An anonymous reader shares a report: Internet access available through mobile devices in Iran appears to be limited, according to several social media accounts that routinely track such developments. Cloudflare Radar, which monitors internet traffic on behalf of the internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare, said on Thursday that IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6), a standard widely used for mobile infrastructure, was affected.

"IPv6 address space in Iran dropped by 98.5 per cent, concurrent with IPv6 traffic share dropping from 12 per cent to 1.8 per cent, as the government selectively blocks internet access amid protests," read Cloudflare Radar's social post. NetBlocks, which tracks internet access and digital rights around the world, also confirmed it was seeing problems with connectivity through various internet providers in Iran. "Live network data show Tehran and other parts of Iran are now entering a digital blackout," NetBlocks posted on X.

Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford has responded to Borderlands 4 performance complaints by calling the game "a premium game made for premium gamers." Pitchford claimed customer service reports for performance issues represent "less than one percent of one percent" of players and told critics to "code your own engine and show us how it's done, please."

The game holds a Mixed rating on Steam despite reaching 300,000 concurrent players Sunday, a franchise record. Gearbox recommends DLSS and frame generation for 60+ fps at 1440p even on powerful hardware. Pitchford compared running the game on older hardware to driving "a monster truck with a leaf blower's motor."

Last week Steam and other major storefronts crashed, reports the Guardian, including Nintendo's eShop, PlayStation Store and Microsoft Store. They were all "unable to cope with the demand for Hollow Knight: Silksong, the long-awaited sequel to the critically acclaimed 2017 indie hit Hollow Knight." (which had sold 15 million copies): SilkSong's release triggered widespread outages, with thousands of users reporting issues trying to buy the game in the first few hours of its release. Many were unable to complete purchases, with error messages persisting for almost three hours after the launch... Despite the technical hiccups, within 30 minutes of going live Steam reported more than 100,000 active players, suggesting many had managed to secure their copies.
Aftermath says the "bug-tastic" phenomenon displaced everything except Counter-Strike 2 and Dota 2 on Steam's list of most-played games. The Guardian notes that "At least seven other new games have delayed their launch in the past two weeks to avoid a clash..."

"People have been spamming the chat and the comments of every single game showcase or news event with the words 'Where's Silksong?' for years," writes the Guardian's video games editor: I've never seen another indie game achieve this level of notoriety before it was even released... As VGC points out, Atari released a similar game on the same day as Silksong (Adventure of Samsara) and it had only 12 concurrent players on Steam.
They add that "the hype is justified". Eurogame called Silksong "beautiful, thrilling and cruel." PC Game said Silksong "glows with a level of precision and imagination that's hard to find anywhere else" and "will beat you, burn you, rub your face in the dirt, and then dazzle you with another piece of a haunted clockwork world."

But at least some of the demand also came from the game's low price of $20 in the U.S., suggests Slashdot reader UnknowingFool (with variable regional pricing). "At 5.2M wishes, it was the most wish listed game on Steam. In Brazil, the local price was 74.95 Brazil Real or 13.94 USD." In the age of $70+ AAA games with additional costs, not everyone celebrated the consumer friendly price. Some independent game developers have expressed concern that their games may not sell as well compared to Silksong and cannot afford to charge less.
From ScreenRant: Hollow Knight: Silksong's unbelievably low price point of just $19.99 is exceptionally good value for the consumer. It is an incredibly lengthy game that is only marginally more expensive than its predecessor... it is proving to be a source of controversy for other indie developers who believe it will distort players' expectations.

A former Memphis disc manufacturing employee has been sentenced to nearly five years in prison after stealing pre-release Blu-rays from his employer and leaking them online. While he received 21 months for copyright infringement, a concurrent firearm charge extended his total prison term to 57 months. TorrentFreak reports: In February, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted 37-year-old Steven Hale from Tennessee, a former employee of a disc manufacturing and distribution company in Memphis. While working at the unnamed company between 2021 and 2022, Hale allegedly stole numerous "pre-release" DVD and Blu-ray discs from his employer. These stolen discs contained many high-profile movie titles including "Spider-Man: No Way Home." In addition to the copyright infringement charge, Hale was also indicted for a firearm offense. When raiding his premises, law enforcement found a gun in a car that was registered in his name, which, for a felon, is a separate criminal offense.

Hale was sentenced at a federal court in Memphis yesterday, where Chief Judge Sheryl H. Lipman handed down a 57-month prison term, exactly in line with the U.S. government's recommendation. Two separate sentences will be served concurrently. Hale received 21 months for the theft and distribution of hundreds of pre-release movie discs. A longer sentence of 57 months was handed down for the firearm charge, which ultimately defines the total prison term. Judge Lipman also granted several requests by the defense. The court recommended that Hale be housed in a facility as close to Memphis as possible so he can be near his family. In addition, the defendant will be allowed to remain on bond and self-surrender to prison at a later date.

The 21-month sentence for the copyright infringement charge is substantially lower than the maximum of 60 months. This is in part the result of a guilty plea the defendant signed in May. After accepting responsibility, the prosecution agreed to drop other charges and recommend a sentence at the low end of the guideline range. Hale entered his guilty plea to Count Two of the indictment. The charge relates to his distribution of ten or more copies of copyrighted works, including pre-release movies, for commercial advantage and private financial gain. This includes the pre-release 'Spider-Man: No Way Home' disc, which is likely the source of the public leak.

Grow a Garden, a Roblox game created by a 16-year-old in just a few days, has shattered records for the most concurrent players in gaming history, surpassing Fortnite with over 21.6 million concurrent players at once. The Associated Press reports: Grow a Garden is as simple as its name suggests -- players can fill a plot of land with plants and animals, harvest and sell, trade or steal each others' bounty. The game is low stress, with an aesthetic reminiscent of Minecraft and a soundtrack of soothing classical tunes such as Mozart's Rondo Alla Turca playing in the background. Its popularity has further cemented Roblox' place not just in the gaming world but in popular culture -- for better or for worse, it's where the kids hang out.

Coincidence or not, Grow a Garden soared to popularity around the same time that Take-Two Interactive announced it would delay the launch of its wildly anticipated Grand Theft Auto 6 until next year. In late June, the gardening game logged 21.6 million concurrent players, surpassing Fortnite's previous record of 15.2 million according to Roblox. Analysts who follow Roblox's stock say Grow a Garden is helping boost the company's revenue and will push the company's quarterly earnings numbers above Wall Street's expectations.

While it's not clear if the GTA audience flocked to this simple gardening game to pass the time until then, the timing reignited the age-old debate about who gamers are and what titles are taken seriously by the video game establishment. It happened with Candy Crush, with puzzle games, with Animal Crossing. Are people who play cozy games true gamers? Or is the title reserved for the folks who shoot enemies in Call of Duty or drive around creating mayhem in GTA?

Thursday was Rust's 10-year anniversary for its first stable release. "To say I'm surprised by its trajectory would be a vast understatement," writes Rust's original creator Graydon Hoare. "I can only thank, congratulate, and celebrate everyone involved... In my view, Rust is a story about a large community of stakeholders coming together to design, build, maintain, and expand shared technical infrastructure." It's a story with many actors:

- The population of developers the language serves who express their needs and constraints through discussion, debate, testing, and bug reports arising from their experience writing libraries and applications.

- The language designers and implementers who work to satisfy those needs and constraints while wrestling with the unexpected consequences of each decision.

- The authors, educators, speakers, translators, illustrators, and others who work to expand the set of people able to use the infrastructure and work on the infrastructure.

- The institutions investing in the project who provide the long-term funding and support necessary to sustain all this work over decades.

All these actors have a common interest in infrastructure.
Rather than just "systems programming", Hoare sees Rust as a tool for building infrastructure itself, "the robust and reliable necessities that enable us to get our work done" — a wide range that includes everything from embedded and IoT systems to multi-core systems. So the story of "Rust's initial implementation, its sustained investment, and its remarkable resonance and uptake all happened because the world needs robust and reliable infrastructure, and the infrastructure we had was not up to the task." Put simply: it failed too often, in spectacular and expensive ways. Crashes and downtime in the best cases, and security vulnerabilities in the worst. Efficient "infrastructure-building" languages existed but they were very hard to use, and nearly impossible to use safely, especially when writing concurrent code. This produced an infrastructure deficit many people felt, if not everyone could name, and it was growing worse by the year as we placed ever-greater demands on computers to work in ever more challenging environments...

We were stuck with the tools we had because building better tools like Rust was going to require an extraordinary investment of time, effort, and money. The bootstrap Rust compiler I initially wrote was just a few tens of thousands of lines of code; that was nearing the limits of what an unfunded solo hobby project can typically accomplish. Mozilla's decision to invest in Rust in 2009 immediately quadrupled the size of the team — it created a team in the first place — and then doubled it again, and again in subsequent years. Mozilla sustained this very unusual, very improbable investment in Rust from 2009-2020, as well as funding an entire browser engine written in Rust — Servo — from 2012 onwards, which served as a crucial testbed for Rust language features.
Rust and Servo had multiple contributors at Samsung, Hoare acknowledges, and Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Huawei, and others "hired key developers and contributed hardware and management resources to its ongoing development." Rust itself "sits atop LLVM" (developed by researchers at UIUC and later funded by Apple, Qualcomm, Google, ARM, Huawei, and many other organizations), while Rust's safe memory model "derives directly from decades of research in academia, as well as academic-industrial projects like Cyclone, built by AT&T Bell Labs and Cornell."

And there were contributions from "interns, researchers, and professors at top academic research programming-language departments, including CMU, NEU, IU, MPI-SWS, and many others." JetBrains and the Rust-Analyzer OpenCollective essentially paid for two additional interactive-incremental reimplementations of the Rust frontend to provide language services to IDEs — critical tools for productive, day-to-day programming. Hundreds of companies and other institutions contributed time and money to evaluate Rust for production, write Rust programs, test them, file bugs related to them, and pay their staff to fix or improve any shortcomings they found. Last but very much not least: Rust has had thousands and thousands of volunteers donating years of their labor to the project. While it might seem tempting to think this is all "free", it's being paid for! Just less visibly than if it were part of a corporate budget.

All this investment, despite the long time horizon, paid off. We're all better for it.
He looks ahead with hope for a future with new contributors, "steady and diversified streams of support," and continued reliability and compatability (including "investment in ever-greater reliability technology, including the many emerging formal methods projects built on Rust.")

And he closes by saying Rust's "sustained, controlled, and frankly astonishing throughput of work" has "set a new standard for what good tools, good processes, and reliable infrastructure software should be like.

"Everyone involved should be proud of what they've built."

Steam has broken its record for the most PC players online, with 38,366,479 concurrent gamers. As IGN notes, that figure is a million more than the previous record, set last month. From the report: So, what helped propel Steam to new heights over the weekend? All the usual suspects were in the top 10 most-played games on Valve's platform, including Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2, Banana (yes, Banana has yet to split), and PUBG, with this year's Black Myth: Wukong, Satisfactory 1.0, Space Marine 2, and Valve's own Deadlock putting in work. Last week saw PlayStation exclusives God of War Ragnarok and Final Fantasy 16 both launch on Steam for the first time, which will have provided a modest boost, too.

The popularity of Steam is gradually increasing as Valve's vice-like grip on the PC market tightens ever further. Competitors such as the Epic Games Store and CD Projekt's GOG occupy a relatively small piece of the PC gaming pie, with Steam continuing to enjoy record-breaking success even amid perceived downturns in the video game industry. The release of Steam Deck is yet another platform on which Steam operates.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is exploring the possibility of directly converting radiation from nuclear reactors into electricity using radiovoltaics, a technology that could potentially revolutionize nuclear power generation by moving beyond traditional steam turbine methods. The agency is requesting information and suggestions on this topic in an RFI released on August 1st. Nuclear News reports: There's got to be a better way": Methods to convert the energy of nuclear fission reactions and the decay of radioisotopes into electricity have not evolved since the invention of radioisotope power systems and fission reactors over 70 years ago and remain unoptimized," the RFI says. They rely on thermal heat transfer, and "in each step of this indirect conversion method neutrons, heat, and energy are lost to the shielding material, working fluid, and other system materials." Advanced reactor designs that use alternative coolants, including helium, sodium, and salts, would still use what DARPA calls "heritage nuclear power conversion technology" with water and steam as the working fluids, as would the fusion power plants being planned today.

Why now? Tabitha Dodson, the program manager for DARPA DSO, which is launching the RFI, told Nuclear News that "two big things" are driving the interest. "One is the extreme surge of investment in small and advanced nuclear technologies, such as in fusion and space reactors, which do not have a concurrent pairing of advanced power generation methods that doesn't involve liquid-based heat transfer," she said. "Next, there has been an order of magnitude improvement in radiation tolerance and efficiency for voltaics in recent years with encouraging performance that indicates radiovoltaics could scale up as an array usable in nuclear reactors." [...]

What is the ask?: The RFI asks: "Is it possible to achieve [a] direct energy conversion nuclear power system, ranging in power from 10s of watts electric (We) to 100s of kWe?" DARPA wants information "on the potential to improve specific power greater than 1 We/kg conversion from watts-thermal per radiation emission product," and information on the potential to improve damage tolerance of the voltaic to nuclear radiation to reach an operating lifetime comparable to the life of its nuclear source, on the scale of decades. "We will learn what our boundary conditions are when respondents tell us what technologies in the field of voltaics are possible, and we'll use that to see if there is sufficient scientific rationale make a case to present for further DARPA investment," Dodson said. "I also hope people are going to start thinking about nuclear systems that use electromagnetic versus thermal-kinetic methods to harvest nuclear energetic reactions."

Intel has announced plans for a substantial workforce reduction, surpassing initial expectations, as part of a comprehensive strategy to bolster its financial position and streamline operations. The company intends to lay off over 16,000 employees, representing more than 15% of its global workforce, with the majority of these cuts slated for completion by the end of 2024, according to the firm's second-quarter earnings report released on Thursday.

Concurrent with the workforce reductions, Intel has outlined plans to significantly curtail its capital expenditures, projecting a decrease of over 20% to a range of $25 to $27 billion in 2024, with further reductions anticipated in 2025. This shift in focus towards capital efficiency comes as the company achieves its goal of developing five process nodes in four years, signaling a recalibration of investment levels to align with market demands. As part of its financial restructuring, Intel has also made the decision to suspend its quarterly dividend starting in the fourth quarter of 2024, prioritizing liquidity to support strategic investments. The cumulative effect of these cost-saving initiatives is expected to yield over $10 billion in savings by 2025.

With the help of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), an international team of astronomers discovered a galaxy at a redshift of 14.32, indicating it existed just 290 million years post-Big Bang. In a NASA release today, Stefano Carniani from Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy, and Kevin Hainline from the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona, described how this source was found and what its unique properties tell us about galaxy formation: "The instruments on Webb were designed to find and understand the earliest galaxies, and in the first year of observations as part of the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES), we found many hundreds of candidate galaxies from the first 650 million years after the big bang. In early 2023, we discovered a galaxy in our data that had strong evidence of being above a redshift of 14, which was very exciting, but there were some properties of the source that made us wary. The source was surprisingly bright, which we wouldn't expect for such a distant galaxy, and it was very close to another galaxy such that the two appeared to be part of one larger object. When we observed the source again in October 2023 as part of the JADES Origins Field, new imaging data obtained with Webb's narrower NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) filters pointed even more toward the high-redshift hypothesis. We knew we needed a spectrum, as whatever we would learn would be of immense scientific importance, either as a new milestone in Webb's investigation of the early universe or as a confounding oddball of a middle-aged galaxy.

In January 2024, NIRSpec observed this galaxy, JADES-GS-z14-0, for almost ten hours, and when the spectrum was first processed, there was unambiguous evidence that the galaxy was indeed at a redshift of 14.32, shattering the previous most-distant galaxy record (z = 13.2 of JADES-GS-z13-0). Seeing this spectrum was incredibly exciting for the whole team, given the mystery surrounding the source. This discovery was not just a new distance record for our team; the most important aspect of JADES-GS-z14-0 was that at this distance, we know that this galaxy must be intrinsically very luminous. From the images, the source is found to be over 1,600-light years across, proving that the light we see is coming mostly from young stars and not from emission near a growing supermassive black hole. This much starlight implies that the galaxy is several hundreds of millions of times the mass of the Sun! This raises the question: How can nature make such a bright, massive, and large galaxy in less than 300 million years?

The data reveal other important aspects of this astonishing galaxy. We see that the color of the galaxy is not as blue as it could be, indicating that some of the light is reddened by dust, even at these very early times. JADES researcher Jake Helton of Steward Observatory and the University of Arizona also identified that JADES-GS-z14-0 was detected at longer wavelengths with Webb's MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument), a remarkable achievement considering its distance. The MIRI observation covers wavelengths of light that were emitted in the visible-light range, which are redshifted out of reach for Webb's near-infrared instruments. Jake's analysis indicates that the brightness of the source implied by the MIRI observation is above what would be extrapolated from the measurements by the other Webb instruments, indicating the presence of strong ionized gas emission in the galaxy in the form of bright emission lines from hydrogen and oxygen. The presence of oxygen so early in the life of this galaxy is a surprise and suggests that multiple generations of very massive stars had already lived their lives before we observed the galaxy.

All of these observations, together, tell us that JADES-GS-z14-0 is not like the types of galaxies that have been predicted by theoretical models and computer simulations to exist in the very early universe. Given the observed brightness of the source, we can forecast how it might grow over cosmic time, and so far we have not found any suitable analogs from the hundreds of other galaxies we've observed at high redshift in our survey. Given the relatively small region of the sky that we searched to find JADES-GS-z14-0, its discovery has profound implications for the predicted number of bright galaxies we see in the early universe, as discussed in another concurrent JADES study (Robertson et al., recently accepted). It is likely that astronomers will find many such luminous galaxies, possibly at even earlier times, over the next decade with Webb. We're thrilled to see the extraordinary diversity of galaxies that existed at Cosmic Dawn!

"What if the big tech companies achieved their ultimate business goal — maximizing engagement on their platforms — in a way that has undermined our ability to function as an open society?"

That's the question being asked by Chuck Todd, chief political analyst for NBC News: What if they realized that when folks agree on a solution to a problem, they are most likely to log off a site or move on? It sure looks like the people at these major data-hoarding companies have optimized their algorithms to do just that. As a new book argues, Big Tech appears to have perfected a model that has created rhetorical paralysis. Using our own data against us to create dopamine triggers, tech platforms have created "a state of perpetual disagreement across the divide and a concurrent state of perpetual agreement within each side," authors Frank McCourt and Michael Casey write, adding: "Once this uneasy state of divisive 'equilibrium' is established, it creates profit-making opportunities for the platforms to generate revenue from advertisers who prize the sticky highly engaged audiences it generates."

In their new book, "Our Biggest Fight," McCourt (a longtime businessman and onetime owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers) and Casey are attempting a call to action akin to Thomas Paine's 18th century-era "Common Sense." The book argues that "we must act now to embed the core values of a free, democratic society in the internet of tomorrow." The authors believe many of the current ills in society can be traced to how the internet works. "Information is the lifeblood of any society, and our three-decade-old digital system for distributing it is fatally corrupt at its heart," they write. "It has failed to function as a trusted, neutral exchange of facts and ideas and has therefore catastrophically hindered our ability to gather respectfully to debate, to compromise and to hash out solutions.... Everything, ultimately, comes down to our ability to communicate openly and truthfully with one another. We have lost that ability — thanks to how the internet has evolved away from its open, decentralized ideals...."

Ultimately, what the authors are imagining is a new internet that essentially flips the user agreement 180 degrees, so that a tech company has to agree to your terms and conditions to use your data and has to seek your permission (perhaps with compensation) to access your entire social map of whom and what you engage with on the internet. Most important, under such an arrangement, these companies couldn't prevent you from using their services if you refused to let them have your data... Unlike most anti-Big Tech books, this one isn't calling for the breakup of companies like Meta, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft or Apple. Instead, it's calling for a new set of laws that protect data so none of those companies gets to own it, either specifically or in the aggregate...

The authors seem mindful that this Congress or a new one isn't going to act unless the public demands action. And people may not demand this change in our relationship with tech if they don't have an alternative to point to. That's why McCourt, through an organization he founded called Project Liberty, is trying to build our new internet with new protocols that make individual data management a lot easier and second nature. (If you want to understand the tech behind this new internet more, read the book!)
Wait, there's more. The article adds that the authors "envision an internet where all apps and the algorithms that power them are open source and can be audited at will. They believe that simply preventing these private companies from owning and mapping our data will deprive them of the manipulative marketing and behavioral tactics they've used to derive their own power and fortunes at the expense of democracy."

And the NBC News analyst seems to agree. "For whatever reason, despite our societal fear of government databases and government surveillance, we've basically handed our entire personas to the techies of Silicon Valley."

Longtime Slashdot reader FudRucker quotes a report from Study Finds: Researchers from Northwestern University, Boston College, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a new synaptic transistor that works just like the human brain. This advanced device, capable of both processing and storing information simultaneously, marks a notable shift from traditional machine-learning tasks to performing associative learning -- similar to higher-level human cognition. This study introduces a device that operates effectively at room temperatures, a notable improvement over previous brain-like computing devices that required extremely cold conditions to keep their circuits from overheating. With its fast operation, low energy consumption, and ability to retain information without power, the new transistor is well-suited for real-world applications.

"The brain has a fundamentally different architecture than a digital computer," says study co-author Mark Hersam, the Walter P. Murphy Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering, in a university release. "In a digital computer, data move back and forth between a microprocessor and memory, which consumes a lot of energy and creates a bottleneck when attempting to perform multiple tasks at the same time. On the other hand, in the brain, memory and information processing are co-located and fully integrated, resulting in orders of magnitude higher energy efficiency. Our synaptic transistor similarly achieves concurrent memory and information processing functionality to more faithfully mimic the brain."

Hersam and his team employed a novel strategy involving moire patterns, a type of geometric design formed when two patterns are overlaid. By stacking two-dimensional materials like bilayer graphene and hexagonal boron nitride and twisting them to form a moire pattern, they could manipulate the electronic properties of the graphene layers. This manipulation allowed for the creation of a synaptic transistor with enhanced neuromorphic functionality at room temperature. The device's testing involved training it to recognize patterns and similarities, a form of associative learning. For instance, if trained to identify a pattern like "000," the transistor could distinguish that "111" is more similar to "000" than "101," demonstrating a higher level of cognitive function. This ability to process complex and imperfect inputs has significant implications for real-world AI applications, such as improving the reliability of self-driving vehicles in challenging conditions. The study has been published in the journal Nature.

"Structured concurrency is a new way to use multithreading in Java," reports InfoWorld.

"It allows developers to think about work in logical groups while taking advantage of both traditional and virtual threads." Available in preview in Java 21, structured concurrency is a key aspect of Java's future, so now is a good time to start working with it... Java's thread model makes it a strong contender among concurrent languages, but multithreading has always been inherently tricky. Structured concurrency allows you to use multiple threads with structured programming syntax. In essence, it provides a way to write concurrent software using familiar program flows and constructs. This lets developers focus on the business at hand, instead of the orchestration of threading.

As the JEP for structured concurrency says, "If a task splits into concurrent subtasks then they all return to the same place, namely the task's code block." Virtual threads, now an official feature of Java, create the possibility of cheaply spawning threads to gain concurrent performance. Structured concurrency provides the simple syntax to do so. As a result, Java now has a unique and highly-optimized threading system that is also easy to understand...

Between virtual threads and structured concurrency, Java developers have a compelling new mechanism for breaking up almost any code into concurrent tasks without much overhead... Any time you encounter a bottleneck where many tasks are occurring, you can easily hand them all off to the virtual thread engine, which will find the best way to orchestrate them. The new thread model with structured concurrency also makes it easy to customize and fine-tune this behavior. It will be very interesting to see how developers use these new concurrency capabilities in our applications, frameworks, and servers going forward.
It involves a new class StructuredTaskScope located in the java.util.concurrent library. (InfoWorld points out that "you'll need to use --enable-preview and --source 21 or --source 22 to enable structured concurrency.")

Their reporter shared an example on GitHub, and there's more examples in the Java 21 documentation. "The structured concurrency documentation includes an example of collecting subtask results as they succeed or fail and then returning the results."

A long-time Slashdot reader writes: Continuing the seemingly industry-wide trend towards enshitification of the Subscription Video on Demand (SVOD) marketplace, Max today announced that it will be making changes to the current Ad-Free plan. To wit, 4K HDR with Dolby Atmos will be removed and concurrent streams will decrease from three to two.

In other words, you are paying the same price for less features. If you wish to keep the features you've had all along, all you have to do is upgrade to Ultimate Ad-Free at a 33% premium for the annual plan or 25% increase for monthly. No news yet on a crackdown of password sharing, however, that seems inevitable as the industry races to the bottom.

Meet the new cable boss, same as the old, except, they bring death by several small cuts instead of a single large one.

India's JioCinema broke the global record for the most concurrent views to a live streamed event on Monday, eclipsing a long-standing milestone set by Disney's Hotstar, as the Asian tycoon Mukesh Ambani spares no expense in expanding his digital empire. From a report: The Indian streaming app, whose partner includes James Murdoch's Bodhi Tree-backed Viacom18, surpassed the record Monday evening, attracting over 32 million concurrent viewers to the final game of the 16th edition of Indian Premier League cricket tourney between Chennai Super Kings and Gujarat Titans.

The top US cryptocurrency enforcement tsar is promising a crackdown on illicit behaviour on digital platforms, saying the scale of crypto crime has grown "significantly" in the past four years. From a report: The Department of Justice is targeting crypto exchanges along with the "mixers and tumblers" that obscure the trail of transactions, Eun Young Choi, who was appointed director of the agency's national cryptocurrency enforcement team last year, told the Financial Times in an interview. The DoJ is targeting companies that commit crimes themselves or allow them to happen, such as enabling money laundering, she said. "But on top of that, they're allowing for all the other criminal actors to easily profit from their crimes and cash out in ways that are obviously problematic to us," she added. "And so we hope that by focusing on those types of platforms, we're going to have a multiplier effect."

Choi said the focus on platforms would "send a deterrent message" to businesses that are skirting anti-money laundering or client identification rules, and who were not investing in solid compliance and risk mitigation procedures. Choi heads a new unit focused on criminal misuse of digital assets as the US under the administration of President Joe Biden has emerged as one of the jurisdictions with the toughest stance on crypto worldwide. "We're seeing the scale and the scope of digital assets being used in a variety of illicit ways grow significantly over the last, say, four years," she said. "I think that is concurrent with the increase of its adoption by the public writ large."

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit tech consortium that manages various open source efforts, today announced the launch of the TLA+ Foundation to promote the adoption and development of the TLA+ programming language. AWS, Oracle and Microsoft are among the inaugural members. From a report: What is the TLA+ programming language, you ask? It's a formal "spec" language developed by computer scientist and mathematician Leslie Lamport. Best known for his seminal work in distributed systems, Lamport -- now a scientist at Microsoft Research -- created TLA+ to design, model, document and verify software programs -- particularly those of the concurrent and distributed variety.

To give a few examples, ElasticSearch, the organization behind the search engine of the same name, used TLA+ to verify the correctness of their distributed systems algorithms. Elsewhere, Thales, the electrical systems manufacturing firm, used TLA+ to model and develop fault-tolerant modules for its industrial control platform. "TLA+ is unique in that it's intended for specifying a system, rather than for implementing software," a Linux Foundation spokesperson told TechCrunch via email. "Based on mathematical concepts, notably set theory and temporal logic, TLA+ allows for the expression of a system's desired correctness properties in a formal and rigorous manner."

It's not HBO Max -- soon it's just going to be Max. From a report: Warner Bros. Discovery officially announced Max as the new name of its flagship streamer, lopping off the HBO part of the name as it mixes in a big bucket of new content from Discovery+ and other new original series. The company announced the name change at a press event Wednesday, where it also revealed a slate of upcoming projects. The rebuilt Max (on the web at max.com) is set to launch first in the U.S. on May 23, featuring what the company promises will be an average of more than 40 new titles and TV show seasons every month. "Max is the one to watch," WBD CEO David Zaslav said on stage at the event, featuring thousands of shows and movies on the service for every member of the household.

According to the service's website, Max will be available in three different versions. The first two plans align with the existing HBO Max pricing, and WBD said current HBO Max customers will not see their pricing change (for now) when the new service debuts. The third tier, "Max Ultimate," expands to up to four streams and includes 4K content. The trio of options are:
Max Ad-Lite ($9.99/month or $99.99/year): Two concurrent streams, 1080p HD resolution, no offline downloads, 5.1 surround sound quality
Max Ad Free ($15.99/month or $149.99/year): Two concurrent streams, 1080p HD, up to 30 offline downloads, 5.1 surround sound quality
Max Ultimate Ad Free ($19.99/month or $199.99/year): Four concurrent streams, up to 4K Ultra HD resolution, 100 offline downloads, Dolby Atmos sound quality

Department of Justice: A complaint was unsealed this morning in federal court in Brooklyn charging Anatoly Legkodymov, a Russian national and senior executive of Bitzlato Ltd. (Bitzlato), a Hong Kong-registered cryptocurrency exchange, with conducting a money transmitting business that transported and transmitted illicit funds and that failed to meet U.S. regulatory safeguards, including anti-money laundering requirements. Legkodymov was arrested last night in Miami and is scheduled to be arraigned this afternoon in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. French authorities and the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) are taking concurrent enforcement actions.

According to court documents, Legkodymov is a senior executive and the majority shareholder of Bitzlato Ltd. (Bitzlato), a Hong Kong-registered cryptocurrency exchange that operates globally. Bitzlato has marketed itself as requiring minimal identification from its users, specifying that "neither selfies nor passports [are] required." On occasions when Bitzlato did direct users to submit identifying information, it repeatedly allowed them to provide information belonging to "straw man" registrants. As a result of these deficient know-your-customer (KYC) procedures, Bitzlato allegedly became a haven for criminal proceeds and funds intended for use in criminal activity. Bitzlato's largest counterparty in cryptocurrency transactions was Hydra Market, an anonymous, illicit online marketplace for narcotics, stolen financial information, fraudulent identification documents, and money laundering services that was the largest and longest running darknet market in the world. Hydra Market users exchanged more than $700 million in cryptocurrency with Bitzlato, either directly or through intermediaries, until Hydra Market was shuttered by U.S. and German law enforcement in April 2022. Bitzlato also received more than $15 million in ransomware proceeds.

Alongside reaching 32 million concurrently online users, Steam has also just surpassed 10 million concurrent in-game players for the first time. From a report: The news was shared by SteamDB, and it shows the milestones were reached on Saturday, January 7, where the in-game concurrents were at 10,082,055 million and the concurrently online users -- those who are simply on Steam but not necessarily playing a game -- were at 32,186,301. As for what these millions of people were playing, the #1 played game in the past 24 hours as of this writing was Counter-Strike: Global Offensive at 1.08 million concurrent players. Sitting behind Counter-Strike were DOTA 2 (766,096), Goose Goose Duck (605,694), PUBG: Battlegrounds (439,944), and Apex Legends (367,585).