An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: On Monday, Intel introduced FakeCatcher, which it says is the first real-time detector of deepfakes -- that is, synthetic media in which a person in an existing image or video is replaced with someone else's likeness. Intel claims the product has a 96% accuracy rate and works by analyzing the subtle "blood flow" in video pixels to return results in milliseconds. Ilke Demir, senior staff research scientist in Intel Labs, designed FakeCatcher in collaboration with Umur Ciftci from the State University of New York at Binghamton. The product uses Intel hardware and software, runs on a server and interfaces through a web-based platform.

Unlike most deep learning-based deepfake detectors, which look at raw data to pinpoint inauthenticity, FakeCatcher is focused on clues within actual videos. It is based on photoplethysmography, or PPG, a method for measuring the amount of light that is absorbed or reflected by blood vessels in living tissue. When the heart pumps blood, it goes to the veins, which change color. With FakeCatcher, PPG signals are collected from 32 locations on the face, she explained, and then PPG maps are created from the temporal and spectral components. "We take those maps and train a convolutional neural network on top of the PPG maps to classify them as fake and real," Demir said. "Then, thanks to Intel technologies like [the] Deep Learning Boost framework for inference and Advanced Vector Extensions 512, we can run it in real time and up to 72 concurrent detection streams."

"FakeCatcher is a part of a bigger research team at Intel called Trusted Media, which is working on manipulated content detection -- deepfakes -- responsible generation and media provenance," she said. "In the shorter term, detection is actually the solution to deepfakes -- and we are developing many different detectors based on different authenticity clues, like gaze detection." The next step after that will be source detection, or finding the GAN model that is behind each deepfake, she said: "The golden point of what we envision is having an ensemble of all of these AI models, so we can provide an algorithmic consensus about what is fake and what is real." Rowan Curran, AI/ML analyst at Forrester Research, told VentureBeat by email that "we are in for a long evolutionary arms race" around the ability to determine whether a piece of text, audio or video is human-generated or not.

"While we're still in the very early stages of this, Intel's deepfake detector could be a significant step forward if it is as accurate as claimed, and specifically if that accuracy does not depend on the human in the video having any specific characteristics (e.g. skin tone, lighting conditions, amount of skin that can be see in the video)," he said.

An anonymous reader writes that Seagate Technology has launched its second generation dual actuator MACH.2 series hard drives. "Computing power, storage capacities, and storage performance: all must continue moving forward in order for technology innovators to solve humanity's greatest challenges," boasts Seagate's page for the drives: MACH.2 is the world's first multi-actuator hard drive technology, containing two independent actuators that transfer data concurrently. MACH.2 solves the need for increased performance by enabling parallelism of data flows in and out of a single hard drive. By allowing the data center host computer to request and receive data from two areas of the drive simultaneously, MACH.2 doubles the IOPS performance of each individual hard drive.... MACH.2 provides up to 2x performance — with two independent actuators and data paths, it enables concurrent I/O streams to and from the host.
Seagate claims it offers "optimal latency" by improving sequential peformance to double data transfer rates over single-actuator drives.

And in other news, Seagate is selling hard drives with commemorative Star Wars themes, including the Mandalorian drive, the Grogu drive, and the Boba Fett drive. (It's in addition to Seagate's officially licensed external drive for God of War Ragnarök — optimised for PS4 and PS5, delivering "the ability to play PS4 games directly from the drive.") Seagate also made drives commemorating Marvel's Avengers and Spider-Man, and now has new drives for Marvel's Black Panther: Wakanda Forever .

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland shares this announcement from the EFF's DeepLinks blog:

This weekend, EFF is celebrating the life and work of programmer, activist, and entrepreneur Aaron Swartz by participating in the 2022 Aaron Swartz Day and Hackathon. This year, the event will be held in person at the Internet Archive in San Francisco on Nov. 12 and Nov. 13. It will also be livestreamed; links to the livestream will be posted each morning.

Those interested in attending in-person or remotely can register for the event here.

Aaron Swartz was a digital rights champion who believed deeply in keeping the internet open. His life was cut short in 2013, after federal prosecutors charged him under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) for systematically downloading academic journal articles from the online database JSTOR. Facing the prospect of a long and unjust sentence, Aaron died by suicide at the age of 26....

Those interested in working on projects in Aaron's honor can also contribute to the annual hackathon, which this year includes several projects: SecureDrop, Bad Apple, the Disability Technology Project (Sat. only), and EFF's own Atlas of Surveillance. In addition to the hackathon in San Francisco, there will also be concurrent hackathons in Ecuador, Argentina, and Brazil. For more information on the hackathon and for a full list of speakers, check out the official page for the 2022 Aaron Swartz Day and Hackathon.
Speakers this year include Chelsea Manning and Cory Doctorow, as well as Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle, EFF executive director Cindy Cohn, and Creative Commons co-founder Lisa Rein.

TuSimple, a self-driving trucking company, said Monday it had fired its chief executive and co-founder, Xiaodi Hou. From a report: The San Diego-based company said in a news release and securities filing that its board of directors on Sunday had ousted Mr. Hou, who was also the board chairman and chief technology officer. Mr. Hou was fired in connection with a continuing investigation by members of the board, the release said. That review "led the board to conclude that a change of Chief Executive Officer was necessary," the company said in the release.

The securities filing said that the board's investigation found that TuSimple this year shared confidential information with Hydron, a trucking startup with operations mostly in China and funded by Chinese investors. The filing also said that TuSimple's decision to share the confidential information hadn't been disclosed to the board before TuSimple entered into a business deal with Hydron. TuSimple said it didn't know whether Hydron shared, or publicly disclosed, the confidential information, the securities filing said. WSJ, reporting on Sunday: TuSimple faces federal investigations into whether it improperly financed and transferred technology to a Chinese startup, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

The people said the concurrent probes by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Securities and Exchange Commission and Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., known as Cfius, are examining TuSimple's relationship with Hydron, a startup that says it is developing autonomous hydrogen-powered trucks and is led by one of TuSimple's co-founders.

Investigators at the FBI and SEC are looking at whether TuSimple and its executives -- principally Chief Executive Xiaodi Hou -- breached fiduciary duties and securities laws by failing to properly disclose the relationship, the people familiar with the matter said. They are also probing whether TuSimple shared with Hydron intellectual property developed in the U.S. and whether that action defrauded TuSimple investors by sending valuable technology to an overseas adversary, the people said.

Steam launched in 2003 — and as recently as 2015, its record for concurrent users logged into the service was 10 million people, reports Kotaku (growing to 14 million in 2017, and by March of 2020, rising up to 20 million).

But now it's jumped another 50% — just two and a half years: We got to 28 million users earlier this year — more than the entire populations of countries like Australia and Taiwan — and now, in late October, we've hit the nice round number of 30 million, with the peak number of users logged on earlier today standing at 30,032,005.

Note that this isn't the number of people playing at any one time, just the number of people logged into the platform, a feat that's often achieved simply by turning your PC on. If you want to know the number of users actually in a game at that time, SteamDB figures put the peak at around 8.5 million, which is still an enormous figure, and a big jump (proportionally) even from earlier in 2022, when the highest number of active players stood at "between seven and eight million".

Adobe thinks it has the answer to Netflix's "password sharing" problem that involves up to 46 million people, according to a 2020 study. TorrentFreak reports: Adobe believes that since every user is different, any actions taken against an account should form part of a data-driven strategy designed to "measure, manage and monetize" password sharing. The company's vision is for platforms like Netflix to deploy machine learning models to extract behavioral patterns associated with an account, to determine how the account is being used. These insights can determine which measures should be taken against an account, and how success or otherwise can be determined by monitoring an account in the following weeks or months. Ignoring the obviously creepy factors for a moment, Adobe's approach does seem more sophisticated, even if the accompanying slide gives off a file-sharing-style "graduated response" vibe. That leads to the question of how much customer information Adobe would need to ensure that the right accounts are targeted, with the right actions, at the right time.

Adobe's Account IQ is powered by Adobe Sensei, which in turn acts as the intelligence layer for Adobe Experience Platform. In theory, Adobe will know more about a streaming account than those using it, so the company should be able to predict the most effective course of action to reduce password sharing and/or monetize it, without annoying the account holder. But of course, if you're monitoring customer accounts in such close detail, grabbing all available information is the obvious next step. Adobe envisions collecting data on how many devices are in use, how many individuals are active, and geographical locations -- including distinct locations and span. This will then lead to a "sharing probability" conclusion, along with a usage pattern classification that should identify travelers, commuters, close family and friends, even the existence of a second home.

Given that excessive sharing is likely to concern platforms like Netflix, Adobe's plan envisions a period of mass account monitoring followed by an on-screen "Excessive Sharing" warning in its dashboard. From there, legal streaming services can identify the accounts most responsible and begin preparing their "graduated response" towards changing behaviors. After monetizing those who can be monetized, those who refuse to pay can be identified and dumped. Or as Adobe puts it: "Return free-loaders to available market." Finally, Adobe also suggests that its system can be used to identify customers who display good behavior. These users can be rewarded by eliminating authentication requirements, concurrent stream limits, and device registrations.

There's a new metaverse project from the creators of the "Bored Apes Yacht Club" NFTs. Last night they held a "virtual land" sale, reports Bloomberg, raising nearly a third of a billion dollars.

At about the same time, Mashable noticed something else happening: If you were trying to complete a transaction on the Ethereum network last night, you might have been taken aback by the ridiculously high gas fees you saw.

For example, one user purchased a $25 NFT on Saturday evening. Their total price? $3,325. That's $3,300 just in fees.
Every transaction on their blockchain incurs a fee (which rises based on the number of concurrent transactions), the article points out. "Ethereum transactions can fail if a user doesn't pay enough in gas fees. When this happens, not only does the transaction not go through, but the user is still charged the gas fee."

"Ethereum proved unusable for hours due to its inability to distribute the load..." reports CNET. "Someone tweeted a picture of them trying to send $100 in crypto from one wallet to another, showing it required $1,700 in gas fees....

"Over $175 million was spent on gas alone."

Mashable adds: An overwhelmed Ethereum Network....caused fees to skyrocket to astronomically high amounts.... One cryptocurrency advocate noticed that from just the Bored Ape's NFT sale, approximately $100 million were wasted during the first hour of the "land" sale in gas fees alone.

As mentioned earlier, transactions can often fail when the Ethereum network is facing unusually high traffic. And last night, many people paid thousands in gas fees for transactions that didn't even go through.

Yuga Labs says it will refund users those fees, but it's unclear just how the company plans to do that. Also, Yuga Labs will ostensibly only cover the fees from failed transactions directly involving the company. If you're a user who was attempting an unrelated transaction, you can say goodbye to those thousands in lost fees....

However, there was at least one winner from the Saturday night sale: Yuga Labs. The owner of the Bored Ape Yacht Club brand raked in $285 million from the NFT sale.
Transaction costs just to mint the Otherdeed NFTs after the launch "reached $123 million," reports Bloomberg, "with each Otherdeed requiring about $6,000, or two Ether, in transaction fees to mint, according to data from Etherscan — or more than the price of the deed itself." Yuga Labs apologised on Twitter for "turning off the light on Ethereum", and suggested the possibility of establishing an ApeCoin blockchain.

"Lost Ark has comfortably passed 1 million concurrent players after just 24 hours, becoming the second most played game in Steam history by concurrent counts," reports the Verge: The Diablo-like MMO launched Friday in the West, after Amazon Games collaborated with Smilegate RPG to localize and translate Lost Ark and make it available in English. It has now passed concurrent records for both Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Dota 2, which regularly dominate the top of Steam's most-played games.

Lost Ark is so popular right now that it has experienced server issues and there's a queue just to start playing. SteamDB lists concurrent players of Lost Ark at 1,311,842, passing CS:GO's record of 1,308,963 players and Dota 2's of 1,295,114. It's not clear exactly how many of those players are actually actively playing the game and not sitting in a server queue, though.

Either way, it's now second place on the top concurrent list behind only PUGB...
The article notes it's Amazon's second big hit after its game New World "set a concurrent record of 913,634 players four months ago."

GameSpot also spotted a playful clause in the game's terms of service. It specifies that while players must be human (and not AI), that doesn't apply if Earth is taken over by robots, simians, or aliens. "In that event, Amazon said these beings will be allowed to play Lost Ark and other games. 'We welcome our alien, robots, ape, or other overlords, as applicable,' Amazon said."

Earlier this week, The Verge reported that Microsoft now has 145 million people using its Microsoft Teams communications app, an increase of 26 percent over last year's reported 115 million daily active users. From the report: To put the 145 million figure in perspective, at the beginning of the pandemic, Microsoft had around 32 million daily active users of Microsoft Teams. That jumped to 75 million in a matter of weeks, and these numbers have more than doubled since even the early days of the pandemic. It's an impressive amount of growth, just as Microsoft has been aggressively pushing businesses to move to the cloud and adopt Teams over the past year.

As always, it's difficult to compare to rival services. Google and Zoom don't reveal daily active users and opt for a more vague daily active participants. This means a single user could be counted multiple times if they participate in different meetings during a day. Zoom revealed it had 300 million daily active participants last year, and Google said last year it had 100 million daily active participants. Slack revealed it had 12.5 million concurrent users during the beginning of the pandemic last year, but the company has shied away from daily active user counts ever since.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Variety: AMC Theatres, the world's largest cinema chain, has raised $917 million in new equity and debt capital, the company said on Monday. "This increased liquidity should allow the company to make it through this dark coronavirus-impacted winter," the company said, adding that its "financial runway has been extended deep into 2021." AMC has raised the finances from Dec. 14, 2020. Of the $917 million, AMC has raised $506 million of equity, from the issuance of 164.7 million new common shares, along with the previously announced securing of $100 million of additional first-lien debt and the concurrent issuance of 22 million new common shares to convert $100 million of second-lien debt into equity.

In addition, the company has executed commitment letters for $411 million of incremental debt capital in place through mid-2023, unless repaid before then, through the upsizing and refinancing of its European revolving credit facility. The chain says that it presumes that it will continue to make progress in its ongoing dialogue with theater landlords about the amounts and timing of owed theater lease payments, and is hopeful that the ongoing vaccination push will result in an increase in cinema attendance. As a result, AMC shares soared 36% in premarket trade Monday.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) made her Twitch debut last night to play Among Us and quickly became one of the platform's biggest broadcasters. According to Twitch, her stream peaked at 435,000 viewers around the time of her first match. The Verge reports: That peak viewership puts her broadcast among the 20 biggest streams ever, according to the third-party metrics site TwitchTracker, and much higher if you're only looking at broadcasts from individual streamers. Ninja holds the record for an individual streamer, with more than 600,000 viewers during a Fortnite match with Drake in 2018. TwitchTracker's metrics suggest that AOC's stream could in the top 10 for an individual in terms of peak viewers.

Ocasio-Cortez's stream came together quickly. She tweeted Monday asking, "Anyone want to play Among Us with me on Twitch to get out the vote?" Major streamers quickly signed up -- she ended up being joined by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Pokimane, HasanAbi, Disguised Toast, DrLupo, and more. Her stream even had graphics prepared, which Ocasio-Cortez said came from supporters who started making art after she tweeted. Despite only having minimal Among Us experience -- Ocasio-Cortez said Monday that she'd never played before, but seemed to have brushed up before the stream -- she did well in her first broadcast. She was chosen as an impostor in the first round and, with a partner, knocked out about half the field before getting caught. Omar later made it to the final three as an impostor before getting voted out by Ocasio-Cortez and Hasan.

"It's the end of a rocky journey..." writes the Verge. After six years of developing the free first-person shooter game Crucible, Amazon launched the game in May, yanked it into closed beta in July, and then 14 weeks later cancelled the game altogether. Ars Technica reports: This followed the game's formal delisting from Steam in July, which followed painfully low concurrent player counts (as low as 200) that made it difficult for players to successfully matchmake with each other. Though the game launched with considerable attention, including a promotional blitz on the Amazon-owned game-streaming platform Twitch, it only briefly maintained a player population exceeding 10,000 users.
"...ultimately we didn't see a healthy, sustainable future ahead [for] Crucible," explains a blog post from Amazon's Crucible team. The Verge reports: The developers will be hosting a "a final playtest and community celebration" in the next few weeks, according to the blog. Once that's done, matchmaking will be disabled, but you'll be able to play custom games (which are expected to be available in the coming days) until 3PM ET on November 9th. The company also says that it will be offering a full refund for any purchases you might have made...

Crucible developers will be moved to other Amazon Games titles, including New World, Amazon's upcoming massively multiplayer online game. That game, which is currently set to launch in spring 2021, has had its own set of challenges, including two delays. And we're also still waiting on the release of Pac-Man Live Studio, a version of Pac-Man that you can play directly on Twitch. Amazon said in May that the game would launch in June, but it's still not out, and the game's website only says that it's "coming soon."

This week saw the release of the 2020 Ruby on Rails Community Survey Results: 2,049 members of the Rails community from 92 countries kindly contributed their thoughts on tools, frameworks, and workflows in their day to day development lives. From these responses we hope to get an understanding of where Rails stands as a framework in 2020.

Some of these questions have been asked since our original survey over a decade ago, and show how the community has evolved over the last twelve years. Inside.com's developer newsletter summarized some of the results: - The typical Rails developer is self-taught, has been working with Rails 4-7 years, and works remotely...

- Rails developers overwhelmingly choose lightweight solutions like jQuery over larger frameworks.

- Most of the developers surveyed feel Rails is still relevant, although they were split on whether or not the Rails core team is moving in the right direction, with 48% totally agreeing with that sentiment.
According to the results, 24% of survey respondents primarily developing on Linux, while 73% used Mac OS X (leaving just 3% using Windows or "Other"). Yet the most popular editor was Microsoft's Visual Studio Code (used by 32% of respondents), followed by Vim-based editors (21%), Sublime (16%), RubyMine (15%), Atom (9%), Emacs (3%), and TextMate (2%).

The survey also asked the size of development teams for "your primary Rails application."

• A team of one - 17%
• Two to four - 35%
• Five to eight - 19%
• Eight to 15 - 13%
• 16 to 25 - 6%
• 25-50 - 5%
• 50-plus - 5%

Meanwhile, in a recent talk, Ruby creator Yukihiro Matsumoto confirmed that Ruby 3 will finally be released this Christmas, December 25, bringing a new pattern-matching syntax, right-hand-side variable assignment, and numbered block parameters.

He also promised improvements to help make Ruby more fast, more concurrent, and more correct. (Though "We don't pursue completeness nor soundness of the type systems, because, you know, Ruby is Ruby. Ruby is basically dynamically typed...")

As the ads boycott grows, Mark Zuckerberg shows no sign of backing down. From a report: "My guess is that all these advertisers will be back on the platform soon enough" the Facebook chief executive has said. Campaigners accuse the tech firm of being too slow and reluctant to remove some hateful content. But Zuckerberg added: "We're not going to change our policies or approach on anything because of a threat to a small percent of our revenue." The comments were made to Facebook staff at a private meeting last Friday, and were subsequently leaked to the Information news site. The social network has confirmed they are accurate and also announced a fresh development: its chief executive is to meet the organisers of the boycott - Stop Hate for Profit. It illustrates the concurrent ways Facebook is dealing with the matter. The first is to be publicly conciliatory: offer smaller changes and hit home its message that hate has no place on the platform. The second is to privately play down the impact of the boycott: reassure advertisers and resist any fundamental changes to Facebook's business model.

Little more than a month after a much-hyped entry into big-budget video games, Amazon is pulling back "Crucible," its new free-to-play PC shooter, and moving the title to closed beta. From a report: "Crucible" is developed by Amazon-owned Relentless Studios, and in a blog post on Tuesday, franchise lead Colin Johanson cited the need to "focus on providing the best possible experience for our players as we continue to make the game better." The game has failed to generate much positive traction. The Verge said "lackluster characters, combat, and art style made it largely forgettable" and that "Crucible" also suffered from "a bit of an identity crisis by trying to be a bit of everything at once." According to Business Insider, "Crucible" had around 25,000 concurrent players at peak, the day after its launch. Two days after launch, it had already disappeared from Steam's top 100 -- a list of most-played games on Steam that bottoms out around 5,000 concurrent players. Players who have downloaded the game will still be able to play it through Steam. "One of the biggest changes you'll see is that we're going to schedule dedicated time each week when we as devs will be playing with the community and soliciting feedback," Johanson wrote. "When we exit beta, it will be based on your feedback and the metrics that we see in-game."

Just like nearly everything else on the internet, streaming services are ruled by recommendation algorithms that are designed to predetermine what people want before they ask for it. WarnerMedia is trying to accomplish the opposite with HBO Max. From a report: The company's new streaming service, which will allow for three concurrent streams, is positing itself as a human-first platform -- the opposite of Netflix's strategy. As streaming becomes more of a centerpiece in people's homes and more platforms find their way to people's television sets, focusing on improving the actual curation system subscribers use is just as important as available content, Sarah Lyons, senior vice president of product experience, told The Verge. CNET adds: Like rivals Netflix and Disney Plus, HBO Max has a sprawling catalog of hit shows and movies, plus a big-budget slate of exclusive originals packed with stars. But HBO Max is the most expensive of the bunch. New subscribers can sign up and pay a simple $15 a month subscription after a week-long free trial, the same price HBO already charges for its linear channel on most pay-TV providers and for its preexisting standalone streaming service, HBO Now. But if you're already paying for HBO in some form, the amount you'll have to pay for Max now, or whether you have to pay anything extra at all... well, it's complicated. "The question is: Does your provider have to deal with us for Max and do you move over? That answer will be fairly simple, and then beyond that it gets a little more complicated," Andy Forssell, the general manager of WarnerMedia's streaming operation, said in an interview last week. "We've got really broad distribution, and ... midnight next Tuesday we'll be where we are -- not that that's an end point, if there any discussions undone." To entice you to give it a try, HBO Max has padded itself with more content than you'll find on either the regular HBO channel or HBO Now.

In a landmark acknowledgment of the toll that content moderation takes on its workforce, Facebook has agreed to pay $52 million to current and former moderators to compensate them for mental health issues developed on the job. The Verge reports: In a preliminary settlement filed on Friday in San Mateo Superior Court, the social network agreed to pay damages to American moderators and provide more counseling to them while they work. Each moderator will receive a minimum of $1,000 and will be eligible for additional compensation if they are diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder or related conditions. The settlement covers 11,250 moderators, and lawyers in the case believe that as many as half of them may be eligible for extra pay related to mental health issues associated with their time working for Facebook, including depression and addiction.

Under the terms of the settlement, every moderator will receive $1,000 that can be spent however they like. But the companies intend for the money to be spent partly on medical treatment, covering the costs associated with seeking a diagnosis related to any mental health issues the moderator may be suffering. The amount of money a moderator will receive beyond the initial $1,000 will depend on their diagnosis. Anyone who is diagnosed with a mental health condition is eligible for an additional $1,500, and people who receive multiple concurrent diagnoses -- PTSD and depression, for example -- could be eligible for up to $6,000. In addition to payment for treatment, moderators with a qualifying diagnosis will be eligible to submit evidence of other injuries they suffered for their time at Facebook and could receive up to $50,000 in damages. The exact amount of the payout depends on how many members of the class apply for benefits, and it could shrink significantly if the majority of the class is found to be eligible for benefits. In the settlement, Facebook also agreed to roll out changes to its content moderation tools, such as muting audio by default and changing videos to black and white. These tools will be rolled out to 80 percent of moderators by the end of this year and 100 percent of moderators by 2021.

Additionally, "Moderators who view graphic and disturbing content on a daily basis will also get access to weekly, one-on-one coaching sessions with a licensed mental health professional," the report says. "Workers who are experiencing a mental health crisis will get access to a licensed counselor within 24 hours, and Facebook will also make monthly group therapy sessions available to moderators." Moderators working in California, Arizona, Texas, and Florida from 2015 until now are covered by this settlement.

Forbes reports that in a world filled with school closings and social isolation, gaming has surged: - Steam, the most popular digital PC gaming marketplace, reached new heights Sunday, drawing a record 20,313,451 concurrent users to the 16-year-old service, according to third-party database SteamDB

- Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, released by Steam-owner Valve in 2012, seems to be the top beneficiary of the increased engagement, breaking it's all-time peak on Sunday with 1,023,2290 concurrent players, topping its previous peak last month by a million, which itself beat the record set in April 2016...

- Activision Blizzard's new free-to-play battle royale spinoff Call of Duty: Warzone, launched March 10 on PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4, is also likely benefiting, drawing in a staggering 15 million in three days, besting the record 10 million in three days by last year's battle royale sensation Apex Legends.
Polygon adds: Gaming saw a 75% increase, week over week, in data usage this March, Verizon said. Video games are proving to be a popular way to pass the time during lockdown -- though we're also starting to see the strain this is placing on various networks and services... Recently, Nintendo experienced a nine-hour network outage. Over the weekend, Xbox Live also went down, preventing users from online play.

Gaming adjacent tools and services are also seeing a surge. As our sibling site The Verge reports, live streaming platform Twitch had a 10% jump in viewership. The popular communication app Discord, meanwhile, recently saw server outages that coincided days after it expanded its screen sharing limit for users.

The games that people are playing themselves are changing in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, too. Pokemon Go, for instance, has tweaked its mechanics to make it easier for people to play from home, while also changing its events to make it easier for people to play solo. And in an effort to entice its players to stay home, Rockstar vowed to add fun bonuses to the MMO for players who are "spending a little extra time at home." Elsewhere, game developers are starting to give out their games for free in an effort to help people stay indoors. It's no wonder we're seeing changes in usage, playtime, and outages across the board.

America's Supreme Court will soon decide whether Google infringed on a copyright that Oracle says it holds on the APIs of Java. But this week Oracle's executive vice president also wrote a blog post arguing that Google "sought the support of outside groups to bolster its position" by using friend-of-the-court briefs to "create the impression that this case is of great import and controversy, and a ruling in Oracle's favor will impede innovation."

"Upon closer inspection, what these briefs reveal is a significantly different picture, one where Google is the outlier, with very little meaningful support outside the purview of its financial fingerprints." As we discussed in a previous post, this case is not about innovation, it is about theft. Google copied verbatim more than 11,000 lines of software code, and now attempts post hoc to change the rules in order to excuse its conduct... As those of us that have watched Google over the past few decades know, Google's view boils down to the self-absorbed position that the work it is doing is of such consequence that the rules shouldn't apply to them. The problem for Google is that very few outside of its self-generated atmosphere agree.

Let's be clear, it is not commonplace or foundational in the software industry to steal other developer's software code. Rather, what is commonplace is a confluence of interests where code is licensed to facilitate its widespread deployment, with the owner choosing the terms... Java embraced choice, with three different licensing alternatives, including a freely deployed open source license, and a commercial license designed to maintain interoperability. And it turns out that nobody except Google found it necessary to steal despite Java's enormous popularity. It is not in dispute in this matter that Google destroyed Java interoperability so it is unbelievable that many of its amici take the position that Google needs to prevail in order to protect interoperability...

Out of 26 briefs, we found:

- 7 briefs representing 13 entities that received "substantial contributions" from Google;

- 8 briefs filed by entities or individuals that have financial ties to Google through grants, dues, cy pres settlement proceeds or employment of individual amici;

- 2 briefs filed by companies with a clear commercial interest in Google prevailing;

- 1 brief filed by several former U.S. government employees all of whom worked for a small government agency run by a former Google executive, despite the U.S. government itself filing a brief in favor of Oracle;

- 4 separate briefs representing a total of 7 individuals;

- A few other briefs where Google financial ties are likely;

- 1 brief submitted by a serial copyright infringer repeatedly sanctioned by the Courts;

What masqueraded as a mass show of support for Google, may not be much more than an exercise in transactional interests.
The groups Oracle is criticizing include the American Library Association, EFF, and the Python Software Foundation, as well as a brief by 83 computer scientists which included Doug Lea, a former memeber of the executive committee of the Java Community Process. Oracle's blog post also makes the argument that besides Microsoft and IBM, "not a single brief from the other 98 of the Top 100 tech companies was filed."

There was a response on Twitter from Joshua Bloch, who worked on the Java platform at Sun before leaving in 2004 to become Google's chief Java architect for the next 8 years. He called Oracle's blog post "nonsense." For example, Doug Lea -- who is in no small measure responsible for Java's success -- accepted one small grant from Google fourteen years ago, and promptly doled it out to deserving undergrads who were testing java.util.concurrent. Have you no shame, Oracle?

We are not Google shills. We are scientists and engineers. Some of us laid the theoretical groundwork for the profession, some designed the computers you grew up on, and some wrote the software you use every day.

We depend on the right to reimplement each others' APIs, and we are truly afraid that your irresponsible lawsuit may deprive us of that right, which we've enjoyed throughout our long careers.

An anonymous reader shares a report from Wired: In January, all seven of the most-watched YouTube Gaming channels weren't run by happy gamers livestreaming the game du jour. They were instead recorded, autoplaying videos advertising videogame cheats and hacks, sometimes attached to sketchy, credential-vacuuming websites, according to one analytics firm. The trend has continued into this month, with five of the top seven most-watched YouTube Gaming channels last weekend advertising cheats. Take one example: As of this article's writing, a video featuring a cracking teenage boy's voice promoting an unconvincing "money glitch" in Grand Theft Auto 5 boasts 11,000 concurrent viewers. "So basically it's about glitching Rockstar's online servers and makes them send out whatever amount of money," says the voice. The video encourages Grand Theft Auto 5 players to visit a website called "Perfect Glitches," type in their gamer tag and the amount of in-game money they want -- up to $9,999,999,999 a day -- and hit "generate." But, ho -- the user must first prove that they are human by filling in their personal information on two other websites. [...] After you fill in your personal information -- anything from your address to your credit card number -- these types of sites will often turn around and sell it. Other times, sites that promise cheats or in-game money will download malware onto your computer.

While several YouTube Gaming cheat channels have disappeared since January, a couple of long-time users remain and many more keep cropping up. One particularly psychedelic channel features a 3-D cat in a Russian hat advertising free in-game money, against a background of gaudy Russian text and a scrolling chat box. Stitch from Lilo and Stitch dances on the top left corner. With 10,000 live concurrent viewers as of this article's writing, the video buoys the whole category for a somewhat niche shooter game called Standoff 2. It's unlikely that the bulk of those eyebrow-raising view numbers are real humans watching this stuff. Instead, scammers drive bot traffic to them to push the videos to the top of YouTube Gaming directories, where they can get the most exposure for the longest period of time -- a better position from which to dupe unlucky viewers. "The prevalence of these game-cheating YouTube Gaming channels with what appears to be huge numbers of bots complicates the narrative of the so-called 'platform wars' between Twitch, YouTube Gaming, Mixer, and Facebook Gaming," reports Wired in closing. "While Twitch's livestream directory might have a couple pirated sports streams or sketchy gambling streams, its top ranks aren't nearly as dominated by ads for cheats."

"If a chunk of YouTube Gaming's hours watched is due to this sort of behavior, then it may be a little longer until Twitch is knocked off its throne."