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There was no bigger story this week than the launch of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. After years of rumor, speculation, and hopeful dreaming, the tech world’s most entertaining platforms slipped into a new world where games don’t have start screens anymore, consoles are constantly watching, and you can surveil anyone’s play time you want. Here are some of the week’s biggest stories, a number of which remind us the walled architecture of our play machines are often microcosms that reflect and intensify the limits of the new digital trappings we always seem to be stumbling through.
Michael Thomsen is Complex's tech columnist. He has written for Slate, The Atlantic, The New Inquiry, n+1, Billboard, and is author of Levitate the Primate: Handjobs, Internet Dating, and Other Issues for Men. He tweets often at @mike_thomsen.
Bill Gates Is Getting Into the Condom Business
While Xbox One's Kinect may not want to help you browse to sex sites, Microsoft founder Bill Gates is cultivating an interest in the sex lives of those in countries where The Gates Foundation works. The charity organization announced it would be donating $100,000 to further two condom research projects as part of the Global Challenges Explorations initiative. One project is working with an experimental material that will slowly tighten during intercourse to increase sensation, and the other is for a special applicator that will allow condoms to applied with one simple motion, "thereby minimizing interruption."
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Xbox One's Kinect Blocks Sex Searches on the Internet
Writing for BuzzFeed, Joe Bernstein documents a lascivious lacuna in Xbox One's voice control features, which refuse to load explicit sex websites when used to surf the Internet. Aversions to explicit sexual content is nothing new for technology companies-all major console manufacturers refuse to certify games with an Adults Only rating and Apple has a notorious hostility toward openly sexualized apps. Xbox One's extension of these long running omissions only reminds just what a carefully sterilized environment convergence boxes end up being.
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Video Game Company Allegedly Turned Players Computers Into Secret Bitcoin Farms
One of the most exciting things about Bitcoins is the theoretical possibility of making money from just running a program on a computer. Of course, it doesn't make much sense to do this until you have a large number of computers working together, but it's as close to a passive form of earning a living as we've got. This week a law suit was filed against a videogame company that allegedly tried to exploit its players by hiding Bitcoin farming software in the game code they were all running. While players were shooting each other, the developer was quietly building up its bitcoin bank account. The scam affected roughly 14,000 players and netted roughly 30 bitcoins, or roughly $17,000 at present exchange rates, before people finally caught on.
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'People Analytics' is Capturing Data on How You Work and Using It to Determine Who Gets Hired and Fired
Reporting for The Atlantic, Don Peck explains how the last several years have seen a massive upsurge in all kinds of data tracking tools that allow companies to evaluate employee performance solely through numbers. "We're getting to the point where some of our hiring managers don't even want to interview anymore," Teri Morse, a vice-president of recruiting for Xerox said. Instead the company is increasingly happy to hire people with the highest output scores for their given job, and if you're not up to snuff, blame yourself, not the algorithm used to measure you.
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Can Players Who Sell Game Items Sue Companies After Updates That Lessen Their Sales?
Over the last few years, Valve has built an infrastructure for players of its games to sell items for profit. The items are typically cosmetic, but like any piece of ornamentation, require hours of work and offer some feeling of specialness and individuality to the player buying them. The program has been a fast success in games like Team Fortress 2 and Dota 2, allowing some players to earn six-figure sums annually for selling digital clothing and gear. In a story for Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Casandra Khaw reports on how patches to these games can dramatically impact profits some sellers make, opening an interesting ethical question about whether they can hold Valve accountable for those loses, legally or ethically. If games become both pastimes and major modes of profit for players, we will probably need new standards for holding game developers accountable, not just for the fun they provide but for the stability and fairness of the markets they enable.
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Sony Patents a Smart Wig to Allow Your Hair to Talk to the Internet
If you thought Google Glass was creepy, you may want to have a seat. This week, a Sony patent for a wig with a computer chip embedded in it was revealed. The techno-fashion accessory would be able to communicate with other devices like phones and tablets and uses "actuators" distributed across the skull cap to alert the wig-wearer of an incoming email with a little buzz to the brain. The wig would also come with a GPS chip and could theoretically buzz in specific directions to guide users left and right.
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The Internet Rewrites Another Part of the English Language
The emergence of Internet shorthand has created a long list of changes to the English language, and this week linguists welcomed a new one with the shift of "because" from conjunction to preposition. More simply, phrases like "because science," "because math," "because duh" are know acknowledged as hyper-simplified ways of expressing a largely complicated thought, while simultaneously being sarcastic and dismissive of anyone who might disagree with your view. It's a strange shift, one that shows how much meaning can be packed into two simple words. At the same time, all the various arguments and objections that could help deepen one's understanding of a subject are instantly steamrolled by the bullhorn of irrefutable truth, because obviously. Like many things on the Internet, it's a paradoxical example of things getting better and worse simultaneously.
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Australian Scientist Working on Technology to Bring Extinct Creatures Back to Life
The gastric-brooding frog has been extinct since 1983, when scientists speculate a fungus spread by humans crossed over and wiped the species off the planet. A new project at the University of Newcastle will try and reverse the extinction process with something called Project Lazarus. Initial experiments took DNA samples from frozen corpses of the now extinct frog and transplanted them into the egg of a close relative species of frog. The initial results produced embryos that were genetically similar to the extinct gastric-brooding frog. None of the embryos survived more than a few days, but the researchers have high hopes the technique will one day prove successful, with the ultimate hope of bringing back the Tasmanian tiger.
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Feds Accuse Dread Pirate Roberts of Ordering Hits on Six People
The ongoing legal saga of Ross "Dread Pirate Roberts" Ulbricht grew ever stranger this week when court documents revealed accusations that he had orderer hits on six different people through Silk Road. In one instance, a user called "FriendlyChemist" tried to extort Ulbricht for $500,000, threatening to release the real world identities of thousands of the site's users. The Feds allege that Ulbricht subsequently offered $150,000 to another user, "redandwhite" to kill FriendlyChemist. Ulbricht is said to have received a photo of a dead body, but authorities claim it was a fake and that the murder was never actually carried out.
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