This week, Apple and Samsung finally settle their differences, regulations could be strangling the internet and Fox is ghosting Comcast.
Scott is a developer who has worked on projects of varying sizes, including all of the PLUGHITZ Corporation properties. He is also known in the gaming world for his time supporting the rhythm game community, through DDRLover and hosting tournaments throughout the Tampa Bay Area. Currently, when he is not working on software projects or hosting F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Scott can often be found returning to his high school days working with the Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), mentoring teams and helping with ROBOTICON Tampa Bay. He has also helped found a student software learning group, the ASCII Warriors, currently housed at AMRoC Fab Lab.
Avram's been in love with PCs since he played original Castle Wolfenstein on an Apple II+. Before joining Tom's Hardware, for 10 years, he served as Online Editorial Director for sister sites Tom's Guide and Laptop Mag, where he programmed the CMS and many of the benchmarks. When he's not editing, writing or stumbling around trade show halls, you'll find him building Arduino robots with his son and watching every single superhero show on the CW.
This story has been a long time in the works. In 2011, Apple sued Samsung, claiming that Samsung had violated a number of Apple's patents. While some revolved around interaction and OS design, which was mostly Google's doing, the most memorable aspect of the suit was definitely the design patent. It is one of the most mocked suits in technology history because Apple claimed that Samsung had violated a patent involving rounded corners on a rectangle.
The topic of cross-console play has been huge in the gaming industry for over a year. Microsoft committed to allowing Xbox owners to play their games with players on other consoles. Their first major project was allowing cross-play on Minecraft, a game that is all about interaction with others. As of this moment, the game can be played on every major platform, and players can all play with one another - almost. If you have an Xbox, PC, Mac, Linux, iPhone, iPad, Android phone or even Switch, you can play together. Unfortunately, PlayStation players are still forced to play in the Sony walled garden. Microsoft and Nintendo have gone so far as to run cross-branded ads promoting their cross-play capabilities.
2018 might just be the year of bad internet regulations being passed globally. A little over a month ago we had the implementation of GDPR, which requires that a citizen of the European Union can request that a company delete all personal data they have collected about that person. Conceptually, the law makes sense: you may not want a company like Facebook to know everything that you have ever done. And when you delete your account, you would like to know that it is actually gone.
What happens when two different companies, both bent on owning everything, bid on the same company? You end up with the epic three-way that is Fox-Disney-Comcast. It all started when Disney bid to purchase Twentieth-Century Fox. Their bid, which was the only one, was $52.4 billion, which seemed like a clear decision for Fox.