Month: July 2019

Enlarge / A woman gets her temperature measured at an Ebola screening station as she enters Rwanda from the Democratic Republic of the Congo on July 16, 2019 in Goma. (credit: Getty | John Wessels)

A second case of Ebola has been detected in the bustling border city of Goma, further stoking fears that the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s now year-long outbreak will continue to thrive and spread.

Goma, a city of around two million people, sits on the border with Rwanda and acts as a busy transportation hub, running an international airport and overseeing around 15,000 border crossings each day.

The first case of Ebola in Goma earlier this month quickly prompted the World Health Organization to declare the outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). The organization says the risk of national and regional spread of the outbreak remains “very high.”

Enlarge / Your local police might like to interest you in this product. (credit: Amazon)

Amazon and its subsidiary Ring, maker of home surveillance equipment, have a very cozy relationship with law enforcement. So cozy, according to reports, that Amazon not only requires police departments it partners with to market its product, but the company writes the copy for them.

Gizmodo obtained emails and documents showing Ring pre-wrote messages used by police on social media and in press releases used in at least three states.

Ring also demands police departments in partnerships with it give the company final review on all its statements about Ring products, Gizmodo reports. That arrangement led to the city of Boca Raton, Florida waiting three weeks to announce a Ring partnership already in progress.

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  The new Android Auto. The big change is the system bar at the bottom, which can now show tiny app controls. Here are music controls. [credit: Google ]

Earlier this year at Google I/O, Google announced a big upgrade to Android Auto, its smartphone-powered car interface and competitor to Apple's CarPlay. Now, around three months later, the interface is finally rolling out to the general public via an app update. This version of Android Auto represents the interface's first major upgrade since its launch in 2014.

The biggest change to this new version of Android Auto is the way the bottom system bar works. The old version of Auto used the bottom bar kind of like a MacOS app dock. It housed shortcuts to your Maps, Contacts, and Music apps, but it also mixed in system-level navigation icons for "Home" the useless "car" screen. The new version does away with all that, sticking a home button on the left, a notification and voice command button on the right, and a middle section that keeps important controls at your fingertips.

On a smartphone, Android will spawn controllable ongoing notifications for things like currently playing music or Google Maps navigation, and the middle section of the bar kind of works the same way. If you're playing music and not on the music screen, you'll see music controls. If you're navigation and not on the maps screen, your next turn-by-turn direction will pop up instead. This is a big boost to the ability to multitask on the car display—just make sure you're paying attention to the road, too.

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  Ashleigh Cummings plays Vic McQueen, a "strong creative" with a gift for finding lost things. [credit: AMC ]

You may have missed AMC's evocative new horror series, NOS4A2, in the jumble of hotly anticipated movies and TV series over the past few months. It has largely flown under the radar in terms of media coverage, but this haunting fable of the high cost of supernatural gifts won over sufficient fans for AMC to already approve a second season—one week before the show's two-part season one finale aired.

(Some spoilers for the novel and series below.)

The series is an adaption of the 2013 award-winning horror novel of the same name by Joe Hill. Hill comes by his horror chops naturally; his dad is some obscure novelist named Stephen King. (Hill also created the fantastic comic book series, Locke and Key, about a mysterious Keyhouse filled with portals to other dimensions that can be opened by various keys. The beleaguered TV adaption project for that series is now with Netflix.)