TLDR 2018-11-08

Samsung's foldable phone 📱, Zuckerberg snubs Parliament 🏢, electric mushrooms 🍄

📱
Big Tech & Startups

Zuckerberg rejects invite from international committee to give evidence on fake news (1 minute read)

Zuckerberg was invited to testify about fake news before the UK Parliament. Canada, Ireland, Argentina, and Australia also showed support for the invitation. Zuckerberg refused, and a Facebook spokesperson explained that he does not have time to talk to every country's lawmakers. UK MP Damian Collins says he is "very disappointed with Facebook's dismissive response," and has re-extended the original invitation saying "We say again: the hearing of your evidence is now overdue, and urgent...We call on you once again to take up your responsibility to Facebook users, and speak in person to their elected representatives."

This is Samsung's foldable smartphone (1 minute read)

Samsung unveiled its much anticipated foldable phone today. Google is officially supporting these new foldable devices with Android and have updated their developer guidelines on how to build apps for these new foldable devices. There's a gif of the phone actually folding in the article.
🚀
Science & Futuristic Technology

China's brightest children are being recruited to develop AI 'killer bots' (3 minute read)

31 of China's top students have been recruited straight from high school to begin training as AI weapons researchers. Each student will be mentored by two senior weapons scientists, one from academia and one from the defense industry. After four years, the students will enter Phd programs and eventually lead China's AI weapons program. One instructor says "We are looking for other qualities such as creative thinking, willingness to fight, a persistence when facing challenges. A passion for developing new weapons is a must...and they must also be patriots." Berkeley CS professor Stuart Russell expresses his concern at the program, saying "Machines should never be allowed to decide to kill humans. I hope all these students will begin their course by watching the movie Slaughterbots."

'Bionic mushrooms' that generate electricity created by scientists (1 minute read)

Scientists have 3D printed cyanobacteria and graphene onto a mushroom in order to produce electricity. Shining a light on the cyanobacteria will kickstart their photosynthesis, which causes them to give off a bit of electricity called "photocurrent". The graphene is able to conduct and collect the electricity, while the mushroom keeps the cyanobacteria alive (they are hard to keep alive outside of artificial conditions). Currently, an array of these mushrooms is enough to power an LED light, but we are still a ways off from powering larger electronic devices.

The UI Animation Newsletter (Newsletter)

This is a newsletter that's all about UI animation and motion effects. There are lots of tutorials for cool animation effects as well as design inspiration. Curated by Val Head, a design advocate at Adobe and author of Designing Interface Animation.

Google Is Said to Be Shopping for More Real Estate in New York (1 minute read)

Google is close to finalizing a deal to buy or lease a 1.3 million square foot office building in the West Village. The space is large enough to allow Google to hire an additional 8,500 workers. Google is also planning to expand its Chelsea market property by adding 300,000 square feet, which will allow for another 3,500 workers. It looks like Amazon won't be the only tech giant looking to expand in New York City.

Virtualbox 0-day (Github Repo)

So I've never quite seen anything like this, but a Github user (MorteNoir1) has apparently uploaded a 0-day vulnerability that allows attackers to break out of VirtualBox's guest accounts using some weird buffer overflow tricks. There are step by step instructions to reproduce the vulnerability and a demo video at the end. If you're into computer security, you'll probably think this is pretty cool.
Get the most important tech, science, & coding news in a free daily email. Read by +1,250,000 software engineers and tech workers.
Join 1,250,000 readers for