The Morning After: Weekend Edition
What's right (and wrong) with the Switch, plus it's time to reset some passwords.
Letter from the Editor
It's been a banner week for Nintendo fanboys and girls, what with the company's new console finally making its way into reviewers' hands -- and giving Nintendophiles their first extended look at the Switch. Naturally, Engadget editors were among the chosen to get some quality time, and early returns are ... middling? Devindra Hardawar is a fan of the system's controllers, and he loved the ability to take the Switch out of his living room and into bed for late-night gaming sessions. But that portability is seriously hamstrung by a screen that's essentially unusable outside and meager battery life (at least when playing Zelda: Breath of the Wild).
Meanwhile, Aaron Souppouris was also spending all his waking hours in Hyrule and shared what he's learned playing Link's latest adventure. Turns out, the latest in the series has a relatively high degree of difficulty, which represents a welcome return to Zelda games of yore. And while his first impressions are generally favorable, he still found fault with the game's screencap feature, and some performance issues. Finally, Sean Buckley brought a dose of reality to hopeful Switch owners the world over by detailing all of the console's shortcomings at launch. (But he's still buying one on launch day.)
And speaking of shortcomings, Uber had some dirty laundry aired this week when a former female employee revealed a series of sexist incidents she experienced while working at the company. Her tale paints a horrific picture of a company rife with sexual harassment that was implicitly endorsed and covered up by HR. While the media attention resulting from these revelations is ostensibly a good thing, Nicole Lee wrote why she's not convinced it'll make any lasting difference at Uber, or any other companies in Silicon Valley, for that matter. For lasting and meaningful change, the leadership at these companies must stop accepting that misogyny is an acceptable by-product of employing some top-performing talent.
A word of advice for CEO Travis Kalanick: Faustian bargains don't work out well for those who make them, and it's time for you to clean house.
Sling TV's discounted 'Extra' bundles brings some cable flavor to cord-cutting
Now that Sling TV is facing more competition in the internet TV business, it's picking up some tricks from cable and satellite TV. Namely, its "4 Extras Deal," which lets customers load up with channel add-ons for an overall discount. While some cord-cutters may prefer slimmer, cheaper packages, families or heavy media consumers might want a lot of options combined with the convenience of internet TV, and this package is for those people.
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault accepts nearly 50,000 samples
Ten years after it opened, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway accepted a major new deposit. Organizations from the US, the UK, Mexico, Benin, India, Pakistan, Lebanon, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Morocco, the Netherlands and Belarus all contributed seeds for safe keeping in the gene bank located near the Arctic Circle. Now home to 930,821 samples, it's a backup ready to "improve agricultural production and prevent loss of crop diversity in the face of natural disasters, climate change and war."
NASA found seven new Earth-sized planets
In case the seed bank doesn't work out, maybe humanity can check out one of the new planets NASA found. During a press conference in DC, the agency announced that among seven Earth-sized exoplanets orbiting a star 40 light years away, three of them are in the "Goldilocks zone" which could allow them to be habitable for life. Meet TRAPPIST-1.
Cloudflare bug potentially leaked data for thousands of websites
We're trying not to call it "Cloudbleed," but that's a good description for the bug recently found by Google's Tavis Ormandy. A buffer overrun problem at a popular web services company resulted in data that should've been secure ending up randomly dumped on other web pages for anyone to scoop up. What that means, is there's a chance info like your password or authorization token for websites like OkCupid or Patreon could be floating around or cached somewhere.
You can reset passwords for potentially affected sites and services (although some, like 1Password, use Cloudflare and were still secure), but you should also use unique passwords everywhere, and turn on two-factor authentication/login verification for any services that support those features.
'Horizon Zero Dawn' made me fall in love with open-world RPGs
The highly-anticipated PS4 exclusive Horizon Zero Dawn arrives February 28th, and Jessica Conditt explains why its 30 hour-ish campaign "sounds like barely enough time." Between its protagonist, the independent outcast Aloy and giant metal dinosaurs, this game made quite the impression.
Hoversurf's electric quadcopter bike redefines dangerous
This Scorpion S-3 platform from Hoversurf seeks to combine flying with the ease of riding a bike. Unfortunately, all we can focus on is how close it puts rider's legs to those unprotected rotors.
But wait, there's more...
Stanford researchers develop a technique to harvest uranium from the sea
The Engadget Podcast Ep 29: The return of the Note 7, PewDiePie and Uber's serious sexism problem
The Morning After is a new daily newsletter from Engadget designed to help you fight off FOMO. Who knows what you'll miss if you don't subscribe.
