"As you're reading this, you're more likely than not already inside 'The Matrix'," according to a headline on the front page of CNN.com this weekend.

It linked to an opinion piece by Rizwan Virk, founder of MIT's startup incubator/accelerator program. He's now a doctoral researcher at Arizona State University, where his profile identifies him as an "entrepreneur, video game pioneer, film producer, venture capitalist, computer scientist and bestselling author." Virk's 2019 book was titled "The Simulation Hypothesis: An MIT Computer Scientist Shows Why AI, Quantum Physics and Eastern Mystics Agree We Are in a Video Game." In the decades since [The Matrix was released], this idea, now called the simulation hypothesis, has come to be taken more seriously by technologists, scientists and philosophers. The main reason for this shift is the stunning improvements in computer graphics, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR) and AI. Taking into account three developments just this year from Apple, Neuralink and OpenAI, I can now confidently state that as you are reading this article, you are more likely than not already inside a computer simulation. This is because the closer our technology gets to being able to build a fully interactive simulation like the Matrix, the more likely it is that someone has already built such a world, and we are simply inside their video game world...

In 2003, Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom imagined a "technologically mature" civilization could easily create a simulated world. The logic, then, is that if any civilization ever reaches this point, it would create not just one but a very large number of simulations (perhaps billions), each with billions of AI characters, simply by firing up more servers. With simulated worlds far outnumbering the "real" world, the likelihood that we are in a simulation would be significantly higher than not. It was this logic that prompted Elon Musk to state, a few years ago, that the chances that we are not in a simulation (i.e. that we are in base reality) was "one in billions." It's a theory that is difficult to prove — but difficult to disprove as well. Remember, the simulations would be so good that you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a physical and a simulated world. Either the signals are being beamed directly into your brain, or we are simply AI characters inside the simulation...

Recent developments in Silicon Valley show that we could get to the simulation point very soon. Just this year, Apple released its Vision Pro headset — a mixed-reality (including augmented and virtual reality) device that, if you believe initial reviews (ranging from mildly positive to ecstatic), heralds the beginning of a new era of spatial computing — or the merging of digital and physical worlds... we can see a direct line to being able to render a realistic fictional world around us... Just last month, OpenAI released Sora AI, which can now generate highly realistic videos that are pretty damn difficult to distinguish from real human videos. The fact that AI can so easily fool humans visually as well as through text (and according to some, has already passed the well-known Turing Test) shows that we are not far from fully immersive worlds populated with simulated AI characters that seem (and perhaps even think they are) conscious. Already, millions of humans are chatting with AI characters, and millions of dollars are pouring into making AI characters more realistic. Some of us may be players of the game, who have forgotten that we allowed the signal to be beamed into our brain, while others, like Neo or Morpheus or Trinity in "The Matrix," may have been plugged in at birth...

The fact that we are approaching the simulation point so soon in our future means that the likelihood that we are already inside someone else's advanced simulation goes up exponentially. Like Neo, we would be unable to tell the difference between a simulated and a physical world. Perhaps the most appropriate response to that is another of Reeves' most famous lines from that now-classic sci-fi film: Woah.
The author notes that the idea of being trapped inside a video game already "had been articulated by one of the Wachowskis' heroes, science fiction author Philip K. Dick, who stated, all the way back in 1977, 'We are living in a computer programmed reality.'" A few years ago, I interviewed Dick's wife Tessa and asked her what he would have thought of "The Matrix." She said his first reaction would have been that he loved it; however, his second reaction would most likely have been to call his agent to see if he could sue the filmmakers for stealing his ideas.

U.S. antitrust regulators told a federal appeals court Wednesday that a federal judge got it wrong when she allowed Microsoft's $69 billion purchase of Activision to close. Reuters reports: Speaking for the Federal Trade Commission, lawyer Imad Abyad argued that the lower-court judge held the agency to too high a standard, effectively requiring it to prove that the deal was anticompetitive. He told a three-judge appeals court panel in California that the FTC had only to show that Microsoft had the ability and incentive to withhold Activision's games from rival game platforms to prove the agency's case. He said the FTC "showed that in the past that's what Microsoft did," referring to allegations that Microsoft made some Zenimax games exclusive after buying that company.

Speaking for Microsoft, lawyer Rakesh Kilaru called the FTC case "weak" and said that the agency had asked the lower-court judge for too much leeway. "It is also clear that the standard can't be as low as the FTC is suggesting," he said. "It can't be kind of a mere scintilla of evidence." He argued that the agency failed to show that Microsoft had an incentive to withhold "Call of Duty" from rival gaming platforms. The judges actively questioned both attorneys, with Judge Daniel Collins pressing the FTC's attorney on how concessions that Microsoft gave British antitrust enforcers affect the U.S. market. He also appeared to take issue with Abyad's assertions that more analysis of the deal was necessary, especially since Microsoft had struck agreements with rivals recently, including one with Sony this past summer. "This was not a rush job on the part of the FTC," he said.

Two antitrust scholars who listened to the arguments said the FTC faced a tough slog to prevail. A finding of "clear error" by a lower court judge is "really stark," said Alden Abbott, a former FTC general counsel, comparing it to the idea that a court ignored key evidence from a witness. Abbott said the appeals court noted that the trial judge had considered "a huge amount of record evidence."

Russia President Vladimir Putin on Friday warned that the West should not be allowed to develop a monopoly in the sphere of AI, and said that a much more ambitious Russian strategy for the development of AI would be approved shortly. From a report: China and the United States are leading the development of AI, which many researchers and global leaders think will transform the world and revolutionise society in a way similar to the introduction of computers in the 20th century. Moscow has ambitions to be an AI power too, but its efforts have been set back due to the war in Ukraine which prompted many talented specialists to leave Russia and triggered Western sanctions that have hindered the country's high-tech imports.

Speaking to an AI conference in Moscow beside Sberbank CEO German Gref, Putin said that trying to ban AI was impossible despite the sometimes troubling ethical and social consequences of new technologies. "You cannot ban something - if we ban it then it will develop somewhere else and we will fall behind," Putin said of AI, though he said ethical questions should be resolved with reference to "traditional" Russian culture. Putin cautioned that some Western online search systems and generative models ignored or even cancelled Russian language and culture. Such Western algorithms, he said, essentially thought Russia did not exist. "Of course, the monopoly and domination of such systems, such alien systems is unacceptable and dangerous," he said.

Google has confirmed in court that Epic was offered a $147 million deal to launch its hit game Fortnite on Android's Google Play Store. From a report: The deal, which Google's VP of Play partnerships, Purnima Kochikar, says was approved and presented to Epic but not accepted, would have seen the money dispensed over a three-year period of "incremental funding" (ending in 2021) to the games publisher. It was meant to stem a potential "contagion" of popular apps bypassing Android's official store and, with it, Google's lucrative in-app purchase fees.

Epic launched Fortnite on Android in 2018 directly through its website, avoiding the Play Store. That allowed it to sell Fortnite's in-game currency, V-Bucks, without paying the commission required of Play Store apps. It relented in 2020, saying that "scary, repetitive security pop-ups" and other factors had put it at a severe disadvantage. But in an antitrust lawsuit filed later that year -- and currently being argued before a jury -- it alleged its initial decision had thrown Google into a panic. It cited internal documents claiming Google feared a "contagion risk" if other game developers (including Blizzard, Valve, Sony, and Nintendo) followed Epic's lead, and it claimed Google attempted to forestall it by offering special benefits or even buying Epic.

Redis, the go-to in-memory database used as a cache and system broker, is looking to include disk as part of a tiered storage architecture to reduce costs and broaden the system's appeal. From a report: Speaking to The Register, CEO Rowan Trollope said he hoped the move would help customers lower costs and simplify their architecture. Redis counts Twitter X, Snapchat, and Craigslist among its customers, and it's popular among developers of modern internet-scale applications owing to its ability to create a cache to prevent the main database from overloading. Trollope said the sub-millisecond distributed system gives devs the performance they need, but admitted other systems built for internet scale, such as MongoDB, might offer price advantages. To address this, the company has already created a tiered approach to memory by offering flash support behind its in-memory system.

"We have a half-step between disk and memory. For some specific use cases, in gaming for example, a company might use us for leaderboards and other in-game stats, which they need in real time," he said. However, after an initial flush of the game launch, a large chunk of users would finish the game and their accounts would go dormant until the release of a new episode or some new content, when they might return. Trollope said using flash allowed users to dynamically tier memory. "We can take the lesser-used data that hasn't been touched in a while and shuttle it off to flash where it can sit for a while. When the user comes back eventually, it's very easy for us to seamlessly move it from flash back into memory. And that allows the company to save costs," he said.

Chess.com and Hans Niemann have reached a settlement in which Niemann has agreed to drop a $100 million lawsuit against Chess.com and Magnus Carlsen, and will be allowed to return to compete, the company announced Monday. From a report: This puts an end to the legal aspect of a cheating scandal that captivated the chess world for nearly a year. As part of the settlement, chess world champion Carlsen said "there is no determinative evidence that Niemann cheated in his game against me at the Sinquefield Cup. I am willing to play Niemann in future events, should we be paired together."

Five-time world champion, Magnus Carlsen, has defeated Praggnanandhaa Rameshbabu in a tiebreak to become Chess World Cup champion. Chess.com reports: The five-time world champion won his first World Cup crown by defeating GM Praggnanandhaa Rameshbabu 1.5-0.5 in the rapid tiebreaks of the 2023 FIDE World Cup for a match victory of 2.5-1.5. In the third-place playoffs, GM Fabiano Caruana convincingly defeated GM Nijat Abasov in both rapid tiebreaks for a 3-1 victory and third place. It was a heartbreaking defeat for the Indian youngster, who had the initiative in the first game until Carlsen fought back and won in a tense endgame. In the second game, the world number-one allowed no chances, and Praggnanandhaa's impressive World Cup run came to an end as hundreds of thousands of fans watched the tense battle. You can watch the 2023 FIDE World Cup broadcast on Twitch and YouTube.

Hackers are infecting players of an old Call of Duty game with a worm that spreads automatically in online lobbies, according to two analyses of the malware. From a report: On June 26, a user on a Steam forum alerted other players of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 that hackers "attack using hacked lobbies," and suggested running an antivirus. The malware mentioned in the thread appears to be on the malware online repository VirusTotal. Another player claimed to have analyzed the malware and wrote in the same forum thread that the malware appears to be a worm, based on a series of text strings inside the malware. A game industry insider, who asked to remain anonymous because they were not allowed to speak to the press, confirmed that the malware contains those strings, indicating a worm.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Simply mentioning the name "Denuvo" among some gamers is pretty much guaranteed to get you an instant, strong reaction. Just look at the comment threads underneath any Ars article covering Denuvo and you'll see plenty of complaints about the DRM-enhancing anti-piracy technology. Irdeto, the company that acquired Denuvo in a 2018 purchase, doesn't generally make a habit of commenting at length on this reputation (or its secretive DRM schemes) in the public press. So when Irdeto Chief Operating Officer of Video Games Steeve Huin agreed to defend his company publicly in an exclusive interview with Ars Technica, I jumped at the chance to talk to him.

Huin stressed to Ars that he sees Denuvo as a positive force for the gaming community as a whole. "Anti-piracy technologies is to the benefit of the game publishers, [but also] is of benefit to the players in that it protects the [publisher's] investment and it means the publishers can then invest in the next game," he said. "But people typically don't think enough of that." "Whether people want to believe it or not, we are all gamers, we love gaming, we love being part of it," he continued. "We develop technologies with the intent to make the industry better and stronger."

[...] While the Denuvo name has become practically synonymous with its "anti-tamper" DRM technology, the company now hopes it can be just as well-known for its recent anti-cheating efforts. Denuvo's anti-cheat technology works on "some of the same principles" as its anti-tamper DRM, Huin said, but is aimed at maintaining code integrity at runtime rather than just when a game is loaded. "The core is the same, but the function of what they do is different," he said. Because of this difference, Huin allowed that, unlike Denuvo's anti-tamper DRM, the anti-cheat product could have "a very low impact" on a game's performance. "Less than one percent is the metric we use for validating," he said.

Perhaps woken by news of its next premier first-party title already looking really impressive on emulators, Nintendo has moved to take down key tools for emulating and unlocking Switch consoles, including one that lets Switch owners grab keys from their own device. From a report: Simon Aarons maintained a forked repository of Lockpick, a tool (along with Lockpick_RCM) that grabbed the encryption keys from a Nintendo Switch and allowed it to run officially licensed games. Aarons tweeted on Thursday night that Nintendo had issued DMCA takedown requests to GitHub, asking Lockpick, Lockpick_RCM, and nearly 80 forks and derivations to be taken down under section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which largely makes illegal the circumvention of technological protection measures that safeguard copyrighted material.

Nintendo's takedown request (RTF file) notes that the Switch contains "multiple technological protection measures" that allow the Switch to play only "legitimate Nintendo video game files." Lockpick tools, combined with a modified Switch, let users grab the cryptographic keys from their own Switch and use them on "systems without Nintendo's Console TPMs" to play "pirated versions of Nintendo's copyright-protected game software." GitHub typically allows repositories with DMCA strikes filed against them to remain open while their maintainers argue their case. Still, it was an effective move. Seeing Nintendo's move on Lockpick, a popular Switch emulator on Android, Skyline, called it quits over the weekend, at least as a public-facing tool you can easily download to your phone. In a Discord post (since removed, along with the Discord itself), developer "Mark" wrote that "the risks associated with a potential legal case are too high for us to ignore, and we cannot continue knowing that we may be in violation of copyright law."

SharewareHeroes.com recreates all the fonts and cursor you'd see after dialing up a local bulletin-board system in the early 1990s. It's to promote a new book — successfully crowdfunded by 970 backers — to chronicle "a critical yet long overlooked chapter in video game history: the rise and eventual fall of the shareware model.

The book promises to explore "a hidden games publishing market" that for several years "had no powerful giants," with games instead distributed "across the nascent internet for anyone to enjoy (and, if they liked it enough, pay for)."

And the site features a free excerpt from the chapter about DOOM: It seemed there was no stopping id Software. Commander Keen had given them their freedom, and Wolfenstein 3D's mega-success had earned them the financial cushion to do anything. But all they wanted was to beat the last game — to outdo both themselves and everyone else. And at the centre of that drive was a push for ever-better technology. By the time Wolfenstein 3D's commercial prequel Spear of Destiny hit retail shelves, John Carmack had already built a new engine.

This one had texture-mapped floors and ceilings — not just walls. It supported diminished lighting, which meant things far away could recede into the shadows, disappearing into the distance. And it had variable-height rooms, allowing for elevated platforms where projectile-throwing enemies could hang out, and most exciting of all it allowed for non-orthogonal walls — which meant that rooms could be odd-shaped, with walls jutting out at any arbitrary angle from each other, rather than the traditional rectangular boxed design that had defined first-person-perspective games up until then.

It ran at half the speed of Wolfenstein 3D's engine, but they were thinking about doing a 3D Keen game next — so that wouldn't matter. At least not until they saw it in action. Everyone but Tom Hall suddenly got excited about doing another shooter, which meant Carmack would have to optimise the hell out of his engine to restore that sense of speed. Briefly they considered a proposal from 20th Century Fox to do a licensed Aliens shooter, but they didn't like the idea of giving up their creative independence, so they considered how they could follow up Wolfenstein 3D with something new. Fighting aliens in space is old hat. This time it could be about fighting demons in space. This time it could be called DOOM.
The book's title is Shareware Heroes: The Renegades Who Redefined Gaming at the Dawn of the Internet — here's a page listing the people interviewed, as well as the book's table of contents.

And this chapter culminates with what happened when the first version of DOOM was finally released. "BBSs and FTP servers around America crashed under the immense load of hundreds of thousands of people clamouring to download the game on day one.

"Worse for universities around the country, people were jumping straight into the multiplayer once they had the game — and they kept crashing the university networks..."

It was Magnus Carlsen's last tournament as world champion, reports CNN — and he was eliminated after a "dramatic slip of his mouse" in his online match against Hikaru Nakamura: After drawing their first two games, the duo faced off in an Armageddon clash — similar to regular chess but black has draw odds, meaning that if black draws the game they win, and black starts with less time on the clock than white — to decide who would face Fabiano Caruana in the grand final.

After a tight encounter, the match was heading to its final seconds with very little to separate the two titans of chess.

And it was a moment of unfortunate luck which separated the two when Carlsen's mouse slipped meaning he put his queen onto F6 which allowed it to be taken by Nakamura and seal the victory.

Nakamura — wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with "I literally don't care" on the front — celebrated with a fist-bump while five-time world champion Carlsen could be seen exclaiming and grimacing in frustration.
On YouTube Thursday, Nakamura posted a 33-minute video titled "Dear YouTube, This Time Magnus Lost," where he explains every move down to the final queen blunder (which he calls by its YouTube nickname, a "Botez Gambit.")

In the video Nakamura admits he'd missed a possible winning position (by drawing) earlier in the game. But he also believes he would've achieved the same result simply by checking Carlsen endlessly until a draw was declared.

And Chess.com tells the rest of the story. Friday Nakamura went on to win the event's final round, defeating grandmaster Fabiano Caruana in another Armageddon-style showdown after they'd each won three out of six games.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Back in 2020, we reported that emulator developers were using a hole in the Xbox Store's app distribution system to get around Microsoft's longstanding ban on emulators running on Xbox consoles. This week, though, many of the emulators that were distributed through that workaround have stopped working, the apparent victims of a new crackdown by Microsoft. Xbox emulator makers and users can't say they weren't warned. In the "Gaming and Xbox" section of Microsoft's official Store Policies, section 10.13.10 clearly states that "products that emulate a game system or game platform are not allowed on any device family."

Microsoft's enforcement of this clause has historically focused on removing emulators published as "private" UWP apps to the Xbox Store. Those apps could be distributed to whitelisted users via direct links accessed on the system's Edge browser, getting around the usual approval process for a public store listing. Previously, users who downloaded one of these "hidden" emulator listings before Microsoft's inevitable takedown could run that emulator on an unmodified retail system indefinitely. That is no longer the case; trying to launch downloaded versions of emulators like Xenia or Retrospection on an Xbox console now generates an error saying, "Unable to launch this game or app. The game or app you're trying to launch violates Microsoft Store policy and is not supported."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Two years ago, I wrote a reasonably prescient editorial about how the writing was on the wall for Google's cloud gaming service Stadia -- and how the company was now hoping to sell its white label streaming technology to other companies instead of building out its own Netflix of games. But it seems that, when Google killed off Stadia, it threw away that technology, too. Google executive Jack Buser has now admitted that the company is no longer offering the white label version of Stadia that allowed companies like AT&T and Capcom to let anyone try games like Batman: Arkham Knight, Control, and a demo of Resident Evil Village for free over the internet, not to mention the first game from Peloton.

"We are not offering that streaming option, because it was tied to Stadia itself," he told Axios' Stephen Totilo. "So unfortunately, when we decided to not move forward with Stadia, that sort of offering could no longer be offered as well." Google called the white label version "Immersive Stream for Games" and sometimes "Google Stream" and, to my knowledge, it was only ever used in experiments like the ones I link above. In AT&T's case, they were limited to its own internet subscribers. Maybe they weren't that successful? When we spoke to AT&T about cloud gaming following those experiments, the carrier didn't seem that bullish about serving up more games itself.

"Microsoft has struck a 10-year deal to bring "Call of Duty" and other Activision games to Nvidia's gaming platform, if the Xbox maker is allowed to complete its much-contested $69 billion acquisition of Activision," reports Reuters. It comes hot on the heels of a 10-year deal with Nintendo that guarantees Nintendo players will get Activision games on the same day as Xbox, with full feature and content parity. Reuters reports: Regulators and competitors like Sony have come out hard against the proposed Microsoft-Activision tie-up, and a Nvidia deal could allay concerns by ensuring more ways for consumers to get games controlled by Microsoft. [...] Microsoft President Brad Smith told a news conference on Tuesday he was now more optimistic of getting the Activision acquisition done after the Nvidia deal and a similar arrangement with Nintendo.

Phil Eisler, vice president and general manager of Nvidia's GeForce Now segment, said that titles such that "Call of Duty" will not be available on Nvidia's service unless Microsoft acquires Activision but that other Microsoft-owned titles such as "Minecraft" are covered immediately under the 10-year license agreement. "We were a little concerned about it at the beginning," Eisler said of the Microsoft-Activision deal. "But then we reached out to Microsoft, and they were very open about wanting to enable cloud gaming and work with us on a 10-year license agreement. So over time, they made us more and more comfortable with it."

Eisler said Nvidia is not paying Microsoft for access to the titles, which has been the chip company's practice with other gaming companies such as "Fortnite" maker Epic Games. Instead, Nvidia's 25 million customers will need to pay Nvidia for access to its cloud gaming platform and pay Microsoft for its games. Nvidia said it now supports the Xbox maker's bid to purchase Activision, but the deal could still be a hard sell with regulators. Smith said he hoped that rival Sony will consider doing the same type of deal with Nvidia.

A new draft of the Dungeons & Dragons Open Gaming License, dubbed OGL 1.2 by publisher Wizards of the Coast, is now available for download. Polygon reports: The announcement was made Thursday by Kyle Brink, executive producer of D&D, on the D&D Beyond website. According to Wizards, this draft could place the OGL outside of the publisher's control -- which should sound good to fans enraged by recent events. Time will tell, but public comment will be accepted beginning Jan. 20 and will continue through Feb. 3. [...] Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that, by its own description, "helps overcome legal obstacles to the sharing of knowledge and creativity to address the world's most pressing challenges." As such, a Creative Commons license once enacted could ultimately put the OGL 1.2 outside of Wizards' control in perpetuity.

"We're giving the core D&D mechanics to the community through a Creative Commons license, which means that they are fully in your hands," Brink said in the blog post. "If you want to use quintessentially D&D content from the SRD such as owlbears and magic missile, OGL 1.2 will provide you a perpetual, irrevocable license to do so." So much trust has been lost over the last several weeks that it will no doubt take a while for legal experts -- armchair and otherwise -- to pour over the details of the new OGL. These are the bullet points that Wizards is promoting in this official statement: - Protecting D&D's inclusive play experience. As I said above, content more clearly associated with D&D (like the classes, spells, and monsters) is what falls under the OGL. You'll see that OGL 1.2 lets us act when offensive or hurtful content is published using the covered D&D stuff. We want an inclusive, safe play experience for everyone. This is deeply important to us, and OGL 1.0a didn't give us any ability to ensure it

- TTRPGs and VTTs. OGL 1.2 will only apply to TTRPG content, whether published as books, as electronic publications, or on virtual tabletops (VTTs). Nobody needs to wonder or worry if it applies to anything else. It doesn't.

- Deauthorizing OGL 1.0a. We know this is a big concern. The Creative Commons license and the open terms of 1.2 are intended to help with that. One key reason why we have to deauthorize: We can't use the protective options in 1.2 if someone can just choose to publish harmful, discriminatory, or illegal content under 1.0a. And again, any content you have already published under OGL 1.0a will still always be licensed under OGL 1.0a.

- Very limited license changes allowed. Only two sections can be changed once OGL 1.2 is live: how you cite Wizards in your work and how we can contact each other. We don't know what the future holds or what technologies we will use to communicate with each other, so we thought these two sections needed to be future-proofed. A revised version of this draft will be presented to the community again "on or before February 17."

"The process will extend as long as it needs to," Brink said. "We'll keep iterating and getting your feedback until we get it right."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: After a week of silence amid intense backlash, Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast (WoTC) has finally addressed its community's concerns about changes to the open gaming license. The open gaming license (OGL) has existed since 2000 and has made it possible for a diverse ecosystem of third-party creators to publish virtual tabletop software, expansion books and more. Many of these creators can make a living thanks to the OGL. But over the last week, a new version of the OGL leaked after WoTC sent it to some top creators. More than 66,000 Dungeons & Dragons fans signed an open letter under the name #OpenDnD ahead of an expected announcement, and waves of users deleted their subscriptions to D&D Beyond, WoTC's online platform. Now, WoTC admitted that "it's clear from the reaction that we rolled a 1." Or, in non-Dungeons and Dragons speak, they screwed up.

"We wanted to ensure that the OGL is for the content creator, the homebrewer, the aspiring designer, our players, and the community -- not major corporations to use for their own commercial and promotional purpose," the company wrote in a statement. But fans have critiqued this language, since WoTC -- a subsidiary of Hasbro -- is a "major corporation" in itself. Hasbro earned $1.68 billion in revenue during the third quarter of 2022. TechCrunch spoke to content creators who had received the unpublished OGL update from WoTC. The terms of this updated OGL would force any creator making more than $50,000 to report earnings to WoTC. Creators earning over $750,000 in gross revenue would have to pay a 25% royalty. The latter creators are the closest thing that third-party Dungeons & Dragons content has to "major corporations" -- but gross revenue is not a reflection of profit, so to refer to these companies in that way is a misnomer. [...] The fan community also worried about whether WoTC would be allowed to publish and profit off of third-party work without credit to the original creator. Noah Downs, a partner at Premack Rogers and a Dungeons & Dragons livestreamer, told TechCrunch that there was a clause in the document that granted WoTC a perpetual, royalty-free sublicense to all third-party content created under the OGL.

Now, WoTC appears to be walking back both the royalty clause and the perpetual license. "What [the next OGL] will not contain is any royalty structure. It also will not include the license back provision that some people were afraid was a means for us to steal work. That thought never crossed our minds," WoTC wrote in a statement. "Under any new OGL, you will own the content you create. We won't." WoTC claims that it included this language in the leaked version of the OGL to prevent creators from being able to "incorrectly allege" that WoTC stole their work. Throughout the document, WoTC refers to the document that certain creators received as a draft -- however, creators who received the document told TechCrunch that it was sent to them with the intention of getting them to sign off on it. The backlash against these terms was so severe that other tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG) publishers took action. Paizo is the publisher of Pathfinder, a popular game covered under WoTC's original OGL. Paizo's owner and presidents were leaders at Wizards of the Coast at the time that the OGL was originally published in 2000, and wrote in a statement yesterday that the company was prepared to go to court over the idea that WoTC could suddenly revoke the OGL license from existing projects. Along with other publishers like Kobold Press, Chaosium and Legendary Games, Paizo announced it would release its own Open RPG Creative License (ORC). "Ultimately, the collective action of the signatures on the open letter and unsubscribing from D&D Beyond made a difference. We have seen that all they care about is profit, and we are hitting their bottom line," said Eric Silver, game master of Dungeons & Dragons podcast Join the Party. He told TechCrunch that WoTC's response on Friday is "just a PR statement."

"Until we see what they release in clear language, we can't let our foot off the gas pedal," Silver said. "The corporate playbook is wait it out until the people get bored; we can't and we won't."

AmiMoJo writes: Members of YouTube's gaming community are calling out the video hosting site for adding new regulations regarding profanity usage and violent content, disproportionately affecting gaming creators who produce unscripted videos such as let's plays of M-rated games. Worse, the policy is retroactively deeming their videos in violation of new rules and affecting their ability to make money on the platform.

The rule changes in question was originally made in November of 2022, and the blog post announcing it says that YouTube now treats all profanity equally (meaning "ass" is just as bad as "fuck"), and any usage of such in titles, thumbails, or in the first seven seconds of a video may result in complete demonetization. While you can swear after the first eight seconds, if you use profanity "consistently throughout the video" it may also be demonetized according to this new policy. The same restrictions apply to violent content, as well.

Previously, YouTube's violent content policy applied to images of real-world violence, though game violence is now specifically noted as of the November update. As for profanity, prior to this change, YouTube allowed creators to use what it describes as "moderate profanity" (it says "shit" and "bitch" fall under this category) in the first 30 seconds without fear of demonetization.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Every day between 6 to 11 pm GMT, Neuro-sama streams herself playing Minecraft and osu, a musical rhythm game. Like many V-tubers, or virtual YouTubers, Neuro-sama appears as a Japanese anime-style character who interacts with her over 50,000 followers by responding to their comments in the chat. But there's one thing that separates Neuro-sama from her peers: she is controlled entirely by AI. [...] Vedal, the AI's pseudonymous creator, says that Neuro-sama was created as a fun experiment. "I made her a Twitch streamer so that she can interact with her audience in real time. A lot of the fun comes from her interactions with Twitch chat," Vedal told Motherboard. "I think the fans play an important role in her success and how fun her streams are. Having the interactions with Twitch chat are what makes her entertaining to watch, without that I don't think she would be as successful." Neuro-sama often impresses online users with her ability to successfully play games such as Minecraft and osu while also interacting with them in a conversational way. Vedal told Motherboard that Neuro-sama has already beaten the top-ranking osu player in a 1 v. 1 game. Though she is not allowed to be ranked on the main osu leaderboard, Neuro-sama is currently ranked number one on the private server she plays on.

Neuro-sama's earliest incarnation was first created in 2018, when Vedal made an AI that learned to play osu. But at the time, the virtual streamer did not have an avatar or speaking capabilities. Relaunched in December 2022, Vedal used a free sample avatar from Live2D, an online avatar maker, and paired it with an anime-style voice to create Neuro-sama. Vedal said that there are plans for her to get her own custom avatar and for her to play more games in the future. Like many modern AI chatbots, Vedal says Neuro-sama was made using a large language model, or LLM, a type of AI model trained from massive amounts of text taken from the open internet. As Motherboard has previously reported, many open-source AI models have a high propensity for human bias, and often mimic racist and sexist stereotypes. So while Neuro-sama's streams are 100 percent automated, Vedal has a team that monitors and moderates her and the chat.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Immune therapies have rewritten the game when it comes to cancer treatment, earning the "fifth pillar" label next to more tried and true treatments like radiation therapy, surgery, and chemotherapy. And no immunotherapy has garnered quite the same excitement as CAR T-cell therapy, first approved in 2017 by the Food and Drug Administration to treat a form of acute lymphoblastic leukemia. At the time, then-FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb called the approval "a new frontier in medical innovation," and it seemed like the possibilities for CAR T were near-endless. Flash-forward almost six years, and six therapies have been approved for blood cancers, including lymphomas, leukemia, and multiple myeloma. There's no question that when CAR T works, it works incredibly well. But why it doesn't work for the majority of patients or cancer types has befuddled researchers.

CAR T therapies also haven't yet been expanded to treat solid tumors, which make up the majority of cancers. The immune therapy hasn't been able to crack physical barriers, idiosyncratic tumor cells, and a suppressive microenvironment that characterize these cancers. But a new generation of CAR T therapies are emerging, equipped with highly effective small molecules that scientists hope will solve their low success rate for both blood cancers and solid tumors. Known as "armored CAR T," these infusions have been boosted with additional layers of protection and cancer-fighting proteins. Early research shows that the armored flavor of CAR T might have what it takes for immunotherapy to go the extra mile.

Briefly, immunotherapy can boost or restore the body's immune system by lowering cancer cells' defenses, priming the immune system's T cells to destroy tumors, or -- in the case of CAR T-cell therapy -- genetically editing a patient's T cells. Scientists do this by isolating a patient's T cells from their blood and inserting a gene for a chimeric antigen receptor -- a type of synthetic protein that has been specially made to bind to another protein present on the surface of that patient's cancer cells. Then, upon infusing these modified T cells back into a patient, the immune fighters will recognize and destroy the tumor cells when the patient's normal T cells have failed. That, at least, is the idea. But when CAR T doesn't work, a few factors could be at play. One, Lim said, is the tumor microenvironment, the set of chemicals and structures present in solid cancers that naturally suppress pushback from the body's immune system. Tumor heterogeneity is also a factor -- depending on the type and stage of cancer, tumor cells may not express the protein that the CAR T cells' receptors have been designed to recognize, blocking the ability of the CAR T cells to attack the cancer Finally, there are physical barriers on the outside of a solid tumor that can even prevent the T cells from entering inside to destroy the cancer. Armored CAR T is meant to overcome these difficulties. With this form of therapy, not only are T cells engineered to express a tumor cell's surface protein, they are also given potent cargo often in the form of small proteins called cytokines. If deployed on their own, such molecules can be toxic -- but pairing them with T cells designed to release them at the tumor site and nowhere else represents a promising new strategy. Jakub Svodoba, an oncologist at the University of Pennsylvania, "is helping to lead a clinical trial using armored CAR T-cell therapy to treat patients with non-Hodgkin lymphoma for whom previous CAR T therapy has failed," reports the Daily Beast. "Last month, he presented findings that the first seven patients treated with this therapy all responded to it and were alive eight months after receiving it. Svoboda said an important additional finding was that toxicities experienced by the patients -- a concern with cytokines -- were comparable to those from traditional CAR T therapy."

Wendell Lim, a cellular and molecular pharmacology researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, and his team are also working on an armored CAR-T therapy, with the potential for it to be used to treat solid tumors. "In a paper published in Science on Dec. 16, he and his colleagues designed T cells to release a cytokine directly to the tumors of mice with pancreatic cancer and melanoma," reports the Daily Beast. "In the study, they wrote that these cancers are 'nearly completely resistant' to treatment with traditional CAR T, but releasing a cytokine allowed the engineered T cells to get past the tumor microenvironment -- effectively solving one of the issues that has set the therapy back."