Royal Academy of Arts will showcase VR’s influence on artists

This winter, the UK’s Royal Academy of Arts will host an exhibit about making art from life, how it has been done throughout history and how technology like VR is influencing artists today. The From Life exhibit will include a look at life drawing, spanning from works done in the 18th century to contemporary pieces, as well as current artists who are using modern technology in their work.

A number of artists will create works for the exhibit using HTC Vive, MakeVR Pro and Google’s Tilt Brush VR tool. From Life will show these artists’ creative processes and how their artwork was made. Additionally, the Royal Academy will work with Factory 42 to develop VR experiences that focus on particular artists and how they work. A documentary — Virtual Reality: Mystery of Creativity — is also in the works and it will show how emerging technologies like VR are being used to create art.

“This is an experimental project that explores everything from artistic process to technological evolution and creative collaboration. In a sense, From Life embodies what an artist-run academy was, is and might become,” the Royal Academy’s artistic director, Tim Marlow, said in a statement.

“It is our mission to enable, cultivate, and preserve creation with virtual reality in the arts. The From Life exhibition is an incredible opportunity to enable some of the UK’s leading artists to explore the creative potential of Vive’s room-scale VR technology,” Vive Arts and Culture Director Victoria Chang added. “We are proud to work with the RA to also bring these artists’ works to a wider audience, to be experienced in homes around the world through being published on Viveport, our global VR app store.”

Source: Royal Academy of Arts

Snapchat plans to add college newspapers to its Discover section

A plethora of publishers have joined Snapchat’s safe news digest, Discover, since it launched back in January. Some are straight news, like NBC and CNN, while others are culture outlets like Buzzfeed and Vulture — in other words, most are broadly-appealing online publications. But according to Recode, Snapchat wants to shake that up a bit by spotlighting a particular breed of local content on Discover: College newspapers. But you can only read their stories if you’re on-campus.

Dozens of college papers will submit content to a new section in Discover, called Campus Publisher Stories. The publications will produce one story per week (including ads), with advertisement revenue split between the paper and Snapchat. The company plans to add a total of two dozen college pubs, with four signed up so far: The Daily Californian from UC Berkeley, The Battalion from Texas A&M, The Daily Orange from Syracuse and The Badger Herald from Wisconsin.

The content will be geofenced to the newspaper’s area, meaning alumni won’t be able to check up on their home school’s activities. On the other hand, it’s a good experiment to see if particular audiences will consume enough content to justify getting locally-bound news on Snapchat.

Source: Recode

Press A to change your life: ‘Otis’ and the new American cinema

Reality is a lie. Everything we experience is filtered through thick veils of of personal baggage, self-interest and delusion, constantly skewing the world into the most comforting state possible. Universes of fragile concepts stand between what you think happened and what actually happened.

Otis shines a detective’s flashlight on this dissonance between reality and personal experience. It’s an interactive crime drama that allows the audience to shift perspectives among three characters at will, telling a single story from disparate points of view. In the free online prototype, viewers press A, S or D on the keyboard to instantly swap perspectives among a babysitter, a father and a man intent on robbing their house.

Otis doesn’t pause when the perspective changes; the story carries on for all three characters. This means audience members will miss bits of every character’s narrative. They won’t see the full story.

That’s director Casey Stein’s favorite part.

“Real life does not work that way — you don’t get all the answers all the time,” Stein says. “And, in fact, you form opinions based on lack of information, if anything. …That’s what makes human life and humanity in many ways so intriguing. And so different. We can say things in different ways, in different tones, and you intentionally leave things out, whether you realize it or not.”

Two people who go on a blind date, for example, will walk away with two completely different stories to tell their friends. Even though a static series of events transpired — dinner, drinks, movie — each person will omit certain things, emphasize other things and generally give a self-centered review of the entire night. Otis attempts to bottle up this idea of fluid reality in a polished, interactive experience.

“You, as a viewer, you’re making decisions that really affect the narrative without feeling like you’re affecting the narrative,” Stein explains. “Because the narrative is actually what you think happened.”

Otis currently exists as a seven-minute prototype, but Stein and his cohorts have big plans for their new filmmaking method. They want to create a socially relevant murder-mystery series set in the American Rust Belt, featuring a story inspired by Cain and Abel. The prototype is their proof-of-concept — a necessary step for an unprecedented, complex narrative experience.

Filming Otis was like completing a giant puzzle, Stein says. Each character had a handful of “fiddle points,” or moments that were pivotal to the story and unmovable. For instance, one of the film’s most powerful scenes involves the babysitter smashing her own face with a soap dish — Stein and his team shot that moment, edited it down and timed it with a stopwatch. Then, they knew how long the other two characters needed to be doing something else (preferably something not as exciting, subtly pushing viewers to stick with the babysitter and the ceramic).

Essentially, Stein’s team shot three separate short films, each with a different leading character.

“There’s no smoke and mirrors,” Stein says. “We literally made this movie basically with a notepad and a stopwatch. That’s it. …This project is one of the most strenuous things I’ve ever been a part of, because of the mental energy that it takes to think about it on that level.”

The end result is something that exists in a kind of digital purgatory: Otis is not quite a video game, but it requires more engagement than a movie or television show. Otis is something new altogether — and it’s all millennials’ fault.

Digital purgatory

Stein isn’t ashamed to admit he watches a lot of TV in bed, on his laptop. Most of his friends do the same, and so do plenty of other cord-cutters across the country. Streaming video is king in a cable-less economy, meaning more people than ever are watching TV and movies on interactive platforms.

“We have all these tools sitting in front of us,” Stein says. “I mean, I’ve got this keyboard and it’s just sitting there, it’s doing nothing. I’m using my laptop as a vehicle for this completely passive act when it could be completely active, if I choose it to be.”

On top of accessible interactivity, the success of apps like Instagram demonstrate the market is hungry for new ways to play with video. Virtual reality further supports this trend, often putting viewers in control of the camera, blurring the line between film and video game. Even some advertisements and music videos on YouTube offer “choose your own adventure” options.

“We see this as an opportunity to exist on a place like HBO or Netflix or Hulu, YouTube — anybody that’s really willing to accept us, is the honest answer — but as a new way to watch television and a new opportunity to experience a story in a different way,” Stein says. “We are starting to become inundated with that as viewers, when you look at things like Snapchat, when you look at things like Instagram, when you look at sort of the plethora of very simple games that are out there. It feels more every day that there’s an appetite for it.”

It’s important to be clear here: Otis is not a choose-your-own-adventure game. It tells one linear story, no branching paths to be found. But, if Stein achieves his vision, no two people will actually experience the same narrative arc. Every person who watches (or plays) Otis sees different scenes, focuses on different people and misses different details. In this sense, Otis’ story is actually told outside of the screen, when viewers get together to discuss what they saw.

“For us, the more interesting conversation is you having the conversation with somebody else about it the next day,” Stein says.

Everything comes back to Trump

Conversation is essential to our understanding of reality, and recently, it helped Stein come to some important realizations about his own life — realizations that are driving his desire to turn Otis into a full series.

Stein grew up in Washington, DC, and he now lives in Brooklyn, New York. He calls himself a left-leaning individual, and like many of his peers, he was shocked when Donald Trump won the presidency in November.

“I was, like many of my friends, upset and frustrated and confused; I didn’t get it,” he says. “More and more I realized I was talking into a vacuum because everybody else felt the exact same way I did. Well, of course they did. I lived in Brooklyn. No shit.”

People across the country were coming to similar realizations around the same time, even as Facebook vowed to crack down on filter bubbles and inaccurate news in users’ timelines. There was a sense among many major-city Democratic voters that they had missed something, and Stein wasn’t immune to this feeling. He recalls thinking, “Maybe what’s really happening here is we’re not listening. Maybe we’re just tuning them out and saying, ‘I don’t want anything to do with those hillbillies’ or whatever. Well, that’s not very American of us. That’s not a very good way to go about it. That’s not even remotely nice.”

So, Stein decided to listen — and, more than that, he decided to tell the story he had missed during the presidential race. He chose to make a full, Otis-style series about life in the American Rust Belt, these isolated, industrial towns from which so much of Trump’s support seemed to stem.

“We know it’s fictionalized,” he says. “I would by no means try to paint a picture of what it’s really like to live in a really impoverished, marginalized town. But the goal for us is to try to get people to listen as much as we can because if we’re not listening to each other, our future isn’t looking too bright.”

Stein realizes his place as a big-city-dweller; he realizes people in small towns across America lead rich, full lives that he may not ever truly grasp. Perspective, after all, is a bitch. Still, he’s going to try.

Stein and Otis writer Bernard Zeiger have rented out a room in the poorest city in West Virginia, a town of roughly 3,000 people, and they’re going to stay there for all of October.

“We’re just going to go live,” he says. “We’re going to go sit and we’re going to talk to people. We’re going to see what’s going on with their lives. We want to hear from them, we want to know what it’s like. We are very different than them and that both frustrates me and excites me at the same time.”

They have the building blocks for the full series — it opens on a fight between a man and his cousin, the latter of whom ends up dead at the end of the altercation. The story unfurls from there, with viewers able to swap between three perspectives: The person trying to arrest the man, the person trying to murder him and the person trying to save him. They’re all trying to figure out what really happened to the cousin, allowing the audience to play detective in all three perspectives.

The Otis prototype is a standalone project, telling a different, self-contained story. It gets the point across, though — it’s a powerful experience that proves Stein’s concept. It demonstrates the feasibility of an interactive mystery. Now, it’s up to Stein to do the research, fill in the gaps and complete the puzzle he started.

“As a filmmaker, authenticity is everything to me,” Stein says. “I hope that I am the strictest judge of myself when it comes to that. If I’m going to tell this story, I want to make sure the person I’m telling this story about not only thinks that it’s accurate, but wants to watch it too.”

After all, just because reality is a lie doesn’t mean it isn’t also true.

Medium adds Bloomberg and other publications to subscription service

In a push to monetize its publishing platform, Medium added a $5 Netflix-style subscription last March. The system includes a way for members to “clap” different posts to give creators a percentage of their membership fee as well. Now Medium is bringing professional publications into the fold with curated selections from the likes of The New York Times, Bloomberg and Rolling Stone tucked behind the subscription paywall.

While Medium already had a limited set of publications online, this is a full roll out of the concept. The full list of partners also includes The Financial Times, The Economist, New York Magazine, Fast Company, CNN, Foreign Policy, MIT Technology Review, Popular Science and The Guardian. If you’re a Medium member, you can read as much as you want from the stories chosen for inclusion. If you haven’t subscribed, you’ll be able to read up to three stories from behind the paywall each month. When you follow the publications, their stories will show up on your personalized Medium homepage, in the Medium app and in your Daily Digest email.

Source: Medium

The LG V30 is the perfect smartphone for vlogging

When LG took the wraps off of the LG V30 at IFA last week, it spent nearly 20 of its 50-minute presentation talking about the phone’s dual camera system. Juno Cho, President of Mobile Communications, rattled off statistics like “almost 80 percent of smartphone users use their smartphone at least once a week to shoot videos.” He also said that “we are literally on the verge of transitioning from storytelling to storyshowing,” which is almost as crazy as Samsung’s new catchphrase: “Your New Normal.” I digress.

Cho is on to something: YouTube, Snapchat and Instagram are proof that amatuer video is massively popular. Having spotted this trend, LG is positioning the V30 as the ideal tool for anyone trying to break into making video. I decided to put LG’s claim to the test and spent some time using the V30 to snap stories for Instagram and Snapchat, plus I took plenty of regular videos with the (amazing) built-in camera app.

Unfortunately the Android versions of Instagram and Snapchat are so bad that I couldn’t see much of a difference between the blotchy stories that were shot on my Xperia X Compact (bad camera) and the blotchy stories shot on the V30 (good camera), so that was out. Instead I decided to narrow my focus to the following three questions: Can you use the V30 to make YouTube videos? Is the V30 a reasonable substitute for a dedicated camera? And is the V30 the best smartphone for making video?

Can you use the V30 to make YouTube videos?

Can you use the V30 to vlog? Can you use the V30 to make YouTube videos even if you’re not vlogging? Yes. This seems like a simple question, and it is: You can use almost any camera to make videos for YouTube, but unfortunately “camera” and “Android phone” are not always compatible. I got the bright idea to vlog with the HTC 10 last year because of that front-facing camera with image stabilization, but HTC’s default app (at the time) allowed videos to dip below 24 frames per second (fps) in low light, and that just looks terrible. It’s fine if a video is dark; it’s not fine if it looks like a simulated drug trip.

The V30’s wide-angle lens is perfect for vlogging.

Is the V30 a reasonable substitute for a dedicated camera?

Luckily my experience with the HTC 10 was not repeated with the V30. In fact, the V30 is the closest thing I’ve seen to a smartphone behaving like a real camera to date. Not only does LG give you control over the really important stuff like white balance and ISO, it also gives you control of shutter speed in video (!) and three options for bitrate (!!!). If you’re someone who knows cameras and has ever tried to use one of the faux manual video apps on many smartphones, this is like being handed a cool glass of water in hell.

And with a couple of exceptions the V30’s camera app does exactly what it says it’s doing, and, this is what I consider necessary for a smartphone to replace a dedicated camera. Not sensor or aperture size or anything like that. The camera has to do what I tell it to do and it has to work all of the time. Then it can replace my real camera.

LG’s manual camera app gives almost total control over video recording.

Despite what LG says on stage, the V30 can’t match cameras with DSLR-sized sensors, if we’re being realistic. A tiny sensor will never produce the bokeh or sensitivity of a sensor of nearly three times the size. But LG gave us something new with the V30: LG-Cine Log. B&H has a lengthy explanation of Log (short for logarithmic) recording, but in a nutshell this mode gives you flat, unsharpened video that’s much better for editing in programs like Premiere and Final Cut. Smartphones may not have the resolving power of larger cameras, but gaining full control over the recording makes the concession far more palatable.

I won’t dwell on Log recording because it is somewhat technical, but one thing is worth noting—and it’s not even clear that LG has this in mind—but for the first time you’ll be able to download and share color profiles with other people in the form of lookup tables or LUTs. Plenty of communities exist for trading and selling LUTs for Sony and Panasonic cameras, and maybe there’s a better colorist out there than the engineers at LG. I look forward to spending $15 on their V30 LUT package on Gumroad.

Smartphones may not have the resolving power of larger cameras, but gaining full control over the recording makes the concession far more palatable.

But of course, nothing’s perfect and neither is the V30. I should disclaim that we’re using pre-production V30s and the camera firmware and software isn’t final. That being said, I did find a couple of strange behaviors with the V30 camera. First, when you plug in an external microphone, the app doesn’t automatically record with it. Instead you have to tap on the microphone icon and set it to record from the headset mic. This is unlike any camera or smartphone I’ve ever used, so this behavior is a bit head-scratcher. Second, something is wrong with 1080p video from the wide angle camera. Again, this is a pre-production model, but the 1080p video from the wide angle camera looks someone set the sharpening and noise reduction to 100 and called it a day.

Is the V30 the best smartphone for making video?

The iPhone 7 Plus and the recently announced Galaxy Note 8 also have dual camera systems, and both take very good video, but their telephoto lenses aren’t a perfect match for what people want to create on YouTube. The tight shots that the telephoto lenses provide are great for interviews and documentary style video, but those aren’t the prevailing formats on YouTube right now. The V30’s combination of wide angle and normal lens open up more popular YouTube formats like vlogging, extreme sports videos, skate videos, and several more. And while the upcoming iPhone announcement could change a lot, the current iPhone 7 series lacks a headphone jack, making it an ordeal to charge and use an external microphone at the same time.

Otherwise it comes down to taste. Video taken on the iPhone, in my opinion, has best-in-class coloring. Samsung’s coloring is fine but looks weird and is hard to post-process because it’s already been pushed pretty far. Not only does the V30 offer Log video that allows you to choose your coloring later, I also think the colors coming out of regular video are very nice.

So can the V30 cut it as your primary video making device? The answer is absolutely yes. Thanks to its versatile dual-camera system the V30 is capable of getting lots of different shots. The camera app itself and the manual video mode within it make the V30 worth considering by itself, and nice perks like the headphone jack and waterproofing set it above devices like the iPhone and the OnePlus 5. Samsung’s “Do What You Can’t” campaign is clearly in love with the idea of empowering content creators, but LG has actually come to the table with the tools content creators need.

Facebook’s widening role in electing Trump

Facebook admitted this week that a Russian propaganda mill used the social media giant’s ad service for political operation around the 2016 campaign. This came out when sources revealed to The Washington Post on Wednesday that Facebook was grilled by 2016 Russia-Trump congressional investigators behind closed doors Wednesday. US lawmakers are furious.

Putin’s propaganda farm bought around $150,000 in political ads from at least June 2015 – May 2017; Facebook was compelled to share the information and will be cooperating with ongoing investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election. The troll farm in question is the Internet Research Agency, a well-funded, well-established, nimble, English-speaking pro-Putin propaganda unit, and the ads are in all likelihood illegal.

What this week’s revelations about Facebook mean is that Facebook ads are now undeniably a form of political campaigning, one with no checks and balances. And people have been taking advantage of this, big time.

The total money spent (that Facebook would admit to) was allegedly responsible for around 3,000 ads with the potential to reach millions of people. Facebook isn’t saying how many people actually saw them.

There were an additional 2,200 ads Facebook said it suspected were also Russia backed; the company has avoided making a positive statement. It’s arguable that the world’s biggest surveillance platform has the data to connect the dots; it simply isn’t doing so for this problem.

Facebook maintains that it is not culpable, only that the buyers violated Facebook’s “inauthentic accounts” rule. The Washington Post wrote:

Facebook discovered the Russian connection as part of an investigation that began this spring looking at purchasers of politically motivated ads, according to people familiar with the inquiry. It found that 3,300 ads had digital footprints that led to the Russian company.

Facebook teams then discovered 470 suspicious and likely fraudulent Facebook accounts and pages that it believes operated out of Russia, had links to the company and were involved in promoting the ads.

The language that Facebook “discovered” this is disingenuous. As if it had no way of monitoring its ad program, and a Russian troll farm blasting propaganda was akin to finding a coin purse someone left under a cushion. Whoa! Who knew, or had any way of knowing? Well, Facebook did.

Pretending otherwise is fool’s errand; no one could be that incompetent at running advertising and metrics and simultaneously have the entire industry in a choke-hold.

Blaming fake accounts

Facebook is working hard and fast to minimize everything about this.

Facebook’s minimizing of the problem, and pretending it’s now fixed — by deleting a few fake accounts — is like minimizing gangrene. As if the accounts belonging to Putin’s Internet Research Agency are a just tiny speck of bad actors and now they’re gone, so phew, rest easy everyone.

The primary talking point is that the accounts have been removed because, by gosh, they violated Facebook’s rules. They “misused the platform” by making fake accounts. Not by actively working against the company’s alleged values around diversity. Or by making racists more racist and fascists feel like they’re so validated that stabbing immigrants to death or mowing anti-racism protesters down with a car is not just a good idea, but the right thing to do.

Facebook said, “… we are exploring several new improvements to our systems for keeping inauthentic accounts and activity off our platform. For example, we are looking at how we can apply the techniques we developed for detecting fake accounts to better detect inauthentic Pages and the ads they may run.”

Cool, so as long as the real accounts of people at Russian or any other propaganda factories are the ones running ads, it’s all good?

In a way, you have to wonder at how Facebook can’t just admit how toxic and monstrous and effective as a tool to manipulate people its advertising really is. Or that, thanks to all its talented engineers and skill at navigating big-picture trends to rake in billions, the company has a hell of a lot to do with why we’re now a nation at war against itself — neo-Nazis murdering people in the streets, immigrant children set for deportation by the hundreds of thousands, our country on the brink of nuclear war, and more, so much more.

Let’s be honest, the trouble is that Facebook’s ads are really effective. Those Facebook “emotional contagion” experiments to make people happy or sad, and then to tell advertisers how to use it to make you do stuff, well that was real and it worked.

Foreign and domestic Trump campaigns

Who else, besides Russian state operatives, was running ads about the same topics, at the exact same time? The Trump campaign.

There is a connection between Russian efforts to influence the election and Facebook ad buys, just as there was the same connection with the Trump campaign, during the same time, with ad content covering the same issues in parallel — race, immigration, LGBT rights, and more. Facebook told The Washington Post that the Russian ads “were directed at people on Facebook who had expressed interest in subjects explored on those pages, such as LGBT community, black social issues, the Second Amendment and immigration.”

The Trump campaign’s Facebook ad strategy — divisive race-fueled messaging on the social network — was so highly successful that The New York Review of Books concluded, “Donald Trump is our first Facebook president.”

Domestic Trump operatives started by 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.

Trump’s team no doubt saw in Facebook’s ad platform the same things that Putin’s propaganda mill had already learned to love. They used Facebook’s ad 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. “They understood that some numbers matter more than others,” NYRB explained. “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.”

In light of this week’s revelations Trump’s Facebook ads deserve a closer look. Like the one that intended to stir anger about mistreatment of US veterans — but depicted Russian veterans.

You have to wonder how a mistake like that is made. It’s easy to wonder if it was an ad made by a Russian house and its pool of files, where topics have stock images labeled by campaign, and if even more of the misapplied images in Trump’s Facebook ads came from an organization that used the same ones for the same topics, too.

It’s more urgent to know if it was an ad run by both foreign and domestic Trump Facebook ad campaigns, because that would surely be something.

Facebook could tell us more about what was in those ads and when — like if both the domestic Trump campaign, and the Russian Trump campaign were coordinated in messaging — but it won’t. It could also tell us who was targeted with what, where, and when, but it hasn’t.

The “tip of the iceberg”

Thursday Sen. Mark Warner told press that Facebook’s disclosure was just the “tip of the iceberg.” Warner reminded everyone that when Facebook was first called out on all this in late 2016 during the election, the social media giant told us a very different story. Speaking Thursday, at the Intelligence & National Security Summit in Washington Warner said “the first reaction from Facebook was: ‘Well you’re crazy, there’s nothing going on’ — well, we find yesterday there actually was something going on.”

In this week’s PR spin coming from Facebook, we’re hearing a lot about fake accounts and false personas, and things that happen (parenthetically) outside Facebook. We’re given the impression that Facebook has no accountability or role in this other than racing to the rescue to protect its users. The same users it sells out to Facebook’s real customers, its advertisers. Or more specifically, anyone with enough money to rank high in its class system of ad buyers.

“It’s not my fault” — aka hiding behind “we got rid of the fake accounts” — doesn’t cut it anymore, and it actually never did. That’s what we keep hearing neo-Nazis say to press when they march in American streets. They just showed up, we can’t control who joins us, he acted alone, they were fake accounts, our ads don’t really swing opinion into action.

These are things America’s neo-Nazis say when members of their groups attack and kill innocent people in the name of racism, in the name of what we know was in those foreign and domestic Facebook ads served up to the very people who would be most receptive to them. People who, thanks to Facebook’s fragmenting and dangerous “filter bubbles” and coddling of Holocaust denial has people retreating from meaningful debate and hunkering down into ideological bunkers.

Facebook has a role in this and it’s ugly. Even as they dance around it and pretend there’s no connection, or that what little they’ll admit to is somehow not a big deal. It’s a huge deal.

How can Facebook truly combat this? Auditing and legitimate transparency would be a starting point. So, you know, don’t hold your breath.

In an “Information Operations Update” Thursday, Facebook’s Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos wrote at length about fake accounts, trying harder to tie its advertising propaganda problem to an abuse problem that is only peripherally related.

Stamos wrote, “We have shared our findings with US authorities investigating these issues, and we will continue to work with them as necessary.”

As necessary, indeed.

We have contacted Facebook for comment and will update this article in the event of a response.

Images: REUTERS/Stephen Lam (Mark Zuckerberg); REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst (Donald Trump); Steve Marcus / Reuters (Alex Stamos, Facebook CSO)

US carriers partner on a better mobile authentication system

Two-factor authentication (2FA) via SMS and a smartphone provides a heavy dose of additional security for your data, but as the US government declared last year, it’s not without its flaws. To fix that, the big four US mobile operators, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T have formed a coalition called the Mobile Authentication Taskforce to come up with a new system. Working with app developers and others, they’ll explore the use of SIM card recognition, network-based authentication, geo-location, and other carrier-specific capabilities.

The idea is to marry current 2FA with systems that “reduce mobile identity risks by analyzing data and activity patterns on a mobile network to predict, with a high degree of certainty, whether the user is who they say they are,” according to the news release.

The problem with SMS authentication is that skilled hackers have successfully hijacked SMS codes in the past, often simply by contacting the carrier and impersonating the victim. It also falls apart if thieves grab your smartphone along with your PC, gain access to your phone via malware, or just steal a glance at a 2FA message on your lockscreen.

Through strong collaboration, the taskforce announced today has the potential to create impactful benefits for US customers by helping to decrease fraud and identity theft, and increase trust in online transactions.

The system will be an open one that can work the four carriers and others. “We will be working closely with the taskforce to ensure this solution is aligned and interoperable with solutions deployed by operators,” said Alex Sinclair, CTO of mobile industry group GSMA.

The goal to improve 2FA security sounds like a noble one, but Congress, at the urging of carriers and ISPs, recently eliminated certain customer privacy protection rules. As such, consumer protection groups might have concerns about 2FA systems that could be used by operators to track customers, for example.

The new system is supposed to arrive for “enterprises and customers in 2018,” the group says. In the meantime, if you’re still not using two-factor authentication (SMS or otherwise), you really, really should be.

Source: AT&T

Facebook and Instagram are home to the new ‘Club Mickey Mouse’ show

The show that gave us Ryan Gosling, Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake and Annette Funicello is getting retooled for modern audiences. Except instead of Club Mickey Mouse broadcasting on Disney Channel, like Mickey Mouse Club did before it, the show will stream exclusively on Facebook and Instagram, according to Variety. What’s more, the show’s first year will be sponsored by Hewlett Packard, with around 70 minutes of video per week.

“This isn’t about a 22-minute episode released once a week,” Disney’s Andrew Sugerman told Variety. “It’s a digital-first variety program that celebrates everything that was done in the original programs, but presenting [it] in the way that it’s consumed by today’s Gen Z audiences.”

Meaning, through Boomerangs, Facebook Live videos and Instagram Stories. With Facebook expected to drop $1 billion on original video next year, you can expect to see more like this. Will the social network help find the next Baby Goose? Only time will tell.

Source: Variety

MacRumors Giveaway: Win Custom-Painted Black AirPods From BlackPods

For this week’s giveaway, we’ve once again teamed up with BlackPods to offer MacRumors readers a chance to win a pair of AirPods that have been painted black to better match darker devices. Our last BlackPods giveaway was one of the most popular we’ve done, so we thought we’d get a second pair of BlackPods out to one of you.

If you missed our first giveaway, BlackPods takes a set of Apple’s AirPods and then paints them using a proprietary coating system that’s been designed just for the AirPods. It uses a three-phase finishing procedure for a high-quality finish, and each pair of BlackPods is completed by hand and given a “rigorous” quality inspection.

BlackPods sells the BlackPods Classic in a high-gloss black finish, and the BlackPods Stealth in a matte satin finish. The company charges $279 for the BlackPods Classic, while the BlackPods Stealth are priced at $299. Apple’s AirPods are normally priced at $159, so that’s a $120 to $140 premium, but the finish is impeccable and is otherwise unobtainable.

Along with selling finished sets of painted AirPods, BlackPods also allows customers to send previously purchased AirPods for customization. The painting service costs $99 for glossy black and $119 for matte black. The process takes approximately 10 days and covers both the AirPods and the Case.

BlackPods are simply re-painted AirPods, so the functionality is the same as standard AirPods directly from Apple, with a W1 chip for simple pairing, long battery life, accelerometer-based ear detection, and gesture support.

We have one full set of BlackPods to give away to a MacRumors reader, with the winner able to choose either the Stealth or Classic finish. 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 (September 8) at 11:00 a.m. Pacific Time through 11:00 a.m. Pacific Time on September 15. The winner will be chosen randomly on September 15 and will be contacted by email. The winner will have 48 hours to respond and provide a shipping address before a new winner is chosen.

Tags: giveaway, AirPods
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TouchArcade iOS Gaming Roundup: Reigns: Her Majesty, Final Fantasy XV, Armello, and More

This week over on TouchArcade has been all about playing catch up after attending PAX West in Seattle. If you’ve never been to a PAX event, and are at all into any aspect of gamer culture, I promise you’ll have a very good time there. Whether you’re into card games, board games, video games, or any other form of gaming you’ll find something there for you. It’s really sort of incredible just how welcoming PAX events are, and how much there is to do. For our purposes, the show floor was packed with mobile games, even though mobile was by no means the star of the show.

We loved the original Reigns and have been closely following the development of its sequel, Reigns: Her Majesty. We got a walkthrough of the game with its creator, and the sequel is shaping up to be exactly what we wanted: More Reigns. This time around you play as a queen, there are loads more cards, and there’s a zodiac system which puts a unique spin on every new play through. It sounds like there are many other secrets and discoveries to be made while playing, but they’re keeping those things close to their chest until the game is released.

Hidden deep inside of the Square Enix booth at PAX was a playable version of Final Fantasy XV: Pocket Edition which we spent a good twenty minutes with. The game is everything we’d hoped it would be, and the first playable episode seems surprisingly one to one with the “full” console version of the game. All of the dialog is there, the quests seem the same, the level-up system feels identical, and overall it looks as if they’re delivering on the promise of having a full-featured version of Final Fantasy XV for mobile. Details are still few and far between regarding when it’ll specifically be released, but, it’s going to be a premium episodic game with the first taste that we played given away for free.

Armello is a digital board game that has had a fascinating lifecycle so far. It was originally pitched as an iPad game back in 2011, but when the game was finally finished it ended up being released on Steam and consoles. The pivot to other platforms turned out incredibly well for developer League of Geeks, who have continued to release loads of additional content for the title. At PAX we experienced one of the things that’s the most fun about covering mobile: When a developer just says, “Hey, check this out,” and pulls a game out of their pocket. It’d seem Armello is finally on its way to iOS, even if it is a good six years late. The game has been received so well on other platforms, at this point I’m just excited to finally have it on my iPhone.

We saw tons more games at PAX, so if following upcoming iOS titles is something you’re in to, check out our full roundup post for links to everything we saw.

For years now, it’s felt like Wizards of the Coast has been struggling to figure out what to do with digital versions of Magic the Gathering. Magic Duels was the last attempt, and while we had overall positive first impressions, the game ended up with a unique problem: Due to design decisions and deck limitations, Duels ended up being too casual for hardcore Magic players and too hardcore for casual Magic players. It never seemed to find its audience, and support for the game was dropped this summer.

Yesterday, Wizards revealed Magic the Gathering Arena, which seems to double down on providing a “real” Magic experience while making a client that looks exponentially nicer than Magic Online. This hopefully should allow Wizards to regain some ground in the Twitch viewing and esports department that Hearthstone has stolen away. While the beta is currently only available on PC, they’ve stressed that it’s built in Unity and will be coming to every platform that makes sense — making a Mac and mobile release feel unbelievably inevitable.

Speaking of Hearthstone and esports, this week Blizzard announced a brand new venue called the “Blizzard Arena” in Los Angeles which is said to be a “cutting-edge, live-event destination.” There aren’t a ton of details yet on what the Blizzard Arena is going to be like, but if nothing else it’s pretty incredible that we’re living in an age where video games are getting popular enough that companies are building entire stadiums to host their games being played as esports. If you thought this whole “esports” thing was a fad, well, this is one of the (many) nails in the coffin of that line of thinking.

In Pokemon Go news, Niantic is hinting at both Pokemon trading and peer to peer battling coming to the game. The interview with Bloomberg details the vision for the future of the game, which I’ve got to admit, sounds pretty awesome. That being said, while I realize the game is still very popular, I as well as everyone I know locally eventually ended up getting bored of it and stopped playing. I’d love to see a parallel universe where Pokemon Go had simply launched with all of these features they see in their “vision.” I bet it would be significantly more popular than it is now, as Niantic allowed way too many people to get tired of the early game where there really wasn’t anything else to do beyond wander around, catch Pokemon, and participate in gym battles.

A ton more happened this week in the world of mobile gaming, but most of my time was consumed with PAX. Definitely check out our PAX roundup, and for way more news, reviews, game releases, and everything else you’d ever need to follow along with iOS gaming be sure to visit TouchArcade!

Tag: TouchArcade gaming roundup
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