Congratulations, Gamescom, you put on a damn fine imitation of E3 this year. Game announcements, game trailers, trailers for trailers—it's been a crazy week. Still not quite as crazy as E3, perhaps, but it's definitely been a welcome break from the vast stretch of nothing-at-all which is the games industry during the summer. And despite covering the major PC announcements this week ( Slightly Mad Studios is spinning about a hundred plates at this point, considering the studio is ostensibly fixing OG
Here's a look at the Play Store's most intriguing new Android apps and games.
Purism’s idealistic Purism promised to blend high-end, current hardware with completely free and open-source software in its laptops. CoreBoot developers, the LibreBoot project, and other people have argued Purism doesn’t deliver on that. In fact, the combination may just not be possible. Let’s dig in.
With the start of the U.S. professional football season around the corner, Microsoft unveiled the new tech it’s going to be providing coaches and fans this season as part of its ongoing partnership with the National Football League. Fans get an updated NFL app for the Xbox One and Windows 10 that provides them with video content, stats, replays and fantasy football information about their favorite teams, while coaches and players will be using new Surface Pro 3 tablets that help them strategize on the sidelines. The Xbox One app is designed to be a command center that fans can open up to get information about their favorite teams, fantasy leagues and all things NFL right from their couch. It’s an update to the app Microsoft released last year that provided fans with videos from their favorite teams, information about their fantasy teams and access to live video from the NFL if they pay for the right TV channels. Starting this year, users can now pick out two favorite teams instead of one, so they can easily follow their hometown favorites along with a local franchise.
Pebble is now The $250 timepiece includes a leather band and stainless steel chassis, either in gunmetal black with a black band, silver with stone leather, or gold with red leather. For $50 more, you can get a matching stainless steel link band instead. Pebble is currently estimating a six- to eight-week shipping window for the Pebble Time Steel with either band. Those who already backed the Pebble Time Steel on Kickstarter will be getting their watches this month (though Pebble has
Old-school optical media will look a little sharper with the arrival of Ultra HD Blu-ray discs this holiday season. The
The Electronic Frontier Foundation recently announced that its tracker-munching browser add-on is ready for prime time. The new release adds a few extra features, including the ability to block select, unspecified “super-cookies,” as well as the ability to block browser fingerprinting. If you’ve never heard of the latter, it’s a common trick used to track users by collecting various facts about your system such as browser type, installed plugins, time zone, and screen resolution and depth, among others. Individually, those features may not be particularly revealing, but in combination they tend to allow for unique identification.
Late Thursday night, Mozilla released a security patch for the Firefox browser after finding a serious vulnerability being exploited in the wild. The vulnerability allows malicious attackers to use some JavaScript magic to “search for and upload potentially sensitive” from your hard drive to their servers. Mozilla is asking all Firefox users to upgrade immediately to version 39.0.3. Anyone on the Firefox Extended Support release via their school or business should upgrade to version 38.1.1. The security issue only affects PCs since the flaw relies on an interaction between Firefox’s PDF Viewer and other parts of the browser. Firefox for Android does not have the PDF Viewer and therefore not vulnerable, according to a
Texting your roommate to get you something from the kitchen? Check.
A lot of Web services promise to make your life easier, but IFTTT—which stands for “ Gmail is one of the Web services I use the most often, and I both love it and hate it. It’s a great email tool, but too often my inbox is overloaded with important tasks, documents, and stuff I just really need to remember. I found several IFTTT recipes that promise to make using Gmail just a tad bit better. Here are a few of my favorites.
Microsoft didn’t do cord cutters any favors with Windows 10. As
A group of Israeli researchers have improved on a way to steal data from air-gapped computers, thought to be safer from attack due to their isolation from the Internet. They’ve figured out how to turn the computer into a cellular transmitter, leaking bits of data that can be picked up by a nearby low-end mobile phone. While other research has shown it possible to steal data this way, some of those methods required some hardware modifications to the computer. This attack uses ordinary computer hardware to send out the cellular signals. Their research, which will be featured next week at the 24th USENIX Security Symposium in Washington, D.C., is the first to show it’s possible to steal data using just specialized malware on the computer and the mobile phone.
When Microsoft revealed its plans to Windows Bridge, also known as Project Islandwood, is scheduled to release this fall, in conjunction with new capabilities that Microsoft will release to its Visual Studio development environment. But for now, Microsoft is pushing the technology into the open-source community