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The best weapon in 'Just Cause 4' is Mother Nature
Just Cause 4 arrives at the end of a busy season of open world games. Fortunately, the series has always done things differently from the likes of Assassin's Creed, Read Dead Redemption, Far Cry and the rest. It's the game that coaxes you into causing destruction and explosions, offering a shamelessly hard-boiled physics playground for you cut loose inside. During a lengthy playtime session last week with what appears to be very close to the final game, Just Cause 4 begs to be live-streamed, clipped and shared on Twitch, Twitter, Reddit, Discord and everywhere else.
After Math: The best kind of falling star
Gavin McInnes and his gang of Proud Boys, newly minted stars of the Alt-Right, took their first steps back toward irrelevancy this week when they got themselves banned from Facebook. At the same time, we've had to say goodbye to a pair of space-based telescopes (Kepler and Dawn), as they reached the end of their operational lifespans; Roscosmos blamed the recent Soyuz launch failure on a bent sensor pin and Apple announced that it would no longer report the sales numbers for the stars of its product lineup -- iPhones, iPads and Macs -- after it was reported that smartphone sales slumped six percent globally this year.
For Twitter, 'sorry' seems to be the easiest word
Two weeks before Cesar Sayoc was arrested for mailing 13 pipe bombs (and counting) to various Democratic politicians and supporters, including President Barack Obama, he was threatening people on Twitter who opposed his nationalist, pro-Trump views. In a tweet to political analyst Rochelle Ritchie on October 11th, which he sent from one of two Twitter accounts that have since been suspended, he said she should hug her "loved ones real close every time" she left home. "So you like [to] make threats. We Unconquered Seminole Tribe will answer your threats. We have nice silent Air boat ride for you here on our land Everglades Swamp. We will see u 4 sure," he added. Ritchie reported the tweet, only to be told by Twitter that it did not violate its terms of service.
After Math: Life imitating art imitating life
Between the political theater and unreal earnings reports, this has been a surreal week for the ages. But while you were glued to the news feeds, an AI-generated art piece sold for silly money, NASA fixed the Hubble by jiggling its handle and a band of clever thieves perpetrated a multimillion-download ad scam that would put the Ocean's crew to shame.
With Khashoggi, tech confronts its blood money
In 2015 we laughed at Hacking Team for getting hacked. Their profit-driven facilitation of human rights abuses around the world was somehow barely competent, but notorious. They sold illegal hackware and surveillance tech to brutal regimes and trained them in attacking citizens and journalists. We knew they were evil clowns. We just didn't expect what happened next.
After Math: Paying more for less
The rent is too damn high unless you're living in a van down by the river, medical care routinely puts people into bankruptcy, gas prices are still floating around $3 a gallon nationwide and Senator Ted "Zodiac Killer" Cruz is worried that his six figure salary won't enable him to buy a second house anytime soon. Times are tough for everybody so one has to wonder why the companies below are seemingly trying to make things actively worse.
Uber, Google, Facebook: Your experiments have gone too far
It was 2014, around the time when Travis Kalanick referred to Uber as his chick-magnet "Boober" in a GQ article, that I'd realized congestion in San Francisco had gone insane. Before there was Uber, getting across town took about ten minutes by car and there was nowhere to park, ever. With Boober in play, there was parking in places there never were spaces, but the streets were so jammed with empty, one-person "gig economy" cars circling, sitting in bus zones, mowing down bicyclists whilst fussing with their phones, still endlessly going nowhere, alone, that walking across the city was faster.
Facebook’s confusion about its Portal camera is concerning
Facebook couldn't have picked a worse time to introduce Portal, a camera-equipped smart display designed to make video chatting in your home easier. And, if the rumors are true, the company is reportedly also preparing to launch a video chat camera for your TV, based on the same system as Portal. Not only does news of this hardware come at a time when when Facebook is under major scrutiny after suffering a massive data breach in September, which exposed private information of 29 million users, including usernames, birth date, gender, location, religion and the devices used to browse the site. But the most concerning part about Portal, is that Facebook's own executives don't seem to have a basic understanding of what types of data the company will be collecting or what it will be using it for.
After Math: Every robot was parkour fighting
What a week it's been! Between Google's Pixel 3 event, the lucky landing by the Soyuz crew, and Facebook's latest data breach, it feels like we almost didn't have time to talk about Waymo's self-driving cars, Amazon's new line of picker bots and Boston Dynamic's gymnastic droids. But that's where the After Math comes in.
Goodbye Google+, you beautiful, squandered opportunity
When Google+ launched in 2011, people were already fed up with Facebook -- and Google was still cool. After Plus' closed invite garnered significant consumer desire, everyone's hopeful "Facebook killer" nabbed a sweet 300 million active monthly users by 2013 (by comparison, Twitter had 230 million). No one could have predicted that on a random Monday seven years later, the tech giant would hang its head, admit a middling API-access privacy hole and the existence of tumbleweeds on the service, and then announce it was shuttering Plus to the public.
Google's Pixel 3 event by the numbers
Google offered everybody a peak at its fall product lineup during its Made by Google event in New York City on Tuesday. The internet search giant cum hardware purveyor showed off its latest handset, the Pixel 3 (as well as a wireless charging dock for it), a more robust Chromecast, a smart Home Hub, and a snazzy 2-in-1 convertible tablet.
After Math: It's Spooky Season
The air is crisp, the leaves are changing and everywhere you look, you'll find decorative gourds on display. And y'all know what that means: we're just a few weeks from Halloween! Plenty of companies are already getting into the frightful mood. French researchers figured out how to fingerfy a phone, Telltale's staffing levels have been reduced to a shambling corpse, and Toyota once again warned that its Priuses could go all Christine on their drivers.
Facebook’s two-factor ad practices give middle finger to infosec
We've all encountered security questions asking where we went to school, our favorite color or food, our first concert, and the ubiquitous "mother's maiden name." Imagine a world where on one screen you carefully chose Stanford, red, spaghetti and so on, and on the next you were shown ads for Italian restaurants, red shoes, and jobs for Stanford grads. Seems like an insane violation, right? I mean, it stands to reason that we expect that the information we type to secure our online accounts and apps is private and safely guarded.
After Math: Hello Darkness, my old friend
Well, this week lasted years. While we weren't being bludgeoned by the cantankerous Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, we were learning about how 50 million Facebook users had their accounts hacked, that Elon Musk is being sued by the SEC for his Twitter posts (the ones about privatizing Tesla, not the ones wherein he libels a rescue diver), and that Red Dead Redemption 2 will rustle the remainder of your hard drive's free space.
Silicon Valley’s Brett Kavanaugh problem
As we steel ourselves to careen numbly toward whatever new horrors lay in store with Trump, his Supreme Court pick Brett Kavanaugh, and the conservative politicians willing to help them, it's impossible not to contemplate how deep and depraved the culture of silence actually goes here. USA Today wrote: "When Kavanaugh gave a speech in 2015 at Catholic University's Columbus School of Law and stated, 'What happens at Georgetown Prep stays at Georgetown Prep. That's been a good thing for all of us, I think,' he summed up the culture perfectly (...) It was their job to protect each other from their misdeeds no matter how big or alcohol-fueled. The boys kept each other's secrets."
After Math: To infinity... and Taiwan!
Apparently, this was the week to shoot for the Moon, in some ways more literally than others. SpaceX announced on Monday that it'd found its first Guinea Pi- I mean "paying customer" for a slingshot sightseeing trip around the far edge of la luna and back. 3D-printed guns' strongest advocate made a break for the hills (of Taiwan) after being accused of sexually assaulting a 16-year-old, Telltale Studios told virtually all of its employees to start looking for alternative employment opportunities, and Amazon is hawking a bargain-basement microwave because they'll put a digital assistant in anything these days.
FCC’s Ajit Pai labels California net neutrality law 'illegal'
FCC head honcho, Ajit Pai, didn't mince words in comments regarding California's recent passing of a tough net neutrality bill. In his keynote speech for neoconservative policy organization Maine Heritage Policy Center, Pai called California's SB 822 "illegal" and said it "poses a risk to the rest of the country." Pai also hinted that he'd be coming for California should SB 822, seen as the toughest net neutrality law in the nation, receive the governor's signature, as it's expected to in the next two weeks.
If Amazon wants Alexa everywhere, it needs better language support
I can't profess to fully understand all of the complexities of localizing services for various languages, nuances, accents and dialects where voice recognition is concerned. However, with Amazon's Alexa ambitions ramping up after its hardware event Thursday, it's worth questioning why the voice assistant's language support is so abysmal.
After Math: Oh boy, new toys!
The holidays seem to kick off earlier and earlier every year. Apple rang in the start of the season in the first week of September at its annual fall iPhone event, but they weren't the only ones showing off new products ahead of post-Labor Day madness. Amazon unveiled plans to deliver live Christmas trees on demand, Spotify tripled its download limits, Nintendo is going to start selling wireless NES controllers for the Switch, and Verizon is ready to roll out its 5G home internet service.
Why PayPal’s crackdown on ASMR creators should worry you
In June, China banned and excised videos of sound effects while claiming to cleanse its internet of pornography. YouTube had already demonetized the genre in a sex panic; now PayPal is banning people for life and holding individuals' funds, ignorant of the facts and marching lockstep to the tune of 8chan trolls enacting a campaign to punish "whores." The most bitter punchline in all this? A tiny percentage of the entire video genre is even remotely sexual, and those suffering — female creators — aren't even making sex content.
