Новости за 11.12.2017

Google just announced three new photography applications: Storyboard (Android only), Selfissimo! (iOS and Android), and Scrubbies (iOS only). The releases are part of a new “appsperiments” program that Google just launched.

President Donald Trump is officially directing NASA to send astronauts back to the Moon, as a pit stop to eventually send people to Mars. The move is part of a new order, Space Policy Directive-1, which Trump signed today during a very brief ceremony at the White House. The directive is meant to reorient NASA’s focus from the Red Planet to the Moon, at least in the short term, shifting away from the priorities set forth by the Obama administration.

Microsoft is now allowing its Cortana digital assistant to access Google Calendar data. The software giant has added a new Gmail connection to Cortana, which will enable the digital assistant to access Google Calendar data. If you’re a Windows 10 user that primarily uses a Gmail account, this new feature will make it easier for the assistant to access calendar appointments and trigger reminders across multiple calendars.

Just over a year ago, Square Enix released the long-awaited Final Fantasy XV. The game was a weird and wonderful mash-up of worlds; part futuristic, while still retaining the fantasy elements so intrinsic to the series; part typical role-playing epic, but set against the backdrop of a heart-warming road trip. The end result was a bit of a mess, but compelling nonetheless, and the experience has continued to grow over the months with multiple expansions and updates.

China’s equivalent of Google, Baidu, is now offering a service that can evaluate whether your website is optimized to be used in China, as reported by Nikkei Asian Review. The new service is aimed at Japanese businesses interested in expanding into China but daunted by the prospect of braving the “Great Firewall.”

After announcing them back in October, Google is launching its augmented reality stickers on the Pixel and Pixel 2 this week. The stickers are cute 3D creatures that appear inside of photos and videos taken in Google’s camera app using new AR tech to appear like they’re really in the scene.

The Walking Dead is back, and for us here at The Verge, that’s an opportunity to examine just how effective the show can be in creating a complex villain. As played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan, big bad Negan has always been violent. But thanks to his man-baby antics, he’s stubbornly remained a comic book thug, never becoming the nuanced character the show so sorely needs.

Airbnb is developing virtual and augmented reality features to help guests find and navigate rental listings, the company announced on its blog today. Three-dimensional scans and 360-degree photos would allow users to get a better sense of a listing, and augmented reality overlays could help guests better understand the homes on a smaller scale once they’re in it. The company has been looking into VR to build trust between guests and hosts since last year, and this announcement confirming experiments... Читать дальше...

It was only a matter of time before HQ Trivia had competitors. The live mobile trivia game show for iOS has skyrocketed in popularity in the four months it’s been around, seeing hundreds of thousands of people log into the twice-daily game to win as much as $10,000. Now, The Q — short for “The Question” — has arrived to try and cement its position as a competitor before HQ makes it to Android.

Amazon announced today that Alexa has been updated to include support for music alarms. So instead of just asking Alexa to set an alarm for you, you’ll be able to request specific songs, playlists, artists, or genres to get you out of bed in the morning.

Apple has acquired Shazam, the company announced today. The deal was first reported by TechCrunch last week and is worth $400 million, according to Recode. Shazam lets users identify songs, movies, TV shows, and commercials from short audio clips.

An Australian startup called Alauda came out of stealth mode this week to announce its plans to host the world’s first “flying car” race in 2019. It built its own scaled-down prototype, a racecar-shaped quadcopter called the Alauda Mark 1 Airspeeder, that it plans on testing in 2018. And naturally it’s taken to Kickstarter to raise money to fund all its efforts.

The nominations for the 2018 Golden Globes were announced this morning. Let’s see if you can spot the commonality among your options for Best Director!

American Express has announced that it will no longer require signatures for credit card purchases beginning in April 2018, joining Discover and Mastercard, which have also announced similar changes.

It’s been a shockingly packed year for great new video games. Over the course of the last 12 months, it seemed like there was never really a pause, or a moment when there wasn’t something interesting to play. To celebrate, this week Verge staff will be publishing essays on their favorite releases of the year, the games that spoke to us personally. Expect to see a new one each morning, culminating in a list of our collective 15 favorite games of 2017 on Friday.

Republic Wireless has announced two new communication devices called the Relay and Anywhere HQ. The Relay is a screen-less, water-resistant device that works like a walkie-talkie, but has the added ability of being able to locate children with GPS, so you can check on them whenever you want.

A group of early internet and computing pioneers have called on the Senate’s FCC oversight committee to censure next week’s net neutrality vote. In an open letter to the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, Innovation, and the Internet, 21 signatories said that FCC chairman Ajit Pai’s “rushed and technically incorrect” plan to repeal net neutrality “is an imminent threat to the internet we worked so hard to create.” They want the committee to ask Pai to cancel the vote, which is currently scheduled for December 14th. Читать дальше...

If you’ve been patiently waiting for Google to release its Home Max speaker, well today is your lucky day. Best Buy has begun selling the Google Home Max speaker, with both the chalk and charcoal colors in stock, as first spotted by Phandroid. The $400 Home Max is designed to compete against high-end speakers like Sonos and Apple’s HomePod, whenever that gets released.

Brockhampton is using DIY art, raw energy, and an innate understanding of online fandom to redefine one of the most loaded terms in pop music

Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, and others spread their money far and wide to influence your government

Verizon has long held exclusive rights to mobile streaming of live NFL games, offering the content as a lure to its own subscribers. Today, the telecoms company announced a new deal with the sports league which will see games streamed to mobile devices regardless of carrier.

Microsoft’s Xbox One consoles are finally getting 4K YouTube support this week. It’s been a long time coming for the Xbox One S, which launched with 4K Blu-ray support but no 4K YouTube back in August 2016. Google has been slow to add 4K support for the Xbox One, but it’s arriving with a new app update for both the Xbox One X and Xbox One S.

An unofficial app for the popular MyEtherWallet.com service is being sold for $4.99 in Apple’s iOS App Store, as spotted by TechCrunch. The week-old MyEtherWallet digital wallet app, which is misleadingly named at best, or a scam at worst, rose to the third most popular ranking in the paid finance category over the weekend, where it still resides at the time of publication. The app’s developer is listed as Nam Le, who has no relation to the service and no history with bitcoin (Le’s other apps include a panda warrior game and a fishing game).

Another former Facebook executive has spoken out about the harm the social network is doing to civil society around the world. Chamath Palihapitiya, who joined Facebook in 2007 and became its vice president for user growth, said he feels “tremendous guilt” about the company he helped make. “I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works,” he told an audience at Stanford Graduate School of Business, before recommending people take a “hard break” from social media. Читать дальше...

Lauren Schmidt Hissrich will adapt The Witcher novels by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski for Netflix, reports Variety. Hissrich, known for writing and producing Marvel's The Defenders and Daredevil on the streaming service, will act as showrunner and executive producer for the series. Netflix announced it would be producing the fantasy TV show back in May.