Author: Cassandra Khaw

Google has confirmed a number of changes to Gmail with the arrival of two new features that will let you know if the people you’re corresponding with aren’t hip with TLS encryption.

The alterations are fairly subtle: when you receive a message from, or are on the brink of sending a message to, someone using a service that doesn’t support encryption, you’ll see a broken lock in the top-right of the screen. Clicking on the icon will bring up a pop-up alert with an explanation and a warning to perhaps consider removing the offending recipient.

Likewise, if you receive a message that can’t be authenticated, you won’t be hit by klaxon alarms. Instead, Gmail will replace the sender's profile photo with an incriminating question mark, identifying them as potentially suspicious. What you do with that information after that, of course, is entirely up to you. Despite the advent of this new warning system, Google stresses that not all affected messages are necessarily harmful. It's just better to practice caution.

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Amazon just announced a new contender in the game engine market: Amazon Lumberyard. Currently in beta, this free, cross-platform 3D engine (with visuals based on CryEngine) features the usual contingent of promises: the ability to build beautiful worlds, make realistic characters, and create “stunning real-time effects.” But there’s also something else. Lumberyard, it seems, is all about connectivity.

According to Amazon, developers will be able to connect their games to “the vast compute and storage of AWS Cloud,” add cloud-connected features in “minutes” with the help of the drag-and-drop graphical user interface, and engage fans on Twitch.

The last bit is obviously the most interesting. There’s a "Twitch Chatplay" feature that lets the game interact with viewers in real-time, meaning spectators might be able to vote on outcomes or gift power-ups to the broadcasters. Rather like Twitch Plays Pokemon, one might imagine. Amazon Lumberyard also includes a Twitch JoinIn feature that will allow for multiplayer games where Twitch broadcasters can instantly invite viewers to join them side-by-side in a session.

That Dragon, Cancer is a game about love, hope, and letting go.

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“You have to let me feel this!”

Ryan Green is half-shouting, half-sobbing at his wife Amy. They’re fighting over the way that Ryan is dealing with the knowledge that their son’s diagnosis will lead to a future of palliative care and grief. We never see their faces, never get more than that solitary audio clip, but it’s a powerful, poignant moment that ends with us plunging Ryan deeper into an ocean of light.

That Dragon, Cancer is not an easy game to experience. It’s a eulogy, an autobiography, a cry into the dark. It’s one family’s endeavour to make sense of a looming tragedy, to press pause on a life that is—was— running out of time. Joel, the tow-headed child at the heart of the whole endeavour, died in March last year. He would have turned seven on the game’s January 12th launch.

Microsoft has confirmed that it has acquired the London-based startup SwiftKey, maker of the popular predictive smartphone keyboard of the same name. According to a press release, development for both iOS and Android platforms will continue, even as Microsoft explores “scenarios for the integration of the core technology across the breadth of our product and services portfolio.” Microsoft is believed to have paid about £170 million ($250 million) to acquire SwiftKey.

The acquisition is neither a new nor unexpected development for Microsoft. SwiftKey is easily one of the most popular keyboard apps available with over 300 million devices utilizing its functionalities and Android support for over 100 languages. Not only that, the company has the distinct pride of having developed a special language model to assist physicist Stephen Hawking.

SwiftKey also has what it calls GreenHouse, a place “to seed ideas and help them grow.” Currently, it features a range of experimental Android apps, such as the SwiftKey Neural which is reportedly the first of its kind to use neural networks. All things that fit perfectly with Microsoft’s desire to “develop intelligent systems that can work more on the user’s behalf and under their control.”

Every few years, cockroaches find themselves conscripted into humanity’s ongoing endeavours to build proper cyborgs. And this example from Instructables may be the cheapest venture yet. A user calling themselves bravoechonovember1 recently released guidelines on how to control a roach with an Arduino for under £30, a figure that does not doesn’t appear to include the cost of acquiring said insects first.

Nitpicking aside, the process itself seems relatively simple, if rather gruesome. The first step is to assemble a “backpack,” which consists of sheet aluminium cut into a rectangular shape, pin connectors, and wires. Then comes the actual surgical procedure.

You’ll need to anaesthetise your cockroach by submerging it into ice water before sanding down the top of its thorax (the bit between its neck and abdomen), attaching your Arduino, and trimming the antennae so you can insert wires into the hollows. Finally, and perhaps most disconcertingly, you’ll have to insert another wire into the creature’s thorax, by means of first creating a perforation with a pin. Ouch.

European aerospace giant Airbus and Uber are partnering to offer the public what will indubitably be an expensive breed of services: on-demand helicopter rides. According to The Wall Street Journal, the project will be launched during the upcoming Sundance Film Festival, which will take place in Utah this week. No details have been revealed in regards to what financial agreements have been reached by the two companies—nor how much the chopper rides will cost—but Airbus chief Tom Enders describes the venture as “pretty exciting.”

A spokesperson from Airbus said that the company would be offering Airbus H125 and H130 helicopters for use in the project, while Uber will be dispatching cars to deliver passengers to and collect them from their aerial voyages. Neither company has spoken about what the potential cost of such a journey might be, but Uber has charged between a few hundred to a few thousand pounds for similar services. In 2013, for example, you could pay £2,000 for a helicopter ride from a helipad in New York City to the Hamptons on Long Island, where an SUV would be waiting to take you to your final destination.

This unusual collaboration is, at least in part, potentially the result of low oil prices. The Wall Street Journal writes that oil and gas companies have traditionally been a key market for Airbus, but sales have suffered in the last two years. As for Uber, this could potentially be another move to diversify its portfolio of available vehicles. In the past, the company has tried offering auto-rickshaw services in Delphi (the service was shut down late last year) and luxury boats in Turkey. As recently as a couple of weeks ago, Uber offered chopper rides during CES in Las Vegas.

(credit: Ecig Click)

For any smoker in the UK looking to kick the habit, your favourite medical professional may soon prescribe you an e-cigarette. According to Reuters, British American Tobacco’s e-Voke recently became the first vaping device to be given a drug licence in the UK, meaning it's officially recognised by the state-funded National Health Service as a "quit smoking medicine."

"We want to ensure licensed nicotine containing products—including e-cigarettes—which make medicinal claims are available and meet appropriate standards of safety, quality and efficacy to help reduce the harms from smoking," the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) said in a statement on Monday.

Reuters writes that the e-Voke licence was issued "towards the end of last year" and that British American Tobacco is "currently evaluating plans to commercialise" their product. It's still unclear as to whether vaping really is safer than cigarettes, but a report issued by Public Health England last year suggests that it could be 95 percent less harmful than the real thing. More importantly, e-cigarettes could represent the first step in a smoker's journey to quitting. Professor Ann McNeill, who helped author the report, described it as a potential "gamechanger" in public health.

The developers behind popular multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) League of Legends now belong entirely to Tencent, the Chinese conglomerate behind similarly popular QQ instant messenger. The news was actually revealed tangentially, when Riot released an article explaining that there would be changes to the company’s equity program.

The succinct post detailed how they will be moving from a “Riot equity program” to a “cash-based incentive program” that would allow employees to share in Riot’s successes. What this entails exactly has not been clarified. But Tencent’s move to purchase the remaining equity shares is not surprising given Riot Games’ track record.

In 2014, it was reported that League of Legends had about 67 million monthly players and more than 7.5 million concurrents, making it arguably the biggest name in e-sports. So big, in fact, that BBC Three saw fit to cover the League of Legends World Championships semi-finals. VentureBeat writes that the game netted $946 million (£633 million) in in-game spending revenues last year, a number that is likely to rise as Riot Games works on an overhaul for League of Legends.

Online streaming giant Netflix, which is responsible for a huge amount of traffic flowing across the Internet during the evening, is experimenting with ways to save bandwidth. Until now, Netflix has just served up a different version of an episode or film depending on your Internet connection—if you have a slow connection, you get a low-res stream; if you have a fast connection, you get a high-res 1080p stream. Now the plan is to stream big films and dramas at a high bitrate, while "visually simple" shows like My Little Pony would be streamed at a much lower bitrate.

Variety reports that, at the moment, a low-end stream for slow connections is encoded at a bitrate of 235Kbps, which delivers video at a resolution of 320×240. On the opposite end of the spectrum, there is a 5800Kbps version for 1080p viewing. The reason for this change stems from how Netflix works: streams are configured to match the user’s available bandwidth.

This approach was deemed somewhat inefficient, however. “You shouldn’t allocate the same amount of bits for ‘My Little Pony’ as for ‘The Avengers,’” Netflix video algorithms manager Anne Aaron said to Variety. Since 2011, Netflix has been working on a new, adaptive method of encoding videos, depending on the visual complexity of the video. With the proposed changes to encoding rules, the 1080p version of My Little Pony, which is full of solid colours and simple textures, is encoded at a bitrate of just 1500Kbps, down from 5800Kbps.