Новости за 29.12.2018

In 2018, Tesla turned its biggest ever quarterly profit, and its first profit in two years. The company shipped close to some 100,000 Model 3s in the first full year of production of the most affordable vehicle it makes. SpaceX, one of Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s other companies, successfully launched its brand new Falcon Heavy rocket for the first time ever — and Musk used it to send one of the original Tesla Roadsters into space. By those measures, 2018 was a wild success for Tesla.

Google just got an important lawsuit over facial recognition dismissed. As first reported by Bloomberg, the lawsuit has been dismissed by a state judge who found that the plaintiffs didn’t suffer “concrete injuries.” The Google lawsuit is one of three cases aimed at prominent tech companies that have allegedly violated the United States’ toughest biometric privacy law and it’s the first one to get dismissed.

Lady Gaga has been teasing a new animated character on social media as part of her Las Vegas residency show. It looks to be a cyborg with long blue hair and the ability to fly through space, a character that Gaga was also dressed as on Friday. In a short, mysterious clip posted to YouTube and Instagram, the character looks around at a shining star before making contact with it and absorbing its powers.

After a banner 2017, SpaceX decided to one-up itself in 2018 by launching the world’s most powerful rocket, which flung a sports car beyond the orbit of Mars.

We’re heading into the last days of 2018, and by extension, the last days of our look back at 1998 — where the dot-com bubble was steadily inflating, cyberspace was transforming everything from crime to horoscopes, and the end of the internet (or maybe civilization itself) was just a year away with Y2K. And that means one thing in the media world: time for some retrospectives!

China just lifted its ban on new video games after nearly a year of keeping games from getting released. Its regulatory arm approved 80 new games today, as first reported by Reuters. But curiously enough, none of them are from the country’s biggest gaming company, Tencent.

The holidays are here, and it looks like you got a new Kindle (or a device with a Kindle app). You now have before you a fun task: to build a portable library of all the books that you have on your reading list — or to create a new list for the coming year.

A lens into some of The Verge’s biggest stories of the year

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2018 was supposed to be a recovery year for Uber. Sandwiched in between the disaster that was 2017, and the expectation that the company will go public in 2019, this was a year for Uber to put its sordid past behind it and stride confidently into the future.

Early in the morning on Friday, December 28th, Netflix slipped its viewers a late Christmas present: a new episode of Charlie Brooker’s technological-dystopia anthology series Black Mirror, in the form of an interactive movie called Bandersnatch. Its arrival didn’t entirely come as a secret — as far back as October, there were rumors it was on the way — but Netflix has been secretive about the storyline and the scope of the project. Just as Netflix seems to be experimenting with high-profile ad... Читать дальше...

The Essential Phone, from Android co-founder Andy Rubin, seemed to have so much unrealized potential — but its journey may be coming to an end. Today, the company has announced (via 9to5Google) that it’s discontinuing the device. Droid Life spotted earlier today that the phone is pretty much out of stock, and Essential says it isn’t making any more.