Month: March 2018

Enlarge / Picture of the US embassy in Havana, taken on September 29, 2017 after the United States announced it is withdrawing more than half its personnel in response to mysterious health attacks targeting its diplomatic staff. (credit: Getty | AFP)

The State Department announced Friday that the US embassy in Havana will now permanently operate with minimum personnel following mysterious “health attacks” that harmed at least 24 Americans, the Associated Press reports.

The attacks occurred from late 2016 to August 2017 and left widespread injuries to brain networks in many of the Americans affected, according to a recent medical case report in JAMA. Those injuries and a wide array of symptoms—from hearing issues, dizziness, to memory problems—developed after diplomats and their families experienced unexplained episodes of directional, irritating sounds, pressure, and vibrations. This initially led some to speculate that a covert “sonic weapon” was involved in the episodes, however scientists and doctors were quick to point out that sounds in the audible range are not known to cause such brain damage.

With ongoing investigations into the attacks, the State Department had pulled nonessential staff from the embassy in October, citing health concerns, and released a travel warning to US citizens. That initial staff drawdown was only temporary, lasting six months, which would have been up this past weekend.

This is now most likely what a VR user on Steam looks like. The headset part, anyway.

When the HTC Vive launched in 2016, one of its major advantages over the competition was supposed to be its integration with the Steam platform through Valve's SteamVR standard. Last month, though, Valve's regular Steam user hardware survey found that Oculus Rift users now outnumber HTC Vive users on Steam for the first time.

The Rift now represents about 47 percent of all VR headset users on Steam, according to the survey, sneaking just past the Vive at about 45 percent. Microsoft's Windows Mixed Reality initiative, launched late last year, accounts for just over 5 percent of the VR users on the platform.

Oculus Rift usage on Steam started shooting up last summer, right around the time Oculus slashed the price of its Rift-and-Touch-controller package to $399 in July (the HTC Vive would later drop from $799 to $599 in August). Reported Rift use on Steam climbed from 35.7 percent of VR users in July to 46.9 percent in September after the price drop. That jump also followed a July update to Oculus Home that let Rift users launch SteamVR apps directly via Oculus' platform rather than going through the SteamVR interface.

Enlarge / Bose's QuietComfort 35 would likely be in the crosshairs of Apple's reportedly high-end noise-cancelling headphones. (credit: Bose)

Apple is developing a pair of high-end wireless noise-cancelling headphones and could launch them as soon as the end of this year, according to a report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman and Debby Wu.

The report corroborates a late February memo from KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo.

Gurman, who, like Kuo, has a long track record of reporting the existence of Apple devices before they’re released, says the headphones will be of the over-the-ear variety and would compete with similar pairs from Bose.

SEATTLE—Emerald City Comic Con falls somewhere in the middle of the nation's nerd-convention spectrum. You won't find hotly anticipated film and TV premieres or modern, mega-huge celebrities, but the show still draws massive crowds of costumed nerds and geeks eager to pick through exclusive merch, attend compelling panels, and meet the likes of David Tennant, Felicia Day, and Wil Wheaton.

I made my way to this year's ECCC in downtown Seattle (making it the nation's most convenient comic convention for me, at the very least) and brought my camera to show you some of what you could expect.

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto/Getty Images)

A new group of companies suspended some of their YouTube advertising after finding out that ads were appearing over conspiracy theory videos peddled by radio show host Alex Jones on various InfoWars-related YouTube channels. According to a CNN report, companies including Nike, Expedia, Paramount Network, Wix, ClassPass, the Mormon Church, and the NRA have suspended ads on InfoWars channels after being made aware by CNN that their ads were running over conspiracy theory videos. Many companies involved claim that they had no idea their ads were running over InfoWars content, and many say they used YouTube's advertiser tools in the hope of keeping their ads off such content.

YouTube launched its relatively new advertiser tools nearly a year ago after the first big ad-pocalypse took the online video website by storm. In a situation much like this, companies began pulling advertisements from YouTube after finding out they were appearing over extremist videos. YouTube's tools are designed to give advertisers more control over the types of content over which they want their ads to run, filtering out potentially inappropriate content and content that doesn't align with a company's values.

CNN's report claims that Nike and other companies opted in to a "sensitive subject exclusion" filter, which presumably disallows ads over content that falls into these categories: "Tragedy and Conflict;" "Sensitive Social Issues;" "Sexually Suggestive Content;" "Sensational & Shocking;" and "Profanity & Rough Language."