Linked List: January 31, 2022

Monday, 31 January 2022

These big video game acquisition just keep coming. Marc Tracy, reporting for The New York Times:

The purchase, announced by The Times on Monday, reflects the growing importance of games, like crosswords and Spelling Bee, in the company’s quest to increase digital subscriptions to 10 million by 2025. Wordle was acquired from its creator, Josh Wardle, a software engineer in Brooklyn, for a price “in the low seven figures,” The Times said. The company said the game would initially remain free to new and existing players.

I’ll bet Google will remove those rip-offs from the Play Store now.

Update: Nice note from Josh Wardle.

New York Times Feature on N.S.O. Group’s Pegasus, and Israel’s Use of It for Diplomatic Gains ★

Ronen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti, in a deeply researched report for The New York Times Magazine:

Israel, wary of angering Americans by abetting the efforts of other countries to spy on the United States, had required NSO to program Pegasus so it was incapable of targeting U.S. numbers. This prevented its foreign clients from spying on Americans. But it also prevented Americans from spying on Americans.

NSO had recently offered the F.B.I. a workaround. During a presentation to officials in Washington, the company demonstrated a new system, called Phantom, that could hack any number in the United States that the F.B.I. decided to target. Israel had granted a special license to NSO, one that permitted its Phantom system to attack U.S. numbers. The license allowed for only one type of client: U.S. government agencies. A slick brochure put together for potential customers by NSO’s U.S. subsidiary, first published by Vice, says that Phantom allows American law enforcement and spy agencies to get intelligence “by extracting and monitoring crucial data from mobile devices.” It is an “independent solution” that requires no cooperation from AT&T, Verizon, Apple or Google. The system, it says, will “turn your target’s smartphone into an intelligence gold mine.”

So much original reporting in this piece, it’s hard to pick an item to quote.

Eric Meyer: ‘No, Apple Did Not Crowdfund “:focus-visible” in Safari’ ★

Eric Meyer:

Nobody at Apple asked the crowd to fund anything. Nobody at Apple asked Igalia to crowdfund anything. They didn’t even ask Igalia to implement :focus-visible, and then Igalia decided to crowdfund the work. In fact, all of those assumptions get things almost exactly backwards  — which is understandable! It’s what we expect from our experience of how the web has developed since at least the late 1990s. But here, something new happened. […]

In other words: the community (more precisely, a portion of it) voted on which feature was most needed, Igalia implemented it, and Apple accepted it. Apple’s role in this process came at the end, not the beginning.

In other words, a major open source project working the way open source projects are supposed to work — but seldom do. Yet somehow it was controversial. Jason Snell:

So let me decode this: Some people in the web development community have different priorities than Apple does. And it makes them grumpy. Because they think that there’s only one correct priority list—theirs. And when one of their priorities is crowdfunded into existence, because Apple had a different priority list, their reaction is not delight at finally getting a much-desired feature, but outrage. The issue isn’t the thing getting done, not really. It’s Apple choosing to not put its vast corporate resources behind their personal priority list.

Apple, Volkswagen, and VAG Rounded ★

I (of course) knew that from 1998 through 2015, Apple’s used the typeface VAG Rounded for all of its keyboard key caps. I was not aware, though, that VAG Rounded originated as a branding typeface for Volkswagen. (I was never a fan of Apple’s use of VAG Rounded; not the worst typeface they could have chosen, but it always felt a bit too casual to my eyes. Apple’s post-2015 keyboards use regular SF Compact for the key caps, not SF Compact Rounded.)

Sony Acquires Bungie for $3.6 Billion ★

Michael McWhertor, reporting for Polygon:

Sony Interactive Entertainment is buying Bungie, the developer of Destiny 2 and the studio that originally created Halo, in a $3.6 billion deal, according to a report from GamesIndustry.

I’d have linked to GamesIndustry’s report, but their website is currently offline, which speaks to the magnitude of this news.

Bungie will reportedly remain a multiplatform studio — Destiny 2 is available on PlayStation, PC, and Xbox platforms — with the option to self-publish its games.

“We will continue to independently publish and creatively develop our games,” Pete Parsons, CEO and chairman of Bungie, said in a statement. “We will continue to drive one, unified Bungie community. Our games will continue to be where our community is, wherever they choose to play.”

Bungie has posted a FAQ on the acquisition and how it will affect Destiny 2 and their imminent Destiny expansion The Witch Queen.

Bungie was owned by Microsoft from 2000 to 2007, and their platform-exclusive Halo franchise helped establish the Xbox platform. (No word from Bungie on a reboot of their best franchise, Marathon.)