Новости за 11.01.2018

My favorite robot at CES this year has legs, but my second favorite robot is designed to minimize my own leg usage. Segway’s Loomo bot has a straightforward value proposition: you ride it like a hoverboard to the store, and then you hop off, load it up with cargo, and have it follow you home.

UK online supermarket Ocado is on a quest to automate its business as much as possible, experimenting with technology from flexible robot hands (for packing soft fruit) to self-driving delivery vehicles. Its latest robotic addition to the team is a prototype bot that’s designed to help human technicians in warehouses.

The beloved FM radio is getting a mobile revival with news that Samsung is teaming up with NextRadio to unlock the FM chips in new Samsung devices in the US and Canada. There are no hardware changes, as FM receivers are already present in most smartphones — it’s just not all smartphone makers activate them.

Split-flap mechanical signs are sadly a relic of a bygone era — while the famous, clacking boards were once used in train stations the world over, advances in technology have seen most of them retired in favor of boring digital displays.

Western Digital’s cloud storage devices are still vulnerable to security flaws despite patches issued to fix the bugs, the company has said in a blog post. According to the firm, future updates are being planned to patch the affected products, although it’s unclear how many problems are still outstanding.

The Internet has long been fascinated with Japan for all the wrong reasons. A country with a rich and complicated history, Japan and its people are frequently reduced to caricatures and clickbait about ninjas, outrageous game shows, animated pornography, and weird commercials. Search Google or YouTube for “weird Japan,” and you’ll find a goldmine of terrible content stereotyping Japan as the sum of its most bizarre media and traditions — a metric that would reflect poorly on any country — and... Читать дальше...

There are approximately one million toy robots on shelves right now that can teach kids to code. But how many let programmers control a “real” robot, without requiring them to become roboticists? Not quite enough, according to Misty Robotics, a spin-off from Sphero, which just announced Misty I Developer Edition. It’s a first stab at an “affordable, easily programmable, advanced personal robot.”

If you’re a regular Chromebook user and worried about the Meltdown bug endangering your data, Google has published a table on the Chromium Wiki detailing which devices are vulnerable, which aren’t, and which have been patched. You can read it in full here.

One of the longest-running fan complaints in the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been the studio’s reluctance to give Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow her own standalone film, but now it looks like the studio is finally serious about making the project happen. Variety reports that the studio has hired screenwriter Jac Schaeffer to write a script for the as-of-yet untitled film.

In a week of weather disasters, a sprinkling of snow in the Sahara desert was an unexpected bright spot. The freak flurry covered parts of the desert with up to 15 inches of snow on Sunday, The Washington Post reports. Local photographers and satellites high above caught the creamsicle-colored scene on camera.

A day after YouTube said it was looking into “further consequences” for influencer Logan Paul, Polygon is reporting that the service will be removing him from its Google Preferred ad program and is shelving Paul’s upcoming YouTube Red original video projects.

German cryptographers have found a way to infiltrate WhatsApp’s group chats despite its end-to-end encryption.

Apple has been moving swiftly into the world of original television programming, and its latest project is a futuristic drama from the director of the Hunger Games franchise. Deadline reports that the company has placed a straight-to-series order for See, described as “an epic, world-building drama” that will be written by Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight and directed by filmmaker Francis Lawrence (The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Mockingjay Parts 1 & 2).

Ford made a slew of announcements this week at CES for connected cities and cloud-based transportation services, but their partnership with Waze may have the most impact on drivers right now.

We all know Twitter is a platform filled with abuse, harassment, and other modern nightmares, but it seems the people at the top are finally listening to our desperate pleas for change. Behold, Twitter posted actual evidence of its commitment to change today as part of a safety rollout: known Mario antagonizer Waluigi has been Dealt With.

Pimax, a Chinese startup developing an 8K virtual reality headset, came to CES this year to show off its latest prototype, the fifth in just a year since the first version was unveiled at last year’s show. After a successful Kickstarter campaign last year, one in which Pimax raised more than $4.2 million and beat out even Oculus VR’s initial crowdfunding campaign, it’s working toward mass production of the consumer version that is slated to come out later this year after an initial shipment to backers. Читать дальше...

Dish announced today that it has been working on integrating Google Home and Google Assistant into its TV service, fleshing out the options for controlling a TV with your voice.

I find it hard to get on board with the idea of filling my home with smart security cameras for a number of reasons, not the least of which is privacy. But there’s one smart camera at CES this year that has a clever solution to the whole spying-on-you problem: just have the camera look away.