Bits Blog: A Software Feud Ends, at Least for Today

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Bits Blog: The Latest to Disclose Government Requests, Yahoo Reveals the Least

Emmanuel Dunand/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s chief executive, in May. She and the company’s general counsel, Ron Bell, said in a statement Monday that Yahoo would issue its first global law enforcement transparency report later this summer.

Following in the footsteps of Facebook, Microsoft and Apple, Yahoo disclosed late Monday some broad data about the number of requests that American law enforcement authorities had made for data about its users.

From Dec. 1, 2012, to May 31, 2013, the Internet company received between 12,000 and 13,000 requests from the government, related to everything from local crimes to terrorism investigations under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. “The most common of these requests concerned fraud, homicides, kidnappings, and other criminal investigations,” the company said in a post on Tumblr, the blogging platform it recently acquired.

Unlike the other companies, which have been criticized for disclosing too little information, Yahoo did not specify how many users were included in the 12,000 to 13,000 requests.

But like the other companies, Yahoo said that the government would not permit it to break out more specific data on the number of FISA data requests, which the government considers so secret that companies aren’t supposed to even acknowledge their existence.

Yahoo went to a secret intelligence court in 2008 and challenged the government’s requests under FISA as unconstitutional, but lost the case. It subsequently joined the government’s secret Prism surveillance program.

In its post, signed by its chief executive, Marissa Mayer, and its general counsel, Ron Bell, Yahoo said it would continue to press for more disclosure of FISA data.

Yahoo said it would also issue later this summer its first global law enforcement transparency report, which will cover the first half of the year, and will continue making similar reports every six months.

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 18, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated when Yahoo disclosed information about the requests for user data it received from American government agencies. Yahoo disclosed the information on Monday, not Friday.

Limbo Follow-Up Project 2 is ‘At Least 2 Years Away’

Limbo developer PlayDead’s second game isn’t coming any time soon. In an interview with IGN, game director Arnt Jensen said that Project 2 is “at least two years away” and that PlayDead is taking the time it needs to get it right.

“We took a lot of financial risk to release Limbo only when we felt it was ready and we are prepared to do so again,” Jensen said. According to PlayDead boss Dino Patti, while the developer acknowledges that financial risk, it isn’t something that impacts PlayDead’s actions. “Money is never the primary factor when we make decisions,” Patti told IGN.

While Project 2 won’t be available in the near future, when it does go on sale it won’t be hard to release on multiple platforms. According to PlayDead, the game is built on the Unity engine, which allows it to be extremely flexible as far as porting. Does this mean the game will also be available for next-gen systems? “We always want as many people as possible to play and Unity makes it easy to come out on different platforms,” Jensen said. “With our own technology, we spent a lot of time and money porting Limbo. With Unity this will be easier.”

This image is all we've seen of Project 2 so far.

As the codename implies, Project 2 is PlayDead’s second game, following the successful Limbo, which sold more than one million copies worldwide. While we don’t know much about the game so far, a listing for Project 2 on the Danish government’s website last month revealed that the game is a “puzzle platform/adventure” and is listed as coming to PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PC and Mac.

According to a description in that listing, Project 2 "tells the story of a boy's struggle against evil forces trying to take over the world through questionable experiments on human bodies." Few details are available, but in the past Patti said that Project 2 is “more crazy” than Limbo as well as “more 3D than you would think,” and that it’s “more weird” than Limbo in “many ways.”

Despite that comment, Jensen noted that some elements from Project 2 may come from ideas cut from Limbo. "We always experiment with ideas," he said. "Many ideas were cut [from Limbo], right up until the very end. We're still working with some of the ideas that didn't make it into Limbo."

Keep checking back to IGN for more information on PlayDead’s Project 2 as it’s released. For more information about the Unity engine’s scalable possibilities, check out our rundown of Unity’s possibilities.