Technology

The Need for Speed franchise is back from a brief hiatus after the failure of 2017’s Need for Speed Payback. During that time, developer Ghost Games has refocused and concentrated on the series’ core: cops, high speeds, world exploration, and customization – with a hokey story thrown in for old times’ sake. Need for Speed Heat has its flaws (its cop integration could be better), but it’s a rousing return that delivers on many of the franchise’s touchstones.
 
While the story of street racers going up against corrupt cops is forgettable, the day/night cycle that governs your activities is appealing. You earn money during the day and reputation points at night. You need both currencies to progress. Cops are more active at night and take chunks of money and rep if you’re caught. Meanwhile, you earn progressively more rep for stringing races together and attracting police attention, so it’s fun to tempt fate with “one more race” before parking it for the night at the nearest safe house. 
 
Even with the threat of arrest, the police in NFS Heat take a slight backseat to racing other street racers (online or A.I.). The cops can be formidable, marshaling ramming trucks and more to bring you down, but they’re easy to escape when they chase you in the middle of a race event. Also, they are only a nuisance now and again because there aren’t enough set-piece moments to amp up their power and presence.

Palm City, which has Miami-like city streets, industrial areas, and broad hills made for drifting, contains more than just race events. Finding collectibles and performing mini-challenges like smashing billboards, going through speed traps, and taking on technical time trial courses dole out rewards. Money and reputation multipliers are also passively earned when joining an online crew. The more everyone races the more everyone earns.
                 
Need for Speed’s gameplay is centered on arcade racing, but I enjoy how it still demands a racer’s touch. The plethora of events in the world are suited towards different styles of racing such as drifting and long high-speed sprints, and so are the cars’ basic driving characteristics and upgrades. I liked having to change my driving mentality and car depending on the circumstance. There were times when I could out-muscle the competition by the sheer superiority of my cars’ horsepower. However, the more satisfying moments were when I won with an underpowered car because I knew how to race the course according to my ride’s characteristics.
 
For example, high-end speed isn’t as important in a circuit race filled with tight turns. Instead, I cornered correctly to win. Conversely, the long sprint races are about maintaining top speed over long distances with drifting required around the tighter corners. You have more time to make up lost ground, but there’s also more traffic to plow into.
 
Overall, Heat does a great job balancing numerous factors to keep the racing flowing and exciting. Traffic density, what you can/cannot crash through alongside the road, the ability to cut corners when necessary, and even a little bit of rubberbanding, all come into play but don’t drag the game down or make it frustrating.

 

Car part upgrades run the gamut of standard (crankshaft, exhaust, etc.) to very useful, such as auxiliary parts that weaken the police’s radar. Upgrades like tires and suspension are also instrumental in shaping vehicle characteristics to make them more suitable for specific race types – a nice component in step with the gameplay. Cosmetic changes like editable decal layers and underglow effects are also worth spending in-game money on (there are no microtransactions), helping make your investments feel worthwhile. Overall, I liked upgrading existing cars in my garage (and therefore become more attached to them) as well as having to buy new ones occasionally to keep up with the game’s difficulty.
 
Need for Speed has meant different things over the years, but Heat is a good all-around representation of the franchise. The police could be a little more prominent, and the world – while well stocked – isn’t as interesting as Forza Horizon’s, for instance, but NFS Heat is the best iteration since Ghost Games’ reboot in 2015.

Photography and video equipment retailer B&H knowingly failed to pay millions of dollars in sales taxes due in New York, according to a lawsuit filed today by the state attorney general.

The suit alleges that, since 2006, B&H has offered “instant rebate” deals to customers. Under those deals, a manufacturer offers to reimburse a company that sells its products at a discount, but the company still has to pay taxes on the full, undiscounted price of the item.

B&H, according to the suit, offered instant rebates, but failed to pay taxes on the discount. Over 13 years, the suit alleges, B&H received at least $67 million in reimbursements on those deals, and didn’t pay more than $7 million in taxes it owed as a result.

The suit claims that the discrepancy couldn’t have been an accident. Prosecutors cite internal communications that they say show employees were aware they needed to pay the taxes. “B&H has a NYS Sales Tax issue with products for which a vendor-sponsored rebate or discount is offered since we are required to collect NYS Sales Tax on the total product price,” a B&H manager allegedly told executives in 2012.

The investigation started after a whistleblower brought the issue to the attorney general, according to the suit. Prosecutors are asking a court to force B&H to pay damages and penalties under New York tax law.

A B&H spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“B&H proudly claims that it puts principles over profits, but for 13 years, the company actually chose profits over principles by defrauding New York taxpayers out of millions of dollars owed to the state,” New York state Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement. “B&H deliberately chose not to pay the sales tax it knew was due to New York State in order to gain a competitive edge over companies that chose to follow the rules.”

According to former Chappy Managing Director Adam Cohen-Aslatei, “something more” is one of the most common pieces of feedback that dating apps get from their users. That’s where S’More comes in.

S’More was founded by Cohen-Aslatei to provide a dating app to users that goes beyond superficial looks.

Here’s how it works:

Rather than scrolling through a feed and swiping left and right, users are served five suggested profiles each day. Unlike other dating apps, user profiles on S’More consist of icons, rather than pictures and text, which reveal characteristics about the profile’s owner. For example, a user might put that they’re seeking romance, interested in hiking and got an education from this or that university, all in the form of little tile icons.

When a user interacts with those icons — S’More calls this a “wink” — more visual pieces of the profile start to unblur and unlock, revealing a profile photo and unlocking the person’s social media feeds, etc.

These interactions also unlock the ability to have a conversation, if they’re reciprocated, which creates a match.

As users continue to interact with others on the platform, S’More learns about what they’re looking for in a relationship and optimizes for those factors when suggesting other profiles.

“The greatest challenge is resetting expectations for consumers,” said Cohen-Aslatei. “We know that the swiping mechanism largely doesn’t work, but we’re providing another option which is, if you truly want to get to know someone, suspend physical judgement before you decide if you like them.”

The company plans to generate revenue through a freemium model, charging users extra to access a Discover page on the app, allowing them to interact with and save more profiles than the allotted five per day.

Moreover, S’More asks all users to rank one another, not as prospective mates but as users of the platform. The hope is that the public-facing user rating promotes a healthy, safe environment for all users to meet and connect without the abuse that’s so common on dating apps. Ratings are also determined by a user’s activity on the platform and how complete their profile is.

The company also requires that users who register take a selfie for ID verification right at the point of signing up.

S’More is launching in beta to Boston and the D.C. area with plans to launch in New York soon.

For Red Blue Games co-founders Edward and Lucas Rowe, developing games has always been intertwined with their indescribable bond as twin brothers. 

“We’d make Paper Mario levels on spools of paper,” Lucas recalls with a smile. 

“We would take those spools of paper and get on either end of it and draw until you met in the middle and you have a world,” Edward adds. “We would do battles with stick figures where we’d each draw a picture and you’d fill it in one at a time and sort of fight each other by adding to the drawing.”

Since they were kids, Edward and Lucas have always been making games together, whether it was on spools of paper, using the HyperCard program on a Mac Plus, or creating a Dungeons & Dragons game using little outside of a Lego set and their creativity. Games became a passion that they both knew needed to be a part of their future.

“The running theme of our childhood is just sort of entertaining ourselves by making games for each other,” Lucas says.

Games are what deepened their connection,  but as the pair got older and their programming skills grew, the two put their passion for creating together on hold to pursue careers in programming and families. That was until 2013 when the brothers finally decided it was time to take the plunge and return to their love of making games. 

“We reached a point where we were both ready, and I feel like there’s a window in your life when you can do something like this and that window was open,” Lucas says. “We knew it was going to close soon, so we took the chance to do it when we could.”

That brings us to Sparklite, the duo’s first major foray into the indie scene. The adventure game features gorgeous visuals and a unique soundtrack, a relevant story and protagonist, and a gameplay loop that will appeal to anyone familiar with the genre. The Rowe brothers are confident they can make a splash with Sparklite.

Facebook has more than 2 billion users, and at that scale comes lots of wrongdoing. The company’s latest quarterly transparency report, which quantifies violations of the company’s community standards, conveys just how much wrongdoing.

Here’s Tony Romm with a summary at the Washington Post:

In the second and third quarter of 2019, Facebook said it removed or labeled more than 54 million pieces of content it deemed violent and graphic, 11.4 million posts that broke its rules prohibiting hate speech, 5.7 million uploads that ran afoul of bullying and harassment policies and 18.5 million items determined to be child nudity or sexual exploitation.

The company also detailed for the first time its efforts to police Instagram, revealing that it took aim at 1.2 million photos or videos involving child nudity or exploitation and 3 million that ran afoul of its policies prohibiting sales of illegal drugs over the past six months.

The numbers are all large and growing, which is bad. Even a single incident can cause havoc for the company’s content moderation teams. The Christchurch shooting, which is covered in this quarter’s report, generated 4.5 million pieces of content that Facebook had to remove between March 15th, when it happened, and September 30th.

But Facebook is catching more of these issues via automated systems, which is good. That includes progress made in automatically detecting hate speech — typically the hardest kind of violation for machine learning systems to pick up on, given the nuances of human language. Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice president of integrity, described Facebook’s progress in a blog post:

Starting in Q2 2019, thanks to continued progress in our systems’ abilities to correctly detect violations, we began removing some posts automatically, but only when content is either identical or near-identical to text or images previously removed by our content review team as violating our policy, or where content very closely matches common attacks that violate our policy. We only do this in select instances, and it has only been possible because our automated systems have been trained on hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of different examples of violating content and common attacks. In all other cases when our systems proactively detect potential hate speech, the content is still sent to our review teams to make a final determination. With these evolutions in our detection systems, our proactive rate has climbed to 80%, from 68% in our last report, and we’ve increased the volume of content we find and remove for violating our hate speech policy.

The faster that Facebook can detect hate speech, drug and weapon sales, child exploitation, and other issues, the likelier it is that the company can alert law enforcement and civil society groups in time to address them. That’s the positive story conveyed by this quarter’s report.

But there’s a darker story, too — one about how often governments compel Facebook to release user data, typically without informing the target, or even shut down service in a country altogether.

Zack Whittaker reports on the spiking number of government requests for Facebook user data at TechCrunch. Requests were up 16 percent for the first half of this year, rising to 128,617:

That’s the highest number of government demands its received in any reporting period since it published its first transparency report in 2013.

The U.S. government led the way with the most number of requests — 50,741 demands for user data resulting in some account or user data given to authorities in 88% of cases. Facebook said two-thirds of all of the U.S. government’s requests came with a gag order, preventing the company from telling the user about the request for their data.

Moreover, the report found that 15 countries had disrupted Facebook service 67 times in the first half of the year, compared with nine countries disrupting service 53 times in the previous half-year. Disrupting Facebook service can sometimes be a desperate measure taken by companies worried that fast-spreading hate speech is leading to real-world violence. But more often it serves as a pretext to quash anti-government dissent.

In any case, I appreciate the now-standard transparency reports we get from Facebook, Google, and the other big platforms. (And Facebook offers much more granular information than its peers, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg was quick to point out on a press call about the report.) And yet while they highlight some of the important work done to keep people safe, these reports also illustrate how little recourse people have if they are falsely caught up in a machine-learning dragnet. The appeals process is limited and opaque, and human language and social norms can change faster than machine learning systems can catch up to them.

If what you want from a platform is something like justice, transparency reports are necessary — but not sufficient. The average user still has no way of holding a platform accountable when it makes a mistake.

For that, you might want something like … an oversight board. Here’s hoping Facebook has more to say on that subject soon.

The Ratio

Today in news that could affect public perception of the big tech platforms.

Trending up: Facebook included Instagram in its transparency report for the first time. The more transparency we get around these things the better.

Trending sideways: In a press call related to the report, Mark Zuckerberg stuck by his policy to let politicians lie in ads on Facebook, but said that he’s “continuing to look at how it might make sense to refine it in the future.”

Trending down: Google fired an employee for leaking information to the press and placed two more on leave for allegedly violating company policies. It’s evidence of rising tensions between management and personnel engaged in employee activism.

Governing

⭐ Google reached a settlement with the US National Labor Relations Board to allow more open discussions on campus. The agreement came after former employee Kevin Cernekee filed a complaint last year, alleging the company restricted free speech and fired him for expressing conservative views. Jennifer Elias at CNBC has more:

As part of the arrangement, Google is required to let employees speak with the media about their employment without getting permission, which marks a change for a company that has exercised tight restrictions over conversations with the press.

The company also has to say that it will comply with federal law, allowing employees to form, join or assist a union as well as “act together with other employees” for their “benefit and protection.” Former employees have claimed that they faced retaliation for speaking out about workforce issues, including organizing the companywide walkout last year to protest Google’s handling of sexual harassment.

Mark Zuckerberg took a shot at competitors during a press call related to the company’s latest transparency report. He said that other tech companies aren’t releasing data related to account takedowns, making it difficult to gauge how much harmful content is out there. (Tony Romm / Twitter)

A pro-Trump media network is building a Facebook empire using fake accounts and groups. The strategies are a coordinated effort to amplify partisan content while avoiding the burdensome rules associated with advertising on Facebook. (Alex Kasprak and Jordan Lilies / Snopes)

Pro-Trump conservatives are getting trolled at live events by a far-right group pushing an even more conservative message. They call themselves Groypers (a reference to a popular 4chan meme) and try to take over the question-and-answer portion of events with anti-gay, anti-Semitic and racist questions. (Ben Collins / NBC)

Industry

⭐In 2016, Mark Zuckerberg seriously considered buying Musical.ly, the app that could eventually become TikTok. Now, he’s demonizing it to make the case against regulating Facebook. Ryan Mac at BuzzFeed has the scoop:

Sources said the talks were serious, though a deal never materialized. Some 14 months later, Chinese conglomerate ByteDance acquired Musical.ly for around $800 million. It later merged the app with the already existent TikTok to form the popular video platform that Zuckerberg has recently been demonizing as a threat to Western tech supremacy.

“Until recently, the internet in almost every country outside China has been defined by American platforms with strong free expression values. There’s no guarantee these values will win out,” Zuckerberg said in a speech last month at Georgetown University. “While our services, like WhatsApp, are used by protesters and activists everywhere due to strong encryption and privacy protections, on TikTok, the Chinese app growing quickly around the world, mentions of these protests are censored, even in the US.”

Facebook ultimately passed on the deal due to privacy and regulatory concerns. The unrealized moment was a missed opportunity to jump aboard a short-video phenomenon that’s gone viral across the US and China. (Sarah Frier and Zheping Huang / Bloomberg)

Australian Teens are using TikTok to show the world how bad the bushfires are. The fires have claimed the lives of three Australians and destroyed hundreds of homes, but haven’t been widely reported on internationally. (Cameron Wilson / BuzzFeed)

Google is going to start offering checking accounts to consumers. It’s the latest Silicon Valley tech giant to push into finance, after Apple launched its credit card last summer. Google’s project, code-named Cache, is expected to launch next year with accounts run by Citigroup. (Peter Rudegeair and Liz Hoffman / The Wall Street Journal)

Some of the UK’s most popular health websites are sharing people’s sensitive data — including medical symptoms, diagnoses, drug names and menstrual and fertility information — with dozens of companies around the world, including Google, Amazon, Facebook and Oracle. (Madhumita Murgia and Max Harlow / The Financial Times)

Google executives said the company isn’t misusing health data from one of the biggest US health-care providers, pushing back against news reports that have triggered criticism from lawmakers and prompted a federal inquiry. The company said it’s building a search tool for digital medical records. (Gerrit De Vynck / Bloomberg)

The average price brands pay Instagram influencers for sponsored posts has surged this year, according to a new report. The average cost is now $1,643 per post, and more brands are requesting sponsored stories. (Amanda Perelli / Business Insider)

TikTok recently began running ads on Google targeting people curious about Facebook’s advertising and influencer business. A TikTok spokesperson said the ads are “small tests.” (Shoshana Wodinsky / AdWeek)

Third quarter earnings from Facebook, Twitter, Snap and Pinterest show Pinterest trails behind the other social networks in terms of how much money it makes off overseas users. The company deliberately rolled out international ad sales slowly, which suggests it has the most growth potential. (Tom Dotan / The Information)

And finally…

BarkBox is aware that its dog toy looks like a Fleshlight.

This is just a sweet story about a Facebook ad that went viral for the basest of reasons, and immediate sold out the product it was selling, bringing untold joy to dogs around the country.

Goodnight.

Talk to us

Send us tips, comments, questions, and transparency reports: casey@theverge.com and zoe@theverge.com.

Peanut, an app that began its life as a match-maker for finding new mom friends but has since evolved into a social network of more than a million women, announced today it has closed on $5 million in new funding and is expanding its focus to reach women who are trying to conceive. The round was led by San Francisco and London-based VC firm Index Ventures, also backers of Dropbox, Facebook and Glossier, among others.

Other Peanut investors include Sweet Capital, Greycroft, Aston Kutcher’s Sound Ventures, Female Founders Fund, Felix Capital and Partech. To date, Peanut has raised $9.8 million.

The idea for Peanut arose from co-founder Michelle Kennedy’s personal understanding of how difficult it was to forge female friendships after motherhood. As the former deputy CEO at dating app Badoo and an inaugural board member at Bumble, she initially saw the potential for Peanut as a friendship-focused matching app with swipe mechanisms similar to popular dating apps.

Over the past couple of years, however, Kennedy realized that what women needed was more of a community space. The team then built out the app’s features accordingly, with the launch of its Q&A forums, Peanut Pages, last year, and more recently, with Peanut Groups. The latter has now become Peanut’s main use case, with 60% of users taking advantage of the app’s community features and just 40% using the friend-finding functions.

“Community is definitely becoming a very important part of what we do. It’s where we see the users that we deem to be power users — women who are using Peanut for hours every day — they’re very much within the community section,” explains Kennedy. “We see that growth there and it actually guides the product. So we’re taking the behaviors that we see and letting that inform our roadmap,” Kennedy says.

Since around November 2018, Peanut has been growing by 20% month-over-month, as more women discover Peanut’s private and ad-free alternative to Facebook Groups. On Peanut, users are verified (by selfies!), and people have the sorts of discussions that don’t really take place in other social apps.

Even Kennedy admits she was surprised at first by what women were talking about in the app.

“The conversations were much, much more personal and intimate and more related to their lives. So whether that had to do with their sex life or relationships, it was on a deeper level,” she says. “These are conversations that women simply can’t have anywhere else. Of course, they’re not happening in Facebook Groups…these are very intimate and self-reflective moments. And [women] want to do that in a private setting in a private social network,” Kennedy adds.

The new funding, in part, will be used to grow Peanut’s 16-person team to 22 this year, which will then double next year.

In addition, Peanut is expanding access to women who are trying to conceive, with the launch of the Trying To Conceive (TTC) community. This will offer a separate sign-up experience and access to a dedicated network of women, where members can candidly discuss the topic and ask questions. Within TTC, members can also create their own groups — like one for women on their fifth round of IVF, for example — to have conversations with others who are at the same place in their journey.

The community, today, won’t point women to other fertility-focused apps or related health services, Kennedy says, though she sees the potential for strategic partnerships further down the road. In the near-term, however, Peanut plans to generate revenue by way of the freemium model and micropayments.

“We’re incredibly excited to partner with Michelle to grow Peanut from the essential platform for mothers it is today, to a social network for women globally. Peanut is a true companion for women, bringing them together when they need each other the most,” says Hannah Seal, principal at Index Ventures, about the firm’s investment. “We’ve been impressed with the response Peanut has received since launch and look forward to supporting the team as it enters into new areas such as fertility, and expands globally.”

“We want to shine a light on an often silent struggle. What has always been Peanut’s point of difference is enabling conversations women feel unable to have on any other platform. Providing a safe, inclusive space for women to discuss fertility is a natural progression for our brand as we continue to support women throughout each life stage. No woman should ever feel lonely, isolated or muted on such an important issue,” Kennedy says.

Disney+ is here, and so is the first episode of The Mandalorian, the highly anticipated live-action television series set in the Star Wars universe. Since it’s the only thing we can talk about in the office today, the Game Informer crew decided to share their thoughts with you in a roundtable discussion that breaks down the plot points, action, and all of the tasty spoilers. Don’t watch until you’ve seen the episode. We’d love to hear your thoughts on the topics we dive into in the comments section below. Thanks for watching!

Motorola is bringing the Razr back in the form of a foldable Android phone, but that doesn’t mean that the company is leaving the classic design of the original behind. As a neat tribute to the OG RAZR, Motorola has included a secret “Retro Razr” mode that turns the $1,499 modern smartphone into the spitting image of its 2004-era predecessor.

The mode is basically a glorified skinned Android launcher that faithfully re-creates the original RAZR UI through software, right down to the classic boot animation. But Motorola has put in some serious work here: the skin is fully functional. Click the button for messaging, and it’ll launch the Android messaging app. Click right to open settings, and the settings app will launch. The best part is dialing a phone number, which features the same pop-up UI as the original, including the sounds.

And while the entire 2019 Razr is a giant touchscreen, Motorola made the retro mode as authentic as possible. The only way to navigate it is by using the (software) buttons on the keypad. (You can’t simply tap on the address book icon.)

Photo by Chaim Gartenberg / The Verge

The throwback mode is hidden away in Android’s quick setting menu. To find it, you’ll have to edit which items show up in the drop-down menu and then drag the Retro Razr button into the menu. Once it’s there, just swipe down like you’d normally do to activate Airplane Mode or adjust the brightness and tap the newly revealed Retro Razr button instead to launch the Easter egg.

Is it useful? Not really. But it’s a cute and clever way for Motorola to pay homage to the original RAZR, even as it moves boldly forward with this new, modern version. (Also, never underestimate the power of nostalgia.)

Facebook has faced a barrage of concern over an apparent bug that resulted in the social media giant’s iPhone app exposing the camera as users scroll through their feed.

A tweet over the weekend blew up after Joshua Maddux tweeted a screen recording of the Facebook app on his iPhone. He noticed that the camera would appear behind the Facebook app as he scrolled through his social media feed.

Several users had already spotted the bug earlier in the month. One person called it “a little worrying.”

Some immediately assumed the worst — as you might expect, given the long history of security vulnerabilities, data breaches and inadvertent exposures at Facebook over the past year. Just last week, the company confirmed that some developers had improperly retained access to some Facebook user data for more than a year.

Will Strafach, chief executive at Guardian Firewall, said it looked like a “harmless but creepy looking bug.”

The bug appears to only affect iPhone users running the latest iOS 13 software, and those who have already granted the app access to the camera and microphone. It’s believed the bug relates to the “story” view in the app, which opens the camera for users to take photos.

One workaround is to simply revoke camera and microphone access to the Facebook app in their iOS settings.

Facebook vice president of integrity Guy Rosen tweeted this morning that it “sounds like a bug” and the company was investigating. Only after we published, a spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch that the issue was in fact a bug.

“We recently discovered that version 244 of the Facebook iOS app would incorrectly launch in landscape mode,” said the spokesperson. “In fixing that issue last week in v246 — launched on November 8th — we inadvertently introduced a bug that caused the app to partially navigate to the camera screen adjacent to News Feed when users tapped on photos.”

“We have seen no evidence of photos or videos being uploaded due to this bug,” the spokesperson added. The bug fix was submitted for Apple’s approval today.

“I guess it does say something when Facebook trust has eroded so badly that it will not get the benefit of the doubt when people see such a bug,” said Strafach.

Updated with Facebook comment.

World of Warcraft: Shadowlands shines a light on one of mankinds’ greatest mysteries: What the heck happens when you die, anyway?! In today’s NGT, we visit Bastion, which is where all of the good girls and boys go when they finally bite the big one.

Dan Tack is our spirit guide, answering all of our super smart and interesting questions. You know, things like, “Can you buy stuff in heaven Bastion?” and “Is this fun?” Watch the episode for all these answers and more!

World of Warcraft: Shadowlands is coming to PC in 2020. Click the banner below to find more content from our month of Blizzard coverage: