Light Start: Nintendo PlayStation sold at auction, The Samurai are back, check who’s tracking you and no corona-talk around here
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The Nintendo PlayStation console just sold for $360 000 at auction
If you believe the myths (and you obviously should) the only Nintendo PlayStation console is real. And it works, according to sources. But the only one of these consoles in existence was recently sold in an auction for a total of $360,000. The buyer is Greg McLemore, the founder of Pets.com and Toys.com, and he beat out other collectors. Including the CEO of Oculus VR Palmer Luckey. What makes the Nintendo PlayStation so valuable though? It was born in a time just following cartridge NES systems when Nintendo turned to Sony to help it convert to disk-format. Sony developed the first NES system that runs disks in a limited run of 200. It is believed that all consoles except one were destroyed — this one. The Verge describes how a man named Diebold found the console: “this prototype of the Nintendo Play Station was discovered by a man named Terry Diebold in a box of stuff once owned by former Sony Computer Entertainment CEO Olaf Olafsson. The two had both worked at Advanta Corporation and when that company went bankrupt, the console was one of many items that ended up at private auction, which is how Diebold acquired it.” We’re betting Diebold is a very rich man now, while McLemore will use his newly gained console for good — by putting it in his own collection or a museum. Apparently, he hadn’t decided yet.
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The Samurai are back: Ghost of Tsushima will release on 26 June
We now know when Sony’s highly anticipated samurai showdown Ghost of Tsushima will launch, and it’s sooner than expected. Luckily the coronavirus track record hasn’t affected the release date of the game, and we’ll see it launch on 26 June 2020. Sony announced that the adventure game by Sucker Punch, set in feudal Japan, is on track. The company also released a brand new trailer for the PS4 exclusive game, featuring the main character on his hero’s journey. All based is absolutely beautiful graphics of course. At this rate, we’re hoping the upcoming PS5 console will have backwards compatibility with at least PS4 titles, so we can seamlessly continue playing our PS4 favourites on the new console. The new trailer features Jin Sakai, the main protagonist with some of his co-characters that are met along the way. We can also see small pieces of in-game combat, primarily using swords, and it looks darned amazing. We cannot wait to get our hands on this game, tbh. The middle of 2020 is stacking up to be a big year for games as we look forward to seeing the second instalment of The Last of Us launch in May, and Cyberpunk slated for September. We’re amped.
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This is where you can see which companies track your online activity
Online security is becoming increasingly important to the general user. The mom at yoga, the young working man on Tinder and even parents of small children. Now, DuckDuckGo (another browser focused on online security), has shared data it’s collected about online trackers with other companies so they can also protect your privacy. The collection is called Tracker Radar, and it features a total of 5,326 internet domains, all used by 1,727 companies and organisations that track you online. This is particularly cool because anyone can access the data. “Anyone can use the Tracker Radar data, which DuckDuckGo updates once a month. But for those who want the company’s help using the data, DuckDuckGo also licenses it for a fee to cover costs, he said,” a report on Cnet explains. So DuckDuckGo is profitable, which makes you wonder whether they’re doing this for the right reason, or are they also tracking data for obscure reasons? We’ll never know, but it’s nice to have a browser you can trust, you know?
Don’t talk about that: How China is censoring messages about coronavirus
WeChat, China’s most popular messaging app, has been censoring keywords that relate to the COVID-19 outbreak. They’ve been doing this at least since December when the outbreak just started. A new report on a study on keywords from news coverage found that China may be censoring these words on purpose. In the study, people registered three test accounts — one registered to a mainland China phone number and two registered to Canadian phone numbers. Researchers found that the app censored at least 500 different keyword combinations between Jan. 1 and Feb. 15, during the peak of the outbreak in mainland China. Citizen Lab, an interdisciplinary laboratory based at the University of Toronto, released the analysis last week. It showed clear signs of censorship of the coronavirus on WeChat and YY — a Chinese live-streaming app similar to Twitch. The lab found that both platforms began blacklisting anything about the new virus, including the words ‘epidemic’ and ‘Li Wenliang’, the doctor whistleblower on the corona case. In a statement to Buzzfeed, a Tencent spokesperson said: “We have rolled out a variety of tools and features on the platform to help users stay safe and protect themselves against the ongoing Coronavirus epidemic. Importantly, this includes debunking false rumors.”
