Month: September 2017

Enlarge (credit: Kate Ter Haar)

On Monday, a former top State Department official who blew the whistle three years ago on what he saw as overzealous surveillance announced a new non-profit law firm, Whistleblower Aid. Unlike most other whistleblowing organizations, however, Whistleblower Aid is employing a few crucial digital tools to help, including Tor and SecureDrop—and it’s entirely pro bono.

"We're also helping people go to Robert Mueller if they have evidence of crimes by senior officials," John Tye, the former official, told Ars, referring to the Department of Justice special counsel that is currently investigating possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 presidential election.

Tye’s partner is Mark Zaid, a well-known national security attorney based in Washington, DC. Unlike most modern law firms, which conduct nearly all business by phone and e-mail, Whistleblower Aid outright eschews these methods.

Enlarge (credit: Nike)

First came the smart phone and then eventually the Internet of Things took off, giving us smart thermostats and smart refrigerators. Now, welcome to the world of the smart jersey. That's right, for $110 or $200, you can buy an NBA replica jersey of your favorite player from Nike that connects to your mobile phone.

The tag on the jersey, when viewed with your Android or Apple mobile phone using the NikeConnect app, will bombard you with a wealth of NBA marketing as well as all kinds of highlights, stats, and team and player information. It also provides marketers with the Holly Grail of advertising opportunities. Once the jersey is activated, Nike knows who bought the jersey, where that buyer lives, and where and when the jersey was scanned.

Video gamers are also enticed to buy these new jerseys. Fans get a so-called "boost" code to use on the NBA2K18 video game by Take-Two Interactive. The code gives an in-game boost to the player whose jersey was purchased, putting him into beast mode.

Enlarge (credit: Floyd Wilde)

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the industry body that oversees development of HTML and related Web standards, has today published the Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) specification as a Recommendation, marking its final blessing as an official Web standard. Final approval came after the W3C's members voted 58.4 percent to approve the spec, 30.8 percent to oppose, with 10.8 percent abstaining.

EME provides a standard interface for DRM protection of media delivered through the browser. EME is not itself a DRM scheme; rather, it defines how Web content can work with third-party Content Decryption Modules (CDMs) that handle the proprietary decryption and rights-management portion.

The development of EME has been contentious. There are broad ideological and legal concerns; some groups, such as the Free Software Foundation, oppose any and all DRM in any context or application. Some do not object to DRM, per se, but are concerned by regulations such as the US' Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Under the DMCA, bypassing DRM is outlawed, even if the bypass is intended to enable activities that are otherwise legal. These concerns are particularly acute in the context of the Web; for many the Web should be open, without any kind of technological restrictions on what can be done with Web content. The protection that DRM offers is seen as anathema to this. Moreover, while browsers themselves can be fully open source, CDMs are built using proprietary, secret code with no source available.

In 1996, near the end of the Golden Age of arcade fighting games, Capcom released X-Men vs Street Fighter. Featuring 17 characters taken from both the Street Fighter and X-Men universe, the game was like a schoolyard argument come to life: "Who would win in a fight, Akuma or Wolverine?" The Street Fighter formula was tweaked to include tag-team character battles, super jumps, over-the-top full-screen effects and super moves, and ridiculously drawn-out combos both on the ground and in the air. If you liked your Street Fighter turned up to eleven, this was your jam.

The game was bright, loud, and frantic, like a cartoon come to life. That was appropriate, as the X-Men characters were modeled after the animated series, right down to the voice actors used for the game. The sprites were large (for the time), colorful and well drawn, and beautifully animated, bringing the two worlds together in a way that felt utterly natural.

Spider-Man takes on Mega Man in Marvel vs. Capcom: Clash of Super Heroes.

The newly released Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite feels just as ridiculous as the original did more than two decades ago. The combos are over the top, the supers are huge and flashy, and there are more particle effects flying around at any given moment than you can count. Lab monsters who love spending time in training mode finding new combos and setups will find they have more than ever to work with; the creative options are wide open.

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T-Mobile USA last week said it would throttle Apple Watch cellular data speeds to 512kbps unless customers paid double the normal $10-per-month service charge, but it quickly backtracked after criticism from customers.

As reported by MacRumors on Friday, T-Mobile was advertising "unlimited talk, text, and data at 512kbps on your smartwatch" for $10 a month. The speed limitation was "noted on the pre-order page when adding an Apple Watch Series 3 to your cart" and apparently applied to any smartwatch.

Customers could get the Apple Watch's full LTE speeds by paying $20 per month by purchasing a "paired Digits" plan. "If customers feel they need high-speed data, they can choose high-speed data with paired Digits for $20 with auto-pay" or $25 per month if auto-pay isn't enabled, T-Mobile told The Verge Friday.

Enlarge (credit: Ron Amadeo)

While Samsung’s latest crop of high-end smartphones has impressed from a design standpoint, many Galaxy S8, Galaxy S8+, and Galaxy Note 8 buyers have complained about the tech giant’s decision to plant a dedicated button for its much-maligned Bixby voice assistant on both devices.

Now, though, the company appears to be backing down—at least a little bit.

As spotted by Samsung blog SamMobile, the tech giant is rolling out a software update to at least some Galaxy devices that lets users disable the so-called Bixby Key from opening the assistant’s “Bixby Home” screen—which acts as a sort of Samsung-made information hub similar to Google’s Google Now page—upon being pressed.

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Remember Battleborn? You could be forgiven if you didn't. The team-based hack-and-slash/first-person shooter/all-sorts-of-genres-mashup that developers insist is not a MOBA launched alongside Overwatch last May, and it was quickly overshadowed by the massive popularity of Blizzard's similar (and more focused) shooter.

Now, just over 16 months after that launch, developer Gearbox Software has announced that Battleborn's upcoming Fall Update will be the last bit of new content for the game. While Creative Director Randy Varnell promises in a blog post that "the servers will be up and active for the foreseeable future," he hinted that the company's resources are being refocused on "a highly anticipated but unannounced project." That probably refers to the still-unconfirmed Borderlands 3, which Gearbox's Randy Pitchford teased at PAX West 2017 by saying that 90 percent of the studio is "working on the thing I think most of you guys want us to be working on."

While Battleborn averaged thousands of players on Steam just after its launch in May, according to data from SteamCharters, player interest quickly dropped off to the point where the game peaked at just 150 simultaneous Steam players last month. Gearbox has tried to renew interest with a couple of major content updates and gameplay tweaks and even experimented with a free-to-play model in June, but it hasn't been enough to get a critical mass of players back into the game.