Month: April 2016

(credit: cthoyes)

This post originally appeared on Inverse and has been re-published with the permission of that site.

Telling a friend you’re paying him back for “ISIS beer funds!!!” is not a particularly good joke. I knew this as I was typing it at 2am on a Sunday, but what I did not know is that it’s an even worse joke on Venmo because the federal government will detain your $42.

Almost immediately after I hit send, Venmo—you know, the app that allows people to send money to each other via their phones—blasted an e-mail into my inbox. The company wanted to “better understand a recent payment,” specifically:

Enlarge / Siri! Shhhh!! (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Apple hasn't officially announced the dates for this year's Worldwide Developers Conference yet, but Siri seems to blab if you ask. Apple's personal assistant says that WWDC will run from June 13 to June 17 in San Francisco. The location hasn't been confirmed, but the conference has historically been held at the Moscone West event space downtown.

The official WWDC site hasn't been updated with the new information and there's no way to register to buy tickets yet, but if Siri is telling people the date, we'll probably get more information soon.

Apple has historically used its opening-day WWDC keynote to show off new OS X and iOS versions, and watchOS was added to the rotation last year. We may see a next-generation version of tvOS, too, now that the Apple TV is a full-fledged platform unto itself. Rumors haven't told us much of what to expect, but OS X may end up getting Siri and a "MacOS" branding change to bring it in line with Apple's other platforms.

This is what Three-Eyed Raven thinks of your FOIA requests. (credit: HBO)

After multiple seasons in which Game of Thrones premiered on file-sharing networks before it officially showed on HBO, the network finally decided to lock down advance access to the series this year. Even if you're a credentialed member of the media or a very, very good friend of Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, you can't ask HBO for a copy of the season six premiere ahead of its April 24 premiere... unless you're President Obama.

Refinery29 author Vanessa Golembewski noticed a report about a Game of Thrones press event in which a showrunner admitted that Obama was given a DVD screener copy. That set off a light bulb in her head: "If the president—and by extension, our government—is in possession of a file, surely that file is subject to my request to see it as a US citizen," she wrote.

As a result, last Friday Golembewski filed what may very well be the first FOIA request specifically for a film or TV series delivered to the Oval Office. The author admitted she'd never filed an FOIA request before, which might explain her tongue-in-cheek responses to various prompts, including a diatribe about college loans and an "expedited" request chosen because "Jon Snow's life is very much in question."

A Foucault's Pendulum. (credit: Flickr user luciasantamaria)

We have a beautiful theory that puts each of nature's forces into a single, neat package. The whole of it can be summed up in a single line of very compact—and for most, including me, incomprehensible—mathematics. At least, that is what we would like to be able to say, but this beauty is marred. Imagine the Mona Lisa with an eyepatch drawn in using crayon.

That is modern physics. The eyepatch is gravity.

There are many ideas about how to remove the crayon eyepatch from the masterpiece of modern physics and create a single, unified theory, but there's little evidence to support any of them. Among the ideas are theories involving extra dimensions (like string theory). And for nearly 10 years, physicists have been fruitlessly searching for evidence for these hidden dimensions.

Google Play Music Podcasts in action. (credit: Google)

Google Play Music Podcasts has finally launched. Back in October, Google announced that it was jumping back into podcast distribution and began accepting RSS feeds to build a podcast store. In what was seemingly an accident, the feature briefly went live for some users in February. But today, Google says the feature will officially go live on the Web and roll out to Android devices. There's no mention of an iOS launch, but it can't be far behind.

Google Play Music Podcasts sticks a podcast store right in the Google Play Music interface. You can search for and subscribe to your favorite shows and then play them everywhere Play Music works. Play Music will occasionally check for new episodes and download them automatically. To start, the store is only live in the US and Canada.

The addition of podcasts makes the Google Play Music app an even busier place. The app is now home to podcasts, an online music locker, a Pandora-style radio system, hand-curated playlists from Google's Songza acquisition, an à la carte music store, and an all-you-can-eat music subscription service. This is also the first non-music content offered in an app called Google Play Music. Mashing everything into a single catch-all audio app means it should be easy to get podcasts to work on Android TV, Android Wear, and Android Auto, but it makes the interface a bit more complicated.

This is what Falcon Lost looks like when being played legitimately, but...

Players who exploited in-game glitches to get around limits on end-game loot drops in The Division may face "punishment" from the publisher, according to a community manager. That's despite the fact this tactic didn't involve actively hacking or modifying the game or its servers.

An anticipated update to The Division last week introduced Falcon Lost, the game's first raid-like multiplayer "incursion" that culminates in a difficult final boss and rare loot for successful players. The incursion was designed to provide this loot just once a week, requiring players to come back again and again over time to gain the full set of randomly doled out gear.

That's not how things worked in practice. Shortly after Falcon Lost launched, word started to leak of a glitch that let players dash through the incursion in roughly 20 minutes, collecting the loot again every single time. The key is the abuse of the Survivor Link and Mobile Cover skills, letting players warp through walls and avoid triggering key moments and enemy spawns in the incursion.