Новости за 04.11.2017

If you’ve ever read one of Ken Liu’s stories, you’ll know that he’s a master at writing something that will pack an emotional, devastating punch. Filmmaker David Gaddie recently released an adaptation of Liu’s 2012 short story Memories of My Mother, a heart-wrenching short that calls to mind brilliant science fiction stories such as Arrival and Black Mirror.

Webcams have presented a security liability for years, yet many of us don't cover them up. Should we? Edward Snowden, Mark Zuckerberg, and former FBI director James Comey all seem to — but none of us are celebrities or heads of state, so what good does it do us?

After months of on-again-off-again discussions about merging, T-Mobile and Sprint have officially called it quits. The companies jointly announced today that they have ended negotiations after they were “unable to find mutually agreeable terms.”

Most people don’t know this, but OnePlus is owned by BBK Electronics, a major Chinese technology manufacturer that also owns smartphone maker Oppo. So it should come as no surprise that certain OnePlus and Oppo phones may share a similar (see: identical) design language.

Visitors to anime streaming service Crunchyroll were greeted with a prompt to download malware this morning, prompting the site’s owners to take it offline while they resolved the issue. After going down for several hours, the site has resolved the issue and is now back online.

Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to our Solar System, may not have just one planet orbiting around it; the star may host a whole complex planetary system. Astronomers have detected belts of cold dust surrounding Proxima Centauri, indicating that the star is home to many more objects — such as rocks the size of asteroids and even more planets that we haven’t seen yet.

It feels so hard not to love Stranger Things. I get that some people see too many bits and pieces of other shows and movies they love inside of it, but I think the reason the series works so well is that it treats all of those elements with the perfect balance of seriousness and whimsy. If someone's a ridiculous conspiracy theorist, they get played as wacky and out there, but they also get to be surprisingly prescient, as you'd expect in a world where the government is hiding a portal into another dimension. Читать дальше...

It’s November, which means Black Friday month is here. Although the major shopping holiday isn’t until November 24th, several retailers are already offering early deals. As reported on last week, Dell and Costco have released their Black Friday deals — we’ll be bringing you Black Friday and Cyber Monday coverage all month which you can follow along with here.

Ping / Counterping is a special feature where editors of The Verge debate issues from the world of technology head-to-head, no holds barred. Vlad Savov and Dieter Bohn are bringing it back after a very long hiatus to debate whether the screen on the Pixel 2 XL is a deal breaker.

It’s always been stressful on the internet, but lately, something feels different. There have always been trolls and ugly news stories, but in recent months, we’re starting to catch dread glimpses of a larger design. We sense a latent horror behind the social media cleanses and offline apps, an understanding that the mere presence of networked electronics draws us ever deeper into the dark ocean of gibbering madness that always lingers just beyond our comprehension.

Amazon Studios has been looking for a way to duplicate HBO’s success with Game of Thrones, and the company may have found a solution: adapting J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings into a TV series. Variety reports that the company is currently in talks with Warner Bros. Television and the late author’s estate, and while discussions are said to be in “very early stages,” it is clearly a high priority, with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos himself involved in the negotiations.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is officially the world’s richest person, but much of his obscene wealth — now standing at nearly $95 billion dollars according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index — is tied up in his company’s stock. That means that, every once in a while, Bezos converts that stock to cash, noting the amount in a Form 4 filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

After a bombshell debut that captured the attention of millions, the popular Serial podcast turned to a new topic for its second season: the case of Private First Class Bowe Bergdahl, who famously walked off an outpost in Afghanistan and spent five years in Taliban custody. Over the course of the season, which stretched from December 2015 to March 2016, Serial took a closer look into Bergdahl’s motivations, and how the case became so polarizing in the United States.