‘Skye’ exists in the soothing space between ‘Spyro’ and ‘Journey’

In the midst of all the neon pixels, gun blasts, stylized narrative adventures and action-packed space romps scattered around the Indie Megabooth at GDC, Skye immediately caught my eye. It was crisp and bright, showcasing a rich fantasy world in a soft, cartoonish 3D style. Something about it was soothing at first sight — perhaps it was the way the main character, a bright blue dragon, soared around the valley like a serpentine kite. Maybe it was the lush green grass draped over the landscape and its series of floating islands.

Whatever the reason, this is precisely the vibe that Skye developers at Puny Astronaut are going for: Eye-catching calm. And, so far, they’re succeeding.

Here’s how Puny Astronaut describes Skye on the back of the game’s information card: “Glide through a gentle and charming world that couldn’t be happier to see you.” And it’s true — in Skye, there are no evil monsters out to destroy the world, no weapons to find, no traps to avoid and no enemies to slaughter. In fact, there’s no way to lose Skye at all. This is a hug in video game form.

The game itself involves traversing the land as a flying dragon, playing with giant suspended pianos, solving puzzles, soaring through fields of flowers and chatting with the townsfolk. Some of them need assistance tending their farms or selling their wares, and players can help out as they investigate the valley.

Skye employs just a handful of simple controls. For example, playing with an Xbox gamepad, press the right trigger and the dragon gets a burst of speed; press Y and he lets out a cute cooing noise that helps investigate the surrounding area.

None of this would work if Skye weren’t a visually pleasing game — half of its intrigue stems from the bright, striking art style, and little details that make the world feel mysterious and open at the same time.

Puny Astronaut is a small studio based in Dundee, Scotland, which means it has a high-profile neighbor — 4J Studios, the company that put Minecraft on consoles. 4J caught sight of Skye early on and it’s invested a six-figure sum into Puny Astronaut, allowing the team to overhaul their original code and create a fully fledged title for Xbox One, Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4. Developers aren’t committed to a concrete release date yet, but they’re eyeing late 2019.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from GDC 2018!

Making sense of the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica nightmare

Over the weekend, a series of bombshell reports from The New York Times, The Observer and The Guardian told the story of Cambridge Analytica (CA) and how it harvested information from 50 million US Facebook profiles — mostly without consent. The reports were (and remain) chilling.

The idea of a data science company no one has ever heard of attempting to poke around in a country’s collective psyche sounds like a plot out of Black Mirror, and yet here we are. More troubling is the idea that the sort of mass-scale psych profiling Cambridge Analytica allegedly carried out was done with a political endgame in mind. The jury is still out on whether its work with data ultimately swayed the result of the 2016 election — CEO Alexander Nix denies using this kind of data-driven “psychographic” profiling for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign — but by now it’s clear that Nix isn’t overly concerned with ethics. Let’s take a closer look at what you need to know about Cambridge Analytica and the firestorm it ignited.

What is Cambridge Analytica?

Cambridge Analytica

Cambridge Analytica is a political data analytics firm and a subsidiary of a larger behavioral research firm called Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL). SCL’s stated mission seems at once both dry and ominous: it aims to “create behavior change through research, data, analytics, and strategy for both domestic and international government clients.” CA’s goal of effecting behavioral change doesn’t stray too far from its parent company’s mission, but the firm was created (with help from billionaire right-wing financier Robert Mercer) in 2013 to bring a specific kind of expertise to bear on the American electoral process.

By mashing up different kinds of personal data scraped from the internet, Cambridge Analytica sought to build “psychographic” profiles assigned to people who could later be pursued with specifically targeted ads and content. The firm made headlines in earlier election cycles because of ties to Senator Ted Cruz’s presidential bid. But in 2016, Jared Kushner tapped it to take over data operations for the Trump campaign. Later, reports from The Guardian’s Carole Cadwalladr indicated that Cambridge Analytica had done work to identify voters in the UK that could be persuaded to back the Brexit movement.

In other words, it’s a lot more than your typical data science company. CA whistleblower Christopher Wylie was pointed in his assessment of the firm in an interview with The Guardian: “It’s incorrect to call Cambridge Analytica a purely sort of data science company or an algorithm company — it is a full-service propaganda machine.”

Getty Images for Concordia Summit

How did Cambridge Analytica get 50 million people’s data?

With a little outside help. To understand the story, we need to rewind to 2014 when Aleksandr Kogan — a psychology researcher at Cambridge University — created a Facebook app called “thisisyourdigitallife” with a personality test that spit out some kind of personal prediction at the end. To build credibility, the app was originally labeled a “research app used by psychologists,” but that was only part of the truth — as it turned out, Cambridge Analytica covered more than $800,000 of Kogan’s app development costs. (Kogan also got to keep a copy of the resulting data for his trouble.) Some US Facebook users took the personality test as a result of ads on services like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and were paid for their efforts, but it’s unclear how many chose to take the test on their own.

All told, some 270,000 US users took the test, but CA obviously walked away with data on many more people than that. That’s thanks to a very specific Facebook peculiarity.

If you have a Facebook account, you’ve almost certainly used Facebook Login before — it lets you create an account with a third-party app or service (or log into an existing account) with your Facebook credentials. It’s incredibly convenient, but by using Facebook Login, you’re tacitly giving developers of Facebook apps access to certain kinds of information about yourself — email address and public profile data, for instance, are available to developers by default.

In 2014, however, using Facebook Login didn’t just mean you were offering up your own data — some data about the people in your social network was up for grabs too. (Facebook later deprecated the API that let this happen because, well, it’s just creepy.) Those thousands of people who logged in to Kogan’s app and took the test might have gotten the personality predictions they were looking for, but they paid for them with information about their friends and loved ones. Whether those results were ultimately valuable is another story. Kogan himself later said in an email to Cambridge coworkers (recently obtained by CNN) that he had provided “predicted personality scores” of 30 million American users to CA’s parent company, but the results were “6 times more likely to get all 5 of a person’s personality traits wrong as it was to get them all correct.”

Was this really a data breach?

For better or worse, no. Facebook’s official line is that calling this a breach is “completely false,” since the people who signed up for Kogan’s app did so willingly. As a result, that the information gained through those app logins was obtained within the scope of Facebook’s guidelines. In other words, despite how shady all of this seems, the system worked exactly the way it was supposed to. The breakdown happened later when Kogan broke Facebook’s rules and provided that information to Cambridge Analytica.

What has Facebook done about all this?

When all of this went down, very little — in public, anyway. In a statement in its online newsroom, Facebook admits that it learned about Kogan and Cambridge Analytica’s “violation” in 2015 and “demanded certifications from Kogan and all parties he had given data to that the information had been destroyed.” As it turns out, some of that personal data might not have been deleted after all — Facebook says it is “aggressively” trying to determine whether that’s true.

More troubling is the fact that, as noted by Guardian reporter Carole Cadwalladr in an interview with CBS, Facebook never contacted any of the users involved. (She also added that Facebook took threatened to sue The Guardian to prevent an exposé from being published, which obviously isn’t a good look.) Facebook VR/AR VP Andrew “Boz” Bosworth posted a rough timeline of the events (along with answers to certain FB-centric questions) earlier today, and it seems likely that timeline will remain a point of focus as investigations continue.

Finally, on March 16, a day before many of the biggest Cambridge Analytica stories broke, Facebook suspended accounts belonging to CA and its parent firm. The move is widely read as an attempt on Facebook’s part to clean up some of the mess before The Guardian and The New York Times ran their most damning reports. Then, in a somewhat unexpected move, Facebook also disabled Christopher Wylie’s account and prevented him from using Whatsapp, the popular messaging app Facebook acquired in 2014. (Consider this a brief reminder of how much of your social world Facebook currently owns.)

Beyond that, some Facebook execs spent the weekend asserting that there was no actual data breach. Meanwhile, CEO Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t said anything about the unfolding situation, though we can imagine his silence can’t last for too much longer.

So what happens now?

Scrutiny, and lots of it. Now that all of this is out in the open, powerful people are taking an interest. On March 18, Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) tweeted that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg should testify in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, adding that “it’s clear these platforms can’t police themselves.” Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) sent a letter (PDF) to Zuckerberg the following day, requesting information like the number of times similar incidents have occurred within the past ten years and whether Facebook has ever notified “individual users about inappropriate collection, retention or subsequent use of their data by third parties.”

Facebook breach: This is a major breach that must be investigated. It’s clear these platforms can’t police themselves. I’ve called for more transparency & accountability for online political ads. They say “trust us.” Mark Zuckerberg needs to testify before Senate Judiciary.

— Amy Klobuchar (@amyklobuchar) March 17, 2018

Meanwhile, in the UK, Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix recently told the Parliament’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee that the company did not collect people’s personal information through Facebook without consent. Since Nix lied, Committee chairman Damian Collins has accused the CEO of peddling false statements and has called CA whistleblower Christopher Wylie to offer evidence to parliament. Even more promising, UK Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham confirmed that she is seeking a warrant to access Cambridge Analytica’s servers.

BREAKING: Damian Collins, chair of UK parliament’s news inquiry, has called Cambridge Analytica whistleblower @chrisinsilico to give evidence next week to parliament. I predict: fireworks.

— Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla) March 19, 2018

And as far as Facebook is concerned, there are few people more powerful than its shareholders. We wouldn’t be surprised to see Facebook’s financials bounce around for a while, too — as I write this, the company’s share price is down nearly 7 percent, shaving billions of dollars off Facebook’s market cap (and eating away at Zuckerberg’s net worth.) The entire core of its business is built on a foundation of trust with its users, and incidents like this can do serious damage to that trust.

This is scary — should I keep using Facebook?

Honestly, you should at least give serious consideration to deleting your account. If you’re a Facebook user, then you and all of your Facebooking friends are collectively the single most valuable thing the company has. Its fortunes rise and fall when its user numbers ebb and flow. The old internet adage says “if you’re not paying, you’re the product,” and this is a perfect example of that.

The data we offer Facebook freely is a commodity to be accessed, mashed up, scraped and targeted against. For some, the value of the platform is enough to override the dangers. There’s nothing wrong with that, and it’s worth taking a few minutes to dig into account’s privacy, app and ad settings to limit the amount of data you unknowingly offer to the machine. But there’s also nothing wrong with saying enough is enough. None of us will cough up a cent to get bombarded by fake news, inane quizzes and game requests. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t paying for Facebook.

World’s largest SSD capacity now stands at 100TB

That didn’t take long — just a month after Samsung released a record-setting 30TB SSD, a rival has claimed the throne. Nimbus Data has unveiled the ExaDrive DC100, which crams 100TB of 3D flash memory into a standard 3.5-inch SATA form factor. For context, that’s 20 million songs (if you assume 5MB each) in a device small enough to fit into your home PC. Not that you’re about to buy one, unfortunately.

As you might guess, this is intended for servers where capacity takes priority over everything else, including performance (the 500MB/sec is nothing to write home about). A data center could hold 100 petabytes of data in a single rack instead of needing large swaths of server room space. That’s helpful for cloud services, AI and other technologies that may need massive amounts of data.

And then there’s the cost. When the DC100 ships in the summer, it’ll have pricing comparable to other business-grade SSDs “on a per terabyte basis.” That likely means a price in the tens of thousands of dollars, which is enough to give pause even to those companies that can afford it. While the drive should be trustworthy enough, that’s a lot of money (and a lot of data) to lose if one goes bad. Think of this more as a peek at the future of SSDs than anything else.

Source: Nimbus Data

Amazon Kindle App for iOS Gains Support for iPad’s Split View

The Amazon Kindle app for iOS devices, which is designed to allow Amazon-purchased ebooks to be read on the iPhone and iPad, was today updated with several new features.

On compatible iPad models, there’s now support for Split View, so you can use the Amazon Kindle app side-by-side with other apps for multitasking while reading.

In addition to Split View support, today’s update adds continuous scrolling, a feature that lets you scroll through books like you would an iPad. You can activate the option by going to Settings and turning on continuous scrolling. Once enabled, the feature can be turned on and off using the Aa menu in your book.

Amazon has also added a feature to pull down in your book library to refresh the list of available books, and there are new Kindle dictionaries for Arabic.

What’s New

– Split view on iPad is here! Resize the app to multi-task while reading without ever switching context.
– Try scrolling through your book – just like a web page. Turn continuous scrolling on via Settings, then easily turn it on and off from the Aa menu in your book. Tell us what you think.
– Pull down in the library to refresh your list of books.
– We’ve added Kindle dictionaries for Arabic.

Amazon Kindle can be downloaded from the App Store for free. [Direct Link]
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Macy’s will use VR to let shoppers ‘see’ furniture in their homes

Macy’s is turning to mobile checkout options and virtual reality in an effort to get more people in its stores. The former uses the store’s app (naturally) and aims to make getting out of the mall easier. The latter is for designing a room’s look with furniture and furnishings.

To use the in-store mobile checkout you’ll have to be on the Macy’s WiFi network. From there you scan your items with your phone’s camera. Before walking out, you’ll have to go to a special station near the door to verify your purchases with an employee, but it all sounds relatively painless. Macy’s says “most” merchandise will be available with the feature, but that it won’t apply to “leased departments” or expensive jewelry.

With the VR tools, you’ll layout the rough shape and design of your room with a provided tablet. And once that’s set in place, you can place virtual sofas and loveseats around the room before donning a VR helmet and seeing how they “feel” in your space. It almost sounds like a stopgap for Macy’s’ next application though: augmented reality. Next month, an update will start rolling out for its mobile app, which will enable you to see how a new credenza will look in your room, not a roughshod approximation of it. Kind of like what Williams-Sonoma and IKEA have done before. Amazon has flirted with AR showrooms as far back as this time last year. And Target, owned by Macy’s, has been offering AR “try-on” for furniture since last October.

Testing for the mobile check-out is rolling out right now and will wrap by year’s end, starting with the the New York Bloomingdale’s in SoHo. As far as the VR goes, there’s a pilot program running in Manhattan, New Jersey and Florida, with it going online in 60 more stores by this fall. Will it be enough to counter Walmart’s, The Gap’s and others’ moves into the space? Time will tell.

Via: Furniture Today

Source: Macy’s

Today’s best deals you won’t want to miss

Whether you’re looking for new tech gear or household items, we’ve got you covered.

Right now there are great discounts on the HTC Vive virtual reality system, a Crucial SSD, Osmo kits, and more!

View the rest of the deals

If you want to know about the deals as soon as they are happening, you’ll want to follow Thrifter on Twitter, and sign up for the newsletter, because missing out on a great deal stinks!

T-Mobile parent company, Deutsche Telekom, will let users opt out of pre-installed apps

Software updates will also come directly from manufacturers.

For a lot of people, buying smartphones through carriers is still preferable over going the unlocked route. In addition to typically better financing options, most carriers always have some deal going on to help offset the cost of new devices. Unfortunately, as great as these two things are, carrier-branded phones are also plagued by pre-installed apps that nobody wants or asked for.

In a recent post on its official blog, T-Mobile’s parent company, Deutsche Telekom, announced that it’s now giving its subscribers the option to choose which apps they want and don’t want on their phone from day one.

Deutsche Telekom says that its customers “will no longer receive preinstalled apps and presets on your Android smartphone,” and laid out a five-step process for how this will work. It reads as follows:

You use your Telekom SIM and start the device. After switching on the smartphone for the first time, you will go through the manufacturer’s initial setup.
Later on, you’ll see our recommended telecom applications either during setup or afterwards (depending on the smartphone model).
Select the applications you want to install.
Immediately after completing the setup process (which may also include a reboot) welcomes you our new telecom welcome moment. There you will be asked, among other things, if you want to receive notifications and automatic updates to installed apps.
The selected applications of Telekom and our partners can now be found on your home screen.

In addition to giving users the freedom of choosing which pre-installed apps they want, Deutsche Telekom also says that future firmware updates will be handled by manufacturers — potentially resulting in much faster turnaround times when new versions of Android are released.

It’s unclear at this time if T-Mobile will gain similar features, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they get added with the next Un-Carrier movement.

Until then, is this something you’d like to see your wireless provider adopt?

Carriers

• Which unlimited plan should you buy?
• Verizon’s Unlimited plans: Everything you need to know
• Everything you need to know about the T-Mobile ONE unlimited plan
• Everything you need to know about the AT&T Unlimited plan
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• Join the Discussion

PUBG Mobile is now available across the globe

Available for Android and iOS.

After launching in China late last year, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds Mobile is finally coming to additional markets. This news comes just a few short days after developer Tencent Games began running a beta in Canada on March 15, and I don’t imagine anyone will be complaining about the rapid expansion.

Tencent and PUBG Corp. note that the game is “now available in many regions around the world” and that it’ll be added to “more regions” later on.

Per Tencent Games’ Vice President, Chen Jerry —

We are very excited to launch PUBG Mobile on iOS and Android internationally. We are working hard to create an authentic PUBG mobile experience that players new and old will love. A lot of went into controls and optimization to give players a smooth and intuitive experience.

Lower graphics aside, PUBG Mobile has just about everything you’ve come to know and love from the PC and Xbox version of the game. You and 99 other players jump out of a plane, collect any loot you can find, and fight to be the last one standing to be the winner of a chicken dinner.

The game currently has a rating of 4.7 stars on the Play Store, with some of the highlights being the gameplay, graphics, and controls. I’m still holding out for Fortnite’s Android release, but in the meantime, this does look like something that’ll be holding my attention until then.

If you’re a PUBG fan, are you excited for the release of its mobile port?

Download: PUBG Mobile (free)

The 3rd-gen Nest Thermostat is back down to $199 in all colors

Control this smart thermostat with your voice using Google Assistant or Amazon’s Alexa.

The Nest Thermostat 3rd generation is down to $199 at Amazon. This smart thermostat usually sells for $250, though it’s receiving this $50 discount thanks to a price-match of a sale from Home Depot where you can also grab this deal. This is close to the best price the product saw during Black Friday, which was $189.

The Nest is one of the most thorough smart systems you can buy. Just look at all these features:

• The Nest Learning Thermostat is the first thermostat to get ENERGY STAR Certified by the EPA.
• System Match activates features that work with your specific heating and cooling systems, and connects to most 24-volt forced-air, heat pump with AUX, dual fuel and radiant systems.
• Convenient Wi-Fi capabilities offer a secure and reliable connection.
• Download the free app from iTunes or GooglePlay and adjust your thermostat from your smartphone, tablet or laptop, even when you’re miles away.
• Farsight illuminates the thermostat’s display when it spots you across the room.
• Monitors your equipment, sends service reminders and tells you if anything is not working correctly. You can also be alerted if your home’s temperature gets dangerously hot or cold.
• Within a week the Nest thermostat starts programming itself to the temperatures you like. Away mode automatically switches to an energy-efficient temperature when you’re not home.
• Different features follow your activity, manage humidity, and keep an eye on the weather to provide a custom climate for your home.
• Track how much energy you’ve used and follow tips that will help you conserve.

You can also pair the Nest Thermostat with other products like the Nest Protect and it will automatically turn off your gas furnace if carbon monoxide is present.

See at Amazon

Congress wants answers from Facebook about Cambridge Analytica

You knew it was just a matter of time before Congress joined those investigating Facebook’s data sharing debacle, even if it’s only in a tentative way. Oregon Senator Ron Wyden has sent a letter to Mark Zuckerberg asking him to explain how Cambridge Analytica ended up with data on 50 million people, most of them without permission. In addition to details of the incident itself, Wyden wants to know why Facebook didn’t drop Cambridge Analytica when it learned of the collection in 2015, whether the data was used for targeted ads and how this could happen despite the FTC decree limiting Facebook’s data collection and sharing activities.

The letter also asks for general background info, such as the number of data policy violations from the past 10 years, privacy assessments since the FTC decree from 2011, as well as the number of apps Facebook audited. The collection took place through an app, “thisisyourdigitallife,” that gathered information about both its immediate users and their Facebook friends.

Wyden has given Zuckerberg until April 13th to provide answers.

This isn’t the same as a formal investigation, and won’t necessarily lead to action. Members of Congress have a habit of sending letters whenever they’re concerned about a subject, and only occasionally follow up — it’s frequently about the public show of concern more than tangible action. This shows that the issue is alarming enough to at least draw attention from Congress, however, and Wyden is on the Senate Intelligence Committee. It won’t be surprising if this leads to a more substantial investigation, especially in light of concerns about election manipulation.

Source: Sen. Ron Wyden (PDF)