Apple has prioritized user privacy over targeted advertising, and Google is spelling out today what that means for itself as well as game and app developers. From a report: Apple is advocating its App Tracking Transparency (ATT) policy, which will require developers to ask for permission when they use personal data from other companies' apps and websites for advertising purposes, even if they already have user consent. It will ask users to opt-in if they will allow advertisers to use their data via the Identifier for Advertisers, or IDFA. Many tests show that many users won't allow it, and that means they won't be so easily tracked for advertising purposes. This change could have a huge impact on the mobile advertising ecosystem, as it could make it harder to target users efficiently with advertising.

Eric Seufert, a user acquisition expert, said on Monday that he believes that Facebook could suffer a 7% revenue hit -- a loss of tens of billions of dollars over time -- as a result of the IDFA changes, and it's no secret that Facebook isn't happy about the impact on itself as well as small businesses. At our Driving Game Growth event on Tuesday, Facebook leaders pointed to the IDFA changes as creating uncertainty for mobile games in 2021. Google, which could also be impacted by the policy change, has stayed out of the fray -- until today. "Today we're sharing how Google is helping our community prepare, as we know that developers and advertisers in the iOS ecosystem are still figuring out how to adapt," said Christophe Combette, group product manager for Google Ads in a blog post.

If you bought a wooden chess set after watching "The Queen's Gambit," the price you paid was most likely dictated by just four pieces. From a report: The knights alone can account for as much as 50 percent of the cost of a nice wooden set. While the rest of the pieces can be machine-made, the knights are carved by hand to resemble the head of a horse, a tedious process to make sure all four are exactly the same. The knights in the set used in World Chess Championship matches ($310 for the pieces and $220 for the board) were inspired by a horse carving from the Parthenon in Athens, said Ilya Merenzon, the chief executive of World Chess, the company that licenses the rights to the matches. The process of creating the set when it was redesigned in 2013 required extensive back-and-forth communication with carvers in India to discuss minutiae like the horse's smile. About 10 people specialize in carving knights for the World Chess sets, Mr. Merenzon said. It takes about two weeks to produce 100 sets, with a set of knights requiring about six hours to carve, he said. Chess sales spiked 125 percent after the October premiere of "The Queen's Gambit," a Netflix show about an orphaned chess prodigy, Beth Harmon, who crushes the male-dominated game. Many sets sold out before Christmas.

The House of Staunton in Alabama, one of the world's largest chess retailers, offers wooden sets with relatively simple knights, such as the $129 tournament-style set in boxwood and rosewood, as well as sets with more detail. They go all the way up to a luxurious $5,995 set in "antiqued" boxwood and ebony and featuring intricate horses. In the higher-end sets, "you can literally see the teeth carved into the horse's mouth," said Noelle Kendrick, the House of Staunton's business development director. "They are extremely detailed. You can see the mane, the rivets of the mane, if it has a flowing mane." The ornamentation isn't strictly decorative. In tournament play, milliseconds matter, and so does how a piece fits into your hand, Mr. Merenzon said. This is particularly true in the especially fast-paced games that can be used to break ties at tournaments: "blitz"-style games, which generally last less than 10 minutes, and "rapid" games, in which players have 25 minutes to make all their moves. The players tend to move their pieces and press their clock in one swift motion.

Researchers have made a major breakthrough using artificial intelligence that could revolutionize the hunt for new medicines. The scientists have created A.I. software that uses a protein's DNA sequence to predict its three-dimensional structure to within an atom's width of accuracy. weiserfireman shares a report: The achievement, which solves a 50-year-old challenge in molecular biology, was accomplished by a team from DeepMind, the London-based artificial intelligence company that is part of Google parent Alphabet. Until now, DeepMind was best known for creating A.I. that could beat the best human players at the strategy game Go, a major milestone in computer science. DeepMind achieved the protein shape breakthrough in a biennial competition for algorithms that can be used to predict protein structures. The competition asks participants to take a protein's DNA sequence and then use it to determine the protein's three-dimensional shape. Across more than 100 proteins, DeepMind's A.I. software, which it called AlphaFold 2, was able to predict the structure to within about an atom's width of accuracy in two-thirds of cases and was highly accurate in most of the remaining one-third of cases, according to John Moult, a molecular biologist at the University of Maryland who is director of the competition, called the Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction, or CASP. It was far better than any other method in the competition, he said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: In one chess tournament, five of the top six were disqualified for cheating. In another, the doting parents of 10-year-old competitors furiously rejected evidence that their darlings were playing at the level of the world No 1. And in a third, an Armenian grandmaster booted out for suspicious play accused his opponent of "doing pipi in his Pampers." These incidents may sound extreme but they are not isolated -- and they have all taken place online since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Chess has enjoyed a huge boom in internet play this year as in-person events have moved online and people stuck at home have sought new hobbies. But with that has come a significant new problem: a rise in the use of powerful chess calculators to cheat on a scale reminiscent of the scandals that have dogged cycling and athletics. One leading 'chess detective' said that the pandemic was "without doubt creating a crisis".

At the heart of the problem are programs or apps that can rapidly calculate near-perfect moves in any situation. To counter these engines, players in more and more top matches must agree to be recorded by multiple cameras, be available on Zoom or WhatsApp at any time, and grant remote access to their computers. They may not be allowed to leave their screens, even for toilet breaks. In some cases they must have a "proctor" or invigilator search their room and then sit with them throughout a match. [E]ye-tracking programs may be a way to raise a red flag if a player appears to be looking away with suspicious frequency. Chess.com, the world's biggest site for online play, said it had seen 12 million new users this year, against 6.5 million last year. The cheating rate has jumped from between 5,000 and 6,000 players banned each month last year to a high of almost 17,000 in August.

The growth in cheating and a corresponding explosion in social media discussion of the problem has created a new atmosphere of suspicion and recrimination. "Paranoia has become the culture," said Le-Marechal, whom a friend declared "the cyber chess detective" when he got the job. "There is this very romantic vision of the game which is being scuppered." Without a significant culture change, most say, the cheats are unlikely to go straight.

This week London's prestigious Financial Times published a 15-minute video investigating the question: "Is QAnon a game gone wrong?" In 2017, the Q team, whoever they may be, made use of the modern equivalent of the Playboy's letters page. It's a message board called 4Chan... A YouTuber called defango has since claimed the work was his. He says he created Q as an alternative reality game, mostly for the LOLs, but also to smoke out bad journalists in the alternative media space. But he also says that in 2018, a man called Thomas Schoenberger wrested control of the game from him... Nobody knows if what he says is really true. What is becoming clear is that the whole thing has run away with itself...

Anyone who plays live action role playing games, known as LARPs, will recognise the gaming elements of QAnon [according to alternate-reality game pioneer Jim Stewartson.] "In 2015, 2016, and 2017, there were a lot of what are called LARPs, live action role playing is what the term means. And it really just means that there is a person pretending to be somebody else. The players knew they weren't real, but it was fun for them to interact with. But what happened on 4Chan and 8Chan is that individual people would go and LARP all by themselves, and create basically a single point of contact for an entire alternate reality game. In 2016, there was FBI Anon, and CIA Anon, Meganon, and all of these different LARPs that were basically practicing, they were prototyping what QAnon is... So it turns out there's a guy named Thomas Schoenberger. He saw this Cicada game as an opportunity to radicalise smart people, and he ended up creating puzzles and calling it Cicada, even though he was not the creator of it."

To this day, no one seems quite sure who the creator of Cicada was. We haven't been able to confirm Thomas Schoenberger's involvement in either Cicada or QAnon... [But Jim Stewartson tells them] "There's a woman named Lisa Clapier who runs an account called SnowWhite7IAM. And her job was to bring people from Cicada to QAnon. So there was a whole theme about follow the White Rabbit. A whole theme around Snow White and Disney characters. And that theme was used specifically to pull people from Cicada into QAnon."
A similar origin story appears in a new article at Heavy.com: Between 2014 and 2016, Schoenberger "stole" Cicada, Heavy's source said, and he started manipulating the puzzle. Later on, while working with Chavez, "breadcrumbs" — vague top secret information hidden in clues, were presented through the Cicada game.

In October 2017 QAnon posts premiered on 4chan, a site Schoenberger was prominent on before moving to 8chan in December, a site run out of the Philippines by pornography mogul and pig farmer, Jim Watkins, Heavy's source said.

Apple is asking a court to reject Epic Games's latest bid to get Fortnite back on the App Store, saying the game maker is acting as "a saboteur, not a martyr" in its challenge to Apple's payment system. From a report: In an overnight filing, Apple said "Epic started a fire, and poured gasoline on it, and now asks this court for emergency assistance in putting it out." Epic can fix the problem "by simply adhering to the contractual terms that have profitably governed its relationship with Apple for years." Epic sued Apple on Aug. 13, claiming the removal of the Fortnite app from the App Store was "retaliation" for the game maker's decision to offer in-app purchases through its own marketplace, circumventing Apple's payment system. Epic has renewed a request for a court order that would reinstate the app on the store. Apple last week filed a countersuit to stop the game maker from using its own payment system for Fortnite, escalating one of the most closely watched legal battles in the tech sector. Citing the #freefortnite campaign, Apple said Epic isn't suffering reputational harm due to the fight. "Epic has engaged in a full-scale, pre-planned media blitz surrounding its decision to breach its agreement with Apple, creating ad campaigns around the effort that continue to this day."

When people build a database to manage reading lists or feed their neighbors, that's coding -- and culture. From an essay: We are past the New York City Covid-19 peak. Things have started to reopen, but our neighborhood is in trouble, and people are hungry. There's a church that's opened space for a food pantry, a restaurant owner who has given herself to feeding the neighborhood, and lots of volunteers. [...] It's a complex data model. It involves date fields, text fields, integers, notes. You need lots of people to log in, but you need to protect private data too. You'd think their planning conversations would be about making lots of rice. But that is just a data point. The tool the mutual aid group has settled on to track everything is Airtable, a database-as-a-service program. You log in and there's your database. There are a host of tools like this now, "low-code" or "no-code" software with names like Zapier or Coda or Appy Pie. At first glance these tools look like flowcharts married to spreadsheets, but they're powerful ways to build little data-management apps. Airtable in particular keeps showing up everywhere for managing office supplies or scheduling appointments or tracking who at WIRED has their fingers on this column. The more features you use, the more they charge for it, and it can add up quickly. I know because I see the invoices at my company; we use it to track projects.

"Real" coders in my experience have often sneered at this kind of software, even back when it was just FileMaker and Microsoft Access managing the flower shop or tracking the cats at the animal shelter. It's not hard to see why. These tools are just databases with a form-making interface on top, and with no code in between. It reduces software development, in all its complexity and immense profitability, to a set of simple data types and form elements. You wouldn't build a banking system in it or a game. It lacks the features of big, grown-up databases like Oracle or IBM's Db2 or PostgreSQL. And since it is for amateurs, the end result ends up looking amateur. But it sure does work. I've noticed that when software lets nonprogrammers do programmer things, it makes the programmers nervous. Suddenly they stop smiling indulgently and start talking about what "real programming" is. This has been the history of the World Wide Web, for example. Go ahead and tweet "HTML is real programming," and watch programmers show up in your mentions to go, "As if." Except when you write a web page in HTML, you are creating a data model that will be interpreted by the browser. This is what programming is. Code culture can be solipsistic and exhausting. Programmers fight over semicolon placement and the right way to be object-oriented or functional or whatever else will let them feel in control and smarter and more economically safe, and always I want to shout back: Code isn't enough on its own. We throw code away when it runs out its clock; we migrate data to new databases, so as not to lose one precious bit. Code is a story we tell about data.

In recent years Amazon has become a major force in television and film, so we have seen that the company can succeed in generating popular mass entertainment. Why is the company struggling so badly with games? Discussing the question with people involved with Amazon Games, some common themes emerge. From a report: "We're bringing a lot of Amazon practices to making games," Mike Frazzini, Amazon's vice president for game services and studios, told me in March. That isn't working because video games are fundamentally a creative endeavor, not the sort of purely quantifiable mass consumer product or service that Amazon knows how to make. No less than great novels or films, great top-end games cannot be created through user data requirements, A/B testing, behavioral analytics, user surveys and iterative critiques by departments ranging from security to finance. Yet games must jump through all those hoops at Amazon, according to people in a position to know. That product development sensibility can work for chintzy mobile games that are made to extract as much money as possible from players but does not work in creating multibillion-dollar long-term franchises that generate not just revenue but emotional loyalty. Instead, thinking of games like tech products just leads to watered-down games without a strong point of view or creative direction.

For example, Amazon executives told me that while designing Crucible they solicited private input from hundreds of streamers and esports figures -- people who play video games for a living and definitely know fun when they feel it. So how could the company ingest that input and still churn out a mediocre product? Turns out, the questions Amazon asked the game pros were generally incremental -- "Which weapon do you prefer?" "What classes and enemies do you enjoy?" -- rather than stepping back and asking, "Does this overall concept work?" That's why Crucible can feel like it was put together with bits and pieces of other successful games, rather than forging a strong vision of its own. The entire structure of most successful game publishers is built around protecting and insulating the creative people -- writers, artists and designers -- from the business. Take-Two does not tell Rockstar what the story of the next Grand Theft Auto should be. Mike Morhaime spent decades shielding the creative engine at Blizzard Entertainment from various corporate owners as Blizzard created StarCraft, Warcraft and Diablo -- iconic franchises all.

Many precincts of the entertainment business are run by financial professionals, but the successful ones -- whether in television, music, film or games -- learn to let the creative people create. "Amazon is run not even by finance guys but by tech guys who instead of putting their creatives outside the bubble and protecting them from the culture, hired them into the bubble and expected them to work within that confine," said one person involved with Amazon's game efforts. "Amazon culture is great for product, horrible for creative endeavors." It is impossible to imagine Jennifer Salke, head of Amazon Studios, issuing her own version of Frazzini's pronouncement: "We're bringing a lot of Amazon practices to making movies." That is because when it comes to film and television, Amazon lets people with deep industry experience run the show and acquire projects being made by outside professionals. Salke was president of NBC Entertainment before joining Amazon two years ago. Her boss, Mike Hopkins, who joined Amazon in February, was previously chief executive of Hulu and chairman of Sony Pictures Television. Frazzini, meanwhile, had no significant game industry experience before joining Amazon.

Twitter has struggled for years to police the growing number of employees and contractors who have the ability to reset users' accounts and override their security settings, a problem that Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey and the board were warned about multiple times since 2015, Bloomberg reported Monday, citing former employees with knowledge of the company's security operations. From the report: Twitter's oversight over the 1,500 workers who reset accounts, review user breaches and respond to potential content violations for the service's 186 million daily users have been a source of recurring concern, the employees said. The breadth of personal data most of those workers could access is relatively limited -- including such things as Internet Protocol addresses, email addresses and phone numbers -- but it's a starting point to snoop on or even hack an account, they said.

The controls were so porous that at one point in 2017 and 2018 some contractors made a kind of game out of creating bogus help-desk inquiries that allowed them to peek into celebrity accounts, including Beyonce's, to track the stars' personal data including their approximate locations gleaned from their devices' IP addresses, two of the former employees said. Concerns about Twitter's ability to protect user data deepened this month after hackers hijacked the accounts of some of its most famous users, including political leaders, business titans and celebrities, as part of an apparent cryptocurrency scam. The pressure on Twitter to protect its users isn't limited to the personal data it collects on them -- which is minimal compared to some other social media sites -- but extends to the influence its users wield, especially world leaders or the political dissidents who oppose them.

Since WannaCry and NotPetya struck the internet just over three years ago, the security industry has scrutinized every new Windows bug that could be used to create a similar world-shaking worm. Now one potentially "wormable" vulnerability -- meaning an attack can spread from one machine to another with no human interaction -- has appeared in Microsoft's implementation of the domain name system protocol, one of the fundamental building blocks of the internet. From a report: As part of its Patch Tuesday batch of software updates, Microsoft today released a fix for a bug discovered by Israeli security firm Check Point, which the company's researchers have named SigRed. The SigRed bug exploits Windows DNS, one of the most popular kinds of DNS software that translates domain names into IP addresses. Windows DNS runs on the DNS servers of practically every small and medium-sized organization around the world. The bug, Check Point says, has existed in that software for a remarkable 17 years. Check Point and Microsoft warn that the flaw is critical, a 10 out of 10 on the common vulnerability scoring system, an industry standard severity rating. Not only is the bug wormable, Windows DNS software often runs on the powerful servers known as domain controllers that set the rules for networks. Many of those machines are particularly sensitive; a foothold in one would allow further penetration into other devices inside an organization.

On top of all of that, says Check Point's head of vulnerability research Omri Herscovici, the Windows DNS bug can in some cases be exploited with no action on the part of the target user, creating a seamless and powerful attack. "It requires no interaction. And not only that, once you're inside the domain controller that runs the Windows DNS server, expanding your control to the rest of the network is really easy," says Omri Herscovici. "It's basically game over." Check Point found the SigRed vulnerability in the part of Windows DNS that handles a certain piece of data that's part of the key exchange used in the more secure version of DNS known as DNSSEC. That one piece of data can be maliciously crafted such that Windows DNS allows a hacker to overwrite chunks of memory they're not meant to have access to, ultimately gaining full remote code execution on the target server. (Check Point says Microsoft asked the company not to publicize too many details of other elements of the technique, including how it bypasses certain security features on Windows servers.)

Business Insider reports that some players are adapting their avatars in the game world of Animal Crossing: New Horizons to show their support for the Black Lives Matter movement in the real world: In "Animal Crossing: New Horizons," players are creating customized signs and clothing for their game characters that say "BLM" and depict symbols of "No justice, no peace...." Anyone with access to a Nintendo Online account can host an online protest in the game; one such virtual protest was held on June 7.

As there's a limit of only eight players allowed to be on another player's island at a time, interested players were directed to a site which put folks in line to gain access. When the player's turn came, they were given a special code needed to enter the island. The protest host made customized signs, pillows, and memorial photos, and carved out a special path and area on their island to hold the sit-in protest. Players were encouraged to bring in-game currency (also known as bells) to the island, which would be converted into a charity donation by the host in the name of the player who contributed. This protest raised money for six different charities. including the NAACP, the National Bail Fund Network, and the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Meanwhile, Forbes reports: Roblox, a popular game among children and early teens that announced 100 million active players last year, has become a small-scale battleground in the upcoming U.S. presidential elections. The BBC is reporting that hackers are taking over accounts to spread pro-Trump propaganda, dressing them up in red hats like Trump supporters and putting pro-Trump messages in profiles...

There are ton of posts on social media from players who say that their accounts have been hacked, and Gamespot notes that since Roblox accounts are indexed by Google, it's easy to see a ton of accounts featuring the same message in the "about field": Ask your parents to vote for Trump this year!#Maga2020. A search on Google yields about 1,800 results... They also appear to be spamming friend requests and friend lists to send out pro-trump messages far beyond the single hacked account.

Basecamp launched its email product Hey earlier this week. David Heinemeier Hansson, the co-founder of Basecamp, tweeted on Tuesday that Apple is already creating challenges for the firm. In a series of tweets, he said: Apple just doubled down on their rejection of HEY's ability to provide bug fixes and new features, unless we submit to their outrageous demand of 15-30% of our revenue. Even worse: We're told that unless we comply, they'll remove the app. On the day the EU announced their investigation into Apple's abusive App Store practices, HEY is subject to those very same capricious, exploitive, and inconsistent policies of shakedown. It's clear they feel embolden to tighten the screws with no fear of regulatory consequences. He adds: Apple has been capriciously, inconsistently, and in a few cases, cruelly, enforcing their App Store policies for years. But most of the abuses were suffered by smaller developers without a platform and without recurse. Apple saw that it worked, and that it paid. Now moving up. This is exactly the issue I gave testimony in front of congress earlier this year! We hadn't yet launched HEY, but I said it worried me, what Apple might do, if you're in direct competition with them. And now we know what they'd do. Attempt to crush us. But while I'm sure Apple's attempt to cut off the air supply to the likes of Spotify is board-room stuff, I think what we're facing is simply the banality of bureaucracy. Apple has publicly pivoted to services for growth, so KPIs and quarterly targets trickle down. And frankly, it's hard to see what they have to fear. Who cares if Apple shakes down individual software developers for 30% of their revenue, by threatening to destroy their business? There has been zero consequences so far! Most such companies quietly cave or fail. We won't. There is no chance in bloody hell that we're going to pay Apple's ransom. I will burn this house down myself, before I let gangsters like that spin it for spoils. This is profoundly, perversely abusive and unfair.

We did everything we were supposed to with the iOS app. Try downloading it (while you can?). You can't sign up, because Apple says no. We don't mention subscriptions. You can't upgrade. You can't access billing. We did all of it! Wasn't enough. We've been in the App Store with Basecamp for years. We know the game. It was always rigged. It was always customer-hostile, deeply confusing, but the unstated lines were reasonably clear. Now Apple has altered the deal, and all we can do is pray they don't alter it further.

Syfy Wire's "Bad Astronomy" column is written by astronomer Phil Plait, head science writer of Bill Nye Saves the World. This week he looked at the recently-declassified videos taken by the U.S. Navy's fighter jets showing unidentified flying objects "moving in weird and unexpected ways." ("The 'aura' around the object in some of the footage could simply be the camera overexposing around a bright object; infrared cameras can do that, creating an odd glow.")

But to prove they're not aliens, Plait ultimately cites an analysis on the site MetaBunk, "run by former video game programmer and critical thinker Mick West" -- and his videos summarizing discussions on the site's bulletin board:

[I]n this one he argues, convincingly to me, that the FLIR video just shows a passenger plane seen from a distance. He also shows that the rotation of the object in the GIMBAL video is almost certainly due to the motion of the camera itself as it tracks the objects. The fighter jet is turning, and at the same time the camera is mounted on a rotating mechanism that allows it to track. These two motions combine to make a somewhat confusing series of rotations in the image, which is why the object in the video appears to rotate around.

But my favorite bit is a video where he gives a single, simple explanation that accounts for two things seen in the Navy videos, specifically, why the object in the GOFAST video appears to scream across the water so rapidly, and how in the GIMBAL video the object seems to travel against a strong wind. The answer: It's an illusion due to parallax, how an object close to you seems to move more rapidly against a more distant background as the camera moves... Given the distance, angle, and motion, it's likely that the GOFAST video shows a balloon.
As a kind of consolation prize, the column concludes by sharing the cheesy opening credits to a 1970 precursor to the TV show Space: 1999 -- called UFO.

The Washington Post describes it as "the next internet." Wikipedia defines it as "a collective virtual shared space...including the sum of all virtual worlds, augmented reality, and the Internet." But it was Neal Stephenson who named it "the metaverse" in his 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash.

Are we closer to seeing it happen? The Washington Post reports: In the past month, office culture has coalesced around video chat platforms like Zoom, while personal cultural milestones like weddings and graduations are being conducted in Nintendo's Animal Crossing: New Horizons. The Metaverse not only seems realistic — it would probably be pretty useful right about now. The Metaverse reality is still years, possibly decades, away. But Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has been publicly pushing for its creation, and he isn't alone in his desire to push for the Metaverse, where the online world echoes and fulfills real-world needs and activities. Constructing the virtual Internet space is Silicon Valley's macro goal, many of whom are obsessed with Neal Stephenson's 1992 book, "Snow Crash," which defined the term.

In recent years, Facebook, Google and Samsung have all made heavy investments in cloud computing and virtual reality companies in anticipation of a Metaverse... But it's Epic Games, with Fortnite, that has the most viable path forward in terms of creating the Metaverse, according to an essay by venture capitalist and former Amazon executive Matthew Ball... [The article also notes other "traits" of the metaverse in Minecraft and Roblox.] The most widely agreed core attributes of a Metaverse include always being live and persistent — with both planned and spontaneous events always occurring — while at the same time providing an experience that spans and operates across platforms and the real world. A Metaverse must also have no real cap on audience, and have its own fully functioning economy... Fortnite hasn't reached Metaverse status yet. But Fortnite as a social network and impossible-to-ignore cultural phenomenon, Ball says, provides Epic Games a key advantage for leading in the Metaverse race. Fortnite draws a massive, willing and excited audience online to engage with chaotically clashing intellectual properties... "This organic evolution can't be overemphasized," Ball writes in his essay. "If you 'declared' your intent to start a Metaverse, these parties would never embrace interoperability or entrust their IP. But Fortnite has become so popular and so unique that most counterparties have no choice but to participate... Fortnite is too valuable a platform...."

The current swarm to an online-only social and capitalist economy has only highlighted the current Internet's failings, and what the Metaverse needs to do, Ball said. Big sites like Facebook, Google and Amazon continue to dominate online activity, as do larger streaming services like YouTube and Netflix. But each location requires its own membership and has separate ecosystems. "Right now, the digital world basically operates as though every restaurant and bar you go to requires a different ID card, has a different currency, requires their own dress codes and has their own units [of service and measurement]," Ball said. "It is clear that this really advantages the biggest services. People are just sticking to the big games, really. However there's a clear argument that reducing network lock-in can really raise all boats here."

Sweeney said as much in his DICE Summit keynote speech February. If the game industry wants to reshape the Internet and move away from Silicon Valley's walled gardens, Sweeney stressed that publishers need to rethink economies in the same way email was standardized... "We need to give up our attempts to each create our own private walled gardens and private monopoly and agree to work together and recognize we're all far better off if we connect our systems and grow our social graphs together.
Neal Stephenson answered questions from Slashdot readers back in 2004.

During the global coronavirus pandemic, demand for the Nintendo Switch console has skyrocketed and retailers have repeatedly run out of stock. Seizing that opportunity, some price gougers on Amazon and eBay are selling Switches for hundreds of dollars over the recommended retail price. From a report: Like lots of money-making opportunities in online-shopping, many of these resellers aren't just stumbling upon their in-demand product of choice. Instead, developers are creating dedicated tools to automatically buy Switches from stores when they come back in stock, and before others get a chance to. Motherboard has traced some of the bulk Switch buying to a community revolving around a new, particular bot. Hundreds of people looking to jump on the gold rush or who are just desperate to get their hands on a Switch for themselves have joined a Discord group where users share tips on how to effectively use the tool.

"I decided to make it as a joke, but I quickly realized just how powerful it could be," Nate, the creator of Bird Bot, the open source tool for quickly purchasing Switches, told Motherboard in an online chat. Right now it is open season for profit-seekers. Some resellers on eBay are asking for over $500 for a Switch, with some vendors successfully getting around $750 for the Animal Crossing themed bundle of the branded console and the game within the last week. The typical retail price for those products are $300 and $360 respectively.

Xbox co-creator Rob Wyatt has filed a lawsuit against Atari for failing to pay him for the design work he did in creating the Atari VCS console. From a report: Tin Giant, Wyatt's company, filed the lawsuit in federal court in Colorado, alleging breach of contract and defamation. Tin Giant said that Atari owes it in excess of $261,720. Wyatt, a co-creator of the Xbox and cofounder of The Last Gameboard, said in an interview last year that he quit as lead architect for Atari. He alleged that Atari did not pay his company, Tin Giant, for six months of work. Atari CEO Fred Chesnais declined to comment in a statement, saying that he had not received a copy of the lawsuit yet. Atari has not developed a game console for more than 20 years.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: As influential as Warcraft III was in the real-time strategy genre, the game's most enduring legacy might be as the basis for genre-defining, fan-made custom game spin-offs like Defense of the Ancients (aka Dota) and Auto Chess in its wake. Now, Blizzard is taking steps to ensure it retains complete ownership of any such custom games that originate from its titles in the future, including those that come out of Warcraft III's recently released Reforged update.

As noted by PC Gamer, a recent update to Blizzard's Acceptable Use Policy expands the legal rights that custom-game makers automatically assign to Blizzard (new language highlighted in bold; old language available on The Internet Archive): "Custom Games are and shall remain the sole and exclusive property of Blizzard. Without limiting the foregoing, you hereby assign to Blizzard all of your rights, title, and interest in and to all Custom Games, including but not limited to any copyrights in the content of any Custom Games." Blizzard's claim on custom-game copyrights is important because, while it's hard to effectively copyright the basic concept of a game, you can copyright the original characters, art, and writing associated with the game itself. "Under Blizzard's new legal language, any similar games created from the base of Reforged would be completely controlled by Blizzard," adds Ars. "While other developers would be able to copy the general gameplay for their own purposes, any derivative games that use the same name, art, or characters would belong to Blizzard."

"While Blizzard doesn't allow custom-game developers to engage in direct 'commercial exploitation' from their creations, those developers are allowed to accept donations to recoup the 'time and resources' involved in creating the game (with some restrictions). Blizzard also retains the right to 'remove Custom Games from its systems and/or require that a Custom Game developer cease any and/or all development and distribution of a Custom Game.'"

An anonymous reader shares a report: Jonathan Kay, co-author of the new book Your Move: What Board Games Teach Us About Life, has largely given up on movies and TV, and has instead made tabletop gaming his primary mode of recreation. "It has a social function in my life, and an intellectual function," Kay says in Episode 392 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "I've now written a book about it, so I guess it has a professional, editorial function. It's a huge part of my life." Kay wrote the book together with Joan Moriarty, who works full-time at the Snakes & Lattes board game cafe in Toronto. The concept of a board game cafe may be unfamiliar to many, but Kay believes that Snakes & Lattes is an important institution.

"I'm not sure if it's still the biggest board game cafe in North America, but I think it might be the oldest single-purpose urban board game cafe," he says. "And the Snakes & Lattes business model became a model for people creating board game cafes in other cities." The rise of such cafes is a testament to the growing popularity of board games. Sales quadrupled between 2013 and 2016, and the annual Gen Con convention now attracts over 70,000 attendees, Kay among them. He enjoys the laid back atmosphere among the mostly quiet, bookish gamers. "Introverts are actually usually very careful about their social interactions, because they know that if there's conflict that emerges, they won't know how to manage it," he says. "So as a result there's a heightened sense of politeness and consideration at these places."

Sony has announced plans to launch PlayStation games on "additional console platforms beyond PlayStation platforms as early as 2021." The first announced series for the change is Sony's long-running baseball sim series MLB The Show. Ars Technica reports: The gazillion-dollar question, of course, is which other console platforms we might expect the series to launch on. Neither Sony nor MLB had any answers to that question as of press time. Sony also didn't hint to doing the same thing for any other current PlayStation-exclusive series. Since the series began life in 1998 on PlayStation 1, simply titled MLB '98, Sony's baseball games have launched exclusively on PlayStation platforms -- and, in fact, they've launched on every PlayStation-branded device. While other multi-platform baseball sim series have fallen by the wayside in the years since, most recently 2K Sports' MLB 2K13, Sony's PlayStation-exclusive take on the American pastime has persisted as an annual release.

"Sony" at large has published games on non-PlayStation consoles in recent years, mostly in the form of Sony Music Entertainment's UNTIES entertainment publishing group. But those games are rarely marked with "Sony" or "PlayStation" branding, let alone temporary exclusivity on PlayStation platforms. Today's news marks the first time a series from Sony Interactive Entertainment with loud ties to the PlayStation brand has been announced for other competing consoles. There are still way more questions than answers: "Might Sony go so far as to launch MLB The Show on Xbox, thus creating a tangled love triangle of who publishes on whose consoles? Or will this become a bizarre move on Sony's part to support Google Stadia, even though Sony has its own complicated sometimes-streaming subscription service? And either way, how far might Sony and the MLB milk this cloud of mystery, assuming that 'as early as 2021' could mean one, two, or even 4,000 years later?"

Bill Gates has revealed that he thinks everyone would be using Windows Mobile right now if Microsoft hadn't have been caught up in a US Justice Department antitrust investigation. From a report: Speaking at The New York Times' DealBook Conference earlier this week, Gates revealed his thoughts on Microsoft's mobile mistakes. "There's no doubt that the antitrust lawsuit was bad for Microsoft, and we would have been more focused on creating the phone operating system and so instead of using Android today you would be using Windows Mobile," claimed Gates. "If it hadn't been for the antitrust case... we were so close, I was just too distracted. I screwed that up because of the distraction."

Microsoft's messy move from Windows Mobile to Windows Phone allowed Android to thrive, but at the time the company had the biggest opportunity in mobile and gave it away. Gates also revealed that Microsoft also missed the opportunity to launch Windows Mobile on a key Motorola handset. "We were just three months too late on a release Motorola would have used on a phone, so yes it's a winner takes all game," explained Gates. "Now nobody here has ever heard of Windows Mobile, but oh well. That's a few hundred billion here or there."