Day: September 20, 2017

When it comes to smart speakers, Amazon’s Alexa is already out to a big lead. But with refreshed Home speakers coming from Google not to mention Apple, Sonos, and others soon to be joining the fray with their own sound systems featuring built-in digital assistants, Amazon has no time to rest on its laurels. To help bring the power of Alexa to places where a regular Echo might not be able to go, Amazon is reportedly getting ready to make an Alexa-powered pair of smart glasses.

But don’t get any visions of these smart glasses looking like an updated take on the awkward Google Glass from back in 2013 . According to a new report from the Financial Times, Amazon’s upcoming smartglasses will instead rely on a tethered wireless connection to your phone and a bone-conducting audio systems to project sound into your noggin without the need for headphones.

While this might sound a bit ridiculous, it would be a relatively simple and unobtrusive way for people to have a digital assistant in their ear at all times. Apple does it with the AirPods, and the Google Assistant is on basically every Android phone made in the last year and a half. But without its own handsets, Amazon needs to find a different way stay relevant on mobile.

Additionally, Bluetooth radios and batteries have gotten pretty small, and with Amazon’s growing clothing and fashion portfolio, the company could offer the new smartglasses in a range of styles. Then again, it’s not like there aren’t Alexa-powered headphones already on the market, and those didn’t exactly set the world on fire.

Along with the new smartglasses, the Financial Times also reported that a new Amazon home security camera is on the way. The internet-connected camera will be integrated in with Amazon’s other Echo devices so that users could watch the security cam’s feed on something like the Echo Show. It’s not super exciting and it seems like a logical addition to growing family of devices, which means it will probably happen.

But if Amazon’s real master plan is to have a microphone connected to Alexa anywhere you go, home or away, the rumored smart glasses could be what Amazon needs to bring Alexa out the living room and into the world—especially after the Echo Tap failed to live up to expectations.

[Financial Times]

Last weekend, a user calling themselves yellows8, posted an intriguing discovery to SwitchBrew.org, a site dedicated to finding ways to hack the Nintendo Switch. Hidden on every Switch console is a mysterious game called Flog, which turns out to be an emulated version of the 1984 NES game Golf upgraded with motion controls. An even bigger mystery was finding a way to actually play the game, and it turns out it’s far from easy.

Why Golf? Satoru Iwata was Nintendo’s fourth president and CEO, but he was also a coder, and in 1984 he created his own data compression tool to squeeze a golf game, complete with 18 holes, onto an NES cartridge. Unfortunately, on July 11, 2015, Iwata passed away from complications resulting from a bile duct tumor he had had removed a year before. It’s not known how the NES Golf game found its way into the Switch’s firmware, but accessing it reveals it was almost definitely put there by someone at Nintendo as a tribute to Iwata.

Unfortunately, launching Golf isn’t as easy as just entering the Konami code, or any combination of button presses. For starters, as testers on the GBA Temp forums and SwitchBrew have discovered, the Switch’s internal clock first has to match the date of Iwata’s passing, July 11. If you’ve ever connected your Switch to the internet, there’s currently no way to access the Golf game, because the console’s internal clock automatically syncs itself to network time. But if your Switch has never been online, that internal clock syncs itself to what’s been user-specified in the settings, which means you can simply hop into the Switch’s settings and dial back the clock to July 11.

It gets a little easier after that, but only slightly. With the date adjustment made, you need to head back to the Switch’s main menu, and detach each Joy-Con. With a controller in each hand, you then need to reproduce a very specific motion that Iwata had used in a Nintendo Direct presentation. With both arms down, hold each Joy-Con pointing downwards, and then raise your hands until the controllers are in front of your face, in a vertical position. If you’ve done everything right, after holding that pose for a moment, the classic NES Golf game will supposedly automatically launch, as several videos posted online, including one from the BBC, have shown.

Unfortunately, the success rate for getting this to reliably work has been abysmal. As SwitchBrew points out, there is additional Switch criteria that needs to be met for this Easter Egg to be revealed, and so far no one has been able to figure out exactly what those are. Some testers have also been trying to find ways to completely reset their internet-connected Switches back to factory conditions, but that involves dismantling the units and removing backup batteries, which doesn’t seem worth it?

Only a handful of testers have managed to get Golf to load, and so far no one has posted a complete, unedited video of the entire unlocking process (including the BBC). To make matters worse, the game doesn’t seem to be completely finished, and actually playing a round using motion controls and the Switch’s Joy-Cons has proven to be confusing. It’s a fun Easter Egg, but your time will probably be better spent unlocking all of Breath of the Wild’s secrets instead.

[SwitchBrew.org via Ars Technica]

Update, 1:39 p.m. EST/EDT: Earlier today, YouTube user fire3element posted what appears to be a complete walk-through of getting the Nintendo Switch to load Golf, including updating the system’s date, and the requisite Joy-Con motions.

Equifax’s response to its data breach has been a total shitshow and the company seems determined to remind us of this each and every day.

For nearly two weeks, the company’s official Twitter account has been directing users to a fake lookalike website, the sole purpose of which is to expose Equifax’s reckless response to the breach.

After announcing the breach, Equifax directed its customers to equifaxsecurity2017.com, a website where they can enroll in identity theft protection services and find updates about how Equifax is handing the “cybersecurity incident.”

But the decision to create “equifaxsecurity2017” in the first place was monumentally stupid. The URL is long and it doesn’t look very official—that means it’s going to be very easy to emulate. Fake versions of the site could be used to phish Equifax customers and steal their personal information, again. A much safer choice would have been to create a subdomain on the Equifax website (equifax.com) and direct users there.

To illustrate how idiotic Equifax’s decision was, developer Nick Sweeting created a fake website of his own: securityequifax2017.com. (He simply switched the words “security” and “equifax” around.) Sweeting’s website looks slightly different than the official Equifax website, as you can see below, but only because he isn’t actually trying to dupe anyone:

Sweeting’s intentions clearly aren’t malicious. If anything, he’s trying to demonstrate why Equifax needs to shut down its website, or at least transfer it elsewhere, so it isn’t further exposing consumers to risk.

As if to demonstrate Sweeting’s point, Equifax appears to have been itself duped by the fake URL. The company has directed users to Sweeting’s fake site sporadically over the past two weeks. Gizmodo found eight tweets containing the fake URL dating back to September 9th:

Each of the tweets containing Sweeting’s URL is signed by someone at Equifax named “Tim.” The latest tweet was sent out September 19th. (Equifax deleted this tweet Wednesday morning, but at the time of writing the other seven tweets were still live.)

“It’s in everyone’s interest to get Equifax to change this site to a reputable domain,” Sweeting told Gizmodo. “I knew it would only cost me $10 to set up a site that would get people to notice, so I just did it.”

The real Equifax site is dangerous, he said, because of how easy it is to impersonate. “It only took me 20 minutes to build my clone. I can guarantee there are real malicious phishing versions already out there.”