firehose

game-controllers, HCI, theramin, zoomachines festival.

Elite: Dangerous, Frontier Developments, Leonard Nimoy.

Almost two years after saying they'd no longer take used PlayStation 2s for trade, GameStop is once again accepting them.

GameStop had stopped accepting the systems and games for trade on June 1, 2013, about six months after Sony ended production of the console. But in a news release sent this morning, the games retailer said it's back on — but trade-ins will be for store credit only.

A PlayStation 2 with a power cable, controller and A/V cable will get $25 store credit. A console lacking any of those three accessories gets $20.

The PlayStation 2 is the undisputed best-selling video game console of all time, moving more than 150 million units in its 13-year-run. More than 1.5 billion copies of video games in its prolific library were sold in that span.

It was only a year ago that SanDisk unveiled the first ever 128GB microSD card. Now, at Mobile World Congress, the company has upped the stakes once again, announcing a microSD card with an incredible 200GB of storage. This is more memory than many modern laptops equipped with solid state drives, and can turn any Android device into a portable hard drive for music and photos. This is certainly where SanDisk is hoping the card will be useful (the company notes that seven out of 10 images are now captured on smartphones and tablets, a ratio they predict will rise to nine out of 10 by the year 2019) but the future of SD cards on mobiles is far from certain.

Samsung's new Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge both break with tradition by dropping the option for expandable storage (just as the iPhone has ever since its inception) and although HTC's new One M9 does give customers the option, HTC is far from leading the market at this point. SanDisk's new card does have impressive transfer speeds of 90MB/s, but that's nothing compared to recent SSDs and there's even some evidence that additional storage can slow down Android smartphones in general. Still, there are millions of existing Android devices that the new microSD card will work on, although with a $400 price tag, not everyone will want to upgrade.

Chinese smartphone giant Xiaomi has launched a new action cam to rival the GoPro Hero — at least, in China anyway. The Yi Action Camera won't be available outside of Xiaomi's home country, but is selling for the impressively low price of 399 CNY (just $64) and offers some eye-catching specs to match. The new device shows the company's ambition to move beyond the smartphone market, and offer consumers the chance to buy in to a larger ecosystem of Xiaomi products.

On paper, the Yi Action Camera easily beats the GoPro Hero

The Yi itself features a 16-megapixel camera capable of shooting 1080p video at 60 frames per second — better on paper than the $130 GoPro Hero, which can only shoot 1080p footage at 30 frames per second, or 720p film at 60 frames. Unexpectedly for such a cheap device, the Yi also uses a high-quality image sensor from Sony (an Exmor R CMOS) and offers 64GB of built-in storage — twice what's available on the Hero. Like GoPro's offering, the Yi can be used up to 40 meters underwater and comes with a smartphone app that can remotely control the camera as well as edit and share newly-captured footage.

The Yi doesn't ship with any basic cases or rigging, although Xiaomi is offering a "travel edition" for an extra 100 CNY that comes bundled with a selfie stick. The company also promises a "rich variety of accessories" will be available for the device to let users attach the Yi to objects including helmets, bikes, and even pets (check out the image above to see how happy this makes cat).

Although there's no word on whether the Yi will ever come to the US, it's impossible not to notice that it handily beats the GoPro Hero in both price and specs (real-life performance may be a different matter). This is a result of the company's strategy of offering high-end devices at razor-thin margins, but the device's very existence shows that we're wrong to think of Xiaomi as just a phone company. Xiaomi has previously launched a smart TV, an air purifier, and a blood pressure monitor, and when its first online shop opens for US customers it won't sell mobiles at all but wearables, headphones, and other accessories. The Yi could easily find a place in this line-up if Xiaomi wanted.

Google has announced that it's working on a new mobile payments framework named Android Pay. Speaking at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Google exec Sundar Pichai confirmed that this would not be a new product for users, but an "API layer" that allows other companies to support secure payments on Android in both physical stores and via apps.

"We are doing it in a way in which anybody else can build a payments service on top of Android," said Pichai. "So, in places like China and Africa we hope that people will use Android Pay to build innovative services."

Android Pay will support NFC and biometrics

Although Pichai did not explain the details of Android Pay to any great degree, he claimed it would "start with NFC" and eventually accommodate biometric sensors as well. Presumably, this would mean working with fingerprint scanners such as those built into Samsung's Galaxy flagship smartphones — a security measure familiar to users of Apple Pay.

Google and Samsung are on "different timelines," says Pichai

Pichai also confirmed that Google Wallet would continue as a separate service to Android Pay, albeit one reliant on Android Pay's framework. Pichai also side-stepped a question about whether Android Pay was a rival to mobile payments systems such as Samsung's, saying that the two companies were on "slightly different timelines" and that they would "work closely [together] to see how we can align [with them]."

Plenty of questions remain as to how exactly Android Pay will work for both developers and users, but it seems clear that Google is hoping to streamline the whole process of mobile payments both online and offline. This is likely to lead to single-tap transactions within Android apps, as well as fingerprint-authenticated purchases in stores for users carrying the right hardware.

Google has been working on mobile payments since Google Wallet was first unveiled in 2011, but the launch of Apple Pay has obviously inspired the company to redouble its efforts. However, while Apple Pay looks like it will become a successful service for mobile payments, Google wants Android Pay to become a successful platform. Will that give it a bigger slice of the mobile payments pie? We'll have to wait and see.

The Supreme Court on Monday let stand the conviction of a rapist whose prosecution rested on DNA swiped from the armrests of an interrogation-room chair.

Without comment, the justices refused to review a 4-3 decision from Maryland's top court that upheld the life sentence and conviction of Glenn Raynor. The dissent on the Maryland Court of Appeals said a probable-cause warrant was needed and painted a grim picture of the future:

The Majority’s approval of such police procedure means, in essence, that a person desiring to keep her DNA profile private, must conduct her public affairs in a hermetically sealed hazmat suit.... The Majority's holding means that a person can no longer vote, participate in a jury, or obtain a driver's license, without opening up his genetic material for state collection and codification.

In urging the high court to review the case, the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote that "allowing police the limitless ability to collect and search genetic material will usher in a future where DNA may be collected from any person at any time, entered into and checked against DNA databases, and used to conduct pervasive surveillance."

Last year, Google made headlines when it revealed that its next version of Android would require full-disk encryption on all new phones. Older versions of Android had supported optional disk encryption, but Android 5.0 Lollipop would make it a standard feature.

But we're starting to see new Lollipop phones from Google's partners, and they aren't encrypted by default, contradicting Google's previous statements. At some point between the original announcement in September of 2014 and the publication of the Android 5.0 hardware requirements in January of 2015, Google apparently decided to relax the requirement, pushing it off to some future version of Android. Here's the timeline of events.

Loud announcement, quiet backtracking

Google's decision to encrypt new Lollipop devices by default was reported widely, in both tech-focused and mainstream publications.

On Monday, Epic Games announced that its Unreal Engine 4 solution for game and graphic creation, which had previously launched with a $19 per month subscription fee, would be free to download and use. Now, if you want to dabble in game creation with Epic's engine, you no longer need to pony up for a solo subscription, latch onto a company's subscription plan, or even fake that you're a student.

Epic CEO Tim Sweeney confirmed the details in a blog post in which he said that anyone can now freely access the engine's entire toolset—along with the Unreal Engine Marketplace, which allows users to buy and sell custom-made art and programming assets. "This is the complete technology we use at Epic when building our own games," Sweeney added. He confirmed that current subscribers will receive a pro-rated refund effective immediately and that anyone who has ever paid for the engine will receive a $30 credit at the Unreal Engine Marketplace. Yes, that's $30 for everyone, regardless of how many hundreds of dollars you may have pumped into subscription fees already.

What hasn't changed is the other, potentially more expensive aspect of building a game in Unreal—namely, that the creators of a finished UE4 game owe Epic five percent of a game's revenue after the first $3,000 they make each quarter. Those fees were in effect while Epic was also insisting on a monthly subscription fee that added up to $240 a year. For comparison, the industry's current leader in cross-platform development tools, Unity Pro, costs game makers $75 per month to use, but it has no follow-up payment requirements. (The lesser toolset, simply named Unity, is free to use with no strings attached.)

…Please don’t do these sorts of things on a weekend, big companies. My heart can’t take it.

So: the ‘Vive!’ The first time Steam VR has broken cover! A hardware partnership between Valve and HTC! Dual 1200 x 1080 displays with a 90 frames per second refresh rate! All kinds of apparently super-precise head-tracking with no jitter! But that’s not the half of it. Add in a couple of ‘Steam VR Base Stations’ and you get to walk around, with the setup tracking your location. I.e. in theory you get to actually walk around a pretend world.

And out by this Christmas. Good lord. Trailer thingy below.

So… basically living inside videogames, then? I mean, they don’t mention a toilet attachment, but I’m sure someone will mod one in before long.

Hopefully we’ll have first-hand reports of whether Valve’s massively ambitious foray into full-body virtual reality has paid off, as John and Graham are currently out at GDC where this thing’s getting shown off. In the meantime, there’s assorted further detail, including more specs, over on the Vive’s official website.

Again, a consumer version is planned by Christmas – which may mean things get ugly between Valve/HTC and Oculus – while a developer kit should be available sometime in the Spring. It’s for ‘select developers’ rather than the open-to-all method Oculus went for, though.

All this revealing comes via HTC rather than Valve, by the way, so there might be much yet to come. Perhaps other hardware firms will have their own takes on SteamVR. Perhaps existent headsets can be retroactively adapted for it. And, of course, there’s finding out about game support yet to come: what, exactly, are we going to be doing with this thing?

God. Exciting. Though hard to get my head around what it actually means in practice. Also I’m worried that I don’t have a room big enough for it – it talks of 15m x 15m. Don’t you dare do a Kinect on me, Vive.

‘Vive’ though? Really? It sounds a bit dildo-y, let’s be honest.