Новости за 21.09.2017

Apple executive Craig Federighi has apparently confirmed that a popular 3D Touch gesture for the iPhone that was removed in iOS 11.0 will be returning in an upcoming software update. The gesture was a quick way of getting to the multitasking screen, and required just a firm press on the left edge of the screen and a flick right to bring up the app switcher.

A Twitter user found himself perplexed today when he opened an older electrocardiogram measurement instrument and found the components belonged to a Game Boy Advance.

In an announcement on Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg said the company would make changes to ensure political ads on its platform are more transparent.

Spoilers for season 1 finale of The Good Place.

When The Good Place premiered last fall, it arrived in the form of a sort of spiritual My Fair Lady. Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell) is dead and has ascended to the show’s equivalent of Heaven, aka The Good Place. But Eleanor’s placement is a clerical error, and the existence she lived back on Earth was hardly worthy of a paradisiacal afterlife. With the help of her assigned soulmate, former moral ethics professor Chidi (William Jackson Harper)... Читать дальше...

In a major reversal, Facebook agreed today to share with Congress more than 3,000 ads linked to a Kremlin-linked group believed to attempted to influence the 2016 US election. The company had previously shared the ads with Robert Mueller, the special counsel currently investigating Russian interference in the presidential election. Facebook had resisted sharing the information more broadly, saying it would threaten advertisers’ privacy.

Today, Hyperloop One announced it raised an additional $85 million in financing, bringing its total haul to $245 million and a likely valuation of more than $700 million. That’s a lot of scratch for a transportation startup with no commercial product, no revenue stream, no government approval, and no proof that its ultrafast transit system would even be safe for human passengers. Nonetheless, the company has managed to convince a variety of wealthy backers and governments to buy into their fantastical... Читать дальше...

“From as early as I can remember, I wanted to swallow the world whole,” first-time filmmaker Jennifer Brea declares at the start of her documentary Unrest.

Hollywood’s weaknesses involving diversity and representation have increasingly come under fire in recent years, and no single flashpoint exemplified these issues like the #OscarsSoWhite controversy. In 2015, activist April Reign called out the Academy Awards on Twitter when all 20 acting nominees were white. The hashtag went viral, and essentially defined the way many view the entertainment industry’s awards ceremonies: as bellwethers for its larger, institutional issues when it comes to race and gender. Читать дальше...

This fall, The Verge is making a choice. The choice is fear! We’ve decided to embrace the season by taking in as many new horror movies as possible and reporting back on which ones are worth your time. We’re calling this series Hold My Hand, as we look at films you might want to watch with a supportive viewing partner. Get comfortable, put the kettle on, check the closet for ghosts, then find a hand to squeeze until the bones pop.

Scientists have created a more realistic fake finger that they hope will help them improve fingerprint ID technology.

Too much pee and too little fresh air probably made employees of an indoor water park sick, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report. Public health departments should keep a close watch on the growing indoor water park industry, the agency says — because you never know what could be in the water.

A Neanderthal boy of around eight who died almost 50,000 years ago still has things to tell us: mainly that our extinct human relatives grew up at a pace similar to our own. Knowing that can give us clues to Neanderthal social structure, as well as how our hominid cousins raised their children.

Astronomers have finally solved a long-standing mystery about the origins of cosmic rays, the highly energetic particles that zoom throughout space. For half a century, scientists haven’t been able to pin down where the most energetic rays in our Universe come from. But thanks to more than a decade of detecting cosmic rays from South America, astronomers have confirmed that these super energetic particles are coming from outside our galaxy.

Two weeks ago, a pair of researchers from Stanford University made a startling claim. Using hundreds of thousands of images taken from a dating website, they said they had trained a facial recognition system that could identify whether someone was straight or gay just by looking at them. The work was first covered by The Economist, and other publications soon followed suit, with headlines like “New AI can guess whether you're gay or straight from a photograph” and “AI Can Tell If You're Gay From a Photo... Читать дальше...

The Volvo XC40 may be just another small SUV for people who wouldn’t be caught dead in a sedan these days, but the company’s approach to sharing and selling the car might be how they get potential customers to pay attention.

Tasha Robinson and Bryan Bishop just spent more than a week at the Toronto International Film Festival, mainlining as many movies as they could manage. Here’s one set of reactions, based on a miniature horror festival they programmed for themselves at TIFF.

Corvus Prophecy was a man with a plan... and also a wrench. The plan: steal the Salt-Vasser Object, then retire off the money from selling it, and finally leave behind the space mercenary life. Unfortunately, information on its whereabouts costs money — money Corvus doesn’t have, but money he could make by sneaking onto spaceships.

Bojack Horseman, everyone’s favorite show about depressed, anthropomorphic animals coexisting with aimless, ennui-affected humans, will return for a fifth season. Cool! But even better than Netflix’s formal, PR-type news, is the tweet from the official Bojack Horseman account.

Kodak Moments, the consumer printing division of Kodak has a new way to encourage you to print photos: a Facebook Messenger chatbot. It works just like you’d imagine. You start a chat thread with the Kodak Moments Assistant on Facebook Messenger, allow it access to your Facebook account, and it will root through the photos you’ve stored there over the years and suggest ones that you might have forgotten about — and that you might want to put in a frame or on a mug.

After launching around the world last month, Motorola’s Moto G5S Plus will come to the US on September 29th, with preorders for the phone beginning today.

Experian's online PIN-recovery system could let attackers undo a credit freeze just by figuring a few easy facts. In the weeks following the Equifax breach, consumers have been told to freeze their credit, thereby blocking possible attackers from opening new lines of credit under their names. It makes sense as a defense strategy, but as cybersecurity reporter Brian Krebs reports today, the protections around those freezes are easy to subvert.

The Asus Chromebook Flip C101, a smaller version of the C302 profiled here as the best Chromebook you can get this year, can now be preordered on Amazon and the Asus website for $299. It’s available on September 25th.

Twitter is briefing Senate lawmakers next week about the use of bots, Sen. Mark Warner has said

LIFX just announced HomeKit compatibility for its Wi-Fi smart lighting devices. Not just for new LIFX and LIFX+ lighting that you can buy from today on, but for existing LIFX products already in homes. It’s a trick that comes courtesy of a software update available now that makes existing LIFX products compatible with Apple's smart-home platform. But LIFX is just the latest in a series of companies to have made older products HomeKit compatible, thanks largely to Apple loosening the restrictions it had placed on its HomeKit partners. Читать дальше...

The first trailer for Wes Anderson’s upcoming stop-motion animation project, Isle of Dogs, is here, and it looks like a very Anderson-esque mix of sci-fi and twee.