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Nintendo just surprised Switch owners by releasing ‘Kirby Fighters 2’

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Nintendo has officially launched a new Kirby brawler for the Switch that it never officially confirmed until now. Kirby Fighters 2 is now available as a digital download for $20, and as the trailer’s voiceover says, it’s a Kirby vs. Kirby vs. Kirby vs. Kirby affair. Nintendo accidentally revealed the title on the eShop earlier today before pulling it down prior to its official launch.

The game is a follow-up to the original Super Smash Bros.—style fighting spinoff that was part of the Kirby Triple Deluxe compilation for the 3DS released back in 2014. It lets you choose your fighter from a cast of the character’s most iconic copy abilities, including Sword, Beam, Artist and the brand-new Wrestler option.



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‘Among Us’ developers cancel sequel plans, focus on their new/old smash hit

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Back in 2018, Innersloth released Among Us, a simple Mafia-style party game that requires teamwork from its players, but also tasks one of them as an imposter whose job is to undermine the group’s efforts. Until about August of this year it hadn’t attracted much attention, which is when the game suddenly exploded in popularity with Twitch players featuring it constantly and drawing more interest, as well as crossplay for iOS and Android that let people easily join in the games.

Just a month ago the developers announced Among Us 2, noting that “It’s been crazy to see how much more popular Among Us could be than we ever imagined.” Now, the folks at Innersloth have changed course again, as the strong support for their $5 game has pushed the developers to cancel the sequel “and instead put all our focus into improving Among Us 1.”

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‘Amnesia: The Dark Descent’ and its sequel go open source

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A little after its tenth anniversary, Amnesia: The Dark Descent is now open-source, allowing modders and aspiring game developers to delve into the title’s codebase to see how the horror masterpiece was created. You can download the source code for both The Dark Descent and its sequel, A Machine for Pigs (which itself started out as a mod), through GitHub.

As series developer Frictional Games points out, the annoucement doesn’t mean you can get the two titles for free. “It just means that people are free to use the source however they want as long as they adhere to the GPL3 license,” the studio said. “The game and all of its content is still owned by Frictional Games. Just like before.”

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Sling’s ‘Watch Party’ group streaming feature works with live TV

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Sling TV just launched a “Sling Watch Party” feature in beta, meaning you can now connect with friends and family via video or text chat while you watch live TV together. The streaming service is the latest to offer a “watch party” feature — following others like Amazon Prime and Disney+ — and it’s the only service to offer watch parties for live TV.

Sling Watch Party allows customers to invite up to three guests to share a TV viewing experience. In addition to having the ability to chat with other viewers, Sling Watch Party also gives you full control of your video camera and volume. You can use the feature on live TV or any on-demand programming.

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Twitter follows up voice tweets by testing voice DMs

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Twitter Audio DMs

The Verge / Twitter

The Verge also got to see the interface for voice messages. At the moment, it’s a simple affair. Playback control is limited to playing and pausing a message, but you can record a missive directly in-line. Rounding things out is an option to report a message if someone is misusing the feature.  

While audio messages are relatively new ground for Twitter, it’s a feature you can find in many other apps. Facebook, for instance, allows you to send them in Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. As Twitter pointed out when it started testing audio tweets on iOS, voice messages add a “more human touch” to the way people use a chat platform. So it’s not a surprise to see the company willing to expirment with the format for DMs.

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Facebook will block ads claiming victory ahead of official results

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Contrary to previous reports, a Facebook rep has confirmed that the social media site will not, in fact, allow ads claiming victory for either the Trump or Biden campaigns to run on election night.

In a September 3rd blog post, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg laid out a new policy banning political ads from being run on the social media site for the entire week leading up to November 3rd, election day. However, that policy did not, according to a recent Fast Company post, prevent campaigns from running new ones starting on November 4th. This would enable either or both presidential campaigns to claim victory and saturate the market with misleading advertisements. Facebook has since clarified in a public statement that such actions are also verboten.

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TikTok bans ads for fasting apps and weight loss supplements

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“As a society, weight stigma and body shaming pose both individual and cultural challenges, and we know that the internet, if left unchecked, has the risk of exacerbating such issues,” the company said. “That’s why we’re focused on working to safeguard our community from harmful content and behavior while supporting an inclusive — and body-positive — environment.”

While a step in the right direction, ads promoting unhealthy dieting are only part of TikTok’s body image problem. There’s also the issue of TikTok users who post that content. The app’s community guidelines ban videos that “promote eating habits that are likely to cause health issues,” but you can still find countless proana videos on the platform despite those rules. Then there’s the opaque algorithm that powers TikTok’s For You feed. Earlier this year, BuzzFeed News detailed how the app exposes people to content that glorifies unhealthy eating and weight loss habits through its home page. TikTok points out people can long-press on a video to stop similar content from showing up on their For You feed, but that doesn’t solve the problem of that those types of videos showing up in the first place.

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Report highlights blindspots in Facebook’s fight against voting misinformation

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The report notes that Eric Covey, chief of staff for Vermont’s secretary of state, reached out to Facebook asking why CrowdTangle couldn’t monitor public posts from individual users, since they are the main source of voter misinformation. Khalid Pagan, a Facebook government and politics outreach manager, responded that such monitoring wasn’t possible because of “privacy concerns.”

In addition to individual user profiles, CrowdTangle’s other major blindspots include private Facebook groups and Instagram accounts with fewer than 75,000 followers, Bloomberg reports. Facebook itself has seemed to acknowledge that CrowdTangle falls short, as the company’s head of News Feed John Hegeman tweeted in July that the tool’s insights “don’t represent what most people see” on Facebook.

Facebook said in a statement that while the company enables state officials to flag content they consider voter interference, it doesn’t rely on them in its efforts against voter misinformation. CrowdTangle is meant to track “influential, public accounts and groups,” the statement said.

“There is no silver bullet to combating misinformation, which is why we’re taking a multi-pronged approach that includes a global fact-checking program and ongoing work with state election authorities to fight voter suppression,” Facebook spokeswoman Mari Melguizo said. “We’ve also set up a dedicated reporting channel for state election authorities to report suspicious claims about voting and polling conditions to us directly.”

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California to ban sale of new gas-powered vehicles by 2035

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Don’t panic, nobody’s coming to take your car. As Newsom’s executive order outlining the new rules notes, existing internal combustion vehicles will still be perfectly legal to own, operate, buy, and sell within the state. The new rules only apply to new vehicle sales. That includes cars, minivans and SUVs. The California Air Resources Board will also be tasked with drafting regulations to do the same with medium- and heavy-duty vehicles by 2045. Newsom’s office notes that transportation accounts for roughly half of the state’s carbon emissions and estimates that these new rules will reduce those emissions by 35 percent.

The move is the first of its kind for a US state, however it’s not an entirely unique idea. A dozen countries including the UK, Germany and India have all passed legislation to phase out gas-powered vehicles by 2030 while Canada and France have established a goal of 2040.

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Google Maps now shows you COVID-19 stats

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Google has already released a number of COVID-related features on its Maps app, including noting potential transit delays due to the outbreak, the relative busyness of local businesses and tagging the locations of nearby COVID testing sites. On Wednesday, Google announced yet another new feature which will inform users as to whether new cases of the virus are on the rise in the area they want to travel to.

google maps includes covid-19 data

Google

Specifically, the company has released a new layer for Maps which displays the seven-day average of new COVID cases per 100,000 people as well as notes whether that infection rate is increasing or decreasing. This layer pulls its data from a variety of sources including Johns Hopkins University, the New York Times, and Wikipedia which in turn get their data from the likes of the World Health Organization, national governments and area hospitals.

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