South Korean train passengers no longer need risk the embarrassment of mistakenly implying a woman is pregnant. A pilot program uses wireless sensors to trigger a light when a pregnant woman approaches a seat. The ‘Pink Light’ program in Busan involves the women carrying a small beacon that runs for six months on a single […]
The latest update for The Sims 4 has removed all gender boundaries that affect the appearance and behavior of a character. The makers say the changes are “to make sure players can create characters they can identify with or relate to.” According to Maxis, more than 700 content pieces that were once restricted to a […]
A Google artificial intelligence project has written a mediocre piano melody. It’s definitely a case of the process being more interesting than the product. The project, Magenta, is part of Google Brain which is the company’s machine learning department. Magenta is an attempt to advance machine learning beyond understanding content to creating art and music. […]
Periscope is to ask users to act as a “flash jury” to decide if comments are abusive. There’s no word on whether parent company Twitter will adopt the idea. The move is designed to deal with the problem of navigating the spectrum between clear-cut cases of abusive content, more debatable cases, and incidents where the […]
Four major tech firms have agreed to remove hate speech from social media and similar services within 24 hours of it being reported. The move, which comes in a European code of conduct, will only apply to content which breaks the law. That limitation means it could be a tricky subject deciding what material comes […]
A US government report has revealed that the Pentagon uses floppy disks as part of the communications network used for issuing nuclear strike commands. The revelation is part of an urgent call for the government to update its ageing technology. The disks in question aren’t the 3.5″ ones in a rigid case that many of […]
Microsoft and Facebook are to build a 4,000 mile transatlantic cable to give themselves a leg-up on data transfers. It follows a similar move by Google. The cable will run from Bilbao on the northern coast of Spain to Virginia. Most such cables run via New York, but Facebook is one of several companies with […]
Google reportedly plans to draw public attention to manufacturers that take too long to roll out Android updates. It may publicly release an internal ranking of which companies lag behind. One of the big drawbacks of Android being an open system that can be modified and implemented in many ways (and on varying hardware) is the […]
A major electronic ink company says its found a way to produce life-like color displays. The catch is that for now at least it’s more suited to signs than e-readers. The news comes from E Ink, the company that first commercialized electronic ink and created the screens for several early e-reader models including some Kindles. The […]
A British university says courts could one day use virtual reality to let jurors “visit” a crime scene. There’s no sign of the technology being adopted any time soon however. Dr Caroline Sturdy Colis will lead a project using chromakey (green screen) displays and VR headsets produced by Valve to recreate a scene. The idea would […]