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Tech News Today for August 29, 2016

Tech News for August 29, 2016

The September Apple event has been confirmed for a week from Wednesday, September 7th at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco at 10 a.m. Pacific. We'll be covering this at twit.tv/live. Read more about the event at theverge.com.

The temperature is rising as we get closer to the presidential election here in the US. This time around, there are significant concerns around hacks that involve the election system, probably more than any other election in the US to date. And along those lines is today’s news that the FBI is investigating the intrustion of two state election databases. The two states under investigation were not named by the FBI, but sources tell Yahoo that Arizona and Illinois were the ones breached by foreign hackers in recent weeks. The FBI is warning election officials across the US to take precautions to increase security for their systems. Read more at yahoo.com.

You might remember that Mark Zuckerberg's New Year's Resolution was much more industrious than yours was. And he's actually keeping his. Re/Code reports that the Facebook CEO plans to unveil a demo of his robot butler next month. He made the announcement at a town hall meeting in Rome, where he also paid a visit to the Pope to whom he gave a drone. Don't get too excited. It wasn't a working drone, but rather a model of Facebook’s solar-powered Aquila aircraft. Read more at recode.net.

Alphabet is used to shooting for the moon. But what exactly has come out of those moon shots at this point? We hear about movement in some of Alphabet's moonshot projects: Big name hires in its self driving car efforts, as well as veteran hires of people involved deeply in broadband to help make Internet Balloons a reality, in the case of Project Loon. But according to Mark Bergan from Recode, internally, Alphabet’s X division is seen as an ineffective effort. Things sound great, but moving them into actual products has proven to be next to impossible, thanks to politics inside the company, as well unmanagable red tape. Read more at recode.net.

Megan Morrone and Jason Howell are joined today by Kurt Wagner of Re/Code to talk about the technology being put into the NFL's footballs this year. Tech News Today streams live at 4PM Pacific, 7PM Eastern at twit.tv/live. You can subscribe to the show or download it on-demand at twit.tv/tnt.

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