LG will make its webOS software available to other companies. From a report: The proprietary software on LG’s own sets will be able to be licensed by outside TV brands, the company announced Wednesday. Notably, TV brands that choose to bring LG’s software to their televisions will also get its Magic Motion remote, LG’s very good cursor-like wand. It would also…
Tag: televisions
‘Terms of Service’ Agreements Are Unbalanced, Need Reforming, Urges New York Times
“The same legalese that can ban Donald Trump from Twitter can bar users from joining class-action lawsuits,” warns the official Editorial Board of the New York Times, urging “It’s time to fix the fine print.” [Alternate URL here] [M]ost people have no idea what is signed away when they click “agree” to binding terms of service contracts — again and again…
Among 2020’s Most Underreported Stories: Pharmaceutical Profiteering May Accelerate Superbugs
Since 1976 “Project Censored,” a U.S.-based nonprofit media watchdog organization, has been identifying “the news that didn’t make the news,” the most significant stories it believes are being systematically overlooked. Slashdot ran stories about its annual list of the year’s most censored news stories in 1999, 2003, 2004, and in 2007, when they’d presciently warned that the media was ignoring the…
DHS Is Looking Into Backdoors In Smart TVs By China’s TCL
chicksdaddy shares a report from The Security Ledger: The acting head of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said the agency was assessing the cyber risk of smart TVs sold by the Chinese electronics giant TCL, following reports last month in The Security Ledger and elsewhere that the devices may give the company “back door” access to deployed sets, The Security…
Lee Kun-hee, Who Built Samsung Into a Global Giant, Dies At 78
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Lee Kun-hee, who built Samsung into a global giant of smartphones, televisions and computer chips but was twice convicted — and, in a pattern that has become typical in South Korea, twice pardoned — for white-collar crimes committed along the way, died on Sunday in Seoul, the South Korean capital….
Foxconn, Other Asian Firms Consider Mexico Factories As China Risks Grow
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Taiwan-based electronics manufacturers Foxconn and Pegatron are among companies eyeing new factories in Mexico, people with direct knowledge of the matter said, as the U.S.-China trade war and coronavirus pandemic prompt firms to reexamine global supply chains. The plans could usher in billions of dollars in badly needed fresh investments over the next…
Michael Hawley, Programmer, Professor and Pianist, Dies at 58
Michael Hawley, a computer programmer, professor, musician, speechwriter and impresario who helped lay the intellectual groundwork for what is now called the Internet of Things, died on Wednesday at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 58. From a report: The cause was colon cancer, said his father, George Hawley. Mr. Hawley began his career as a video game programmer at…
Vint Cerf Explains Why the Internet is Holding Up
In a video interview over Google Hangouts this week, 76-year-old Vint Cerf explained to the Washington Post why the internet’s 50-year-old architecture is still holding up, “with a mix of triumph and wonder in his voice.” “Resiliency and redundancy are very much a part of the Internet design,” explained Cerf, whose passion for touting the wonders of computer networking prompted Google…
Ex-CIA Engineer Set To Go On Trial For Vault 7 Leak
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Manhattan federal prosecutors are poised to open their case Tuesday in the trial of a former software engineer for the Central Intelligence Agency who is charged with handing over a trove of classified information on the spy agency’s hacking operations to WikiLeaks (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source). In 2017, WikiLeaks released more than…
Google Assistant Passes 500 Million Users
One day after Amazon announced that it has populated the world with over 100 million Alexa-powered devices, Google decided to take the opportunity to tout some of its numbers. At CES 2020 on Tuesday, the company said that the Google Assistant is now used by 500 million monthly active users. VentureBeat reports of the new features coming to the digital assistant…