Innholdsfortegnelse for #336 i Techlife News

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will testify before a House oversight panel on April 11 amid a privacy scandal that has roiled the social media giant, the panel announced Wednesday. Reps. Greg Walden, R-Ore., and Frank Pallone, D-N.J., said the House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing will focus on the Facebook’s “use and protection of user data.” Announcement of the hearing date comes as Facebook faces scrutiny over its data collection following allegations that the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica obtained data on tens of millions of Facebook users to try to influence elections. Walden is the committee’s Republican chairman and Pallone is the panel’s top Democrat. “This hearing will be an important opportunity to shed light on critical consumer data privacy issues and help all Americans better understand what happens…

The CEO of Facebook is defending its advertising-supported business model. Mark Zuckerberg’s defense comes after Apple CEO Tim Cook said his company wouldn’t be in Facebook’s situation because Apple doesn’t sell ads based on customer data the way Facebook does. Zuckerberg responded Monday that an advertising-supported business model is the only way that the service can survive because not everyone would be able to pay for Facebook if it charged a fee. He says the idea that Facebook doesn’t care about its customers is “extremely glib.” Facebook is facing scrutiny over its data collection following allegations that political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica obtained data on tens of millions of Facebook users to try to influence elections. Zuckerberg spoke with Vox, while Cook talkedwith Recode last week.…

Spotify’s opening act on Wall Street struck a chord with investors betting the unprofitable company’s trend-setting music streaming service will maintain its early lead over Apple and other powerful challengers. After several hours of anticipation Tuesday morning, Spotify’s shares traded as high as $169 in their stock market debut before falling back slightly. The stock closed at $149.01 — well above its previous high of $132.50 in deals worked out during Spotify’s 12-year history as a privately held company. The stock market’s warm welcome left Spotify with a market value of about $27 billion, according to FactSet. By comparison, internet radio station Pandora Media’s market value stands at $1.2 billion nearly seven years after that company went public. The performance left Spotify’s market value among the 10 highest ever recorded…

Inside the Michigan Engineering Zone, it was time to give “Tink,” a robot built by students at Detroit’s Pershing High School, some rivets. Safety glasses on and her red hair tied back, 15-year-old student Delann Pillivant grabbed the robot’s aluminum frame and pushed a power drill into its center bar, making the modification for an upcoming global robotics competition coming this month to Detroit. Pillivant spent most of her first year at the facility, known as the “MEZ,” watching older students on the Pershing robotics team take the lead in building a robot from scratch, modifying it for FIRST Robotics competitions. This year, Pillivant is in the driver’s seat — literally — for the robotics team, which comes to the MEZ in Midtown every week to get training in science,…

Paddington 2 Paddington is now happily settled with the Brown family in their home in Windsor Gardens, spreading joy and marmalade wherever he goes. While searching for the perfect present for Aunt Lucy’s 100th birthday, Paddington spots a unique pop-up book in Mr. Gruber’s antique shop and embarks on a series of odd jobs to buy it. Adventure ensues when the book is stolen, and Paddington and the Browns must unmask the thief. FIVE FACTS: 1. The movie is the best-reviewed ever on Rotten Tomatoes. As of March 14, 2018, Paddington 2 has received 192 Fresh reviews and no naysayers. This meant that it overtook 163 Fresh and 0 negative critiques from the previous-record holder Toy Story 2 (1999). 2. Michael Bond, the creator of Paddington Bear, passed away six…

Let’s start with a popcorn warning. If you’re bringing your usual tub of multiplex popcorn into “A Quiet Place,” just be aware that you’ll be hearing every single crunch. That’s because much of John Krasinski’s ingeniously creepy new film, in which he stars alongside his real-life better half, Emily Blunt, takes place in virtual silence. This is a movie about a world where noise gets you killed. In fact, if you ate popcorn IN the movie, you’d quickly be dead. Unless you were standing by a waterfall. More on that in a minute. Krasinski, in his third feature outing as director, has a lot going for him here: An inventive premise (was it dreamed up by some vengeful librarian?), a terrific cast featuring two extremely effective child actors, and the…

Actor Robert Downey Jr. is joining the directors of “Avengers: Infinity War” in calling for fans to maintain secrecy. The star tweeted “no spoilers please.” He signed it with the (hashtag) ThanosDemandsYour Silence. Thanos is the fictional Marvel Comics villain who will be portrayed by Josh Brolin in the movie. Downey plays Iron Man. Directors Joe and Anthony Russo went on Twitter to tell fans they would be screening a limited amount of footage prior to the film’s release on April 27. They say “only a handful of people know the film’s true plot.” They asked fans to maintain the same level of secrecy so that they don’t spoil it for others.…

The center of our galaxy is teeming with black holes, sort of like a Times Square for strange super gravity objects, astronomers discovered. For decades, scientists theorized that circling in the center of galaxies, including ours, were lots of stellar black holes , collapsed giant stars where the gravity is so strong even light doesn’t get out. But they hadn’t seen evidence of them in the Milky Way core until now. Astronomers poring over old x-ray observations have found signs of a dozen black holes in the inner circle of the Milky Way. And since most black holes can’t even be spotted that way, they calculate that there are likely thousands of them there. They estimate it could be about 10,000, maybe more, according to a study in Wednesday’s journal…

Ride-hailing company Uber says it will suspend its service in Greece using private drivers following new legislation approved by the Greek parliament that placed stricter operating restrictions on the company. In an email sent to customers Thursday, the company said it would suspend its UberX service running in Athens at the end of the working day Monday “until the appropriate solutions are worked out.” However, it said it would continue operating its conventional taxi service. Taxi drivers’ associations had pressed the government to make the legal changes and held a strike in Athens last month. They had argued that using private drivers was creating unfair competition at the expense of licensed drivers.…

Foxconn Technology Group is setting some construction hiring targets for its manufacturing campus in Racine County. The construction management team wants 60 percent of the project to be done by Wisconsin companies. The Kenosha News says general contractor Gilbane is calling for 10 percent of the subcontractors to be based in Racine County and 10 percent to be female-, minority- or veteran-owned businesses. Construction of the $10 billion manufacturing complex is expected to generate 10,000 construction jobs each of the next four years. Foxconn has announced it plans to begin construction later this spring.…

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will testify before Congress next week. His appearance comes as authorities around the world investigate allegations that the political data-mining firm Cambridge Analytica inappropriately accessed data on as many as 87 million Facebook users to influence elections. Here’s a look at the various investigations and calls for information. IN THE UNITED STATES: — CONGRESS: Zuckerberg is set to testify April 10 in a joint hearing of the Senate Commerce and Judiciary Committees and April 11 before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. This will be his first-ever testimony before Congress. Individual congressional members have also written Facebook seeking answers. — FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION: Tom Pahl, acting director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, says the agency’s probe will include whether the company engaged in “unfair…

Facebook revealed that tens of millions more people might have been exposed in the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal than previously thought and said it will restrict the user data that outsiders can access. Those developments came as congressional officials said CEO Mark Zuckerberg will testify next week, while Facebook unveiled a new privacy policy that aims to explain the data it gathers on users more clearly — but doesn’t actually change what it collects and shares. Facebook is facing its worst privacy scandal in years following allegations that Cambridge Analytica, a Trump-affiliated data mining firm, used ill-gotten data from millions of users to try to influence elections. Facebook said this week that as many as 87 million people might have had their data accessed — an increase from the 50…

It may be a while before President Donald Trump gets another chance at creating a new, “merit-based” immigration system, a keystone of his four-part plan that Congress rejected last month. In the meantime, his administration is busy making it harder, not easier, for skilled migrants to come work in the United States. The State Department has ended an Obama-era program to grant visas to foreign entrepreneurs who want to start companies in the United States. It is more aggressively scrutinizing visas to skilled workers from other countries. And it is contemplating ending a provision that allows spouses of those skilled workers to be employed in the U.S. The administration and its backers contend it’s trying to fix flaws in the existing, employer-centric skilled immigration system while advocating for a complete…

The Mayo Clinic in Minnesota is giving low-risk pregnant women the option of fewer checkups by providing equipment that allows them to monitor their blood pressure, fetal heart rate and other medical conditions at home. Women involved in the OB Nest program have eight clinic visits, Minnesota Public Radio reported . The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says the standard pregnancy visit schedule entails more than a dozen appointments. Women enrolled in the program can contact a nurse online or by phone if they see abnormal results or have questions or concerns. The program began in 2016. The program gives doctors and midwives more time to tend to patients with high-risk pregnancies, said Dr. Yvonne Butler Tobah, a Mayo obstetrician and health sciences researcher. The program also allows pregnant…

Golden Hour Kacey Musgraves Since her emergence in 2013, Kacey Musgraves has slipped her radical ideas into the country music narrative. On Golden Hour, she continues to broaden the horizons of the genre by incorporating unfamiliar sounds such as Bee Gees-inspired disco on ‘High Horse’ and synth-pop shimmer in ‘Velvet Elvis’. FIVE FACTS: 1. In 2007, when she was 18, Kacey came seventh on the competition series Nashville Star. 2. She has penned songs for some of the biggest voices in country music including Miranda Lambert, Martina McBride, and Gretchen Wilson. 3. Kacey has admitted herself that if she wasn’t a singer she’d be a makeup artist. 4. She is best friends with American Idol alum Kree Harrison. 5. Before making it big enough to hire her own agent, she…

Film and television productions about the inner city typically follow the same formula: life is depressing, addicts lurk at every corner and students can barely do homework without ducking to the rat-a-tat-tat of drive-by bullets. Teen dramedy “On My Block,” a new series recently released by Netflix, attempts to turn that blueprint on its head by tackling race and poverty with John Hughes 1980s-style humor and away from the themes of hopelessness found in films like 1991’s “Boyz n the Hood.” The 30-minute, 10-episode series is part of a growing number of productions about people of color in the United States. It comes on the heels of the successful Pixar-animated, Oscarwinning movie “Coco” and the highly successful Marvel Comics’ adaptation of “Black Panther.” It also comes as more Latino and…

According to streaming technology provider Media Fusion, five times more people watched church online on Easter in 2017 than did the year before. The statistic is one of the few metrics available to track the growth of online church and the proliferation of social media in houses of worship. Locally, several churches are embracing technology in a variety of ways, including streaming services. Brad Mendenhall, lead pastor at World Harvest Church, said his church streams one of its two Sunday services live every week. “We stream on our website, and we also just started streaming on Facebook Live,” Mendenhall said. “We’re reaching about 40 computers on the website and 150 viewers on Facebook.” One of the difficulties of tracking viewer numbers is that streaming services can log IP addresses of…

“Rocket Men”(Random House), by Robert Kurson The first astronauts to orbit the moon ended their 1968 Christmas Eve television broadcast with a personal message for the people of Earth. No one knew what the three Apollo 8 astronauts would say — not their worried wives 240,000 miles away nor the buttoned-down NASA engineers who meticulously planned every moment of the high-stakes mission to reach the moon before the Soviets. With the moon showing on TV screens, Bill Anders began reading:“In the beginning, God created the heaven and the Earth ...”Then Jim Lovell and Frank Borman followed by reading a few lines each from the book of Genesis. The plain voices reading the Bible’s creation story made grown men weep, Kurson writes, and sent people outside to peer at the sky…

Scott Pruitt, administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, turned his sights this week on a nearly half-century-old federal waiver that allows California to pursue its own, tough tailpipe emission standards, and allows other states to opt in to California’s standards rather than federal ones if they choose. The waiver has allowed California, the U.S. state with the most people and the biggest economy, to steer the rest of nation toward tougher limits on car and truck emissions that pollute the air and change the climate. Pruitt said this week the agency will work with all states, including California, to set new pollution and mileage standards for gas- and diesel-powered vehicles. Here’s a look at California’s unique waiver from federal emissions standards for cars, why it matters to the rest…

When a drone flew within meters of a landing plane last week, endangering 278 passengers and crew, Air New Zealand responded by saying that such reckless drone operators should be thrown in prison. Other agencies also sounded the public alarm. Air traffic controllers said they were concerned about the increasing numbers of drones flying illegally in controlled airspace, while regulators said flying drones into a flight path was inexcusable and the “height of stupidity.” Yet The Associated Press has found that none of the agencies involved notified police about the drone. Not while it was endangering the plane, nor later to try to track down the perpetrator. Air New Zealand didn’t call. Auckland Airport didn’t call. Air traffic controllers didn’t call. And the Civil Aviation Authority, the regulatory agency that…

“We’ve made a bunch of mistakes.”“Everyone needs complete control over who they share with at all times.”“Not one day goes by when I don’t think about what it means for us to be the stewards of this community and their trust.” Sound familiar? It’s Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg addressing a major privacy breach — seven years ago. Lawmakers in many countries may be focused on Cambridge Analytica’s alleged improper use of Facebook data, but the social network’s privacy problems go back more than a decade. Here are some of the company’s most notable missteps and promises around privacy. 2007 The social media darling unveils its Facebook Platform to great fanfare. Zuckerberg says app developers can now access the web of connections between users and their friends, a set of connections…

Facebook isn’t just a company. It’s a behemoth, with 2.1 billion monthly users, $40 billion in revenue and more than 25,000 employees worldwide. And that leaves Washington with a daunting task: How do you tame a corporate giant? Or do you even try? “It’s tricky and it’s going to be hard, but there are ways it can be dealt with,” says Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, a former tech executive who has led investigations into Russian interference on social media over the last year as the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee. “The idea that we’re going to keep the wild, wild West — I don’t think it’s sustainable.” The picture will begin to come into focus next week. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is scheduled to testify April 10 and 11…

With software updates across all devices (macOS 10.13.4, iOS 11.3 and tvOS 11.3), Apple has launched a privacy push that sets to immediately introduce new information regarding data privacy. While there’s no doubt that these updates, released on Thursday, have been prompted by the new Europeandata protection regulation GDPR , they have come at the ideal time after the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal that kicked off last week. Apple CEO Tim Cook has evenmade a public rebuke of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg over the social media’s business model. HOW PRIVACY BECAME A MASS-MARKET CONCERN Back in October last year, a blog post fromdeveloper Felix Krause demonstrated how easy it was for a developer to create a password prompt that looks identical to the one we’re all familiar with on our Apple…

UnitedHealth Group agreed to partner with a rival health insurer and one of the country’s largest lab testing companies in a pilot project to examine sharing health care data through blockchain technology. Minnesota-based UnitedHealth announced Monday that it will work with Kentucky-based Humana, New Jersey-based Quest Diagnostics and a New York firm called MultiPlan. The financial details of the partnership weren’t disclosed, the Star Tribune reported. Blockchain is software that began as a way to create a secure digital environment for exchanging financial information, said Mike Jacobs, a senior distinguished engineer at UnitedHealth Group’s Optum division for health care services. Industries outside the realm of digital currencies are now exploring the option of using nonpublic blockchains for their enterprises. “This is likely one of the very first nationwide health care…

Game on for “Ready Player One.” Steven Spielberg’s virtual reality adventure launched slightly above expectations with $53.7 million over the four-day Easter weekend and $41.8 million over the three-day weekend, according to final box-office figures Monday. The opening gave Spielberg his best since 2008’s “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” as well as 2018’s high-grossing debut for anything not named “Black Panther.” Still, for a $175 million film, the Warner Bros. release will need to have strong legs to make “Ready Player One” a success. Its international rollout is helping, where the film grossed $128 million over the weekend, including an especially robust $61.7 million from China. Tyler Perry’s “Acrimony” followed in second with $17.1 million over the three-day weekend. The Lionsgate release, starring Taraji P. Henson,…

A new television documentary about Elvis Presley takes advantage of the vast collection of footage, pictures, documents and music from his estate to give a behind-the-scenes look at the king of rock ‘n’ roll. “Elvis Presley: The Searcher,” a two-part, three-hour documentary, will premiere April 14 on HBO. Director Thom Zimny, who worked on several Bruce Springsteen documentaries, had full access to Graceland’s vault and made ample use of it to unearth little-seen footage. “That was one of the exciting parts because every day I was discovering new gems of Elvis Presley’s archives,” Zimny said. “He came up with pieces of footage that Priscilla and I had never seen before, and we grew up with Elvis,” said Jerry Schilling, one of Elvis’ longtime friends and an executive producer on the…

The vehicle in a fatal crash last week in California was operating on Autopilot, making it the latest accident to involve a semi-autonomous vehicle, Tesla confirmed. The electric car maker said the driver, who was killed in the accident, did not have his hands on the steering wheel for six seconds before the crash, despite several warnings from the vehicle. Tesla Inc. tells drivers that its Autopilot system, which can keep speed, change lanes and selfpark, requires drivers to keep their eyes on the road and hands on the wheel in order to take control of the vehicle to avoid accidents. Tesla said its vehicle logs show the driver took no action to stop the Model X SUV from crashing into a concrete lane divider. Photographs of the SUV show…

A SpaceX capsule carrying food, experiments and other goods for NASA has arrived at the International Space Station after a two-day journey. The Dragon capsule and its 6,000-pound shipment was captured by the space station’s robot arm Wednesday. It’s the second trip to the 250-mile-high orbiting outpost for this capsule, refurbished following a visit two years ago. It will remain attached to the space station for about a month, returning to Earth in May. The space station is currently home to astronauts from the U.S., Russia and Japan. The supply capsule launched Monday from Cape Canaveral, Florida, aboard a used Falcon rocket. SpaceX wants to reduce launch costs by recycling rocket parts. It combined a recycled capsule and a recycled rocket once before.…

The life of renowned physicist and author Stephen Hawking was celebrated Saturday in English city of Cambridge, with hundreds of well-wishers lining the streets for a glimpse of the hearse carrying his remains to a private funeral. There was a spontaneous burst of applause outside St. Mary the Great church when the hearse arrived. The bells of the church tolled 76 times, one for each year of Hawking’s remarkable life. Hawking was remembered as a brave man who triumphed over motor neurone disease by continuing his research into space and time even after paralysis set in and his muscles faded. Some 500 invited guests attended the funeral for Hawking, who died on March 14. Actor Eddie Redmayne, who portrayed the scientist in the 2014 biographical film “The Theory of Everything,”…