Month: April 2017

Enlarge / You, too, can be as gleeful as Baby Luigi, if you play Mario Kart 8 Deluxe!

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe isn't quite a sequel to the 2014 Wii U original (the 12th best game of that year, for what it's worth). But it isn't quite a straight port to the new Nintendo Switch, either. After playing Deluxe for a few days now, we tend to think of it more like a useful post-release patch that happens to require $60 and an entirely new system to play.

The core racing in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe feels exactly like the Wii U version, right down to the excellent selection of 48 courses, so most of what we said in our original review (plus thoughts on the DLC, which is already included in this package) stand largely unchanged. Here are some quick impressions of what has changed this time around.

Battle Mode is back

The most important update to Mario Kart 8 Deluxe comes in the Battle Mode. The Wii U version frustratingly put battles on regular courses built for lap-based racing, meaning you could spend quite a while just hunting down opponents to hit with items like shells and bob-ombs.

Enlarge

Today, Google is shipping a major update for Google Home: multi-user support. Up to six people will be able to connect their account to Google's voice appliance, which will then be able to identify each person just by listening to them speak. The Google Home app jumped the gun on this launch earlier in the month, but now the feature is actually rolling out.

After connecting their accounts, each user will have to go through the usual hotword training, reciting "OK Google" to the device three times. For future commands, Google Home will then call out the name of the person it detects before it gives a response. So if you ask "What's my day like?" Google Home will respond with "Good Morning [name]," and then rattle off the weather and calendar appointments. To start the setup process, look for the card that says ”multi-user is available” in the Google Home app. Thanks to the way Google rolls out features, it might take a few days.

On-the-fly detection of voices sounds like a challenging problem to overcome. During the training process, your "OK Google" phrases are analyzed by a neural network, which Google says can "detect certain characteristics of a person's voice." Future "OK Google" commands are compared to the previous analysis, and Google Home decides if it's a match. Google notes, "this comparison takes place only on your device, in a matter of milliseconds."

Enlarge / Orion Hindawi, co-founder and chief technology officer of Tanium Inc. (credit: Getty Images/Bloomberg)

Following a report by the Wall Street Journal that the security vendor Tanium used a hospital's live network as a demonstration platform on sales calls and even revealed private hospital data in a publicly posted demonstration video, Tanium CEO Orion Hindawi has admitted that mistakes were made in handling data from El Camino Hospital's network. Hindawi was vague about whether the company had live access to the network, but in a blog post late yesterday, he said that the data was from "this particular customer's demo environment" and that Tanium did not—and should not—have remote access to customers' security data except in a very few cases where customers had granted access. But this appears to have been a change made after Tanium lost access to the El Camino Hospital network in 2015.

"We do have a few customers who have agreed for us to use their environments for external demos and have provided that access to us," Hindawi wrote. "Since 2015, we’ve insisted that before a customer is willing to let us demo from their environment, regardless of the access they offer us, we document that in writing and agree on what data we can show to ensure there isn’t any confusion. Other than the few customers who have signed those documents and provided us remote access to their Tanium platforms, we do not—and in fact cannot—demonstrate customer environments with Tanium."

Hindawi called the El Camino systems accessed a "demo environment," indicating that it was a proof of concept testbed set up by the hospital and not an actual live network. "That said, we take responsibility for mistakes in the use of this particular customer’s demo environment," he wrote. "We should have done better anonymizing that customer’s data… Looking at those demos, we see there are easy things we should have done to obscure and anonymize further."

I'm Tiny (virtual) Riiiiick! (credit: Adult Swim Games)

Roughly one year into commercial VR's lifetime, two of its games have emerged as the funniest: Job Simulator and Accounting. The former, made by Owlchemy Labs, is an elaborate toy playset set in a dystopian future, while the latter is an off-the-wall humor experiment that hinges on its VR characters shouting ridiculous things. The first is funny because of how it lets you play around; the other is funny because of its endless stream of spoken jokes (helmed largely by Rick and Morty co-creator Justin Roiland).

Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality, then, is VR comedy's chocolate and peanut butter—because it really does squish the aforementioned games together. The bonkers designers at Owlchemy teamed up with the writing and production staff at Rick and Morty, including Roiland, to give the Adult Swim animated series its first VR game (and, arguably, its most full-blown video game altogether). True to its source material, Virtual Rickality is hilarious and weird, and series fans will want to experience it. But it's also a reminder of VR's limits as an entertainment medium, a fact that the series' fans will more easily forgive than anybody who lands on this game as a newcomer.

How many clones can he kill?

Enlarge (credit: Verizon)

Verizon Wireless lost 398,000 retail postpaid phone subscribers in the first six weeks of 2017. That's when the company launched unlimited smartphone data plans and immediately turned things around.

Verizon still ended up losing customers for the quarter ending March 31, the company said in earnings results released today. But a gain of 109,000 retail postpaid phone connections after the launch of unlimited data dropped the overall phone loss to 289,000.

"The launch of Verizon Unlimited positively changed the trajectory of customer additions in the quarter," the company said.