Technology - Google News

T-Mobile won’t sell the Galaxy Fold when it is rereleased - The Verge
SpaceX's Starhopper Rocket Prototype Aborts 1st Untethered Hop Attempt - Space.com
74% Of Adults Have Been Harassed While Gaming Online, Study Says - Kotaku

T-Mobile won’t sell the Galaxy Fold when it is rereleased - The Verge

Posted: 25 Jul 2019 07:30 AM PDT

Now that Samsung has announced that it has made changes to the Galaxy Fold and will rerelease it this September, the next question is: should anybody trust it enough to buy it? We can't really answer that question until we review it (again), but we do have an answer to another question: will carriers trust it enough to sell it? We asked T-Mobile and AT&T, the US carriers that originally announced they'd carry the Fold in stores or online. AT&T isn't saying anything definitive yet, but we got an unambiguous answer from a T-Mobile spokesperson:

T-Mobile will not carry the Galaxy Fold because we already offer customers a wide range of the latest smartphones. Please reach out to Samsung for any further inquiries.

That's probably about as close to shade as you're going to get in the buttoned-up world of PR speak with two big companies that regularly partner with each other. It's not a surprise, but T-Mobile has had a reputation for being more willing to take flyers on new and different Android devices than other big US carriers. It was the first major US carrier to pick up OnePlus phones, for example.

It turns out — and I am deeply sorry for this — that T-Mobile knows when to walk away.

To be clear, we still expect the unlocked version of the rereleased Fold to work fine on all four major US carriers. But when it was originally announced, only T-Mobile and AT&T committed to selling the phone. Both had to cancel preorders, and it was kind of a confusing mess there for a while.

T-Mobile was also the only carrier to realize that the "protective layer" on the original Galaxy Fold was problematic enough to warrant a label warning not to peel it off, as you can see in this tweet from Desmond Smith, director of creative content at T-Mobile:

As for AT&T, it doesn't have anything official to share yet, but it did say it was still working with Samsung. Perhaps that means the company was nearly as surprised as we were by Samsung's announcement that the Fold is fixed, and it still needs to get units in to run through its own tests. Even if AT&T does end up carrying the Fold again, it's not a great look for Samsung to have rushed up an announcement at 9PM ET last night without looping in its major US carrier partners.

Samsung claims it has made several improvements to the screen and hinge that should protect the Fold from being so easily damaged. It extended that protective layer "beyond the bezel" so it doesn't look like a thing you should peel off. It also added "additional reinforcements" around the hinge to stop debris from getting in.

The Fold is expected to be released in September, but we don't have a specific date yet. I doubt there will be much fanfare when it does come out: September is the same month that the new iPhone is usually released, so Samsung would have a hard time getting much attention even if it wanted it. We'll let you know if we get anything more concrete from AT&T or Samsung on retail sales for the Fold.

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SpaceX's Starhopper Rocket Prototype Aborts 1st Untethered Hop Attempt - Space.com

Posted: 24 Jul 2019 06:15 PM PDT

SpaceX fired up its Starhopper test vehicle for its biggest hop yet Wednesday (July 24), but the rocket aborted the flight just seconds into the attempt.

Starhopper, a prototype for SpaceX's Starship program, ignited its Raptor engine for about 3 seconds at the company's Boca Chica test site in South Texas, but the vehicle failed to lift off. Instead of hopping up about 65 feet (20 meters) as planned, the rocket belched flame and smoke, then shut down.

"It appears as though we have had an abort on today's test," SpaceX certification engineer Kate Tice said during a webcast of the Starhopper test. "As you can see there, the vehicle did not lift off today."

SpaceX's Starhopper test vehicle attempts its first untethered test hop on July 24, 2019 at the company's Boca Chica, Texas test site. The vehicle did not lift off as planned..

SpaceX's Starhopper has performed two brief tethered test hops in early April, as well as ground tests of the rocket's main Raptor engine, which is fueled by liquid methane and liquid oxygen. Today's test flight was designed to be the first untethered flight for Starhopper, with its Raptor engine firing at 80% capacity, Tice said.

"This is a development program," she added. "Today was a test flight designed to test the boundaries of the vehicle."

Wednesday's aborted test hop was supposed to happen last week, but Starhopper encountered an issue during a routine preflight static-fire test of its Raptor. Shortly after the static fire, Starhopper was engulfed in a huge fireball, but the vehicle emerged mostly undamaged, according to SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.

"Yeah, big advantage of being made of high-strength stainless steel: not bothered by a little heat!" Musk wrote on Twitter at the time.

Starhopper is designed to test vital technologies for SpaceX's even-larger Starship vehicle and its massive 35-Raptor engine booster, the Super Heavy. Starship will be powered by six Raptors, Musk has said.

The Starship/Super Heavy combo is designed to be a fully reusable launch system capable of launching 100 people into space at a time. The company aims to eventually use Starship as its main heavy-lift vehicle, as well as for a private tourist flight around the moon (a billionaire has already bought the first flight) and eventual trips to Mars.

You can see SpaceX's full video of the Starhopper test hop below.

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Email Tariq Malik at tmalik@space.com or follow him @tariqjmalik. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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74% Of Adults Have Been Harassed While Gaming Online, Study Says - Kotaku

Posted: 25 Jul 2019 03:00 AM PDT

Illustration for article titled 74% Of Adults Have Been Harassed While Gaming Online, Study Says

74 percent of adults who play games online have experienced some form of harassment, according to a new report released today.

The report, published Thursday by the century-old civil rights nonprofit organization Anti-Defamation League, offers some staggering statistics on the prevalence of trolling, threats, discrimination, and just plain rude name-calling in online gaming. Alongside a survey of over 1,000 people who play games, the ADL also looked at game publishers' moderation of those spaces, and found them wanting.

"Large-scale commercial games have these aspects of their platform that are totally unmoderated spaces," said Daniel Kelley, the associate director of ADL's center for Technology and Society, to Kotaku. "We know from places like 4chan or 8chan that unmoderated spaces become toxic."

How toxic? Some of the numbers that came from the study, conducted in April of this year, are mind-boggling. 65 percent of the players surveyed experienced "severe harassment," which includes "physical threats, stalking and sustained harassment" while gaming online. 29 percent said that at some point, they had been "doxed" as a result of a game, which the study defines as a stranger publishing private information about them.

About a third of LGBTQ players believed that they were harassed because of their sexual orientation. A third of black or African-American people surveyed, as well as a quarter of Latinx and Asian-American people, say they think they were harassed because of their ethnicity. Women were the most-harassed demographic—probably because women's voices can be identifying in games' voice chats—with nearly 40 percent having reported harassment based on gender.

The Anti-Defamation League decided to investigate problem of online gaming harassment after noticing the relative lack of strong data on it, and similar organizations' reluctance to tackle the topic, Kelley said. "There's a sense that there's a problem here. I'd read about it but hadn't talked to the community. Is this something that had been hyped up in the media and was not real?"

Another thing the ADL found was that not all games are created equal when it comes to harassment in their social spaces. Among the top games that the ADL found to foster harassment were Dota 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Overwatch, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, and League of Legends. Dota 2 was the top game players said they had stopped playing because they didn't want to deal with others' rude antics.

And while 80 percent of players said that they had, at some point, experienced positive social interactions in a game—with World of Warcraft, Minecraft and NBA 2K being the leaders in happy moments—that number dropped to just 37 percent when talking about Riot's League of Legends.

Kelley said that games haven't caught up with other online services in terms of their approach to dealing with harassment. Over the last decade, as social media has become a confluence of big business and mass culture, companies like Facebook and Twitter have begun outright denouncing hate speech and harassment on their platforms. "There's an expectation that if you're on Facebook, Twitter, Twitch, any text thing—there's some form of moderation," Kelley said. "I was looking at both Fortnite and League of Legends' [current] policies around harassment and looking at Twitter's in 2006 and they seem to be carbon copies of each other." While games also include voice chat as well as text, Kelley said that harassment occurred pretty much equally between both methods of communication.

Of the game players surveyed, 35 percent admitted to doing the bad behavior themselves, whether it be simple trolling or calling other players offensive names.

Perhaps the most shocking revelation from the report was its findings about how often gamers encounter extremist or white supremacist talk in games. "Almost a quarter of online multiplayer gamers (23%) have been invited to discuss or have heard others discussing the 'superiority of whites and inferiority of non-whites' and/or 'white identity/a home for the white race,'" the study reads. "While this result does not necessarily imply that players were being recruited to join a white supremacist organization in any online game, the prevalence of expressions of white supremacy in online games suggests that this hateful ideology may be normalized in some game subcultures."

The ADL suggested that the Entertainment Software Ratings Board, the organization that puts age ratings on video games in the United States, reconsider its rating system. Kelley notes that, while the ESRB looks at the nudity in a game or the specific types of violence, they don't take into account what players do online. "They pass the ball on, 'What are the online interactions like?' If you look at, for instance, Fortnite, that's T-rated, but 70 percent of folks are experiencing harassment, according to our study," he said. "You also need to look at stuff like, 'How is the reporting system? Does it happen in-game or out of the game?'"

Gamers' humor can be a bit extreme. We tend to take it for granted that someone might think it's funny to type "kys," or "kill yourself," in an online game for laughs. But even if the behavior is done in a joking manner, Kelley said, it's important to put a spotlight on it. "Games are mainstream," he said. "It's important to call that out, that it is not normal. It is not acceptable to tell someone to kill yourself. There's a value in reflecting back to folks who may say this is normal. But as part of broader society, is that a part of the values we want to enshrine in this growing medium?"

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