Technology

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Metacritic wants people to actually play a game before reviewing it, so the site now requires users to wait 36 hours from when a new game is released before leaving a score. The intention is to prevent review-bombing campaigns, where people leave negative scores on a title sometimes as a way to punish the developer. Heading to a review page for a recently released title on Metacritic will now display the message “Please spend some time playing the game,” with a specific date and time when a user can publish a review for that game on the site. The new policy change has locked user reviews for two big games that came out today: Ghosts of Tsushima and Paper Mario: The Origami King. Users have to wait until July 18th at 12PM PT to review them. The new policy was first spotted by PlayStation Un...

Video game spending in the US reached its highest point since 2010, according to a new NPD Group report, with sales through June reaching $6.6 billion on hardware, software, and accessories. It’s the highest total for the first six months of the year since spending hit $7 billion a decade ago. Spending has been dramatically higher in 2020 than it was compared to last year, with sales through June up 19 percent year over year, and June sales specifically were up 26 percent compared to the same month in 2019. While NPD’s numbers don’t cite a specific reason for the boost in sales, it’s hard not to draw the conclusion that a major contributing factor was the spike in video game playing caused by millions of people having a sudden boost in free time thanks to COVID-19 shutdowns. US NPD VG R...

The US Department of Homeland Security has raised concerns internally that face masks meant to protect against the spread of COVID-19 may interfere with facial recognition technology, The Intercept reported. It also appears worried about the use of face masks to evade law enforcement even after the COVID-19 pandemic is over. A bulletin from May 22nd, which was drafted in conjunction with other federal agencies including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, discusses “the potential impacts that widespread use of protective masks could have on security operations that incorporate face recognition systems — such as video cameras, image processing hardware and software, and image recognition algorithms — to monitor public spaces during the ongoing Covid-19 public health emergency and in the mo...

The Dell XPS 17 isn’t for me. Yes, it has a 17-inch screen. Yes, it has high-powered specs including an H-series processor and an RTX GPU. But compared to many other laptops available today, it’s really heavy — it’s about five and a half pounds. Some folks might enjoy hefting a five-and-a-half-pound laptop around the house or in their backpack during the day. But that’s not me, and I doubt it’s most people. Which begs the question: why use this instead of a desktop? It’s got good chips and a big screen, but a desktop has better chips and a bigger screen. On the flip side: if you want something portable that’s built like an Ultrabook, why not buy a 15- or 16-inch machine that’s actually practical to carry around? The question is whether the extra screen space and the bump in performance are...

Legendary chiptune composer Hirokazu “Chip” Tanaka just released a new solo album, and the accompanying music video for the song “Hammerhead Shark Song” is extremely fitting. Tanaka is best known for the soundtracks to classic games like Metroid, Mother, and Donkey Kong, and the video — directed by Toby Fox, creator of the retro-infused RPG Undertale — maintains that vibe while adding in a hefty dose of surrealism. The black-and-white video looks a bit like a 16-bit era game, with Tanaka walking to a performance where he’s joined, naturally, by some hammerhead sharks onstage. Things only get stranger after that: there are walking UFOs, floating faces, and all manner of odd imagery. The fact that it resembles a video game shouldn’t be too surprising; Fox says a lot of the scenes were made u...

Twitch has intervened to stop the US Army using fake prize giveaways on its esports channel to redirect viewers to army recruitment pages. The practice was brought to light by a report from The Nation on the use of esports as a recruitment tool by the American military. The US Army, Navy, and Air Force all field esports teams comprised of active and reserve personnel who stream on Twitch and chat with young viewers about life, video games, and the opportunities afforded by military service. “Esports is just an avenue to start a conversation,” Major-General Frank Muth, head of the army’s recruiting command, told ThinkTech Hawaii recently. “We go out there and we have a shared passion for esports … and it naturally devolves into a conversation, ‘What do you do?’, ‘I’m in the army.’” “T...

To mark World Emoji Day today, we’re getting our first official look at some of the new emoji that are coming to smartphones later this year. Emojipedia has compiled some of the emoji designs coming to iOS and Android, and 9to5Google has some additional details on the designs coming to Android specifically. Below you can see Apple’s take on some of the new emoji: a ninja, an all-gender sign, a coin (which has “The Crazy Ones” embossed on the top, a sneaky reference to Apple’s famous “Think Different” ads), bubble tea, a dodo, and a piñata. There’s also a pair of lungs, as well as an emoji which Unicode has called an “anatomical heart” to differentiate it from the traditional heart emoji. Apple’s new emoji include bubble tea, a dodo, and pinched fingers.Image: Emojipedia Oh, and we’ve also ...

It’s been such a newsy week that we’re ending it with two columns — enough to last you the whole weekend. First, we have what we hope is the ultimate Twitter hack FAQ, in response to this week’s catastrophic security breach. Yesterday’s issue was the most-read in Interface history, and we wanted to make sure you had all the latest developments. Second, I’m excited to share a conversation I had this week with Facebook’s chief diversity officer, Maxine Williams, on the occasion of the company releasing its annual diversity report. I wanted to know why progress on the issue has been so hard to come by, what it means that she reports to Sheryl Sandberg now, and much more. Williams is a dynamo; I hope you’ll enjoy our chat. * * * On Wednesday, Twitter had the worst security incident in company ...

Microsoft has updated its Launcher app for Android to version 6, giving the software a big visual overhaul and a performance upgrade on top of its existing functionality. Version 6 of Launcher has a new app icon, dark mode, daily wallpaper feature (provided by Bing), customizable icons, and it now works in landscape orientation, too. There’s also a personalized news feed that updates throughout the day, and general performance improvements, including faster loading and reduced battery drain, thanks to a new codebase. The app is available to download here from Google’s Play Store, and you can read more about the changes in Microsoft’s blog post about the launch here. The main purpose of the Launcher app is to make it easier to transition between tasks on Android and Windows devices. Image: ...

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation has opened an investigation into Wednesday’s unprecedented Twitter attack that resulted in numerous takeovers of high-profile accounts belonging to politicians, business leaders, and corporations, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. The FBI is concerned that the coordinated attack and the vulnerabilities it exposed in Twitter’s systems may pose serious security risks, due to the widespread compromising of sensitive accounts, including those of President Barack Obama and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. President Donald Trump’s account was not affected, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany tells the WSJ, but it’s unclear if Trump’s account has special protections. Twitter tells The Verge it is in communication with t...

NASA has once again delayed the launch of its new powerful space observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope, mostly due to disruptions stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic. Most recently slated to fly in March of 2021, the massive telescope is now scheduled to launch on October 31st, 2021. The Government Accountability Office, or GAO, had already predicted this delay. NASA came up with the new date after doing an extensive review to see if the March 2021 timing was actually possible. The agency attributes about three months of the delay to social distancing and other precautions that had to be put in place to keep people safe from the coronavirus. “Much of the impact, of course, comes from people not being at work, right?” Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator of the Science Missio...