Month: October 2019

Enlarge / The on-stream moment that eventually earned the AU Hearthstone team a six-month suspension from tournament play.

The American University Hearthstone team that held up a sign reading "Free Hong Kong Boycott Blizz" during a tournament stream last week has now received a six-month ban from competition, according to a tweet from team member Casey Chambers.

"We expect all players to follow the Hearthstone Collegiate Championship rules," the punishment letter reads, in part. "Every Voice Matters at Blizzard, and we strongly encourage everyone in our community to share their viewpoints in the many places available to express themselves. However, the official broadcast needs to be about the game and the competition, and to be a place where all are welcome."

The language in the AU punishment letter closely mirrors that found in a statement Blizzard released last Friday regarding Ng "Blitzchung" Wai Chung and an on-stream statement he made in support of Hong Kong protesters after winning a Hearthstone Grandmasters tournament last week. Blizzard's statement reduced Blitzchung's punishment to a similar six-month suspension and reinstated tournament winnings that had been denied in the immediate wake of Blitzchung's protest earlier that week.

Enlarge (credit: Andrew Brookes / Getty)

Authorities have shut down a massive underground child pornography network, arresting 337 alleged users in the process, the Department of Justice announced on Wednesday. The mastermind, a South Korean man named Jong Wo Son, ran the Tor hidden service from a server in his bedroom, according to authorities.

The feds say the site hosted 200,000 video files. Users who uploaded videos to the site were rewarded with free access to videos uploaded by others. Users could also purchase access to the videos using bitcoin.

A notice on the upload page stated "do not upload adult porn." A search page listed popular search terms on the site including "PTHC" ("preteen hardcore") and "%4yo."

Enlarge / The Space Launch System (SLS) rocket’s liquid oxygen tank structural test article was manufactured and stacked in June 2019 at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans. (credit: NASA)

The principle behind a cost-plus contract is simple. Occasionally, the US government needs something exceptionally difficult, complex, and unprecedented to be built. In those cases, with technical challenges all but certain to arise, the government pays a contractor the entire value of the development costs, plus a fee—often 10 percent.

This is a useful tool to get the best contractors in the country to focus their efforts on large programs the government deems valuable. But it's not a good way to encourage a company to move quickly on a program, especially as businesses seek to maximize profits. This is because the longer a contract goes, the more money it costs, and the greater fees it generates.

The alternative to this is a fixed-price contract, in which the government pays a vendor a fixed fee for a product. If the company delivers a product for less than that, it makes a profit. If the product ends up costing more, the company eats the difference. Most of the time, a company does not get paid the bulk of the funding until they deliver a product.

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  The Daydream View. It's cloth!

Google's big hardware event happened yesterday, which saw the announcement of the Pixel 4, Pixelbook Go, Nest Wi-Fi, Nest Home Mini, and new Pixel Buds. While the "Made by Google 2019" event was going on, Google was quietly shutting down enough products that it could have also held a mini "Killed by Google 2019" event that same day. Pour one out for the Google Daydream VR headset and the Google Clips camera.

Google Daydream now sleeps forever

Google Daydream View launched in 2016 and was Google's swing at proper phone-based virtual reality. Like the Samsung and Oculus collaboration Gear VR, the Daydream View was a cheap, light, "dumb" headset that featured VR lenses and little else. You slotted a smartphone into the front, and the phone switched to a VR mode, rendering a stereoscopic image that was blasted into your eyeballs through the lenses. You already have an expensive smartphone, so why not dip your toe in the VR waters with a cheap $100 headset.

Google originally experimented with phone-based VR with Google Cardboard, but the Daydream View added key features, like a head strap, a controller, and a material that wasn't literal garbage. Unlike Cardboard, Daydream made it so you'd actually want to stay in VR for more than 5 minutes. There was even a second-generation Daydream View headset released in 2017.