Новости за 01.12.2017

In a blow to Twitter’s credibility, the company retracted its previous explanation for why it did not remove tweets that included graphic anti-Muslim videos that were retweeted this week by President Donald Trump. “We mistakenly pointed to the wrong reason we didn’t take action on the videos from earlier this week,” CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted on Friday. “We’re still looking critically at all of our current policies, and appreciate all the feedback.”

My room looks infinitely cooler when lit by a glowing smart ring, but I don't need or want my fashionable lamp to include Amazon's Alexa assistant. I've been testing the C by GE Sol light for the past few months and have grown attached to it. It’s a large glowing ring with a built-in microphone and speaker for playing music and controlling Alexa.

Tomorrow’s replacement skin could be 3D printed from a new ink embedded with living bacteria.

Every week, a slew of new music videos hits the web. Watching them at your desk is not time theft because you deserve it; think of it as a nice reward for surviving another work week. But what if you don’t have time to watch every video — maybe you have a deadline, a hungry pet, or other grown-up concerns. In consideration of your schedule, Lizzie and Kaitlyn bring you a series called One Video. Each week we’ll tell you “one video” you need to watch, why, and for how long.

Netflix’s mesmerizing new German-language series Dark certainly is aptly named. A great deal of the new 10-episode season takes place in dim rooms and unlit garages, in an ominously oppressive forest and a shadowy cave, or under sickly, faltering lighting that suggests a kind of heavy moral decay falling over the world. The series is conceptually dark, full of cheating spouses, ugly secrets, grotesque killings, and dead birds falling from the sky in a hail of limp, twisted bodies. But more noticeably... Читать дальше...

Samsung unveiled a new expensive flip phone, the Samsung W2018, during a launch event in China today, as first reported by GizmoChina. Many of the W2018’s specs are on par with the S8 and Note 8, with one exception: the camera lens.

Did you miss out on snagging a $79 Google Home on Black Friday? Then you might want to check out Best Buy’s deal on Google’s smart speaker today: buy one Google Home for $129, and get one free.

Redbox may be best known for renting physical DVDs and Blu-rays, but The Wall Street Journal reports that the company is facing a lawsuit from Disney for selling digital download codes to the studio’s films. Redbox started the practice last month, offering customers the ability to purchase printouts of codes for movies like Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and Moana at its kiosks, with prices set far below digital retailers like iTunes or the Google Play Store.

Newegg is offering a somewhat strange bundle of a year’s subscription to Microsoft Office 365 (which gives you access to the latest desktop apps) combined with a year of Xbox Live Gold for $79.99, via Twitter user Wario64.

Starting today, readers without a New York Times subscription will only be able to read up to five free articles per month — half of the previously allotted 10 articles.

Microsoft is rumored to be creating an ARM-powered notepad device with two screens that fold over much like the Courier concept, and a new job posting reveals that the company is planning some type of Surface ARM hardware. Spotted by WinFuture, the job posting is for a radio engineer based in Microsoft’s building 85, one of the many buildings Microsoft uses for its Surface and hardware employees.

Quick question: have you heard Jake Paul’s Christmas album yet? Team 10 and Paul, an influencer who once (more than once, honestly) terrorized an LA neighborhood, released an 18-minute, six-track EP dubbed Litmas that will surely be the last thing your eardrums are capable of absorbing. Shall we begin?

In a motion filed this week, federal prosecutors asked a judge to force Martin Shkreli to hand over the one-of-kind Wu Tang album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin.

Buying a phone can be a chore, but we’ve done the work for you

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UC Berkeley graduate students want to know how the university will protect them if the GOP’s grad tax goes through

Amazon is talking with generic drug makers about possibly entering the health care market, reports CNBC. Anonymous sources say the company has had “high-level” talks with pharmaceutical company Mylan and the Sandoz division of Novartis, both of which produce large numbers of generic drugs. A note from investment bank Leerink also apparently confirmed the Sandoz meeting. The report says that Amazon’s plans are unclear at this point, although one source said the company talked about potentially purchasing drugs. Читать дальше...

Let get this out of the way: Nilay and Dieter are not on the show this week.

Tinder’s been experimenting with a lot of premium add-ons to boost revenue: it recently shot up and became the number one top-grossing app on the App Store after bringing its paid Gold tier to the US. Now, it’s adding another way to get people to use more Super Likes. It’s offering a curated list of four potential matches that you can pick to send one free Super Like to (or send to all four if you’re willing to pay extra).

Just in time for the holidays, Spotify is offering a year’s subscription of its ad-free Premium for $99, or $20 off of the usual price, for the entire month of December, via Engadget.

For the second year in a row, Nintendo has released a fantastic, miniature machine that’s just about perfect for playing classic games. And for the second year in a row, the company has burdened that machine with a glaring flaw: wired controllers with frustratingly short cords. The SNES Classic features longer wires than its 8-bit predecessors, but in a world of wireless everything, it’s still a frustrating omission.

“So bad they’re good” movies tend to be overambitious productions that get away from their creators, with ludicrous plots and bad special effects. The Room, the 2003 anti-classic from eccentric writer-director-star Tommy Wiseau, is a strange exception. On paper, it’s a simple drama about a man betrayed by his cheating girlfriend, set in modern-day San Francisco. But its disjointed pile-up of abandoned subplots, inhumanly stilted acting, and anatomically improbable sex scenes have cemented its place as one of the worst films of all time. Читать дальше...

Trouble continues to mount for electric car startup Faraday Future: Richard Kim, the VP of design and the man behind the look of the company’s flagship car, the FF91, has resigned. Kim tendered his resignation on Tuesday, and his last day with the company is today, according to two people with direct knowledge of the situation.

The Google Home Mini isn’t exactly known for having a powerful speaker, but it seems that the smaller version of Google’s smart speaker is stronger than we thought. Reports have been cropping up on Google’s forums and Reddit about the device crashing if the volume is turned up too loudly, as spotted by SlashGear.

We’ve reached the end of 2017, and it’s been quite the year for books. December tends to be the slow period of the publishing calendar, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t some exciting books hitting stores this month.

How clever is artificial intelligence, really? And how fast is it progressing? These are questions that keep politicians, economists, and AI researchers up at night. And answering them is crucial — not just to improve public understanding, but to help societies and governments figure out how to react to this technology in coming years.