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Tech News Today for August 3, 2017

Tech News for Thursday August 3, 2017

Disney appears to be all in on immersive VR entertainment. We've told you before about the Utah company The Void that creates what they call "hyper-reality" experiences, where you go to a certain location and don a backpack, headset and other gear and experience a kind of 5 senses virtual reality. Now The Void has teamed up with Disney, Lucasfilm, and Industrial Light & Magic’s immersive entertainment division, ILMxLAB to create a new Star Wars experience near Downtown Disney in Anaheim, California, and near Disney Springs in Orlando, Florida. Details of the story you'll be immersed in are very slim, but a piece of artwork on starwars.com suggests that STAR WARS: SECRETS OF THE EMPIRE will be out this holiday season and seems to take place near Darth Vader's castle as seen in Rogue One. Read more at techcrunch.com.

Facebook’s quest to mitigate fake news on the network took another step with an announcement that misinformation in the news feed will be accompanied by a “related articles” feature, showing other articles that disprove false information spreading on the network. Facebook is opting for giving users information to read to counterbalance false news, as opposed to outright filtering it out and removing it from the network entirely which could be a very slippery slope. Read more at wsj.com.

The bad news about Uber has slowed down to a trickle in the past week, but today the flood gates were opened once again. Bloomberg reports that Uber purchased more than 1,000 defective Honda vehicles from importers. Even though the company knew the vehicles had been recalled, Uber still bought and leased them to drivers in Singapore, the first asian city where the service was available. One of those defective vehicles burst into flame back in January. Read more at bloomberg.com.

Megan Morrone and Jason Howell are joined today by Dave Gershgorn of Quartz to talk about why Facebook killed its chatbots. Tech News Today streams live weekdays at 4PM Pacific, 7PM Eastern at twit.tv/live. You can subscribe to the show and get it on-demand at twit.tv/tnt.

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