Новости за 30.08.2018

It didn’t take long for the Jacksonville mass shooting to yield to wearying, familiar discourses. On Fox News’ The Story with Martha MacCallum, the host tried to tie games to a welter of mass shootings. “[The gunmen] spend 12, 15 hours a day [gaming], like Nikolas Cruz was one of them, Adam Lanza, and now this young man, gaming,” MacCallum said, adding that playing for hours on end is a danger on par with cigarette smoking. That’s par for the course for Fox, but even the BBC got in on the act... Читать дальше...

Apple has acquired a company that specializes in building lenses for smart glasses that can display augmented reality images overtop the real world. Reuters said that Apple likely purchased the company, Akonia Holographics, sometime earlier this year.

ZTE can’t resist its notch envy. The company introduced its newest flagship phone — the Axon 9 Pro — at IFA in Berlin today, and, of course, it features a notch along with a bezel at the bottom of the display. It also features vertically aligned dual, rear-facing cameras, a la the iPhone X. The phone looks like a 2018 flagship. Here’s the spec rundown:

In the wake of the Jacksonville shooting, Electronic Arts is donating $1 million to those impacted by the event. The company will also set up a fund to allow others to make additional contributions, as well as hold a Jacksonville Tribute Livestream with members from the community on September 6th.

New Yorkers who opened up Snapchat, The Weather Channel, CitiBike, or a number of other apps and services this morning found that the name of their city had been swapped with anti-Semitic vandalism, replacing it with “Jewtropolis.”

Sennheiser entered the truly wireless earbud market today with the debut of its new Momentum earbuds. They’re Bluetooth-enabled, as you’d expect, and are touch sensitive so wearers can access Siri or Google Assistant directly with a tap. They ship with a charging case that’ll power them for at least 12 hours of listening, according to Sennheiser. The case appears to require a USB-C cable. On their own, they have a four-hour battery life. They’ll be released in mid-November for £299.99.

But it doesn’t make the Asus ZenBook Pro 15 a good computer

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One of the biggest announcements at IFA 2018 so far has been Acer’s new Predator Thronos gaming chair (I mean that literally — it’s almost five feet tall and weighs over 485 pounds).

Sony has just taken the wraps off of the Xperia XZ3, its latest flagship smartphone at IFA 2018, And while Sony is positioning this as its latest and greatest smartphone, it’s hard to look at the XZ3 and not feel like its just an iterative update on the XZ2 that it released earlier this year.

Sony’s Extra Bass speakers are pretty easy to spot: they’re big speakers with lots of LED lights and flashing strobes, and they’re designed to make your next block party or backyard gathering extra lit. But at IFA 2018, Sony is announcing the XB501G. It puts all that fun into a smaller, roughly soccer ball-sized package that lets you bring the party with you wherever you go.

Sony’s 1000X line of wireless headphones have become the market leader for noise-canceling headsets, and this year at IFA 2018, the company has announced the latest (and greatest) model: the 1000X M3, which offer better noise canceling, an updated design, USB-C, and more.

It was a vexing day.

Conversations about social media continued to dominate the capital. “Conversations” is too strong a word — it was more like a sustained airing of petty grievances. As usual it was unclear what, if anything, would emerge from these grievances, other than another round of headlines about them.

Start with grievance No. 1: the president said he lost social media followers because of anti-conservative censorship:

“I think that Google and Facebook and Twitter... Читать дальше...

HTC is announcing a “lite” version of the HTC U12 Plus flagship today. The HTC U12 Life is a mid-range smartphone that’s more of a successor to the U11 Life from last year, than a U12 Plus at a lower price point. HTC is using a 6-inch FHD+ (2160 x 1080) display this year, with a 18:9 aspect ratio and 1500:1 contrast ratio. While most phone makers are pushing towards notches, HTC is avoiding them once again with the U12 Life, but the company has shrunk the bezels at the bottom and top of the display somewhat. Читать дальше...

Google’s Titan Security Key is finally available to anyone who wants one. The two-factor token went live today in the Google store, with a full kit available for $50, shipping immediately. The kits include a USB key, a Bluetooth key, and various connectors. The key has been available to Google Cloud customers since July, when the project was first publicly announced.

Since they launched in 2013, Ultimate Ears’ Boom speakers have been some of the most recognizable Bluetooth speakers around, and they set something of a standard for what a rugged, portable speaker should look and sound like. UE has updated a few things here and there over the years with the UE Boom 2 and the addition of the larger MegaBoom and new software tricks, but things haven’t really fundamentally changed since the original UE Boom came out. That changes now.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve attended a major tech exhibition like IFA and found myself having to ask if the product I’m looking at is the new or the previous model. Tech companies release way too many products way too quickly. But that’s not an issue with Asus’ new ZenBooks, which are dramatically, hilariously, delightfully smaller than their predecessors. The key to it all? Drastically reduced bezels that turn the previously sizable 13-inch ZenBook into a tiny bijou of a laptop... Читать дальше...

On Thursday, Uber announced its shortlist of countries that are being considered as future markets for its soon-to-be-launched “flying taxi” service. Uber Air, as the service is known, aims to launch demonstration flights in several cities in 2020 and a paid flying taxi operation by 2023. The company also said it plans to expand its experimentation with delivery drones for its Uber Eats service.

Samsung is announcing its first commercial 8K TV, the Q900R, at IFA 2018 this week. The QLED panel will be available in 65-inch, 75-inch, 82-inch, and 85-inch sizes, and is capable of peak brightness of 4,000 nits. It also supports the newer HDR10+ format backed by Samsung and Amazon.

DC Universe introduced its upcoming video service to viewers in a live stream hosted by Kevin Smith this evening, who brought a whole host of announcements about the streaming platform. The service is scheduled to launch on September 15th, while the first original show, Titans, will premiere at New York Comic Con on October 3rd, and will come to the service on the streaming service on October 12th.

Trump thinks he’s being censored

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President Donald Trump intensified his criticism of Google today, posting a native video of unknown origin to his Twitter account this afternoon claiming the search giant stopped promoting the State of the Union (SOTU) address on its homepage after he took office. It turns out the video he posted is not only misleading, but also contains what appears to be a fake screenshot of the Google homepage on the day in question. It has since been viewed more than 1.5 million times.

Twitter tested a feature that suggests users to unfollow, as first spotted by TheNextWeb’s Matt Navarra earlier today. The test lasted for only a few days, and it has since concluded. “We know that people want a relevant Twitter timeline. One way to do this is by unfollowing people they don’t engage with regularly,” reads a Twitter statement given to The Verge. “We ran an incredibly limited test to surface accounts that people were not engaging with to check if they’d like to unfollow them.”

LG announced a new line of gaming monitors this week at IFA in Berlin. These UltraGear 34-inch monitors have IPS displays with a 21:9 aspect ratio and 3440 x 1440 resolution. The new UltraGear monitors are pretty standard for top-of-line gaming displays, as they sport specs similar to Alienware and Acer offerings. But these screens do mark LG’s latest update in the gaming monitor market, support both Nvidia and AMD GPU display tech, and offer an even wider resolution than previous models.

Influencers have long made money by striking deals with companies and brands to promote products on their channels and streams — in the case of more popular influencers, sometimes upward of thousands of dollars for a single post or video. According to members of the beauty community, however, some companies are now paying influencers extra money to badmouth those companies’ competitors. Makeup artist Kevin James Bennett called this practice out on Instagram, decrying it as “mobster-like behavior,”... Читать дальше...

Sony today announced the addition of 200 local broadcast stations for the big four networks — ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC — to its PlayStation Vue TV subscription service. The 200 channels are spread across select markets. With this latest batch, Sony now claims that Vue offers “more than 450” ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC stations throughout the US.