Новости за 23.08.2017

The Federal Trade Commission says it won’t attempt to block Amazon’s proposed acquisition of Whole Foods, despite some calls for the agency to closely scrutinize the deal.

People in the US who search Google for “depression” on their mobile phones will soon have the option to take a screening questionnaire to test whether they’re depressed. The new feature, which Google spokeswoman Susan Cadrecha says "will be fully rolled out on mobile in the US over the next day or so," isn't meant to subvert a medical evaluation. It's meant to steer you to one if you appear depressed.

Hulu with Live TV can now be streamed using web browsers on PC and Mac, expanding the service beyond the mobile devices and set-top boxes it’s already on. Live TV channels can be viewed using Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Microsoft Edge browser, and Internet Explorer 11. Taking live TV to the browser is something that Hulu’s competitors — Sling TV, PlayStation Vue, YouTube TV, and DirecTV Now — have already done; Sling added the feature just over a week ago.

Today is the 10th anniversary of Chris Messina suggesting that the pound symbol could be used to tag and organize tweets, thereby tagging and organizing people, ideas, and images. Can you believe it?

Samsung is already working on getting into the smart speaker market. DJ Koh, president of Samsung’s mobile division, confirmed the news to CNBC today at its Galaxy Note 8 event, saying the product would launch "soon." That timeline isn't specific, but at least it's something. Koh says he's already working on the device and wants to create a "fruitful user experience at home with Samsung devices, and [he] want[s] to be moving quite heavily on it."

Facebook has allowed users to upload and view 360-degree photos for a little over a year now, but the social media platform is also adding the ability to capture them, too. Starting today, both the iOS and Android versions of the Facebook app will allow users to create 360-degree photos without requiring a third-party app or camera.

Adam Wingard didn’t necessarily set out to be a horror director, but his love of horror films, and his deep familiarity with the genre, pushed him in that direction. He started out with low-budget, high-intensity projects (Pop Skull, A Horrible Way To Die, You’re Next), and became part of a generation of young horror filmmakers who gradually built a reputation off gruesome shorts in anthology films like V/H/S and The ABCs of Death. In 2014, he and frequent screenwriter partner Simon Barrett made The Guest... Читать дальше...

The Galaxy Note 8 is official, marking Samsung’s final move to get past the Note 7 incident and onto bigger, less (literally) explosive things. For a quick recap of what was announced at the keynote here at the Unpacked event in New York City, we’ve condensed all the biggest moments from a one-hour presentation to a totally unintentional (but certainly appropriate) eight-minute supercut. Eight minutes of Note 8! Isn’t that great? Good thing the event didn’t run too late. Must be fate!

I’ve been looking at the $930 starting price for the new Samsung Galaxy Note 8, scratching my head in bewilderment, looking at that price again, and furrowing my brows. We don’t usually get many mainstream phones with a starting price north of $900 ($960 if you opt for Verizon or AT&T, and even worse in the UK thanks to the pound’s Brexit-induced weakness), and I find myself wondering about the market dynamics nudging the flagship price tiers up. Is it a matter of market saturation encouraging... Читать дальше...

You will soon be able to subscribe to publications after reading their stories in Facebook’s Instant Articles, the company confirmed Wednesday. CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that the company will begin testing subscriptions inside Instant Articles, the company’s fast-loading news format, later this fall. “If people subscribe after seeing news stories on Facebook, the money will go directly publishers who work hard to uncover the truth, and Facebook won't take a cut,” Zuckerberg wrote in a post. Читать дальше...

Blizzard has premiered the latest Overwatch animated short at Gamescom, focusing on the ice-wielding hero, Mei.

Snapchat wants to have its own original scripted shows by the end of this year. At the Edinburgh International Television Festival today, Snapchat’s head of content, Nick Bell, called scripted programming an “interesting next venture” for the company, Variety reports.

How slime oozed back into our lives

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Patrick Gilmore, the studio head at Amazon Game Studios Orange County, has a unique view from his office. It’s not some picturesque Southern California landscape, filled with swaying trees or sandy beaches. Instead, when Gilmore peers down the hallway, he sees an e-sports broadcast booth, where once a week the studio live-streams its next game, Breakaway. The new game initially looks a lot like other competitive multiplayer games, with its combination of mythological heroes and back-and-forth team-based action. Читать дальше...

Every August, droves of car collectors gather for a week on the Monterey Peninsula to show off, ogle, and place big-money bids, all culminating in an elaborate Sunday afternoon car show: the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance. Ladies wear complicated hats and men don pastel seersucker suits for the golf course occasion. It’s an ostentatious display that seems distant, even out of step with the concerns and circumstances of the outside world.

After the Note 7 fiasco, all of Samsung’s reputation was riding on its next smartphone launch back in March for the Galaxy S8. But even though that’s done and over with, the company is still finding its upcoming Note device associated with what happened last year. Will this finally be the phone that gets us all past Samsung’s past? For everything you need to know about this year’s flagship phablet, and other gadgets announced at the company’s Unpacked event in New York City, see our coverage below. Читать дальше...

A new version of Samsung’s fitness-tracking wearable, the Gear Fit 2 Pro, has leaked online ahead of the company’s Unpacked event with a listing on Samsung’s Malaysia website, which was spotted by Evan Blass.

UK postal service the Royal Mail is trialling completely electric vans from carmaker Arrival. Arrival, also based in the UK, has partnered with the postal service to operate nine trucks to deliver mail and packages in London and surrounding areas. The trucks are three different sizes and will begin deliveries today from the postal service’s central London hub.

Scientists have created a virtual reality system that allows fruit flies to fly around a virtual pillar, and zebrafish to swim with aliens from the video game Space Invaders. The goal is not to give animals a good time, but for scientists to study how mice, flies, and fish respond to the VR worlds in real time. It’s basically a new tool to study animal behavior in the lab.

Drone delivery has taken another small step toward becoming a reality, thanks to a new trial taking place in Iceland. Israeli drone logistics company Flytrex has partnered with Icelandic on-demand goods service AHA to set up a small drone delivery route in Reykjavík.

Three of Bethesda’s biggest franchises are coming to virtual reality, and today the publisher announced release dates for all of them — and they’re all coming out this year. It starts with the VR version of Skyrim on November 17th, which will be coming to PlayStation VR, followed by Doom VFR on December 1st for both PSVR and the HTC Vive. Finally, Fallout 4 will be available on the Vive on December 12th.

Every time I've used a Linux computer — at least, a Linux computer that's not hidden behind the sheen of Chrome or Android — it's been the exact same story: nothing ever works right the first time. So I was both excited and a little scared when I was offered a Librem 13 laptop from Purism. The $1,399 ($1,537 as tested) Librem 13 runs PureOS out of the box, Purism's security-focused version of Linux. That means all the initial hurdles of getting Linux running on a system were solved for me. I wouldn't... Читать дальше...

After two years in development, HyperX has unveiled the latest in its Cloud headset family, called the Cloud Alpha. Announced at Gamescom in Cologne, the headphones have a new dual-chamber design, which HyperX claims will improve audio quality by tuning and separating the bass from the mids and highs. HyperX, a brand popular with professional e-sports players, says the dual chambers reduce distortion, and provide a “rich, textured sound for extraordinary spatial awareness,” that can be worn comfortably for hours at a time. Читать дальше...

We’ve heard for some time now that Apple had decided to get out of the game of trying to build an entire self-driving car itself and was instead focusing on the software side of autonomous driving. Now, in a new report by Daisuke Wakabayashi at The New York Times, we see that those smaller ambitions have a new waypoint: a self-driving shuttle to ferry employees between Apple’s current campus and the new one.

Warner Bros. has never had the clearest vision for what it wants to do with its DC universe movies, and one new idea the studio is now reportedly adding to the mix is a Joker origin story film produced by none other than Martin Scorsese. Deadline reports that the project, which is said to be in the early stages, will be directed by Todd Phillips (The Hangover), from a script by the director and The Fighter screenwriter Scott Silver. According to the report, it will be part of a new sub-brand at Warner Bros. Читать дальше...