A legal firm has filed a class-action lawsuit against Nintendo due to a 'drifting' problem with the Joy-con controller for the Switch console.
With over 35 million Switch consoles sold worldwide (March 2019), Nintendo's device has been a hit with gamers. The total number of Joy-con controllers sold for the device is unknown.
However, there is a common 'drifting' problem that affects the Joy-con controller for some users. They typically report that the controller seems to respond to non-existent input to the analog stick, thus causing 'drift' in the game. Many opt to send the controller in for repairs when this starts happening.
Law firm Chimicles Schwartz Kriner & Donaldson-Smith has filed a class-action lawsuit against Nintendo of America, alleging that the company sells the Joy-cons with the knowledge that they are defective.
The complaint, filed on behalf of purchasers of Switches and Joy-Con controllers, brings claims under various consumer protection statutes as well as various warranty and common law claims.
According to the complaint, Nintendo has failed to acknowledge the problem despite reports worldwide and refuses to fix defective controllers for free.
UK Gambling Commission boss tells members of parliament that under current legislation, loot boxes and FIFA player packs do not count at gambling.
In FIFA, gamblers can purchase packs but have no idea what players they will end up with. Similarly, loot boxes essentially contain surprise items like weapons, costumes and so forth. This surprise element has prompted critics to liken the purchasing of these packs to gambling.
There are concerns about the effect this has on children who may be tempted to keep spending money in order to get the in-game content they want. However, it is not regulated by the gambling watchdog in the UK because the prize is not money, and does not necessarily have monetary value.
Third-party secondary markets that buy or sell in-game content or allow it to be used as virtual currency, but this activity is not authorized or supported by the publishers.
Brad Enright, programme directory at the Gambling Commission, said that EA in particular faces a constant battle with third-party markets. Gambling Commission chief Neil McArthur told the Department for Culture, Media and Sport select committee that there are "significant concerns" about children being exposed to games with elements of expenditure and chance, but that under the law it is not classified as gambling.
Nintendo has unveiled a new version of its highly successful gaming console Switch. The new version has first been introduced in Japan, but is expected to hit the U.S. soon.
FCC has received documents for regulatory approval, so it only seems to be perhaps weeks or few months before we'll see the new Switch in America.
The new device looks and feels identical to the Switch we know, but there is one very significant change. Nintendo has increased the battery size, which obviously improves upon the battery life.
This means a lot more mobile gaming. In fact, Nintendo promises around 4.5 to 9 hours of battery life. This is a massive boost to previous 2.5 to 6.5 hours.
The company has revealed that The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild can be played nearly twice as long with the newer version. Previously Switch would run out of juice after three hours of Zelda, the new version can go for 5.5 hours.
At least in Japan the price of the device has stayed the same, so we don't expect any price hikes here in the States either. We'll just have to wait and see how long it takes for FCC to approve the device.
For the first time in eight years, Netflix has suffered a loss in subscribers in the United States. The company that has seemed invincible has shown some signs of weakness.
The company CEO, Reed Hastings, explains the reduction of subscribers with recent price hikes, and he's most certainly right. However, Netflix isn't too worried, as the decrease was only around 126 000 users.
Compare this to the fact that Netflix gained around 2.7 million new subscribers around the world.
However, it's not a good day for the investors or the company, when they did expect increase in subscribers at home, and a 5 million increase worldwide.
Hastings also brought up the fact that second quarter of the year didn't have many high profile releases. Even with lackluster performance like this, he isn't still considering competition as a problem.
Netflix stock took immediately a slight dive, although nothing radical.
The company has probably better news next time around when the figures include the new viewership champ Stranger Things 3.
Official expectations are for 7 million new subscribers, we'll have to wait and see whether that'll be closer to the truth.
FaceApp is an image manipulation app that caused a craze in social media back in 2017. Now, the craze is back, after the company updated its ageing filter last weekend. To be honest, the ageing filter is simply amazing - the results are very, very believable and realistic.
But. The company developing FaceApp is based in Russia. And this means that, as per Russian legislation, all data passed to the company, can be accessed by Russian security and military services, if they want to.
So, does the app upload all of your images and data to Russian servers? Apparently, the answer is no. Sure, the app asks for your permission to access your phone's images, but it only accesses the one you select for manipulation.
A security researcher has tested what the app actually sends to the Internet and where the data goes to. The conclusion is that all the uploads are being sent to Google or Amazon -owned cloud servers, located in U.S., Australia or Europe, depending on applied filter and user's own location. The actual image manipulation with filters is being done on servers, which then sends the processed image back to the user's smartphone, once finished.
Tesla has been working on its autonomous driving features for years, and slowly but surely they are inching towards what they call full self-driving. It's not a feature on all Tesla's, however, you'll have to pay quite a bit of extra for the option, and for the second time this year it's about to get more expensive.
In May, Tesla raised the price from $5,000 to $6,000, and it was already earlier suggested that another price hike was in the works. Now Musk has revealed on Twitter that its going to be raised another thousand dollars or so in August.
The raise will happen on August 16 after which the option should start at about $7,000, for those who choose the option pre-installed.
After a slight backlash on Twitter, Musk had some better news to share too. According to him, Tesla is going to release Enhanced Summon around the same time.
This means that Tesla vehicles will be capable of driving themselves off the parking spot to your location. There's no exact release date for the feature, though.
Level 5 autonomous driving, FSD or full self-driving as Tesla calls it, seems still far off. It would allow users to get from place to another without ever touching the steering wheel.
Just recently Qualcomm unveiled their newest, and most powerful, mobile chipset. The new Snapdragon 855+ improves upon its predecessor, the Snapdragon 855, in both CPU and GPU prowess.
As Qualcomm announced that the chip would be introduced to the public in August, one immediately glanced over at Samsung's table for a reaction. The reason being that the Korean manufacturer is preparing the launch of its new Note10 lineup in mid-August.
It would seem natural that Samsung would employ the best chip at the time for its American audience. However, this doesn't seem to be the case, according to WinFuture.
The report claims that Samsung is going to stick with the less powerful Snapdragon 855 that it used in Galaxy S10 phones launched earlier this year. It's all well and good, because the chip is indeed only a little bit behind the newly announced Plus model, but the international crowd is going to get an improvement in the chip department.
As per usual, Samsung has its international version using their own Exynos chips, which are going to be upgraded to Exynos 9825, instead of the Exynos 9820 in Galaxy S10. This means improved performance for Europeans and others, but not for us here in the States.
Instagram appears to be having problems again with users reporting that the app simply crashes when they try to open it on their smartphones.
The Facebook subsidiary seemed to start having trouble in the last few hours with DownDetector showing the reports reaching over 5,000 by 17:00 GMT. Some Instagram users also took to Twitter to report the problem, typically with the hashtags #Instagramdown and #Instagramdownagain.
Most users seem to be reporting the problem occurs when they try to open the Instagram app on mobile, only to be thrown back to the Home Screen (sometimes with a black screen first). "I can't open the app when I do the screen goes black and it takes me to the phone home screen. I tried re-downloading the app, and refreshing. Instagram was working fine this morning, what's going on ?," one user reports on DownDetector.
When people talk about satellite positioning systems, they usually refer to GPS. GPS is of course the US government owned venture that stands for Global Positioning System, but it is not the only game in town – or on earth rather.
Many of the positioning application we use gather information from several different satellite systems in the GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System). One of them is the Russian developed GLONASS and another one is EU's own Galileo.
However, the latter mentioned has had some troubles lately, and might have not been much of use for you and me. According to a website that is portraying the status of Galileo system reports that all the satellites in the constellation are "not usable", "not available", or "testing."
The satellites themselves are still in orbit and probably working fine, it is the earthly infrastructure that has failed us and been down since Friday. Thus many of our GPS devices, like our smartphones, have had to recently rely on non-EU GNS partners.
One might conclude that Galileo isn't exactly the most reliable of the GNSS providers but that is completely understandable since it is still largely in a pilot phase. EU is aiming full operations to begin in 2020.
Microblogging service – or perhaps after increase in character limit, miniblogging service – Twitter has redesigned its user interface, and released it to the public.
The new design is trying to make it easier to use the service and its core features. This means that the navigation has been updated, and it should be easier to access things like your notifications, messages, and trends.
The site still relies in the three column view in which the center column is dedicated to your Twitter feed. However, Trends for you has moved from the left side to the right side, and now takes up the space above Who to follow, which is still at the bottom right.
Navigation has been moved from the top to left side and takes up way more of the real estate. The navigation bar includes the following options: Home, Explore, Notifications, Messages, Bookmarks, Lists, Profile, and More.
More gets you to less used features, like settings, ads, analytics and so forth.
A new Tweet button can be found under the navigation menu and the tweet field is still at top center like you're used to.
All the elements are far larger, and the design is much simpler, easier to read, and perhaps to use. It might be a little too simple for some, but on the other hand it does now offer two different dark modes.
The leading chip manufacturer for Android phones has released a new system-on-chip. Qualcomm's new offering is called Snapdragon 855+ and it improves upon their flagship model with better performance.
The plus version brings a higher clock speed for it's Kryo 485 processor cores as well as more performance from the Adreno 640 GPU. Processor clocks are up to 2.96 GHz from 2.84 GHz, and graphics performance sees a boost of 15 percent.
Why would Qualcomm update their perfectly capable chip half way through the year, you might ask. Well, they are focusing this new SoC towards devices that yearn for better AR and VR capabilities, while the chip is slightly better at general purpose things.
There's no 5G capabilities in the chip as it is using the LTE enabled X24 modem, but it supports an external X50 modem if 5G speeds are needed.
Snapdragon 855+ will be found on first devices as soon as second half of the year. Asus has promised to use it in its upcoming gaming device, ROG Phone II, and it could be possible that either Google's Pixel or Samsung's Galaxy Notes have it as well.
Aptoide has removed two Android apps that are used to watch TV shows and movies for free from the market following a lawsuit two film companies.
TBV Productions and Hunter Killer Productions targeted Aptoide - an alternative Android app marketplace to Google Play - with a lawsuit for listing Showbox and Popcorn Time. Both apps allow for the streaming of mainstream films and TV shows from either the BitTorrent protocol (exclusive means for Popcorn Time) or from other sources.
The lawsuit had alleged that Aptoide promoted and encouraged the use of these Android applications for copyright infringement purposes. An interesting claim is that because Aptoide declared both apps as "100% safe" - referring to the apps being free of malicious software - that it was endorsing the apps.
Aptoide responded to the lawsuit by removing the main Showbox and Popcorn Time apps. Trying to visit their old URLs simply prompts an error now. Additionally, other Popcorn Time variants have disappeared from the alternative app store.
According to TorrentFreak, Showbox was downloaded between 5-25 million times, while Popcorn Time was downloaded between 300,000 and 3 million times.
Cambridge Analytica scandal results in a record $5 billion fine for the social network giant.
Approved by a 3-2 vote, Facebook was delivered a record fine related to the ability of political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica to access data of up to 87 million users of the social network.
In 2011, Facebook had already agreed to notify users and gain express consent to share their data with third parties. Since March 2018, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has been probing whether Facebook had violated this agreement.
The $5 billion settlement was approved in a 3-2 vote along political party lines, with 3 Republicans voting in favor of the settlement, and 2 Democrats against. It still has some hurdles to clear, with the Department of Justice' civil division to finalize it yet.
Facebook had warned investors back in April that it was expecting a fine of this magnitude, but had reassured them that it has already put funds aside to deal with it. In fact, when the news broke of the FTC approving the settlement, shares in Facebook initially rose 1.8 percent.
The Finnish armed forces are readying new rules for the country's semi-compulsory military service. In the reform, entitled Koulutus 2020, Finnish for Training 2020, they disclose smartphone as training equipment, Finnish newspaper Ilta-Sanomat reports.
The service is compulsory for men starting at the age of 18 either as a combatant trainee or a civilian service member. For the ones choosing the path of military training they will be required to have a smartphone as a training tool in the future.
As it is mandatory, if the young recruit doesn't own a smartphone, they will be provided with one by the government. Also if the one doesn't want to use their own, in a very real worry that it might be broken for example, they also get a government issued smartphone.
The new training procedure including a smart device is currently being ran as a pilot in a couple subdivisions, specifically Army Academy (Maasotakoulu) and Coastal Brigade (Rannikkoprikaati).
Currently there are a few Android tablets per company and they are borrowed on an as-needed basis.
YouTube has managed to dodge the 'copyright mafia' since the beginning, or at least since acquisition by Google, fairly well. I guess having tons of lawyers from Google helping out fighting the copyright problems has been the key.
Obviously adding complete and easy-to-use copyright claim features to the platform has made it less likely of a target of copyright holders.
Unfortunately there are consequences to giving so much power to the individuals and organizations. There's even an aphorism of some kind about power and corruption.
There certainly has been corruption among the folk posting mass copyright claims on YouTube. So much so, that for much of the independent YouTube community copyright claims have become a joke.
Whether it is to suppress ideas or content of critics, or just to gain a competitive edge against competitors, YouTube's copyright claim has been used for it all.
Due to YouTube's abhorrent record in communicating with the community, many of the creators have probably given up that there's any kind of protective action against what can be truly called the copyright claim mafia.
However, sometimes it is very nice to be wrong. For those people, today is the day.
A legal firm has filed a class-action lawsuit against Nintendo due to a 'drifting' problem with the Joy-con controller for the Switch console.
UK Gambling Commission boss tells members of parliament that under current legislation, loot boxes and FIFA player packs do not count at gambling.
Nintendo has unveiled a new version of its highly successful gaming console Switch. The new version has first been introduced in Japan, but is expected to hit the U.S. soon.
