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21st Century Fox is buying UK’s Sky in $14.6 billion deal

Following talks last week , 21st Century Fox has agreed to buy Sky, the UK’s largest pay-TV network, for £11.7 billion ($14.6 billion). The UK-based pay-TV broadcaster and broadband provider counts nearly 22 million subscribers in the UK, Ireland, Italy, Germany and Austria. That’ll give Rupert Murdoch’s Fox a delivery platform for content from its 20th Century Fox movie studio and Fox TV network, along with cable TV channels like FX, Fox Sports and National Geographic. The deal “creates a global leader in content creation and distribution, enhances our sports and entertainment scale, and gives us unique and leading direct-to-consumer capabilities and technologies, ” 21st Century Fox said in a statement . As part of the deal, Sky headquarters will stay in London and continue a £1 billion ($1.25 billion) expansion of its headquarters. Rumored talks last week valued Sky as high as £18.5 billion ($23.2 billion). The Rupert Murdoch-owned media empire already owns 39 percent of Sky and tried to buy the remaining shares back in 2010. However, the company abandoned the attempt after several of the company’s tabloids became embroiled in a the so-called phone hacking scandal. With Brexit significantly weakening the pound, Sky has become significantly cheaper for US-based Fox, making it ripe for an acquisition. Source: 21st Century Fox

Alaska Airlines and Virgin America Are Merging, Here’s What It Means for You

Alaska Airlines and Virgin America are coming together to form the fifth largest U.S. carrier, and if you fly either airline often their merger means a few changes for you. Here’s what you can expect. Read more…

The Feds Want All New Cars To Talk To Each Other By 2023

The U.S. Department Of Transportation and automakers have been testing the concept of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication for years. Today the agency said it’s getting serious about having cars talk to each other for safety, and has proposed specific rules and methods that would force automakers to load vehicles with this tech on all new vehicles by 2023. Read more…

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The Feds Want All New Cars To Talk To Each Other By 2023

I’m Not Sure Who Won This Octopus vs Eel vs Human Fight

Hot damn. A snorkeler in Hawaii stumbled on this underwater scrap between an octopus and a terrifying moray eel and it looks like it’s going to be a tangled fight to death. The moray eel looks like it has the clear advantage because, well, it’s a big ass bully with the octopus in its jaws but after a few whips around, the octopus grapples the eels with its tentacles and then unleashes an ink bomb in time to confuse the eel and escape. Phew. Read more…

Slack now has built-in video calling

Slack’s quest to become a do-it-all chat app continues. The company is trotting out video calling support in the Mac, Windows and Chrome versions of its client, making it easy to see a coworker or catch up with a friend. Anyone can start a one-on-one chat, while those on paid plans can have calls with as many as 15 people at once — handy for virtual meetings where your voice isn’t enough. This isn’t exactly a revolutionary feature by itself, but Slack adds its signature emoji responses to let you raise your hand or offer approval without interrupting the discussion. You can still tell the app to default to using third-party video services like Google Hangouts, so you’re not locked into Slack’s software. The feature should reach desktop users in the “next few days.” Mobile users aren’t left completely in the lurch, but they won’t get the full experience, unfortunately. They can join an active video call, but only on the audio side. There’s no mention of whether or not video calls are coming to mobile, but that’s likely given Slack’s tendency to mirror features across platforms whenever it can. The upgrade isn’t exactly coming out of left field. Facebook already has a Slack competitor in Workplace , and Microsoft has been signalling that it’s eager to take on Slack with a Skype upgrade. Video calling could keep you from considering rival apps, whether it’s just for video chats or for a wholesale switch. Via: The Next Web Source: Slack

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Slack now has built-in video calling

Recreating a 17th Century Painting in Photoshop Is Basically Magic

Using stock images and Johannes Vermeer’s 1664 painting The Concert as a base, photographer Erik Almas admirably recreated the lost masterpiece in Photoshop. Heck, it might be able to fool you into thinking it were the real thing… if you were standing and squinting from very far away. Still. It’s pretty neat to see Almas’ workflow and how creative he gets in trying to mimic the original. Read more…

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Recreating a 17th Century Painting in Photoshop Is Basically Magic

The International Space Station’s network bandwidth will be doubled by new upgrades

The internet connection on the International Space Station and other platforms in orbit is getting a serious upgrade that will double its capacity, NASA announced today. But they aren’t sending up a new router or satellite; the improvements are mainly terrestrial. The ISS and dozens of satellites rely on the Space Network, a more or less unified architecture for sending large amounts of… Read More

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The International Space Station’s network bandwidth will be doubled by new upgrades

Microsoft Will Soon Start Bundling Drivers With Windows Store Games

Microsoft will start bundling drivers with Windows Store games to improve the performance of the game once downloaded. A report on Thurrott adds: This will work by the game download trigging Windows Update to acquire the minimum driver requirements to make sure that application works as intended. This may perturb some users who like having complete control over the driver updates for their hardware as this auto-download mechanism will overwrite the existing installation of the driver. Of course, you can still roll-back the update but hopefully Microsoft gives us a way to stop the auto-download of the driver via the Windows Store when this feature arrives. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Microsoft Will Soon Start Bundling Drivers With Windows Store Games

First Version of Sandboxed Tor Browser Available

An anonymous reader writes: To protect Tor users from FBI hacking tools that include all sorts of Firefox zero-days, the Tor Project started working on a sandboxed version of the Tor Browser in September. Over the weekend, the Tor Project released the first alpha version of the sandboxed Tor Browser. “Currently, this version is in an early alpha stage, and only available for Linux, ” reports BleepingComputer. “There are also no binaries available, and users must compile it themselves from the source code, which they can grab from here.” The report notes: “Sandboxing is a security mechanism employed to separate running processes. In computer security, sandboxing an application means separating its process from the OS, so vulnerabilities in that app can’t be leveraged to extend access to the underlying operating system. This is because the sandboxed application works with its own separate portion of disk and memory that isn’t linked with the OS.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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First Version of Sandboxed Tor Browser Available

Disney IT Workers, In Lawsuit, Claim Discrimination Against Americans

dcblogs quotes a report from Computerworld: After Disney IT workers were told in October 2014 of the plan to use offshore outsourcing firms, employees said the workplace changed. The number of South Asian workers in Disney technology buildings increased, and some workers had to train H-1B-visa-holding replacements. Approximately 250 IT workers were laid off in January 2015. Now 30 of these employees filed a lawsuit on Monday in U.S. District Court in Orlando, alleging discrimination on the basis of national origin and race. The Disney IT employees, said Sara Blackwell, a Florida labor attorney who is representing this group, “lost their jobs when their jobs were outsourced to contracting companies. And those companies brought in mostly, or virtually all, non-American national origin workers, ” she said. The lawsuit alleges that Disney terminated the employment of the plaintiffs “based solely on their national origin and race, replacing them with Indian nationals.” The people who were laid off were multiple races, but the people who came in were mostly one race, said Blackwell. The lawsuit alleges that Disney terminated the employment of the plaintiffs “based solely on their national origin and race, replacing them with Indian nationals.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Disney IT Workers, In Lawsuit, Claim Discrimination Against Americans

Ken May

Author: kenmay