Month: March 2016

(credit: Kārlis Dambrāns)

In its final court filing before oral arguments that are scheduled for next week, Apple argued that the government’s interpretation of an obscure 18th-Century law goes too far, and it should not be able to authorize the forced creation of a customized iOS firmware to aid in the opening of a seized iPhone.

In a Tuesday call with reporters, Apple lawyers said that this case is serious and has profound implications. The company largely re-iterated many of its previous arguments in earlier filings, ending with this conclusion:

The government’s position has sweeping implications. Under the government’s view, the state could force an artist to paint a poster, a singer to perform a song, or an author to write a book, so long as its purpose was to achieve some permissible end, whether increasing military enrollment or promoting public health.

Last month, the government obtained an unprecedented court order under the All Writs Act, an obscure 18th-century statute, which would compel Apple to assist in the government's investigation. If the order stands up to legal challenges, Apple would be forced to create a new customized iOS firmware that would remove the passcode lockout on the phone. Apple has said both publicly and in court filings that it will fight the order as much as possible, and the company has drawn support from many cryptographers, tech companies, and even the husband of a survivor of the attack.

Charles Bolden flew on the space shuttle four times. (credit: NASA)

It was nearing the end of a two-hour Appropriations subcommittee hearing in the US House of Representatives when Rep. Mike Honda (D-Calif.) asked NASA Administrator Charles Bolden an interesting question. The question referred to comments Chris Kraft made a few years ago in an interview with the Houston Chronicle, in which he said that the operating costs of NASA's large Space Launch System rocket "will eat NASA alive."

Kraft, the agency's original flight director, and the man for whom NASA's mission control is named, is skeptical of the plan to build a very large rocket with a similar capability to the Saturn V used by Apollo program. He and a number of Apollo engineers are concerned that NASA can't afford to fly the expensive rocket more than once every other year and that a lack of missions will have dangerous consequences for the rocket's reliability. Some, like Kraft, have argued that NASA should cede rocket-building to private companies like the United Launch Alliance and SpaceX, which have demonstrated an ability to do so safely and at a lower cost.

After summarizing this idea, Honda asked Bolden, "How do you respond to these sorts of concerns about the Space Launch System, and what is NASA doing to work with industry and government partners to develop a spectrum of missions beyond EM-1 and EM-2 to fully utilize this enormous national asset?"

What comes after nuking the fridge? We're about to find out.

In 2019, a new Indiana Jones movie will hit theaters, directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Harrison Ford as the adventurous archaeologist who plunders ancient cultures with a style that would make Lara Croft jealous. This is odd news, considering the last movie in the franchise was so terrible that people began to describe all failed sequels as "nuking the fridge" in reference to a particularly awful scene where Indy survives a nuclear blast inside an old refrigerator.

The new movie was announced today with a brief comment from Disney Studios Chairman Alan Horn: “Indiana Jones is one of the greatest heroes in cinematic history, and we can’t wait to bring him back to the screen in 2019. It’s rare to have such a perfect combination of director, producers, actor and role, and we couldn’t be more excited to embark on this adventure with Harrison and Steven.” The announcement also said that the four previous films "have brought in nearly $2 billion at the global box office," which might help explain why everybody is "embarking on this adventure."

Missing from the announcement is Shia La Beouf, who co-starred with Ford in Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull and was for a while considered to be the heir apparent to the franchise. Ford is presumably going to carry this film, which raises a lot of questions. Though the actor still has the gravitas and humor required for the role, it's hard to imagine a senior Indy running around in classic adventure movie style. It's likely that the studio will want to pair him with a younger star or stars to round out the story.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson. (credit: Susan Ruggles)

The ongoing legal drama between Apple and the Federal Bureau of investigation has largely been characterized as an Internet privacy and security issue—and a constitutional one, too. It's also been characterized as a human rights issue. Now, the Rev. Jesse Jackson says it's about civil rights.

Clearly, the security, privacy, and human rights aspects of the fight are all somewhat connected to civil rights. But Jackson's letter to the judge overseeing the legal battle between the tech giant and the federal government has put his own spin on the hot-button topic. Jackson, the president and founder of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, wrote (PDF) Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym of Riverside Federal Court, urging her to side against the government:

Dr. Martin Luther King would often say, "Where we stand in times of controversy is a measure of our character. Some leaders follow opinion polls. Others stand up for their principles, refuse to compromise and mold opinion."

In these difficult times, the government, courts and private companies must stand up and uphold—however unpopular—our First Amendment rights, our right to privacy and basic individual freedoms guaranteed to us under the US Constitution.

Other writers will weigh in on the intricacies of technology and privacy rights. What I want to bring to the forefront of this legal debate is the impact and implications this case has on civil rights and our historic civil rights movement.

This case cuts right to the heart of our right to live free from unwarranted government surveillance. It is a matter of deep personal concern to me—given the past and present illegal and unwarranted spying and surveillance of civil rights organizations, much conducted under the guise of national security.

Jackson spoke of the FBI infiltrating the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the wiretapping of King, and how the FBI's COINTELPRO "campaign spied on, infiltrated, and disrupted domestic civil rights and political groups. Rainbow PUSH Coalition and I personally have been subject to spying and surveillance, and more recently, there have been accounts of surveillance of the Black Lives Matter movement and activists."

Sony's Andrew House showing everything that comes in the $399 PSVR package.

SAN FRANCISCO—At a Game Developers Conference press event Wednesday, Sony announced that its PlayStation VR headset would launch in October 2016 for $399 / £349 / €399 / 44,980 Yen. That price does not include the PlayStation Move camera needed to track the headset, or the PlayStation Move hand-tracking controllers needed for many games.

The finalized announcement comes nearly two years after Sony's virtual reality headset was officially unveiled as "Project Morpheus" at the 2014 Game Developers Conference. Sony announced a "first half of 2016" launch window for the headset at last year's show, but recent statements from GameStop CEO Paul Raines had suggested that date might slip.

The price comes in well below the $599 Oculus is asking for the Rift, and the $799 HTC is asking for the SteamVR-powered Vive headset, both of which will ship to early orderers in the next few weeks. Those headsets also require a decently powerful PC that can cost $1,000 or more—PlayStation VR users only need to invest in a $350 PlayStation 4.

A shot from the impressive "Adam, Part 1" shows how adding depth-of-field to a Unity scene can make it look significantly less generic. (credit: Unity)

SAN FRANCISCO—The rise of engines like Unity has been great for making game development more accessible to the masses. Unity now says the 1.1 million monthly users of Unity Personal Edition outnumber "all the employees at every public game company in the world." That vast popularity has a negative side effect, though: the rise of an identifiably generic "Unity look" among many games made using the engine.

That "Unity look" is the result of so many new developers using the same Unity Engine default materials, assets, lighting effects, and shaders in their games. Dedicated artists and coders can add their own stamp to a Unity project, of course, by coding their own custom assets and shaders to give their project a more unique aesthetic. But a lot of smaller developers can't or won't bother putting in the work to really get their game past the "generic" look that can characterize Unity projects.

As Unity has progressed from version 5.0 to the newly released version 5.4 beta in the last year, they've put a lot of work into this problem. You can see a lot of those changes in the above video, which shows some pretty generic-looking Unity 5.0 demos getting quite a bit more character by simply implementing some of the graphical effects introduced in the intervening 12 months.

A photo of presidential candidate Donald J. Trump is illuminated with flood lights, in a backyard in West Des Moines, Iowa. (credit: Tony Webster)

Working a call center job is a rite of passage for many geeks; back in the day, our own Lee Hutchinson manned the lines as a contractor for computer manufacturer Gateway. The job was, naturally, soul crushing.

But what's it like when you want to work the phones for a presidential candidate—say, Donald Trump?

We found out this week, when New Yorkers who e-mailed the Donald Trump campaign as volunteers were told to attend one of two "Call Center Training Sessions" at the Trump Tower in Manhattan. In fine print at the bottom, the volunteers were told they'd need to sign a non-disclosure agreement, or NDA, to be part of the campaign.

(credit: Julia Child with a fish.)

After the success of the charming and emotional Bob Ross marathon on Twitch, the company is expanding the range of its creative streaming with a new marathon. This time around, the topic is cooking—the new Food channel will be broadcasting all 201 episodes of Julia Child's The French Chef. The stream starts today at 5pm EDT and should last around four days.

Twitch started out in 2011 as a video game-oriented offshoot of the Justin.tv lifecasting platform. In August 2014, the original Justin.tv site was closed down so that the company could focus exclusively on Twitch. A few days after this change, Amazon announced that it was buying the company for $970 million.

The Bob Ross and Julia Child streams both represent an attempt to broaden Twitch's appeal in two ways at once. The focus on creativity rather than gaming is one element. While there's a certain amount of crossover—streamers have cast things like making cosplay costumes and creating game-related artwork—as Bob Ross demonstrated, the appeal is broader. Adding cooking into the mix takes things even further from the core gaming audience.