David Petraeus and 5 other cheaters busted by technology

The affair of CIA director David Petraeus became public after FBI agents tracked down emails between him and his mistress, Paula Broadwell. But Petraeus isn't the only one whose secret activities were tossed into the light of day because of technology. Here are five other suckers who learned the technology's privacy pitfalls the hard way.

If there’s one lesson we can all learn from the David Petraeus sex scandal, it’s that technology is a real bummer – for cheaters, at least. Petraeus, who resigned as Director of the CIA last Friday, was caught cheating on his wife by the FBI thanks to a few salacious emails to his biographer and secret paramour, Paula Broadwell. Of course, Petraeus – a man known for being technologically-savvy – is far from the first person who had their secrets led out on a trail of digital breadcrumbs. Here are five other tricksters who would have gotten away with it (or never done the dirty deed in the first place) if it weren’t for that blasted technology.

Busted by voicemail

The epic fall of pro golfer Tiger Woods may have started with a seemingly dubious report in the National Enquirer about his alleged affair with club promoter Rachel Uchitel. But the biggest story of 2009 truly heated up after US Weekly published a damning voicemail from Woods to “on-again-off-again girlfriend” Jaimee Grubbs. Following the release of the voicemail, Woods fessed up to his “transgressions,” and apologized to his fans and sponsors. Of course, things only got worse for Woods from there: More than a dozen other mistresses surfaced, sponsors dropped him, his wife and daughter left him, his fortune plummeted, and now he sucks at golf.

Busted by Twitter

Former U.S. Representative Anthony Weiner (D-NY) learned the hard way that what happens on the Internet stays on the Internet. In May 2011, right-wing bloggers found out Weiner had sent a photo of his, well, wiener to a 21-year-old female who followed him on Twitter. Weiner denied that the photo was his until a few months later, when another woman revealed that she too had received sexually explicit photos from him. Soon after, Weiner held a press conference during which he admitted to his wrongdoing, and added that he’d “engaged in several inappropriate conversations conducted over Twitter, Facebook, email and occasionally on the phone with women I had met online.” To Weiner’s credit, there really isn’t any other type of conversation that people have with women they’ve met online.

Busted by Instant Message

Way back in 2006, six-term Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL) was forced to resign from the House after reports surfaced that he’d exchanged explicit instant messages with underage high school boys who worked as Congressional pages. The IMs, uncovered by ABC News, revealed that Foley had asked the children to send him photos of themselves, and pushed them to tell him details about their me-time activities. While Foley was not married, it’s safe to say that his actions cheated the American people. In the years since his resignation, Foley has worked as a real estate agent, a furniture salesman, and a radio show host. And, for some insane reason, he recently served as a speaker for the Palm Beach County Young Republicans. Apparently, someone in Palm Beach didn’t get the memo.

Busted by Craigslist

Last year, U.S. Rep. Christopher Lee (R-NY) was forced out of office after Gawker revealed that he’d been trolling the “Women Seeking Men” section of Craigslist. Gawker uncovered a string of emails, which included a PG photo of Lee, posed shirtless, which he had sent from a Gmail address to a female government employee from Maryland. While Lee said in his email that he was 39-years-old and divorced, he was in fact 46-years-old and married. Lee has since disappeared from the face of the earth (or at least the parts in public view). Good work, Gawker!

Busted by Nike FuelBand

The Nike Fuelband may be a great way to keep track of your exercise routine. But, as fate would have it, it’s also a great way for promiscuous lovers to get caught red handed. According to Paul Lilly of Hot Hardware, a Nike representative told him of “a guy” whose girlfriend caught him cheating only because of the Fuelband’s activity tracker. “They shared their activity between each other and she noticed he was active at 1-2 a.m, when he was supposed to be home,” the Nike rep told Lilly. So remember, if you want to get away with it, don’t leave home with a freakin’ tracking device still on your arm.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Microsoft rewards long-term Xbox Live subscribers with new 360s

A custom-designed, 250 GB console is on its way to veteran subscribers, says XBL Director of Programming.

Some veteran subscribers to Microsoft’s Xbox Live service will receive a nice piece of recognition for their loyalty in the form of a free, custom-designed Xbox 360.

Xbox Live Director of Programming Larry Hryb announced the giveaway on Twitter, and included an image of the specialty consoles that will be sent to the service’s long-term subscribers.

“I can confirm we’re surprising some of the #Xbox LIVE members that have been with us the longest with one of these,” he wrote.

Over at All Games Beta, there are photos of the 250 GB console and the XBL-themed box it will arrive in, as well as a letter from the Xbox Live team that will accompany it. The letter indicates that the console will be sent to subscribers who have been with the service for more than ten years, and the console will also come with a free year of Xbox Live.

Given many of the recent updates to Xbox Live that have pushed it further away from standalone gaming console and toward the realm of all-purpose media center, there’s a good chance that the number of subscribers over the next ten years might make a similar console giveaway impossible — though we’re probably not alone in hoping it happens.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Mobile developer Red Robot Labs snags industry vet John Davison

Mobile games developer Red Robot Labs welcomes their new Director of Content and Publishing John Davison. His history with the gaming industry bring a lot to the table for the start-up.

Mobile games developer Red Robot Labs focuses many of its games on location-specific elements, but with its latest hire, the company may be looking to relocate itself to the top of the gaming world. John Davison, a 20-year veteren of the video game industry, will call Red Robot Labs his new home as he settles into a role as the start-up’s Director and General Manager of Content and Publishing.

Davison’s most recent position prior to this announcement was Vice President of Programming for CBS Interactive Games, which left him as overseer of content for GameSpot and Metacritic. He had also served as editor for Ziff Davis’ network of tech and gaming sites. Essentially, if there is anyone that knows the gaming world, it’s John Davison. 

Red Robot Labs, the team behind the well-received Life is Crime and Forever Drive–both available on iOS and Android–are happy to welcome Davison in from the world of covering gaming and into the world of making them. In a press release from the company, CEO Mike Ouye stated, “As a video game industry veteran with a proven entrepreneurial track record, John is the perfect addition to Red Robot as we aim to disrupt and innovate the mobile space for gamers.”

Davison is already staking his claim for what he plans to bring to Red Robot Labs and the gaming landscape as a whole. “There is a huge opportunity to build new products around the ways that gamers interact and discover content, and the team at Red Robot understands this better than any group I’ve ever come across. We want to empower gamers with technology designed specifically for them.”

Considering both Red Robot Labs’ and John Davison’s track records of innovation, creativity, and community, there’s a lot of promise in this partnership. Gamers everywhere should be on the lookout for whatever may come next from this team.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

James Cameron: Avatar 4 will be a prequel

According to director James Cameron, Avatar 4 will be a prequel that sets up the second arc of the franchise's story line.

There have been some conflicting reports of late on what exactly director James Cameron has in mind for the future of his Avatar movie franchise. In June, comments made by Avatar star Sigourney Weaver led us to believe that Cameron was planning to shoot three Avatar sequels back to back to back. Then, last week, Cameron’s long-time collaborator and Avatar co-producer Jon Landau told the Courier Post Online that while Cameron was planning to shoot both Avatar 2 and Avatar 3 in short order, Avatar 4 was not yet on the man’s short term schedule.

While that leaves us wondering when/if Avatar 4 might hit theaters, we can confirm that James Cameron wants to make a fourth Avatar film. At a recent press event to promote the September 10 release of a new Blu-ray Collector’s Edition of Cameron’s massive hit movie Titanic, MTV asked the director what plans he has for the future of the Avatar series. Though Cameron is a bit vague on the specifics of Avatar 4, he makes it plain that the inevitable movie would be a prequel and that it would kick off the second arc of Cameron’s overarching Avatar storyline.

“I have an idea for a fourth,” Cameron said. “I haven’t really put pen to paper on it, but basically it goes back to the early expeditions of Pandora, and kind of what went wrong with the humans and the Na’vi and what that was like to be an explorer and living in that world.”

“Because when we drop in, even in the first film in Avatar 1, as it will be known in the future, we’re dropping into a process that’s 35 years in to a whole colonization. That will complete an arc and if that leads into more, we’ll start, not imitating Star Wars, but it’s a logical thing to do because we’ll have completed the thematic arc by the end of three. The only thing left to do is go back to see what it was like on those first expeditions and create some new characters that then become legacy characters in later films.”

That’s an ambitious plan, especially given that Cameron is talking about a film that is still hypothetical and won’t even enter pre-production for at least four years. Then again, Cameron goes on to tell MTV that making Avatar sequels should be far, far easier now that the first movie has laid the technological and canonical ground work for Cameron’s Avatar universe. “It was a hideously complex process to make [Avatar] and a lot has been said about that, but we don’t want [the sequels] to be done in the same prototypical way as the first one, we want it to be a much smoother workflow just for creativity reasons,” Cameron added.

That’s great news for Avatar fans, but we have to wonder if perhaps this far-reaching scheme isn’t a bit overly ambitious. What happens to this franchise if Avatar 2 is a flop? Will Cameron drop his planned third and fourth Avatar films, or will the director be forced to make them regardless of fiscal gain simply because he’s already put so much effort into mapping out the tale he wants to tell? We have faith in James Cameron — even his early work under Roger Corman is surprisingly watchable — but we worry that the man may be biting off more than even his massively popular, intensely wealthy jaws can chew. 

Then again, like we said, Avatar 4 is a long, long ways off. It seems a bit premature to worry about a film that won’t materialize until the end of the decade, so instead let’s all start grilling Cameron about the far more imminent Avatar 2. Isn’t it odd how little we know about that film compared to the hypothetical fourth Avatar movie?

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Ubisoft drops always-on Internet connection DRM from Assassin’s Creed, other PS titles

Ubisoft's stringent DRM policies are dead according to the company, at least for single player PC games.

 

Assassin’s Creed 3 director Alex Hutchinson described himself, his team, and his game as dinosaurs in a recent interview with Edge Magazine. “We’re the last of the dinosaurs. We’re still the monster triple-A game with very large teams [and] multiple studios helping out on different bits. There are fewer and fewer of these games being made, especially as the middle has fallen out.”

The disappearance of “the middle,” B-list games like Ubisoft’s own Beyond Good & Evil that could succeed without selling millions of copies at retail, is really only one reason that the triple-A release is an increasingly rare bird in video games. Piracy, at least according to Ubisoft, has crippled its PC gaming business so not only do triple-A releases have to duke it out in the risky, competitive console market, they face impossible odds earning a buck on PC. How bad is PC piracy? Ubisoft claims that 95 percent of its PC players don’t play illegally obtained video games.

For the past few years, Ubisoft has combatted the problem by bolstering its triple-A games with aggressive digital rights management, namely through the Uplay network. Ubi was amongst those publishers that thought the key to protecting its intellectual property on PC was to require players to have a persistent Internet connection while playing. In other words, it tried to protect its dinosaurs with dinosaur anti-piracy measures.

It’s interesting then that, in a week where Ubisoft admits that the era of the blockbuster game is ending, it’s also abandoning its archaic DRM. Speaking with Gamasutra, Ubisoft’s VP of digital publishing Chris Early said that customer outcry has allowed it to change its policies.

“If you look back to early 2011 and before, we did at one point in time go with always-on activation, for any game. We realized that while it was probably one of the strictest forms of DRM, it wasn’t the most convenient for our customers. We listened to the feedback, and have removed that requirement from those games, and stopped doing that going forward.

For some games, but not all. “It depends on the type of game, but in a single player game, we require a one-time authentication, then we allow offline play,” continues Early, “Then for online multiplayer, obviously when you’re playing online, you’re authenticated and then you remain online. It’s basically as simple as that.”

Ubi’s change of heart could be construed as a feint though. Even more endangered than the triple-A game is the single player triple-A game. If all games require some kind of online play in the future, Ubi won’t have to worry about offending players that want to play offline. What will those Ubi games look like? Watch Dogs. That’s precisely what they’ll look like.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Jack of All Trades: Forza Horizon preview

Turn 10 looks to expand Forza's horizons by doing everything a racer can do. Pun intended.

When I ask Dan Greenawalt, creative director on the Forza driving series, why he thinks it is that interest in racing games has declined over the past decade, he stops me. “Let me be clear: Forza’s doing just fine. It’s not racing that’s disappearing. It’s not the big franchise like Forza and Gran Turismo. It’s the mid-tier racers. We’re doing just fine.”

Then why does Forza Horizon exist?

Developed in conjunction with Playground games, Forza Horizon is a game of its time. In the past, racing games were a thriving subsection of video game design and one of the hallmarks of technological progress. When new gaming machines came around, there would always be a new racing game. “It’s always cars and water that define the new tech,” I say to Greenawalt. “And hair!” he responds.

Today, only the heavyweights remain. Activision, Disney and others have all tried to launch new racing franchises like Blur and Split/Second in the past 5 years but none have succeeded. What’s more those studios have all closed. Blur’s Bizarre Creations, Split/Second’s Black Rock Studio, and even established racing studios like WipeOut creator Sony Liverpool have all shuttered.

Horizon was born out of one of those studio deaths. Members of both Bizarre and Codemasters’ shuttered Dirt/Colin McRae Rally studio formed Playground and Forza Horizon is its first title. Unsurprisingly the game is a strange amalgam of the past, an attempt to do everything racing games have ever done in one single package. It’s an open world game (Burnout Paradise) where driving stylishly earns you points to upgrade yourself and build a reputation (Blur). It’s set in a fictional region of Colorado, where all types of driving including off-road (Dirt) is available. Meanwhile it pours in hundreds of cars, classic and modern alike, from the ST1 to an MG, and renders them as attractively as the Xbox 360 can. There’s the Forza lineage.

The world’s open for exploration and discovery. Barn Finds for example are rumors from a DJ that tell you what region of the map you might be able to discover a classic car. It encourages both exploration and gear head impulses, but eventually the need for accessibility rears its head and the game’s Greenline, a shining arrow on the road will tell you how to get there. Greenline will tell you how to get to any goal picked right off the game map.

You almost expect to find a kitchen sink and a bag of chips waiting in the pause menu.

So again, why does Forza Horizon exist? If Turn 10 and Microsoft are doing okay, why the need to become a Jack of all trades? Greenawalt says that Horizon’s goal is to wash away the simulation stigma that surrounds his series. People say they want “arcade” racing rather than “simulation,” but Greenawalt says that arcade immediacy isn’t what people are looking for. Why did Blur and Split/Second fail? “They’re disposable,” says Greenawalt, “What people really want is motivation, not mechanic.”

Thus Horizon’s looming list of features. It’s got race events, it’s got the collecting aspect, it’s got the showroom modes that Forza obsessives love. The whole thing is themed around a fictional music festival whose aesthetic and 5-hour playlist was picked out by Bestival DJ Rob Da Bank. The goal is to give players a million different ways to fall in love with Playground and Turn 10s cars so they’ll keep playing.

Does it work? Is Forza Horizon the game that will expand the franchise’s reach beyond what remains of racing’s audience?

Tough to say. Two months from release, Forza Horizon’s look isn’t quite as luscious as you’d want it to be. The cars are beautiful as always, even if they are rendered by the aged Xbox 360, but Turn 10’s Colorado countryside is a little drab in the sections I saw. These screenshots you see here simply aren’t indicative of the game I saw in motion. I still can’t speak for the driving, as Greenawalt guided the demo while we talked. This is a game meant to soaked in rather than sampled a la carte, so anything but a surface impression will have to wait for a full play.

The philosophy of its creators is laudable but you know what they say: A Jack of all trades is a master of none. Forza risks its unique identity in a shrunken landscape with Horizon. It’s a worthy gamble to try and find an even bigger audience, but Turn 10 should be careful it doesn’t lose the audience it’s got.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

James Franco gets awesome with the Galaxy Note 10.1

James Franco does more than act – apparently his resume includes being a writer, producer, director and…Galaxy Note 10.1 multitasker?

A cool new promo video shows off James Franco’s skills at multitasking with the latest and greatest slate from Samsung.

Source : blog[dot]gsmarena[dot]com

DT Daily: Curiosity fires up laser, SMS scam threatens iPhone

Tweet

August 20, 2012

• DT Daily Syndication

NASA's Curiosity rover fires its lasers, director Tony Scott commits suicide, a SMS scam hits the iPhone, Best Buy names a new CEO, and more.

Related Links:

• Mars Rover Opportunity Fires ChemCam Laser For First Time, Zaps ‘Coronation’ Martian Rock
• Official: British director Tony Scott dead after jumping from California bridge
• Apple: We can’t protect you from fake SMS messages, just use iMessage
• Best Buy Names Hospitality Executive as New Chief
• Sony Xperia SL
• StatCounter data shows Windows Phone overtaking Blackberry in US by November 2012
• CastleMiner Z becomes fastest selling Xbox LIVE Indie game

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Movie director Tony Scott jumps to death from California bridge

Movie director Tony Scott died Sunday after jumping from a bridge in Los Angeles. A suicide note has reportedly been found at his office.

Tony Scott, director of hits such as Top Gun, Days of Thunder and Crimson Tide, has died after jumping from a bridge in Los Angeles.

According to Lt Joe Bale of the LA coroner’s office, 68-year-old Scott was seen by several witnesses parking his car on the Vincent Thomas Bridge in San Pedro around lunchtime Sunday shortly before jumping into the water. His body was recovered around three hours later.

Early reports suggested a suicide note had been found inside his car, but it now appears the note was instead discovered in his office.

The British-born director, brother of Ridley Scott, had been working in Hollywood since the early 1980s after beginning his career directing commercials. His filmography includes blockbusters such as Beverly Hills Cop II, True Romance, The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 and, most recently, Unstoppable. At the time of his death, he was as busy as ever, prepping Top Gun II as well as a number of other movies and TV productions.

Speaking to BBC radio shortly after Sunday’s news broke, Steven Gaydos, executive editor of entertainment magazine Variety, said he felt “extremely shocked” by Scott’s death, calling him “one of the most popular, successful, stylish, creative filmmakers in Hollywood over the last 30 years.”

[Image: Featureflash / Shutterstock]

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Metroid: Other M 2? Team Ninja wants to make it for Nintendo

Dead or Alive 5 developer Team Ninja wants another crack at Nintendo's Metroid.

Metroid: Other M 2? Team Ninja would certainly like to make it happen. Dead or Alive 5 director Yosuke Hayashi said at Gamescom this week that he’d love to return to the series.

“Unfortunately Metroid is kind of out of our league as it’s Nintendo’s game,” Hayashi told VG247, “But we’re still in close touch with co-creator Sakamoto-san, so we want to do something with him moving forward definitely. It really depends on what he wants to do with the game first.”

Metroid: Other M looked like everything fans of the science fiction adventure series ever wanted. Exploration, an expansion of Samus Aran’s pirate-infested universe, and a clever mixture of third-person and first-person perspectives, all in a package meant to flesh out the series’ skeletal story. Super Metroid and Metroid Fusion director Yoshio Sakamoto would be at the helm, working with Team Ninja, experts at fast-paced 3D action.

So what if Team Ninja has a history of making some of the most misogynistic games in history? Surely Nintendo won’t allow “breast physics” into its games.

Samus may not have been playing beach volleyball in Other M, but the strong, silent bounty hunter was turned into an indecisive coward beholden to a cast of men in Team Ninja’s Metroid. It wasn’t a bad game though, just a terribly told story.

If Nintendo is going to return to Metroid, it might be better to revisit its two-dimensional roots. 

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Bryan Singer discusses his new webseries, H+, and the danger of technology

Director and producer, Bryan Singer, talks with us about the his recently debuted futuristic webseries H+, the dangers of technology, and what tech he couldn't live without.

Hollywood producer and director Bryan Singer is the man behind some very big Hollywood movies, including the X-Men franchise, Superman Returns, as well as the upcoming Jack the Giant Killer and X-Men: Days of Future Past. The man behind the indie favorite The Usual Suspects is exploring the online world for the first time with the Warner Premiere original series, H+, which debuted yesterday, August 8 on YouTube.

H+ promises to send viewers on a journey into an apocalyptic future where technology has begun to spiral out of control and one-third of the world has traded in smartphones and laptops for H+ Nano Teoranta, which directly connects the human mind to the Internet. Check out the trailer at the bottom, or just head over to the official page to watch Episode 1.

Singer, who also serves as the producer of the Fox hit TV series, House, talks about the transmedia potential for H+ and discusses why the Internet might be a better avenue for Hollywood video game adaptations in this exclusive interview.

Within the last year or so, Warner Premier has released a Mortal Kombat short series that did so well that they now are doing a big budget movie based off of that. When it comes to H+, do you see opportunities outside of the Internet for this to live on?

I hope so. That was part of the reason I was very keen on the quality being as high as it is, the production value, the epic nature of the story, and the quality of the cast. We really want it to be top-notch so that if it lived on, and was ultimately down the road distributed in different mediums, and lived on [as] a series or inspired other things, it would start from a place of high cinematic quality.

This series focuses a lot on the future, can you talk about a favorite gadget or piece of technology that you can’t live without?

I can’t live without a car. That would be the piece of technology I can’t live without. Probably I’d need a phone; I think everyone needs a phone. If I lived in a kibbutz somewhere or was a migrant worker maybe I could stand to not have one, but in this day and age, everybody’s incredibly connected. I think people need it for practical reasons, but also crave it for social reasons. Once the television was broadcast all over the world, it opened up the world to local people. Now local people want to connect with and reach out to that world, which is an amazing thing about technology. People are no longer really alone in who they are or what they are in life. With the Internet they can reach out and find out that they’re not that alone, that there are people like them, people they can talk to who enjoy the same things, and enjoy the same conversations. It’s really extraordinary.

What are the dangers with technology?

The danger is when people become techno-narcissistic and basically sit around a table and don’t talk to each other or connect with each other physically, and just sit on their cell phones typing. You have to imagine the H+ version of that where they’re just sitting and staring into space. It would be a very quiet, weird, society. I see people just walking around living that.

How far from reality do you see the implants in H+?

Five years ago, I never thought that I’d be a texter. I never thought that I’d have a Facebook. Who knows that things like this, these implants, when this kind of technology becomes real and everybody starts doing it, even a terrified, logical person like myself may say, “Everyone else has got one. I don’t want to be left out.”

Google is working on the personal HUDs in those glasses.

Giving that information in your face, there’s something exciting about that. I think the big inspiration for me was the Douglas Trumbull movie, Brainstorm, where you would record your thoughts onto a tape, and then someone else could play those thoughts, feelings, and sensations that you’ve had. Imagine a time when someone records an experience that isn’t just audio or visual, but it’s sensory, like riding in a rollercoaster, or a particular act of sex, or jumping out of airplane. Imagine being able to give that experience mentally, physically, and experientially to a person in a wheelchair, how incredible that would be, but also how dangerously addictive that could be.

Speaking of technology and addiction, you can’t have a conversation without at least mentioning video games. Have you kept up on what’s going on in the interactive space at all?

I’m not a super gamer, so I’m probably a little behind on what the latest and greatest is.

Did you play games at all growing up?

I’m older, so I played different games than they play today. I played arcade games and I played the games at home on the old Intellivision and Atari 2600 systems. Today I play apps on my computer and my iPhone. I play games like Angry Birds and Amazing Breaker. But I’m different with my games. When I play games I don’t want to think. I like playing simple games where you knock the football into the hole or shoot the zombies. I think so much in my job creatively — working out very complicated scripts on movies and TV shows when we’re doing projects as a company. When I play a game, I want to check out and just blow things up.

Do you think about games from the perspective of when you’re creating or working on franchises, like in H+ where you explore the potential of the universe as a video game?

I always think about that to some degree, or an app, or a way for interactivity. I don’t necessarily go out of my way to try to implement it, but I do think, “How would the piece of art or entertainment that I’m creating translate to a game.” But I’m not a heavy player, so it’s hard for me to know what the playability of that game would be. I think about it, it’s just not always at the forefront of my mind.

Your director of H+ actually just also directed the new Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn online series, which obviously is based on one of the biggest video game franchises of all time.

He’s incredibly talented. I’m sure he’ll do an amazing job on it. Perhaps that’s a better format for that. It’s challenging, turning games into movies, because movies are so different. A game is all about playing, and a movie is all about being played. One has to find the essence of the game and the essence of the character in the game, and then create a journey and a story that caters to a movie and a controlled, defined experience. He’s a very talented filmmaker, so he’ll probably do a good job with that.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com