Month: September 2016

Just some of the smartwatches that will be getting Pokémon Go soon if recent reports are accurate.

The Apple Watch version of Pokémon Go announced last week likely won't be the only smartwatch-powered version of the game. Recent reports suggest the hit mobile game will be coming to Android Wear as well in the near future.

The digital excavators at Pokémon Go Hub unearthed evidence of an in-progress Android Wear version of the game in a decompiled copy of the latest Android smartphone update. Those source files include multiple references to Google's Android Wear utility services and code to send data from smartphone to smartwatch via AES encryption. The code even contains functions to adjust the experience based on the smartwatch's capabilities to account for the wide range of Android Wear products available.

Then, just yesterday, Niantic CEO John Hanke put some more weight behind the uncovered code, telling a TechCrunch Disrupt audience that an Android Wear version of the game is "pretty likely."

Ars plays Pac-Man Championship Edition 2. (video link)

Long after arcades faded from the height of pop culture, but well before cheap apps and microtransactions ruled the gaming world, there was a pretty amazing transitional period for cheap, quick-blast gaming: the world of Xbox Live Arcade. Microsoft's service launched on the Xbox 360 with low-priced apps and a reliance on arcade classics, and shortly after its debut, Pac-Man proved it out as a great place for new, arcade-inspired experiences.

Pac-Man Championship Edition garnered praise and sales in equal measure in 2007 for putting a lovely "modern-retro" spin on the series, and in 2010, that game's tweaks got their own tweaks in a "DX" update of the game. Six years later, Namco has returned with one more pass in the form of Tuesday's Pac-Man Championship Edition 2.

Enlarge (credit: European Parliament)

BRUSSELS—The European Commission has promised free Wi-Fi in every town, village, and city in the European Union, in the next four years.

A new grant, with a total budget of €120 million, will allow public authorities to purchase state-of-the art equipment, for example a local wireless access point. If approved by the the European Parliament and national ministers the cash could be available before the end of next year.

The commission has also set a target for all European households to have access to download speeds of at least 100Mbps by 2025, and has redefined Internet access as a so-called universal service, while removing obligations for old universal services such as payphones.

Cyclone Chapala captured early Monday morning by NOAA's Aqua satellite. (credit: NOAA)

Tropical cyclones can cause devastating and lethal damage to East and Southeast Asian countries. But accurately tracking changes in the frequency and intensity of typhoons is challenging in part because the data on these storms hasn’t always been consistently kept, and in part because there’s simply a lot of variability in the number of storms that make landfall.

In a recent issue of Nature Geoscience, new cluster and bias-corrected analyses of storm data show that the intensity and frequency of these dangerous storms have increased considerably. This increase is most likely due to oceanic warming related to climate change.

The authors of this paper focused on typhoons that strike East Asia, which limits the analysis to the northwest Pacific Ocean. They used a regional cluster analysis to probe the storm data, grouping the cyclones according to the part of the ocean where they formed and their movement patterns. This clustered analysis allowed the researchers to organize the inconsistent data in a way that allowed them to make inferences despite data variability.

Enlarge (credit: Pardon Snowden)

Edward Snowden and his allies have formally made the case that he should be pardoned by President Barack Obama. The ACLU, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch launched the PardonSnowden.org website today to press the cause, and Snowden himself spoke to The Guardian in a video interview.

“if not for these disclosures, we would be worse off," said Snowden, speaking to Guardian reporter Ewen MacAskill, one of the journalists with whom he shared secret documents in 2013. "Yes, there are laws on the books that say one thing, but that is perhaps why the pardon power exists. For the things that may seem unlawful in letters on a page but when we look at them morally, when we look at them ethically, when we look at the results, it seems these were necessary things, these were vital things."

Snowden argued that the changes put in place by Congress, US courts, and the president all show that society has benefited from his actions, adding that "there has never been any public evidence that any individual came to harm as a result."