Elon Musk says we're only 2 years from being able to nap in self-driving cars

Multi-company tech mogul Elon Musk recently laid out plans for his traffic-defeating Boring company during a talk at the TED conference, but now, we finally have the full video of his appearance. And he delivers a few more interesting comments. 

Answering a question regarding how long it will be before we can hop in our self-driving car, give it directions, and then take a nap until we've reached out destination, Musk says he thinks we're about two years away.

If true, that could truly change the landscape of our cities; from how human-controlled cars operate to the number of taxi drivers who may be put out of work. Read more...

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Trump’s war on the media is straight out of a dystopian dictator’s handbook

President Donald Trump was a distracting entertainment from the moment he launched his campaign in June of 2015 — until he wasn't.

His opening speech, in which he called Mexican immigrants "rapists" and told the world he would be the best jobs president "God ever created," was looked at as the ravings of a man whose outsized ego was too big to be anything but hilarious. 

News outlets such as CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC carried his run-on sentences and gesticulations seemingly every time he got behind a podiumThe Huffington Post for a time only wrote about Trump in its entertainment section. 

SEE ALSO: Elon Musk just endorsed Trump’s secretary of state pick, and it makes no sense Read more...

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Twitter news video will appear 24/7, thanks to Bloomberg

Twitter is now a 24/7 streaming video service, beginning with financial news. 

Bloomberg, the finance news site with a wealth of funds from terminals, has agreed to produce exclusive video content for Twitter that will play 24 hours a day, seven days a week, Wall Street Journal reported Sunday. 

The announcement comes just ahead of Twitter's first-ever NewFronts, where the tech company will pitch advertisers on a slate of original programming they can advertise within for the upcoming year. 

SEE ALSO: Twitter goes Lite for developing markets

The deal also landed just after a quarterly earnings report delighted investors and analysts because of its surprise surpassing of expectations. Twitter had added 9 million monthly active users, while analysts had expected only 2 million, for example.  Read more...

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Facebook accused of targeting 'insecure' children and young people, leaked report shows

Facebook has apologised for reportedly allowing advertisers to target emotionally vulnerable people as young as 14, as a 23-page leaked document obtained by The Australian revealed. 

According to the news outlet, the document prepared by two top Australian Facebook executives uses algorithms to collect data (via posts, pictures, and reactions) on the emotional state of 6.4 million "high schoolers," "tertiary students," and "young Australians and New Zealanders … in the workforce," indicating "moments when young people need a confidence boost." 

In other words, data says they feel "worthless" or "insecure" and are therefore well-positioned to receive an advertiser’s message.  Read more...

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This night light goes inside your toilet bowl because why not

You might’ve seen this on Shark Tank, but if you haven’t, it’s a handy little attachment that runs on AAA batteries and lights up your toilet bowl. Installation seems easy, but it takes a little finagling. Read more...

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Google-backed exhibit shows robots just want to be friends. They promise.

Robots aren't plotting an imminent human take-over; robots are our partners and friends. That's the broad theme of a Google.org-backed robotics exhibit coming soon to Chicago. 

Robot Revolution features cutting-edge bots that can climb up and down ladders, solve a Rubik's cube at lightning speed, compete in a soccer match, mimic your facial expressions, make "eye" contact, and, in the case of the furry seal robot PARO, respond to human touch. 

SEE ALSO: Toyota's new robotic leg brace will help stroke patients walk again

The exhibit first premiered at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry in 2015, then traveled to Denver and Philadelphia. Now it's back with even more robots and support from Google's philanthropic arm and Boeing, the aircraft and rocket manufacturing giant.  Read more...

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Merriam-Webster thinks Apple lovers are sheeple

Merriam-Webster defines its new word, "sheeple," as those who are "easily influenced." 

I'm sure plenty of groups of people qualify as said "sheeple." I, for example, am easily influenced by any shop selling doughnuts, and I'm sure many people are like me. But the dictionary chose Apple fans as its mental image.  

SEE ALSO: Wake up, sheeple: Your favorite political insult is now officially a word

Here's their example:

Are you an iPhone owner with a battery case worth about $100? Then you, my friend, have made it to the dictionary. 

Perhaps it's not the greatest accomplishment, but please take solace in knowing we are all sheeple in our own ways.  Read more...

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Here's Mark Zuckerberg totally 'not' campaigning in Indiana

In our latest installment of "No, really, Zuck is honest-to-god not running for political office," we find Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg taking a ride around South Bend, Indiana, with Mayor Pete Buttigieg. 

SEE ALSO: Harvard dropout to give Harvard commencement speech

Zuckerberg is calling this yet another stop in his 2017 personal challenge to "get out and talk to more people about how they're living, working and thinking about the future."

During the drive, which is broken up into two parts, most of the talk focuses on the city's blighted areas and what the mayor is trying to do to help the area thrive.  Read more...

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It's the end of the line for Yik Yak

Yik Yak has been on its last legs for a while, and now the end is officially here. 

The anonymous, location-based messaging app that rose to popularity in 2014 will "begin winding down" over the next week, Yik Yak co-founders Tyler Droll and Brooks Buffington wrote in a blog post Friday.

Square — yup, the Jack Dorsey-led payments company — acquired some of the Yik Yak engineering team for $1 million. Unsurprisingly, Square didn't want the app. 

Yik Yak was once valued at $400 million and raised $73.5 million in venture funding. Then, it was plagued by cyberbullying on its platform and a dropoff in interest among the college and high school students who used it.  Read more...

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"Switch On" is a dream space for fans of synthesizers and vintage electronics

In Austin, Texas a small shop called "Switched On" sells and repairs a wide range of synthesizers. Michael Stein, composer of the Stranger Things theme, used to fix synthesizers at this shop. Read more...

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Snowden takes a bow for whistleblowing after NSA pulls back surveillance

Edward Snowden felt a little bit of vindication Friday. 

People said speaking up isn't worth the risk. Today, we can see they were wrong. Blow the whistle, change the worldhttps://t.co/GfwPn2ICYX

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) April 28, 2017

Before Friday, the NSA had a policy of sucking up texts and emails exchanged between Americans and people outside the U.S., with impunity, if those communications even mentioned non-American targets of NSA surveillance. The agency did not require a warrant to collect this information.

SEE ALSO: Edward Snowden weighs in on WikiLeaks CIA dump

But the NSA announced Friday that it would no longer participate in this form of collection. Snowden counted that as a win for whistleblowing.  Read more...

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This Week in Space: Cassini, the James Webb Space Telescope, and Bricks

There's good news for NASA, bad news for Cassini, and what on earth do bricks have to do with space?

The post This Week in Space: Cassini, the James Webb Space Telescope, and Bricks appeared first on ExtremeTech.

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This week in apps: Instagram hits 700 million, Apple's new music deal, and more

3 shower speakers to upgrade your shower time

Which shower speaker should you buy? We put three to the test to find the best one out there. Up for review: the Memorex Bluetooth Splash-proof Speaker, the UE Roll 2, and the Altec Lansing H2O. Read more...

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Trump's big EPA website change should make you furious

Yet another fear among scientists and climate activists has become reality in the era of Trump.

Years of research and data about carbon emissions, other greenhouse gases, and more was hidden from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency website by the Trump administration Friday as the climate change webpage goes under "review." 

Adding insult to injury, this comes on the eve of the People's Climate March. 

Climate change activists have been wringing their hands ever since Inauguration Day, fearing that the new administration would do something just like this. The EPA has been chipping away at climate change mentions on its website since January, but Friday's takedown seems to be the biggest step yet.  Read more...

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The NSA's massive surveillance operation is now just a little less massive

The NSA's spying program is still vast, but it's now a touch more restricted.

The agency has long collected texts and emails sent to and by Americans if those electronic communications contained the names of folks whom the NSA was conducting surveillance on, but that's no longer the case. 

SEE ALSO: Get creeped out by this tense trailer for the new WikiLeaks documentary

This, as the New York Times reported Friday, is a significant rollback of a surveillance program that privacy advocates have railed against since a series of NSA spying programs and mechanisms were revealed in 2013. 

The main issue many privacy advocates had: The spying didn't require a warrant and was based on the content of the message rather than the people having the digital conversation.  Read more...

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Whoops. Millions of Android phones are wide open to hackers

All is not well in Google Play. 

A group of researchers has determined that hundreds of apps in the store have a gaping security hole that potentially allows hackers to implant malware and steal data from millions of Android smartphones. 

According to a paper detailing the alleged flaw, the problem lies within apps that create open ports on cellphones. This is a known and understood problem with computers, but hasn't before been systematically studied in smartphones. The University of Michigan team used a custom tool to scan 24,000 apps and found 410 potentially vulnerable applications — at least one of which has been downloaded millions of times. Read more...

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The Tesla Model 3 dashboard sure looks nice

Tesla Model 3s have yet to ship to customers, but that doesn't mean they're not already on California roads. 

An observant passerby spotted a blue Model 3 in the wild on April 27 being driven near the company's Palo Alto headquarters and managed to capture photos of the vehicle's interiorAs Teslarati reports, the pics appear to show the final version of the car's dashboard. 

SEE ALSO: Tesla plans to double its charging network by the end of the year

The large digital display located in the center of the dash  calls to mind Tesla CEO Elon Musk's refusal to put a speedometer behind the wheel. 

@nickg_uk No

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 28, 2017 Read more...

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Amazon wants to make Alexa sound like your human friends

Alexa is always there for those of us with Amazon's AI-enabled speakers, but when she speaks, sometimes it's hard to tell that she really cares. 

We're not saying we need to all fall in love with our smart assistants, Her-style, but hearing a little bit more warmth in Alexa's automated responses could make the human-AI overlord relationship so much better. Or, you know, just make us more comfortable allowing a sophisticated AI system to learn just about everything there is to know about us.

Fortunately, Amazon has heard our cries for machine validation, and the company is finally giving Alexa the capability to speak like the true AI friend she is. Read more...

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