ArduinoMania

China has signaled it will begin actively enforcing regulation that forbids the livestreaming of unauthorized games. Per Reuters, the country’s National Radio and Television Administration said on Friday all internet platforms are “strictly forbidden” from streaming titles that the government has not approved.

According to video game industry analyst Daniel Ahmad, China has always required that games be officially licensed before they can be distributed or streamed within the country, but it rarely enforced the latter ban. That behavior allowed games such as Elden Ring, a title that’s not officially approved for sale in China, to find substantial audiences on platforms like Huya. Ahmad notes that FromSoftware’s latest garnered approximately 17 million cumulative daily average viewers in its first week of release.

“What this means in practice is that unless your game is approved by the [National Radio and Television Administration], it is going to be very difficult for it to get visibility via live streaming, short video, advertisement or other platforms [and] channels,” Ahmad said.

China has become increasingly tough on video games in recent years. Last summer, the country began enforcing a three-hour weekly limit on the amount of time children can play online video games. At the time of the ban, a state-owned news outlet described the medium as “spiritual opium.” The National Radio and Television Administration employed similar rhetoric, claiming issues like teenage addiction necessitated the need for urgent action on video game livestreaming.

Success and failure at Pebble

Eric Migicovsky, Medium

The founder of Pebble, one of the hottest products ever to hit Kickstarter, reflects on why the startup failed during the 10-year anniversary of its crowdfunding launch. "We succeeded at inventing the smartwatch and an entirely new product category," he writes. "But in the end, we failed to create a sustainable, profitable business."

The Goodman experiment

Alan Siegel, The Ringer

Bob Odenkirk and the folks who created Saul Goodman offer an oral history on how the character eventually got his own show even though it wasn't intended to work out that way. "Not long after Saul made his debut midway through Season 2 of Breaking Bad, it became very apparent that he was more than just comic relief," Siegel explains.

Mark Zuckerberg's augmented reality

Alex Heath, The Verge

The Verge offers a detailed look at Meta's AR roadmap, including info on a number of different augmented reality glasses models the company is working on. 

Chinese astronauts — or taikonauts, as the country calls them — Zhai Zhigang, Ye Guangfu and Wang Yaping have returned to Earth after spending 183 days in space. That's the country's longest crewed mission to date so far, with the taikonauts spending those six months aboard Tianhe, the living module of China's Tiangong space station. As Space notes, Wang Yaping was also the first female taikonaut to live aboard Tianhe and the first Chinese woman to go on a spacewalk. 

The taikonauts were part of the Shenzhou-13 mission, which is the second of four crewed missions and the fifth out of the eleven overall missions China intends to launch to finish building its space station by the end of the year. They did two spacewalks and performed 20 science experiments while in orbit. The team also manually controlled the Tianhe module for a docking experiment with an unmanned cargo spacecraft. 

China, which isn't an ISS partner, launched Tianhe to low Earth orbit in April 2021 and quickly followed that up with several more launches in an effort to meet its space station's 2022 construction deadline. The country sent the first crewed mission to its fledgling station in June last year, and the three taikonauts involved spent three months in Tianhe testing systems and conducting spacewalks. In June, China is expected to launch its next crewed mission, the Shenzhou-14, with three taikonauts onboard who'll also spend six months in orbit.

Back in 2021, The Washington Postreported that around two percent of the 1,000 highest-grossing apps in the Apple App Store were some form of scam. Turns out the Mac App Store also isn't immune to shady developers. As The Verge reports, a developer named Kosta Eleftheriou has shed light on questionable apps listed on the Mac App Store, which use pop-ups that make it difficult to exit unless you pay their subscription fees. Eleftheriou had also previously identified a number of scam apps for iOS that made it through Apple's review process.

The developer started looking into the situation after a Twitter user named Edoardo Vacchi posted about an app called My Metronome that disables the Quit option until you pay for a subscription. (Apple made it easier to report scam apps on iOS 15, but Vacchi said there was no way to report My Metronome on Mac.) Eleftheriou confirmed Vacchi's claim and pointed The Verge to other applications exhibiting the same behavior. Mac and iOS developer Jeff Johnson did some digging of his own and found that the developer behind My Metronome, Music Paradise LLC, is registered at the same address in Russia as another developer named Groove Vibes. 

The Verge downloaded apps by both Music Paradise and Groove Vibes and found that while some of them had appropriate ways to quit, others disabled the quit option and Mac's force quit keys. It's still possible to exit the applications without paying, but the links to close their pop-ups look like they were deliberately designed to be hard to find. 

Apple prides itself in having a rigorous review process for the App Store — Tim Cook even said during an Epic trial last year that the store would be a "toxic mess" without it. Shady and fraudulent apps are still slipping through despite the measures taken by the tech giant, though, and it may even be earning from them. According to that 2021 report from The Post, the scam apps it found may have defrauded users out of an estimated $48 million, including Apple's commission. The My Metronome app is no longer available for us when we checked, but it's unclear if it was Apple itself that removed it. We asked the tech giant for a comment and will update this post if we hear back. 

Input devices consisting of optical readers for punched paper tape have been around since the earliest days of computing, so why stop now? [Jürgen]’s Paper Tape Reader project connects to any modern computer over USB, acting like a serial communications device. Thanks to the device’s automatic calibration, it works with a variety of paper materials. As for reading speed, it’s pretty much only limited to how fast one can pull tape through without damaging it.

While [Jürgen]’s device uses LEDs and phototransistors to detect the presence or absence of punched holes, it doesn’t rely on hardware calibration. Instead, the device takes analog readings of each phototransistor, and uses software-adjusted thresholds to differentiate ones from zeros. This allows it to easily deal with a wide variety of tape types and colors, even working with translucent materials. Reading 500 characters per second isn’t a problem if the device has had a chance to calibrate.

Interested in making your own? The build section of the project has all the design files; it uses only through-hole components, and since the device is constructed from a stack of 1.6 mm thick PCBs, there’s no separate enclosure needed.

Paper tape and readers have a certain charm to them. Cyphercon 4.0 badges featured tape readers, and we’ve even seen the unusual approach of encoding an I²C byte stream directly onto tape.

DuckDuckGo's crackdown on dodgy content now extends to digital bootleggers. TorrentFreak has discovered that the search engine no longer lists results for some major pirate websites, including The Pirate Bay, 1337x and Fmovies — look for anything from their domains and you'll come up empty-handed. Streaming and stream-ripping sites like Flixtor and 2conv also produce no results, while other pirate outlets (such as RarBG) may only turn up one result instead of the hundreds of thousands you see elsewhere.

The site for the video download tool YouTube-dl also produces no results despite recent defenses of its legality. While the RIAA has portrayed YouTube-dl as a piracy tool, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, GitHub and others found that it doesn't rip DRM-protected material.

We've asked DuckDuckGo for comment. As TorrentFreak says, though, liability for copyright violations might be an issue. The company removed pirate "bangs" (shortcuts for pirate sites) as far back as 2018, and competitors like Google and Microsoft are already downranking piracy-related results. A move like this could protect DuckDuckGo against costly copyright battles.

You might not be thrilled with in-game advertising, but you might soon see more of it. Insidersources (sub. required) claim Microsoft is developing a program to help marketers place ads in free-to-play Xbox games. Companies could buy from an ad inventory to secure space on virtual billboards. It's not clear if this would extend to character skins or video rolls, but Microsoft is apparently crafting a "private marketplace" to limit ads to brands that won't disrupt gameplay.

Microsoft is reportedly still pinpointing ad technology firms that would build the catalog and cooperate on placement. The debut might not take long, though, as the program could launch by the third quarter (that is, summer).

The company declined to confirm or deny the plans. In a statement to Insider, a spokesperson said Microsoft was constantly striving to "improve the experience" for developers and players but didn't have "anything further to share."

The program could rankle gamers worried about ads for real-world products finding their way into fictional universes. However, the focus on free-to-play titles might prove crucial. This could help developers make money from free games without leaning too heavily on paid content like skins and season passes. That, in turn, might persuade creators to make Xbox-centric games rather than building for the PlayStation or Switch.

A few months after AMC Theatres started accepting crypto payments, you can use its app to buy movie tickets using Dogecoin, Shiba Inu tokens and other virtual currencies. CEO Adam Aron said the app is using Bitpay to process cryptocurrency payments, which are only accepted in the US for now. You can also buy tickets with Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal and an old-fashioned thing called a credit card.

It seems customers have embraced AMC's adoption of cryptocurrency. Very soon after AMC enabled crypto payments on the web, they accounted for 14 percent of online transactions. So, if you happen to have some Dogecoin that's been languishing in your wallet since someone gave it to you as a joke in 2014, you can grab your phone and put your coins to use by booking a ticket for a movie over this long weekend.

Elon Musk, who until the last week or so, was known on Twitter mainly for trolling and incurring the wrath of the SEC, has now set his sights on taking over the platform. Speaking at a TED conference on Thursday, the Tesla CEO positioned his $43 billion hostile takeover bid not as something he wants to do, but as something he feels is “important to the function of democracy.”

“It's important to the function of the United States as a free country and many other countries,” he said. “Civilizational risk is decreased, the more we can increase the trust of Twitter as a public platform.”

That may sound like a lofty goal — and it’s not that different from how Jack Dorsey and other Twitter leaders have talked about the platform — but Musk’s actual ideas for making Twitter more “trustworthy” are bizarre and sometimes contradictory. It suggests he has little understanding of how Twitter works, much less how to run the company.

During the interview, Musk repeatedly stated he believed speech on Twitter should only be constrained by what’s legal. Twitter, he said, should “err on the side of, if in doubt, let the speech exist.” He said that permanent bans should be used sparingly. “A good sign as to whether there's free speech is, [if] someone you don't like is allowed to say something you don't like, and if that is the case, then we have free speech.”

Besides being a somewhat narrow view of free speech, Musk’s own track record would appear to be at odds with this statement. While he has zero experience running a social media company, his actions as Tesla’s CEO suggest there are many scenarios in which he is notably less committed to absolute free speech.

As Quartzpoints out, Musk has reportedly fired numerous Tesla workers who disagree with him. Recently, one employee was shown the door for posting videos to his personal YouTube channel that depicted flaws in Tesla’s self-driving software running on his own vehicle. Musk also reportedly tried to force a law firm, hired by Tesla and SpaceX, to fire an associate who had previously worked for his arch-nemesis the SEC, in an apparent retaliation for the lawyer’s involvement with the agency’s investigation of Musk. Incidentally, Tesla has faced allegations of discrimination and is currently contending with a lawsuit from the state of California over its treatment of Black employees.

Trust and safety experts were also quick to point out that a lack of content moderation actually has a chilling effect on free speech. “Effective moderation is not inherently in conflict with free speech,” Samidh Chakrabarti, Facebook’s former head of civic integrity tweeted. “It is required for people to feel free to speak.”

This is more than just theoretical. Just ask former CEO Dick Costolo who famously presided over one of the most toxic eras in Twitter history thanks to a hands-off approach to content moderation. It was under his tenure as CEO that Gamergate and other targeted harassment campaigns were able to drive scores of users off the platform. Costolo later admitted that his failure to deal with trolls was a huge mistake.

Others pointed out that less moderation would quickly result in Twitter being overrun with spam and other shady — yet entirely legal — content. Even Musk seemed to contradict himself on this point, saying that a “top priority” would be to rid Twitter of the “spam and scam bots and bot armies” that frequently impersonate him.

Away from the culture war battles over "free speech," Twitter is facing significant challenges of its own. The company is still in the middle of a big shift, changing many of its core features in an effort to find new sources of revenue. It still has aggressive growth targets for users and revenue that would prove challenging even for seasoned Twitter insiders — which Musk is not.

And Musk doesn’t even seem to know what he actually wants. He acknowledged that he was unsure of if he would be able to pull off actually buying Twitter (other shareholders seem to agree on that point) and claimed to be unconcerned with making money from his investment. He claimed to have a “plan B,” but didn’t share details. He also admitted that his tweets are little more than a “stream of consciousness” he sometimes composes while on the toilet.

As with so much else he does, it’s impossible to tell if he really wants to fully control Twitter or if all this is yet another elaborate troll. It could be both.

“I do think this will be somewhat painful,” he mused. On that, at least, he’s spot on.

Comets aren't known for being gargantuan, but there are clearly exceptions to that rule. Researchers using the Hubble Space Telescope have spotted the largest known comet to date, C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein). With a nucleus 80 miles across, it easily overshadows the 60-mile girth of previous record holder C/2002 VQ94 — it's about 50 times bigger than the typical comet. 

The comet was first discovered in 2010 by its namesake astronomers Pedro Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein. However, scientists only recently verified the size by comparing Hubble imagery against a computer model of the coma (the 'atmosphere' of the comet as it releases gas) and data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array. At roughly 2 billion miles away from Earth, C/2014 UN271 is too far away for Hubble to visualize the nucleus.

And before you ask: no, there's no danger of an Earth-shattering collision. C/2014 UN271 is on a 3-million-year-long elliptical orbit that will take it no closer than 1 billion miles from the Sun, or slightly beyond Saturn's distance, in 2031. It appears to have originated from the Oort Cloud (the still-theoretical nest of comets at least 2,000AU from the Sun) and may travel up to half a light-year away. Its -348F temperature may seem frigid, but it's warm enough to produce a carbon monoxide coma.

The size confirmation isn't just about bragging rights. This finding widens humanity's understanding of comet sizes, and adds to the still-small catalog of very distant comets. It might also provide more evidence of the Oort Cloud's existence and, by extension, help explain the cloud's role in Solar System development.