Tech News Today For April 20, 2017
Tech News for Thursday April 20, 2017
MasterCard is working on a fingerprint sensor that's built into your physical credit or debit card and will work with the chip to verify your in-person purchases. Engadget says MasterCard is currently testing the cards in South Africa and hopes to roll them out by the end of the year. The card isn't any thicker than a normal card and will work with current chip and pin readers. Read more at engadget.com.
If you have a voice-controlled speaker in your home, you know how impersonal it is. Sure it can talk back, but an Echo and Google Home never has an idea of who it's talking to. The Google Assistant built into the Google Home speaker can now recognize multiple different voices and deliver a specific info to the person it recognizes - like plane flight info and calendar entries. Up to six different voices can be recognized by a Google Home speaker, but for all this to work, each voice has to be tied to a different Google Account. Read more at buzzfeed.com.
Uber is often called a sharing economy business, but that's not technically accurate. Toyota and others have invested $45 million in a company called Getaround who's business model involve sharing your car with people. People are calling it the AirBnb for cars and TechCrunch says the long game is for people to have instant access to driverless cars. Read more at techcrunch.com.
Palmer Luckey, the co-founder of Oculus, is back - kind of. On Thursday, Luckey chastized the Washington Post for pointing out in a couple sentences in an article that he donated $100,000 to Donald Trump's presidential inauguration. The donations weren't made in his name directly. Instead, he made the donations through a company called Wings of Time, which is listed as the owner of. The name makes reference to the classic RPG video game Chrono Trigger. Luckey was the public face of Oculus, Facebook's VR company, until last year when it was discovered that he donated money to pro-Trump, anti-Hillary Clinton groups that made often offensive memes that at time deviated from politics into toll-like attacks on people online who don't share their views. In September he apologized for making donations. On March 30, Facebook announced he left the company. Read more at polygon.com.
According to CNET, the Federal Trade Commission wants to remind Instagram influencers that they need to do a better job of disclosing when their posts are sponsored. Hashtags and a simple thanks are not enough. The FTC sent letters to several internet celebrities who were cutting corners and spelled out what it means to have a monetary connection to a product which could include a business or family relationship, monetary payment, and even the gift of a free product. Public Citizen and the Center for Digital Democracy sent a complaint to the FTC that called out several celebrities who had not been disclosing their relationship with advertisers or sponsors including Bella Thorne, David Beckham, Chris Pratt, and even Mark Wahlberg. Read more at cnet.com.
Megan Morrone and Nathan Olivarez-Giles are joined today by Rolfe Winkler from the Wall Street Journal to talk about what happens when a security company accidentally on purpose exposes its clients online. Tech News Today streams live weekdays at 4PM Pacific, 7PM Eastern at twit.tv/live. You can subscribe to the show and watch it on-demand at twit.tv/tnt.