According to a press release posted today, Netflix is planning to raise $2 billion to help fund new content, including "content acquisitions, production and development, capital expenditures, investments, working capital and potential acquisitions and strategic transactions." TechCrunch reports: The funds will be raised in the form of senior unsecured notes, denominated in U.S. dollars and euros, it said. This debt offering is the sixth time in under four years that Netflix is raising $1 billion or more through bonds, noted Variety, which was among the first to report the news. As of September[...]
Brendan Iribe, the co-founder and former CEO of Oculus, announced today that he is leaving Facebook. From a report: Iribe is leaving Facebook following some internal shake-ups in the company's virtual reality arm last week that saw the cancellation of the company's next generation "Rift 2" PC-powered virtual reality headset, which he had been leading development of, a source close to the matter told TechCrunch. Iribe and the Facebook executive team had "fundamentally different views on the future of Oculus that grew deeper over time," and Iribe wasn't interested in a "race to the bottom" in te[...]
Over the weekend, seven-time winner Jonas Neubauer showed up at the Classic Tetris World Championship in Portland, Oregon like he has every year since it moved there in 2011. Instead of adding another championship to his name, he finished in second place this time, bested by 16-year-old Joseph Saelee who went on an amazing three-game tear. From a report: "The kid played with pure heart, the most clutch Tetris that we've seen from anyone," Neubauer said after the dust had settled. "He just really had the ability, had the natural ability, and let it shine as bright as he could in his first tourn[...]
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon Web Services, followed Apple's lead in calling the for the retraction of Bloomberg's story about spy chips being embedded in servers. "They offered no proof, story kept changing, and showed no interest in our answers unless we could validate their theories," Jassy wrote in a tweet on Monday. "Reporters got played or took liberties. Bloomberg should retract." Apple CEO Tim Cook told Buzzfeed on Friday that the scenario Bloomberg reported never happened and that the October story in Bloomberg Businessweek should be retr[...]
An anonymous reader writes: Undoubtedly in response to this politically motivated sort of claptrap, SQLite has released their own Code of Conduct. From the preamble: Having been encouraged by clients to adopt a written code of conduct, the SQLite developers elected to govern their interactions with each other, with their clients, and with the larger SQLite user community in accordance with the "instruments of good works" from chapter 4 of The Rule of St. Benedict. This code of conduct has proven its mettle in thousands of diverse communities for over 1,500 years, and has served as a baseline f[...]
Brines suffused with the life-giving gas could offer hope for past and even present microbes on the Red Planet, according to a new study. From a report: New research suggests our neighboring world could hide enough oxygen in briny liquid water near its surface to support microbial life, opening up a wealth of potentially habitable regions across the entire planet. Although the findings do not directly measure the oxygen content of brines known to exist on the Red Planet, they constitute an important step toward determining where life could exist there today. Aerobic respiration, which relies o[...]
If it seems as though the app you deleted last week is suddenly popping up everywhere, it may not be mere coincidence. From a report: Companies that cater to app makers have found ways to game both iOS and Android, enabling them to figure out which users have uninstalled a given piece of software lately -- and making it easy to pelt the departed with ads aimed at winning them back. Adjust, AppsFlyer, MoEngage, Localytics, and CleverTap are among the companies that offer uninstall trackers, usually as part of a broader set of developer tools. Their customers include T-Mobile US, Spotify Technol[...]
An anonymous reader shares a report: You can add another big name to the list of phone makers found cheating on benchmarks. UL Benchmarks has delisted Oppo's Find X and F7 phones from its 3DMark charts after testing from itself and news outlet Tech2 revealed that both devices were artificially ramping up processor performance when they detected the test by name. Oppo acknowledged that it always stepped things up when it detected "games or 3D Benchmarks that required high performance," but claimed that any app would run full bore if you tapped on the screen every few seconds to signal your acti[...]
Two years ago, XPrize, which creates challenges that pit the brightest minds against one another, announced that it would give any startup or company $1 million that can turn thin air into water. This month, it announced that the challenge has been concluded. From a report: A new device that sits inside a shipping container can use clean energy to almost instantly bring clean drinking water anywhere -- the rooftop of an apartment building in Nairobi, a disaster zone after a hurricane in Manila, a rural village in Zimbabwe -- by pulling water from the air. The design, from the Skysource/Skywate[...]
Ever since Microsoft settled on a cadence of two feature updates a year -- one in April, one in October -- the quality of its operating system (taking into consideration the volume of bugs that emerge every few days) has deteriorated, writes Peter Bright of ArsTechnica. From the story: The problem with Windows as a Service is quality. Previous issues with the feature and security updates have already shaken confidence in Microsoft's updating policy for Windows 10. While data is notably lacking, there is at the very least a popular perception that the quality of the monthly security updates has[...]