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Tech News Today for November 10, 2016

Tech News for Thursday November 10, 2016

A recurring theme this year has been Facebook’s algorithmic selections of stories and updates that users see in their news feeds. Once it was curated by humans, now it's done by robots behind the scenes, but no one seems satisfied with how it's being handled. One big challenge is the dissemination of false news through the platform, and many argue that a part of Tuesday’s outcome could have been crafted by misinformation that rose to the top of the news feed thanks to those mechanical choices by Facebook bots. Facebook VP of product management Adam Mosseri told Techcrunch that it takes gaming of the system seriously and is investigating ways to better detect misinformation. Read more at techcrunch.com.

President Elect Donald Trump appears to be good for the stock market as a whole, but not so good for tech stocks. The Dow is up for the second day in a row, but the so-called "Trump Bounce" seems to be more like a Trump kick in the pants for Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Yahoo, Netflix, Twitter. An analyst told Business Insider that the tech sell off is due to fears that inflation might be higher under Trump. Read more at businessinsider.com.

The European Union charged back in April that Google’s market dominance with Android stifles competition by forcing manufacturers to pre-install Google’s services into the OS while keeping competitors out. Google now defends its open source OS by comparing it against Apple and Microsoft, showing how on each of those mobile platforms the majority of pre-installed apps and services are provided by the company behind the hardware. Google argues that the EU’s claims seem to imply that Android and iOS aren’t in fact competitors which it says is missing the point of why the smartphone landscape is so competitive. The EU is likely to impose substantial fines if Google is found to be guilty of wrongdoing. Read more at arstechnica.com.

If you're having trouble seeing the world through rose-colored glasses, you're in luck. You can now buy Spectacles from the newly renamed Snap, makers of Snapchat. The Spectacles are making an auspicious debut in giant yellow vending machines called Snapbots. The machines are traveling across the US and you can track them from the Spectacles website or the app. A special geofilter will also appear when the Snapbot is nearby. The glasses take pictures and video from your point of view and they cost $130. This is clearly just what we need to distract our nation from the fact that none of us seem to agree on anything. Read more at techcrunch.com.

The Oculus Rift is getting some important updates, the first of which will improve the fluidity of animations running at half the normal frame rate, a feature called Asynchronous Spacewarp that was first announced last month at Oculus Connect. That’s handy because it enables the Oculus Rift to run on cheaper PCs with a class of graphics card lower than was required before. Now, a GTX 960 card and an i3 processor can get you in the door for Oculus Rift, a step down from the previous requirement of an Nvidia GTX 970 and Intel Core i5 processor. That means very soon, you can pick up a prebuilt $499 CyberPowerPC desktop to get started, lower than the $1000 machines required before. Read more at pcper.com.

Megan Morrone and Jason Howell are joined today by Nate Olivares-Giles from the Wall Street Journal to talk about Google's new DayDream VR headset. Tech News Today streams live weekdays at 4PM Pacific, 7PM Eastern at twit.tv/live. Subscribe to the show and watch on-demand at twit.tv/tnt.

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