Новости за 11.02.2022

Expect a big shake-up to Warzone in tandem with the next Call of Duty game. Activision has shared early details of its Call of Duty releases for 2022, and it's promising a "massive evolution" of Warzone designed in sync with the core CoD title. They'll both sport a new game engine, and Warzone will include both an "all-new playspace" and a familiar-sounding sandbox mode. The main game, meanwhile, is a sequel to 2019's Modern Warfare reboot.

Netflix is making a docuseries about one of the worst rappers of all time. Coincidentally, Heather "Razzlekhan" Morgan and her husband, Ilya Lichtenstein, were charged this week with conspiring to launder 119,754 bitcoin, which was stolen in the 2016 hack of crypto exchange Bitfinex.

Like millions of other people, I’ve been enthralled by Drive to Survive on Netflix which means I’m also newly obsessed with the world of Formula 1. I’m all in. I have the calendar reminders set. I watch all the practices if work permits. It has really become a thing, which means that since the season ended, there was a massive void in my sports viewing – save for the archive of F2 races on ESPN+. But watching a backlog of races is only so exciting when you’ve been following the sport and already know Oscar Piastri ran away with the title. Читать дальше...

A few months back, Blade Runner director Ridley Scott said a live-action series set in that universe is in the works. The project looks to be a step closer to reality, as Amazon Studios has reportedly put it in development. Amazon's TV and film production arm is said to be fast tracking scripts and looking at possible production dates.

Disney's Netflix collaboration effectively ended years ago, but now the shows themselves are going away... for the moment, at least. As What's on Netflixnoticed, Netflix is warning viewers that Marvel's originals for the service will disappear on March 1st. If you haven't caught up on shows like Daredevil, Jessica Jones and The Punisher, you'd better act quickly.

Toyota is plowing more money into EV production in the US. Just a few months after the automaker announced a $240 million investment in its West Virginia plant, it's pumping another $73 million into the facility.

The James Webb Space Telescope has finally captured its first image of a star — or rather, images. NASA has shared a mosaic of pictures (shown above) of a star taken using the primary mirror's 18 segments. It looks like a seemingly random collection of blurry dots, but that's precisely what the mission team was expecting. The imagery will help scientists finish the lengthy mirror alignment process using the telescope's Near Infrared Camera, or NIRCam. The first phase is nearly complete as of this writing. Читать дальше...

Many of Amazon's gadgets went on sale at the start of this week and continue to be discounted today. Key among them are both new Kindle Paperwhites — the standard version and the Signature Edition — along with the second-generation Echo Show 8 and the Fire TV Cube. On top of that, Apple's AirPods Pro are on sale for $175 and the 2021 Apple TV 4K remains discounted to $160. Here are the best tech deals from this week that you can still get today.

Google is facing more antitrust pressure in the EU over its advertising tech. Reutersreports the European Publishers Council (EPC) has filed an EU complaint against Google alleging the company has an illegal "stranglehold" on ad tech and the press. The Internet giant's ad suite is claimed to be "rife with conflicts of interests" as it not only represents the buyer, seller and auction house, but supposedly exploits that control to profit at the expense of its customers.

Tailoring is fancy, sufficiently fancy that you may go your entire life and never once experience the art. It’s expensive, having garments custom-made to suit your body shape, even if there are a legion of benefits in doing so. Mass-produced clothes, meanwhile, are never going to do the job if you’ve got a body that diverges from what’s expected or treated as “normal.”

While we saw Amazon's new smart thermostat go on sale earlier this week, now you can get the more advanced Google Nest Thermostat for less, too. The smart home gadget is down to $99 at Amazon right now, which is 24 percent off its normal price and close to its all-time low. All colors have been discounted and you can get the device with a trim kit for only $114, or 21 percent less than usual.

Google+ shuffled off this mortal coil to the great app graveyard back in 2019 — right? Well, not quite. As a reminder, its corpse was reanimated as Google Currents, designed strictly for paying G Suite customers. Now, Google Workspaces announced that it has killed that app off too, marking the final end of Google's social network or whatever G+ was, Ars Technica reported. 

Tech news season is in full swing as Samsung launched its Galaxy S22 flagship phones this week, along with new Tab S8 tablets. This week on the podcast, Cherlynn is joined by senior writer Sam Rutherford and special guest Chris Velazco from The Washington Post to discuss Samsung’s new gear. The trio also recap some of the best games announced at Nintendo Direct, followed by a look at the week’s biggest news including Peloton’s layoffs, Steam Deck previews and the Olympics.

Twitch wants everyone to have nicer, more family-friendly usernames. The video streaming website has updated its policy to prohibit usernames that have hate speech, threats of violence and personally identifiable information in them. It will now also ban usernames with references to "sexual acts, arousal, fluids or genitalia," as well as references to hard drugs. Those with some kind of reference to weed, alcohol or tobacco don't have to worry about a thing, though — those three are A-OK and don't fall under the new "hard drugs" rule. Читать дальше...

The Joint European Torus (JET) fusion reactor in the UK has generated the highest level of sustained energy ever from atom fusion. On December 21st, 2021, the "tokamak" reactor produced 59 megajoules of energy during a five-second fusion pulse. That’s double what it created back in 1997. (Yes, I know energy is not created or destroyed, but you get what I mean!)

The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has accepted Google's latest plan to replace third-party cookies from the Chrome Browser. The regulator said that Google made legally binding commitments to address its concerns that the "Privacy Sandbox" would weaken competition and harm consumers. 

The CIA has been conducting a secret mass surveillance program that affects Americans' privacy, according to a newly declassified letter (PDF) by US Senators Ron Wyden (D-Ore) and Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.). In the letter dated April of 2021, the members of the Senate Intelligence Committee urged the agency to tell the public the kind of records it collected, the amount of American records' maintained and the nature of the CIA's relationship with its sources. 

Best Buy restricted sales of several NVIDIA RTX 3000-series GPUs, including the RTX 3080 and 3090 models, to members of its $199 per year subscription program, PC Mag has reported. It made the graphics cards available for an "Exclusive Access Event," but anyone attempting to buy one was greeted with a popup saying that access was limited to Totaltech members. 

Elon Musk has given SpaceX's first huge Starship update in years, and during his presentation, the company showed off what a launch with the massive launch system would look like. The Starship system is composed of the Starship spacecraft itself on top of a Super Heavy booster. SpaceX is working towards making it rapidly and fully reusable so as to make launches to the Moon and to Mars feasible. After making its way outside our planet, the booster will break off and return to its launch tower... Читать дальше...

We knew this day would come, but it still feels strange to say goodbye: the original website hosting Wordle — https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/ — now points to its new forever home of https://www.nytimes.com/games/wordle/index.html.

Space startup Astra's effective commercial debut didn't quite go according to plan. As SpaceNewsreports, the company's first practical mission for NASA failed when the Rocket 3.3 vehicle's upper stage flew out of control shortly after detaching from the first stage. While the launch itself went smoothly, footage suggests the payload fairing separation went awry.

A US federal court has sentenced Canadian hacker Doug Bowser to 40 months in prison for his involvement in Switch hacking group Team Xecuter, the Department of Justice announced on Thursday. Not to be confused with Nintendo of America president Doug Bowser (or Mario’s nemesis, for that matter), Bowser was part of a collective that developed and sold devices people could use to play pirated games on their consoles.

Bandcamp has always had a serviceable if unpolished mobile app for streaming the tracks you buy from its platform. However, one thing you couldn’t do before today was queue albums and tracks. The good news is Bandcamp has addressed that shortcoming of its software with a new update that’s available through the App Store and Google Play Store.

MoviePass is making a comeback, and we've learned some more details about the latest incarnation of the cinema subscription service. Cofounder Stacy Spikes, who is back at the helm, says MoviePass 2.0 is being built on a Web3 framework and will have a kind of virtual currency.