Photography at Padma

Microsoft to let indie developers self-publish on Xbox Live Arcade (Updated)

FURTHER UPDATE: Microsoft's Marc Whitten tells Kotaku that self-published indie games on Xbox One won't be relegated to a separate section, like the Xbox 360's lightly frequented Xbox Live Indie Games clearinghouse. Instead, "my goal is for it to just show up in the marketplace," with different search "pivots" and curated, featured content to aid in discoverability. "But you shouldn't think of it as there's an indie area and a non-indie area."

Fake memory implanted in mice with a beam of light

If you’ve ever been frustrated by erratic memories, spare a thought for the mice involved in a study published in the journal Science. Researchers have been able to consistently create a “false memory,” making a mouse fearful of a place it has no reason to fear. The memory was implanted by shining blue light into the mouse’s brain, which triggered a carefully chosen group of neurons.

73 percent of Ouya owners haven’t paid for a single game

Most of the time, when you launch a new console, you can be confident that almost everyone who purchases the hardware will buy at least one game. Not so with the Ouya, which CEO Julie Uhrmantells The Verge has only seen 27 percent of its user base drop even a single dime on a game. The news comes after many Ouya developers have gone public with disappointing initial sales numbers on the console, ranging from the hundreds to the low thousands.

Google announces Android 4.3, the latest incremental Jelly Bean update

After weeks of leaks, other leaks, and false starts, Google finally unveiled Android 4.3 at this morning's breakfast event with Android and Chrome head Sundar Pichai.

Hey kids! Learn to be “cyber smart” from the NSA’s youth page!

The National Security Agency wants your kids to know that it's cool to be "cyber smart."

As part of the agency's outreach to promote interest in technology and recruit a future generation of computer security experts, the NSA has links on its homepage to two sites targeted at children and adolescents. The "Kids Page," intended for elementary age children, appears to be down at the moment—either that, or the error code reference (Reference #97.887ffea5.1374616699.dc7bfc5) is an encoded message to grade school operatives that it's time to report in.

NSA head admits the agency made “huge set of mistakes” in 2009

On Thursday, at the Aspen Security Forum—a $1,500-per-head conference held this week in the Rocky Mountains—the head of the National Security Agency (NSA) admitted that the spy agency had been overbroad in its acquisition of telephone data.

NSA Director General Keith Alexander told the assembled crowd at the Aspen forum that when President Barack Obama first took office in January 2009, he called out the agency on its blanket data collection practices.

Tech giants named in PRISM want to see an NSA “transparency report”

A high-powered coalition of civil liberties groups and tech titans—including all but one of the companies involved in the National Security Agency’s PRISM program—is demanding greater transparency about covert government surveillance programs, as well as the growing body of secret law that authorizes them. 

Judge rules anti-child-porn statute doesn’t infringe on sexting adults

Today, a Philadelphia-based federal judge issued an order (PDF) rejecting a First Amendment challenge to the constitutionality of a pair of laws that require creators of sexually explicit media to maintain records certifying that those depicted in their works are 18 or older.

Why It Doesn’t Matter If Edward Snowden Is A Hypocrite

Anti-authoritarian data leaker Edward Snowden is officially seeking the warm embrace of Russia, a country known for disappearing journalists and running a propaganda arm in the guise of a public media station. He’s also deliberately withheld the most damning information about how the National Security Agency actually operates. Yet, even if Snowden joined the Russian KGB, his exposé of highly controversial U.S. spying programs would be just as valuable.