Google Announces YouTube TV Streaming Service, Starts at $35/Month

At an event in Los Angeles today, Google unveiled YouTube TV. The service, which is not yet available or even ready to be demoed by press, is a live TV streaming service, similar to what you see from AT&T’s DIRECTV NOW and Sony’s PlayStation Vue. In addition to live TV, though, it offers access to the entirety of YouTube Red Originals, meaning its not exactly short on digital content. 

Priced at $35 a month, each account is granted up to six users, all of whom receive a catered viewing experience. At launch, YouTube TV will offer ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC, as well as about 30 cable channels. Not only that, but the service offers cloud DVR with no storage limits, support for using it on a variety of devices (Chromecast, tablet, Android, iOS, desktop, etc), all capped by no contracts or service agreements.

Channels Offered at Launch

youtube tv lineup

Above you can see the channels offered at launch. You will notice a few major omissions, including an HBO add-on (but you can already buy that separately), but maybe more importantly, a set of channels provided by Viacom and Turner Broadcasting, Without those, you won’t find access to Comedy Central, MTV, CNN, TBS, TNT, AMC, as well as A&E. While they won’t be part of the initial rollout, it’s still possible they will come at a later time, but who knows.

For sports fans, YouTube TV will indeed offer ESPN, plus regional sports networks like Fox Sports and Comcast SportsNet. That will be good for watching local NBA and MLB teams. YouTube adds that it has partnered with local TV stations, too, allowing viewers access to local sports and news based on where you live.

As for where it will be available, YouTube and Google gave no specifics. Currently, “YouTube TV will be available soon in the largest U.S. markets and will quickly expand to cover more cities across the country.” So, yeah, not much help there.

If you’d like to sign up for updates regarding YouTube TV, follow the link below. For additional details, follow the via link.

YouTube TV Link

Via: YouTube

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Amazon outage breaks large parts of the internet

If your favorite website or internet service isn’t accessible today, it’s probably not just you. Amazon Web Services’ S3 cloud storage is experiencing "high error rates" that have caused chaos among many of the sites that depend on AWS to work. Our own website is one of them, but the failure has also affected some or all of Giphy, Medium, Slack, Quora and a slew of other websites and apps you likely use. Some connected home devices aren’t working correctly, either. Even Amazon’s ability to report problems was broken for a while — the AWS dashboard wasn’t changing color because its issue was "related" to S3’s problems.

Amazon hasn’t explained exactly what went wrong or offered an estimated time of repair, although its status page has narrowed the outage down to a North Virginia location. We’ve asked Amazon for more info and will let you know if it can share additional details.

No matter what’s at fault or how long the outage goes on, the incident underscores a mounting problem: an increasing dependence on a handful of services to power large swaths of the internet. AWS and its rivals make cloud features viable for companies that can’t always afford to run their own servers, but they also increase the chances that a failure will affect many people. Unless the tech industry can find a way to diversify its online data sources, these internet-wide crises aren’t going away any time soon.

Via: TechCrunch, Bloomberg

Source: Amazon Web Services, BuzzFeed Tech (Twitter)

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What’s in Subway’s chicken? Hint: Maybe only 50% chicken

The chicken in Subway Restaurants’ chicken sandwiches may only contain around 50 percent chicken, according to an investigation by Canadian media outlet, CBC. The rest: soy.

The investigation involved DNA testing chicken sandwiches collected from five popular fast food restaurants. The rest of the sandwiches contained mostly chicken. But in testing, Subway’s oven roasted chicken and the chicken strips in its Sweet Onion Chicken Teriyaki sandwich clocked in with just 53.6 percent and 42.8 percent chicken, respectively. The results stood up after extra rounds of sampling.

Subway responded to the CBC in a statement:

SUBWAY Canada cannot confirm the veracity of the results of the lab testing you had conducted. However, we are concerned by the alleged findings you cite with respect to the proportion of soy content. Our chicken strips and oven roasted chicken contain 1% or less of soy protein. We use this ingredient in these products as a means to help stabilize the texture and moisture. All of our chicken items are made from 100% white meat chicken which is marinated, oven roasted and grilled. We tested our chicken products recently for nutritional and quality attributes and found it met our food quality standards. We will look into this again with our supplier to ensure that the chicken is meeting the high standard we set for all of our menu items and ingredients.

Among all the chicken sampled, there was a total of about 50 ingredients other than chicken identified. Each chicken sample averaged 16 ingredients. Some of the ingredients are expected, such as salt and other seasonings. But many were commercial preservatives and fillers.

One commonality was that they all had high levels of salt.

“People think they’re doing themselves a favor and making themselves a healthy choice [by eating chicken rather than other meat],” nutritionist and registered dietitian Christy Brissette told the CBC. “But from a sodium perspective you might as well eat a big portion of poutine.”

The full results on the percentage of chicken in the sandwiches is:

  • Subway Oven Roasted Chicken Sandwich: 53.6%
  • Subway Sweet Onion Chicken Teriyaki (chicken strips): 42.8%
  • McDonald’s Country Chicken – Grilled: 84.9%
  • Wendy’s Grilled Chicken Sandwich: 88.5%
  • A&W Chicken Grill Deluxe:  89.4%
  • Tim Hortons’ Chipotle Chicken Grilled Wrap: 86.5%

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Trump Aims To ‘Eliminate’ Clean Water Rule

A small pond serves as the water source for a cattle ranch in Tallula, Ill. The 2015 Waters of the United States rule, or WOTUS, expanded federal protections to a broader range of water sources.

Seth Perlman/AP


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Seth Perlman/AP

A small pond serves as the water source for a cattle ranch in Tallula, Ill. The 2015 Waters of the United States rule, or WOTUS, expanded federal protections to a broader range of water sources.

Seth Perlman/AP

The Trump administration is moving to roll back an environmental rule intended to define which smaller bodies of water are subject to federal authority under the Clean Water Act.

President Trump signed documents Tuesday directing the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to review the Obama administration’s “Waters of the United States” rule. In doing so, Trump said he is “paving the way for the elimination” of the rule.

Supporters say the regulation is needed to ensure safe drinking water. But a long list of opponents say it goes too far and poses a burden on them. The rule is currently on hold after a stay by the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

“It was a massive power grab,” Trump said as he prepared to sign the documents, surrounded by a group of farmers, homebuilders, and county commissioners. “Regulations and permits started treating our wonderful small farmers and small businesses as if they were a major industrial polluter. They treated them horribly.”

But as NPR’s Greg Allen has reported, “overturning the rule isn’t something that can be done through executive order. The EPA would have to restart the lengthy rulemaking process, according to Jon Devine, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council.”

When the Clean Water Act passed in 1972, it defined waters that would need protection from pollution as “navigable.” For most of us, that means big enough to float a boat. Over the years, though, it became clear that smaller streams and wetlands needed protection as well, especially those that feed into rivers and lakes that provide drinking water. But Congress and successive administrations tried, and failed, to clarify exactly which waters were subject to the act. The Army Corps of Engineers interpreted the act differently in different regions of the U.S., and courts only added to the confusion.

The Obama administration tried once and for all to settle the question with the Waters of the United States rule in 2015. At the time, it was hailed by the Obama administration as protecting the water supply for about 117 million Americans.

But it faced heavy criticism and lobbying against the rule from farmers, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, real estate developers and golf course owners, among others.

Owen McDonough of the National Association of Homebuilders says a developer who buys a rural piece of land “is all of a sudden faced with jurisdiction waters, and then he has to secure federal permits, and offset his impacts.” He says builders must hire expensive environmental consultants to get those permits.

Last August, then-candidate Trump echoed that criticism when he addressed the homebuilders association. It’s worth noting that Trump has a stake in the rule’s fate. As Greg Allen has reported, the Trump Organization has about a dozen golf courses across the U.S.

And the president’s new EPA chief, Scott Pruitt, sued the agency over the water rule when he was Oklahoma’s attorney general.

The American Farm Bureau Federation also launched a campaign called “Ditch the Rule.” In an ad featuring a farmer’s wife running barefoot in a field, it asserted that the Waters of the U.S. rule would force farmers to get a permit for every ditch or puddle on their land. The bureau also says the rule goes overboard by including so-called prairie potholes, which don’t have water in them year-round.

“The [Obama] administration really belittled a lot of farmers’ concerns,” says the Farm Bureau’s Don Parrish. He says growers who fail to get a needed permit could face heavy fines or even jail time.

But Ellen Gilinsky, a former EPA administrator who advised on the Waters of the U.S. Rule, says many such fears are overblown. She says the rule actually reduced the number of ditches that would require permits, and that both farmers and ranchers have numerous exemptions.

“I really think there’s a lot of blood shed over this rule that didn’t need to be,” Gilinsky says. “I think there’s an opportunity to take another look at it and bring everyone to the table and get a rule everyone can feel good about.”

Supporters of the Waters of the United States rule say states simply don’t have the resources to ensure healthy streams and clean drinking water on their own. Gilinsky says she hopes the Trump administration can finally get all sides to agree on which waters the federal government should protect.

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Volvo goes beyond automatic braking, adds automatic steering

For all the good that

automatic emergency braking

can do, it’s still limited by the direction the car is moving. Sometimes brakes aren’t enough and a collision may still be unavoidable if the driver can’t steer clear. But

Volvo’s

newest safety feature should help.

The Swedish automaker will introduce updated versions of its blind-spot monitoring system and City Safety suite of driver assists, as well as a new feature called Oncoming Lane Mitigation, on the new

XC60

.

The City Safety system primarily consists of automatic braking and detection of people, large animals and vehicles. With the addition of automatic steering, the system will be able to not only apply brakes to avoid a collision, but steer out of the way if the brakes aren’t sufficient. It works at speeds from 31 to 62 mph. And

Volvo’s

blind-spot monitoring system, which until now has simply alerted the driver to vehicles alongside, will also take advantage of automatic steering. If the car detects a vehicle in the lane the driver is steering toward, the car can apply opposite steering force to prevent hitting the car.

Unlike those two features, which are updates to existing functions, the Oncoming Lane Mitigation feature is all new. If the Volvo detects that the driver has crossed into a lane of oncoming traffic, it will be able to recognize oncoming vehicles and steer back into the correct lane. This feature works at speeds from 37 to 87 mph.

These emergency steering systems will be introduced on Volvo’s upcoming XC60 crossover. The XC60 will make its official debut at the

Geneva Motor Show

, along with details on availability. In the meantime, though, Volvo has provided a couple of teaser shots of the

crossover

, seen above in the gallery. Not much is shown, but it will have the similar square-shouldered, upright fascia and D-pillar taillights of its corporate cousins.

Related Video:

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The End Nears: $10,000 Robot Can Climb Stairs, Fences, Open Doors

minitaur-climbing-door-opening-robot.jpg
This is a video demonstration of the Minitaur quadruped robot developed by Ghost Robotics. The 13-pound robot stands about 10 inches tall, 16 inches long and can move over difficult terrain, climb stairs, fences, open doors, and is available for purchase for $10,000. Obviously, if any Minitaur robot climbs my stairs and opens my bedroom door at night, there’s going to be a problem. There’s also probably going to be a shit in the bed. Keep going for the video while I nail all my doors shut and put a cyanide capsule in my cheek.

Thanks to Sebastian, who’s inspired me to finish work on my robot apocalypse survival bunker this weekend.

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Cloudbleed Is a Problem But It Gets Worse

Huge security disasters like Cloudbleed are never fun. However, as more information about the newly reported vulnerability becomes available, we can understand how dangerous bugs stand to screw up the internet. Luckily, in the case of Cloudbleed, it’s not as bad as it could have been. But it’s not good, either.

Read more…

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