Tech

Google wants its upcoming game-streaming service, Stadia, to up the ante for live-streamed games on YouTube, but Google didn’t address the many ways its system could lead to harassment, demonetization, and other problems for creators One of Stadia’s most exciting developments for YouTube creators is “Crowd Play,” a feature that allows creators to play games like NBA 2K19 with their viewers. It seems like a good idea on the surface, but Google’s presentation didn’t mention any potential harms that could come from Crowd Play. For just over an hour, multiple members of Google’s Stadia team and YouTube’s head of gaming, Ryan Wyatt, spoke about the benefits Stadia had for players and creators. Gaming is more seamless, Google Stadia chief Phil Harrison claimed; Wyatt told YouTubers it would open a whole new world of interaction and engagement with fans. Neither Harrison nor Wyatt touched upon one of the most important questions: how easily can … [Read more...] about Google Stadia wants YouTubers to play with fans, but that could leave creators open to attacks

HMD is in hot water following a report from Norwegian site NRKbeta, which found that HMD's Nokia 7 Plus was sending users' personal information to a server in China. HMD responded to the report, admitting "our device activation client meant for another country was mistakenly included in the software package of a single batch of Nokia 7 Plus." Further ReadingChina’s “democracy” includes mandatory apps, mass chat surveillanceNRKbeta's investigation found the Nokia 7 Plus was sending the IMEI, MAC ID, and the SIM ICCID, all of which are unique hardware or SIM card identifiers that could be used to track an individual. There was also rough location information, as the device sent the ID of the nearest cell tower. NRKbeta's article is in Norwegian, but through Google Translate the site claims this data was sent every time the phone was switched on and that the phone was sending this data for several months. HMD admits this data ended up on "a third-party server" but … [Read more...] about HMD admits the Nokia 7 Plus was sending personal data to China

On Microsoft's official Office GitHub repository (which contains, alas, not the source code to Office itself but lots of developer content for software that extends Office), the widely loved (?) Clippy made a brief appearance with the publication of a Clippy sticker pack for Microsoft Teams. Teams users could import the stickers and use them to add pictures of a talking paperclip to their conversations. The synergy between the two seems obvious. With its various machine learning-powered services and its bot development framework, Microsoft finally has the technology to make Clippy the assistant we always wanted him to be: a Clippy that can be asked natural language questions, that we can actually speak to and that can talk back to us, that can recognize us by sight and greet us as we sit down to the working day. Teams, an interface that's conversational and text heavy, is the perfect venue for a new Clippy compliant with all the buzzwords of the late twenty-teens. Twenteens? Whatever. … [Read more...] about Clippy briefly resurrected as Teams add-on, brutally taken down by brand police

Google this week announced a bold vision for the future of gaming with Stadia, a new cloud gaming platform that promises to upend the industry by changing how games are played, distributed, sold, and even built. But during its Stadia reveal at Game Developers Conference, the company left out more details than it provided, in particular the business model of the service and the games that will be available when it inevitably launches. In an interview with The Verge on Tuesday, Stadia chief Phil Harrison, a longtime game industry executive who’s worked at both Microsoft and Sony, answered some of those questions. Harrison says the company won’t talk about the consumer model of Stadia — whether it’s a subscription service or some other type of model — until this summer. He’s also tight-lipped about game partnerships beyond id Software bringing Doom Eternal to Stadia at launch. But Harrison was willing to better outline Google’s vision and why … [Read more...] about Google Stadia chief predicts the cloud will be the game console of the future

Initially announced last September, Microsoft's Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) service has now entered public preview. The service brings together single-user Windows 7 virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and multi-user Windows 10 and Windows Server remote desktop services (RDS) and is hosted on any of Azure's virtual machine tiers. Microsoft is pricing WVD aggressively by charging only for the virtual machine costs; the license requirements for the Windows 7- and Windows 10-based services will be fulfilled by Microsoft 365 F1/E3/E, Windows 10 Enterprise E3/E5, and Windows VDA subscriptions. The Windows Server-based services are similarly fulfilled by existing RDS client access licenses. This means that for many Microsoft customers, there will be no additional licensing cost for provisioning desktop computing in the cloud. The virtual machine costs can be further reduced by using Reserved Instances that commit to purchasing certain amounts of VM time in return for lower pricing. As … [Read more...] about Windows Virtual Desktop now in public preview