Slashdot reader shirappu writes: For eight years now, the Mars Rover Curiosity has been exploring the surface of Mars. Even now, it’s still exploring, and still getting upgrades. According to Tech Crunch, NASA is now looking to interested volunteers to help upgrade the rover’s terrain-scanning AI systems by annotating image data of the planet itself. “The problem is that while there…
Tag: TechCrunch
Oracle’s BlueKai Tracks You Across the Web. That Data Spilled Online
From a report: Have you ever wondered why online ads appear for things that you were just thinking about? There’s no big conspiracy. Ad tech can be creepily accurate. Tech giant Oracle is one of a few companies in Silicon Valley that has near-perfected the art of tracking people across the internet. The company has spent a decade and billions of…
After Merger, T-Mobile Lays Off Hundreds of Sprint Employees
In a conference call on Monday lasting under six minutes, T-Mobile vice president James Kirby told hundreds of Sprint employees that their services were no longer needed. He declined to answer his employees’ questions, citing the “personal” nature of employee feedback, and ended the call. From a report: TechCrunch obtained leaked audio of that call, which was said to be one…
US Commerce Dept. Amends Huawei Ban To Allow For Development of 5G Standards
The United States Department of Commerce today issued a change to allow American companies to participate in developing more streamlined standards for 5G with Huawei. TechCrunch reports: According to the Department: “This action is meant to ensure Huawei’s placement on the Entity List in May 2019 does not prevent American companies from contributing to important standards-developing activities despite Huawei’s pervasive participation…
Ahead of WWDC, Apple’s Developer App Adds Mac Support, New Features, iMessage Stickers
Ahead of Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference starting next week, the company has today launched a new version of its Apple Developer App to better support its plans for the virtual event. TechCrunch reports: Notably, the app has been made available for Mac for the first time, in addition to a redesign and other minor feature updates. With the needs of an…
T-Mobile Hit By Phone Calling Outage
T-Mobile appears to be having problems. TechCrunch: Customers are reporting that they can’t make or receive phone calls, although data and text messages seem to be unaffected. DownDetector, which collects outage reports from users, indicates that a major outage is underway. It’s not clear how widespread the issue is, but at the time of writing T-Mobile was trending across the United…
Podcast Apps Pocket Casts and Castro Removed From Apple’s China Store
Before June each year, content and media platforms in China anxiously anticipate a new round of censorship as the government tightens access to information in the lead-up to the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown. This year, Chinese users lost access to two podcast apps — Pocket Casts and Castro Podcasts. From a report: Neither apps are searchable within Apple’s Chinese…
MIT’s Tiny Artificial Brain Chip Could Bring Supercomputer Smarts To Mobile Devices
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Researchers at MIT have published a new paper that describes a new type of artificial brain synapse that offers performance improvements versus other existing versions, and which can be combined in volumes of tens of thousands on a chip that’s smaller physically than a single piece of confetti. The results could help create…
Mozilla Eyes Decentralized Web-Based Videoconferencing Platform ‘Meething’
Last month Techcrunch reported that Mozilla had gone “full incubator” by holding a startup lab called Fix the Internet, followed by “a formal program dangling $75,000 investments in front of early-stage companies…” Fix the Internet had many key themes, including collaboration and decentralization (as well as user-controlled data and privacy-protecting social networks). That event “drew the interest of some 1,500 people…
And That’s Really It For Google+
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Last year, Google launched the beta of Currents, which was essentially a rebrand of Google+ for G Suite users, since Google+ for consumers went to meet its maker in April 2019. While Google+ was meant to be an all-purpose social network, the idea behind Currents is more akin to what Microsoft is doing…