November 2020 Tech News

Netflix goes old-school:

Netflix has decided to try out a new thing, and it should be a good ole bit of fun, because it has decided to create a channel on its browser-based website (for now) that will stream pre-selected movies and series like a regular old channel that you might find on a cable or satellite TV service. So it’s going back to the way things used to be, but without the ad breaks.

Now, this service is entirely opt-in, and it’s so far only been unveiled in France under the name Netflix Direct. This is apparently because French viewers tend to like watching things they haven’t selected themselves? It’s odd reasoning but if it works, it works. Now, this will not be for everyone, obviously, but for those who don’t want to have to choose, it’s probably a great way to have a curated channel with things of a certain quality that can be streamed to those who want it.

This would be a nice addition to Netflix for those who don’t know what to watch. It certainly would help with all those times where you make food and then sit around looking for something to watch and then the food gets cold but because you still can’t find something to watch and so it just gets colder and colder… although that may not be a problem for everyone.

 

Bridgefy launches some great messaging for protests and disasters:

There’s an ongoing issue in the world, and it has to do with communication when communication is difficult or impossible. When a disaster strikes and all those usual things fall away, all those usual means of connecting via cell towers disappear, then you still need to be able to communicate. And that is what the messaging app Bridgefy has attempted to do.

The app is for offline messaging and uses an innovative blend of Bluetooth and wifi to maintain communication in disasters and in places where internet has been blocked or just shut off. You know, like in autocratic states or for people attempting to protest. This app has proved useful in recent years with things such as outages in Turkey and Greece during earthquakes, troubles in Nigeria and even in the Hong Kong protests. And the app just got a much-needed update.

The update adds something that is quite important when trying to communicate without having to worry about things like government surveillance, and that’s end-to-end encryption. The app has already proven successful and will likely continue along that route so long as it presents users with a safer, harder to crack service for communicating when communication is either difficult or repressed.

 

Social media companies went into overdrive during the election:

The United States election went by this month and Joe Biden came out ahead, but during the election itself the social media platforms went into absolute overdrive as they dealt with all the misinformation that was being thrown around by the Trump administration and by Trump supporters. Every social media platform had to tangle with the misinformation that was being thrown in every direction.

TikTok flagged and took down misinformation, YouTube was pulling videos all over the place, Facebook and Instagram sent out notifications to warn people about misinformation floating around, Facebook pulled things too, and once the election was technically over, Twitter announced that Trump would be losing his Twitter privileges come January and would be treated like every other user. So false info from him will just be pulled down.

And that was the election. A lot of whining online, a lot of conservative fake news and news outlets finally having enough of it all. All in all, it was rather fun to watch. From the outside at least.

 

Twitter will now warn you if you’re gonna like something wrong:

As we’ve already seen, social media companies decided to take the election seriously and did a whole load of misinformation banning. They blocked things and did all sorts, but Twitter has decided to extend some of that into the post-election times. They already decided to put up notifications when you try to retweet something with “misleading information”. You can still retweet it but it will notify you that it’s a lie, and now they’re gonna be doing the same thing with likes.

The function will stop you before you like something, and will tell you that it is not a truthful tweet. The hope is that this will dissuade people from engaging in blatant lies if they know that these things are lies. Sadly, many people are conspiratorial and believe that Twitter is out to get them, so this likely won’t work, but it’s a nice gesture. Not as nice as just blocking false information, but ya know. Baby steps.

 

Apple announced things at its “One More Thing” event:

Apple decided to have one of its big ole events again, and they did many of their usual things: announced a new MacBook Air, a new MacBook Pro and a new iOS update that has been named the Big Sur (which then came on 12 November). So all the usual kinds of things, but the company also unveiled some new chips that will come to the Mac and also the new app functionality that will have apps coming to Mac. So the usual stuff, really.

 

Furries do great furry things:

Furries come out into the general news every now and then to do something fun, and this time they did something very entertaining. Now, first off, to understand this, it’s important to understand the context. Right before the news outlets in the States announced that Joe Biden had won the presidency, Trump held a press conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping, and no one knows whether this was a mistake and they were supposed to book a Four Seasons hotel. Either way, it’s funny.

So that’s just a funny mistake that was potentially made, but a furry named coopertom decided to recreate the location in VR Chat and then invited a bunch of furry friends over. So it became a digital playground for my favourite internet sub-culture, and that’s just something wonderful that’s always worth a good ole mention.

 

YouTube had an outage:

YouTube generally manages to remain rather stable throughout its existence, and that is kind of a necessity considering its ubiquity, but on 12 November 2020 it had a big ole issue and went down around the world. The service was unavailable for several hours and the outage affected 286,000 people. Google got the service back up and running quickly enough, but it has been rather quiet about what caused the outage. Even the biggest online services can be subject to errors though. So, who knows what could have happened there.

 

Snapchat does TikTok:

Seeing as TikTok was repeatedly threatened by forces in the United States, various companies decided to try and come in and steal TikTok’s market share, and this was all announced a while back but now it’s come into actual being. You see, Snapchat has decided to release its special little feature called Spotlight, and it’s essentially TikTok but on Snapchat. So it’s just one of many rip-offs that’s likely to come in the following months, much like how Twitter decided to try its hand at doing Instagram Stories. Everyone just copying from everyone. The way capitalism was always meant to be. Never innovating, just chasing the latest trend and trying to one-up the people who did it first and better. Oh well. Fun times.

 

 

 

 

 

October 2020 Tech News

Things aren’t looking so good for Big Tech:

Big Tech has a bit of a reckoning on the way, or at least provided the Democratic party wins the United States election in November, because the House Judiciary Committee has finished up a panel on some antitrust issues concerning some of the tech giants. The panel met to discuss the issues surrounding Alphabet (which owns Google), Apple, Amazon and Facebook, and it stated that there are definitely some antitrust issues that need to be addressed.

It has been stated though that it’s unlikely anything will be done about this for the next few months, but that things may happen once the election ends. It’s especially likely that things will happen if Joe Biden is elected president because he appears to be particularly receptive to dealing with a trust issue. So maybe a time of reckoning is at hand.

Furthermore, the United States government later stating that breaking Google up may be the only option to end antitrust issues with them. So that isn’t the best thing to hear if you are Big Tech.

 

A program that watches how you write raised some extra cash:

A program called Writer has succeeded in raising some capital to the tune of $5 million, and while this isn’t an extraordinarily huge amount, the service promises something a little different to similar services like Grammarly. First off, it’s a word processor that does all the deluxe word processor things; it watches your spelling, the way you construct sentences and paragraphs, et cetera, but what sets it apart from the rest is the way it highlights individual words and phrases that are problematic for reasons external to grammar and punctuation.

The program watches and corrects the way you use certain words and then flags them for bias. So it looks at loaded language that you maybe shouldn’t be using, especially in a corporate setting in which inclusivity has become an increased priority. It will flag words for bias based on various factors, such as race, disability, sex, et cetera. It’s a fascinating algorithm that’s basically able to be an unconscious prejudice detector, and so just like other services of a similar kind, it’s available on a subscription basis for those who don’t understand that the words they use have more than one meaning.

 

Twitter only now decides hoping for someone’s death is bad:

Social media has always been a place where you can pop online, find someone you disagree with and then stalk them online, act creepy, tell them you hope they get cancer, but only now, when Trump got coronavirus, did Twitter decide that wishing for someone’s death is a no-no and that it would take down posts that celebrate his infection or possibility of death. It just took a major, divisive figure to get sick for them to decide to do something decent, so that’s nice.

However, according to them, this has been a rule since April, but there wasn’t much enforcement of it. And it just needed a demagogue’s sickness to push them into gear. So it’s great to see that when regular people have death wished upon them by anonymous people online that it’s just fine and there’s no point in doing anything about it but that when it’s someone like him, then we suddenly need to see to it that the rules are enforced!

Also, they haven’t actually enforced these rules, even now, it was mostly to placate Trump. Everyone else can still have cancer wished on them.

 

Facebook banned QAnon:

QAnon, the unhinged conspiracy theory about evil people secretly doing evil things rather than evil people overtly doing evil things, has finally been banned on Facebook. Originally, the social media platform decided to ban them whenever they threatened violence but has since decided to just ban the whole thing before it can become violent. Which is good, especially seeing as the FBI labelled QAnon a potential domestic terror threat in the United States. Probably better to get rid of them than patch things up as they incite violence.

 

Pakistan bans TikTok:

TikTok appears to be under threat all over the world, and this time the threat to its existence comes from Pakistan. The country decided to ban the app because of its “immoral and indecent” content, which does smell quite a lot like blatant censorship. The news comes off the back of TikTok having been banned in India and undergoing a process to perhaps even see it being banned in the United States, although that remains to be seen.

According to a statement from the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, the company was given plenty of time to respond to the accusations of lax moderation and never did. And so it got banned. The Authority does state that it would be willing to review the decision based on any information that TikTok brings forward in future. The Authority likely just wants stronger moderation on the app, but that could easily be seen as censorship

But the ban only lasted eleven days, and then TikTok pledged improved moderation and all went back to normal. It’s almost as if you force some level of moderation on a platform, the platform holders will do it rather than lose business. Fascinating.

 

Sony released a PS5 teardown video:

Sony decided to show us all how it’s done. How the PlayStation is put together. Or rather, how to take a PlayStation apart (although it does warn you not to it yourself). The company released a video hosted by Yasuhiro Ootori, the VP of the mechanical design department at Sony, and he shows off the PlayStation 5, breaks it down and shows off all the components.

So this video is worth a watch if you want to see just how big the machine is, all it’s specifications, its tiny SSD drives, it’s cute little stand and the tiny hole it has to vacuum out dust. It’s both adorable and informative! So, give it a watch, it’s less than ten minutes long anyway.

 

New iPhone doesn’t come with accessories:

Apple has decided to grace us mere mortals with its amazing plan to save the planet by charging the same amount of money for its next iPhone but just putting fewer things in the box. No more power adaptors or earphones shall be in the box any longer! And so if you don’t have special wireless earphones then tough luck to you, good madam and sir!

The stated reason is to make the whole process of manufacturing all this stuff carbon neutral. So making production more efficient, not being as wasteful with boxes and such, and having smaller boxes with less stuff in it does contribute to that, but it should always be noted that the reason for this is not environmental protection but rather reducing the bottom line and increasing profits wherever possible. But hey, at least it does kinda help the environment a bit.

 

A prison visitation video service maybe exposed some people:

Prisons are not the greatest places in the world, although that is kind of their purpose, but regardless of that they should at least be kept safe. This is why the prisons have locked down to attempt to stop the spread of the coronavirus throughout the system, and that’s good, but it seems that prisoners just can’t catch a break because now there are issues with the special visitation video systems they use: they expose people’s personal lives.

This all started in St Louis in the United States, where a video service called HomeWAV, screwed up and accidentally allowed anyone to see private conversations between prisoners and families and, even more worrying, between prisoners and lawyers, which are supposed to be completely secure. This all happened because a security leak led to the online database losing its password protection and giving anyone who went to the site access.

A random security researcher found this and then the company accused a third party for the breach, because you apparently give administrator privileges and the ability to remove password functionality to a third party! There also hasn’t been much apologising from the company. So even prison calls aren’t secure, and those places are supposed to be some of the most secure places in the world!

 

The moon is getting an internet connection:

It’s nearly time for the first ethical colonisation in history because the moon is getting an internet connection. At last! It was the only reason many people never went there. So, the reason for having internet on the moon is that it will help with future moon colonisers general lives, such as operating various types of machinery, having communication abilities and maybe even to keep up with the latest trends while far from earth #MoonFashion.

NASA plans on having people on the moon by 2024, and Nokia has been enlisted, along with a private space craft design company called Intuitive Machines, to get a good ole connection set up on the moon. The set up will be finished by 2022 and will be a 4G/LTE connection because 5G is still a bit untested at present, but there are plans to upgrade it to that in future. So, this is a fun turn of events. We will have moon people in the next few years, and they’ll have access to Twitter. How fun!

 

Quibi is shutting down:

Oh and woe, the destined for greatness streaming service Quibi turned out to be a bad idea that didn’t actually work! What a magnificent loss! But in all seriousness, Quibi was always doomed for failure but at least the people behind it have finally acknowledged that fact and have decided to shut the whole thing down once and for all.

Quibi, for those unfamiliar, is a streaming service built for mobile devices, and the idea is that you can watch these things, which are designed to be in short bites of content (called “quibis”… like a quickie, I guess) and they can be watched in landscape or portrait! And that was supposedly something revolutionary, but whatever.

The service was the brainchild of some pretty big names, Jeff Katzenberg and Meg Whitman, and they came out to deliver the truth about the service: it was a bad idea to begin with and it was timed poorly. It launched in the middle of the pandemic! People are staying home, not watching stuff on the train. But it is a rather sad thing and it only lasted a whopping six months. But at least it tried!

 

 

 

 

September 2020 Tech News

Twitter and Zoom faced some algorithmic bias:

Various technologies allow people to have their faces on screen in some way and this can cause some issues with the algorithms that give priority to certain faces in images or videos. This is intended for various conveniences such as focusing on faces to remove blur and tagging. But those things have also caused some issues.

For Zoom, that issue led to a Twitter user sharing an image from a Zoom call with a colleague, and the colleague’s head was removed from the video service. It would appear that the man’s head was removed because he’s black and the service believed a light behind him was a face instead. So it just removed him entirely. This shows a bit of a bias in how the algorithm prioritises certain people over others.

Another issue came from Twitter, in which various users tested out which photo would gain priority when Twitter’s algorithm was forced to choose between multiple faces as its display image. It started out with testing whether the algorithm would prioritise Mitch McConnel or Barack Obama, one of which is white and the other is black, and the algorithm chose to prioritise the white man.

These algorithms are designed by human beings and so while algorithms themselves cannot be racist, because they’re just machines, the prejudice of those who design them can sneak in. This may not even be conscious on the part of the designers, but it’s something to keep an eye on, and it’s something that these companies have stated that they need to keep an eye on.

 

Nvidia unveiled its new GPUs:

Nvidia went and showed off its new RTX 3090 GPU, an absolute beast that easily overshoots all the prior GPUs Nvidia has put out there. It does come at a nice cost of $1,499 and so it isn’t for just anyone looking to play some games. But of course it will be a far superior GPU, with improved cooling, real-time ray tracing improvements and it brings in some 8k gaming.

The GPU is an absolute beast, and for those looking for the full list of specs check out this Rock, Paper, Shotgun piece on it. It breaks the whole thing down nicely. The future of gaming comes with every year’s new innovations, but this thing looks like a gigantic leap forward. It should be interesting to see what comes next.

 

The Epic versus Apple saga continues:

The big kerfuffle between Epic and Apple has continued. This past month, Epic decided that it wanted Fortnite back on the App Store during these legal proceedings, but Apple was always unlikely to allow that to happen because it needs to appear strong against Epic. In addition, Apple claimed that this whole thing has just been a way to reinvigorate interest in Fortnite. The tech giant hasn’t been too happy about being challenged.

So because of this, Apple has decided to seek damages over this contract breach, and it claimed that Epic just wants more money and even decided to officially state that: “Epic portrays itself as a modern corporate Robin Hood” despite being a massive, multi-billion dollar company. And Apple has started with some retribution because of this: it decided to remove the convenience of the “sign in with Apple” feature in Fortnite (although it hasn’t implemented this yet, but has suggested that it could at any moment) and it even pulled Fortnite: Save the World from the Mac.

In the meantime, Google, which also has beef with Epic, has officially distanced itself from this whole Apple v. Epic thing. It wants people to see its court case with Epic as something completely separate from Apple’s one.

 

Streaming services commit to self-regulation:

No company likes to invite regulation into its industry, and the online video streaming industry is no different. You see, in India, these companies are facing the threat of government-mandated regulation. This will entail a whole bunch of legal action and such, and so instead of going through a rigamarole like that, the various streaming giants have instead decided to sign a code created by the Internet and Mobile Association of India, and this code allows them to self-regulate instead.

Various companies, like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+ and others, have committed to this self-regulation. This self-regulation seems like some pretty obvious stuff though. Things like adhering to age ratings, having internal departments for dealing with any issues and having a complaints department. At least none of the companies attempted any strong opposition to voluntary self-regulation. So that’s nice.

 

Researchers took the first 3,200-megapixel photo:

Researchers at Stanford have created a massive digital camera that will be installed at Stanford’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) (which is in Chile) and it will be used to study things like dark energy, dark matter and such.

According to them, this camera would be able to take a picture so large that it would take 378 ultra-high-definition TV screens to display it at full size. And that the resolution is so high that “you could see a golf ball from about 15 miles away”. So it’s a pretty gnarly photo. And the first photo was taken as a test run before it gets into the real nitty gritty of its work.

This should be a fantastic technological marvel for continuing to study things that are so very small that our disgusting human eyeballs are not able to see. Exciting times and exciting sights are ahead of us.

 

ByteDance is going to partner with Oracle and Walmart:

The TikTok debacle continues ever on. It all started with ByteDance, the owners of TikTok, coming out swinging by stating that it would not be selling TikTok but would instead partner up with Oracle. That would allow Oracle to handle the U.S user data and would allow TikTok to keep operating under ByteDance without having to give up its algorithm. Then Walmart expressed its interest in having a piece of the pie.

Ultimately, this resulted in Oracle taking 12.5%, Walmart taking 7.5% and the rest going to a ByteDance subsidiary called TiKTok Global (but seeing as 40% of ByteDance is owned by U.S. investors, this equals out to TikTok being majority owned by U.S. companies and individuals).

In the meantime though, this led to Trump trying to block TikTok from being downloaded, but ByteDance contested this and it got dropped. The saga continues!

 

Nvidia is buying Arm:

Nvidia, the PC hardware heavyweight, has confirmed that it will be buying up Arm, a chip design company, to add to its ever-expanding business. This new acquisition has not yet been finalised but the heads of Nvidia, Arm and SoftBank (the company that currently owns Arm) have agreed on the outline.

This represents Nvidia’s desire to push further into the UK as an engineering location, and so Nvidia will continue to grow. In the meantime, SoftBank will make a lot of money; up to $40 billion. And this is needed for the company after it suffering several large-scale losses over the last few years. This is unlikely to affect the end-user in any meaningful way though, but at least the capitalist machine keeps on a ticking.

 

China banned a kid’s programming language:

Scratch is a visual programming language developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab and it’s used by about 60 million kids. It’s just there to teach you how to do some basic programming and to get you interested in it. But despite having about 3 million Chinese users, the Chinese government has decided to ban the programming language and has blocked the website from Chinese users.

The software, which is mostly used to make games, animations, stories and other cute little things, was (also) used to make some things that were critical of the Chinese government and so it had to go! Anything that criticises them is a no-no. But other educational programming languages will likely crop up in the country to take Scratch’s place.

 

Airbus has concepts for hydrogen-powered planes:

Airbus has decided that it needs to do some innovation, especially during a time when a deadly virus has wracked the planet and has left air travel something of a hazardous business to be in. So Airbus decided to set a 2035 deadline for new carbon-free commercial airlines. The company has put out three visual concepts for these zero emission jets thus far.

The concepts involve special hydrogen burning engines instead of the usual jet fuel ones, and some wing alterations. These jets should function the same as other jets but without all those nasty emissions. There are many issues around this though, such as the fact that hydrogen extraction is still rather expensive (although Airbus sees this as a minor hindrance as hydrogen will have to become cheaper as demand goes up) and storing hydrogen also presents a dilemma, but these are problems that will just have to be sorted out.

 

Scientists have made something that eats plastic:

A study has been published in the Proceedings of the National Sciences, and in it, the scientists discovered further evidence about a bacteria called Ideonella sakaiensis that produces specific enzymes that are able to break down PET, the most common form of plastic. This means that these enzymes, if synthesised, could allow us to get rid of a huge proportion of the plastic waste in the world. A substance that is notorious for being difficult to get rid of. So well done to them!

August 2020 Tech News

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 TikTok and US government fight it out:

The current United States government is often a barrel of depressive laughs, but one of the biggest tech things to come around recently has been Donald Trump’s decision to go after TikTok of all things. Now, this is quite a mess of a thing so let’s start by saying that the whole issue arose because TikTok is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, and the claim is that the US government is attempting to protect US citizens from having their personal information stolen by a foreign company. It’s obviously much better for an American company, like Google, Apple or Microsoft, to steal user info.

So he decided to try and force ByteDance to sell TikTok in the United States, and he gave the company 45 days to adhere to this (thereby forcing them to prepare for in case they got shut down)! But when you’re doing really well you probably don’t want to have to sell and so ByteDance decided it wasn’t going to budge and that it was going to fight this unhinged demand from Trump. However, Trump’s supporters, like Mike Pompeo, jumped in to say that they completely support his plan to force the Chinese company to sell.

So, we’ve now got a company that doesn’t want to sell and a president who’s forcing his way into the economy to try and make it happen. He wants a United States company to buy up TikTok, and some of the biggest potential buyers to come along have been Microsoft and Oracle (although the Chinese government has stated that it wants final say on who buys it). But then Trump did something else that’s a bit of a problem: he decided that seeing as he “brokered” this deal, the United States government should get a portion of the proceeds from the purchase. Which is pretty much bribery…

He said: “A very substantial portion of that price is going to have to come into the Treasury of the United States because we’re making it possible for this deal to happen.” So that’s a bit of a problem! And it may face some legal action because it’s kind of… illegal to do that. And it even led to TikTok suing the president! On top of that, the company’s CEO even decided to resign, probably because this whole hassle just isn’t worth the effort.

Then, Trump decided he wanted to try banning Tencent, which owns WeChat, Riot Games and some of Epic Games, from trading with US companies. So the revenge began with TikTok and just spread. The ban even led to some potential issues with its place on the App Store, seeing as ads may be forced off the app.

Meanwhile, in a more sensible part of the world, the Australian government decided against pursuing action against ByteDance because it saw no reason to do so. Cool.

 

Apple now has a $2 trillion market cap:

Apple shares have increased by 59% in 2020, and that’s awesome in an age of intense pandemic-accelerated poverty, and that led to it popping over the $2 trillion mark for a while before dropping back down. However, it’ll likely get back up there again! This comes during some rather bad times for these big tech companies as legislators turn their eyes towards what is perceived as a few companies that have effectively enforced an oligopoly over the whole tech industry. However, that probably won’t stop those wonderful ole profits from rising, rising, rising!

 

Facebook blocks Bolsonaro supporters:

Facebook put a big global block on a few Bolsonaro supporters. Now, this wasn’t actually its decision but was instead forced on it by the Brazilian Supreme Court. The court declared that the Brazilian president’s supporters had violated hate speech laws while doing some fake news stuff along the way. The move will likely be seen by many as a way of stopping the spread of false information, but Facebook is fighting the decision.

According to Facebook, the block, which was initially just in Brazil but eventually switched to a global block after the Supreme Court fined Facebook, violates freedom of speech. The last few months have seen increased debate over whether social media platforms should enforce stronger restrictions on what people say, because those platforms are technically private platforms and so they do not have to allow everyone to have a platform. Regardless of the debate, Facebook doesn’t like it and wants to fight.

 

Google is entering the online banking space:

Google has decided to expand its online banking services. This service, which is still in its infancy but plans to release sometime in 2021 (although there are no solid plans), is called Google Pay (see what they did there, Google Play, Google Pay… oh, they’re just so funny) and it’s partnered up with a number of United States banks to lend itself more credibility.

Some of the new banks include Bank Mobile, BMO Harris, First Independence Bank and a few more. In total, there are currently eight banks involved, and Google is possibly pursuing even more banks and credit unions. However, if you want your special Google Banking app you may have to wait even longer unless you’re a United States citizen because there’s nothing for international users. Yet.

 

SnapChat is tackling TikTok:

SnapChat wants to take on Tiktok and it wants to do it by partnering with various music labels so that users can use licensed music without fear of copyright claims. Isn’t that nice? So, the idea is to tackle TikTok while TikTok has some trouble coming its way from the United States government. Business is business after all. Attack while the enemy is weak, and all that jazz.

This feature is launching as a test in Australia and New Zealand for now, but seeing as music licensing is quite an annoying thing to get around it may never end up going anywhere else. Or maybe it does. Who knows!? Only time will tell. But for now, it’s just in the testing phase. But it would be nice to be able to use licensed music without it getting blocked immediately.

 

SpaceX gets more funding:

SpaceX, which is run by a man who doesn’t have billions (sarcasm for those unaware), has secured a further $1.9 billion in funding. These kinds of funding efforts come all the time but it’s just interesting to see it from a company led by someone who made serious bank during this ongoing pandemic somehow raising even more cash for the company.

 

Uber and Lyft lose court case over employees:

Uber and Lyft have been trying to have their employees classified as contractors for ages, but a new ruling from the San Francisco Superior Court has stymied those efforts. The issue here is that these ride-sharing companies want their employees to be classified as “contractors” because that allows them to get around certain laws concerning employee benefits.

The court ruling states that these companies went against Assembly Bill 5 (AB5), which states that companies have to classify workers as employees if the job controls how the worker completes said job. So, unlike a contractor, drivers kind of have to complete their jobs in very specific ways.

The companies plan on appealing this because of course they are, and it appears that they are framing this as benefiting the employees rather than the companies themselves, and they’ve even claimed that they’ll have to temporarily shut down if this happens to them. But such verbal sleights of hand are rather common when legal issues emerge around the way companies conduct themselves (it didn’t work either).

 

Epic Games takes aim at Apple:

Epic Games has not been too pleased with the monopolistic nature of Apple’s App Store, and so after the Fortnite company decided to put direct payments in its game, which would be purchases that don’t go through Apple, the mega-popular hit got pulled from the service. Epic responded by making fun of Apple’s Nineteen Eighty-Four ad from way back when and then went a bit more serious and accused them of anti-competitive policies (which occurs in the midst of Apple’s involvement in some anti-trust troubles) and then sued the company over the whole debacle.

This has just continued to rage ever on with Google even pulling Fortnite from its Play Store (and this led Epic to eventually sue them too), then Facebook got in on the action and started to stand up to Apple and then Microsoft jumped on board to dogpile Apple too. So, the whole situation is threatening to get out of hand as companies dog pile on one another, but at least it’s rather entertaining to watch what happens from afar as the capitalists vie for supreme dominance.

After this all happened, Apple decided to pull Epic’s dev tools from the service, such as those used in the Unreal Engine, and this would effectively screw over a lot of game developers who use that engine. And so Epic has added this to the list of things it wants the court to do with Apple, but Apple has retaliated by saying Epic tried demanding “special treatment” ahead of this whole debacle. Which is something Epic Games vehemently denies. And thus far, the court has blocked Apple from harming the Unreal Engine but Fortnite is still off the store. This hasn’t stopped Apple from terminating Epic Games’ account though.

And while this has all been going on, Epic decided to do a “#FreeFortnite Cup” in Fortnite to try and weaponize the fanbase against Apple. So that’s nice and not extremely problematic at all!

 

ICE made a facial recognition contract:

Do you know what kind of technology has definitely never caused any controversy? Facial recognition. And do you know which American federal agency never causes controversy? ICE. Well, we’re all in for a treat because the agency in charge of tracking down illegal immigrants in the United States has teamed up with Clearview AI, a facial recognition company that takes images from all over the internet, including social media, to make its matches.

The decision comes in the midst of facial recognition becoming an increasingly taboo technology that many companies and governments want to stay away from because it’s, in the eyes of the public, rather toxic. But that hasn’t stopped America’s most beloved agency from adopting the technology. Well done!

 

A mask firing gun has been invented:

Possibly the greatest invention of the pandemic has come: a mask firing gun! This comes courtesy of just a regular ole YouTuber named Allen Pan. He decided to create a gun that would just fire masks at people. It’s made using an 800 PSI CO2 canister, a solenoid valve, a brake line, a spray paint grip and some magnets. This could be perfect for shooting at partisans who think masks are somehow undermining their rights.

June 2020 Tech News

Snapchat took a stance against Trump:

After Twitter decided to add some fact checking labels onto Donald Trump’s tweets about voting by mail (and later adding warnings to a tweet of his that threatened violence), the president decided to threaten social media companies with regulation (which goes against common conservative values, but whatever). Then, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg decided to criticise Twitter (although he’s done some about turns since), but Snapchat went the other route right from the get-go.

The social media platform decided to stop promoting Trump’s content on its Discover page, and has stated that it refuses to “amplify voices who incite racial violence and injustice by giving them free promotion”. So, Snapchat has taken a stance. Trump hasn’t been booted off the platform, and his content is readily available to those who follow him, but it won’t show up on Snapchat’s curated Discover page.

The Discover page has long been a curated space, unlike platforms like Facebook and Twitter, but the platform won’t otherwise affect Trump’s content. However, this hasn’t stopped his people from lashing out at the company and claiming that it’s trying to rig the election in Joe Biden’s favour. Either that or it just doesn’t want hate speech on its platform. Probably a riddle for the ages.

Facebook will add labels to state-controlled media:

Facebook, seemingly following a similar trend to Snapchat and Twitter despite its CEO originally going against what Facebook’s competitors have done, has rolled out a new feature that will help label news sources on its platform. This labelling is for state-owned media. Whenever a news source is coming from a government, the label will trigger and be shown alongside whatever that news source is.

In the current fake news era, in which all news sources should be viewed with at least some sense of scepticism, this announcement is long overdue. Facebook has also, thankfully, laid out its criteria for something to be classified as “state-run media”, because there are various ways in which governments help otherwise independent media operators, such as through funding. However, according to Facebook, various experts have been consulted and all of that will be taken into account.

This kind of real action from social media platforms is important. For far too long, social media platforms have attempted to pretend that they have no duty to curate their own platforms. But with news like this, it should, hopefully, be harder for state-run groups to tamper with news sources without the regular people learning about that tampering. Or at least hopefully that’s the case.

In addition to this, Facebook has added a label for political ads. This further notifies users of when political entities have a hand in what appears on the platform.

Remove China Apps app did well in India:

An anti-China app gained some traction in India at the beginning of the month. This app, which was from a self-proclaimed Indian app developer called OneTouch AppLabs, checked whether other apps on your device had been developed in China and then flags them. This allowed people to choose not to use Chinese-produced apps if they wanted, because this can often be difficult to do yourself because figuring out where an app comes from can be a challenge.

The app worked, according to the developers, by identifying a target app’s market research and determining its country of origin from there. However, it was kind of sketchy and the developers had a strange online presence. But the app did have high ratings on the Google Play Store and did manage to make it elsewhere in the world. It even surpassed a million downloads in its first ten days (and later surpassed five million). So that’s not bad. But it’s now been pulled from the Play Store for violating terms of service.

Anything like this can be a worry though because apps like this wonderfully named Remove China App can also be concealing their origins. It does also tend to stoke anti-Chinese sentiments, and while you can criticise the Communist Party, apps like these can lead to more widespread anti-Chinese sentiments aimed at the people rather than the politicians. Just worth keeping an eye on.

Protests increase demand for face-scrubbing tech:

Ever since the Black Lives Matter protests started after the murder of George Floyd, various people and groups have come forward to show their support by creating software that blurs people’s faces in photographs that might be taken at demonstrations. This tech also often scrubs photos of their metadata, such as when it was taken and on what device. Basically, this kind of tech makes it so that people can’t find you if you were at a protest.

This is pretty depressing considering the fact that many of these protests are occurring in places that have free speech, freedom of assembly and freedom to protest laws. So that’s disheartening. It’s wonderful to see a world slowly sinking into authoritarianism. But at least this kind of software can stop you from being identified, tracked and then arrested like some government groups have decided to do with their power. Yay!

IBM halts facial recognition development:

In response to the Black Lives Matter protests, IBM’s CEO Arvind Krishna, sent a letter to the United States Congress and pledged IBM’s support for police reform. It also brought up the company’s prior commitment to progressive politics back in the fifties, but the truly interesting part of the letter was the CEO’s statement that IBM would halt all development of facial recognition technology because of its use in “mass surveillance, racial profiling, violations of basic human rights and freedoms, or any purpose which is not consistent with our values and Principles of Trust and Transparency.”

This is a rather interesting move considering the increased prevalence of facial recognition software for a variety of purposes over the last few years. Halting development on something that has become more and more integral to the development of various technologies, such as AI (which was mentioned in the letter). Software like this can be used to perpetuate the biases of those who create and implement it, and a major tech company like IBM taking a stand like this is a rather fascinating one to see.

Twitter implements new “read it first” feature:

Social media is known to be a place filled to the absolute brim with online vitriol and toxicity. Conspiracy theories run rampant because people don’t bother to think before they post something, and then this just adds to more and more misinformation around the globe. The proliferation of fake news may be a buzzword Trump loves to throw around but it is a genuine problem, and after Twitter decided to take a stand against the blatant lies Trump decided to spout to his massive audience, it would appear that Twitter is taking an even stronger stand.

This may be part of an ongoing trend, but Twitter has decided to implement a new feature that will ask you to read an article before you retweet it. The feature won’t stop you from retweeting it and will only serve as a prompt (although people who have replied to the tweet that Twitter put out about this seem to be arguing in bad faith and acting as if this is a form of censorship rather than a gentle prod that may mildly inconvenience people). Some people may actually follow through with it and read the article and then decide against sharing it, but of course there will always be those who decide to share discriminatory material because they want to.

The feature is currently just a test feature and so it may not stick around, but sometimes having too much convenience can lead to people abusing a system. So just one extra step may actually help matters a bit, but it certainly won’t be a massive change up that ends all online misinformation forever. That would take actual work from platform holders, after all!

The Internet Archive tried a thing, got shut down:

The Internet Archive decided to try a thing that would have helped many people currently struggling with their education through the COVID-19 pandemic: an online National Emergency Library that would make 1.3 million books available for checkout for free. This would have meant that many people could have gotten their hands on the books needed to further their education, but that sadly didn’t happen.

The library was supposed to stay open through till the end of June, but it got cut short and shut down on 15 June instead because publishers decided to threaten them with legal action. Various book publishers, like HarperCollins and Penguin Random House, understandably likened this to digital piracy on an “industrial scale”. Makes sense, and that is what those companies would have to do under the circumstances to ensure that their intellectual property was protected.

However, this could have helped a lot of people with their education, but it was doomed to failure. Something in a similar vein could one day be encouraged and maybe even built, something along the lines of Project Gutenberg but for things not in the public domain, but until such a time that a thing like that is feasible people will just have to resort to regular old libraries.

Apple announced a bunch of things at the WWDC 2020 keynote:

Apple has come out once again to show off all the things it plans on doing and rolling out over the next year. Some of it is very basic stuff like a new version of iOS (which isn’t even news considering its regularity), Apple’s going to be adding some interface things in there (which often annoys people at first but you get used to it), new stuff for the Apple Watch and Airpods, the usual stuff you’d expect. But the two most interesting things in terms of actual changes are about privacy changes and processors.

Privacy and location tracking have become hot topics in the last few weeks thanks to their usage in cracking down on freedom of assembly, and so new iOS features allow you to remove the option for your exact location, but to instead have an approximate location shown. This is good if you’re at a protest and don’t want to get ID’d. In addition, their privacy policies are being simplified (good) and your phone will indicate whether an app is accessing your camera or microphone. Which should help people monitor whether someone is watching or listening to them.

The other big thing is the new processor news. Apple has been using Intel processors for years, but it has decided to make the change over to in-house processors. So, Apple is now designing its own tech rather than using another company’s tech. The only issue here is that any kind of major hardware change like that can come with compatibility issues. Although that is common whenever new technology is unveiled. We’ll have to see how those processors fare against existing brands in the coming months.

YouTube is making its own TikTok:

YouTube has decided that it too wants to get in on the TikTok game and has released a feature for mobile devices that focuses on short 15 second, multi-segment videos. It even has the same functionality as TikTok in that you can make video clips by tapping and recording and the releasing so as to piece the clips together later.

It does make sense though, the young people like these TikTok videos for some reason and YouTube needs to try to maintain its place as the video streaming juggernaut of the internet landscape. So they’ll be catering to these short attention span videos on mobile but your more dedicated platforms, like PCs, will likely just continue on as per usual (at least for now), because the audience for regular old YouTube has never left.

Robots can be used to disinfect warehouses:

A couple of researchers from MIT decided to try out a different approach to cleaning out shared spaces that may be infected with COVID-19 particles. They decided to take an Ava Robotics mobile robot base and attach a UVC light to it so that it can make its way through spaces like factories, schools, restaurants, et cetera to disinfect said areas.

The UVC light, which doesn’t agree with human beings all that much, is capable of eliminating 90% of coronavirus particles on surfaces and it eliminates particles in the air. In addition, these robots are able to map out an area and move around to disinfect the entire area. These researchers tested this at the Greater Boston Food Bank, and it was able to cover the entire 4,000 square foot warehouse in half an hour.

This is certainly better than risking human lives on disinfecting places, but it’s likely far too expensive a solution for the majority of organisations. However, for large-scale institutions this may be a fantastic way of ensuring their locations are virus-free.

News of the Week – 27 January 2020

Doom Eternal’s delay just brought more crunch:

So just last week we received the lovely news that CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077 will be delayed and that crunch will resume regardless; the delay hasn’t stopped the crunch at all. Which is just wonderful, isn’t it? Well this week we learned something even more wonderful! You see, Doom Eternal, which is currently in development over at id Software, has been doing exactly the same thing!

The company was supposed to release the game back in November 2019, and when the company announced its delay many people came out to be all angry about it while other people, who are a bit less whiny and realise that they can wait for their games, were completely fine with it. However, it now seems that the company was “crunching pretty hard most of last year”, according to the game’s director Marty Stratton.

The company, rather than letting people calm down a bit and work reasonable hours now that a delay had come around, were instead pushed into going hard on development time. The employees were forced into a lengthier period of crunch and this executive doesn’t really seem to care all that much about that either.

It’s now gotten to the point where we should no longer praise devs for announcing that its games will be delayed because that quite possibly means that the employees, who are afraid of being let go in an incredibly volatile industry if they don’t conform to what they’re “encouraged” to conform to, don’t obey.

Whenever a game is delayed this question needs to be re-examined. Is it being done so that the workers can be forced into further hard work that immensely damages their mental wellbeing, or is the delay being made in good faith and it’s to stop anything like this from happening. However, we can no longer take these devs at face value and should be willing to question them and to hold them accountable. And it should be noted that when the word “devs” is used in this instance, it means the executives and managers at these companies. Those people are the ones responsible for this. Poor management is what gets games pushed into crunch, it isn’t a “natural” part of the development process.

So remember to always question what these companies are trying to pull and always remember that age-old mantra that brands are not your friends, because they aren’t. They do not care about you as an individual, and they will be more than willing to lie if it gets them the PR they want. However, the increased visibility of crunch has forced them to acknowledge it, and maybe the lies behind the delay will now also force them to address these issues.

Sources:

• Eurogamer – id Software crunched “most of last year” to hit delayed Doom Eternal date
• Gamasutra – Doom Eternal dev team were ‘crunching pretty hard’ during 2019
• VG247 – “We were crunch pretty hard most of last year” – Marty Stratton unapologetic over Doom Eternity’s delay

A tax watchdog went after Rockstar:

Rockstar has been called out by a tax watchdog group in the UK called Taxwatch UK, and this watchdog group decided to just check out some of Rockstar’s publicly published financials and revealed something rather fun. You see, Rockstar, despite being a multi-billion dollar company, likes to make use of tax relief incentives in the UK that are actually kinda intended for… small businesses so they can get their break in the industry.

However, not to pass up on free money, Rockstar has gotten about £80 million in tax relief from this programme. The company claimed a nice percentage of the overall fund for 2018/2019 by claiming an amount that was 37% of the total! Rockstar took 37% of the entire UK’s Video Game Tax Relief (VGTR) fund. Which is a rather insane figure for a company that makes more money than many others combined.

In addition, to qualify for this tax relief fund you have to produce something that is “culturally British”, but that’s intentionally vague and so a game of theirs like Grand Theft Auto V, which is set in a recreation of Los Angeles that features many aspects of American life, is clearly culturally British because it has a more British sense of humour and some of it was developed by British people, I guess?

Rockstar was quick to respond, and it did the usual PR thing you’re meant to do. You know, the company spoke about how that money went to hire over a thousand people throughout the British Isles in places like London, Lincoln, Yorkshire and Scotland and so that makes it perfectly fine. The company was using this tax relief fund to get itself some additional funding, and that is completely legal. But you do need to maybe think of the morality behind it. It’s kinda iffy, ain’t it?

The Association for UK Interactive Entertainment (UKIE), which is essentially the UK’s version of the ESA (a lobbying group meant to stick up for the game devs and publishers against whatever backlash they get from… anyone), also came out to criticise Taxwatch UK for the report because it’s pretty hostile towards Rockstar and Rockstar just like can’t handle that kind of bullying. Bullying coming from a small tax watchdog group with no actual power. Terrifying.

It’s worth remembering that tax relief schemes like these are meant to be for smaller companies, and when they’re used like this they’re pretty much being abused. Tax relief can be a godsend to smaller companies that are just starting out, but when the money is being thrown at a billionaire company it kind of starts weakening what that tax relief was intended for in the first place.

Sources:

• Taxwatch UK – Rockstar takes the pot – 2019 accounts show huge increase in Grand Theft Auto tax claim
• Eurogamer – Rockstar responds to report it claimed £6m in UK tax relief
• Gamasutra – GTA developer Rockstar pushes back against UK tax abuse allegations
• VG247 – Rockstar and UKIE respond to Taxwatch UK’s £6 million tax relief report

Original Half-Life ­games are free on Steam for a while:

In a rather surprising, yet also unsurprising, development, Valve has decided to release its entire Half-Life collection for free on Steam for a few months in the lead-up to the release of its upcoming VR-exclusive Half-Life: Alyx (which the team has stated, in a recent AMA, is pretty much done). The game is effectively free to download and install until the new game releases in March.

Valve announced the news in a Steam blog post and stated that the whole story is available for people to check out. This is, obviously, a marketing thing intended to get you excited about a prequel to a game that people have wanted a sequel to since 2007. The company wants you excited about jumping into the boots of one of the best characters in gaming history, but this time as the protagonist and in a VR environment that can effectively stop a whole load of people from playing it because of the cost.

But let’s not get cynical here. Or at least not too cynical. So if you’ve never played the Half-Life games before then grab them. The first game is quite different from the rest but worth a play, but I would say that most of your enjoyment may come from the sequel and the episodes. Just keep in mind that there is no conclusion to the Episodes. They just end on a cliffhanger and that cliffhanger was never addressed. Never.

So go grab them if you haven’t played them, and if you have played them but haven’t on Steam somehow then go grab them. If you’re interested in picking up Half-Life: Alyx and haven’t played any of the games then definitely grab em. Otherwise just… do what you want. They’re good games! Okay, this post is deteriorating. On to the next one!

Sources:

• Steam – Pay now for free – Half-Life series
• Eurogamer – All previous Half-Life games are now free on Steam in the run-up to Alyx’s release
• Eurogamer – Valve says Half-Life: Alyx is “done” so you probably don’t need to worry about delays
• IGN – Every Half-Life game is free to play until April 21^st
• IGN – Half-Life: Alyx devs confirm ‘game is done’
• Kotaku – Valve is ‘confident’ Half-Life: Alyx won’t be delayed
• Polygon – The Half-Life games are free to play on Steam through March
• Polygon – The 7 big things we just learned about Half-Life: Alyx
• Rock, Paper, Shotgun – The whole Half-Life story is free to play on Steam right now
• Rock, Paper, Shotgun – Valve are confident Half-Life: Alyx won’t be delayed
• VG247 – Half-Life series is free-to-play until Half-Life: Alyx releases
• VG247 – Half-Life: Alyx will be around the same size as Half-Life 2, delay not expected

Ninja Theory has a new game in the works:

Ninja Theory, the devs that put out the superb and well-received exploration of mental health Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, have put out a statement to announce its new game. The company has been working on a sequel to Hellblade since at least last year (when the company announced it), but this is a completely new thing.

The new game has been called Project: Mara and will be a more grounded experimental horror game about “mental terror”. This sounds a lot like the company is exploring similar themes to Hellblade, and I think a whole load of people will be quite happy if that’s the case. However, other than knowing the game exists and that it’ll be an exploration into new ideas for storytelling and such, we know nothing. We don’t know when it’s coming, we don’t know what the gameplay is going to be like. We pretty much know nothing at all.

The only reason this can really be called news at all is because Ninja Theory has prestige now. The company did a good job with the first Hellblade and so the company is worth a shot. If this new games shakes things up like Hellblade did then lightning may have struck twice. Let’s cross our fingers and hope that that’s exactly what happens.

Sources:

• Blogpost – Ninja Theory Announces Project: Mara
• Eurogamer – Hellblade developer Ninja Theory announces Project: Mara
• IGN – Hellblade developer Ninja Theory announces Project: Mara
• Polygon – Ninja Theory teases new ‘experimental’ horror game Project: Mara
• Rock, Paper, Shotgun – Hellblade developers Ninja Theory announce Project: Mara
• VG247 – Ninja Theory’s Project: Mara is a “real-world and grounded representation of mental terror”

TikTok’s owners are getting into gaming:

ByteDance, the Chinese conglomerate behind TikTok, the video sharing app that I don’t really understand but that all my students use on a daily basis, has decided that it’s time for its business fingers to spread out a bit and start getting into the mobile gaming market. Because, you know, mobile gaming makes a hell of a lot of money and with the name “TikTok” behind you you’ll likely make something young people will want.

The decision appears to be aimed at a more “hardcore” subdivision of the mobile market. A decision that appears a bit strange at first glance seeing as the casual mobile market makes such a killing, but the company is planning on going after the high-spenders, and so it needs to bring in some “whales” (for those who don’t know, this is the dehumanising way in which customers who spend a lot of cash in games are labelled).

This new division has been quietly building for a while, but the company has now gone public with its plans. These plans are going to put it in direct competition with another, and more well-known (in gaming circles) Chinese conglomerate, Tencent. So a battle between these two rich companies as each tries to outdo the other in the hardcore mobile market is soon to ensue. Should be fun to watch.

Sources:

• Gamasutra – Report: TikTok owner ByteDance planning big push into mobile games
• VG247 – TikTok maker is getting into “hardcore” mobile games