Month: November 2021

Enlarge / For your eyes only. (credit: Apple)

Apple is giving new meaning to the phrase "for your eyes only." A patent filed by Apple and published Thursday by the US Patent and Trademark Office details the tech giant's interest in creating "privacy eyewear" that blurs content on a device's screen unless someone wearing special glasses is using it.

As spotted by Patently Apple, the patent, which focuses on creating different FaceID profiles for various visual impairments, explores a new type of privacy screen. The patent doesn't specify any Apple product by name. Instead, it refers to electronic devices in general, including smartphones, watches, laptops, TVs, and car displays. Drawings in the patent show the feature working on a smartphone-like device.

The technology would use a face scan to determine if the user is wearing the required glasses. It could recognize the headgear by a specific graphic, such as a QR or bar code.

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  Comparison images provided by Rockstar Games.

The servers for the Rockstar Games Launcher on PC have been down for nearly 24 hours now, and PC versions of Rockstar's games have been removed from sale on the company's website. The timing of the outage is particularly tough for the company, coming amid Thursday's launch of the remastered Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy.

Rockstar officially noted the outage in a support tweet Thursday afternoon, merely saying that "services for the Rockstar Games Launcher and supported titles are temporarily offline for maintenance. Services will return as soon as maintenance is completed." Fourteen hours later, the company gave a brief update, saying, "We thank you for your patience and understanding as we continue to work on restoring services for the Rockstar Games Launcher and supported titles." That same update also appears on Rockstar's support site.

PC Gamer reports that the launcher is loading in offline mode for players who have previously launched specific games on the service. Multiplayer titles like Grand Theft Auto Online and Red Dead Redemption Online remain inaccessible on PC for the time being, however. And for those launching recently downloaded titles like the GTA Definitive Trilogy for the first time, a required online authentication check will fail during the outage.

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  Comparison images provided by Rockstar Games. (Rockstar didn't clarify what these were captured on, so we're assuming PC.) [credit: Rockstar Games ]

The PlayStation 2-era Grand Theft Auto trilogy is now available on modern gaming devices and comes with across-the-board aesthetic touch-ups. That should be good news. The series' shift from top-down 2D to open-world 3D was a seismic event in the gaming industry, and despite showing their age, each of these games provides a fine amount of macabre criminal adventuring.

But while some parts of the trilogy's re-release are easy to praise, others are less exciting. Shortly after the $60 GTA Definitive Trilogy went live on Thursday, I logged some time with the Nintendo Switch and Xbox Series X versions. I also spent a few hours staring at the game's locked-up installation on my Windows 10 testing rig. I can now see why Rockstar wasn't eager to make this collection available to the press ahead of launch—and also why the game maker didn't want to break up this set into three $20 purchases. As Ryder might say in GTA San Andreas: This re-release is a buster. (And that's not a good thing.)

That’s one way to encourage grand theft, Rockstar

Over 12 hours after the collection's launch on the Rockstar Games Launcher, I still can't launch the games despite having fully downloaded them.

The worst part of the release is the collection's Windows 10 version, which is now exclusively available on the Rockstar Games Launcher. Ahead of this week's launch, Rockstar removed the old versions of GTA III, Vice City, and San Andreas from storefronts like Steam. You can still access these versions—along with years of community-driven mod support—if you've already purchased them, but they are no longer for sale.