firehose

Since Harmonix first announced it was bringing the Rock Band franchise to a new generation of consoles, there have been persistent questions about how the new games would support guitar and drum controllers designed for older systems. The answer to those questions comes with a price for Xbox gamers who will have to pay $20 extra if they want to use their old Xbox 360 instruments on the Xbox One.

The extra cost is to cover the inclusion of a "Legacy Game Controller Adapter," which preorder listings show coming packaged with the standalone Xbox One version of the game for $80. The $60 PlayStation 4 edition has no such adapter, since the previous PlayStation 3 instruments already required a USB dongle to support wireless play (that dongle will still be required to use old instruments on the PS4, but new PS4-specific instruments will sync directly via bluetooth).

While the price difference is a bit galling for players in Microsoft's ecosystem, it's still a much better deal than shelling out $250 for the "Band-in-a-Box" package, which includes new drum, guitar, and microphone controllers, or $120 for a package that includes a new wireless guitar controller (those prices are the same for the PS4 version as well). Activision's upcoming Guitar Hero Live won't work with old guitar controllers at all, requiring users to pay $100 for the game and a new controller with a six-button, two-row configuration.

Based on anonymized data collected from users of an app designed to check for a newly revealed vulnerability in many Android devices, Check Point discovered that one application in the Google Play store is exploiting the vulnerability to gain a high level of access to the Android OS, bypassing user permissions—and bypassing Google’s security scans of Play applications to do so. Update: A Google spokesperson told Ars that the offending app has been suspended in the Play store.

While the app was discovered installed on an infinitesimal percentage of devices checked by Check Point, it shows that the vulnerability caused by insecure OEM and cell carrier software meant to provide remote access to devices for customer service engineers has already been exploited by “legitimate” phone applications—and the method used to bypass Google’s security checks could be used for more malicious purposes on millions of devices. And there’s no easy way for Google or phone manufacturers alone to patch the problem.

At the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas earlier this month, Check Point’s Ohad Bobrov and Avi Bashan presented research into an Android vulnerability introduced by software installed by phone manufacturers and cellular carriers that could affect millions of devices. Labeled by Bobrov and Bashan as “Certifi-Gate," the vulnerability is caused by insecure versions of remote administration tools installed by the manufacturers and carriers to provide remote customer service—including versions of TeamViewer, CommuniTake Remote Care, and MobileSupport by Rsupport. These carry certificates that give them complete access to the Android operating system and device hardware. The applications are commonly pre-installed on Samsung, LG, and HTC handsets.

AT&T has won a $252,000 judgment from the remnants of sham telecoms that were created in order to bill legitimate phone companies for services they didn't provide.

The companies billed AT&T $13 million, but AT&T figured out the scam after paying only a fraction of that. The defendants, All American Telephone Co., e-Pinnacle Communications, Inc., and ChaseCom, operated out of Utah and Nevada and had all shut down by 2010. The Federal Communications Commission granted AT&T’s complaint against the companies in March 2013 and last week ordered the defendants to pay back the $252,496.37 they got from AT&T.

The FCC dismissed AT&T's request for interest and "consequential damages," saying the company can pursue those in court.

A Forbes article from last year claims 33 million people participate annually in fantasy football. That’s more people than the populations of Kansas, Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, West Virginia, Nebraska, Idaho, Hawaii, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Montana, Delaware, South Dakota, Alaska, North Dakota, Vermont, Wyoming, and Washington, DC combined. Now consider that most of fantasy football’s growth has happened in just the past 15 years thanks the to advent of online leagues.

To explain fantasy football, and fantasy sports in general, I invited SB Nation host and contributor Susannah Collins to What's Tech? Collins covers the NFL at Vox Media, and will be premiering a new show on the site later this year.

Subscribe to What's Tech? on iTunes, listen on SoundCloud, or subscribe via RSS. And be sure to follow us on Twitter. You can also find the entire collection of What's Tech? stories right here on the The Verge Dot Com.

Earlier this year, Apple opened up some interesting new ways of controlling the MacBook by giving it a trackpad that could detect how hard or soft you were pressing. Now a new company, Sensel, is trying to take that idea a few steps further. It's launching a Kickstarter campaign today for what's essentially a giant version of the MacBook's Force Touch trackpad. But what makes it even more interesting is that Sensel's trackpad doesn't have to look like a flat slab — it can also transform into other input devices.

An iPad mini-sized, pressure-sensitive, shape-shifting trackpad

Sensel's trackpad is called the Morph. It's similar in size to an iPad mini and is supposed to have 20,000 pressure sensors embedded throughout it. In a demo, the Morph was able to detect even the slightest pressure from my fingers; it even picked up the bristles of a paintbrush gliding across it. That input all appeared immediately when the Morph was wired to a Mac or PC; there was a very slight delay when connected to an iPad over Bluetooth.

Where the Morph really gets interesting is with what Sensel is calling "overlays." Overlays are thin covers that sit on top of the Morph's trackpad, transforming it from a flat surface into a more recognizable device: it could become a computer keyboard, a DJ controller, a piano keyboard, or a gamepad, for instance. Each cover can still tap into the full pressure sensitivity of the pad beneath it, so you can turn it into a piano that plays louder as you strike its keys harder, or a keyboard that allows you to rest your fingers on it. (Morph's keyboard overlay, in fact, is surprisingly easy to use.)

Sensel Morph photos

Sensel plans to make about 10 overlays to start, a few of which will ship with every Morph. But it's also interested in seeing what users of the Morph will do with it. Sensel wants to see people create their own overlays using 3D printing; Morph owners could even sketch out an overlay on paper and use that — it'll work just fine. Sensel is making an app that should allow people without coding knowledge to map areas of their custom overlays to specific commands, so people can create controllers specific to their needs.

Morph's advantage is giving you something real to touch

That could make the Morph a powerful tool for artists, gamers, or just technical power users. Although, there is reason to question how long the Morph will have an advantage over what you can buy from Apple: what are the chances that an iPad won't have a Force Touch display within the next year or so? Sensel readily admits that it sees that as the future, but it argues there's still a big reason to want the Morph. Even with pressure sensitivity, a tablet is just a flat piece of glass — there's no tactile feedback.

Sensel is launching a Kickstarter campaign for the Morph beginning today. It's looking for $60,000, with the devices selling for $249 each. The campaign is supposed to be more about preorders than bankrolling; "The device itself is pretty much ready to go," says Aaron Zarraga, Sensel's co-founder and chief technical officer. Sensel now plans to work on refining its overlays and figuring out what else the Morph's future users want to see it turn into.

Over the weekend, news started trickling out about a recently published game console patent filed by Nintendo back in February. That's not that surprising—we've known for a while that the company is working on a new console project codenamed "NX." What's more surprising is that the "example system" described in the patent explicitly "is not provided with an optical disk drive for reading out a program and/or data from an optical disk."

Companies patent things that don't come to the market all the time, of course, and there's no specific indication this patent will even form the basis of Nintendo's NX. Still, the very existence of a patented console design without an optical disc drive got us thinking: is the console market finally ready to graduate from the CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs that have been the cornerstone of console game distribution for decades now? Do game consoles still need physical media at all?

A connected world

In the US, at least, quickly increasing broadband adoption has made this a question worth considering. By the end of 2013, 70 percent of all US adults had a broadband connection in the home. That number shot up to 81 percent when you look at the 18- to 29-year-olds that provide the core market for most AAA games (and 77 percent among 30- to 49-year-olds), numbers that are likely even higher two years on.

This year's Galaxy Note 5 is an outstanding device — combining power with grace, and utility with handsome looks — but it also has a pretty major design flaw. The phone's stylus can be inserted into its silo in both orientations, which is a change from previous S Pen designs, and one of those orientations can result in permanent damage to the Note's functionality. If you are unfortunate enough to slide your S Pen in the wrong way, you'll have a hard time unjamming it from the slot (though eventually you should be able to pry it away), but more importantly, you might disable the Note's stylus detection feature. It's a big problem that can result from a very small mistake. Samsung has now issued a response, and well, the answer is that you should read and adhere to the manual.

"We highly recommend our Galaxy Note5 users follow the instructions in the user guide to ensure they do not experience such an unexpected scenario caused by reinserting the S pen in the other way around."

With the iPhone 4, the joke was “You’re holding it wrong.” With the Note 5, it’s apparently “You’re sliding it in wrong.” Either way, it’s not very funny.

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Mosaic of Saturn’s 700-mile-wide moon Dione made from nine images acquired during its “D-5” flyby on Aug. 17, 2015. Saturn itself covers the entire background. (NASA/JPL/SSI)

Dione imaged from a distance of 45,000 miles (73,000 km) on Aug. 17, 2015. Saturn fills the background, its edge-on rings cutting a thin dark line across the center with their shadows falling across the planet’s clouds at bottom.

Dione’s night side blocks the view of Saturn’s rings, seen edge-on as Cassini approached the moon on Aug. 17, 2015.

A wide-angle camera image of Dione’s surface acquired during closest approach. The area at center was also imaged by the narrow-angle camera, and is one of the highest-resolution views of Dione’s surface ever obtained.

Cassini narrow-angle camera (NAC) view of Dione’s surface (see previous image for context). Illumination is enhanced by reflected sunlight off Saturn.

At 3 meters per pixel this NAC image, acquired Aug. 17, is the highest-resolution view of Dione’s surface ever obtained.

Cassini’s parting view of Dione’s crescent, made from five images acquired from 37,000 miles (59,000 km) to 47,000 miles (75,000 km) away on Aug. 17, 2015.

Color-composite of Dione from Aug. 17, 2015. NASA/JPL-Caltech/Jason Major.

I like to think I’d be a respectful god. I wouldn’t go poking around inside your head or turn you into a heifer. I might, however, be tempted to dick about with cosmic powers and portents. What will you think when I plop another Moon into the night sky, drop a supernova behind Pluto, or extinguish the Sun? Y’all had better hope that, if I ever achieve godhood, I’m too distracted by Universe Sandbox ² [official site] to notice.

Rebuilt and expanded in a new engine, the cosmic simulator sequel last night launched on Steam Early Access. Come check out these cosmic calamities:

Universe Sandbox ² (no, i don’t know why it’s not 2) is very much a sandbox, focused on letting you play with the cosmos as you please. It simulate gravity, climate, colossions, and a variety of cosmic phenomena, relying on you to come up something to do with that. How quickly would Earth be swallowed by a black hole near Mars? See for yourself. What would happen if a dozen Moons crashed into Earth? Bad things, I’m sure you’ll find. It’s got a huge selection of objects to set up, and you can fiddle with their attributes, changing size and mass and age and all that to suit your needs.

Developers Giant Army have been selling alpha access for a while, but now it’s available direct through Steam Early Access for £18.99. Over “at least another year” of development, they plan to add basic life simulation, missions, and more. The usual Early Access disclaimers apply, especially given the devs’ fickle history.

Creator Dan Dixon had once planned to offer the sequel free to everyone who bought the first game, but as the game grew – as did its development team – and time wound on, he changed his mind. The original was created on a wonky abandoned engine, while ² started over on Unity. I can understand going back once he realised quite how much work ² would be, but still, remember plans aren’t promises and neither’s inviolable.

The streaming radio app TuneIn is continuing to move beyond traditional radio. It's adding a paid offering today that'll give listeners access to over 40,000 audiobooks, 600 commercial-free music stations, and most notably live sports broadcasts from Major League Baseball, with the ability to listen to all home and away MLB feeds. Baseball fans can already subscribe to audio feeds directly through MLB — and at a much cheaper price — which is why this is part of a larger package that TuneIn intends to keep building. It's also offering access to live coverage of Barclays Premier League and Bundesliga games.

Music stations have extra music piped in

TuneIn's Premium package will go for $7.99 per month and is launching today in the US, UK, and Canada, with a global rollout planned over the next few months. Commercial-free radio streams and audiobooks are apparently among the more requested types of content that TuneIn's 60 million users have been asking for. To get commercial-free radio, TuneIn is actually having existing stations provide it with separate streams that have music in place of their ad breaks; the local station still handles the programming, so the additional tracks should fit in with what the station is already playing.

As for why you'd want to pay for commercial-free radio over a dedicated music streaming service, TuneIn says that they're just two different experiences; some people want one, and some may want the other. As TuneIn CEO John Donham sees it, TuneIn is to Spotify as radio is to the CD — the existence of one didn't kill the other. "The experiences are fundamentally different experiences," he tells The Verge, "and we expect the world to continue to look like that."

tkingfisher:

biodiverseed:

zlayaevreika:

odumb:

this is a giant cucumber that we found hanging from a tree on the side of the road. i tried it and it was disgusting so i threw it in the neighbors hot tub

this fruit is called kigelia and it is poisonous. good job, kiddo

I feel like this is why horticulture should be taught in schools: if kids are plucking and tasting random fruits while believing cucumbers grow on trees, it’s a situation ripe for poisoning. Further, if a person like this ends up in a place without a supermarket, they are basically screwed.

Coincidentally, this is another problem I have with foodwalks, and poorly-labelled public food forests: if something poisonous comes up in a context of ‘everything here is edible!,” people will probably try and eat it.

Co-signed. Dear lord.

At exactly 3 o'clock on Thursday afternoon, a tall, mustachioed man in a cream tuxedo jacket emerged from a brick building behind London's Borough Market. He greeted the group of 20-somethings that had lined up behind blue velvet ropes and, one-by-one, directed us down into what seemed like a dungeon. Ominous organ music scored our descent, and the spiral staircase was nearly pitch black.

"I feel like I'm walking to my death," a man behind me muttered to his friends. Minutes later, we were wearing hooded plastic ponchos and wandering around a thick, white cloud of vaporized alcohol. Some tried to take selfies, others sipped cocktails out of halved human skulls. Everyone was breathing deeply.

"mixology meets meteorology."

People have been queueing up outside this building since the end of July, when the pop-up bar Alcoholic Architecture opened its doors to the public. Bompas & Parr, the eccentric design firm that created the installation, describes it as "the world's first alcoholic weather system for your tongue" — a place where "mixology meets meteorology." For an entrance fee of £10 (£12.50 during peak hours), visitors can spend an hour drinking potent cocktails and getting lost in "the cloud": a small room filled with vaporized gin and tonic.

Spending 40 minutes in the cloud, according to its creators, is the equivalent of consuming a "large drink." The difference, of course, is that the alcohol enters the bloodstream through the lungs and eyes, which means visitors can get the same buzz with 40 percent less alcohol by volume (and fewer calories).

Prior to opening, Sam Bompas and Harry Parr consulted chemists and doctors about what mixture of alcohol would be safe for the experiment, and how long people could be exposed to it. The goal, they say, was to create a unique, early evening experience, rather than a place for London's club crowd to get completely wasted. That explains the one-hour limit, as well as the project's tagline: "Breathe responsibly."

"We're a real business, so we needed to make sure that everyone who comes through is safe," Bompas said last week by phone from a bar in Amsterdam; coincidentally, he was drinking a gin and tonic at the time.

Bompas and Parr are no strangers to sensory experiments. The duo gained international attention in 2007, when they began creating intricate structures out of jelly. Their other works include a climbing wall made out of chocolate and a bouncy castle of breasts at New York's Museum of Sex.

Alcoholic Architecture began as a short-lived installation in 2009 — the result of what Bompas calls "a funny idea." But its first London run proved popular, inspiring the designers to make it a more elaborate experience. Some bars and companies have offered various vaporized concoctions in recent years, though none are as wholly immersive as what Alcoholic Architecture offers. Its current incarnation will run through early next year, and slots are already booked through September.

A medieval time warp

Walking through the installation is like stepping into a medieval time warp — albeit one with exquisite cocktails and thumping music. The Victorian building that houses Alcoholic Architecture sits directly across from the gothic Southwark Cathedral, on the site of an ancient monastery, and the drinks served at the bar — Chartreuse, Benedictine, Trappist beer — are all concoctions that the monks would have brewed. The entire space has a distinctly dungeon-like feel to it, all stone and coldness, with a stained-glass skeleton portrait in a far corner. Audio of a monk-inspired poem plays on loop in the men's bathroom, recited by an "in-house medium."

Upon entering the basement, imbibers don plastic ponchos and enter the small bar area, where mixologists in white robes stand in front of an ivy-draped backdrop. Some pause to order a cocktail; most head straight through plastic curtains and into an adjacent room, where the cloud awaits.

The first few minutes in the cloud are disorienting, to say the least. White vapor completely fills the room, limiting visibility to less than a meter and forcing everyone to blindly search for their bearings. Muffled dance music is piped in through unseen speakers, with lights alternating between neon hues of blue and pink. After about 20 minutes, I notice that my hands have already wrinkled from the moisture.

The atmosphere can be unsettling at first. My primary concern was not bumping into any of the other imbibers, who, in the thick fog, were barely shadows. It's also a small space, and as more people flooded in from the bar, it became even tougher to negotiate. Aside from a young couple canoodling on a ledge, everyone was milling around in atomized friend groups, literally blind to everything else.

According to Bompas, this kind of dense, moist environment is supposed to enhance taste — not only for the vaporized gin, but for the cocktails, as well. "You get this incredible flavor release, you kind of get lost in the flavor a little bit," Bompas said. "If you're in the cloud, you can actually taste the different botanicals expressing themselves in the gin, and the flavors in the tonic water as well."

My unrefined palate didn't pick up on those subtleties, though I did feel a light buzz as the hour drew to a close with a "thunderstorm" of flashing light and noise. It didn't follow the same contours as that familiar, first-drink buzz; it was more subtle and gradual, and true to Bompas' word, I was far from drunk. The bizarre, cramped quarters may have exerted a placebo effect to some degree, but I wasn't the only one feeling light-headed. By the end, what at first seemed like a smoke-filled crypt had morphed into a more typical club scene, full of lubricated chatter, laughter, and dancing. It seemed to be the reaction Bompas was hoping for.

"I just think in a city like London, people are always looking for a new experience and a new way to entertain their friends," Bompas said. "The way we designed it, we give them enough entertaining moments so they can have fun even on a really bad date."

Alcoholic Architecture is open through early 2016 at 1 Cathedral Street, London. Tickets are available here.