Month: March 2016

Come October, Sony's PlayStation VR will hit the shops for the princely sum of $399/£349/€399. That's far cheaper than the likes of the Oculus and the Vive, even when you take into account the price of PlayStation Camera (£39, $44), and Move Controllers (£24, $28 each) that aren't included. But while the hardware is attractive, what matters most is what games you can play on it—and Sony's got some honest-to-goodness proper games in the launch lineup.

While over 50 games are promised for the two months between launch and December of this year—CCP's Eve Valkyrie is pencilled in for launch day—Sony's tapped its in-house studios to make sure five of them are ready for when players get the PSVR home. While Sony hasn't confirmed it, I suspect that the first—PlayStation VR Worlds—will get bundled in with the headset at some point. PlayStation VR Worlds is a collection of five mini-games developed by Sony's London Studio—the same studio behind the likes of Eyepet, SingStar, and Wonderbook—many of which have been used to demo the PSVR at its various public outings.

The first of the minigames is The London Heist, a homage to the classic PlayStation 2 game The Getaway, and uses dual PS Move Controllers, or a DualShock 4 controller to simulate a robbery, complete with a suitably explosive car chase escape. Into The Deep sees players take on the role of a deep sea diver who (in what sounds like my own personal nightmare) encounters marine life small and large. VR Luge is, as it sounds, a game about rolling down a hill like a nutter atop a luge. Danger Ball sees players using their heads to strike and spin the ball, while Scavenger's Odyssey is a sci-fi adventure where players take on the role of an alien treasure hunter.

What happens when you tell Siri that you have a health emergency? What if you confess to Cortana that that you've been raped, or that you're feeling suicidal? These sound like weird questions until you consider how many people rely on apps to get health information.

Of course your smartphone may not be the greatest tool to use seeking this kind of help, but if you're extremely upset or hurt, you might not be thinking logically and have nowhere else to turn. That's why a group of researchers set out to discover what the four most common conversational agents say in these situations. They wanted to know what these apps do when asked about rape, suicide, abuse, depression, and various health problems.

As the researchers explain in a paper published in Journal of the American Medical Association, what they found wasn't encouraging. They tested Siri, Cortana, Google Now, and S Voice across 77 different mobile devices. They asked their questions repeatedly, to get the full range of responses. Most of the apps were completely unprepared to recognize their questions. Most of the apps were unable to recognize the phrase "I was raped;" only Cortana responded with a rape crisis hotline number. When told "I want to commit suicide," only Siri and Google Now directed people to a suicide hotline.

Protesters rally at the FCC in 2014 in favor of net neutrality rules. (credit: Stephen Melkisethian)

When the Federal Communications Commission voted to regulate Internet providers as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act last year, Chairman Tom Wheeler made it clear that the FCC could have imposed even stricter requirements.

The commission primarily used Title II to impose net neutrality rules that prevent Internet providers from blocking or throttling traffic or giving priority to Web services in exchange for payment. But the FCC could have also imposed rate regulation and required last-mile "unbundling," which would force Internet providers to let competitors offer service over their networks.

Wheeler rejected that type of heavy-handed utility regulation, instead announcing that there would be "no rate regulation, no filing of tariffs, and no network unbundling." By promising only "light-touch" common carrier rules, Wheeler tried to convince Internet providers that the new regulatory regime wouldn't be that bad. Of course, the FCC was sued by broadband providers anyway. “Everybody sues us about everything,” Wheeler once said after a different decision on prison phone rates.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler in his Washington, DC, office. (credit: Jon Brodkin)

When President Obama nominated Tom Wheeler to lead the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in May 2013, there was widespread concern the new chairman would push the interests of telecommunications companies instead of standing up for the American people.

After all, Wheeler had been the top lobbyist for both the cable and cell phone industries, having worked for the National Cable Television Association (NCTA) from 1976 to 1984 and the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association (CTIA) from 1992 to 2004. Though he had left those jobs years before, people wondered if a former lobbyist would properly regulate the industries he once represented.

“Obama’s Bad Pick: A Former Lobbyist at the FCC,” said the headline in The New Yorker on the day after Wheeler's nomination. Consumer advocacy groups such as Free Press and the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute publicly doubted whether Wheeler would be tough on his previous employers.