Technology

James Thomson started developing PCalc in 1992 as a way to learn to program for the Mac. Since then, he’s rewritten the calculator app multiple times to feature new UI changes, ported it to the iPhone, Apple Watch, and Apple TV, and maintained it for the Mac over the decades. But PCalc’s popularity — let alone financial success — is an unlikely one. After all, Thomson doesn’t just have to sell customers on the idea of paying for a calculator app; he has to convince them to spend $10 on his app in a world where Apple already offers its preloaded Calculator app for free on every iPhone and Mac. Apple bundles each iPhone with over 35 applications, spanning web browsing, email, weather, clock, calendar, camera, music, and virtually every other major part of the phone. It also has a huge home-f...

Nintendo debuted a new trailer for Metroid Dread ahead of its October 8th launch on the Switch. Whereas the E3 2021 trailer was claustrophobic, featuring the E.M.M.I robots that will stalk you throughout the game, this one shows off bigger environments, as well as other enemy types and bosses that you’ll encounter along the way. Notably, Samus goes up against a gigantic living Chozo warrior, one that appears to share a lot in common with Samus in terms of its armor and arsenal. There’s also a boss that looks a bit like Kraid from Super Metroid. Additionally, the trailer lets you get a glimpse of some new skills that Samus will pick up during the story. There are familiar ones, like the ability to do Samus’ signature screw attack, getting a speed boost to blow through walls, and collecting ...

Twitter is beginning its rollout of Ticketed Spaces, or paid live audio rooms. The company announced yesterday that it’s “experimenting” with the feature for some iOS users. It first rolled out applications to try the product in June with the plan to eventually make it available to all interested iOS and Android users. “Know it’s taking us a little time, but we want to get this right for you,” Twitter wrote in its announcement yesterday. Hosts can charge between $1 and $999 for their ticketed rooms and can also set a room size cap for them. These test group participants will initially keep 97 percent of the money they make, after the fee Apple and Google charge for in-app purchases. But Twitter will increase its cut from 3 percent to 20 percent if a user makes a total of $50,000 across the...

Elden Ring is a collaboration between two masters of fantasy: Game of Thrones author George R.R Martin and Dark Souls studio FromSoftware, led by visionary director Hidetaka Miyazaki. With big names like those come equally big expectations, and the game has been hotly anticipated, even as players have seen little of it since it was announced in 2019. (The first gameplay trailer was revealed in June.) In many ways, it’s a big departure for the studio, with a more traditional story structure and an ambitious open world to explore. To get a better sense of what Elden Ring actually is, I recently had the chance to view a hands-off demo and chat with FromSoftware’s Yasuhiro Kitao to learn about its development and philosophy. Here are six things I learned. The world is huge For the first time, ...

Microsoft has warned thousands of its Azure cloud computing customers, including many Fortune 500 companies, about a vulnerability that left their data completely exposed for the last two years. A flaw in Microsoft’s Azure Cosmos DB database product left more than 3,300 Azure customers open to complete unrestricted access by attackers. The vulnerability was introduced in 2019 when Microsoft added a data visualization feature called Jupyter Notebook to Cosmos DB. The feature was turned on by default for all Cosmos DBs in February 2021. A listing of Azure Cosmos DB clients includes companies like Coca Cola, Liberty Mutual Insurance, ExxonMobil, and Walgreens, to name just a few. We were able to get access to any customer database that we wanted “This is the worst cloud vulnerability you can ...

Elon Musk has criticized fellow centibillionaire and space cowboy Jeff Bezos for filing lawsuits against the former’s aerospace company SpaceX. Earlier this month, Bezos’ space firm Blue Origin sued NASA after it lost a critical government contract to put astronauts on the Moon to SpaceX. This has had the effect of delaying SpaceX’s own work on the project. And now, this week, Amazon has urged the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to dismiss newly-submitted plans by SpaceX to launch another cluster of satellites to power its satellite internet service Starlink. Replying to a story about the latter complaint, Musk tweeted: “Turns out Besos [sic] retired in order to pursue a full-time job filing lawsuits against SpaceX …” The recent complaint from Amazon doesn’t seem to be a formal law...

The 2021 Overwatch League playoffs have hit a slight snag. Yesterday, the League announced it will no longer host live playoff matches in Dallas and Los Angeles. “Due to significant changes in the environment affecting travel for some teams, we’ve decided to pivot away from originally scheduled live events in Dallas and Los Angeles,” the League wrote in a statement on Twitter. “Instead, postseason competition will return to Hawai’i for playoffs.” The move is likely in response to the COVID-19 delta variant surge that’s spreading across the globe and the diminishing ability for travelers to obtain visas to and from the United States. Last season, the League split into two regions: North America and Asia Pacific, or APAC. Regular season play and the playoffs were sequestered within the regio...

I was having a good time with No More Heroes 3 until I somehow lost my save file. I don’t think it was the game’s fault, but unfortunately since it’s coming out today for the Nintendo Switch, I wasn’t able to finish it in time for a full review. I did get several hours into it, though, and it was already feeling like a worthy followup to the Wii original, which I was a big fan of back in 2007. Developed by Grasshopper Manufacture, there wasn’t anything quite like the original No More Heroes, an action game that saw video game nerd protagonist Travis Touchdown climb the ranks of the world’s deadliest assassins through a series of increasingly ridiculous boss fights. The game also featured an open-world structure where you had to perform menial tasks like pumping gas in order to earn enough ...

Blizzard says it plans to change the name of Overwatch’s gunslinger character following the explosive sexual harassment lawsuit brought against Activision Blizzard by the state of California. The character was originally named “McCree” after Jesse McCree, a former longtime Blizzard staffer who appears to be pictured in the so-called “Cosby Suite” reported on by Kotaku. Blizzard hasn’t shared a new name for the character yet, and the studio will delay an in-game narrative arc where he played a “key part” due to the change. The company also committed to no longer naming in-game characters after real employees. A message from the Overwatch team. pic.twitter.com/2W3AV7Pv6X — Overwatch (@PlayOverwatch) August 26, 2021 Recently, some Overwatch League casters had chosen to not say the gunslinger ...

United Launch Alliance won’t be selling any more of its workhorse Atlas V rockets, and it has stopped buying the launch vehicle’s Russian-made rocket engines for good, the company’s chief executive told The Verge. ULA’s decision sets up the retirement of one of the US government’s most trusted launch vehicles and is expected to mark the end for Russia’s iconic — but controversial — RD-180 engine, an engineering marvel and a core source of revenue for Russia’s space program. “We’re done. They’re all sold,” CEO Tory Bruno said of ULA’s Atlas V rockets in an interview. ULA, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, has 29 Atlas V missions left before it retires sometime in the mid-2020s and transitions to its upcoming Vulcan rocket, Bruno said. The remaining Atlas V missions include...

A person claiming to be behind the T-Mobile data breach that exposed almost 50 million people’s info has come forward to reveal his identity and to criticize T-Mobile’s security, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal. John Binns told the WSJ that he was behind the attack and provided evidence that he could access accounts associated with it, and he went into detail about how he was able to pull it off and why he did it. According to Binns, he was able to get customer (and former customer) data from T-Mobile by scanning for unprotected routers. He found one, he told the Journal, which allowed him to access a Washington state data center that stored credentials for over 100 servers. He called the carrier’s security “awful” and said that realizing how much data he had access to mad...