Samsung has been given permission to start testing its self-driving cars on the roads in South Korea.
The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport approved Samsung’s plans to test its self-driving technology on Monday.
According to the Korea Herald, the company is using a customised Hyundai car for the tests.
Officials from the technology giant have denied the company has any intention of making cars.
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.
A battered news industry can find some flickers of hope in a survey that gauges public willingness to pay for journalism, as long as its leaders plan judiciously.
A little more than half of American adults regularly pay for news, through newspaper and magazine subscriptions, apps on electronic devices or contributions to public media, according to the Media Insight Project, a collaboration between the American Press Institute and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
Amazon’s Prime subscription service grew rapidly in the latest quarter as the company added more streamed content and free shipping for more items sold through its marketplace.
On Thursday, Amazon said that first quarter revenue from Amazon Prime rose 49% to $1.9 billion compared to the same period a year earlier.
IT’S OFFICIAL: THE country’s top regulator of the internet wants to end net neutrality. Specifically, Federal Communications Commission chair Ajit Pai plans to repeal changes that gave the agency the authority to enforce net neutrality protections—that is, rules requiring internet service providers to treat all internet traffic equally. But he won’t likely be able to do so without a big legal fight.
Over the past decade, China has emerged as a force to be reckoned with in the automotive universe. For most car makers, the Middle Kingdom is either first or second on its list of priorities. Thus, it is only fitting that the 2016-2017 auto show season would come to a conclusion in China’s most cosmopolitan city.
The Shanghai motor show presents Chinese consumers with an opportunity to see the latest and greatest offerings from around the world. At the same time, the world’s press has the chance to evaluate the newest developments from China’s growing contingent of automakers.
The 2017 Shanghai Auto Show is open to the public until April 28 at the National Exhibition and Convention Center.
The designers at Balenciaga must be big Ikea fans, because the French fashion house just unveiled a fancy new leather bag that looks strikingly like Ikea’s famous blue tote—though the price tag looks a whole lot different.
Balenciaga’s goes for $2,145. Ikea’s is just 99 cents.
This was too much comedy for Ikea to process silently. In Sweden, at the urging of its agency partner Acne, Ikea (via in-house shop Ikea Creative Shop) whipped up a print ad and a social post comically explaining to readers how to tell the difference between Balenciaga’s bag and Ikea’s.
“Boosting economic growth” is a bipartisan goal. In fact, both the 2016 presidential candidates mentioned some version of it on their campaign websites. One way to boost economic growth is to increase the number of people working, and one way to get more people working is to increase immigration. Economic evidence shows that, in addition to boosting economic growth, immigration leads to a positive impact on wages of native-born workers.
Evidence also suggests that immigration boosts innovation. A recent study by one of us looks at the effect of Jewish émigrés from Germany during World War II on American innovators and innovation. The study finds a significant increase in innovation—in fields entered by immigrants, there is a 30% increase in patents by domestic inventors. These benefits are driven at least in part by contacts between immigrants and native inventors. One of the mechanisms at play is that American inventors come into contact with new sets of ideas and methods that they then use for their own work.
It’s impossible to keep up with the nonstop news coverage and multiple storylines around the recent Wikileaks CIA dump. The initial Vault 7 data drop led to Assange’s press conference about “helping” private companies patch vulnerabilities, all while fear started to spread around the intelligence community listening in to our internet-connected Samsung TVs and Apple products at home, and Cisco disclosing that its routers and Internet switches had been hacked.
Most recently, CIA Director Mike Pompeo criticized WikiLeaks in his first public address since being confirmed, calling the organization a “non-state hostile intelligence service.” Pompeo makes an undeniable point about the far-reaching consequences of a leak such as this one — which, speaking from an intelligence perspective, is likely the most frightening yet.
Google, the internet’s biggest advertising company, may be building an ad blocker.
The search giant plans to roll out a feature in the next mobile version of its Chrome browser that would filter out certain types of ads, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday,
Such a tool seems at odds with the company’s primary revenue source, but Google thinks that it could actually deter people from resorting to other blockers in the long run, according to the report.
By targeting only the most disruptive ad formats — pop-ups, interstitials, and autoplay videos, for instance — the hope is that less people will be driven to third-party software. Google already ostensibly bans many of these types of ads anyway.
