The biggest acquisition of the year! AT&T acquires Time Warner for $85 billion; half of the US Internet was paralyzed yesterday | Lei Feng Morning News

The biggest acquisition of the year! AT&T acquires Time Warner for $85 billion

Sina Technology

AT&T and Time Warner announced that they have reached a definitive merger agreement. AT&T will acquire Time Warner for $107.50 per share in cash and stock. The total value of the transaction reached $85.4 billion, and the merger agreement has been unanimously approved by the boards of directors of both companies.

The deal will combine Time Warner's vast content library and content production capabilities with AT&T's extensive customer relationships, the world's largest pay-TV customer base, and strong TV, mobile and broadband distribution channels. Currently, AT&T has hundreds of millions of mobile and pay-TV customers, while Time Warner's media includes TV networks CNN, TNT, HBO channels, and film and TV studio Warner Bros.

After the transaction is completed, AT&T will be transformed into a media giant.

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Under attack! US East Coast websites are down

Yesterday morning, a friend who was watching the fun broke the news: most websites in the United States are no longer accessible.

Early yesterday morning, Dyn, a US domain name server management service provider, announced that the company suffered a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack on Friday morning local time, causing many websites to go down on the East Coast of the United States.

Let's take a look at the distribution map of affected areas. You can see that the red area is the downtime area.

Popular sites such as Twitter, Tumblr, Netflix, Amazon, Shopify, Reddit, Airbnb, PayPal and Yelp were not spared and none of them could be logged in.

The earliest attack began just after 7 a.m. Friday (7 p.m. Friday Beijing time), disrupting Dyn operations for about two hours, and was followed by a second attack a few hours later, causing further disruption.

At about 4:30 a.m. Beijing time on Saturday, Dyn was attacked for the third time. Dyn said that the attack was launched by devices infected with malicious code from tens of millions of IP addresses around the world, and the source of millions of malicious attacks was the so-called "smart" home products connected to the Internet of Things.

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Rumor has it that a new buyer for Twitter has emerged, this time it's Masayoshi 's SoftBank

BI Chinese website

There are rumors that the social network Twitter is being acquired again.

The news sent Twitter shares up 7% during regular trading hours on Friday, suggesting investors are still hopeful that the struggling social media company could be acquired.

Japan's SoftBank is presumed to be the latest buyer of Twitter, but the source of this merger speculation is unclear.

Barron's Tech Trader Daily blog mentioned the merger rumor, but found that the news came from the financial website Flyonthewall. However, Barron's mentioned that Flyonthewall's news came from conversations between traders and did not give any specific sources.

In other words, judging from the information currently available, this acquisition rumor may just be speculation. Flyonthewall pointed out that no evidence could be provided for this rumor, but it did mention that it would affect Twitter's stock price.

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New York State officially bans Airbnb short-term rentals

According to foreign media reports, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo recently officially signed a ban bill against the online short-term rental platform Airbnb.

Once the legislation takes effect, hosts who continue to advertise short-term accommodation (rental periods of less than 30 days) through Airbnb will be fined $1,000 for the first offense, $5,000 for the second offense, and $7,500 for the third offense, which will effectively end Airbnb's business in New York State.

It should be noted that such short-term rentals will still be allowed if the landlord also lives in the rented apartment, because it means that the landlord is only renting out a room or a bed space, but this still causes concern among many people.

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First interactive swarm robot unveiled

Zhongguancun Online

Recently, at the UIST conference held by the Association for Computing Machinery, the cute micro robots "Zooids" were unveiled, which amazed netizens. These little guys can work together like ants to complete some simple tasks, such as moving your phone or forming a group of dial pads.

This is the first interactive group robot. Compared with the rough industrial robots and toy-like educational robots, these little guys will have a bright future. of The application space seems to be very large.

The robots are considered the first swarms of interactive robots, small, high-speed robots that work together like ants to display information or move objects.

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UK demonstrates driverless cars that can "communicate with each other"

According to foreign media reports, the UK recently saw the first autonomous vehicle that can "communicate with each other". Companies involved in the development of this autonomous vehicle technology include Jaguar Land Rover, Ford, Tata Motors European Technical Center (TMETC) and multinational consulting firm Arup. In the demonstration, when one of the cars suddenly braked, the drivers of other vehicles were able to receive a reminder.

In addition, vehicles can also inform each other of traffic light information, which will allow vehicles to adjust their speed and avoid red lights as much as possible. These technologies will help improve traffic congestion and effectively reduce automobile exhaust emissions.

Tim Armitage, Arup's UK Autodrive project leader, said: "Cars that can 'talk' to each other will bring significant benefits to the surrounding environment. This will not only improve road safety and parking efficiency, improve traffic congestion, but also provide more useful information to drivers."

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Charging drones in the air is no longer a distant dream. British scientists have done it.

cnBeta

Scientists at the Imperial College of London recently found a way to charge drones in the air. This technology concept has actually existed for more than 100 years. In theory, you only need to have a car on the ground to charge drones in the air, allowing the aircraft to continue flying in the air. In the future, this technology may have great industrial application prospects.

How did they do it? Scientists used a technique called "inductive coupling," a concept that inventor Nikola Tesla demonstrated more than 100 years ago. Using electronics, two copper coils can be tuned to each other to wirelessly exchange power at a specific frequency. Scientists have been experimenting and proving the technology for decades, but they haven't developed wireless power transmission over the air.

Now, scientists at Imperial College London have made a breakthrough by removing the battery from a mini drone and wirelessly powering it using inductive coupling technology. Scientists believe this is the first time that a flying object, such as a drone, has been charged wirelessly.