Legal | The saga of Hi Score Girl continues this week, with the Osaka Prefectural Police charging creator Rensuke Oshihiri and 15 employees of publisher Square Enix with copyright infringement. Game publisher SNK Playmore originally filed criminal charges against Square Enix over the summer, claiming that Hi Score Girl, a comedy about gamers, used its characters without […]
A programming language that is based on Arabic instead of ASCII.
قلب is a programming language exploring the role of human culture in coding. Code is written entirely in Arabic, highlighting cultural biases of computer science and challenging the assumptions we make about programming.
Hackito Ego Sum published a security analysis on Sunday, and it's highly critical of the overall security of BitTorrent Sync. Hackito included this caveat:
This is a huge release for the NewsBlur Android app. So much has happened in the last six months. We’ve had a big backend rewrite that makes the app feel like new. It’s faster, which is necessary to make the new offline reading feature really shine. Now you can read on your Android phone or tablet while on the train, underground, or just in airplane mode to save battery.
Better yet, not only can you read while offline, but you can better read at night with the new dark theme. Take a look.
Here’s what’s new in version 4.0:
Offline reading and story syncing. Stories read while offline will sync as soon as you’re back online.
Option to also store images from stories for offline reading. They do take space, though.
A dark theme for reading at night.
The Text mode can be set to automatically fetch, so you can get to the full text quicker.
An option to mark stories newer than a story as read.
Major backend improvements for faster story loading and transitions. This app should feel like new.
The NewsBlur Android app is a free download. And as always, there’s more big ticket features coming soon for Android.
The Norwegian passport shows the Northern lights under a black light.(Neue)
Add it to the list of ways Norway wins—soon the country will have a passport that reveals an image of the Northern Lights when placed under a black light (see picture above).
That design element alone might make it coolest passport in the world (although Australian passports’ images of kangaroos, camel races, and platypus pose a strong challenge). The black-light aurora borealis image is an innovative approach to security—it’s common for passports to have images that can be seen only under UV light, but the Norwegian design gives this functional feature an element of beauty and relevance to its purpose.
Here’s what the passport’s internal pages look like in normal light:
The juxtaposition is intentional—”The landscape with its vast variation from the south to the north, is the starting point for the design concept,” according to an emailed statement from Neue, the design studio that won the nationwide competition to redesign the country’s passport.
The design beat out other competitors because of signature Norwegian traits: a sleek design and attention to the natural elements that Norwegians—or at least the jury of Norwegians who chose the passport—hold dear. The jury’s statement praised the design’s “simplicity” and said, according to the Neue press release, “the design is attractive and stylish, the colors are subtle and the abstraction of the landscapes are exciting.”
The inside isn’t all that’s striking about the passports. Forget the dull earth tones so prevalent on other passport covers. The Norwegians will be bringing pops of color to international borders everywhere:
Each year, Yale courts not only me but roughly 79,999 other prospective students (down from 240,000 in 2005) for its class of 1,300. For the class of 2018, Yale rejected 93.7 percent of its applicants.
Four women rigged, highlined and filmed an incredible session walking over the canyons of Moab with the assistance of some men and sent their footage to GoPro. When GoPro released the film, it excluded the women almost entirely.
The end of Interstellar left people with a lot of feelings: love, hate, mild confusion, a strong urge to find a bathroom after spending over three hours in a theater—the list goes on. If you fall into the “confusion” camp, allow astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson to explain what the heck the movie’s ending was all about as only he can.
Ken Takakura, a veteran of over 200 films the APcalls one of the last great Japanese movie stars, has died at the age of 83. Takakura died on November 10, but the news was not announced in the Japanese media until after a private funeral service had been held. Takakura rose to fame playing tough-guy roles in yakuza films, before eventually becoming Hollywood’s go-to actor for Western movies made in Japan.
Takakura was born Goichi Oda in 1931 in Fukuoka, Japan, and joined the Toei film studio after graduating from Meiji University in 1955. The Japanese film industry operated under a studio system at that time, and at Toei Takakura labored on dozens of films, usually playing a stoic outcast who acts in defense of the poor and weak after being repeatedly provoked by the system. These roles endeared Takakura to the Japanese public, where a cult of ...
WASHINGTON—In an effort to improve quality and refreshment levels, the Environmental Protection Agency announced Tuesday that municipalities around the country will begin adding a combined 500 million squirts of fresh lemon to the U.S.
Borough Market in London, England recently celebrated their 1,000th anniversary as well as Apple Day, a holiday celebrating the fruit, with The Real Apple Store, an art installation modeled after an Apple store that displayed 1,000 varieties of British apples. The installation was done by London firms TinMan and Teatime, and let visitors see and taste varieties of apples they may have never experienced before like the odd-looking Knobby Russet.
The Smashing Pumpkins have released a new song, and it’s actually pretty good. “Tiberius” is off of Monuments To An Elegy, the group’s new album that hits stores on December 9. Merging classic Pumpkins elements with some modern multi-tracking, “Tiberius” is also available to Pumpkins fans who pre-order Monuments at certain independent record stores.
Jason and Elizabeth Putsché, a husband-and-wife photography team and founders of the non-profit Photographers for Animals, have spent the past five years creating “Community Cats,” a series of poignant photos capturing the lives of feral cats in and around the Baltimore, Maryland area. The Putschés are also currently in the midst of making a full-length documentary about the feral cat community and the humans who try to help them.
For over five years Jason and Elizabeth Putsché have documented the mysterious lives of a regularly misunderstood animal—the feral cat. Also referred to as community cats, alley cats, street cats, stray cats—controversy surrounds them, headlines vilify them, and scientists scrutinize them, yet millions of people feed, care, and advocate for them. Because they aren’t adoptable they have the highest kill rates in animal shelters, and though talked about and debated regularly, they are rarely seen.The Putsches’ photographs bring feral cats into focus, showing these inconspicuous creatures in their natural habitats. Urban, rural, industrial, suburban—constant chameleons, they adapt to any conditions. These felines captivate and fascinate—and the Putsches’ photos contend that their magnificence ought not be overlooked.
For the past three years, NASA scientists have been examining the differences between how male and female astronauts' health is affected by spaceflight. The results are fascinating.
Plenty of ground has been broken since Washington and Colorado became the first states to make the sale and recreational use of marijuana legal earlier this year. We've seen the first medical marijuana ad on television, the first rules governing how banks handle the money coming from dispensaries, and even the first weed publishing vertical at an established newspaper. Now the world's first international marijuana brand is being created — and it will use Bob Marley's likeness to promote it.
According to The Guardian, Marley's family is working with private equity firm Privateer Holdings to create a company called Marley Natural. Its focus will be on distributing "heirloom Jamaican cannabis strains" of marijuana, but will also offer other things like creams and accessories emblazoned with the company's branding and the reggae star's name. Though the company will be rooted in New York City — where marijuana is only decriminalized at the moment — the plan is to grow, distribute, and sell it in areas where the plant is legal by the end of 2015. The other branded products will be available worldwide.
The move would likely increase the already staggering amount of money that has been posthumously made in Marley's name — the music icon's likeness has already been used on so many things like shirts and bags that last month Forbes ranked him as the fifth-highest paid dead celebrity, earning his family an estimated $20 million over the last year alone. Michael Jackson topped that list with earnings in the area of $140 million, but considering the number of states legalizing marijuana and the support shown in surveys about the acceptance of legalization (like this one from the Pew Research Center), there's a good chance that gap would decrease.
Marley is already the fifth-highest paid dead celebrity
That's not even considering the amount of money involved in counterfeited Marley merchandise, too. In 2011, Billboard magazine ran a cover story called "The Business of Bob Marley" which theorized that the unlicensed usage of Marley's likeness had generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue over the years. Aligning Marley's official likeness with an international marijuana brand would not only make obvious cultural sense, but could also help reign in some of that lost money. As Chief Executive of Privateer Holdings Brendan Kennedy told The Guardian, "Partnering with us is a way of protecting his image."
While fans will have wait to get their hands on the pop culture pioneer's pot, the company has launched a website where users can do things like read up on what specific products will be offered, watch interviews with his family, and participate in the growing conversation about marijuana legalization.
Imagine you have an online service for chatting with friends, with somewhere in the neighborhood of 650 to 700 million monthly active users. Those users put up something like 2.5 billion pieces of discrete content every month: posts, photos, comments, and likes. That would be a pretty huge service, second only to Facebook itself in its sheer size and scope. You'd think the app for that service would be wildly popular. But you'd be wrong — because until now, that app didn't exist.
The service, of course, is Facebook Groups, which will now get its own dedicated app on iOS and Android. And those eye-popping numbers are very real despite the fact that the majority of users have been digging through several layers of the "Big Blue" classic Facebook app to access Groups. "Groups are buried," says product manager Shirley Sun, echoing the same problem we heard from everybody on the Groups team. User experience researcher Loi Sessions Goulet pointed out that for people using messaging apps to communicate with small groups, “the main problem they were facing was disorganized conversation.” Instead of chat focused on simple topics that you can dip into when you want them, it’s a million conversations happening in real time. Groups could help with that, Facebook thought, but again, “the functionality was buried.”
So the team excavated it. Today, Facebook is launching a separate Groups app.
If you're not familiar, Groups is Facebook's product that essentially replicates the traditional News Feed of photos, links, and status updates — but does it on a smaller scale. You can set up a small group that includes just your close friends, family, or softball team. Then that group sort of acts like a mini-Facebook, letting you post photos, comments, and other status updates. Instead of algorithms guessing which news story you're most likely to click on, you just see stuff from other people in the group. And when you post to a group, the privacy settings of your post are predetermined by the group's settings. Lastly, if you want to find groups that already exist for stuff you’re interested in, there’s a discover tab that shows the groups your friend network already uses.
We've been using the app for a few days now and found it to be fast, fluid, intuitive, and surprisingly fun. That's not a huge surprise – it comes in part from Facebook's Creative Labs, which has been responsible for other polished Facebook apps like Paper and Slingshot. Animation on both Android and iOS is fluid and fast, the overall app layout is simple and direct, and functionality (including privacy settings) is easy to intuit just by poking around a bit. It's a great app.
But Groups isn't meant to be a wild new endeavor for Facebook. As Sun put it, it's for "people who are already active today, and want to engage even more." She's basically right: Groups doesn't feel like something totally different from Facebook. In fact, it feels like what Facebook used to be. Using it feels like a throwback to the Facebook of old, back when the only thing you'd find in it was stuff from your friends and family. In the app, you get immediate access to the updates you actually want from your (actual) social networks.
Will there be ads? Facebook’s not saying yet, but for now there aren’t, and that’s wonderful. As for the future, Sun tells us that when it was designing Groups, the team was "focused on experience without considering a monetization end goal."
Groups will continue to exist inside the main Facebook app
When Facebook broke out Messenger from the main app, it caused a hullabaloo because you couldn't access Messenger from the main Big Blue Facebook app anymore. Not so with Groups, which will continue to also live there, buried four interactions deep. But if you use groups, you can get to them faster now — you can even put a specific group directly on your iPhone or Android phone’s homescreen.
As an independent app, Groups also gives users more controls over their notifications: you can get everything immediately from your study group, but your keg party planning group photos can wait (or, more likely, vice versa). That kind of granular notification structure could make Groups useful in a business context — and in fact Facebook has been doing exactly that.
Because it's private, you end up using Groups a little differently. It's a freer place to post photos for your friends and family, but Facebook envisions other uses, too. There are three privacy settings: public, closed, and secret — and each has simple explanations for what they mean. So when you create a group, you also choose the privacy settings. It's probably not enough for you to entrust your (ahem) most private photos to Facebook, but it is probably enough to trust that your unsexy vacation photos won't accidentally get posted publicly for everybody to see. You can also see little green indicators next to the group members that are online and using Facebook right now.
Facebook offers some clues in how it hopes people will use groups the suggestions it gives you when you create a new one: clubs, sports teams, and even couples. On the extreme end of the spectrum, more than one person who worked on the Groups team was proud to say that over a quarter of the population on the island of Mauritius are part of a buying and selling group.
One option we expected to see more of, but didn't, was a default for businesses and companies. That's not just because rumors of a business-focused Facebook app have picked up recently, but also because Facebook itself basically runs on Groups. It has for some time now, to the point where lead engineer Dave Ferguson says that Facebook has shut down its main email listserv last month. Everybody just uses Groups for everything, he says, because "distribution email lists were pretty inadequate compared to groups." You can go through a longer history with Groups, and threads of conversations are broken out.
An email-killing Yammer/Slack/Basecamp/Convo app designed explicitly for businesses may very well come in time, but theoretically Groups could be that app now for some people. For the rest of us, it's enough that this Groups app provides a nicer experience for those 700 million or so people who use it for their non-work groups. "People like their groups," Ferguson says, "let’s solve their top problems as step one."
Groups is the furthest thing from flashy, and that's the point. If you're wondering what ever happened to the Facebook that helps you stay in touch with your friends and family, here it is, back again without the spammy top ten lists, viral content, or ads. It's Facebook with just your friends. Imagine that.
Apple will soon allow third-party accessory makers to integrate the company's Lightning port directly into their products. 9to5Mac today reported on the move, which should make life easier for manufacturers operating on slim margins and cut down on the number of cables that iPhone and iPad users need to carry around. Currently, some devices like Bluetooth speakers and iPhone battery cases often require a microUSB cord for charging. But by giving its partners the option of swapping that USB port for the Lightning hardware iOS users are familiar with, Apple's making things easier on everyone.
Third-party manufacturers will also soon have access to a smaller Lightning connector, according to 9to5Mac. This will enable them to fit Apple's connector inside smaller products and use it in novel ways. Beyond accessories, Apple has already opened up the Lightning connection to headphone makers. Philips will release new, high fidelity headphones next month that utilize Apple's connector instead the iPhone's headphone jack. It's not unreasonable to think that Apple will eventually go down the same road with Beats and its own earbuds. But will the Lightning cable be able to endure all this added usage? Apple's cord already has a habit of fraying from time to time, so you might want to have some extras around if it's destined to become the iOS ecosystem's do-everything cable.
25 years ago, Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick designed Maniac Mansion, one of the defining titles from the golden era of adventure games. Now they're making a spiritual successor.
The two creators just launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund development of Thimbleweed Park, a new game that not only plays like a classic Lucasarts game, but looks like one too. "We don't want to make a game 'inspired by,' or 'paying homage to' classic point and click adventures," the duo says, "we want to make a real classic point and click adventure."
The game stars a pair of detectives investigating a dead body found in a river, and will feature five different playable characters — including a clown who can't remove his makeup — and multiple endings depending on how you play. It features a deliberately old-school look, with huge, chunky pixels and an interface that will feel intimately familiar if you played games like Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island. (It will also feature an easy mode for those who don't want to deal with the genre's notorious difficulty.) Gilbert and Winnick are looking to raise $375,000 to fund production of the game, which will include adding another programmer and artist to the team six months into development.
"We want Thimbleweed Park to be like an undiscovered classic Lucasarts' adventure game you'd never played before," the Kickstarter page explains. "A game discovered in a dusty old desk that puts a smile on your face and sends a wave of nostalgia through you in the same way it does for us."
Uber CEO Travis Kalanick took to Twitter today to address the latest public-relations debacle to confront the transportation company. After an Uber vice president mused about hiring opposition researchers to dig up defamatory information about journalists who criticized the company, Kalanick said the comments showed "a lack of humanity." Buzzfeedbroke news of the comments last night after attending the dinner party where the remarks were made. "Emil's comments at the recent dinner party were terrible and do not represent the company," Kalanick said, referring to Emil Michael, Uber's senior vice president of business. "His remarks showed a lack of leadership, a lack of humanity, and a departure from our values and ideals."
Kalanick went on to say that the company is trying to show "that we are principled and mean well," and that "until Emil's comments we felt we were making positive steps along those lines." But the notoriously combative Kalanick stopped short of apologizing for Michael's behavior, or for saying that Michael would be disciplined. He also avoided mentioning Pando editor-in-chief Sarah Lacy, whose recent criticism of Uber apparently spurred Michael to muse that the company could look into "your personal lives, your families." The Verge has reached out to Uber for additional comment and will update this post if we hear back.
The NFL has suspended Minnesota Vikings running back Adrian Peterson without pay for the rest of the 2014 season. He will not be considered for reinstatement until April 15, 2015, when the league will determine the results of Peterson's participation in counseling and treatment.
NFL Media's Ian Rapoport reports that Peterson will appeal the suspension, and hopes to have the matter determined by a neutral arbitrator.
Dan Lehman, a telephone technician at Pioneer Communications who monitors the phones and headsets on the sidelines for the Gophers, received some mild internet fame as a result of the image. KMSP-TV in the Twin Cities tracked him down and asked if the move was indeed intended to be psychological warfare, as our own Spencer Hall quipped in his playoff threat watch. Turns out he just wanted a Dilly.
"Ever since we moved into TCF Bank stadium, Dairy Queen has given the press area upstairs treats at halftime, and [my boss] grabs a treat on the way down, whatever we want, Dilly Bars or Buster Bars, and that game I just happened to ask him to bring me down a Dilly," Lehman tells us. "That's every game, regardless of weather."
Need some more Dilly Bar Dan quotes? Of course you do. Here's another, via ESPN.
"It's never too cold for a Dilly Bar," he said. "That's just one of those things that I'll enjoy whenever they give it to me."
May your Dilly Bars stay frozen and plentiful, Dan.
Civil War: Front Line #11: The moment when Marvel said, “Actually, it’s about ethics in superhero journalism.”
___
I never forgot this BS. Never. One of the last straws that had me all ‘eff contemporary superhero Marvel and DC’. Seriously. Just… too much rant. Almost speechless.
Late to the party, I know, but I discovered Star Citizen today. At first glance it looked great...until I noticed the complete absence of women and people of color in the game's media.
I've watched three trailers, an in-universe "commercial" for a starship, and an FPS demo, and every single person in all of them is a white male. Pilots. Carrier deck crew. Carrier bridge crew. Bounty hunters. Every bit of concept art. EVERYbody. It's positively creepy.
For bonus sexism points, the dev article on how the game handles dying is entitled "Death of a Spaceman". And in one of the trailers--I forget which one, now--a character addressed his comrades as "gentlemen". What is this, the 1950s?
I know the game itself will allow players to make their PCs female--although confirming that took quite a bit of digging. But all the game's media, it's public face, says "you're not welcome, go away."
The NewsBlur Blog.
/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/2468262/Screen_Shot_2014-11-18_at_8.33.29_AM.0.png)
/cdn2.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/2468270/Screen_Shot_2014-11-18_at_8.33.46_AM.0.png)
/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/2468450/icecream.0.0.gif)
