The Morning After: Facebook exploited, useless Japanese gadgets

From beta to record breaker.
The rise and rise (and rise) of ‘Fortnite’

It’s safe to say that when a video game that counts Drake among its fans and has breakfast TV shows around the world discussing its effect on younger players, it has truly made it. No, we’re not talking about Grand Theft Auto, but Fortnite, Epic Games’ mass-multiplayer shooter that has more than 40 million players across consoles and PC, and continues to grow at a rapid pace.

When Fortnite launched as a paid Early Access game in July 2017, it was solely as a player vs. environment experience, but that was just the start. Here’s how it climbed its way to megahit.

The UK’s biggest sushi chain re-acquaints us with the word ‘chindogu’.Postmodern dining with the Japanese art of useless gadgets

The Japanese word “chindogu” covers a delightful range of terrible gadgets. It’s about vaguely genius concepts, ruined either in their execution or ambition. If you’ve seen the baby-floor-mop onesie or the upside-down umbrella for capturing rainwater, you’ve seen a chindogu. Yo Sushi, wanted to celebrate this ridiculous facet of Japanese culture, and invited Engadget’s Mat Smith to embarrass himself through a selection of crapgadgets and tasting dishes. Here are the GIFs that matter.

Using data harvested from 50 million profiles.
Whistleblower explains how Cambridge Analytica ‘exploited’ Facebook

Last night Facebook announced bans against Cambridge Analytica, its parent company and several individuals for allegedly sharing and keeping data that they had promised to delete. This data reportedly included information siphoned from hundreds of thousands of Amazon Mechanical Turkers that collected data from about 50 million accounts. That data reportedly turned into information used by the likes of Robert Mercer, Steve Bannon and the Donald Trump campaign for social media messaging and “micro-targeting” individuals based on shared characteristics. Now, the FTC might have to get involved.

But wait, there’s more…

The Morning After is a new daily newsletter from Engadget designed to help you fight off FOMO. Who knows what you’ll miss if you don’t Subscribe.

Craving even more? Like us on Facebook or Follow us on Twitter.

Have a suggestion on how we can improve The Morning After? Send us a note.