Last Wednesday on The Shift with Drex, we talked about Alex Jones and censorship, Facebook and Instagram’s dashboard, facial recognition in shopping malls, and Marvel’s Spider-Man, a new game for the PS4.

This week, defining censorship, Facebook and Instagram dashboards, malls stop spying on you, and hands-on with the PS4 exclusive, Marvel’s Spider-Man.

When shutting down an idiot isn’t censorship

Alex Jones and his Infowars are being dropped from a number of social platforms and media aggregators.

No, this is not censorship. Jones is free to spout his nonsense all he wants. Nobody is taking the right away from him.

The thing is, nobody has to listen to him.

And Apple, Facebook, Pinterest, Spotify, YouTube don’t have any obligation to provide him with a platform. Snapchat is said to be monitoring the situation, and in a tweet, Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s CEO, has explicitly said that Jones “hasn’t violated our rules.”

MailChimp, the customer relationship management (CRM) and newsletter delivery service has also terminated accounts for violating our terms of service.

The InfoWars app is still available in Apple’s App Store and Google Play, though.

This doesn’t mean that there isn’t reason for concern, though. What these companies did is not censorship, but Matt Taibbi thinks this is a slippery slope.

Facebook and Instagram hope you’ll manage your own use with new dashboard

As part of its campaign to not lose control of its own destiny, Facebook (and Instagram, which is owned by Facebook) are giving us tools to better manage the amount of time we spend on our devices looking at our feeds.

This is a trend with the tech companies, with Apple, Google, and the rest all taking steps to give you control.

And ultimately this is under your control.

So take it already.

Facial recognition software scrapped in Calgary shopping centres

Cadillac Fairview has stopped using facial recognition software in Calgary’s Chinook Centre and Market Mall.

Two weeks ago a visitor to Chinook Centre posted a photo to Reddit that captured lines of code on a video directory.

The privacy commissioners for Alberta and Canada have both launched investigations into the use of the software.

Hands-on with the new video game Marvel’s Spider-Man

You’ll never have so much fun being a superhero as you will playing Marvel’s Spider-Man, a new video game created for Sony’s PlayStation 4. Releasing on September 7, it was developed by Insomniac Games.

I spent about four hours playing the game during a media event in Los Angeles last month. In that time I progressed through the first couple of hours of the story and spent lots of time just moving through the virtual Manhattan.

It’s difficult to consider any superhero game these days without comparing them to Rocksteady’s Batman Arkham series. Those games nailed the Dark Knight’s atmosphere and tone, but more importantly they made you feel, when you were sneaking around and fighting criminals, like you were Batman.
Insomniac has done the same thing here, perfectly capturing the essence of the character of Spider-Man and the city of New York.

Spider-Man’s New York City isn’t Batman’s Gotham. It’s bright and cacophonous. And Spider-Man isn’t Batman. He’s young and sarcastic, eager to please. He moves like a gymnast.

Becoming Spider-Man

So much of what makes Spider-Man is how he moves. Insomniac knew that creating an authentic game required that it be fun to journey through the landscape. “The number one thing to get right is flinging,” admitted creative director Bryan Intihar.

Traversing through New York is central to the game and it is joyful. The system is forgiving enough to prevent any frustration, but you’ve got plenty of control over your movement, and once you get a handle on the options it’s exhilarating to just swing.

The game is designed to keep you moving around, too. In addition to the story missions, this open world experience provides plenty of side missions and collectibles. Completing them gives you tokens that are the currency for upgrading your gadgets, like your web shooters, as well as your outfit.

And the Spidey costume here is different, characterized by a white spider graphic.

There’s a reason for the costume’s white spider

Art director Jacinda Chew was given license to come up with all new character designs.
In an interview, Chew told me that the goal was to keep what made the original designs iconic, modernize the design, and give it a narrative hook.

“The Ditko suits were red and blue with clean lines,” said Chew, speaking about Steve Ditko, the artist and writer who created Spider-Man with Stan Lee. “We modernized it by giving it an athletic shoe instead of a booty,” she explained.

Chew revealed that there is a story-based reason for the novel costume, but she wasn’t willing to give anything more away, simply asking, “Why the white spider?”

Leveraging the Spider-Verse

As much as Marvel’s Spider-Man is familiar, it’s different from other incarnations of the character you’ve seen.

At the media preview, Intihar said that the development team was inspired by writer Brian Michael Bendis and his work on Ultimate Spider-Man, in which he came up with the notion of the “Spider-Verse”. That idea, of how the spider-influenced superhero might be realized in other dimensions, is a tremendous creative engine.

It’s what gave Intihar and his team liberty to come up with an original story, with unique takes on characters and plotlines from the Spider-Man canon.
We’re not burdened with an origin story, either. Lead writer Jon Paquette and his team respect the players by alluding to all that’s gone before without needing to explain every detail. And it’s clear that lots has happened. Peter is not a teenage high-school student in this game, he’s a scientist, having left his college job as a photojournalist behind.

And as much as you play Spider-Man, you also play the game as Peter Parker, trying to make rent, trying to get to appointments on time, and trying to balance being a superhero with being a person.

The characters you expect are all here, although they may be a bit different than what you’re familiar with. J. Jonah Jameson is podcasting. Aunt May works in a social agency. And Mary Jane Watson is an investigative journalist.

Insomniac is letting us play as MJ, too. In the sequence I played she was sneaking around and solving puzzles. It’s another way that the developer is telling the story of Spider-Man, Peter Parker, and all the other characters outside of cutscenes.

The perfect studio for the job

The truth is that Insomniac’s portfolio made them the perfect studio for this game. In Spider-Man, the studio found a franchise that would allow them to use all of the mechanics and gameplay elements they’ve become expert at.

The world building and traversal mechanics from Sunset Overdrive are at the core of this new game. The gadgets and weapons from Ratchet & Clank are found in the way you can upgrade Spidey’s arsenal and abilities. The mature and complex characters and storytelling developed while making the Resistance games are also here.

Insomniac’s take on the webhead is refined and original. At once familiar and unique, Marvel’s Spider-Man is a blast.

Spider-Man themed PS4 Pro

Marvel’s Spider-Man is a key release for Sony this fall, and to capitalize on the excitement, the company is releasing a special edition PS4 Pro in red with the white spider logo on it.

The bundle, which includes a copy of the game, is priced at Cdn$500. The PS4 Pro is PlayStation’s premium console that delivers 4K and HDR gaming. For those with a 4K HDR TV, that is.

You can preorder it now.

Last Wednesday on The Shift with Drex, we talked about Apple hitting a market capitalization of a trillion dollars, “inauthentic” Facebook accounts being dumped by the company, 3D printing handguns, and the use of facial recognition software by malls in Calgary.

This week, Apple’s revenues pushed the stock price high enough that the company is almost worth a trillion dollars. Plus, Calgary malls are using facial recognition software to track the movement of visitors. and 3D printers can be used to make firearms. But first, Facebook has taken some accounts offline for being “inauthentic”.

“Inauthentic” Facebook accounts taken offline

This week, Facebook pulled the pages of 32 accounts. The company was careful not to claim the accounts were trying to influence the U.S. midterm elections with disinformation, however, saying instead that they were involved in coordinated inauthentic behavior.

Unlike the obvious activity of the Russia-based Internet Research Agency leading up to the 2016 U.S. federal election, Facebook said it could not definitively identify the people or organizations behind the Facebook and Instagram accounts, in part “due to changes we’ve made over the last year to make this kind of abuse much harder”.

Former Facebook advisor Dipayan Ghosh told NPR that he believes the accounts were controlled by Russian influencers.

Ghosh also said he believes that the 32 accounts are a “drop in the bucket”.

What it means to be able to use 3D printers to make weapons

Defense Distributed, a Texas based company, wants to publish online gun frame blueprints that can be used with 3D printers. They’ve been blocked this week by judges who don’t want the plans to be available outside the U.S.

The truth is, such blueprints are already readily available. Since 3D printers have been available, the plans to print gun frames and gun parts have been available, too.

And, as Kyle Mizokami wrote in Popular Mechanics, it’s easier to purchase actual parts to build a gun than it is to print the parts out of plastic with a semi-reliable printer.

Calgary malls using facial recognition to track shoppers

Technically, no law is being broken. But if you live in Calgary and you’ve been to Chinook Centre or Market Mall, you’ve been tagged by facial recognition software.

In fact, it’s likely that malls across Canada are all doing it.

Because the mall owner, Cadillac Fairview, claims to not be “capturing or retaining images” they are not violating any privacy laws.

A spokesperson for the company told CBC that the software is only used to tag the gender and approximate age of people in the mall.

The software was captured running in the digital map kiosk at Chinook Centre.

While the use of the software might not be overtly violating any laws, the ethics of not explicitly notifying customers they are being watched is questionable.

Apple on the verge of being a trillionaire

Apple made more than US$50 billion in the last quarter. It’s projecting some $60 billion for the next one, which is a more than 15 percent bump over the last Q4.

Despite the concerns of some about the saturation of iPhones, Apple sold a few more than last year. The premium price on models like the iPhone X helped contribute to the booming revenues.

All of that success puts the company’s market valuation at $935 billion.

Last night on The Shift with Drex, we talked about Disney’s decision to create new episodes of The Clone Wars for its upcoming streaming service, TV manufacturer TCL’s decision to enter Canada, what it means that the Roku Channel is coming to Canada, and Nathan Fillion as Nathan Drake in an Uncharted fan film.