Новости за 16.12.2017

The Washington Post reports that the Trump Administration has prohibited the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from using seven words in official documents used for next year’s budget.

In September, publisher Kroncker Wallis Kickstarted its new edition of influential math text Euclid’s Element. The publisher has a new project that’s now funding on the platform: Illustrating Nature: The World Through the Eyes of Alexander von Humboldt is a book that collects the illustrations and notes of one of the world’s greatest scientific explorers.

The new year is just around the corner, and that means a whole new slate of movies and TV shows to watch on your streaming service of choice will soon be on their way. Netflix will be kicking the new year off in a big way, and it comes down to four words: Tim Burton’s original Batman.

Since the week before Thanksgiving, I’ve been using the iPhone X. Prior to that, I was using the iPhone 8 Plus, which Apple loaned me. During the busy fall reviews season, I also used the Google Pixel 2 and briefly used the Essential smartphone.

I haven't seen The Last Jedi yet (I'm going Saturday night!), but I'm excited to catch it this weekend. That's not something I would have expected two years ago: I've never been a big Star Wars fan, but The Force Awakens is such a perfect start to the new trilogy that it was able to change that.

Yesterday, Firefox users noticed a strange new plug-in popping up in their browsers. A new plug-in called Looking Glass found its way into each instance of the new Firefox Quantum browser. It was disabled by default, but users were still alarmed to see a plugin they hadn’t installed. When they checked to see what Looking Glass did, they found a vague and ominous description — “MY REALITY IS JUST DIFFERENT THAN YOURS” — which did little to quiet suspicions.

It’s been close to five years since Google decided to shut down Reader, the ubiquitous and beloved RSS news client. At one point, I used to do almost all my internet reading through RSS. I kept my feeds meticulously clean, poring over personal blog entries and tabbing quickly down the news, opening stories that piqued my interest. The loss of my favorite platform felt like a personal betrayal.

Christmas is nine days away, which makes this weekend the perfect time for last minute holiday shopping, either for yourself or loved ones. There’s a lot of great tech on sale that make excellent gifts including the Google Home Mini and Kindle Paperwhite. For more gift ideas, check out The Verge’s 2017 Holiday Gift Guide.

At some point, most science fiction readers come across the “Big Three” authors from its so-called Golden Age: Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke. Over the course of his lifetime, Clarke witnessed the birth of the space age, and helped push science fiction from a nascent literary movement into a modern vision for humanity’s future with grounded, realistic stories that drew on science and technology—themes that are more relevant than ever today, on the 100th anniversary of his birth. Читать дальше...

In February 2015, journalist Kate Dawson was browsing the Getty Images website when she stumbled upon an enigmatic black and white photo of a woman with four strings of pearls around her neck and a chiffon scarf around her nose and mouth. The woman was surrounded by an ominous gray haze. “I was just struck by the photo,” Dawson tells The Verge.

Threatened by House Republicans last month, the latest version of a bill with sweeping tax cuts preserves a massive federal credit for electric cars — and the bill looks to have the necessary votes to pass. By Friday afternoon, Republican senators Bob Corker (R-TN) and Marco Rubio (R-FL) agreed to this version of the $1.5 billion Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

Last month, details emerged about a secretive unit within Uber dedicated to stealing trade secrets, surveilling competitors, using self-destructing messages, and dodging government regulators. The accusations came from a former member of Uber’s security team, Ric Jacobs, whose 37-page letter detailing all of Uber’s shady behavior was sent to Uber’s management earlier this year. Prior to today, only snippets of the letter have been read aloud in court. Now, a redacted copy of the letter is public... Читать дальше...

Back in September, Google said Chrome 64 would address several user concerns around content that autoplays, most notably, the ability to have autoplay videos go silent by default. Now, if you’re really keen on testing it out, you do so today by downloading the Chrome 64 beta, as spotted by Engadget. The company said the full autoplay video blocking feature, which is part of a broader ad blocking effort in Chrome that’s been in the works for quite some time, would arrive in the consumer version of the browser come January. Читать дальше...

It wouldn’t be a new Star Wars film without an adorable and yet equally divisive pet-like character from which Disney can launch a merchandising gold mine. The Force Awakens gave us the stoic and circular R2-D2 successor BB-8, but Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi, which hits theaters today, is all about the porg. To celebrate the puffin-like bird species of planet Ahch-To, on which Luke Skywalker has exiled himself, Disney is launching a Facebook Instant Games mini-game today called Porg Invasion.

Product tie-ins for Star Wars: The Last Jedi seem to have hit the market just in time for the holidays — along with the movie you’ve probably just seen — but there’s already a car that pays homage to next year’s Solo: A Star Wars Story. This is the creatively named Renault Zoe Star Wars edition.

Google said today that it’ll be shutting down Project Tango next year, on March 1st. Project Tango was an early effort from Google to bring augmented reality to phones, but it never really panned out. The system was introduced in 2014 and made it into developer kits and even a couple consumer devices as recently as last year.

On Wednesday, T-Mobile announced that it plans to launch an internet TV service sometime in 2018. The carrier is in the process of acquiring Layer3 TV for an undisclosed sum to help jumpstart the new offering.