Sunday, April 17, 2022

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WhatsApp is adding the option to hide your ‘Last Seen’ status from specific contacts

Posted: 16 Apr 2022 01:54 PM PDT

This week, WhatsApp began rolling out emoji reactions. And it looks like the company could soon implement another overdue feature. With the latest beta release of its iOS app, WhatsApp has added an option that allows users to limit specific individuals from seeing their "Last Scene" status, according to WABetaInfo.

If you're not familiar with that part of WhatsApp, it's the feature that indicates when someone last checked the app, and it's a way to find out if a contact may have potentially seen your message even if they have read receipts turned off. For a while now, WhatsApp has allowed you to limit who sees your status to only your contacts. You can also disable the feature altogether, but you haven't had the ability to prevent specific individuals from seeing that information.

However, WhatsApp iOS beta version 22.9.0.70 adds a new "My Contacts Except…" option under the Last Seen section of the app's privacy settings. According to WABetaInfo, adding an individual to that list also prevents you from seeing their status. The outlet says WhatsApp is also implementing more granular privacy controls for both profile photos and about sections. With the feature now in beta testing on both Android and iOS, it likely won't be long until it's officially available in WhatsApp.

Twitter's edit feature may list a tweet's revision history

Posted: 16 Apr 2022 12:02 PM PDT

Even since Twitter confirmed it was working on an edit button, there have been questions about how the company would limit potential abuse of the feature. And we may now have an answer. In a tweet spotted by The Verge, developer Jane Manchun Wong, who's known for reverse engineering apps to find new features, suggests the forthcoming tool could create a new tweet whenever someone tweaks something they wrote.

"Looks like Twitter's approach to Edit Tweet is immutable, as in, instead of mutating the Tweet text within the same tweet (same ID), it re-creates a new Tweet with the amended content, along with the list of the old Tweets prior to that edit," Manchun Wong said.

What that list looks like is unclear at the moment.

In a separate series of tweets, a handful of other developers, including Alessandro Paluzzi, were able to enable the functionality before its official rollout. In screenshots and GIFs shared by those individuals, the edit option is accessible through the three-dots menu.

Tapping that button leads to an interface that looks similar to the platform's existing composition window – the one major difference being that button you press to post the tweaked message says "Update," instead of "Tweet." Notably, the screenshots circulating online don't show a tweet's edit history, though that could be because Twitter has yet to implement that part of the feature.

Whatever form Twitter's edit functionality takes could be ultimately decided by the outcome of Elon Musk's bid to buy the company. After purchasing a 9.2 percent stake in the social media giant and deciding not to join its board of directors, the Tesla and SpaceX executive offered to buy Twitter for $43 billion. On Friday, the board unanimously approved a poison pill strategy in an attempt to ward off the bid.

'No More Heroes 3' heads to PlayStation, Xbox and PC this fall

Posted: 16 Apr 2022 10:10 AM PDT

After debuting exclusively on Nintendo Switch last year, No More Heroes 3 is coming to PC and home consoles. In a tweet spotted by The Verge, publisher XSeed Games said on Friday it plans to release Suda 51's latest project on PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and PC sometime this fall. The new versions will feature improved high-definition visuals, better framerates and faster loading times, according to the company. That's good news considering the Switch version sometimes struggles with performance issues.

Travis Touchdown's latest misadventure sees the master assassin tasked with fighting off an alien invasion of Earth. XSeed has yet to announce pricing for the new versions, but it looks like fans can look forward to the company offering limited-edition physical copies of the game that come bundled with a handful of extra goodies, including a soundtrack with cover art that references Akira. XSeed will share more information about the digital release later.

China cracks down on livestreaming of ‘unauthorized’ games

Posted: 16 Apr 2022 08:52 AM PDT

China has signaled it will begin actively enforcing regulation that forbids the livestreaming of unauthorized games. Per Reuters, the country's National Radio and Television Administration said on Friday all internet platforms are "strictly forbidden" from streaming titles that the government has not approved.

According to video game industry analyst Daniel Ahmad, China has always required that games be officially licensed before they can be distributed or streamed within the country, but it rarely enforced the latter ban. That behavior allowed games such as Elden Ring, a title that's not officially approved for sale in China, to find substantial audiences on platforms like Huya. Ahmad notes that FromSoftware's latest garnered approximately 17 million cumulative daily average viewers in its first week of release.

"What this means in practice is that unless your game is approved by the [National Radio and Television Administration], it is going to be very difficult for it to get visibility via live streaming, short video, advertisement or other platforms [and] channels," Ahmad said.

China has become increasingly tough on video games in recent years. Last summer, the country began enforcing a three-hour weekly limit on the amount of time children can play online video games. At the time of the ban, a state-owned news outlet described the medium as "spiritual opium." The National Radio and Television Administration employed similar rhetoric, claiming issues like teenage addiction necessitated the need for urgent action on video game livestreaming.

Recommended Reading: The rise and fall of Pebble

Posted: 16 Apr 2022 07:00 AM PDT

Success and failure at Pebble

Eric Migicovsky, Medium

The founder of Pebble, one of the hottest products ever to hit Kickstarter, reflects on why the startup failed during the 10-year anniversary of its crowdfunding launch. "We succeeded at inventing the smartwatch and an entirely new product category," he writes. "But in the end, we failed to create a sustainable, profitable business."

The Goodman experiment

Alan Siegel, The Ringer

Bob Odenkirk and the folks who created Saul Goodman offer an oral history on how the character eventually got his own show even though it wasn't intended to work out that way. "Not long after Saul made his debut midway through Season 2 of Breaking Bad, it became very apparent that he was more than just comic relief," Siegel explains.

Mark Zuckerberg's augmented reality

Alex Heath, The Verge

The Verge offers a detailed look at Meta's AR roadmap, including info on a number of different augmented reality glasses models the company is working on. 

China's record-breaking astronauts are back on Earth after six months in orbit

Posted: 16 Apr 2022 06:08 AM PDT

Chinese astronauts — or taikonauts, as the country calls them — Zhai Zhigang, Ye Guangfu and Wang Yaping have returned to Earth after spending 183 days in space. That's the country's longest crewed mission to date so far, with the taikonauts spending those six months aboard Tianhe, the living module of China's Tiangong space station. As Space notes, Wang Yaping was also the first female taikonaut to live aboard Tianhe and the first Chinese woman to go on a spacewalk. 

The taikonauts were part of the Shenzhou-13 mission, which is the second of four crewed missions and the fifth out of the eleven overall missions China intends to launch to finish building its space station by the end of the year. They did two spacewalks and performed 20 science experiments while in orbit. The team also manually controlled the Tianhe module for a docking experiment with an unmanned cargo spacecraft. 

China, which isn't an ISS partner, launched Tianhe to low Earth orbit in April 2021 and quickly followed that up with several more launches in an effort to meet its space station's 2022 construction deadline. The country sent the first crewed mission to its fledgling station in June last year, and the three taikonauts involved spent three months in Tianhe testing systems and conducting spacewalks. In June, China is expected to launch its next crewed mission, the Shenzhou-14, with three taikonauts onboard who'll also spend six months in orbit.
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