Month: December 2017

Enlarge (credit: Samuel Axon)

Apple confirmed today in statements to several media outlets that it will buy Shazam, pending approval. This news had previously been reported by TechCrunch, which had one source claiming the sale price was around $400 million—far less than Shazam's $1 billion valuation at its last round of funding.

Shazam is arguably best known for its music recognition technology; tap the "Shazam" button in the app for smartphones and it will usually identify whatever song it hears after just a few seconds. Shazam has become so popular that there's even a network TV game show called Beat Shazam hosted by Oscar-winner Jamie Foxx. In it, contestants must guess songs faster than Shazam can.

But Shazam has also invested in second-screen TV viewing features, image recognition, and augmented reality services and products. Shazam's talent and technology could be used in several of Apple's products and initiatives, including Apple Music, Siri, and augmented reality.
Shazam already integrates with Siri. You can ask Siri "what song is this" while a song is playing externally, and, after a long pause, it will provide you with the name and artist, along with a "buy" button for Apple Music/iTunes gussied up with Shazam logo. Currently, the Shazam app allows you to add a song to your Spotify playlist after identifying it, regardless of whether you're using an Apple or Android phone. We don't know yet what, if anything, will happen to that feature because of the Apple purchase.

Enlarge / FBI Director Christopher Wray is sworn in prior to testifying before the House Judiciary Committee December 7, 2017 in Washington, DC. (credit: Win McNamee/Getty Images)

In recent testimony before Congress, the director of the FBI has again highlighted what the government sees as the problem of easy-to-use, on-by-default, strong encryption.

In prepared remarks from last Thursday, FBI director Christopher Wray said that encryption presents a "significant challenge to conducting lawful court-ordered access," he said, again using the longstanding government moniker, "Going Dark."

The statement was just one portion of his testimony about the agency's priorities for the coming year.

After an initial glimpse at this summer's San Diego Comic-Con, the first full trailer for Ready Player One premiered this weekend. Author Ernest Cline brought the footage to his hometown theater—Austin, Texas' Alamo Drafthouse—and live-streamed it (with a post-roll Q&A) for fans worldwide on the film's Facebook page.

"If Willy Wonka was a game designer instead of a candy maker and held his golden-ticket contest inside the world's greatest video game, that's kind of the essence of what the story is," Cline said.

For those unfamiliar with Cline's best-seller, Ready Player One is the story of a kid growing up in the near future, dreaming of escape from his life in a massive, dystopian trailer park. Our hero Wade Watts only finds real happiness in The OASIS, a massive multiplayer VR world where he can indulge his love for 1980s pop culture. (See flashes of The Iron Giant, Battletoads, Lara Croft, Chun-Li, Overwatch characters, and many, many more.)

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Yagi Studio)

The Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality repeal "is based on a flawed and factually inaccurate understanding of Internet technology," a group of inventors and technologists told members of Congress and the FCC in a letter today.

The letter's 21 signers include Internet Protocol co-inventor Vint Cerf; World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee; Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, public-key cryptography inventors Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman; RSA public-key encryption algorithm co-inventor Ronald Rivest; Paul Vixie, who designed several widely used Domain Name System (DNS) protocol extensions and applications; and security expert and professor Susan Landau, who has fought against government attempts to make phone encryption less secure. The letter was also signed by former chief technologists at both the FCC and Federal Trade Commission, David Farber and Steven Bellovin, respectively.

FCC’s “flawed” understanding of Internet

The letter calls for a delay of this Thursday's FCC vote to deregulate broadband service and eliminate net neutrality rules. It says:

Enlarge / Rex's "stare at the sky" POV is all too commonly shared by the game's actual camera.

Lock an infinite number of monkeys in a room with an infinite number of typewriters for an infinite amount of time, and I’m not sure they’d ever come up with Xenoblade Chronicles 2. The action-JRPG so greatly lacks a cohesive style—mechanically and artistically—that its very absence becomes its cohesive style. It’s a mishmash of ideas from MMOs, anime, gacha games, science fiction, fantasy, management sims, satire, melodrama, and probably a load of other stuff I haven’t even seen.

But just like the classic adage about simians writing Shakespeare, given enough time, it kind of works.

It does not give that impression at first. Xenoblade Chronicles 2 leads with some of the most generic setup and characters I’ve seen since the PlayStation 2 era, when everyone and their uncle put out six 80-hour RPGs a month. You start as Rex: a determined young man on his own. He meets a magical girl who is wanted by an empire, among others, and goes off on an adventure where he slowly accrues party members of various stripes. Some of those party members get amnesia, of course, because what JRPG is complete without an amnesiac subplot?

If that all sounds like the plot of every JRPG in the past 20 years to you, you’re not alone. That familiarity, plus the game’s well-documented and tacky ogling of its female lead, had me ready to roll my eyes right off the screen for the first couple hours or so. The poor start is especially egregious given the incredibly evocative intro to the original Xenoblade Chronicles—which was set on a world made from the interlocked corpses of two continent-sized colossi.