Tech News Today for November 30, 2016
Tech News for Wednesday November 30, 2016
Netflix made a lot of subscribers happy today with the news today that its bringing offline playback capability to most movies and TV shows on the service. One big omission is Disney content, so don’t expect to store Zootopia on your iOS or Android device. Content that is available for storing offline, many of which is Netflix’s own original content, will be denoted with an “available for download” tab. Read more at fortune.com.
Why transfer your data through the cloud, when Amazon will drive it to its destination in a giant truck? Today the company announced the AWS Snowmobile, an 18 wheeler capable of securely delivering petabytes or exabytes of data. The truck will pull up to the front of your business with its 45-foot shipping container. You load up your data and they'll drive it to their cloud, which is not actually a big fluffy cloud. In case you're interested, an exabyte is a quintillian bytes. That's a lot of bytes. Read more at aws.amazon.com.
Comma.ai, the self driving startup founded by George Hotz that withdrew from the US market upon receiving a NHTSA special order, has a new plan. The Comma Neo is an open source robotics research platform aimed at makers who want to convert their own vehicles into self driving cars. The hardware and software is available on Github and the guide reveals that the system runs off of a OnePlus 3 Android smartphone for “easy development”. The cost of all required hardware runs $700. Read more at cnet.com.
Security researchers say that more than one million accounts have been breached by Gooligan, a family of Android malware designed to infect your device and steal authentication tokens to access Google Play, Gmail, Google Photos, Google Docs, G Suite, Google Drive, and more. If you have the latest version of Android or a fairly new phone, you're probably OK. But whatever operating system you're using, it's important to be careful when you download third party apps. Read more at engadget.com.
G Suite, Google’s rebranded Apps suite for business, is introducing a new app development tool called App Maker that allows an organization to create custom apps tailored to their specific needs in a seemingly easy, drag and drop browser based platform. Google has built more than 300 of its own apps internally using this system, and now its opening it up for other enterprise users. Read more at fastcompany.com.
Tech News Today with Megan Morrone and Jason Howell streams live weekdays at 4PM Pacific, 7PM Eastern at twit.tv/live. You can subscribe to the show and watch it on-demand at twit.tv/tnt.