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."

Ana Diaz writes via Polygon: Jack Morrison logs on to stream, he doesn't boot up Twitch, Streamlabs OBS, or speak into a fancy microphone. Instead, he grabs a basic circular mirror and sets it in front of his desktop monitor, facing the screen. Then he sits in front of his monitor, as usual, and plays the game, propping up his cell phone to face him and setting his camera live. When he boots up Apex Legends, viewers see the gameplay reflected in the mirror as they watch him play. This makeshift setup might have been surprising just a year ago, in an industry that seems to be more and more concerned with having the latest streaming technology. But it's become a rather common practice on TikTok, where video game streaming has picked up in the past few months. In September, the company said that one billion people in total use the app each month, and jokes and sounds riffing on video games have long proliferated widely across TikTok. Now, Morrison (JackMorrisonTV on TikTok) and other streamers with similarly crude setups have taken over the app's "LIVE" section, capturing as many as 2,400 viewers at a time.

These streamers are using low-key setups, in comparison to the complex (and expensive) setups that dominate Twitch, where a DSLR camera and the capture card to use it can cost over $800. The exact build of each TikToker's setup varies, but nearly all of them capture video via an external camera that's focused on a screen, or in Morrison's case, a reflection of a screen. A brief scroll through the gaming section of TikTok's live content shows these streamers' ingenuity; some will stream videos of tablets or phones as they play mobile games, while others will just put the camera in front of a screen. The games also vary widely, with people playing games like Snake, Minecraft, and Wordscapes in addition to shooters like Valorant.

The number of live streams is much smaller than the wave of short-form videos being pushed out every single day on the app, making them stand out more. It also feels like a more accessible platform, especially for people who are just getting started with streaming. TikTok streamers are using more basic technology, such as mirrors, cell phone stands, and the like. It's also less competitive than Twitch, which has over seven million unique streamers go live each month. [...] TikTok is also testing monetization features that might make it more appealing for streamers to use. [...] For now, streams seem like a quick and easy way to take advantage of TikTok's massive audience. Whether or not bona fide TikTok streaming stars will emerge on the platform or find a sustainable home there remains to be seen.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from GeekWire: The Japanese video game company Sega announced Monday that it plans to "explore a strategic alliance" with Microsoft, which will see Sega build new games and overhaul its development process via Microsoft's Azure platform. The new alliance is part of a forward-focused initiative at Sega called "Super Game." According to a news release, Microsoft's Azure provides Sega with a "next-generation development platform" that Sega can customize to account for different styles of work and infrastructural changes. "SEGA has played such an iconic role in the gaming industry and has been a tremendous partner over the years," Microsoft CVP Sarah Bond said in a statement. "We look forward to working together as they explore new ways to create unique gaming experiences for the future using Microsoft cloud technologies. Together we will reimagine how games get built, hosted, and operated, with a goal of adding more value to players and Sega alike."

According to Sega, the key focuses behind Super Game are the keywords "Global," "Online," "Community," and "IP utilization." With 5G on its way to supercharge cloud gaming in many parts of the world, Sega is explicitly using Microsoft Azure in an attempt to anticipate and serve whatever the next trend might be. The name of the initiative follows up on information spotted in Sega's March 2021 financial presentation, where the company stated that its strategy included the creation of a Super Game within the next five years, defined as a title that "can be expanded globally." With IP utilization as one of the Super Game's hallmarks, it suggests that Sega plans to turn one of its tentpole franchises -- the same financial report mentioned Phantasy Star Online, Sonic the Hedgehog, Persona, Yakuza, and Total War as potential candidates -- to be made into a big-ticket service game. Whatever that ends up being, its development process will be powered by Microsoft Azure.

The documents leaked to U.S. regulators by a Facebook whistleblower "reveal that the social media giant has privately and meticulously tracked real-world harms exacerbated by its platforms," reports the Washington Post.

Yet it also reports that at the same time Facebook "ignored warnings from its employees about the risks of their design decisions and exposed vulnerable communities around the world to a cocktail of dangerous content."

And in addition, the whistleblower also argued that due to Mark Zuckberg's "unique degree of control" over Facebook, he's ultimately personally response for what the Post describes as "a litany of societal harms caused by the company's relentless pursuit of growth." Zuckerberg testified last year before Congress that the company removes 94 percent of the hate speech it finds before a human reports it. But in internal documents, researchers estimated that the company was removing less than 5 percent of all hate speech on Facebook...

For all Facebook's troubles in North America, its problems with hate speech and misinformation are dramatically worse in the developing world. Documents show that Facebook has meticulously studied its approach abroad, and is well aware that weaker moderation in non-English-speaking countries leaves the platform vulnerable to abuse by bad actors and authoritarian regimes. According to one 2020 summary, the vast majority of its efforts against misinformation — 84 percent — went toward the United States, the documents show, with just 16 percent going to the "Rest of World," including India, France and Italy...

Facebook chooses maximum engagement over user safety. Zuckerberg has said the company does not design its products to persuade people to spend more time on them. But dozens of documents suggest the opposite. The company exhaustively studies potential policy changes for their effects on user engagement and other factors key to corporate profits.

Amid this push for user attention, Facebook abandoned or delayed initiatives to reduce misinformation and radicalization... Starting in 2017, Facebook's algorithm gave emoji reactions like "angry" five times the weight as "likes," boosting these posts in its users' feeds. The theory was simple: Posts that prompted lots of reaction emoji tended to keep users more engaged, and keeping users engaged was the key to Facebook's business. The company's data scientists eventually confirmed that "angry" reaction, along with "wow" and "haha," occurred more frequently on "toxic" content and misinformation. Last year, when Facebook finally set the weight on the angry reaction to zero, users began to get less misinformation, less "disturbing" content and less "graphic violence," company data scientists found.
The Post also contacted a Facebook spokeswoman for their response. The spokewoman denied that Zuckerberg "makes decisions that cause harm" and then also dismissed the findings as being "based on selected documents that are mischaracterized and devoid of any context..."

Responding to the spread of specific pieces of misinformation on Facebook, the spokeswoman went as far to acknowledge that at Facebook, "We have no commercial or moral incentive to do anything other than give the maximum number of people as much of a positive experience as possible."

She added that the company is "constantly making difficult decisions."

AnandTech reviews the recently unveiled M1 Pro and M1 Max chips : The M1 Pro and M1 Max change the narrative completely -- these designs feel like truly SoCs that have been made with power users in mind, with Apple increasing the performance metrics in all vectors. We expected large performance jumps, but we didn't expect the some of the monstrous increases that the new chips are able to achieve. On the CPU side, doubling up on the performance cores is an evident way to increase performance -- the competition also does so with some of their designs. How Apple does it differently, is that it not only scaled the CPU cores, but everything surrounding them. It's not just 4 additional performance cores, it's a whole new performance cluster with its own L2. On the memory side, Apple has scaled its memory subsystem to never before seen dimensions, and this allows the M1 Pro & Max to achieve performance figures that simply weren't even considered possible in a laptop chip. The chips here aren't only able to outclass any competitor laptop design, but also competes against the best desktop systems out there, you'd have to bring out server-class hardware to get ahead of the M1 Max -- it's just generally absurd.

On the GPU side of things, Apple's gains are also straightforward. The M1 Pro is essentially 2x the M1, and the M1 Max is 4x the M1 in terms of performance. Games are still in a very weird place for macOS and the ecosystem, maybe it's a chicken-and-egg situation, maybe gaming is still something of a niche that will take a long time to see make use of the performance the new chips are able to provide in terms of GPU. What's clearer, is that the new GPU does allow immense leaps in performance for content creation and productivity workloads which rely on GPU acceleration. To further improve content creation, the new media engine is a key feature of the chip. Particularly video editors working with ProRes or ProRes RAW, will see a many-fold improvement in their workflow as the new chips can handle the formats like a breeze -- this along is likely going to have many users of that professional background quickly adopt the new MacBook Pro's. For others, it seems that Apple knows the typical MacBook Pro power users, and has designed the silicon around the use-cases in which Macs do shine. The combination of raw performance, unique acceleration, as well as sheer power efficiency, is something that you just cannot find in any other platform right now, likely making the new MacBook Pro's not just the best laptops, but outright the very best devices for the task. It's a comprehensive review, and Intel should be panicking.

"As the United States seeks to shore up its defenses against cyberattacks, the country is seeking to harness the skills of some of the country's most promising young minds," reports the Washington Post, "using a model that mirrors competitive video gaming, also known as esports."

Though it's a partnership between the federal government, academia and the private sector, it's being run by Katzcy, a northern Virginia-based digital marketing firm, the Post reports: U.S. Cyber Games, a project founded in April and funded by the National Institute of Standards and Technology's National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education, has assembled a team of 25 Americans, ages 18 to 26, who will compete against other countries in the inaugural International Cybersecurity Challenge, scheduled to be held in Greece in June 2022.

The cyber games consist of two broad formats, with the competitions organized and promoted to appeal to a generation raised on video gaming. The goal is to identify and train candidates for careers in cybersecurity. There are king-of-the-hill-type games where one team tries to break into a network while the other team tries to defend it. There are also capture-the-flag-type games where teams must complete a series of puzzles that follow the basic tenets of cybersecurity programs, like decrypting an encrypted file or analyzing secret network traffic...

The U.S. cyber team's head coach, retired Lt. Col. TJ O'Connor who served as a communications support officer with special forces, noted the unique platform presented by cybersecurity competitions. Unlike other forms of computer science education, O'Connor said, staying up to date on the latest developments in cybersecurity is difficult, with hackers constantly iterating on and developing new tactics to break through cyberdefenses. "Understanding the most likely attack is one thing you gain through Cyber Games. It's an attack-based curriculum, and then you can plan the most appropriate strategies when they occur," said O'Connor, who helped create and now chairs Florida Tech's cybersecurity program.

A new research paper written by a team of academics and computer scientists from Spain and Austria has demonstrated that it's possible to use Facebook's targeting tools to deliver an ad exclusively to a single individual if you know enough about the interests Facebook's platform assigns them. TechCrunch reports: The paper -- entitled "Unique on Facebook: Formulation and Evidence of (Nano)targeting Individual Users with non-PII Data" -- describes a "data-driven model" that defines a metric showing the probability a Facebook user can be uniquely identified based on interests attached to them by the ad platform. The researchers demonstrate that they were able to use Facebook's Custom Audience tool to target a number of ads in such a way that each ad only reached a single, intended Facebook user.

The research raises fresh questions about potentially harmful uses of Facebook's ad targeting tools, and -- more broadly -- questions about the legality of the tech giant's personal data processing empire given that the information it collects on people can be used to uniquely identify individuals, picking them out of the crowd of others on its platform even purely based on their interests. The findings could increase pressure on lawmakers to ban or phase out behavioral advertising -- which has been under attack for years, over concerns it poses a smorgasbord of individual and societal harms. And, at the least, the paper seems likely to drive calls for robust checks and balances on how such invasive tools can be used. The findings also underscore the importance of independent research being able to interrogate algorithmic adtech -- and should increase pressure on platforms not to close down researchers' access.

Bleeping Computer has an update on the unique predicament of Compound, "an Ethereum-based money market protocol that enables users to earn interest or borrow assets against collateral." (Which "Due to an erroneous upgrade process, the decentralized finance platform ended up spilling out Ethereum assets worth $90 million to its users...") Compound's founder Robert Leshner urged users who received these Compound tokens in error to return the assets to the platform's Timelock contract. To incentivize users, Leshner stated that for their "white-hat" behaviour they may keep 10% as a reward. "Otherwise, it's being reported as income to the IRS, and most of you are doxxed," threatened the founder in the same tweet... Realizing that the original wording of his tweet may not have sat well with many, Leshner revised his tone:

"I'm trying to do anything I can to help the community get some of its COMP back, and this was a bone-headed tweet / approach. That's on me," said Leshner. "Luckily, the community is much bigger, and smarter, than just me. I appreciate your ridicule and support...."

Because the Compound protocol requires a seven-day governance process before any production changes can be made, Compound's only option at this time is to wait on users, hoping they will return the assets.
CoinDesk reported Friday afternoon that "So far, two users have returned a total of 37,493 COMP tokens worth over $12 million at the time of writing." But on Saturday Leshner was tweeting out more thank-you's to additional white-hat users "returning COMP to the community." In an interview with CoinDesk, Leshner said the moral dilemma can be split roughly into two camps. "There's a lot of members of the community that view protocols like Compound as benefitting the entire ecosystem," he said. "And there are some users that don't necessarily care. The builder mindset is, 'This adds value, this is crucially important,' and the trader mindset is 'Money is money,' and that's the only ethos of crypto."

He went on: "I'm personally hopeful users will return funds to the community. It's not my property, it's not their property, it's the community's property...."
One suggestion from Twitter? "The first 5 people to return COMP get 1/5 pieces of Leshner NFT that can be combined Exodia style to summon Robert in real life." "This idea is crazy, and I'm in," Leshner tweeted, adding later that "Anyone who returns COMP to the community is an alien giga-chad; and if a squad of alien giga-chads ever summon me, I will appear."

Leshner told CoinDesk: "I want to hear other people's views on this, because it's not my decision," he said. "This is a decision every user has to make themselves, and I think most of them are taking the view of, 'Haha, f**k you guys, it's your problem.'"

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Security researchers are sounding the alarm on a critical vulnerability affecting tens of millions of devices worldwide connected via ThroughTek's Kalay IoT cloud platform. The security issue impacts products from various manufacturers providing video and surveillance solutions as well as home automation IoT systems that use the Kalay network for easy connectin and communication with a corresponding app. A remote attacker could leverage the bug to gain access to the live audio and video streams, or to take control of the vulnerable device. Researchers at Mandiant's Red Team discovered the vulnerability at the end of 2020 and worked with the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and ThroughTek to coordinate the disclosure and create mitigation options.

Tracked as CVE-2021-28372, the issue is a device impersonation vulnerability that received a severity score of 9.6 out of 10. It affects the Kalay protocol that is implemented as a software development kit (SDK) that is built into mobile and desktop applications. Mandiant's Jake Valletta, Erik Barzdukas, and Dillon Franke looked at ThroughTek's Kalay protocol and found that registering a device on the Kalay network required only the device's unique identifier (UID). Following this lead, the researchers discovered that a Kalay client, such as a mobile app, usually receives the UID from a web API hosted by the vendor of the IoT device. An attacker with the UID of a target system could register on the Kalay network a device they control and receive all client connection attempts. This would allow them to obtain the login credentials that provide remote access to the victim device audio-video data. The researchers say that this type of access combined with vulnerabilities in device-implemented RPC (remote procedure call) interface can lead to complete device compromise. By the latest data from ThroughTek, its Kalay platform has more than 83 million active devices and manages over 1 billion connections every month. The best way to protect yourself from this vulnerability is to keep your device software and applications updated to the latest version, as well as create complex, unique login passwords. The report also recommends you avoid connecting to IoT devices from an untrusted network.

Grubhub and Russian self-driving startup Yandex are teaming up to use robots to deliver food on US college campuses. It represents the latest deal that envisions hundreds of six-wheeled self-driving robots that essentially act as roving lunchboxes in cities across the country. From a report: The robot-powered delivery service won't kick off until this fall when college students return to campus. Yandex, which is often described as Russia's Google, will operate the robots, as well as handle the entire food delivery process. Grubhub, which has partnerships with over 250 college campuses in the US, will serve as the platform for the delivery transactions.

Grubhub cited the cost savings it will get by eliminating the delivery worker from the equation as a potential benefit from the deal with Yandex -- though neither company disclosed the financial terms of the partnership. "We're excited to offer these cost-effective, scalable and quick food ordering and delivery capabilities to colleges and universities across the country that are looking to adapt to students' unique dining needs," said Brian Madigan, vice president of corporate and campus partners at Grubhub, in a statement. Yandex says that its delivery robots can navigate pavement, pedestrian areas and crosswalks, and reach campus areas not accessible by car. "Such functionality enables the robots to handle delivery tasks traditionally performed by people and provides efficient last-mile logistics automation," the company says.

Type "vaccines" into Amazon's search bar, and its auto-complete suggests "are dangerous" for your search. But that's just part of a larger problem, points out Fast Company (in an article shared by Slashdot reader tedlistens).

For example, Amazon's search results are touting as "best sellers!" many books with some very bad science: Offered by small publishers or self-published through Amazon's platform, the books rehearse the falsehoods and conspiracy theories that fuel vaccine opposition, steepening the impact of the pandemic and slowing a global recovery. They also illustrate how the world's biggest store has become a megaphone for anti-vaccine activists, medical misinformers, and conspiracy theorists, pushing dangerous falsehoods in a medium that carries more apparent legitimacy than just a tweet.

"Without question, Amazon is one of the greatest single promoters of anti-vaccine disinformation, and the world leader in pushing fake anti-vaccine and COVID-19 conspiracy books," says Peter Hotez, a pediatrician and vaccine expert at the Baylor College of Medicine. For years, journalists and researchers have warned of the ways fraudsters, extremists, and conspiracy theorists use Amazon to earn cash and attention. To Hotez, who has devoted much of his career to educating the public about vaccines, the real-world consequences aren't academic. In the U.S. and elsewhere, he says, vaccination efforts are now up against a growing ecosystem of activist groups, foreign manipulators, and digital influencers who "peddle fake books on Amazon...."

Gradually, Amazon has taken a tougher approach to content moderation, and to a seemingly ceaseless onslaught of counterfeits, fraud, defective products, and toxic speech... Despite its sweeps, however, Amazon is still flooded with misinformation, and helping amplify it too: A series of recent studies and a review by Fast Company show the bookstore is boosting misinformation around health-related terms like "autism" or "covid," and nudging customers toward a universe of other conspiracy theory books.

In one audit first published in January, researchers at the University of Washington surveyed Amazon's search results for four dozen terms related to vaccines. Among 38,000 search results and over 16,000 recommendations, they counted nearly 5,000 unique products containing misinformation, or 10.47% of the total. For books, they found that titles deemed misinformative appeared higher in search results than books that debunked their theories. "Overall, our audits suggest that Amazon has a severe vaccine/health misinformation problem exacerbated by its search and recommendation algorithms," write Prerna Juneja and Tanushee Mitra in their paper, presented last month at the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. "Just a single click on an anti-vaccine book could fill your homepage with several other similar anti-vaccine books..." Like any products on Amazon, or any content across social media platforms, anti-vaccine titles also benefit from an algorithmically-powered ranking system. And despite the company's aggressive efforts to battle fraud, it's a system that's still easily manipulated through false reviews...

Much of the uproar about misinformation has focused on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, but Amazon's role deserves more attention, says Marc Tuters, an assistant professor of new media at the University of Amsterdam, who helped lead the Infodemic.eu study. The retailer sells half of all the books in the U.S. and its brand is highly trusted by consumers.

Two years into its ban from the US Government and, in turn, access to the Play Store on its Android-powered devices, Huawei is unveiling HarmonyOS. The platform is an alternative to Android that powers TVs, smartphones, tablets, and smartwatches. 9to5Google reports: Announced at an event today, Huawei is positioning HarmonyOS as an operating system that can handle just about everything, from the smartphone in your pocket to IoT devices such as "power sockets and lamps." The company says the goal of the platform is to have one set of code that can be used across virtually any device, saying that it is not aware of "any other operating system in the world" that can cover such a wide range of devices. Leaning into this ability, Huawei developed a "Control Panel," which gives users the ability to connect multiple devices together, with the example of using the "music widget" to throw audio playback to nearby speakers or TVs. A "Super Device" widget shows icons for other nearby devices and enables a quick and easy pairing mode.

On smartphones, the HarmonyOS homescreen can use a swipe-up gesture on apps developed for the platform to see a widget pulling information from that app. Those widgets, apparently, can also be used across devices because of the shared codebase Huawei says HarmonyOS offers. The homescreen can also intelligently add apps to a folder based on the category. Interestingly, Huawei says HarmonyOS devices will also be able to move running apps from one device to another, which is really neat and unique. Moving apps between devices apparently also works between watches and TVs, with a workout app being used on both simultaneously given as an example. A video calling app was also shown moving between devices. Huawei says that performance of HarmonyOS is "superior" to Android with EMUI, specifically calling out long-term use.

While there are certainly new elements in HarmonyOS, it appears to be a "fork" of Android. The Verge spent time with the HarmonyOS-powered MatePad Pro and described the act of installing Android APKs as "though I was using an Android device." Visually, there are also a tremendous number of similarities between HarmonyOS and Android, though there are some distinct elements of Apple's iPad OS in the platform's tablet-optimized homescreen, seen below as Evan Blass posted to Twitter. Android Authority further described HarmonyOS as "ultimately a spin on Android 10" with a "slight rebrand." TechRadar said the software was "clearly" based on Android. These findings from the media appear to back up a previous report from ArsTechnica, which showed the developer preview as basically a clone of EMUI-skinned Android.

Quoting the Google Developers blog: Developers around the world are constantly creating open source tools and tutorials but have a hard time getting them discovered. The content published often spanned many different sites - from GitHub to Medium. Therefore we decided to create a space where we can highlight the best projects related to Google technologies in one place - introducing the Developer Library.

The platform showcases blog posts and open source tools with easy-to-use navigation. Content is categorized by product areas; Machine Learning, Flutter, Firebase, Angular, Cloud, Android, with more to come.

What makes the Developer Library unique is that each piece featured on the site is reviewed, in detail, by a team of Google experts for accuracy and relevancy, so you know when you view the content on the site it has the stamp of approval from Google.
The "Dev Library" web site describes itself as "a showcase of what developers like you have built with Google technologies."

It's no secret that Sony held back PS4 cross-platform play for years, but new confidential documents and emails reveal just how much Sony was against letting people play the same games with their friends on other platforms. From a report: Sony initially blocked cross-platform play for both Rocket League and Minecraft, despite Nintendo and Microsoft both enabling players to play across Xbox and Switch. The issue really blew up when Sony blocked Fortnite crossplay in 2018, and players were angry. It now appears that Sony may have been holding out to offset potential revenue losses. In the months leading up to Sony's decision to block Fortnite crossplay in 2018, Epic Games had pleaded with Sony to enable crossplay, emails in the Epic Games v. Apple case reveal. "I can't think of a scenario where Epic doesn't get what we want -- that possibility went out the door when Fortnite became the biggest game on PlayStation," said Joe Kreiner, Epic's vice president of business development.

Kreiner proposed, "We announce crossplay in conjunction with Sony. Epic goes out of its way to make Sony look like heroes." Epic even offered to brand its E3 presence with PlayStation or add unique characters, exclusive to PS Plus subscribers, to sweeten the deal. "Let's make this a huge win for us all. Epic's not changing it's mind on the issue, so let's just agree on it now," said Kreiner. Sony didn't agree. Gio Corsi, Sony's senior director of developer relations at the time, dismissed the idea of crossplay, noting that "cross-platform play is not a slam dunk no matter the size of the title" -- a clear reference to Epic's flex about Fortnite's dominance on PlayStation. "As you know, many companies are exploring this idea and not a single one can explain how cross-console play improves the PlayStation business," said Corsi. But as of August 2019, it appears that Sony may have found a worthy argument: a way to potentially siphon off money from its competitors in exchange for access to PlayStation players.

Indie developer (and Humble Indie Bundle originator) Wolfire Games has filed a proposed class-action lawsuit against Steam creator Valve, saying that the company is wielding Steam's monopoly power over the PC gaming market to extract "an extraordinarily high cut from nearly every sale that passes through its storeâ"30%." Ars Technica reports: The lawsuit, filed in a Washington state federal court, centers on what it considers an illegal tying of the Steam gaming platform (which provides game library management, social networking, achievement tracking, Steam Workshop mods, etc.) and the Steam game store (which processes online payments and delivers a copy of the game). After years of growth, the vast majority of PC gamers are locked into the Steam platform thanks to "immense network effects" and the high switching costs to move to a new PC platform, the suit argues. That makes the platform "a must-have for game publishers," who need access to the players on Steam to succeed. But games that use the Steam platform also have to be sold on the Steam Store, where Valve takes its 30 percent cut of all sales. By leveraging its monopoly platform power into a "gatekeeper role" for the store, Valve "wield[s] extreme power over publishers of PC Desktop Games" that leads to a "small but significant and non-transitory increase in price" for developers compared to a truly competitive market, the suit argues.

The suit includes a laundry list of competitors that have tried to create their own platforms to take on Steam's monopoly, including CD Projekt Red, EA, Microsoft, Amazon, and Epic (not to mention "pure distributors" with platform-free stores like GameStop, Green Man Gaming, Impulse, and Direct2Drive). But the lawsuit argues that Steam's lock-in effects mean none of these stores have been able to make much of a dent in Valve's monopoly position, despite plenty of well-funded attempts. Even the Epic Games Store, which has spent hundreds of millions of dollars securing exclusives and free game giveaways, has a market share of only "a little above 2 percent," according to one cited analysis (in an interview last June, Epic's Tim Sweeney estimated a more robust 15 percent market share for EGS).

"The failure of these companies to meaningfully compete against the Steam Gaming Platform shows it is virtually impossible as an economic matter to compete against the Steam Gaming Platform," the suit argues. "The Steam Gaming Platform has well-cemented dominance in the PC Desktop Gaming Platform Market, and given its unique and strong network effects, that is unlikely to change." The only meaningful way to avoid [Valve's] anticompetitive measures, the suit argues, is "to avoid using the Steam Gaming Platform at all." But Valve's monopoly position means that "there are no economically viable alternatives to the Steam Gaming Platform" for most PC games. While the suit acknowledges a few counterexamples (Riot's League of Legends is cited by name), such titles "typically require a long history of recognition and success before they can attempt to thrive without the Steam Gaming Platform," the suit says.

An online tool lets customers pay to unmask the phone numbers of Facebook users that liked a specific Page, and the underlying dataset appears to be separate from the 500 million account database that made headlines last week, signifying another data breach or large scale scraping of Facebook users' data, Motherboard reports. From the report: Motherboard verified the tool, which comes in the form of a bot on the social network and messaging platform Telegram, outputs accurate phone numbers of Facebook users that aren't included in the dataset of 500 million users. The data also appears to be different to another Telegram bot outputting Facebook phone numbers that Motherboard first reported on in January. "Hello, can you tell me how you got my number?" one person included in the dataset asked Motherboard when reached for comment. "Omg, this is insane," they added. Another person returned Motherboard's call and, after confirming their name, said "If you have my number then yes it seems the data is accurate."

A description for the bot reads "The bot give [sic] out the phone numbers of users who have liked the Facebook page." To use the bot, customers need to first identify the unique identification code of the Facebook Page they want to get phone numbers from, be that a band, restaurant, or any other sort of Page. This is possible with at least one free to use website. From there, customers enter that code into the bot, which provides a cost of the data in U.S. dollars and the option to proceed with the purchase, according to Motherboard's tests. A Page with tens of thousands of likes from Facebook users can cost a few hundred dollars, the bot shows. The data for Motherboard's own Page would return 134,803 results and cost $539, for example.

According to a new report, YouTube has dethroned Facebook to become the most popular social media platform. Engadget reports: According to the report, YouTube and Facebook are the most widely used platforms. But of the two, only YouTube is still growing, increasing its share of users from 73 percent of adults in 2019, to 81 percent in 2021. Facebook's numbers, meanwhile, remained unchanged from 2019 at 69 percent. "Facebook's growth has leveled off over the last five years, but it remains one of the most widely used social media sites among adults in the United States," Pew writes in its report.

Flat growth wasn't unique to just Facebook, either. According to Pew, the only other platform to see "statistically significant" growth since 2019 was Reddit, which grew from 11 percent in 2019 to 18 percent in 2021. "This represents a broader trend that extends beyond the past two years in which the rapid adoption of most of these sites and apps seen in the last decade has slowed," Pew says. The report also found that 49 percent of Facebook users say they check the site multiple times a day, compared to just over a third of YouTube users visiting the platform more frequently than once a day.

Another interesting insight is that YouTube is the most dominant platform among 18 to 29-year-olds at 95 percent, followed by Instagram with 71 percent, Facebook at 70 percent, Snapchat with 65 percent, and TikTok at 48 percent.

Last fall, Justice Clarence Thomas argued that it was time to rein in Section 230 immunity. Now, Justice Thomas is laying out an argument for why companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google should be regulated as utilities. From a report: On Monday, the Supreme Court vacated a lower court ruling in finding that President Trump had acted unconstitutionally by blocking people on Twitter. That case, which the justices deemed moot, hinged on the idea that the @realdonaldtrump account was a public forum run by the President of the United States, and therefore, was constitutionally prohibited from stifling private speech. In his concurrence, Justice Thomas agrees with the decision, but argues that, in fact, Twitter's recent ban of the @realdonaldtrump account suggests that it's platforms themselves, not the government officials on them, that hold all the power. "As Twitter made clear, the right to cut off speech lies most powerfully in the hands of private digital platforms," Thomas writes. "The extent to which that power matters for purposes of the First Amendment and the extent to which that power could lawfully be modified raise interesting and important questions."

Thomas argues that some digital platforms are "sufficiently akin" to common carriers like telephone companies. "A traditional telephone company laid physical wires to create a network connecting people," Thomas writes. "Digital platforms lay information infrastructure that can be controlled in much the same way." Thomas argues that while private companies aren't subject to the First Amendment, common carriers are unique to other private businesses in that they do not have the "right to exclude." Thomas suggests that large tech platforms with substantial market power should be bound by the same restrictions. "If the analogy between common carriers and digital platforms is correct, then an answer may arise for dissatisfied platform users who would appreciate not being blocked: laws that restrict the platform's right to exclude," Thomas writes.

The Washington Post reports: Facebook is conducting a vast behind-the-scenes study of doubts expressed by U.S. users about vaccines, a major project that attempts to probe and teach software to identify the medical attitudes of millions of Americans, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post. The research is a large-scale attempt to understand the spread of ideas that contribute to vaccine hesitancy, or the act of delaying or refusing a vaccination despite its availability, on social media — a primary source of health information for millions of people...

Its early findings suggest that a large amount of content that does not break the rules may be causing harm in certain communities, where it has an echo chamber effect... Just 10 out of the 638 population segments contained 50 percent of all vaccine hesitancy content on the platform. And in the population segment with the most vaccine hesitancy, just 111 users contributed half of all vaccine hesitant content... The research effort also discovered early evidence of significant overlap between communities that are skeptical of vaccines and those affiliated with QAnon, a sprawling set of baseless claims that has radicalized its followers and been associated with violent crimes, according to the documents...

Facebook, which owns WhatsApp messenger and Instagram, collects reams of data on its more than 3.3 billion users worldwide and has a broad reach onto those users' devices. Public health experts say that puts the company in a unique position to examine attitudes toward vaccines, testing and other behaviors and push information to people.

But the company has a steep hill to climb when it comes to proving that its research efforts serve the public because of its history of misusing people's data.
Facebook is removing content which violates its policies. Yet the documents obtained by the Post say "While research is very early, we're concerned that harm from non-violating content may be substantial."

"Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the British computer scientist who was knighted for inventing the internet navigation system known as the World Wide Web, wants to re-make cyberspace once again," reports Reuters: With a new startup called Inrupt, Berners-Lee aims to fix some of the problems that have handicapped the so-called open web in an age of huge, closed platforms such as Facebook. Building on ideas developed by an open-source software project called Solid, Inrupt promises a web where people can use a single sign-on for any service and personal data is stored in "pods," or personal online data stores, controlled by the user.

"People are fed up with the lack of controls, the silos," said Berners-Lee, co-founder and chief technology officer of Inrupt, in an interview at the Reuters Next conference... John Bruce, a veteran technology executive who is CEO of Inrupt, said the company had signed up Britain's National Health Service, the BBC and the government of Flanders in Belgium as pilot customers, and hoped to announce many more by April...

A key aim for Inrupt is to get software developers to write programs for the platform. Inrupt, like the original web, is at its core mostly a set of protocols for how machines talk to one another, meaning that specific applications bring it to life.

"The use cases are so broad, it's like a do-over for the web," Berners-Lee said.
In a video interview, Berners-Lee tells Reuters that what people are worried about isn't privacy per se but "the lack of empowerment" — for example, to collaborate with people. And then he acknowledges that the worldwide web does suffer from limited access control. "I wanted it to be a collaborative space, but in a way that was naive, because collaborative spaces you need to be private. You need to start off with just a limited sharing, and then you allow the sharing to increase."

Social networks provided some features like a unique login and identity. But unfortunately, then "The large social networks will tend to get larger" — and ultimately without a single global signon, users then become trapped in separate silos.