Axel Springer's price-comparison shopping service Idealo and 40 other European peers have accused Google of tilting the playing field in its favour and urged EU antitrust regulators to enforce a ruling against the company. From a report: The joint call by the group ratchets up pressure on European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager to take further action against Google, the world's most popular internet search engine, two years after she ordered it to stop favouring its own price comparison shopping service (CSS). The companies, the largest group to take a stand against Google to date, in a joint letter to Vestager seen by Reuters on Thursday said that the U.S. web giant had yet to comply with the 2017 order. Google was also fined 2.4 billion euros ($2.65 billion) at the time. The signatories to the letter are from 21 EU countries and include Idealo, Europe's second largest price comparison shopping service, Polish No. 1 Ceneo, Britain's Kelkoo, and Foundem and Heureka in the Czech Republic.

Speaking of YouTube ads, the Google-owned company is rolling out a new ad format for its TV experience, dubbed Masthead, to all users. The company tested this new ad format with some users earlier this year. From a report: Announced in a brief post, YouTube says that its beta test of this new ad format was successful in select markets leading to the now global rollout of the Masthead ad format. The new format is available to all advertisers on a CPM basis as part of a cross-screen advertising campaign on YouTube. YouTube's Masthead ad format is not subtle by any means, appearing over the entire top portion of the TV app. Further, that ad auto-plays silently and expands to full-size when the user hovers over the ad. Advertisers, such as FOX, call this "first of its kind" initiative a "fantastic way" to promote its content. The TV network has been using the YouTube Masthead to promote its hit show The Masked Singer.

schwit1 shared this new from the Washington Post: Police officers who download videos captured by homeowners' Ring doorbell cameras can keep them forever and share them with whomever they'd like without providing evidence of a crime, the Amazon-owned firm told a lawmaker this month... Police in those communities can use Ring software to request up to 12 hours of video from anyone within half a square mile of a suspected crime scene, covering a 45-day time span, wrote Brian Huseman, Amazon's vice president of public policy. Police are required to include a case number for the crime they are investigating, but not any other details or evidence related to the crime or their request.

Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., said in a statement that Ring's policies showed that the company had failed to enact basic safeguards to protect Americans' privacy. "Connected doorbells are well on their way to becoming a mainstay of American households, and the lack of privacy and civil rights protections for innocent residents is nothing short of chilling," he said. "If you're an adult walking your dog or a child playing on the sidewalk, you shouldn't have to worry that Ring's products are amassing footage of you and that law enforcement may hold that footage indefinitely or share that footage with any third parties."
While Ring tells users not to film public roads are sidewalks, Ring isn't enforcing that, according to the article. Amazon argues that that's ultimately the user's responsibility.

And will their cameras start using facial recognition algorithms? Amazon answers that that feature is "contemplated but unreleased," though they add that "We do frequently innovate based on customer demand," and point out that other competing security cameras are already offering facial-recognition...

For an actor who made a career by playing silly characters, actor Sacha Baron Cohen gave yesterday one of the most eloquent and convincing speeches in a long time in support of cracking down on large social media networks to prevent the spread of lies and hate speech that these platforms allow. From a report: While accepting his award, Cohen touched on the role companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter have played in spreading lies and hate speech online, calling the sites "the greatest propaganda machine in history." Below is a short summary of his main talking points. Cohen called Facebook, YouTube and Google, Twitter and others -- the biggest propaganda machine in history. He coined the term "Silicon Six" to describe the six US billionaires that control this machine -- naming Zuckerberg at Facebook, Sundar Pichai at Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Alphabet, Susan Wojcicki at YouTube, and Jack Dorsey at Twitter. The actor ripped Zuckerberg for defending holocaust deniers.

He ripped Zuckerberg for his platform facilitating Russia's interference in US elections. He ripped Zuckerberg for facilitating the Myanmar genocide. Said if another genocide takes place, Zuckerberg needs to go to jail. Cohen ripped Facebook for allowing political ads. Said if Facebook existed in the 1930s they would have allowed Hitler to post "post 30-second ads on his 'solution' to the 'Jewish problem'." Cohen likened the Christchurch massacre video to "a snuff film broadcast by social media." He said social media sites are today's largest publishers, and should have to abide to the same standards that newspapers, radio, and TV stations abide. He agreed that social media should function based on government-mandated rules, and not by internal policies set by billionaires more focused on protecting share prices than human life. He called "for regulation and legislation to curb the greed of these high-tech robber barons."

Every gambling machine in the UK's betting shops is being updated with software designed to detect and prevent problematic behaviour in players. From a report: The system locks gamblers out of machines for 30 seconds if erratic or excessive play is detected. While the brief lockdown is in effect, warnings about safe gambling are displayed on the machines' screens. One expert said the enforced break was "probably not long enough to have a positive effect." The artificial intelligence (AI) Anonymous Player Awareness System was launched this month by the Betting and Gaming Council (BGC), an industry group representing 90% of the UK betting and gaming market. Among the behaviour patterns it tries to detect are chasing losses, spending too long on a single machine and playing a succession of games rapidly. "It was rolled out to all our machines in our 1,600 shops in early November," a spokesman for Betfred told the BBC. "These alerts are now operational on machines in all 3,200 Ladbrokes and Coral shops," a Ladbrokes Coral spokesman added.

Scott Stein, reviews Google Stadia cloud gaming service for CNET: Stadia's launch day was earlier this week... sort of. Really, consider this the start of Stadia's early-access beta period. Because Google's big promises haven't arrived, and at the price of the Stadia's Founder's Edition, I can't recommend anyone jump onboard at the moment. Google's experimental game streaming service, Stadia, launches without many of its promised features, and just a handful of games. It works, but there's not much incentive to buy in. We've heard about the promises of streaming games over the internet for a decade. Stadia really does work as a way to stream games. I've only played a couple of the 12 games Google promised by Tuesday's launch, though. That short list pales compared to what Microsoft already has on tap for its in-beta game-streaming service, xCloud. It's no match for what Nvidia's game streaming GeForce Now already has or what PlayStation Now offers. Prices of Stadia games at launch in the US are below. They're basically full retail game prices. This could get crazy expensive fast.

[...] Stadia has so few games right now, and I'm trying them with no one else online. It isn't clear how things will work now that the service is going live, and what other features will kick in before year's end. I'm curious, but I might lose interest. Others might, too. I have plenty of other great games to play right now: on Apple Arcade, VR and consoles such as the Switch. Stadia isn't delivering new games yet, it's just trying to deliver a new way to play through streaming. One that you can already get from other providers. Until Google finds a way to loop in YouTube and develop truly unique competitive large-scale games, Stadia isn't worth your time yet. Yes, the future is possibly wild, and you can see hints of the streaming-only cloud-based playground Stadia wants to become. But we'll see what it shapes into over the next handful of months and check back in. Raymond Wong, writing for Input Mag looks at the amount of data playing a game on Stadia consumes and how the current state of things require a very fast internet connection to work: Like streaming video, streaming games is entirely dependent on your internet speed. Faster internet delivers smooth, lag-free visuals, and slower internet means seeing some glitches and dropped framerates. Google recommends a minimum of connection of 10Mbps for 1080p Full HD streaming at 30 fps with stereo sound and 35Mbps for 4K resolution streaming (in HDR if display is supported) at 60 fps with 5.1 surround sound. Reality didn't reflect Google's advertising, though. Despite having a Wi-Fi connection with 16-20Mbps downloads in a hotel room in LA, streaming Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Destiny 2 to my 13-inch MacBook Pro wasn't 100% stable. The visuals would glitch out for a second or two about every 10 minutes of playtime. [...] A fast internet connection isn't the only thing you need for Stadia to work right. You need a lot of bandwidth, too. One hour of playing Red Dead Redemption 2 at 1080p resolution on my 46-inch HDTV via a Chromecast Ultra ate up 5.3GB of data. This seemed insane until I saw an hour of Destiny 2 on a Pixel 3a XL with 6-inch, 1080p-resolution display gobbled up 9.3GB of data!

An anonymous reader quotes the Guardian: "Give us more guns!" is a common battle-cry among players of first-person shooters, the videogame industry's bloodiest genre. Doom co-creator John Romero has a rather different opinion. "I would rather have fewer things with more meaning, than a million things you don't identify with," he says, sitting in a Berlin bar mocked up to resemble a 1920s Chicago speakeasy. "I would rather spend more time with a gun and make sure the gun's design is really deep -- that there's a lot of cool stuff you learn about it...."

Modern shooters are too close to fantasy role-playing games in how they shower you with new weapons from battle to battle, Romero suggests. This abundance of loot -- which reflects how blockbuster games generally have become Netflix-style services, defined by an unrelenting roll-out of "content" -- means you spend as much time comparing guns in menus as savouring their capabilities. It encourages you to think of each gun as essentially disposable, like an obsolete make of smartphone. "The more weapons you throw in there, the more you're playing an inventory game." Romero contrasts this to the sparing design of the original Doom, which launched in 1993 with a grand total of eight guns. "For Doom, it was really important that every time you got a new weapon, it never made any previous weapons useless...."

Doom is also a game that knows how to keep a secret. It isn't just a firefight simulator but a treacherous, vaguely avant-garde work of 3D architecture. Its levels are mazes of hidden rooms and camouflaged doors that screech open behind you -- sometimes revealing a pile of ammunition, sometimes disgorging enemies into areas you've cleared. Today's shooters set less store by secret spaces, Romero says, because they cost so much to make.

Google's proposal to create a level playing field for price comparison shopping rivals to stave off fresh fines has not led to more traffic for its competitors, Europe's antitrust chief said this week. From a report: European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager two years ago slapped Google with a $2.65 billion fine for favoring its own price comparison shopping service and told it to stop its anti-competitive business practices. The world's most popular internet search engine subsequently offered to allow competitors to bid for advertising space at the top of a search page, giving them the chance to compete on equal terms.

The proposal does not seem to be doing the trick, Vestager said. "We may see a show of rivals in the shopping box. We may see a pickup when it comes to clicks for merchants. But we still do not see much traffic for viable competitors when it comes to shopping comparison," she told a Web Summit conference. British price comparison service Foundem, whose original complaint triggered the EU case against Google

Cloudflare was sued by a notorious patent troll Blackbird Technologies in 2016. Instead of giving up to its demands, Cloudflare employed a different strategy. From a blog post: In October 2016, Blackbird was looking to acquire additional patents for their portfolio when they found an incredibly broad software patent with the ambiguous title, "PROVIDING AN INTERNET THIRD PARTY DATA CHANNEL." They acquired this patent from its owner for $1 plus "other good and valuable consideration." A little later, in March 2017, Blackbird decided to assert that patent against Cloudflare. [...] Companies facing such claims usually convince themselves that settlements in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars are quicker and cheaper outcomes than facing years of litigation and millions of dollars in attorneys fees. We decided we would do our best to turn the incentive structure on its head and make patent trolls think twice before attempting to take advantage of the system. We created Project Jengo in an effort to remove this economic asymmetry from the litigation. In our initial blog post we suggested we could level the playing field by: (i) defending ourselves vigorously against the patent lawsuit instead of rolling over and paying a licensing fee or settling, (ii) funding awards for crowdsourced prior art that could be used to invalidate any of Blackbird's patents, not just the one asserted against Cloudflare, and (iii) asking the relevant bar associations to investigate what we considered to be Blackbird's violations of the rules of professional conduct for attorneys.

As promised, we fought the lawsuit vigorously. And as explained in a blog post earlier this year, we won as convincing a victory as one could in federal litigation at both the trial and appellate levels. In early 2018, the District Court for the Northern District of California dismissed the case Blackbird brought against us on subject matter eligibility grounds in response to an Alice motion. In a mere two-page order, Judge Vince Chhabria held that "[a]bstract ideas are not patentable" and Blackbird's assertion of the patent "attempts to monopolize the abstract idea of monitoring a preexisting data stream between a server and a client." Essentially, the case was rejected before it ever really started because the court found Blackbird's patent to be invalid. Blackbird appealed that decision to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which unceremoniously affirmed the lower court decision dismissing the appeal just three days after the appellate argument was heard. Following this ruling, we celebrated.

As noted in our earlier blog post, although we won the litigation as quickly and easily as possible, the federal litigation process still lasted nearly two years, involved combined legal filings of more than 1,500 pages, and ran up considerable legal expenses. Blackbird's right to seek review of the decision by the US Supreme Court expired this summer, so the case is now officially over. As we've said from the start, we only intended to pursue Project Jengo as long as the case remained active. Even though we won decisively in court, that alone is not enough to change the incentive structure around patent troll suits. Patent trolls are repeat players who don't have significant operations, so the costs of litigation and discovery are much less for them.

A family physician warned about a new problem this week in the New York Times: As a family doctor, I often hear from parents about how their kids push back at any attempt to limit how much time they spend playing video games. The parents will say, it's after midnight, maybe it's time to turn off the video game and get some sleep. But the kid -- usually a teenage boy -- responds that he wants to be a professional gamer. "This is my job," the boy might say... Millions of young Americans are paying real money to watch other young people play video games. Tyler Blevins, known as "Ninja," earns $500,000 a month playing Fortnite -- and that was before he dumped his previous host, Twitch, where he had over 14 million followers, to join Microsoft's streaming platform, Mixer.

Does it make sense to support a teenager's dreams of being the next Tyler Blevins? Plenty of parents do everything they can to support their children's athletic dreams. They invest in soccer camp for the next Mia Hamm, do endless tennis drills with the next Serena Williams or wake up before sunrise to drive the next Michael Phelps to swim practice. Is it any different if your child is staying up all night playing video games? The University of California, Irvine, offers scholarships to play e-sports in games such as Overwatch and League of Legends, just as many colleges have long offered scholarships to play traditional sports such as soccer and football...

The key to emotional well-being is balance. Children, especially teens, can easily careen off balance. As parents, we have to teach our kids the skills they need to keep from crashing through the guardrails. That is not to say you should be dismissive of your child's passion. If your child is dreaming of being a professional gamer, I advise parents to answer just as they would a teenager who wants to be a professional athlete. Play your game. Improve your skills. But homework and other responsibilities come first. And don't sacrifice sleep. .. Parents can support their kids' interests while also providing a reality check... You say: I commend you for your dream. I applaud your dream. I support you in your pursuit of your dream. But dreams don't always come true. And even if yours does, it may not last. Nobody plays professional soccer or professional football forever, and the same is true for e-sports, which take a greater physical and mental toll than many would imagine -- with long bouts of live streaming in particular being tied to real risks.

haaz (Slashdot reader #3,346) tells us that history has just been made as part of the Children's Miracle Network Hospitals annual online game-playing fundraiser, Extra Life:
A man from Milwaukee, Wisconsin is trying to play pinball long enough to break the standing Guinness World Record for Longest Marathon Pinball Play of 30 hours 10 minutes.

He's using Extra Life's gaming/DIY fundraising site to webcast his attempt and raise money for Children's Hospital of Wisconsin. He gets a five minute break every hour, and yes, he's wearing an adult diaper.
Just minutes ago on Twitter, the Children's Hospital of Wisconsin announced he'd beaten the record. And lots of other fundraising game-playing marathons are happening around the world today, including one in Canada -- and many of them are being streamed online.

The event began in 2008, and over the last four years has raised close to $10 million each year. As one gaming site put it, "Let's help the future programmers of our cyborg overlords fulfill their mission by streaming some video games for the kids this weekend!"

The skies of Syria, Yemen, and Libya swarm with armed and dangerous unmanned aerial vehicles. And the technology is spreading farther and farther afield. From a report: Three decades ago, drones were available to only the most technologically developed state military organizations. Today they're everywhere, being used by weaker states and small military forces, as well as many non-state actors, including Islamic State and al-Qaeda. "We're seeing a cycle of technological innovation regarding the use of drones and associated systems, and that cycle of techno-tactical adaptation and counter-adaptation will only hasten going forward," says Raphael Marcus, a research fellow in the department of war studies at King's College London.

The diffusion of such technology is leveling the playing field, says Marcus, author of Israel's Long War With Hezbollah: Military Innovation and Adaptation Under Fire. He says that because armies no longer have the monopoly on the use of drones, surveillance technology, precision capabilities, and long-range missiles, other actors in the region are able to impose their will on the international stage. "The parameters have changed," he says. That's already leading to greater instability. For example, Hezbollah's thwarted drone strike in August and increasingly sophisticated and more frequent drone attacks by Hamas raise the risk of another war with Israel; meanwhile, Yemen's Houthi rebels made an impact on the global price of oil with a strike on Saudi Arabia, using 25 drones and missiles.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: DeepMind today announced a new milestone for its artificial intelligence agents trained to play the Blizzard Entertainment game StarCraft II. The Google-owned AI lab's more sophisticated software, still called AlphaStar, is now grandmaster level in the real-time strategy game, capable of besting 99.8 percent of all human players in competition. The findings are to be published in a research paper in the scientific journal Nature. Not only that, but DeepMind says it also evened the playing field when testing the new and improved AlphaStar against human opponents who opted into online competitions this past summer. For one, it trained AlphaStar to use all three of the game's playable races, adding to the complexity of the game at the upper echelons of pro play. It also limited AlphaStar to only viewing the portion of the map a human would see and restricted the number of mouse clicks it could register to 22 non-duplicated actions every five seconds of play, to align it with standard human movement.

Still, the AI was capable of achieving grandmaster level, the highest possible online competitive ranking, and marks the first ever system to do so in StarCraft II. DeepMind sees the advancement as more proof that general-purpose reinforcement learning, which is the machine learning technique underpinning the training of AlphaStar, may one day be used to train self-learning robots, self-driving cars, and create more advanced image and object recognition systems. "The history of progress in artificial intelligence has been marked by milestone achievements in games. Ever since computers cracked Go, chess and poker, StarCraft has emerged by consensus as the next grand challenge," said David Silver, a DeepMind principle research scientist on the AlphaStar team, in a statement. "The game's complexity is much greater than chess, because players control hundreds of units; more complex than Go, because there are 10^26 possible choices for every move; and players have less information about their opponents than in poker."

Ever wondered what would manifest if you mixed 1990s nostalgia with a clever name and some futuristic hacking tech? The answer is the Pwnagotchi: a DIY, open source gadget for hacking Wi-Fi that gets smarter the more networks it gets exposed to using machine learning. From a report: It also has an adorable interface that reflects different "moods" depending on what it's doing, and echoes the Tamagotchi digital pets of the 90s. The idea is for its user to take it around the city and "feed" it with Wi-Fi handshakes, the process that allows phones or laptops to communicate with other wireless devices like a router or a smart TV. In theory, these handshakes can then be cracked to reveal the Wi-Fi network's password, which would be useful if the Pwnagotchi user wanted to hack into the Wi-Fi network at a later time. Hackers, of course, love it. The software for the Pwnagotchi was publicly released on September 19. Barely a month later, and with little promotion other than on Twitter, there's already an enthusiastic community of hundreds of security researchers and hackers all over the world who are playing with it, modding it, writing plugins to improve it, and helping each other out on a Slack channel.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: When Google launches its Stadia streaming service on November 19 (for some pre-orderers, at least), it will only include titles that are also available on standard PCs and consoles. Going forward, though, the company says it's going to focus on first-party exclusives "that wouldn't be possible on any other platform." That's how Google head of Stadia Games and Entertainment Jade Raymond (well-known as one of the creators of Assassin's Creed) summarized the company's plans in a recent interview with GamesIndustry.biz. Google announced today that its first first-party game development studio would be located in Montreal, and Raymond told GI that studio will be focused on trying things that other dedicated game platforms can't do.

Part of that promise, Raymond says, is the ability to use Google's distributed data center hardware to perform real-time calculations that can't be done on even the most powerful home hardware. "A fully physics-simulated game is one of the Holy Grails of game creation since Trespasser was being imagined 20-something years ago, and now we finally have a platform where we'll be able to deliver some of those experiences," Raymond said, making reference to the overly ambitious failure of 1998's Jurassic Park: Trespasser. That distributed server technology could also aid in the performance and scale of MMOs, Raymond said, because "everyone [on Stadia] is essentially playing in one big LAN party as far as the tech is concerned. There is no difference or constraints from an architecture perspective of how far the users are, or worrying about replication and all the other things that typically limit the number of people you can have in a game." Raymond went on to say that she foresees story-based Stadia games with characters that have "believable human interactions" rather than canned lines of repeated language. "She also talked up the potential to watch a YouTube documentary that includes footage of a classic game, then jump into a Stadia-powered gameplay session with that game directly," reports Ars Technica.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Since the World Health Organization proposed new diagnoses for "hazardous gaming" and "gaming disorder" last year, there's been an ongoing scientific debate about which way the causation for these issues really goes. Does an excessive or addictive relationship with gaming actually cause psychological problems, or are people with existing psychological problems simply more likely to have an unhealthy relationship with gaming? A recent study by Oxford's Internet Institute, published in the open access journal Clinical Psychological Science, lends some support to the latter explanation. But it also highlights just how many of the game industry's most devoted players may also be driven by some unmet psychological needs.

To study how so-called "dysfunctional gaming" relates to psychological needs and behaviors, the Oxford researchers surveyed a nationally representative sample of 1,004 UK adolescents and their caregivers. They asked the caregivers to evaluate their adolescents' levels of "psychosocial functioning:" how well the adolescents are able to internalize or externalize problems in their lives as evidenced by their behavior. [...] Of the 1,004 adolescents surveyed, 525 said they played online games daily for an average of about three hours per day. Among that group, over 55% showed at least one of the nine indicators for Internet Gaming Disorder, and even 23% showed at least three indicators. Those reported "dysregulated gaming" effects showed a significant positive correlation with the amount of time spent playing, as well as a significant negative correlation with the reported psychosocial evaluations from caregivers. In other words, those with "dysregulated" gaming habits were more likely to spend more time playing each day and less likely to be able to handle problems in their lives in a healthy way. Crucially, though, the measured effect of the dysregulated gaming variable in the study "accounted for a practically insignificant share of variability in key outcomes... as compared with the role played by basic psychological needs," as the study authors write. "This evidence suggests that having information about the extent to which an adolescent's video-game play is dysregulated provides no practically useful incremental information when viewed in light caregivers' assessments of emotional, behavioral, peer, or conduct difficulties."

"So while so-called adolescent 'problem gamers' are more likely to show behavioral problems, that fact in and of itself is much less important in predicting those problems than other measures of whether those adolescents' psychological needs are being met," reports Ars Technica. "That suggests that both dysregulated gaming and psychosocial behavior problems are both potential signs of more fundamental underlying psychological frustrations rather than excessive gaming causing problems in and of itself."

Jack Newcombe, the Chief Operating Officer of a syndication company with 44 million daily readers, describes the strange voice he heard talking to his 18-month old son: She says we have a nice house and encourages the nanny to respond. She does not. The voice even jokes that she hopes we don't change our password. I am sick to my stomach. After about five minutes of verbal "joy riding," the voice starts to get agitated at the nanny's lack of response and then snaps, in a very threatening voice: "I'm coming for the baby if you don't answer me...." We unplug the cameras and change all passwords...

Still helpless, I started doing the only thing I could do -- Googling. I typed "Nest + camera + hacked" and found out that this happens frequently. Parent after parent relayed stories similar to mine -- threatening to steal a baby is shockingly common -- and some much worse, such as playing pornography over the microphone to a 3-year-old... What is worse is that anyone could have been watching us at any time for as long as we have had the cameras up. This person just happened to use the microphone. Countless voyeurs could have been silently watching (or worse) for months.

However, what makes this issue even more terrifying is a corporate giant's complete and utter lack of response. Nest is owned by Google, and, based on my experience and their public response, Google does not seem to care about this issue. They acknowledge it as a problem, shrug their shoulders and point their fingers at the users. Their party line is to remind people that the hardware was not hacked; it was the user's fault for using a compromised password and not implementing two-step authentication, in which users receive a special code via text to sign on. That night, on my way home from work, I called Nest support and was on hold for an hour and eight minutes. I followed all directions and have subsequently received form emails in broken English. Nobody from Google has acknowledged the incident or responded with any semblance of empathy. In every email, they remind me of two-step authentication.

They act as if I am going to continue to use Nest cameras.

It was 116 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade outside the new Al Janoub soccer stadium, and the air felt to air-conditioning expert Saud Ghani as if God had pointed "a giant hair dryer" at Qatar. From a report: Yet inside the open-air stadium, a cool breeze was blowing. Beneath each of the 40,000 seats, small grates adorned with Arabic-style patterns were pushing out cool air at ankle level. And since cool air sinks, waves of it rolled gently down to the grassy playing field. Vents the size of soccer balls fed more cold air onto the field. Ghani, an engineering professor at Qatar University, designed the system at Al Janoub, one of eight stadiums that the tiny but fabulously rich Qatar must get in shape for the 2022 World Cup. His breakthrough realization was that he had to cool only people, not the upper reaches of the stadium -- a graceful structure designed by the famed Zaha Hadid Architects and inspired by traditional boats known as dhows. "I don't need to cool the birds," Ghani said.

Qatar, the world's leading exporter of liquefied natural gas, may be able to cool its stadiums, but it cannot cool the entire country. Fears that the hundreds of thousands of soccer fans might wilt or even die while shuttling between stadiums and metros and hotels in the unforgiving summer heat prompted the decision to delay the World Cup by five months. It is now scheduled for November, during Qatar's milder winter. The change in the World Cup date is a symptom of a larger problem -- climate change. Already one of the hottest places on Earth, Qatar has seen average temperatures rise more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 F) above preindustrial times, the current international goal for limiting the damage of global warming. The 2015 Paris climate summit said it would be better to keep temperatures "well below" that, ideally to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 F).

[...] To survive the summer heat, Qatar not only air-conditions its soccer stadiums, but also the outdoors -- in markets, along sidewalks, even at outdoor malls so people can window shop with a cool breeze. "If you turn off air conditioners, it will be unbearable. You cannot function effectively," says Yousef al-Horr, founder of the Gulf Organization for Research and Development. Yet outdoor air conditioning is part of a vicious cycle. Carbon emissions create global warming, which creates the desire for air conditioning, which creates the need for burning fuels that emit more carbon dioxide. In Qatar, total cooling capacity is expected to nearly double from 2016 to 2030, according to the International District Cooling & Heating Conference. And it's going to get hotter.

Activision and Infinity Ward are doubling down on their commitment to not have loot boxes in the upcoming Call of Duty: Modern Warfare with the announcement that it will instead feature a battle pass. The new system is almost identical to other battle pass systems found in games like Fortnite. IGN reports: In a newly published blog post, Activision announced that is "introducing a new Battle Pass system, not a loot box system," to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. The news comes after Infinity Ward announced the studio is not developing a loot box system for Modern Warfare despite rumors and leaks suggesting otherwise. A battle pass is a system where players can earn rewards by playing the game and completing in-game objectives. The more objectives players complete, the further they progress through the Battle Pass and the more rewards they unlock.

Unlike a loot box, a battle pass usually shows what rewards players are on track to unlock, and this will be the case for Modern Warfare's battle pass as well. "The new Battle Pass system will allow players to see the content that they are earning or buying," Activision writes. "Battle Passes will launch timed to new, post-launch live seasons, so you can unlock cool new Modern Warfare-themed content that matches each season." Activision also says that "functional content" that impact gameplay and game balance, like base weapons and attachments, will be unlocked simply by progressing through the game and not a battle pass. "There will be both a Free Stream and a Premium Stream of content in the Battle Pass System in Modern Warfare," says Activision. "New base weapons will be earned through gameplay, simply by playing Modern Warfare. Functional attachments for base weapons can be unlocked through gameplay as well just like in the game's Beta." Instead, the battle pass and in-game store will feature cosmetics that "does not impact game balance."

The battle pass is expected to arrive later this year.

Security researchers believe the Chinese Communist Party's official "Study the Great Nation" app has a backdoor that could help monitor use and copy data from those who have it installed on their devices. The BBC reports: Released in February, Study the Great Nation has become the most downloaded free program in China, thanks to persuasive demands by Chinese authorities that citizens download and install it. The app pushes out official news and images and encourages people to earn points by reading articles, commenting on them and playing quizzes about China and its leader, Xi Jinping. Use of the app is mandatory among party officials and civil servants and it is tied to wages in some workplaces.

Starting this month, native journalists must pass a test on the life of President Xi, delivered via the app, in order to obtain a press card which enables them to do their jobs. On behalf of the Open Technology Fund, which campaigns on human rights issues, Germany cyber-security firm Cure 53 took apart the Android version of the app and said it found many undocumented and hidden features. In its lengthy report, Cure 53 said Study the Great Nation had "extensive logging" abilities and seemed to try to build up a list of the popular apps an individual had installed on their phone. It was "evident and undeniable that the examined application is capable of collecting and managing vast amounts of very specific data," said the report. The app also weakened encryption used to scramble data and messages, making it easy for a government to crack security. Adam Lynn, research director at the Open Technology Fund, told the Washington Post, which broke the story: "It's very, very uncommon for an application to require that level of access to the device, and there's no reason to have these privileges unless you're doing something you're not supposed to be."

The security company didn't find evidence that this high-level access was being used, but said it's not clear why an educational app would need such access to a phone.