Star Wars smartphones are coming to SoftBank in Japan

Japanese mobile carrier SoftBank is marking the incoming release of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story by launching a pair of phones that let you choose your Force allegiance. The Star Wars Mobile phones are made by Sharp and come in both Dark and Light side editions.

Here are the unexciting specs:

5.3-inch 1080p IGZO display
Snapdragon 820 processor
22.6-megapixel camera
3,000mAh battery
TV tuner
3GB of RAM
32GB of storage (plus microSD slot)
7.6mm thick, 155g

Apple offers gift cards up to $150 for its Black Friday deals

After skipping out on Black Friday last year, Apple is back with some seasonal deals. Or, well, gift cards. Rather than giving customers money off products, the iPhone-maker is instead bundling in gift cards worth up to $150 on select purchases.

Here’s what you can get:

$150 gift card when buying a MacBook (from $1,299), MacBook Pro 13-inch or 15-inch (from $1,299; no late-2016 models are included so that means no TouchBar), MacBook Air (from $999), iMac (from $1,099), or Mac Pro ($2,999)

Up to $100 gift card when buying an iPad Pro (from $599), iPad Air 2 (from $399), or iPad mini 4 (from $399)

Up to $50 gift card when buying an iPhone SE (from $399), iPhone 6s (from $549), or iPhone 6s Plus (from $649)

$25 gift card when buying an Apple TV (from $149) or select Apple Watch Series 1 models (from $269)

Similar deals are also available in markets including Canada (gift cards up to CA$200), Australia (gift cards up to AU$200), New Zealand (gift cards up to (NZ$215), and the United Kingdom (gift cards up to £120).

The deals are, frankly, a little disappointing, especially when Apple’s teaser for the sales suggests something quite substantial. (Or maybe that was just our imagination.) Getting $150 or $100 off a future Apple purchase isn’t to be sniffed at, but it’s a shame the company hasn’t bothered to include any of its latest products in the deals. For more savings, you should check out what other stores have to offer

GoPro is already recalling its long-awaited Karma drone

After selling 2,500 units so far, GoPro today announced plans to recall its Karma drone after just 16 days on the market.GoPro founder and CEO Nick Woodman said the recall is due to safety concerns caused by a malfunction causing power loss and unpredictable behavior by the drone. According to Woodman in statement:

Safety is our top priority.

A very small number of Karma owners have reported incidents of power failure during operation. We have moved quickly to recall all units of Karma and provide a full refund while we investigate the issue. We are working in close coordination with both the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission and Federal Aviation Administration. We are very sorry to have inconvenienced our customers and we are taking every step to make the return and refund process as easy as possible.

Unfortunately, this came at a terrible time for GoPro. Last week, the company announced it missed quarterly revenue expectations by 23 percent. A 2,500 unit recall for its first non-camera product doesn’t bode well.

Strange Facebook bug shows certain users as dead — including Mark Zuckerberg [Updated]

A strange Facebook bug spotted by Business Insider shows a memorial message sitting atop profiles that informs friends and families a user has died. The message reads:We hope people who love [User] will find comfort in the things other share to remember and celebrate his life.The message also includes a link to a Facebook form to set up an account for a deceased person as a memorial account.
It’s not affecting everyone, so it’s unclear at this time how widespread the bug is, or what’s causing it. Business Insider reports it has seen the message on CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s account, but we haven’t been able to spot it ourselves. In fact, we haven’t spotted it at all — so it seems to be a problem that’s not affecting the platform globally.

We’ve reached out to Facebook for clarification.

There’s a simple solution to Facebook’s fake news problem

It’s almost as if Mark Zuckerberg could hear the sound of furious journalists pounding away on keys. Or, more likely, he read one of the countless pieces last week that sought to expose Facebook’s role in last week’s election. Either way, he’s responded to the media outcry that Facebook was directly responsible for Trump’s win.I ranted about this very thing after the election last week, but it bears repeating: Facebook isn’t responsible for Trump’s ascension to power, at least not directly.

That’s not a fair burden to place on the shoulders of a platform meant to facilitate information sharing. If you’d like an easier argument to make, blame the algorithmic timeline that forces each of us into an echo chamber of similar world views. Blame the decision to cut human editors. Blame Facebook’s decision to allow pages that deliberately misrepresent a news story (or make one up entirely) to operate with impunity.

For every argument Zuckerberg makes about being a platform to promote free speech and open views, I can make another about conscious misrepresentation and the promotion of libelous material. And his argument that “truth” is complicated is falling on deaf ears.

He’s not wrong. Truth is a complicated matter and even major publications get it wrong from time to time. But we’re not seeking perfection. Something, anything, would be a step in the right direction. A simple law of averages approach would work wonders. Once a certain percentage of your content is deemed false, the Page is suspended. Keep it up and you’ll be deleted from the platform entirely.

If Zuckerberg can make the claim that “more than 99 percent of what people see [on Facebook] is authentic,” then it’s certainly not a stretch to assume he can apply the tools used to come up with that stat on a per-Page basis.Arguing that Facebook isn’t at fault for giving a platform to the masses is fair. Arguing that it shoulders no responsibility in how they use it, well, isn’t.

Running Doom on the MacBook Pro Touch Bar isn’t ideal — but it’s pretty damn cool

I contend that Touch Bar on the MacBook Pro is a gimmicky feature. I’m also a little giddy about the prospect of playing Doom on it. Come at me.

In the hacking community, the de facto initiation centers around the ability to run software on hardware it isn’t intended to run on. Doom on Apple’s Touch Bar certainly fits the standard, although playing the classic PC shooter with 2170 x 60 resolution isn’t exactly ideal.

No matter, iOS developer Adam Bell did it anyway.

                                          

As you can see from the video, it’s a bit short on screen real estate. Still, it’s playable — but only barely.In a second video, Bell made better use of the Touch Bar by turning it into the game’s heads-up display. Granted, it’s got to be a little awkward to look down for key information about health and ammunition, but it exists, and that’s all that matters.

Microsoft says sorry for almost saying the N-word in Xbox newsletter

Microsoft had a minor mishap when it inadvertently sent out an Xbox promotional email headed with the racially dubious subject line “NNNNGGGHHHAAAA.”While the email, advertising the upcoming fourth instalment of open-world zombie apocalypse game Dead Rising, was obviously intended to be read and pronounced as a stereotypical zombie growl, it looks dangerously close to the ‘N-word.’

This has prompted  Microsoft to issue an apology before the message has insulted someone.

In the contrite, the Windows-maker clarified the email wasn’t intended to be offensive, but also took a chance to acknowledge it could’ve phrased the subject line differently to avoid the issue altogether.