Month: March 2018

Enlarge / Falling from this height won't lead to a gold penalty, thanks to pushback from fans. (credit: Rare)

As we noted in our initial impressions of Sea of Thieves last weekend, the game is probably going to need some serious changes to be a truly enduring multiplayer lark. Developer Rare is now killing off one of those brainstormed gameplay changes before it comes to pass, canceling a planned "death cost" after intense fan feedback.

Currently, dying in Sea of Thieves only costs the player a little bit of time waiting to respawn. But in a forum post late last week, Rare announced a coming "death cost" feature would add a "small gold fee" to be deducted every time your character dies, upping the stakes and presumably providing additional motivation to avoiding those unplanned deaths. "Rates are dependant on the cause of death, so the more avoidable the death, the less patience the Captain will have when we enable this feature!" Rare wrote.

The response by players in a 19-page thread accompanying the announcement was almost universally negative. Many players worried this kind of additional cost would just encourage griefers to stalk other players, killing them over and over and making it nearly impossible to accumulate in-game gold. Rare clarified in an update that it "never intended to charge players for [player-vs-player] related deaths, as we understand the negative impact this would have on player experience."

Enlarge / Signage stands at the Oracle Corp. headquarters campus in Redwood City, California, on March 14, 2016. (credit: Michael Short/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The case of Oracle v. Google is Silicon Valley’s lawsuit that will seemingly never die.

On Tuesday, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled in favor of Oracle, finding that Google may owe billions in damages. Nearly 7.5 years after the original lawsuit was filed, the case will now be sent back down to federal court in San Francisco to figure out how much Google should pay.

"Google’s use of the Java API packages was not fair," the court ruled Tuesday.

Enlarge / Facebook took out ads in US and UK Sunday newspapers apologizing for not doing more to prevent customer data leaks amidst mounting concerns about just how much data Facebook collects. (credit: Jason Alden/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica revelations regarding the exposure of profile data for millions of users, Facebook is now facing an investigation into its data-collection practices by the Federal Trade Commission. In a statement issued on March 26, FTC Consumer Protection Bureau Acting Director Tom Pahl said that the FTC "takes very seriously recent press reports raising substantial concerns about the privacy practices of Facebook. Today, the FTC is confirming that it has an open non-public investigation into these practices."

The FTC investigation will likely focus on what data Facebook shares with third parties. But third parties aren't the only entity hoping to win "friends" and influence people on this social platform. Facebook collects a great deal of information about users for use by its internal algorithms. Those algorithms govern who and what users see, whom they get recommended to "friend," and other aspects of how our Facebook experiences are subtly (or sometimes not-so-subtly) shaped by advertisers and others leveraging the platform.

As Ars reported, Facebook has pushed users to allow access to SMS messages and call logs with its Messenger and Facebook Lite applications under the auspices of providing a service. "Keep up with all your conversations in one place" by using the app as the default SMS application on Android phones, Facebook offers. Previous versions of the Facebook mobile app on Android (in versions of Android prior to 4.1) were able to read SMS and call logs simply by asking for access to contacts, which Facebook has described as standard practice for applications. This allowed Facebook to keep track of the time, length, and contact information for any call made or received by the Android device by uploading it to Facebook's data centers. Facebook could also access metadata about text and multimedia messages sent via SMS.

Samuel Axon

The space gray versions of Apple's Magic Keyboard with Numeric Keypad, Magic Mouse 2, and Magic TrackPad 2 are now available to purchase separately from the company's new iMac Pro.

Previously, the space gray versions of the accessories were only available alongside Apple's newest all-in-one desktop computer, which starts at $4,999 and is aimed at professional users. White-and-silver versions of Magic Keyboard, Mouse 2, and TrackPad 2 have been available, but the other models' exclusivity led to complaints from some Apple users.

Enlarge / The towering primary mirror of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope stands inside a cleanroom at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. (credit: NASA)

The US space agency began preliminary design work on what would come to be known as the James Webb Space Telescope back in 1996. At the time, NASA projected a launch date of 2007 for the large, infrared telescope, with a total cost of $500 million.

That was then. On Tuesday, senior officials at NASA announced yet another delay for the world-class instrument. After encountering more technical challenges and struggles with its testing processes, NASA said, the telescope now would launch no earlier than May 2020. Moreover, the agency said it no longer could guarantee that the project would live within an $8 billion cost cap imposed by Congress.

These were painful admissions to make for a program that has already sustained more than a decade in delays and billions of dollars in cost overruns. But acknowledging them, ultimately, is probably the right thing to do. NASA will only ever have one opportunity to safely launch and deploy the Webb telescope. Once in space, it cannot be repaired.

Last year, the CIA used a South By Southwest festival event to reveal one of its weirdest training exercises: a series of globe-trotting, espionage-filled board games. If you're wondering why we're circling back to this news almost exactly one year later, we have four letters for you: FoIA.

A series of Freedom of Information Act requests, filed last June by Southern California tech entrepreneur Doug Palmer, finally bore fruit last week. The CIA has now released rules, art, and design documents for the two board games we played at last year's SXSW.

CIA