Новости за 20.07.2018

Disney has fired writer-director James Gunn from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 after a right-wing media personality resurfaced a series of offensive tweets Gunn made, in many cases from 2009 and 2010. “The offensive attitudes and statements discovered on James’ Twitter feed are indefensible and inconsistent with our studio’s values,” Walt Disney Studios chairman Alan Horn said in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter, “and we have severed our business relationship with him.”

The Walking Dead is preparing for a life after Rick Grimes, as both actor Andrew Lincoln and comic creator Robert Kirkman confirmed this week at San Diego Comic-Con that the show’s season 9 will be Lincoln’s last. Now, at The Walking Dead’s official Comic-Con panel today, AMC has released the first trailer for season 9 and confirmed an October 7th, 2018 premiere date.

The best feature of Apple’s iPhone X isn’t its hardware or design; it’s the extremely fun, easy-to-use, and efficient gesture-based navigation system that replaces the old home button. Apple’s use of gestures in the iPhone X has spurred a renaissance in gesture UIs, and many companies are now developing their own takes on them. OnePlus has added a gesture-based control option to its popular enthusiast-focused phones, while Motorola and Huawei have developed systems that work with the fingerprint... Читать дальше...

Cargo, the company that sought to make ride-share vehicles a bit more like drive-by convenience stores replete with snacks and tech accessories for sale, has announced that it’s officially joining forces with Uber.

People have always imagined the future, but starting in the 20th century, these visions involved more and more technology. So says science historian Peter Bowler, author of A History of the Future: Prophets of Progress from H.G. Wells to Isaac Asimov.

Senate Republicans have abandoned an effort to impose harsher restrictions on Chinese telecommunications company ZTE after the US officially lifted its trade ban on the company earlier this month, according to a report from The Washington Post. That means that President Donald Trump’s deal for the company to resume working with US companies will stand, despite significant bipartisan opposition amid worries the company could threaten US national security interests.

Waymo, the self-driving unit of Google parent company Alphabet, has hit another milestone: 8 million miles driven on public roads. That translates into roughly 25,000 miles driven every day, which is light-years ahead of the company’s competitors and is the result of Google’s very early investment in self-driving technology.

With an increasing number of households buying into virtual assistants like Google Home and Amazon Alexa, it’s important to keep in mind that these devices are designed to listen. This includes recording and learning the tone of your voice and improving voice recognition and features for the virtual assistant. It’s supposed to be a feature and not a bug, but it’s landed Amazon’s Echo speakers in hot water after they spontaneously erupted in laughter.

Following a year of intense competition as US telecoms raced to one-up each other on new unlimited data plans, the promotional benefits are beginning to dry up. Cell carriers are now pulling back on deals to try to shore up revenue to offset the cost of large mergers and acquisitions and network upgrades. According to a consumer price index for wireless service put together by the US Labor Department, the cost of a cell plan rose by 0.3 percent in June 2018 from the same time a year ago, as reported by The Wall Street Journal today. Читать дальше...

Roku sells more dedicated streaming devices than perhaps any other company in the world. It’s been estimated that there are more Rokus in US households than there are Fire TVs, Chromecasts, or Apple TVs. (Amazon strongly disagrees, but has never shared any sales numbers.) But here’s something that might surprise you: the money that Roku makes from its hardware lineup isn’t enough to sustain the company’s business.

In the wake of the European Union fining Google a record $5 billion for anti-competitive behavior with its Android products, rival search engine DuckDuckGo claims that the company’s antitrust issues don’t stop there.

If you Google image search “idiot” right now, you’ll find images of President Donald Trump. Online activists, in protest of Trump’s policies regarding unauthorized immigrants and members of the LGBTQ community, among others, are pushing his portraits to the top by manipulating the search engine’s ranking algorithm, as first reported by The Guardian earlier this week.

There was a lot of fierce debate about whether we should open the massive and ancient black sarcophagus that was unearthed in Alexandria, Egypt, a few weeks back. For many, including this reporter, the damn thing needed to remain closed, lest we all be subjected to some kind of horrifying, world-ending torment.

At a party at San Diego Comic-Con yesterday, Neopets announced that it is developing a mobile game called Legends and Letters. The company also announced that a mobile site and app are on the way, which will allow users to play dozens of the excellent mini-games available on the browser site.

Immersive entertainment is a wide-ranging term that can encompass everything from virtual reality and theme parks to haunted houses and interactive theater. But no matter the flavor, one thing all immersive media share is that they’re in a constant state of exploration and evolution. Unlike film and TV, which both have a framework of generally accepted conventions and tropes, most immersive work is still trying to figure out what audiences respond to. Creators keep inching toward the mainstream with every new brand activation... Читать дальше...

WhatsApp is considering curbing the amount of times you can forward messages to multiple chats, citing privacy concerns. The Facebook-owned app will begin a test that places a limit on message forwarding, it announced today.

AT&T said it would roll out a real 5G network in a dozen cities in 2018, and now we know the next three cities on the carrier’s list: Charlotte, Raleigh, and Oklahoma City will get the 5G treatment.

It’s Boosted vs. the world

Continue reading…

We’ve got a super stuffed episode of The Vergecast this week.

First, the biggest news in tech right now is the European Commission’s ruling that Google has been unfairly using Android to push Google search on users, giving it an unfair advantage. Nilay, Dieter, and Paul sit down and discuss the implications.

In the second half of the show, Dieter discusses some of the new MacBook Pro benchmarks that claim the processors may throttle performance due to cooling issues.

Nilay... Читать дальше...

Instagram knows all of our secrets, particularly the people we love to stalk. Some people think the company outs our habits to other users in their story. These users believe that the people who populate at the top of your story viewers are the ones who stalk you the most. Maybe your crush is always at the top or maybe it’s your nemesis. It doesn’t matter who.

My favorite phone released this year doesn’t have the fastest performance, doesn’t have the best camera, and has worse than average battery life. It also has a superfluous button for a virtual assistant that I can’t reprogram to something more useful and has the worst name for a phone I’ve seen in years. It’s not a phone that I recommend most people should buy. But LG’s G7 ThinQ (I told you it has the worst name) is my favorite phone right now because it meets my specific set of wants and needs better than anything else at the moment. Читать дальше...

Consumer technology devices like phones and laptops have dodged the White House’s imposed tariffs so far, but the latest proposed round has the potential to hike up the costs of goods from familiar brands like Apple, Fitbit, and Sonos.

Singapore has been hit by what local media is calling the country’s worst ever cyber attack. Hackers targeting Singapore’s largest healthcare institution, SingHealth, stole the personal profiles of some 1.5 million patients, as well as the details of prescriptions for 160,000 others. Included in the latter group was Singapore’s Prime Minister, Lee Hsien Loong, who the Ministry of Health said was targeted “specifically and repeatedly.”

Today, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter joined to announce a new standards initiative called the Data Transfer Project, designed as a new way to move data between platforms. In a blog post, Google described the project as letting users “transfer data directly from one service to another, without needing to download and re-upload it.”

Microsoft hasn’t exactly been winning over consumers recently, leaving many onlookers wondering if the company is switching all of its efforts to businesses and turning into another IBM. Over the past couple of years, Microsoft has killed off its Groove Music service, officially discontinued Kinect, scrapped its Microsoft Band fitness device, and finally admitted Windows Phone is dead. Other consumer efforts like Cortana have been left to fall behind rivals by chasing business users, and even... Читать дальше...