With millions of students now attending school from home, affordable laptop alternatives like the Chromebook are more popular than ever. The cheaper price point does come with some trade-offs including limited support for some software and hardware, but artists on a budget can now use a Wacom tablet with their Chromebooks to nurture their burgeoning artistic skills.
As noted on Wacom’s website, while the basic functionality of some of the company’s older pen-driven drawing tablets might work on certain versions of Chrome OS, more advanced features like pen pressure sensitivity and the use of a Wacom tablet’s shortcut keys won’t reliably work on a Chromebook. But that could soon be changing as today Wacom has officially announced that its One by Wacom tablet is the company’s first device that’s fully Chromebook compatible and has received the official Works With Chromebook certification.
Since so many young students rely on Chromebooks the One by Wacom—which is the company’s most affordable drawing tablet with a $60 price tag—will be natively supported under the latest version of Chrome OS which means that no drivers have to be installed and there’s no Wacom software to be installed and regularly updated. The tablet can simply be plugged into a USB port and used as a more precise alternative to a mouse for drawing and image editing, although the One by Wacom only supports basic stylus functionality including pressure sensitivity. More advanced features like tilt detection or programmable shortcut buttons are only available on more expensive Wacom models.
Artists and designers requiring more advanced features and functionality in their tablets typically tend to also rely on software from companies like Adobe and Autodesk who currently only support operating systems like Windows or Mac OS and machines featuring enough RAM and processing power to handle intensive graphical workloads—though there are versions of both Adobe’s Photoshop and Autodesk’s Sketchbook Pro available via Android on Chrome OS. Wacom has also confirmed to Gizmodo that all of the company’s tablets and pen displays will be getting Chromebook certification. Support for the One by Wacom will be followed by Chrome OS support for Wacom’s other tablet lines including Intuos, Intuos Pro, Wacom One, Cintiq, and Cintiq Pro.
Getting into digital art may have just gotten a little more affordable.
Amazon’s assistant can now power on your robot vacuum or turn off your smart lights all on its own. Yes, you heard that right.
Amazon announced last September that it would soon be rolling out an update that would allow Alexa to act on hunches it had about the way your connected devices are behaving in your home—turning off a smart bulb in a room long after you’ve gone to sleep, for example. Normally, Hunches works by allowing Alexa to merely suggest solutions to these detected problems. But now, Alexa users can opt to allow the smart assistant to just do the thing itself.
Hunches are enabled by default, though Alexa will run through how to disable the feature after explaining your first Hunch. To access your Hunches preferences, open the Alexa app and select the “more” option from the menu at the bottom of the screen. Select settings, scroll down, and click on Hunches.
This was especially interesting to me, the owner of a connected coffee maker. Surely, I thought, this has the potential to go terribly awry should Alexa go rogue and start brewing my next morning’s coffee in the middle of the night—just slowly depleting my supply of coffee grounds.
But as of today, the feature is limited to smart locks, lights, plugs, and thermostats. If you have another connected device, though, the spokesperson said that users “may start to receive Hunches from Alexa based on how you typically use your connected devices.”
For now, it seems, my coffee is safe. So help me if this bot starts slowly whittling away at what’s left of my sanity.
A false-color mosaic Titan’s polar regions. Kraken Mare is the dim splotch to the right of center. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/University of Idaho
Data gathered by NASA’s Cassini probe has allowed scientists to estimate the depth of Kraken Mare—the biggest methane sea on Saturn’s moon Titan.
New research published in the Journal of Geophysical Research is expanding our knowledge of Titan’s hydrocarbon seas, specifically Kraken Mare. This sea, approximately 600 miles (1,000 km) long, is larger than all five of North America’s Great Lakes combined and holds around 80% of the moon’s surface liquids. The seas on Titan contain lots of methane and ethane and are comparable to liquified natural gas on Earth.
Titan is the only moon in the solar system known to host an atmosphere. The thick, nitrogen-rich blanket that covers the moon hides a complex hydraulic system on the surface, but instead of liquid water, the rivers, lakes, and seas on Titan consist of oily black methane. Titan features other curiosities as well, such as gigantic dust storms, ice volcanoes, and enormous sand dunes.
As the new research shows, the deepest parts of Kraken Mare could be more than 1,000 feet (300 meters) deep. The team, led by Valerio Poggiali, a research associate at the Cornell Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Science, can’t actually be sure of that figure, because the radar pings used to determine sea depth never actually reached the seafloor.
False-color image of Kraken Mare. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Agenzia Spaziale Italiana/USGS
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NASA’s Cassini spacecraft orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017, and scientists have already studied some of the smaller seas on Titan using Cassini’s onboard altimeter. On August 21, 2014, Cassini flew to within 600 miles (970 km) of Titan’s surface and was able to send radar pings into Kraken Mare. Interestingly, this was the same flyby that resulted in the discovery of Ligeia Mare—a “magic” vanishing island on Titan.
Researchers at Cornell and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory devised a neat technique for determining the depth of Titan’s seas, which involves measuring differences between the time it takes radar to bounce back from the surface of the sea as opposed to the sea bottom. This technique helps to estimate sea depth, but the researchers have to make certain assumptions about the density of fluids on Titan and how quickly radio waves pass through them.
Using this technique, the team measured the depth of Moray Sinus, a northern estuary on Kraken Mare, which they found to be 280 feet (85 meters) deep. The absorption rate of the radar waves suggests the liquid in this part of the sea consists of 70% methane, 16% nitrogen, and 14% ethane. The scientists were expecting more methane than this due to the size and location of the sea, but this discovery suggests a more uniform distribution of chemicals across the moon’s various bodies of water.
Altimeter scans done across the main portion of Kraken Mare were less conclusive. As the authors write in the study, the NASA probe found “no evidence for signal returns from the sea floor, suggesting the liquid is either too deep or too absorptive for Cassini’s radio waves to penetrate.” That said, if the liquid in this part of the sea is similar in composition to the liquid found at Moray Sinus, then it must be deeper than 330 feet (100 meters) and possibly as deep as 1,000 feet (300 meters), according to the study.
Poggiali is hopeful that a robotic submarine might be sent to Titan one day to explore Kraken Mare or some other body of water. And in fact, he sees the new research as a step in that direction.
“Thanks to our measurements, scientists can now infer the density of the liquid with higher precision, and consequently better calibrate the sonar aboard the [future robotic submarine] and understand the sea’s directional flows,” explained Poggiali in a Cornell University statement.
A conceptual plan from 2015 showed how such a mission might look, but nothing has actually been approved in this regard. That said, NASA will be sending an aerial drone, called Dragonfly, to Titan, which should arrive at the moon at some point in the mid-2030s.
Artist’s impression of the TOI-178 system.Image: ESO
A unique planetary system located 200 light-years from Earth hosts five exoplanets with orbits locked together in a repeating pattern, despite their very different sizes and densities. The discovery is challenging astronomers’ notions of the kinds of planetary systems that can exist and how they form.
Five of six exoplanets in orbit around the star TOI-178 are in an 18:9:6:4:3 orbital resonance with each other, according to new research published today in Astronomy & Astrophysics. So for every 18 orbits made by the innermost of these five exoplanets, the next planet along the chain will complete nine orbits during the exact same period. The third will complete six orbits, and so on. The video below offers a demonstration of the process in action.
The innermost of the six exoplanets (shown with a blue orbital path) is not in resonance with the others, though it might have been in the past. In the animation above, rhythmic patterns are represented by red pulses and a chime sound (in the pentatonic scale), which get triggered when each exoplanet completes either a full orbit or a half orbit. As the video shows, two or more exoplanets trigger the chime quite often, the result of them being in orbital resonance. The new study was led by Adrien Leleu, CHEOPS fellow at the University of Geneva.
When Leleu, a dynamicist (an expert in celestial mechanics) and his colleagues first observed the TOI-178 system, they thought they saw two planets orbiting around the host star in the same orbit, but this result was inconclusive. The scientists decided to make follow-up observations using the European Space Agency’s CHEOPS satellite and the ground-based ESPRESSO instrument on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, in addition to the Next Generation Transit Survey and SPECULOOS projects, both in Chile. All these instruments allowed the team to detect the six exoplanets and characterize their orbits, which they did using the transit method (looking at the dimming of the host star when a planet passes in front) and by measuring the wobble of the host star.
All six exoplanets are in close proximity to the central star, with the nearest planet taking around two days to make a complete orbit and the most distant orbiting in around 20 days. None are inside the habitable zone, the Goldilocks region around a star where liquid water (and thus life) would be possible. Five of the six exoplanets are locked in perfect resonance, such that some planets come into alignment every few orbits. The 18:9:6:4:3 chain is among the longest ever discovered.
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Orbital resonance happens when orbiting bodies exert a periodic gravitational influence on each other. In our solar system, Jupiter’s moons Io, Europa, and Ganymede are in a 4:2:1 resonance.
The TOI-178 is interesting for a number of reasons, with the orbital resonance a sign of prolonged stability.
“From our understanding of planet formations, chain of resonances often occurs in the earliest phases of planetary system formation, when the star is still surrounded by a gaseous disc,” Leleu explained in an email. “However during the billions of years that follow the formation, many things can happen and most systems get out of the resonances. It can happen slowly, due to [gravitational] tidal effects for example, or violently, due to instability and planet collision/ejection.”
Only five other star systems have resonant chains involving four or more planets, “which is not a lot,” he added. Astronomers consider these planetary systems to be rare and quite young.
“What is unique to TOI-178 is not only this orbital configuration, but also the planets’ composition,” said Leleu. This consequently presents a challenge to our understanding of how planets form and evolve.
Indeed, the planets are between one and three times the size of Earth but have masses ranging from 1.5 to 30 times the mass of Earth. So while their orbital configurations are neat and tidy, their compositions are not. For example, one planet is a super-Earth, but its immediate neighbor is a low-density ice giant similar to Neptune. We don’t see that sort of thing around here.
According to Leleu, theory suggests that the planets should have lower density the farther they are from their star. But that’s not the case here. “In TOI-178, it’s only true for the two inner planets that are rocky, but then the third planet from the star has a very low density, then planet 4 and 5 are more dense, and then planet 6 is once again more fluffy,” he said.
Astronomers will now have to figure out how the system formed, including whether some of the planets formed farther out and slowly drifted inward.
Interestingly, TOI-178 could host other, more distant planets, but they just haven’t been detected. Looking ahead, ESO’s upcoming Extremely Large Telescope, which should become operational later this decade, might be able to to learn more about this odd star system.
Millions of users of the dating site MeetMindful got some unpleasant news on Sunday. ZDNet reported that the hacker group ShinyHunters, the same group who leaked millions of user records for the company that listed the “Camp Auschwitz” shirts, has dumped what appears to be data from the dating site’s user database. The leak purportedly contains the sensitive information of more than 2.28 million of the site’s registered users.
According to ZDNet, the 1.2 gigabyte file was shared as a free download “on a publicly accessible hacking forum known for its trade in hacked databases.” It included troves of sensitive and identifiable user information, including real names, email addresses, city, state, and ZIP code details, birth dates, IP addresses, Facebook user IDs, and Facebook authentication tokens, among others. Messages, however, were not exposed.
The outlet, which included screenshots of the file posted to the hacker forum as well as a small sample of the data exposed, highlights that not all the leaked accounts include the user’s full details. Nonetheless, it stated that the information leaked could be used to link individuals’ dating profiles to their real-world identities. The hacking forum where the data was posted has been viewed more than 1,500 times. Per the outlet, it is still available for download.
ZDNet said it was informed of the leak by a security researcher, who it did not name, earlier this week. It added that it had contacted MeetMindful on Thursday to ask for a comment on the matter but had not received a response for days.
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Gizmodo has also gotten in touch with MeetMindful to ask it about the reported hack. We’ll make sure to update this blog if we hear back.
According to its Crunchbase profile, MeetMindful is a dating site platform for “people who are into health, well-being, and mindfulness.” It was founded in 2013, is based in Denver, Colorado, and is still active.
Here’s where it starts to get a little strange, though. The site’s listedsocialmedia channels have been inactive for months, which is interesting considering that major dating apps have been growing during the pandemic. I mean, don’t they want to encourage their users to date (safely)? From the outside, the service seems like dead zone. Who knows though, it could be all the rage inside the site itself.
It is unclear whether MeetMindful has notified its users of the incident. If it’s true, users need to know so that they can be on the lookout for suspicious activity and change logins and passwords if necessary. Bottom line: Get moving.
Microsoft’s Xbox logo is seen during the worldwide release of the Xbox Series X gaming console at an electronics store in Tokyo on November 10, 2020. Photo: Charly Triballeau / AFP (Getty Images)
On Friday, Microsoft announced that it was going to raise prices for Xbox Live Gold during a pandemic, a statement that rightfully ignited anger among Xbox fans. Just a few hours later, Microsoft furiously backtracked and said it had “messed up.” No price hikes would be coming at this time, the company said. It addition, it was throwing in free multiplayer for free-to-play games, too.
In an update to its original blog posted just before midnight on Friday, Microsoft recognized that multiplayer is a critical part of gaming and said it had “failed to meet the expectations” of players who use multiplayer every day. It’s not like it’s easy to skip out on Xbox Live Gold, which is required to play games online on Xbox consoles. The move would have increased the cheapest option for a one-year membership from $60—which can currently still be bought from stores like GameStop and Amazon—to $120. Ouch.
In an apparent effort to appease angry and disappointed players, Microsoft said it would no longer require players to have an Xbox Live Gold membership to play multiplayer for free-to-play games, such as Fortnite or Call of Duty: Warzone. For comparison’s sake, before this announcement, Microsoft was the only major platform that did not allow players to use multiplayer for free on free-to-play games, the Verge reported.
“We messed up today and you were right to let us know. Connecting and playing with friends is a vital part of gaming and we failed to meet the expectations of players who count on it every day. As a result, we have decided not to change Xbox Live Gold pricing,” Microsoft said in its update. “We’re turning this moment into an opportunity to bring Xbox Live more in line with how we see the player at the center of their experience. For free-to-play games, you will no longer need an Xbox Live Gold membership to play those games on Xbox.”
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Microsoft did not specify when free multiplayer would come for free-to-play games, only that it was working to do so “as soon as possible” over the next few months.
In terms of pricing for Xbox Live Gold, existing members will stay at their current price point for renewal. New and existing members can pay $9.99 for one month, $24.99 for three months, $39.99 for six months, and $59.99 for retail 12 months, per the company.
It wasn’t hard to deduce that the company’s proposed price increase wouldn’t be taken very well. First off, it’s proposing this during a pandemic, which has benefitted its gaming division. Second, it didn’t even bother to explain why it was increasing the price. The only inkling of a reason it gave was that it would “continue to invest” in the Xbox community and that in many markets, the price of Xbox Live Gold hadn’t changed in more than 10 years.
“Periodically, we assess the value and pricing of our services to reflect changes in regional marketplaces and to continue to invest in the Xbox community; we’ll be making price adjustments for Xbox Live Gold in select markets,” the company said in its original blog post.
Microsoft’s now axed price hike was seenbymany as an effort by the company to nudge players into switching over to its Game Pass Ultimate service, which gives members access Game Pass, a service with a Netflix-like library of games, and Xbox Live Gold, among other perks, for $14.99 per month. The deal for Game Pass Ultimate is better than paying for Xbox Live Gold or Xbox Game Pass on their own and would end up making Microsoft more money in the long run.
As noted by Polygon, however, not everyone can afford to buy Game Pass Ultimate, and they shouldn’t be forced into it just to put more money into Microsoft’s pockets. Thankfully, now they won’t have to, and they can celebrate that fact by playing multiplayer on free-to-play games in the near future.
A new study describes a cloudless, Jupiter-like exoplanet.Illustration: M. Weiss/Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian
Nearly 600 light-years from Earth, the exoplanet known as WASP-62b whips around its host star at a breakneck pace. The planet is a hot Jupiter, and despite its gassy constitution, its atmosphere is completely cloudless, according to a study published this month in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
WASP-62b was first detected in 2012 in a sweep by the Wide Angle Search for Planets South survey (hence the acronym in its name). The survey detects exoplanets by spotting them as they pass in front of their host stars, causing a dip in the brightness of the star’s shine.
“We can’t actually see these planets directly. It’s like looking at a firefly next to a streetlamp,” Munazza Alam, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and lead author of the recent paper, said in a phone call. “We’re gleaning all this information about the planet’s atmosphere from what we call combined light observations, meaning we’re looking at the light from both the star and the planet.”
Hot Jupiters are a class of exoplanets, named because they are gas giants (like our local Jupiter) that orbit close to their host stars and thus are quite hot. They stand among super-Earths, mini-Neptunes, and a slew of other classifications that seek to describe exoplanets based on their archetypes in our local solar system. As a result of a hot Jupiter’s proximity to its host star, the exoplanets have extremely short orbital periods. If WASP-62b’s orbit began on a Monday morning for Earth, its year would be over before you clocked out for the weekend.
Within the Milky Way, Alam said, hot Jupiters are rarer than smaller planets, and among exoplanets, it’s more common to find cloudy atmospheres. That makes this hot Jupiter a bit of an oddball.
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The team looked at spectroscopic data gathered by the Hubble Space Telescope that focused on quantities of potassium and sodium in the atmosphere. None of the former turned up, but sodium was detected in “whopping” amounts, Alam said, suggesting that the atmosphere of WASP-62b was clear at the pressures detected by Hubble. The results make the planet the first hot Jupiter with a cloud-free atmosphere and only the second exoplanet with such a clear atmosphere after a hot Saturn (WASP-96b) detected in 2018. Both planets have that significant sodium content, which appears in a tent-like peak in the data, that make for a cloud-free gas giant.
Down the line, the team aims to probe different atmospheric layers of the hot Jupiter that are not detectable by Hubble. Future observations of the exoplanet will be done with the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, which will be able to see in near-infrared.
“Kepler showed us that there are thousands of planets out there, and TESS is doing that as well in different parts of the sky,” Alam said. “We found thousands of smaller planets, which is really changing the demographics of the planet population as we knew it.”
Video game retailer GameStop, that store you stumble into at the mall while trying to figure out why you’re at a mall, is having quite a moment on Wall Street. The company went on a rollicking market run Friday, skyrocketing nearly 70 percent before trading was briefly halted due to online drama involving its stock.
The gaming store has been on a roll ever since recent shifts within the company’s board of directors “sparked a rally” of its stock. Since then the GameStop’s value has continued to climb. Bloomberg reports:
GameStop is up 245% in January to date, with its average daily rolling 10-day volatility peaking at the highest level in the nearly two decades the stock has been trading, data compiled by Bloomberg show. Friday’s eye-popping surge fueled its market value above $4.5 billion at its peak.
This surge has been partially fueled by a controversial band of online proponents, day traders on a reddit thread: r/wallstreetbets. The r/wallstreetbets traders have been vociferously rallying behind GameStop’s stock, ginning up interest via social media, with The Street noting that the redditors are “responsible for pushing the stock to levels it hasn’t seen in years.”
This is where the drama part comes in. Critics claim that the online supporters are having an undue influence on the stock’s trajectory. The Verge, for instance, notes that the “hype generated by r/wallstreetbets helped create what’s known as a “short squeeze” on GameStop’s stock.” A short squeeze, explains Yahoo Finance, is essentially a pumping up of the stock that “forces short sellers to buy in order to forestall bigger losses, sending the stock price much higher.”
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Image: Screenshot: Reddit
One of the more vociferous critics of GameStop has been well-known short-seller, Andrew Left, who runs Citron Research, a newsletter critical of companies Left deems “fraudulent” or doomed to fail. Contrary to the redditors, Left has been predicting the gaming company’s imminent downfall.
On Thursday, he released a Youtube video in which he called the company a “failing mall-based retailer” and listed the reasons why he believed that the company would soon fall to $20 per share (instead, it closed at $43.03 later that day and rose to $65 by end of day Friday).
The drama between the redditors and Left reached a boiling point Friday, however, with Left claiming there had been attempts to hack into his Twitter account and also implying that his family had been somehow harassed. On Twitter he wrote: “We will no longer be commenting on GameStop, not because we do not believe our investment thesis but rather the angry mob who owns this stock has spent the past 48 hours committing multiple crimes that I will be turning over to the FBI, SEC, and other governmental agencies.”
Left doesn’t exactly have a spotless track record himself. After a controversial report on a Chinese real estate developer in 2012 (short-sellers made a bundle while the company was left reeling), Left was ultimately banned from the Hong Kong financial market for allegedly making “false and/or misleading” statements. Earlier in his career, in 1994, he was also sanctioned by the National Futures Association, the self-regulatory body committed to overseeing the country’s derivatives market, as “part of a wider probe” into a firm he was employed with at the time.
Markets Insider writes:
While it remains to be seen who will win out, some indicators have suggested the bulls’ party is ending. The Relative Strength Index for GameStop shares – a measure of the stock’s momentum – sat just below 80 following Thursday’s 10% climb. Readings above 70 suggest the stock is overbought, and the index hasn’t landed below that threshold since January 12.
Right now, it’s not totally clear where the stock is headed.
What if the most significant measure of your life’s labors has nothing to do with your lived experiences but merely your unintentional generation of a realistic digital clone of yourself, a specimen of ancient man for the amusement of people of the year 4500 long after you have departed this mortal coil? This is the least horrifying question raised by a recently-granted Microsoft patent for an individual-based chatbot.
First noticed by the Independent, The United States Patent and Trademark Office confirmed to Gizmodo via email that Microsoft is not yet permitted to make, use, or sell the technology, only to prevent others from doing so. The application for the patent was filed in 2017 but just approved last month.
Hypothetical Chatbot You (envisioned in detail here) would be trained on “social data,” which includes public posts, private messages, voice recordings, and video. It could take 2D or 3D form. It could be a “past or present entity”; a “friend, a relative, an acquaintance, [ah!] a celebrity, a fictional character, a historical figure,” and, ominously, “a random entity.” (The last one, we could guess, might be a talking version of the photorealistic machine-generated portrait library ThisPersonDoesNotExist.) The technology could allow you to record yourself at a “certain phase in life” to communicate with young you in the future.
I personally relish the fact that my chatbot would be useless thanks to my limited text vocabulary (“omg” “OMG” “OMG HAHAHAHA”), but the minds at Microsoft considered that. The chatbot can form opinions you don’t have and answer questions you’ve never been asked. Or, in Microsoft’s words, “one or more conversational data stores and/or APIs may be used to reply to user dialogue and / or questions for which the social data does not provide data.” Filler commentary might be guessed through crowdsourced data from people with aligned interests and opinions or demographic info like gender, education, marital status, and income level. It might imagine your take on an issue based on “crowd-based perceptions” of events. “Psychographic data” is on the list.
In summary, we’re looking at a Frankenstein’s monster of machine learning, reviving the dead through unchecked, highly-personal data harvesting.
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“That is chilling,” Jennifer Rothman, University of Pennsylvania law professor and author of The Right of Publicity: Privacy Reimagined for a Public World told Gizmodo via email. If it’s any reassurance, such a project sounds like legal agony. She predicted that such technology could attract disputes around the right to privacy, the right to publicity, defamation, the false light tort, trademark infringement, copyright infringement, and false endorsement “to name only a few,” she said. (Arnold Schwarzenegger has charted the territory with this head.)
She went on:
It could also violate the biometric privacy laws in states, such as Illinois, that have them. Presuming that the collection and use of the data is authorized and people affirmatively opt in to the creation of a chatbot in their own image, the technology still raises concerns if such chatbots are not clearly demarcated as impersonators. One can also imagine a host of abuses of the technology similar to those we see with the use of deepfake technology—likely not what Microsoft would plan but nevertheless that can be anticipated. Convincing but unauthorized chatbots could create issues of national security if a chatbot, for example, is purportedly speaking for the President. And one can imagine that unauthorized celebrity chatbots might proliferate in ways that could be sexually or commercially exploitative.
Rothman noted that while we have lifelike puppets (deepfakes, for example) this patent is the first she’s seen that combines such tech with data harvested through social media. There are some ways that Microsoft might mitigate concerns with varying degrees of realism and clear disclaimers. Embodiment as Clippy the paperclip, she said, might help.
It’s unclear what level of consent would be required to compile enough data for even the lumpiest digital waxwork, and Microsoft did not share potential user agreement guidelines. But additional likely laws governing data collection (the California Consumer Privacy Act, the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation) might throw a wrench in chatbot creations. On the other hand, Clearview AI, which notoriously provides facial recognition software to law enforcement and private companies, is currently litigating its right to monetize its repository of billions of avatars scraped from public social media profiles without users’ consent.
Lori Andrews, an attorney who has helped inform guidelines for the use of biotechnologies, imagined an army of rogue evil twins. “If I were running for office, the chatbot could say something racist as if it were me and dash my prospects for election,” she said. “The chatbot could gain access to various financial accounts or reset my passwords (based on information conglomerated such as a pet’s name or mother’s maiden name which are often accessible from social media). A person could be misled or even harmed if their therapist took a two-week vacation, but a chatbot mimicking the therapist continued to provide and bill for services without the patient’s knowledge of the switch.”
Hopefully, this future never comes to pass, and Microsoft has offered some recognition that the technology is creepy. When asked for comment, a spokesperson directed Gizmodo to a tweet from Tim O’Brien, General Manager of AI Programs at Microsoft. “I’m looking into this – appln date (Apr. 2017) predates the AI ethics reviews we do today (I sit on the panel), and I’m not aware of any plan to build/ship (and yes, it’s disturbing).”
Nobody likes Joy-Con drift. In fact, Joy-Con drift sucks so hard that Nintendo has been pummeled with numerous lawsuits over the widespread, well-documented problem. Well, Nintendo can add another lawsuit to the pile. A Canadian law firm, Lambert Avocat, has filed a class-action lawsuit seeking compensation for anyone in Quebec who bought a Nintendo Switch, Switch Lite, Nintendo Switch Pro Controller, or Joy-Cons.
If you and all your Switch-owning friends have miraculously avoided Joy-Con drift, the issue is that after a while (sometimes not even a very long while), Joy-Cons start triggering phantom movements on screen, regardless of whether you’re actually touching the joystick. Lambert Avocat notes that its client discovered her left Joy-Con was drifting after 11 months. After sending them back to Nintendo for repairs, two months later, the right Joy-Con started drifting. She then bought a second pair of Joy-Cons and a Nintendo Switch Pro Controller—all of which eventually exhibited Joy-Con drift.
The firm contends that Joy-Con drift “constitutes an important, serious and hidden defect” that wasn’t properly disclosed by Nintendo, consumers wouldn’t be able to detect defective Joy-Cons just by looking at them, and all-in-all violates Quebec’s Consumer Protection Act. (If you happen to live in Quebec and have bought any of the aforementioned products since Aug. 1, 2017, you, too, can apply to be part of the lawsuit.)
Nintendo’s Joy-Con drift legal woes span the globe. There’s one in Illinois, another one in California led by a child and his mother, and another in Washington that was later amended to include the Switch Lite a week after it launched. Per IGN, at the end of last year, nine European consumer organizations said they had received nearly 1,000 complaints about Joy-Con drift and called on consumers to report their problems as part of a potential investigation. A French consumer protection organization has also filed a complaint against Nintendo, alleging that drift and Nintendo’s continued failure to permanently address drift were evidence of planned obsolescence.
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Clearly, there’s a problem here and Nintendo knows it. No, seriously, they know because, as our sister site Kotaku reported last year, Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa apologized during a financial Q&A session. “Regarding the Joy-Con, we apologize for any trouble caused to our customers,” Furukawa said, before citing a class-action lawsuit as a reason why Nintendo couldn’t comment further on how it intended to fix this whole mess. It has since added a whole Joy-Con repair section to its customer support website.
Consumers and consumer advocacy organizations are right to be pissed, but the onus isn’t on them to fix Joy-Con drift. Yours truly has experienced drift withtwo sets of Joy-Cons, both after less than six months of use. And while it’s nice Nintendo will repair Joy-Cons for free, it’s moot if, after repairs, you continue to experience the problem. Buying replacement Joy-Cons also loses its luster when there’s a good chance that those, too, will also eventually drift. What you end up with is a periodic cycle of repair or replacement that you likely didn’t factor into the initial purchase cost. In any context, this is bad form for any gadget maker.
There are plenty of theories as to what actually causes Joy-Con drift—some say it’s dust and debris sneaking its way into the controller, others contend it’s wear-and-tear on contact pads. But until Nintendo sheds some light on why, publicly commits to a more permanent solution, or updates how the controllers are designed, Joy-Con drift ain’t going anywhere. And neither are the lawsuits.