Новости за 09.03.2018

This week, the Florida Senate passed the Sunshine Protection Act, a proposal for the state to stay in daylight saving time all year round. That’s not happening because the federal government controls time, but the people of Florida have the right idea. Daylight saving time begins this Sunday, but it should last in perpetuity, allowing us to live in a world of evening light.

Facebook’s analytics company released a new app this week, which like many of their products, exists mainly to collect user data and package it up for Facebook.

Amazon has added a new feature for its Alexa voice assistant that you will let you make successive requests without needing to repeat your Echo speaker’s wake word, as noted today by CNET. Amazon is calling the new setting “follow-up mode,” and while it won’t let you nest one request into another, it will let you ask make multiple requests back to back. For instance, you won’t be able to ask Alexa to turn off the lights and change the temperature in the same breath, but you can make one request... Читать дальше...

Martin Shkreli, who became infamous as the “pharma bro” CEO who massively hiked the price of an anti-parasite treatment, has been sentenced to seven years in prison on fraud charges unrelated to the price increase, according to CNBC.

Motorola has put together an eclectic selection of Moto Mod accessories for its smartphones, ranging from an Alexa speaker to an instant camera. So it was probably only a matter of time until we arrived at this: a virtual reality headset, custom-built for the Moto Z line and its big, circular camera bump.

Madeleine L’Engle’s 1962 children’s novel A Wrinkle in Time is a weird book — and that’s gloriously deliberate. It’s about a family where weirdness is the norm, the natural offshoot of scientific brilliance and wild creativity. But it’s also about how one member of that family struggles with her own awkwardness, unlikability, and temper, and how those faults become assets in a supernatural fight to save her family from a vast interplanetary evil.

eBay has a storewide 20 percent discount going on today, which also applies to some of the biggest electronics, including the Nintendo Switch. As spotted by Kinja Deals, by using the promo code PSPRING20, you can slash the price of a brand-new, factory-sealed Switch down to $224. (Update: while the original $224 listing has sold out, you can still get the Switch from other retailers for 20 percent off.) It’s probably the best deal on the usually full-price console we’ve seen yet.

Google is opening the gates to something that should ultimately make the Google Assistant a lot more useful: it’ll now allow other companies to create custom commands when the Assistant is built into their products. So the manufacturer of a smart dishwasher that supports Google’s voice assistant could add a command to “start a hypercycle,” even though that’s not a universal feature found on other dishwashers.

Apple filed a patent made public yesterday for a keyboard that resists crumbs. The patent describes two different ways that a keyboard can keep dirt out, either by sealing gaps off or having a membrane beneath each key that would blow out air every time a key is pressed, pushing out unwanted debris.

British Airways is expanding its biometric identification gates to new airports in New York (JFK), Miami (MIA), and Orlando (MCO). These “biometric e-Gates,” which have been in a trial at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) since November 2017, use facial recognition to match flyers with their passport, visa, or immigration photos and can remove the need to show a boarding pass or identification when getting on a plane.

Waymo is expanding the scope of its self-driving experiments, announcing Friday that its autonomous trucks would soon begin delivering freight for Google’s data centers in Atlanta. The trucks won’t be completely driverless, but will be operating on public roads during the pilot, the company said.

Bose has announced at SXSW that it’s working on its own pair of augmented reality glasses, but not in the way that you’d think. Instead of superimposing data over the world visually, like Google Glass or Intel’s Vaunt glasses, Bose’s AR concept unsurprisingly focuses on audio, adding “audible layer of information and experiences” to the real world, according to a report from CNET.

Facebook now has all the major music labels behind its recent initiative to use licensed music in videos posted by users on Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and Oculus. Warner Music Group today announced that it reached a deal with Facebook to add its artists to the mix, joining Universal Music Group and Sony / ATV Music Publishing. As with those earlier agreements, Warner’s stable of musicians and songwriters will earn royalties from fan-created videos featuring their work.

Netflix released season 2 of the Marvel series Jessica Jones on March 8th (International Women’s Day), giving fans the chance to start their weekend binges early. But given that season 1 dropped back in 2015, viewers may need some refreshers before diving in. A lot has happened in Jessica Jones’ world since her debut, including a spinoff show for Jessica’s brief love interest Luke Cage, two more MCU series set in the same world (Iron Fist and The Punisher), and the miniseries The Defenders, which... Читать дальше...

If you’ve kept even just a peripheral gaze aimed at the online gaming community over the last six months or so, you’ve likely seen the explosion in popularity of Fortnite Battle Royale. Epic Games’ cartoony and competitive survival shooter game took a core element of Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds — 100 human players parachuting onto an island with an ever-shrinking battlefield — and turned into a worldwide phenomenon. Clips and highlights have inundated Instagram, Reddit, and Twitter at an alarmingly high rate... Читать дальше...

I can’t count how many times I’ve heard people speculate, joke, or jokingly speculate that their cellphone might be giving them cancer. It comes from a very reasonable place of discomfort — few people understand how radiation works, we put our phones right beside our brains all the time, and technology in general often feels like it ought to be causing some sort of societal ill.

Google is celebrating Mario Day (March 10th, MAR10) in style this year. Nintendo and Google have partnered up to bring Mario to Google Maps on iOS or Android. Mario Time, as Google calls it, will be available in the latest Google Maps mobile apps starting today. A new yellow “?” icon will appear next to destinations, which will enable Mario to become the navigation arrow in his kart and accompany you along your commute.

Facebook and Major League Baseball have reached a deal that will give the social network exclusive streaming rights to 25 regular season games in 2018. All of those will be weekday afternoon games, so traditional TV networks will maintain their hold on primetime and weekend play. Even so, as Bloomberg notes, this is the first time Facebook has nabbed exclusive streaming rights for regular season games from one of the major US sports leagues. The first Facebook-only game will be on April 4th between the Phillies and Mets. Читать дальше...

I had hoped that getting a media preview of a new museum exhibition meant having the luxury of strolling around undisturbed, without the crowds that turn any museum visit in New York into Macy’s on Black Friday. Instead, there are dozens of other journalists with cameras on tripods — and about 30 very excited fourth graders.

Microsoft is currently working on a second generation of its Surface Hub, the company’s giant 55- and 84-inch 4K smart displays. “Surface Hub created an entirely new device category and we’re thrilled with the strong momentum we have seen across the globe,” says a Microsoft spokesperson in a statement to The Verge. “We’re working on V2 and will share more in the first half of this year.”

The Why’d You Push That Button team has landed in Austin. We made it. Our producer Andru and I ate chocolate chip cookies on the plane, and Kaitlyn ate pretzels. Suspicious. We’re here because we’re doing the show live, in Austin, at SXSW. Andru won’t be able to edit anything out, so if you’ve ever wondered what Kaitlyn and I sound like in the studio with no one to rein us in, you should probably come check out the show.

Asos, one of the biggest names in fashion e-commerce, is rolling out its Style Match visual search tool globally for iOS and Android. First introduced for its iOS app in the UK last August, the feature lets users take or upload a photo to the app to find visually similar clothing styles that are available to shop. Currently, there are 85,000 products available to search through, and Asos says it’s adding 5,000 new items weekly.

One thing that can absolutely ruin a day on the slopes is cold fingers. Now, with ski and snowboard season nearly over, I can tell you about a pair of heated gloves I’ve been testing that have kept my hands toasty warm in temperatures as low as -9 degrees Fahrenheit (-23 degrees Celsius) — even with lots and lots of snow.

Welcome to the land of compromise

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Microsoft is once again selling its own custom version of Samsung’s Galaxy S9. The handset is available in Microsoft Stores in the US, and will ship with some customizations from Microsoft. “A Microsoft customization is applied to the Samsung Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9 Plus Microsoft Edition when the devices are unboxed and connected to Wi-Fi,” says a Microsoft spokesperson in a statement to TrustedReviews.