Новости за 26.12.2017

Uber announced it was shutting down its auto-leasing business Xchange Leasing in September, and now it’s being bought by startup auto leasing company Fair.com, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

The Library of Congress just announced some changes to its long-running plan to archive all of Twitter. On December 31st, 2017, it will stop archiving all tweets and instead choose certain tweets to archive on a “very selective basis,” Gizmodo reports. The decision was announced in a recently published white paper that reads “the tweets collected and archived will be thematic and event-based, including events such as elections, or themes of ongoing national interest, e.g. public policy.”

Let’s start with the good news: no Samsung phones caught fire or exploded this year.

Once again, the year is winding down, and everybody under the sun is looking back at the past year’s news and culture as if the world began on January 1st, 2017. But while the hype cycle operates in tidy annual waves, our lives don’t. As part of our usual look back at our favorite things of the year, we’re acknowledging the things we loved in 2017 that didn’t come out in 2017, and talking about how those new-to-us discoveries and late-arrival favorites got us through another tumultuous year.

From Anthem to Yoshi, and everything in between

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The world was kind of a crappy place in 2017, especially online. Google, as a company, needs to do a better job dealing with that.

The BBC announced back in July that Jodie Whittaker would be flying the TARDIS as the next incarnation of Doctor Who’s titular character. And as has become tradition in recent years, the long-running series’ annual Christmas special saw Whittaker make her first appearance in the role, taking over from Peter Capaldi, who has played the twelfth incarnation of the character since 2014.

Facebook entered 2017 stronger than it ever had, but with its reputation smeared. During the US presidential election, Facebook had been manipulated by profiteers and Russian agents, who flooded it with fake news and posts meant to inflame partisan divides. Beset by public-relations crises, Facebook spent this year trying to win back the public’s trust, with uneven results.

Leeroy Jenkins has returned once more to ruin World of Warcraft raids, but this time for a good cause. The creators of the infamous meme released a never-before-seen dry run of the botched attack, this time with the hopes of raising awareness about net neutrality.