Month: August 2022

Enlarge (credit: Nintendo)

Through the first half of 2022, Nintendo of America has been in the crosshairs of critics and the US National Labor Relations Board thanks to reports and formal complaints about working conditions for its contracted employees, all brought into the spotlight after a reported layoff allegedly involved pro-union sentiment. In the months since that story broke out publicly, Kotaku reporter Sisi Jiang has tracked down even more allegations about the famed game publisher's American headquarters—and the allegations land squarely in the domain of sexual harassment and gender inequity.

A sweeping report published at Kotaku on Tuesday recounts roughly one decade of internal incidents among NoA's pool of temporary employees, dating back to "the early Wii U era," backed by a number of on-the-record allegations from former Nintendo staffers along with anonymous reports. The report includes attempts to reach out to Nintendo of America's leadership, an associated temp agency, and individual staffers who were named as workplace sexual harassers, but Kotaku says it never received answers to its questions.

Many of the reported issues revolve around a divide between full-time employees, colloquially known as "red badges," and the rest of the company's American workforce, which was managed by temp hiring agency Aerotek before that company was absorbed into another company during a recent reorganization. The women who spoke to Kotaku both on and off the record collectively suggest that their hopes for turning part-time status into a full-time Nintendo career were strained by being women. One anonymous source said, "your chance was probably worse as a girl," while another who spoke on the record suggested women weren't given work-related goals or metrics to grow their careers, instead being told to essentially increase "face time" with male colleagues.

Enlarge (credit: Vesnaandjic | E+)

A lot of scrutiny has been placed on how Twitch handles users' reports after being targeted by extreme hate campaigns. Last year, the livestreaming service started suing users conducting “hate raids” that rely on bots to spew a continual barrage of hate speech, “targeting black and LGBTQIA+ streamers with racist, homophobic, sexist, and other harassing content.” Now, vulnerable users are hoping that Twitch will use its industry heft to help effect more change and stop some of the deadliest attacks affecting marginalized users on the platform: swatting that has reportedly been increasing since 2015 and now happens multiple times a week.

These swatting attacks are conducted by anonymous persons making prank calls to police, falsely reporting emergency circumstances (like an armed potential mass shooter or hostage situation that doesn’t exist) in order to get SWAT teams to descend, with guns out, on a Twitch streamer’s location. The Washington Post reported this week that these swattings are seemingly intensifying and traumatizing for any Twitch streamers targeted, who are aware that swattings can be deadly. One trans Twitch streamer told the Post that police in London aimed an assault rifle at her face.

Official attempts to prevent swatting

Back in 2017, a Twitch user died after a swatting. The Twitch user who set up the swatting, Casey Viner, was sentenced to 15 months in prison, while the man whom Viner hired to place the prank call, Tyler Barriss, was sentenced to 20 years.

Enlarge (credit: Mark Walton)

In a recent interview with Nikkei Asia, Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa said the company has no plans "at this point" to increase the price of the Switch. Despite "rising production and shipping costs" for the system, Furukawa said Nintendo wants to "avoid pricing people out" of its console ecosystem (a worry apparently not shared by Meta, which recently raised the asking price of its Quest 2 VR headset).

While some are overreading the "at this point" phrasing as suggestive of a future Switch price increase, all this talk has us focused on some different questions. Namely, why haven't we seen a price drop for the Nintendo Switch in the last five-plus years? And can we ever expect Nintendo to offer the system for less than its launch price?

A historical anomaly

When it comes to consistent console pricing, the Switch is truly in a class by itself. As of this writing, the Switch has been available in North America for over five years—nearly 2,000 days—yet it's still being sold in the US for the same $299.99 you would have paid when the system launched in March, 2017.

Enlarge / A selection of apps from the Microsoft Store. (credit: Microsoft)

Windows 11's first major update, also called Windows 11 22H2, is due to be released to the public on September 20, according to separate reports from The Verge and Windows Central.

The update has been available in near-final form in Microsoft's Windows Insider Preview channels since May, and we've already covered most of its major changes—Windows 11 22H2 will include a few new security features (and new default settings for existing features), a redesigned Task Manager, new touchscreen gestures and window management features, and tweaks for the Start menu and taskbar, among other things. It also continues to replace old bits of Windows 8- and 10-era UI (like the brightness and volume indicators) with rounded Windows 11-style versions, bringing more visual consistency to Windows PCs.

Like all major Windows updates, it likely won't be offered to all current Windows 11 users on September 20. Microsoft usually sends the update to a small number of PCs first and gradually expands availability until all Windows 11 PCs have installed it. Users can manually install new updates by downloading an ISO or using the Windows 11 Installation Assistant from this page.

Enlarge / Elon Musk speaks at the 2020 Satellite Conference and Exhibition, March 9, 2020, in Washington, DC.

The judge overseeing the Twitter/Elon Musk case is giving Musk access to evidence from one former Twitter executive but rejected his request for documents from 21 other potential witnesses. As previously reported, Musk was seeking evidence from employees responsible for calculating spam-account estimates and reportedly claimed Twitter was hiding key witnesses.

In response, Delaware Court of Chancery Judge Kathaleen McCormick ruled yesterday that Twitter "is required to collect, review, and produce documents from Kayvon Beykpour," the recently fired head of Twitter's consumer product group. But Twitter "is not required to collect, review, or produce documents from any other of the defendants' proposed 22 additional custodians. The plaintiff need only collect, review, and produce documents from the 41 custodians to which plaintiff has agreed to date and Mr. Beykpour."

Musk's request was part of his effort to disprove Twitter's estimate that fewer than 5 percent of its monetizable daily active users (mDAU) are spam or fake.

Enlarge (credit: Google)

Android 13 is slowly rolling out to Pixel phones, but here's something to consider when that update message finally pops up on your device: You can never go back.

Google is apparently changing the way Android updates are enforced on its latest devices. A new warning message on the Pixel Factory Image page says that the Pixel 6, 6 Pro, and 6a can never go back to older versions of Android once they update:

Anti-rollback was first introduced in Android 8 as a security feature. Google can patch all the exploits it wants, but security fixes are meaningless if an attacker can just roll back a device to a previous version that's full of security holes. Rollback protection works by recording the newest installed version into tamper-evident storage that persists across device wipes, and now the system knows if it's on an old version or not. Previously, this feature would just show a warning message on boot (and it looks like that will still happen on the Pixel 5 and lower), but now, Google plainly says of the Pixel 6, "You will not be able to flash older Android 12 builds."