Hasta La Gadget!

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The moon you see up in the night sky tonight is a Blue Moon. But no, it’s not actually the color blue. Duh, everybody knows a Blue Moon isn’t actually blue. A Blue Moon means the second full moon in the same month! But, um, that’s not the reason why tonight’s moon is considered a Blue Moon either. Wait, what?

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Last week we reported on seemingly bad news that Valve was not working on Half-Life 3 at the moment. This was “confirmed” by John Patrick Lowrie, the voice actor for some of Valve’s games such as Half-Life 2 and DotA 2. However according to a comment posted on Lowrie’s blog (which has since been removed), it seems that the voice actor “misspoke” when it came to sharing news about Half-Life 3.

According to Lowrie, “My comments just seemed to cause a whole bunch of confusion and when I tried to minimize the confusion I misspoke and caused a whole bunch more confusion,” and suggested that perhaps he would be one of the last people to know about Valve’s plans since voice actors are apparently the “last to know anything”, and that they only find out about a project when they are hired for it.

Of course this hardly means that by this logic that Half-Life 3 is indeed in the works since Valve has not yet said anything, but as Lowrie has succinctly put it, “What I was trying to say before (and failed) is that whatever Gabe Newell has to say about a project is the best info you’re going to get. He owns the company and knows what’s going on.” We’re not sure if this good or bad news, so make what you will of it.

Half-Life Voice Actor “Misspoke” About Half-Life 3′s Status original content from Ubergizmo.

Over the past couple of months we have heard rumors and seen leaks of Sony’s upcoming Honami device, which had also gone by the Xperia i1 moniker, but reports are now suggesting that the final name could be known as the Xperia Z1. In any case the folks at ePrice have reportedly managed to get their hands on what appears to be the press shots of the upcoming handset, along with what appears to be sample images taken by the handset.

Unfortunately the press shots of the device aren’t exactly very clear or big enough to see the details, but they do appear to resemble the leaked images that we have seen in the past. They don’t really tell us anything new, except that the handset could arrive in three different colors – black, purple, and white. As a quick recap for those who might have missed the news, the Honami is rumored to sport a 5” Full HD display with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 chipset under the hood clocked at 2.2GHz, 16GB of onboard storage, a microSD card, a 3,000mAh battery, and its main feature would be its 20MP camera. There is a good chance that Sony could unveil the device during IFA 2013 on the 4^th of September, so be sure to check back with us then for the details!

Alleged Sony Honami Press Shots Surface original content from Ubergizmo.

The question of how much contact the NSA has with internet traffic throughout the US is being raised again, this time by the Wall Street Journal. Yesterday The Atlantic took issue with the security agency’s mathematics and 1.6 percent claim, while the WSJ report looks more closely at its reach into telecommunications companies. The mishmash of codenamed programs are said to cover up to 75 percent of US internet traffic, although the amount actually stored and accessed is much smaller. The main difference between the calculations may be due to the difference between what ISPs — handing over data under FISA orders — carry, and what the NSA specifically requests. Its capabilities mean it can pull a lot more than just metadata, with access to the actual content of what’s sent back and forth becoming even more troubling as privacy violations exposed by its own audits come to light.

There’s an FAQ-style breakdown of what’s new and notable from the usual “current and former” officials to get those interested up to speed quickly — keep your tinfoil hats and end-to-end encrypted communications systems close by.

Filed under: Internet

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Source: Wall Street Journal (1), (2)