Need to make a new Gmail account but don’t want to deal with creating a mandatory Google+ profile to go with it? Don’t sweat it, because Mountain View’s removed that requirement to join its ailing social network, and once again signing up for the search giant’s email service takes you directly to the inbox without any fuss. As evidenced in marketing blog Wordstream‘s screenshot below, however, you’ll still need a G+ account if you want to futz around with the rest of Google’s services. Meaning, if leaving reviews for apps or media in Google Play and uploading videos to YouTube is totally your bag, you’ll have to take the plunge and “upgrade” your Gmail account regardless. Still, for those who just need to create a burner email address to give out to less-than-trustworthy websites, the process is a bit less annoying now.
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Remember when Apple introduced its EasyPay self-checkout feature in 2011, and everyone wondered “how can they really tell if a customer is buying something or just shoplifting?” According to the Scottsdale, AZ police, former college and professional basketball player Rex Chapman had the same thought and acted on it. They arrested the 12-year NBA veteran at 1:45 PM local time, after employees recognized him as a former player for the Phoenix Suns and tied him to a string of thefts. Chapman accused of committing seven instances of theft over a few months, snagging gear worth more than $14,000 and selling it at a local pawnshop for cash. All of this was allegedly done by picking up the items, pretending to use the self-checkout feature in the iPhone’s Apple Store app and then just walking out. Now Chapman is facing nine counts of Organized Retail Theft and five counts of Trafficking in Stolen Property — all of which are felonies — and we’re wondering if Tim Cook has another security issue that could use some attention.
[Image credit: ASSOCIATED PRESS]
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We’d heard that the US IPO for Chinese company Alibaba could be among the biggest ever, and it did not disappoint. Closing at a stock price of $93.89, it raised $21.8 billion for the company and is the biggest IPO in US history. According to Bloomberg, it could become the biggest ever (topping Agricultural Bank of China’s $22 billion IPO in 2010) if underwriters make use of an option to buy more shares, which market observers expect they will. Now that Alibaba has joined the club of recent tech IPOs like Facebook and Twitter and it has cash to throw around, many wonder if it will start acquiring smaller companies the way its Silicon Valley rivals have lately. Despite being mostly unknown in the US Alibaba is massive in China, operating sales platforms described as similar to Amazon, eBay and Paypal, and Reuters says it controls more than 80 percent of online sales there. Jack Ma (pictured above) founded the company in his apartment in 1999 and is now China’s richest man, personally worth some $18 billion as of market close, according to the Wall Street Journal.
[Image credit: PETER PARKS/AFP/Getty Images]
Austin, Seattle and Boston welcomed our Engadget Live tour this year with open arms and before we gear up for Engadget Expand, we’re heading to one more city: Los Angeles. Grab your free tickets and join us at the Belasco Theater on October 3rd at 7PM.
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Thinking about picking up a used iPhone on eBay? Shop carefully, friends: it’s apparently phishing season. The BBC is reporting some auction listings are redirecting to counterfeit eBay login pages — fronts for phishing scams designed to steal customer usernames and credit card information. The good news is that eBay isn’t technically hacked. The online marketplace allows sellers to use scripting to gussy up item listings. Cross-site scripting is generally not allowed, but these scammers are doing it anyway.
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Gravity. More than the name of a killer movie, it’s likely something we take for granted every single day. After all, nearly everything we do is reliant on the idea that stuff stays in place when we stop holding it. Astronauts don’t have that luxury, however, and when even simple tasks take a ton of effort, something relatively complex like using a 3D printer is even harder. Why would astronauts need one of those? Well, because stuff breaks in space, and replacing a busted part isn’t as simple as hitting Home Depot — just ask the crew of Apollo 13. To help get around that, the folks at Made in Space have designed a 3D printer that circumvents the lack of Earth’s gravity when used in orbit. Instead of molten filament essentially “stacking” on itself to form an object like it does planetside, according to The Verge, the Zero-G Printer liquid’s surface-tension holds a widget together.
Update: No launch tonight! Weather conditions forced a postponement. According to NASA, the next launch window is tomorrow night, on the 21st at about 1:52 AM ET.
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Still don’t believe man journeyed to the moon? According to NVIDIA’s recreation of the landing site, it definitely happened. But that’s not all we have on deck for the weekend. Read on for Engadget’s news highlights from the last 24 hours, including a review of a WiFi-enabled crock pot and personality analysis based on your Twitter feed.
Engadget Daily: NVIDIA tackles the moon landing, why Microsoft is buying ‘Minecraft’ and more!
You’re running late to a meeting, glaring at your wrist in disbelief that it’s fifteen minutes past the hour. Are you really that late? Lifting the watch to your ear you hear the all-too familiar tick of its internal mechanisms. Yes, it works — and you are indeed late. This scenario could soon be a thing of the past, mostly because the mechanical watches of tomorrow may not tick at all. Researchers at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne have created a new, silent oscillator that could potentially be used to make watches with fewer mechanical parts.
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Sure, we’ve seen apps that let you easily share files between your phone and PC. No biggie there. But the demo we’re about to show you is a tad more sophisticated than that. Over at MIT, two teams of researchers have developed a smartphone system called THAW, which allows you to share files and use the phone as a game controller — all by pressing the handset against your computer’s display. As you can see in the below demo video, for instance, it’s possible to transfer files onto the phone simply by dragging them where the phone is, as if it were just another folder on your desktop. Similar to what you can already do with NFC, you can press the phone against the screen, and walk away with whatever web page you had been looking at. (To be fair, iOS 8′s Continuity feature does that automatically.)
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We’ve seen robotics improve by (literal) leaps and bounds recently, but what about more nuanced things, like a fine sense of touch? Researchers at MIT and Northeastern University are showing off a new fingertip version of the GelSight sensor, a cube-shaped attachment that uses a camera and a sensitive rubber film to 3D map the objects they’re grabbing. That new level of precision, the team says, could lead to more independent robots that are better able to manipulate their environment.
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