"The New York Times has an obituary for Masayuki Uemura, designer of the first Nintendo Entertainment System console," writes Slashdot reader nickovs. Here's an excerpt from the report: Video game consoles had a moment of popularity in the early 1980s, but the market collapsed because of shoddy quality control and uninspiring software that failed to provide the thrills of arcade hits like Pac-Man and Space Invaders. Truckloads of unsold game cartridges ended up in landfills, and retailers decided that home gaming systems had no future. But in 1985, the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System in the United States changed the industry forever. The unassuming gray box with its distinctive controllers became a must-have for an entire generation of children and prompted Nintendo's virtual monopoly over the industry for the better part of a decade as competitors pulled out of the market in response to the company's dominance. "The NES was not the first video game console," adds nickovs. "The quality of the games that became available for the NES, including titles like Super Mario Brothers, made it much more appealing than pervious boxes and that lead to its commercial success. These games would not have been possible without the hardware that Uemura designed."

New technology promising to solve Ethereum's growing pains is gaining traction, increasing bets that some day most of the network's transactions might not actually take place on its own blockchain. From a report: For years slow speeds and high transaction fees have plagued the network underpinning the $550 billion cryptocurrency Ether -- home to the most popular blockchain applications. Its weaknesses have allowed new competitors such as Solana and Avalanche to gain ground. However, help from so-called Layer 2 technologies, or rollups, could be a solution. Digital ledgers like Ethereum are designed to slow down and become more expensive as their popularity increases. But these Layer 2 projects, many of which have only recently debuted, can effectively take transaction data off Ethereum, compress it and post it back onto the original chain for a fraction of the time and cost. So far the the user base is relatively small. But rapid growth is raising expectations that Ethereum will not only be able to ward off competition but that other blockchains might adopt similar scaling solutions. If the technology takes off, networks like Ethereum might only be directly used for very large transactions in the future, with the bulk of activity happening on Layer 2 networks.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Record: A recently discovered FBI training document shows that US law enforcement can gain limited access to the content of encrypted messages from secure messaging services like iMessage, Line, and WhatsApp, but not to messages sent via Signal, Telegram, Threema, Viber, WeChat, or Wickr. The document, obtained earlier this month following a FOIA request filed by Property of the People, a US nonprofit dedicated to government transparency, appears to contain training advice for what kind of data agents can obtain from the operators of encrypted messaging services and the legal processes they have to go through.

Dated to January 7, 2021, the document doesn't include any new information but does a good job at providing an up-to-date summary of what type of information the FBI can currently obtain from each of the listed services. [...] While the document confirms that the FBI can't gain access to encrypted messages sent through some services, the other type of information they can glean from providers might still help authorities in other aspects of their investigations. The content of the document, which may be hard to read due to some font rendering issues, is also available in the table [embedded in the article]. Of note, the table above does not include details about Keybase, a recent end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) service that has been gaining in popularity. The service was acquired by video conferencing software maker Zoom in May 2020.

Microsoft's $300 Xbox Series S was the most popular console during Black Friday, it's been claimed. From a report: According to Adobe's Digital Economy Index data, the cheaper Series S outsold both PS5, Switch OLED Model and the more expensive Xbox Series X during the biggest holiday sale day of the year. Adobe claims its data comes from analysing 1 trillion visits to retail sites, in addition to surveying over 1,000 retailers on their most popular items. If accurate, a key element of Series S's popularity is likely that, unlike the highly sought-after PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, Series S has been widely available to purchase during Black Friday week. At the time of publishing, it's still in stock at many retailers.

CNN profiles Magnus Carlsen, the world's best chess player — and the state of the chess community today: Interest in chess spiked at the beginning of the pandemic, and again in October 2020 after the release of the Netflix series, "The Queen's Gambit." In the first three weeks after its debut, sales of chess sets went up by 87% in the U.S. and sales of books about chess leaped 603%, according to marketing research company NPD Group. Not since the 1970s, when American legend Bobby Fischer burst onto the scene, has the game captured the attention of the world like this....

Carlsen tries hard to be indifferent toward anything at all during the press conference and interview. But he does have strong opinions on how the game should be changed to make sure it holds the attention of the current groundswell of interested players. "I've been somebody who's supported having quicker games in the world championship for a long time," he said. "I think for people who are not into chess at all, who don't know anything about the game, you're more naturally attracted to quicker games." World championship games can last hours and often end in ties because mistakes are so rare...

Carlsen's love of fast-paced chess isn't surprising, considering he is the current world champion in both "Rapid" and "Blitz" formats — games that generally last for 15 minutes or less. His tiebreak wins in previous championship games were both in the rapid format and there are numerous videos on YouTube where his quick thinking is showcased. Computers are now powerful enough to calculate billions of possible move combinations in seconds, ably deciding the best possible option. It makes preparation more exacting and less enjoyable, and Carlsen thinks quicker games would help solve that...

Carlsen could rightly be considered the greatest chess player ever. He has been the world champion for eight years and holds the longest unbeaten run in history. He only trails Russian grandmaster Garry Kasparov in weeks spent as the highest rated player.
But the New York Times points out that Carlsen has done something none of his chess-playing predecessors have ever done. "He has leveraged his fame to become one of the chess world's leading impresarios. In the process, he has amassed a small fortune." Carlsen has several private sponsorship agreements, including with Unibet, a sports betting site; Isklar, a Norwegian water company; and Simonsen Vogt Wiig, a Norwegian law firm. But the main vehicle for his business ventures is Play Magnus, a company that he co-founded in 2013, the year he became world champion. Initially designed as an app that allowed users to mimic Carlsen's playing style and strength at different ages, Play Magnus has expanded, mostly through acquisitions, to become a company with a dozen subsidiaries. It now includes an online playing site, multiple teaching and training platforms, and digital and book publishing arms.

According to Andreas Thome, Play Magnus's chief executive, the company has about 250 employees and about four million registered users of its products and proprietary learning programs. One year after it went public on the Euronext Growth Oslo stock exchange, Play Magnus now has a market capitalization of about $115 million. It is the only publicly traded chess company in the world.
Carlsen's personal stake in the company is worth nearly $9 million, the Times points out — even as Carlsen is now competing in the world chess championship for a $2.24 million prize, where "as much as 60% will go to the winner."

In the 14-game match, the first two games...all ended in a draw. "The result means there have now been 16 draws in a row in world championship games played at classical time controls," the Guardian pointed out, "dating back five years to game 11 of Carlsen's match against Sergey Karjakin in November 2016."

And then the third game, played Sunday....also ended in a draw.

Illegal miners and mass relocations after a ban on crypto mining in China have overloaded energy grid. From a report: Matthew Heard, a software engineer from San Jose, is worried about his 33 bitcoin mining machines in Kazakhstan. In the past week, they kept getting shut off in an attempt by the national grid to limit the power being used by crypto miners. "It has been days since my machines have been online," he said. "During the last week, even if my machines do come on, they barely stay on." Kazakhstan has been struggling to cope with the huge popularity of crypto mining, driven this year partly by the steep rise in value of cryptocurrencies and partly by a mass migration of miners to its borders after China made mining illegal in May.

After three major power plants in the north of the country went into emergency shutdown last month the state grid operator, Kegoc, warned that it would start rationing power to the 50 crypto miners that are registered with the government, and said they would be "isconnected first" if the grid suffers problems. Heard set up in Kazakhstan in August and his machines are managed by Enegix, a company that rents out space to run crypto mining machines. He said his income has dropped from an average of $1,200 worth of bitcoin per day to $800 in October, and in the past week his machines have only been on for 55 per cent of the time. Machine owners are not notified when shutdowns are going to happen or when they will go back online, he said.

A patch of virtual real estate in the online world Decentraland sold for a record $2.4 million worth of cryptocurrency, the buyer crypto investor Tokens.com and Decentraland said on Tuesday. From a report: Decentraland is an online environment -- also called a "metaverse" -- where users can buy land, visit buildings, walk around and meet people as avatars. Such environments have grown in popularity this year, as the pandemic caused people to spend more time online. read more Interest surged last month when Facebook changed its name to Meta to reflect its focus on developing virtual reality products for the metaverse. Decentraland is a specific type of metaverse that uses blockchain. Land and other items in Decentraland are sold in the form of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), a kind of crypto asset. Crypto enthusiasts buy land there as a speculative investment, using Decentraland's cryptocurrency, MANA. A subsidiary of Tokens.com, called the Metaverse Group, bought a patch of real estate for 618,000 MANA on Monday, which was around $3.27 million at the time of this Slashdot post, a Decentraland spokesman and a statement by Tokens.com said.

When it comes to sales of electric cars, Norway is in a league of its own. In September, battery-powered electric vehicles accounted for 77.5 percent of all new cars sold. That figure makes Norway a world leader by a long way -- leapfrogging over the UK, where 15 percent of new car sales were electric as of October, and the US, where that number is just 2.6 percent. From a report: Norway's electric dream has been credited to a series of tax breaks and other financial carrots that mean brands like Tesla can compete on price with combustion engines. But these incentives -- and their success -- have created a unique predicament: Norway is running out of dirty cars to tax.

It's quite a big problem. The previous government -- a center-right coalition that was replaced by a center-left minority government in October -- estimated that the popularity of EVs was creating a 19.2 billion Norwegian krone ($2.32 billion) hole in the country's annual revenue. While EVs might be great news for the environment, their rapid success in Norway is now forcing some serious fiscal consternation. The road to this point has been long -- and offers lessons to other countries racing to ditch gas-guzzling combustion engines. In Norway, the most progressive electric vehicle policies in the world started with a pop group, an environmentalist, and a small red Fiat Panda. It was 1988 when activist Frederic Hauge, along with fellow green campaigners from the band A-ha, traveled to the Swiss city of Bern, where they found the red Fiat. A previous owner had converted the car to run off a lead battery, and the group planned to use the vehicle to persuade the Norwegian government to encourage electric vehicle uptake.

The Fiat became the centerpiece of a nine-year campaign in which Hauge and members of A-ha drove the car on Norway's toll roads without paying. The fines racked up, and when they remained unpaid, the vehicle would be impounded and sold at auction, where Hauge would buy it back and repeat the cycle of toll dodging. A-ha's celebrity members added glitz to the crusade against toll fees for EVs and Hauge -- who has led an environmental group called Bellona since 1986 -- courted press attention to demand incentives for electric cars. "By being a positive vigilante, he made the media and also the politicians aware of the electric car," says Oyvind Solberg Thorsen, director of Norway's Road Traffic Information Council, which publishes statistics about the country's roads and vehicles.

Is the ocular product EyeDetect a leap ahead of the polygraph? Or just the same dubiousness in a more high-tech box? From a report: In 2018, John Rael, a volunteer track coach in Taos, N.M., was on trial for allegedly raping a 14-year-old girl when his lawyer made an unusual request. He wanted the judge to admit evidence from "EyeDetect," a lie-detection test based on eye movements that Rael had passed. The judge agreed, and five of the 12 jurors wound up voting not to convict. A mistrial was declared. EyeDetect is the product of the Utah company Converus. "Imagine if you could exonerate the innocent and identify the liars ... just by looking into their eyes," the company's YouTube channel promises. "Well, now you can!" Its chief executive, Todd Mickelsen, says they've built a better truth-detection mousetrap; he believes eye movements reflect their bearer far better than the much older and mostly discredited polygraph. Its popularity may be growing: the company says EyeDetect has gone from 500 customers in 2019 to 600 now.

Its critics, however, say the EyeDetect is just the polygraph in more algorithmic clothing. The machine is fundamentally unable to deliver on its claims, they argue, because human truth-telling is too subtle for any data set. And they worry that relying on it can lead to tragic outcomes, like punishing the innocent or providing a cloak for the guilty. EyeDetect raises a question that draws all the way back to the Garden of Eden: Are humans so wired to tell the truth we'll give ourselves away when we don't? And, to a more 21st-century query: Can modern technology come up with the tools to detect those tells? An EyeDetect test has a subject placed in front of a monitor with a digital camera and, as with the polygraph, lobbed generically true-false queries like "have you ever hurt anybody" to establish a baseline. Then come specific questions. If the subject's physical responses are more demonstrative there, they are presumed to be lying; less demonstrative, they're telling the truth.

The Environmental Protection Agency announced a new national recycling strategy today, the agency's first ever such commitment, according to the Washington Post. The Verge reports: It's a roadmap for the US to achieve a goal of recycling at least half of its municipal waste by the end of the decade. That's a steep rise considering the US' recycling rate has actually declined since 2015, and was only at about 32 percent of all municipal waste in 2018 (the most recent year for which there's EPA data). The recycling plans the EPA announced today are just the first piece in "a series" of forthcoming documents the agency plans to release to work towards a "circular economy," or an economy where resources are recovered and reused to make new products rather than allowed to wind up in landfills. It's a sort of tacit acknowledgement that recycling alone doesn't make a huge dent in the world's trash problems.

There are several key tactics the EPA plans to employ to meet its new recycling goal. For starters, the US will have to do a better job of collecting recyclable materials. The uptick in online shopping has changed where packaging waste winds up. There's less cardboard for instance, coming from shopping malls and grocery stores because of the popularity of home deliveries. That has posed problems for recycling companies because cardboard coming from peoples' homes tends to be dirtier than retailers' trash, experts tell The Verge. Often times, cardboard or plastic that's too contaminated with food or other items can't be recycled. So the EPA intends to do more public outreach and education to ensure more of the stuff people throw out actually gets recycled.

The EPA also wants to develop new markets for recycled materials so that it's worth it for companies to recycle. That means there could be new policies or financial incentives on the way to boost demand for recycled materials. The strategy document mentions, for example, a "Demand Challenge partnership program" that would recognize companies for using more recycled materials in their products. Notably, the EPA says it might finally "explore" ratification of the Basel Convention, a 1989 international treaty aimed at reducing the flow of e-waste and other hazardous trash from wealthy to lower income nations. The new strategy also marks the first time, the EPA says, that the agency's recycling plans will connect the dots between waste, environmental injustice, and the climate crisis.

First it was called Freedive, then it was dubbed IMDb TV. Now, less than three years after launching its free ad-supported video-streaming service, Amazon is looking to rename it, The Information reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the situation. From a report: Amazon executives believe the existing name is too hard for people to pronounce, which hurts its popularity, said people familiar with the situation. Several alternatives have been tossed around in internal discussions, including Zon -- short for Amazon -- as well as Free TV and Free Streaming TV. The Zon idea was shot down but otherwise Amazon is yet to make a decision about the new name, the people said.

Microsoft is going head to head with Chromebooks with a new $249 Surface Laptop SE, its most affordable Surface yet. While the software giant has attempted to compete with the popularity of Chrome OS in US schools for years, the Surface Laptop SE is the company's first true Chromebook competitor. From a report: Surface Laptop SE will be sold exclusively to schools and students, starting at $249. It's part of a much broader effort with Windows 11 SE, a new student edition designed to compete with Chrome OS that will ship on a range of low-cost laptops in the coming months. Surface Laptop SE is every bit the low-cost Windows device you'd expect to see for $249.

While it retains the same keyboard and trackpad found on Microsoft's Surface Laptop Go, the all-plastic body houses an 11.6-inch display running at just a 1366 x 768 resolution. This is the first 16:9 Surface device in more than seven years, after Microsoft switched to 3:2 for its Surface line with the Surface Pro 3 launch in 2014. The screen looks like the biggest drawback on this device, particularly as we weren't fans of the low-resolution screen (1536 x 1024) found on the $549 Surface Laptop Go. Lenovo's Chromebook Duet ships with a better 10.1-inch (1920 x 1200) display for the same $249 price as the Surface Laptop SE. Intel's Celeron N4020 or N4120 power the Surface Laptop SE, combined with 4GB / 8GB of RAM and 64GB or 128GB of eMMC storage.

ZDNet reports: JavaScript is now used by more than 16.4 million developers globally, says a survey of more than 19,000 coders — making it the world's most popular programming language "by a wide margin".

SlashData's 21st State of the Developer Nation Report examined global software developer trends across 160 countries during Q3 2021, covering programming languages, tools, APIs, apps and technology segments, as well as attitudes of developers themselves... While not necessarily a surprise in itself — JavaScript has, after all, been the world's most-used language for a number of years now — SlashData found that upwards of 2.5 million developers had joined the JavaScript community in the past six months alone. That's the same as the entire user base of Swift; or, the combined communities of Rust and Ruby.

The data for JavaScript also included language derivatives TypeScript and CoffeeScript.

Python might not be a close second, but its popularity is impressive nonetheless: according to SlashData, the language is now used by some 11.3 million coders, primarily within data science and machine learning, and IoT applications. The brainchild of Guido van Rossum, Python's popularity has exploded in recent years, overtaking that of Java, which is currently used by 9.6m developers. Java remains a go-to for mobile and desktop apps, SlashData's survey found. According to SlashData, Python added 2.3m developers to its community in the past 12 months. "That's a 25% growth rate, one of the highest across all the large programming language communities of more than 7M users," the report noted.

"The rise of data science and machine learning (ML) is a clear factor in Python's popularity. More than 70% of ML developers and data scientists report using Python. For perspective, only 17% use R, the other language often associated with data science."
The survey concluded these are, in order, the 10 most popular programming languages:

1. JavaScript
2. Python
3. Java
4. C/C++ [Yes, it lumps them together]
5. PHP
6. C#
7. "Visual development tools"
8. Kotlin
9. Swift
10. Go

The report also found that Rust, although coming in at #14, grew faster than any other language in the past 24 months, "nearly tripling in size from just 0.4M developers in Q3 2019 to 1.1M."

EA CEO Andrew Wilson called NFT and "play-to-earn" games the "the future of our industry," but added that "it's still early to figure out how that's going to work," when asked about the topic during the company's earnings call this week. From a report: "I think that in the context of the games we create and the live services that we offer, collectible digital content is going to play a meaningful part in our future," Wilson said. "So, it's still early to tell, but I think we're in a really good position, and we should expect us to kind of think more innovatively and creatively about that on a go-forward basis." EA has yet to officially step into the NFT and "play-to-earn," or blockchain space that's been growing in the past few years. "Play-to-earn" games often require players pay an up-front cost through cryptocurrency to play the game and collect unique, in-game items. Those items can then increase in value and be sold to other players. It's common for players to also have input on the game's development as their monetary stake in it increases the game's overall value. Recent EA job listings include "NFT" and "blockchain" in the descriptions, suggesting that the company is at least aware of the genre's surge in popularity. A post for a senior director of the company's competitive gaming brand reads, "We set the pace for EA's investment in gaming subscriptions, our PC storefront and platform, competitive gaming (including FIFA, Apex Legends, and Madden NFL), as well as new business opportunities, including fantasy sports, blockchain and NFTs, and more."

The eNaira is supposed to live within a mobile wallet, have the same value and be interchangeable with the physical naira for everyday transactions. Nigerians believe the eNaira, which is governed by a centralized blockchain, is part of the central bank's drive to discourage cryptocurrencies' popularity among Nigeria's youth, just like China's effort with the digital yuan. From a report: And so last week, Nigeria's central bank made two types of eNaira wallets available on Google and Apple stores: one for individuals, and another for merchants. But some users say parts of the wallet for individuals have not worked properly. Fisayo Fosudo, a Nigerian YouTuber who reviews gadgets and apps, said he and three friends initially got error messages that the eNaira app could not match their emails to their bank verification numbers. He would later register successfully but found broken links that did not lead to helpful support pages on the central bank's website. "Was really looking forward to reviewing the eNaira app but it's been hard to get it to work seamlessly. We wait," Fosudo said. After many users left poor reviews for the Android version of the eNaira app for individuals, it was taken down. It had been downloaded 100,000 times before that. The Apple Store version remained available at press time.

Zoom is piloting showing ads to users on its free "Basic" tier, the company has announced in a blog post. From a report: Ads will appear on the browser page shown to users at the end of a call. Zoom says ads are being rolled out to free users in "certain countries," though its blog post doesn't detail exactly which these are. Users on the service's Basic tier will only see ads if they join a meeting hosted by another Basic tier user. Although ads won't be shown during meetings themselves, it's still a potentially big shift for the videoconferencing service. Zoom has typically imposed only minor restrictions on its free tier, which helped the service explode in popularity last year as people around the world adapted to working and socializing from home. Even its end-to-end encryption, which Zoom initially said would be limited to paid users, ended up coming to free users after all.

In response to mounting pressure from activists, parents and regulators who believe tech companies haven't done enough to protect children online, businesses and governments around the globe are placing major parts of the internet behind stricter digital age checks. The New York Times reports: People in Japan must provide a document proving their age to use the dating app Tinder. The popular game Roblox requires players to upload a form of government identification -- and a selfie to prove the ID belongs to them -- if they want access to a voice chat feature. Laws in Germany and France require pornography websites to check visitors' ages. The changes, which have picked up speed over the last two years, could upend one of the internet's central traits: the ability to remain anonymous. Since the days of dial-up modems and AOL chat rooms, people could traverse huge swaths of the web without divulging any personal details. Many people created an online persona entirely separate from their offline one. But the experience of consuming content and communicating online is increasingly less like an anonymous public square and more like going to the bank, with measures to prove that you are who you say you are. [...]

Critics of the age checks say that in the name of keeping people safe, they could endanger user privacy, dampen free expression and hurt communities that benefit from anonymity online. Authoritarian governments have used protecting children as an argument for limiting online speech: China barred websites this summer from ranking celebrities by popularity as part of a larger crackdown on what it says are the pernicious effects of celebrity culture on young people. "Are we going to start seeing more age verification? Of course," said Hany Farid, a professor of engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, who has called for more child safety measures. "Because there is more pressure, there's more awareness now, on how these technologies are harming kids." But, Mr. Farid said, regulators and companies need to proceed with caution. "We don't want the solution to be more harmful than the problem," he said. Further reading: 'Banning Anonymous Social Media Accounts Would Only Stifle Free Speech and Democracy'

Cybersecurity researchers at Bitdefender say cyber criminals have been using a rootkit named FiveSys "that somehow made its way through the driver certification process to be digitally signed by Microsoft," reports ZDNet: The valid signature enables the rootkit — malicious software that allows cyber criminals to access and control infected computers — to appear valid and bypass operating systems restrictions and gain what researchers describe as "virtually unlimited privileges". It's known for cyber criminals to use stolen digital certificates, but in this case, they've managed to acquire a valid one.

It's a still a mystery how cyber criminals were able to get hold of a valid certificate. "Chances is that it was submitted for validation and somehow it got through the checks. While the digital signing requirements detect and stop most of the rootkits, they are not foolproof," Bogdan Botezatu, director of threat research and reporting at Bitdefender told ZDNet. It's uncertain how FiveSys is actually distributed, but researchers believe that it's bundled with cracked software downloads.

Once installed, FiveSys rootkit redirects internet traffic to a proxy server, which it does by installing a custom root certificate so that the browser won't warn about the unknown identity of the proxy. This also blocks other malware from writing on the drivers, in what's likely an attempt to stop other cyber criminals from taking advantage of the compromised system. Analysis of attacks shows that FiveSys rootkit is being used in cyber attacks targeting online gamers, with the aim of stealing login credentials and the ability to hijack in-game purchases. The popularity of online games means that a lot of money can be involved — not only because banking details are connected to accounts, but also because prestigious virtual items can fetch large sums of money when sold, meaning attackers could exploit access to steal and sell these items.

Currently, the attacks are targeting gamers in China — which is where researchers also believe that the attackers are operating from.
"The campaign started slowly in late 2020, but massively expanded during the course of summer 2021," ZDNet adds.

"The campaign is now blocked after researchers at Bitdefender flagged the abuse of digital trust to Microsoft, which revoked the signature."

ISPs around the world claim the unprecedented bandwidth demands Netflix's Squid Game is placing on their broadband networks means they should be getting more money. From a report: But experts say that's not how telecom networks work, suggesting that already cash-flush telecom giants are just positioning themselves for an underserved hand out. The popular South Korean thriller, a not so thinly-veiled critique of late-stage capitalism, tracks a group of indebted people who compete in deadly children's games for cash. According to Netflix, Squid Game is the most popular show in company history, the number one program in 94 countries, and has been watched by 142 million households. ISPs around the world also claim the show's popularity is driving a massive surge in bandwidth consumption, and they want their cut.

In South Korea, Internet service provider SK Broadband sued Netflix earlier this month, claiming that between May and September the ISP's network traffic jumped 24 times to 1.2 trillion bits of data processed every second. This surge is Netflix's fault, the ISP insists, and Netflix should be held financially responsible. In the UK, British Telecom executives have been making similar complaints, insisting that Netflix should be forced to help pay for the surge in network traffic caused by the show. But broadband experts say that's not how broadband networks actually work. "It makes no sense for ISPs to cry victim because they provide a popular service, and are expected to provide it," John Bergmayer, telecom expert at consumer group Public Knowledge told Motherboard. "People subscribe to broadband to do things like stream video, and it's broadband customers who are requesting all these Squid Game streams. They are not somehow imposed on ISPs by Netflix."

Somewhere on Yahoo, one writer asks "Is the comic book industry dying or thriving?" There was a time when comic books were sold at newsstands alongside mainstream publications, according to Forbes, but that changed in the early 1980s when periodical comics all but disappeared from newsstands. From then on, the vast majority of comic books were sold through independently owned retail comic shops.
But GamesRadar+ notes a boom started in the 1990s — when comic books became an investment: Long story short, folks outside of regular comic book readers discovered that, in some cases, key comic book issues (such as those that debuted popular characters or titles) could be worth significant amounts of money on the secondary market, leading to some fans buying dozens of copies of a single issue in the hopes of someday capitalizing on their monetary value...

Someone should've explained supply and demand — the bubble burst because when everyone is buying and meticulously preserving a million copies of a comic book, there is no rarity to drive up the value to the level of less well-preserved comic books from earlier eras.
Their article also points out that this era saw the dawn of lucrative "variant covers". But the '90s also saw a rebellion of top Marvel artists who left to found Image comics, "the first major third-party publisher to challenge Marvel and DC's reign over the industry in years," which led to "a rise in independent and creator-owned comic books, both large and small, and helped the rising tide of indie publishers gain a solid foothold as an overall industry presence." (Presumably this "rising tide" would also include publishers of manga and anime-derived titles.)

So where are we now? The article on Yahoo notes the vast popularity of comic book movies, and also argues that "The billion-dollar comic business continues to boom." According to Publisher's Weekly, sales of comic books and graphic novels topped $1.28 billion in 2020, an all-time high. It's no fluke. With a few exceptions — sales fell a little in 2017, for example — comic book sales have been rising consistently for decades.
But who's actually reading comic books? Is it teenagers? Nostalgic adults? Investing collectors? People who saw the movies first? (If you're 12 years old, are you going to read some comic book, or watch The Avengers?)

Comic books now also have to compete with incredibly immersive videogames, virtual reality, and a gazillion cellphone apps — not to mention social media, and even online fan fiction. So I'd be interested to hear the experiences of Slashdot's readers. It seems like we'd be a reasonably good cross section of geek culture — but can we solve the riddle of the state of the comic book industry today?

Share your own thoughts in the comments. Is the comic book industry dying or thriving?