| It is 4/20 so I have and will continue to receive many pitches referencing weed, tongue-in-cheek or otherwise. The most noteworthy offender so far might be T-Mobile, which actually put this in my inbox "Verizon Earnings on 4/20: A Joke T-Mobile Can't Pass Up" and forced the pun "VerHIGHzon" in the body text. Anyways lots of actual news, too, in The Daily Crunch for April 20, 2017. 1. Google could make ad-blocking a native, default feature on Chrome Google is strongly considering putting an ad-blocker in Chrome, and also making it set to 'on' by default on both desktop and mobile versions of the web browser. Blocking ads is an odd strategy for an advertising company, but Google basically seems to want to stop the worst offenders only, taking away those scummy, dangerous ads like whole page takeovers. The side benefit would be weakening the power of existing ad block solutions, many of which charge Google and others fees to be whitelisted. It could easily run afoul of regulatory watchdogs worried about antitrust, but at least a few people have pointed out that with the EU's troubles and Trump's White House, antitrust might not be as much of a worry as it once was. 
2. Facebook went even weirder than Spaces on Day 2 of F8 Facebook had a very busy F8 conference this year, but its second day event proved firmly within the realm of sci-fi. The company was talking about telepathic interfaces and devices that let you "hear" through skin. Slightly more down to earth were the 360-degree cameras it unveiled, but that's still kind of nuts, too. 3. Apple makes a promise to "eventually" use only recycled minerals Apple just made a commitment to use only recycled minerals, avoiding freshly mined ones. There's no timeframe on when that might happen, or even when it could become feasible, since mined minerals are core components of electronics like the iPhone. Still, Greenpeace lauded the commitment – though they take issue with the average iPhone's relatively short shelf life. 4. Verizon misses on Q1 Verizon, which owns TechCrunch via AOL, saw earnings fall short of analyst expectations today. The first quarter results included declines in overall revenue, in postpaid wireless subscribers, and in digital media earnings. No wonder it's open to the idea of getting bought by Disney or Comcast. 5. Shopify's new storefront tools let gamers unlock real world purchases Shopify has made it easy for mobile game developers to build stores into their apps, where people can buy real things, including t-shirts and branded swag. The store could potentially stock any kind of item, however, and different purchases could be tied to progress in the game, making for a whole new, bizarre kind of flash sales model. Top score unlocks the Yeezys! 6. GoPro pre-announces a 360-degree camera GoPro is building a 360-degree video camera called the Fusion that captures at high-resolution, and includes a feature for selecting a 1080p parcel of that spherical view for standard video format sharing. It's probably more generally appealing than the Omni, GoPro's pro-level multi-camera mount, but it's also weird for them to pre-announce this early (maybe reassuring the market that they have product pipeline) and there's no price yet. 7. Tesla settles lawsuit with Aurora Tesla has settled a lawsuit against its former head of self-driving, Sterling Anderson, and the startup he co-founded with ex-Google self-driving CTO Chris Urmson. The settlement gets Tesla most of what it wants, according to the automaker, and Anderson says he's happy they can move on to developing innovative autonomous driving tech. | 
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