This week, DuckDuckGo is protecting your mobile privacy, Rockstar is apologizing for GTA, and Halo is finally coming to TV.
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.
It has been an interesting week for privacy products expanding their focus. DuckDuckGo announced App Tracking Protection for Android, bringing an Apple feature to Android. But DuckDuckGo isn't the only player in the space. Brave recently switched Google out for their own search product in their browser, and this week they are enhancing the browser again - with crypto.
This month, Rockstar Games released the much-anticipated Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition. While gamers were excited about this release, they were treated to a series of massive problems. The company very quickly pulled the PC release from its online store but gave strange reasoning for the decision. Anyone who had purchased it, and likely anyone who watched someone play it on Twitch, YouTube, or Facebook, knew exactly what the real reasoning was. This week, the company officially addressed the issue, changing its story from last week.
Several months ago, Apple introduced a new feature to iOS - App Tracking Transparency. This feature allows users the opportunity to tell apps that track user data on their phones to bug off. It limits the amount of data available to those apps from things that happen off of the platform. Android, while being the more customizable platform, is missing this feature - until now. DuckDuckGo, the privacy-focused browser and search engine, is taking the lead to introduce the feature themselves.
Over the past decade, the focus of the Xbox brand has shifted several times. Under Steve Balmer's time as CEO, Xbox was intended to be the center of your entertainment life. As part of that endeavor, they created Xbox Entertainment Studios and began to create custom content for the platform. The project that was the highest-profile was a series based on the company's Halo franchise, but it has been fraught with issues. Despite 7 years of development Hell, Microsoft showed off a teaser for the project, now destined for a new home on Paramount+.