim with it and track lap times. Samsung’s current smartband, the Gear Fit2, isn’t submersible underwater, so that’s a definite winning point. There’s also a music playback option that allows Spotify tracks to be played offline, as well as GPS functionality. Читать дальше...

We’re getting closer and closer to the end of August, and Android O still doesn’t have a name. I’ve already compiled the various likely options — which include Oreo, Oatmeal Cookie, and Orange-flavored things — and torn my hair out over Google possibly classifying Octopus as a dessert.

As the Moon blocks the Sun’s light completely next week in a total solar eclipse, more than 50 high-altitude balloons in over 20 locations across the US will soar up to 100,000 feet in the sky. On board will be Raspberry Pi cameras, weather sensors, and modems to stream live eclipse footage. They’ll also have metal tags coated with very hardy bacteria, because NASA wants to know whether they will survive on Mars.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is reducing his stake in the company to just 1.3 percent, after holding 24 percent of the software maker back in 1996. In a filing to the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) on Monday, Gates revealed he’s donating 64 million shares of Microsoft worth a total of $4.6 billion. It’s a huge donation, and Bloomberg reports that it’s the biggest since he gave away $16 billion worth in 1999 and $5.1 billion of shares in 2000.

Google has bought Senosis Health, a startup that turns smartphones into medical devices and collects various health stats, reports GeekWire. The Senosis apps can monitor lung health and hemoglobin counts, among other things, using functions on a smartphone including its accelerometer, microphone, flash and camera. For example, to measure the hemoglobin, Senosis’ app uses the phone’s flash to illuminate a user’s finger.

Microsoft announced its smaller Xbox Wireless Adapter earlier this month, allowing Windows PCs to use an Xbox One controller wirelessly. It’s 66 percent smaller than the older version, and just looks like a regular USB stick. Like its predecessor, the new adapter supports up to eight controllers at the same time, as well as four regular chat headsets or two stereo ones.