This week, what’s new in video games, how the Canadian spy agency and others played with hacking your mobile phone, and the Slack Variety Pack podcast.

New games from Vancouver developers

Among the new games to play are three by Vancouver indie developers. Open War League is a free-to-play strategy game for the iPad. Players build bases and armies and try and take over territory, fighting, or allying, with other players.

Rocketsrocketsrockets and Invisible Inc. are two games for Mac and Windows computers.

Rocketsrocketsrockets, from Radial Games, is like a colourful arcade-style ballet, described as “dogfighting meets figure skating in space”. Designed for multiple players, you fly around trying to shoot down the other rockets that are also flying around.

Invisible Inc. comes from Klei Entertainment, and is a slick, stylish, stealth-meets-strategy game.

Other fun games to consider include Crypt of the NecroDancer, Broken Age, part 2, Assassin’s Creed Chronicles, and Splatoon, a fun shooter for the Wii U.

Spy agencies target mobile phones through app stores

The latest report stemming from the classified documents from Edward Snowden claims that Canada and the other countries involved in the Five Eyes intelligence alliance were looking for ways to hack into mobile phones.

The plan was to use the Google and Samsung app stores, which provide software for Android devices, to get software onto mobile phones for the purposes of collecting data and even to send “misinformation” to a handset.

Representatives from the spy agencies reportedly worked on this during a series of workshops in late 2011 and early 2012.

At the same time, they discovered that the UC Browser app for Android mobile devices, the most popular Internet browser used in Asia, was entirely porous, and was leaking information about users’ devices and accounts.

UC Browser is developed by the Chinese company, Alibaba. The company says that the security flaws have since been updated.

One big question, though, is why government representatives, who have identified a risks in software, wouldn’t disclose that information in the interest of public safety.

The answer, it seems, is because they wanted to exploit it.

Slack, the communication tool, now has a podcast

The Slack Variety Pack is exactly what the title suggests it is: a variety show. It’s light, and smart, and has the same kind of sound layering that is common among contemporary radio programs.

Now Slack is not an entertainment company, but a technology company. Slack is a communications tool. But the company, founded by Vancouver’s smart Stewart Butterfield, is valued at US$2.8 billion.

Slack has some money to spend, and spending it on a smart, funny podcast is, frankly, a good business decision. The podcast is not without it’s subtle hints. One segment has a bunch of smart kids telling their grandparents to stop using email: “You asking me why I don’t reply to your email is like someone asking you why you have not replied back to their telegrams.”

The podcast is produced by Pacific Content, a group of equally smart people with plenty of tenure in radio and digital culture.

The result is a good blend of interesting stories, including a fairly good deconstruction of what a quantum computer is and does, with a look at Burnaby’s D-Wave Systems, with gags and gimmicks, like “what does an emoji sound like?”.

I’m an early adopter and a big fan of Slack. And I listen to the podcast, too.