This morning a Samsung customer support account tweeted an odd warning that, to prevent malicious software attacks on your smart TV, you should scan it for viruses every few weeks. It even included an instructional video to help you do so. The tweet, first spotted by The Verge, was short lived. Samsung has since removed it, but it existed long enough to raise a few red flags.
At a time when most people neglect to scan their laptops and cellphones, asking customers to scan their TVs every few weeks seems like a stretch. It's a bit troublesome to think our smart TVs might be so vulnerable they need such frequent updates and that Samsung would place that responsibility on users, rather than running automatic scans.
As Gizmodo points out, the warning seems specific to the QLED lineup. It's unclear if the tweet was written in response to a specific threat or virus, though. This isn't the first time Samsung has invoked fear over its smart TVs. In 2015, customers panicked over the phrasing of the company's smart TV privacy policy, which made it sound like the TVs could eavesdrop on users. Samsung denied the possibility, but hackers have exploited smart TVs and other smart home gadgets. As we fill our homes with more connected devices, we have to accept that they each come with vulnerabilities, and we may be forced to run more virus scans than we'd like.
Engadget has reached out to Samsung for more details.
This morning a Samsung customer support account tweeted an odd warning that, to prevent malicious software attacks on your smart TV, you should scan it for viruses every few weeks. It even included an instructional video to help you do so. The tweet, first spotted by The Verge, was short lived. Samsung has since removed it, but it existed long enough to raise a few red flags.
At a time when most people neglect to scan their laptops and cellphones, asking customers to scan their TVs every few weeks seems like a stretch. It's a bit troublesome to think our smart TVs might be so vulnerable they need such frequent updates and that Samsung would place that responsibility on users, rather than running automatic scans.
As Gizmodo points out, the warning seems specific to the QLED lineup. It's unclear if the tweet was written in response to a specific threat or virus, though. This isn't the first time Samsung has invoked fear over its smart TVs. In 2015, customers panicked over the phrasing of the company's smart TV privacy policy, which made it sound like the TVs could eavesdrop on users. Samsung denied the possibility, but hackers have exploited smart TVs and other smart home gadgets. As we fill our homes with more connected devices, we have to accept that they each come with vulnerabilities, and we may be forced to run more virus scans than we'd like.
Engadget has reached out to Samsung for more details.
Apple plans to release three new iPhones in the second half of 2020, including high-end 5.4-inch and 6.7-inch models with OLED displays and a lower-end 6.1-inch model with an OLED display, according to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Those display sizes line up with a DigiTimes report from a few months ago.
In a research note shared with Taiwanese media outlets today, Kuo said the 5.4-inch and 6.7-inch models will support 5G, while the 6.1-inch model will support up to LTE. Qualcomm is still expected to be Apple's primary supplier of 5G modems, complemented by Samsung, with RF power amplifiers supplied by Broadcom.
Kuo believes that all new iPhones will support 5G starting in 2021. He also believes that Apple will have its own 5G modem ready by 2022 to 2023, which should reduce its dependance on Qualcomm and Samsung.
The new 5.4-inch and 6.7-inch sizes suggest that Apple may be planning to shrink the size of the current 5.8-inch iPhone XS, a move that fans of smaller phones would certainly appreciate, while increasing the size of the current 6.5-inch iPhone XS Max. The iPhone XR would remain a 6.1-inch device.
Kuo usually provides English translations of his research notes after a short period. We'll update if there are any additional details to add.
Microsoft's pirate-themed action-adventure game, Sea of Thieves, launched last year.
Microsoft
When Craig Duncan and his team at Microsoft's Rare video game studio were dreaming up their next big game, they imagined a world where people and their friends create their own stories as they play.
"It's your mark on the world," Duncan said. "The core vision of it is players going on adventures together."
That idea morphed into Sea of Thieves, a cartoonish, tongue-in-cheek pirate game, in which players travel oceans together in boats, exploring underwater ruins and searching around islands dotted throughout the world. "It can be a genuinely magical experience," he said. "It can give you an experience that's unlike any other."
Sea of Thieves is part of a new genre of video games designed to entice people into living worlds meant to be played for hours on end. Inside the industry, they're called "games as a service" or "live service games." But to everyone else, they're a chance to play a favorite game to their heart's content.
World of Warcraft is one of the most popular games ever made. It launched in 2004.
Screenshot by CNET
This idea is far from new. Adventure games like 1999's EverQuest and 2004's World of Warcraft became cultural phenomena, attracting millions of people who not only played the games but also bought related books and merchandise for decades. Millions even went to see a feature-length film, appropriately called Warcraft, in 2016.
But in the last couple years, more companies have created their own takes on the genre. Many were on display at the E3 Electronic Entertainment Expo last week.
Bethesda Softworks has The Elder Scrolls Online fantasy epic and Fallout 76 post-apocalyptic survival game. Electronic Arts launched its Anthem adventure game earlier this year. Bungie, maker of the industry-defining Halo series of games, now offers a space battle epic called Destiny. And Epic's Fortnite battle royale last-man-standing game has itself become one of the most popular in the industry.
"There's clearly a group of people -- and I would go so far as to say it is a large group of people -- who are very much into investing in something they can invest in and get what they want out of it," said Pete Hines, head of marketing at Bethesda. "They get back fun, entertainment, social connections, a feeling of progression and whatever else they're looking for."
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It's not all happiness and roses, though. Companies say that as they've entered the genre over the past few years, they've learned these games are harder to create and maintain than they'd expected. The pressure to keep fans happy with new stories and experiences, while also finding ways to pay for the teams and technology that powers them, has led to trouble.
"The industry is getting worse in a lot of ways, they're getting more predatory and more exploitative," said Steven Williams, a longtime gaming commentator whose YouTube channel, Boogie2988, has more than 4.5 million subscribers.
He and many other commentators say companies aren't thinking enough of gamers or employees when creating these titles. They're asking too much money for extra experiences, storylines and items, while giving back too little, he said. Stories of employees working seemingly nonstop to satisfy gamers' expectations has also worried him.
And many of these gamers say new business models go over the line. One in particular, known as microtransactions, asks players to pony up real money on top of the original cost of the game to pay for extra designs for characters and weapons.
"We've got $60 games with $120 special editions, and microtransactions too," Williams said. "It's the nightmare scenario we were all warning about and now we're there."
Red Dead Redemption 2 was critically acclaimed at release. But Red Dead Online was criticized initially.
CNET / Rockstar Games
Game makers counter they're learning as they go and frequently end up apologizing and attempting to make good with their community when they screw up. But they also say they're trying to answer players' wants to create game worlds they can explore for longer periods of time with their friends.
"We're trying to figure out what will engage and captivate," said Strauss Zelnick, head of Take-Two Interactive Software, which offers online additions to 2013's Grand Theft Auto V and last year's Red Dead Redemption 2 cowboy game. (Zelnick is also interim chairman of CBS, which owns CNET.)
Zelnick said his teams try to offer "more value than we charge," he said, even if it doesn't always come across that way.
"You don't want players to say, 'I really, really love the game, but...'" he said. "You want them come back and say, 'I really, really love the game and sure, I had to pay for it, but it's appropriate to pay for great experiences.'"
The Elder Scrolls Online has adopted an TV series approach to new storylines in order to keep people coming back.
Meanwhile, developers are figuring out how best to make this new breed of live-service games too. And as more of them are made, another problem is that there are so many on the market, it's hard to decide which one to play.
"This space is so new," said Matt Firor, game director for The Elder Scrolls Online. So his team has designed the game to be more welcoming to people who only play once in a while. For example, people who haven't advanced far in the story can still play alongside dedicated players who've done nearly everything they can.
"Most of my friends have a main game they play," said Sam Kirkendoll, 29, who works in fundraising for a university in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. He's been playing World of Warcraft since 2007, but he said other friends dabble, leave and then come back.
Firor, of The Elder Scrolls, learned that what brings back those dabblers are big updates with lots of new stuff to do. So his team has started hyping big launches of new stories much the same way TV producers market new seasons for their shows.
Rovio has found that tweaking and adding to Angry Birds has kept people playing for years.
Rovio
"You just need to keep innovating and bring new type of experiences," said Kati Levoranta, CEO of Rovio, maker of the hit Angry Birds mobile game. The company's tweaks and new things to do haven't just enticed existing players back, she said, they've brought new ones in too. As a result, the number of people who have played Angry Birds 2 every day has continued to increase, despite it being four years old.
"We know the world where we live today is quite fast-paced, and there are new things coming along all the time," she said. "So you need to keep yourself fresh and relevant."
Keeping them happy
Game makers said one key to making it all work is giving players a way to offer feedback and then responding with tweaks as they go.
"You learn over time, because you always have the community giving you feedback," said Yves Guillemot, CEO of Ubisoft, which makes The Division 2 post-apocalyptic paramilitary thriller and Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege strategy game. "We can learn what they want and adapt content to what they need."
Rare's Duncan released the game's biggest changes in April, a year after its initial launch. The update included storylines called Tall Tales, which were developed with the help of dedicated players who tested the changes and gave feedback. The company also put out regular videos to the community to keep them apprised of how development was going, up to its launch.
"Sea of Thieves today wouldn't be the game it is without the journey we've been on in the last year," he said.
Cast your mind back to 2016 and you might recall Quick, Draw! — an AI experiment from Google that guessed what users were doodling. It was basically AI Pictionary, with Google later releasing the millions of sketches it collected as an open-source dataset.
But there was one doodle that Google’s AI never recognized and that never appeared in its data: the humble penis.
It sounds childish, but it’s sort of a big omission. The penis is perhaps the most significant and durable doodle of all time. It’s a sigil that’s been scrawled on surfaces for thousands of years — everywhere from Roman walls to medieval manuscripts — and variously signifies good luck, virility, or just “I’m a man and I was here.”
To rectify Google’s mistake, the Mozilla foundation commissioned Dutch design studio Moniker to build an AI penis doodle detector. It’s a bit of silly fun, but Moniker and Mozilla say they’re also making a serious point: in an age where US tech giants control so much of what we see online, should we be worried about the moral standards they get to set?
You can test out the penis detector out here. When you doodle a penis it’ll say “we assume this was a mistake” and erase it, warning users: “Don’t take individual expression too far!” Draw enough of them and it will go on a mad tirade, doodling itself into a frenzy.
Moniker’s Roel Wouters tells The Verge that the inability of Google’s AI to recognize a penis doodle is certainly trivial in the grand scheme of things, but it’s still a potent symbol of tech giants’ power. He gives the example of Facebook and Instagram’s ban on the nipple as a more serious example of American prudishness being imposed on the world.
“The point is that we think our moral compasses should not be in the hands of big tech,” says Wouters. “We question the fact that we gave the responsibility for our social infrastructure away in exchange for “free” usage without even realizing. Don’t you think it’s a bit weird that Instagram’s ‘community guidelines’ for sharing images are imposed on all the world’s citizens and all cultures?”
Wouters says he personally loves Google’s Quick, Draw! project, and even used the company’s AI software TensorFlow to build his alternative. But he points out that as companies use more artificial intelligence to moderate online platforms, the potential for mistaken censorship — even self-censorship — increases. Knowing that an AI might spot our profane thoughts or feelings, we might never express them in the first place.
The project isn’t really about “freedom of speech,” says Wouters, but it’s a reminder “about the unwanted powers of big tech and their governmental paternalistic tendencies.” He adds: “To us doodling a penis is a light-hearted symbol for a rebellious act.”
That’s been true for thousands of years — whether corporate AI recognizes it or not.
Did you ever notice how you tend to google the lyrics of a song and then you’re not going to Genius’s website because Google is displaying them on the Search results all along? Well, Genius alleges that Google has been copying its lyrics for years and posting them directly on Google Search, thus preventing visitors from going to its own site. And Genius says it hid a Morse code message within the lyrics to prove Google was doing it.
Genius first suspected Google of ill-doing in 2016 when a software engineer discovered that Desiigner’s Panda song lyrics on Google matched the ones on Genius. The song has hard-to-understand lyrics The Wall Street Journal reports, but Genius had the error-free version of the lyrics straight from the artist.
“We noticed that Google’s lyrics matched our lyrics down to the character,” Genius’s chief strategy officer Ben Gross told The Journal.
Genius notified Google in 2017, and then in April of this year that copied transcriptions appeared on Google Search.
“Over the last two years, we’ve shown Google irrefutable evidence again and again that they are displaying lyrics copied from Genius,” Gross said.
What the company did to catch Google was to watermark lyrics with the help of apostrophes. By alternating between straight and curly single-quote marks in exactly the same sequence for every song. When turned into dots and dashes, the apostrophes spell the words Red Handed, which is a smart trick.
However, Google claims that the lyrics found inside those “information panels” on its site are licensed from partners not created by Google.
“We take data quality and creator rights very seriously and hold our licensing partners accountable to the terms of our agreement,” Google told The Journal. Moreover, Google issued a second statement to say it’s investigating the issues and would terminate its agreements with partners who aren’t “upholding good practices.”
The report notes that Google partnered with LyricFind in 2016, but the company’s chief executive Darryl Ballantyne told The Journal that it doesn’t source its lyrics from Genius, relying on its own content team for the lyrics.
Over the weekend, cheaters never prosper as the creators of Pokémon Go sues a group of cheaters who used hacked apps to breeze through games. (Conveniently, we also run through the history of video-game cheating through the decades.) And, while it may not be cheating, spies may have used an AI-generated face to infiltrate US politics. That's a little more involved than the Konami code.
The EV maker has started selling used Model 3s online in the San Francisco Bay Area, and some of them are potentially good deals (if not as good as you often see with used cars). There's some extra peace of mind here, too. As with Tesla's existing in-person used-car sales, each vehicle goes through a 70-point inspection and comes with either a four-year, 50,000-mile warranty or a two-year, 100,000-mile warranty.
Niantic is holding Global++ to account for its unauthorized versions of Pokémon Go, Ingress and even Harry Potter: Wizards Unite -- which isn't even out yet. The company says the modified mobile apps not only violate intellectual property rights but "undermine the integrity of the gaming experience."
Timing is everything, so why did Amazon decide to lay off dozens of its Game Studios employees on the last day of E3, the world's biggest gaming show? The company reportedly told affected employees that they only have 60 days to find new positions within Amazon. If they fail to do so within that period, they'll have to leave the company with (thankfully) a severance package in tow.
The company's statement reads: "Amazon Game Studios is reorganizing some of our teams to allow us to prioritize development of New World, Crucible and new unannounced projects we're excited to reveal in the future."
