Why I'll Be Using Xbox One Instead Of PS4 For All My Online Gaming Going Forward

Credit: Epic Games

I"ve put time, effort and money into my Fortnite: Battle Royale account, linked to my PS4. I"ve got the John Wick skin with the Glider to match. I"ve got Raven, Lightshow, Super Striker and a few more premium skins. I"ve got a fully-levelled Carbide and I"ll have The Visitor as soon as some people land in Snobby Shores so I can kill them. I have a little home in the game, a locker where all my past achievements and indulgences sit in a nice little stack. When season 5 starts, however, I"m packing it in. I"ll start a new account on my Xbox One and go from there. I"ll do the same for all other games going forward.

Last week, Sony put its foot in it and has, after some apparent consideration, decided to leave it there. Epic Games released Fortnite: Battle Royale on Switch to expected fanfare, giving people who want to play the game on the go a much more accurate option than the excellent if lacking mobile port. The dream was clear: I could play Fortnite on PS4 at home, and then use my Switch when I was on the road or just out of the house. But that"s not how Sony saw its dream, and it"s locked my account out of ever playing on Switch. The company hasn"t exactly been supportive of crossplay in the past, but this is the first time it"s caused it any serious trouble.

With this looking hostility to crossplay lurking in the background, it leaves me wondering if I"ll get left behind in other games if I start my account on PS4 if and when a Switch port appears. The Switch won"t get every major game, but it will get some, and it doesn"t appear that Sony has any intention of letting its platform play nice any time soon--it"s also just easier to keep these things all in one place. The Xbox One works just fine, thank you very much, and I may as well just play here: watch the free market at work.

Am I certain to run into crossplay or cross-progression problems if I"m playing a game on PS4? No, I"m not. Crossplay is a relatively new phenomenon in the industry and not all that widespread. But Fortnite is instructive about how things can go wrong even if you didn"t necessarily expect them to: when I first started playing I just booted it up on PS4 like I usually do, and it was fun when I found I could move my progression to mobile or PC. But I had grown accustomed to his, and so when I wanted to play on Switch I was pretty annoyed to find out I"d have to start my Battle Pass all the way over. It"s not the worst problem, but it"s one place where the Xbox One now has a clear, inarguable advantage. As a multiplatform player with the choice to migrate it feels like the only natural move.

Going forward, it just seems silly to invest time into levelling an account on Sony if crossplay might be in the cards sometime in the future, and I have to imagine some other multiplatform players are feeling the same way.

Right now, this isn"t such a bee in Sony"s bonnet. I already have a PS4 Pro, and so the company loses out on a small amount of PSN percentages if I buy my V-Bucks on Xbox Live. But that"s now. If this continues to be a problem, this could be the reason that people choose to buy the next Xbox over the next PlayStation in what appears to be an increasingly crossplay friendly future. And that"s not just a bee in Sony"s bonnet, it"s a hornet in its hat.

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Smugglers Caught Using Drones to Drop $80 Million Worth of iPhones Into China

Chinese customs officers have arrested smugglers who attempted to drop millions of dollars worth of iPhones from drones into China.

Twenty-six suspects were arrested in China recently after they tried to use drones to fly two 660-foot cables from Hong Kong to Shenzhen, according to Reuters. Those cables were going to be used to lift iPhones worth 500 million yuan ($ 79.6 million) to the mainland, where they could be sold via the black market for a hefty profit, according to the report. A local Chinese report from the Legal Daily said it was the first time drones were employed to smuggle phones.

The operation was set to go off at night, where smugglers would pack small bags with approximately 10 iPhones and attach them to the drones. Those drones would then fly from Hong Kong to the mainland in just a matter of seconds. According to Reuters, the smugglers had the ability to transport up to 15,000 iPhones each night.

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Smuggling of high-value products—like iPhones, jewelry, and luxury products—is nothing new in China. In fact, the government has been working hard to crackdown on the practice and do a better job of breaking up what has become an increasingly powerful black market.

Smuggling gangs often steal devices or buy them at a deeply reduced rate and sell them for a higher price in China. They’re careful, however, to keep their prices below the going rate for those who purchase products legitimately. The result is a profitable business for smugglers and an opportunity for Chinese consumers to get authentic goods at a cheaper price.

Despite breaking up the drone attempt, Shenzhen officials warned that smuggling would continue. According to Reuters, the customs officers are planning to use several types of equipment to thwart other attempts by the smugglers.

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China busts smugglers using drones to transport smartphones: state media

BEIJING (Reuters) - Customs officers in southern China’s technology hub Shenzhen busted a group of criminals using drones to smuggle 500 million yuan ($ 79.8 million) worth of smartphones from Hong Kong to Shenzhen, the official Legal Daily reported on Friday.

Authorities arrested 26 suspects who used drones to fly two 200-meter (660-feet) cables between Hong Kong and the mainland to transport refurbished iPhones with a total value of 500 million yuan, the paper said in a report on the crackdown by Shenzhen and Hong Kong customs.

“It’s the first case found in China that drones were being used in cross-border smuggling crimes,” the Legal Daily reported, citing a news conference held by Shenzhen customs on Thursday.

The smugglers usually operated after midnight and only needed seconds to transport small bags holding more than 10 iPhones using the drones, the report quoted customs as saying. The gang could smuggle as many as 15,000 phones across the border in one night, it said.

Regulating the use of drones has become an important task for China, the world’s largest manufacturer of consumer drones.

China published strict rules last year to tackle incidents of drones straying into aircraft flight paths, including requiring owners of civilian drones to register craft up to a certain weight under their real names.

Shenzhen customs was quoted by the Legal Daily as saying it would closely monitor new types of smuggling with high-tech devices and enhance their capability with technical equipment, including drones and high-resolution monitors, to detect smuggling activity.

Reporting by Lusha Zhang and Se Young Lee; Editing by Paul Tait

Tech

Beware of Pranksters Crashing Apple iPhones Using Twitter

If you’re an Apple iPhone user who also enjoys Twitter, listen up.

Pranksters on the social media service have been sharing a character from the Indian Telugu language that causes iPhones to crash, according to Mashable. The offending users have been putting the character into their Twitter usernames and tweets and encouraging people to share them with their friends. If the character lands in a user’s Twitter feed, it will cause the social app to crash. The app will continue to crash after users try to boot it back up, ultimately stopping victims from accessing the service on their iPhones.

Last week, reports surfaced saying that a single Telugu character was enough to wreak havoc on iPhones. When the character is sent via any messaging or social networking app, the affected user’s app will crash. While it’s an obscure bug that only affects Apple’s iOS 11, it’s one that pranksters and those trying to cause harm are exploiting across the Internet. Worst of all, there’s no fix at the moment and unsuspecting victims needn’t do anything to be affected.

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Apple acknowledged the Telugu bug last week and has promised a fix. The company hasn’t yet delivered, though, and it’s impossible to say when it’ll be released.

According to Mashable, which tested the bug on Twitter, the only way for affected users to regain access to the app is to log in via Safari and block the person that shared the character. At that point, the character won’t show up in their feeds and Twitter will be accessible.

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Self-Driving Cars Companies Are Using Remote Babysitters, And More Car News This Week

Is there anything more satisfying than finder a quicker way to your destination? You might be in a car, or on foot, or you’re building a software product or a company culture and suddenly—Jeez, that was easier.

Sometimes, it works. As transportation editor Alex Davies reported this week, companies building self-driving cars have found that it"s important—necessary, even—to use remote drivers, sitting behind screens miles away, if they want to get their less-than-perfect tech on the road. Sweet. Alex also took a look at Nuro, a brand new self-driving mini-truck startup that wants to deliver your snacks to you, so you never have to leave your block again. Also sweet.

Sometimes, however, shortcuts are a bad idea. Uber bought an ex-Waymo engineer’s autonomous truck startup because it thought the engineer"s company could give it a tech boost. But Waymo sued, and the two tech giants are set to face off in court next week. State governments thought they could go green quickly by buying “recycled” pavement—but they might not be saving money, or the environment, in the long run. Pick your timesavers carefully, kiddos.

Plus, news about an Alphabet company"s new effort to organize cities" travel data, a Pax Britannica among tech companies for the purpose of building safer streets (and protecting their business models), and a place to find everything you have ever wanted to know about autonomous vehicles. Let’s get you caught up.

Headlines

Stories you might have missed from WIRED this week

• A blockbuster trade secrets lawsuit between Waymo and Uber is set to kick off Monday. Here’s what you need to know about the self-driving tech dispute—and why you really, really must pay attention.

• Alex uncovers a secret fact about the growing autonomous vehicle sector: Almost every tech developer is leaning on remote drivers, who can guide cars through problem spots from miles away. Self-driving...to a point. For safety’s sake, of course.

• Ford looks out into the horizon and sees the sunset of the personal automobile—in cities, at least. So it’s building a cloud platform, an operating system for the city of the future.

• Sidewalk Labs, Alphabet’s urban solutions company, is doing something similar, trying to put all public and private city transportation data in one, accessible, shareable space. Say hello to its new spin-off company, Coord.

• Fifteen tech companies came together to sign onto ten new, very nice-sounding “commandments” for livable cities. They include open data, equity, and a zero-emission future. But don’t give anyone too much credit. Those companies still have to make actual changes to the way cities operate, writer Jack Stewart warns.

• A new report suggests American public transit needs to adapt to meet the future—and can’t blame all its problems, or pin all its hopes, on mobility companies like Uber and Lyft.

• In a vague-ish announcement, Waymo says it’s purchasing “thousands” of new Chrysler Pacificas that will operate without a driver at the wheel.

• Hello to Nuro, a new self-driving delivery truck startup from fancy Google alums. The company is betting it can deliver stuff sans humans in three to five years.

• I take a deep dive into the science of “green” pavement. If done wrong, pavement could hurt the local ecosystem; if done right, that black and grey stuff beneath your feet could do its part to save the world.

• Need to get up to speed on what self-driving cars even mean? Check out WIRED’s new guide, a constantly updated deep dive.

Car-Table Hybrid of the Week

The world is a wide and wondrous place, so of course you can plunk down some undetermined sum of money to buy a car frozen into a table, à la Han Solo Chez Jabba. The specially commissioned, 10-car/table collection is from the chrome nerds at Discommon.

Discommon

Required Reading

News from elsewhere on the internet.

• Because Uber and Waymo shouldn’t have all the fun, this week the beseiged electric car company Faraday Future filed suit against its former CFO’s new startup—for trade secret theft.
• Joby Aviation, which has raised $ 130 million in funding, unveils its new flying car cough electric plane-drone hybrid cough. The company wants to operate its own airborne ride-hailing service.
• Self-driving vehicle startup Phantom AI gets into a scary crash while operating semiautonomous features—and while TechCrunch reporters were inside.
• Uber teams up with electric bicycle-sharing company Jump for a San Francisco pilot project. Users will be able to track down a bike and and pay for a ride within Uber’s app.
• California startup Udelv staged an autonomous vehicle grocery delivery in the Bay Area this week. It wants dozens more of its orange robots on the roads soon.
• If you’re the type of car nerd who watches the Super Bowl for the commercials, here’s everything you need to know before the game.
• Is this German man a hero or a villain?

In the Rearview

Essential Stories from WIRED’s canon

India"s Silicon Valley nearly doubled in population in less than two decades. But it turns out you can"t take shortcuts to economic development without caring for the natural resources. Last May, Samanth Subramanian explored why Bangalore, once land of hundreds of lakes, is now dying of thirst.

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