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Even years after the disastrous launches of games like SimCity and Battlefield 4, EA's poor reputation among many PC gamers still hasn't recovered all that much. EA Senior Marketing Director for Origin Peter O’Reilly seems to realize this, telling trade magazine MCV recently that the company is on a "journey to regain the trust of the PC gamer."

That means "ensuring a great play experience from launch," O'Reilly said, and indeed, online games like Battlefield: Hardline and Star Wars Battlefront have launched without the widespread server trouble reported on some previous EA titles. But O'Reilly also pointed to a number of consumer-focused programs as part of EA's trust-building attempts on the PC. Those include no-questions-asked refunds for games on Origin within seven days of purchase, free Origin game downloads as part of the "On the House" program, and the recently launched Origin Access subscription program that gives PC gamers access to older titles for $5 a month. "We’re excited about the progress we’ve made but are always pushing ourselves to innovate on behalf of players," O'Reilly said of those efforts.

Regardless of the specifics, it's definitely a welcome message from EA, which has been fighting against poor opinions of its Origin service for years. The tenor reminded us a bit of Microsoft's Phil Spencer, who last June owned up to the failure of Games for Windows Live and promised a new focus on the PC with "Xbox on Windows 10" (an effort that has paid decent dividends so far).

Most of the smart clothing in the spotlight until now has been fitness-related: socks that monitor running strides, shirts that measure heart rate, and other similar devices. While fitness is an obvious avenue for intelligent garments, some scientists are focusing on a more simple approach to smart fabrics. A recent New Scientist article highlights a number of research groups developing smart clothing and fabrics that "adapt to the environment of the wearer's body" to control body temperature.

These early developments are essentially about comfort, the premise being that a smart shirt could help you stay warm in a freezing office and cool when you step outside of the office into blistering summer heat. The report notes that aside from keeping us covered, clothing "controls air circulation and alters the amount of heat escaping from the body"; researchers are figuring out how they can best manipulate that process to make our clothing work a little harder for us in any weather.

One of those research groups is taking inspiration from squid—yes, squid. A team from the University of California, Irvine headed by Alon Gorodetsky is trying to control radiative heat similarly to how cephalopods such as squid change colors by reflecting visible wavelengths of light. While the group won't give any specifics of its technique, they are developing a similar process for longer wavelengths that carry heat. The team has partnered with Under Armour on this project, which isn't a surprise considering that Under Armour has years of experience in the athletic clothing industry and is also getting into more connected devices with the recent release of its Gemini 2 smart sneakers and HealthBox all-in-one fitness tracking package.

If you’re not yet obsessed with crows, you’re behind the times. A flood of research on the birds keeps turning up astonishingly smart behavior. They use tools: in artificial captive situations, in the wild, and by exploiting urban features like traffic. They recognize human faces. They can solve complicated multi-step puzzles.

Despite all the ability, current research barely scratches the surface of the Internet’s love affair with these animals. Floods of anecdotes and videos attribute everything from gratitude to playfulness to the corvid family—colloquially known as crows. We can even watch them appearing to find entertainment in tormenting other animals, like these apparently mischievous (or sadistic) crows causing a cat fight.

It’s hard to escape the feeling that this playfulness tells us something important about crow intelligence—it seems intuitive to take it as a further sign of prodigious animal intellect. The problem is, animal behavior is notoriously tricky to interpret. We have a tendency to project our own minds onto animals, says Alex Kacelnik, a professor of behavioral ecology at Oxford University. “We see animals doing things for which we don’t have appropriate explanations other than pretending we ourselves are doing it.”

LG is closing a security hole that makes it possible for attackers to steal chat histories and other sensitive data stored on an estimated 10 million G3 phones.

The vulnerability resides in an LG app called Smart Notice. It comes preinstalled on new LG G3 devices and displays a variety of notifications and suggestions, including recommendations to stay in touch with favorite contacts, saving recent callers' contact information, and birthday reminders. The app fails to validate data presented to users, making it possible for attackers to manipulate data such as contact information so that it executes malicious code on affected handsets.

"Using the vulnerability, an attacker can easily open the user device to data theft attack, extracting private information saved on the SD Card including WhatsApp data and private images; put the user in danger of phishing attack by misleading the end-user; and enable the installation of a malicious program on the device," researchers wrote in a blog post published Thursday. "We informed LG, which responded quickly to notice of the vulnerability and we encourage users to immediately upgrade their application to new Smart Notice release, which contains a patch."

Pulling Zotac's SN970 Steam Machine from its box, first impressions are good. Despite the garish Steam logo on top, its small white case with black side panels is pleasingly understated. It's weighty, too—the "wow, this thing must be expensive!" kind of weighty that you'd hope for from a device that costs a substantial £900.

Despite being smaller than a PlayStation 4—and tiny compared to the hulking mass of an Xbox One—Zotac's Steam Machine is far more powerful thanks to the Intel Core i5 processor and Nvidia GTX 960 graphics card inside. I was really quite eager to plug it in and play some games. Then the problems started.

The last time I used Steam OS was in 2014, back when it was still in beta, and everyone was falling over themselves to declare Valve's latest invention the best thing to happen to video games since the d-pad. Since then, Steam Machines—the console-like PCs that ship with Steam OS—have been released... and the reviews haven't been kind, to put it mildly. But I figured, how bad can it be? After all, we complain about Windows all the time and its constant need for updates and new graphics card drivers that can often make things worse rather than better. An OS designed to just get out of the way and let me play games? That can only be a good thing.

New documents released (PDF) on Wednesday by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of California show that for the last several years, police in the city of Anaheim, California—home of Disneyland—have been using an invasive cell phone surveillance device, known as a "dirtbox."

The ACLU obtained the 464 pages of documents recently after it sued the Anaheim Police Department (APD) last year over the agency’s failure to respond to its public records request concerning such surveillance-related documents.

The DRTBox has been described by one Chicago privacy activist as a "stingray on steroids," referring to the controversial cell-site simulator that spoofs cell towers to locate phones and intercept calls and texts.