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Tuesday, September 6th, 2016
| Time | Event |
| 12:40a | SoftBank Completes $31 Billion Acquisition of ARM Roughly two months later, SoftBank announced today that it has completed its $31 billion acquisition of British chip designer ARM Holdings. The Verge reports: "SoftBank's purchase of ARM is the latest in a line of acquisitions in recent years for the Japanese company, including the $20 billion Sprint acquisition, and a $15 billion investment in Vodafone's Japanese division. ARM is well known for designing chips and licensing them to companies like Apple and Samsung, and ARM-designed chips dominate mobile computing in phones and tablets. 15 billion ARM-designed chips shipped last year alone, and around half of those were in mobile devices. SoftBank is expected to use the ARM deal to bolster its Internet of Things plans." 
Read more of this story at Slashdot.  |
| 7:00a | Satellite Owner Says SpaceX Owes $50 Million Or Free Flight An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Israel's Space Communication Ltd said on Sunday it could seek $50 million or a free flight from Elon Musk's SpaceX after a Spacecom communications satellite was destroyed last week by an explosion at SpaceX's Florida launch site. Officials of the Israeli company said in a conference call with reporters Sunday that Spacecom also could collect $205 million from Israel Aerospace Industries, which built the AMOS-6 satellite. Spacecom has been hit hard in the aftermath of the Thursday explosion that destroyed the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and its payload. The Israeli company said the loss of the satellite would have a significant impact, with its equity expected to decline by $30 million to $123 million. Spacecom shares dropped 9 percent on Thursday, with the explosion occurring late in the last trading day of the week. Trading in the shares was suspended on Sunday morning, and the stock plummeted another 34 percent when trading resumed. In a conference call with reporters, Spacecom's general counsel Gil Lotan said it was too early to say if the company's planned merger with Beijing Xinwei Technology Group would proceed. Xinwei last month agreed to buy Spacecom for $285 million, saying the deal was contingent on the successful launch and operation of Spacecom's AMOS-6 satellite. The $200 million AMOS-6 satellite that perished in the explosion belonged to Facebook and was going to be used to beam internet to developing parts of the world.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
| 1:00p | Meet URL, the USB Porn-Sniffing Dog HughPickens.com writes: CNN reports that URL, the porn-sniffing dog, is the newest crime-fighting tool at the Weber County Sheriff's office with a nose that could help put away some of the country's most predatory and dangerous criminals. URL (pronounced Earl) sniffs out electronic storage media. Still just a pup, the 18-month-old K-9 is one of fewer than two dozen such dogs in the United States that hunt the unique chemical compounds emitted from flash drives, memory cards, cell phones, iPads and other similar devices. While dogs like URL can't tell detectives if a device has electronic evidence on it, they are able to find devices that humans might otherwise miss. Detective Cameron Hartman points to the high-profile case of former Subway spokesman Jared Fogle, who was convicted on child pornography and other charges last year. A K-9 named Bear, who was trained by the same man who trained URL, led investigators to hidden thumb drives inside Fogle's home. The U.S. Attorney's office for Southern Indiana confirmed those devices contained evidence against Fogle. URL has found evidence relating to pornography during the execution of search warrants for the task force in several investigations of child sex crimes and child trafficking. "He actually found a USB that was in this jar that was closed, and the jar was in a box, and the box had stuff in it. The jar itself had stuff in it."
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
| 4:00p | Pentagon Chiefs Fear Advanced Robot Weapons Wiping Out Humanity Longtime reader schwit1 writes: Huge technological leaps forward in drones, artificial intelligence and autonomous weapon systems must be addressed before humanity is driven to extinction, say chiefs of Pentagon From a report: Air Force General Paul Selva, the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the US Defense Department, said so-called thinking weapons could lead to: "Robotic systems to do lethal harm... a Terminator without a conscience." When asked about robotic weapons able to make their own decisions, he said: "Our job is to defeat the enemy" but "it is governed by law and by convention." He says the military insists on keeping humans in the decision-making process to "inflict violence on the enemy. [...] That ethical boundary is the one we've draw a pretty fine line on. It's one we must consider in developing these new weapons," he added. Selva said the Pentagon must reach out to artificial intelligence tech firms that are not necessarily "military-oriented" to develop new systems of command and leadership models, reports US Naval Institute News .
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
| 5:20p | Apple Accidentally Lists iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus Ahead of Its Wednesday Event From a BGR report: Everyone makes mistakes from time to time, and it looks like the web team responsible for updating one of Apple's websites accidentally pushed an update live early this morning. Reddit user "Jaspergreenham" says he was browsing the accessories page on Apple's Hong Kong website when he stumbled across the two new phones. Notice anything wrong with that screen capture? The left-hand column on the site allows users to drill down based on device model, but there are two devices listed there that don't actually exist yet: The iPhone 7 and the iPhone 7 Plus.Apple doesn't usually misses out on these things.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
| 6:40p | An Algorithm May Soon Cover Your Local Sports Team Sam Edwards, writing for Motherboard: A Spanish startup is promising to revolutionize readers' access to often unreported news. The unreported news in question, however, is not overlooked disasters or under-reported tragedies in far-flung countries, but minor league sporting events. David Llorente, co-founder of Narrativa, said was inspired to develop an AI-powered content generation system after he tried fruitlessly to find coverage of minor league soccer games from other countries in his native Spanish. "There are people interested in these things, in these leagues, in these kind of sports," he told Motherboard. "The idea was to focus on regional sports. I wanted to write about football, but about Japanese football in Spanish, to cover this niche." Sevilla won with a resounding 20 against Athletic in Nervion, where the sum up eight straight wins at home. Gameiro scored the first one for the locals and closed the scoreboard by converting a penalty kick after Kychowiak was fouled. Athletic was unlucky despite controlling ball possession and wasn't able to finish any of the numerous chances that they had. -- Narrativa game summary. Narrativa is part of the booming automatic content generation industry which uses algorithms to convert data sets into narratives. Related: How a robot wrote for Engadget.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
| 9:30p | Huawei Is Building A Successor To The Google Nexus 7, Says Report According to reliable product leaker Evan Blass, Google is working with Huawei to produce the successor to the wildly popular Google Nexus 7. Evan Blass tweeted yesterday: "Google's Huawei-built 7-inch tablet, with 4GB RAM, on track for release before the end of the year." Ars Technica reports: "Of course 'Nexus' probably won't be the name of this device. Google is undergoing the Great Hardware Unification of 2016, and according to a report from Android Police, the Nexus line is going away to make way for a unified 'Pixel' line. The two upcoming Google phones are reportedly going to be branded 'Pixel' and 'Pixel XL.' If that report holds true, this device would probably be branded a 'Pixel,' too. We last saw a 7-inch Google tablet in 2013, when the Nexus 7 was released as a follow-up to the original 2012 version. Both of these were built by Asus and were well-received thanks to their novel (at the time) 7-inch, 16:9 form factor and low price (~$230)."
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
| 11:30p | T-Mobile To Boost Its LTE Speeds To 400 Mbps An anonymous reader writes from a report via The Next Web: T-Mobile plans to boost its LTE speeds to up to 400 Mbps in the very near future. The Next Web reports: "The company is getting ready to boost its maximum theoretical internet speeds to become the faster carrier in the U.S. by a wide margin. The network will soon support theoretical speeds up to 400 Mbps -- nearly half the speed of Google Fiber. There's a two-pronged approach to the upgrade. First is incorporating 4x4 MIMO (multiple input, multiple output) technology, which will supposedly double the speed from the current 7-40 Mbps customers tend to experience with T-Mobile (about the same as Verizon with LTE-A). This upgrade is available now in 319 cities, although it's a moot point because only the S7 and S7 Edge will be able to use the tech via a software update "later this month." In October, the company will roll out 256 QAM support to the S7 and S7 Edge (and again, more phones later), which increases the amount of bits per transmission. T-Mobile says this will lead to theoretical maximum speeds of 400 Mbps." The Next Web followed-up with T-Mobile to ask about what the real-world speeds would be after the upgrade. The company says "customers can expect to see real world peak speeds of 190 Mbps," which is over four times current peaks speeds, but also far below the theoretical 400 Mbps.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
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