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Atari Online News, Etc. Volume 18 Issue 33
Volume 18, Issue 33 Atari Online News, Etc. August 19, 2016
Published and Copyright (c) 1999 - 2016
All Rights Reserved
Atari Online News, Etc.
A-ONE Online Magazine
Dana P. Jacobson, Publisher/Managing Editor
Joseph Mirando, Managing Editor
Rob Mahlert, Associate Editor
Atari Online News, Etc. Staff
Dana P. Jacobson -- Editor
Joe Mirando -- "People Are Talking"
Michael Burkley -- "Unabashed Atariophile"
Albert Dayes -- "CC: Classic Chips"
Rob Mahlert -- Web site
Thomas J. Andrews -- "Keeper of the Flame"
With Contributions by:
Fred Horvat
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=~=~=~=
A-ONE #1833 08/19/16
~ Twitter Continues Fight ~ People Are Talking! ~ Firebee News Update!
~ Turn-about Fair Play! ~ Google Chrome Support ~ AIs in Doom Contest!
~ Twitter Filters Lacking ~ New Intel Processor! ~ Battlefront 1 Beta!
-* Final Fantasy XV Is Delayed! *-
-* Pokemon Uranium Hosting Taken Down! *-
-* Hacker Releases Personal Info of Democrats *-
=~=~=~=
->From the Editor's Keyboard "Saying it like it is!"
""""""""""""""""""""""""""
Although we've reached 90-degrees a few times this week, we have
not had a heat wave - thankfully. This heat and humidity can
really take a lot out of people! We've had a little rain, but
nothing significant to take a bite out of our drought conditions.
Things continue to heat up down in Rio also; the Americans have
cracked the 100 mark as far as the number of medals won - quite
impressive! Only a couple of days left, so the count can still
climb! Go Team USA!
Until next time...
=~=~=~=
Firebee News Update
News About The Boards
In the meantime Medusa identified one part at the new boards,
that seems - as already suspected - to be responsible for the
problems. The communication with the assembling company and the
producer, Texas Instruments, didn't lead to any hint yet for the
exact causes of the behavior of the busdriver. The part behaves
namely not as noted in the specifications, and in bizarre manner
also not as the same ones of the 1. series. Especially
aggravating is that the busdriver additionally changes his
behavior after several minutes of usage. To fix this quickly,
while we still will search for the true cause with the assembling
company and the part manufacturer, Medusa ordered now extra
identical constructed parts from NXP. We will send one board and
the new part to the assembling company, which will exchange the
part, to see if subsequently all problems are solved.
We will keep you updated, and start the shipping of the series not
before all problems are solved satisfactorily. Should the exchange
of the busdriver lead to success, all computers will be tested
individually and by hand by us before they are shipped.
=~=~=~=
->In This Week's Gaming Section - Final Fantasy XV Is Delayed!
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" Battlefront 1 Open Beta!
Nintendo Takes Down Pokemon Uranium Hosting!
And more!
=~=~=~=
->A-ONE's Game Console Industry News - The Latest Gaming News!
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
ëFinal Fantasy XVí Is Delayed Until Late November
Final Fantasy XVës September 30 launch date is no more. Square
Enix just kicked its epic fantasy for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One
downfield two months to November 29, which means youíll have to
find something else to do during this yearís national food
feting.
This is strictly about further shoring up the game, says Square
Enix, attributing the delay to ìpolishî and ìquality testingî so
that ìthe reality of the game can match the expectations of both
the fans and the creative teams.î
Director Hajime Tabata took to YouTube to explain further, in a
dispatch filmed August 14 in London. Tabata says that the game
has gone gold, and that he expects ìthe quality of this version
will satisfy most players out there.î The teamís also created a
new 30 minute gameplay video based on the gold version, due
August 17.
That said, Tabata says the game isnít quite at ìthat highest
possible qualityî he and his team are aiming for. In other words,
Tabata wants to head off nitpicking by the gameís hardcore base.
The plan was to do that with a day one patch, and yet heís
worried about players who lack Internet access, whoíll be unable
to download it. Whatís more, he says, even the day one patch
falls short of his launch vision.
By moving the release date to November 29, says Tabata, the team
can include both the day one patch, and more besides.
Which makes perfect sense to me. After waiting nearly a decade
for the gameís arrival, whatís a few more months?
Note that the animated spinoffs, Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV and
Brotherhood: Final Fantasy XV, are still due on August 30. Square
Enix says it will ìnotify [at a later time] whether the releases
for the disc versionî of either ìwill be changed or unchanged.î
The ëBattlefront 1í Open Beta Invades PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4
Electronic Arts has updated the Battlefield 1 website with news
that the gameís open beta for the Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and
Windows PC will start on August 31. It should be noted that the
company specifically states ìOrigin for PCî in its update, meaning
youíll need the companyís desktop client to play the open beta and
eventually purchase the full digital game. Those who sign up for
the open beta before August 21 will receive instructions on when
and how they can play the early preview.
According to the company, the open beta will focus on the Sinai
Desert, a location just east of El-Jifar. Players on the ground
will engage in combat throughout the narrow streets of
Bir el Mazar while other players in the air will participate in
dogfights taking place above ìmajestic cliffs.î Backing players
when the battle seems hopeless is an Armored Train that will
blaze through the desert packed with plenty of weapons for either
team.
ìRide agile horses across the sand dunes,î the company states.
ìTake out enemies with a deadly slash of your saber, or attack
from afar with powerful rifles fired from horseback. Horses are
even effective in antivehicle assaults using grenades ó you can
run circles around the slower mechanized vehicles and harass them
with explosives.î
The open beta will provide two gameplay modes: Conquest and Rush.
In Conquest, up to 64 players fight for control of key
objectives. Rush, on the other hand, supports up to 24 players
and charges the attacking force to find and destroy telegraph
posts maintained by the defending force. To protect these posts,
the defending force must disarm the explosives planted by the
enemy team. If the telegraph posts are destroyed, the defending
force falls back to the next area to defend another set of posts.
Gamers who want early access to the open beta will need to agree
to EAís terms to willingly receive emails from the company
regarding Battlefield 1 and other EA-based games, as well as
events related to these titles. After agreeing to the terms,
gamers must sign in with their EA Account, or create one if thatís
not done already. Once completed, gamers will be a part of the
official Battlefield Insider program and can choose their
preferred platform.
ìYouíre a Battlefield Insider, which means you get in-game
rewards, exclusive content, and a sneak peek at news about
Battlefield (plus news about other EA games, services, and
events). And, of course, you get early access to the
Battlefield 1 public beta,î the company states. ìBut before
youíre able to play, we need to know your preferred platform ó
this is the platform weíre going to be emailing you a code for.î
Battlefield 1 is slated to arrive on October 21, and players can
choose between the $60 Standard Edition and the $80 Deluxe
Edition. While both currently offer two pre-order bonuses (the
Hellfighter Pack and early access to a free map drop), the
Deluxe Edition grants a three-day head start over standard
customers, the Red Baron Pack, the Lawrence of Arabia Pack,
three vehicle skins, and five additional battlepacks.
So far, the Origin service isnít listing the hardware
requirements for the PC version. However, if itís running the
same version of the Frostbite engine that powers Battlefront 4,
then PC gamers may need an Intel Core 2 Duo or AMD Athlon X2
processor at the very least, a Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT or AMD
Radeon HD 3870 graphics chip, 4GB of system memory, and 30GB of
free storage.
We expect to see the official Battlefield 1 system requirements
roll out within the next week before EA unleashes the open beta
on the masses.
Nintendo Takes Down Pokemon Uranium Hosting,
Underground Options Explode
Nintendoís legal department are being kept quite busy lately.
From taking down nearly three decade old gaming magazines to
crushing the dreams of fans, Nintendo is on a roll lately. This
includes another fan dream crushing move- taking down the Pokemon
Uranium hosting. I covered the launch of this one here on Retro
Gaming Magazine recently. Now I am writing up them taking down
Pokemon Uranium. I am noticing a trend with fan games based on
Nintendo intellectual properties (IP).
It was no surprise that this was going to happen. The team
behind this saw the future when another other big name fan game
release, AM2R, was taken down. As the saying goes though, the
show must go on and the team behind Pokemon Uranium had nine
years behind them in work to show off. Show off they did. The
game was quite popular and was making headlines everywhere as
being awesome. Now it is making headlines for being taken down.
For those that did not get a chance to check out Pokemon Uranium,
it was a Windows game that used Nintendo owned characters and
graphic styles. While there were over 150 new Pokemon to collect
and a whole new type of digital creature, the other additions
took the show. Pokemon Uranium featured online battles with
players across the world and also online trading of Pokemon.
These two features were something fans have been wanting for
decades and, of course, Nintendo has drug their feet unbearably
slow in giving these to the fans. More information is available
in my news article on Pokemon Uranium here on Retro Gaming
Magazine.
It is a shame that Nintendo is not taking the route that other
publishers have done in the past. That is the road of working
with these independent developers- people that work for nearly a
decade knowing they are not going to earn a single penny. They
do it for the love of the game, not the paycheck. You canít buy
that type of dedication. Think about it Nintendo.
=~=~=~=
->A-ONE Gaming Online - Online Users Growl & Purr!
"""""""""""""""""""
AIs Fight to the Death in 'Doom' Contest Next Month
Google DeepMind took a leap forward last year when its artificial
intelligence agent mastered 49 Atari 2600 games. The learning
system, or "deep Q-network" (DQN), that DeepMind designed achieved
this mastery through general experience, rather than specific
programming for each game. This milestone is just one step along a
grander path toward the general-purpose "smart machine": an AI
that can master any task with minimal input. DeepMind's work in
this field is groundbreaking, and it's helping advance the field
in ways you might not expect.
Wojciech Jaskowski is an assistant professor for the Institute of
Computing Science (ICS) at Poznan University of Technology, Poland.
After reading about DeepMind's feat in the scientific journal
Nature, he began to think about the possibilities. If an agent
could learn Atari 2600 with our current levels of knowledge, why
not push the envelope further? Why not try a 3D game? Jaskowski
settled on the 1993 first-person shooter Doom. It has low power
requirements and, more important, it's open source. He assembled a
team of university students from ICS with the aim of building a
platform that would facilitate testing AI agents.
The framework they created, called ViZDoom, allows for the
development of bots that can play Doom. It's intended primarily
for research in machine visual learning, which means that bots
only have access to the screen buffer. They play by "seeing" the
images on-screen, and have no access to any information within the
game's code. That's the key difference between ViZDoom bots and
the regular "AI" characters that exist inside most first-person
shooters.
Jaskowski's team was successful in its endeavor. They submitted a
paper back in May proving not only that their creation was an
effective research platform, but that neural networks were capable
of learning visually in a 3D, first-person-perspective
environment. Now, anyone can download the ViZDoom platform and
test out their AI systems using it. The reaction from the AI
community has been very positive. It's been downloaded by several
high-profile educational institutions, and Jaskowski said that
even DICE, the video game company best known for the Battlefield
series, has been using VizDoom internally to research AI.
To drive usage of the platform forward, Jaskowski is running a
competition in collaboration with the IEEE Computational
Intelligence in Games conference (CIG). Anyone can submit their
creation to compete in an AI-only deathmatch, with the results
being announced at CIG in late September. So far, three warm-up
matches have taken place, and a number of entrants have pitted
their creations against one another, while others have held their
cards close to their chest, preferring to save their bots for the
final contest. The purpose of it all, Jaskowski told me, is
really about seeing what is possible with the current crop of AI
technology.
How exactly teams will solve the questions ViZDoom poses is up to
them. So long as the only data being fed to the bots is the screen
buffer, anything goes. They'll have to understand what's wall and
what's floor, what's a character and what's a power-up. And that's
without working out the shooting - bots can only use rocket
launchers, which makes things harder, since if you fire a rocket
next to a wall, you kill yourself. In footage of the first warm-up
round, lots of bots struggled with the basics. It's likely that
many are building on DQN, the deep learning network built by
DeepMind to conquer the Atari 2600.
Although the final lineup won't be confirmed for a few weeks,
individuals from educational institutions like MIT and Stanford
University have been active in the competition's official
discussion group, as have employees from Intel, Google and other
large corporations.
That Google might be taking part in a competition that its
research helped spawn is emblematic of the AI and machine-learning
community's spirit of collaboration. It's a field in which
Facebook, Google and Twitter, which in many ways compete with one
another, work together. Take Torch, for example: It's an open
source library that's hugely important for machine-learning
projects. It also happens to be maintained by scientists and
engineers from those three companies, and contributed to by many,
many others. There's an understanding that, although the products
that come from AI research may compete with one another
eventually, getting to the point where machine learning can power
those products will be a lot easier working together than alone.
Jaskowski's team and ViZDoom might seem like a tiny part of what
is an enormous field. But without the contributions of the many
like-minded students and academics working on AI, we'd be years
behind where we are today.
=~=~=~=
A-ONE's Headline News
The Latest in Computer Technology News
Compiled by: Dana P. Jacobson
Guccifer 2.0 Leaks Personal Info of
Nearly 200 Congressional Democrats
The hacker, who recently claimed responsibility for the
high-profile hack of Democratic National Committee (DNC), has
now taken credit for hacking into the Democratic Congressional
Campaign Committee (DCCC) as well.
To prove his claims, the hacker, going by the moniker
Guccifer 2.0, dumped on Friday night a massive amount of personal
information belonging to nearly 200 Democratic House members onto
his blog.
The notorious hacker published several documents that include
cell phone numbers, home addresses, official and personal e-mail
addresses, names of staffers, and other personal information for
the entire roster of Democratic representatives.
The data dump also includes several memos from House Minority
Leader Nancy Pelosi's personal computer, detailing fundraisers and
campaign overviews.
"As you see the US presidential elections are becoming a
farce, a big political performance where the voters are far from
playing the leading role," the hacker wrote in a blog post.
"Everything is being settled behind the scenes as it was with
Bernie Sanders."
The leaked data dump includes passwords to access multiple DCCC
accounts as well as coordinated shared passwords used by the
committee.
The Guccifer 2.0 is the same hacker who claimed responsibility
for the recent widespread DNC hack last month, although the
United States officials believed he's actually a persona created
by Russian government hackers to influence the US presidential
election.
WikiLeaks published nearly 20,000 emails from top DNC officials
that were obtained from Guccifer 2.0ís previous hack.
However, Guccifer 2.0 has dismissed any connection to Russia,
but in his blog post, he called the US political system a
"farce," in which voters are no longer playing any leading role.
Guccifer 2.0 said the DCCC hacking was "even easier than in the
case of the DNC breach."
In response to the latest leak, Representative of the House
Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Adam Schiff released
the following statement:
"The unauthorized disclosure of people's personally
identifiable information is never acceptable, and we can fully
expect the authorities will be investigating the posting of this
information."
Although Guccifer 2.0 said this latest leak is for people who
have "right to know whatís going on inside the election process,"
not a single leaked documents appear to prove this, rather they
disclosed personal details and choice of passwords by the
Democrats.
How Twitter Became A Key Player in the Fight Against ISIS
Twitter has ramped up its war on the accounts of violent
extremists across its platform.
In an announcement on Thursday, Twitter said that since February,
it has suspended 235,000 accounts that it determined are linked
to violent extremist groups like the self-described Islamic State
militant group. That brings the total number of accounts it has
suspended since mid-2015 to 360,000.
In recent years, Twitter has emerged as a fertile territory for
Islamic extremists to spread ideology and inspire lone-wolf
attacks. The social media giant's efforts to crack down on
recruitment efforts have likewise become a vital component of the
fight against the expansion of violent extremism.
Recommended: 40 iPhone tips and tricks everyone should know
ìAs noted by numerous third parties, our efforts continue to
drive meaningful results, including a significant shift in this
type of activity off of Twitter,î the company said in the
statement announcing the new suspensions.
The platformís efforts appear to be working. In July, the Obama
Administration announced that pro-Islamic State Twitter traffic
has dropped by 45 percent in the last two years. Furthermore, the
Associated Press revealed that the average number of followers on
a pro-Islamic State account has dropped from around 1,500 in 2014
ñ the year the groupís rapid and brutal expansion across the
Middle East took the world by surprise ñ to an average of
300 followers.
Twitter said that while there is no "magic algorithm" for finding
and freezing violent extremist accounts, it is pushing to respond
more quickly to user reports of extremist accounts, as well as
employing "proprietary spam-fighting tools."
Twitter has also become a key platform for law enforcement from
nations allied in the fight against the Islamic State to gather
intelligence and to counter extremist propaganda.
Governments from countries including France, Great Britain, and
the United States have their own psychological operations teams
designed to spread counter-narratives aimed at showing the brutal
reality of living under the Islamic State, such as the abuses
against women.
They seem to be working. At the same time, however, others argue
that shutting down accounts by contradicting the values of free
speech could work in favor of extremist groups who gain new
recruits by playing on the idea that the West is at war with the
Muslim world.
ìWe betray our own values [of free speech] when we shut down
these sites, especially when we only do it for ISIS and not for
home-grown [American] militias of the far-right,î Yasir Kazi, a
Muslim cleric and assistant professor in religious studies at
Rhodes College in Memphis, Tenn., told the Monitorís Anna Mulrine
last year. ìWhen we apply it to Muslim radicals, once again this
impression is given that this war is only against Islam.î
ìThese tactics further enrage our youth and make them feel as if
the government is out to get them,î he added. ìIf anything, these
tactics encourage, rather than discourage, radicalism.î
The social media presence of pro-IS Twitter accounts should also
be kept in perspective, J.M. Berger, a social media analyst and
co-author of ìISIS: The State of Terror,î told Ms. Mulrine.
ìThe first thing we need to do is recognize how successful we
already are. ISIS represents the fringe of the fringe,î he said.
Mr. Berger said a one-month study he did during 2014 revealed
that of Twitterís 288 million users, 46,000 belonged to ISIS
followers: ìa percentage of a percentage.î
Overall, a combination of efforts to flip the narrative of life
under the Islamic State and shutting down its accounts are making
inroads. Twitter said its daily suspension of accounts has risen
by more than 80 percent.
Security Researcher Turns The Tables on Cyber-scammers
Have you ever gotten a phone call, email or pop-up from someone
trying to scam you with an obviously non-existent problem with
your computer that will be expensive to solve?
French security researcher Ivan Kwiatkowski knows how you feel,
but he wasn't content with hanging up or uttering a few choice
words of reprimand. He decided to give them a taste of their own
medicine, as he described in a blog earlier this month.
The tech support scam has been around for the better part of a
decade, bilking an estimated 3.3 million people in the US out of
more than $1.5 billion in 2015, according to Microsoft. Your
typical scam, as described by security software maker
Malwarebytes, is pretty simple: Pretend to be from a reputable
company such as Microsoft, trick the victim with phony error
messages and then collect money with the promise of resolving the
issue.
But when his parents received a warning that their computer was
infected with the Zeus virus, Kwiatkowski decided to have some
fun, booting up a virtual machine and calling the tech support
number listed. Following the support rep's instructions,
Kwiatkowski downloaded a remote-assistance client that gave
Patricia - his support rep - access to the files on the virtual
machine.
She begins berating him about his poor computer hygiene. Staying
in character, he innocently spars with Patricia about an alleged
hacker she has identified as attached to his computer, her
location, and even basic computer definitions. But he throws her
for a loop when asks where in Paris he can purchase the $190
software necessary to repair his system. She informs him that
it's an exclusive program "distributed only through Microsoft's
premium partners and Microsoft's secure channels."
"Oh, so I just have to get it from microsoft.com then?" he asks.
She pauses but answers "yes," and the call ends soon after when
it becomes apparent that she has nothing to sell him.
But Kwiatkowski wasn't quite done toying with his scammers. He
called back, getting a different assistant who tried to sell him
on the software again. Still in character, Kwiatkowski offered a
series of fake credit card numbers that baffle a team of
operators he can hear in the background attempting to charge the
accounts.
"That's when I'm hit by a stroke of genius," he says in his blog
post. He retrieves a sample of the latest Lochy ransomware and
emails it to his new tech support rep under the guise that it's a
picture of his credit card. As the ransomware quietly encrypts
the rep's files, Kwiatkowski offers more fake credit card numbers
before the rep gives up.
While the ransomware could be considered a nice salvo against
scammers, Kwiatkowski says his real goal is to waste their time,
making the scamming operation less profitable.
"Scammers don't have the time to separate legitimate [victims]
from the ones who just pretend," he says. "Their business model
relies on the fact that only gullible people will reply."
Whether he made a dent in their operation is up for debate, but
you can follow Kwiatkowski's adventure in crime and punishment on
his blog.
Troll Targets Say Twitterís New Filters Donít Go Far Enough
Twitter has heard the complaints about abuse on its platform ó
really, it has. Itís heard them so loud and clear that itís
rolling out new ways to help you shut those voices out.
At least, thatís the message Twitter sought to send yesterday,
when it announced two new tools that give users more ways to
control what tweets they see. The first lets you limit who gets
to buzz your phone with @-replies only to people you follow. The
second is a so-called ìquality filter,î which sounds like a step
toward finally curbing the mob-style harassment Twitter seems so
optimized to enable. But some targets of that harassment arenít
so sure itís a meaningful fix.
Twitter says flipping on the filter will ìimprove the quality of
tweets you see by using a variety of signals, such as account
origin and behavior.î If that sounds vague, itís on purpose ó
Twitter hesitates to share more for fear bad actors will try to
game the system. So itís not clear whether the quality filter acts
like an automatic spam filter or if a team of actual humans is
manually curating a blacklist of abusive accountsóor both. But the
setting, which has already been available to verified users, does
seem to get rid of certain dubious content, such as duplicate
tweets and bot spam. The filter specifically does not block tweets
from people you follow or accounts with which youíve recently
interacted.
One broken aspect Twitterís new filters do not seem to address is
the process by which users report abuse to the company and the
all-too-opaque way the site reviews those complaints. And across
the Twittersphere, that left users feeling ambivalent about
Twitterís seeming nod toward fighting harassment.
What Lies Beneath
New York-based social worker and writer Michelle Taylor ó aka
Feminista Jonesóuses an elaborate setup of filters and scripts to
block the hate heaped on her as she blogs about black feminist
issues. As a verified user, she already has the quality filter
switched on, but she says it only helps if sheís accessing Twitter
via the web or the companyís own mobile app. She says she uses
other apps to track good mentions and keep up with her followers
but winds up having to ìcatch a lot of the other crapî in the
process. Taylor says she uses a script to block Twitter ìeggsî ó
accounts without profile pictures, typically set up in haste just
to troll others. She also filters plenty of keywords from her
timeline. Still, doing all that work isnít always effective.
ìMany of the trolls know not to use certain words,î she says.
Even setting aside trolls who find workarounds, filtering out
abuse isnít really the same as eliminating it from the platform.
ìHiding notifications from people I donít follow narrows my
ability to engage,î says Jamilah Lemieux, senior editor at Ebony
Magazine, of Twitterís new notification filter. For a public
figure like herself, whose job often involves connecting with
people she doesnít know, eliminating that contact altogether
doesnít work.
Ariel Waldman, a blogger and erstwhile online community manager
who has called Twitter out in the past for failing to police abuse
on its platform, says the companyís latest response isnít enough.
Yes, the new features solve some of the exhaustion of using
Twitter every day, she says. But they still allow harassment,
which can lurk just beneath the surface in an unchecked
notification.
Itís the persistence of those tweets that creates the ultimate
existential dilemma for Twitter: does abuse truly cease to exist
ó or to matter ó if its targets no longer see it? How Twitter
chooses to answer that question ultimately goes to how it views
itself: is it merely infrastructure, like a telephone line, or
does it have some greater responsibility to police how people
use its platform? ìAs much as Twitter seemingly likes to argue
to the contrary, Twitter at the end of the day is a product, not
a telecommunication protocol,î Waldman says.
ëTwitter at the end of the day is a product, not a
telecommunication protocol.í
Yet itís understandable that the company has hesitated to target
many accounts, especially those with a political bent. After all,
sometimes important, powerful movements emerge largely thanks to
an unfettered Twitteróthink the Arab Spring or Black Lives
Matter. Other times, however, seemingly political speech morphs
with alarming speed into personal attacks. Still, does anyone
want a tech company deciding where that threshold lies?
ìThe problem isnít Twitter. The problem isnít social media. The
problem is the hateful nature of so many people who feel
emboldened by anonymity and simply use these tools to spew their
hate,î says Taylor. ìUntil we find a way to stop being from being
so hateful, just in general, this wonít go away.î In the
meantime, Twitter is trying to help, she says.
But for the regular targets of hate on Twitter, certain kinds of
speech just arenít up for debate. ìBy allowing your productís
users to be continuously harassed, abused and intimidated and
only offering them filtering as a solution, youíre effectively
upholding an abuserís playground,î Waldman says. ìItís actually
giving them the steering wheel to censor speech on the product.î
If abuse forces others into silence, thatís not really any kind
of free speech at all.
Google Will End Support for Chrome Apps on Windows, Mac, and Linux
Google has just announced plans to gradually phase out support for
Chrome apps on every platform except for Chrome OS. Starting later
this year, new Chrome apps will be available only to Chrome OS
users and won't be accessible on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
(Existing apps will remain available and can still be updated.)
Then, sometime in the second half of 2017, the Chrome Web Store
will no longer display Chrome apps at all on those operating
systems. And come early 2018, you'll no longer be able to load
Chrome apps on Windows, Mac, or Linux at all. Extensions and
themes are not at all affected by this change; in fact, they'll
soon be given a much larger focus in the Chrome Web Store.
That might sound like a big deal, but Google says that a very tiny
percentage of people are actively using Chrome apps. "There are
two types of Chrome apps: packaged apps and hosted apps. Today,
approximately 1 percent of users on Windows, Mac, and Linux
actively use Chrome packaged apps, and most hosted apps are
already implemented as regular web apps."
The company's justification for this step is that with the
advancements of the open web, there's no longer any real place or
need for Chrome apps. "For a while there were certain experiences
the web couldnít provide, such as working offline, sending
notifications, and connecting to hardware." According to Google,
most of those functionality holes have been patched, and more
improvements are coming. So the message is clear: move your stuff
to the web. "Developers who canít fully move their apps to the
web can help us prioritize new APIs to help fill the gaps left by
Chrome apps." The tone is a little different when it comes to
Chrome OS, where Google believes they play a "critical role."
Intel's Next-gen PC Chip Works, It's The Fastest Ever,
and It's Coming This Fall
The PC industry's glory days, when people snapped up new computers
powered by steadily faster chips, are over. But Intel thinks its
newest PC processor will get some hearts racing in a few months.
At its Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco on Tuesday, Intel
Chief Executive Brian Krzanich showed PCs powered by a
seventh-generation Core processor in PCs handling some demanding
chores - editing high-resolution 4K GoPro video and playing a hot
new first-person shooter game, Overwatch.
It's "the highest performance CPU Intel has ever built. It'll make
rich experiences available to everyone," Krzanich said. "We're
shipping seventh-generation Core already to our PC partners and
will launch devices to consumers this fall."
The seventh-generation Core processor, code-named Kaby Lake, is
the first PC chip to emerge since Intel slowed its "tick-tock"
pace of processor development. It previously introduced new chip
designs and new manufacturing technology in alternating years, but
Kaby Lake just refines an existing design on an existing
manufacturing process.
The slower cadence isn't the only trouble for Intel. The steady
improvement in processor clock speeds has largely stalled, PC
sales are shrinking and consumers have flocked to smartphones
powered by other companies' chips. But Krzanich is optimistic
about Moore's Law, the observation named after Intel co-founder
Gordon Moore that the number of electronic components on a chip
doubles every two years.
"Moore's Law is far from dead," Krzanich said.
=~=~=~=
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