Andrew Williams / WIRED
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Google has stripped Huawei’s Android licence amid US trade war
Google has revoked Huawei’s Android licence in the wake of the US Commerce Department placing the Chinese telecoms and technology firm on its Entity List, which bans US companies from selling technology to it without specific government approval (The Verge).
The core Android operating system is open source, so Huawei can continue using that, but the company won’t have access to Google’s service framework, including the Play Store. The restriction will reportedly only affect future Huawei phones and, potentially, major operating system updates, so existing devices should continue to work as normal for now.
‘Revenge porn’ laws are failing, says victims group
Laws that criminalised ‘revenge porn’ as a distinct offence in 2015 have led to a reduction in the number of charges, even though the number of alleged cases being investigated has gone up (BBC News). Victim support group the Revenge Porn Helpline has called for the non-consensual distribution or threatened distribution of intimate images to be classed as a sex offence rather than a communications offence. Victims have criticised poor police training and a lack of anonymity.
Nick Mitchell’s Northern Fail app took Northern Rail’s countless failures and made them countable (WIRED). In the last year, Northern Rail has cancelled 15,800 trains and partly cancelled a further 18,696. Across the entire network, trains failed to arrive or stop at stations more than a quarter of a million times.
See Google’s hidden record of everything you’ve ever bought
Google has an obscure purchases page that catalogues everything you’ve ever bought with your Gmail address, from pizza to porn (CNBC). Google says it doesn’t use this information to serve you ads, but the only way to delete this record is to remove the receipt message from your inbox. Only free Gmail account purchases are tracked – G Suite users will see a blank page.
Inside Minecraft Earth, Microsoft’s huge augmented reality gamble
Minecraft Earth is a standalone augmented reality version of second-biggest-selling video game of all time that combines some gameplay elements familiar from Pokémon Go with others that are uniquely Minecraft (WIRED).
To create it, Sax Persson and his team spent a year-and-a-half working out how to pin down holograms with near-centimetre precision in the real world while negotiating the even trickier task of staying faithful to a game loved by its legions of fans because of its lo-fi aesthetic, non-existent instruction manual and absorbingly open-ended world.