Beyond VR?

If you're looking for more evidence that VR in its current incarnation has already failed, I think one need look no further than the fact that some of VR's proponents are already trying to rebrand it as something other than VR. Something more useful and less problematic, perhaps.

From Alphr:

We are at a frontier. Just ahead, almost within reach, are a series of technological developments that are finally growing out of their infancy and will change not just the way we think about technology, but the way we think about reality and existence itself.

These developments will form part of what is called extended reality, or XR. The term describes the entire spectrum of reality, from the virtual to the physical, from augmented reality to augmented virtuality, virtual reality and everything in between. But what it implies is a dramatic, potentially species-defining change in human experience.

To many people, this kind of talk will likely sound overly conceptual, but XR’s implications are highly tangible. Psychiatrists could treat a phobia using VR to simulate, with near-perfect precision, the physical and psychological environment required to induce the phobic response. At the Tribeca Film Festival, ‘Tree’ gave guests the opportunity to immerse themselves in a rainforest and take in the sights and smells of the Amazon while running their hands on the trunk of a centuries-old tree. These examples barely scratch the surface of what is possible. XR’s potential is nearly limitless and in 2018, it will arrive.

[...]

This arrival of XR represents the collapse of the virtuality/reality divide. Within the new XR framework, virtuality and reality are no longer opposites. Neither are digital and biological. XR implies a far more complex relationship between these things – one in which virtuality can make things real.

If you're thinking that this all sounds a lot like the case that VR's advocates and apologists were making for VR itself, not that long ago, then you're not alone. From the promises of "nearly limitless" and yet somehow still vague potential, with the same tired old examples that still "barely scratch the surface of what is possible," to the promise that it will all arrive next year, in exactly the same way that VR has been predicted to explode into mass adoption sometime in the next year ever since Oculus Rift was released in 2016, this is exactly the same tired, old, VR sales pitch that has utterly failed to captivate consumers for two years now, and counting.

What's new, though, is the deliberate attempt to shift the discussion away from the VR label, to a new term, "XR," which allegedly combines Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Microsoft Mixed Reality, and any other, similar technology, into a seamless spectrum that "represents the collapse of the virtuality/reality divide," with virtuality and reality ceasing to be opposites.

Of course, exactly why consumers are supposed to want this next year, when they didn't last year and don't this year, is not specified; neither is there any mention of a specific technological development or breakthrough which will make this happen (next year, remember), in precisely the way that all existing VR/AR/MR headsets have so far failed to achieve. There's still no mention of a specific use for "XR" which is quantitatively different from any existing experience, desirable for the average consumer, and which also requires "XR" technology in a way that simply isn't the case for existing VR technology.

That qualitative enhancements to existing experiences are simply not enough to shift large volumes of expensive VR headset is plainly evident in VR's still-lacklustre sales numbers, and in the VR content developers who are retooling VR offerings to work without the tech. Neither is there any reason to think that the "XR" technologies of literally tomorrow will be able to "simulate, with near-perfect precision," any sort of environment at all, when existing VR headsets can't, and when the PCs that drive them are not increasing significantly in processing power. Have I mentioned lately that Moore's Law isn't a thing anymore? And while VR hardware developers are making incremental improvements by iterating on the display technology, there are any number of other problems with VR that aren't directly related to the quality and feature sets of the displays.

Let's be clear: VR is not currently a thing. It wasn't a thing last year, it didn't become a thing this year, and absent divine intervention, it's not going to become a thing next year, either. AR might have more potential, as demonstrated by the likes of Pokemon Go, but it's still in a profoundly primitive state, and years away from enabling any "dramatic, potentially species-defining change in human experience." While machine learning and automation are definitely fuelling profound changes our society and economy (the Singularity, already in progress), there's no reason to think that it's going to have any specific application to VR/AR any time soon. And Microsoft's "MR" headsets are just VR headsets with different branding... which is exactly what is being attempted in Alphr's article.

"XR" is not on the verge of taking off, any more than VR is on the verge of taking off, and the folks at Alphr are whistling past the graveyard. I stand by my prediction: VR will continue to not be a thing, and 2018 will be the year when tech media outlets finally start to admit it.

Star Trek: Bridge Crew scraps its VR requirement

I think it's fair to say that Star Trek: Bridge Crew was one of the most-anticipated VR titles of the year. Hell, a game that puts you on the bridge of a Star Fleet cruiser, like, actually virtually there? Even my VR-hating heart could see the appeal of that one.

The problem, though, is that ST:BC is a multiplayer game, and thus was only really playable with other (VR-equipped) players... of which there are none, since VR isn't a thing yet. So it's not surprising that Ubisoft, in a belated and desperate bid to prevent their online multiplayer game from dying on the vine, in spite of its Star Trek IP, have decided to remove ST:BC's VR requirement.

As reported by WCCFTech:

Hey nerds, have you always dreamed of stepping aboard the bridge of a Starfleet cruiser, but don’t want to shell out for a VR headset to play Star Trek: Bridge Crew? Well, you’re in luck, as Ubisoft has released a new patch which removes the game’s VR requirements. Now everybody can blast a few Klingons with friends!

[...]

Star Trek: Bridge Crew isn’t abandoning VR by any means – in fact, the non-VR patch also adds support for Microsoft mixed-reality headsets. Regardless of how you may choose to play, Bridge crew lets everybody join games together.

Apart from its rather boosterish tone (rather unlike WCCFTech's normal "Where Consumers Come First" style, frankly), which is obviously just copypasted from a press release, the basic event here is pretty starkly obvious. Brave talk of Microsoft mixed reality (MMR?) headsets aside, VR development is such a money-sucking pit right now that even a developer the size of Ubisoft can't afford to release VR-exclusive games, and keep them exclusive to VR.

Also, the fact that ST:BC is playable without VR speaks quite eloquently to the fact that VR isn't enabling anything by way of new gameplay, here - it's just qualitative enhancement, not quantitative enablement, which is not enough to sell VR to the masses. It still a little early to call this one, but I'm feeling pretty confident about my VR prediction for the upcoming year.

LOL. Microsoft store denied! by Google.

Well played, Google. Well played.

As reported by The Verge:

In a surprise move, Google has published Chrome in the Windows Store this week, but not in the way you might be expecting.

Google has simply packaged an app for Windows 10 that opens itself to the Chrome download page. Downloading Chrome will then open up the link in your default Windows 10 browser. It’s a hilarious snub of the Windows Store, and makes it clear Google isn’t planning to bring its browser to Microsoft’s store any time soon.

There are many reasons Google won’t likely bring Chrome to the Windows Store, but the primary reason is probably related to Microsoft’s Windows 10 S restrictions. Windows Store apps that browse the web must use HTML and JavaScript engines provided by Windows 10, and Google’s Chrome browser uses its own Blink rendering engine. Google would have to create a special Chrome app specifically for Windows 10 S, much like it would have needed to do to support Windows Phone years ago. It’s extremely unlikely that Google is even considering the work involved in such a project.

It's good business, and good trolling, all in one tiny gesture. This "app" won't help anyone on Windows 10 S who wants to use Chrome, of course, but there are so few of them that it's not especially likely that Google gives a shit.

Or, as Mehedi Hassan at Thurrott.com puts it:

At the end of the day, the Google Chrome Installer is still very, very pointless — the only functionality of the so-called installer is to open the download link for Chrome on your default browser. It basically removes the need for you to open Internet Explorer (or Microsoft Edge) and manually go to the Chrome download page everytime you set up a new Windows 10 installation.

-5/5 stars.

That's not pointless at all; that's some solid value. If there's anything pointless in this picture, it would have to be the Windows Microsoft Store itself.

Oh, well. Maybe next year...

UPDATED DEC. 20th:

Aaaaaaaand it's gone. From The Verge:

Google published a Chrome app in the Windows Store earlier today, which just directed users to a download link to install the browser. Microsoft isn’t impressed with Google’s obvious snub of the Windows Store, and it’s taking action. “We have removed the Google Chrome Installer App from Microsoft Store, as it violates our Microsoft Store policies,” says a Microsoft spokesperson in a statement to The Verge.

Citing the need to ensure apps “provide unique and distinct value,” Microsoft says “we welcome Google to build a Microsoft Store browser app compliant with our Microsoft Store policies.” That’s an invitation that Google is unlikely to accept.

[...]

The Verge understands Google created this installer app to combat the fake Chrome apps that can be found in the Windows Store, a problem Microsoft has been trying to address for years. Google’s workaround has now been removed from the Windows Store, so Windows 10 users will have to continue using Microsoft Edge to access the download site for Chrome if they want to access Google’s browser.

Wow. You'd almost think that Microsoft lack a sense of humour about their horrible digital storefront.

Nintendo Switch scores 10 million sold

As any regular reader of this blog knows (yes, all two of you, ☺), I did not think that Nintendo would pull this off.

After a whole year of production and supply-chain problems, and with no clear or specific indications from Nintendo themselves that they'd actually solved those problems in time to capitalize on the busy holiday shopping season (their CEO recently responded to questions about this XMas' Switch supplies by talking up their plans for the 1st quarter of next year, for fuck's sake), and with them only sitting at 7 millions sold by the end of October, I really didn't think they'd sell another 3 million units by the end of December, a pace which was 3.42 times faster than the 875K per month that they'd averaged all year to that point.

And, guess what? They didn't do 3M more in sales by the end of December.

They did it by the end of November.

As reported by Erie News Now (who got the story from CNNMoney):

Nintendo just confirmed what we already knew: its hybrid gaming system is a hit.

The company said on Tuesday the Nintendo Switch -- one part mobile, one part home console -- has sold 10 million units since its March 2017 launch.

The announcement comes less than two months after Nintendo increased its fiscal-year projection, ending March 31, 2018, from 10 million to 14 million units sold. Nintendo expects operating profit for the year to hit $1.06 billion, up from its original projection of $572 million.[...] By contrast, the Wii U sold just over 13 million units since its 2012 launch, before it was discontinued earlier this year.

It would seem that there were plenty of Nintendo Switches available for sale on Black Friday, after all, and that basically all of them were indeed sold. Even if this recent number is slightly padded, and even if there aren't a lot of Switches left to sell for the rest of the month (something I wouldn't bet on, anymore, BTW), it's now entirely possible for Nintendo to exit 2017 on a solid pace to hit their end of March target, after all.

With their 2DS line, the NES Classic, and the SNES Classic also selling really well, there's just no doubt about it: Nintendo are having a hell of a year, and their big gamble on the Nintendo Switch really has paid off, in a way which should be sustainable long-term. The fact that they're now seeing some solid third-party exclusive releases for the Switch, like the recently-announced Bayonetta 3, cements the situation for them. No wonder Sony finally decided to take the Switch seriously, in the form of some serious price cuts to their PS4, PS4 Pro, and PSVR.

So, congratulations, Nintendo! You've pitched me a strike already, and we're not even close to the end of the year yet.

Prognostication Scorecard: 1-1-4

One right, one wrong, with 4 as yet To Be Determined.

Nintendo Switch Prediction: 

• The Switch may move another million or so units over the holidays, but it won't hit the 10 million mark by the end of December, and will fall well short of Nintendo's 15-million-by-March target. WRONG! (See above.)

PS4 & XBOX Predictions: 

• Sony will try harder, now that they have a PlayStation head who isn't retiring, although exactly what a Cloud-based PS4 will look like, or how Sony chose to react to the challenge from Nintendo, if at all, remain to be seen. RIGHT! Price cuts count as trying harder. Cloud-based PS4 offerings are still pretty fucking vague.
• PSN/Steam crossplay is a possibility here, especially in light of Valve's recently-announced trust-based CS:GO matchmaking system -- House was against crossplay, but Kodera might change course. TBD. We might not know this one until the end of 2018.
• Microsoft simply didn't get the XBO-X to market in time; it will sell well enough this holiday season, but not well enough for them to gain ground on Sony, and Nintendo's Switch will outsell their XBOX throughout the coming year. They'll still end 2018 as the #2 console, but not by much. TBD. XBOX seems to be selling well enough, but no numbers yet.

VR Prediction: 

• No developments for at least three months, if then. VR will continue to not be a thing. TBD. We might not know the outcome of this one until the end of March.

Windows 10 Prediction: 

• No big developments for at least three months here, either. TBD. NMS's recently revamped numbers look slightly better for Windows 10, but don't show a huge swing yet.

Thanks, but I’m still saying no to Windows 10

This article, by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols at Tech World, really tickled my fancy this morning:

I’ve been hearing a lot from friends recently about how Windows 10 is the best Windows ever and people would be stupid not to switch. These being friends, I don’t want to be rude, but — cough, ahem — I don’t buy it.

Is security your No. 1 concern? Well, Windows 10 is no more secure than Windows 7 — which is to say it is a profoundly insecure operating system. There have been a lot of serious Windows security patches in the last year, and Windows 10 had all the same problems as Windows 7.

[...]

I also wouldn’t care to be “upgraded” against my will, as happened to Windows 10 users who had toggled what they needed to toggle to tell Microsoft, “Please don’t move me from Windows 10 1703, Windows 10 Fall Update, to 1709, Fall Creators Update.” As my colleague Woody Leonhard points out, this happened via Windows Update with the November patches, when there were “so many issues with this month’s security patches that it’s hard to decide where to begin.”

By the way, I want it on record that I don’t want Windows 10’s rapid release cadence, with its short-lived support timelines. Two major upgrades — or service patches, as I still think of them — a year is one too many. I can’t make sure everything works with a significant update every six months. I don’t know anyone who can.

[...]

What it all adds up to is that, while Windows 10 is certainly a good operating system, it’s far from great. For the time being, I’m sticking with Windows 7 on my Windows machines, and I recommend you do too. I know what to expect from Windows 7, but with Windows 10, every new forced update is a roll of the dice.

Great stuff, and well worth a read, so go give the man some clicks. And if you haven't switch from Windows 7 to 10 yet, either... well, I also recommend that you don't. I haven't, and still don't plan to. Not unless Microsoft get a handle on their anti-consumer bullshit, anyway, which doesn't look like it's going to be happening anytime soon.

Skyrim VR is everything wrong with VR

According to Sidney Fussell at Gizmodo, anyway:

The best way to describe the sometimes thrilling and sometimes nauseating Skyrim VR experience is as an incredible chair. Just imagine yourself in a movie theater, reclining in an enormously luxe, obsidian-black leather seat. The design is contoured perfectly to align your neck and spine, while the arm rests make you feel weightless, as if you’re lying on a California King sized cloud. Then, the movie starts. The 50-foot screen is playing one foot from your face. Suddenly, arm and neck restraints burst from the chair and you sit there, your arms bound and your eyes brutalized in luxuriant agony.

Because however well realized the world in Skyrim VR is, it’s still just elaborate armchair tourism. Whether using the PS4 DualShock controller or Playstation Move controllers, I’m still sitting in that chair, just like I was in 2011 when I bought the PS3 version of the game. While walking through the towns or exploring a field, I feel more like a disembodied camera than an actual person occupying space. It feels like a missed opportunity. The same way a Google Daydream user experiences the Taj Mahal, the game gives players a novel way of exploring Skyrim without actually inhabiting it.

[...]

Skyrim VR is probably the best of the “the same thing but in VR” titles, but hopefully it signals the end of them. Because while there are many technical limitations to creating VR games (to say nothing of our limited ability to even stomach playing them) developers need to start thinking natively in VR now if VR is to stand on its own as more than a landing spot for cash-grab re-release in an industry in love with redundancy.

For the record, there are a lot of things wrong with VR beyond the fact that even the best VR games tend to be better without the VR, and I've blogged about them extensively. Still the fact that VR still doesn't enable any quantitatively new experiences, and only allows for qualitatively enhance experiences like Skyrim VR, might be one of its biggest problems, and developers do need to start thinking natively in VR if they're ever to figure out what VR technology is actually good for.

Which is why it's... awkward that there's no money to be made in VR development, and thus no budgets to speak of for the native in VR/exclusive to VR applications that Fussell is calling for. Which probably means that it not only won't happen, it can't happen... unless VR suddenly takes of in spite of a total lack of native VR content, of course, but that seems unlikely.

So... VR is still not a thing, and it will clearly take more than yet another half-hearted Skyrim port from Bethesda to change that.

Windows 7 continues to gain Steam.

Pun not only intended, but verily provoked by this post from Wayne Williams at Betanews:

While Windows 10 still lags behind Windows 7 in terms of market share, there’s one section of user that has embraced the new operating system since day one -- gamers. That’s no surprise of course, as they like to run the latest and greatest hardware and software.

Steam’s monthly usage survey, which shows the state of things from the gamers’ perspective, has consistently reported Windows 10 as the top operating system of choice, until last month when -- to the surprise of many -- Windows 7 took over.

[...]

According the latest figures, Windows 10 fell another 5.05 percentage points. It now accounts for 23.94 share (23.64 percent for the 64-bit build, and 0.29 percent for the 32-bit edition). Windows 7’s share grew by 6.21 percentage points. It now has 71.3 percent (69.89 percent for the 64-bit OS, and 1.41 for the 32-bit build).

[...]

As was the case last month, Simplified Chinese is now by far and away the most popular language used on Steam (64.35 percent, as opposed to 17.02 percent using English), and its share grew 8.23 percentage points in November, no doubt accounting for Windows 7’s latest growth spurt.

This is fascinating; especially in a month when NetMarketShare are showing a fairly strong performance by Windows 10. The likes of NMS and StatCounter are clearly weighting heavily in favour of NA; Steam, on the other hand, is finally showing a more globalist picture by including gamers from the country with the largest population on Earth, and producing exactly the opposite result in the process.

It's enough to make one wonder to what extent any of these OS market share statistics are actually measuring the state of the market. Are they all just sampling different slices of the market, weighting it according to preconceptions that aren't documented anywhere, and then presenting results as fact that are really little better than guesswork? Is it all just "lying with statistics?" And, if so, are there any viable alternatives?

I've spent a lot of time watching the OS market share numbers in the last couple of years, along with other tech media web sites and bloggers, as we try to assess how well (or poorly) Windows 10's performance is proceeding, and the prospect of it all being wasted effort, effectively tracking phantoms through fog, is... well, somewhat depressing, to be honest. It's important to know whether Microsoft's bad GWX behaviour is being rewarded, though, so we do need some way to gauge that performance. So, what's a blogger to do?

One can try to take all of the numbers with a grain of salt, of course, but that's hard to do in practice; the natural human tendency is to focus on the numbers that align with your expectations, while giving shorter shrift to the numbers that don't seem to "fit." It doesn't help much that the various statistic reports use slightly variant, "black box" methodologies, which means that they actually are measuring slightly different things, massaging their raw numbers in slightly different ways, and keeping us basically in the dark about how and why they do all of it.

I don't think that I can stop watching the OS market share numbers; after two years of watching the story unfold, I find that I now want to know how the story ends, even though the plot of this movie has enough holes in it to drive a bus through. So, I'll keep on keeping on... I just won't be enjoying it as much as I might have.

Which hardly makes me unique; it seems like fewer tech bloggers are bothering to make note of the latest market share numbers anymore, presumably because they're blogging for money and articles on this topic get fewer clicks, thus reinforcing their natural ennui with market forces. Still, as long as Wayne Williams keeps on keeping on, I guess I can, too.

I will also be learning Chinese in my spare time, though. Because it's looking more and more like that's a smart thing to do, just generally. (Seriously, only seventeen percent? English needs to step up its fucking game...)

I, for one, will welcome our new computer overlords...

Still don't think that the Singularity is underway? Well, check our the next thing in AI, as reported by Science Alert:

In May 2017, researchers at Google Brain announced the creation of AutoML, an artificial intelligence (AI) that's capable of generating its own AIs.
More recently, they decided to present AutoML with its biggest challenge to date, and the AI that can build AI created a 'child' that outperformed all of its human-made counterparts.

The Google researchers automated the design of machine learning models using an approach called reinforcement learning. AutoML acts as a controller neural network that develops a child AI network for a specific task.

For this particular child AI, which the researchers called NASNet, the task was recognising objects - people, cars, traffic lights, handbags, backpacks, etc. - in a video in real-time.

AutoML would evaluate NASNet's performance and use that information to improve its child AI, repeating the process thousands of times.

When tested on the ImageNet image classification and COCO object detection data sets, which the Google researchers call "two of the most respected large-scale academic data sets in computer vision," NASNet outperformed all other computer vision systems.

Being able to automate the task of programming teaching automation systems is obviously the next level here, and has the potential to greatly accelerate the process of developing and deploying machine learning systems that outperform anything currently in use. This has the potential to rapidly and significantly improve all of our current machine learning systems and applications, of course, including e.g. self-driving cars and other autonomous vehicles (or, Autos).

It also adds an extra layer of opacity to the process; Google is already heavily dependent on effectively black box algorithms, and struggling to explain decisions made in an emergent manner by systems that are already too complex to be easily understood by the humans who nominally designed them, and this new technology will result in systems that we barely understand designing systems, on their own, that humans won't understand at all... and eventually trusting them to manage all the nuts and bolts of our institutions. This raises some pretty obvious concerns, and Science Alert's article  doesn't overlook them:

Though the applications for NASNet and AutoML are plentiful, the creation of an AI that can build AI does raise some concerns. For instance, what's to prevent the parent from passing down unwanted biases to its child?

What if AutoML creates systems so fast that society can't keep up? It's not very difficult to see how NASNet could be employed in automated surveillance systems in the near future, perhaps sooner than regulations could be put in place to control such systems.

It's at this point that I'd like to say that I, for one, will welcome our new computer overlords. I now return you to the Singularity, already in progress.

NetMarketShare's new online tools are more powerful than I first suspected... and also confusing...

Of all the ways in which NMS's free stat reports have annoyed me over the years, the most annoying is the way they segregate results. You can compare OS market share across desktop devices, for example, or across mobile devices, but not both at the same time... so you can't compare, say, Windows to Android, to see their growth and trends over time relative to each other.

StatCounter does offer this sort of comparison, but only as an overall picture (i.e. all Windows versions, all Android versions, all iOS and MacOS versions, &c.), which make for simple graphs... but if you do want to drill down a bit, you can only drill into one OS at a time. You can't, for example, compare Windows 10 and Windows 7 to the most popular versions of iOS, MacOS, and/or Android, all at once.

Apparently neither NMS nor StatCounter thought that people would want to do this... or, perhaps they did know that people would want to do this, and simply decided to reserve the more powerful functionality for their paid subscription services. Which is entirely fair; after all, these are businesses and not charities, and they have to make money somehow. I get that. As a dedicated online freeloader, though, I still found it ever so slightly irritating.

But the game has changed, thanks to NetMarketShare's brand new online tools, which were "completely rearchitected [...] to provide more accurate and accessible data," actually do allow you to pull from multiple datasets at once, making possible exactly the kinds of extremely nerdy comparisons that I've been idly wishing I could do, without having to pay to do them.

The results are, to say the least, surprising:

The surprise? According to NMS, Android is still only 33.48% of the market, well behind Windows' 45.41%. This is surprising because, to quote Wikipedia:

According to a January 2015 Gartner report, "Android surpassed a billion shipments of devices in 2014, and will continue to grow at a double-digit pace in 2015, with a 26 percent increase year over year." This made it the first time that any general-purpose operating system has reached more than one billion end users within a year: by reaching close to 1.16 billion end users in 2014, Android shipped over four times more than iOS and OS X combined, and over three times more than Microsoft Windows. Gartner expected the whole mobile phone market to "reach two billion units in 2016", including Android.^[307] Describing the statistics, Farhad Manjoo wrote in The New York Times that "About one of every two computers sold today is running Android. [It] has become Earth’s dominant computing platform."^[18]

StatCounter disagrees with both assessments, clocking both Android and Windows at about 38% of the market, but with Windows' share of the combined OS market growing in recent months... which makes no sense, since desktop/laptop PC sales have been declining.




I know that NMS revamped their product to remove botnet traffic, but why would that affect Android's numbers? Are Android botnets a widespread thing that nobody knows about, or can detect, except NetMarketShare for some fucking reason? It makes even less sense than the effect on Linux' numbers. And how have Gartner, StatCounter, and NetMarketShare all ended up with such apparently divergent results? Seriously, WTF is going on?

I think I want to see some serious critique of NMS's new product/methodology. Their new online tools look very slick and very powerful, but if their data collection and analytical methology is badly flawed, then their online tools may be useless, no matter how slick or powerful they seem.

NMS make major changes, and finally explain themselves.

I'm quite late posting today's OS market share numbers, in part because I honestly wasn't expecting much to change from last month. Well, was I ever wrong on that, because NetMarketShare have changed just about everything... and, more importantly, they've finally explained why:

Welcome to the new NetMarketShare.com

---

We completely rearchitected the product to provide more accurate and accessible data. Here's what's new:

Elimination of botnet data

---

As bot traffic across the web has risen dramatically, it has been a challenge to detect and remove it from our dataset. This is a critical issue since bots can cause significant skewing of data. In particular, we have seen situations where traffic from certain large countries is almost completely bot traffic. In other countries, ad fraudsters generate traffic that spoofs certain technologies in order to generate high-value clicks. Or, they heavily favor a particular browser or platform.

The primary focus of this release was to build detection methods to eliminate this traffic. We rewrote the entire collection and aggregation infrastucture to address this issue.

Please note: This dataset is separate from and replaces the legacy data. Subscribers that need legacy data please contact us for access.

The "bot traffic" explanation is... plausible, actually. Bots are a huge online problem, and for a business whose business is measuring online traffic, it makes sense that large-volume bot activity would seriously mess with their data, and their analyses.

For the tracking of OS usage numbers, of course, this basically renders every previously posted result (i.e. the "legacy data") completely irrelevant. Therefore, I will let it go, and start over fresh, much as NMS have themselves. It's important to keep some sense of the history here, through, so... let's see what NMS have on tap for history.

Annoyingly, the new table which accompanies this graph doesn't break out each month's numbers in a nice grid, but rather shows only the average for the period. Each month's numbers are only available as mouse-over tooltips, which is worse for at-a-glance comparisons but probably better for NMS's business model (which is, after all, to sell the numbers to subscribers). Also, the new NMS data doesn't go all the way back to Windows 10's launch, so we can only look at the range from May of 2016 through the end of November, 2017.

Even so, the botnet-less trend lines look rather different than the botnet-filled versions. Mousing over the data points on that graph, we can learn that Windows 7 currently holds 43.12% of the market, basically unchanged from last month's 43.05%, while Windows 10 holds 31.95% of the market, an uptick from last month's 28.86%. Interestingly, Windows 10's growth has come mostly at the expense of Windows XP, which declined from 7.64% to 5.73%.

Generic "Linux" only shows up as 1.65% of the market, down slightly from last month's 1.85%, although that doesn't include Ubuntu (which is also Linux) or Chrome OS (which is also Linux), etc. That kind of fragmentation is part of the problem that Linux has in attracting new users, though, so that seems fair enough, and at least NMS is now listing Chrome OS separately as a desktop OS, which will allow us to track its progress over time - potentially very interesting. Combining all the various versions of each OS together gives a better overall picture of how Linux-based OSes compare to Windows:

Exactly why botnets would be inflating Linux' OS market share numbers, rather than Windows', is something that I'd like to see explained in more detail at some point. Linux is famously more secure than Windows, generally, so it would make far more sense for botnet traffic to be inflating Windows' market share results, instead. I'll be keeping an eye out for a better explanation there.

In the meantime, though, we have a new, and hopefully more reliable, baseline for watching the progress of the OS market from this point on. It'll be interesting to see what happens. I'm still not expecting to see much movement for the next few months, for the reasons previously stated, but I wasn't expecting NMS to revamp their entire business in a month, either, so who the fuck knows? If nothing else, it should be interesting to see what happens.

375 million jobs may be automated by 2030

This according to a new report by CNN Tech:

The McKinsey Global Institute cautions that as many as 375 million workers will need to switch occupational categories by 2030 due to automation.

The work most at risk of automation includes physical jobs in predictable environments, such as operating machinery or preparing fast food. Data collection and processing is also in the crosshairs, with implications for mortgage origination, paralegals, accounts and back-office processing.

To remain viable, workers must embrace retraining in different fields. But governments and companies will need to help smooth what could be a rocky transition.

"The model where people go to school for the first 20 years of life and work for the next 40 or 50 years is broken," Susan Lund, a partner for the McKinsey Global Institute and co-author of the report, told CNN Tech. "We're going to have to think about learning and training throughout the course of your career."

The authors believe we may see a massive transition on a scale not seen since the early 1900s, when workers shifted from farms to factories. The report also cited the potential need for an effort on the same scale as the Marshall Plan, when the United States spent billions to rebuild Western Europe after World War II. 

This is noteworthy mainly because outfits like CNN had been, until now, entirely focused on giving airtime and mindshare to economists whose entire message was that new technologies would comfortably replace any and all jobs lost to other new technologies. This report is the first I've seen from the CNNs of the world that actually looked at the scale of the problem, and the cost of retraining the numbers of workers who will be displaced by existing automation technologies.

And that is the problem here: we're not talking about the impact of possible future technologies.We're talking about automation technologies that exist now, that are being deployed now, that are displacing workers already, and that are going to displace hundreds of millions of workers, worldwide, in the next decade. These people will not merely be unemployed; they'll be unemployable, through no fault of their own, trained and experienced in jobs that simply won't exist anymore. This is exactly the scenario that "alarmists" have been trying to warn policymakers about, and that has some lawmakers running Universal Basic Income pilot programs.

The good news? Universal Basic Income is looking like it has might be an effective way of tackling the issue. As reported by The Independent:

Support for a basic income has grown in recent years, fuelled in part by fears about the impact that new technology will have on jobs. As machines and robots are able to complete an increasing number of tasks, attention has turned to how people will live when there are not enough jobs to go round.

Ontario’s Premier, Kathleen Wynne, said this was a major factor in the decision to trial a basic income in the province.

She said: "I see it on a daily basis. I go into a factory and the floor plant manager can tell me where there were 20 people and there is one machine. We need to understand what it might look like if there is, in fact, the labour disruption that some economists are predicting."

Ontario officials have found that many people are reluctant to sign up to the scheme, fearing there is a catch or that they will be left without money once the pilot finishes.
Many of those who are receiving payments, however, say their lives have already been changed for the better.

[...]

Finland is also trialling a basic income, as is the state of Hawaii, Oakland in California and the Dutch city of Utrecht.

And for those skeptics in the United States, there's this report from Futurism:

In recent months, everyone from Elon Musk to Sir Richard Branson has come out in favor of universal basic income (UBI), a system in which every person receives a regular payment simply for being alive. Now, a study carried out by the Roosevelt Institute has concluded that implementing a UBI in the U.S. could have a positive effect on the nation’s economy.

The study looked at three separate proposals: a “basic income” of $1,000 per month given to every adult, a “base income” of $500 per month given to every adult, and a “child allowance” of $250 per month for every child. The researchers concluded that the larger the sum, the more significant the positive economic impact.

They projected that the $1,000 basic income would grow the economy by 12.56 percent over the course of eight years, after which point its effect would diminish. That would translate to an increase in the country’s gross domestic product of $2.48 trillion.

So the question becomes, as developing machine intelligence technology displaces hundreds of millions of human workers, will the world's governments have the political will to actually support them by implementing a "dole" system that looks like the best possible solution? In counties like the United States, where "socialism" is currently a worse political insult than "fascist," and where income disparity is about to get a lot worse as Republicans push through a huge tax break for their wealthy donors at the expense of lower-income Americans and more than a trillion dollars of additional debt, will Universal Basic Income have any chance of becoming a thing in time to matter? And what happens to the global economy if the can't?

And with that, I return you to the Singularity, already in progress.

Microsoft claims 600 million active Windows 10 devices

Wanna bet that the new OS market share numbers show almost no movement, when they come out on Friday? Because I'm pretty certain that's our immediate future holds, here.

From GeekWire:

Microsoft’s Windows 10 has reached a new milestone: 600 million active monthly devices.

CEO Satya Nadella referenced the new number for the first time moments ago at the company’s annual shareholders meeting, where he is giving analysts and investors an update on Microsoft’s progress and strategy.

The number is up from the 500 million devices touted by Microsoft earlier this year, but it’s still well short of the company’s original goal of 1 billion Windows 10 devices within two to three years of its 2015 release. The company acknowledged previously that it wouldn’t be able to reach that original goal.

Quick rule of thumb: anything that a CEO says to his company's shareholders is pretty much guaranteed to be mostly bullshit. Sorry, accentuating the positive while downplaying the negatives, if not avoiding those subjects entirely. Satya Nadella is lying with statistics, here.

This 600 million number is no closer to being relevant to anything than the 500 million number that Nadella's been quoting until five minutes ago. It includes unsold devices; it includes Point of Sale terminals; it includes devices whose users rolled back to Windows 7 and 8; it includes a lot of things that nobody cares about, but that Nadella et al. will try to use in order to build hype for Windows 10, but nothing that an outside observer can actually use to assess the state of Windows 10 play for themselves.

Don't believe the hype. Wait for the data which supports it.

4K already obsolete as HDMI 2.1 brings 10K support.

I piss on your 4K. Talk to me when you have a 10K display to sell. Which is also won't need and won't buy, naturally, but whatevs.

From engadget:

Back in January, the HDMI Forum unveiled its new specifications for the HDMI connector, called HDMI 2.1. Now, that HDMI specification is available to all vendors who have already adopted HDMI 2.0. It's backwards compatible with all previous HDMI specifications.

The focus of HDMI 2.1 is on higher video bandwidth; it supports 48 Gbps with a new backwards-compatible ultra high speed HDMI cable. It also supports faster refresh rates for high video resolution -- 60 Hz for 8K and 120 Hz for 4K. The standard also supports Dynamic HDR and resolutions up to 10K for commercial and specialty use.

This new version of the HDMI specification also introduces an enhanced refresh rate that gamers will appreciate. VRR, or Variable Refresh Rate, reduces, or in some cases eliminates, lag for smoother gameplay, while Quick Frame Transport (QFT) reduces latency. Quick Media Switching, or QMS, reduces the amount of blank-screen wait time while switching media. HDMI 2.1 also includes Auto Low Latency Mode (ALLM), which automatically sets the ideal latency for the smoothest viewing experience.

You know how it's already something of a pain in the butt to figure out whether the 4K display you're looking at actually support all the bells and whistles that make 4K "worthwhile," like HDR? Well, actually, if you're reading this then you probably don't, but the 4K label is something of a mess right now, with multiple competing 4K flavours, most of which aren't worth wasting time or money on. Well, you can add VRR, QFT, QMS, and ALLM to your shopping list of "must have" UHD-HDR-4K features.

Confused yet? Don't worry, engadget have this handy chart to help you figure it all out:

See? Simple as cake.

Sarcasm aside, this really serves to reinforce why I don't think 4K is going to become a thing. Not only is there no 4K broadcast standard yet, and no legislative push happening (a la HDTV) to mandate one, but 4K itself has already evolved itself right into obsolescence before most consumers even knew it existed. Seriously, will you still shell out $1400 for a 4K monitor, knowing that any 4K display that you look at today will be missing all the features that you'll absolutely want five minutes from now? Unless you're a hardcore early-adopter, the answer is probably, "No."

And all that assumes that you were interested in 4K in the first place, which most consumers aren't, but... well, I've covered that already, haven't I?

No, I stand by my earlier assessment: 4K is not, and will not become, a thing. Ever. Save your money.

Probably not a good sign

If you're Microsoft, and still hoping that the world will flock to your flagship OS (which is totes going to happen any day now, folks, just keep waiting for it), then might not be a good sign for fairly pro-Windows sites like Betanews are advocating for Linux as an alternative, in stories with headlines like this one:

Yeah.... ouch.

Quoting from the article itself:

Linux Mint is a great operating system. For those that want an alternative to Windows 10, it is a wonderful choice for two specific reasons. For one, it has a superior user interface. Whether you opt for the Cinnamon desktop environment or instead choose Mate, you will have a more intuitive experience than the insanity that is Windows 10. Secondly and more importantly, however, you don't have to worry about a billion dollar company tracking all of your activity. While telemetry sometimes has its benefits, Microsoft seems to have forgotten that their operating system is a guest on your computer. Again, it is your computer -- not the Windows-maker's.

[...]

Are you ready to take back your computer and ditch Windows 10? Use the below links to download the ISO. While both Cinnamon and Mate are solid environments, the latter is the prettier of the two. I would only recommend Mate if your computer is very under-powered. With that said, if you are already running Windows 10, your computer should handle Cinnamon perfectly fine.

[...]

• Linux Mint Cinnamon (64-bit Download) (Release notes)
• Linux Mint Mate (64-bit Download) (Release notes)

Man, the telemetry business really isn't going away, is it? And it's really not helping Microsoft at all; every time I see telemetry mentioned, it's negatively. You'd almost think that Microsoft could do themselves a huge favour by making it possible to easily opt out of data collection, or something.

But I digress. Back to Linux Mint itself, the new "Sylvia" release of which comes with some solid-sounding features, like native Flatpak support (which simplifies software installation, allowing you to "install bleeding-edge applications even if their dependencies are not compatible with Linux Mint," according to Clement Lefebvre of Linux Mint) and TimeShift (which simplifies system backups), and is available now.

Did I mention that it's free? Yeah, it's free.

Windows 7 is good until 2020, so there's no rush to switch operating systems, but if you were wondering if there were other viable options available besides Windows 10, the answer would seem to be a resounding yes... and sites like Betanews are giving them more attention and good press, something which may be only just beginning. NetMarketShare may have massaged their OS market share reports until the Linux Shift was invisible again, but that doesn't mean that a shift isn't happening, or that Windows 10's ascendancy is assured. I suspect that we're in for a couple of years of interesting developments on this front... stay tuned.

No, VR headsets did not top 1 million units in sales last quarter.

One very convenient thing about the Nintendo Switch's year so far has been the way its total units sold have matched its total units shipped. Because Nintendo have had no end of trouble ramping up production to meet demand, the Switch has been selling out everywhere all year long, which means that the numbers of units shipped is more or less equal to the number of units sold; you don't need to parse reported numbers for the Switch to figure out whether you're talking about sales, or just about production.

The same is not true of other consumer products, which normally ship more units than they sell in a quarter (the current quarter, i.e. October through December, is when these numbers normally reverse themselves, with far more units selling than shipping). This confusion, between shipments and sales, may be why we're seeing these two stories "breaking" at exactly the same time:

VG247: "VR headsets topped 1 million sales last quarter for the first time"

VentureBeat: "VR headsets pass 1 million shipments for the first time in a single quarter"

1 Million VR headsets shipped does not equal 1 million headsets sold. Sorry, VG247, but you're wrong, and VentureBeat is right:

While the debate about whether virtual reality is just some oversold hype rages on, the nascent industry can at least boast of having crossed an important milestone.

According to a report from Canalys today, one million virtual reality headsets shipped in the three months ending September 30. This was the first time the gadgets had topped this mark in a single quarter.

[...]

During the third quarter, Sony was the market share leader, with shipments of 490,000 PlayStation VR (PS VR) sets. Facebook’s Oculus was number two with 210,000 Rift headsets shipped. HTC came in third, with 160,000 Vive VR headsets. Those three companies are dominating, accounting for 86 percent of the VR headset market share in Q3.

Interestingly, none of the Microsoft/Windows 10 "Mixed Reality" headset manufacturers are on this list; the increase in units shipped is all from the existing three players in the space, i.e. Sony, HTC, and Oculus. Canalys credits the past summer's Oculus Rift fire sale (coupled with HTC's deep discounts) with making this possible, but remember that these are shipments of VR headsets, not sales. The fact that companies are shipping more headsets would be a solid indicator of those manufacturers' optimism about the prospect for selling them, of course, but the sales haven't happened yet, and it's far from certain that they will, given that there have been no other indicators so far of increased consumer interest in VR.

It also has to be said that 1 million units shipped in a quarter is pretty pathetic performance for a VR industry that was projected to be selling that many units each month by now. We'll see if the sales materialize, but I recommend waiting for those numbers to actually happen before popping the cork on the champagne bottles. Shipping inventory which will gather dust on shelves before needing to be cleared out at deep discounts, which is what Oculus just did with the Rift, is probably not the VR success story that the industry is hoping for.

Windows 10 runs terribly on ARM

I hope Microsoft wasn't banking too heavily on Windows 10 on ARM competing with cheaper Chromebooks, because it's probably not in the cards. The performance simply isn't there, according to this article on SlashGear:

When it announced its Windows 10 on ARM, specifically on Snapdragon 835, thrust late last year, Microsoft emphasized power efficiency as the primary selling point. What it might not have disclosed is that those savings in battery life might come at the cost of a significant hit in performance. [...] Sadly, this Windows 10 on ARM sighting might be the worst we’ve seen so far.

This isn’t a case of Windows 10 on ARM vs Windows 10 on x86. It is, after, arguable that a quad-core Intel Core i7, even a fanless one, could outperform an octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 under certain condition. No, this is a case of Windows 10 on ARM versus, say, Android on ARM, running on the exact same chipset and closely similar hardware.

An Android device running on a Snapdragon 835 averages 2,200 on single-core and 7,700 on multi-core tests on Geekbench. Last week’s mysterious “Qualcomm CLS” device 1,202 and 4,263 on those same scores. This ASUSTeK TP370QL, in comparison, yields an embarrassing 889 in single-core performance and 3,174 in multi-core at its highest.

[...]

At this point, it isn’t clear where Microsoft wants to take Windows 10 on ARM anyway. It has all but lost interest in the mobile market, as far as pushing Windows 10 itself goes, and might be eyeing a very niche market for Windows 10 on Snapdragon-powered tablets, possibly for industry use. But with benchmark scores like that, it might be dead on arrival.

Ouch.

Intel wasn't at all happy about Windows 10 on ARM, which they saw as infringement of their x86 patents, but if these benchmarks are anything to go by, Intel needn't worry too much, since nobody will be buying ARM-based Windows 10 machines anytime soon. Whether they start buying x86-based Windows 10 machines again is still anyone's guess (although I still guess that they won't, because Moore's Law isn't a thing anymore).

Belgium rules loot boxes are gambling, and will seek to make them illegal. Hawaii may follow suit.

This story is, obviously, blowing up right now, but it looks like PC Gamer gets first post:

Last week, Belgium's Gaming Commission announced that it had launched an investigation into whether the loot boxes available for purchase in games like Overwatch and Star Wars Battlefront 2 constitute a form of gambling. Today, VTM News reported that the ruling is in, and the answer is yes.

The Google translation is a little sloppy, as usual, but the message is clear enough. "The mixing of money and addiction is gambling," the Gaming Commission declared. Belgium's Minister of Justice Koen Geens also weighed in, saying, "Mixing gambling and gaming, especially at a young age, is dangerous for the mental health of the child."

Geens, according to the report, wants to ban in-game purchases outright (correction: if you don't know exactly what you're purchasing), and not just in Belgium: He said the process will take time, "because we have to go to Europe. We will certainly try to ban it.

GamingBolt has another great post on this development:

Folks, we won. After Belgium confirmed last week that it would be investigating charges of unregulated gambling in popular video games such as Overwatch, thanks to the Star Wars Battlefront 2 controversy, they have come out with their decision- loot boxes are indeed gambling, they say, and they will move to have them banned in the European Union.

This is fantastic news for multiple reasons- if loot boxes are illegal in Europe, then publishers will have two options- either develop two versions of their games (one with loot boxes, one without), or forego a release in Europe (therefore, half the market for most western publishers) entirely. Therefore, unless publishers literally want to spend the money on balancing and QAing two progression paths for their games, they will have no chance but to remove loot boxes from their titles- if this regulation passes.

That, "folks, we won," at the start of GamingBolt's post may turn out to be the most important part of this story. This really is a case of consumers banding together, and staying together, to generate sustained public pressure and bring about change, in a gaming community that has famously been unable to do any of those things until five minutes ago. Gamers have finally realized that they have the power in this relationship, and can force the big AAA publishers to back down on issues that really matter to them, and this is unlikely to be the last time it happens, either.

Did I ever mention that I'm an AMD man?

For a long time now, I've been an AMD customer, forgoing frankly better performance in exchange for a lower price point. The resulting PCs have always been good enough for me (I'm a gamer, but not a fan of first-person shooters, so "good enough" really was good enough -- my current AMD-based PC is still going strong after nearly six years) and, of course, also slightly cheaper. And man, oh man, I have never in my life been happier to be a cheap-ass bastard than I am today.

As reported by ZDNet:

Thanks to an investigation by third-party researchers into Intel's hidden firmware in certain chips, Intel decided to audit its firmware and on Monday confirmed it had found 11 severe bugs that affect millions of computers and servers.

The flaws affect Management Engine (ME), Trusted Execution Engine (TXE), and Server Platform Services (SPS).

Intel discovered the bugs after Maxim Goryachy and Mark Ermolov from security firm Positive Technologies found a critical vulnerability in the ME firmware that Intel now says would allow an attacker with local access to execute arbitrary code.

[...]

The bugs affect systems using Intel's 6th, 7th, and 8th Generation Core CPUs, a range of Xeon processors, as well the Apollo Lab Atom E3900 series, Apollo Lake Pentium, and Celeron N and J series chips.

Intel says the flaws would allow an attacker to "Impersonate the ME/SPS/TXE, thereby impacting local security feature attestation validity".

The attacker could also load and execute arbitrary code that would be invisible to the user and operating system. 

Yikes.

Intel has released detection tools for both Windows and Linux that can help you determine just how at-risk your system might be, so good on them, but this is still the second time this week that a breaking story reveals a big company's supposed security measures as making users' systems less secure... and the week's not yet over. Hell, the week's only barely beginning. So much for the news lull that I was expecting.

Report: EA removed MTs from SWBF2 because Disney insisted

When I first heard that EA had announced the temporary removal of gacha monetization from Star Wars Battlefront II, my immediate knee-jerk reaction was, "I'll bet that someone from Disney made a phone call," and I wasn't the only one. EA, after all, was clearly intending to weather the storm and cash in on the game's gacha, but Disney was facing a wave of negative Star Wars-related PR with The Last Jedi's release only a month away; the reversal really only made sense if it happened at Disney's instigation.

Well, it seems that's exactly what happened, according to SegmentNext:

Disney might have saved EA from an even bigger catastrophe before the game released, according to Wall Street Journal reporter Ben Fritz. Apparently, Disney called EA to let them know how displeased they were about the handling of the Battlefront 2 microtransactions.

Battlefront 2 had a rather disastrous launch after it came out that EA was adding in a great deal of grinding to Battlefront 2 in order to unlock well-known heroes like Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker. Fritz apparently wrote an article that talked about how Disney contacted EA to let them know about Disney CEO Bob Igner’s “worry” about their handling of the game.

[...]

This isn’t the only Star Wars game that EA has mucked up recently either, after they canned production of a Star Wars game developed by Visceral Games that was originally going to be single-player and story-driven in favor of a multiplayer-focused game, which sparked its own debate about how relevant single-player games were in this day and age with games like Horizon Zero Dawn, Assassin’s Creed Origins, Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, and more being given as pro-single player examples.

Lucasfilm eventually released a short, boilerplate PR statement confirming that they "support EA’s decision," but the simple reality is that EA probably wouldn't have made this decision if Disney hadn't weighed in. EA may be one of the biggest companies in videogames right now, but they're minnows compared to Disney... and Disney own Star Wars. If EA fuck up badly enough, Disney can just pull the license, and the suddenness of EA's reversal on their Star Wars gacha is suggestive of that being basically what EA were really afraid of here.

Meanwhile, the temporary removal of gacha from SWBF2 seems to have some too late to prevent some sort of regulatory action, with French regulators also investigating whether gacha systems would require regulation or consumer protections. With Belgium also looking into regulating loot boxes, it's looking more and more like EA's unseemly over-reach on the issue may just have precipitated exactly the kind of regulatory response that they were desperate to avoid.

Meanwhile, SWBF2's is garnering pretty poor reviews across the board, with a Metacritic score of only 69, and a user score of only 0.8 (the original SWBF managed a MC score of 75, with an average user score of 3.5, by comparison). And, for a wonder, its sales appear to be following suit, actually reflecting of this poor critical and consumer reception, at least in the UK.


The Know has a decent roundup of the latest developments:

So, have gamers finally had enough of this shit? Are they finally voting with their feet and wallets? Only time will tell, but the fact that it's finally happened, even once, gives me hope for humanity.

About Windows 10's superior security...

I first saw this story last week on BleepingComputer, but didn't really take the time to understand it properly until today. Honestly, BleepingComputer's coverage was a little dry, and anyone other than a security researcher or system administrator would be forgiven for thinking that it wasn't that big a deal, especially since BleepingComputers article includes a workaround for the problem.

Well, it turns out that this is a big deal. In fact, it's a really big deal, and it's been blowing up all day.

Por ejemplo, this story by ZDNet:

Key Windows 10 defense is 'worthless' and bug dates back to Windows 8

Microsoft has been telling users to upgrade to Windows 10 because of its superior in-built defenses against attacks, compared with Windows 7. That advice would be true if it properly implemented the defense known as Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR).

ASLR is used by Android, Windows, Linux, iOS and macOS to prevent attacks that rely on code executing at predictable memory locations by loading programs at random addresses.

It's been used by Microsoft since Windows Vista to counter memory-based attacks. However, Microsoft introduced an error in Windows 8 when implementing a feature known as Force ASLR or system-wide mandatory ASLR.

[...]

"Starting with Windows 8.0, system-wide mandatory ASLR (enabled via EMET) has zero entropy, essentially making it worthless. Windows Defender Exploit Guard for Windows 10 is in the same boat," [Will Dormann of Carnegie Mellon University's CERT/CC] wrote on Twitter.

[...]

Not only is the feature "worthless" in Windows 10, but Windows 7 with EMET actually does a better job of enforcing ASLR than Windows 10, according to Dormann.

"Actually, with Windows 7 and EMET System-wide ASLR, the loaded address for eqnedt32.exe is different on every reboot. But with Windows 10 with either EMET or WDEG, the base for eqnedt32.exe is 0x10000 EVERY TIME. Conclusion: Win10 cannot enforce ASLR as well as Win7," he wrote.

"Windows 8 and newer systems that have system-wide ASLR enabled via EMET or Windows Defender Exploit Guard will have non-DYNAMICBASE applications relocated to a predictable location, thus voiding any benefit of mandatory ASLR. This can make exploitation of some classes of vulnerabilities easier," wrote Dormann in a CERT/CC advisory.

Dormann notes there is no solution to this problem, but has offered a workaround in the advisory that admins can follow.

So, not only is this a major bug that Windows 7 doesn't have, but it's been an undetected part of Windows since 2009, and isn't fixed yet in Windows 8 or 10. There's no telling how much damage may already have been done by hackers exploiting this weakness in later Windows versions, even as users of those Windows versions believed themselves to be safer than Windows 7 users... something which simply wasn't true. This comes after a year in which Microsoft has been telling people that Windows 10 was impervious to ransomware, apparently unaware that this vulnerability made it easier for bad actors to target valuable data.

Yikes.

The workaround incidentally, is a registry edit...  coincidentally, also the way you can turn off Cortana to safeguard your privacy, but still something which most users are simply not comfortable doing. Or, as ExtremeTech puts it:

As always, we do not recommend mucking about in the registry unless you are certain you know what you’re doing. US-CERT has some additional details on both the problem and this fix available on its website. And yes, Windows 7 users, you get to preen a bit — this problem does not affect your operating system.

If you're thinking that US-CERT sounds very governmental, it is: specifically, it's the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team.

Microsoft are apparently aware of the issue... now... and they're working on a fix, although they're denying that this is a vulnerability according to ThreatPost:

Microsoft told Threatpost it acknowledges the issue.

“The issue described by the US-CERT is not a vulnerability. ASLR is functioning as designed and customers running default configurations of Windows are not at increased risk. The US-CERT discovered an issue with configuring non-default settings for ASLR using Windows Defender Exploit Guard and EMET, and provided workarounds. Microsoft is investigating and will address the configuration issue accordingly,” Microsoft said.

So, it's not a vulnerability... it just leaves your data more vulnerable to attack. Riiiiight.

It's at this point that I'll remind you that Windows 7 is still in its extended support period, which means that you can stay with its superior implementation of ASLR until at least 2020, if you're into that sort of thing. And while I don't expect that anyone will abandon Windows 10 for Windows 7 over this issue, I must say that this latest black eye for Microsoft, coming so soon after the scaremongering they and their apologists were doing over WannaCry and ransomware just a few months ago, is oddly satisfying. Or maybe not so oddly.

Prognostication

December is coming... and with it, what is (traditionally) a slow time for news.

In a normal year, everything that will be announced this year has been announced by now; results for this quarter won't be known until January, so there are no meaningful numbers to analyze; and everyone in the news business is only weeks away from the annual crop of year-end top story roundup articles, which normally hit just before everyone goes on holiday for a couple of weeks.

As such, I wouldn't normally be expecting to have too many new developments to blog about for the rest of the year. Of course, 2017 hasn't been a normal year, and it's always possible that the fast-evolving gacha/loot box story will continue to have legs, but I'm guessing that now's a pretty safe time to make a few predictions before taking a bit of a break myself.

So... prediction time! At least regarding the topics that this blog has mostly been about for the last couple of years.

VR:

Let's start with a nice, quick one.

Having languished all year long, VR will continue to sell poorly this XMas season. Thanks to HTC's just-announced Vive Focus, the Microsoft-backed Mixed Reality headsets have managed to be obsolete before properly hitting the market, and the original Vive, Oculus Rift, and PlayStation VR are all basically dinosaurs now...  and it's not like consumers were all that interested in them before. Sales of VR should continue at this same poor level, with no new major announcements or releases until the new year at the earliest. [UPDATE: June 17th, 2018: RIGHT!] E3 has just happened, with nothing of note being announced for VR, in either hardware or software. Oculus Go's release has had no measurable effect, either.


Prediction: No developments for at least three months, if then. VR will continue to not be a thing.

Windows 10:

November and December are a high-volume time of year for most businesses, when disruptive system-wide OS rollouts are generally considered to be a bad idea; many companies don't even allow new system launches after the end of October (my employer deployed a new order-tracking and -fulfillment system on October 30th, and are coming to rather regret that decision). Basically, this means no new Windows 10 deployments for the rest of the calendar year, and this no Enterprise-driven shift away from Windows 7/Server 2008.

New deployments won't be happening at any brisk pace to start the new year, either, as companies come to realize that keeping pace with Microsoft's overly-aggressive update schedule is simply too difficult and too costly - the Windows-as-a-Service model has some serious problems that Microsoft badly need to solve. January is also not normally a big season for major system changes; many companies have synced their fiscal calendars to the taxation year, which means that the end of the year is also the end of their fiscal year, so January is normally spent on year-end book-keeping -- again, not normally a good time for a disruptive, company-wide new OS rollout.

Individual users won't be migrating to Windows 10 en masse, either. PC sales have been declining steadily for years, so I don't expect to see a wave of XMas PC purchases this year, and users with older PCs have made it very clear that they have no intention of switching unless and until they absolutely have to.

Add one and one and one, and you get no major shifts in the OS market until next February, at the earliest... which mean no big change in NetMarketShare et al's reported statistics until the first of March. Any changes that happen will be marginal, and Windows 10 won't overtake Windows 7 until next year, no matter how badly tech media bloggers want it to happen. The real test will be the period from next March to next November; if Windows 10 is going to take off, it will have to be then, when big companies with fresh budgets can do deployments with the least amount of disruption. If it doesn't happen then, it won't happen until closer to Windows 7's end-of-life in 2020.

Prediction: No big developments for at least three months here, either. [UPDATE: June 17th, 2018: RIGHT!] Or, mostly right, anyway. Microsoft parted ways with the former head of their Windows and Devices division, and broke that division up across the company, which means that they've abandoned their Windows-focused strategy entirely. The fact that this was necessary says all that needs to be said about the strategy itself; even Microsoft finally gave up hoping that it would start producing results. That OS market is still not shifting significantly, with Microsoft themselves no longer expecting that to change, confirms my prediction.

Nintendo Switch:

There's no doubt that Nintendo's having their best year in a long time, but the Switch's first year hasn't been without its problems... chief among them, of course, being the production issues which prevented Nintendo from meeting any of their production milestones, as far as anyone can tell. In a recent presentation to shareholders, Nintendo's CEO answered questions about whether Nintendo would have enough units in stores for the upcoming XMas season by talking about the quarter after that... never a good sign.

I read that as Nintendo not having nearly enough units in stores to sell this season, which is a problem since the period from Black Friday to Boxing Day is when most retailers (in NA, anyway) post up to 50% of their year's sales (October to December can be up to 70% for some retailers). Failing to have enough units in stores at this time of year is a huge misstep, one which Nintendo will not recover from until well after the post-holiday hangover -- consumers normally don't spend much in January or February, with sales not picking up again until March.

Nintendo, of course, were bullishly predicting that they'd hit 15 million units sold by March, but there are a lot of assumptions that seem to underlie that prediction, including the pace of sales remaining more or less constant in spite of supply problems at a critical point in the year, and the traditional early-year sales slowdown. Nintendo are also assuming that every Nintendo household will be buying multiple Switches, something which seems like an unrealistic expectation.

Of course, the Nintendo Switch could become a full-blown craze, just like the original Wii did, but events like that are incredibly rare, and most companies only ever get one of them. The Wii became a craze because it appealed to people who'd never gamed before, in the same way that the PS2 became the best-selling console of all time by also being the cheapest DVD player on the market when it launched; there's no evidence yet that the Switch appeals to anyone except early adopters, longtime Nintendo fans, and core gamers who spend a lot of time travelling and who are willing to buy their favourite games a second time in order to have a version to take with them.

The Switch boasts only two games with real system-selling potential, and both of them are aimed at long-time Nintendo fans who were always going to buy the Switch, anyway; if you're not a long-time Zelda or Mario fan, the platform doesn't have much to offer except the opportunity to spend more than retail (because cartridges, for fuck's sake) buying games for a 2nd time that you either already own, or can buy more cheaply on Steam without incurring several hundred dollars of additional expense. And since Nintendo's gaming handhelds have declined in popularity every year since 2009, largely replaced by the smartphone for most users... well, suffice to say that I think a full-blown craze is unlikely.

The Switch will almost certainly outsell the WiiU, but that's a low bar to clear, frankly. If the Switch is still selling 2 million units a month after it passes the 20 million mark, I'll concede that it's remarkable launch has strong enough legs to keep running; until then, I will continue to regard Nintendo's plans to double production, and then double it again, to be just so much PR bullshit -- statements aimed more at their shareholders than anything else. The Switch is probably here to stay for a while, and will certainly avoid the ignominious fate that claimed the WiiU, but it won't be equalling, let alone surpassing, the PS4's market share anytime soon. And they won't be launching in China, either, no matter how badly analysts want it to happen.

Prediction: The Switch may move another million or so units over the holidays, but it won't hit the 10 million mark by the end of December, and will fall well short of Nintendo's 15-million-by-March target. [UPDATE: December 12th, 2017: WRONG!]

PlayStation & XBox (or, XBO-X):

Sony began 2017 with a commanding position in the console gaming market. Although Steam was still dominant on PC, and had more than twice as many installed users as PS4, Sony still had 53.4 million PS4 users worldwide, and was projecting 18 million more over the course of the year; they had the best-selling non-smartphone VR headset on the market; they had pushed their updated PS4 Pro console out a full year ahead of Microsoft's Scorpio; and they had successfully crushed Nintendo's WiiU, which had launched poorly, sold worse, and finally gone out of production. Sony were winning; all they had to do, to keep winning, was keep their collective foot on the gas.

And so, naturally, they decided to spend the year coasting, instead.

Sony coasted while Nintendo announced, and launched, the Nintendo Switch, a handheld/console hybrid that outsold all other consoles combined last month, at least in the U.S., in spite of persistent supply issues; apparently still stinging from the failure of PS Vita, Sony have no plans to contest the handheld gaming space with an updated machine of their own. Sony coasted while Microsoft announced one consumer-friendly initiative after another, from Play Anywhere to backwards compatibility to cross-play, something on which Sony are still dragging their feet; they kept coasting while Microsoft debuted the XBox One X, the "most powerful gaming console ever made," which can actually outpower and outperform the PS4 Pro -- thus giving Microsoft the hardware performance edge, for the first time this console generation.

With all this coasting, one might be forgiven for thinking that the people in charge of Sony's PlayStation division had basically stopped caring... mainly because that was pretty much what had happened. Even though I'd never heard his name before this year, I wasn't at all surprised to learn that Andrew House, the head of Sony's PlayStation department, was retiring; the whole of Sony's past year felt like the work of someone playing out the string until they could finally retire and spend the rest of their time bass fishing. Sony's gaming division lost a lot of momentum in 2017.

Whether they can regain that momentum in 2018 in anyone's guess. Sony's new PlayStation head, John Kodera, plans to take Sony's gaming efforts into the cloud, a strategy which aligns well with general trends in the videogame industry, while also being something that the Nintendo Switch's damn-it-all cartridges and tiny onboard storage seem poorly positioned to do. Whether they also decide to update the PS Vita with a new, cloud-powered version remains to be seen, but it's almost certain that the PS4 will get another hardware upgrade, the name of which will also be stupid. Sony is still the dominant player in console gaming, with the PlayStation 4 sitting at 64.9 million sold worldwide (compared to the XBox One's 31.25 million, and Nintendo Switch's 7.02 million), and will continue to occupy the #1 spot for a while, but they'll need to work harder to stay on top.

Microsoft, meanwhile, will continue trying to make XBox Live relevant to PC gamers who mostly game on Steam, while pushing 4K gaming to consumers who mostly doesn't own or want 4K televisions. The XBox One X (or XBO-X) will sell well, because it's new and in stock during the XMas shopping season, but it's really only appealing to people that already own 4K TVs and are also already invested in the XBL ecosystem, which may not be as many people as Microsoft thinks it is. With Play Anywhere equalling the end of actual exclusive XBox One games (anything released for XBox is also released for Windows by default), the only remaining move is for Microsoft to (a) ramp up in-house game development, to try to make the XBL/Microsoft Store look like a more inviting place to buy games, and (b) push the development of Mixed Reality gaming. The first will yield no results at all next year, since games take years to develop, and the second will yield no results at all, period, because VR (see above).

Predictions: Sony will try harder, now that they have a PlayStation head who isn't retiring, although exactly what a Cloud-based PS4 will look like, or how Sony chose to react to the challenge from Nintendo, if at all, remain to be seen. [UPDATE: December 8th, 2017: RIGHT!] PSN/Steam crossplay is a possibility here, especially in light of Valve's recently-announced trust-based CS:GO matchmaking system -- House was against crossplay, but Kodera might change course. For their part, Microsoft simply didn't get the XBO-X to market in time; it will sell well enough this holiday season, but not well enough for them to gain ground on Sony, and Nintendo's Switch will outsell their XBOX throughout the coming year. They'll still end 2018 as the #2 console, but not by much.

Somewhat unexpected:

Wow. If you'd told at the start of this year that I'd end it having more to say about the Nintendo Switch than about Windows 10, I'd have said you were crazy, but here we are. I guess Nintendo's comeback console is just much more interesting than anything Microsoft is doing, these days.

Which goes to show the value of prognostications: more often than not, they're wrong. They're still fun, though, and worth writing down -- after all, a prediction that you can later deny having made is kind of cowardly. I'll still check in from time to time, and blog about anything that does catch my eye, including the normal OS market share check-ins on December 1st and January 1st, but that should be about it for the year. No best-of, worst-of, or top-story roundup lists here!

Unless of course, something of interest does happen. And with a year like the one we've been having, it honestly wouldn't fucking surprise me.