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Tech News Today for November 15, 2016

Tech News for Tuesday November 15, 2016

Microsoft is partnering with Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Y Combinator founder Sam Altman who runs the nonprofit Open AI. The organization, which was founded earlier this year, is on a mission is to protect humanity from our robot overlords by making them be our slaves and not the other way round. Although that's not exactly how they put it. They say Open AI will utilize Microsoft's Cloud OS, Azure, to democratize AI by running its deep learning and neural networks rexperiments in the cloud. Microsoft also revealed the Azure Bot Service, a new program that lets companies and developers store and run bots in the cloud. Read more at businessinsider.com.

Tech distraction in the car is no joke. It’s also, apparently, really difficult to resist for many drivers. Last year, highway fatalities say the largest annual percentage increase in the past 50 years. And so far in 2016, highway deaths have jumped 10.4 percent over the same period last year. Experts attribute the increase to the increase in technology use inside vehicles while driving. Read more at nytimes.com.

Mark Gurman from Bloomberg says that behind closed doors Apple is working on some smart spectacles of their own. Let's not call them "wearable glasses" because most eyeglasses have been wearable for a while. Gurman says the difference between Apple's glasses that connect to your smartphone and Google Glass is that Apple is going to work on the product until it's ready. All of this comes from Gurman's mostly reliable sources. Apple has not commented publicly about the glasses or whether or not they'd be delivered by a giant yellow robot vending machine. Read more at bloomberg.com.

Google rolled out some updates to its Google Photos app to help users tweak their photos to be better color corrected and sharper. But beyond that, Google released a new standalone app for Android and iOS called PhotoScan. The app is designed to help users take those polaroids and printed photos taking up space in the attic and digitize them with the smartphone camera. PhotoScan prompts the user to snap a single image of the photo, and then subsequent images of the four corners. All of those points together give the app what it needs to reject things like relections and light sources that might appear during the capture process, resulting in a pristine copy of the photo. Read more at venturebeat.com.

Security research firm Kryptowire has discovered malware on 120,000 Android phones. And its not the fun kind of malware, either. It's the bad kind that slurps up your personally identifiable information including text messages, contacts, IP addresses and more. The adware, called Adups, came preinstalled on several different models of budget Android phones including the Blu R1 HD and other devices sold all over the world, including in the US market through Amazon and Best Buy. Mobile antivirus software didn't detect the malware because it assumes that software that ships with a device is safe. The stolen data was allegedly sent back to China. Read more at arstechnica.com.

Megan Morrone and Jason Howell are joined today by Mikey Campbell, Senior Editor at Apple Insider, to talk about the new DJI Phantom 4 Pro. Tech News Today streams live weekdays at 4PM Pacific at twit.tv/live. You can subscribe to the show and watch it on-demand at twit.tv/tnt.

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