A bill introduced to the New York City Council this week seeks to address the growing problem of “cyber flashing,” or the act of sending explicit photos to strangers through file sharing technology like Apple’s AirDrop.

Thanks to iPhone’s popularity — and AirDrop’s behavior — Apple products are prime candidates for exploitation. The wireless protocol is designed to quickly connect to, and move content between, two supporting iOS or Mac devices.

Unlike other systems, AirDrop presents a preview of incoming photos and video, which users can then accept or decline. Cyber flashers take advantage of the automated preview feature to present inappropriate material to victims.

Further, AirDrop allows users to send files anonymously, as devices are identified by their user-defined name. An iOS user, for example, can easily modify their device name in the operating system’s Settings menu.

Though AirDrop is by default restricted to a user’s contacts list, the feature can be configured to allow connections with all nearby devices. Once modified, discoverability settings are saved, meaning a device is perpetually set to one of three options: “Receiving Off,” “Contacts Only” or “Everyone.”

A decidedly modern form of sexual harassment, cyber flashing is typically conducted in high occupancy spaces like trains and buses, where people are often seen with their eyes glued to mobile device screens. The more users in a given area, the more targets there are for perpetrators who use crowd cover to remain anonymous.

“In the old days, you had to have a long trench coat and good running shoes,” New York City Councilman Joseph Borelli said in a statement to The New York Times. “Technology has made it significantly easier to be a creep.”

Councilmen Borelli, Donovan Richards, Justin Brannan and Alan Maisel are co-sponsors of a bipartisan anti-flashing bill introduced on Wednesday. If passed, the legislation would make it illegal to “send an unsolicited sexually explicit video or image to another person with intent to harass, annoy or alarm such other person,” punishable by up to a year in jail or a $1,000 fine.

“Keep your pic in your pants,” Richards said. “If you do it, the message we are sending is that the repercussion is a fine or jail time.”

As AppleInsider explained last year, users can protect themselves from becoming cyber flashing victims by limiting AirDrop discoverability to known contacts.

To do so, open Control Center on any device running iOS 12 by swiping down from the top right corner of the screen (iPhone X and newer) or up from the bottom of the screen (iPhone 8 and older). Press down on the Bluetooth icon, or press and hold, to reveal additional connectivity controls, tap on the AirDrop icon and select Contacts Only or Receiving Off.

Alternatively, the same AirDrop settings can be found under General > AirDrop in the Settings app.

The team at Unity published a brief blog post today outlining what they see as the six principles which should guide the development of “ethical” artificial intelligence tools and systems.

While these are just suggestions, they may help jumpstart some useful conversations within game development teams about how and why advanced AI tools and applications (like machine learning and natural language processing) are used. 

However, Unity’s main focus seems to be on AI used outside the game industry in fields like healthcare, engineering, and media. It makes sense given Unity’s ongoing efforts to push its game development tools into the hands of creatives in other industries, and the comparative lack of cutting-edge AI techniques (since game AI is typically designed not to excel at its task, but to foster a good experience for players) employed in game dev.

“These principles are meant as a blueprint for the responsible use of AI for our developers, our community, and our company,” reads an excert of the blog post. “We expect to develop these principles more fully and to add to them over time as our community of developers, regulators, and partners continue to debate best practices in advancing this new technology.”

Without further ado, here are Unity’s six guiding principles for AI:

• Be Unbiased.
  Design AI tools to complement the human experience in a positive way.  Consider all types of human experiences in this pursuit. Diversity of perspective will lead to AI complementing experiences for everybody, as opposed to a select few.
• Be Accountable.
  Consider the potential negative consequences of the AI tools we build. Anticipate what might cause potential direct or indirect harm and engineer to avoid and minimize these problems.
• Be Fair.
  Do not knowingly develop AI tools and experiences that interfere with normal, functioning democratic systems of government. This means saying no to product development aimed at the suppression of human rights, as defined by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, such as the right to free expression.
• Be Responsible.
  Develop products responsibly and do not take advantage of your products’ users by manipulating them through AI’s vastly more predictive capabilities derived from user data.
• Be Honest.
  Trust the users of the technology to understand the product’s purpose so they can make informed decisions about whether to use the product. Be clear and be transparent.
• Be Trustworthy.
  Guard the AI derived data as if it were handed to you by your customer directly in trust to only be used as directed under the other principles found in this guide.

This comes well over a year after Google DeepMind established its own research group, the DeepMind Ethics & Society unit, to establish and solve the big questions posed by cutting-edge AI development. That effort continues even as Google DeepMind continues to train AI agents to excel at games like Quake III Arena, StarCraft, and Go.

UI has come a long way since the 8-bit era, when bosses would flash shades of yellow or red at an accelerating tempo when they were teetering on the brink of defeat.

These days, character models serve as a kind of sophisticated UI of their own, and conveying complicated systems like stamina or damaged systems to players without the use of big garish red bars or dry percentages is an art unto itself.

To get a closer look at how developers use models as UI we reached out to three studios working on very different games, with very different protagonists, and very different needs in terms of communicating information to the player in a way that feels unobtrusive and intuitive. How you show damage differs dramatically, it turns out, if you’re displaying it on the galvanized steel of a giant battle mech or a starship instead of the fragile flesh of the human body.

Designers have been playing with the idea of characters as UI for a long time with human protagonists, from simple implementations like the “strawberry jam” effect of flashing or glazing the edges of the screen with red when you take damage, to more nuanced approaches like showing individual wounds or bullet holes on 3rd person models.Undead Labs’ State of Decay 2 expands on this idea even further, altering behavior and animations based on factors as subtle as a character’s mood.

“When viewing all the members of their community, we use different stances to communicate injuries, ailments, and the morale of each member,” says Jørgen Tjernø, one of the game’s programmer’s. “Greeting VO lines are changed to indicate that a person has taken serious injuries or is feeling sick, and we replace idle and walk animations to indicate significant injuries.”

The same consideration extends to NPCs, as well. “The way we apply injuries works the same for all humans – for example an enemy NPC will receive the same kind of injury from falling too that a player would. This also applies to friendly NPCs that you aren’t currently controlling.”

But one of the challenges of that deeper approach is that slight inconsistencies can break the entire system.

“As an example, we received feedback that it seemed very incongruous that the character was limping, yet their response when talked to was chipper and up-beat,” Tjernø says. “When the player sees behavior that is inconsistent with the story the systems are telling about the character, it is easy for them to lose their sense of immersion. That kind of dissonance is important to address.”

According to Brian Giaime, State of Decay 2’s senior system designer, one of the ways of avoiding those kind of jarring contradictions is a judicious approach to showcasing injuries.

“Just having an injury doesn’t immediately change a character’s visual state to where they’re limping, etc.,” Giaime tells me. “That triggers when a character is either completely out of stamina, or below a ‘critical health’ threshold. We use injuries to inform players that they’re taking a more permanent kind of damage; they can come from being too close to explosions, getting hurt by our ‘Freak’ zombies, or falling from great heights.”

The game treats injuries the same way it does traits, which Giaime says lends “narrative scaffolding for players to tell stories around. We use these when we want something to instill dread and long-term recovery cost.”

Perhaps even more important than the net loss of health, though, is the game’s stamina system; running out of juice when you’re trapped by a large group of zombies or a handful of powerful Freak variants can be an automatic death sentence.  You won’t be able to sprint long enough to escape them, and your attacks will come too slowly and spaced too far apart to effectively keep multiple enemies at bay.

“Fatigue is a separate system meant to represent a character’s long-term stamina dwindling due to a lack of rest or an abundance of exertion. The longer a character stays out, and the more they exert themselves, the more fatigue they’ll accumulate, eventually having enough for it to ‘activate’, appearing as lost max stamina on the stamina bar. Once that happens, any action which consumes stamina flashes the bar, and increases the fatigue bar, reducing the player’s max stamina further, making each fight more dangerous and increasing the pressure to return home or to an outpost to switch characters, letting the fatigued character rest.”

"When the player sees behavior that is inconsistent with the story the systems are telling about the character, it is easy for them to lose their sense of immersion. That kind of dissonance is important to address."

Deeply fatigued characters can only run in staccato bursts before staggering and slowing to a torturous limp, and if they’re also badly wounded they’ll grip broken arms or ribs, or practically double over in pain. But Giaime says the team was careful not to make being injured and exhausted a guarantee that a favorite character would never make it home; they also wanted to use those states as a learning tool.

“Our ‘wounded/tired state’ is a coherent but fundamentally binary way of hindering players. Getting to this state means you’ve taken a critical amount of damage, or are completely out of stamina. Both of those cases are things players ought to avoid, and so we reduce your ability to successfully fight in these cases, hopefully teaching players early on to develop combat tactics which avoid them.

“Managing stamina, dodging attacks instead of absorbing hits, or just training up your characters to provide more room for error are all natural takeaways from these mechanics, and the tuning is such that we believe people won’t have to do much, if any, learning through dying.”

And beside just making it obvious through behavior that characters were wounded, and training players to take better care of their charges, the team built in a buffer to make even very dire situations potentially escapable.

“Our most significant tool to help players learn how to survive, without having to lose characters to permadeath, is our ‘fight for life’ system. This system gives players that get in over their heads a chance to recover some health and stamina after losing all of their health but not all of their max health. Only a total loss of max health results in death. In this way we ensure that consequences remain significant for players who are overconfident, without being overly punishing to players who are still learning the ropes.”

Applying the same sort of systems to a complicated machine designed to plumb the depths of space is a completely different beast, simpler in some ways and much more complex in others. Instead of the familiar patterns of human behavior when we’re tired or hurt, designers are faced with subsystems and weapon platforms, sensor packages and flight dynamics.

In Mark Abent’s case, the lead gameplay programmer on Star Citizen, the remit from the beginning was to create beautiful, complicated, and fully destructive craft that would showcase every scoring laser hit or armor shattering explosion.

“Ever since I started here, the whole point has been ‘if you see something on a ship, you can blow it up,’” Abent says. “We don’t want ‘shoot the ship for a long time until it explodes;’ we want ‘shoot the ship, hit components, critical, minor or whatever.’ Components get damaged, they break, they impact the performance of the ship. If you shoot a Hornet and its wing breaks off, the pilot will feel it, and the attacking player will see it.”

And it’s not just about visual effects. “We want to make sure that when something breaks or fails, you feel it, hear about it, etc. There are a ton of indicators – particle effects, like a fire on a wing, that would indicate your flight isn’t fully functional. Each piece will have individual health pools – so you work to damage and destroy an engine block, and that impacts the flight performance. The engine should cut off, you might be able to use backup systems or divert power, but you’re going to see a dramatic decrease in flight performance.”

Abent envisions the final game weight factors as granular as projectile size and weight when determining damage and how it’s displayed.

“A peashooter might dent a ship over time but a rail gun can take out a chunk in one shot. As locations on the ship get weaker, it takes less force to continue damaging them. Big parts of the ship now have built in visual changes that we put in as we create the ship, so you get a shortcut to visible damage on certain sections.”

The problem is, Star Citizen isn’t (just) a game about fighters. The game simulates a broad scale of craft, from small, darting interceptors to freighters or capital ships, massive ships that come with their own set of difficulties and demands.

“The hard part is, how do we display this across huge spaces, with ships of varying shapes and sizes? We’re making ships of varying shapes and sizes, from things that look and feel like a car, to others that are massive, like the size of city blocks. How do we program the game logic to incorporate different health states across different ships? Does a power coupling on  a ship the size of a city block have the same strength as one on a small racing craft? There are a lot of questions that we need to answer to make these systems reality.”

The first step to answering these questions is creating a pipeline that allows the team at Cloud Imperium Games to break big problems down into smaller, manageable chunks. Originally, the team was doing all this chassis and system damage modeling by hand, a huge drain on resources and manpower. Now, new tools like an in-engine editor have significantly streamlined the process.

“When someone damages shields enough, you’ll lose power. Then the crew inside has to repair the power plant to get shields back up. However, it’s very time consuming to place these by hand inside the ship. We’re creating tools in the editor that allow us to pick out entities, export them and place them within the ship in seconds.”

"We want to make sure that when something breaks or fails, you feel it, hear about it."

It’s an iterative process that happens in multiple stages.

“That’s one of the reasons we sometimes ‘reissue’ ships that are already in the game,” Abent says, “to bring their tech and code up to par with the new systems we design to govern ship damage, power, heat, etc. We also create these systems piecemeal. We aren’t saying ‘tomorrow, your ship will have breakable pieces, a governing power system, overheating mechanics, or degradation,’ but instead we design the system once we understand the final aiming point and go about implementing it in pieces. Eventually, all these components will be part of a more cohesive system that makes your ship maintenance something that all SC pilots and crews will have to consider in minute-to-minute gameplay.”

The goal is to make ship damage a strategic consideration, to force players to think about any combat encounter not only tactically but in terms of the bigger picture, the potential for profit/loss.

“Even if I won, and I didn’t take much damage, I may have put a ton of strain on my systems, lost a wing, I could be running out of ammo. I can’t just go into battle because it’s fun, we want it to be a strategic decision. Ship damage is what makes that happen.”

It’s become a core mechanic around which a lot of the game’s other systems have been constructed, key to everything from player progression to how battles are conducted and scaled.

Abent frames it in easily digestible terms. “Think of it this way: in The Last Jedi, an X-wing pilot disables the defenses on a Super Star Destroyer, enabling his fleet’s slower bombers to creep in and destroy the ship. Those are interacting and overlapping strategic decisions, and it’s how we envision Star Citizen working, but without ship damage and damage states it’s almost impossible. But when you can have a fleet of fighters disable systems on a huge capital ship, launch a dropship at the disabled ship, board and take over? Bring in bombers and blow it out of the sky? Salvage some of the valuable pieces you shot off, while the other side is trying to recover them? You’ve created emergent gameplay.”

The model damage in Battletech is actually a holdover from its genesis as a tabletop game. A wireframe of each mech was displayed on a record sheet with a certain number of empty circles allocated to each section (its center torso, for instance, or each leg). A dice roll indicated which area was hit and every time the mech took damage, players would fill in circles in that area, until all the circles were full and the entire piece was destroyed.

“Being able to dynamically reflect that visually in gameplay is an advantage we have in a video game over the tabletop game,” says Steve Rynders, Battletech’s principal character pipeline artist at developer Harebrained Schemes. “Fortunately, Piranha Games shared their Mechwarrior Online assets with us and the models were already built in a way that supported damaging and destroying geometry. Aside from it being awesome to see an arm blown off and its pieces rain down on the terrain along with the sparks and explosion, it helps to reinforce and communicate to the player that there has been a state change.”

To show off meaningful systems or parts damage, Rynders and the team dynamically toggle between different assets.

“Our implementation swaps between an undamaged skinned mesh group and a group of damaged geometry that is either still skinned to the animation skeleton, or a physics body (which are the pieces that fall to the ground). When a piece is destroyed, the appropriate groups are turned off and on, and the physics bodies become active and VFX like explosions, smoke, and sparks are played at the appropriate joint locations.”

Determining when a unit has taken enough damage to cripple a system or cause a limb to get blasted into molten shrapnel also goes back to the extensive foundation laid by the tabletop game.

“In a lot of ways these kinds of questions are already answered for us by 30 years of play, feedback, expansion, and rules tweaks,” says lead designer Kiva Maginn, “but we did make some moderately significant changes to the original game model. For instance, tabletop BattleTech includes a concept called ‘through armor critical.’ A TAC is a chance that any attack might bypass a ‘Mech’s armor to inflict damage on internal systems, leading to weapons being destroyed, ammo exploding, and otherwise awful consequences.”

“We eventually decided not to include it in our adaptation. The reasoning is that while it’s fun to take a TAC that blows up your whole ‘Mech when you’re sitting around a table with your friends, eating pretzels and rolling dice, it’s a lot less fun when a faceless, emotionless AI does the same thing to you.”

"Aside from it being awesome to see an arm blown off and its pieces rain down on the terrain along with the sparks and explosion, it helps to reinforce and communicate to the player that there has been a state change"

Instead, damage in the video game is simulated through the use of ablative armor over a more fragile structural layer. After the armor is destroyed, any hits on the structure may trigger critical damage to one of the systems stashed in that part of the mech, destroying crucial elements like weapons, ammo, or heat sinks.

“Once all the points of structure are lost on the location, the whole location is destroyed,” Maginn says. “It’s an arm, we animate it popping off and falling to the ground, and if it’s a leg, your ‘Mech falls on its butt. When a location is destroyed, anything equipped there is also destroyed, and torso and head destruction result in the instant death of the ‘Mech and its pilot.”

As in the tabletop game, further damage to a destroyed section is applied to an adjacent piece closer to the center of the mech, inwards towards the center.

“In a sense, while locations like arms and legs are functional places to mount equipment and weapons, they’re also another form of ablative defense: if your arm is being damaged, at least it’s just an arm, and not the much more vital center torso or head.”

It’s one of the ways the game is designed to keep players in the fight even after taking damage and to avoid the kind of one-hit kill scenario of the tabletop game’s TACs. Another is the way players are encouraged to spread weapons and systems across the entirety of their mechs, so losing an arm or a leg isn’t an automatic game over.

“If you take a lot of fire to your left arm, you’ll eventually lose that arm. That means that serious, gameplay-affecting damage is generally focused on one part, or system, or weapon. If you have a Medium Laser in your left arm, losing that arm is going to take your laser away. But all the other weapons you’ve got equipped are still perfectly functional; if your ‘Mech is also carrying an AC20 in its right torso, losing that left arm isn’t really much of a change to your overall effectiveness.”

Maginn points out that locational damage is also a good way to make players think tactically in three dimensions. “By maneuvering carefully, you can present different facings to the enemy, so that as one arm is damaged, you can switch over to taking damage on the other arm.”

As in State of Decay 2, damage to AI mechs is handled the same way it is for player units. The principal AI director, Kevin Maloney, says the AI is forced to deal with the same locational damage and systems destruction, and is constantly calculating how to effectively roll with whatever punches the player manages to land.

“The AI cares a lot about getting the most damage it can dealt to hostiles. So in terms of destroyed systems it just factors that when thinking about how to hurt you the most. For example, if a Catapult (that by default is equipped with Long Range Missiles, Medium Lasers and Jumpjets) loses its LRMS and Jumpjets it will then move to the place where it can do the most damage with its lasers and not give a thought to jumping. The AI is regularly checking on not only the state of its systems but heat, its weakest armor side, stability and numerous other factors so it can make the best decision it can with the most current information.”

Hello everyone! We’re really happy because, after a long time, Youtubers Life OMG Edition is about to land on Xbox One.

When we started developing Youtubers Life, we knew we had to step up and improve the original formula. Thanks to the massive community feedback, we added new features added and vastly improved the GUI and controls, adapting them to PAD gameplay, all of this supported by tons of visual and playability improvements that make Youtubers Life OMG Edition the much-deserved version that our fans demanded.

Youtubers live exciting but demanding lives, that’s why we’d like to share some tips with you to successfully tackle your path to fame in this refined version of the game. Youtubers Life OMG Edition mixes tycoon and life sim genres where managing time, your subscribers wishes, and your own needs are key to achieve success.

One of your firsts decisions to make will be choosing your channel theme. You can talk about games and visit a gaming conference, or share songs and play shows, or create new recipes and display your culinary abilities in gastronomy competitions. Each channel has its own nuances, mini-games and missions, providing great replayability value.

As every aspiring Youtuber, you’ll start at your mom’s house (we don’t know about your father yet) being a complete unknown who makes videos for fun. In the beginning, uploading videos won’t be a great source of income, at least until you manage to grow your subscriber count… We recommend looking for temp work or taking commissions from people you can find at the disco or the cinema. There are lots of people willing to pay good money to unload video-making work!

In Youtubers Life OMG Edition we wanted to delve into the romanticized view of the fan-driven Youtuber. Now, you need to really take care of your followers by publishing social network content, attending events, uploading daily videos… so much stress! Fortunately, your collaborators can help you make videos, frequently uploading them to your channel. You can even record your experiences while attending events and upload those videos, your fans will love that!

When you’re done with your mom’s house internet connection speed (which takes ages to upload a single video), you’ll know the moment of moving with a friend has arrived, but be advised: your expenses will skyrocket! Be careful or you’ll end up living under a bridge! Before moving, save some money, improve your PC and take care of your friends. Don’t be in a hurry to move houses, although you’ll eventually need to change if you want your channel to grow – you’ll be happy to find out that each new house comes with its perks.

Reaching success in Youtubers Life OMG Edition is totally dependent on the decisions you make and improve by uploading videos and gaining subscribers. Adapt your play style thanks to the talent tree present on each type of channel, try different video types to get attention and accept commissioned work from commercial brands to earn big money! But be careful, your fans will get angry if you rely too much on paid work. You get to decide how to enjoy this highly-replayable and full of possibilities experience.

We believe Youtubers Life OMG Edition will be equally loved by those who have already played the game and those who were patiently waiting for release on Xbox One. We’re eager for all our fans to test this much-improved version, and we want you all to share your feedback with us! Vast is the Youtuber world and we want to keep working to offer the best and closest experience to what it means being an Internet celebrity.

7.20c:
==
* Wraith Band: Attack speed bonus reduced from 7 to 6
* Wraith Band: Recipe cost increased from 210 to 220
* Bracer: Recipe cost increased from 210 to 220
* Null Talisman: Recipe cost increased from 210 to 220
* Sange: Recipe cost reduced from 650 to 600
* Yasha: Recipe cost reduced from 650 to 600
* Kaya: Recipe cost reduced from 650 to 600
* Bloodstone: Charges increased from 12 to 14
* Bloodstone: HP/MP regen per charge increased from 0.25 to 0.3

* Bounty Hunter: Agility gain reduced from 3.0 to 2.7
* Bounty Hunter: Track cast range reduced from 1200 to 1000
* Brewmaster: Cinder Brew activation mechanic has been reworked. It now ignites anytime a target is dealt 80 spell damage or more, dealing 20/25/30/35 DPS for 3 seconds. (If you activate it while the debuff is already going, it will extend the ignite debuff duration. If activated after the ignite debuff wears out, a new ignite debuff will be added)
* Brewmaster: Cinder Brew primary buff duration is no longer extended when activated (they are seperate debuffs now).
* Brewmaster: Level 25 Talent reduced from +200% Drunken Brawler Critical Strike to +175%
* Centaur: Stampede slow duration increased from 1.8 to 2.3 seconds
* Chaos Knight: Chaos Strike lifesteal increased from 35/40/45/50% to 35/45/55/65%
* Clinkz: Attack range increased from 640 to 650
* Clinkz: Burning Army base attack time improved from 1.65/1.5/1.35 to 1.5/1.35/1.2
* Clinkz: Level 20 Talent increased from +100 to +125 Attack Range
* Dazzle: Shadow Wave cooldown increased from 13/11/9/7 to 14/12/10/8
* Death Prophet: Base movement speed increased from 310 to 315
* Death Prophet: Level 10 Talent increased from +12% Magic Resistance to +15%
* Death Prophet: Level 20 Talent increased from -2s Crypt Swarm Cooldown to -3s
* Doom: Devour hp regen reduced from 5/10/15/20 to 4/8/13/18
* Drow Ranger: Marksmanship now deals bonus 120 physical proc damage against heroes
* Elder Titan: Astral Spirit attack damage per hero reduced from 20/40/60/80 to 15/30/60/80
* Elder Titan: Astral Spirit cooldown increased from 16 to 17
* Ember Spirit: Sleight of Fist bonus damage increased from 35/70/105/140 to 40/80/120/160
* Ember Spirit: Level 10 Talent increased from +200 Flame Guard Absorption to +250
* Ember Spirit: Level 15 Talent increased from +50 Flameguard DPS to +60
* Enchantress: Base armor increased by 2
* Faceless Void: Time Lock damage reduced from 30/40/50/60 to 25/30/35/40
* Gyrocopter: Strength gain increased from 2.1 to 2.3
* Kunkka: Tidebringer cleave damage increased from 150% to 165%
* Lina: Base armor increased by 1
* Lone Druid: Base armor reduced by 2
* Lone Druid: Agility reduced from 24 + 2.7 to 20 + 2.4
* Lone Druid: Spirit Link cooldown rescaled from 44/36/28/20 to 43/36/29/22
* Lone Druid: Level 10 Talent reduced from +175 Attack Range to +150
* Lone Druid: Level 20 Talent changed from +40 Spirit Link Attack Speed to -0.2 Spirit Bear Base Attack Time
* Luna: Agility gain reduced from 3.3 to 3.1
* Luna: Level 10 Talent reduced from +20 Attack Speed to +15
* Luna: Level 20 Talent reduced from +10 All Stats to +8
* Luna: Lunar Blessing night vision reduced from 250/500/750/1000 to 200/400/600/800
* Lycan: Howl attack speed reduced from 21/34/47/60 to 20/30/40/50
* Meepo: Divided We Stand XP gain reduced from 50% to 40%
* Meepo: Level 15 Talent reduced from +40 Poof Damage to +30
* Nature’s Prophet: Base armor increased by 1
* Nature’s Prophet: Agility gain increased from 2.4 to 2.8
* Naga Siren: Level 15 Talent reduced from +15 Agility to +12
* Outworld Devourer: Intelligence gain increased from 2.7 to 3.0
* Outworld Devourer: Base armor increased by 1
* Outworld Devourer: Equilibrium slow from 12/20/28/36% to 12/22/32/42%
* Outworld Devourer: Arcane Orb no longer ignores Ancients
* Phantom Assassin: Level 15 Talent reduced from -4 Armor to -3
* Phantom Assassin: Blur manacost increased from 20 to 30
* Puck: Intelligence gain increased from 2.4 to 2.7
* Sand King: Base damage reduced by 2
* Sand King: Strength gain reduced from 2.9 to 2.8
* Sand King: Agility gain reduced from 2.1 to 1.8
* Spectre: Haunt damage increased from 40/50/60% to 40/55/70%
* Spirit Breaker: Greater Bash damage reduced from 16/24/32/40% to 12/20/28/36%
* Storm Spirit: Intelligence gain increased from 3 to 3.2
* Storm Spirit: Static Remnant damage increased from 120/160/200/240 to 120/170/220/270
* Slardar: Level 20 Talent changed from +50 Attack Speed to +30% Lifesteal
* Slark: Pounce duration reduced from 2.75/3/3.25/3.5 to 2.5/2.75/3/3.25
* Slark: Dark Pact manacost from 55/50/45/40 to 60
* Slark: Shadow Dance duration from 4/4.5/5 to 4/4.25/4.5
* Slark: Agility steal now also occurs when an enemy dies within 300 units from you with the debuff, rather than only when you get the killing blow
* Slark: Level 10 Talent reduced from +8 Agility to +6 Agility
* Slark: Level 20 Talent reduced from +2s Pounce Leash to +1.5s
* Slark: Level 25 Talent reduced from +120s Essence Shift Duration to +100s
* Timbersaw: Strength gain increased from 2.1 to 2.4
* Timbersaw: Whirling Death tree bonus damage increased from 10/14/18/22 to 10/15/20/25
* Tusk: Strength gain increased from 3 to 3.4
* Undying: Level 20 Talent reduced from +6 Tombstone Attacks To Destroy to +5
* Undying: Level 25 Talent increased from Gains Reincarnation 200 CD to 250 CD
* Ursa: Fury Swipes damage reduced from 12/18/24/30 to 10/16/22/28
* Ursa: Level 15 Talent reduced from +16 Agility to +14
* Venomancer: Base agility increased by 4
* Venomancer: Level 15 Talent increased from +6% Poison Sting Slow to +8%
* Visage: Strength gain reduced from 3.2 to 3.0
* Visage: Grave Chill cast range reduced from 650 to 625
* Visage: Level 20 Talent reduced from +80 Familiars Movement Speed to +60

It’s been almost two months since we officially joined the Dynamics 365 family with the general availability of our first two mixed reality business applications: Dynamics 365 Remote Assist and Dynamics 365 Layout.

We are thrilled with the response from our partners and customers since our launch. It’s so much fun learning from and hearing about how others are forging their way using mixed reality.

For this month’s post, I wanted to take a quick moment to highlight a couple customers that are early adopters and long-term partners: Toyota and thyssenkrupp. Both companies are breaking new ground while helping us usher in the era of mixed reality.

Toyota

Toyota is well known for their values of quality, safety and continuous improvement. With significant amounts of 3D CAD data, they understand the power of bringing the digital and physical worlds together. When they learned of mixed reality and Microsoft HoloLens, they began to look at processes that could be transformed.

As part of the painting process for their vehicles, Toyota performs a process called “film coating thickness inspection” to manage the thickness of the paint to ensure consistent quality of coating on every vehicle — a process that is performed regularly, even after mass production has started.

Before using HoloLens, Toyota performed film coating thickness inspection manually with automobile-sized paper patterns, similar to those used in dressmaking. The automotive pattern has approximately 500 holes, punched as measurement points based on existing CAD drawings. Because of the size, complexity and manual nature of the patterns, they were often error prone and took days to create. And, due to risk of dust and dirt from the paper patterns, the vehicles being inspected had to be removed from the manufacturing facility, adding more than a day to production timelines.

With the HoloLens solution, Toyota can now take their existing 3D CAD data used in the vehicle design process and project it directly onto the vehicle for measurements, optimizing existing processes and minimizing errors. In addition, the process can be standardized and replicated across their global operations. Using mixed reality, a process which previously took one to two days and multiple people to execute now takes four hours and one person.

Toyota proved the value of mixed reality and is currently trialing Dynamics 365 Layout to improve machinery layout within their facilities and Dynamics 365 Remote Assist to provide workers with expert support from off-site designers and engineers.

ThyssenKrupp

We’ve partnered closely with thyssenkrupp since the very early days of HoloLens, jointly developing mixed reality solutions that could be implemented at scale. First, in the earliest iterations of Dynamics 365 Remote Assist, they were able to drastically improve response time, increase efficiency and raise elevator uptimes for many of their 24,000 thyssenkrupp elevator-service engineers by providing hands-free remote assistance — the length of their service calls was reduced fourfold. We continue to work closely with thyssenkrupp on current and future Dynamics 365 mixed reality applications as well as extending existing custom applications into broadly available solutions.

For example, thyssenkrupp has recently announced the broad rollout of HoloLinc, a first-of-its-kind, fully digitized sales process for the stair lift industry. After a pilot in The Netherlands with more than 300 successful installations to date, the HoloLinc solution is being rolled out from this month onward in the U.K., Germany, Belgium, France, Italy, Spain and France, with Norway and Japan to follow next year.

The rollout on a global level is seen as a major milestone in mass industrialization innovation. To date, thyssenkrupp Elevator has equipped 120 salespeople with the HoloLinc toolkit, which comprises a Microsoft HoloLens, a tablet, a portable printer, and other technical accessories. What’s most exciting is that HoloLinc improves a process for customers who need it most, as mobility issues have a huge impact on quality of life. By using mixed reality, a process which formerly took around 40 to 70 days can now be done in just 14 days. Now that is true digital transformation of a long-standing process!

I am looking forward to sharing more about the work our customers and partners are doing with mixed-reality business applications. As always, I’m available on Twitter (@lorrainebardeen) and eager to hear about what you’re doing with mixed reality.

There are so many reasons to enjoy the Linux desktop. One reason I often state up front is the almost unlimited number of choices to be found at almost every conceivable level. From how you interact with the operating system (via a desktop interface), to how daemons run, to what tools you use, you have a multitude of options.

The same thing goes for web browsers. You can use anything from open source favorites, such as Firefox and Chromium, or closed sourced industry darlings like Vivaldi and Chrome. Those options are full-fledged browsers with every possible bell and whistle you’ll ever need. For some, these feature-rich browsers are perfect for everyday needs.

There are those, however, who prefer using a web browser without all the frills. In fact, there are many reasons why you might prefer a minimal browser over a standard browser. For some, it’s about browser security, while others look at a web browser as a single-function tool (as opposed to a one-stop shop application). Still others might be running low-powered machines that cannot handle the requirements of, say, Firefox or Chrome. Regardless of the reason, Linux has you covered.

Let’s take a look at five of the minimal browsers that can be installed on Linux. I’ll be demonstrating these browsers on the Elementary OS platform, but each of these browsers are available to nearly every distribution in the known Linuxverse. Let’s dive in.

GNOME Web

GNOME Web (codename Epiphany, which means “a usually sudden manifestation or perception of the essential nature or meaning of something”) is the default web browser for Elementary OS, but it can be installed from the standard repositories. (Note, however, that the recommended installation of Epiphany is via Flatpak or Snap). If you choose to install via the standard package manager, issue a command such as sudo apt-get install epiphany-browser -y for successful installation.  

Epiphany uses the WebKit rendering engine, which is the same engine used in Apple’s Safari browser. Couple that rendering engine with the fact that Epiphany has very little in terms of bloat to get in the way, you will enjoy very fast page-rendering speeds. Epiphany development follows strict adherence to the following guidelines:

• Simplicity – Feature bloat and user interface clutter are considered evil.

• Standards compliance – No non-standard features will ever be introduced to the codebase.

• Software freedom – Epiphany will always be released under a license that respects freedom.

• Human interface – Epiphany follows the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines.

• Minimal preferences – Preferences are only added when they make sense and after careful consideration.

• Target audience – Non-technical users are the primary target audience (which helps to define the types of features that are included).

GNOME Web is as clean and simple a web browser as you’ll find (Figure 1).

The GNOME Web manifesto reads:

A web browser is more than an application: it is a way of thinking, a way of seeing the world. Epiphany’s principles are simplicity, standards compliance, and software freedom.

Netsurf

The Netsurf minimal web browser opens almost faster than you can release the mouse button. Netsurf uses its own layout and rendering engine (designed completely from scratch), which is rather hit and miss in its rendering (Figure 2).

Although you might find Netsurf to suffer from rendering issues on certain sites, understand the Hubbub HTML parser is following the work-in-progress HTML5 specification, so there will be issues popup now and then. To ease those rendering headaches, Netsurf does include HTTPS support, web page thumbnailing, URL completion, scale view, bookmarks, full-screen mode, keyboard shorts, and no particular GUI toolkit requirements. That last bit is important, especially when you switch from one desktop to another.

For those curious as to the requirements for Netsurf, the browser can run on a machine as slow as a 30Mhz ARM 6 computer with 16MB of RAM. That’s impressive, by today’s standard.

QupZilla

If you’re looking for a minimal browser that uses the Qt Framework and the QtWebKit rendering engine, QupZilla might be exactly what you’re looking for. QupZilla does include all the standard features and functions you’d expect from a web browser, such as bookmarks, history, sidebar, tabs, RSS feeds, ad blocking, flash blocking, and CA Certificates management. Even with those features, QupZilla still manages to remain a very fast lightweight web browser. Other features include: Fast startup, speed dial homepage, built-in screenshot tool, browser themes, and more.
One feature that should appeal to average users is that QupZilla has a more standard preferences tools than found in many lightweight browsers (Figure 3). So, if going too far outside the lines isn’t your style, but you still want something lighter weight, QupZilla is the browser for you.

Otter Browser

Otter Browser is a free, open source attempt to recreate the closed-source offerings found in the Opera Browser. Otter Browser uses the WebKit rendering engine and has an interface that should be immediately familiar with any user. Although lightweight, Otter Browser does include full-blown features such as:

Otter Browser can be run on nearly any Linux distribution from an AppImage, so there’s no installation required. Just download the AppImage file, give the file executable permissions (with the command chmod u+x otter-browser-*.AppImage), and then launch the app with the command ./otter-browser*.AppImage.

Otter Browser does an outstanding job of rendering websites and could function as your go-to minimal browser with ease.

Lynx

Let’s get really minimal. When I first started using Linux, back in ‘97, one of the web browsers I often turned to was a text-only take on the app called Lynx. It should come as no surprise that Lynx is still around and available for installation from the standard repositories. As you might expect, Lynx works from the terminal window and doesn’t display pretty pictures or render much in the way of advanced features (Figure 5). In fact, Lynx is as bare-bones a browser as you will find available. Because of how bare-bones this web browser is, it’s not recommended for everyone. But if you happen to have a gui-less web server and you have a need to be able to read the occasional website, Lynx can be a real lifesaver.

I have also found Lynx an invaluable tool when troubleshooting certain aspects of a website (or if some feature on a website is preventing me from viewing the content in a regular browser). Another good reason to use Lynx is when you only want to view the content (and not the extraneous elements).

Plenty More Where This Came From

There are plenty more minimal browsers than this. But the list presented here should get you started down the path of minimalism. One (or more) of these browsers are sure to fill that need, whether you’re running it on a low-powered machine or not.

Learn more about Linux through the free “Introduction to Linux” course from The Linux Foundation and edX.