Новости за 03.11.2018

You can find a lot of Halloween-themed coverage on The Verge, but this week also marked the Mexican holiday Día de Muertos — and the 20th anniversary of Grim Fandango, the classic adventure game that was heavily inspired by it. Grim Fandango was one of the last games from the acclaimed studio LucasArts, and its clever blend of noir pastiche and folklore has earned it acclaim since the very beginning, when GameSpot praised its “great writing and beautiful art direction.”

Amazon is apparently narrowing in on its location for its second headquarters: Crystal City, Virginia, on the outskirts of Washington DC in Northern Virginia. The Washington Post says that the company has “held advanced discussions” that are “more detailed” than similar talks happening in other candidate locations in the immediate region and around the country.

Last week we put out a video about how the golden age of streaming services — where you sign up for one service and find a wealth of content from all over — is rapidly ending. And tellingly enough, one of the best examples of a service like that, FilmStruck, which specialized in classic cinema, announced plans to shut down just days later.

Black Friday isn’t quite here yet, but we wouldn’t blame you for assuming it was late November already given the amount of deals that have started to pop up. Target has unleashed its Black Friday ad, and we expect others to follow suit shortly.

Wireless carriers are preparing for 5G connectivity, the next generation of cellular networking that promises to bring faster download speeds to consumers. Hardware manufacturers are also getting ready, with plans already in motion for a number of devices that will take advantage of those faster networks. A new report suggests that Apple will release its 5G phone in 2020.

Kim Stanley Robinson is known for his heady and thought-provoking science fiction novels. Aurora turned the concept of a generation ship on its head, following a decrepit interstellar ship sailing for a moon in the Tau Ceti system, while New York 2140 examines the economics of climate change. His latest, Red Moon, is set within spitting distance of today, envisioning the power struggle between an ascendant China and a declining United States. While it’s chock-full of ideas, it’s an underwhelming read compared to his recent stories. Читать дальше...

Three new studies show the technology’s promise

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As the midterms approach, a central question has been how campaigns would adapt to the fact their digital ads were now public. Thanks to online archives established this year by Facebook, Google, Twitter, we now have unprecedented visibility into campaigns. But as I’ve noted here a couple times now, advertisers are working hard to make themselves less visible. The tug-of-war between transparency and obscurity is turning out to be one of the defining stories of this election.

More than 20,000 Google employees and contractors participated in the mass global walkout yesterday to protest the company’s handling of sexual harassment allegations against top executives, according to organizers of the protest who published a Medium post this evening. As of September 30th, 2018, Google had 94,372 full-time and contract employees worldwide, meaning more than 20 percent of the entire company participated in the walkout.

Ahead of the US midterm elections next Tuesday, Twitter is hard at work scrubbing its platform of thousands of fake accounts and coordinated activity seemingly designed to influence voter turnout, according to a report from Reuters today. The report says Twitter has removed around 10,000 such accounts targeting Democratic voters and masquerading as party members and officials, and it continues to monitor its platform for similar activity.

Politicians are routinely compared to fictional villains, but Donald Trump is one of only a few to actively court these comparisons. Sometimes this is an ordinary act of reclaiming someone else’s insults, but often, it’s more like a quasi-ironic attempt to appropriate the coolness and machismo of villainy. Trump is the presidential version of 4chan denizens adopting Bane and the Joker as patron saints: some men want to watch the world burn, others salivate at the prospect of beating up protestors. Читать дальше...

Amazon launched a new delivery option for Prime members in the US today, just ahead of the holiday gift-giving season. The invite-only program is curiously called Amazon Day, not to be mistaken for Amazon’s yearly Prime Day shopping event, as spotted by CNET.

Blizzard and Lego showed off the first Overwatch Lego set last month in the form of a limited-edition Bastion figure, and now at BlizzCon the two companies are taking the wraps off the rest of the lineup.