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The FCC leaked pictures of a gold iPhone X
On the same day that an Apple memo urging employees to stop leaking company info leaked, the company is now dealing with another, well, leak. But, this time it wasn't anyone from inside Apple who spilled the goods; it was the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). As spotted by 9to5Mac, a gold iPhone X appears to have arrived at the FCC offices, which is surprising considering Apple hasn't made an official announcement about the new color on its flagship smartphone. The tones on this iPhone X are quite shiny and, at a glance, look like a darker version of those on the gold iPhone 8. One of the main differences with the gold iPhone X is that it has black bezels, whereas the gold iPhone 8 comes with white ones. Apple just tried a similar formula with the Product RED iPhone 8 Plus we checked out yesterday.
Windows 10 update message interrupts live weather report
Microsoft made Windows 10 a recommended upgrade for previous versions, and users have reported the desktop operating system asking about a download without warning. There have even been reports of the software installing itself without user consent. It can be rather annoying, and a meteorologist at KCCI in Des Moines observed that first hand. During a live weather report, a pop-up appeared prompting the control room to update to Windows 10. As you can see, these messages are bit more intrusive than the notifications on other platforms, like Apple's OS X for Mac.
Grammycam footage during last night's show was pretty terrible
It seemed like a solid idea. GoPro cameras in the base of those gold Grammy award statues were meant to capture a unique perspective of the music industry's annual party. However, the results were really pretty awful. Those so-called Grammycams performed well, offering views from the stage as winners accepted awards and spouted thank yous to the crowd. Unfortunately, most of the sights were awkward angles of musicians and a lot of closeups of hands.
HBO's Bill Simmons outs Google podcast plans
Google tipped podcasts for Play Music back in the fall, but it looks like the company is finally prepping for their debut. Thanks to HBO's Bill Simmons, the Twitterverse now knows that Google Play's "podcast platform" is due to launch this month. Of course, there's a chance Simmons is just blowing hot air (he's been known to do that from time to time), but if a group outside of Google's ranks knows about an arrival date, it's likely big-name content producers. The tweet has since been deleted, so you can draw your own conclusions there.
Twitter noob Snowden gets hammered with 47GB of notification emails
What happens when one of the most wanted men in the world joins Twitter and forgets to disable email notifications? 47GB of emails. As you might expect, Edward Snowden was immediately inundated with followers, replies, favorites, DMs and retweets -- all of which came with individual alerts to the NSA whistleblower's email account. For reference, Snowden currently sits at 1.26 million followers (and counting) and his first tweet earlier this week has been favorited 110,000 times with 120,000 retweets. Hopefully his phone was in silent mode. [Image credit: AP Photo/Charles Platiau, Pool]
F-35 pilots are seeing double, but it's the plane that's drunk
The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter may be stealthy, powerful and expensive, but the plane's greatest threat isn't the enemy. Instead, engineers have discovered a software glitch that gives these new super fighters the technological equivalent of double vision. F-35s are equipped with Advanced Sensor Fusion, a system that's designed to collate sensor data from all of the planes and combine them into one big picture. If you have 10 jets zooming around, all of the allied pilots and commanders will, theoretically, be able to see everything that's going on.
SOE gives free game time for yesterday's login issues
If you were one of the players affected by Sony Online Entertainment's network-wide downtime yesterday, we have some good news. The company has announced on various social media outlets that it will be giving away two days of free access time to all accounts. This includes those on Landmark's beta access accounts as well. "We deeply regret the recent service interruption that is currently impacting all SOE games," DCUO Community Manager Mepps said in a forum post. "As a thank you for your patience, we will add two days of membership time to all members' accounts." According to EQ2wire.com, this downtime was caused by the SonyOnline.net domain name expiring, which SOE president John Smedley addressed in a tweet: "Sorry for the DNS problems folks. Won't happen again. Notices sent to wrong email. Doh."
Forza 5, GRID 2 devs have fun over BAFTA award mix-up
Question: When is an April Fool's prank not an April Fool's prank? Answer: When the prank happens three days late and isn't intentional. In other words, when the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA), which is responsible for the BAFTA Awards, accidentally sends a nomination slip intended for Turn 10, developers of Forza Motorsport 5, to Codemasters, developers of the GRID and F1 series. Whoops. Codemasters took the mix-up in stride, tweeting at Turn 10 to let them know where their paper was, followed by playfully ransoming it off. Turn 10 noted that April 7 is National Beer Day in the US, and asked if a pint would cover the cost. Codemasters pointed out that they've already got quite the nice pub, and that's when things started to get a little ... silly. Read on for images and more tweets from the playful exchange.
BioWare patches SWTOR's 2.4 a day early [Updated]
If you were planning on playing Star Wars: The Old Republic tonight, you might want to take a look at a BioWare forum post first. It seems as if the company accidentally rolled out its 2.4 patch a day early and as a result, some players have had to re-download the entire game client. "If you have already begun patching or completed patching, we recommend that you do not run the launcher until after tomorrow's maintenance," BioWare says. "If you do not run the launcher until tomorrow, you will only have to patch Game Update 2.4." [Thanks to everyone who tipped us!] [Update]: BioWare has restored previous patch data and says "you are fine to play normally."
So EA isn't putting microtransactions in every game after all
Remember that one time when EA CFO Blake Jorgensen pissed off the entire internet (except for Beau) by intimating that the gaming giant would be building microtransactions into all of its upcoming games? Well, forget that, because apparently that's not what he meant. "I made a statement in the conference along the lines of 'we'll have microtransactions in our games' and the community read that to mean all our games," Jorgensen told Polygon. "And that's really not true. All of our mobile games will have microtransactions in them, because almost all of them are going to a world where they are play for free." Jorgensen goes on to say that EA will likely be putting in-house credit card processing and download support into all of its titles, but that doesn't necessarily mean a mass conversion to the microtransaction model.
PS3 'jailbreak code' retweeted by Sony's Kevin Butler, no punchline needed
Oh, honey. Sony PlayStation's (entirely fictional) Kevin Butler holds many (also fictional) positions within the company, but apparently none of them require him to keep up with (very real) news events. Travis La Marr (aka @exiva) tweeted the now-infamous PS3 METLDR root key towards Butler with the challenge to "Come at me." What's a spokesperson to do but confuse it for a Battleship reference and retweet the entire code? Obviously someone let him in on the joke, as the tweet's since been removed (original URL can be found as More Coverage below). At least Sony won't have to subpoena for his info here. Geohot, we hope you're laughing. Update: As Digital Foundry points out, this sequence actually refers to the USB dongle ID generator key, also used for PS3 security circumvention. [Thanks, Scott M]
iTunes Connect is still down, was due back today
It looks like the iTunes Connect team is still on "holiday break"; it was scheduled to end today. iTunes Connect is used by developers to manage their apps on the iTunes Store and to check sales of their apps. Developers have been without iTunes Connect since last Wednesday. Those who were hoping to submit new versions or pricing changes will have a lot to catch up on once iTC goes live again, and the App Store reviewers will have a big backlog to go through. Update: iTunes Connect is back up! Developers on Twitter are noting the holiday surge in purchases...
Did an NYT editor let the 'Slate' slip?
There's a loud buzzing this morning, and it's not just the hangover from late-night celebrations of the Yankees' pennant win; quite a few tech and Mac sites (we heard it first from Edible Apple, although it's really everywhere now) are reporting on week-old remarks from the New York Times executive editor, Bill Keller, that were supposed to remain off-the record -- and of course are now playing on video all across the web. If you look at the transcript of his chat, or the 8:20 mark in the video, you'll see him refer to delivery of journalism to mobile platforms, and then he mentions the "impending Apple slate." Is this a simple moment of wishful thinking for Keller, or is it linked to the presumptive starring role that daily newspapers would play on the hypothetical Apple wundergadget? I can't wait to find out. Read on to see the video.
Lifted tutorial code winds up in $0.99 App Store tennis game
For some, the recently released iTennis game in the iTunes App Store looked extremely familiar -- that's because it was a rather blatant ripoff of code provided by the iCodeBlog, a site known for its free iPhone coding tutorials. The original tutorial, written by Brandon Trebitowski, was apparently compiled and submitted by Peter Sheen of BlaBlaIncTech and placed on sale for $.99USD on iTunes in late May. Trebitowski revealed the theft through iCodeBlog yesterday, and Jonathan Siegel got in touch with us regarding the situation. As response has gotten out through iCodeBlog, there has been a backlash through both BlaBlaIncTech's site and the App Store. As a result, around 4:45 Pacific Time, the game was pulled from iTunes. In an attempt to contact someone from BlaBlaIncTech, I headed over to the site to find no contact information except for a support chat that was spammed with nearly 15,000 comments regarding the theft. While I was writing up this post, BlaBlaIncTech removed the link to its guestbook from the front page of the site. Ten minutes later, the game was gone from the App Store. Ten minutes after that, all mention of iTennis was gone from BlaBlaIncTech's site.
Fishing daily bug gives you the right fish first time, every time
And I thought I was just lucky -- apparently there really is a bug going around with the daily fishing quests that means you'll always get the special fish you're looking for on the first cast. The first time it happened, I was like hey, that's awesome. The second time it happened, I was like wow, I'm really getting a break on these fishing quests, and the third time it happened, I decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth. But Blizzard knows about the issue now, and I'd expect a hotfix soon.The one exception, of course was the Shrimpin' Ain't Easy quest that required you to fish up more than one Bloated fish to get at the shrimp inside. On that one, I can actually confirm that you didn't get the right fish every time, and it did take you the requisite 10 casts or so (which is what it's supposed to take for the other quests also, according to El's Anglin').I have to say, I've really enjoyed both the fishing and cooking dailies (as I said on the podcast the other week, I just finally got my Delicious Chocolate Cake recipe for the "Cake is Not a Lie" achievement). Can't wait to see what kind of fishing and food we'll find in Wrath.
Apple's DNS patch coming up short
The distance between good intentions and actual results seems to be getting longer and longer. While Apple did release a security patch yesterday that included a fix to BIND for the highly publicized cache poisoning exploit -- some time after most other vendors got updates out to customers -- that fix doesn't seem to be, you know, actually working.Multiple sources have noted that Apple's DNS patch, at least on Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5 client versions, isn't implementing the key feature that's meant to block cache poisoning: port randomization on requests. While the same version of BIND running on Linux systems behaves as expected, Mac OS X machines doggedly issue DNS requests on sequential ports, making them far more vulnerable to spoofing by malicious folk.This may seem like an esoteric vulnerability, and indeed for most Mac users the more important question is whether or not your ISP or network manager has patched the primary DNS servers you rely on (you can check your DNS server status via Dan Kaminsky's tool here). The behavior of Apple on this security issue, however, is very troubling. Waiting weeks to issue a patch for a key vulnerability and lagging behind other OS vendors is bad enough; shipping that patch only to have the user community discover that it doesn't work worth a bucket of warm spit ... that's not the act of a company that claims to care deeply about the security of its customers.Update: Kaminsky suggests that we lighten up; Mac OS X Server (which would be the most vulnerable to attack, if it serves as the primary DNS for your network) has been patched, even if the client patch isn't behaving properly yet.
