Important announcements
Google built a fake city in California to test self-driving cars
Google’s self-driving car project, Waymo has been inviting reporters to show what their team has been working on, including a secret fake city near Silicon Valley built to test its fleet of robot cars. Waymo engineers have reconstructed intersections that have proven difficult for their self-driving cars to maneuver in the past, like a two-lane roundabout. The fake city called Castle also has a full collection of props like bicycles, skateboards, plants, kids’ toys, dummies, and of course, a lot of traffic cones, all of which are used to reproduce scenarios the robot cars might encounter in the real world.
You can read more here.
‘Onliner’ malware spambot targets 711 million email accounts
More than 700m email addresses, as well as a number of passwords, have leaked publicly thanks to a misconfigured spambot, in one of the largest data breaches ever. The data was available because the spammers failed to secure one of their servers, allowing any visitor to download many gigabytes of information without needing any credentials.
More info are available here.
Salesforce has developed a new AI system for talking to databases
Salesforce’s new AI system can take natural language questions and use those to query an SQL. The Seq25QL system can take a user question like “how many clients do I have in Florida” and the system can scan the database and return the answer, which could greatly streamline enterprise efficiency. Salesforce concurrently released the WikiSQL data set publicly so that data scientists can use the data to improve and train natural language queries.
You can read more here.
Top new products
LG V30
The phone will have Snapdragon 835 processor, 4 GB or 6 GB of RAM and dual rear cameras. It will come with a 3,200mAh battery and will be officially launched on August 31.
More info here.
Moto X4
The phone will have a 5.2-inch FHD AMOLED display, an Octa-core Snapdragon 630 processor and 4GB of RAM. It will come with dual cameras comprised of two 12MP sensors. One will be RGB, while the other one is meant for taking Monochrome pictures.
More info here.
Xiaomi Mi MIX 2
The phone will have Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 SoC, 6GB of RAM and a 6.4-inch QHD display. It will be launched on September 11 and will come with a 4500mAh battery.
More info here.
Top interesting info
Bitcoin hits a record price above $4,600
The price of bitcoin is now trading at its highest level ever. Bitcoin rose more than 6.5 percent, to a record high of $4,703.42, up nearly 70 percent for the month, according to CoinDesk. Meanwhile, bitcoin cash is trading at $580 per coin, and ethereum’s ether token, another cryptocurrency, is trading at $360.
You can read more here.
Google Flights has been updated with new features
A new tab under Google’s Flights search, called Flight Insights, now shows users tips to make your travel a little more cost-efficient, such as flying on a different day, landing in a different airport, or checking to see how airfares vary over time on a graph. Google will also expand map view to show nearby airports that might help save on flight costs.
More info can be found here.
Facebook will use AI to correct skewed 360-degree photos
Facebook will be using deep neural networks to analyze 360-degree photos to fix the image orientation for a better viewing experience, especially in VR. It’s still in a research phase for now, but, judging by some of their early results the method looks pretty promising.
You can read more here.
