Новости за 25.09.2017

Verizon has discontinued its Wear24 smartwatch only four months after its release. Android Police first spotted the takedown, and Verizon separately confirmed the news to The Verge. If you try to navigate to the watch's initial landing page, you'll be redirected to a support page for the wearable.

Baidu is trying to make it easier for tourists to get around in China, Japan, and English-speaking countries. According to Nikkei, the Chinese web company and search giant is developing a gadget that will be able to listen to someone speak in one language and then immediately repeat it back in another language.

LG and Comcast announced that they will be bringing Comcast’s Xfinity TV Partner app to 2017 and 2018 LG webOS Smart TV models sometime in 2018, letting customers get live Comcast cable directly on a smart TV without a set-top box.

Cardi B’s “Bodak Yellow” is officially the No. 1 song in the country, beating out Taylor Swift’s “Look What You Made Me Do” on the Billboard Hot 100 this week. This makes her the first solo female rapper to top the chart since Lauryn Hill in 1998 and only the fifth female rapper to ever have a No. 1 hit.

They’re plagued by connection problems that other companies have left behind

A chunk of ice four and a half times the size of Manhattan fell off an Antarctic glacier. This marks the second time in two years that a huge iceberg has calved from the area. The break-off could speed up the loss of more ice, eventually eating away at a barrier that prevents land-based ice from flowing to the sea.

In the wake of Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico’s 3.4 million American citizens remain almost entirely without electrical power — but it’s not because their power plants are blown. The problem is that roughly 80 percent of transmission lines, which take power from the plants to distribution centers, are down. Nearly all the local power lines that run to residences and businesses have likely also been destroyed.

Smartphones’ GPS systems are going to start getting a lot more accurate. According to IEEE Spectrum, Broadcom is starting to make a mass-market GPS chip that can pinpoint a device’s accuracy to within 30 centimeters, or just under one foot. That’s compared to today’s GPS solutions, which typically have a range of three to five meters, or up to 16 feet away.

China has blocked WhatsApp, security experts confirmed today to The New York Times. Over the past few months, WhatsApp has experienced brief disruptions to service, with users unable to send video chats or photos. Now, even text messages are completely blocked, according to Nadim Kobeissi, an applied cryptographer at Symbolic Software, a Paris-based research firm that also monitors digital censorship in China.

Snapchat is rolling out a new feature on iOS and Android today that will transform your boring sky shots into pictures worthy of other social media platforms. TechCrunch reports that these “sky filters” will use augmented reality to add sunsets, starry skies, rainbows, and more to users’ pictures.

Facing mounting criticism, Mark Zuckerberg announced last week that Facebook will overhaul its approach to political ads, bringing more transparency to the process. Facebook users will soon be able to see who paid for an ad, Zuckerberg said, and when users visit an advertiser’s page, they will be able to see all of the ads that those advertisers are running. The changes were announced as lawmakers were considering similar regulatory measures.

One of the many announcements at Apple’s keynote a couple weeks ago was that 4K movies would be added to iTunes at the same price as HD content. Previously purchased HD movies would also be upgraded to 4K for free, though for streaming only. In response, Amazon Video has drastically slashed the prices of its own 4K content to match iTunes.

Austin’s annual Fantastic Fest, held at the Alamo Drafthouse, carries science-fiction, fantasy, horror, and other cult films from around the world.

The latest big update to Apple’s desktop operating system, macOS High Sierra, has just been released as a free upgrade for users. It’s available now in the Mac App Store. All Macs from 2010 and later are compatible with the update, and some MacBooks and iMacs released as far back as 2009 can also run it. For a thorough look at all the new features that make up High Sierra, definitely read The Verge review.

Former Vice President Joe Biden is getting into recording daily news briefings as his next job. In short podcasts (three to 15 minutes each), Biden will introduce articles on anything from health care to climate change. The briefings will be available as an Alexa skill on the Amazon Echo and also on iTunes, Spotify, and Google Assistant.

German blogger Carsten Knobloch says a reader sent him photos of the upcoming Sonos speaker that'll ship with Amazon's Alexa assistant built in. You can see it pictured above. Knobloch first published the images on his blog Caschys Blog. The leaked device lines up with what we already know about its UI.

Apple's new version of macOS comes out today, and while almost every upgrade is under the hood and out of sight, there is one really great new feature inside Safari that is definitely worth updating for: in High Sierra, Safari automatically mutes autoplaying videos. The update to High Sierra is free and will be available for all Macs released since 2010, and some Macs introduced in 2009 as well. You can also get the Safari update on earlier versions of macOS, by updating to Safari 11.

GoPro announced today in an email that it’s holding a launch event this coming Thursday, September 28th, in San Francisco, California. While the company didn’t specifically name the new camera, all signs point to the new Hero 6 Black being the star of the show. CEO Nick Woodman will start things off at 9AM PT.

Apple has removed Bing as the default search engine for Siri web search results in iOS and in Spotlight on the Mac in favor of Google, according to TechCrunch. The switch has already begun to roll out to iPhone and Mac users, and should be completed this afternoon.

Instagram continues to see incredible growth thanks to its Stories feature, with the app now reaching 800 million monthly users and 500 million daily users, according to CNBC.

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas.

The most controversial feature of the year’s most hotly anticipated car is a touchscreen, a 15-inch display perched on the dash of the Tesla Model 3 like an affront to decades of automotive design. Everything runs through this screen: gear shifter, music, HVAC, navigation... even the windshield wipers and sideview mirrors. There is no instrument cluster and no heads-up display.

Breitbart chairman and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon once hoped to infiltrate Facebook’s hiring process to obtain information on the company, according to a new report from BuzzFeed.

President Barack Obama reportedly pulled Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg aside and made an appeal to take the threat of fake news and political disinformation seriously, reports The Washington Post. According to the paper, Obama warned that unless Facebook and the government did more to address the threat, it would only get worse in the next presidential race. That conversation reportedly occurred just nine days after Zuckerberg dismissed the idea that fake news on Facebook influenced the election... Читать дальше...

Chinese messaging app WeChat dominates its domestic market, as its would-be foreign competitors are often blocked in China. Today, WeChat has removed what could be considered its most “American” feature: a famous photo of Earth called Blue Marble taken from outer space in 2007 by NASA. For years, the image was prominently displayed on the app’s start screen, but WeChat is replacing NASA’s photo with one taken by a Chinese satellite. Both images are Photoshopped to have the silhouette of a human standing before the Earth. Читать дальше...