Here are a few of the tech stories I’ve found interesting over the last couple days.
Microsoft’s “Xbox Everywhere” Strategy Becomes More Clear
Microsoft has been hinting at the future of the Xbox platform for years with the company strategy shifting from strictly making the hardware that games run on to creating a gaming ecosystem that is hardware agnostic. Now those plans are becoming officially clear. While Microsoft will continue to sell Xbox consoles as we know them, currently the Xbox Series X and Series S, the cloud gaming platform really is the future of the Xbox ecosystem.
The company is working with TV manufacturers to include an Xbox app on Smart TV’s that would enable Xbox cloud gaming right from the TV with just a controller. Microsoft also announced plans to release a small device that would plug into TV’s to enable cloud gaming. Think a Chromecast type device, but for Xbox cloud gaming. Cloud gaming on web browsers, currently in beta, will launch officially later this year. And the Xbox app on PC will get cloud gaming functionality as well.
Basically, Microsoft wants any device you own to be able to access Xbox cloud gaming. The hope is that this will greatly expand the potential userbase of Xbox games from the 60-100 million consoles that are sold during a lifecycle now to hundreds of millions of millions of people.
Content is a big part of this, and that’s where Xbox Game Pass comes in. Microsoft has been buying game developers left right and center for years, and wants the Game Pass library to expand. by trying to shift gaming to a subscription based model akin to Netflix, that is a stable, predictable revenue stream that could turn out to be a massive business in the coming years.
https://www.thurrott.com/games/xbox/251241/microsofts-gaming-strategy-xbox-everywhere
Massive Internet Outage Caused by Single Customer
Fastly, the CDN company that was responsible for the massive outage that took down some of the biggest websites on the internet earlier this week revealed that the outage was caused by a single customer. According to Fastly one unnamed customer uploaded a configuration change to their account, and that somehow resulted in the entirety of Fastly’s network failing.
That’s obviously a bug, and a pretty hilarious one. Fastly says it is making changes to prevent that kind of issue from happening again.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/9/22525820/fastly-outage-bug-customer
JBS Meats Pays $11 Million USD Ransom to Resolve Attack
This one is a definite yikes. It is widely accepted that the best practice when suffering from a ransomware attack is to not pay the ransom, and restore data from backups. Paying ransom only serves to prove that ransomware attacks work, and they will continue as long as there is profit. Stop paying the ransom, and the incentive to continue gets less and less.
That’s why it was disappointing that it was revealed that JBS Meats paid nearly $11 Million USD to unlock access to their networks. While it is good that the largest meat supplier in the world is back up and running, it likely did so because it was not equipped to recover from an attack in a timely manner, which is a bad look for a company of that size.
The hope is that as ransomware attacks become more common companies will take the threat more seriously, and be prepared should they ever be compromised.
https://www.engadget.com/ransomware-jbs-payment-032554207.html?src=rss_b2c
Android 12 Beta 2 Released
Not to be outdone by Apple’s WWDC this week, Google released the second beta of Android 12. While still not an official release, beta 2 brings more of the features the company showed off at Google I/O in May, and inches the new version closer to release. Android 12 is expected to be released in late August or early September.
https://www.engadget.com/android-12-beta-2-170039031.html
Samsung to Show Off New Wear Platform June 28th
When Google announced its partnership with Tizen to re-launch the Wear OS platform, currently called Wear, the company didn’t show off much of what the new platform would actually look like, leaving people like me to speculate on what Wear will turn out to be. We won’t have to speculate for much longer, as it looks like Samsung will be showing off the new Wear Platform at this year’s virtual Mobile World Congress.
This could be our very first look at what the new combined smartwatch platform from Google and Samsung will look like, and I’m looking forward to it.
https://www.androidcentral.com/samsung-will-show-its-wear-os-based-watch-experience-mwc