As of this week, players who owned a legitimate copy of Tron: Evolution they paid for but never played it, no longer can. From a report: Tron: Evolution, a tie-in game for the 2010 Tron: Legacy film, used SecurRom, a form of digital rights management (DRM), and publisher Disney hasn't paid its bill. This means Disney can no longer authenticate purchases and "unlock" copies of the game that people bought but haven't used yet. Players first noticed they couldn't play the game after purchasing it in October, but a thread on Reddit today brought more attention to the issue. "I often buy games on sales, but don't play them immediately," user Renusek said on Reddit. "Yesterday I decided to play Tron: Evolution, maybe even practice speedrunning it, so I install the game, try to activate it (game still uses SecuROM DRM) and... the serial key has expired (?!)." SecurROM is DRM software that companies attach to video games to make sure they aren't downloaded illegally. It was popular among big game publishers some years back, often causing havoc and annoyance to players.

The fastest-growing data center market segment returned to growth mode in the third quarter of 2019, with global hyperscale capex spending exceeding $31 billion, up 8 percent year over year. From a report: The $31 billion is the second-highest spending quarter in history in terms of the amount hyperscale operators -- led by Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft -- are spending on building, expanding and equipping data centers, according to IT research and market firm Synergy Research Group. "Hyperscale companies are in growth mode and revenue growth rates remain in strong double-digit territory, with aggregated third quarter revenues up 14 percent over 2018," said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst at Synergy Research Group. "Amazon, Google, Facebook and Alibaba are all growing much more rapidly than that. These expanding companies are highly reliant on bigger and better data center operations, which will drive continued growth in capex levels." Hyperscale data centers are giant facilities containing tens of thousands of servers and other IT products such as storage, networking and UPS hardware.

Media center app maker Plex officially launched its ad-supported video service with movies and TV shows from MGM, Warner Bros., Lionsgate and Legendary Wednesday. The service will be available in more than 200 countries and territories, making it the first ad-supported video service with a nearly global reach. From a report: Getting the rights to launch in so many countries was key to bringing ad-supported video to Plex, said CEO Keith Valory in a recent interview with Variety. "More than half of our users are outside of the U.S." The initial catalog will include thousands of movies and TV show episodes, according to Plex executives, with plans to add many more over time. Some titles will only be streaming in some territories, while others are being made available everywhere. At launch, users will have access to movies like "Rain Man," "Teen Wolf," "The Terminator," "American Ultra," "Frequency," "Hard Candy," "Ghost in the Shell," and more. Plex's free-to-watch catalog will initially be more heavily focused on movies than TV shows, but the company plans to add more TV content in the coming months.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: He was a former hacker from Alabama who styled himself a "disruptive technologist" and believed that he was using his data-mining expertise as a force for good. But then, in April, Virgil Griffith traveled to North Korea with a visa he had obtained from a diplomatic mission in New York City, going through China to circumvent an American travel ban. He gave a talk at a conference in Pyongyang about how to use cryptocurrency and blockchain technology to launder money, according to federal investigators. Now Mr. Griffith, 36, faces federal charges that he violated international sanctions. He was arrested on Thursday as he landed at Los Angeles International Airport.

Mr. Griffith, an American citizen who lives in Singapore and works for the Ethereum Foundation, is accused of conspiring with North Korea since August 2018. He appeared in federal court in Los Angeles last week and will eventually be brought to New York. He faces up to 20 years in prison. Though the United States government had denied Mr. Griffith permission to go to North Korea, he traveled there anyway in April and spoke at the Pyongyang Blockchain and Cryptocurrency Conference, according to a criminal complaint unsealed on Friday. During his speech and in discussions afterward, he provided information about how North Korea could use cryptocurrency to "achieve independence from the global banking system," the complaint said. He also later made plans "to facilitate the exchange" of a digital currency between North and South Korea. "We cannot allow anyone to evade sanctions, because the consequences of North Korea obtaining funding, technology, and information to further its desire to build nuclear weapons put the world at risk," said William F. Sweeney Jr., an assistant director-in-charge at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. "It's even more egregious that a U.S. citizen allegedly chose to aid our adversary."

Hacker magazine, 2600, where Mr. Griffith was a contributing writer, said on Twitter that what Mr. Griffith had done -- explaining the concept of cryptocurrency -- was not a crime. The magazine's editor, Emmanual Goldstein, said Mr. Griffith was incapable of doing what federal investigators have accused him of. "He would not help a murderous dictator," he said. "He's a typical hacker who loves technology and adventure."

Roberto Escobar, brother of the late drug lord Pablo Escobar, has announced a foldable smartphone that is "very difficult to break" thanks to the screen's "special type of plastic." The Escobar Fold 1, as it is called, significantly undercuts Samsung's Galaxy Fold and Huawei Mate X with a price of only $349. Neowin reports: While all the foldable phones announced so far have a price tag of at least $1,500+, the Escobar Fold 1 will be available from only $349 which includes free shipping and a case as well. It will be sold unlocked and work on all compatible networks worldwide. This makes it cheaper than other non-foldable flagship smartphones available in the market right now.

The drug lord's brother has been able to price the phone so low by cutting out the middlemen like networks and retailers. He is also preparing to file a $30 billion class-action lawsuit against Apple for scamming people and wants the company to "give some of their illegal profits back to the people." Like the Huawei Mate X, the Escobar Fold can be unfolded to turn it into a tablet with a screen size of 7.8-inches. The expanded AMOLED display has a 4:3 aspect ratio and an FHD+ resolution. The design language is different from the Samsung Galaxy Fold which features two separate displays, one of which folds.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Huawei's latest phone, which it unveiled in September -- the Mate 30 with a curved display and wide-angle cameras that competes with Apple's iPhone 11 -- contained no U.S. parts, according to an analysis by UBS and Fomalhaut Techno Solutions, a Japanese technology lab that took the device apart to inspect its insides. In May, the Trump administration banned U.S. shipments to Huawei as trade tensions with Beijing escalated. That move stopped companies like Qualcomm Inc. and Intel Corp. from exporting chips to the company, though some shipments of parts resumed over the summer after companies determined they weren't affected by the ban.

While Huawei hasn't stopped using American chips entirely, it has reduced its reliance on U.S. suppliers or eliminated U.S. chips in phones launched since May (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source), including the company's Y9 Prime and Mate smartphones, according to Fomalhaut's teardown analysis. Similar inspections by iFixit and Tech Insights Inc., two other firms that take apart phones to inspect components, have come to similar conclusions. With the Mate 30, audio chips supplied in older versions came from Cirrus Logic. In the newer Mate 30 models, chips were provided by NXP Semiconductors NV, a Dutch chip maker, according to Fomalhaut. Power amplifiers provided by Qorvo or Skyworks were replaced with chips from HiSilicon, Huawei's in-house chip design firm, the teardown analysis showed. A Huawei spokesman said it is the company's "clear preference to continue to integrate and buy components from U.S. supply partners. If that proves impossible because of the decisions of the U.S. government, we will have no choice but to find alternative supply from non-U.S. sources."

Amazon-owned home surveillance company Ring gave law enforcement a heat map that let police see all devices installed in an area, allowing them to view users down to the street level. CNET first reported the news. From a report: While the feature was removed in July, law enforcement could reportedly use the function to search for the concentration of cameras in a neighborhood, and even see circles drawn around individual user locations. The documents that revealed the feature were obtained by a privacy researcher and shared with the publication. The feature was so specific, according to CNET, that police could essentially obtain the specific location of Ring customers. While police can request videos from users through Ring, the company has denied that it provides information to law enforcement on who, specifically, owns their products. Ring said in a statement to CNET that zooming in on the map "would not provide actual device locations."

According to Motherboard, the FBI applied for a search warrant in October compelling Sony to provide data on a PlayStation 4 user who was allegedly part of a cocaine distribution network. The application even asks for what games the alleged drug dealer played, and his progress in them. From the report: "The Provider is hereby ordered to disclose the above information to the Government within 14 days of service of this warrant," the search warrant application, filed on October 22 in the Western District of Missouri, reads. The case revolves around Curtis Alexander, also known as "Dola," who the FBI alleges used PlayStation's online service to coordinate the sale of large quantities of cocaine.

"The CHS [Confidential Human Source] stated ALEXANDER was currently charging $34,000 per kilogram of cocaine. The CHS stated ALEXANDER utilizes the PlayStation username 'Speedola20,'" the application reads, referring to an unnamed informant for the FBI who helped investigate Alexander. The CHS said Alexander contacted them through the PlayStation game "during game." "The phase 'during game' is a reference to audio communication held during the CHS and ALEXANDER's participation in an online multi-player game," the application continues. "Investigators believe that ALEXANDER likely believes that audio communication during the course of his participation in an online game is secure. As such, ALEXANDER likely believes that he can use audio communication during game play on the PlayStation to arrange the details of a drug transaction." The FBI and CHS went on to setup a sting in which the Bureau surveilled Alexander selling the informant a bag of around 100 grams of white powder for $4,400, and Alexander told the CHS he wanted to talk again later that evening on the "game," the court document adds. The FBI asked for essentially all info that Sony may have held on the user, "including stored or preserved copies of emails, chats, or other messages sent to and from the Account, drafts of such, and the source destination addresses associated with each, the date and time at which each was sent, and the size and length of each," the search warrant application reads. It's not known if Sony provided the data.

Microsoft has fixed a vulnerability in its login system that could have been used to trick unsuspecting victims into giving over complete access to their online accounts. TechCrunch reports: The bug allowed attackers to quietly steal account tokens, which websites and apps use to grant users access to their accounts without requiring them to constantly re-enter their passwords. These tokens are created by an app or a website in place of a username and password after a user logs in. That keeps the user persistently logged into the site, but also allows users to access third-party apps and websites without having to directly hand over their passwords. Researchers at Israeli cybersecurity company CyberArk found that Microsoft left open an accidental loophole which, if exploited, could've been used to siphon off these account tokens used to access a victim's account -- potentially without ever alerting the user.

CyberArk's latest research, shared exclusively with TechCrunch, found dozens of unregistered subdomains connected to a handful of apps built by Microsoft. These in-house apps are highly trusted and, as such, associated subdomains can be used to generate access tokens automatically without requiring any explicit consent from the user. With the subdomains in hand, all an attacker would need is to trick an unsuspecting victim into clicking on a specially crafted link in an email or on a website, and the token can be stolen. [...] Luckily, the researchers registered as many of the subdomains they could find from the vulnerable Microsoft apps to prevent any malicious misuse, but warned there could be more.

The FBI warned in a letter to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) Monday that it considers mobile applications developed in Russia, including the popular photo-aging app "FaceApp," to be "potential counterintelligence threats." Axios reports: FaceApp is a Russian-owned mobile application that allows users to upload photos of themselves and see what they may look like at a different age. Experts warned about potential privacy and national security concerns when the app spiked in popularity this past summer, prompting Schumer to request that the FBI and Federal Trade Commission look into the matter in July. "The FBI considers any mobile application or similar product developed in Russia, such as FaceApp, to be a potential counterintelligence threat, based on the data the product collects, its privacy and terms of use policies, and the legal mechanisms available to the Government of Russia that permit access to data within Russia's borders." The agency goes on to say: "Russia's intelligence services maintain robust cyber exploitation capabilities [...] the [Russian Federal Security Service] can remotely access all communications and servers on Russian networks without making a request to ISPs."

The FBI said it will coordinate for notifications and investigations, and will work with applicable task forces if the app is perceived as a threat to "elected officials, candidates, political campaigns or political parties." Schumer said in a statement: "In light of FBI's warning that FaceApp, and similar applications developed in Russia, poses a potential counterintelligence threat to the United States, I strongly urge all Americans to consider deleting apps like FaceApp immediately and proceed with extreme caution when downloading apps developed in hostile foreign countries."

"On the 25th anniversary of the original Sony PlayStation, The Verge shares the story of the PlayStation supercomputers," writes Slashdot reader jimminy_cricket. From the report: Dozens of PlayStation 3s sit in a refrigerated shipping container on the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth's campus, sucking up energy and investigating astrophysics. It's a popular stop for tours trying to sell the school to prospective first-year students and their parents, and it's one of the few living legacies of a weird science chapter in PlayStation's history. Those squat boxes, hulking on entertainment systems or dust-covered in the back of a closet, were once coveted by researchers who used the consoles to build supercomputers. With the racks of machines, the scientists were suddenly capable of contemplating the physics of black holes, processing drone footage, or winning cryptography contests. It only lasted a few years before tech moved on, becoming smaller and more efficient. But for that short moment, some of the most powerful computers in the world could be hacked together with code, wire, and gaming consoles. "The game consoles entered the supercomputing scene in 2002 when Sony released a kit called Linux for the PlayStation 2," reports The Verge. Craig Steffen, senior research scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and his group hooked up between 60 and 70 PlayStation 2s, wrote some code, and built out a library.

"The PS3 entered the scene in late 2006 with powerful hardware and an easier way to load Linux onto the devices," the report adds. "Researchers would still need to link the systems together, but suddenly, it was possible for them to imagine linking together all of those devices into something that was a game-changer instead of just a proof-of-concept prototype."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Amazon Web Services has developed a more powerful version of its own chips to power services for cloud-computing customers, as well as some of AWS's own programs. AWS Chief Executive Andy Jassy on Tuesday introduced a second-generation chip, called Graviton2, aimed at general-purpose computing tasks. He didn't specify a release date. The company last year unveiled its first line of Graviton chips, which it said would support new versions of its main EC2 cloud-computing service. Prior to that, Amazon -- and other big cloud operators -- had almost exclusively used Intel Xeon chips. The company said at the time that the Graviton-backed cloud service would be available at a "significantly lower cost" than existing offerings run on Intel processors. Jassy said Intel is "a very close partner," but to push the envelope on prices, "we had to do some innovating ourselves."

"Amazon is using its 2015 acquisition of startup Annapurna Labs, which Jassy called a 'a big turning point for us,' to design its own chips," reports Bloomberg. "The new processor uses technology from SoftBank Group Corp. unit ARM Holdings, a standard that dominates in mobile phones."

Google CEO Sundar Pichai is adding another responsibility to his job: Pichai will also be the CEO of parent holding company Alphabet going forward, taking the helm from co-founder and longtime CEO Larry Page. From a report: Additionally, co-founder Sergey Brin will be resigning from his post as the president of Alphabet. Brin and Page jointly announced the leadership change in a blog post Tuesday afternoon, writing: "Alphabet and Google no longer need two CEOs and a President. Going forward, Sundar will be the CEO of both Google and Alphabet. He will be the executive responsible and accountable for leading Google, and managing Alphabet's investment in our portfolio of Other Bets."

Amazon is leveraging machine learning to fight fraud, audit code, transcribe calls, and index enterprise data. From a report: Today during a keynote at its Amazon Web Services (AWS) re:Invent 2019 conference in Las Vegas, the tech giant debuted Amazon Fraud Detector, a fully managed service that detects anomalies in transactions, and CodeGuru, which automates code review while identifying the most "expensive" lines of code. And those are just the tip of the iceberg. With Fraud Detector (in preview), AWS customers provide email addresses, IP addressees, and other historical transaction and account registration data, along with markers indicating which transactions are fraudulent and which are legitimate. Amazon takes that information and uses algorithms -- along with data detectors developed on the consumer business of Amazon's business -- to build bespoke models that recognize things like potentially malicious email domains and IP address formation. After the model is created, customers can create, view, and update rules to enable actions based on model predictions without relying on others.

The company behind Lyrics website Genius, Genius Media Group, is suing Google for "unethical, unfair and anticompetitive" behavior. From a report: Genius alleges that traffic to its site started to drop because its lyrics -- which are annotated by its contributors -- are being copied, and then published by Google via the tech giant's lyrics partner, LyricFind. The lawsuit was filed in New York on Tuesday (December 3) and seeks "no less than $50 million" in "combined minimum damages" from both Google and Canada-based LyricFind. "Defendants Google LLC and LyricFind have been caught red-handed misappropriating content from Genius's website, which they have exploited -- and continue to exploit -- for their own financial benefit." The suit reads: "One of Genius's primary services is the development and maintenance of a vast repository of annotated music lyrics, some of which are artist-supplied and many of which are transcribed and refined by a community of over two million Genius contributors."

Some Facebook employees recently told their managers that they were concerned about answering difficult questions about their workplace from friends and family over the holidays. What if Mom or Dad accused the social network of destroying democracy? Or what if they said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, was collecting their online data at the expense of privacy? So just before Thanksgiving, Facebook rolled out something to help its workers: a chatbot that would teach them official company answers for dealing with such thorny questions. From a report: If a relative asked how Facebook handled hate speech, for example, the chatbot -- which is a simple piece of software that uses artificial intelligence to carry on a conversation -- would instruct the employee to answer with these points: Facebook consults with experts on the matter. It has hired more moderators to police its content. It is working on A.I. to spot hate speech. Regulation is important for addressing the issue.

It would also suggest citing statistics from a Facebook report about how the company enforces its standards. The answers were put together by Facebook's public relations department, parroting what company executives have publicly said. And the chatbot has a name: the "Liam Bot." (The provenance of the name is unclear.)

Google is rolling out a way to directly message photos and chat with another user or users within the Google Photos app. From a report: The addition will allow users to quickly and easily share those one-off photos or videos with another person, instead of taking additional steps to build a shared album. The feature itself is simple to use. After selecting a photo and tapping share, you can now choose a new option "Send in Google Photos." You can then tap on the icon of your most frequent contacts or search for a user by name, phone number of email. The recipient will need a Google account to receive the photos, however, because they'll need to sign-in to view the conversation. That may limit the feature to some extent, as not everyone is a Google user. But with now a billion some Google Photos users out there, it's likely that more of the people you want to share will have an account, rather than not.

At its peak, one meltwater lake drained the equivalent of an Olympic-size swimming pool every three seconds. From a report: A cerulean lake consisting of glacial meltwater on the surface of the Greenland ice sheet, located about 18 miles from where the Store Glacier meets the sea in west Greenland, briefly became one of the world's tallest waterfalls during the course of five hours in July 2018. The waterfall, like many others on the ice sheet's surface, was triggered by cracks in the ice sheet. In the case of this one meltwater lake that scientists closely observed in July 2018, the water cascaded more than 3,200 feet to the underbelly of the glacier, where the ice meets bedrock. There, the water can help lubricate the base of the ice sheet, helping the ice move faster toward the sea.

The observations of scientists, armed with aerial drones and other high-tech equipment, of the partial lake drainage that resulted could help researchers better understand how surface melting of the ice sheet could affect its melt rate, and improve global sea level rise projections. Scientists are keenly interested in how meltwater on the surface of the Greenland ice sheet -- the largest contributor to global sea level rise -- acts to speed up the movement of ice toward the sea by lubricating the underside of the ice surface. The new study, published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that scientists are underestimating the number of melt ponds that partially, and rapidly, drain into the ice sheet each year. This means tweaks may be needed to the computer models used to predict sea level rise from Greenland.

Den Automation, the once-promising UK smart home startup that raised nearly $5.8 million via equity crowdfunding and boasted former Amstrad chief Bob Watkins as CEO, has agreed to go into liquidation, The Register reported Tuesday. From the report: Documents seen by this publication show Wilkin Chapman Business Solutions Limited has been appointed as liquidators, with Ian Michael Rose and Karen Tracey Potts the named practitioners. UK law prioritizes creditors according to a set order. Liquidators take precedence and shareholders get the leftover scraps. It's therefore extremely unlikely that any of the 1,104 investors who backed the company on Seedrs will see much -- or any -- of a return on their investment. Den Automation was founded in 2014 by Yasser Khattak, a 17-year-old wunderkind from Maidstone, Kent, who came up with the idea for the business while studying for his A Levels. Khattak subsequently dropped out to focus on the business full time. The concept behind Den Automation was simple. It built "smart" light switches and wall sockets that were visually indistinguishable from their "dumb" equivalents and could be installed by a layman, rather than a trained electrician.

Mozilla today removed four Firefox extensions made by Avast and its subsidiary AVG after receiving credible reports that the extensions were harvesting user data and browsing histories. From a report: The four extensions are Avast Online Security, AVG Online Security, Avast SafePrice, and AVG SafePrice. The first two are extensions that show warnings when navigating to known malicious or suspicious sites, while the last two are extensions for online shoppers, showing price comparisons, deals, and available coupons. Mozilla removed the four extensions from its add-ons portal after receiving a report from Wladimir Palant, the creator of the AdBlock Plus ad-blocking extension. Palant analyzed the Avast Online Security and AVG Online Security extensions in late October and found that the two were collecting much more data than they needed to work -- including detailed user browsing history, a practice prohibited by both Mozilla and Google.