Новости за 19.10.2017

For more than a decade and a half, Philip Pullman has talked about a companion novel to his acclaimed fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials. Earlier this year, he revealed that fans of The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass would not only finally get to read The Book of Dust, but that it was a trilogy, with the first installment, La Belle Sauvage, hitting bookstores today.

I spent a good amount of time at Google’s New York City pop-up shop this morning, and while the product demo areas were great — and felt true to what you’d imagine a Google retail store to be — the actual buying process was anything but.

Verizon has supposedly had its own over-the-top TV service in the works for a while now. Bloomberg first reported that it was supposed to launch in the summer back in March, and Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam confirmed in a Variety report that the company was working on the service in May. But those plans are apparently getting delayed even more: a new report from Bloomberg says that Verizon is now looking at a spring 2018 release date, at the earliest.

Bids for Amazon’s second headquarters are due today, and all the vying North American cities interested in luring Amazon’s business have sent in their pitches. While some more conventional cities like Charlotte, North Carolina, offered up proposals of 20 possible locations for an Amazon campus in a carved wooden box, others truly went the extra mile, revealing maybe too much desperation.

A former employee at Tesla’s Fremont factory filed a wrongful termination lawsuit against the electric carmaker, alleging he was fired in retaliation after seeking protection from anti-gay harassment, The Guardian reported today.

Television networks and movie studios have been regularly leaning on virtual reality as a marketing tool, and today AMC announced that it has launched its own app dedicated to VR tie-in material. Simply named AMC VR, the app is available now for iOS devices, Android, the Gear VR, and Google Daydream featuring a collection of material tied to shows like The Walking Dead and Into the Badlands.

Facebook launched a new gaming platform earlier this year called Instant Games. Today the company's giving developers the option to monetize those games through in-app purchases and video ads. The ads will initially roll out as a test through select developers and in certain games, like Blackstorm’s Everwing and FRVR’s Basketball FRVR.

Facebook has announced it will be testing news subscription models over the next several weeks for Instant Articles across the US and Europe, but only on Android devices. In July, news broke that Facebook Instant Articles would soon allow paywalled content, and in August, Facebook confirmed it would be adding subscriptions for Instant Articles.

Mobile AI chips. What are they actually good for?

In the recent months we’ve heard a lot about specialized silicon being used for machine learning in mobile devices. Apple’s new iPhones have their “neural engine”; Huawei’s Mate 10 comes with a “neural processing unit”; and companies that manufacture and design chips (like Qualcomm and ARM) are gearing up to supply AI-optimized hardware to the rest of the industry.

What’s not clear, is how much all this benefits the consumer. When you’re buying your phone... Читать дальше...

As tech companies face continued scrutiny over Russian activity on their ad platforms, Senators today announced legislation meant to regulate political ads on the internet.

Almost a year to the day after George Hotz canceled plans for selling a $999 after-market product that would gift certain cars semi-autonomous capabilities, the famed iPhone hacker is back with a similar piece of hardware from his company Comma.ai. But this time around, the open source product — called Eon — costs $699 and is more DIY dashcam than a shortcut to self-driving.

The Pixel 2 comes out today, and so of course iFixit has torn open the first unit it could find to let us see what’s going on inside. The site published its inside look at the Pixel 2 XL this morning, and while there aren’t a ton of surprises to be found (the camera module is pretty large; Google is hiding a secret chip), cracking open the phone does reveal one thing we didn’t know a ton about: how the Pixel’s Active Edge feature actually works.

Google today announced that it will follow Apple’s lead in lowering the amount of money app developers must pay for mobile subscriptions processed through the Play Store. Back in June 2016, Apple introduced a new policy for its App Store to encourage developers to sell subscriptions as in-app purchases within iOS. That involved reducing the standard App Store transaction fee from 30 percent to 15 percent. It took effect in September of last year.

Google is adding a new “try now” button to Android apps in the Play Store that support the company’s Android Instant Apps feature. Instant Apps, first announced last year and opened to all developers back in May, let users immediately try out an app without having to download it. This is generally achieved by relying on deep linking between different areas of the app, similar to how one would navigate to specific parts of a website. The goal is to give users a quick, purposeful experience that... Читать дальше...

Today, BBC’s R&D team announced a five-year initiative to use machine learning to work out what audiences want to watch. To accomplish this, the team is partnering up with data scientists and experts from UK universities as well as media and tech companies based in Europe and internationally.

The wings of a butterfly have inspired a new type of solar cell that can harvest light twice as efficiently as before and could one day improve our solar panels.

When EA bought back the Star Wars Battlefront franchise in 2015, much ado was made about the significant work that went into making the game look and sound like a movie-accurate Star Wars title. But visual trappings aside, the actual rebooted Battlefront was an online-only shooter that lacked a lot of the depth of the earlier titles, and quickly shattered its user base with expensive DLC. It sold more than 14 million copies, but had very little staying power.

Over the years, Marvel has earned a reputation for perhaps not being the most director-friendly studio in the industry. Edgar Wright left Ant-Man after eight years on the project, due to differences in vision. Joss Whedon walked away from the Avengers franchise after finding the creative compromises on Age of Ultron too difficult. And Patty Jenkins left Thor: The Dark World for similar reasons — and then went on to direct Wonder Woman. Along the way, filmmakers like Ava DuVernay have been invited to direct Marvel movies... Читать дальше...

Frank Castle is coming to Netflix. The first season of Marvel’s series about the vigilante antihero The Punisher finally has a release date: November 17th. The announcement came along with a new trailer that shows off some of Castle’s origins.

Lyft announced an impressive new funding round of $1 billion led by CapitalG, Google’s venture arm. The latest cash infusion values the ride-hailing service at $11 billion, the company announced. As part of the deal, CapitalG Partner David Lawee will be joining Lyft’s board.

When Jeff Bezos launched Amazon as an online bookstore back in the 1990s, his physical character was that of an excited but nebbishy nerd. Sometime in the last decade, however, Bezos appears to have changed his workout routine. He made headlines in July of this year when his rippling muscles were captured in a photograph.

Meet the judge who codes — and decides tech’s biggest cases

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Microsoft started rolling out the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update to PCs earlier this week, complete with features like Windows Mixed Reality and people integration for the taskbar. While most of the new additions are obvious, Microsoft quietly added an anti-cheat feature for games.

When Shishir Mehrotra worked at YouTube, he was struck by the relatively pedestrian tools that kept the site running. Mehrotra, who served as the company’s head of product until he left in 2014, managed his team largely using a combination of Google Docs and Sheets. The system worked well enough, but the tools had been built for a previous age. Mehrotra began to fixate on a question: what would documents and spreadsheets look if they were invented today?

Intent on becoming a major producer of electric vehicles in the next decade, Volkswagen is already plotting to show off its abilities in the field by trying to break a racing record.