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A daily dose of today's top tech news, in brief.
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You need to hear this.
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Adobe announces an end to Flash, says support will end in 2020
Adobe today announced it will lay to rest its groundbreaking, but often derided Flash software at the end of 2020. Flash has been considered by many to be obsolete for years, bogging down systems and posing major security risks, especially to Windows users. The software was also declared by former Apple CEO Steve Jobs in 2010.
Well before Adobe made this announcement, several major tech companies have been making moves to phase Flash Player out of browsers, including Google Chrome, which began phasing Flash out in favor of HTML-5 last year. In Adobe's announcement, the company said that "open standards like HTML5, WebGL, and WebAssembly have matured over the past several years," negating the necessity for Flash.
Microsoft has also committed to phasing out Flash support by 2020.
Congress invites major tech CEOs to testify at net neutrality hearing
Congress has invited the CEOs of several major tech companies to testify before Congress to provide context and insight as the government works to define clear rules on internet regulation. Invitees include CEOs from Facebook, Alphabet, Netflix, and Amazon, who are all staunch supporters of net neutrality, as well as executives from Comcast and AT&T that have both lobbied to change existing the Title II classification for internet providers.
House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Greg Walden, who announced the hearing titled "Ground Rules for the Internet Ecosystem," said that he believes Congress is "closer than ever to achieving a lasting resolution. The time has come to get everyone to the table and figure this out."
The hearing will take place on September 7.
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But there's more going on in the world than that.
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Canadian courts ask Google to change global search results
In one of several major settlements leveled against Google by foreign governments, Canada's Supreme Court ruled that Google must take down search results for pirated content, not just in Canada, but worldwide. Though it is not generally possible to fight a ruling following a Canadian Supreme Court ruling, Google plans to take the case to court in the US, arguing the ruling infringes on Google's freedom of speech rights.
"We're taking this court action to defend the legal principle that one country shouldn't be able to decide what information people in other countries can access online," says David Price, senior product counsel at Google.
The case closely resembles a law passed last month in Germany mandating that media companies that operated in the country had to remove hate speech and illegal content within 24 hours to avoid fines of up to $57 million. Austrian courts also ruled that Facebook must take down hate speech targeting the nation's Green Party leader.
The EU is also hitting Google on multiple legal fronts, including a record setting $2.7 billion fine for what it calls unfair marketing practices, as well as the "right to be forgotten" that would extend well beyond EU borders.
Google, and other companies, face difficult decisions in whether to comply with these rulings, and it remains to be seen whether Google's attempt in the U.S. court system will succeed.
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And you can't not know this.
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Automated, all electric cargo ship to hit the Baltic Sea in 2018
Think self-driving cars are cool? How about self-driving, electric cargo ships? In what seems like a dream come true for environmentalists and Tesla fanatics everywhere, two Norwegian companies are teaming up to develop a short range, electric, autonomous coastal container ship.
The ship, named the Yara Birkeland, will hit the seas in 2018. At the beginning, the ship will be crewed, but will transition to largely autonomous operation by 2020. The ship will be responsible for short journeys down a fjord on Norway's Baltic Sea Coast, "feeding" cargo from factories to a larger port.
Though the development of autonomous long distance cargo ships remains a long way off, even the short distances the Yara Birkeland will be traveling will save 40,000 diesel truck trips every year.
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