Month: May 2019

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  The Pixel 3a XL. [credit: Ron Amadeo ]

Google finally took the wraps off the Pixel 3a at Google I/O this week. It's a cheaper, plastic version of the Pixel 3 with the same great camera and the same great Google software support.

There really isn't a ton to say about the Pixel 3a. The phone is so incredibly similar to the Pixel 3 that it can be hard to tell apart from a distance. Both devices have the same design, but the 3a is just rendered in plastic and (in the case of the XL version) noticeably lighter. It feels a bit like one of those plastic demo phones you'll see in stores—a perfect copy, but lighter and cheaper.

The Pixel 3a's body doesn't feel bad. The back continues the Pixel 3's two-tone design with a hard, glossy plastic around the top camera portion of the back and a soft-touch plastic coating. The back wraps around the sides with easy-to-hold, rounded corners, and the display and display cover sit on top of the body. The 3a isn't premium, but at only a $400, it doesn't have to be.

Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) today announced plans to introduce "The Protecting Children from Abusive Games Act," which would target "the exploitation of children through 'pay-to-win' and 'loot box' monetization practices by the video game industry," according to a summary released by Hawley's office.

As outlined, the bill would mirror the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act in applying to games "targeted at those under the age of 18" and "games with wider audiences whose developers knowingly allow minor players to engage in microtransactions." Under the bill, such games would prohibit loot boxes, defined here as "microtransactions offering randomized or partially randomized rewards to players."

The bill summary also takes aim at so-called "pay-to-win" mechanics that "manipulate a game's progression system... to induce players to spend money..." or which alter the "competitive balance between players of multiplayer games." The Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general would be able to enforce the law.

Enlarge / SpaceX performs its fourteenth overall parachute test supporting Crew Dragon development in the Mojave Desert in March 2018. (credit: NASA)

SpaceX had a problem during a test of its Crew Dragon parachute system in April, NASA confirmed on Wednesday. "The test was not satisfactory," said NASA's chief of human spaceflight, Bill Gerstenmaier, at a House subcommittee hearing. "We did not get the results we wanted. The parachutes did not work as designed."

The test appears to have occurred last month at Delamar Dry Lake in Nevada, where SpaceX was conducting one of dozens of drop tests it intends to perform to demonstrate the safety of its Crew Dragon spacecraft. This was a "single-out" test in which one of Dragon's four parachutes intentionally failed before the test. "The three remaining chutes did not operate properly," Gerstenmaier said.

The admission came during questions from an Alabama Representative, Mo Brooks, who has been critical of the new space company because its advances in rocket technology threaten the Marshall Space Flight Center, which he represents.

The clock is ticking faster and faster as the world escalates toward destruction in the first teaser for Watchmen, HBO's forthcoming new miniseries based on the hugely popular graphic novel by Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons.

(Some spoilers below for 2009 film and Watchmen and Doomsday Clock comics.)

Watchmen is one of the most critically acclaimed comic book series, widely viewed as a harbinger of the genre reaching full maturity due to its dark vision of flawed superheroes in an alternate timeline who go into hiding when public sentiment turns against them. Set in 1985, the series opens with the murder of a man named Edward Blake, who turns out to be a superhero known as the Comedian. Some former superhero compatriots team up to discover who has begun offing their colleagues, culminating in a confrontation with entrepreneur Adrian Veidt (formerly the superhero known as Ozymandias). Veidt orchestrates a massacre of half of New York City's population by a giant alien squid in hopes that it will unite warring nations against a common foe.

Enlarge (credit: Mighty Travels / Flickr)

More than 100 e-commerce sites around the world are infected with malicious code designed to surreptitiously skim payment card data from visitors after they make purchases, researchers reported on Wednesday. Among those infected are US-based websites that sell dental equipment, baby merchandise, and mountain bikes.

In total, researchers with China-based Netlab 360 found 105 websites that executed card-skimming JavaScript hosted on the malicious domain magento-analytics[.]com. While the domain returns a 403 error to browsers that try to visit it, a host of magento-analytics[.]com URLs host code that’s designed to extract the name, number, expiration date, and CVV of payment cards that are used to make purchases. The e-commerce sites are infected when the attackers add links that cause the malicious JavaScript to be executed.

One of the infected sites identified by Netlab 360 is ilybean[.]com, an Orlando, Florida, business that sells baby beanies. As the screenshot below shows, the site executes JavaScript hosted at magento-analytics[.]com.

Enlarge / Give kids something to talk about, and they'll take it home with them. (credit: Courtney Celley/USFWS)

There are significant generational differences when it comes to opinions on climate change in the US. Students are more open to learning about this scientific issue without getting snagged on the culture wars that have divided American opinions along political and cultural lines, which probably explains why younger people are less likely than their grandparents to claim that climate science is “a hoax.” But can kids help us with that problem now, or will they have to wait decades for their turn behind the levers of power?

A team of researchers led by North Carolina State University’s Danielle Lawson set out to test how kids affect their parents’ opinions by bringing what they learn home. The researchers recruited middle school teachers in coastal North Carolina, assigning some to try out a specific climate change lesson plan and using the rest as a control group for comparison. In total, about 200 families went through the experimental curriculum, with about 100 kids in the control group taking unchanged classes.

The experimental curriculum consisted of four class activities teaching students about the difference between weather and climate and how climate change impacts the species around them. They then participated in a relevant local community project. This experience was designed to fulfill education standards but also to be similar to other lesson plans in which novel experiences have been shown to get kids talking at home, resulting in parental attitude changes. To that end, the kids were also given an assignment to interview their parents about their perceptions of changes in the local weather.

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  In a series a comparative text samples published on Facebook, co-author Paige Leitman shows significant similarities throughout her "The Black Road" adventure and the Elsweyr adventure published by Bethesda. [credit: Paige Leitman/WotC & Bethesda Netherlands ]

A promotional Elder Scrolls-themed tabletop RPG adventure released by Bethesda Tuesday contained widespread instances of apparent plagiarism from a Dungeons & Dragons adventure published by Wizards of the Coast in 2016. That adventure was pulled down from the Internet Wednesday afternoon, and Bethesda now says it is "investigat[ing] the source."

Bethesda's pen-and-paper Elder Scrolls "Elsweyr" adventure (archived here for reference) contains text that in total seems only slightly reworded from the D&D adventure "The Black Road," written by Paige Leitman and Ben Heisler as part of Wizards of the Coast's Organized Play program. The adventures are largely identical throughout their texts, aside from sometimes sloppy replacements of certain words and phrases with synonyms and the changing of certain items and locations to fit in the Elder Scrolls setting.

The introduction to "The Black Road" reads, in part: