Category: iT news

You can say this about any episode in Game of Thrones’ six-year history, but boy oh boy, things are really spiraling out of control in Westeros.

We’ve been conditioned to expect first-rate political strategy from Tyrion, but it’s clear now that he’s not even a passable military strategist. The siege of King’s Landing failed spectacularly, and the Targaryen coalition left the Tyrells utterly defenseless in the Reach. Cersei, on the other hand, can move political chess pieces and command an army. We’re not even halfway through season 6, so it would be silly to think she’ll still be on the Iron Throne when this is all over, but I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t know she would have quite such a meticulous and well-executed fight in her. She and Jaime are our top scorers this week, and for better or worse, it looks like the incest faction of House Lannister is on the rise. Daenerys has three dragons and way better hair, but right now, that sort of looks like all she’s got.

On that note, we kick the night off in Dragonstone. Jon is arriving from Winterfell — which he left at the end of the last episode — so I suppose we’re meant to assume that at least a month has passed in the last week. A funky timeline… I like it!

Tyrion and Jon have a moment on the beach that reminds me of every time I’ve ever seen two old frat bros hanging out: they swap a few insults and talk about Tyrion peeing off the side of the Wall, a story we’ve all heard at least 40 times. (And it wasn’t really that funny or cool the first time.) They also talk about girls they have or haven’t boned, and Tyrion informs Jon that his marriage to Sansa was “unconsummated.” Jon gets the first points of the night (+5) for some good comedic timing and this facial expression:

Image: HBO

Daenerys, who has a lot of time on her hands, has choreographed a fun stunt in which Drogon almost knocks Jon Snow’s head off. Our girl has one move, but its charms haven’t worn off yet, if you ask me.

Image: HBO

By the way, she made Jon and his coterie give up all their weapons and the rowboat that would ferry them back to their ship, so, uh, they’re trapped here. Unfortunately, so much of what happens on Game of Thrones is just the same five to seven things — backstabbing, front-stabbing, poisoning, smooching, horseback riding, eating bread — and the prospect of another throne-room meeting with Daenerys does not seem thrilling. We’ve seen her hold court what feels like dozens of times, and she’s spent the last several of these meetings steadily picking up allies without much guff. I guess we better hope this conversation goes poorly just to mix it up?

Luckily, Davos flubs it right out of the gate as Jon’s ill-prepared hype man. After Missandei rattles off Daenerys’ full three minutes of titles and catchphrases, Davos pipes up with “This is Jon Snow. [400-second pause.] He’s King in the North.” Minutes later, he will accidentally reveal that Jon used to be dead. Davos, button up.

Image: HBO

Daenerys and Jon swap equally incoherent arguments about whether Jon Snow should “bend the knee,” become Warden of the North instead of King in the North (can someone explain the difference, other than I guess, taxes?), and help Dany fight Cersei. His basic line of reasoning is, “Your dad was crazy, but never mind, you’re right, that’s not relevant. I just don’t think centuries-old oaths should hold up. I mean… be cool.” Hers is, “I am the last Targaryen, Jon Snow.” Oh, interesting. I would try to avoid betting anything serious on that one.

More importantly, Daenerys doesn’t believe Jon’s White Walker story. Irritated, he informs her, “You’ll be ruling over a graveyard.” (+10) And Davos, trying to recover from messing everything up for most of the time he’s been here, jumps in like, yeah, uh huh, yeah, “It doesn’t matter whose skeleton sits on the Iron Throne!” (+10) Okay, you two. I get that Jon has a lot of Northern lords to keep happy, but it seems like he could have just bent the knee? What does it matter to anyone in Winterfell whether Daenerys, who is hundreds of miles away, still trying to take control of even one of her kingdoms, wants to call herself Jon Snow’s supervisor? Would Jon even have to tell them? Daenerys would probably have to listen a lot more closely to the White Walker spiel if she considered herself responsible for the Northmen’s safety, and it’s not like Jon even has an army with him that she can demand he ship off to King’s Landing. I think we all know what’s really going on here, and it’s that Jon Snow is a little bit of a brat.

Somewhere in all this, Varys and Melisandre have a weird conversation about nothing. It’s notable only because Mel says that both she and Varys will die at some point, in the country they’re in. Yeah… me, too. Moving on!

Poor Theon gets hauled out of the ocean by an unnamed Ironborn sailor. The guy has been floating around for so long, he’s basically a huge, incredibly pale prune. He just sort of lies there, like a prune, and we cut to King’s Landing.

Image: HBO

In what is apparently the only form of community-building and shared use of public space in Westeros, everyone has gathered in the streets to throw garbage at Yara, Ellaria, and Tyene. I guess I would like a little more insight into how the news cycle in Westeros works, and whether there is some kind of old-school Wiki by which the city population found out who these women are. I guess I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that they have no idea, and just like throwing trash at women.

Euron drags them into the throne room, and Jaime’s eyes almost pop out of his head when Euron throws them at Cersei’s feet and declares that he’s brought her “what no other man could give.” He turns the charm on full blast (+5), letting Cersei know that she deserves “more than a true friend,” and that “there’s only one reward” that would make him happy, wink, wink, Jaime convulsion. For good measure, he asks Jaime if he should put a finger in Cersei’s butt. Okay, enough. And yeah, in case you were wondering, this episode was written by Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss.

Finally, in the basement of the Red Keep, we get into this week’s serious points. Cersei, wearing some truly unflattering pink lip gloss, taunts a bound and gagged Ellaria Sand about Oberyn Martell’s death. Then she launches into a fantastic, classic Cersei monologue that veers from vulnerable (“She was mine and you took her from me.”) to psychopathic (“You will live to watch your daughter rot.” +10) before laying a big fat “queen’s justice” smooch on Tyene. The lip gloss, which I had been mentally mocking like a 13-year-old mean girl, was actually Glossier-brand poison. The joke, friends, is on me. And Glossier.

But I don’t really get how this mouth poison works! Cersei had the gloss on for quite a while before she wiped it off and downed the antidote, but it’s so powerful that it can kill Tyene without her even actually ingesting any? Or did she lick it off her own lips?

We don’t see Tyene bite the dust on-screen, but I can’t imagine Benioff and Weiss suddenly deciding she’s worth the narrative investment to have her wriggle out of this. +25 to Qyburn for reverse-engineering this poison from Myrcella’s corpse, and +25 to Cersei for delivering it. Ellaria will supposedly be kept alive in this cell with her dead child’s body… forever? That is bleak, but we don’t have time to dwell on it.

Please bear with me while I do something gross.

I have no choice but to award Cersei a whole slew of points for walking out of her death basement feeling, let’s just say, “good.” And by “good” I mean “motivated” to give her brother a blowjob. If this is how you feel after you murder a teenager, I think maybe you should consider some professional guidance. But +25 each to Jaime and Cersei for sex with a blood relative, +15 to Jaime for a butt close-up, +25 to Cersei for head-to-toe nudity, and another +5 each for post-coital red wine. The Lannisters are winning the war, and they’re also winning the Game of Game of Thrones. As a nice bookend to this King’s Landing trip, Cersei convinces a representative from the Iron Bank to back her over Daenerys, who she paints as a scary “revolutionary” and slave-trade disruptor. Also, I learned the word “profligacy” during this scene. Who says this show is all spectacle and no substance?

Speaking of spectacle: back at Dragonstone, Jon is having some quiet reflection time before giving out the final rose in the dramatic season finale of The Bachelor.

Image: HBO / Edits: Kaitlyn Tiffany

Tyrion gets a sweet +5 for calling him out on this, saying, “You look a lot better brooding than I do.”

And here we get a little breakdown of Jon’s White Walker messaging problem. “People’s minds aren’t made for problems that large,” Tyrion tells him, suggesting that maybe it’s not so bright to wander around trying to convince everyone that they’re all going to die. I’m tired of hearing vague references to climate science presentation, but this has a more interesting dynamic than I initially thought, and Tyrion has to hold Jon’s hand through the logic of the conversation at every turn, eventually pretty much calling him an idiot for forgetting to ask about the dragonglass mine, his sole purpose in coming to Dragonstone.

Tyrion then sprints on over to Daenerys to ask for mining privileges for Jon, and says some vague Pinterest quote that makes Dany punch back, “Are you trying to present your own statements as ancient wisdom?” Wow, +5 to Daenerys. When was the last time you told a joke, Khaleesi? I’m impressed, considering all of your plans are going 100 percent wrong.

Then she’s like “Hmm, wait. What about that resurrection thing that guy said by accident earlier?” But she doesn’t have a ton of time to think about it, because she has to film the B-roll for her Bachelorette season finale.

Image: HBO / Edits: Kaitlyn Tiffany

In Winterfell, Sansa is running things into the ground. Just kidding. She’s doing an amazing job and everyone loves it. She lays out some agricultural planning, gives cool advice about winter outerwear, and racks up points for hitting Littlefinger with yet another burn (+10, “The woman who murdered my mother, father, and brother is dangerous? Thank you for your wise counsel.”) It’s great, and to celebrate, Littlefinger does a whole mess of cocaine, apparently.

Without warning, he launches into the most useless speech I have ever heard in my life, telling Sansa, “Fight every battle, everywhere, always in your mind. Everyone is your enemy. Everyone is your friend. Every possible series of events is happening all at once.” Dude! I get that you took a special 5-credit college seminar on close-reading The Prince or whatever, but I need you to relax.

Giving Sansa a brief reprieve from heinous men talking at her, Bran suddenly arrives. Sansa is understandably moved by the sight of her long-lost little brother, and throws herself into his lap for an aggressive and fully felt hug. He responds like this:

Image: HBO

And just like that, Sansa’s Heinous Men Reprieve is over. It was less than 90 seconds long. Sitting in the Godswood, Bran tries to explain his new role as the Three-Eyed Raven, telling Sansa, “I can see everything that’s ever happened to everyone,” and then proving it by recounting her wedding to a sadistic rapist. “It was so beautiful that night,” he informs her. “Snow falling, just like now. And you were so beautiful, in your white wedding dress.” Sansa doesn’t have a lot of options here other than to make a face that, loosely interpreted, says, “Would it be possible for The Verge’s Kaitlyn Tiffany to deduct 5,000 fantasy league points from Bran for being a huge dick?” The truth is, I can’t. As we’re learning in Westeros, many of the rules aren’t so fun. Sansa, please go back to talking about grain stores. Also, I love you.

At the Citadel, Archmaester Marywn is impressed that Sam healed Jorah, but Sam also gets in trouble a little bit for breaking the rules. Yes, yes, we know. He’s very smart, but he’s constantly almost goofing everything up. My only question about this scene is, where the hell is Gilly? Other than in this Belle & Sebastian video I found:

Finally, we see the Unsullied’s invasion of Casterly Rock play out twice, narrated by Tyrion. The first time: it fails and everyone dies, including Missandei’s boo thing, dear god. The second time: Tyrion reminds everyone that he built Casterly Rock’s sewage system and knows a secret way in. Great! +60 each to Grey Worm and the Unsullied for sacking the city, and another +50 to Grey Worm for redshirt kills. This rare Team Targaryen win is thrilling for a few moments, until Grey Worm realizes that most of the Lannister army is not even there. Channeling Christian Bale circa 2008, he picks up a random dude by the shirt collar and bellows, “WHERE ARE THEY?”

Well, if he means Bronn, the Tarly family, Jaime, and like 10,000 dudes in fancy red-and-gold outfits, they’re in The Reach, having a very easy time of sacking it. As Jaime is in charge, he gets +60 for taking the seat of House Tyrell, and if you’re playing with special teams, the Royal Army will rake in +60 as well.

There’s no real battle sequence here, because the main event is Jaime’s final showdown with Olenna Tyrell. Knowing Jaime is there to kill her, she puts on her most chic mourning attire and pads out the final minutes of her life with devastating burns. Jaime explains his military strategy, saying he stole it from Robb Stark and loves to learn from his failures. “You must be very wise by now,” she notes for a +10. Already knowing the answer, she asks Jaime to recite the name of the sword he inherited from Joffrey (it’s “Widow’s Wail”) just so she can respond, “He really was a cunt, wasn’t he?” (+5). After knocking back the poisoned wine Jaime offers her (+5 Olenna, +25 Jaime), she delivers the only parting shot befitting the Queen of Thorns: a steely eyed brag about murdering Joffrey back in season 4. “Tell Cersei. I want her to know it was me.” (+50)

Image: HBO

Say whatever you want about how often Benioff and Weiss talked about buttholes and twats and cunts in this episode (it was a lot), but they wrote a great final scene for the Queen of Thorns. I don’t know what we’re going to do without her, and I certainly don’t know what Daenerys and Tyrion are going to do without their last remaining ally. But I’m glad for the small mercy of having her be killed by the type of moody, hot narcissist who will listen to any monologue, so long as it’s about him, his sex life, and his personal failings. God bless Jaime Lannister for being such a glutton for verbal punishment.

And bless you if — like The Verge’s current fantasy league leader — you kept dead players on your roster for a whole week. That was dumb, but it’s okay. You can make some trades from the Free Agents team when you have a moment, and you can do so under Settings on Fantasizr. It is not a sound investment to wait for your fallen to join the army of the dead.

The Verge Fantasy League Standings

1. Michael Zelenko, 275 points

Top scorer: N/A

Special team: The Royal Army, 60

Trades: Michael kept Obara Sand this week even though she’s dead.

2. Andy Hawkins, 245 points

Top scorer: Jon Snow, 15

Special team: The Unsullied, 60

3. T.C. Sottek, 225 points

Top scorer: Grey Worm, 110

Special team: Wildlings, 0

Trades: T.C. traded the departed Nymeria Sand for Ed Sheeran.

4. Kwame Opam, 175 points

Top scorer: Olenna Tyrell, 70

Special team: The Dothraki, 0

Trades: Both Tyene Sand and Olenna Tyrell died this week, but I don’t know if Kwame will remember to trade them because he doesn’t work at The Verge anymore.

5. Tasha Robinson, 170 points

Top scorer: Jaime Lannister, 130

Special team: The White Walkers, 0

6. Chaim Gartenberg, 155 points

Top scorer: Cersei Lannister, 115

Special team: The Wights, 0

7. Liz Lopatto, 125 points

Top scorer: Sansa Stark / Davos Seaworth, 10

Special team: The Lord of Light, 0

8. Sarah Smithers, 70 points

Top scorer: N/A

Special team: Dragons, 0

9. Loren Grush, 65 points

Top scorer: Tyrion Lannister, 5

Special team: Brotherhood without Banners, 0

10. Bryan Bishop, 25 points

Top scorer: N/A

Special team: The Night’s Watch, 0

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I’m standing on a high peak, surrounded by red Martian rocks, when the sand storm approaches. I see it in the distance. It bubbles up in the atmosphere, its menacing clouds coming closer and closer. When the red wind finally hits, it’s underwhelming. There aren’t any gusts against my body, no flecks of dirt against my helmet, no adrenaline running through my veins. All I can feel is the queasiness that comes with spending a half-hour using a VR headset.

This is Mars 2030, a VR experience of the Red Planet produced by Fusion Media Group in partnership with NASA and MIT’s AeroAstro Lab. (Fusion Media Group is a competitor of Vox Media, The Verge‘s parent company.) Mars 2030 allows you to wander around 15 square miles of Martian landscape. You can plant a flag, pick up some rocks, drive a rover, visit a habitat, and do pretty much nothing else. However, there’s no game, no task for you to accomplish (other than analyzing rocks for traces of life), and no life-threatening situations. You can’t even die. Overall, it’s very much unlike what a mission to the Red Planet would probably be like.

Just traveling across 34 million miles of deep space to get to Mars would be a huge challenge: zero gravity and space radiation would likely ravage your body and mess with your mind. Even if you get there in one piece, there won’t be much lallygagging around outside; you’d be spending every single minute of your life trying to not die. The atmosphere is unbreathable, there’s no liquid water, and the average temperature is about minus 80 degrees Fahrenheit. The gravity is also a third of what’s on Earth, and it’s not clear what would happen to your sack of skin, blood, and bones once you’re there. (And we haven’t even gotten to the problems of growing food — mainly that the soil might be toxic.)

The Mars 2030 VR experience assumes all this has been figured out already, which is a mistake. After all, trying to figure out how to survive on Mars is narratively rich and compelling. When you arrive, you have to figure out how to remove perchlorates from the soil, set up a functioning habitat and its solar panels, or build a robot to mine Mars for water, for instance — or you die. Having a storyline doesn’t make something less educational. Just ask any US student who learned what dysentery was from the early video game The Oregon Trail.

The VR “experience” just shows you that there’s already a habitat powered by solar panels and a greenhouse where potatoes and broccoli are growing underneath purplish-pink LED lights. The toilet looks very futuristic, with what looks like a suction system and two levers on each side. I try to pull the lever, just to hear a toilet flush in VR, but it doesn’t work. There’s also a humanoid robot called Valkyrie that’s supposed to assist with tasks like mining the Martian soil for water. I encounter Valkyrie once: creepily marching in place as if it’s glitching.

After visiting the habitat, I teletransport to a cavern that was once a lava tube. (There’s also the option of “walking,” but it was so nausea-inducing that the creators decided to add a teletransport button.) The cavern is long and convoluted. It’d look like a cave here on Earth if it weren’t for the dusty, red rocks. I pick one up and suddenly I’m shown a scene from billions years ago, when volcanoes were spewing huge streams of lava on the surface Mars. Another rock I pick up later shows me a different scene on Mars, complete with a giant lake and floating icebergs.

The VR experience is meant to show what strolling around Mars will be like in 2030, around the time NASA plans to get there. The spaceship, habitat, and space suits are all based on NASA’s concepts, with “the highest regard for scientific accuracy,” the project leader Julian Beyes tells me. But you won’t be able to feel like you’re on the Red Planet: you’re just sitting on a chair holding two joysticks, looking at a computerized version of a Martian landscape that looks more stunning on an actual 2D photograph. For an “immersive” VR experience, it’s pretty boring. (I was invited to test a near-finished preview of the experience, which has since been updated for a “better build.”)

Photo: Fusion Media Group

There was only one moment in the VR experience that felt real to me: I was outside the lava tube, at night, alone in this alien expanse. The night sky was filled with brilliant stars, just like it would be here on Earth. For a second, I really did feel like an astronaut on another planet. If humans walk on Mars, perhaps they, too, will marvel at the weird familiarity of seeing the Milky Way from an alien world.

Then, they’ll go back to worrying about staying alive.

Mars 2030 is available for $14.99 today on Steam for HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. It’s coming out on PlayStation VR next year. The download is free for teachers and students.

Spotify has just updated its subscriber information, and it now has more than 60 million paying users. That means the company is up 10 million subscribers since March, when it last announced it had 50 million. As of last month, Spotify said it had 140 million total users.

Since it last released subscriber numbers, a few things have changed for Spotify. Most crucially, the company reached licensing agreements with Universal Music Group and Sony. The deals will give these labels’ artists the option to keep their music off of Spotify’s free tier for a certain period of time, while Spotify will get a slight break in royalty payments.

As Variety points out, Spotify is also expected to go public before the end of this year.

These numbers make Spotify twice as big, subscriber-wise, as Apple Music, which last month announced it had 27 million paying subscribers.

Google is going to make it a bit easier to check the battery level on Bluetooth devices connected to your phone. As spotted by XDA Developers, the Android Open Source Project has added support for “[retrieving] battery level information of [a] remote device.”

When this makes its way to a full Android release, it should allow an Android phone to display the battery level of any connected Bluetooth headphones, speakers, or other accessories. Those devices will have to be set up to share their battery information, though, so this feature likely won’t work with many products at first.

It’s not clear how long it’ll take Google to bring this feature from Android’s open-source development into a polished feature. But a member of Android O’s engineering team suggested it’s in the works during a Reddit Q&A earlier this month, saying, “We’re looking at this and are happy to report that some of our hardware manufacturing partners already support this.”

As the engineer seems to be pointing out, some Android phones already support this feature. XDA Developers notes that Samsung, LG, OnePlus, and more have all built custom support into their phones for showing Bluetooth devices’ battery levels. So this is a case where Google is actually playing catch-up in a small way to the companies customizing Android.

It’s not entirely clear how Google will implement this either — whether battery indicators would appear as notifications, in the status bar, or someplace else. The setup seems to be flexible, allowing Google and perhaps even app developers to display more information on Bluetooth devices wherever they want.

Android O is already in a near-finalized state, so we’ll very likely have to wait for a later release to find out how Google plans to make the feature work. But with the next Pixel supposedly abandoning the headphone jack, a battery indicator sure sounds useful for the many people who’ll be switching over to wireless headphones.

Facebook
knocked it out of the park with its financials last week, and a lot of its success comes from Zuckerberg’s unique focus. Unlike other firms that jump from project to project, ranging widely from what makes them money — like Google — Facebook stays close to what made it successful. There is no stronger evidence than when you compare the two office projects from Apple and Facebook.

The huge Apple Flying Saucer (sadly, it doesn’t fly) is nearing completion. Facebook recently announced it too was building a new showcase site,
called “Willow,” but Facebook was building the first arcology at scale.

This will give Facebook some bragging rights. While its new campus might not be as advanced-looking as Apple’s, it will be more socially, environmentally and organizationally attuned. millennials really like two of those three concepts a lot, suggesting Facebook will be more attractive to the best and brightest, and that its site will be more advanced where it counts.

I’ll explain why Facebook will soon set the bar when it comes to forward-looking office design at scale, and why its new facility may represent the future of office design.

I’ll close with my product of the week: the Sleeptracker, an interesting sleep aid from Beautyrest.

Why an Arcology?

An Arcology is basically an environment that combines employees’ living and work spaces into a self-contained whole. The first time I saw this concept was Walt Disney’s city of the future, which was supposed to be
EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow). Sadly, Disney died before achieving his dream, and Epcot became kind of a mini world’s fair instead. There continued to be visionaries who saw the potential for a contained ideal world for employees, but for the most part, no one really executed.

That seemed rather strange over time, because firms — particularly in technology — covered almost every base but living. Top firms for years have subsidized or provided free food. In addition, they have laundry services, car wash services, transportation services (bus and plane), restaurants on campus, bakeries on campus — and they help you find a place to live when relocating for a new job.

When Apple built its new campus, the local city council wanted it to include housing, largely because traffic where it built already was horrid. In one strange incident a few years back, a man who was contemplating suicide (nothing to do with Apple) basically froze all traffic in Silicon Valley. Even the surface streets were grid-locked. When you drop thousands of new employees into an area that already has massive traffic issues, you won’t have happy employees or neighbors — and a lot of those neighbors buy Apple products.

On the other hand, Facebook has a self-contained facility with Willow. People live and work there, and it is modeled after a Disney property, suggesting Zuckerberg channeled Disney.

It is designed not only to be a great place to work, but also a great place to live. Most folks will be able to walk or ride a bike to work easily. The only issues they likely will have are from tourists who may descend on the facility in droves, suggesting they’ll likely have to secure the perimeter much as they do a Disney park, as many of the firms in Silicon Valley do anyway.

Willow’s Benefits

One of the ways firms can recruit employees from their competitors is by providing a better work-life balance, basically ensuring a higher quality of life. By combining living and working in a contained environment, Facebook not only does that, but also improves the social nature of the entire working experience, which is consistent with the company’s mission.

The Willow site becomes a physical representation of the Facebook ideal and model for the firm to move forward. Further, it establishes Facebook as a leader in providing a social experience and in showcasing that it wants that experience to be more than superficial.

This is important, particularly if you value initiatives like work/life balance and diversity. Since millennials in particular do value these concepts, this effort should ensure that Facebook can out- recruit Apple in the long term.

Wrapping Up

Apple is now a firm that’s laser-focused on raising prices and lowering costs. That trend isn’t sustainable indefinitely, as there is likely a ceiling for how much more someone is willing to spend for an Apple product and a floor for when suppliers start going out of business.

Facebook is improving its results by focusing on providing a better product and by ensuring that it has the best people, who stay focused on the job at hand.

To me, that is a far more successful way to operate, and the concept of aligning financial results with making customers and employees happy just seems far more desirable then being defined by high prices and abused suppliers.

I met
Phillipe Kahn years ago at a party the night of the Windows 95 launch. He’s a fascinating guy, who was responsible for starting some of the most interesting Silicon Valley companies. Kahn currently runs Fullpower Technologies, which specializes in IoT and wearable solutions.

He pinged me a few weeks ago about a product he was working on for Beautyrest, called the
Sleeptracker. It tracks sleep — with a name like that, what else would it do? I was intrigued, so he sent me a device and I started using it last week. It isn’t cheap,
at $200, but if you value your sleep it appears to be a good investment.

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Unlike wearable sleep trackers, you install this one under your mattress so you can charge your fitness tracker at night. This always was a problem for me, because if I used my smartwatch for sleep tracking I tended to wake up with a dead watch — plus the display tended to wake me up (I’m a light sleeper).

The device is simple to install, with the hardest part being lifting the mattress to put the sensors under it — one for each sleeper placed near where the pillow goes. (As a side note, my mattress weighs a ton.)

The Beautyrest Sleeptracker just works in the background, and after you wake up you get an email with the night’s performance. The first night I used it, I apparently slept like a baby and was perky. After the second night, I woke bone tired. The Sleeptracker pointed out that the quality of my sleep had gone down sharply. I expect it was because I had a heavy late dinner, so I won’t be doing that again.

The Sleeptracker compares your stats to others in your age group to help identify anomalies, and you get a score that you are encouraged to improve over time.

If you have small pets sleeping on your bed, this thing adjusts for them, and it works with both Apple HealthKit and Amazon Alexa.

Like
Arianna Huffington, I believe sleep is important, and this is helping me focus on making it better. I’ve only been using it a few days, but so far I’m sold. Anything that helps me sleep better is a godsend, and it’s ideal for my product of the week.

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Rob Enderle has been an ECT News Network columnist since 2003. His areas of interest include AI, autonomous driving, drones, personal technology, emerging technology, regulation, litigation, M&E, and technology in politics. He has undergrad degrees in merchandising and manpower management, and an MBA in human resources, marketing and computer science. He is also a certified management accountant. Enderle currently is president and principal analyst of the Enderle Group. He formerly served as a senior research fellow at Giga Information Group and Forrester. Email Rob.

Asus will unveil its newest ZenFone — the ZenFone 4 — on August 19th in the Philippines. The invitation is transparent about the fact that we can expect the new phone to include a dual-camera system and better sensors. A version of the ZenFone 4 already exists in Russia under the name ZenFone 4 Max. That phone includes dual rear-facing cameras and is powered by either a Snapdragon 430 or 425 processor. It isn’t clear whether Asus will just reintroduce this phone for other markets or release a similar device.

Now, while the ZenFone 4 is likely the same as the one already released in Russia, Asus’ head of marketing, Marcel Campos, is posting photos to Instagram using the hashtag “ZenFone X.” He’s clearly showing off what these new cameras can do, particularly with wide shots.

These photos aren’t bad for a mid-range Android phone, although we’ve seen other OEMs include dual-camera systems at an affordable price point, including Honor and even Asus with its ZenFone 3 Zoom. As is typically the case with ZenFone, the new phone will likely be released abroad at first.

Ryan Reynolds tweeted the first official image of Domino from Deadpool 2 today. The photo of Zazie Beetz, who will play the X-Force mutant in the sequel, is a callback to one of the first promo images of Reynolds as Deadpool, in which he lounges on a bear rug by a fire.

In the new image, Domino poses in the same room, near the same fire, except this time she’s lying on a Deadpool suit.

Deadpool 2 will also star Josh Brolin as Cable, T.J. Miller as Weasel, and Brianna Hildebrand as Negasonic Teenage Warhead.

Deadpool 2 is currently set to premiere on June 1st, 2018.

Image copyright
HBO

A group of hackers claims to have stolen the script for a forthcoming Game of Thrones episode and other data in a breach at entertainment firm HBO.

The group says it has 1.5 terabytes of the company’s data and has posted episodes of Ballers and Room 104 online.

It added that more material would be released “soon”.

HBO confirmed it had experienced a “cyber incident” in a statement.

In an email published by Entertainment Weekly, the hackers appeared to offer more details in exchange for favourable coverage.

“Hi to all mankind,” they wrote. “The greatest leak of cyber space era is happening.”

They encouraged recipients to download the material and added: “Whoever spreads well, we will have an interview with him.”

Reports have said the allegedly stolen Game of Thrones script appears to be from the fourth episode of season seven, which is currently being broadcast.

The BBC has not been able to independently verify that the hackers possess the material they claim to have stolen.

HBO confirmed that a “cyber incident” had resulted in the compromise of information.

“We immediately began investigating the incident and are working with law enforcement and outside cybersecurity firms,” the firm added.

“Data protection is a top priority at HBO, and we take seriously our responsibility to protect the data we hold.”

The intrusion was “obviously disruptive, unsettling, and disturbing for all of us,” said chairman and chief executive Richard Plepler in an email to HBO employees.

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A split in the Bitcoin community is set to create a new incompatible version of the cryptocurrency on Tuesday.

A group of insiders is unhappy with existing plans to speed up transaction times.

They plan to offer existing investors a matching amount of a new virtual asset – called Bitcoin Cash – which could put pressure on the value of original bitcoins.

One expert has warned there could be trading “chaos” over the coming days.

Several popular Bitcoin platforms are refusing to support the new coins.

That means investors who currently rely on some Bitcoin currency exchanges and virtual wallets will be unable to take advantage of the offer unless they switch to alternative providers. And moving from one platform to another carries risks of its own.

“Nobody can be sure how this is going to play out over the short term,” commented Iqbal Gandham, UK managing director of the eToro trading platform.

Compromise plan

The breakaway plan was revealed just over a week ago after it emerged that a compromise scheme to reform Bitcoin appeared to have gathered enough support to be adopted.

The middle-ground solution – known as Segwit2x – is an attempt to address one of Bitcoin’s constraints: at present the ledger of past transactions, known as the blockchain, can have only one megabyte of data added to it every 10 minutes.

The limitation was originally introduce to protect Bitcoin from cyber-attacks, but has meant some users have had to wait days for their transactions to complete at busy times.

Two conflicting solutions were initially proposed:

• to increase the size of each block of the blockchain to more than one megabyte, which would allow more transactions to be processed in each batch
• to relocate some of the information from the blockchain to a separate file, which would be transmitted alongside it

Many “miners” – dedicated businesses and others that contribute computer processing power to authorise transactions in return for the chance of being awarded newly minted Bitcoins – favoured the former plan.

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EPA

But many developers – those working on Bitcoin’s code or that of associated software – preferred the latter.

The Segwit2x initiative solved the impasse by suggesting the data-splitting step should occur in August and then be followed by an increase in the block size to 2MB in November.

Under the terms of a related scheme – referred to as Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 91 (BIP 91) – the first step would only happen if 80% of the mining effort adopted the new blockchain software required and used it consistently between 21 July and 31 July.

New coins for old

After more than 95% of miners signalled their support for the plan it was widely assumed that a Bitcoin “civil war” had been averted.

But then ex-Facebook engineer Amaury Sechet and other Bitcoin insiders revealed plans to launch Bitcoin Cash on 1 August at 12:20 UTC (13:20 BST).

They claimed that the danger with the Segwit2x scheme was that there was no guarantee a doubling of the block size would follow the data-splitting step, as promised.

Instead their new currency would have a block size of 8MB and ditch the data-dividing idea.

To further complicate matters, some Bitcoin exchanges are divided about whether to support the creation of Bitcoin Cash and allow its trade, with several yet to declare their plans.

Furthermore, some exchanges plan to suspend or restrict trade in Bitcoin altogether for several days until they are confident that any disruption has passed.

Potential chaos

The uncertainty surrounding Bitcoin Cash’s chances has led to one futures market in Bitcoin Cash to value one coin as being worth about $267, a fraction of the $2,780 each bitcoin was trading at short time ago.

In theory, if mass adoption were expected, the two currencies should be much closer in price.

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“There’s massive uncertainty and the quoted futures price should be taken with a grain of salt,” commented Dr Garrick Hileman, research fellow at the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance.

“We won’t know the real Bitcoin Cash price until a number of exchanges across the world start trading it, and it’s still not clear when that will happen.”

And he added that there could be some wild swings in the value of both types of Bitcoin over the coming days.

“My sense is that the split can be managed if exchanges and wallets take the necessary precautions,” he explained.

“But I suspect some will not be well prepared as this happened quickly and a lot of organisations are coming on board at the last minute.

“It wouldn’t surprise me if there is some chaos.”

An upcoming Game of Thrones script and two unreleased episodes of Ballers and Room 104 have leaked online after an apparent security breach at HBO, Entertainment Weekly reports. The GoT script is reportedly from the episode scheduled to air next week.

The hackers apparently claim to have 1.5 terabytes of data stolen from HBO. EW reports that the hackers sent an email to several reporters on Sunday night that contained information about the leak. The email reportedly said “HBO is falling,” and promised that more leaks would be coming soon.

HBO has struggled with Game of Thrones leaks in the past. In 2015, the first four episodes of season 5 leaked online. HBO eventually confirmed that they came from advance screeners usually given to an approved group, like members of the press. In 2016, HBO Nordic, which is available in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Finland, accidentally released a season 6 episode a full day early.

For season 7, HBO decided not to send out any advance screeners, and asked the GoT cast to take extra security measures, like two-factoring their email accounts, to keep their scripts safe.

“The problem before us is unfortunately all too familiar in the world we now find ourselves a part of,” HBO CEO Richard Plepler wrote in an email to staff obtained by EW. “As has been the case with any challenge we have ever faced, I have absolutely no doubt that we will navigate our way through this successfully.”

The Verge has reached out to HBO for comment and will update with any new information.