Day: November 8, 2017

Waymo is first to put fully self-driving cars on US roads without a safety driver

Dianne Jacobs

Waymo, the autonomous vehicle division of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, reached an important milestone recently: since mid-October, the company has been operating its autonomous minivans on public roads in Arizona without a safety driver — or any human at all — behind the wheel. And starting very soon, the company plans to invite regular people for rides in these fully self-driving vehicles. The news that Waymo’s vehicles have been on public roads with no human in the driver’s seat was announced today by the company’s CEO John Krafcik at a…

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Facebook testing a new method to prevent revenge porn that requires uploading your nudes

Dianne Jacobs

Facebook is testing a new method to combat revenge porn in Australia, the Australia Broadcasting Corporation reports. The strategy entails uploading your nude photos or videos to Messenger in order to help Facebook tag it as non-consensual explicit media. The company is doing this in partnership with Australian government agency e-Safety in order to try to prevent people from sharing intimate images without consent. If someone fears they are at risk of revenge porn, they can contact e-Safety. The organization might then tell them to send a nude photo of…

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Twitter officially expands its character limit to 280

Dianne Jacobs

Twitter has expanded its character limit to 280 to all users in supported languages including English starting today. The company had first announced the plan to move beyond its traditional 140 characters back in September, noting at the time how a longer character count allowed users to express more of their thoughts without running out of room to tweet. The expansion was initially available to a select group of Twitter users as a trial. At the time of its original announcement, the company cited data backing up its decision that referenced how…

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