Californians warmed to the idea of year-round daylight-saving time, approving an initiative that would urge state lawmakers to junk the annual springing forward and falling back. From a report: With 43 percent of precincts reporting Tuesday night, Proposition 7 was leading 61 percent to 39 percent. It's a long way from here to year-round daylight-saving time. First, the Legislature would have to approve it by a two-thirds vote. Then Congress would have to allow California to deviate from standard time when most of the rest of the nation shifts to it.

At its developer conference Wednesday, Samsung introduced its new Infinity Flex Display, a foldable OLED screen that can allow manufacturers like Samsung to create new, unique devices such as a phone that folds out to become a tablet-like device with a larger display. From a report: "The foldable display lays the foundation for a new kind of mobile experience," said DJ Koh, president and CEO of Samsung IT and mobile communications division, in a statement. "We are excited to work with developers on this new platform to create new value for our customers." Although the product shown Wednesday was just a prototype, the company plans to release a consumer product that features the technology in the coming months. In addition to creating the hardware, Samsung has partnered with Google to work on the software to make sure apps work seamlessly regardless of whether the display is folded in a "smartphone-like" mode or opened fully as akin to a tablet.

Samsung said Wednesday it was rolling out new voice-assistant features to challenge its U.S. rivals' dominance in AI. At its developer conference, where the company is also expected to unveil its first foldable smartphone, the company said it was fully opening its virtual assistant, called Bixby, to third-party developers and businesses for the first time. The move may help the company challenge incumbent players Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, and Google's Assistant.

Much of the assistant market is yet to be tapped, and it is the right time for developers to embrace Bixby, an executive said. The company said it is offering a no-trade off set of tools (what it calls Bixby Developer Studio) to developers to make use of Bixby. It's the first time any company is offering the full suite of tools that it uses to make its assistant to developers, the company said.

Further reading: VentureBeat.

A startup says it can replace donated eyes with 3D-printed corneas. From a report: Here's a futuristic problem that may not have occurred to you: If self-driving cars really catch on and the number of traffic fatalities plunges, so will the number of organs available for transplant. Currently, about 20 percent of donated organs come from people who die in car accidents. Luckily, there's a futuristic solution: 3D-printed organs.

This technology is far from ready for the clinic, as researchers are still trying to figure out how to print out complex tissue structures with blood vessels and nerves. But for one early indicator of progress in this field, look to the eye. Precise Bio, a North Carolina-based startup founded by several professors at the renowned Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, is working on bioprinting tissues for a variety of medical applications. The company just announced that its first products will be for the eye -- starting with a human cornea suitable for transplantation. "We plan to put our printers in eye banks," says Precise Bio CEO Aryeh Batt.

Unannounced, unadvertised freebie lands ahead of Microsoft's X018 conference. PUBG, the game that kicked off an international "battle royale" gaming sensation, is currently free for all Xbox One owners. From a report: Even if you do not have a paid Xbox Live Gold subscription, you can head to this link and claim what appears to be a permanent copy of the game for your Microsoft Account. Timed trials of Xbox One games tend to be exclusive treats for XBLG subscribers. Bizarrely, the Konami soccer game PES 2019, which launched at a standard $60 retail price point in August, is also free to claim as of today. (Here's that link.) Of course, there is the caveat that these games' giveaways could be yanked from accounts by Microsoft at any moment. In the meantime, we suggest clicking first, asking questions later. Update: Microsoft says the games will be free only till November 11.

Apple is not in talks "at any level" to settle its wide-ranging legal dispute with mobile chip maker Qualcomm, Reuters reported Wednesday, citing a source familiar with the matter. From the report: In the past, Apple used Qualcomm's modem chips in its flagship iPhone models to help them connect to wireless data networks. But early last year, Apple sued Qualcomm in federal court in San Diego, alleging that the chip company's practice of taking a cut of the selling price of phones as a patent license fee was illegal. The case is to go to trial early next year and has spawned related legal actions in other courts around the world. In July, Qualcomm's chief executive, Steve Mollenkopf, told investors on the company's quarterly earnings call that the two companies were in talks to resolve the litigation.

Amazon is shipping its first-ever printed holiday toy catalog, titled "A Holiday of Play," to millions of customers in the U.S. starting this month, the company said. From a report: "Amazon is excited to offer a new way for customers to shop for toys this holiday season," Amazon said in a statement. The catalog comes with a distinct retro look, invoking memories of old Toys "R" Us catalogs that made the now-defunct toy retailer so successful. Some of the featured toys come with a QR code, allowing readers to instantly scan and shop for more products. Readers can also scan the product images in the catalog with their Amazon App to get more information and add them to their shopping cart. The move is Amazon's latest in following the playbook of traditional brick-and-mortar retailers.

puddingebola shares a report: WLinux is a $20 open-source, Debian-based distribution, designed to run on Windows 10's Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). The WSL allows Windows 10 to run various GNU/Linux distros inside Windows as Microsoft Store apps, providing access to Ubuntu, openSUSE, Debian, Fedora, Kali Linux, and others. The WSL has disadvantages over a running a dedicated GNU/Linux system. For example, there's no official support for desktop environments or graphical applications, and I/O performance bottlenecks, but it is being improved over time. The developers of WLinux describe it as a "fast Linux terminal environment for developers", saying it is the first distribution to be "pre-configured and optimized to run specifically on Windows Subsystem for Linux". Announcing WLinux's availability, Microsoft program manager Tara Raj, called out the wlinux-setup tool, "which allows users to easily set up common developer toolchains, and removes unsupported features like systemd."

San Francisco voters passed a measure that has divided the tech community and sparked a national debate about the industry's responsibility to fix the city's homelessness crisis. From a report: The San Francisco Chronicle called the race at 60 percent in favor with 99 percent of the vote counted. Proposition C will raise the city's gross receipts tax by an average of .5 percent on annual gross receipts over $50 million that companies like Square, Lyft and Salesforce generate. The new funds will bring in an estimated $250 million to $300 million a year -- twice what the city currently spends on an annual basis to help the homeless in tech's de facto capital. The thousands of people living on San Francisco's streets serve as a daily reminder of economic inequality in a city that has one of the highest concentrations of billionaires in the nation. Earlier this year, a United Nations expert on housing called the living conditions of the homeless in the Bay Area "cruel" and "unacceptable." The decision to increase funding for the city's most needy is a victory for the local nonprofits behind the measure and their tech fairy godfather, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, who, along with his company, has poured more than $7 million into the campaign in the month leading up to the election.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has rejected a request to appear before an international parliamentary delving into the questions around fake news. From a report: The rebuff came after Damian Collins, the head of the U.K. parliament's media committee, joined forces with his Canadian counterpart in hopes of pressuring Zuckerberg to testify, as he did before the U.S Congress. Facebook rejected the invitation to appear before the so-called "international grand committee" session Nov. 27, arguing it wasn't possible for Zuckerberg to appear before all parliaments.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a report via MIT Technology Review: A lumpy disc of dark-gray steel covers a bench in the lab space of Boston Metal, an MIT spinout located a half-hour north of its namesake city. It's the company's first batch of the high-strength alloy, created using a novel approach to metal processing. Instead of the blast furnace employed in steelmaking for centuries, Boston Metal has developed something closer to a battery. Specifically, it's what's known as an electrolytic cell, which uses electricity -- rather than carbon -- to process raw iron ore.

If the technology works at scale as cheaply as the founders hope, it could offer a clear path to cutting greenhouse-gas emissions from one of the hardest-to-clean sectors of the global economy, and the single biggest industrial source of climate pollution. After working on the idea for the last six years, the nine-person company is shifting into its next phase. If it closes a pending funding round, the startup plans to build a large demonstration facility and develop an industrial-scale cell for steel production. The process to produce steel results in around 1.7 gigatons of carbon dioxide being pumped into the atmosphere annually, "adding up to around 5 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, according to a recent paper in Science," MIT Technology Review reports.

The electrolytic cell that Boston Metal developed was realized after it was proposed to be used to extract oxygen from the moon's surface. "The by-product was molten metal," the report says. "But producing something like steel would require an anode made from cheap materials that wouldn't corrode under high temperatures or readily react with iron oxide. In 2013, [MIT chemist] Sadoway and MIT metallurgy researcher Antoine Allanore published a paper in Nature concluding that anodes made from chromium-based alloys might check all those boxes."

hackingbear writes: In the opening of China's first import-themed trade fair, President Xi Jinping promised tougher penalties for intellectual property theft, a key concern of the Trump administration, in front of leaders and executives from 3,600 companies from more than 170 countries. China has been steadily advancing intellectual property protection over the years. In addition to filing twice as many patents as the U.S. in 2017, up nearly 14 folds from 2001, it is also increasingly being selected as a key venue for patent litigation by non-Chinese companies, as litigants feel they are treated fairly as foreign plaintiffs won the majority of their patent cases in 2015 (though that likely attracts patent trolls). China's journey from piracy to protection models the journeys of the U.S. which had blatantly violated intellectual properties in building its modern industry.

Google has pushed out the final "guaranteed" official software update for Nexus devices. According to Hot Hardware, the November update for both the Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P "carries the final build number of OPM7.181105.004, running Android 8.1 Oreo." From the report: The last Nexus smartphones to launch from Google were the Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P, which debuted in late 2015. Under Google's three-year update policy, both smartphones have received two major Android releases (Android 7.0 Nougat in 2016 and Android 8.0 Oreo in 2017) along with three years of monthly security updates. The monthly security updates should have ended in September, but Google out of nowhere provided a two-month reprieve through November 2018.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: The ozone layer, which protects us from ultraviolet light, looks to be successfully healing after gaping holes were discovered in the 1980s. The Northern Hemisphere could be fully fixed by the 2030s and Antarctica by the 2060s. A new United Nations report says it's an example of what global agreements can achieve. The ozone layer had been damaged by man-made chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). The chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) effectively began eating away at the ozone. CFCs were found in things like spray cans, fridges, foam insulation and air conditioners. As a result, in 1985 a gaping hole in the ozone over the South Pole was discovered. An international agreement called the Montreal Protocol made sure that businesses came up with replacements for these damaging products. 180 countries signed up to it. In signing the protocol, those countries agreed to phase out chemicals like CFCs.

TechCrunch is reporting that GraphQL, the Facebook-incubated data query language, is moving into its own open-source foundation. "Like so many other similar open-source foundations, the aptly named GraphQL Foundation will be hosted by the Linux Foundation." From the report: Facebook announced GraphQL back in 2012 and open sourced it in 2015. Today, it's being used by companies that range from Airbnb to Audi, GitHub, Netflix, Shopify, Twitter and The New York Times . At Facebook itself, the GraphQL API powers billions of API calls every day. At its core, GraphQL is basically a language for querying databases from client-side applications and a set of specifications for how the API on the backend should present this data to the client. It presents an alternative to REST-based APIs and promises to offer developers more flexibility and the ability to write faster and more secure applications. Virtually every major programming language now supports it through a variety of libraries.

"GraphQL has redefined how developers work with APIs and client-server interactions. We look forward to working with the GraphQL community to become an independent foundation, draft their governance and continue to foster the growth and adoption of GraphQL," said Chris Aniszczyk, vice president of Developer Relations at the Linux Foundation. As Aniszczyk noted, the new foundation will have an open governance model, similar to that of other Linux Foundation projects. The exact details are still a work in progress, though. The list of founding members is also still in flux, but for now, it includes Airbnb, Apollo, Coursera, Elementl, Facebook, GitHub, Hasura, Prisma, Shopify and Twitter.