SATURDAY, 23 MARCH 2019, 02:06
More than 100 police officers were deployed to break up a mass brawl reportedly organized by two rival YouTube stars in Berlin. The BBC reports: The fight broke out on Thursday evening on Alexanderplatz square in the German capital, police said, adding that nine people were arrested. More than 400 people had gathered after two social media influencers reportedly urged their fans to join a...
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Nobel Peace Prize laureate Jody Williams and other activists warned on Thursday that fully autonomous weapons could be deployed in just 3-4 years and urged Germany to lead an international campaign for a ban on so-called “killer robots.” Williams, who won the Nobel in 1997 for leading efforts to ban landmines, told reporters Germany should take...
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Special counsel Robert Mueller finished his investigation into the 2016 presidential election Friday.
AmiMoJo shares a report from Ars Technica: The afternoon commute of Reddit user Beastpilot takes him past a stretch of Seattle-area freeway with a carpool lane exit on the left. Last year, in early April, the Tesla driver noticed that Autopilot on his Model X would sometimes pull to the left as the car approached the lane divider — seemingly treating the space between the diverging lanes as a...
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has published a new report calling for a “fiber for all” plan to combat the broadband access crisis in the United States. Government data and independent analysis show we are falling behind the rest of the developed world in this area, and “the U.S. is the only country that believes having no plan will solve this issue,” writes Ernesto Falcon from the EFF. “We...
The start-up, which lets people create virtual “pin boards,” officially joined the herd of tech companies stampeding to the public markets this year by unveiling its offering prospectus.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ExtremeTech: MIT researchers have reportedly developed an algorithm that can accelerate [neural networks] by up to 200x. The NAS (Neural Architecture Search, in this context) algorithm they developed “can directly learn specialized convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for target hardware platforms — when run on a massive image dataset — in only 200 GPU...
An anonymous reader shares a report: Apple is expected to launch an ambitious new entertainment and paid digital news service on Monday, as the iPhone maker pushes back against streaming video leader Netflix. But it likely will not feature the New York Times. Mark Thompson, chief executive of the biggest U.S. newspaper by subscribers, warned that relying on third-party distribution can be...
The first skirmishes have already been fought in what could turn into a tech cold war. “The game is on,” said the Netflix chief executive, Reed Hastings.
Devin Nunes, R-Calif., escalated the feud between conservatives and Twitter earlier this week with a lawsuit accusing the company of defamation and negligence — two different allegations, one of which poses a more serious question for the social media platform and technology companies in general. Nunes is claiming that Twitter negligently violated its terms of service when it allowed people...
The iStore has revealed local pricing for Apple’s new iPad Air and iPad Mini.
Expect to hear a lot of hyperbole at an Apple event on Monday about the company transforming entertainment and news. One thing Apple isn’t likely to discuss is its growing conflicts of interest.
The White House sent its point man on cybersecurity to Berlin this week to drive home US President Donald Trump’s warnings over Chinese telecommunications equipment maker Huawei.
A group of researchers claims to have built a prototype for an “online polygraph” that uses machine learning to detect deception from text alone. But as a few machine learning academics point out, what these researchers have actually demonstrated is the inherent danger of overblown machine learning claims. From a report: When Wired showed the study to a few academics and machine learning...
Google’s just-announced cloud gaming service, Stadia, holds the promise of seamless, multi-device gaming. Is it too good to be true?
Intel will not develop new Compute Cards, the company said this week. From a report: Compute Cards were Intel’s vision of modular computing that would allow customers to continually update point of sale systems, all-in-one desktops, laptops and other devices. Pull out one card, replace it with another, and you have a new CPU, plus RAM and storage. “We continue to believe modular computing is a...
Microsoft’s programming language TypeScript has become one of the most popular languages among developers, at least according to a report published by the analyst firm RedMonk this week. Wired: TypeScript jumped from number 16 to number 12, just behind Apple’s programming language Swift in RedMonk’s semiannual rankings, which were last published in August. Microsoft unveiled TypeScript in 2012,...
An anonymous reader shares a report: Tez. Trendalyzer. Panoramio. Timeful. Bump! SlickLogin. BufferBox. The names sound like a mix of mid-2000s blogs and startups you’d see onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt!. In fact, they are just some of the many, many products that Google has acquired or created — then killed.
While Google is notorious for eliminating underperforming products — because even...
An anonymous reader writes: Deciding which streaming outlet you want to subscribe to can be just as hard as finding a show itself. With options from big players like Netflix, HBO Now, Hulu, Showtime, Amazon and YouTube Premium — and looming new platforms from the likes of Disney, Apple, AT&T and NBCUniversal — consumers are already starting to grow frustrated with the crowded streaming...
AT&T’s “5G Evolution” cellular service isn’t just controversial and arguably misleading, it’s also slower than the 4G speeds offered by rivals T-Mobile and Verizon, according to a new report today from OpenSignal. From a report: Over a one-month period spanning January 28 through February 26, OpenSignal compared the average performance of “5G E capable” phones and “all others” on AT&T’s network...