"Even many Axie regulars say it's not much fun, but that hasn't stopped people from dedicating hours to researching strategies, haunting Axie-themed Discord channels and Reddit forums, and paying for specialized software that helps them build stronger teams..."

Bloomberg pays a visit to the NFT-based game Axie Infinity with a 39-year-old player who's spent $40,000 there since last August — back when you could actually triple your money in a week. ("I was actually hoping that it could become my full-time job," he says.) The reason this is possible — or at least it seemed possible for a few weird months last year — is that Axie is tied to crypto markets. Players get a few Smooth Love Potion (SLP) tokens for each game they win and can earn another cryptocurrency, Axie Infinity Shards (AXS), in larger tournaments. The characters, themselves known as Axies, are nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, whose ownership is tracked on a blockchain, allowing them to be traded like a cryptocurrency as well....

Axie's creator, a startup called Sky Mavis Inc., heralded all this as a new kind of economic phenomenon: the "play-to-earn" video game. "We believe in a world future where work and play become one," it said in a mission statement on its website. "We believe in empowering our players and giving them economic opportunities. Welcome to our revolution." By last October the company, founded in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, four years ago by a group of Asian, European, and American entrepreneurs, had raised more than $160 million from investors including the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and the crypto-focused firm Paradigm, at a peak valuation of about $3 billion. That same month, Axie Infinity crossed 2 million daily users, according to Sky Mavis.

If you think the entire internet should be rebuilt around the blockchain — the vision now referred to as web3 — Axie provided a useful example of what this looked like in practice. Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit and an Axie investor, predicted that 90% of the gaming market would be play-to-earn within five years. Gabby Dizon, head of crypto gaming startup Yield Guild Games, describes Axie as a way to create an "investor mindset" among new populations, who would go on to participate in the crypto economy in other ways. In a livestreamed discussion about play-to-earn gaming and crypto on March 2, former Democratic presidential contender Andrew Yang called web3 "an extraordinary opportunity to improve the human condition" and "the biggest weapon against poverty that we have."

By the time Yang made his proclamations the Axie economy was deep in crisis. It had lost about 40% of its daily users, and SLP, which had traded as high as 40 cents, was at 1.8 cents, while AXS, which had once been worth $165, was at $56. To make matters worse, on March 23 hackers robbed Sky Mavis of what at the time was roughly $620 million in cryptocurrencies. Then in May the bottom fell out of the entire crypto market. AXS dropped below $20, and SLP settled in at just over half a penny. Instead of illustrating web3's utopian potential, Axie looked like validation for crypto skeptics who believe web3 is a vision that investors and early adopters sell people to get them to pour money into sketchy financial instruments while hackers prey on everyone involved.
The article does credit the company for building its own blockchain (Ronin) to provide cheaper and faster NFT transactions. "Purists might have taken issue with the decision to abandon the core blockchain precept of decentralization, but on the other hand, the game actually worked."

But the article also chronicles a fast succession of highs and lows:

• "In Axie's biggest market, the Philippines, the average daily earnings from May to October 2021 for all but the lowest-ranked players were above minimum wage, according to the gaming research and consulting firm Naavik."

• Axie raised $150 million to reimburse victims of the breach and repair its infrastructure. "But nearly two months later the systems compromised during the hack still weren't up and running, and the executives were vague about when everything would be repaired. (A company spokesperson said on June 3 that this could happen by midmonth, pending the results of an external audit....):

• Days after the breach it launched Axie: Origin, a new alternate version with better graphics/gameplay — and without a cryptocurrency element.

• About 75% of the 39-year-old gamer's co-players have "largely" stopped playing the game. "But at least one was sufficiently seduced by Axie's potential to take a significant loan to buy AXS tokens, which he saw as a way to hedge against inflation of the Argentine peso. The local currency has indeed lost value since he took out the loan, but not nearly as much as AXS."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Parker Lewis for sharing the article

schwit1 shares a report from Task & Purpose: A fan of the popular mechanized combat simulator 'War Thunder' shared the specs of China's Type 99 Main Battle Tank online in order to win an argument over the game. [...] The latest incident, first reported by the OSINTtechnical Twitter account, involves information in Mandarin on the penetrator section of a Chinese tank round along with a technical diagram. While many of the original images have been taken down, they were essentially the schematics for a Chinese tank munition, presumably revealed to the world so a video game could more accurately depict what would happen if a Chinese tank and an American tank -- or British, French, Russian, German or Israeli tank -- met in combat. And this isn't the first time these forums have become an outlet for technical leaks. [...]

The most recent leak, the latest leak, from someone with access to the latest technical manuals from China's People's Liberation Army, occurred because a user wanted the game's Chinese battle tanks to have better in-game stats. While most of the information about the Chinese tank round was already known, it was still apparently more important for one gamer to prove another gamer wrong on a message board than it was to consider the implications of publishing the technical details of military munitions online.

The video game developer, Gaijin Entertainment, banned the user, telling Kotaku that, "Our community managers immediately banned the user and deleted his post, as the information on this particular shell is still classified in China. Publishing classified information on any vehicle of any nation at War Thunder forums is clearly prohibited, and the game developers never use it in their work."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: Researchers in Japan have clocked a new speed record for data transmission -- a blistering 1.02 petabits per second (Pb/s). Better yet, the breakthrough was achieved using optical fiber cables that should be compatible with existing infrastructure. For reference, 1 petabit is equivalent to a million gigabits, meaning this new record is about 100,000 times faster than the absolute fastest home internet speeds available to consumers. Even NASA will "only" get 400 Gb/s when ESnet6 rolls out in 2023. At speeds of 1 Pb/s, you could theoretically broadcast 10 million channels per second of video at 8K resolution, according to the team.

The new record was set by researchers at Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), using several emerging technologies. First, the optical fiber contains four cores -- the glass tubes that transmit the signals -- instead of the usual one. The transmission bandwidth is extended to a record-breaking 20 THz, thanks to a technology known as wavelength division multiplexing (WDM). That bandwidth is made up of a total of 801 wavelength channels spread across three bands -- the commonly used C- and L-bands, as well as the experimental S-band. With the help of some other new optical amplification and signal modulation technologies, the team achieved the record-breaking speed of 1.02 Pb/s, sending data through 51.7 km (32.1 miles) of optical fiber cables.

Industry trade group the National Cable Television Cooperative (NCTC) could be dropping the "cable" moniker as it eyes a potential name change. Fierce Video reports: A trademark application filed by NCTC on May 17 shows one proposal for a new name: National Content & Technology Cooperative. An NCTC spokesperson confirmed to Fierce that the organization will be changing its name, but said it is considering a large number of options and hasn't yet settled on a final decision. The spokesperson noted it's taking time to register potential names, but some of the other choices on the table include simply "NCTC," "NCTC Online" or even sticking with its current brand of the National Cable Television Cooperative. [...] According to the application, it appears NCTC is also considering losing the image of a coaxial cable that's currently featured in its logo.

So why the potential shift away from cable? One factor could be that the industry has clearly changed since NCTC formed in 1984, with cable operators in recent years deemphasizing traditional video offerings. The "Cable Television" part of the group's name is becoming less accurate over time, said Brett Sappington, VP of Interpret. "Broadband, not television, is the cash cow for the cable industry," he told Fierce Video. "Many of the organization's members are actually moving away from offering their own video service and are, instead, focusing on broadband bundled with streaming services." [...] Along with industry changes come some shifts in perception as well. "Cable TV doesn't necessarily have a positive connotation today," Sappington noted. "In fact, many online TV services such as Sling TV or FuboTV emphasize why consumers should 'drop cable' and go with their services instead," he continued.

This week New York's attorney general announced they're officially "launching investigations into the social media companies that the Buffalo shooter used to plan, promote, and stream his terror attack." Slashdot reader echo123 points out that Discord confirmed that roughly 30 minutes before the attack a "small group" was invited to join the shooter's server. "None of the people he invited to review his writings appeared to have alerted law enforcement," reports the New York Times., "and the massacre played out much as envisioned."

But meanwhile, another Times article tells a tangentially-related story from 2019 about what ultimately happened to "a partial recording of a livestream by a gunman while he murdered 51 people that day at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand." For more than three years, the video has remained undisturbed on Facebook, cropped to a square and slowed down in parts. About three-quarters of the way through the video, text pops up urging the audience to "Share THIS...." Online writings apparently connected to the 18-year-old man accused of killing 10 people at a Buffalo, New York, grocery store Saturday said that he drew inspiration for a livestreamed attack from the Christchurch shooting. The clip on Facebook — one of dozens that are online, even after years of work to remove them — may have been part of the reason that the Christchurch gunman's tactics were so easy to emulate.

In a search spanning 24 hours this week, The New York Times identified more than 50 clips and online links with the Christchurch gunman's 2019 footage. They were on at least nine platforms and websites, including Reddit, Twitter, Telegram, 4chan and the video site Rumble, according to the Times' review. Three of the videos had been uploaded to Facebook as far back as the day of the killings, according to the Tech Transparency Project, an industry watchdog group, while others were posted as recently as this week. The clips and links were not difficult to find, even though Facebook, Twitter and other platforms pledged in 2019 to eradicate the footage, pushed partly by public outrage over the incident and by world governments. In the aftermath, tech companies and governments banded together, forming coalitions to crack down on terrorist and violent extremist content online. Yet even as Facebook expunged 4.5 million pieces of content related to the Christchurch attack within six months of the killings, what the Times found this week shows that a mass killer's video has an enduring — and potentially everlasting — afterlife on the internet.

"It is clear some progress has been made since Christchurch, but we also live in a kind of world where these videos will never be scrubbed completely from the internet," said Brian Fishman, a former director of counterterrorism at Facebook who helped lead the effort to identify and remove the Christchurch videos from the site in 2019....

Facebook, which is owned by Meta, said that for every 10,000 views of content on the platform, only an estimated five were of terrorism-related material. Rumble and Reddit said the Christchurch videos violated their rules and they were continuing to remove them. Twitter, 4chan and Telegram did not respond to requests for comment
For what it's worth, this week CNN also republished an email they'd received in 2016 from 4chan's current owner, Hiroyuki Nishimura. The gist of the email? "If I liked censorship, I would have already done that."

But Slashdot reader Bruce66423 also shares an interesting observation from The Guardian's senior tech reporter about the major tech platforms. "According to Hany Farid, a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley, there is a tech solution to this uniquely tech problem. Tech companies just aren't financially motivated to invest resources into developing it." Farid's work includes research into robust hashing, a tool that creates a fingerprint for videos that allows platforms to find them and their copies as soon as they are uploaded...

Farid: It's not as hard a problem as the technology sector will have you believe... The core technology to stop redistribution is called "hashing" or "robust hashing" or "perceptual hashing". The basic idea is quite simple: you have a piece of content that is not allowed on your service either because it violated terms of service, it's illegal or for whatever reason, you reach into that content, and extract a digital signature, or a hash as it's called.... That's actually pretty easy to do. We've been able to do this for a long time. The second part is that the signature should be stable even if the content is being modified, when somebody changes say the size or the color or adds text. The last thing is you should be able to extract and compare signatures very quickly.

So if we had a technology that satisfied all of those criteria, Twitch would say, we've identified a terror attack that's being live-streamed. We're going to grab that video. We're going to extract the hash and we are going to share it with the industry. And then every time a video is uploaded with the hash, the signature is compared against this database, which is being updated almost instantaneously. And then you stop the redistribution.

It's a problem of collaboration across the industry and it's a problem of the underlying technology. And if this was the first time it happened, I'd understand. But this is not, this is not the 10th time. It's not the 20th time. I want to emphasize: no technology's going to be perfect. It's battling an inherently adversarial system. But this is not a few things slipping through the cracks.... This is a complete catastrophic failure to contain this material. And in my opinion, as it was with New Zealand and as it was the one before then, it is inexcusable from a technological standpoint.
"These are now trillion-dollar companies we are talking about collectively," Farid points out later. "How is it that their hashing technology is so bad?

Russia is not planning to block Alphabet's YouTube, the minister for digital development said on Tuesday, acknowledging that such a move would likely see Russian users suffer and should therefore be avoided. From a report: Russia has blocked other foreign social media platforms, but despite months of fines and threats against YouTube for failing to delete content Moscow deems illegal and for restricting access to some Russian media, it has stopped short of delivering a killer blow to the video-hosting service.

Researchers have linked spending more time playing video games with a boost in intelligence in children, which goes some way to contradicting the narrative that gaming is bad for young minds. ScienceAlert reports: While the difference in cognitive abilities was a small one and isn't enough to show a causal relationship, it is enough to be notable -- and the study was careful to factor in variables including differences in genetics and the child's socio-economic background. Meanwhile, watching TV and using social media didn't seem to have a positive or negative effect on intelligence. The research should prove useful in the debate over how much screen time is suitable for young minds.

The researchers looked at screen time records for 9,855 kids in the ABCD Study, all in the US and aged 9 or 10. On average, the youngsters reported spending 2.5 hours a day watching TV or online videos, 1 hour playing video games, and half an hour socializing over the internet. Researchers then accessed data for more than 5,000 of those children two years later. Over the intervening period, those in the study who reported spending more time than the norm on video games saw an increase of 2.5 IQ points above the average rise. The IQ point increase was based on the kids' performance on tasks that included reading comprehension, visual-spatial processing, and a task focused on memory, flexible thinking, and self-control. The report notes that the study "only looked at children in the US and did not differentiate between video game types (mobile versus console games)."

The research has been published in the journal Scientific Reports.

The Washington Post reports on the "My Friends My Data" coalition, a group of start-up founders "working to push tech giants to adopt a new industry-wide standard that would allow users to transfer their followings from one app to another, thereby creating more competition between platforms." "Large social media companies are intentionally holding our personal contact information hostage," said Daniel Liss, founder and CEO of Dispo, a photography-based social network. "This limits consumer choice, stymies competition and inhibits free speech. We are committed to giving our community members control of their friend data...."

MFMD's founding members include a who's who of buzzy social apps like Dispo, Itsme, Clash App, Muze, Spam app and Collage, which together have received more than $100 million in venture funding and amassed tens of millions of downloads. The group has issued letters to Meta, TikTok, Snap, Twitter and other large social platforms calling on them to join their crusade. As the start-ups have found, competing with tech giants like Meta or YouTube is difficult when the top talent on the Internet is essentially locked in to specific platforms because of their inability to take followers elsewhere.

Many creators are already on board with MFMD's initiative. Some learned lessons about ownership the hard way after the fall of Vine. Many top Vine stars were overleveraged, investing all their energy in building out their following on the short-form video platform. When the app shuttered in 2016 those who hadn't used Vine to springboard to other apps like YouTube were left without access to the massive fandoms they had built....

[Liss] said that in addition to putting public pressure on the tech giants he hopes the MFMD can be a political force as well. "I'm very comfortable engaging in the political process on behalf of what we think is right," Liss said. "Not just for our companies but also for the next generation of consumer start-ups."
Eugene Park, a gaming Twitch streamer in Los Angeles with 300,000 followers, likes the idea of making followers transferrable to other services, telling the Post it "would be taking power from the tech companies and putting it in the hands of creators who really make up these giant platforms."

In the meantime, the article points out, TikTok users "have taken to referring to other apps like Instagram and YouTube using 'algospeak' pseudonyms, because they say even uttering the name of a competitor can downrank your content."

TikTok is launching a new way for the top creators on its billion-user app make money -- and for advertisers to reach the cream of the short-form video crop. Variety reports: The company announced TikTok Pulse, an advertising program to let marketers buy inventory in the top 4% of all videos on the platform in a dozen different categories (including beauty, fashion, cooking and gaming). Creators and publishers with at least 100,000 followers will be eligible to participate in the initial stage of TikTok Pulse. The company said that with the launch of Pulse, it will "begin exploring" its first advertising-revenue share program with creators, public figures and media publishers.

TikTok Pulse will roll out first in the U.S. in June, with additional markets to follow in the fall, according to Sofia Hernandez, TikTok's global head of business marketing. "This finally offers marketers something they have been asking for for years -- to be part of a community," she said.

At the end of the year 2000, Noah Grey created the free and open-source blogging software Greymatter (now maintained by a community of users). Wil Wheaton's new book describes it as "the original, primordial blogging platform. Blogs look like they do... because Noah Grey did it first."

Three days ago Noah Grey created a Gofundme campaign headlined "I am losing my home in four days."

"I am deeply ashamed and afraid of having to doing this, but I have no choice." My sister and I are about to lose our house. It's being foreclosed next Tuesday (May 3rd)... unless we can pay $35,000 before then. (We could pay $23k and get to keep the house for now, but will be left to pay off the rest over an unknown amount of time....)

I don't know who among the few friends I have that will read this can contribute anything at all, and heaven knows I understand.... [T]his was sprung on us with no warning, and having the money ready to go is our only salvation....
Noah's plea was retweeted by long-time geeks who remembered his contribution, including tech entrepreneur Anil Dash as well as the founder of Harvard's Nieman Lab. And a San Antonio newspaper reported on another response from Texas: Alex Mahan, the brand director of Lockheed Martin, wrote on Twitter: "I coded my first blog in 2000 with Greymatter. If it weren't for Noah, I might not have had a career in web development. He was always helpful and patient with my beginner questions back then. Please throw down some $ if you are able."
Wil Wheaton himself apparently got involved. (Several people made donations along with the tagline #WilSentMe.)

And with an average donation size of $95.87, a total of 1,073 people ultimately donated... $102,873.

By the end of the day Friday, wearing a t-shirt that says 127.0.0.1, Noah Grey shared a tearful video on Twitter.

"This has been the craziest, most emotionally overwhelming day of — of my life.... Oh my god, thank you. It hardly even feels like enough to say the words. But thank you so much. Everybody, oh my god... It may take me time to respond to all of this, but I will — I will.... I have never felt so seen. I have never felt so — I've never felt embraced by the internet before.
"I've seen some say this feels like 'the Old Internet' in action...." Grey posted on Twitter this weekend. "But 20+ years ago I was still a struggling mentally-ill man who wanted to matter... and never dared let himself feel he *might* til now. I am shattered with gratitude."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Alibaba Cloud has advanced its work to port Android to the RISC-V architecture. The Chinese cloud giant has spent more than a year working on a port of the Google-spawned OS and in January 2021 showed off a GUI powered by Android 10 running on silicon designed by T-Head Semiconductor -- an Alibaba subsidiary that designs its own RISC-V chip. Alibaba Cloud has now revealed it's working on Android 12, and has integrated third-party vendor modules. The result is Android on RISC-V that's capable of playing audio and video, running Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios, and driving cameras.

The company has also "enabled more system enhancement features such as core tool sets, third-party libraries and SoC board support package on RISC-V," which collectively make RISC-V a better target for Android. Another advance is successful trials of TensorFlow Lite models on RISC-V. That effort means Android on RISC-V should be capable running workloads like image and audio classification and Optical Character Recognition. Alibaba Cloud hasn't detailed whether its porting efforts are directed to any particular processor, but is keen to point out that its homegrown Xuantie C906 processor recently aced the MLPerf Tiny v0.7 benchmark -- a test applied to Internet of Things devices. The company has also pointed out that its home-grown RISC-V kit has already been employed in smart home appliances, automotive applications, and edge computing. [...] The Xuantie C906 uses Alibaba-designed cores that are -- as required for RISC-V users -- available on GitHub. When the firm has a complete version of Android on RISC-V, it "will be an important step towards China's goal of reducing its reliance on technology that other nations can control with restrictions such as trade bans," notes The Register. "As RISC-V is open source, preventing its flow to China is all but impossible."

A new breed of startups wants to formalise cattle trading. The Economist: Livestock fairs, where most animals are still bought and sold, can be expensive and chaotic. Farmers shell out entry fees to register their beasts. They must pay for labourers to load and unload the animals, as well as for transport to and from the fair. They worry about cattle thieves. Making a sales pitch to every prospective customer takes a toll in the heat. And if your cows find no buyers, you must go through the whole rigmarole again, complains Anil Renusay, another cattle farmer in Vajeghar. Then there is fraud, says Satish Birnale, who rears buffaloes in Sangli, a small western city. Some traders inject their animals with steroids. Horns are often polished "as if the cows have just been to a beauty parlour," he says. "It's like searching for a bride in an arranged marriage. We have to be careful and not go just by the looks."

Firms like Pashushala and Animall claim to have solved such problems with a system of checks, including a nod from a local veterinarian. Animall requires sellers to upload videos and pictures of their cattle, and provide details not just of breed or age, but also past pregnancies, how much milk they provide and so on. A team calls every user to verify the information. Ads with blurry photos or listings with pictures taken from the internet are swiftly removed. A close-up of the cow's udders is important. So are comments by the farmer about the animal's temperament. In one video a seller croons, "Beautiful! Oh, look at those singhs (horns)". It is not a new pitch. But it is now easier and cheaper to make.

CNBC explores the dream of "a future where nobody has to constantly update and change online passwords to stay ahead of hackers and keep data secure." Here's the good news: Some of the biggest names in tech are already saying that the dream of a password-less internet is close to becoming a reality. Apple, Google and Microsoft are among those trying to pave the way... In theory, removing passwords from your cybersecurity equation nixes what former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff has called "by far the weakest link in cybersecurity." More than 80% of data breaches are a result of weak or compromised passwords, according to Verizon....

Doing away with passwords altogether is not without risks. First, verification codes sent via email or text message can be intercepted by hackers. Even scarier: Hackers have shown the ability to trick fingerprint and facial recognition systems, sometimes by stealing your biometric data. As annoying as changing your password might be, it's much harder to change your face or fingerprints. Second, some of today's password-less options still ask you to create a PIN or security questions to back up your account. That's not much different from having a password.... Plus, tech companies still need to make online accounts accessible across multiple platforms, not just on smartphones — and also to the people who don't own smartphones at all, roughly 15% of the U.S.
Some data points from the article:

• "Microsoft says 'nearly 100%' of the company's employees use password-less options to log into their corporate accounts."

• "In September, Microsoft announced that its users could go fully password-less to access services like Windows, Xbox, and Microsoft 365."

• "Similarly, Google sells physical security keys, and its Smart Lock app allows you to tap a button on your Android or iOS device to log into your Google account on the web."

• Apple's devices have used Touch ID and Face ID features for several years."

The Covid-19 pandemic brought on a surge of "zoom-bombing" as hackers and pranksters crashed into virtual meetings with abusive messages and imagery. Now, Zoom has agreed to a "historic" payout of $85m as part of a class-action settlement brought by its users, including church groups who said they were left traumatized by the disruptions. From a report: As part of the settlement agreement, Zoom Video Communications, the company behind the teleconference application that grew popular during the pandemic, will pay the $85m to users in cash compensation and also implement reforms to its business practices. On Thursday, federal judge Laurel Beeler of California granted final approval to the agreement which was first filed in July. The agreement was granted preliminary approval in October. The settlement stems from 14 class-action complaints filed against the San Jose-based company by users between March and May of 2020, in which they argued that the company violated their privacy and security.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In most cases, the release of yet another classic console emulator for the Switch wouldn't be all that noteworthy. But experts tell Ars that a pair of Game Boy and Game Boy Advance emulators for the Switch that leaked online Monday show signs of being official products of Nintendo's European Research & Development division (NERD). That has some industry watchers hopeful that Nintendo may be planning official support for some emulated classic portable games through the Nintendo Switch Online subscription service in the future. The two leaked emulators -- codenamed Hiroko for Game Boy and Sloop for Game Boy Advance -- first hit the Internet as fully compiled NSP files and encrypted NCA files linked from a 4chan thread posted to the Pokemon board Monday afternoon. Later in that thread, the original poster suggested that these emulators "are official in-house development versions of Game Boy Color/Advance emulators for Nintendo Switch Online, which have not been announced or released."

In short order, dataminers examining the package found a .git folder in the ROM. That folder includes commit logs that reference supposed development work circa August 2020 from a NERD employee and, strangely enough, a developer at Panasonic Vietnam. NERD's history includes work on the software for the NES Classic and SNES Classic, as well as the GameCube emulation technology in last year's Super Mario All-Stars, so the division's supposed involvement wouldn't be out of the ordinary. Footage from the leaked Game Boy Advance emulator also includes a "(c) Nintendo" and "(c) 2019 -- 2020 Nintendo" at various points. While suggestive, none of this is exactly hard evidence of Nintendo's involvement in making these emulators. Some skepticism might be warranted, too, because there is some historical precedent for an emulator developer trying to get more attention by pretending their homebrew product is a "leaked" official Nintendo release.

Some observers also pointed to other reasons to doubt that these leaks were an "official" Nintendo work product. ModernVintageGamer and others noted that the leaked GBA emulator includes an "export state to Flashcart" option designed "to confirm original behavior" on "original hardware," according to the GUI. That option is illustrated with a picture of an EZFlash third-party flash cartridge in the emulator interface, an odd choice given Nintendo's previous litigious attacks on such flashcart makers. A "savedata memory" option in the emulator also references the ability to "inter-operate with flashcarts, other emulators, [and] fan websites..." That's a list that would serve as a decent Johnny Carson "Carnac the Magnificent" setup for "things Nintendo wouldn't want to reference in an official product." A prominent video game historian that Ars consulted with said they were "99.9% sure [the emulators are] real" and that "personally I'm absolutely convinced of its legitimacy."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Space.com: Another piece of space infrastructure for Ukraine is under attack, according to an NBC report. Jammers from Russian forces besieging the country are targeting global positioning system (GPS) satellite signals that are used for navigation, mapping and other purposes, the report said, quoting the U.S. Space Force. "Ukraine may not be able to use GPS because there are jammers around that prevent them from receiving any usable signal," Gen. David Thompson, the Space Force's vice chief of space operations, told NBC Nightly News Monday (April 11). "Certainly the Russians understand the value and importance of GPS and try to prevent others from using it," Thompson added. He noted that Russia has not directly attacked any satellites in orbit, but the Space Force is keeping an eye out for such possibilities.

Specifically, Russia is targeting the Navstar system of satellites used by the United States and made available openly to many countries around the world, Thompson said. (Russia has its own independent system, called GLONASS, while the Europeans have one called Galileo and China has one called Beidou.) Navstar uses 24 main satellites that each orbit the Earth every 12 hours. The system works by sending synchronized signals to users on Earth. Because the satellites move in different directions, the user receives their signals at slightly different times. When four satellites are available, GPS receivers can use their signals to calculate the user's position, often to within just a few feet. In late February shortly after Russia's invasion of Ukraine began, SpaceX's Starlink satellites were activated over the country to help restore internet services destroyed by the Russians. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk later warned that Starlink user terminals in Ukraine could be targeted by Russia and advised users to take precautions.

The crypto payments startup Circle Internet Financial said it's closer to submitting an application to operate as a bank in the U.S., pushing forward with a months-old plan even as regulators make it more difficult for crypto companies to secure this kind of license. From a report: Circle, the issuer of the second-largest stablecoin, disclosed its intention to become a crypto bank in August and has held ongoing discussions with regulators since then, Chief Executive Officer Jeremy Allaire said in an interview. He declined to say when the company would submit the application, saying only that it would be "hopefully in the near future."

The company, which issues USD Coin, is deeply funded. On Tuesday, Circle said it raised $400 million from BlackRock, Fidelity Management and Research and others. The startup plans to go public by merging with a special purpose acquisition company in a deal valued at $9 billion. The U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which oversees bank charters, has discussed a variety of topics with Circle management in regards to the company's banking ambitions. Those include interoperability between blockchains and how to assess the operational risks of a specific blockchain, according to Allaire. A representative for the OCC declined to comment on the conversations with Circle. The risk of connecting different blockchains was laid bare recently. Hacks involving crypto bridges totaled more than $1 billion in a little over a year, including a $600 million attack involving the crypto video game Axie Infinity.

Chainalysis is a software for tracing cryptocurrency, "to turn the digital underworld's preferred means of exchange into its Achilles' heel," writes Wired.

This week they describe what happened when that company's co-founder discovered that for two yeras, hundreds of users of a child pornography-trading site — and its administrators — "had done almost nothing to obscure their cryptocurrency trails..." and "seemed to be wholly unprepared for the modern state of financial forensics on the blockchain." Over the previous few years, [Internal Revenue Service criminal investigator Chris] Janczewski, his partner Tigran Gambaryan, and a small group of investigators at a growing roster of three-letter American agencies had used this newfound technique, tracing a cryptocurrency that once seemed untraceable, to crack one criminal case after another on an unprecedented, epic scale. But those methods had never led them to a case quite like this one, in which the fate of so many people, victims and perpetrators alike, seemed to hang on the findings of this novel form of forensics.... Janczewski thought again of the investigative method that had brought them there like a digital divining rod, revealing a hidden layer of illicit connections underlying the visible world....

When Bitcoin first appeared in 2008, one fundamental promise of the cryptocurrency was that it revealed only which coins reside at which Bitcoin addresses — long, unique strings of letters and numbers — without any identifying information about those coins' owners. This layer of obfuscation created the impression among many early adherents that Bitcoin might be the fully anonymous internet cash long awaited by libertarian cypherpunks and crypto-anarchists: a new financial netherworld where digital briefcases full of unmarked bills could change hands across the globe in an instant. Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious inventor of Bitcoin, had gone so far as to write that "participants can be anonymous" in an early email describing the cryptocurrency. And thousands of users of dark-web black markets like Silk Road had embraced Bitcoin as their central payment mechanism.

But the counterintuitive truth about Bitcoin, the one upon which Chainalysis had built its business, was this: Every Bitcoin payment is captured in its blockchain, a permanent, unchangeable, and entirely public record of every transaction in the Bitcoin network. The blockchain ensures that coins can't be forged or spent more than once. But it does so by making everyone in the Bitcoin economy a witness to every transaction. Every criminal payment is, in some sense, a smoking gun in broad daylight. Within a few years of Bitcoin's arrival, academic security researchers — and then companies like Chainalysis — began to tear gaping holes in the masks separating Bitcoin users' addresses and their real-world identities.
The article describes some investigative techniques — like pressuring exchanges for identities, tying a transaction to a known identity, or even performing an undercover transaction themselves. "Thanks to tricks like these, Bitcoin had turned out to be practically the opposite of untraceable: a kind of honeypot for crypto criminals that had, for years, dutifully and unerasably recorded evidence of their dirty deals.

"By 2017, agencies like the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and the IRS's Criminal Investigation division had traced Bitcoin transactions to carry out one investigative coup after another, very often with the help of Chainalysis.

"The cases had started small and then gained a furious momentum...."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Z00L00K for sharing the article.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Facebook today reported an increase in attacks on accounts run by Ukraine military personnel. In some cases, attackers took over accounts and posted "videos calling on the Army to surrender," but Facebook said it blocked sharing of the videos. Specifically, Facebook owner Meta's Q1 2022 Adversarial Threat Report said it has "seen a further spike in compromise attempts aimed at members of the Ukrainian military by Ghostwriter," a hacking campaign that "typically targets people through email compromise and then uses that to gain access to their social media accounts across the Internet." Ghostwriter has been linked to the Belarusian government.

"Since our last public update [on February 27], this group has attempted to hack into the Facebook accounts of dozens of Ukrainian military personnel," Meta wrote today. Ghostwriter successfully hacked into the accounts in "a handful of cases" in which "they posted videos calling on the Army to surrender as if these posts were coming from the legitimate account owners. We blocked these videos from being shared." In its February 27 update, Meta said it detected Ghostwriter's "attempts to target people on Facebook to post YouTube videos portraying Ukrainian troops as weak and surrendering to Russia, including one video claiming to show Ukrainian soldiers coming out of a forest while flying a white flag of surrender." Meta said it had "taken steps to secure accounts that we believe were targeted by this threat actor" and "blocked phishing domains these hackers used to try to trick people in Ukraine into compromising their online accounts." But Ghostwriter continued its operations and hacked into accounts of Ukrainian military personnel, as previously mentioned.

Separately, Facebook recently removed a network of Russian accounts that were trying to silence Ukrainians by reporting "fictitious policy violations." "Under our Inauthentic Behavior policy against mass reporting, we removed a network in Russia for abusing our reporting tools to repeatedly report people in Ukraine and in Russia for fictitious policy violations of Facebook policies in an attempt to silence them," Meta said today. Providing more detail in its quarterly report, Meta said the removed network included 200 accounts operated from Russia. "The individuals behind it coordinated to falsely report people for various violations, including hate speech, bullying, and inauthenticity, in an attempt to have them and their posts removed from Facebook. The majority of these fictitious reports focused on people in Ukraine and Russia, but the network also reported users in Israel, the United States, and Poland," the report said.

Internet fads come and go faster than a hiccup, but one that's somehow lasted almost as long as the internet itself is the "Rick roll." From a report: The term refers to an online prank in which the "Rick rollee" receives a URL address and it leads them to the music video for singer Rick Astley's hit debut single "Never Gonna Give You Up." The opening synthed "doo-de-doo-doo-doo-doo" has created more grins and eye rolls than when the song scored an ungodly amount of airplay in 1987. Sky Elements Drone Shows found a way to Rick roll a sizable portion of the city for April Fools' Day with 300 of its customizable drones by forming a QR code in the sky that linked to Astley's music video.