Amazon blamed human error for the disruption in its cloud services that resulted in widespread glitches for its clients from news sites to government services on Tuesday.
An incorrect command led to the removal of a larger set of servers than intended, the company said in a blog post on Thursday. The disruption in the company's Simple Storage Service, or Amazon S3, lasted for more than 3.5 hours and impacted sending and receiving clients' data. The company said it will make changes to improve the recovery time of its key S3 subsystems. @Reuters The next big Windows 10 release, the Creators Update, will let you "snooze" the update for three days or pick your own restart date. Microsoft added an icon in the Windows Update Settings page that shows if your device is up-to-date. Once it arrives, you can schedule when to time it or simply snooze it for three days. Furthermore, you'll have more choice for the "active hours" when it absolutely can't do an update. Microsoft is also tweaking privacy settings, making it easier to pick the privacy and data collection settings that suit you. @Engadget Google Allo’s update brings an easier way to access GIFs, 10 new animated emoji and a shortcut to Google Assistant. Google is placing a button to access the Assistant right in the little box where you type out a message. Previously, you had to type “@google” in order to call up the Assistant. Alongside the Assistant button, Google also adds the ability to search for GIFs and to type “@lucky” followed by a search term to automatically pull up a GIF. @Engadget Google will release a new Pixel phone this year. it’ll remain “premium” in its next iteration, and Google isn’t interested in offering a low-cost version, preferring instead to let that segment be addressed by its external hardware partners. Google’s Pixel smartphone this year was a significant reset for the company’s mobile hardware strategy – and one that earned a lot of praise from customers and critics. @TechCrunch Google Home may get support for multiple user accounts. The code in the latest Google Home app contains references to a device being able to “recognize your voice” and needing to be trained, which suggests that user switching could happen by Google’s device identifying who’s speaking. It came out earlier this week that Amazon is working on getting Alexa to distinguish between voices, too. @TheVerge Japanese-based messaging app Line is building its own digital assistant called Clova with help from Sony and LG. Besides normal queries, Line is also promising Clova will be able to handle "complicated questions" and include a facial recognition aspect. It is also designed to work in third-party apps and hardware. Clova isn't scheduled for release until sometime in "early summer" of this year. @Engadget Maven, General Motors’ vehicle rental service, will now let you reserve a car for a whole month, parking and insurance included. Previously, Maven only offered hourly or daily pricing options for its car-sharing fleet. Customers will also receive a dedicated parking space and a personalized walk-through of the vehicle. Insurance and $100 worth of gas are also included, and there are no membership or application fees. Maven Reserve will only be available in LA and San Fransisco to begin with, although GM has plans to broaden it out later. @TheVerge Jeff Bezos also has plans to develop a lunar spacecraft with a lander named "Blue Moon." Amazon's founder Jeff Bezos wants to use that spacecraft to launch an Amazon-like shipping service that would deliver equipment needed to establish human settlements on the lunar surface by mid-2020s. It could also deploy rovers and scientific instruments meant to study Earth's natural satellite. Amazon has been circulating a seven-page white paper to NASA officials and Trump's transition team containing the project's details. @Engadget Apple's redesigned iPhone might not be ready in time for a September launch. Multiple supply chain watchers in recent weeks have said they believe production on the "OLED iPhone" will not start until September, which suggests the high-end iPhone "8" may not go on sale in September, as has been the case for years. Apple could debut all three devices in September, as it usually does, but only release the two iPhone 7 successors shortly thereafter, forcing customers to wait for the high-end iPhone 8. @BusinessInsider Virgin Galactic forms a new company Virgin Orbit for low-cost small satellite launches based on Virgin's LauncherOne system. LauncherOne uses a two-stage rocket dropped from a carrier aircraft. Its earlier iterations could only carry up to 500 pounds of payload. Orbit will use a modified Boeing 747 called "Cosmic Girl" that'll allow the system to ferry a bigger rocket with heavier cargo to Low Earth Orbit. This is the third private space companies Richard Branson’s VIrgin Group has. @Engadget Amazon might be working on its own home security camera. It's found the image of some sort of easily-positionable camera, with a blue light circling the lens, sitting on the Amazon's own web servers. It’s got a white exterior design — the central camera area is black — and a pivoting base. There are two mics at the top, and at each corner of the camera there are infrared sensors. @TheVerge
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Snap values itself at nearly $24B with its IPO pricing — the first tech IPO of 2017.
Snap has given a final price for its IPO, setting the company’s valuation at nearly $24 billion with a price of $17 per share. Snap will be raising nearly $3.4 billion in its IPO. Snap filed to go public in early February, showing a rapidly accelerating advertising business that went from $59 million in revenue in 2015 to nearly $400 million in 2016. @TechCrunch Oculus announced that they are slashing the prices of the Rift and Touch by $100 each, bringing the price to $598 for both. Part of this aggressive move is to drive more Rift users to Touch. Oculus also states that room-scale tracking on the Rift was going to be seeing some big improvements moving forward, and Oculus will continues to have Xbox One gamepad support. Mac support is still something Oculus is looking at, but it may not be coming for at least 6 months. @TechCrunch Chevrolet has become the first carmaker to offer an unlimited data plan with its cars. The deal, for a 4G LTE data plan, applies to cars sold in the US from 3 March and will cost $20 (£16) a month. It is being offered with the help of US carrier OnStar and will see vehicles fitted with a wi-fi hotspot that connects to the web via LTE. The system allows owners to connect up to seven devices at a time. @BBC Twitter partners with ESL and Dreamhack, two of the biggest organizations in the pro-gaming world, to stream live e-sports. Those broadcasts will start this Saturday, with Twitter streaming the ESL’s Intel Extreme Masters World Championship in Katowice, Poland, for free on its platform. Twitter says it already has more than 15 events locked in for live-streaming this year, including Dreamhack tournaments and future IEM championships. @TheVerge 'Overwatch' Season 4 brings a server browser that users can set their own parameters for how they want to play. You can customize everything from movement speed; hero abilities; map rotation; capture speed; ultimate abilities and a whole lot more for your perfect match. Also, High-ranking players (with ratings north of 3000) will have to compete in seven matches per week to maintain their ranking. @Engadget Spotify will offer lossless-quality music for $20 per month, rivaling Tidal. Both The Verge sources and Reddit members have discovered that Spotify is prepping its own lossless offering, Spotify Hi-Fi. There's no word as to when Hi-Fi would arrive -- Spotify isn't commenting beyond acknowledging that it's "always testing new products.” @Engadget Nvidia officially reveals its GeForce GTX 1080TI GPU for $699. The graphic card promises 35% faster performance than the GTX 1080, and "is even faster in games" than the Titan X, according to NVIDIA. The promotional page for the GPU compares its performance to the company's own GTX 980, showing performance upgrades better than double, and even triple in some cases. The GPU's official release is on March 10. @IGN Microsoft now lets anyone create and publish Xbox games with the new Xbox Live Creators Program. Before this, developers had to part of an established game development or media company, or they had to apply through Microsoft’s ID@Xbox indie game program to receive self-publishing capabilities.This new program has a one-time fee that ranges from $20 to $100. @TheVerge Microsoft plans to bring mixed reality to the Xbox in 2018. While its headsets are strictly for the PC right now, they will soon be coming to the Xbox -- as well as Microsoft's upcoming Project Scorpio console -- in 2018. Microsoft also showed off a developer edition of the Acer Windows "Mixed Reality" headset which ships to a few select developers later this month. @Engadget Gmail now lets you receive 50MB attachments. Unfortunately, sending mails remain capped at the same limit (25M) as before, with larger files only transmissible via Google Drive. The fact that the company has altered the size at all means that, hopefully, the rules will be relaxed even further in the future. @Engadget Yahoo hackers accessed 32 million accounts with forged cookies in the last two years. Yahoo said some of the latest intrusions can be connected to the “same state-sponsored actor believed to be responsible for the 2014 breach”, in which at least 500 million accounts were affected. Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer has given up a cash bonus from 2016 and a stock award for 2017, which seems to be worth about $14 million. @HuffingtonPost Xbox launches Netflix-like Game Pass subscription with over 100 games.
$10 dollars a month lets you play any of over 100 Xbox One and Xbox 360 games, and the game list will constantly change over time. A key difference from other subscription services is that you can actually download the games to your console without worrying about latency, lag spikes, or bandwidth issues. @TNW Amazon AWS S3 outage breaks large parts of the internet. The S3 outage is due to “high error rates with S3 in US-EAST-1”. Affected websites and services include Quora, Engadget, Business Insider, image hosting at a number of publisher websites, filesharing in Slack, and many more. Connected lightbulbs, thermostats and other IoT hardware is also being impacted. @TechCrunch Walmart's updated app helps you skip store lines for both prescription pickups and money transfers. Once you've filled in a medicine or money transfer order on your phone, you just have to waltz up to the appropriate store counter, scan a QR code with the app and complete your business. They'll start rolling out to stores in March, but the deployment will only finish sometime in the fall. @Engadget Raspberry Pi Zero W is a $10 computer with WiFi and Bluetooth. It boasts exactly the same specifications as its predecessor but the Zero W adds both 802.11n WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0 to the existing Zero design. The Zero, which came out in Oct 2015, will stay at $5 (£4), while the Zero W is priced at $10 (£9.60) plus tax. @Engadget Google has no plans to produce any more Pixel Chromebooks. The versions that are already out in the market have totally sold out and that there are no plans to make any more of those, either. The Pixel brand these days is now being used for Google’s new line of smartphones. The Pixel laptop is Google’s premium Chromebook and the original product bearing the Pixel name. @TechCrunch YouTube announced its entry into streaming live TV. YouTube TV will let you access live and recorded content from major networks both broadcast and on cable. All of this will be coupled alongside YouTube's existing content on any screen that YouTube is available on. It'll be available later this spring for $35 a month with no contract; that'll let up to six users access content whenever they want. @Engadget Ford wants to launch drones from self-driving vans to deliver all your packages. The automaker said the idea fits into its self-styled “City of Tomorrow,” a high concept vision of the future involving autonomous vehicles, ride-sharing and so on. It has said it plans to manufacture a completely autonomous car, without steering wheel or pedals, by 2021. @TheVerge Google Play starts to consider user engagement, not just downloads, in ranking games. This shift could have a serious impact on how games are marketed, as many publishers often focus on ad campaigns aimed solely at getting games onto users’ devices as a means of getting their titles ranked higher in Google Play’s charts. The changes were announced alongside the launch of strike-through pricing for running promotions, as well as the new editorial pages. @TechCrunch Amazon is prepping ‘Lily’, a commercial version of Alexa, for fielding questions from phone calls and text messages. Baked into Lily's suite of products are Lex and Polly -- two AWS developer services that use the same natural language processing as Alexa to power third-party apps as well as voice and text chatbots. Lily is expected to be formally announced around the middle of March. @Engadget A female Tesla engineer is suing the electric carmaker for “unwanted and pervasive harassment”. AJ Vandermeyden alleges that she and several other female employees were denied promotions, paid less than their male peers, and retaliated against after making their concerns known to human resources. She filed her lawsuit against Tesla last fall, but only spoke out publicly this week in an article published in The Guardian. @TheVerge @Engadget
Google assistant comes to recent Android phones. As of this week, Google's AI helper will start rolling out to Android phones running Marshmallow or Nougat, as long as your phone has Google Play Services and meets some basic specs (at least 1.5GB of RAM and a 720p screen). The initial rollout will focus on English-speaking users in the US. @Engadget Huawei unveils its Leica-branded P10, P10 Plus flagships, and the Watch 2. The P10 is sporting what Huawei calls a "Leica Dual-Camera 2.0 Pro Edition" setup, which Huawei claims to deliver best-in-class landscape, portrait and macro shots. Huawei has also teamed up with Pantone for some exclusive color options: "Dazzling Blue" and "Greenery." The Watch 2 adds 4G connectivity with some design tweaks to its original model. @Engadget HP's Pro x2 hybrid comes with a Wacom pen with military specs. The Windows 10-equipped Pro x2 612 G2 weighs just 2.65 pounds with a travel keyboard, lasts up to 11 hours and can be charged to 50 percent within a half hour. This top-end model packs Gorilla Glass and a MIL-STD 810G rating for drops, dust, humidity, temperature changes and functional shock. It's now available at $979+. @TheVerge LG launches G6 with unique 18:9 "FullVision" display. The 5.7-inch IPS screen packs a resolution of 2,880 x 1,440, along with a pixel density of 564 ppi plus support for Dolby Vision and HDR10 content. The display's corners have also been rounded off, evoking the softer edges of the device itself, although the curves don't match exactly. It's also LG's first G-series phone to be water- and dust-resistant, rated at IP68. @TheVerge The KEYone is a return to classic BlackBerry form with a full physical keyboard. The physical keyboard, which sits below the 4.5-inch LCD screen, is touch-sensitive and has several useful functions, like scrolling without touching the screen, or assigning each key a shortcut. There’s also a fingerprint sensor on the space bar. It ships in April at $549. @TechCrunch DJI looks to enterprise applications with the Matrice 200. Matrice 200 is a customized version of the movie-focused Inspire 2 model DJI announced in late 2016, sporting mounts compatible with the early model’s cameras, including the 30x optical zoom Zenmuse Z30 and the XT thermal imager. The new model is also weatherproofed. Pricing is still TBD. @Engadget Security error leaves NY airport servers unprotected for a year. New York's Stewart International Airport, located 60 miles north of Manhattan, left its server backup drives exposed to the internet since April 2016. The 760 GB of exposed data included TSA letters of investigation, SSNs, internal airport schematics and emails. No information was believed to have been compromised during the near year-long exposure. @Engadget Mr. Carton just became the first cartoon TV series made with Unity Game Engine. Six episodes have aired thus far, and are available on YouTube. The two-minute adventures follow the titular hero, a cardboard man in a cardboard world. Disney's use of the game engine in the live action remake of The Jungle Book is just one sign that Unity's mainstream appeal is real. @Engadget FCC CHAIRMAN TO HALT PRIVACY RULES THAT SHIELD CUSTOMERS' PERSONAL DATA FROM ISPSThe privacy rules were approved by the FCC under former Chairman Tom Wheeler back in October and would have required an ISP to ask for a user's explicit permission before collecting data on browsing habits, app usage and location or financial information. They were set to take effect on March 2nd, but Chairman Pai has effectively put a stop to them by until another vote can be held. @TechCrunch ONLINE LENDER STARTUP SOFI RAISES $500 MILLION ADDITIONAL FUNDINGSoFi raised an additional $500 million in a financing round led by Silver Lake, which brings Sofi's total investment to $1.9 billion. It plans to use the funds for international expansion of its online lending business and development of new financial products. SoFi got its start refinancing student loans but gradually expanded into personal loans, mortgages, wealth management, life insurance and other areas. @Engadget 'ROLLERCOASTER TYCOON' FINALLY GOES 3D ON MOBILERollerCoaster Tycoon Touch is now available for free on both iOS and Android. Beyond the graphics, not much is changing gameplay-wise compared with RollerCoaster Tycoon 4 Mobile and RollerCoaster Tycoon Classic, a rehash of the series' first two games released in 2014 December. @TechCrunch VR SOCIAL PRODUCTIIVITY APP 'BIGSCREEN' RAISES $3MBigscreen just raised $3 million in funding led by Andreessen Horowits. Its beta application, which has use cases like collaborating in virtual meeting rooms to playing online games in the same room as avatars, currently boasts 150,000 users, an impressive number for the high-end VR community it exists within. @Engadget GOOGLE SHUTS DOWN GROUP-SHARING NETWORK 'SPACES'Spaces will lock down in read-only mode on March 3rd, then completely shut down on April 17th. It was launched in 2016 May to help small groups work together with shared images, links, videos and text. @TheVerge TWITTER IS LOCKING ACCOUNTS THAT SWEAR AT FAMOUS PEOPLEWhen Twitter determines that an account is being abusive — using criteria that the company has declined to describe in any detail — it hides the account's tweets from anyone who isn't following it. The restrictions last for a set period of time, typically 12 hours for a first offense. @Engadget T-MOBILE TO BEGIN OFFERING LTE-U SUPPORT LATER THIS SPRINGLTE-U was originally proposed by Qualcomm as a component of the new LTE Advanced standard to improve cellular data speeds and coverage. T-Mobile notes that its LTE-U implementation will smartly use the available spectrum, increasing when Wi-Fi demand is low and decreasing when there’s greater Wi-Fi usage. @TheVerge ZENIMAX IS TRYING TO STOP OCULUS FROM SELLING RIFT HEADSETS AND VR GAMESZeniMax, the parent company of game developers id Software and Bethesda Softworks, filed the request in federal court on Feb 23. The same Dallas court found Oculus guilty of copyright infringement and its executives guilty of violating a non-disclosure agreement and committing false designation last month. @TheVerge UBER CALLS WAYMO’S LAWSUIT ALLEGING STOLEN SELF-DRIVING TECH ‘BASELESS’ Waymo filed the explosive lawsuit on the evening of Feb 23, claiming that Anthony Levandowski, a former Google engineer and current top executive at Uber, had stolen 14,000 confidential documents before leaving Google, which he then used to help build Uber’s autonomous vehicles. Uber vows on Feb 24 to "vigorously" defend itself in court.
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