Month: July 2017

Enlarge (credit: Spiel des Jahres)

The Spiel des Jahres—Germany's "Game of the Year"—award is the biggest prize in the board-game business. It guarantees both sales and bragging rights around the world. In May, the Spiel des Jahres jury announced its shortlist. Today, the organization crowned the winners: Kingdomino by Bruno Cathala won the main award, while Exit: The Game by Inka and Markus Brand won "complex" game of the year. (The "children's" award already went to penguin-flicking game Ice Cool.)

The two titles are quite different. Kingdomino is a quick-to-learn, family-oriented tile-laying game in which each player builds a 5x5 "kingdom" out of oversized cardboard dominoes, each showing different landscapes and bearing different numbers of crowns. Points are awarded at the end of the game by multiplying the size of each connected landscape area by the number of crowns that each landscape area contains. Add all the landscapes in your kingdom together and you have your total. Simple!

But thanks to a clever tile-selection mechanism, each turn gives you only a limited choice, and taking better tiles immediately means you choose later in the next round. Conversely, taking worse tiles in the present ensures first choice in the future. Once chosen, tiles are placed based on easy rules—but with the limitation that your kingdom can never grow beyond a 5x5 grid or you lose the tile. (A well-regarded, two-player variant lets players expand their kingdoms to a 7x7 grid, allowing for more strategic depth.)

Enlarge / One of the affected Atom processors. (credit: Intel)

When Microsoft introduced Windows 10 and its "Windows as a Service" model, the company promised Windows users a steady stream of updates to their machines. The days of being stuck on an old version of Windows would be forgotten; once you were on Windows 10, you'd have access to the latest and greatest forever. But that support came with a small footnote: you'd only receive updates for the "supported lifetime of the device" that you were using Windows 10 on.

The old system of Windows development, with substantial paid upgrades every three years or so, had many problems. Not least among those problems was how many people opted to stick with older versions of Windows, which was bad for both system security (old Windows has fewer security protections than new Windows) and software developers (old Windows APIs have wider market share than better, newer ones) alike. But the old system did afford a certain advantage when to hardware support: each new release of Windows represented an opportunity to revise the system specs that Windows demanded. A new major version of Windows could demand more memory, certain processor features, or a particular amount of disk space.

Moreover, if a given version of Windows worked on your hardware, you'd be assured that it would continue to receive security updates for a set period of time, thanks to the 5+5 support policy that Windows had: five years of security and feature updates, followed by five years of security-only updates. Exactly how many years of updates you'd get would, of course, depend on how far through that ten year cycle your purchase was made, but at least the end date was predictable and known ahead of time.

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The owners of the Ashley Madison cheating-dating website have agreed to pay $11.2 million to settle two dozen data breach lawsuits as a result of a 2015 incident involving as many as 37 million members' personal identifying information being exposed online. The deal (PDF) earmarks up to one-third, or about $3.7 million, for attorneys' fees and costs. An additional $500,000 has been set aside to administer the remaining $7 million earmarked for Ashley Madison members.

The breach and the lawsuits highlight the site's poor security and deceptive business practices, which have also resulted in a $1.6 million settlement with the Federal Trade Commission and several states. A Missouri federal judge must sign off on the latest deal, which was submitted in federal court Friday.

Under its terms, members who submit a "Valid Claim form and Reasonable Documentation" will be refunded their $19 if they had purchased the $19 "Full Delete" feature. Members who paid that fee were supposed to have their data deleted from the site's servers, but it wasn't—such data was infamously exposed in the hack.

Enlarge (credit: Liz West)

The branding of the next major Windows 10 update, due in around September this year, was announced in May as the Fall Creators Update. Our UK siblings immediately wondered if the update would retain that same name in the UK. While American English calls the season between summer and winter "fall," most of the rest of the anglophone community uses the British English "autumn."

At the time of the initial announcement, Microsoft said that it would use the "Fall" name universally. But now that appears to not be the case; spotted by Windows Central, the branding being used in the UK and other English-speaking countries such as India, is now the Autumn Creators Update. In the US and Canada, it will remain the Fall Creators Update.

Given that the name was already inelegant, we find ourselves wondering if Microsoft would be better off abandoning this branding entirely. For the most part, Windows itself does not use this type of branding. Although Windows Update referred to the "Creators Update," for example, everywhere else in the operating system simply calls it Version 1703 (which is to say, the Windows version from the third month of 2017). Windows Server, which will soon receive updates in parallel with Windows 10 similarly doesn't use this type of branding; it just uses the version number.