Free Games

• PS4

  • BioShock: The Collection

    • 2016
    • Remastered, 1080p ports of all three plot-driven first-person shooter games (BioShock, BioShock 2, and BioShock Infinite), taking you from the depths of Rapture to the skies of Columbia in some great stories in dystopias freed of “petty morality” summed up by “No gods or kings, only man”

  • The Sims 4

    • 2017
    • A reportedly decent port of the classic life simulation series that has you creating characters and households, then living their lives

  • Firewall Zero Hour

    • 2018
    • 4v4 tactical VR shooter developed exclusively for the PSVR that has you seizing or protecting sensitive information from opposing teams

• Xbox One

  • TT Isle of Man: Ride on the Edge

    • 2018
    • Motorcycle racing game that has you challenging the deadly Snaefell Mountain course that has you taking on 38 miles of roads at over 180 mph

  • Call of Cthulhu

    • 2018
    • A role-playing psychological horror game inspired by H.P. Lovecraft’s writing, while also being an adaptation of the 1981 RPG of the same title

  • Fable Heroes

    • 2012
    • A beat ’em up spinoff of the Fable series, with a toy-like aesthetic and mixed reviews, it’s at least the first family friendly Fable title

  • Star Wars Battlefront

    • 2004
    • The original Battlefront game for the first Xbox, it’s a first and third person shooter that primarily plays as a conquest game with limited respawns for each team and also has a Galactic Conquest mode with some strategy elements

• Epic Games

  • Farming Simulator 19

    • 2018
    • Pretty much what it says on the tin- it’s a full farming simulator with huge American and European environments, over 300 vehicles and machines, online co-op play, and a surprisingly large mod community
  • Next week we can look forward to PC ports of some popular board games

Apparently Ring isn’t just a product that lets people surveil their neighbours and gives police access to a network of cameras, it also tracks its customers through its app

• We talked about the Ring camera doorbells and Amazon’s shady agreements with local police to promote the products and get access to recorded footage last summer back in episodes 263 and 268
• Well now the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) put together an investigation of the associated Android app and found it packed with third-party trackers sending out a plethora of personally identifiable information on its customers
  • This stuff includes names, IP addresses, mobile network carriers, persistent identifiers, and sensor data from the devices themselves
• All of that info comes together to form a detailed fingerprint of the user that can be sold or used to see what people are doing in their digital lives, and most damning of all is that there is no notification, consent, or ways to mitigate the damage done
• Ring is taking this information and delivering it to organizations like:
  • Facebook
  • Branch
    • a “deep linking” platform that builds those exact kind of digital fingerprints and associates them with other marketing and analytics data
  • AppsFlyer
    • another marketing data firm that’s now getting their hands on sensor data from all those devices
  • And Mixpanel
    • yet another business analytics service, but this one deserves special mention since Ring is sending them people’s full names, email address, details on your phone’s OS and hardware model, bluetooth settings, and how many locations you have Ring devices installed in
  • Of those services only Mixpanel is on Ring’s list of third-party services they say they work with, but they don’t make it clear just how much information they share
• All that is to say, for being a company based around securing your home they sure don’t seem to have any consideration for your personal information. If you use a Ring device, it may be time to rethink that

Tesla’s taking heat this week because of their fairly predatory practices when it comes to buying upgrades

• In a pretty suspicious move, about a week and a half before the end of their financial year Tesla rolled out a new feature in their phone app allowing people to buy software upgrades for their cars to enable full autopilot
• Shortly afterward, they were hit with a lot of users complaining about unintended purchases and a terrible refund policy
  • In one case someone broke down exactly what happened- they essentially butt dialled the purchase, contacted support as soon as they could afterward and then a week later were told that there are no refunds for software purchases.
    • The support staff even compared it to “paying for an addition to a house, deciding you don’t like it, then requesting a refund from the contractor”
    • There are even some staff claiming that the upgrade can’t be removed from the car, when it’s basically just an enable/disable flag with no major download or installation involved
  • Eventually someone high-profile enough complained on Twitter and Elon Musk said that the refund situation would be addressed, but who knows if that will roll out to all the little people affected
• The kicker here is how easy Tesla made it to accidentally make the purchase- it’s harder to download a free app
  • If you’re logged in to the Tesla app and go to the upgrades screen, the $4000 autopilot upgrade is automatically selected, added to your cart, and the payment prompt is immediately displayed
  • You then have two buttons- ApplePay, which would prompt for TouchID, FaceID, or your password, or Pay With Credit Card
    • One thing to note here is that they do have their refund denial policy shown at this point. On a black or very dark grey screen, below those buttons in slightly lighter grey text. All the other text is bright white.
    • Another interesting tidbit is that the refund policy was actually photoshopped off of the screen when it was shown in an investor presentation
  • If you do hit Pay With Credit Card it takes you to a confirmation screen with everything filled out- they don’t even ask for your card’s security code to verify, you just tap Pay at the bottom.
  • So if you’re in the Tesla app and put your phone in your pocket without locking it, whether by mistake or not, you’re three taps away from dropping $4000 without even knowing it
  • There are even some reports that the confirmation screen is new- some users last year just wanted to see the total with tax and were immediately charged
• In investigating this I also stumbled upon some of the skeezy strategies Tesla has used on their website- when you look at the price of a car they default to showing it adjusted for “potential savings”
  • You might see that and expect some kind of rebates or sales, but in fact they bundle in the estimated savings from not buying gas for the life of the car, making a difference of thousands of dollars between the expected price and what Tesla actually charges for their vehicles.
• All of this just really goes to show how Tesla seems to be trying to trick people into spending money, and the fact that it’s right before their fiscal year end makes it even more suspicious

The Wawa chain of American convenience stores was targeted by credit card skimming malware last month, resulting in as many as 30M cards going up for sale on the dark web this week

• Apparently the malware began rolling out on March 4th and wasn’t discovered until December 10th, so it had gathered about nine full months worth of numbers, names, and expiration dates
• Anyone who used a payment card at a Wawa location last year should definitely check your bills closely. Wawa is reportedly offering affected customers one year of credit monitoring but those services may not be very effective, so if you’re concerned you may want to consider putting a security freeze on your file instead

Tidbits

• Activision Blizzard makes exclusive streaming deal with YouTube, Overwatch League and Call of Duty will be streaming on YouTube
• 343 Industries is looking to ban Halo: Reach players abusing the experience system by frequently joining games and not actually playing
  • Apparently the new release of Reach involves a new experience progression system to unlock customizations, rather than the old system where you could just buy whatever you have enough credits for, and going AFK is one strategy players are using to grind for more experience
  • Another has been dubbed “sword lining”, where two Griffball teams line up and take turns killing each other with swords
• Bethesda has finally fully addressed the inventory hack in Fallout 76 that we talked about last year, wherein hackers could use your inventory like a lootable chest to steal everything from your character in seconds
  • Reportedly the company is creating clones of the affected characters with their entire inventory as of December 20th, as well as about $66 worth of their premium ‘atoms’ currency.
  • Players can then make a secure trade from the clone to their original character via a private server, and Bethesda is providing support agents to help with that process
• Zuckerberg has gone on record that Facebook’s goal for the next decade “isn’t to be liked, but to be understood”, saying they didn’t always communicate their views clearly because they worried about offending people
  • The Daring Fireball says it best: “The more you understand Facebook, the less you like or trust them. So: mission accomplished.”
• Nintendo’s Switch has officially become their third best-selling home console of all time, behind the Wii and the NES (and almost quadrupling the WiiU)
  • Fun fact, estimates show they surpassed the Xbox One during the 2019 holiday season despite the XBone being out for more than three years before the Switch’s release
  • And just to tack on to the end of this, The Outer Worlds is officially coming to the Switch on March 6th
• Lastly, in a little bit of heartwarming news to close things out, professional Fortnite player and streamer Aydan Conrad went on Twitch last week to stream himself calling his mom and paying off her student debt
  • He gave full credit to his viewers, saying that everyone watching made the whole thing possible

Based on this tweet, I want to know what ten games our Fanily like. See how much crossover we all have.

Josh’s Top 10

• Rollercoaster Tycoon
• Sonic the Hedgehog 2
• Psyconauts
• Overwatch
• Slay The Spire
• Fallout 4
• Super Smash Bros Ultimate
• Stardew Valley
• Minecraft
• The Sims

Alan’s Top 10

• Eternal Darkness Sanity’s Requiem
• Shovel Knight Treasure Trove
• Kirby Superstar (honourable mention to Planet Robobot)
• Pokemon Trading Card Game
• God of War (2019)
• Beat Saber
• Titanfall 2
• Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask (honourable mention to A Link to the Past)
• Superhot
• Black Mesa