firehose

All things considered, there was only one possible destination for this second season of House Of Cards. (Hint: It’s pictured above.) The only real question was how we would get there.  The season as a whole was a disjointed one, and some of the early subplots (notably Lucas Goodwin’s ill-fated attempt to fill Zoe’s shoes) almost feel like they happened in a different show entirely. Momentum stalled a number of times along the way. But give credit where credit is due: Beau Willimon and company managed to stick the landing in a (mostly) satisfying manner.

But before the big finale, there’s one more hour of moving the chess pieces around the board. Unable to work his charms on President Walker, Frank moves on to Catherine Durant, whom he convinces to offer Feng asylum in exchange for vague promises about the future. Feng confirms the money laundering ...

Microsoft plans to release a new Halo digital feature project this year, the company confirmed to Polygon, with Ridley Scott attached as executive producer and Battlestar Galactica's Sergio Mimica-Gezzan as director.

"343 Industries, Xbox Entertainment Studios and Scott Free Productions are proud to announce a new ‘Halo' digital feature project to be released later this year," Microsoft said in statement issued to Polygon. "The project will be executive produced by Ridley Scott and Scott Free TV President, David Zucker. Sergio Mimica-Gezzan (‘Battlestar Galactica,' ‘Pillars of the Earth,' ‘Heroes') will direct."

According to the Wrap, the involved companies are considering Prison Break creator Paul Scheuring to write the digital feature. The latest project is separate from the 343 Industries and Steven Spielberg Halo live-action TV series collaboration that was announced during the Xbox One reveal last year.

Researchers have released technical details and attack code for 30 security issues affecting Oracle's Java Cloud Service. Some of the issues make it possible for attackers to read or modify users' sensitive data or to execute malicious code, the researchers warned.

Poland-based Security Explorations typically withholds such public airings until after any vulnerabilities have been fixed to prevent them from being exploited maliciously. The researchers broke from that tradition this week after Oracle representatives failed to resolve issues including bypasses of the Java security sandbox, bypasses of Java whitelisting rules, the use of shared WebLogic server administrator passwords, and the availability of plain-text use passwords stored in some systems.

"The company openly admits it cannot promise whether it will be communicating resolution of security vulnerabilities affecting their cloud data centers in the future," Adam Gowdiak, CEO of Security Explorations said. The security research firm is the same one that has discovered a host of extremely severe vulnerabilities in Oracle's Java software framework, some of which have been exploited in the wild to surreptitiously install malware on end-user computers.

Amazon is in the hits business. The company never reveals specific sales numbers for its Kindle and Kindle Fire products except in words like "best-selling," but Amazon sells tablets and ebook readers in the millions. Starting today, it probably has a third hit on its hands: the Fire TV, its new media streamer. And that’s no accident.

At $99, Amazon’s new set-top box will compete with devices like Apple TV, Roku, and Google’s Chromecast to be the gadget consumers use while cuddled up on the couch in front of their big flatscreen. On one hand it’s an obvious move: Amazon has thrust huge resources behind its streaming video service, which is of course the primary method of consumption on the Fire TV, and the company has always said that it makes money not when you buy a device, but when you use it (to buy things from Amazon).

Of course, lots of tech companies want to be the one selling you movies, songs, and TV shows. But Amazon has a huge advantage. Even as it presented the new device inside a faux living room in New York City, Amazon made clear why it’s building the Fire TV: it’s seen that everyone wants to buy a set-top box, it knows not everyone is happy with the one they bought, and it has plentiful data on exactly why. There lies opportunity.

Amazon knows both what people buy and how they feel about it

Amazon doesn’t innovate by crafting new product categories, like Apple does. It also doesn’t make much money selling its hardware. Instead, it takes all the data it gathers as the world’s biggest online retailer, breaks down exactly what’s available and what consumers want, then produces a piece of hardware that it can sell cheaply in order to bring consumers into its ecosystem. Just as Netflix created House of Cards to satisfy the particular tastes of its viewers, Amazon made the Fire TV because millions of buyers are already looking for it. To understand the Fire TV is to take one glance at Amazon’s best-selling electronics list: two Roku models, Google’s Chromecast, and the Apple TV are the only non-Amazon devices in the top ten. The world’s largest online retailer just took on all three.

If the device gets to scale (it’s already number one on the best-seller list), Amazon will make money by using the Fire TV to sell everything else. That’s how it’s always done things. "We have a philosophy that we try to price our devices as close to break-even as we possibly can," says Kindle VP Dave Limp. "If they put it in a drawer, we’ve not benefited at all." Once the consumer has a Fire TV in their living room, he says, "somebody might by à la carte content, movies, TV shows. Somebody might sign up for Prime... we want to be really aligned with the customer that we only make money when they use our products, not when they buy them."

All three of Amazon’s hardware product categories follow this strategy, particularly its tablets. Amazon enters a growing but immature market, sells good devices essentially at cost, markets them aggressively across its site (especially on the all-powerful homepage), and reaps the benefit when customers use them to buy other things from Amazon. With the Fire TV, which puts the Prime Video experience front and center as no Kindle device ever has, it's potentially a more lucrative idea than ever.

This sort of inside-out production isn’t without precedent. Years ago, before Samsung was a household name in consumer electronics, it was a key manufacturer of the internals for smartphones and tablets. The Korean titan learned the business from the inside out, and mastered the supply chain in an effort to make phones cheaper and more efficiently. Amazon’s experience is equally useful: it studies people’s shopping and usage habits, and gives buyers both space and incentive to report what they like and dislike. Its focus group is the entire industry, and it collects data before ever building a prototype. Amazon’s customer reviews said the Roku was slow; the Fire TV is fast. Customers complained about searching with a remote; the Fire TV’s flagship feature is the ability to find things to watch using your voice. Amazon doesn’t have to guess what people want, it just has to wait for others to get it wrong.

Amazon doesn’t have to guess what people want, it just has to wait for others to get it wrong

Limp says that Amazon’s been watching the set-top box market for a while, and that the company’s involvement started by identifying the problem. "We talked about the playing field, and one of the filters we use internally is ‘do we want to use the boxes that are there?’ And then we went out and talked to customers as well, and they were frustrated." Putting the pieces together from there was easy. "We had the product in the labs for a long time, but as we started — as those dominoes started falling, as we started solving each one of those problems, I’d say about 18 months ago or so, we started feeling like we had a product. When you put it in your own house — and at this time they were still early versions of this — we just went ‘gosh, I want that.’"

There was a checklist for success, and Amazon followed it to the letter. And if the Fire TV isn’t what you want? Well, Amazon will happily keep selling you a Chromecast or Roku. Or a PlayStation or Xbox, for that matter. "We think [the Fire TV] is the best one out there," Limp says. "But that doesn’t mean people won’t buy other ones. There are other ones at different price points, there’s lots of selection, and we’ll see." And the best thing about being Amazon is that no matter how it shakes out, no matter which one you buy, Amazon wins.

Ben Popper contributed to this report.

Yahoo is one of the many technology companies demanding reforms on US surveillance laws, and now says it's taken additional security measures to protect data it handles. Today the company announced that it's been encrypting traffic from its data centers since the beginning of this week, and plans to add encryption to additional services like Yahoo Messenger. That's on top of existing measures that let web users access secured versions of its various properties like Yahoo News, Sports, and Finance.

""Our goal is to encrypt our entire platform.""Hundreds of Yahoos have been working around the clock over the last several months to provide a more secure experience for our users and we want to do even more moving forward," wrote Alex Stamos, Yahoo's chief information security officer in a blog post today. "Our goal is to encrypt our entire platform for all users at all time, by default."

In a meeting with reporters today, Stamos — who joined Yahoo three weeks ago — did not specifically call out the National Security Agency by name, but made it clear that revelations about NSA spying led directly to Yahoo's move toward more encryption. "The impetus for the huge push is obviously government revelations," Stamos told reporters. "The side effect is that the protections we're putting in place protect in a lot of different scenarios."

"The huge push is obviously government relations."

Yahoo was one of eight companies including Google, Facebook, Apple, and others that called on the US government for reforms to the NSA in December. That request came amid heightened interest in revelations of NSA surveillance programs on US citizens. Encrypting everything makes that scenario more difficult, though Stamos warned that the system is not foolproof.

"It's true that if there's any individual that's being targeted by a top-tier nation state, they're probably going to find a way. But that's very different from being able to keep track of the email and browsing habits of millions of people at the same time," Stamos said. "Anything we can do to protect users from non-targeted, widespread surveillance is our duty, and that's why we're trying to do."

Casey Newton contributed to this report.

Game developer Henry Smith has launched an experimental Kickstarter, that asks backers to allow him to make non-specific free games for the next year.

Described as a "patronage" scheme, the maker of the award-winning Spaceteam said he wants to spend the next year creating free games for everyone, not just backers. Called The Spaceteam Admiral's Club, it is seeking $80,000 in funding.

"The Spaceteam Admiral's Club is an experimental Kickstarter campaign, not about one specific game, but about patronage, with a goal of directly supporting me so I can keep making free games for a whole year," he explained. "I'm working on two new games, Blabyrinth and Shipshape, but I don't know exactly how things are going to change, which is part of the fun."

Spaceteam (below) is a "co-operative shouting game" for mobile devices, winner of the Indiecade 2013 Interactive Award and IGF Finalist.

"If we make this campaign a success then I think this model could work sustainably for other indies as well," added Smith, who has previously worked at BioWare and Irrational Games. "It could bring more innovation and diversity to the industry, and create meaningful relationships between people who play games and people who make them."

The increasingly ubiquitous picture characters known as emoji have broken into a whole new frontier — Twitter on the web. Twitter has designed its own character set for web tweets, allowing for a much-improved experience across platforms; until now, emoji support was limited to Twitter apps on systems with the characters built in, like Android, iOS, or OS X.

The new emoji aren't yet fully compatible with embedded tweets, however. On Windows, each character appears as a blank square unless you click through to the tweet itself, and other platforms display their regular set. Still, the expansion to the standard web should result in a lot fewer tweets that appear confusingly devoid of emotion.

The teen girl I’m mentoring is typing away in Twine while I stare out the window on stand by in case she needs help (she doesn’t)