Google’s tablets may have disappeared from its Android site, but the company insists that was a mistake, not a sign it’s giving up on the form factor. Speculation about the future of Android on larger screen devices has grown in the aftermath of Chrome’s recent update to support touchscreen-only tablets without keyboards. Chromebook Tablets were […]
Microsoft has reportedly acquired GitHub, and could announce the deal as early as Monday. Bloomberg reports that the software giant has agreed to acquire GitHub, and that the company chose Microsoft partly because of CEO Satya Nadella. Business Insider first reported that Microsoft had been in talks with GitHub recently. GitHub is a vast code […]
As Apple gears up for its developer keynote conference tomorrow, one of its bigger announcements is likely to be new changes coming to its augmented reality platform. Since announcing ARKit last year, the tech giant has hardly been sheepish about its belief in AR’s potential. “I think AR is big and profound,” Apple CEO Tim […]
Toshiba’s long-winded sale of its memory chip business is finally completed. The company announced that the sale to a Bain Capital consortium, consisting of Apple and various other tech companies, has been finalized… As noted by ZDNet, the deal is worth two trillion, three hundred million yen – which is roughly $18 billion. The finalization […]
Apple has apparently relented and let encrypted text and voice service Telegram proceed with an update to make its app compliant with Europe’s new GDPR privacy protections, just days after CEO Pavel Durov alleged Apple was preventing Telegram from releasing updates worldwide at the behest of Russian censors. Per the Verge, Durov thanked Apple and […]
Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference is just a couple of days away, but some of the updates appear to have been revealed early. Specifically, developer Steve Troughton-Smith tweeted some screenshots this morning of what he said was macOS 10.14. And while the screenshots focused on Xcode 10, they also revealed a couple of bigger changes to […]
Samsung Electronics Co. will feature an upgraded camera when it unveils its next Galaxy Note smartphone on Aug. 9, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg late this week. The new model, likely to be called the Note 9, will look similar to last year’s model. It will include a faster processor from Qualcomm Inc. […]
Revelations that an Amazon Echo smart speaker inadvertently sent a family’s private conversation to an acquaintance highlights some unexpected risks of new voice-enabled technologies. According to Amazon, the Echo’s Alexa voice assistant misheard a word as “Alexa” — a trigger to activate the device — and interpreted subsequent conversation as a “send message” request. That […]
In the quest to understand dark matter, scientists have now determined that the effective size of dark matter particles — how strong their interactions with regular matter are — must be smaller than we thought. Using the XENON1T dark matter detector, researchers have produced experimental results that establish the most stringent limit to date for […]
In the era of “fake news,” Facebook is doing away with its “Trending” news section. At the same time, it is testing new products aimed at delivering news from trustworthy sources. “We’re removing Trending soon to make way for future news experiences on Facebook,” Alex Hardiman, head of Facebook’s news products, said in a written […]
Misconfigured Google Groups may accidentally be spewing private conversations over the internet. Why it matters: A study conducted by Kenna Security published Friday found that, out of 9,600 public Google Groups it found by researching domains held by some of largest web sites, around a third leaked email sent through the platform. Show less Kenna lists a sampling […]
Pete Warden writes convincingly about computer scientists’ focus on improving machine learning algorithms, to the exclusion of improving the training data that the algorithms interpret, and how that focus has slowed the progress of machine learning. The problem is as old as data-processing itself: garbage in, garbage out. Assembling the large, well-labeled datasets needed to […]
