Daily Tech Headlines – June 17, 2016
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| Daily Tech Headlines – June 17, 2016 | |
| Number | 8 |
| Broadcast Date | JUNE 17, 2016 |
| Episode Length | 6:55 |
| Hosts | Tom Merritt |
Android apps come to Chromebooks, iPhones banned in Beijing and a Robot goes wandering.
Headlines
- The Beijing Intellectual Property Bureau ordered Apple to stop sales of the iPhone 6 and 6S ruling that the iPhone models infringed on an exterior design patent held by Shenzhen Baili for its 100C smartphone. Chinese law does allow Apple to appeal the ruling to a higher court. The Wall Street Journal reported several mobile phone stores in the city had already stopped selling the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus a couple of months ago.
- Google announced a dedicated machine learning research group located in the Google Research Offices in Zurich, Switzerland. The group will focus specifically on Machine Intelligence, Machine Perceptions, and Natural Language Processing & Understanding. The aim is to improve machine learning and find practical uses for it.
- Microsoft acquired messaging app vendor Wand Labs. Microsoft cited Wand’s expertise in, “semantic ontologies, services mapping, third-party developer integration and conversational interfaces” as part of the reason for the purchase. Essentially that means Wand and its seven employees is good at apps that use a chat interface to do things like share songs and control your thermostat. Wand CEO, Vishal Sharma, spent seven years at Google and contributed to the Google Now project there. Wand will join the Bing engineering and platform team.
- Verizon will be the exclusive launch partner of the new Asus ZenPad Z8 in the US. The 7.9-inch Android Marshmallow tablet has a 2048x1536 QXGA screen and dual-front facing stereo speakers with DTS-HD support. It will include support for Verizon’s XLTE service meant to double bandwidth from the carrier. It has a Snapdragon 650 SoC and 16GB of internal storage and a microSD card slot for up to 128 GB more. It’s up for preorder today and comes to stores June 23 for $250 on a payment plan of $11 a month for 24 months. A $35 folio case is available separately.
- The Google Play Store started rolling out today to Asus Chromebook Flip users who have the Developer Channel of ChromeOS installed, allowing ChromeOS to run native Android apps. Google's François Beaufort says "more devices will follow very soon." The Verge reports the Acer Chromebook R11, C738T, and the 2015 Chromebook Pixel are expected to get the update later this month.
- The 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Thursday that video-sharing sites are protected by the DMCA for pre-1972 music recordings. Several record companies had sued Vimeo arguing that since pre-1972 recordings fell under state copyright law, they were not protected by the DMCA. The appeals court reversed a lower court’s decision in favor of the record companies and also overturned a ruling that the DMCA did not grant safe harbor to employees who saw infringement on the platforms they worked for.
- Snapchat announced its launching on online magazine, titled Real Life, on June 27, 2016. The magazine will be headed by sociologist Nathan Jurgenson, and will "publish essays, arguments, and narratives about living with technology." Real Life will have full editorial independence from Snapchat. Snapchat has previously worked with Jurgenson on the Theorizing the Web conference, as well as funding research.
- Mozilla rolled out a new experimental feature called "container tabs" in its nightly build of Firefox yesterday. Container tabs let you select between four pre-determined identities (work, home, banking, and shopping), each with distinct cookies, caches and storage. You can remain logged into multiple accounts in the same browser. Each container must be manually assigned to each tab, but Mozilla hopes to make this contextual in future builds. In their blog post for the nightly build, Mozilla reminds users that they can still be fingerprinted across containers, as the IP Address, OS, and user agent are not altered between containers.
- Sony is demonstrating the PlayStationVr headset at 30 select Best Buy and Gamestop locations in advance of its autumn release. Sony says the demos will be available in 300 stores starting June 24. It will only be available for a few hours each day and not every day at all locations. The PlayStationVR is available for preorder and will ship October 13th.
- A robot programmed to wander as part of a study of independent movement by Promobot Laboratories wandered into a city street in Perm, Russia because someone forgot to shut a gate. It’s battery died in the middle of an intersection blocking traffic.
Links
| Preceded by: "Daily Tech Headlines – June 16, 2016" |
Daily Tech Headlines – June 17, 2016 |
Followed by: "Daily Tech Headlines – June 20, 2016" |