Google Featured Photos puts those Chromecast screensavers on Macs
Ever get lost staring at those screensavers on Chromecast?
Now you can get them for your Mac. Google has launched a new app that surfaces popular Google+ on your unused display. These are the same photos that grace the Chromecast, Pixel, and Google Fiber devices when they’re not in use. The app only pulls from publicly shared, high-resolution photos, and they’re often breathtaking landscape shots. Each shot also includes the photograph’s name, so you can follow him or her.
- Google is now letting you see the entire world in VR from home
The app is called Featured Photos. You can download it from here. Once you do, you’ll find the new screensavers available under the screensaver option in the Settings app on your Mac. If you’re an Android user, Google’s existing Wallpapers app will also now let you get access to the same set of popular photos for your home or lock screen. Google also detailed how you can get your Google+ photos in its screensaver collection.
All you have to do – to increase your chance of being considered – is join the Google+ Create program.
Facebook Messenger lets you play instant games like Pac-Man: Here’s how to find and play them
To keep you on Facebook longer or at least using its chat app, Facebook has launched an Instant Games feature for Messenger.
The feature lets you instantly play titles within the chat app itself, and like FarmVille and other Facebook games of the past, you’ll be able to share your achievements to your News Feed, so that your friends can immediately jump in and try games. Here’s everything you need to know.
- 17 Facebook Messenger tips and tricks you likely didn’t know
- Facebook Messenger bots: What are they and how can you find them?
Facebook: What is Instant Games?
Instant Games is Facebook’s new HTML5 gaming platform that lets Facebook users play games in Messenger and from the News Feed, without the need to download anything. Instant Games are cross-platform, so they’ll work on the web and all mobile devices.
Facebook: What games can you play?
At launch, there are 17 games: Pac-Man, Galaga, Arkanoid, Space Invaders, Track and Field 100M, Shuffle Cats Mini, Words with Friends Frenzy, Hex, Everwing, Endless Lake, Templar 20148, The Tribes Puzzle Rush, 2020 Connect, Puzzle Bobble, Zookeeper, Brick Pop, and Wordalot Express.
Facebook: How does Instant Games work?
In the latest version of the Facebook Messenger app, open a conversation with a friend or friends, tap on the game controller icon just below where you type your message (or tap the more icon, where it might be buried under), and choose a game to start playing right away. When you finish a round, your friends in the conversation will see your score and have the chance to play their turn.
Facebook said you can also discover games within the Messenger search field, or in Facebook News Feed, where you can play solo or challenge friends back in Messenger. Keep in mind this isn’t the first time instant-like games have been playable in Messenger. During March Madness earlier this year, for instance, Facebook hid a secret basketball game in its messaging service.
The main Facebook app will also include a dedicated bookmark, so you can find games you’ve already played right from there. And if you want to play from your computer, simply go to Facebook in your browser, then open a chat with a friend or friends, and click the game controller icon. Just like you can in the Messenger app, you’ll be able to browse titles and instantly play.
Facebook: When will the games be available?
Facebook launched this new feature on 29 November in a closed beta. The social network said it will first roll out to 30 countries, but it’s limited to the web and newer iOS and Android operating systems.
Want to know more?
Watch Facebook’s promo videos above, or check out its blog post.
NY Governor Cuomo signs bill outlawing online scalpers
Getting tickets to Beyoncé and Hamilton is already hard enough but it can be nearly impossible if you’re competing against the automated purchasers used by 21st century scalpers. These so-called “ticket bots” are specifically designed to get around the strict per-customer purchase limits on sites like TicketMaster and LiveNation, allowing a small handful of individuals to buy a lion’s share of a show and then offer them on the resale market for a massive profit. But that’s no longer the case in New York where, governor Andrew Cuomo recently signed legislation banning these robots.
“It’s predatory,” Governor Cuomo said at a press conference yesterday. “It’s wrong and, with this legislation, we are taking an important step towards restoring fairness and equity back to this multi-billion dollar industry.”
The new law opens up the definition of what constitutes a “ticket bot” to include basically any automated system used to quickly amass legally sold tickets. Using a ticket bot — even just maintaining a financial interest in the botnet — will now constitute a Class A misdemeanor, subject to fines and imprisonment. What’s more, it is now also illegal to resell tickets, even if they’re sold for face value, if you know that they were obtained using one of these systems. It will be interesting to see how this law is enforced and whether other states follow New York’s lead.
Source: Office of the Governor of New York
Religion and gambling have the same effect on your brain
Finding Jesus can feel a lot like falling in love, winning an award or getting high because all of these events activate the same reward circuits in the brain, according to a new study from the University of Utah. Researchers studied fMRI scans of 19 devout Mormons as they were exposed to prayer, scripture and sermons designed by the LDS Church to evoke spiritual feelings, and found reproducible activation in the nucleus accumbens, a region in the brain associated with reward and pleasure.
Brain regions that handle focused attention and the perception of importance or novelty also lit up during the fMRI scans. However, the connection between spiritual experiences and the brain’s reward circuits suggests that religious training may be a form of classical, or Pavlovian, conditioning, senior author Jeffrey S. Anderson told ResearchGate.
“Association of positive feedback, music and social rewards with religious beliefs or doctrines may lead to these doctrines becoming intrinsically rewarding,” Anderson said. “These same mechanisms may help explain attachment to religious leaders and ideals. …It may be that a Lutheran woman in Minnesota and an ISIS follower in Syria might experience the same feelings in the same brain regions for completely different belief systems, with very different social consequences.”
It’s likely that some people are more prone to finding pleasure in religion than others, Anderson said. However, this particular neurological response isn’t limited to spiritual folks. Anderson said he expected non-religious people would experience similar brain activation in response to patriotic imagery, peaceful nature scenes or while contemplating profound scientific ideas.
“We know that similar regions are activated during appreciation of music, experience of romantic and parental love, and winning at gambling,” he said.
University of Utah scientists were careful not to diminish the complexity of religious fervor in the brain. They note that descriptions of religious experiences are varied, and suggest a comprehensive study of the entire brain during spiritual activity to more fully understand the systems powering this apparent Pavlovian response.
Source: Taylor & Francis, Researchgate
PlayStation’s Communities app helps you find teammates faster
PlayStation’s official mobile app has been live since 2013, letting players glance at their friends list, keep up with console news and buy new games on the fly. Then Sony released another companion app last December dedicated to messaging within the PlayStation Network. Today, iOS and Android users get a third: Communities, which will let players join groups with similar interests and game preferences.
Per its description, Communities will operate like themed forums to chat about games and jump into them with other players. Having trouble with a Destiny raid? Team up quickly with similarly-troubled peers and jump in to the game straight from the mobile app. It will also suggest communities for you to join based on what games you’ve played, as well as pointing out which groups are trending, if you care about joining the coolest crew on the PSN streets.
Could this feature have been rolled into the primary PlayStation app? Yes. Yes it could have. You need only look at how poorly the standalone Messages one was received to see how superfluous Communities might become, but at least it won’t get lost in the main mobile app’s crowded UI. But shoving players into digital rooms is a smart way to get them jumping into games together, as Titanfall 2’s clan-style Networks have proved. Whether enough of them go through the trouble of downloading another PlayStation app is another story.
Source: PlayStation blog
The Pokémon constant: Someone will always beat it with Magikarp
Worthless. Pathetic. Horribly Weak. Virtually useless. This is how Pokémon games’ in-game encyclopaedias describe Magikarp, a hapless fish-creature that is widely regarded as the “worst” monster in the game series’ ever-growing list of fighting creatures. It only has three attacks, and one of them literally does nothing. So, naturally, someone beat Pokémon Sun And Moon using nothing but the worthless flounder. Because why not?
Japanese player Nanako_Official barrelled through Sun and Moon’s Elite Four with a level 70 Magikarp, keeping the weak Pokémon in the fight by stocking up on health items and making the most of the game’s battle mechanics. Specifically, Nanako said he had to use the ‘struggle’ move to overcome Magikarp’s weakness to Ghost-type Pokémon. Normally, a Pokémon only struggles if it’s out of Power Points (PP) — but the move is capable of dealing damage to any opponent, regardless of type. By intentionally letting Magikarp run out of PP, Nanako was able to defeat enemies the Pokémon should never have been able to take down.
Beating a Pokémon game with Magikarp sounds like a gruelling, painful exercise — but it’s also sort of a tradition. The “Magikarp Only Run” is one of half a dozen extremely difficult fan-challenges available to Pokémon players. Other popular runs include the infamous Nuzlocke Challenge, which forces players to release any Pokémon that faints in battle and the MonoType run, which limits the player to using only a single “type” of Pokémon. Frankly, all these challenges sound a little insane — but maybe that’s what it takes to be a true Pokémon master.
Via: Kotaku
Source: Rocket News
Mirai botnet targets Deutsche Telekom routers in global cyberattack
The German Office for Information Security confirmed on Tuesday that not only had nearly a million routers on the Deutsche Telekom (DT) network been recently attacked but that the assault was part of a larger campaign stretching across the world.
The Mirai botnet, which knocked a number of US service sites — including Spotify and Twitter — offline on October 21st, is reportedly the culprit. These attacks targeted unsecured IoT devices like baby monitors and security cameras, taking control of them using common exploits. Once the devices are under the botnet’s control, they can be used to flood sites with traffic (aka a DDoS attack) in order to overwhelm their servers and knock them offline.
“It was a global attack against all kinds of devices,” Dirk Backofen, a senior Deutsche Telekom security executive, told Reuters. 900,000 or roughly 4.5 percent of DT’s landline customers were targeted as well as a number of German government routers. Routers in Ireland, Great Britain, even as far away as Brazil were also targeted.
The routers in question are three models made by Taiwan’s Arcadyan Technology — though DT resells them under the brandname, Speedport. The company pushed a patch live on Monday to correct the vulnerability. For its part, DT apologized to its customers and has begun applying “filter measures in the network to prevent the remote maintenance interface from being accessed by the attackers in order to exclude a new infection of devices,” according to the site’s FAQ. More software updates are expected for the next few days as DT network engineers continue to shore up the vulnerability.
Source: Reuters, Deutsche Telekom
Siri gets its first major movie promotional stunt
While Amazon has been furiously releasing updates to keep Alexa abreast of current events (and holiday shopping deals), Apple has been content to keep most of their Siri updates limited to major OS releases. That’ll change with the iTunes release of The Secret Life of Pets, which marks the first time Apple’s virtual assistant has been used to promote a movie release or partnered with a major movie studio.
As 9to5Mac notes, the promotional stunt for The Secret Life of Pets gives Siri 15 somewhat humorous canned responses to the question “What do my pets do when I’m not at home?” When Engadget tried the gimmick, Siri responded with: “I don’t know, but the dog just asked me for a walking route to the nearest park.” And: “I don’t know, but the cat just asked me about the five day forecast for the living room sunny spot.”
Those answers might be cute, but they’re also not quite as smart as say: having Siri pull up your Nest cam highlights or launching your treat cam app. Either way, Apple felt the feature was worth a brief, product-placement heavy Facebook Video commercial:
Via: 9to5Mac
Source: iTunes on Facebook
Intel forms a self-driving car technology group
Intel is no stranger to working on self-driving car technology, but it’s now proving that it’s committed for the long haul. As part of a broader organizational shuffle, the chip designer is forming an Autonomous Driving Group dedicated to these hands-off vehicles. The company’s former Internet of Things lead Doug Davis will lead the new division alongside Kathy Winter, who comes from Delphi — conveniently, one of Intel’s self-driving partners.
Former ARM executive Tom Lanstzch will take Davis’ previous spot as IoT lead.
It’s too soon to say whether or not this is more than a formality, but it’s not a shocking strategy. Intel is determined to stay relevant beyond the PC, and that means giving extra attention to categories like autonomy, IoT and wearables. The company can’t afford to cede ground in the automotive world, either. NVIDIA is quickly making a name for itself in driverless tech, and a slow response could lead to Intel becoming a bit player in a particularly hot market.
Source: Intel Newsroom
Holidays bring us a rare discount on Sonos speakers
Sonos is now offering $30 off all of its current products, making the amazing speakers and soundbars a bit more affordable. Whether you are looking to build up your existing system, or start a new one for the first time, you won’t want to miss out on this deal. From the smaller Play:1 all the way to the Soundbar and Sub, you can save on each and every item that the company sells.
The savings are valid through the end of the year, or while supplies last. Don’t take the chance though, and make sure that you get your order in sooner than later. Which speaker will you be picking up? Let us know!
See at Sonos
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