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'Fortnite' update delivers destruction, new areas and meme emotes
Fortnite Season Four is here, and Epic Games has delivered in a big way. After teasing a spectacular comet crash at the end of the previous season, today's update sees much-loved areas of the map destroyed, new ones added and players bestowed with tonnes of new skins, emotes and in-game items.
T-Mobile and Sprint will merge to create a 5G powerhouse
After years of on-again, off-again talks, it's official: T-Mobile and Sprint have announced plans to merge. The all-stock, $26 billion deal values Sprint at $59 billion (the combined company would be worth $146 billion) and will give T-Mobile the reins, with the carrier's John Legere serving as CEO and Mike Sievert continuing to operate as COO. Sprint chief Marcelo Claure will serve on the board of directors alongside Masayoshi Son, the CEO of Sprint's parent company SoftBank. As for the ostensible reason for the merger? If you ask the networks, it's all about 5G.
Ford will stop selling most of its cars in North America
If there was any doubt that the auto industry is rapidly changing, Ford just delivered proof. The industry pioneer is scaling back its small car lineup in North America to just two vehicles, the Mustang and the unrevealed Focus Active crossover, in the "next few years." The rest of its range will be limited to SUVs, trucks and commercial vehicles. Ford isn't shy about its reasons: "declining consumer demand and product profitability" make it impractical to develop other sedans. You'd better act quickly if you've been looking at a brand new Fusion or Taurus.
Gmail’s big redesign helps you spend less time in your inbox
We probably don't need to tell you that Gmail has become the email service of choice for innumerable people since it first went live in 2004. New features have been added at a steady clip ever since, but we haven't really seen a big redesign since 2011, though you could consider the addition of inbox tabs in 2013 a significant change, too. Whispers started cropping up earlier this month of another considerable overhaul, which Google is formally revealing today. What's immediately obvious is the new flatter, cleaner look intended to bring Gmail more in line with Google's Material Design principles -- the web version of Calendar got similar treatment last year. The bulk of what's new here, though, is a swath of features designed to make Gmail a more productive place for business users. But the updates apply to Gmail as a whole, so there's plenty for the personal user to play around with, too.
Amazon can deliver packages to the inside of your car
Amazon Key's in-home delivery is all well and good (assuming you trust it in the first place), but there's an obvious caveat: you have to go home to get your package. Now, you might not even have to go to that trouble. Amazon has launched a Key In-Car service that, as you can guess, lets couriers deliver packages to the trunk of your vehicle as long as it's in a publicly accessible parking space. You'll need a 2015 or newer GM-made or Volvo car with an internet-savvy account (OnStar or Volvo On Call), but after that it's relatively seamless: the delivery driver requests access to your car, and you'll get a notification when the package has been dropped off and your car is relocked.
Amazon, Netflix and studios sue subscription service over piracy
Hollywood studios usually fight piracy by chasing after software add-ons and free streaming services, with the occasional device thrown in. A paid service, however? That's relatively rare... or at least, it has been. Amazon, Netflix and multiple Hollywood studios (including Disney, Fox, Sony, Universal and Warner Bros.) have sued SET Broadcast over allegations its SET TV service is used expressly for piracy. While there is a dedicated set-top box, the centerpiece is a $20 per month subscription service that offers access to over 500 live TV channels and "thousands" of on-demand shows, including Netflix shows and movies that are still officially limited to theaters. As you might guess, the media giants argue SET TV is focused "overwhelmingly, if not exclusively" on pirated material.
Nest will give away smart thermostats to low-income families
This Earth Day, Nest Labs, Inc. will launch a new initiative called The Power Project that will help get Nest E thermostats in the hands of lower-income Americans. It's a way to ensure that socioeconomic status isn't a bar to accessing the energy savings that Nest's smart thermostats can provide.
Chrome now mutes auto-playing videos by default
Chrome will block autoplaying videos and ads with sound by default. Like VentureBeat notes, this was originally supposed to be added to Chrome 64 back in January, but it got delayed a few months. This should be enough to keep most sites quiet for you. However, if a website still manages to annoy you with un-muted, auto-playing videos you can block its audio privileges wholesale. Auto-muting a small touch, but an appreciated one, and it's a lot more convenient than searching through two dozen tabs looking for the one with the "audio" icon. Happy (silent) surfing!
Scientists accidentally produce an enzyme that devours plastic
There are research teams around the world dedicated to finding a remedy for the growing plastic pollution crisis, but now it seems that one group of scientists have found a feasible answer -- and they stumbled upon it by accident. Researchers studying a newly-discovered bacterium found that with a few tweaks, the bug can be turned into a mutant enzyme that starts eating plastic in a matter of days, compared to the centuries it takes for plastic to break down in the ocean.
AI creates 'Flintstones' cartoons from text descriptions
It can a long time to animate cartoons -- just ask the Rick and Morty team. But what if you could ask computers to do some of the lifting? They just might. Researchers have produced an AI system, Craft, that automatically produces The Flintstones scenes based on text descriptions. The team trained Craft to recognize elements from the classic cartoon by feeding it more than 25,000 three-second clips, each of which included descriptions of who was in the scene and what was happening. From there, the AI only needed a line or two referencing a scene to stitch together characters, backgrounds and props.
Uber unveils much-needed passenger safety features
Uber has taken a lot of flack over passenger safety, but it has just rolled out some long-overdue changes to its app and taken other steps to ensure passengers are secure. First up, a new update will let you automatically provide alerts for up to five "trusted contacts." When you request a ride, the system will prompt you to share the trip and will notify them when you arrive at your destination. It also offers an option to share only nighttime trips.
Even genuine replacement Apple displays can mess with iPhones
Following the news that the latest iOS update can break phones with non-official replacement screens, repairers are encountering a different, more subtle problem: If you put a genuine Apple replacement display into an iPhone 8, 8 Plus or X, it'll no longer be able to adjust its brightness automatically. If Apple or one of its authorized partners were to put the same display in the same phone, though? No problem. The aftermarket repair community has verified the behavior in phones from the US all the way to Australia. It's confirmed to be an issue with phones running iOS 11.1, 11.2 and 11.3, which led sources to suggest it's been a problem since the launch of the latest batch of iPhones last fall. I was able to confirm that even swapping the displays of two brand-new iPhones causes the ambient light sensor to stop working, despite it not being altered or touched in any way. Experiments have shown that the sensor is disabled by iOS during the boot process.
Check right now if Cambridge Analytica used your Facebook data
In the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, you're probably wondering: Was I actually affected? After all, the company obtained data on 87 million users (that's the current estimate, anyway.) Facebook has, thankfully, started sending News Feed notifications to explain whether users' accounts were affected. If you're still waiting for yours to come through, however, you can visit this page and find out immediately. In short, it explains if you or your friends ever logged into This Is Your Digital Life — the quiz app developed by university researcher Dr Aleksandr Kogan, which Cambridge Analytica used to profile and manipulate users.
Leap Motion crafts a reference design for cheap AR headsets
Leap Motion is a company most famous for building a gesture-recognition doodad for PCs that wound up integrated into keyboards. Since then, however, it has built ever-smarter sensors that can bring hand gestures to VR without the use of dedicated controllers. Now, the outfit is taking its biggest ever, er, jump by announcing Project North Star, a proposed augmented reality headset it plans to open-source next week.
Read Mark Zuckerberg's media Q&A on data security
Yesterday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg hosted a call with the media in which he spoke about the Cambridge Analytica situation and how Facebook is working to protect its users' data going forward. The transcript of that call, including the Q&A that took place after Zuckerberg made his opening remarks, is now available online. The company has posted it as part of its "Hard Questions" series, which has previously tackled subjects like whether social media is good for mental health and democracy, how Facebook counters terrorism and hate speech.
YouTube shooting suspect had been angry over filtering, demonetization
Tonight San Bruno police identified the shooter at YouTube's HQ as Nasim Aghdam, a 39-year-old woman from San Diego and said there is no evidence she knew the victims or that they were specifically targeted. While the sources have not confirmed a reason behind the attack, now that her name is known we've found a number of videos from her posted on YouTube and other sites saying that she was a vegan athlete and animal rights activist.
Intel brings a six-core i9 CPU to laptops
With its latest batch of 8th-generation Core chips for laptops, Intel is focused on delivering even more desktop-like performance. Just take a look at its new six-core monster processor, the Core i9-8950HK. We were impressed that the company was able to bring quad-core chips to ultraportables with its first batch of 8th-gen CPUs, but the 8950HK lives up to the crazy specifications we'd expect from the i9 lineup (which includes Intel's insane 18-core desktop chip).
Federal investigators 'unhappy' Tesla revealed crash details
The US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said it is "unhappy" that Tesla released information about the fiery March 23rd crash that killed a driver. In a blog post last Friday, Elon Musk said that the Autopilot was active when the Model struck a highway barrier and caught fire. He also noted that according to vehicle data, driver Wei Huang didn't have his hands on the steering wheel for six seconds prior to the crash into a disabled safety barrier.
This galaxy without dark matter is bending the rules of space
The complexities of space are pretty mind-boggling, but there are a handful of accepted theories on which scientists base their research. Space is a vacuum, for example, while a light-year is about 5.88 trillion miles. So researchers at Yale University were understandably shocked when they discovered that one long-held theory might not be right. For years, science has assumed galaxies and dark matter go hand in hand. Now, a galaxy has been discovered that's almost completely devoid of it.
SpaceX and Boeing inch closer toward crewed space missions
NASA's Commercial Crew Program is making "significant progress" according to the space agency, which has outlined upcoming missions for both Boeing and SpaceX. The race between the two companies to be the first to provide commercial transportation services in space appears to be neck-and-neck. Boeing has a crewless orbital flight test scheduled for August this year, while SpaceX plans to complete a crewless flight to the International Space Station in the same month. Crewed missions are then slated to take place in November and December, respectively.
