This week, Clearview's customer list is exposed, DropMix's gaming style is upgraded, and Firefox's browsing is more protected.
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.
Since the company accidentally came out of stealth mode, Clearview AI has had continuing trouble. While law enforcement loves the ability to identify people with their phones, public perception and the reception by privacy advocates have been incredibly negative. To add insult to injury, the company has refused to discuss or disclose exactly who they have been working with.
Harmonix has long been a top name in music and rhythm games. With console titles like Rock Band, and tabletop titles like DropMix, they have continued to innovate in the space. This innovation has come during a time when most thought that the rhythm genre had returned to a small, niche market. But, with DropMix, the company proved that there was still a wider interest in music titles. But, with custom hardware needed and perishable components, the reach of the game was still limited. With the newest title Fuser, they may have found a happy medium.
The past few years have seen the transition of much of the internet from transferring data over HTTP to HTTPS. While the distinction seems small, the end behavior has been huge. ISP and internet relays can no longer see the data being transferred between you and the websites you visit, so long as they are using HTTPS. While the data itself is encrypted, the requests are not. That means that these same organizations have the ability to see the sites and pages you visit, if not the data, because the DNS lookups themselves are not encrypted. That is until now.
In 2017, PragerU filed suit against Google and YouTube over the company's content policies. The educational organization made the same claims that many content creators have made over the past few years - that YouTube's policies are inconsistent and applied more often against publishers that disagree with the company's political stance. While a private organization generally has the ability to determine what happens attached to its name, PragerU argued that YouTube's position in the industry made it more like a public space. Because of that position, the company's content policies are tantamount to censorship.