Google is phasing out Chrome apps for Mac and Windows
Google’s Chrome browser has supported stand-alone “apps” on Mac, Windows and Linux for some time now, but they’ll be going away before long. The company just announced that it’ll be removing support for apps gradually over the next two years. The decision comes as part of an effort to simplify the Chrome browser and move developers to more standardized web apps. Apps will remain part of Chrome OS for the foreseeable future.
If you haven’t used Chrome’s web apps much before, they do a pretty good job of simulating smaller apps in their own dedicated window. Chrome needs to be running for the app to work, but they otherwise feel separate from the browser and are often almost indistinguishable from a native app. (I use Chrome apps for things like Google Keep, Hangouts and Wunderlist on my Mac from time to time, for example.)
The phase-out plan for Chrome apps calls for newly-published apps to only be available to Chrome OS starting at the end of 2016. By mid-2017, the Chrome app store won’t show apps Mac, Windows or Linux users anymore (though extensions will still be available), and in early 2018 Chrome apps won’t function at all on those platforms.
That gives users plenty of time to find alternatives and for developers to build standard web apps for their services. And Google says that one percent of users on Mac, Windows and Linux use Chrome’s “packaged” apps. There’s another type of Chrome apps, hosted apps, that Google says are already implimented as standard web apps. Netflix is a good example: It’s available in the Chrome app store for multiple platforms, but it just opens the Netflix site in a new browser tab. It’s little more than a glorified bookmark.
While some users might be annoyed by this change, it doesn’t sound like Chrome will lose much in the way of functionality, and the long runway for shutting down the platform means users will easily be able to adjust their workflows. And Google’s push towards web standards means it’s already been encouraging developers to build services that are browser-agnostic. The slow discontinuation of Chrome apps is just another part of that goal.
Source: Google
Blizzard built a World of Warcraft cafe
World of Warcraft is an institution. After 12 years, Blizzard’s seminal MMO is still running, and although player counts have fallen since its 2010 peak, there were still 5.5 million active accounts last September. Germany has always been a key market for the company, consistently ranking among the top five countries, and to celebrate the game’s sixth expansion, Legion, Blizzard has given players a treat. In the heart of Cologne, Germany, home to the annual Gamescom convention, the developer has transformed the 14th century festival hall Gürzenich into a WoW locale.
At the venue’s launch event on Wednesday, fans were invited to wander around a recreation of “The Fel Hammer,” a starting zone in the new expansion. Inside, they were treated to heavy metal renditions of WoW music, face painting, photo booths, and WoW-themed food and drink (including Alliance and Horde cocktails, of course). Cosplayers were everywhere, and there was even a quest giver with an exclamation point above their head, who directed attendees to another “NPC” with a question mark who gave out free prizes. As well as being great PR for Blizzard, it’s a nice way to give something back to the fans that pay the bills.
We’re live all week from Cologne, Germany, for Gamescom 2016. Click here to catch up on all the news from the show.
Hacking and AI: Moral panic vs real problems
On August 4th, seven different artificial intelligence systems competed against each other to see which was best at hacking. The Cyber Grand Challenge was sponsored by DARPA (the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and held at Def Con, in a vast ballroom remade to resemble an e-sports broadcast. Of course, because we’re talking about about AIs made to seek out security vulnerabilities (and either patch or exploit them), some were inclined to scream “Skynet!” and run for the hills.
Okay, they didn’t literally run for any hills. But the EFF wrote a very panicked blog post warning of the dangers to come if an AI trained to hack wasn’t parented properly. The histrionic post made a few headlines, but missed the point of the competition entirely. If the AI playing Def Con’s all-machine Capture The Flag had feelings, they would’ve been very hurt indeed.
The seven different AI agents were projects of teams that hailed from around the world, coming together to compete for a $2 million purse. Partnering with Def Con, DARPA pit the rival development teams against each other in a CTF, where the programs had to beat each other at reverse engineering unknown programs, probing the security of opponent software, applying patches and shoring up defenses.
This is all the kind of stuff usually done by human hackers. Basically each AI program would be hacking into things, and deciding how to fix bugs. It also means the AI needs to be good at attacking, too.
That’s what got the EFF’s panties in a collective bunch. And insofar as AI goes these days, their pants-based discomfort is shared by more than a few people currently worried about Skynet and computers calling them Dave and telling them to calm down. The EFF cautioned:
“We are going to start seeing tools that don’t just identify vulnerabilities, but automatically write and launch exploits for them. Using these same sorts of autonomous tools, we can imagine an attacker creating (perhaps even accidentally) a 21st century version of the Morris worm that can discover new zero days to help itself propagate.”
The EFF’s post selectively crafts an argument that a set of standards or policies, must be created as soon as possible by AI researchers before things spin horribly out of control. As if people with bad intentions follow rules. This kind of mindset — where the most nightmarish visions of opening Pandora’s AI Box demand we wrap ourselves in some sort of moral life jacked before dipping a toe in the proverbial water — is not unique to the EFF. For instance, this exact kind of moral panic about pseudo-sentient machines has been unspooling in the press over the past year about AI and sex dolls, or sexbots.
Just as the EFF post wants “moral and ethical” policies for those who create AI hackers, The Campaign Against Sex Robots calls for eerily similar standards in sexbots for fear of AI companions unleashing “violence and victimization” on humans.
In early 2015, robot ethics researcher at De Montfort University Kathleen Richardson, along with Erik Billing of the University of Skövde in Sweden, launched the campaign. Its mission: to raise awareness about how the combination of AI and sex dolls “are potentially harmful and will contribute to inequalities in society.” For CASR, sex dolls with AI are “getting us ready for a new, different kind of sexual relationship where anything goes.”
Unfortunately for both sectors of the reigning AI morality police, sentient hacking machines and highly inventive sexbots are a long ways off. Our (hopefully) smart and kinky droids are predicted to become a reality around 2050, and the same goes for any kind of program that you could legitimately call an AI hacker.
Still, if all you had to go on were the warnings of dangerous AI seen in the headlines, you’d think DARPA’s Cyber Grand Challenge was a wild free-for-all where smart programs got smarter under the incautious and malfeasant hand of the US government. Far from it. The CGC had a careful framework in which the software essentially acted like an antivirus program on steroids and competed in its own version of American Idol. Apologies to everyone hoping for drama, but it was just a glorified bug-finding competition.
The winning team, ForAllSecure, a spin-off from Carnegie Mellon, explained the goals and limitations of its AI best in their video on DARPA’s Cyber Grand Challenge website. In it, they talk about their platform in direct relation to strengthening consumer — and yes, government — security. The hope is that their AI will do a whole lot of securing and patching automatically, of things old and forgotten, as well as things poorly made. Their platform could also return its results to create security scorecards.
In their Reddit IamA after winning the CGC with their program “Mayhem,” ForAllSecure explained, “Our hope is to use Mayhem to check the world’s software for bugs. It’s really hard to get to the level of a security expert to be able to analyze your own software or form your own opinions on security of software. But if we had a system that could automatically do those tasks, everyone would be safer online.”
ForAllSecure’s responses were a stark contrast to the EFF’s dire warnings of someone using something like Mayhem to find vulns and attack connected Barbies and tea kettles, or an AI running amok all on its own. The team said, “Imagine if you could take your smart fridge (or whatever), which was written by some sketchy company who put in the minimum amount of security research possible, and apply fairly good binary-hardening techniques.”
They added, “The same could apply to all the government or whatever people who are still using super old code. If you could go in and add stack canaries, CFI, etc. without breaking it, that could be awesome.”
Competing teams line up before the DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge at Def Con 24.
Winning the CGC means that Mayhem is now considered the best platform of its kind in the world. When asked how close to Skynet we are, ForAllSecure replied, “Our system is still very much an instance of artificial ‘special’ intelligence, rather than artificial ‘general’ intelligence. We’ve taught it how to find bugs, exploit them, and patch. It doesn’t have the ability to teach itself more things than that.”
Still, like all things to do with government research and development, the capabilities here for warfare are real. We’re already in a digital arms race; we now know we passed that point long ago, so any discussions about heading off stockpiles of vulns or attacks at the pass are moot.
And ForAllSecure had some pretty wise words on the importance offense. “If you focus only on defense, you’ll find you are always playing catch-up, and can never be ahead of attackers. If you make sure to focus on pushing the state of the art on both sides, you’ll do a lot better improving the state of cyber security.”
Perhaps what the ethics cops at the EFF should’ve got their ticket books out for was researcher Davi Ottenheimer’s keynote the day before the Cyber Grand Challenge, “Great Disasters of Machine Learning.” In it, he took a very close look at the Tesla Autopilot incident that killed a man in May, when his Model S sedan slammed into a tractor-trailer in Florida. Ottenheimer concluded that what had actually happened was the car’s AI made a critical decision at the last moment before the crash, essentially deciding to save the car — valuing itself over the life of the driver. It seems to me that this intersection of marketing hype, billionaire hubris, “intelligent” software, and promises of consumer safety is a much clearer and pressing problem than “let’s make rules because there are bad guys.”
Perhaps the Cyber Grand Challenge deserves a little blame itself for igniting this moral panic. Maybe it was a little bit of a victim of its own hype. Press sure loved making hay out of AI warfare, and whoever put the Matrix-meets-Fox Sports stage sets and “back to you, Jim” livestream together certainly had a flair for the dramatic. The gigantic, gilded Paris Las Vegas room was packed with rows of filled seats. There were even press boxes for talking heads, from which confused announcers stumbled over hacker names live on camera, awkwardly trying to make a lively event out of computers sitting there like obedient little dust collectors.
After the bot-on-bot sort-of violence of DARPA’s automated CTF, Mayhem went on to challenge actual humans in a similar competition at Def Con.. And don’t worry: it lost.
Image: Ann Hermes/The Christian Science Monitor via Getty Images (Cyber Grand Challenge teams).
Niantic vows to ban ‘Pokemon Go’ cheaters
Niantic is trying to make Pokemon Go more fair for its millions of players across the globe, this week officially confirming that it will ban any account that appears to be cheating.
“After reviewing many reports of in-game cheating, we have started taking action against players taking unfair advantage of and abusing Pokemon Go. Moving forward, we will continue to terminate accounts that show clear signs of cheating,” Niantic said.
The company didn’t specify what the “clear signs of cheating” are, but it will most likely target accounts using bots to level up at inhuman speeds, those with skewed location data and other hacks that violate its user guidelines. Anyone who believes their account has been unfairly banned can submit an appeal right here.
Trainers, we’re working hard to provide a fair, fun and legitimate game experience for all: https://t.co/aaYfjvECq0
— Pokémon GO (@PokemonGoApp) August 19, 2016
Niantic recently shut down many third-party Pokemon Go tools like PokeVision, which displayed all of the creatures available for capture in a live map. Closing these services allowed the company to expand into new territories, the company explained.
Niantic isn’t alone in the fight against cheaters — Twitch is also on the hunt for players that violate Pokemon Go’s guidelines. Anyone caught cheating in a live stream will receive a strike against his or her Twitch account.
Source: Pokemon Go
Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7 and new Gear VR headset are available now
Samsung announced a host of new gear earlier this month, the most notable of which is its excellent new Galaxy Note 7 handset, and it’s all available now in the US. The phone is now on sale at AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, US Cellular and Sprint stores as well as at Best Buy, Target, Walmart and a handful of other retailers. If you loathe going to retail locations, you can pick it up on Samsung or straight from the carriers online.
The new Gear VR headset is on sale, as well. It’ll set you back $99.99 and is a notable upgrade over the earlier model — we found it to be one of the best introductions to VR content you can have, particularly at its reasonable price. If you’ve wanted to create your own VR content, Samsung’s Gear 360 camera is available, but that’ll set you back more. It costs $349.99, but it’s one of the few options consumers have for creating more immersive video. The little camera will only be available online, for now.
Lastly, a pair of Samsung accessories — the Gear IconX earbuds and Level Active headphones — are both available for $199.99 and $99.99, respectively. The Gear IconX buds are particularly intriguing; they’re totally free of cords and have built-in memory for storying music. And they can also track motion, making them an all-in-one fitness and music solution. The Level Active, a more traditional pair of Bluetooth enabled headphones, is a bit less exciting. They do integrate with Samsung apps through an “active” button you can press to hear workout data from the S Health app or to activate a timer for your run.
MacRumors Giveaway: Win an iPhone Accessory Prize Pack from Cygnett
For this week’s giveaway, we’ve teamed up with popular iPhone accessory maker Cygnett to give MacRumors readers a chance to win a Cygnett Accessory Prize Pack that includes any Cygnett case, a battery pack, a Lightning cable, and an iPhone car mount.
Cygnett makes a wide range of iPhone cases for all iPhone models from the iPhone 5 and iPhone SE to the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus. Cases range from the thin and light polycarbonate AeroShield to the shock resistant silicone Flex 360 to the sleek Urbanwallet case. Giveaway winners can choose their favorite Cygnett case for any iPhone.
Along with iPhone cases, Cygnett has a wide selection of battery packs ranging in size from 2,500 mAh to 10,000 mAh. The battery pack included in the giveaway is the Chargeup Digital, a 6000 mAh charger that’s ultra thin and has rapid charging capabilities.
To go with the iPhone case and the battery pack, our prize pack will also include Cygnett’s durable 2m Source Lightning to USB cable in any color and the adjustable VentView Universal car mount that’ll fit any model iPhone.
Three MacRumors readers will win a Cygnett accessory package. To enter to win, use the Rafflecopter widget below and enter an email address. Email addresses will be used solely for contact purposes to reach the winner and send the prize.
You can earn additional entries by subscribing to our weekly newsletter, subscribing to our YouTube channel, following us on Twitter, or visiting the MacRumors Facebook page.
Due to the complexities of international laws regarding giveaways, only U.S. residents who are 18 years of age or older are eligible to enter. To offer feedback or get more information on the giveaway restrictions, please refer to our Site Feedback section, as that is where discussion of the rules will be redirected.
a Rafflecopter giveawayThe contest will run from today (August 19) at 11:00 a.m. Pacific Time through 11:00 a.m. Pacific Time on August 26. The winners will be chosen randomly on August 26 and will be contacted by email. The winners have 48 hours to respond and provide a shipping address before new winners are chosen.
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Apple Accepting Donations for Louisiana Flood Relief
Apple has added banners to its U.S. website, iTunes Store, and App Store encouraging customers to donate to the American Red Cross to help support people who have been affected by the widespread flooding in southern Louisiana.
Donation tiers available include $5, $10, $25, $50, $100 and $200, with all proceeds from donations sent to the American Red Cross. All transactions are processed as iTunes or App Store purchases.
Flooding in Louisiana, which started last week after torrential rainfall, have damaged more than 40,000 houses and left many thousands of people without homes. More than 20 parishes have been affected, and in many of the areas, flood insurance was not common because they weren’t known flood zones. The Red Cross has called the Louisiana flooding the worst natural disaster in the United States since Hurricane Sandy.
Apple often puts out a call for donations for disaster relief. In the past, Apple has collected Red Cross iTunes donations for the 2016 fires in Alberta, the 2015 Nepal earthquake, the refugee and migration crisis in the Mediterranean sea, the 2013 Philippines typhoon, and more.
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In photos: The evolution of the Samsung Gear VR
It all started with the Galaxy Note 4.
Samsung’s NYC unveiling of the Galaxy Note 4 was unusual for a couple of reasons. From the half-baked introduction to the Galaxy Note Edge to awkwardly rushing Adam Levine and James Valentine on and off the stage for the ill-fated Milk Music, the presentation was just kinda odd. Towards the end of the presentation, everyone was invited to check out a unique partnership with Oculus. The Samsung Gear VR was announced as an accessory that would eventually be available for the Note 4, and it would be all about bringing high quality VR to the world.
Fast forward to this week. Samsung has shipped tens of thousands of Gear VR headsets all around the world, and a new matte black version with a removable USB-C port and several other significant changes to the headset that add up to a significantly improved experience. To really get a feel for how the Gear VR has improved over time, we’re going to take a look at all three headsets side by side and appreciate the differences.
At their core, all of the Gears VR are designed to function the same way. You pop the phone in the back, look through the lenses, and interact with the touch pad on the side. The core design is a step above Google Cardboard for three reasons. First, there’s extra tracking sensors in the headset that work with the phone for a smoother motion-based experience. Second, the headset’s touch sensor opens the doors to different types of interaction, like swiping back and forth for action in a game. Finally, there’s a USB port on each headset to run power from outside of the headset to the phone. This was less exciting in the Note 4 days with overheating problems, but with the Note 7 it not only works well for charging but Samsung also wants to see some accessories use this port for data someday.
Connecting the phone is a small part of the experience, but the change over time is significant. The Note 4’s proprietary microUSB port meant nothing but the Note 4 would ever use the original Gear VR. This was fixed with the release of the Galaxy S6 and the updated Gear VR, which now supports all Samsung phones up to the Note 7.
The Samsung Gear VR was all about bringing high quality VR to the world
With the update to USB-C on the Note 7, a Gear VR with an interchangeable port was necessary and appreciated. More than that, Samsung stopped using spring-loaded switches on the latest Gear VR phone connector. This makes it a lot easier to remove and add phones, and makes swapping the port out a lot simpler.
The most significant update to the Gear VR over time has been size. The physical space where you put your eyes has grown with every generation, and with good reason. The larger opening supports more users with prescription lenses, which is a big deal on a headset where you can only slightly adjust the distance of the lenses from your eyes. That adjustment wheel, locates at the top of each Gear VR, has also seen some improvement over the years.
With each release the wheel becomes smoother and more convenient to use, without losing its position over time if you move around a bit.
That increased face hole has not meant an appreciably larger front to the Gears VR, which makes sense when you look at phone size over time. The Galaxy S7 edge is not only narrower but thinner than the Note 4, and packs a better display and lacks the overheating issues found in the aging predecessor when enjoying VR.
The only real change to the part your phone lays on in the Gear VR has been the lenses, which now support a field of view of 101-degrees instead of the original 96. You can see the different plastic patterns used over time to work with the lenses and displays that have changed over time as well.
Finally, the touchpad. Samsung has switched this around a bit over time, but has now settled on a slightly indented touch area with a little bump for the touch area.
This is way better than the current D-Pad set up for playing games, and it turns out doesn’t make a huge difference when it comes to navigation for apps that are not games. We’ve also got a bigger touch surface on the newest version of the Gear VR, which is nice.
Samsung’s efforts in improving the Gear VR are subtle, but incredibly important. The most recent version of this headset is a clear mashup of the things that have been done up this point, and all of those ideas come through as improvements. It’s going to be very interesting to see what Samsung does to improve the Gear VR from this point, and rest assured we’ll be the ones watching!
Samsung Galaxy Note 7
- Samsung Galaxy Note 7 review
- The latest Galaxy Note 7 news!
- Here are all four Note 7 colors
- Complete Galaxy Note 7 specs
- Join the Note 7 discussion in the forums!
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Pandora’s new streaming service could launch as soon as September
We’ve know about Pandora’s plan to turn the remaining pieces of Rdio into its own subscription service for some time now, but thanks to The Wall Street Journal, we know that the launch could be imminent. WSJ reports that the company is close to securing the necessary licensing deals for the new paid service in both the US and abroad. The media outlet’s sources indicate that in addition to a free tier, there will also be two paid options — a detail we’ve heard the company’s CEO discuss in the past. We surmise that listening for free means that you’ll have to suffer through some ads, but that’s something Pandora will likely confirm at launch.
While Pandora’s version of streaming has focused on internet radio stations based on an artist, this new service will be on-demand like Spotify, Tidal and Apple Music. The company hasn’t offered an update on the launch of the “expanded listening experience” it touted after nabbing what was left of Rdio last year. At that time, the vague “late 2016” estimate was offered. According to WSJ though, the new paid tiers could arrive as soon as next month. Pandora One currently offers ad-free listening with the ability to skip more often and other features for $5 a month or via a day pass for 99 cents.
In terms of pricing, Pandora CEO Tim Westergren discussed the two paid tiers in an interview back in June. He explained that in addition to a $10 monthly plan, the company also aims to offer a cheaper option with “mid-level” features. Of course, timing to the official announcement is dependent on these pending licensing deals, but from the details of this latest report, it sounds like Pandora will have some news for us in the near future.
Source: The Wall Street Journal
AIVAnet 