Technology

In honor of World Emoji Day (yes, thata thing), Apple is previewing some of its upcoming emoji. Later this year, Appleemoji set will feature people with a variety of hairstyles and colors, including curly hair, red hair and white hair. What you&re about to see are simply Appletake on emoji that were previously approved by the Unicode Consortiumemoji subcommittee.

Folks with curly hair, rejoice!

Lethear it for the redheads

Like white on rice

No hair No problem

Other fun emoji include a freezing face, peacock, mango, lobster, nazar amulet, superheroes and kangaroo.

Back in March, Apple proposed new emojis to represent people with disabilitiesin Unicodenext batch of emoji. Then in May, Unicode announced some of the draft candidates for its next emoji release in Q1 2019to include some of Appleproposed emoji, which featured a guide dog, an ear with a hearing aid and more. If you want to hear more about what goes into emoji approval, be sure to check out this interview with Jeremy Burge, vice-chair of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee.

Back in August of 2016, Pinterest acquired Instapaper, the read-it-later bookmarking service originally built by Marco Arment.

Just shy of two years later, Instapaper is going back to being independent.

In a blog post published this afternoon, the team clarifies that a new company called &Instant Paper, Inc.& has been formed to oversee Instapaper, and that it&ll largely be made up of the same folks who&ve worked on it since ~2013.

Don&t expect much to change, for better or worse — at least, not immediately. The company is waiting three weeks before officially transferring ownership, in order to &give [its] users fair notice about the change of control with respect to their personal information.&

The team doesn&t outline the reasoning for splitting away, but it has many users hoping its newly regained independence means it can become GDPR-compliant sooner than later. Instapaper shut off its services in Europe back in May so they could &make changes in light of [GDPR]&; two months later, the service remains offline in the EU.

Instapaper confirmed this afternoon that GDPR-compliance is still a goal:

Google Cloudnew region in Los Angeles is now online, the company announced today. This isn&t exactly a surprise, given that Google had previously announced a July launch for the region, but ita big step for Google, which now boasts five cloud regions in the United States. It was only three years ago that Google opened its second U.S. region and, while it was slow to expand its physical cloud footprint, the company now features 17 regions around the world.

When it first announced this new region, Google positioned it as the ideal region for the entertainment industry. And while thatsurely true, I&m sure we&ll see plenty of other companies use this new region, which features three availability zones, to augment their existing deploymentsin Googleother West Coast region in Oregon or as part of their overall global cloud strategy.

The new region is launching with all the core Google Cloud compute services, like App Engine, Compute Engine and Kubernetes Engine, as well as all of Googlestandard database and file storage tools, including the recently launched NAS-likeCloud Filestore service. For businesses that have a physical presence close to L.A., Google also offers two dedicated interconnects to Equinixand CoreSitelocal LA1 data centers.

Itworth nothing that Microsoft, which has long favored a strategy of quickly launching as many regions as possible, already offered its users a region in Southern California. AWS doesn&t currently have a presence in the area, though, unlike Google, AWS does offer a region in Northern California.