Новости за 28.11.2017

Federal judge William Alsup delayed the upcoming trial between Uber and Waymo because the ride-hailing company withheld key evidence during the discovery process. Waymo, the self-driving car company that was spun out of Google, sued Uber in February for allegedly stealing key parts of its autonomous vehicle technology.

This year’s Cyber Monday was the biggest sales day for online and for mobile ever in the US. Online sales brought in $6.59 billion in total, while sales on mobile broke a new record by reaching $2 billion. Mobile also dominated over desktop for the first time for Shopify merchants, which include brands as varied as Tesla Motors and Kylie Cosmetics, according to the company.

There seems to be a major flaw in Apple’s macOS High Sierra operating system that allows anyone with physical access to a Mac to gain system administrator access without so much as entering a password.

Expensify is a popular app that helps employees quickly submit reports for business-related expenses. Expensify’s standout feature is its SmartScan OCR, or optical character recognition, technology. The feature saves data-entry time by scanning your receipt, verifying that the expense is compliant with your employer’s rules, and then organizing it into an expense report — all automatically. When the technology fails, however, Expensify says it has a team of secure technicians to intervene behind the scenes. Читать дальше...

In a bid to encourage more users to privately message one another, Instagram today announced a new feature it’s calling “remixing.” The process involves editing a friend’s photo sent to you via direct message with stickers and custom text and doodles, and then sending it back to them within another photo of yourself.

The 2018 Grammy Award nominations were released this morning, and certain categories looked markedly more diverse in their selections. “Despacito” became the first Spanish-language song to be nominated for Record of the Year and Song of the Year, every lead artist nominated for Record of the Year was a person of color, and the list for best Album of the Year did not contain a single white male artist for the first time in Grammy history. (Sorry, Ed Sheeran.) In short, the nominations are incredibly diverse. Читать дальше...

Hulu has been steadily rolling out its new UI and live TV service to a whole bunch of platforms since it was first announced in May. Next up: Samsung’s smart TVs, as spotted by Multichannel.

As part of Giving Tuesday, Google has added a new Donate button to its knowledge graph when you search for recognized nonprofit organizations. The Donate button allows you to directly contribute money to nonprofits when searching for them on the web, though the organization also has to enroll with Google for the button to appear. (I checked through large organizations like the American Red Cross, UNICEF, Planned Parenthood, and Feed The Children, but did not find the buttons available yet.)

The Federal Communications Commission put out a final proposal last week to end net neutrality. The proposal opens the door for internet service providers to create fast and slow lanes, to block websites, and to prioritize their own content. This isn’t speculation. It’s all there in the text.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai promised to look into the great cheeseburger emoji debate, and he's made good on his word. Apparently Android 8.1 ships with a new and improved cheeseburger emoji in which the cheese is placed atop the patty, as opposed to underneath it. Emojipedia first spotted the fix.

Amazon toady announced that third-party developers will be able to make use of the Alexa assistant’s voice recognition feature to personalize apps for its line of Echo speakers. The news, announced at Amazon’s re:Invent conference in Las Vegas and reported first by TechCrunch, builds on the company’s announcement in October that Alexa can now identify individual users’ voices to personalize responses.

The final stretch is still ahead; after Thanksgiving and Black Friday weekend comes Cyber Monday, a time of massive online-only deals. Tech giant Amazon may have gotten into brick-and-mortar stores with its acquisition of Whole Foods in August, but it’s still keeping its online presence strong. Amazon is also running its Smile program for these deals, so you can use smile.amazon.com to donate 0.5 percent of your purchases to a chosen charity, a small but still helpful amount that might make the spending craze feel less awful. Читать дальше...

We are months away from next year’s Lunar New Year, yet phone companies like Huawei and One Plus have already begun announcing red phones that people may opt to give each other during the festivities.

The HDMI Forum, the governing organization that creates specifications for (you guessed it) HDMI cables, has officially released the next version of the HDMI standard: HDMI 2.1. The new standard was first announced earlier this year at CES 2017, but has now been finalized and released to companies to start integrating into devices.

I’ve always been a fan of survival horror games, and there’s only really one way to play them: late at night, alone, in a dark living room. But with today’s release of two Resident Evil games for the Nintendo Switch, the equation changes a little.

On the southeast coast of Georgia, around 20 miles north of the Florida border, a few concrete slaps and a handful of roads lie on 4,000 acres of luscious green land. They are the remnants of a now-defunct manufacturing plant. The area hasn’t seen much action in 50 years, but soon, it could be teeming with activity again — as the site of future US rocket launches.

As pieces of technology hardware, laptop hinges really haven’t dramatically changed in a while: you lift up your screen, your computer turns on, and you go about your business. But Google is imagining a world in which things are more automated, as seen in this new patent spotted by Patently Mobile for a motorized Pixelbook screen that could automatically lift up your display when you tap the lid.

One of the most popular feature requests (more than 20,000 votes) for Windows 10 is tabs in File Explorer. Microsoft has resisted adding tabs to File Explorer and apps in general for years, after originally introducing tabs in Internet Explorer 6 with a toolbar extension back in 2005. That resistance is about to change, in a big way. Microsoft is planning to add tabs to apps in Windows 10, allowing you to group together apps in a better way.

Ever get the feeling someone is looking over your shoulder at your phone? Well, you might not have to worry about that in the future: Google’s researchers have developed an AI tool that can spot when someone is sneaking a peek at your screen.

Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds is coming to mobile — but only in China. Tech giant Tencent has announced that it’s working with PUBG developer Bluehole on a smartphone version of the game that will be available to players in mainland China, though there are currently no details on when the game will be released. Tencent says that the mobile version will remain largely the same as its PC counterpart in terms of gameplay and structure, but adapted for a smaller screen and touch controls.

In the wake of the sexual misconduct accusations against yet another man in power — this time, Sen. Al Franken — Elizabeth Sampat and a friend commiserated about how hard the last few months have been with the onslaught of revelations about sexual harassment and assault. As one man on Facebook tried to defend Franken’s actions, the two women found themselves commiserating over more than just the celebrity backlash. They were tired of how men in their lives reacted, too.

Astronauts have done over 200 spacewalks outside of the International Space Station, and the latest one offers some pretty stunning views of our planet.

Lynk & Co, the new car brand spawned from the relationship between China’s Geely and Sweden’s Volvo, is today starting the first deliveries of its very first car, the 01 SUV. Geely bought Volvo back in 2010, but it didn’t quite have the right brand positioning to market itself to the young and aspiring consumer in the country: Volvo was too premium, while Geely’s own-brand vehicles were too far down into the bargain basement. Hence: Lynk & Co, a spinoff marque that would operate under... Читать дальше...

I know what you're thinking: wasn't Circuit Breaker Live just live on Twitter yesterday? Indeed, yes, you're right. We're back again today, though, and we've got an incredible show that you can watch live at circuitbreaker.twitter.com at 4PM ET.

Samsung has launched a new app called SeeColors designed to help people who are colorblind adjust the color settings on their QLED TVs to their specific needs. The app lets people diagnose their personal deficiencies, and links with the TV to adjust colors based on the results. Samsung notes that 300 million people suffer from Color Vision Deficiency (CVD), with many unaware of their condition. The app claims to be able to identify the type and level of a person’s CVD.