Новости за 01.05.2018

Later this year, Amazon plans to launch Prime Book Box, a monthly book subscription service for kids. For $22.99 per month, subscribers will receive a box of four board books (for ages two and younger) or two hardcover picture books or novels (for ages three to 12). This is Amazon’s first monthly subscription service to offer physical books, TechCrunch reports.

Thousands of videos featuring beloved British cartoon character Peppa Pig have been removed from the Chinese popular short-video app Douyin, according to state media tabloid The Global Times. Douyin is an app that enables users to upload, edit, and share short videos with different effects and stickers. The videos of Peppa Pig reportedly started disappearing over the weekend, and around 30,000 videos have now been removed from the platform.

With all the buzz over the recently released Avengers: Infinity War, it’s been easy to forget that Marvel has another superhero movie coming out this summer. To help audiences remember, the studio has just released a new trailer for Ant-Man and the Wasp.

The UK Parliamentary committee dealing with technology is fed up with Facebook’s lack of answers on data privacy. In a letter to the company today, the chairman of the Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport Committee more-or-less demanded that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg show up later this month for testimony. If he didn’t, the chairman wrote, the committee would force him to appear the next time he entered the country.

Westworld is back for its second season. Its murdered robots have become murder-robots, and the show’s never-ending timeline trickery and narrative puzzle boxes are still escalating. And while the second season’s second episode “Reunion” may have finally started answering some of the bigger questions surrounding the park, it also may have finally fixed one of the show’s more irksome aspects (for me, anyway): the dinosaur problem.

For being a single cell organism without a brain, slime mold can act pretty smart. As it grows, slime mold can keep track of where it’s been, it can solve mazes in search of food, and it can even be trained to take risks in the name of a big payoff. How exactly? We visited the Swarm Lab at the New Jersey Institute of Technology to find out.

I’m calling this week’s episode of Why’d You Push That Button the “politics of unfollowing.” What makes someone click that unfollow button, and why does it hurt our feelings when they do?

Atari’s long-awaited Atari VCS finally has a preorder date of May 30th, nearly a year after it was initially teased at E3 in 2017, as reported by Engadget.

Google’s Clips camera is on sale right now for $199, a $50 markdown just two months after the camera’s launch. That’s far from fire sale territory, but Google’s willingness to mark the product down so soon might speak to a lack of immediate success for the first gen product.

Smart luggage company Bluesmart is shutting down and selling off its technology, and has placed blame on the major airlines that adopted a de facto ban of its battery toting bags. The recent ban on smart luggage with non-removable batteries, which was meant to reduce the risk of battery fires, put Bluesmart “in an irreversibly difficult financial and business situation,” the company wrote in a blog post today.

Amazon’s Echo is designed to sit and stay inside your home — but accessory companies keep transforming them into portable speakers, just in case you want that, and today we’re getting a battery pack for the redesigned Echo. Ninety7 has made battery bases for the Google Home and Echo Dot, but this is its first one for the updated Echo that was released last October.

Today is a big day at The Verge: we’re launching Verge Science on YouTube! YouTube is the center stage of video storytelling. It’s a place that allows us to dive deeper into science, travel farther afield, and get more experimental than we could elsewhere. (That last one is particularly exciting.)

The Wii U’s library was so small that it was hard not to play most of the best games if you owned one. One of the few I missed out on during the Wii U’s original run was Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze, a classic-style side-scrolling platformer that arrived in 2014 to solid reviews. For whatever reason, I never got around to playing. This week the game comes out on the Switch, and while it offers virtually the same experience on a different platform, it’s also a chance for me to rectify that mistake and finally check out the game. Читать дальше...

There are few, if any, pieces of technology that have endured in their original form quite as long as Koss’ Porta Pro on-ear headphones, which are turning 34 years old this year. Their lasting popularity is testament to the Porta Pros’ quality, but a change has finally been enforced upon Koss with the shift away from headphone jacks on smartphones. And that brings us the new Porta Pro Wireless model being released today.

Olloclip, a mobile accessory company, is launching a set of iPhone X camera lenses today. The Connect X lens system, as the company calls it, includes a new mount that covers both the dual rear-facing cameras and the front-facing camera. (It also covers the TrueDepth camera, so you’ll have to remove the mount to use Face ID.)

Facebook’s annual F8 developer conference kicks off this morning, just roughly a month and a half since the Cambridge Analytica scandal completely redefined the conversation around data privacy and social networking platforms.

Microsoft is unveiling a number of new features for its Outlook desktop app, Outlook for iOS / Android mobile apps, and the company’s Outlook.com webmail service this week. The new Outlook features that are now available or coming soon are being detailed by Microsoft less than a week after Google started rolling out a new Gmail redesign. Google’s new Gmail features are mostly aimed at business customers, in an attempt to get more businesses using G Suite. Microsoft’s new Outlook features are also primarily aimed at business customers... Читать дальше...

Back in December, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reported on the existence of Marzipan, said to be an internal project at Apple that would allow for single apps to be designed for both Mac and iOS user interfaces. In January, Gurman followed up to note that the project was on track for inclusion in this year's iOS 12 and macOS 10.14. But according to longtime Apple watcher John Gruber, of Daring Fireball, the initative is unlikely to surface this year — and may be less ambitious than previously assumed. Читать дальше...

A year after the launch of its Velop mesh router system, Linksys is back with a smaller, cheaper model, with one big catch: it’s slower, too.

After years of on-again, off-again discussions, T-Mobile and Sprint finally came to an agreement in April 2018 to merge into a single company. The ultimate product will be a much larger T-Mobile that rivals the size of its biggest two wireless competitors, Verizon and AT&T, and is led by existing T-Mobile CEO John Legere, while Sprint’s leadership takes seats on the board.

UNICEF has launched a page that lets you donate to its Australian branch without giving any money at all. All you need to do is give away part of your computing power to let it mine cryptocurrency.

A week after Google shut down a method for app developers to skirt internet censorship, Amazon is doing the same. In a post last week, Amazon Web Services announced that it would implement a new set of enhanced domain protections specifically designed to stop domain-fronting, a practice that lets developers disguise their traffic to evade network blocks.

WhatsApp co-founder and CEO Jan Koum is leaving the company amid arguments with parent company Facebook over data privacy and the messaging app’s business model, according to a report from The Washington Post. Koum, together with his fellow co-founder Brian Acton, sold WhatsApp to Facebook in 2014 for an eye-popping sum of $19 billion, $3 billion of which consisted of Facebook stock granted to both Koum and Acton, who left the company back in September. Koum confirmed his departure in a personal Facebook post today. Читать дальше...