This week, we're feeling the presidential ban hammer, upset by the Apple walled garden, and jealous of the Quibi free tier.
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.
Last week, President Trump told a group of reporters that he was looking to ban TikTok in the coming days. The ban is over national security issues after it was revealed the company was copying data from users without letting users know. This comes after months of companies and governments around the world banning the app in various forms. Many companies have banned the app from corporate phones. The US and others banned its use on government phones and, in some cases, banning employees and the military from using it entirely.
One of the emerging videogame industries is game streaming. While OnLive may have been ahead of its time, Sony has PlayStation Now, Google has Stadia, and Microsoft has Project xCloud, which will soon be released publicly as Game Pass Game Streaming. While Microsoft has been running a limited test of xCloud on iOS through TestFlight, it turns out it is a feature that will never be because of Apple.
In the crowded field of social media, one brand we did not expect to be talking about in 2020 is Google+. The service ran from 2012 until 2019 when Google shut it down following poor consumer reception and, acting as the final nail in the coffin, was a revealed data breach. Because of that breach, a small number of affected users came together to file a class-action suit against Google, a move that was almost inevitable. While the case has gone on for the past year, a settlement has finally been reached.
Quibi is far from the darling of the streaming video industry. In fact, the company was confusing even before its launch. The professionally-produced short-form content concept didn't make a lot of sense to most of the industry, but T-Mobile saw the potential. While there were a lot of initial signups, the company struggled to convert trials to paid memberships. It could be that people weren't interested in paying $5 per month to watch maybe one or two interesting shows (Reno 911!, anyone?).