Forget flying cars and get ready for air taxis

Flying cars are dumb.

Yes, the cars in Blade Runner, The 5th Element and Back to the Future are cool, and who wouldn’t want to push a button and take to the sky in their Honda Civic? But it’s not going to happen any time in the next few decades, if ever. Frankly, the average driver can’t be trusted with anything that breaks free of the earth. Plus, adding potentially millions of vehicles to the sky is a logistical nightmare that’s sure to end in more than a few collisions that, unlike earth-based vehicles, would end with potentially hundreds of injured or killed bystanders. But that doesn’t mean the only time we’ll take to the skies for transit will be via international airports.

Instead of flying cars, get ready for fleets of small “air taxis” zipping from hub to hub within a region, delivering passengers to their destinations. There’s a reason Uber is so bullish on this idea — it’s an outstanding complement to its current business model. The company wants a world where you take an Uber to one of its flight hubs, hop into a eVTOL (electric vertical take-off and landing) craft and be whisked to another hub on the other side of town. You’d then finish the trip in, you guessed it, an Uber.

It’s also not too hard to imagine current airlines wanting in on the action too; most already offer commuter flights. Plus, of course, there’s going to be an onslaught of random startups hoping to be the “Uber of the sky.”

But Uber’s dream requires partners, new regulations, a change to air traffic control and an infrastructure that doesn’t exist today. Plus, you need actual flying vehicles, whatever they might look like.

Fortunately, there’s commercial interest in building these air taxis of the future. Airbus’ A3 and Aurora Flight Sciences (an Uber partner that happens to work with the DoD) are both working on eVTOL craft. Neither aircraft being developed by these companies resembles a car. Instead they look like futuristic tiny planes. Both take off like a helicopter but fly like a plane, which makes them perfect for short (under 50 to 60 miles) jaunts for two people. But as these get closer to full production (both companies are targeting 2020 for full-size test vehicles), it’s clear that one of those seats will be filled by a pilot.

“Pilot” is probably not what the person behind the wheel (or maybe joystick) will be called. Maybe a controller is the better description. Flying one these multi-rotor craft would be impossible without a computer stabilizing the flight with tiny adjustments being made to each motor at all times. A typical helicopter has two rotors that have to be adjusted constantly by the pilot. Adding six more to that mix and a human wouldn’t be able to keep control. “It’s obviously impossible to fly this plane fully manually. This plane has to be a fly-by-wire system out of the out of the box.” said Diana Siegel, eVTOL program manager at Aurora.

Full autonomy may come eventually, but like self-driving cars, a lot of work needs to be done. Ken Goodrich, research engineer at NASA’s Langley Research Center, believes it might be 20 years before we see a pilot-less aircraft zipping around an urban area. “You’ll certainly find people that say, ‘oh no, you know that will happen in five years 10 years.’ You know, truthfully nobody knows. But we probably will have to take an evolutionary process to get there, just like it’s taking place with driver-less cars today.”

Autonomy won’t stop in the air though. Air traffic control is going have to evolve to handle all these extra craft. According to Goodrich, at certain times there are as many air traffic controllers on the ground as there are planes in the air. That model would be unsustainable if a city were to add multiple hubs and potentially hundreds of air taxis.

“The individual’s ability to manage airplanes quickly becomes an issue. If you try to scale that up, not only is it individuals that run into bottlenecks but just hand offs between individuals is also a bottleneck. It has to become much more automated,” Goodrich told Engadget.

The FAA, for its part, has been talking to manufacturers and is “taking a flexible, risk-based approach to integrating innovative new technologies” said Ian Gregor, FAA public affairs manager. Gregor also noted that the agency is looking at the AI-controlled future, “Several areas need further research, particularly identifying the operational risks, making sure the automation that ‘flies’ the autonomous vehicle is safe, and how the automation will interact with the air traffic control system.”

Zach Lovering, project executive of A3’s Vahana eVTOL, seems enthusiastic about the agency’s course, “While it’s true that historically the FAA has been slow to adopt new technologies, recent work being performed across many divisions of the FAA marks a significant shift in their approach. Not only is the FAA working to modernize the small aircraft certification process, but they are also working to integrate unmanned vehicles into our airspace.”

But even if the air taxis can fly and the FAA is ready to add them to US airspace there’s still one big hurdle that technology might not be able to tackle: The people living near the hubs.

The biggest issue will be sound. There’s a reason houses near the airport are cheaper. That said, the creators of these aircraft insist that they won’t be any louder than nearby roads. “Our design goal is really to be able to take off and blend in with road traffic that are 70-75 decibels,” said Siegel. That’s possible thanks to the electric motors that’ll be powering the rotors on the craft.

After the initial vertical take, the craft will fly forward like a plane and be even quieter. But potential neighbors will probably want to see a demonstration before they’re cool with a tiny airport in their hood.

Additionally, who will be the first customers? Taking a new type of car across town is one thing, flying in a new type of craft might take a while to catch on. Plus, there’s a good chance that it’s going to be way pricier than driving. In addition to the aircraft, you need a hub with landing spots, chargers, buildings and staff to act as local traffic control, customer service and maintenance. So initially it’ll be confined to executives, Fyre Festival trust fund kids and lottery winners.

But eventually, the rest of us would be able to ride across the town when we’re in a huge hurry. Although for some, their first trip will likely be because of an emergency. These eVTOLs would make great ambulances in a congested urban area. However they’re used and how soon the rest of us will be able to fly in one without a pilot is just a matter of getting full-size craft in the air which should happen in the next three to five years. Maybe sooner.

I’m sorry, you’re not getting a flying car, but if your grandchildren are lucky they might get something that flies to get them around town. “We think it’s kind of funny when people call us a flying car — if Vahana is a flying car then so is a helicopter!” Lovering told Engadget. Siegel concurs, “If we can get away from [the phrase] ‘flying car’ that would be wonderful.”

So let’s keep the cars on the ground. Because the sky belongs to something else.

Welcome to Tomorrow, Engadget’s new home for stuff that hasn’t happened yet. You can read more about the future of, well, everything, at Tomorrow’s permanent home and check out all of our launch week stories here.

Qualcomm pays BlackBerry $940 million in royalty spat

Qualcomm hasn’t been very successful with its licensing practices. It’s gotten into trouble in South Korea for charging phone makers over an “unnecessarily broad set of patents” It has also been dealing with lawsuits from the FTC and Apple for similar tactics. Qualcomm was ordered to pay BlackBerry $815 million in an arbitration settlement last April. BlackBerry announced today that the two companies have reached a final agreement amount of $940 miillion, which includes the original arbitration amount along with interst and attorneys’ fees. The release says that Qualcomm will pay the full amount before the end of May.

BlackBerry has been trying to change its fortune after getting out of phone design. It brought in $286 million in revenue last quarter, making this $940 million settlement a much needed infusion of cash to can help the beleaguered company pivot towards self-driving cars. For its part, Qualcomm seems to be weathering the storm of lawsuits and anti-trust fines with countersuits and settlements like the current BlackBerry agreement. Qualcomm’s chips power a large number of mobile devices, with a Snapdragon system-on-chips in high-end Android phones. The company also continues to expand to as many other devices as possible, including IoT and connected cars. We’ve reached out to Qualcomm for comment on this story and will update when we hear back.

Source: Blackberry

The Facebook president and Zuck’s racist rulebook

If a political campaign is an engine then propaganda is its oil, and its gas is the medium of communication with voters.

The hacking of the DNC and tonnes of raw crude in propaganda mined out through WikiLeaks, Breitbart and Daily Stormer was black gold for the Trump campaign.

We’re now learning, thanks to the Facebook Files and the campaign’s ability to connect with and inflame its racist, anti-immigrant base, that the accelerant was Facebook itself. Facebook’s internal rulebook could be considered the Trump campaign’s blueprint for its highly successful ad strategy’s race-fueled messaging on the social network.

“Donald Trump is our first Facebook president,” concludes The New York Review of Books, after spending considerable time with Prototype Politics: Technology-Intensive Campaigning and the Data of Democracy by Daniel Kreiss and Hacking the Electorate: How Campaigns Perceive Voters by Eitan D. Hersh.

“His team figured out how to use all the marketing tools of Facebook,” NYRB wrote. “They understood that some numbers matter more than others—in this case the number of angry, largely rural, disenfranchised potential Trump voters—and that Facebook, especially, offered effective methods for pursuing and capturing them.”

Indeed it did, because Facebook’s own rules around speech and censorship appear to make the social media site a safe space for racists and terrorists in equal measure. We knew it wasn’t a safe place for LGBT populations, vulnerable teens and certainly not for domestic violence victims or women who talk about human sexuality.

But until the publication of the Facebook Files by The Guardian this week did we have a firm grasp on the inverse question: Just who is Facebook safe for, anyway?

A clean, well-lit place for racists

Racists, revenge porn perpetrators, Holocaust deniers and people who think immigrants are filth: One look at the company’s rulebook on content moderation reveals these upstanding members of Facebook’s community get a free pass on cultivating hate. As long as they don’t run afoul of a very slim, arguably subjective set of edge case rules, that is.

Holocaust denial is a particular piece of “free expression” that Facebook is keen to defend — to the point of only enforcing its takedown in countries it thinks it might get sued in. The Guardian explains a Facebook training manual states it only hides or removes Holocaust denial content in four countries (France, Germany, Israel and Austria).

The manual says, “Some 14 countries have legislation on their books prohibiting the expression of claims that the volume of death and severity of the Holocaust is overestimated. Less than half the countries with these laws actually pursue it. We block on report only in those countries that actively pursue the issue with us.”

When reached for comment, Facebook told us, “We currently prevent access to Holocaust denial content in the following countries: Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany, Israel and Austria. We keep our policies under continual review and our policy and legal teams are currently looking at our obligations in respect of Holocaust denial.”

The company’s head of global policy management, Monika Bickert, added, “We recognize the importance and the sensitivities around the issue of Holocaust denial and have made sure that our reviewers are trained to be respectful of that sensitivity.”

While it’s not quite a “we’re sorry you feel that way,” we only hope that Facebook understands that Holocaust denial is less like a nut allergy and more like ignoring the facts of genocide for the express purpose of harm.

Bad press about this would be the only way to get Facebook to pretend to behave responsibly about this, but it’s a loss out of the starting gate for a company that clearly doesn’t get what’s wrong with this in the first place.

And something is very deeply wrong here, on a company-culture level, for this to even be happening in the first place. Should Facebook respond to the bad press about its support of Holocaust denial under the flimsy rhetoric of “free speech,” it will just be a target-specific response. Meaning, they’ll fix one thing, while the bigger problems remain.

Those problems being its inability to grasp why it is such an excellent incubator for hate, and its willingness to fix things only after we’re all totally fucked.

Fertile ground for Trump voters

The Guardian‘s Facebook Files are an abridged version of the company’s content moderation policies, and they reveal an obvious forgiveness for the cultivation of hatred against immigrants, and thus, people of color. While Facebook is lightning fast to censor a gay man’s post saying Trump supporters are “a nasty, fascistic lot,” anyone characterizing immigrants as rapists or robbers gets a free pass (as long as they’re not “equating” them with rapists or robbers).

Facebook’s permissible statements include: “Islam is a religion of hate. Close the borders to immigrating Muslims until we figure out what the hell is going on”; “migrants are so filthy”; “migrants are thieves and robbers”; and “Mexican immigrants are freeloaders mooching off of tax dollars we don’t even have.” These are all statements in Facebook’s rulebook marked as “ignore” when reported.

In the documents we learn that “All terrorists are Muslims” is okay to say on Facebook, but not “All Muslims are terrorists.” The Guardian explains that this is because “terrorists are not a protected category, whereas Muslims are – which is why the first remark can be ignored and the second should be deleted if flagged.”

Oh, okay. Because the people saying these things will totally get the difference, as they have all been educated about the way Facebook interprets the meanings of these things. In fact, the people saying these things won’t see any difference by their very nature. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, people who are swayed by the rhetoric of hate groups have two primary characteristics: They seek community and have a “low tolerance for ambiguity.” Meaning, Facebook can split hairs all day on the subject of their sentences because for the behaviors of cultivating hate, it’s all about the general context. Racists literally don’t care about “grey areas.”

In a way it doesn’t matter anyway because Facebook’s documents end in a shrug when it comes to things that are difficult to decide — the default is always to leave it up. Moderators only have around ten seconds to make that decision anyway.

Facebook’s Bickert told Engadget: “Keeping people on Facebook safe is the most important thing we do. We work hard to make Facebook as safe as possible while enabling free speech. This requires a lot of thought into detailed and often difficult questions, and getting it right is something we take very seriously.”

For its part, Facebook told us, “Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that over the next year, we’ll be adding 3,000 people to our community operations team around the world — on top of the 4,500 we have today — to review the millions of reports we get every week, and improve the process for doing it quickly.”

Facebook’s moderation rules appear to have been created backward: They quibble over the company’s beliefs about protected groups, while failing to grasp the bigger picture about what kind of environment is created by these kinds of misguided, made-in-a-bubble rules.

Rather than focus on creating a large collection of safe communities, the rules seem formed to fold in preexisting xenophobias and racism and give them Facebook’s tools to thrive; one might call it “a clean, well-lit place for fascism.” Meaning, the moderation rulemakers either really don’t understand how hate groups form and grow, or they’re fine with whatever as long as there’s no bad press and everyone remains an active user. Gotta chase those ad dollars, yo.

Facebook has become a hate-group incubator; the company can’t even wrap its head around the problem of fake news enough to prevent its own program to fight fake news from failing — which it is. Not surprisingly, fake news is weighted by neo-Nazi, pro-Trump propaganda, though Facebook won’t quite admit that key piece of information that could stop its spread. Instead, Facebook’s weak excuse of a program to mark fake news as “disputed” is being seized upon and promoted, shared widely (wider than it likely would’ve) by alt-righties who marshal their sizable Facebook troops and disseminate it with cries of “censorship!”

A lot of noise was made in the press after the election about the Trump campaign’s use of Cambridge Analytica and the way the skeezy data company exploited Facebook users (in addition to the 30 million Facebook users exploited for Trump by an unnamed data mining company). But The New York Review of Books tells us that Facebook was already packed with people ready to vote for Trump, and “Facebook’s real influence came from the campaign’s strategic and perfectly legal use of Facebook’s suite of marketing tools.”

Brad Parscale was the genius who put together Trump’s Facebook outreach strategy. “A few weeks before the election,” NYRB wrote, “he said he had a hunch from reading Breitbart, Reddit, Facebook, and other nontraditional news sources, and from the campaign’s own surveys, that there were whole segments of the population — people who were angry and disaffected — that were being missed by traditional pollsters and the mainstream media.”

And so he went to work during the primaries, purchasing $2 million in Facebook ads — eventually ramping that up to $70 million a month, with most of it in Facebook ads. The New York Review of Books quotes Trump digital team member Gary Coby telling WIRED that, “On any given day…the campaign was running 40,000 to 50,000 variants of its ads … On the day of the third presidential debate in October, the team ran 175,000 variations.”

NYRB detailed:

“He then uploaded all known Trump supporters into the Facebook advertising platform and, using a Facebook tool called Custom Audiences from Customer Lists, matched actual supporters with their virtual doppelgangers and then, using another Facebook tool, parsed them by race, ethnicity, gender, location, and other identities and affinities.

From there he used Facebook’s Lookalike Audiences tool to find people with interests and qualities similar to those of his original cohort and developed ads based on those characteristics, which he tested using Facebook’s Brand Lift surveys.”

Unlike the Democrats, NYRB diagrams how Trump’s team figured out how to use Facebook “to successfully sell a candidate that the majority of Americans did not want.” They used Facebook’s own tools, refined at targeting those most vulnerable to suggestion, to influence those ripening under Facebook’s own rules that coddle Holocaust denial, and anti-immigrant, and anti-Muslim sentiment. This could be plainly seen in Trump’s Facebook ads.

As NYRB explains, Trump’s campaign “understood that some numbers matter more than others—in this case the number of angry, largely rural, disenfranchised potential Trump voters—and that Facebook, especially, offered effective methods for pursuing and capturing them.”

There was a joke after the election that Facebook’s motto “Move fast and break things” was better spoken as “Move fast and break democracy.” But this is bigger than that.

In the United States, racist speech is considered free speech because it is opinion. Also in the US, hate groups are not illegal, but they are kept in check by a system of federal laws that monitor against hate crimes. Now, imagine that Uber has evolved to be allowed to determine what can and cannot be encouraged regarding communities dedicated to sexual harassment and abuse, and you can see why this might not work.

Facebook is not a country, yet it is assigning and removing rights about censorship and speech. It is not a civil rights organization, yet it decides that immigrants don’t have protected status within its walls.

It’s a company. One that is creating censorship tools so it can do business in China. It is a behemoth that complies with censorship demands from the governments of Thailand, Turkey, India, Israel, Pakistan and Vietnam.

It’s also a company to which there is no alternative.

Images: REUTERS/Brendan McDermid (Protestors); REUTERS/Jim Young (Facebook, Zuckerberg)

Sergey Brin’s secret airship will deliver aid and schlep his family

Last month, news dropped that Google co-founder Sergey Brin is building an airship on the sly — not a traditional airplane but an honest-to-god helium-filled dirigible. While he insisted the project wasn’t operating under the tech titan, which had previously announced backing its own “flying car,” it wasn’t clear what Brin would be doing with the world’s largest current aircraft. Now, details are starting to come out: Apparently, the zeppelin will split its time between delivering humanitarian supplies to remote locations and serving as a luxurious “air yacht” for Brin’s friends and family.

Sources told The Guardian that Brin’s as-yet-unnamed aircraft will cost between $100m and $150m and be the largest flying object in the world (but still smaller than the iconic Hindenberg). While it can’t claim a title over its historical predecessor, it’s also filled with non-flammable helium, avoiding its superior’s tragic fate. While more details haven’t been revealed, as it’s still under construction in the Navy’s old wartime airship hangers in Northern California’s Ames airfield, the craft is planned to be 200m long — which is kind of hard to hide when Brin does decide to take it out for its first test drive.

Source: The Guardian

Don’t scream: The new ‘Friday the 13th’ game is out today

After a slight delay, the first official Friday the 13th game since 1989 is available today on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. If you want to jump right into the action at Camp Crystal Lake, though, you might have to wait for Friday the 13th: The Game’s servers to accommodate the apparent rush of people trying to kill the counselors/survive the maniacal Jason Voorhees. The official Twitter account has been dropping updates since the wee hours of this morning, so if you’re having issues make sure to check there first.

WE ARE LIVE
GO KILL EACH OTHER IN VIDEO GAMES AND SHIT.

— Friday the 13th Game (@Friday13thGame) May 26, 2017

Source: Steam, PlayStation Store, Xbox Game Store, Kickstarter

Theresa May wants to force tech giants to curb extremist content

British Prime Minister Theresa May called on global leaders at the G7 conference in Sicily to force internet and social media companies stop the spread of terrorist content available online. “Make no mistake: the fight is moving from the battlefield to the internet,” she said in a statement. May called on companies to develop tools to automatically identify and remove extremist materials, block the users who post it and report such activity to the authorities. The Prime Minister also announced the creation of an international forum to encourage industry leaders to share information and technologies to curb the spread of terrorist content. In addition, May proposed that regional governments cooperate by returning and prosecuting foreign fighters via improved “intelligence-sharing, evidence gathering and bolstering countries’ police and legal processes. The Guardian’s Anushka Asthana reported on Twitter that May’s initiatives have the backing of President Trump, as well.

May’s comments come just days after a terrorist attack in Manchester. Her call is for governmental action, but tech companies have already stepped up to try and curb the spread of terrorism. Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and Alphabet-owned YouTube are creating a shared database of “hashes” for any terror-related content they remove from their services. Twitter tripled the amount of terrorist accounts it suspended last year and Google launched a series of ads aimed at dissuading would-be terrorists from joining extremist organizations. Engadget has reached out to several tech companies for comment on this matter. Twitter responded by pointing us to this past March’s Transparency Report, which contains details on the company’s proactive steps to curb content like this.

There is a fine line between protecting free speech and cracking down on violent groups bent on killing in the name of an extremist cause, of course. May’s proposals likely have the best of intentions to protect citizens around the globe, but some administrations some administrations have a mixed history of blanket solutions that may cause more harm than good.

Via: BuzzFeed News, The Evening Standard

Source: gov.UK

MIT 3D-printed the shape-shifting future of pasta

A new research project from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Tangible Media Group combines 3D printing, molecular gastronomy and macaroni. According to MIT News, researchers Wen Wang and Lining Yao have engineered flat sheets of gelatin and starch into shape-shifting noodles that react and fold when exposed to water. While Yao’s goal of one day creating a self-folding dumpling is still out of reach for now, the research team thinks their breakthrough could help reduce food shipping costs and lead to new trends in fine dining.

Wang and Yao were actually working with bacterium that respond to humidity when they started playing around with edible materials that would have a similar effect. The noodles are made of thin layers of gelatin with different densities. As the dense top layer absorbs water, it bends over the less-dense bottom layer creating a simple piece of tube-shaped pasta. By 3D-printing strips of cellulose starch over the top layer, the research team was able to control the final shape of the noodles and create everything from traditional rigatoni to avant-garde mushrooms and blossoming flowers. To show off their research, the team worked even with chef Matthew Delisle from Boston’s L’Espalier restaurant to create noodles that could be incorporated into dishes worthy of their own Chef’s Table segment:

While the noodles are definitely fun to look at, the Tangible Media Group came up with another, more pedestrian application for them as well: pasta makers could create flat-packed noodles to reduce volume, packaging waste and shipping costs. “We did some simple calculations, such as for macaroni pasta, and even if you pack it perfectly, you still will end up with 67 percent of the volume as air,” Wang said. “We thought maybe in the future our shape-changing food could be packed flat and save space.”

While the MIT team had access to a lab-grade 3D printer and modeling software, they’ve also laid out instructions for creating shape-shifting pasta with lower-tech methods like screenprinting. There’s also a database of pasta patterns that anyone can use to print their own versions in the future and the team envisions a system where anyone can just order up custom pasta shapes online. There’s only one problem at the moment: while Wang says the noodles “had great texture and tasted pretty good,” her colleague Yao pointed out to Popular Science that the noodles are still mostly gelatin — meaning they’re pretty, but might not have the same satisfying starchiness of real pasta. Still, Yao is hopeful that her pasta research, which was partially funded by Target’s Food + Future incubator, will continue to develop new starch-heavy gelatin films and folding methods. As for the self-folding dumpling: “It turns out that’s really hard,” Yao says. “We can get there eventually, I think.”

Via: Popular Science

Source: MIT News

Tidal burns through its third CEO in two years

Yet another Tidal CEO is out. Jeff Toig, who took over the position from interim CEO Peter Tonstad in 2016, has reportedly left the company. Which means Tidal is now looking for its fourth chief executive in two years.

This news is just more evidence that the company is severely lacking in direction and strong leadership. Last year, the music service ousted its CFO and COO over a dispute about the release of streaming numbers. And there are continued claims that the company is over-reporting streaming numbers, which, judging by their record label payments, appear to be much lower in reality.

Toig joined Tidal after two years as SoundCloud’s chief business officer. It’s not clear why exactly he’s leaving the company after such a short tenure, but a source told Billboard that he actually cut ties in March.

Along with rotating leadership, Tidal’s streaming and financial problems have been no secret. The company, which Jay-Z bought for $56 million dollars in 2015, lost $28 million dollars that year and $10.4 million the year before. And it has continued to lose ground against competitors Spotify and Apple Music, which have 50 million and 20 million paid subscribers, respectively. Tidal is still hovering around just one million at last count.

However, earlier this year, Sprint bought a third of the company for $200 million, which infused the music streaming service with some much-needed capital. And shortly thereafter, Tidal brought on two industry names — former Billboard editor Tony Gervino and past XXL Magazine editor Elliott Wilson — to its content team. Maybe the company’s next move will be to bring some stability to its helm.

Source: Billboard

MacRumors Giveaway: Win a Copy of ‘Total War: WARHAMMER’ From Feral Interactive

For this week’s giveaway, we’ve teamed up with Feral Interactive to give MacRumors readers a chance to win a copy of real-time strategy game Total War: WARHAMMER, which became available for the Mac in April.

Total War: WARHAMMER is a turn-based strategy game that allows players to build an empire and then plan and execute real-time tactical battles against enemies. Unlike other Warhammer games, Total War: WARHAMMER takes place in a high fantasy setting, pitting greenskins (orcs and goblins), vampires, dwarves, and humans against one another.

There are four playable factions that players can control, each with unique gameplay elements, play styles, abilities, and units to send into battle. The goal is to build up a city, recruit units, make alliances with other nations, and fight to protect and expand your hold over the Old World.

Aerial units like wyverns and dragons, specially trained Legendary Lords, and other powerful elements like magic must be thoughtfully wielded to turn the tide in battle. Because there are multiple factions and game paths to take, Total War: WARHAMMER is endlessly replayable.

Mac vs. Mac online multiplayer is available and supports up to eight players. There’s also a co-op mode that allows players to play through the campaign with or against a friend.

Feral Interactive, for those unfamiliar with the company, is a video game publisher that works with various companies to bring popular PC games to the Mac. Feral has brought a wide range of titles to the Mac, like the LEGO series, Rome: Total War, Tomb Raider, XCOM, and several Warhammer titles.

Total War: WARHAMMER is available from Steam, the Feral Interactive website, or the Mac App Store for $49.99-$59.99, but we have 10 Steam copies to give away to MacRumors readers.

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 (May 26) at 11:00 a.m. Pacific Time through 11:00 a.m. Pacific Time on June 2. The winners will be chosen randomly on June 2 and will be contacted by email. The winners will have 48 hours to respond and provide a shipping address before new winners are chosen.

Tags: giveaway, Feral
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TouchArcade iOS Gaming Roundup: Steredenn, Fidget Spinner Apps, Prison Architect, and More

In case you missed the post last week, once again this is Eli Hodapp, and I’m Editor in Chief of MacRumors’ iOS gaming sister site TouchArcade. We’re putting together these weekly roundups of the biggest news and releases in the world of iOS gaming. If you’re interested in this quick recap, there’s tons more where this came from over on TouchArcade. We post daily news, reviews, and more, covering every aspect of the world of iOS gaming.

We’ve also got a very active iOS gaming Twitch channel, a Discord server, our own forums, and a weekly podcast. All of these things are packed with other iOS gamers and developers, discussing iOS gaming around the clock! Anyway, here are the big things you don’t want to miss this week:

We kicked off Monday morning with a five star review of Steredenn. It’s an incredible horizontal space shooter that aside from just being a really fun game does a lot of incredibly innovative things when it comes to how weapon upgrades are handled, as well as how you move your ship. For instance, these games often use a relative-touch based control scheme, and that’s true here, but when the game detects your ship is obscured by your finger both a horizontal and vertical line appear on screen indicating where you are. It sounds basic, and I suppose it is, but the difference these little things make is amazing.

While I’m a little surprised that the collective internet eye-roll surrounding the Angry Birds movie didn’t cause some sort of seismic event when it was first announced, the film did incredibly well, grossing just under $350 million. (It’s actually far better than you’d expect, if you haven’t seen it.) So, it should be a surprise to absolutely no one that a sequel is on the way.

Due out on September 20th, 2019, The Angry Birds Movie 2 already has some interesting names signed on. It’ll be directed by Thurop Van Orman and John Rice (with the latter serving as co-director), who have worked on Adventure Time and Rick and Morty. No further details surrounding the plot or direction of the film have been made public, although there’s plenty of time for all sorts of tidbits to dribble out before late 2019.

We’ve spent a lot of time discussing the troubling trend of what a bad platform iOS when it comes to preserving gaming history, as iOS system updates (and other things) often render classic iOS titles totally broken. With iOS 11 likely dropping support for 32-bit apps and games, we’re on the verge of seeing the largest purge of older iOS games yet. While Apple’s response is to simply update those games to 64-bit binaries, we explore in an editorial, “just updating” is often not as simple as it sounds – particularly if the creator of a game you love is deceased.

Lightening things up a bit, we’ve been scratching our heads trying to figure out the unbelievable popularity of fidget spinner apps. It seems the whole draw of a fidget spinner is it’s a physical toy that exists, which you actively fidget with. You’d think virtualizing this would remove most of the appeal, but judging by the iTunes charts, that isn’t the case at all. After talking to various educators, we offer an alternative theory. Perhaps fidget spinner apps are becoming the next big thing because fidget spinners themselves are rapidly getting banned from classrooms, while smartphones, inexplicably, are totally allowed? Either way, if you’re interested in trying the most popular one, download Ketchapp’s Fidget Spinner.

Limbic released the original Zombie Gunship on the App Store ages ago, and the unbelievable success of a game where you shoot down swarms of zombies aboard an AC-130 put the studio on the map. Another Zombie Gunship game has been in development forever, in soft launch for even longer, and finally launched worldwide this week. While it shares a lot with its predecessor, Zombie Gunship Survival has much more meat on its bones with loads of things to unlock and other upgrades to work towards. The original Zombie Gunship was a ton of fun, so more of that, plus loads of improvements makes Survival even better.

The rivalry between the FIFA and Pro Evolution Soccer series on mobile has been heating up for years now, but with FIFA taking an odd turn to becoming more of a card collecting game, this week’s release of Pro Evolution Soccer 2017 is perfect for soccer fans looking for more action. Early impressions of the game indicate that it finally feels like iOS has the soccer simulator that it deserves with a full-featured soccer experience that is just absolutely loaded with depth. Controls are swipe based, which people seem to either love or hate, but it’s totally free to try out so if you’re at all interested in soccer, this is the game to get.

After a lengthy soft launch period, the cult-classic fighting game Skullgirls is finally available. Like many other mobile fighters, it is controlled using swipe gestures which has proven to work incredibly well for the genre. The mechanics of the game are super tight, and once you get used to the swiping system, you likely won’t find yourself missing a controller at all. Like many free to play fighters, Skullgirls is powered by a freemium random draw gacha system to unlock new characters, which again, has become totally normal for the genre (for better or for worse).

Prison Architect has been incredibly popular on Steam, and this week the mobile port hit the App Store. It’s iPad only, like many PC to mobile ports, and puts players in charge of designing and managing their own prisons. Featuring surprising levels of complexity, Prison Architect has an array of scenarios to complete which really serve as a tutorial of sorts for the full-featured sandbox mode. One strange thing is how you pay for the game: It’s free to download and try, then you can buy individual scenarios for $2.99 a piece, the sandbox mode for $4.99, or unlock everything for $14.99. It feels like they give too much away for free, but for the curious consumer I suppose that’s a good thing.

In the past, Capcom has released Street Fighter games on mobile, with the first one hitting the App Store all the way back in 2010. Aside from compatibility updates here and there, the games have largely sat dormant and over the years have only felt increasingly more outdated. This week, in true Capcom fashion, the iterative sequel Street Fighter IV Championship Edition was announced. Aside from 25 playable characters, Championship Edition will have full MFi controller support, WiFi multiplayer, and loads of other updates and refinements over the original Street Fighter mobile games. Championship Edition will be released “this summer,” and you can pre-register for the game here to get notified when it does.

Last, but not least, with the holiday weekend upon us, an absurd amount of iOS games are on sale. The whole Infinity Blade series can be had for a buck a piece, along with many, many other classic, premium iOS games. Head over to our listing to see everything worth considering downloading, along with reviews of the vast majority of games that are on sale.

That’s it for this week! For even more iOS gaming news, head over to TouchArcade – otherwise stay tuned for next week’s roundup!

Tag: TouchArcade gaming roundup
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