Month: February 2018

Enlarge / Insel's Wild Buster is one of the games that has been removed from Steam after evidence of user review faking was found.

Insel Games, a Maltese developer of online multiplayer titles, has been banned from Steam and had all its titles removed from Valve's storefront after evidence surfaced that it was encouraging employees to manipulate user review scores on the service.

Yesterday, redditor nuttinbutruth posted a purported leaked email from Insel Games' CEO encouraging employees to buy reimbursed copies of the game in order to leave a Steam review. "Of course I cannot force you to write a review (let alone tell you what to write)—but I should not have to," the email reads. "Neglecting the importance of reviews will ultimately cost jobs. If [Wild Busters] fails, Insel fails... and then we will all have no jobs next year."

In a message later in the day, Valve said it had investigated the claims in the Reddit post and "identified unacceptable behavior involving multiple Steam accounts controlled by the publisher of this game. The publisher appears to have used multiple Steam accounts to post positive reviews for their own games. This is a clear violation of our review policy and something we take very seriously."

Enlarge / This won't hurt a bit. (credit: Erik T. Frank)

Deadly battles play out several times a day in the Ivory Coast’s Comoé National Park, leaving wounded behind. The fights break out when hundreds of African Matabele ants march off to raid a nearby termite mound to slaughter termite workers and haul them back to the nest to feed the colony. But termites, with their strong, sharp mandibles, aren’t easy prey, and raiders often get limbs bitten off in the fight.

In the aftermath of a raid, researchers are finding evidence that the ants care for their wounded. The wounded ants secrete a pheromone that calls other returning raiders to carry their injured comrades home. Back at the nest, healthy nest-mates clean the injured ants’ wounds. And the behavior of injured ants even creates a triage system so that only the ants that might actually be saved get rescued.

“It’s only a flesh wound!”

Ants that are only missing a leg or two can generally make the 50-meter trek back to the nest, but their injuries make them more vulnerable to predators, so about a third of injured ants who try to walk home won’t make it. So when nest-mates are nearby, injured ants slow down and even develop a sudden tendency to fall over.

Enlarge / Apple's HomePod is the most hyped-up home speaker to hit the market in a long time. (credit: Jeff Dunn)

What is this thing?

That, in essence, is the question most onlookers have asked about Apple’s HomePod speaker since its unveiling last summer. The natural inclination is to compare it to smart speakers like the Amazon Echo or Google Home. It’s a speaker with a talking assistant in it, the thinking goes. Apple just wants a piece of that growing pie.

But that doesn’t sit right. Sure, Siri, the assistant at the heart of the speaker, can answer questions, set alarms, and turn off connected light bulbs. But the HomePod costs $350, roughly three times as much as the base Echo and Home devices, it sounds miles better than both, and Apple isn’t nearly as concerned with assisting you through every part of your day and controlling everything in your home. The HomePod is decidedly more “speaker” than “smart.”

Enlarge / Google's two demo smart replies, now directly in a notification.

Google's "smart reply" feature in Android is a pretty neat application of machine learning. Google's servers scan your incoming text messages or emails and writes replies for you. Smart replies hang out at the bottom of an app like Gmail or Google Inbox, and you can pick from several replies based on the context of the message. Now Google is experimenting with making smart replies even faster by embedding reply options directly into Android notifications.

The experiment comes from Google's new "Area 120" group, an idea incubator inside the company. Users who signed up for the group's early access program got an email yesterday announcing the new feature, which is an app the team is just calling "Reply." The app isn't out yet, but the email shows off two concept images and gives users a link to sign up.

The images show a notification from Hangouts and Android Messages with the expected text and image, but below them, right in the notification panel, are a few machine-produced replies. Someone asks "Are you at a restaurant?" and you can fire back a quick reply with a single tap.

(credit: macappsaddict via Flickr)

Netflix's latest content grab ushers the mind behind Nip/Tuck, Glee, and American Horror Story into the company. The streaming giant announced that it has penned an exclusive five-year film and series deal with writer-director-producer Ryan Murphy. According to some reports, the deal is worth as much as $300 million.

Murphy will officially start at Netflix on July 1, 2018. While most of the ideas Murphy will bring to Netflix users' screens are as yet unannounced, the company has already scored the rights to two of his forthcoming series: Ratched, a drama series about the notorious nurse from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and The Politician, a comedy series that could star Barbra Streisand and Gwyneth Paltrow.

Despite the move to Netflix, Murphy will continue to oversee his shows currently in production on Fox and FX, as well as an upcoming FX drama series called Pose, which focuses on the transgender community in 1980s New York.