Arcade expert and hot sauce mogul Billy Mitchell made a name for himself by earning record-breaking scores in games like Pac-Man and BurgerTime. Two years ago, de facto scorekeeper Twin Galaxies stripped Mitchell of his Donkey Kong records after concluding that his most recent score was not achieved on authentic arcade hardware. (Guinness also stripped him of his records.) Mitchell refuted this, and in September of 2019, the gamer and his lawyer announced they’d be taking Twin Galaxies to court, after claiming that the company had defamed his name. According to Ars Technica, Mitchell had, in fact, already filed suit in April of 2019, as to avoid California’s statute of limitations running its course. The case was served to Twin Galaxies this February, and a hearing will be held in July. While this all seems rather silly, the outcome could have lasting implications for the arcade gaming community.
Twin Galaxies was careful in its wording that explained why Mitchell’s records were being removed and why he was being banned from submitting further scores, but the “King of Kong” still takes the claim as a defamatory accusation of cheating. Twin Galaxies says that the court deciding in Mitchell’s favor “would have chilling effects on the freedom of speech.” In other words, things could get messy for Twin Galaxies and other record-keeping organizations if Mitchell’s case sets a precedent, as just about anyone with an axe to grind could take such a group to court.
CNBCnoted that this pioneering case is relatively unremarkable, revolving around a Booking.com attempt to trademark its name. There’s an incoming surge of higher-profile cases coming during this period, though, and the teleconferences might just shape perception of both the cases and the Supreme Court itself. As a general rule, the public only learns about the inner workings of cases once there’s a verdict. This expands the potential audience to many more people and might prompt calls to broadcast arguments even when life returns to normal.
Hackers don’t necessarily need to break into networks to compromise game companies — sometimes, it’s just about coercing the right people. An anonymous attacker talking to Motherboard has revealed that they bribed a Roblox customer support representative to get access to the customer support panel for the online game platform. The intruder could see email addresses, change passwords, strip two-factor authentication and even ban users.
This was done solely to “prove a point,” the hacker claimed. As evidence, they provided photos showing details of a handful of players, including high-profile examples. However, this wasn’t a strictly virtuous act — the perpetrator changed passwords for two accounts, sold items and updated two-factor settings once it became clear an attempt to claim a bug bounty (for a non-existent flaw) wasn’t going to work.
For hospitals that might not be able to print their own, Formlabs is using 150 3D printers at its Massachusetts headquarters to print the adapters. Once production is fully ramped up, the company expects to print up to 3,000 parts per day.
“Formlabs’ EUA for BiPAP adapters signifies the need for these components and 3D printings’ unique ability to fill that need. 3D printing enables rapid iteration and prototyping of new, innovative medical equipment, while expediting the production process, shortening supply chains, and allowing for localized manufacturing,” said Max Lobovsky, Formlabs CEO and co-founder.
Lobovsky noted that prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the FDA had only authorized a handful of EUAs. In March, Abbott received the rush-approval for its toaster-sized lab-in-a-box, and recently, NASA’s ventilator design was approved through the fast-track authorization.
While companies from Tesla to Dyson and NVIDIA have explored new ways to manufacture ventilators, pivoting manufacturing to make the devices is difficult and requires a lot of expertise. Plus, all ventilators have to clear regulatory hurdles and require creating new supply chains. Solutions like Formlabs’ adapter and right-to-repair efforts to prolong the life of existing equipment may be more practical.
As previously reported, the UK will break from the Apple-Google “decentralized” approach. Instead, the NHS’s technology group NHSX chose a centralized model, in which a list of contacts made via Bluetooth signals will be stored on users’ devices as anonymous tokens. If a user has symptoms or tests positive, the contacts can be submitted to the app, which analyzes the data and sends notifications if necessary.
While critics say the centralized approach raises privacy concerns, NHSX CEO Matthew Gould told Reuters that the group “put privacy right at the heart” of the app. He explained that the app doesn’t know who users are, where they are or who they’ve been near. Britain’s Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham pointed out that the centralized approach will allow the UK to gather more insights into the virus, something a decentralized approach might limit.
Just yesterday, France announced that it will begin testing its COVID-19 tracking app beginning May 11th, and Australia has already launched its own version. In the US, a group of senators is working on a bill that would set requirements for data collection and transparency in COVID-19 tracking apps, and Apple and Google have outlined how public health authorities around the world can use their upcoming tracking system to preserve user privacy.
Things actually get a bit more interesting as you move down the line, though. The i7-10700K is essentially the same chip as that 9900K, an 8-core, 16-thread 5Ghz processor that should retail for about $100 less. In fact, all the core chips down to i3 now feature hyperthreading, which can boost performance in certain programs by 20-30%. This actually makes the i3 potentially appealing. The i3-10300 looks suspiciously similar to Intel’s last 4-core flagship, the i7-7700K, but should cost $150. That might not cut it for super heavy workloads like rendering or data processing, but for most games and daily tasks, the i7-7700K still holds up.
Of course, there are downsides. These CPUs all require a new motherboard and chipset, called Z490, and they don’t enable PCIe 4.0, the new interface standard that allows for super fast storage. There are rumors that Intel’s next CPUs might keep compatibility with Z490 and that those chips will add PCIe 4.0, but for now you’re stuck with PCIe 3. It should be noted that AMD’s high-end chips all support PCIe 4.0, and AMD has managed to keep motherboard compatibility for the past three years. (Although PCIe 4.0 does require a motherboard with one of its latest chipsets.) These Intel 10th-gen chips are also still based on Intel’s aging 14nm manufacturing process and Skylake architecture, so aside from more cores, don’t expect huge performance gains here.
Do these Intel 10th-gen chips bring the competition back to AMD? Well, it’s a step in the right direction. They do offer more cores for the same price, and unlock features up and down the product line. Intel’s chips do also tend to be a little faster per-core in certain programs, but AMD is catching up, and they do offer some compelling alternatives, like the 12 core 3900X, which can be found for around $430. After years of CPU stagnation, any competition is good, and as price-per-core has plummeted over the past three years, we consumers get to reap the benefits.
Today, Intel announced that it has acquired the transit app developer Moovit for nearly roughly $900 million, confirming rumors that circulated over the weekend. Used by more than 800 million users and services in over 3,000 cities and 102 countries, Moovit combines info from public transit operators and its user community to provide real-time trip mapping and planning services. The deal should help Intel’s Mobileye provide new and improved mobility services, like robotaxis.
“Moovit is a strong brand trusted by hundreds of millions of people globally. Together, with Mobileye’s extensive capabilities in mapping and self-driving technology, we will be able to accelerate our timeline to transform the future of mobility,” said Mobileye CEO Amnon Shashua.
Soon after, with growing numbers of people around the world on lockdown, use of the social network started to tick up and the company began to push out one coronavirus-related update after another. Some moves, such as tightening ad policies, were defensive — an effort to weed out scammers and profiteers. Others, such as a new coronavirus “information center” in News Feed, seemed designed to reassure users: the world might be chaotic, but Facebook is trying to help. “A big part of this is going to be about helping communities come together through our services to help each other out,” Zuckerberg said at the time.
But while Zuckerberg has been praised for many of these moves, he may have had another, more calculated, motivation for his quick response: to rehab his and Facebook’s public image. During an early March meeting, company executives reportedly solicited ideas about how to respond to the crisis that would “help change public opinion about Facebook,” the Wall Street Journalreported.
Two months later, and it appears Facebook’s efforts are paying off — at least by some measures.
Facebook usage is higher than ever, with the company passing a new milestone: 3 billion monthly users across its “family” of apps. Moreover, the company may actually be winning back some users who had abandoned the social network.
“We are seeing people who are new coming to our products as well as people who are re-engaging,” Facebook CFO Dave Wehner said during a call with analysts following the company’s quarterly earnings report. “So we think this is an opportunity for us to kind of re-engage those users and get them back into being more frequent users of Facebook.”
The company’s Portal TV device, once derided, is now sold out, as sales of Portal devices have increased ten-fold, according to Zuckerberg.
The platform still struggles to stem the tide of misinformation, especially when some of it comes directly from the White House. But Facebook has shown a willingness to take aggressive steps it has shied away from in the past, and even some of the company’s previously vocal critics have praised its quick action.
Rep. Adam Schiff has encouraged Twitter and YouTube to be more like Facebook in their response to COVID-19 misinformation.
Facebook is also using the current situation to guard against other companies that represent a threat to the social network. Facebook recently announced it plans to take on Zoom, which has quickly become a mainstay of pandemic communication, with its own take on videoconferencing: Messenger Rooms. The company has also been ramping up its investments in live streaming and gaming in a series of moves that could challenge Twitch and YouTube.
Meanwhile, an economic downturn could prevent other upstarts from becoming a threat to the company.
“In times like this, the advice that they [other companies] get from their investors is: conserve your cash. Make the cuts that you need to cut, make sure that you survive the storm,” says Mark Coopersmith, a senior lecturer teaching entrepreneurship and innovation at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.
“It’s really about survival, so you come out stronger on the other end. And a lot of smaller tech companies aren’t going to make it through, which means that the incumbents like Facebook and Google and Amazon and big players definitely have an advantage in difficult times like this.”
Facebook is especially well positioned to weather a bad economy (it had more than $50 billion in cash reserves at the end of last year). While it’s still unclear how the coronavirus pandemic will affect perception of Zuckerberg and Facebook in the long run, Zuckerberg has made clear he intends to continue to stay competitive and invest in new products.
“I think it’s important that rather than slamming on the brakes now, as I think a lot of companies may, that it’s important to keep on building and keep on investing and building for the new needs that people have and especially to make up for some of the stuff that other companies would pull back on. And I think that’s — in some ways, that’s an opportunity,” he said.
What might be just as important now, according to Coopersmith, is whether Zuckerberg and Facebook can walk a delicate balance between giving users what they want without giving the impression they are exploiting the situation for their own gain.
“If it [Facebook] tries to be too opportunistic at a time like this, it may spread itself too thin, it may test the trust that it’s regaining with customers. And it may lose that opportunity to reconnect.”
Dual-screen computers are coming, but maybe not as soon as Microsoft first thought. The company originally planned to launch Windows 10X alongside new hardware — the Surface Neo — this holiday season. However, rumors from last month suggested that the forked version of the OS — which was being designed specifically for phones, tablets and laptops with two screens — had been delayed until 2021, since dual-screen devices will unlikely be ready to ship by the fall. A blog post from Microsoft’s chief product officer indicates that the company is hoping to bring 10X to single-screen devices in the meantime.
“With Windows 10X, we designed for flexibility, and that flexibility has enabled us to pivot our focus toward single-screen Windows 10X devices that leverage the power of the cloud to help our customers work, learn and play in new ways,” says Panos Panay in the post. “These single-screen devices will be the first expression of Windows 10X that we deliver to our customers, and we will continue to look for the right moment, in conjunction with our OEM partners, to bring dual-screen devices to market.”
EA’s contribution to Summer Games Fest now has a specific date. The publisher has announced that an online-only version of EA Play Live will take place on June 11th at 7PM Eastern through the company’s website. It didn’t drop any clues as to what’s in the pipeline, although you can reasonably presume there will be updated versions of sports mainstays like Madden NFL, FIFA, NBA Live and NHL.
The event should be notable beyond the move to an internet-only event in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s EA’s first Play event where it’s likely to show PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X titles. While there’s a chance Microsoft’s Series X gameplay premiere might spoil some of the surprise, Play Live could show both more titles and provide a clearer sense of how EA will take advantage of the new consoles’ performance. It’s not certain if the first wave of PS5/XSX titles will offer meaningful gameplay improvements or simply represent graphical upgrades to familiar formulas.
