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Showing posts from August, 2019
Quentin Tarantino’s historical revisionism makes his movies better suited for the future
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YouTube’s recent algorithm change explains why your feed is full of children’s videos
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Omar Marques/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images YouTube quietly rolled out changes to its algorithm last month in an effort to surface more family-friendly content amid an investigation into the platform by the Federal Trade Commission, according to a new Bloomberg report . The change essentially led to certain channels being surfaced and recommended for viewers, while other channels were ignored. Although the change was touted as a regular update that YouTube’s engineering team rolls out often, a spokesperson told Bloomberg that this change was an effort to improve the “ability for users to find quality family content.” Whether the recommended videos are quality family content is up for debate within the YouTube user community. The main YouTube subreddit is full of people complaining about being recommended children’s content — including from non-English-speaking channels — based on nursery rhymes. It’s a facet of the change that coincides with Bloomberg ’s reporting: it f
Google is testing a Play Pass subscription service for premium apps and games
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This Tesla-powered Porsche 912 is the new face of vintage restorations
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Verizon’s CEO thinks half of the US will have access to 5G next year
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Welcome to Lake Duck Pond, a fake town of 82,000 people
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This Kickstarter keyboard combines 1970s tech with magnets to make every key pressure-sensitive
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Samsung’s headphone dongle leaks ahead of Note 10 announcement
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AMD vs. Nvidia: the midrange graphics card battle is heating up
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Intel’s first 10nm Ice Lake CPUs revealed: here’s your decoder ring
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Bird’s new electric scooter has a better battery and anti-vandalism sensors
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Mophie’s iPhone XS and XR battery cases are now available for all
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This keyboard that doubles as a trackpad is almost a great iPad mouse
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Fortnite season X adds mech suits, a meteor, and ‘volatile rift zones’
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The 10th season of Fortnite — officially dubbed season X — is finally upon us, and it adds a number of new features based on a time-bending theme. One of the biggest changes is a new vehicle, a two-person mech suit called a B.R.U.T.E. where one player handles movement, and the other shooting. There are also all-new “rift zones” caused by a massive explosion that kicked off the season, and it sounds like they’ll regularly change things up — and even bring back elements from past Fortnite seasons. “Locations once thought to be lost are beginning to appear, but they aren’t the same as they once were,” developer Epic explains. The most notable change on the island itself, meanwhile, is the long-awaited return of Dusty Depot — the meteor that destroyed it in season 4 is now suspended in the air. You can even land on it and explore. The explosion at Loot Lake is in a similarly suspended state, which is likely to change over the course of the season. Other map changes seem smaller, like
New legislation is putting social networks in the crosshairs
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Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) addresses an audience in Washington, DC. He’s the force behind new legislation targeting social networks | Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Earlier this week, in discussing Facebook’s settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over privacy violations, I lamented that the United States is governing technology platforms through fines rather than laws . Even if settlements like these satiate the public demand for accountability — and it’s not clear that this one will — they change none of the underlying conditions that enable companies to violate our privacy in the first place. For that, you need laws — and so, let’s check in on three laws now under consideration. One, today there was a flurry of activity surrounding potential privacy legislation in the Senate. A push for national privacy legislation began after California passed its own privacy law last year, modeled in part on Europe’s General Data Protection Legislation, and tech lobbyists hope to pu
Windows 10 is getting a macOS-like cloud OS restore feature
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Alphabet overtakes Apple to become most cash-rich company
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