Here are a few of the stories I found interesting over the last couple days
Fallout from the SolarWinds Hack Continues
This will just be a story that I follow for a very long time, and we are still less than a week out from the news initially breaking, so there are new things to talk about with the SolarWinds hack every day. More companies are revealing that they had bee compromised, but that there did not appear to be any actual attacks on their systems. There are also some indications that some entities may have been compromised by the same attackers, but via different vectors. Hackers had the ability to at least monitor data and communications on the networks of some of the largest companies in the world, and government entities, at least in the United States.
Facebook and Apple Publicly Fight over Personalized Ads
This one is super meaty. Apple has begun the previously delayed rollout of new functionality in iOS and iPad OS that gives users the options to turn off ad tracking on an app by app basis. Facebook is not happy, to the point that it took out full page ads in every major US newspaper two days in a row this week.
At a very high level, advertising on the internet works by targeting users and demographics. Every notice how if you search for something, you start to see ads for that thing? The reason why is the tracking that takes place. Essentially, when there is a space for an ad on a web page or application, the ad network tries to serve you an ad that is as relevant and personal as possible. Companies can target their ads to say “serve this ad to people in a specific geographic region that are male and between 20 and 30 years old” or “serve this ad to anyone between 30 and 49 who previously searched for chicken soup recipes.” It can get very granular, and the more granular the ad, the more Facebook can charge for it. Ads that are not personalized and targeted at a generic audience are worth far less, so Facebook makes less money.
What Apple is beginning to implement is a pop up to users who open an app, asking if they want targeted personalized ads, and a user can say yes or no. If a user says no, companies like Facebook and Google will be unable to track users while they are on that website or in that app, and will not be able to sell personalized ads, only generic ads, which make less money.
This will be a huge fight between these companies for quite some time. Apple says they are doing this to protect user privacy, Facebook (and Google) say it will irreparably harm the web advertising model, which is bad for both large and small businesses. The problem here is that both sides are correct, and I’m not sure where there will or can be compromise. We will likely see this fight continue very publicly for a long while.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/16/22178068/facebook-apple-newspaper-ads-ios-privacy-changes
Disastrous Cyberpunk 2077 Leads to Unprecedented Action by Sony and Microsoft
Cyberpunk 2077 is a video game that was released a week ago on PC, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Playstation 5, and Playstation 4. Delayed several times from its original June release date, the game’s developer CD Projekt Red, managed to get the game out before the end of the year, hoping to capitalize on holiday sales.
The problem is that the game, especially on the older Xbox One and PlayStation 4 consoles, was clearly not ready to be released. There are reports that CD Projekt Red cut the game’s development so close to release date that it did not even test the game’s ability to run on Xbox One and Playstation 4. After the game released, it became clear that the game was buggy to the point of being unplayable on those consoles. There is no proper version for the new Xbox Series X|S and Playstation 5, with the game being playable on those consoles through backwards compatibility. By all accounts the sheer horsepower advantage those consoles have means the game runs better on those consoles, but still lags far behind the PC version.
Under extreme backlash from unhappy customers, CD Projekt Red told users who purchased the game digitally to request a refund through Microsoft or Sony, trying to wash its hands of the situation. Microsoft publicly said they would offer refunds, but Sony initially did not offer refunds outside of its normal policies.
On Thursday night, almost a week after launch, Sony very publicly announced that that they were going to allow any person who purchased Cyberpunk 2077 digitally can get a refund, no questions asked. Sony also took the extraordinary step of removing the game from their Playstation store so that it is no longer available for purchase. Microsoft has said it will offer refunds to all who ask, no questions asked, but that it will continue to keep the game for sale on its store.
I’ve never seen anything like this before. There are well documented cases of buggy games at release, but nothing this high profile, and nothing to the point where a developer allegedly didn’t even bother to properly test versions of the game because it ran out of time before release. This is a huge problem for CD Projekt Red, and represents a huge loss of confidence in it as a developer. I feel bad for the people who were actually working on the game, who almost certainly knew this was going to happen. This falls squarely on the executive team at CD Projekt Red wanting to push this game out for the holiday season before it was ready, and they are going to pay dearly.
It should be noted that the company does promise near constant improvements to the game to make it run better on all platforms, and fix the bugs and issues the game has. There is one update due out before Christmas Day to address some issues, and the company has said that they hope to resolve the majority of the issues with the Xbox One and Playstation 4 consoles in updates coming in January and February.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/18/22189059/microsoft-cyberpunk-2077-refunds-xbox-microsoft-store
Google Stadia Launches on iOS and iPad OS in Beta
Google’s cloud gaming service, Stadia, has launched on iPhones and iPads a little over a year after initial release. Stadia becomes the second cloud gaming service that is usable on iOS, after Amazon’s Luna. Since Luna is not available in Canada at this time, it is the first service available on those platforms in Canada.
Cloud gaming services have not been widely available on iOS devices to this point because Apple’s draconian App Store policies (that have landed the company in anti-trust trouble in the US and the EU), have meant that dedicated apps are not available. Google has managed to get Stadia working through a Progressive Web App that works in the Safari browser on iPhone and iPad. This is not quite as easy and clean as a dedicated app, but promises to work fairly well.
I’ve had the opportunity to try Stadia recently due to Google giving away Stadia Premier editions to subscribers to YouTube Premium, as well as a free 3 month trial of Stadia’s Pro service and various discounts that let me buy a copy of Borderlands 3 on Stadia for 79 cents out of pocket. I am going to write more about Stadia in the new year, but I did try it through the web app on iPad OS, and I will say that it works surprisingly well. I played Borderlands 3 for about 10 minutes and encountered no issues. It is a promising start.
https://mobilesyrup.com/2020/12/16/google-stadia-now-officially-available-ios/