Новости за 15.12.2017

Samsung is reportedly planning to announce its next flagship phone, the Galaxy S9, in February, according to a report from Bloomberg, with the phones launching as early as March.

Earlier this year at Microsoft’s Build conference, the company revealed it was working with Apple to get iTunes included in the Windows Store. The promise was that it would be available by the end of 2017, but now it looks like that won’t be happening.

Did you know you can block Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook? What a Friday. Up until September of this year, it was a little-known secret that anybody, including Zuckerberg, could be blocked on the site. But after the company acknowledged this, it was discovered that high-frequency profiles — like the one owned and operated by the creator of Facebook — couldn’t be blocked due to an error that tripped up the feature if a page had been blocked by a large number of users in a short period of time.

You can now block Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook. What a Friday. Up until now, you've been unable to block Zuckerberg or his wife Priscilla Chan on Facebook. You'd receive an error message that said something like, “Block Error. Sorry, there was a problem blocking Mark Zuckerberg. Please try again." This wasn't intentional, Facebook told BuzzFeed News a few months ago. Instead, the company says its system got too busy to handle these block requests. Okay then.

Steam has removed icons featuring Matt Furie’s cartoon frog Pepe from its platform, part of Furie’s larger legal battle to wrest the character away from the far right. As reported by Kotaku, users began complaining yesterday that Pepe and Pepe-like emoticons had disappeared from their inventory. The developer of a game called Make America Great Again: The Trump Presidency wrote that they’d removed their emoticons after Steam received a legal order. “If we sign a thing that says [Furie] can sue... Читать дальше...

Google Maps is adding a helpful new feature for travelers and commuters who tend to daydream or lose track of time during their train, subway, or bus ride. The app will now send a push notification when you’re approaching your stop.

I see a lot of movies. I moved to the Bay Area from New York nearly five years ago, knowing not a single person living in San Francisco, and I found going to the movies to be a solitary, almost meditative experience. Even as my friend group expanded, I kept up on the cherished cinematic ritual: the exorbitantly priced snacks, the ticket-taking and seat-selection process, the previews, and then the movie itself, with its sense of experiencing something new and unseen. There’s an antiquated sense of sacredness to a movie theater... Читать дальше...

Using Facebook without contributing, in the form of messages and comments on your friends’ posts, makes you feel bad, the company said today. In a remarkable blog post, citing both internal and academic research, the company said “in general, when people spend a lot of time passively consuming information — reading but not interacting with people — they report feeling worse afterward.” At the same time, actively communicating with friends “is linked to improvements in well-being,” the company said. Читать дальше...

Using Facebook without contributing, in the form of messages and comments on your friends’ posts, makes you feel bad, the company said today. In a remarkable blog post, citing both internal and academic research, the company said “in general, when people spend a lot of time passively consuming information — reading but not interacting with people — they report feeling worse afterward.” At the same time, actively communicating with friends “is linked to improvements in well-being,” the company said. Читать дальше...

Apple has ordered a space drama from Battlestar Galactica creator Ronald D. Moore, Deadline reports. Moore will write the currently untitled series, while Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi (Fargo) will serve as executive producers.

Getting battle royale sensation PUBG on the Xbox One was a major coup for Microsoft, and now the company is exploiting that by bundling the game with the Xbox One X over the holidays. According to the company, every purchase of the new 4K console between December 17th and the 31st will include a copy of PUBG (though the promotion is only available in select regions).

Hagfish are jawless, eel-like creatures that are known to spray huge quantities of goo when attacked. Now, scientists have found another defense mechanism that protects these slimy monsters: their flaccid, squishy skin.

A new electric truck startup came out of stealth this week to announce its plan to bring its heavy-duty electric vehicle to market before the Tesla Semi hits in 2019. Thor Trucks’ prototype, the ET-One, is a “Frankenstein” built from parts cobbled together from other tractor-trailers. It has a range of 300 miles, a full load capacity of 80,000 pounds, and will eventually retail for $150,000. It’s also working on a 100-mile-range version.

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.

Aurora Flight Sciences, an aviation and aeronautics research company, recently demonstrated a fully autonomous military helicopter that can be controlled remotely with just a tablet. During a demonstration at the Marine Corps Base in Quantico, Virginia, an old UH-1H Huey helicopter flew three missions to deliver cargo without a pilot on the controls and with two infantrymen providing minimal instructions from a small hand-held tablet and a laptop.

The FCC voted to put an end to net neutrality, giving internet providers free rein to deliver service at their own discretion. There’s really only one condition here: internet providers will have to disclose their policies regarding “network management practices, performance, and commercial terms.” So if ISPs want to block websites, throttle your connection, or charge certain websites more, they’ll have to admit it.

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I’m never entirely sure how it happens, but my email is constantly filling up with messages from companies from which I don’t remember requesting newsletters or offers. But they somehow keep popping up anyway.

Khalil Shreateh, a self-professed IT expert from Palestine, hit the headlines four years ago when he hacked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s wall. Shreateh was frustrated that Facebook was ignoring a big security flaw, so demonstrating it on Zuckerberg’s own Facebook wall was an easy way to get the company to act. Shreateh discovered a security flaw in LinkedIn last month, and he reached out to The Verge after becoming frustrated that the company was ignoring his report — just like four years ago.

The Vergecast three-piece is back together, with Nilay leading the flagship podcast. The biggest news this week is something we’ve seen coming for a while: on Thursday, the FCC voted to repeal net neutrality rules. Nilay, Dieter, and Paul sit down to discuss the action and their viewpoints on what this means going forward for the internet.

Facebook is now rolling out its Snooze feature to all users after a period of testing in September. The tool lets you mute a friend, page, or group for 30 days so you can temporarily purge their updates from your News Feed.

Bethesda has really gone all-in with virtual reality. Whereas many developers and publishers have toyed with the medium, releasing smaller experiments to test the waters, over the last few weeks Bethesda has released three of its biggest games in VR. On the surface, it sounds great. With a VR headset, you can become fully immersed in the thrilling horror of Doom, the post-apocalyptic wasteland of Fallout, or Skyrim’s picturesque fantasy realm.

Avengers: Infinity War’s Russo Brothers have added a new project to their slate: an adaptation of Simon Stålenhag’s recently Kickstarter-funded art book The Electric State.

Now that the new Star Wars is upon us — which, as we all know, is the real Reason for the Season — it’s time for what is now my yearly overthinking of the entire franchise. Last year, I came to the realization that if the galaxy had adequate women’s health care, Anakin would have never turned to the dark side. This year, I want to point out that Rogue One, a tremendously underrated installment of the series, is really about internet freedom.

One of last year’s best games was a short but haunting adventure called Inside. Developed by the team behind the similarly macabre hit Limbo, the game put players in the role of a young boy in a mysterious, gray world, uncovering all kinds of horrors along the way. It starts out as a simple platformer, but the game slowly reveals itself to be something more complex, and much darker, than it initially seems — and now you can play it on your phone.