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OnStar now offers its safety features through a phone app
GM's new Guardian app brings OnStar safety features to your phone, provided you're a member.
Toyota will test risky self-driving scenarios at a Michigan track
It's not enough to test self-driving cars in realistic conditions -- if they're going to avoid crashes, they need to handle nightmare scenarios. Toyota is about to address that. It's building a closed test facility at Michigan Technical Resource Park (below) that will pit autonomous cars against "edge case" scenarios that will challenge the technology's limits. It's planning to subject vehicles to clogged urban landscapes, slick roads and even a four-lane highway with fast entrance and exit ramps.
Laptop destroyed over Snowden leaks is now an art exhibit
Remember how, after the initial Snowden revelations, the Guardian newspaper was forced to destroy all of its computers that held the whistleblower's leaked documents? It was a strange moment; a small group of editors, under the watchful eye of two GCHQ officials, laying waste to hard drives and other internal components with industrial angle grinders and drills. Now, some of the remains -- a busted MacBook Air and a Western Digital hard drive, to be precise -- are on display at the Victoria and Albert (V&A) Museum in London. It forms part of a new exhibition called "All of This Belongs to You," which runs from now until July 19th. The hardware itself isn't particularly old or unusual, but its role in cybersecurity journalism and the Snowden leaks should make it a provocative exhibit nonetheless.
UK spies collected journalists' email as part of a test
Want to know why many people don't like it when governments call for an end to encrypted communication? Here's why. A new round of Edward Snowden leaks at The Guardian has revealed that the intelligence agents at Britain's GCHQ collected email from major news outlets (including the BBC, Le Monde, the New York Times and the Washington Post) in 2008 while testing a system that stripped out data irrelevant to searches. While it's not clear that the agency singled out the press during the test, there's no indication that it got rid of the messages, either.
SWTOR's Guardian, Juggernaut discipline changes detailed
Another day has brought us another Star Wars: The Old Republic dev blog detailing the class changes coming in the Shadow of Revan expansion. This time around, the focus falls squarely on Jedi Guardians and Sith Juggernauts. BioWare says that both versions of SWTOR's single-saber tank will get new passives, new utilities, and more thanks to the discipline tweaks scheduled to hit the game's class trees in December 9th's 3.0 update.
'Whisper' app accused of not hiding whistleblowers
Whisper lets you share secrets without the fear of it getting traced back to you. At least that's the pitch. Now, according to a Guardian report, the service is tracking the location of users that didn't want to be tracked. The report, which deep dives on several issues regarding user privacy and security, adds that Whisper is apparently also sharing info with the US Department of Defense and is retaining posts and user data in a searchable database. Responding to the claims, Editor-in-chief Neetzan Zimmerman says that Whisper "neither receive(s) nor store(s) geographical coordinates" from users who opt out of geolocation services. "User IP addresses may allow (a) very coarse location to be determined to the city, state, or country level."
Star Trek Online details four Delta Rising starships
Star Trek Online fans are eagerly -- and anxiously -- awaiting information about the new Tier 6 starships coming with next month's Delta Rising. Cryptic is beginning to roll out ship details and specs by listing four of the Delta starships in a dev diary today. The Federation will get the new Guardian cruiser, a very durable and flexible ship that can convert enemy fire into a weapons boost, and the Dauntless experimental science vessel, which can project fake copies of the ship to fool enemies. Over on the other side, the Klingons will enjoy the Mat'Ha Raptor, a vessel with an insane amount of firepower. Finally, Romulan characters can snag the Aelahl Warbird Battlecruiser, which can throw out a collapsing singularity for fun and horrible consequences. These starships will be sold on the C-store and accessible by players level 50 and above.
Snowden reports NSA employees intercept, share private nude photos
Edward Snowden is currently holed up in Russia, but the Guardian recently paid him a visit, and today published an interview today in which the former government contractor discussed numerous privacy violations, including the "routine enough" practice of intercepting nude photos shared privately through email and other means. According to Snowden, NSA employees come across nude photos on a regular basis, but rather than labeling such content as irrelevant, they often pass it along to colleagues. "They turn around in their chair and they show their co-worker. And their co-worker says: 'Oh hey, that's great. Send that to Bill down the way.' And then Bill sends it to George, George sends it to Tom. And sooner or later this person's whole life has been seen by all of these other people."
I saw a real Jedi in Star Wars: The Old Republic
Let me tell you about this Jedi Guardian named Nayelii. She lives on Star Wars: The Old Republic's Ebon Hawk server. She could actually be a he, but the avatar (and the name) seemed female, so that's the pronoun I'm going with at the moment. I say "seemed" because Nayelii was wearing hooded robes, it's fairly dark through most of the Kuat Drive Yards flashpoint, and I tend to play dungeons with my camera at max range. Anyway, that's all beside the point because last weekend Nayelii put on what is unequivocally the best tanking performance I've seen in all my years playing MMORPGs.
The Guardian's new US newspaper has a robot editor-in-chief
There's something a little different about the editor for The Guardian's new monthly US print edition: there isn't one. Set to launch Wednesday, #Open001 is being created using a proprietary algorithm rather than people (and we thought the media was dying!). The 5,000 paper run will be available for free at several advertising agencies. Articles are selected from the paper's online edition, based on how they performed on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Some of the stories set to be included in this month's edition include "Robots and sex: creepy or cool?" and "Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg: who are you calling bossy." Captivating, right?
This 42-minute video contains all you need to know about Destiny
If you're not sure what to make of Destiny, a new 42-minute video from Destiny Updates is worth watching. The clip touches on the game's MMO, RPG, and shooter aspects, as well as its social building blocks, its economy, and its gear and progression systems. The video is filled with timestamp links, so if you want to skip ahead to the section on, say, cooperative multiplayer, you can. Click past the cut for the full clip.
British spy agency reportedly collected millions of webcam images from Yahoo users
Britain's surveillance agency, GCHQ, hasn't fared much better than the NSA these past several months; the latest leak shared with the Guardian claims that Britain has been collecting millions of webcam images from Yahoo users. What's more, it appears that these images were used to discover "targets" and match users with existing persons of interest via automated facial recognition. According to documents provided by Edward Snowden, GCHQ intercepted still images of Yahoo video calls -- including those done with Yahoo Messenger -- in bulk and saved them as part of a program code-named Optic Nerve. The agency apparently collected these images whether or not users were deemed intelligence targets -- in a six-month period in 2008, it amassed webcam pics from more than 1.8 million Yahoo users around the globe. The documents also reveal that these images were collected with the purpose of identifying targets using facial-recognition tools to compare Yahoo users to existing GCHQ targets.
LotRO's Guardians to get off-tank build
What's on deck for Lord of the Rings Online's Guardians once the expansion hits in November? A new class dev diary reveals how the heavy metal fighters are being reworked from the ground up, including a brand-new trait line for an off-tank build. The new trait line is Fighter of Shadow, and it uses a marking mechanic to tag mobs for future proc buffs and heals. Guardians who pursue the Fighter of Shadow will become effective off-tanks, able to block with two-handed weapons and throw out more AoE attacks than the other two builds. That's not to say that the other two trait lines, focusing on tanking and DPS respectively, aren't seeing some work done. The tanking Guardian will get a stacking buff that can provide mitigation to himself or his fellowship, and the DPS Guardian will become a master of bleeds.
The Guardian opens pop-up coffee shop with iPads at the tables in London
Londoners who take a little iPad with their coffee might want to swing by Shoreditch and check out The Guardian's pop-up coffee shop. As TechCityNews reports, the Guardian newspaper has teamed up with Nude Espresso and EE to open the pop-up coffee shop, called #guardiancoffee, in the world's first pop-up mall made of shipping containers in the Shoreditch area of London. Inside, customers will find not only a delicious blend, but also free 4G internet and iPads throughout so patrons can browse the Guardian and the Observer newspapers on Apple's tablet. Other tech incorporated into the pop-up coffee shop include a projection of Twitter feeds and infographics on the walls so users can see the latest news as they order their coffee. Believe it or not this isn't the first food place with built-in iPads at the table in London. Back in October we reported that Elements restaurant south of the river in London installed iPads at the table so customers could play with them while dining. #guardiancoffee is at Unit 1-3, BOXPARK, 2-10, Bethnal Green Road, London E1 6GY. [Image via TechCityNews]
Massively's LotRO Riders of Rohan launch-day roundup
When you first heard about Lord of the Rings Online, you probably had an idea of which areas from the Lord of the Rings lore you'd want to visit and which events you'd like to take part in. Not all of the areas in Middle-earth were part of LotRO when it launched, but with each expansion the game world gets a bit more complete. Developer Turbine has been hard at work developing iconic areas like the Mines of Moria and Isengard, but the zone players have been anticipating the most is the Plains of Rohan. The Riders of Rohan expansion goes live today, opening the visually stunning Plains of Rohan area and introducing tons of new content, class updates and gameplay changes. Developers have been careful to capture the feel of the plains in not only the area's art style but also its impressive musical score. The Riders of Rohan expansion adds a new mounted combat feature that lets players fight on customisable war horses. The open plains are filled with roving warbands of orcs and other challenges to be overcome. Read on for a run-down of all the latest news on the Riders of Rohan expansion.
RIFT is breaking down faction walls and normalizing PvP in 1.10
"In 1.10, change is happening in a big way," RIFT CM James Nichols proclaimed on the forums. He then went on to announce that RIFT's two competing factions, the Guardians and the Defiant, will start to make steps toward unification in the final pre-expansion update. According to Nichols, while the two factions will remain philosophically opposed, they recognize the greater threat to the world and are coming together. For players, this means that there will be a lot more inter-faction communication and interaction. To start with, both factions will be able to join together for public groups, trading, the dungeon finder, raids, instant adventure, and weddings. The team also has plans to open up chat channels, quest sharing, guilds, friends list, and more between the two sides. There will be exceptions to some of these features on PvP servers, however. RIFT is also preparing to implement PvP normalization, which means that all players competing in PvP will do so with the same stats and no benefits from gear. Trion Worlds promises that there will still be "meaningful PvP progression" but that this should put the emphasis on skill rather than gear. [Thanks to Warbs and Marc for the tip!]
Hyperspace Beacon: All SWTOR classes are useful in Huttball, part 1
I'm excited about this week's topic. It's not often that I get to put Star Wars: The Old Republic's misconceptions to rest. As I said last week, my guild does recreational PvP, which is to say that we do it for the fun of it and not because we have to be the best of the best. This helps us enjoy the sport of it without having the pressure of maintaining a ranked-PvP score. Unfortunately, that also means we run into a lot of other players who don't know exactly what they are supposed to be doing in games like Huttball. Those same complaining players are also the ones who claim that their particular class is deficient in one way or another based on the PvP map. The biggest cringe in SWTOR comes from Huttball. Naysayers complain that one class or another does something different or better than they do. Today, I'm going to break down a couple of the classes to show you how each of them can be more effective. Let's dive in.
Lord of the Rings Online previews Guardian changes for Riders of Rohan
Guardians in Lord of the Rings Online are tanks. That's pretty much their entire purpose in life. But with the upcoming Riders of Rohan expansion, the class is seeing a substantial revision that will allow it to also take on a DPS role. The latest development blog on the class explains the new skills that Guardian players can look forward to as well as the changes implemented to allow Guardians a different role in groups. The biggest change is the removal of Parry Stance and the addition of Overpower Stance, which grants all of the benefits of the old stance as well as increased damage and lowered damage mitigation. Several skills also have new or enhanced effects in Overpower Stance. Furthermore, Guardians will receive a new Legendary Trait to improve bleed effects and a few improvements to threat generation. Players anxious to see what new tricks are granted to the familiar tank-heavy class should look at the full blog for the details on the alterations.
Dan Chung photographs the Olympics using an iPhone, Snapseed and some binoculars
When you think of professional photographers shooting sporting events, you usually visualize huge Canon or Nikon lenses mounted on expensive camera bodies on top of massive tripods. But as The Guardian's photographer Dan Chung proves, sometimes you can do just as much with a lot less. Throughout the Olympics Chung is photographing the games using only an iPhone, an app, and (occasionally) an add-on iPhone lens or some binoculars. The stunning image of Michael Phelps shown here was captured by Chung using only the iPhone 4S with its 8 megapixel camera and the excellent iOS photo editor Snapseed (US$4.99 in the App Store). To get other images from the Games using his iPhone, Chung also sometimes chooses to shoot through the Schneider lens iPro Wide Duo Kit or with a pair of Canon binoculars in front of the phone's camera. Chung is obviously a photographer with a lot of talent, but it's still amazing that these photographs were captured through a smartphone. For those interested in photography (or the Olympics) click on over to The Guardian where they are running a photoblog of all Dan Chung's images throughout the Games. Special thanks to Dan Chung and The Guardian for permission to reprint the image above. [Image credit and © Dan Chung/The Guardian.]
Sprint Guardian now available, allows parents to limit texting and keep tabs on a kid's location
Sprint Guardian has been in the oven for some time now -- we actually heard about it during our interview with John Tudhope and David Owens at CTIA 2012 -- but now, at long last, the service is available. Concerned parents nationwide can locate Guardian on "many" Sprint Android-powered phones through the Sprint Zone. The program itself features apps from Safely and Lookout, enabling parents to "protect their phone-carrying children through location checks and limits on texting while driving or at school." In other words, you can prevent a child's phone from being able to call or text whilst the user is driver, and lost phones can be located more easily. Naturally, such luxuries don't come free: Sprint Mobile Controls, Sprint Drive First and Sprint Family Locator are available as a Family Safety bundle for $9.99 per month for up to five lines on the same account. Or, you know, just give your youngin' a Hamilton each month for not acting like a lunatic with phone in hand.
