Tech News Today for March 27, 2017
Tech News for Monday March 27, 2017
Over the weekend one of Uber's self-driving cars in Arizona was involved in a high-speed crash after a human driver failed to yield. Uber temporarily suspended its driverless testing program in Tempe, San Francisco, and Pittsburgh, but now they've started back up again. A brief investigation showed that the Uber car was in self-driving mode when the vehicles collided and caused the autonomous vehicle to roll onto its side. Read more at bloomberg.com.
The Trump administration is creating an Office of American Innovation that will be charged with modernizing the tech infrastructure of all federal agencies. Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner will lead the office, which is expected to be formally announced next week sometime. The Washington Post, which broke this news, will run the Office out of the White House's west wing. Kushner will report directly to Trump and will reportedly fill his team with consultants, former tech and business executives. It's not clear just who those people will be as of yet. Kushner told the Post: "The government should be run like a great American company. Our hope is that we can achieve successes and efficiencies for our customers, who are the citizens." Read more at washingtonpost.com.
Get ready to update your iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. iOS 10.3 is now available and it introduces a new feature called Find My AirPods that sounds super useful and a new filesystem called Apple File System, or APFS for short. The Apple File System should work better with flash storage offering faster read and write speeds, and it will save space. iOS 10.3 introduces CarPlay improvements, Siri support for cricket scores from the Indian Premier League and International Cricket Council, a new user security section in the Settings app, and weather data in the Weather app now has 3D Touch forecast. Read more at 9to5mac.com.
The Note 7 is back. Or at least part of it is back. Samsung says they'll start selling refurbished Note 7s, without the batteries that might catch fire. Salvaged components from the estimated 4.3 million devices will also be recycled and precious metals, such as copper, nickel, gold and silver will be extracted, using environmentally friendly methods, says Samsung in a blog post. Read more at theverge.com.
Megan Morrone and Nathan Olivarez-Giles are joined today by Rolfe Winkler of The Wall Street Journal to talk about Elon Musk's latest company called Neuralink which aims to connect the human brain to AI. 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.