Новости за 06.07.2018

Twitter suspended 70 million accounts in in the past two months as part of a crackdown on malicious activity on its platform, according to a report in The Washington Post. The rate of suspensions for May and June is reportedly twice the company’s October 2017 suspension rate.

Guild Wars 2 developer ArenaNet has fired two of its developers, following a disagreement with a streamer on Twitter. Narrative designer Jessica Price and Peter Fries, a writer who’d been with ArenaNet for more than 12 years, were dismissed for what ArenaNet is calling “a [failure] to uphold our standards of communicating” with the game’s players.

The Kepler Space Telescope is almost out of fuel, which means its life is coming to an end, NASA announced today. The space agency says it put the planet-hunting spacecraft into a “hibernation” safe mode this past Monday, and that a plan to reactivate Kepler next month could burn out whatever fuel remains.

Today, US space tourism venture Virgin Galactic announced a new partnership with two of Italy’s biggest aerospace companies to someday launch people into space from the European country. The plan is to eventually conduct flights of Virgin Galactic’s passenger spaceplane from Italy’s future Grottaglie Spaceport, which will be located at an airport on the heel of the country’s famous boot. If this all pans out, Virgin Galactic could be the first group to launch someone into space from Italy — or any other European territory. Читать дальше...

Lucasfilm has kept things pretty quiet when it comes to J.J. Abrams’ Star Wars: Episode IX, but Variety is now reporting that the director has cast Keri Russell in the upcoming film. The character she’ll be playing isn’t named, but according to the report it calls for “action-heavy fight scenes.”

The valuable domain name Crypto.com, whose owner Matt Blaze has steadfastly refused to sell to cryptocurrency companies, is now owned by a cryptocurrency company. TechCrunch reported today that Monaco purchased the domain for an undisclosed amount. Monaco is known for its cryptocurrency token MCO and a Visa debit card backed by cryptocurrency; after the domain sale, the company is rebranding itself as “Crypto.com.”

Seagate is a pretty familiar name when it comes to storage, but its primary focus has been on consumer hard drives and flash storage for the enterprise market. Now, the company has launched a new consumer SSD, signaling a renewed interest in making more storage for traditional PCs and laptops.

Given the far-ranging, universe-shaking implications of Avengers: Infinity War just a few months ago, it’s hard to remember that there are still stories to be told within the Marvel Cinematic Universe that don’t take place on cosmic stages, or have world-shaking stakes. Ant-Man and the Wasp, the third and final MCU film planned for 2018, jumps back in time and scale from Infinity War. Instead of taking in the fate of every sentient being in existence, it focuses on the attempts to rescue one woman who’s been gone for 30 years. Читать дальше...

Pixar’s Inside Out is a charming, creative film — that “provides a good example of many common but incorrect assumptions about emotion.” That’s according to Ralph Adolphs and David Anderson, both professors of neuroscience at Caltech and the authors of The Neuroscience of Emotion (Princeton University Press).

Three Canadian social media celebrities died Tuesday after they were swept over a 100-foot waterfall at Shannon Falls, near Squamish, British Columbia, the CBC reports. Two of the three, Ryker Gamble and Alexey Lyakh, who were two of the creators behind the popular travel YouTube channel High On Life, dove into the pool above the falls in an attempt to save Megan “Mindy” Scraper, Lyakh’s longtime partner, who’d slipped into the water. None survived. Scraper was 29, Lyakh was 30, and Gamble was 30. Читать дальше...

There are so many streaming options available these days, and so many conflicting recommendations, that it’s hard to see through all the crap you could be watching. Each Friday, The Verge’s Cut the Crap column simplifies the choice by sorting through the overwhelming multitude of movies and TV shows on subscription services, and recommending a single perfect thing to watch this weekend.

After mastering its rocket landings on the Florida coast, SpaceX wants to try the same trick in California. The company recently filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission to land one of its Falcon 9 rockets on ground at Vandenberg Air Force Base in southern California, following a launch from the facility there. If that happens, it’ll be the first time that SpaceX has done a land landing on the West Coast.

Engineers from SpaceX and the Boring Company are heading to the Chiang Rai province of Thailand to join the growing effort to rescue a soccer team trapped in a cave, according to Elon Musk. It’s unclear what the engineers will do once they arrive. The effort, led by the Thai navy, has already claimed the life of a navy SEAL.

Party on the go

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Sonos officially filed for an initial public offering today, marking a major step as the audio company tries to stand out in a world of smart speakers. The company, which was founded in 2002, has grown into a dominant force in the speaker industry, with a name that is all but synonymous with the concept of multi-room audio setups. Sonos will trade on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol “SONO.”

The laptop lives on

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My inner 5-year-old is openly jealous of my actual 5-year-old

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There’s a certain strain of 2D fighting games that, perhaps unsurprisingly, has largely fallen into obscurity. It comes down to hardware. The Neo Geo Pocket Color was a glorious handheld gaming device that, sadly, not enough people owned. Part of what made it so great was that it was the only place that you could find arcade-caliber fighting games that were designed to be played on the go, including revered SNK series like King of Fighters and Samurai Shodown. It was like an arcade cabinet you could put in your pocket. Читать дальше...

You might remember Google’s Quick, Draw! project from 2016 — a web-based Pictionary game which asked users to doodle familiar objects while Google’s AI guessed what they were. Well, a clever soul named Dan Macnish has turned data from this game into a AI-powered camera, which takes pictures and prints them out as crude doodles.

But you don’t have to work in a studio to love how they sound

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Tech companies are taking more and more heat over other people’s software. An alarming story in The Wall Street Journal this week dove into the world of Gmail plugins, many of which have the power to scan through users’ entire inboxes. Some of that scanning is automated, but in other cases developers have combed through emails by hand, raising obvious privacy issues.

In May, Tanzanian bloggers lost an appeal that had temporarily suspended a new set of regulations granting the country’s Communication Regulatory Authority discretionary powers to censor online content. Officially dubbed the Electronic and Postal Communications (Online Content) Regulations, 2018, the statute, which the Tanzanian government is counting among its efforts to curb hate speech and fake news, requires online content creators — traditional media websites, online TV and radio channels... Читать дальше...

It’s been 52 years since England won the World Cup, but that hasn’t stopped English fans from dreaming of another victory ever since. Coming out of the group stages, England defeated Colombia earlier this week to edge the country even closer to the World Cup final. Home fans supporting England in Russia have all been chanting “it’s coming home,” and created internet memes that have left the rest of the world a little confused. Now, even Alexa is getting involved.

Samsung Electronics has reported record profits for every quarter in the past year, but it looks like that run is at an end. The company just released earnings guidance of 14.8 trillion won ($13.2 billion) in operating profit off 58 trillion won ($51.8 billion) in revenue for Q2, which would represent a 0.7-percent decline in sales and an 11-percent increase in profit. Last quarter Samsung made 15.64 trillion won in profit from revenue of 60.56 trillion won, its strongest results ever.

Former Google designer Nicholas Jitkoff, who’s now the vice president of design at Dropbox, has created a really nifty new web tool he’s calling itty bitty sites, or self-contained microsites that exist solely as URLs. You can create your own by following this URL: itty.bitty.site. From there, you can fill the equivalent of about one printed 8.5 x 11-inch page with any combination of plain text, ASCII characters, or emojis. The actual byte limit depends on where you’d like to share it; Twitter and Slack allow for around 4,000 bytes... Читать дальше...