firehose

Team Pixel Pi's first-person survival game, Pulse, will feature Oculus Rift headset support, the developers announced on the game's Kickstarter page.

"We were looking for a way to put the player even closer to Eva's perspective," the update states. "To allow them to experience the mysterious world of the blind even closer, while harnessing the surreal ability to 'see' sound. We are happy to announce that we've found that way, and will be bringing it to you with Pulse."

Pulse centers on blind protagonist, Eva, who must venture into a forest to find her lost brother after he was sent out to undergo a rite of passage. Eva navigates world as it is revealed to her through sound, movement, touch and vibrations.

The group of former-game design students launched a Kickstarter campaign for Pulse in March, which was successfully funded in April, raising more than $80,000 of its $75,000 goal from 2,129 backers. For information about the 2013 Independent Games Festival Student Showcase finalist, be sure to read our interview with the Team Pixel Pi, where they discuss the game's concept and development.

Pulse will launch on Windows PC, Linux and Mac on an unannounced date.

On by default on most newer Android devices, Google's Android backup stores your personal details in plaintext.

If you’re using Google’s “back up my data” feature for Android, the passwords to the Wi-Fi networks you access from your smartphone or tablet are available in plaintext to anyone with access to the data. And as a bug report submitted by an employee of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on July 12 suggests, that leaves them wide open to harvesting by agencies like the NSA or the FBI.

“The ‘Back up my data’ option in Android is very convenient,” wrote Micah Lee, staff technologist at the EFF. “However, it means sending a lot of private information, including passwords, in plaintext to Google. This information is vulnerable to government requests for data.”

The Backup Manager app stores Android device settings in Google’s cloud, associated with the user account paired with the device; the Backup Manager interface is part of the core Android application API as well, so it can be used by other Android apps. Backup is turned on by default for Nexus devices and can push data such as MMS and SMS messages, browser bookmarks, call logs, and system settings—including Wi-Fi passwords—to Google’s cloud for retrieval in the event that a device is broken, lost, or stolen.

Google yesterday pushed forward a significant update for Chrome for Android beta that will bring video chatting capabilities without the need for a plug-in or extraneous application.

Developers will be able to create real-time communications applications with the WebRTC API, which Google says:

…consist of three independent components: getUserMedia, which provides access to the user’s webcam and microphone; PeerConnection, which sets up calls with the ability to traverse NATs and firewalls; and DataChannels, which establishes peer-to-peer data communication between browsers.

These three features have been enabled in desktop Chrome for a while, and [yesterday’s] release adds support in Chrome for Android.”

As mentioned, the feature lets you use the camera and microphone on your mobile device to video chat without any need for third-party plug-ins. When you visit a particular site, it will request that you give it permission, and then you’ll be able to have a window-in-window chat with another individual. If you don’t have anyone to chat with, you can still test the functionality for yourself.

Beyond Good and Evil 2 would have been "too big" for the current generation of consoles in terms of its player freedom, creator Michel Ancel told IGN during a recent Rayman Legends event.

Speaking with site, Ancel explained that the team wants to "try again" at making the game — not "just a sequel," but instead something "that really makes all the ideas that we had for the first one possible now with these consoles."

"I think we were doing something too big for this period," Ancel said. "Honestly, it was too challenging to put that on [current] consoles. I don't say the consoles were not good enough, I don't say the team was not good enough, but you have to scale what you want to do and the console itself."

According to Ancel, making the game bigger means giving players more freedom. Players don't want to investigate a story that's simply been written by developers.

"My feeling is that you want to investigate with your own way of investigating," Ancel said. "I like the freedom of choosing your vehicles, flying away with the spaceship and all those things."

Little has been said officially about Beyond Good and Evil 2, though Ubisoft did reassure fans in 2012 that work on the project slowly continues.

There's a good chance that a local law enforcement agency or a private company has all the information it needs to track your general whereabouts over the course of weeks, months, or even years. This detailed surveillance is made possible by automatic license plate readers that can capture and record the details on every single vehicle that passes by them. They've existed for years mounted to bridges and police cars, but their numbers have been accumulating throughout the US — and in a report released Wednesday, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has detailed just how ubiquitous the technology has become, and how it could be abused.

Over 99 percent of scanned plates belong to innocent drivers

According to the ACLU, nearly three-quarters of police agencies were using plate scanners as of 2011. The ACLU doesn't take issue with their outright use — but it's concerned with how their findings could be mishandled. For the most part, vehicles' location data ends up in a database specific to the local law enforcement agency. If a vehicle has been placed on police watch list, it may trigger an alert for the officers. But the vast majority of the plates belong to innocent drivers. The ACLU found that less than one percent of plates matched up with a watch list, and even fewer led to an arrest.

That leaves "hundreds of millions of data points" on innocent drivers stored inside of law enforcement computers. "Anyone with access to these systems could track his boss, his ex-wife," the ACLU notes. "An agent could target the owners of vehicles parked at political meetings, gay bars, gun stores, or abortion clinics." Many agencies prohibit officers from looking into the data for personal reasons, but as one New York police department put it, the use of this data "is only limited by the officer’s imagination."

Because of the potential for abuse, the ACLU believes that the surveillance data should be deleted within a matter of days or weeks. In its investigation of 293 state and local law enforcement agencies, the ACLU found that a number of agencies were deleting the scanner data within a short time frame, but others held onto it for years or never deleted it at all. However, the ACLU did not fully detail how many agencies fell into either camp.

Some surveillance data is never deleted

Private companies are getting in on the action too. Parking garages and repossession agencies — which capture the license plate data for their own use — hang onto their data as well, and sometimes sell it to law enforcement groups. While the scope of a private company's collection may seem to be limited, the ACLU reports that one repossession company claims to be in possession of photographs and location data on "a large majority" of registered vehicles in the US.

The growing presence of plate readers has its benefits though: it makes finding a stolen vehicle or a vehicle associated with a crime much easier. So far five states have enacted laws to manage the scanners' use, and the ACLU hopes that others will soon move to govern the widespread collection of American citizens' travel details.

Ars has written several times before about Austin-based TrackingPoint, producers of "precision guided firearms," or PGFs. TrackingPoint's current set of products is a range of bolt-action hunting rifles which use a large computerized scope to assist their users in making shots at distances of up to about 1,000 yards (about 915 meters). The system works well enough that even novice rifle users can reliably place rounds on target at that distance, as we found out when we demoed several PGFs back in March.

TrackingPoint's initial run of PGFs have almost all been pre-sold, and the company is looking to expand in a big way: it plans to construct a technology demonstrator tentatively called the "Super Gun," which will be able to fire a large projectile and achieve a typical PGF's single-shot accuracy at distances out to more than 3,000 yards—that's about 1.7 miles, or 2.7 kilometers.

"We wanted to be able to push the limits of what the technology is capable of," explained TrackingPoint CEO Jason Schauble to Ars. "We came up with the project to challenge our engineering team, to take things to the next level. Because if I can take it [from twelve hundred yards] to three thousand yards plus, I know I can also hit anything in between."

The Delaware Supreme Court ruled against Viacom yesterday in the company's years-long court dispute with Harmonix over bonus payments, and the media conglomerate must now pay the $299 million it owes to the studio.

Yesterday's decision in the case, Viacom v. Winshall — the defendant represents Harmonix's former stockholders — affirms prior judgments against Viacom from an arbitrator in 2011 and a lower court in 2012. Viacom had appealed the lower court's decision to the state supreme court. The company maintained all along that the arbitration agency failed to consider certain evidence, and that it lacked the authority to rule that a particular issue in the case could be decided by an arbiter rather than a court.

The higher court dismissed both claims yesterday. Unless Viacom appeals the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, or the ruling is reconsidered, it will stand.

MTV Networks, a subsidiary of Viacom, purchased Harmonix in September 2006 for $175 million, and Viacom ended up selling the studio in December 2010. The terms of the acquisition included "earn-out" payments to be made to Harmonix's former stockholders, depending on the studio's performance in 2007 and 2008.

Viacom paid Harmonix bonuses of $150 million in 2007, but determined that it owed the stockholders nothing in 2008 and later sought a refund of its earlier payment. Walter Winshall, the stockholders' representative, disputed the calculation, and the companies went to an arbitration agency, which decided in December 2011 that Viacom owed Harmonix an additional $383 million. Viacom agreed to pay $84 million of that amount to settle the 2007 bonuses, but the companies went to court over the remaining $299 million for 2008's payouts.

A Harmonix representative told Polygon the studio has no comment on the ruling. We've also reached out to Viacom for comment, and will update this article with any response we receive.

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