Month: September 2016

(credit: Fox)

Microsoft's quest to put a stop the US government's habit of demanding access to customers' digital records in court-ordered secrecy has won dozens of allies in the tech world.

The likes of Apple, Google, and Mozilla—among many others—have put their names to an amicus brief in support of a lawsuit Microsoft filed against the federal government over its controversial and continued use of gagging orders.

When the software giant filed the suit in April, its chief legal officer Brad Smith said that gag orders had been applied to 2,576 demands by various law enforcement agencies for access to user data, including e-mails, over an 18-month period.

Enlarge (credit: Vasily Maximov/AFP/Getty Images)

A 22-year-old Russian blogger and Pokémon Go fan could end up being jailed for up to five years, after it was alleged that the man had insulted "religious sensitivities" by playing the game in church.

Ruslan Sokolovsky regularly used his video blog on YouTube to make political comments about secularism and freedom in Russia.

On August 11, he filmed himself playing Pokémon Go in a Yekaterinberg cathedral. The stunt resulted in police searching his home and finding evidence of "incitement to hatred and attacks on the liberty of faith," Russian authorities claimed.

One way to resurrect a struggling franchise is to bring in a new development team. All the better if said team has the kind of status that helps fans forgive past mistakes. Capcom did it when it gave control of Devil May Cry to Ninja Theory, and now Square Enix is hoping for similar success by giving Nier Automata to Platinum Games.

2010's Nier wasn't, by any measure, a success. A mixed critical reception was followed by sub-par sales and boxed copies filling bargain bins. By combining so many complex elements in an action RPG, Nier was far too convoluted and confusing to be fun. It was a game that was less than the sum of its parts, albeit one with a passable story in comparison to other examples in the genre.

Bringing in Platinum Games should immediately enhance two areas: combat—which the studio is famously brilliant at—and audience interest. After all, saying there's a sequel to a half-arsed action RPG is one thing. Saying there's a new game from the creators of Bayonetta, Vanquish, and Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is quite another. Having played Nier Automata, I can confirm that the game bears Platinum Games' trademark over-the-top combat—and the fact that I'm writing about it hints that there's audience interest. Job done, then? Well, maybe.

Enlarge (credit: Paul Natkin/Getty Images)

Today marks the 70th birthday of legendary Queen frontman Freddie Mercury, and to celebrate, an asteroid nearly half a billion kilometers away has been named after the late singer—quite the gift for the man who once sang of himself as "a shooting star leaping through the sky."

Queen guitar hero/astrophysicist Brian May, backed by the International Astronomical Union, announced that asteroid 17473—a 3.5km-wide ball of rubble currently located in the main Asteroid Belt between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars—will now be known as Asteroid 17473 Freddiemercury, in honour of "Freddie's outstanding influence in the world."

Discovered in 1991 by Belgian astronomer Henri Debehogne, the Freddiemercury asteroid loops around the sun at 20km per second. Its elliptical orbit never comes closer than 350 million kilometers to Earth, while its surface only reflects about 30 percent of the light that falls on it, making it difficult to see without the aid of a powerful telescope. "It's just a dot of light," said May in a YouTube video, "but it's a very special dot of light."

Enlarge (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

HDMI Licensing, the outfit that decides what is or what isn't HDMI compatible, is releasing HDMI Alternate Mode (Alt Mode) for USB Type-C devices.

The new spec will finally allow HDMI video signals to pass along a USB Type-C cable without the need to use a pricey dongle or dock to convert the DisplayPort signals that are natively output via the Type-C standard.

Future smartphones, tablets, cameras, and laptops—which will hopefully include Apple's Macbook with its solitary Type-C port—will only need a cheap dumb convertor or simple USB Type-C to HDMI cable in order to work with a HDMI display.

Enlarge / Hey guys, it's been a while. So, uh... what did I miss?

It’s still a little hard to believe that World of Warcraft has been around long enough for people to be nostalgic about “the good old days.” At this point, WoW has been around for longer than what's sure to be a sizable chunk of its player base has been alive. We're talking 11 years of clicking tiny icons on bars, watching spells cool down, and saving up enough gold to buy a shiny new mount that's totally better than your other, functionally identical mount.

The newest expansion, Legion, is definitely an attempt to feed on that nostalgia. Familiar faces and locations return from throughout the game's tenure as the premier MMO on the block. That seems perfectly targeted at players like me. It's been nine years since I last played World of Warcraft, back in my halcyon high school days of 2007 when I had plenty of time to sink into the game's first expansion, The Burning Crusade.

So, as I set out to review the nostalgia-tinted Legion (how does one review something on this scale?), I felt I should see what two-presidential-terms’-worth of updates and expansions had already done to the game I knew and loved. What changed? What stayed the same? What did “Hearthstone” mean before it was a collectible card game? This is my tale of Rip van Winkle culture shock experienced in revisiting a virtual place I haven’t lived for years.

Enlarge / USA V France the 2016 IWRF Rio Qualifiers (credit: Luc Percival for FFH / IWRF)

Overheating is a problem for many athletes, but wheelchair athletes can face an even more extreme version of this challenge. Many of these athletes compete with spinal cord injuries and therefore “are unable to sweat and control their blood flow below the level of their lesion,” said Katy Griggs, who researches the thermoregulatory responses of wheelchair athletes. The ways that these Paralympians “can cool themselves by external sources are important,” she told Ars.

Due to these difficulties with thermal regulation, Team USA wheelchair rugby players (all but two of whom have spinal cord injuries) jokingly refer to themselves as “reptiles.” But their efforts to cool themselves during the 2016 Paralympic Games, beginning this week in Rio de Janeiro, are deadly serious.

Trainers generally pay close attention to athlete temperatures and the possibility of heat illness, but they have to be extra vigilant when it comes to wheelchair athletes because self-monitoring can be more difficult. For instance, wheelchair users can’t always see the color and amount of their own urine, making it more difficult to use it as a gauge to hydration. (And to be more alert to dehydration or overhydration, Team USA staff now use refractometers to measure the gravity in urine.)

Enlarge / The Apple logo onstage at WWDC 2016. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Apple’s big September product presentation is happening on Wednesday—WWDC in June is when we find out about software, but when it comes to the hardware that the company makes most of its money from, September is Apple’s biggest event of the year.

Last year’s event was especially huge and wide-ranging. Apple launched its new tvOS platform, tweaked the hardware and software of the still-new Apple Watch, introduced the iPad Pro and the iPhone 6S series, and provided software updates for everything across all of its product lines. Wednesday will still be a busy day, but relatively speaking it ought to be quieter.

The iPhone

The new iPhones will reportedly look a lot like the current ones, but with less-obvious antenna lines. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Most rumors still call the next iPhone the “iPhone 7,” but unlike past years it doesn’t sound like the latest model will get a big external redesign. Expect this to look a lot like the current 6 and 6S design, but with tweaked or removed antenna cutouts to give the back of the phone a cleaner look. The new phone will still come in two sizes, one 4.7-inch version and one 5.5-inch version.