firehose

Like it or not, smartphones have become an indispensable part of your average teenager's life. To gain a better understanding of just what today's youth are actually using them for, The Huffington Post interviewed 14-year-old high school student Casey Schwartz about her iPhone habits. Unsurprisingly, a large part of her activity revolves around messaging. Casey and her friends have run the gamut of messaging clients, cycling through Snapchat, WhatsApp, Skype, and others to facilitate their daily group chats.

Apple's iMessage is among the few apps that have stood the test of time. In fact, it's proven a requirement for anyone hoping to maintain a real-world relationship with the teen. When one of her friends lagged behind in upgrading to an iPhone, she was effectively shut out of Schwartz's inner circle. "Not because we didn’t like her, but we just weren’t in contact with her," she explains. Facebook (where she's tallied over 1,000 friends) and Instagram also see obsessive levels of use, and the 14-year-old has even weighed in on Yahoo's big Tumblr buy. "I'd rather it was how it was before because I'm afraid they're going to change it and make it worse." For the full portrait of a modern teen's iPhone usage, head over to HuffPo.

Edinburgh, Scotland resident Bryan Henderson started playing Peter Molyneux's social media experiment, Curiosity: What's Inside the Cube?, an hour before its end. Now, the 18-year-old gets to be a digital god.

Curiosity, a free mobile game from 22Cans, challenged players to slowly tap away layers on a gigantic cube. The goal was for one person to break through, revealing a secret prize that Molyneux promised would be "life changing." Five million downloads and six months later, Henderson scratched through the final layer.

"It took a really long time for it to sink in, the fact that I had won, along with finding out about Godus and my involvement in it," Henderson told Polygon. "Seeing my name across the Internet has blown my mind, and I think it's still sinking in."

In a previously recorded video, Molyneux explained that the prize winner would gain the ability to become a digital god. Specifically, the deity in 22Can's upcoming title, Godus.

"You will have fame," Molyneux said. "You will have fortune. And you will have the power to introduce morals into a game."

As the game's winner, Henderson will be able to "intrinsically decide on the rule Godus is played on," Molyneux said, and will share the game's success. Each time people spend money on the title, an undisclosed portion will go to Henderson.

"I think I'll be a pretty nice god, but getting to mess with people sounds like it could be fun."

Henderson had the option to share the long-awaited secret or keep it to himself — an option that never crossed his mind.

"I didn't even think about keeping it for a secret," Henderson said. "I guess I just didn't want everyone to be disappointed."

He's already told a few friends and family, who were "way more excited" about the prize than he was.

"My mum has taken the duty of telling the rest of the family," Henderson said.

As for whether or not Molyneux's prize is life changing, he doesn't disagree.

"I couldn't be happier or more excited," Henderson said. "I think I'll be a pretty nice god, but getting to mess with people sounds like it could be fun."

The Fox television network this week confirmed that officials from the Justice Department notified its parent company nearly three years ago of plans to seize the telephone records of James Rosen, a Fox News correspondent who allegedly revealed top secret US intelligence on North Korea. As the Wall Street Journal reports, the Justice Department told parent company News Corp. of the investigation in August 2010, three months after a judge signed off on a subpoena of Rosen's phone records.

The plot thickens

Fox had previously expressed outrage over the seizure, claiming that prosecutors had never notified the network of the operation as they claimed to have done. Now, Fox says that the Justice Department did in fact notify News Corp., but this information was never passed down to the network. A News Corp. spokeswoman tells the Journal that the company is investigating the oversight.

Federal prosecutors allege that Rosen reported on secret information that was leaked to him by Stephen Kim, a former State Department contractor. Kim has been charged under the Espionage Act, and has pleaded not guilty. A grand jury indicted him in August 2010, but details of the investigation only recently became public, after the Associated Press revealed that the Justice Department had been conducting electronic surveillance on as many as 100 of its reporters as part of an unrelated probe.

Late on the night of September 9th, 2012, I was sitting at my kitchen table, going over notes for a piece I was writing about video game arcades. The next morning at 6AM I was bound for an Amtrak train which would take me to Pennsylvania, then to Baltimore, on a four-day trip of interviews for the piece. I was packed and ready for bed. I was exhausted, and as I brushed my teeth, thought of the next day’s work.

I’d like to be able to say that I went peacefully to bed, my iPhone tucked underneath my pillow as I was wont to do, but that isn’t what happened. What happened, instead, was a series of events involving my phone, a toilet, and a bowl of rice at 1AM. As I removed the SIM card from the phone and buried it in rice, still vibrating and refusing to power down, I didn’t know that my phone was definitely, totally, completely dead.

I went to bed angry at myself for dropping my phone into a toilet

In horror, I quickly and hastily chose from among the dozens of tester phones I am routinely surrounded by. I passed up a Windows Phone as too foreign since I have so little experience with them, and settled on a European version of the HTC One S. It was bigger than my iPhone, which I didn’t like, but it was close enough in size that I thought I could manage for the unavoidable four days of hell I was surely in for. After all, travelling with a brand new phone when I’d need access to my emails, maps, music, and text messages with only minutes to make the switch was not ideal in any way. I went to bed afraid and confused, angry at myself for dropping my phone into a toilet. As I struggled to figure out how to set the alarm on this dreaded device and silence its notifications, I cursed it openly.

This was my introduction to Android.

It’s been almost 8 months, and one month ago, I finally relinquished that HTC One S, trading it in for the much larger, but very similar, HTC One. I was, again, suspicious of sizing up: I assumed that my days of multitasking one-handed were over, and they were. The One S wasn’t mine and it wasn’t an American phone, which seemed to cause it occasional data problems, but, other than that, I loved it. I got on that Amtrak train on September 10th groggy and acutely aware that I was going to be uncomfortable with my phone for the duration of the trip.

It’s now been so long since I touched an iPhone

But I was wrong. By the end of the trip I was emailing other Verge writers, effusively praising the glories of Android. Rdio worked beautifully! The notifications were so much better than the iPhone’s! My email, oh God, my email. I composed long, beautiful emails in dead spots where I had no service and it quietly sent them later on. The Twitter app seemed... better. It loaded faster, I thought. The battery life was better than my iPhone’s. I could effortlessly Gchat, 24 hours a day! Editing documents on my phone was something I could actually do realistically now. Oh, and the maps put the iPhone 4 to shame. There were other, smaller things, too, but I can’t remember them, because it’s now been so long since I touched an iPhone.

The most important thing was that the transition, which I’d sort of wanted but feared for several years, was seamless, mostly because I already used so much Google stuff. This should come as no surprise to switchers and long-time Android users, but it did to me. I’d messed around with Android phones over the years, but had lazily stuck with iPhones, consistently, since their debut back in 2007. There were plenty of things I didn’t like about the iPhone, but I’d never encountered anything I considered a deal breaker. Nothing but absolute force made me change. And when I did change, I never looked back.

The HTC One S

I didn’t even try to turn my iPhone back on when I got home four days later. In fact, I didn’t try to turn it on for about six months (it’s dead, as I suspected). And, while I’ve been actively window shopping for a phone to call my own since last September, I never once seriously considered buying a new iPhone.

A few months ago I started saying that while I loved Android, my ideal Android phone didn’t exist for AT&T. Let me describe it: it’s an Android phone, made my HTC, and it’s about the size of an iPhone. It has LTE. The size was really the one remaining annoyance, I guess. Though I’d adjusted just fine to the extra height and width of the One S, four months ago or so, I still had it in my head that the ideal phone for my smallish hands was roughly... iPhone sized.

Enter the Facebook phone, also known as the HTC First. No phone could fit my wish list more perfectly, and once I realized that the Facebook veneer was optional, I assumed this would be my next phone. Finally, I thought, someone woke up and made what I’ve been dreaming of! And it's HTC! HTC whose Beats by Dre (don’t laugh, they rule) I adore and now require, whose hardware is, in my opinion, the best in the industry, whose Sense skin I actually really like. Thank you, HTC!

Finally, I thought, someone woke up and made what I’ve been dreaming of

But I didn’t buy it. Instead, I decided to give the also-brand-new HTC One a spin. The One is HTC’s newest, beautifully-designed and built flagship Android phone. Sure, it has some weird home screen stuff on it which made me mad to look at, but it was easily disabled, leaving me with Sense, which as I said, I’m a fan of. The One was also quite large by my standards and I assumed that I wouldn’t want to buy one because of that.

Again I was wrong. Now, it’s not like this phone is giant, but it feels different, and it takes some getting used to. The first few days were uncomfortable, and I thought about going back to the One S until I found a phone I wanted to commit to. I briefly thought, "I should just get that Facebook phone," as I my thumb struggled mightily to reach the notification drop down one-handed. By the end of the first week, though, I had adjusted, and there were some things that I knew I wasn’t willing to budge on which would make it hard for me to abandon the One: first, the screen, which is large, is also incredibly beautiful (remember, I never had an iPhone with a Retina display); it’s beautifully built, and it seems to be indestructible, though I haven’t tried dropping it in a toilet... yet.

My hands needed to learn to stretch

The truth is that while I spent months imagining — and talking about — a phone which was exactly the HTC First, I was all the while adjusting to a different and better reality: that of a slightly larger phone. The smaller "iPhone-sized" dream was just a red herring.

Here’s the thing: I’m probably a pretty standard smartphone user, in that I find something I like and I stick with it. I don’t switch phones every few months or even every year. Change isn’t hard, it’s just not something I’m interested in. I go with what works, and I think that’s what most people should do. I’ve had five phones in around seven and a half years, counting the few months I used the HTC loaner. But it’s an inescapable reality that despite myself, I’ve once again adapted to the modern world. It turns out I was wrong: the phone didn’t need to fit my hands, my hands needed to learn to stretch.

By Jim Rossignol on May 26th, 2013 at 9:34 am.

Sundays are for worshipping the sun god. Careful though, because sacrificing meat on the burning altar of bar-be-cue may enrage him further. Later, as you hide in your cave from the blazing skygod, perhaps you’ll read about the happenings of the computer people. Or perhaps you’ll simply sleep.

• Simon Parkin on “that cancer game”: “Joel is four years old and currently fighting his third year of terminal cancer. His young body has already endured a life’s worth of surgery, of chemotherapy, of prayer. The tumours have left him partially deaf and blind and, at one point, forced him to relearn how to walk. Yet he remains a survivor, confounding his medical team’s expectations with a resolute determination to stick with life, with his brothers, with his lot. But while the family remain in the eye of this storm – next week Joel has an MRI scan to check whether the skewered tumours have returned – they’ve chosen this moment to express their story through a video game. Why now?”
• Hyper-inflation in Diablo III: “Hyperinflation is the economist’s equivalent of an astrophysicist’s quasar cluster or a marine biologist’s dolphin “stampede”: a rare exhibition of a unique set of circumstances which arise infrequently and are closely studied when they materialize. Such events are exotic enough that they become legendary: many individuals knowing little about monetary policy are aware of the recent outbreak in Zimbabwe, or familiar with the defining instance in the post-WWI Weimar Republic.”
• Six developers of 2D shooters talk about why they enjoy working in the genre. Matt James: “In shmups the design is close to the surface, it’s easy to see. I have nostalgia for designing shmups and thinking about their design. Nostalgia and some sentimentality about the past – my past – was a key theme in Leave Home, although that probably grew out of the fact it was a shooter as much as making it a shooter was an intentional decision in the first place.”
• Leigh Alexander on Sissyfight: “Sissyfight was an important moment in this whole history,” [Zimmerman] adds. “A big motivation for me in doing this is just that I know there are a bunch of players out there who really miss the game, and I feel a certain amount of duty to try to get it back online for those people who had friends on Sissyfight, who met their spouses there,” Clark says One such couple are doing all the new avatar art rewards for the Kickstarter, even. “That human side, as cheesy as that might sound, is why I want to make sure this gets funded, so we can give it back to the people that really deserve it.”
• Game design and the “beautiful dilemma”: “The best game experience I can have is when its mechanics present me with several good options every turn. And then it hits me with a beautiful dilemma: Each turn, I can always do something good, but I cannot do everything that I want to now.”
• Rich Stanton writes about Starcraft II pro Greg ‘Idra’ Fields for the Guardian: “Idra’s the sort of athlete who, if you opened up a playbook, and there was the recommended fundamental playstyle … he does that, but refined to such an incredible degree that it almost feels like he’s cheating.”
• Cara Ellison publishes Martin “GoldenEye” Hollis on Monopoly: “It is still a terrible game however. Partly I say this because the mid-game drags on interminably as the needle of advantage gradually yet erratically swings over, but mainly I say it because playing it is a horrific, soul-destroying and divisive experience. Monopoly is a game for all the family but you might not feel like family afterwards. You will however have all the money.”
• Beautiful photography from the “abandon building” genre.
• An Xbone link, but I enjoyed Tom Bramwell’s grilling of Phil Harrison: “Why should my readers trust that what you’re saying about Kinect this time is going to hold true?”

Music this week is Boards Of Canada’s Reach For The Dead.

Adding to a spate of recent infiltrations of major media outlets, the Syrian Electronic Army appears to have compromised the Android applications for the British Sky Broadcasting Group. In response to the hack, Sky has removed all of its Android apps — including Sky Go, Sky+, Sky Wi-Fi, and Sky News — from the Google Play market. Sky recommends that all users of its apps delete them immediately and wait for new versions to become available.

It's not clear yet if the hack had any malicious results for users of the apps, but so far the Syrian Electronic Army's campaigns have spread jokes and propaganda rather than malware. The group, considered by researchers at HP as one of the most skilled hacking teams in the world, has taken responsibility for compromising social media accounts for CBS, NPR, the BBC, the Financial Times, and several other major news and media outlets. That's not to say the SEA's actions are harmless; in April, the group hacked the Associated Press' Twitter account, spreading a false claim that explosions at the White House had injured President Barack Obama.

We've asked Google and Sky to comment on the breach and will update this story as we receive more information.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in!