Новости за 23.02.2018

Keen Android users who’ve been following a somewhat obscure Google Issue Tracker thread from November of last year celebrated an exciting new development today. The thread, in which a user asked about a dark mode to improve battery life on Android phones with OLED screens, had been marked “fixed,” with a Google employee saying the Android engineering team had added this feature and that it would “be available in a future Android release.”

Keen Android users who’ve been following a somewhat obscure Google Issue Tracker thread from November of last year are celebrating a new development: the thread, in which a user asked about a dark mode to improve battery life on Android phones with OLED screens, has been closed.

A decade after it was founded, Dropbox has filed to go public. The beloved, easy-to-use (if somewhat stagnant) file syncing service had documents unsealed at the SEC today revealing plans for an initial public offering, where Dropbox is looking to raise up to $500 million. The company will trade on Nasdaq under the symbol “DBX.”

Huawei recently debuted the Mate 10 Pro at CES, and it’s already gearing up to launch another phone called the P20. Now, images of the phone have appeared on the website for China’s telecommunications regulator TENAA, giving a look at four sides, as reported by GMS Arena.

Measles has made a dangerous comeback in Europe as vaccination rates have dropped, the World Health Organization says. Compared to 2016, the number of infections quadrupled to more than 21,000 cases across Europe in 2017. Thirty-five people died.

Tesla is expanding its charging infrastructure into a new area: office parking lots. A new “workplace charging” program unveiled today offers businesses free Tesla wall connectors and will also cover installation, provided they meet certain qualifications set forth by the California carmaker. Tesla won’t cover the cost of operating the charging stations, and the company says there could be other permitting, construction, zoning, or labor costs.

Newly unsealed documents show that Snapchat played an unexpected role in the investigation of an apparent drug murder in Colorado in 2016. Devon Smeltz disappeared in August 2016, shortly after a late-night disturbance was captured on surveillance video near his home in Fort Collins. Eight days after the incident, Smeltz’s body was discovered in a rural county one hour east of the city, launching an investigation by Fort Collins police.

Wakanda, the fictional African nation at the heart of Marvel Studios’ Black Panther, is a dazzling, technological utopia chock-full of science fiction gadgets and gizmos to make gearheads go gaga. What I didn’t expect, though, when settling into the seat of my Brooklyn theater last Saturday, was for the transportation-nerd parts of my brain to be so thoroughly tickled. Black Panther is a transit buff’s dream come true, with an array of cool planes, trains, and cars — and just a dash of reality... Читать дальше...

Microsoft and Xiaomi have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to work closely in cloud computing, AI, and hardware. It has so far been uncommon for a US company to partner with a Chinese company on artificial intelligence, but it definitely makes sense as both countries are the biggest markets for those products and services.

Pretty much everyone can agree that a full understanding of document file types is pretty much rocket science. It’s not clear to anyone except maybe Bill Gates why exactly it’s so difficult to use Microsoft Word to edit a PDF file, and how to go about making changes to said file without routing it through a half-dozen different applications and re-saving it twice as many times.

Two years ago, you were younger and lovelier. Your childhood was closer to you than it is now, and you had just seen Beyoncé’s Super Bowl halftime show instead of some other Super Bowl halftime show.

HTC has laid off several employees from its US offices, as reported by Digital Trends and independently confirmed by The Verge. The job cuts followed HTC’s president of smartphone and connected devices Chialin Chang’s resignation last week.

How the rapper Dessa’s turn to neuroscience inspired her new album, Chime

Apple is working with local police to remedy a surge in unintentional emergency calls to 911 that are originating from the company’s distribution and repair center in Elk Grove, California. The influx of calls has been ongoing for months, averaging 20 accidental calls a day and totaling over 1,600 since October. 911 dispatchers hear silence and intermittent employee chatter when the calls come in.

There’s been little word on Apple’s AirPower wireless charging mat since it was announced alongside the iPhone X and iPhone 8 in September, but a new report from MacOtakara claims that the charging pad will be shipping sometime in the second half of March, via VentureBeat.

Symantec, the software giant behind products like Norton AntiVirus, has severed a partnership with the National Rifle Association after public pressure.

Discord, a chat platform for gamers, has teamed up with a number of e-sports teams to expand its verified servers program. In other words, now users will be able to tell right away if they’re communicating with an official e-sports team: there will be a gray badge at the top left saying, “Verified.”

The Westfield Century City mall in Los Angeles is a multilevel marvel, a mashup of shopping mall and resort aesthetics that combines a massive AMC movie theater, the Italian marketplace Eataly, and dozens of high-end retail stores. But across the courtyard from the Amazon Books location — tucked in next to a Tesla Motors storefront, no less — there’s a pathway to another world.

In a paper published in JAMA Internal Medicine in 2016, researchers suggested that in the 1960s, the sugar industry paid scientists to obscure the relationship between sugar and heart disease, derailing the course of nutrition science and policy for years to come. Now, two researchers at Columbia University say that those claims are not backed by the historical evidence, and by promoting the idea of a “sugar conspiracy,” they hinder our understanding of how science is actually done.

In January, the city of San Francisco made the unusual move of suing a tech startup. Turo, an app company that allows people to rent out their personal cars, had failed to pay the fees required to operate legally at the SFO airport, the city alleged. Turo claims it shouldn’t be subject to the same regulations as legacy rental car companies. And today Turo responded by counter-suing the city.

Google is bringing its augmented reality system ARCore out of beta with new features, and it’s making its Lens visual search tool part of Google Photos on all phones. Today, ARCore 1.0 launches on all Google Pixel phones, all recent Samsung flagship phones, the Android O version of LG’s V30 and V30 Plus, the Asus ZenFone AR, and the OnePlus 5. In addition to the preview version’s capabilities, ARCore 1.0 includes support for anchoring virtual objects to any textured surface, not just flat, horizontal ones. Читать дальше...

1Password, the password managing app, has introduced a new proof-of-concept feature that alerts you when you use a compromised password. The feature integrates a new service that was released earlier this week by web security expert Troy Hunt called Pwned Passwords, which lets users check to see if a password they’re using has already been leaked onto the internet. The database has over 500 million passwords that have been compiled from previous breaches.

We expected Motorola to expand its midrange G phone series at Mobile World Congress this year, and now it seems we’re getting confirmation of that plan. Android Headlines published supposed renders of the Moto G6 Plus yesterday, showing it in five different colors.

In the spoiler-sensitive environment of today’s entertainment, there may be people who resent the opening scenes of Annihilation, which gives away most of the movie’s direction. A biologist named Lena (Natalie Portman) has survived a cataclysmic event. Sitting in an isolation chamber, surrounded by unnerved people in hazmat suits, she’s interrogated about what just happened to her. In the process, she reveals who among the yet-to-be-introduced cast of characters survives, and who dies. And the... Читать дальше...

This week on The Vergecast, Dieter is on vacation, so Silicon Valley editor and host of an upcoming Verge podcast, Casey Newton, joins us. Nilay, Paul, and Casey run through the news of the week, including Samsung Galaxy S9 leaks, Twitter bots, and third-party keyboards.