firehose

Emoji; they've conquered the world, featured in novels, and more recently they've allowed us to track Twitter's mood in real time. Now, a new app for iPhone automatically generates another internet staple, ASCII art, using only emoji. Emojify lets you take photos with your phone's camera, or pull existing images from your camera roll, and replaces the pixels with emoji. Once you've selected your photo, you'll be able to control image size (ranging up to 16-megapixel files for poster-sized prints) and contrast before exporting or sharing your creation.

The quality of Emojify's output really depends on your source material. For best results, you'll want a strong subject with a plain, light background. The developers have crafted a number of examples of what's possible with the app, as seen on Designboom, drawing from famous artworks like Da Vinci's Mona Lisa and Alberto Korda's iconic Che Guevera photo. Emojify is iPhone only for now, and it's available from the App Store for $0.99. Here's what we managed to achieve with our first attempt:

By Craig Pearson on August 20th, 2013 at 8:00 am.

If someone is keeping a Big List Of Inevitable Things somewhere, they can cross out ‘modders remaking Morrowind in the Skyrim engine’. For it is no longer inevitable, but is in fact, er, evitable? No, that’s not right. Though I guess you could avoid it, but that would make the modders of Skywind very sad indeed, because all their hard work in rebuilding Morrowind is worth looking at. Even if you just coo over the videos below, because cooing over the scenery is pretty much all that’s possible right now.

They’ve built most of the world, but the tricky part of adding NPCs, quests, and skills has yet to come. So if you do manage to skip through the several steps required to download and install the thing, including owning the original Morrowind and its expansions, when you decide to leave Skyrim and visit Morrowind you’ll just hanging about awkwardly. Questless. At least you won’t upset anyone if you run around naked in this empty land of nothing. In fact, feel free to download one of those mods where you add a mighty wang to your character and let it flap about. There’s no-one there to judge you.

Check it, yo.

Via das Reddit.

No Homers: Bypassing a user-specific ban to access an otherwise public website violates computer fraud law.

Fox Broadcasting Company

Changing your IP address or using proxy servers to access public websites you've been forbidden to visit is a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), a judge ruled Friday in a case involving Craigslist and 3taps.

The legal issue is similar to one in the Aaron Swartz case, in which there was debate over whether Swartz "had committed an unauthorized access under the CFAA when he changed his IP address to circumvent IP address blocking imposed by system administrators trying to keep Swartz off the network," law professor Orin Kerr wrote yesterday on the Volokh Conspiracy blog.

The ruling in Craigslist v. 3taps (PDF) is the first "directly addressing the issue," Kerr wrote. 3taps drew Craigslist's ire by aggregating and republishing its ads, so Craigslist sent a cease-and-desist letter telling the company not to do that. Craigslist also blocked IP addresses associated with 3taps' systems.

After testing the waters with a preview back in April, Microsoft is today rolling out Skype video calling and messaging to all Outlook.com users across the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, Brazil, and France. Your Skype contacts should now appear grouped within Outlook's contact list, though you'll need to install a plugin before you can chat face-to-face via video calling. And don't fret if you've somehow never signed up for Skype until now; your Microsoft account works just like a Skype ID for messaging and video chat. Supported browsers include Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Firefox. To take advantage of the new feature, start a message conversation as you normally would, and then click on the video or audio icon to start up a Skype session. Microsoft is promising users in other regions that it's "working hard" towards achieving a worldwide release.

By Justin McElroy
on August 19, 2013 at 11:59p

The concept behind The Bureau: XCOM Declassified is great.

We see the monolithic cross-government, anti-alien organization at its inception, stripped down to its core. With the first alien threat to our world striking without warning, we’re almost instantly on the ropes, relying on sheer wits, bravery and slapdash ingenuity to save us.

But that’s also how the game developer 2K Marin has built around this great concept feels — slapdash. It’s a decent tactical action base with material grafted on to it so incongruous it might as well be from another world.

Wrap Up:

The Bureau is full of possibility, but it's far from memorable

The underutilized XCOM base is an appropriate metaphor for The Bureau itself. Limitless possibilities for intrigue, tactics, mystery and terror appear to be on offer. But The Bureau keeps most of it to itself, leaving only scraps and the grunt work of killing aliens. That may be an amusing way to kill 10 hours or so, but it’s a long way from a memorable one.

The Bureau was reviewed using a pre-release Steam key and account provided by 2K Games. You can find additional information about Polygon's ethics policy here.