‘Yakuza 6’ makes Tokyo’s red-light district virtually real

I’m a relatively late fan of Sega’s famed Yakuza franchise. It was the 2015 ‘prequel’, Yakuza 0 on the PS4, that got me hooked: it was the series’ first title to be localized in Chinese, which helped me understand its rich storyline on the humble beginnings of series protagonist, Kazuma Kiryu, and his strangely charming acquaintance, Goro Majima.

What also fascinated me about these open-world games was how most of it was based on Tokyo’s Kabukicho and Osaka’s Dotonbori, often with incredible attention to detail.

For Yakuza 6: The Song of Life due on April 17th, the game is once again set in the Kabukicho-like Kamurocho, with a second stage set in a part of Hiroshima, where Kiryu would eventually stumble upon a big secret later on.

I’ve yet to make it to Hiroshima in real life, but during one of my recent trips to Tokyo, I decided to swing by Shinjuku to see how closely Sega’s realization stands up. With very real restaurants, hotels and attractions digitized in high-detail, it’s occasionally uncanny.

This neighbornood is pretty much where the main story line starts for each game in the series. The signage for this Kamurocho Tenkaichi Street shares a familiar design with the real one for Kabukicho Ichibangai in Shinjuku, Tokyo. Note the barrage of signs, lighting tiny windows and scattered traffic cones and bikes. The latter two might double as weapons, but Tokyo IRL has ’em everywhere too.

Here’s Kamurocho Tenkaichi Street (or Kabukicho Ichibangai) as viewed from the other side. You can see the same lamp post design in both worlds, and even spot the fictional Shokichi Camera electronics store across the road in the far end, which is actually a Labi — also an electronics chain — in real life. Even though Labi is missing out on this marketing opportunity, the Yakuza team still applied a similar design to the fake store logo, possibly just for giggles.

Don Quijote aka Donki is a well-known discount chain store in Japan, and it’s been featured in the Yakuza series since its first release (and it started selling the games as well since the second instalment). Think Pikachu onesies, rice cookers, bikes, headphones, matcha-flavored Kit-Kats and sex toys, all in one place. Part of the store layout here in the game was surprisingly similar to what I saw in real life, though the game only offers one floor to explore. The Yakuza series isn’t the only game franchise to replicate Tokyo in detail: Persona 5 somehow managed to recreate the chaos of Shibuya, train station and all, faithfully. It didn’t however, have the brand clout that Yakuza apparently wields.

Real Japanese eateries such as Sushi Zanmai and Cafe Pronto are dotted around the game as well, though you might not find them at the same locations in the real world. Kiryu can also get a membership at fitness chain, Rizap, in order to boost his various stats — and gets his own “before” and “after” montage in the process.

It’s also worth pointing out that you can buy items that exist in real life, mainly beverages (Suntory is also a long-time collaborator since the first release) and medicines. Kiryu even uses a Sony Xperia XZ, which is a nice upgrade from his old featurephone — at least he can take selfies now.

Another iconic brand dotted around the game is Karaoke Kan, which has been featured since Yakuza 3. Again, the similarity is very impressive, to say the least. You can actually walk in and play a karaoke-themed game to let Kiryu practise his deep voice.

The fictional Nakamichi Street also closely resembles the real Kabuki Central Road. You can see certain building design elements kept in the digital world.

Alas, Japanese convenience store FamilyMart didn’t participate in the tie-in, but the game still placed a fictional Poppo store in the same spot here at one end of Pink Street. Speaking of, Yakuza 6 is the first title in the series that lets you walk seamlessly into and out of stores and restaurants. Just try not to bring your fights into those establishments, they don’t like that. (Although there’s a special move that involves the shop assistant helping beat the thugs with a microwave — really.)

Yakuza 6’s Kamurocho has a fancy Kamuro Theater complex in the middle, which parrots Kabukicho’s Shinjuku Toho Building, a site most famous for its massive Godzilla head that roars and spits steam nine times a day. The inside, however, is less interesting than the real deal.

Here’s the side of Kamuro Theater / Shinjuku Toho Building facing Nakamichi Street / Kabuki Central Road. Again, note how the game has preserved some of the building designs plus signage layouts. The size and scale is spot-on.

The APA Hotel in the game is a tad bigger than the one in real life (which is right by VR Zone Shinjuku, by the way), but it’s otherwise an impressive copy that’s hard to miss.

Last but not least, here’s a snapshot of the fictional East Shichifuku Street, which features a near-identical outdoor car park with familiar-looking billboards promoting nearby… venues. Having had many strangers approaching me to solicit “business” there in the real world, I much prefer the quieter street in the game.

Thanks to the simultaneous Chinese launches in Hong Kong, where I’m based, I picked up Yakuza 6 well ahead of the Western launch, which is now penned for mid-April. That’s OK, because the localization is well worth the wait for such a story-heavy series; you definitely won’t want to skip the emotional cinematics — or the appearance of Beat Takeshi.

Mat Smith, the man who introduced me to Donki, also contributed to this article.

BBC game helps kids lead the fight against fake news

The BBC wants the news consumers of tomorrow to understand and identify fake news, and has launched a game to help them do exactly that. The game, called BBC iReporter, puts young people in the shoes of a newbie BBC journalist about to break their first news story. Players must make all kinds of journalistic choices in pursuit of their scoop. Which sources should they trust? Where should they go to check their facts? Their objective, just like real journalists, is to deliver a tight, credible story against the clock, or face the wrath of their editor.

The BBC announced its youth-focused fake news-fighting initiative last year. Its ambition, clearly, is to equip kids with the skills they need to make sensible judgement calls on the media they consume. Right now, fake news is causing ripples both online and in the real world — undoubtedly a more informed future generation will help to mitigate that.

The game, developed by animation studio Aardman, launches today on BBC School Report News Day, which sees journalists and editors head into schools around the UK to share their skills, hold workshops and give students a behind-the-scenes look at the workings of a fast-paced media company.

Source: BBC

Leaked Amazon figures show TV drives millions of Prime signups

Amazon is notoriously secretive about its sales figures, from how many Kindles it has sold to how many subscribers pay for Prime. Reuters is reporting that it has obtained leaked documents that, if true, will shed plenty of light on at least one part of Amazon’s business — Prime Video. If you thought Amazon was keeping quiet because its projects were flops, think again, because some of its shows are actually more popular than some of the fare you’ll find on basic cable.

The documents purportedly claim that the first season of Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle was watched by 8 million people in the US. That’s better than the last few episodes of AMC’s The Walking Dead, which posted ratings of 6.8 million for its most recent episode. Now, basic cable ratings are more volatile — TWD’s mid-season opener had 8.3 million — but Amazon’s intent here is a little different to AMC.

Since the only way for folks to watch High Castle is to subscribe to Prime, if Amazon can encourage more people to sign up than it cost to make the show, then it’s a winner. And, according to the report, 1.15 million people chose to sign up to Amazon’s subscription service to watch the show.

According to people familiar with the matter, Amazon considers the first Prime Video show you watch as one of the reasons you signed up. The company then essentially works out how many other people did the same, divided by its budget, to work out a cost per signup for each show. Another example in the report is The Grand Tour, which the company believes compelled 1.5 million people to sign up at a cost of $49 per subscriber.

The company’s eye for more highbrow fare does appear not to have paid off particularly well on this first stream basis. Awards may generate attention, but it doesn’t seem to translate into ratings (or signup) gold for shows like Transparent. The third season of the family drama scored a respectable 1.3 million views, putting it on a par with HBO shows that aren’t called Game of Thrones. Good Girls Revolt had 1.6 million views, but only 52,000 people signed up because of it, which explains why Amazon killed it after a year.

Now, all of this should be taken with a pinch of salt, but many of the facts here do seem to pass a sniff test of reasonability. If this is how Amazon is looking at its video strategy, then it makes sense that the company would be desperate to find the next Game of Thrones. It also explains the somewhat baffling logic of spending the better part of a billion dollars on a new Lord of the Rings TV series — if only because the movies already fill that niche. But if it can encourage five or six million Tolkien fans to sign up, then the show will be hailed as a success, even if that’s a pretty big if.

Source: Reuters

Tech giants like Google and Alibaba are working to save endangered species

Google, eBay and other technology leaders are aiming to protect the world’s animals. Why? In a widely unregulated social-media world, many tech platforms have become a haven for the wildlife black market, a $20 billion industry.

The sale of illegal animal goods — from ivory to exotic pets — is the fourth-largest criminal global trade industry behind narcotics, counterfeiting and human trafficking, according to Traffic, a wildlife-trade-monitoring network. In the past decade, the sale of these goods and species has moved from illicit backroom dealings in stores to apps and online shopping ads.

Now, 21 tech giants from North America, Europe, Asia and Africa are taking a stand as the first businesses to join the Global Coalition to End Wildlife Trafficking Online, which has issued a pledge to reduce this illegal trade online by 80 percent by 2020.

The coalition is spearheaded by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Traffic and the International Fund for Animal Welfare. They’ll collaborate directly with these tech companies in drawing up action plans to take on trafficking threats and offering staff trainings to pinpoint illegal sales.

Giovanna Grein, program officer for wildlife crime for Traffic at WWF, said this will happen in two phases. First, companies will share what they have learned about addressing specific trade threats so they can learn from one another. Then, each company will develop a plan for its sites or apps.

“Law enforcement alone cannot police the open web globally due to the sheer scale of online trade and their limited resources,” Crawford Allan, senior director for wildlife crime at Traffic at WWF, told Engadget. “We realized if the companies can remove ads before they are posted or can look out for organized criminals that they can report to law enforcement, this will really help tackle the problem rapidly.”

Allan said this coalition is the first of its kind, especially among companies that would traditionally be seen as competitors. Beyond Google and Alibaba, organizations that have joined the coalition are Baidu, Baixing, eBay, Etsy, Facebook, Huaxia Collection, Instagram, Kuaishou, Mall for Africa, Microsoft, Pinterest, Qyer, Ruby Lane, Shengshi Collection, Tencent, Wen Wan Tian Xia, Zhongyikupai, Zhuanzhuan and 58 Group.

When they asked these companies to be part of the coalition, WWF, Traffic and IFAW laid out the issues around wildlife trade and the role of these sites in facilitating illegal trade and explained how the companies can combat this activity by setting up closed-door workshops among the businesses. You might assume it would be a challenge to corral all these competitors, but Allan said they were all willing to confront the issue as an industry.

Officials stand by a one-horned rhinoceros that was killed and de-horned by poachers in Kaziranga India, 2017.

From the tech perspective, this coalition builds on efforts to fight illegal trafficking online. Mike Carson, eBay’s senior manager of global policy and regulatory management, told Engadget the retail site established a global ivory ban back in 2008. It has been working to flag and scrub listings from criminal traders, and said 45,000 illegal wildlife listings were blocked or removed last year alone.

Carson said eBay had been working with WWF, Traffic and IFAW to train employees. He said he is looking forward to working with industry peers to combat the trade, but said there’s always room for improvement: eBay will build on these policies through the coalition and “define a set of areas” where wildlife trafficking seems to be most prevalent on the site.

A big part of the coalition’s work will be to educate consumers about the importance of avoiding goods like ivory that were most likely the result of illegal poaching, Carson said.

Carved pieces of confiscated ivory before being crushed in New York, 2015.

“There should be a negative stigma attached to the purchase and sale of illegal wildlife products, just as there is for other illegal items like drugs or weapons,” he added.

Consumer awareness is key, said Susan Lieberman, vice president of international policy at the Wildlife Conservation Society, which isn’t part of the coalition.

“You aren’t going to a shopping mall — you are buying from the comfort of home, rather anonymously. When people are home on their computers there needs to be more awareness raised among the average customer,” she said. “The customer needs to know that it is illegal. When companies start these awareness campaigns, it’s not about nice brochures but making sure people can’t even find these items to begin with. You have to make it harder for [traders].”

She said shoppers who have doubts about an item’s provenance should just not buy it — something like a rhino horn should be a no-brainer.

Lieberman has spent 30 years monitoring wildlife trade, and said that in the past governments could target brick-and-mortar shops selling illegal goods, but internet has led to something of a free-for-all.

She said she doesn’t think tech companies have done enough in the past to put an end to this, but this coalition is a step in the right direction.

“Social media has just made it easy — too easy — for this kind of illegal activity. Good things are easier, too, but we just need to make sure it is extremely hard for people to buy and sell endangered species,” Lieberman added.

Allan believes once companies start stepping up enforcement on their platforms, criminals will move more of their operations to the “dark web,” which will hopefully shrink their audience and stem sales.

It might be impossible to make this criminal activity go extinct, but the coalition is a step in the right direction of saving some of the Earth’s most precious species.

Images: Barcroft Media via Getty Images (Rhino); Brendan McDermid / Reuters (Carved ivory)

Documents Reveal 26 Million U.S. Viewers Tuned into Amazon Prime Video in Early 2017

Amazon’s U.S. audience for all movie and TV show programming on Amazon Prime Video was about 26 million customers in early 2017, according to company documents seen by Reuters.

Amazon Prime Video is provided as a benefit to Amazon Prime members who subscribe to Amazon’s $99 per year Prime service, and features thousands of TV shows and movies, along with original content produced by Amazon.

Amazon has never revealed figures for its total Prime Video audience, but the documents provide an insight into the success of Amazon’s successful original programming strategy, which involves producing content to entice consumers into Prime membership and boost merchandise sales.

For example, the documents cover late 2014 to early 2017 and compare metrics for 19 shows exclusive to Amazon, including cost, viewership and the number of people they helped lure to Prime. Known as Prime Originals, the shows account for around a quarter of what analysts believe to be total Prime sign-ups over the same period.

Video has grown to be one of Amazon’s biggest expenditures at $5 billion per year for original and licensed content, two people familiar with the matter said. The company has never disclosed how many subscribers it won as a result, making it hard for investors to evaluate its programming decisions.

The internal documents show what Amazon considers to be the financial logic of its strategy, and why the company is now making more commercial projects in addition to high-brow shows aimed at winning awards, the people said.

According to the documents, season one of alternate history drama “The Man in the High Castle”, which is based on Philip K Dick novel, had 8 million U.S. viewers as of early 2017. The program cost $72 million in production and marketing, and attracted 1.15 million new subscribers worldwide.

Amazon’s accounting reveals that the show drew new Prime members at an average cost of $63 per subscriber. A Prime subscription costs $99, while Prime members often go on to buy more goods from Amazon than other consumers. The documents also reveal that Amazon drew over 5 million people globally into its Prime subscription membership by the beginning of the 2017.

Apple announced Amazon Prime for Apple TV last summer, but owners of the set-top box had to wait six months for the service to eventually drop. Amazon Prime Video supports Apple’s centralized TV app, meaning users can use Siri Universal Search to find Amazon Prime Video content, and add it to their “Up Next” queue of shows and movies.

Tags: Amazon, Amazon Prime Video, Amazon Prime
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How to Set Up Medical ID on Your iPhone

Medical ID is a built-in feature of your iPhone’s Health app that gives ambulance crews and other emergency first responders fast access to potentially life-saving information about any allergies or medical conditions you have, even if your iPhone is locked.

Even if you don’t suffer from any health conditions, it’s still worth enabling Medical ID, because it can also provide other vital information about you to emergency services, such as your blood type and who to contact in an emergency. This article shows you how to set up Medical ID in iOS 11.

How to Set Up Your Medical ID in iOS 11

Launch the Health app on your iPhone. (If you’re using an iPhone 6s or later, firmly press the Health app icon to jump straight to the Medical ID via 3D Touch and skip the next step.)

Tap Medical ID at the bottom of the screen.
If you’re in the U.S., you can opt to register as an organ donor with Donate Life America by tapping the option at the bottom of the Medical ID screen. If you don’t want to register, or you’re outside the U.S., simply skip this step.
Tap the Edit button at the top right of the screen.

Under Emergency Access, toggle the Show When Locked switch to the On position. Make sure you perform this step, otherwise emergency services won’t be able to access your Medical ID.
Start adding information to your Medical ID card. Apart from your name and date of birth, the other types of information you can add in this section include medical conditions and medical notes, allergies and reactions, medications, blood type, organ donor status, weight, and height. (Note that information added to your Medical ID isn’t included in your Health Data or shared with other apps.)
Under Emergency Contacts, tap the green plus sign to add someone from your Contacts list. (You can add several people, but bear in mind that if you use the Emergency SOS feature on your iPhone’s lock screen, all emergency contacts receive a message alerting them of the SOS and your location.)

For each emergency contact you add, select an option from the list that best describes your relationship to that person, e.g. “father” or “doctor”.
Tap Done in the top right of the screen when you’re finished.If you decide against keeping a Medical ID record, the Edit mode includes a Delete Medical ID option at the very bottom of the screen.

Accessing Medical ID on a Locked iPhone 8 or Earlier

Press the Home button on the iPhone to activate the passcode screen.

Tap Emergency in the bottom left corner of the passcode screen.

Tap Medical ID in the bottom left corner of the Emergency keypad screen.

Note: If the Apple handset doesn’t have a Home button, swipe up with your finger from the bottom of the screen to trigger the passcode screen, or use the alternative method for accessing Medical ID below.

Accessing Medical ID on a Locked iPhone X or Later

Simultaneously press and hold the Side (power) button on the right and the Volume Up button on the left of the handset.
Swipe rightwards across the Medical ID slider. You can also access the Medical ID on Apple Watch: Press and hold the side button and drag the Medical ID slider to the right.

Related Roundup: iOS 11Tag: health
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European Regulators Set April 23 Deadline to Decide on Apple’s Proposed Shazam Acquisition

The European Commission today announced it has set a provisional deadline of April 23 to decide on Apple’s proposed acquisition of Shazam.

Last month, the regulatory body said it would consider whether Apple’s purchase of the popular music identification service may lead to a significant adverse effect on competition in Europe, after Austria, France, Iceland, Italy, Norway, Spain, and Sweden requested the deal be assessed under European Union merger law.

The European Commission didn’t specify how the deal could hurt competition, but Shazam does have partnerships with European companies like Spotify that could be affected by the acquisition. However, it’s standard for major acquisitions to be subject to review, so the deal will likely be approved without any scrutiny.

Apple announced its plans to acquire Shazam in December in a statement provided to MacRumors and other publications:

We are thrilled that Shazam and its talented team will be joining Apple. Since the launch of the App Store, Shazam has consistently ranked as one of the most popular apps for iOS. Today, it’s used by hundreds of millions of people around the world, across multiple platforms. Apple Music and Shazam are a natural fit, sharing a passion for music discovery and delivering great music experiences to our users. We have exciting plans in store, and we look forward to combining with Shazam upon approval of today’s agreement.

Shazam is a popular service that can identify the name and lyrics of songs, music videos, TV shows, and more. It has apps across iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Mac, and iMessage, while the service has been built into Siri since iOS 8. The app is also integrated with streaming music services like Apple Music and Spotify.

In addition to Shazam, Apple this week announced it plans to acquire digital magazine subscription service Texture to be integrated into Apple News.

Via: Reuters

Tags: European Commission, Shazam
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Researchers Uncover macOS and Safari Exploits at Pwn2Own 2018

The eighteenth annual CanSecWest security conference is underway in downtown Vancouver, Canada, where researchers are competing in the 11th Pwn2Own computer hacking contest for over $2 million in prizes.

Day one results have already been published over at the Zero Day Initiative website, with a couple of successful Mac-related exploits already appearing in the list of achievements.

Image via Zero Day Initiative
Samuel Groß of phoenhex returned to Pwn2Own to successfully hack Apple’s desktop Safari browser. Groß used a JIT optimization bug in Safari, a macOS logic bug, and a kernel overwrite to execute code to successfully exploit the browser, earning himself $65,000 and six points towards Master of Pwn. The exploit also caused a text-based message to appear on a MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar.

The achievement harks back to Groß’s similar success at last year’s event, where he targeted Safari with an escalation to root on macOS that allowed him and Niklas Baumstark to scroll a message on a MacBook Pro Touch Bar, earning them $28,000.

Another Safari exploit at Pwn2Own 2018 was initiated by Richard Zhu, who managed to bypass iPhone 7 security protocols with the help of two Safari bugs at November’s Pwn2Own mobile event. However, this time Zhu failed to get his exploit chain working within the allotted 30-minute time limit.

Richard Zhu at Pwn2Own 2018 (Image via ZDI)
Unfazed, Zhu returned to wow the crowd with a Microsoft Edge exploit that used two use-after-free (UAF) bugs in the browser and an integer overflow in the kernel to successfully run his code with elevated privileges. The dramatic effort against the ticking clock earned him $70,000 and seven points towards Master of Pwn.

Apple representatives have attended the Pwn2Own contest in the past, and affected parties are made aware of all security vulnerabilities discovered during the contest so that they can be patched in future software updates.

The participating teams earned a total of $162,000 in prizes on day one, and the event resulted in three Apple bugs, two Oracle bugs, and three Microsoft bugs. Pwn2Own day two begins today at 10:00 a.m. Pacific and will involve additional exploit attempts against macOS and Safari.

Tag: Pwn2Own
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Pocket Introduces Time Estimates for Articles and Videos in iOS App

The developers behind read-it-later service Pocket this week announced a new update for iOS and Android that will give users a simple but useful glimpse into how long each article will take them to read. After updating to version 6.6.16 on the iOS App Store, the Pocket app for iPhone and iPad will display time estimates “for every article and video” that has been saved.

The time estimates will be located below the titles of each saved piece of content, to the right of the URL. At launch, time estimates are available on devices set to English, but the Pocket team said that it plans to add support for more languages “in the near future.” The developer is also working on introducing time estimates to Pocket for Web down the line.

You’ve told us that it would be helpful to know how long it takes to start and finish each item in your list, and now you can! When you open Pocket on your phone or tablet, you’ll see time estimates for every article and video you’ve saved, right below the title.

So the next time you have 3 minutes waiting for an appointment, 10 minutes on your commute, or are unwinding on the couch after a long day, open up Pocket and find a story that suits your moment.

Pocket is a service available across multiple platforms that lets users save any web page to revisit later, be it an article, video, recipe, shopping item, or other similar pieces of content. This way, users can save an article on Safari for iOS using the Share Sheet extension, and then look at it a few days later on the Mac app, even when they’re offline.

Just over one year ago Pocket was acquired by Mozilla, and at the time Mozilla stated that the Pocket would become a wholly owned subsidiary of Mozilla Corporation and part of the Mozilla open source project. Mozilla said that Pocket’s core employees and technology would help accelerate its Context Graph initiative, while promoting the discovery and accessibility of high quality web content.

One of Pocket’s biggest rivals in the read-it-later app space is Instapaper, which itself was acquired by Pinterest in 2016.

Pocket is available for free on the iOS App Store. [Direct Link]

Tag: Pocket
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Nest Now Shipping ‘Hello’ Smart Doorbell With Night-Vision Camera and Two-Way Audio

Nest has begun shipping the Hello, a smart doorbell that’s capable of streaming 160 degree HD live video from your door directly to your phone.

First announced back in September, the $229 doorbell device can take a photo of a person standing on your doorstep before the bell is even rung, and also supports two-way audio so you can speak with them.

The doorbell features a 3-megapixel camera with infrared night vision and records 1,600 × 1,200 video at 30 frames per second. The Hello also has a 160-degree field of view, and is 802.11 a/b/g/n Wi-Fi compatible. It stores up to three hours of video out of the box, with additional storage available by taking up a Nest Aware subscription.

In addition to shipping Hello orders via its online store, Nest also announced it is now shipping the $249 Nest x Yale Lock, a tamper-proof deadbolt front door lock with touchpad that connects to the Nest app. The touchpad means owners can give people they trust a passcode instead of a key for entry, and the door it’s attached to can be locked and unlocked wirelessly.

Lastly, Nest also revealed that it is now taking pre-orders for its new wireless external temperature sensors for the Nest Learning Thermostat and Thermostat E. Owners can add up to six of the battery-powered, inch-wide sensors, each of which cost $39, or $99 for a three-pack. Nest also says it plans to bundle its thermostats with the temperature sensors after they officially hit stores in April.

Nest products don’t integrate with Apple’s HomeKit setup, but are popular competing connected home solutions. See the Nest website for more details.

Tag: Nest
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