Новости за 14.02.2018

FX golden boy Ryan Murphy is jumping ship when his contract expires in July, and moving over to Netflix. Netflix announced the deal last night, and The New York Times reports that it’s worth up to $300 million — one of the largest-ever overall deals for a showrunner.

Qualcomm has announced its newest LTE modem for smartphones ahead of Mobile World Congress, the Snapdragon X24, which promises to reach top download speeds of up to 2Gbps.

Google is enabling its built-in ad blocker for Chrome tomorrow (February 15th). Chrome’s ad filtering is designed to weed out some of the web’s most annoying ads, and push website owners to stop using them. Google is not planning to wipe out all ads from Chrome, just ones that are considered bad using standards from the Coalition for Better Ads. Full page ads, ads with autoplaying sound and video, and flashing ads will be targeted by Chrome’s ad filtering, which will hopefully result in less of these annoying ads on the web. Читать дальше...

The heads of six major US intelligence agencies have warned that American citizens shouldn’t use products and services made by Chinese tech giants Huawei and ZTE. According to a report from CNBC, the intelligence chiefs made the recommendation during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Tuesday. The group included the heads of the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, and the director of national intelligence.

News out of Taiwan today is that HTC’s president for the Smartphone and Connected Devices Business is resigning, effectively immediately. Chialin Chang, who’d previously served as HTC’s CFO and, between 2013 and 2017, its head of global sales, was one of the last remaining high-level executives not to have departed the company. But the position he was occupying started to look redundant after HTC sold off most of its smartphone design and engineering team to Google for $1.1 billion.

If you ever find yourself on a bullet train between, say, Tokyo and Osaka at 5.37pm on a Thursday afternoon, you’ll see a lot of dudes in suits with three things on the little fold-out table: a meticulously arranged bento box, a can of Suntory Premium Malts beer, and a Panasonic Let’s Note laptop.

Magic Leap is planning multiple editions of its augmented reality glasses for different levels of consumers and professionals, with the cheapest starting at the price of a “higher-end mobile phone to higher-end tablet,” says company president and CEO Rony Abovitz. “I think we’re trying to establish certain tiers — we’re not going to be a single-product company over time,” Abovitz told an audience during an interview at Recode’s Code Media conference today.

Jordan Peele’s Get Out is heading into this year’s Academy Awards with four nominations, including Best Picture, and audiences will be able to see the film again for free at AMC theaters this Presidents’ Day. Peele made the announcement today via Twitter, with a creepy video clip promoting the event as a celebration of the film’s one-year anniversary. (Get Out was released last year on February 24th; the free screenings will be happening next Monday, February 19th at 7:00PM local time.)

Lightfield-display technology company Magic Leap is partnering with the NBA to create digital basketball games that people can watch through its goggles – whenever it is that people are able to get their hands on said goggles, which have been years in the works and are supposed to ship this year.

Termite-hunting ants in sub-Saharan Africa treat each other’s wounds by licking them, according to new research. It might sound icky — but the treatment actually saves lives.

Last week, Amazon announced that it would stop displaying advertisements and offers on the lock screen of discounted smartphones that the company sells to Prime customers. But if you’ve paid to remove those ads from a Prime Exclusive device in the past, you can expect a full refund — in the form of Amazon.com store credit.

Bill Gates warns that big tech companies aren’t worried enough about government regulation, in a new interview with Axios today. Calling out “Apple and other tech giants,” Gates argues that companies are inviting government intervention by flaunting hubris, saying they need to be “careful that they’re not trying to think their view is more important than the government’s view, or than the government being able to function in some key areas.”

An armed New Mexico man broke into the house of YouTubers Megan Turney and Gavin Free last month, forcing the couple to hide in their closet and await police. Christopher Giles drove 11 hours from Albuquerque to the couple’s home in Austin, Texas, and his “sole intent was to cause harm to someone who resides there,” according to a search warrant obtained by KXAN. Giles allegedly shot at police, who returned fire, killing Giles.