Новости за 15.03.2018

Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key from Comedy Central’s Emmy Award-winning series Key and Peele will reunite for a new film from Coraline and The Nightmare Before Christmas director Henry Selick, called Wendell and Wild. The film will be distributed by Netflix, according to Deadline.

While Ford has spent much of the year talking about its plans for connected cars and cities, it’s back to talking about the trucks and SUVs it’s going to sell to consumers to pay for all that advanced technology. But Ford is striving to be known for its hybrid vehicles and steal thunder from every other company trying to get in the electric car game.

iPhone users in Iran discovered today that they’re no longer able to access the App Store, in what appears to be a total block of the country, according to Bleeping Computer. While Apple doesn’t sell phones or operate the App Store in Iran, Iranians could still import Apple products from another county and set them up to access portions of the App Store meant for other regions. It appears that now, Apple has closed that loophole, blocking any traffic coming from inside Iran from accessing the App Store in any capacity. Читать дальше...

Ford announced a raft of new driver-assistance features today, promising to make automatic emergency braking and other safety technology standard on many of its vehicles. The automaker stopped short of trying to look as if it would compete with semi-autonomous systems like Tesla’s Autopilot, but it’s a sign that improved safety technology will be coming to many more vehicles in the near future.

Two weeks ago, The Verge reported the existence of a six-year predictive policing collaboration between the New Orleans Police Department and Palantir Technologies, a data mining giant co-founded by Peter Thiel. The nature of the partnership, which used Palantir’s network-analysis software to identify potential aggressors and victims of violence, was unknown to the public and key members of the city council prior to publication of The Verge’s findings.

Facebook now has an app that lets people in developing countries pay for Wi-Fi. The company has launched an Express Wi-Fi app in Google Play to go along with its distributed Wi-Fi network. It currently only works in Indonesia and Kenya.

Starting today, Google is adding a “wheelchair accessible” routing option to Google Maps, as reported by Gizmodo. Tailored toward the use of public transit in metropolitan areas, when selected, the route that is presented will factor in the availability of wheelchair ramps and elevators on routes.

At SXSW 2018, I was invited to take part in a four-day immersive story experience called a SimuLife. Mounted by the Austin-based creative lab Interactive Deep Dive, SimuLife is meant to blur the line between fantasy and reality by letting me interact with the story as part of daily life. It’s like David Fincher’s movie The Game, executed in the real world. Other than those broad edicts, I wasn’t given any advance information about the experience. I’m documenting my journey through the story — wherever it leads. Читать дальше...

At SXSW 2018, I was invited to take part in a four-day immersive story experience called a SimuLife. Mounted by the Austin-based creative lab Interactive Deep Dive, SimuLife is meant to blur the line between fantasy and reality by letting me interact with the story as part of daily life. It’s like David Fincher’s movie The Game, executed in the real world. Other than those broad edicts, I wasn’t given any advance information about the experience. I’m documenting my journey through the story — wherever it leads. Читать дальше...

Facebook Lite, a version of Facebook made for developing countries that is designed to run on 2G networks, is rolling out to more countries, including developed ones, according to Reuters. Like Messenger Lite, the thought is that people with older Android devices or slower internet connections would benefit from the stripped-down app.

Airbnb has added new filters to its platform to help people with disabilities more easily find accommodations.

Several stories this week have proclaimed that the DNA of former NASA astronaut Scott Kelly changed during his year living on the International Space Station. The stories say that 7 percent of his genes did not return back to normal when he came back to Earth. It makes it seem as if the space environment permanently altered his genetic code. The problem? That’s not true.

One-year-old babies may not be able to speak, but they are able to think logically, according to new research that shows the earliest known foundation of our ability to reason.

When Burnout Paradise first launched in 2008, the development team had an idea of the kind of audience it would attract. Previous entries in the series were focused on arcade-style challenges, where players would attempt to crash cars with pinpoint precision. But for Paradise, the team moved in a slightly different direction, spreading out a huge range of challenges across a vast, open world. They expected players would really dig into the hardcore racing aspects, battling against each other in... Читать дальше...

From apps that diagnose irregular heart rhythms to phone cases that claim to measure blood pressure, there has been a wave of technology promising to use our everyday devices — smartphones and wearables — to fight heart disease. But why heart health, and how much can these gadgets really do?

HTC is hard at work on its next flagship phone, the U12 Plus, and now we’ve gotten our first good look at what the phone will look like, courtesy of a leak from Evan Blass over at VentureBeat. It’s hard to tell from the pictures if this is the same phone as the rumored U12 prototype that HTC showed off at a 5G event in Taiwan or if this is a different model.

John Chen will remain BlackBerry’s chief executive through at least November 2023, the company announced today. BlackBerry credits Chen with reversing what once appeared to be doomed prospects by eliminating the company’s storied mobile hardware business and shifting its primary focus to “investments in cybersecurity and embedded software that today are delivering the vast majority of the company’s revenue and growth.”

Blue Apron will start selling meal kits in stores in an attempt to bolster its lagging business, as reported by The Wall Street Journal. Blue Apron was one of the first meal kit delivery companies on the market, but with increasing competition, it now seems to acknowledge that relying on a subscription-based model isn’t enough.

Rihanna posted an Instagram Story today to denounce Snapchat after the platform showed an offensive ad featuring the artist to users. The ad was for a smartphone game called Would You Rather that appeared inside Snapchat on Monday asking users if they would rather slap Rihanna or punch Chris Brown.

General Motors announced today that it would spend $100 million to begin making production versions of its self-driving electric Chevy Bolts at two of its manufacturing facilities in Michigan. The cars, which GM dubs the “Cruise AV,” will be the automaker’s first production-ready vehicle built from the ground up to operate with no steering wheel, pedals, or manual controls.

If you were wondering why Nintendo Labo, the DIY cardboard accessory kits for the Switch, costs at least $70, Toy-Con Garage is why. As we approach the April 20th release date for Labo, Nintendo has finally revealed more details of Toy-Con Garage, a software feature included in each Labo kit that teaches kids basic If This Then That programming. It’s an ingenious feature that lets the cardboard toys be combined and remixed with each other, opening up way more possibilities for them to be played with. Читать дальше...

Lenovo announced the Mirage Solo — the first standalone Daydream VR headset that wouldn’t require a smartphone to use — at CES earlier this year for a mid-2018 release. And now we’ve got a price and release date for the device courtesy of B&H, which has the headset available to preorder for $399.99 for an expected May 11th release date, via Ubergizmo.

Microsoft is unveiling its first major update to the SwiftKey keyboard it acquired back in 2016. Today’s 7.0 release replaces the existing hub found in the keyboard with a new toolbar that expands to provide access to stickers, GIFs, and soon some useful location and calendar features. The new toolbar is designed to make it quicker to insert GIFs, emoji, and the new sticker packs that Microsoft will be making available.

The Android Wear brand introduced in 2014 is going away and being replaced with a new name: Wear OS. A new area of Google’s website has officially confirmed the change. Wear OS even has a new slogan: “Make every minute matter.” For now, that’s really all the news there is; since it works on both Android and iOS, Google’s smartwatch platform is being given a more flexible moniker that doesn’t tie it to a specific mobile operating system. Apple’s software platform on the Apple Watch is called watchOS. Читать дальше...

At South by Southwest, everyone is a VIP and no one is a VIP.

Your $1,600 badge gives you access to everything in the world and nothing at all. You can breeze through the door at a startup’s private party with the flash of a business card or you can stand in a line wrapping around the block to get into a cable TV network’s “sensory house,” which has already run out of Sugarfina gummies.

As a woman obsessed with mundanity and excess as well as status and how internet-age social structures... Читать дальше...