This week, Apple's trying to dodge bugs, Nintendo's embracing their past, and Facebook's giving out your number.
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.
Google's Project Zero is a security team within the company that identifies and discloses security issues in products produced by the company and other high profile products from other companies. The original concept of Project Zero was very dangerous, but the company amended their ways. Today, Project Zero works with the developers of the products in which they find the exploits to determine how and when the exploit should be disclosed.
When Switch Online first launched, Nintendo added free games to the subscription. Knowing their customer base better than any of the gaming companies, they decided to reach into their back catalog and offer games from the original NES console. However, we discovered recently that they planned to make games from other consoles available, particularly the Super NES. During this week's Nintendo Direct presentation, the company announced the first titles that would be coming from the Super NES, and it is quite a collection.
It wouldn't be a week on the internet if Facebook hadn't created a scenario in which consumer and governmental trust in their handling of data weren't called into question. This week's example of bad decision making comes in the form of a database of user phone numbers, made available via an unsecured cloud database. To make matters worse, this was not the only version of this database made available, as Facebook had already taken down a similar database of phone numbers.
In April of 2018, a group of more than 20 privacy groups filed a complaint with the FTC, claiming that YouTube had repeatedly and knowingly violated the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (Coppa). The allegations involved knowing that users under the age of 13 have regularly used YouTube to access video content, and YouTube had collected viewing history in order to make recommendations, as well as serve targeted advertisements, all without parental consent.