What’s new
Facebook will open “community skills hubs” in Europe
Facebook will open three new centers in Spain, Poland and Italy to train people in digital skills. The “community skills hubs” will offer training in digital skills, media literacy and online safety to groups with limited access to technology, including old people, the young and refugees. The company plans to train one million people over the next two years. Also, Facebook will invest 10 million euros in France through its artificial intelligence research facility.
You can read more here.
Android may have native Wi-Fi Direct printing in the near future
Wi-Fi Direct is a peer-to-peer system that allows two Wi-Fi enabled devices (like a phone and printer) to connect directly to one another without the use of a router. A newly added code in the Android Open Source Project Gerrit, com.android.bips.p2p, includes a package that manages Wi-Fi Direct discoveries and connections, adds a user interface with menus for adding printers, selects saved printers from a list, and sends print jobs to them.
More info are available here.
New products
Alcatel 5
Alcatel 5 has a 5.7-inch display, an octa-core processor, 3 GB of RAM and 32 GB of internal storage. It comes with a 3000 mAh battery and Android Nougat.
More info here.
Xiaomi Mi A1
The phone has a 5.5-inch Full HD display, Snapdragon 625, 4 GB of RAM and 64 GB of storage. It comes with a 12MP main camera and a 5MP front camera.
More info here.
You might want to know about this
Google paid a researcher $112,500 for discovering an Android exploit chain
Google announced it awarded $112,500 to Guang Gong, a researcher who works for Chinese security giant Qihoo 360, for reporting an exploit chain which could be used to compromise Pixel mobile devices. This is the largest amount Google has ever paid as bug bounty.
You can read more here.
Twitter notifies those who retweeted Russian bots
Twitter says it sent email notifications to the accounts which followed, retweeted, or liked Russian bots during the 2016 U.S. election. An investigation found that 677,775 American users interacted in some way with Russian propaganda accounts.
More info can be found here.
Fun stuff
Pepper the robot was fired from his job at the grocery store
Pepper, a humanoid robot created by Japanese telecoms giant SoftBank, was put to work in Margiotta Food & Wine in Edinburgh for a week, helping customers with inquiries while at the same time attempting to offer some light entertainment. Unfortunately, he wasn’t very helpful because his answers are limited and the owner had to fire the robot.
You can read more here.
