You can now register for Google I/O 2017!

Registration for Google’s developer conference is now open!

Last year, Google Allo, Duo, Assistant and Home were announced at Google I/O 2016, and that was just at the keynote. The annual developer conference is full of interesting pieces of news, but the real reason it exists is for developers to learn how to build great apps and experience for the Android and Chrome platforms.

This year, with rumors swirling about Andromeda, Fuschia, and whatever else Google has in store for the future of Android, Google I/O is sure to be an excellent time.

And now it’s officially open for registration! As with last year, the conference is in May — May 17-19, to be specific — at Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, California, home of Google’s own campus (in fact, the Amphitheater is just a few miles away). Registration is open from today, February 22, until February 27 at 5PM PST.

As with previous years, too, the draw is random, so it doesn’t matter when you apply in the process; Google will begin picking people as of February 28. This year, though, the price of a general admission ticket has risen to $1,150, up from $900 in 2016. Academic tickets are still relatively reasonable at $375.

If you’re applying to attend Google I/O, let us know — and good luck! We’ll see you there.

Register for Google I/O 2017

Here’s every bit of the LG G6 prior to the announcement

Well, there it is. After leak upon leak, there is now very little left to learn about the LG G6.

Thanks to prolific leaker, Evan Blass, you now know exactly what the LG G6 will look like. As predicted, it’s got tiny bezels, two cameras, presumably of different focal lengths, and a fingerprint sensor on the back. That’s what we can see in this render.

Aside from that, we’ve learned that the phone will have a 2:1/18:9 aspect ratio, along with waterproofing, (unfortunately) a Snapdragon 821 processor, and perhaps a larger battery than the 2800mAh cell on the G5 because… drum roll please it’s sealed in.

Now that the full picture of the LG G6 is coming into focus, are you more or less excited than before? And what would it take for you to pick one up over a Galaxy S8, which is presumably coming just a month later with a considerable faster processor and similarly slim bezels.

LG G6

• LG G6 rumor roundup
• LG forums
• All the LG G6 news
• What the LG G6 needs to succeed

This is what the Huawei P10 flagship phone will look like in full black

Huawei is getting ready to show off a new phone, and thanks to a new leak, we know how it will look in full (and in black).

Evan Blass, who has a good track record when it comes to leaking mobile news via his Twitter handle @evleaks, has posted a new render of the upcoming Huawei P10, and it’s one of the clearest looks we’ve seen of the device yet. The renders reveal the frontside, backside, dual rear-facing cameras, red power button on the side, and more in brilliant detail. Keep in mind the P10 is rumoured to be the “most expensive ‘P device’ ever”.

• Mobile World Congress 2017: Nokia, Sony, Huawei, and more

Huawei tends to announce its “P” flagship in April, and its Mate series in the latter half of the year, but the company has already teased that it will use Mobile World Congress 2017 in Barcelona for the Huawei P10, as well as the Huawei Watch 2. None of the specifications have been confirmed by Huawei, but according to reports, it will feature a 5.2-inch QHD display, Kirin 960 processor, and 4GB RAM.

It might also have 32GB and 64GB storage options, and EMUI 5.0 overlaid on Android Nougat. Check out Pocket-lint’s rumour round-up to see what else it is expected to feature. Pocket-lint will be live at MWC 2017 to bring you the confirmed specs once they’re revealed.

Huawei P10. pic.twitter.com/7UNx2w5blW

— Evan Blass (@evleaks) February 22, 2017

Lawmaker: Chile and Texas don’t share a flag, y’all

The current roster of emojis includes many national flags, but not state-specific ones. So, left with few other options, people have taken to using the Chilean flag emoji (🇨🇱) to signify Texas pride. This makes sense considering how much the two flags look alike, but one Texas lawmaker has had enough.

Reuters reports that on February 16, State Representative Tom Oliverson filed a resolution that asks Texans to lay off using the emoji when talking about their home state. The legislation is polite, but calls on lawmakers “to reject the notion that the Chilean flag, although it is a nice flag, can in any way compare to or be substituted for the official state flag of Texas and urge all Texans not to use the Republic of Chile flag emoji in digital forums when referring to the Lone Star Flag of the great State of Texas.”

The language of the resolution doesn’t propose an enforceable law. Instead it’s more of a lighthearted plea for tweeters to stop mixing up the two flags. Oliverson doesn’t seem to be taking the legislation too seriously either, telling Reuters he “designed it be educational, kind of like a public service announcement.”

In emoji form, the Chilean flag looks a lot like The Lone Star Flag, but they’re not identical. The biggest difference is that while Chile’s flag has a blue square in the top left corner containing a white star, Texas’ has a blue bar on the left side with a white star in the middle. The flags are even similar in name — Chile’s flag is known in Spanish as “La Estrella Solitaria,” or “The Lone Star.”

This amusing resolution is further proof that, as we suspected, emojis are taking over the world. They’re getting their own movie, helping us order tacos and being incorporated into the bible. They’re beyond our control and language is dead.

Images: Mark Scott Johnson via Flickr (Chile flags, lead); Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons (Chile flag and Texas flag graphics)

Source: Reuters, LegiScan

‘Overwatch’ streamer destroys his in-game imposter

Brian St. James is called Kephrii in the competitive Overwatch scene, and he’s known as the highest ranked Widowmaker player in the world. He recently ran into a hacker impersonating his gamer tag and using cheats, but instead of getting mad, the real Kephrii got even. While streaming the match on YouTube, St. James showed off his skills by consistently killing the fake Kephrii, who played Widowmaker, then Tracer (two different character classes), on the opposing team.

In the recorded video, full of expletives and a fair amount of braggadocio, St. James talks to his teammates, asking for shields and calling out the enemy location. In between the two game rounds, the real Kephrii lets his teammates know what’s up. “Guys, he’s cheating,” says St. James. “I told you this; that Kephrii is cheating, he’s aim-botting.” The hacker is pulling off impossible shots with the help of aiming software on his gaming PC.

The combination of impersonation and facing a cheat has got to be maddening, and you can hear it in the terse way St. James responds to the threat. Both players get their shots in, though St. James seems to dominate the contest. In the final call, the real Kephrii gets the nod for best play of the game for his 5-player kill streak. “Can’t even be me with hacks bud,” he types into the chat window.

Via: Kotaku

Source: YouTube

‘Mass Effect’ gets raunchy in its new Cards Against Humanity pack

If your favorite part about Mass Effect is making jokes about the game’s wide-array of sexual paring options, you can skip Andromeda — Cards Against Humanity has announced a limited run Mass Effect expansion. Well, expansion is a bit of an overstatement. The terrible person’s favorite card game is selling 14 Mass Effect themed cards for $1 — and yes, most of them are poking fun at the series history of letting the player hook up with pretty much everyone.

That’s partially BioWare’s fault. According to Cards Agasinst Humanity’s Trin Garritano, the Mass Effect writing staff overwhelmingly favored cards with sex jokes. “We had to push through a few non-sex cards just to widen the appeal of the deck,” he told Polygon. “It was an incredible problem to have and I am still absolutely ticked by this.” Sounds about right. The new pack is available today, and will sell until stock runs out. Oh, and don’t worry about the expansion pack having Andromeda spoilers — apparently, Bioware wouldn’t let the CAH staff play it. Bummer.

Source: Cards Against Humanity

Google’s ride-sharing platform is expanding beyond the Bay Area

After successful tests of its casual carpool service in the Bay Area and Tel Aviv, Alphabet’s combination navigation app and ride-sharing platform Waze is ready to expand beyond its first two test markets. According to a new report from the Wall Street Journal, the Waze Rider companion app will launch new service in “several US cities” as well as Latin America over the next few months.

While Waze’s carpool service is likely to take a chunk of Uber’s business (which Alphabet is also invested in through it’s venture capital arm Google Ventures), the Waze approach to ride-sharing is a little more casual. As Waze CEO Noam Bardin told the Wall Street Journal, “can we get the average person on his way to work to pick someone up and drop them off once in a while? That’s the biggest challenge.”

Because riders are technically only reimbursing the driver for mileage, trips in the Bay Area are much cheaper than a comparable Lyft or Uber ride: $4.50 to get from Oakland to downtown San Francisco for Waze versus $10-12 minimum for the competition, according to the Journal. The downside is that Waze rides need to be booked further in advance and the service has a less consistent base of drivers. At the moment, riders only pay 54 cents per mile, all of which goes directly to the driver, but the company says it is planning to charge riders an extra 15 percent fee if the service catches on.

Although Waze has not yet announced which cities will be adding the service, any congested city with a large commuter population is a likely target. The service is already available in Tel Aviv, where Waze was originally based, but the Journal hints that further global expansion could come to São Paulo, Brazil and the service could eventually factor into Alphabet’s self-driving Waymo project as well.

Source: Wall Street Journal

New York City expands program linking students to tech jobs

If you ask New York City, the Tech Talent Pipeline is a shining star in its technology education efforts. The program helps students find internships and training that get them cushier tech jobs when they graduate, and it appears to be paying off — the average starting salary among participants has gone up 34 percent, and 96 percent of first-wave graduates landed jobs. Accordingly, the city is expanding the partnerships for the Pipeline to give more students a chance. The wider participation includes new schools, companies and charitable donations.

To begin with, the program is adding Lehman College in the Bronx. An alliance between Cornell Tech, CUNY and New York City companies will expand internship opportunities for women in computer science by 60 percent, while companies like the New York Times, Time Inc., Jet and Urban Outfitters are committing to either expanding or offering tech-oriented fellowships, internships and junior-level jobs. There’s also a total of $675,000 in renewed charitable commitments, $500,000 of it from JPMorgan Chase.

The expansion isn’t coming as a huge surprise. Mayor de Blasio is making a big push for more middle class jobs, and NYC’s burgeoning tech sector is a large part of it. Even a modestly expanded Tech Talent Pipeline program could keep that going by not only producing more qualified workers, but by giving companies an incentive to stick around instead of moving to more established tech havens like Silicon Valley.

Via: Daily News

Source: New York City

‘EVE Online’ is crowdsourcing the search for real exoplanets

EVE Online players will help scientists look for other planets from the comfort of their computer desks later this year. The game’s developer, CCP Games, is teaming up with Massively Multiplayer Online Science (MMOS), the University of Reykjavik and the University of Geneva to crowdsource space exploration within EVE’s virtual universe.

Players will hunt for planets outside of our solar system, called exoplanets, through a mini-game called Project Discovery. They’ll receive real-world astronomical data to study during space flights, which can take up to a few minutes depending on the distance between space stations. If enough players reach a comparative consensus on the data’s classification, it’ll be sent back to the University of Geneva to help refine its search. Michel Mayor, winner of the 2017 Wolf Prize for Physics and discoverer of the first exoplanet, will give a full presentation on the project during this year’s EVE Fanfest in Reykjavik, Iceland.

This is not CCP Games’ first foray into “citizen science.” EVE Online players used Project Discovery last year to contribute to the Human Protein Atlas. They helped scientists understand the role of proteins in the human body by analyzing patterns in images of human cells. That project yielded incredible results in a short amount of time, according to CCP Games. Over 25 million classifications of human cells were sent back to the database.

“In searching for the next dataset for our massive player community to tackle, the stars aligned for players to have the opportunity to directly contribute to the search for new planets with a world-renowned scientific team,” said EVE Online Executive Producer Andie Nordgren said in a statement. “Real people around the world collaborating in a virtual universe to explore the real universe is the stuff science fiction, and soon science fact, is made of.”

Source: CCP Games

YouTube and PewDiePie aren’t breaking up any time soon

It’s been a week since YouTube sensation Felix Kjellberg (better known as PewDiePie) had to face the music for the anti-Semitic jokes he made in several of his videos. In the fallout, PewDiePie lost his deal with Disney’s Maker Studios, but the bigger blow came from YouTube directly. The company cancelled his original series Scare PewDiePie and also removed his channel from Google Preferred. That platform aggregates YouTube’s top creators and makes it easier for brands to sponsor them. While PewDiePie can still run ads on his videos, his earnings will still likely be negatively affected.

However, despite the storm of outrage that surrounded YouTube’s biggest star last week, it seems PewDiePie may get out of this not much worse for the wear. He’s published five videos to YouTube in the last week, one of which was an apology for his tasteless jokes. Each of these has pulled in millions of views, just like normal. If his subscriber numbers have gone down, it’s been a drop in the bucket. He still has well over 53 million followers, making his channel the most popular on YouTube. To put it in perspective, megastars Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift have just 27 million and 21 million followers, respectively.

This massive popularity means that we shouldn’t expect to see PewDiePie abandon YouTube any time soon, despite the fact he was complaining about the platform even before last week’s dust-up. Similarly, YouTube didn’t take the stronger step of banning PewDiePie after his anti-Semitic videos, even though he probably did indeed violate the site’s terms of service. PewDiePie is too valuable to YouTube, and YouTube too valuable to PewDiePie for this couple to really break up.

Kjellberg said he made $7 million in 2014, and Forbes estimated that he made $12 million in 2015 thanks to his YouTube Red series as well as his book which came out that year. Even though his earnings will likely decline as a result of his YouTube breakup, it’s still good business for him to stay on the platform and keep doing what he does. In the short term, it doesn’t seem his popularity has been affected by all this bad attention. Indeed, his Facebook and YouTube pages are filled with the sort of “screw the haters” commentary you might expect from people who don’t mind Nazi jokes.

Sure, Kjellberg could head to a new platform and get some attention for doing so — Facebook, with its video push, would be a logical destination. But there’s no guarantee that his millions of followers would automatically follow him. He’d definitely suffer a viewership decline in the short term, and maybe forever. That translates into more money left on the table. As much of an issues as Pewds might have with YouTube, it’s probably not severe enough to go through the trouble and cost of establishing his brand somewhere else.

As for YouTube’s role in this, it’s no surprise that it dropped PewDiePie’s show and removed him from Google Preferred. But it’s also not surprising that the company didn’t take a stronger action. His channel isn’t just the most popular out there — it’s number one by a huge margin. (This list is unofficial, but it checks out — YouTube itself doesn’t publicly release its most popular channels.) The second-most popular channel, HolaSoyGerman, has 31 million followers. And PewDiePie’s is the only independently run channel in the top 10.

All this is to say that, like it or not, PewDiePie is a big deal — and that clout has helped him stay afloat through this controversy. YouTube might have banned a lower-profile user, but there’s an incentive for the company to have him stick around, even if he’s no longer officially endorsed. The company’s guidelines say that it prohibits “gratuitous violence, nudity, dangerous and illegal activities, and hate speech,” and you could certainly make the argument that PewDiePie’s “jokes” fall into that last category.

YouTube also says that it quickly removes flagged material and will terminate the account of repeat violators. While PewDiePie has included some tasteless Nazi references in now-deleted videos, it feels like YouTube cancelling his show came as a direct result of his video in which he hired a pair of Indian men from quick-task service Fiverr to hold a banner that said “Death to all Jews.”

YouTube declined to comment on specific moderation for specific accounts, but while the company would be within its rights to shut his channel down, banning the platform’s most popular user is no small matter. It would have made the controversy much more public and newsworthy and would have energized PewDiePie’s army of followers. It’s not hard to imagine YouTube being cast in the role of the overbearing censor stepping on free speech. What’s best for YouTube’s business here is to remove the offending videos, sever its professional relationship with PewDiePie and just move on.

That’s exactly what has happened, and it looks like things will be business as usual for both parties. At least for now: PewDiePie’s propensity for shooting his mouth off and attracting negative attention means YouTube is going to have to keep a close eye on him. The next time careless or insensitive video he posts could be bad enough that YouTube will have to make the difficult decision of banning its most popular creator. However, there’s enough money on the table that we’re guessing PewDiePie plays it straight for the time being.