Month: August 2022

Categories
Technology

Fan Builds His Own Incredible Attack On Titan Video Game For PC

Fan Builds His Own Incredible Attack On Titan Video Game For PC

Yeah, there have been official Attack on Titan video games, but they’ve never really managed to fully capture the speed and scale of the show, so one indie developer figured he’d try and make his own and release it for free. Which he has done, and then some.

Swammy details the story of his little project in this videoexplaining that what started as a fun little experiment in early 2021 blew-up after his girlfriend convinced him to post a short gameplay video on TikTok. An overwhelmingly positive response inspired Swammy to continue development on the demo, building on a foundation of swinging through the city by adding first some Titans to go up against, and then—after one disastrous mix-up—a co-op multiplayer mode.

By January 2022, the game was looking pretty good!

FREE ATTACK ON TITAN FAN GAME – TRAILER (Swammys AOT Fan Game)

As you can see, the main appeal of this game vs the official releases is the swinging system, which in Swammy’s game is a lot faster and freer. If you’ve played the recent spider-man games, for example, you’ll be pretty much at home here, especially if you play this game in third-person (it’s playable from either first or third-person perspectives).

By the middle of 2022 Swammy’s project had racked up millions of views on social media and hundreds of thousands of downloads. And now it’s blowing up all over again because he’s announced that the whole thing is getting a revamp as he tries to port it over to Unreal Engine 5:

If you want to play the game as it exists today, you most definitely can, with download links available here. Note that while there are versions available for both PC and Android, the PC edition is the one getting all the work, with the Android one now at its “final build”, after “constant harassment and threats” gave Swammy “zero reason to continue working on it, for my own mental health”.

It’s super easy to download and start playing—though there’s a video here if you need some help—and having been messing around with it this morning, I can understand a lot of the hype from fans. Sure, it’s pretty rough around the edges, and stuff like the interface is as barebones as it gets, but allowing for the fact this is a one-man job, and how fun the basic act of swinging around and stabbing things is, I think it’s really cool.

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Categories
Australia

Widespread rain to return to NSW and Victoria, flood warnings already issued

New South Wales and Victory are being told to brace for a multi-day rain event, as a cold front and low pressure system sweep across the nation.
It comes after an icy cold blast yesterday dusted parts of Western Australia with a rare flurry of snow.

The Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) has issued more than a dozen flood warnings across the two states in anticipation of the wet weather.

The Sydney Harbor Bridge seen through the windscreen of a car as rain pours on the city, Monday, Feb. 28, 2022. The state of New South Wales has seen more than 500 flood rescues and 927 requests for assistance in the past 24 hours as record rain continues to fall across the eastern states of Australia. (AP Photo/Mark Baker)
Sydney will be hit by more rain at the end of this week. (AP)

The BoM said “widespread rain and the chance of storms” will impact inland NSW from Thursday to Saturday.

“Increasing showers” are forecast for Sydney from Friday, with up to five mm of rain predicted to fall.

Moderate to major flood warnings are in place around Dubbo and Bourke.

“Moderate falls are possible about the western slopes, which may lead to renewed river rises,” the BoM wrote.

Meanwhile, Western Australia’s south-west corner has been dusted with snow.

polar air hits WA
A large pool of icy air from the Southern Ocean spread over south-western Australia causing temperatures to plummet. (BoM)
A rare flurry of snow delighted hikers in Stirling Range National Park.
A rare flurry of snow delighted hikers in Stirling Range National Park. (Frederick Schafsma)

Parts of the state have been shivering through it’s coldest weather of the year, due to a polar blast of air.

“Perth had its coldest day of 2022 to date yesterday with temps in the single-digit range for all but a few hours and a maximum of just 12.1C,” Weatherzone said.

The air driving the cold front is said to be “unusually cold”.

a travel warning has been issued as thick fog covers Brisbane this morning.

‘River City’ wakes to white-out as fog swallows city

Categories
US

Giuliani Still Feuding With Georgia Prosecutors Over Trump Testimony

Medical Procedure Prevents Travel to Testify in Georgia

  • A dispute over Rudy Giuliani’s grand jury testimony focused on whether he could travel to Georgia.
  • Giuliani said a medical procedure prevented him from flying, but prosecutors cited travel receipts.
  • Trump’s personal lawyer denied buying airplane tickets and professed ignorance about the travel purchases.

Rudy Giuliani on Tuesday denied purchasing plane tickets that local prosecutors in Georgia had cited in their bid to get the former New York City mayor’s testimony before a grand jury investigating efforts by former President Donald Trump and his allies to reverse the state’s 2020 election results.

A week before his scheduled appearance before that grand jury, Giuliani said a recent medical procedure prevented him from traveling by plane and necessitated a delay of his testimony.

But, in a new court filing, local prosecutors in the office of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis said they had obtained records showing that Giuliani paid in cash for multiple airline tickets — “including tickets to Rome, Italy, and Zurich, Switzerland” — for flights between July 22 and July 29.

In a court filing Tuesday, Giuliani’s lawyers said he had not traveled by plane to any location following his recent “surgical procedure.”

“First, and foremost, conspicuously absent from the state’s pleading is the fact that no such travel ever occurred,” wrote Giuliani’s lawyer William Thomas Jr. “Secondly, Mr. Giuliani never purchased airline tickets in case, or otherwise.”

Thomas wrote that Giuliani had been invited to attend a conference overseas and said that, “presumably,” the event organizers or some other third-party could have purchased tickets on his behalf — “but that is unknown to Mr. Giuliani or his counsel. “

During his travel overseas, Giuliani was scheduled to give a speech in Rome, his lawyer added. But Giuliani, “based solely on his health, canceled his speech in Rome,” Thomas wrote in the court filing.

“Mr. Giuliani has no knowledge of anyone else purchasing tickets for him to travel to Rome, but in any event he did not go.”

The filing came just hours before a court hearing Tuesday — the same day Giuliani was set to appear before the grand jury — on his request to delay his testimony. It marked just the latest instance of Giuliani professing to lack knowledge about the planning and funding of his international travel.

Last week, the New York Times reported that the company of Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash covered tens of thousands of dollars of Giuliani’s travel expenses in the summer of 2019, a period federal investigators scrutinized during a criminal inquiry into his ties to Ukraine. The nearly three-year inquiry, which examined whether Giuliani illegally lobbied the Trump administration on behalf of Ukrainian officials, is unlikely to result in charges, the Times reported.

While that investigation appears to be fading away, Giuliani is coming under intensifying scrutiny from the Fulton County district attorney’s office. Giuliani has emerged as a key figure in that inquiry, in which local prosecutors are examining a now infamous phone call Trump made to Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, urging him to “find” enough votes to reverse his loss to then-President- elect Joe Biden.

Giuliani was among the president’s allies who participated in a scheme to create so-called alternate slates of pro-Trump voters in key battleground states the former president lost in 2020, including Georgia. Court filings have shown that Willis’ office informed all 16 pro-Trump voters in Georgia that they could face charges in connection with the criminal investigation.

Federal prosecutors have also been examining Giuliani’s role in creating alternate slates of pro-Trump voters, and the House committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol has highlighted his role spreading false conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.

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Categories
Technology

WhatsApp extends its unsend time limit to ‘a little over two days’ – TechCrunch

WhatsApp extends its unsend time limit to 'a little over two days' – TechCrunch

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 pm PDT, subscribe here.

Whazzaaaaaaa, we’re back with another round of newsy goodness on this fine Tuesday. It’s a pretty wild news day today, with a bunch of startup high-jinx. Check out the site for all of it, of course, but we’ve selected some of the stories that piqued our attention today. Let’s gooooo! — Christina and Haje

The TechCrunch Top 3

  • Say it, forget it, post it, regret it: WhatsApp was at the top of the news food chain today with two stories. The first is something users seem very excited about — more time to delete a message. In fact, users now have 60 hours to delete a message they didn’t like or didn’t mean to send. This is an extension from 1 hour, 8 minutes, and 16 seconds, Ivan reports. Excuse us while we go look at something…
  • New feature alert: Now that we got that pesky deleting thing out of the way, WhatsApp also unveiled new privacy options for users that includes screenshot blocking and stealth mode, taylor writes. The screenshot blocking option, which is a once-viewed message, reads very much like Inspector Gadget’s self-destructing message, minus the explosion.
  • gone phishing: Armenian startup EasyDMARC took in $2.3 million to tackle the billion-dollar phishing industry that has reared its ugly head since strangers have been able to get people to click on links. Mike reports that the company has bundled up the DMARC protocol, or ‘Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance’ into something easier for businesses to use.

Startups and VCs

Watching startups play extreme hardball is our kind of spectator sport. In this case, only a year after going public, app growth and monetization agency AppLovin submitted an unsolicited proposal today to buy the game engine Unity in a deal worth $20 billion. But there’s a catch: Unity would have to terminate its recent deal to merge with ironSource, an AppLovin competitor, Amanda reports.

While plenty of crypto investors have scaled back their breakneck pace of startup investing as they wait for more clarity on the macro environment, Luke reports that there have never been more firms and more money dedicated to blockchain venture investing. Portal Ventures closes on $35 million debut fund to feed the beast.

RealOpen’s latest product, RealScore, is a crypto credit scoring system for buyers and sellers of luxury real estate, Anita reports. Headed up by ‘Selling Sunset’ star Christine Quinn, the brokerage primarily serves high-net-worth clients who want to purchase property using cryptocurrency.

More more more more more more more:

  • Yeah, but what do you really do: Paul reports that Truework, which helps lenders verify borrowers’ income and employment, raises $50 million.
  • Canoo is up a creek, paddling like mad: Pre-revenue EV startup Canoo shows it is burning cash like there’s no tomorrow, in a race to hit a $1 billion EV sales goal, Rebecca reports.
  • I didn’t like that one: Returning items from whence they came can be a royal PITA. ReturnLogic bags new money to make that less nightmarish, Christina writes.
  • First, India. Next, the world!: Accel led a $2.6 million investment into Produze on its mission to help agri-producers in India export globally, reports jagmeet.
  • Fifty dune buggies, coming up!: Abigail caused us to get real excited: It looks like the Meyers Manx dune buggy is coming back, this time as an EV.
  • Well that’ll cause a hangover: VC-backed low-alcohol aperitif startup Haus is up for sale after Series A falls through, writes Natasha M.

To optimize for growth, study your down-funnel metrics

Illustration showing man tweaking funnel with lever to optimize for growth; growth marketing down funnel

Image Credits: erhui1979 (opens in a new window) /Getty Images

Early-stage startups put a lot of time and energy into marketing and acquisition: These levers direct new customers into the top of your sales funnel to drive growth. And investors love growth.

But in August 2022, they like revenue even better, which is why Jonathan Martinez says companies should turn their attention to down-funnel metrics.

“Varying messaging by user cohort is your largest lever for moving users through the funnel,” writes Martinez in his latest TC+ post. “It’s imperative to slice users into their respective buckets, because it opens the opportunity for unique targeting and messaging.”

(TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Big Tech Inc.

India game firms are not accepting the “game over” vibe they are getting from the country’s prime minister if the ban on Battlegrounds Mobile India continues. Some firms are decrying the ban as an “unfortunate event” and said such “arbitrary decisions run counter to established principles and will deny opportunities to an entire generation of youth in India,” manish reports.

We have a gaggle of Google news today, starting with a fun story from Ivan about the search engine giant launching a website to help children practice reading. That is followed by talk of the company’s new campaign aimed at pressing Apple into adopting Rich Communication Service, or RCS, which is a protocol designed to improve messaging between Android and iOS users, Aisha writes.

Brian has been following the movement of the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 as it moved through both houses of Congress and to President Biden for his signature. He explains what this new bill, focused on US semiconductor protection, entails.

  • You can’t dance here: We were shocked to find out that TikTok’s parent, ByteDance, bought a hospital group in China, Rita writes. The company was already getting into healthcare, but going from acquiring a company that provides healthcare to owning hospitals is a big leap, or tour jeté, if you will.
  • But you can dance here: Spotify has a pair of new features, with Aisha writing about updates to the home screen that include personalized discovery feeds for both music and podcasts. Meanwhile, Ivan reports on the company’s Soundtrap app for musicians, unveiling live collaboration and autosave features.
  • Streaming while dancing: Looks like Walmart is getting into streaming services again, Lauren writes.
  • Don’t dance with that cookie: The European Union is going after some entities it says have largely ignored warnings to bring their cookie consent banners into compliance, Natasha L reports.
  • ICYMI: Here are some of yesterday’s big stories that spilled over into today: Kyle and Natasha M write about Groupon cutting over 500 staff and sarah‘s report on Snapchat’s new “Family Center” feature.

Categories
Sports

Toby Rudolf opens up on sexuality, pride comments, full Jake Duke interview, LGBTQI community, Cronulla Sharks

Toby Rudolf opens up on sexuality, pride comments, full Jake Duke interview, LGBTQI community, Cronulla Sharks

Sharks prop Toby Rudolf has opened up on why he spoke out and revealed details of his own sexuality amid the pride jersey controversy that engulfed the NRL.

In a wide-ranging interview with Fox League’s Jake Duke, the fan favorite discussed many parts of his career and life, including his support to the LGBTQI+ community earlier this month.

Rudolf welcomed the pride jersey initiative and revealed in an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald he had had same-sex experiences despite identifying as heterosexual, stating “sexuality is fluid”.

WATCH THE FULL TOBY RUDOLF ‘ALL IN’ WITH JAKE DUKE ON FOX LEAGUE AND KAYO

Stream every game of every round of the 2022 NRL Telstra Premiership Season Live & Ad-Break Free During Play on Kayo. New to Kayo? Start your free trial now >

While many players chose to remain silent on the issue, Rudolf felt the need to show his support.

“I think I wanted to just throw my support behind the community that has sort of been there my whole life,” Rudolf said.

“Also I’m not too fussed to speak about anything about me like I’m not scared of anything to let people know about the things that I do.

“I think the main thing though is the LGBTQI+ community were sort of dragged through the mud that week and they were just looking for a bit of, I wanted to give them a bit of a boost.”

Growing up with a single mother and around members of the LGBTQI+ community Rudolf revealed that his uncle Marty played an integral role throughout his upbringing.

“Probably the biggest one was my uncle Marty, mum’s best friend,” Rudolf told Fox League’s Jake Duke.

“He was the gay guy that was in the article a few days earlier.

“He used to take me on camping trips, we used to go caving together at Jenolan Caves, went to Vanuatu once.

“He was always there, was always sort of guiding me along the way.”

Broncos set to make changes after losses | 01:53

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REVEALED: NRL’s punishment for Ricky for ugly spray as Kent slams

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‘RATTLED THE CAGE’: The moment Eels star began mulling over Tigers backflip

Rudolf joked the big motivation for his sexualty comments was wanting to get on a Mardi Gras float.

“Well the NRL’s got one,” Duke informed Rudolf.

“Do they!” Rudolf replied.

“Yeah the NRL’s got one,” Duke said.

“Absolutely you can be on it, in the Budgy Smugglers?”

“Keen as,” Rudolf answered.

While Rudolf speaks about his experience and love for the LGBTIQ+ community so openly he said it remained a complicated situation.

“There’s always going to be a stigma around it I think, especially us playing such a hard man sport,” Rudolf said.

“There’s still just a bit of I guess stigma around you know being gay and all this and whatever but people just need to get over it I think.

Eels tired of ’embarrassment’ by Souths | 01:22

MORE NRL NEWS

IN TROUBLE: Stuart facing unprecedented ban with NRL boss ‘so angry’

TALKING POINTS: NRL facing moment of truth after ‘ugly’ Ricky spray

WHISPERS: Dragons eye hookers amid shock retirement; Haas’ lucrative switch

DRAMA: Knights trainer breaks silence, reveals word that made Klemmer saga ‘worse’

“I can understand where people come from with the religious background and whatnot but in the general world today, the modern world it’s just ELE, everybody love everybody.”

“… It (the feedback from the comments) was really positive. No matter what you say you’re always going to have a couple of negative comments but 99% of people just sort of applauded me and my bravery,” Rudolf said.

“I didn’t really think it was that brave I just thought it was me just talking about my stuff, it didn’t phase me too much.

“I went out to Northies that night after the game, after we won that golden point game and everyone there was just being really nice as well, being really supportive, saying they loved what I said and yeah overall was just overwhelmingly positive.

“I was really nicely surprised.”

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Categories
Australia

Aunty Kathleen grew up having to ‘yarn in secret’. Now she’s helping revive her de ella Indigenous language

Aunty Kathleen grew up having to 'yarn in secret'. Now she's helping revive her de ella Indigenous language

Indigenous people from America and Australia have gathered in the Red Center with the collective goal of saving their languages ​​from extinction.

Native American language experts are sharing their secrets of success in a four-day conference attended by more than 100 people from communities across Australia.

From north-western California, Julian Lang firsthand witnessed the revival of his own native tongue—the Karuk language.

“One person teaches another person and that person becomes a seed for so many more,” Mr Lang explained.

“We wanted to create five new speakers in five years, and three years later we have five new speakers.”

No books needed to revive languages

Twelve Native American revivalists will be sharing the “master-apprentice program” their ancestors developed more than three decades ago.

The program does away with books, pen and paper, and doesn’t rely on a curriculum.

Instead, they speak about everyday things, slowly acquiring words and context.

Indigenous Australians and Native Americans
Indigenous Australians and Native Americans have gathered at the Red Center to learn from each other about how to revive their languages.(ABC News: Xavier Martin)

Julian Lang is one of the founders of the program and said it takes dedication and time — he estimates about three years and 900 hours.

Once an apprentice, now he is teaching Tori McConnell to reconnect more fully with her Karuk culture.

“They used to pick up young native kids and take them to school and strip them of their culture and their language and their identity,” the 22-year-old explained.

“We are reconnecting with who we are in those pieces that the schools and the churches kind of stripped away.”

“We were told never to speak our language again”

This story of language extinction is universal.

Australian government policies actively sought to extinguish Indigenous languages ​​up until the 1970s — like Pertame, also known as Southern Arrernte, originally spoken around the Finke River south of Alice Springs.

Pertame woman, Aunty Kathleen Bradshaw-Swan, recalled how they would yarn in secret when they were children.

Pertame woman Aunty Kathleen Bradshaw-Swan
Pertame woman Aunty Kathleen Bradshaw-Swan was told at school to never speak her language.(ABC News: Stephanie Boltje)

“At school, we were told not to speak that lingo and we were told never to speak our language again,” Aunty Kathleen said.

“My sister Christobel was saying, sometimes she got hit by the headmaster for speaking the language.”

They are two of about 20 people who fluently speak Pertame.

The latest census found 167 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages ​​are still spoken in homes across Australia.

But as many as 110 languages ​​are severely or critically endangered.

“I am sad about our language being taken away in the past but with these people coming there are new beginnings for us,” Aunty Kathleen Bradshaw-Swan told The Drum.

The immersion technique

The UN has declared this next 10 years as the International Decade of Indigenous Languages.

In 2019 Aunty Kathleen and her granddaughter traveled to New York to hear about techniques that could fast-track the learning process, and they liked what they heard about the Master-Apprentice Program.

This one-on-one, or breath-to-breath, immersion technique is being shared at community-led The Pertame School in Alice Springs.

Samantha Penangka Armstrong is helping to run the conference with The Batchelor Institute and is also one of the apprentices.

“It’s reverting back to our old ways where we just only spoke language with our elders,” she said.

Samantha Penangka Armstrong
Samantha Penangka Armstrong is learning Pertame using the Master-Apprentice method developed by Native American language revivalists.(ABC News: Stephanie Boltje)

“It could be asking about a certain plant, what it’s used for, when it’s in season, if animals eat it or if humans eat it, getting the kids up for school — it’s learning Pertame [by speaking] Allow me.”

Through this conference, it’s hoped the next generation across Australia will benefit from the Native American experience.

“It’s really important for them to learn and get their language back,” Samanatha Penangka Armstrong told The Drum.

“It is not only just for their identity, but really ties into connection to country.”

“You can’t go onto country unless you actually speak to country in your own language.”

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Categories
US

Manhunt underway for killer of Monterey Park police officer; victim IDd

Manhunt underway for killer of Monterey Park police officer; victim IDd

A 26-year-old off-duty Monterey Park police officer shot and killed in Downey Monday afternoon has been identified.

Gardiel Solorio was hired as a police recruit earlier this year and had just started field training in late July.

Monterey Park Police Department Chief Kelly Gordon described the Bell Gardens native as being hardworking, dedicated and family oriented. He is survived by his parents, brothers, sisters and fiancé.

Solorio had a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from Cal State LA, he strived to be a good role model for his nephews and wanted to make an impact on the community, Gordon said.

“Right now our main focus is making sure that the person who did this is brought to justice and the investigation is allowed to take place the way it needs to take place,” Gordon said during a news conference Tuesday afternoon.

Downey police responded to an LA Fitness in the 12000 block of Lakewood Boulevard around 3:30 pm to find a man down in the parking lot with gunshot wounds.

Solorio was pronounced dead at the scene.

Investigators are still trying to determine if there was a confrontation prior to the shooting, or an exchange of gunfire.

Overnight, a number of law enforcement agencies came together to honor the fallen officer during a procession to the Los Angeles County coroner’s office in Boyle Heights.

The Downey Police Department is leading the investigation but has not released any suspect information or possible motive for the shooting.

Police released no new details about the shooting during the news conference.

The shooting has community members concerned.

“It just makes my stomach hurt … My prayers are to the family,” LA Fitness member Christina Baca said.

Detectives are asking witnesses to come forward and call the Downey Police Department with any information.

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Categories
Technology

New Google site begs Apple for mercy in messaging war

New Google site begs Apple for mercy in messaging war

Just a few of the many Google messaging logos. Can you name them all?
Enlarge / Just a few of the many Google messaging logos. Can you name them all?

Rum Amadeo

Google has been unable to field a stable, competitive messaging platform for years and has thoroughly lost the messaging war to products with a long-term strategy. At least some divisions inside the company are waking up to how damaging this is to Google as a company, and now Google’s latest strategy is to… beg its competition for mercy? Google—which has launched 13 different messaging apps since iMessage launched in 2011—now says, “It’s time for Apple to fix texting.”

Google launched a new website called “Get the Message”—a public pressure campaign with a call to “tweet at @Apple to #GetTheMessage and fix texting.” Google hopes public pressure will get Apple to adopt RCS, a minor upgrade to the SMS standard that Apple uses for non-iMessage users. Google has been pushing this strategy since the beginning of the year, but coming from the company with the world’s most dysfunctional messaging strategy, it just comes across as a company tired of reaping what it has been sowing.

Worldwide, iMessage isn’t that popular (people tend to like Whatsapp), but in the US, iMessage is enough of a cultural phenomenon to have Billboard Top 100 songs written about how much it sucks to have a green (SMS) iMessage bubble. One of Apple’s biggest competitors—especially for online services—is Google, and Google’s inability to compete with iMessage has contributed a great deal to the current situation. Google apparently feels iMessage’s dominance is damaging to its brand, so now it’s asking Apple, nicely, to please stop beating it so badly.

Google’s site says, “It’s not about the color of the bubbles. It’s the blurry videos, broken group chats, missing read receipts and typing indicators, no texting over Wi-Fi, and more. These problems exist because Apple refuses to adopt modern texting standards when people with iPhones and Android phones text each other.”

A 14-year-old standard is “modern,” right?

Some of Google’s claims on this website don’t make much sense. Google says, “Apple turns texts between iPhones and Android phones into SMS and MMS, out-of-date technologies from the 90s and 00s. But Apple can adopt RCS—the modern industry standard—for these threads instead.” RCS isn’t a modern standard either—it’s since 2008—and, despite a few middling updates since then, hasn’t kept up with the times.

RCS has hung around so long and is still so poorly implemented because it was created by the carriers (through the GSMA) as a carrier-centric messaging standard. Carriers did this in the heyday of pay-per-message SMS, when carrier messaging was a real revenue stream. Now that carrier messaging is commoditized though, the carriers in control of RCS don’t have an incentive to care about RCS. RCS is a zombie spec.

In Google’s defense, SMS is from 1986, so RCS is more modern than that. This is probably more of a sign that you should never work with the GSMA if you don’t have to, though. If Google and Apple ever teamed up to make a duopoly messaging, they would not need the carriers or their ancient messaging standard.

Google’s proprietary fork of RCS

Being from 2008 means RCS lacks much of what you would want from a modern messaging standard. First of all, as a standard, RCS is carrier messaging, so messages are delivered to a single carrier phone number, rather than multiple devices via the Internet, like how you would expect a modern service to operate. As a standard, there’s no encryption. Google tried to glom features onto the aging RCS spec, but if you consider those part of the RCS sales pitch, which Google does, now it’s more like you selling “Google’s proprietary fork of RCS.” Google would really like it if Apple built its proprietary RCS fork into iMessage.

Google’s version of RCS—the one promoted on the website with Google-exclusive features like optional encryption—is definitely proprietary, by the way. If this is supposed to be a standard, there’s no way for a third-party to use Google’s RCS APIs right now. Some messaging apps, like Beeper, have asked Google about integrating RCS and we were told there’s no public RCS API and no plans to build one. Google has an RCS API already, but only Samsung is allowed to use it because Samsung signed some kind of partnership deal.

If you want to implement RCS, you’ll need to run the messages through some kind of service, and who provides that server? It will probably be Google. Google bought Jibe, the leading RCS server provider, in 2015. Today it has a whole sales pitch about how Google Jibe can “help carriers quickly scale RCS services, iterate in short cycles, and benefit from improvements immediately.” So the pitch for Apple to adopt RCS isn’t just this public-good nonsense about making texts with Android users better; it’s also about running Apple’s messages through Google servers. Google profits in both server fees and data acquisition.

Categories
Sports

Lauren Jackson picked for Opals squad ahead of FIBA ​​Women’s Basketball World Cup

Basketball start Lauren Jackson

Lauren Jackson’s stunning return back to international basketball has continued after officially being picked in the Opals squad for the FIBA ​​world cup, which starts in Sydney on September 22.

Jackson, 41, was announced as part of a 12-strong squad, marking the veteran’s fifth world cup appearance, the last of which was in 2010.

“There were a lot of emotions when [coach] sandy [Brondello] rang me,” Jackson said.

“I had a bit of a cry to be honest.

“I have been working my body hard, and I didn’t honestly know if it was going to hold up to my intense training regimen, but it has and I’m feeling good.

“The whole team have been so welcoming and made me feel at home. The age difference disappears as soon as I step onto the court.

“I believe in this team and what we can achieve. If I can play a part in getting us onto the podium, then the hard work is all worthwhile.”

Jackson announced her competitive basketball comeback in February this year after joining the Albury Wodonga Bandits, and was then picked up in the extended Opals squad in June.

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In December 2021, Jackson told ABC Sport she had been using medicinal cannabis to overcome a battle with prescription painkillers after years of injury.

“I’ve been open about my battle with prescription medication during my career, and when I retired I went off everything because I wanted to raise my kids and just be the very best version of myself,” she said.

“[Medicinal cannabis] helped me a lot and has gotten me to the point where I’m able to train again and live a very active lifestyle with my two little boys.”

Brondello said Jackson had put in the work to be included in the squad.

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Categories
Australia

Melbourne man’s identity still unknown five weeks after being hit by train at Brunswick

Melbourne man's identity still unknown five weeks after being hit by train at Brunswick

Police are trying to identify a mystery man who has been in hospital for nearly five weeks and has only been able to utter a few words since being hit by a train in Melbourne’s inner-north.

A computer-generated image of the unidentified man hit by train in Brunswick five weeks ago. Source: Victoria Police

A computer-generated image of the unidentified man hit by train in Brunswick five weeks ago. Source: Victoria PoliceCredit:Victoria Police

A train struck the man between Royal Park and Jewell railway stations on the Upfield line in Brunswick on Thursday, July 7, before paramedics took him to hospital with life-threatening injuries.

The man remains in a serious but stable condition in hospital, where he has been able to express the names “Roy” and “Ryan” “from Coburg”. However, police are uncertain whether he is referring to himself or someone he knows.

The man had no phone, wallet or cards to assist police in identifying him, and despite extensive police efforts have been unable to uncover any further information about the man.

Police have now released a computer-generated image of the man, who is about 175 centimeters tall, between 65 and 75 years old, and of medium build.

He has a prominent mole below his left eye and was wearing black runners with white soles, black socks and a black belt at the time of the incident.

Anyone who recognizes the man or has information is urged to contact Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000 or submit a confidential report online.

If you or anyone you know needs support call Lifeline 131 114, or Beyond Blue 1300 224 636.