firehose

Oju Africa / Wired UK

Oju Africa—a division of African mobile manufacturer Mi-Fone—has launched a set of "afro" emoticons following the recent debate over a lack of diversity of emojis.

It started with an article by MTV journalist Joey Parker, who flagged the fact that there are no (or barely any) non-white emojis in the basic range within most text-message apps used by Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Parker contacted Apple's CEO Tim Cook about the issue and, remarkably, received a reply. It wasn't from Cook himself but from Katie Cotton, VP of worldwide corporate communications for Apple.

She told Parker: "Tim forwarded your e-mail to me. We agree with you. Our emoji characters are based on the Unicode standard, which is necessary for them to be displayed properly across many platforms. There needs to be more diversity in the emoji character set, and we have been working closely with the Unicode Consortium in an effort to update the standard."

On Saturday, network monitoring firms BGPMon and Renesys discovered a new stage in Turkey's governmental social media blocking as the country's citizens go to the polls this weekend. Turk Telekom is now rerouting requests to popular Domain Name Service servers outside the country—including Google’s public DNS server—so those requests instead go to a server within Turk Telekom’s network. Anyone within Turkey attempting to use Google DNS or a similar service as a way to gain access to Twitter or YouTube will instead be directed to a government DNS server where those services are blocked.

This means the Turkish government isn’t just blocking Twitter and YouTube, but it's now able to log the IP addresses of any device attempting to reach the two services using foreign DNS servers. As BGPMon’s Andree Toonk noted in a blog post, “The current situation is concerning, and we don’t see this type of hijacking for DNS network very much, the only note worthy exception is China where we’ve observed this several times before."

The Turkish government moved to block Twitter and YouTube because of alleged audio recordings of government officials, including Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, that were uploaded to the service along with written transcripts. The recordings included an alleged phone call between Erdoğan and his son discussing how to hide or get rid of large sums of money amid ongoing corruption investigations and a meeting of senior government officials discussing military options in Syria.

Twin Galaxies, which for more than 30 years was considered the final authority in video game high score records, is under new ownership, its third different regime in the past three years.

The video gaming personality Jace Hall declared himself the "Head Custodian and Caretaker" of Twin Galaxies and its records, whose online database had disappeared from the Internet in the past year. The previous ownership, two arcades where many high score attempts have been made over the year, took over Twin Galaxies in 2012 and announced plans to charge score-chasers for refereeing their submissions.

Hall referenced that in a series of promises he made as Twin Galaxies' new overseer. "As long as Jace Hall is the Head Custodian and Caretaker of Twin Galaxies, Twin Galaxies will never be charging for score submissions or adjudication ever again. Period." He also promised the return of the Twin Galaxies website within the next 30 days.

Twin Galaxies was founded in Ottumwa, Iowa in 1981 by Walter Day, who compiled a scoreboard that, in 1982, became recognized as the national high-score database for dozens of video games at the beginning of the arcade video game boom. Twin Galaxies in 2008 and 2009 was the official certifier of high scores for Guinness World Records. It figured prominently in the 2007 documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, about the pursuit of the world record high score in Donkey Kong.

From left to right: Oculus Founder Palmer Luckey, VP of Product Nate Mitchell, and CEO Brenden Iribe

Kyle Orland

Based on the immediate reaction to Tuesday's surprise announcement that Facebook is buying VR headset maker Oculus, you'd have thought the move was effectively a death sentence for what was previously the most promising virtual reality technology in decades. At the extremes, some particularly vitriolic commenters even felt comfortable enough to suggest the death sentence should extend to the technology's creators and their families.

"We expected a negative reaction from people in the short term, [but] we did not expect to be getting so many death threats and harassing phone calls that extended to our families," Oculus Founder Palmer Luckey said in a reddit post this weekend. "We know we will prove ourselves with actions and not words, but that kind of shit is unwarranted, especially since it is impacting people who have nothing to do with Oculus."

Elsewhere in the reddit thread, Luckey said that the initial reaction wasn't really surprising, but it still obviously felt undeserved from his point-of-view. "We expected a kneejerk reaction from people who don't have all the information we do and will not have it for some time," he wrote. "We expected a negative reaction, that does not mean we think the reaction is warranted. My primary goal is the long term success of VR, not short term warm and fuzzy feelings."

Here are some of the places that Ars tracked Cyrus Farivar to in February 2014.

Cyrus Farivar

In January 2014, documents provided by Edward Snowden showed that a Canadian spy agency used a unique identifier to follow thousands of Canadians as they moved about the country. The tracking all originated from an unnamed airport.

It got us thinking: how hard would it be to replicate this little experiment, writ small? Could I use one of my own online identifiers as a way to track my own movements through time and space?

The answer, perhaps unsurprisingly, is: yes. It’s easy to do, and it’s revealing about what I do, when I do it, and where I go.

After almost a week of silence, legendary game developer and Oculus CTO John Carmack has finally voiced his opinions on Facebook's planned acquisition of the virtual reality headset maker. Replying to a blog post by chiptune musician Peter Berkman, Carmack says he "wasn't expecting Facebook" to purchase the company he joined last August. "I wasn't personally involved in any of the negotiations," he adds, "I spent an afternoon talking technology with Mark Zuckerberg, and the next week I find out he bought Oculus."

"The real questions were how deeply to partner, and with who."

Regarding criticisms voiced by Berkman and many onlookers — chiefly that Oculus abandoned its early supporters and was operating only to be acquired — Carmack disagrees. "There is a case to be made for being like Valve, and trying to build a new ecosystem like Steam from the ground up. This is probably what most of the passionate fans wanted to see." But that comparison doesn't make sense, Carmack argues. Valve had the digital games industry to itself for years, and, as Sony proved recently, virtually reality is set to become a major industry for tech "titans" to fight over. "The real questions were how deeply to partner, and with who," says Carmack — going it alone just didn't make sense.

Why Facebook? "I could think of other companies that would have more obvious synergies. However, I do have reasons to believe that they get the big picture as I see it, and will be a powerful force towards making it happen. You don't make a commitment like they just did on the whim." Much of the backlash regarding the acquisition has centered on Facebook's business model — data mining and advertising. This isn't a concern for Carmack, who says he "just can't get very worked up about it ." While he appreciates the need for privacy, "the idea that companies are supposed to interact with you and not pay attention has never seemed sane to me ... I rather like the recommendations that Amazon gives me on each visit. Educate me. What terrible outcome is expected from this?"