Tech News Today for November 22, 2016
Tech News for Tuesday November 22, 2016
Telegram launches Telegraph, a long-form publishing platform. Read more at venturebeat.com.
Remember last year's iOS SMS bug? When someone sent you a certain string of characters via SMS, it would crash and restart your iPhone. Now the same thing is happening, but with a video. According to YouTuber EverythingApplePro, a certain MP4 video, when played in Safari, will slow down your iPhone, iPad, or your iPod Touch and then cause it to crash. It's a short 3 second video with music. No Mr. Robot masks or anything. Read more at 9to5mac.com.
Last month, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram reacted to an American Civil Liberties Union report that showed police were using their data streams to follow protests thanks to the services of the social monitoring platform called Geofeedia. It turns out, that had a dramatic effect on the direction of the company. Geofeedia CEO Phil Harris said the service “wasn’t created to impact civil liberties” and Geofeedia has started scaling back its business as a result, including letting go of half of its 60 person staff. Read more at chicagotribune.com.
It looks like Facebook's fake news problem might not just be about politics. In fact, some of Facebook's own reporting of its Aquila drone seems to have stretched the truth a bit. On June 28th Facebook announced the successful test flight of its Aquila drone over the Arizona desert. Now Bloomberg says the National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the crash of that drone on the same "successful test flight." Read more at bloomberg.com.
Microsoft’s Xbox and Oculus have been friendly in months past, having included an Xbox Wireless Controller with Rifts in the box and native support for the Rift on Windows 10 PCs. Microsoft announced that Xbox One owners will be able to stream their gameplay into the Oculus Rift app when it is released to the Oculus store on Dec 12. The Xbox One will connect to the Oculus app through the home network to stream the video output from the console to the headset. Read more at news.xbox.com.
Megan Morrone and Jason Howell are joined today by Geoffrey Fowler to talk about some of his holiday gift picks. Tech News Today streams live weekdays at twit.tv/live. You can subscribe to the show and get it on-demand at twit.tv/tnt.