China's regulators have ended the issuance of game licenses through a stopgap approval process, Bloomberg reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter. The move would close the last known official path for making money from new titles in the world's biggest gaming market. From the report: Licenses are no longer being granted through a process known as the "green channel," used for testing both domestic and foreign games, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter is private. The approval mechanism had been in place since at least August, following the government's decision earlier this year to restructure how it reviews video games for violence, gambling and sensitive topics. The new restrictions in the $38 billion market threaten the fortunes of game companies such as Tencent Holdings and NetEase and add to the uncertainty about the Communist Party's long-term plans for regulating the industry. While it's unclear why Beijing has shut that window, the government has stepped up its oversight of an industry it sees fomenting addiction, myopia and other ills among the country's youth. Some analysts had anticipated that the broader freeze would end by September. They had seen the green channel as a temporary solution to carry the industry until then.

The American Civil Liberties Union on Wednesday called on the Department of Homeland Security to disclose its use of facial-recognition software. The nonprofit also again pushed for an end of law enforcement's use of the technology. From a report: The ACLU's statements follow reports Tuesday that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials met this summer with Amazon. Around that time, the company pitched the agency on potentially using its facial-recognition software, called Rekognition, along with other Amazon products. A handful of US police agencies are already trying out Rekognition as part of their crime-fighting and investigative efforts. The ACLU since May has criticized Amazon's marketing of its facial-recognition software to law enforcement and has asked Congress and the public to debate whether the technology should be used. The nonprofit has argued that facial-recognition technology has the potential of being misused by policing agencies and misidentifying people.

Apple's CEO Tim Cook has joined the chorus of voices warning that data itself is being weaponized against people and societies -- arguing that the trade in digital data has exploded into a "data industrial complex." From a report: Cook did not namecheck the adtech elephants in the room: Google, Facebook and other background data brokers that profit from privacy-hostile business models. But his target was clear. "Our own information -- from the everyday to the deeply personal -- is being weaponized against us with military efficiency," warned Cook. "These scraps of data, each one harmless enough on its own, are carefully assembled, synthesized, traded and sold. Taken to the extreme this process creates an enduring digital profile and lets companies know you better than you may know yourself. Your profile is a bunch of algorithms that serve up increasingly extreme content, pounding our harmless preferences into harm. We shouldn't sugarcoat the consequences. This is surveillance," he added. In a series of tweets, Cook added: It was an honor to be invited to ICDPPC 2018 in Brussels this morning. I'd like to share a bit of what I said to this gathering of privacy regulators from around the world. It all boils down to a fundamental question: What kind of world do we want to live in? GDPR has shown us all that good policy and political will can come together to protect the rights of everyone. We believe that privacy is a fundamental human right. No matter what country you live in, that right should be protected in keeping with four essential principles.

First, companies should challenge themselves to de-identify customer data or not collect that data in the first place. Second, users should always know what data is being collected from them and what it's being collected for. This is the only way to empower users to decide what collection is legitimate and what isn't. Anything less is a sham. Third, companies should recognize that data belongs to users and we should make it easy for people to get a copy of their personal data, as well as correct and delete it. And fourth, everyone has a right to the security of their data. Security is at the heart of all data privacy and privacy rights. Technology is capable of doing great things. But it doesn't want to do great things. It doesn't want anything. That part takes all of us. We are optimistic about technology's awesome potential for good -- but we know that it won't happen on its own.

Google is positioning itself in schools as a trusted authority on digital citizenship at a moment when the company's data-handling practices are under growing scrutiny. From a report: Google is on a mission to teach children how to be safe online. That is the message behind "Be Internet Awesome," a so-called digital-citizenship education program that the technology giant developed for schools. The lessons include a cartoon game branded with Google's logo and blue, red, yellow and green color palette. The game is meant to help students from third grade through sixth guard against schemers, hackers and other bad actors. Google plans to reach five million schoolchildren with the program this year and has teamed up with the National Parent Teacher Association to offer related workshops to parents. But critics say the company's recent woes -- including revelations that it was developing a censored version of its search engine for the Chinese market and had tracked the whereabouts of users who had explicitly turned off their location history -- should disqualify Google from promoting itself in schools as a model of proper digital conduct.

Earlier this week, the Portuguese Courts ruled a decision against Google in relation to the injunction filed by Aptoide, a popular third-party app store. It is applicable on 82 countries including UK, Germany, USA, India, among others. Google will have to stop Google Play Protect from removing the competitor Aptoide's app store from users' phone without users' knowledge which has caused losses of over 2.2 million users in the last 60 days. From a press release: The acceptance of the injunction is totally aligned with Aptoide's claim for Google to stop hiding the app store in the Android devices and showing warning messages to the users. Aptoide is now working alongside its legal team to next week fill in courts the main action, demanding from Google indemnity for all the damages caused. Aptoide, with over 250 million users, 6 billion downloads and one of the top stores globally, has presented this July, a formal complaint to the European Union's anti-trust departments against Google.

CCP Games, the Icelandic studio known for their long-running MMO Eve: Online (2003), shuttered their VR production studios in a surprise move last year, selling off their Newcastle-based branch behind their multiplayer space dogfighter EVE: Valkyrie (2016), and completely shutting down their Atlanta studio behind sports game Sparc (2017). Now, CEO Hilmar Veigar Petursson speaks out in an interview with Destructoid about the studio's return to traditional desktop gaming, and his thoughts about the VR landscape. From a report: In short, he thought VR would be bigger by now, and more capable of supporting a healthy multiplayer userbase. EVE: Valkyrie, the company's flagship VR game, was the result of over three years of development before becoming a day-one launch title on Oculus Rift and PSVR, arriving shortly afterwards on HTC Vive via Steam in 2016 -- a seemingly best-case scenario for any multiplayer-only game.

Under CCP direction, EVE: Valkyrie saw a number of updates designed to entice players back, including new ships, maps, and weekly events; CCP even pushed a major update to the game last year that brought support for desktop and console players, a move to help boost sales and revive the ailing VR-only playerbase. Still, the multiplayer game just didn't perform as CCP ultimately expected, and the company officially stepped back from VR shortly thereafter. "We expected VR to be two to three times as big as it was, period," Petursson tells Destructoid. "You can't build a business on that."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: When ICE launched an immigration crime hotline last year, the Trump administration pitched it as a way to provide resources to victims, but activists saw something else: an attack on the immigrant community. The hotline was part of the Victims Of Immigration Crime Engagement (VOICE) Office, an outfit established in February 2017. When the office first launched a line for its services the following April, protestors flooded the hotline to call in pranks and slow down response times. The plan picked up even more steam as the protestors shared the hotline number online, encouraging others to call in with fake tips.

According to internal emails and documents obtained by The Verge under the Freedom of Information Act, prank calls fully upended the system, leaving operators unable to answer more than 98 percent of incoming calls during the protest as the media relations team attempted to contain the narrative. In reports and emails produced in the first days of operation, ICE officials described an "overwhelming" amount of calls. The day after the launch, the office received more than 16,400. Of those, only a little more than 2,100 were placed into a queue, and only 260 answered. Callers in the queue waited as long as 79 minutes to reach an operator. An official noted that, should the rate of calls continue, they would need an additional 400 operators to field the hotline.

Lyft is acquiring Blue Vision Labs, a UK-based augmented reality firm whose underlying technology helps cars both know their location and understand their surroundings. It's also unveiling its first test vehicle to advance its vision for self-driving cars. TechCrunch reports: The first car from Lyft's Level 5 self-driving initiative will be the Ford Fusion Hybrid. While the integration of Lyft's autonomous technologies and a Ford car is impressive, perhaps more meaningful is the company's acquisition of Blue Vision Labs, a startup out of London that has developed a way of ingesting street-level imagery and is using it to build collaborative, interactive augmented reality layers -- all by way of basic smartphone cameras.

Blue Vision will sit within Lyft's Level 5 autonomous car division headed up by Luc Vincent (who joined the company last year as VP of engineering after creating and running Google Street View). The startup and its staff of 39 (everyone is joining Lyft) will also become the anchor for a new R&D operation in London or the San Francisco-based company, focused on that autonomous driving effort. Level 5 is stepping up a gear in another way today, too: Lyft is unveiling a new vehicle that it will be using for testing. Blue Vision has developed technology that provides both street level mapping and interactive augmented reality that lets two people see the same virtual objects. The company has already built highly detailed maps that developers can now use to develop collaborative AR experiences -- it's like the maps of these spaces become canvasses for virtual objects to be painted on. Over time, we may see various uses of it throughout the Lyft platform, but for now the main focus is Level 5. The report doesn't provide an exact amount that Blue Vision was acquired for, but people familiar with the acquisition say it's around $72 million with $30 million on top of that based on hitting certain milestones.

At this year's Uber Elevate Summit in May, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi discussed the possibility of a drone-based food delivery service. Now, it looks like a job posting has hinted that the company is looking to launch the service in 2021. Engadget reports: According to the Wall Street Journal, Uber is looking to hire someone with "flight standards and training" experience, who can "enable safe, legal, efficient and scalable flight operations." If the info is legit, It looks like Uber is looking to keep development of the program under wraps as the job posting is no longer listed on its website. According to the Wall Street Journal's report, the drone-based delivery service has been dubbed "UberExpress," and will exist under the umbrella of Uber Eats. The job description reportedly described a desire for an applicant that can "help make delivery drones functional as soon as next year and commercially operational in multiple markets by 2021."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: In a pilot study with a small sample size, researchers looked for microplastics in stool samples of eight people from Finland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, the United Kingdom and Austria. To their surprise, every single sample tested positive for the presence of a variety of microplastics (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source). In a pilot study with a small sample size, researchers looked for microplastics in stool samples of eight people from Finland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, the United Kingdom and Austria. To their surprise, every single sample tested positive for the presence of a variety of microplastics.

The new paper, which was presented Monday at a gastroenterology conference in Vienna, could provide support for marine biologists who have long warned of the dangers posed by microplastics in our oceans. But the paper suggests that microplastics are entering our bodies through other means, as well. To conduct the study, they selected volunteers from each country who kept food diaries for a week and provided stool samples. Dr. Philipp Schwabl, a researcher at the Medical University of Vienna who led the study, and his colleagues analyzed the samples with a spectrometer. Up to nine different kinds of plastics were detected, ranging in size from .002 to .02 inches. The most common plastics detected were polypropylene and polyethylene terephthalate -- both major components of plastic bottles and caps.

The federal and local governments have long relied on private companies for defense and law enforcement technologies, from Lockheed Martin jetfighters to Booz Allen Hamilton data analysis. But increasingly, the government is expanding beyond the usual defense contractors to the company that also provides free shipping and online TV. From a report: "The ... thing that was shocking for me was to understand just how the federal authorizations are allowing Amazon to have such a monopoly over the storage of government information," says Jacinta Gonzalez, field organizer for immigrant advocacy group Mijente. Along with the National Immigration Project and the Immigrant Defense Project, Mijente funded a new report entitled, "Who's Behind ICE?: The Tech and Data Companies Fueling Deportations." Its findings are based on documents such as contracts, memoranda, and corporate financial reports --which are publicly available but take a lot of digging to decipher.

While Amazon plays the leading role, the report also details the involvement of companies including Peter Thiel's Palantir, NEC, and Thomson Reuters in storing, transferring, and analyzing data on both undocumented residents and U.S. citizens. The U.S. government is moving its databases from federal facilities to cloud providers, especially Amazon Web Services (AWS), raising concerns about accountability.

U.S. researchers from FireEye have linked a Russian research lab to a cyberattack on a Saudi petrochemical plant. The malware strain called Triton -- or Trisis -- "was designed to either shut down a production process or allow SIS-controlled machinery to work in an unsafe state," reports ZDNet, citing technical reports from FireEye, Dragos, and Symantec. From the report: The group behind the malware, which FireEye has been tracking under the codename of TEMP.Veles, nearly succeeded last year, when it almost caused an explosion at a Saudi petrochemical plant owned by Tasnee, a privately owned Saudi company, according to a New York Times report. The malware's origins were a mystery when FireEye first discovered Triton in 2017 and remained a mystery even after the New York Times report in March 2018.

But in a report published today, FireEye says that following further research into incidents where the Triton malware was deployed, it can now assess with "high confidence" that the Central Scientific Research Institute of Chemistry and Mechanics (CNIIHM), a government-owned technical research institution located in Moscow, was involved in these attacks. FireEye's report does not link the Triton malware itself to CNIIHM, but the secondary malware strains used by TEMP.Veles and deployed during the incidents where Triton was deployed. Clues in these secondary malware strains used to aid the deployment of the main Triton payloads contained enough artifacts that allowed researchers to identify their source.

Yahoo has agreed to pay $50 million in damages and provide two years of free credit-monitoring services to 200 million people whose email addresses and other personal information were stolen as part of the biggest security breach in history. "The restitution hinges on federal court approval of a settlement filed late Monday in a 2-year-old lawsuit seeking to hold Yahoo accountable for digital burglaries that occurred in 2013 and 2014, but weren't disclosed until 2016," reports ABC News. From the report: Claims for a portion of the $50 million fund can be submitted by any eligible Yahoo accountholder who suffered losses resulting from the security breach. The costs can include such things as identity theft, delayed tax refunds or other problems linked to having had personal information pilfered during the Yahoo break-ins. The fund will compensate Yahoo accountholders at a rate of $25 per hour for time spent dealing with issues triggered by the security breach, according to the preliminary settlement. Those with documented losses can ask for up to 15 hours of lost time, or $375. Those who can't document losses can file claims seeking up to five hours, or $125, for their time spent dealing with the breach. Yahoo accountholders who paid $20 to $50 annually for a premium email account will be eligible for a 25 percent refund.

The free credit monitoring service from AllClear could end up being the most valuable part of the settlement for most accountholders. The lawyers representing the accountholders pegged the retail value of AllClear's credit-monitoring service at $14.95 per month, or about $359 for two years -- but it's unlikely Yahoo will pay that rate. The settlement didn't disclose how much Yahoo had agreed to pay AllClear for covering affected accountholders.

Security researchers at UpGuard discovered that a Washington-based ISP called Pocket iNet left 73 gigabytes of essential operational data publicly exposed in a misconfigured Amazon S3 storage bucket for months. "Said bucket, named 'pinapp2,' contained the 'keys to the kingdom,' according to the security firm, including internal network diagramming, network hardware configuration photos, details and inventory lists -- as well as lists of plain text passwords and AWS secret keys for Pocket iNet employees," reports Motherboard. From the report: Upguard says the firm contacted Pocket iNet on October 11 of this year, the same day the exposed bucket was discovered, but the ISP took an additional week before the data was adequately secured. "Seven days passed before Pocket iNet finally secured the exposure," noted the firm. "Due to the severity of this exposure, UpGuard expended significant effort during those seven days, repeatedly contacting Pocket iNet and relevant regulators, including using contact information found within the exposed dataset."

According to UpGuard, the list of plain text passwords was particularly problematic, given it provided root admin access to the ISP's firewalls, core routers and switches, servers, and wireless access points. "Documents containing long lists of administrative passwords may be convenient for operations, but they create single points of total risk, where the compromise of one document can have severe and extensive effects throughout the entire business," noted UpGuard. "If such documents must exist, they should be strongly encrypted and stored in a known secure location," said the firm. "Unfortunately, a single folder of PocketiNet's network operation historical data (non-customer) was publicly accessible to Amazon administrative users," the ISP said in a statement to Motherboard. "It has since been secured."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google's Pixel 3 smartphone is shipping out to the masses, and people hoping to take advantage of the new Qi wireless charging capabilities have run into a big surprise. For some unexplained reason, Google is locking out third-party Qi chargers from reaching the highest charging speeds on the Pixel 3. Third-party chargers are capped to a pokey 5W charging speed. If you want 10 watts of wireless charging, Google hopes you will invest in its outrageously priced Pixel Stand, which is $79.

Android Police reports that a reader purchased an Anker wireless charger for their Pixel 3, and, after noticing the slow charging speed, this person contacted the company. Anker confirmed that something screwy was going on with Google's charging support, saying "Pixel sets a limitation for third-party charging accessories and we are afraid that even our fast wireless charger can only provide 5W for these 2x devices." Normally we would chalk this up to some kind of bug, but apparently Google told Android Police that this was on purpose. The site doesn't have a direct quote, but it writes that, after reaching out to Google PR, it was "told that the Pixel 3 would charge at 10W on the Pixel Stand [and that] due to a 'secure handshake' being established that third-party chargers would indeed be limited to 5W." In an update, Google said the reason has to do with the "proprietary wireless charging technology" it has via its Pixel Stand and other select wireless chargers. The Pixel 3 only supports 5W Qi charging; "Google's 10W proprietary wireless charging technology" is what will allow the phone to charge at faster speeds.

"Google says it is 'certifying' chargers for the Pixel 3 via the 'Made for Google' program and pointed us to one such device, a Belkin charger called the 'Boost Up Wireless Charging Pad 10W for Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL,'" reports Ars Technica. "Belkin's description is very enlightening, saying 'Made with the Google Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL in mind, this wireless charging pad uses Google's 10W proprietary wireless charging technology. It's certified for Pixel, so you know that the BOOST UP Wireless Charging pad has been made specifically for your Pixel 3 and meets Google's high product standards.'"