On Tuesday, Google disclosed it recently disrupted a massive network of computers infected by Glupteba. The company estimates the malware has infected approximately one million Windows PCs globally, which would make it one of the largest known botnets to date.

A botnet is a network of computers or internet-connected devices all infected by malware that is under the control of a single party. In this case, Google traced Glupteba to at least two individuals based out of Russia. The company is suing them in hopes it will “set a precedent, create legal and liability risks for the botnet operators, and help deter future activity.”

At times, the company says it saw the network grow by about 1,000 devices per day. The malware that adds a computer to the Glupteba botnet is usually found hidden on sketchy websites that offer free software. According to Google, Glupteba’s operators used the malware to steal personal data, mine cryptocurrencies and funnel other internet traffic through the infected machines.

Per The Washington Post, the hackers also used some of Google’s own services to distribute the malware. The company suspended more than 1,000 accounts that had been used to spread Glupteba.

“We don’t just plug security holes, we work to eliminate entire classes of threats for consumers and businesses whose work depends on the Internet,” the company said. “We have teams of analysts and security experts who are dedicated to identifying and stopping issues like DDoS, phishing campaigns, zero-day vulnerabilities, and hacking against Google, our products, and our users.”

Google coordinated with internet infrastructure providers to disrupt the botnet, but warns it has so far only succeeded in stopping it temporarily. Glupteba uses blockchain technology as a failsafe against a complete shutdown. When it doesn’t hear from its owners, the software is programmed to automatically use data encoded on the Bitcoin blockchain for instructions on how to reconnect.

“Unfortunately, Glupteba’s use of blockchain technology as a resiliency mechanism is notable here and is becoming a more common practice among cyber crime organizations,” Google said. “The decentralized nature of blockchain allows the botnet to recover more quickly from disruptions, making them that much harder to shutdown.” The company says it’s working with its partners to make the internet more resilient to such attacks.

Employees and contractors at Activision Blizzard are walking out of work today in support of their colleagues at Raven Software. The protest, the third such work stoppage to hit the company since it was sued by California over sexual harassment allegations in July, comes after Raven, one of the studios that supports Activision’s incredibly popular Call of Duty franchise, laid off 12 quality assurance contractors. The action started on Monday when 60 workers at Raven Software, including both full-time employees and contractors, left work to protest the surprise terminations.

The protest has no planned end date, a first for the walkouts at Activision Blizzard. Those involved in the action are demanding the publisher hire all QA contractors, including those who lost their jobs on Friday, as full-time employees. “Those participating in this demonstration do so with the continued success of the studio at the forefront of their mind,” said Blizzard Activision worker advocacy group A Better ABK on Twitter. “The Raven QA department is essential to the day-to-day functioning of the studio as a whole. Terminating the contracts of high performing testers in a time of consistent work and profit puts the health of the studio at risk.”

Management at Raven told QA staff at the end of last week it would hold one-on-one meetings with everyone to decide if they would get the chance to stay at the studio as a full-time staff member. The developer told approximately 30 percent of the team their contracts would end on January 28th, with more still waiting to find if they’ll have a job beyond the start of the year. According to A Better ABK, every worker Raven decided not to keep was in “good standing,” which is to say they had not underperformed in their job or committed a fireable offense.

According to The Washington Post, Raven studio head Brian Raffel said during an all-hands meeting on Monday he didn’t consider the terminations as layoffs. Instead, he said the studio had merely decided not to renew the contracts of those who were let go. Raffel reportedly later apologized for his comments.

“We are converting approximately 500 temporary workers to full-time employees in the coming months,” an Activision Blizzard spokesperson told Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier in response to the layoffs. “Unfortunately, as part of this change, we also have notified 20 temporary workers across studios that their contracts would not be extended.” The move comes after the publisher posted a net income of $639 million during its most recent fiscal quarter.

We’ve reached out to Activision Blizzard for additional comment.

This latest action isn’t directly related to the misconduct claims that have left Activision Blizzard in turmoil for months — though it’s likely safe to say frustrations across the company are at a boiling point. The first walkout occurred in July shortly after the company issued an “abhorrent and insulting” response to the harassment lawsuit from California's fair employment regulator. More recently, employees staged a second action after The Wall Street Journal published a bombshell report on Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick’s handling of the crisis. That article implicated Kotick in the mistreatment that has characterized the company’s work culture for years. As part of that protest, thousands of Activision Blizzard employees called for Kotick’s resignation.

Discord has started testing a feature called Premium Memberships with a small group of users. The tool allows community owners to gate access to part or all of their server behind a monthly subscription fee. It’s something the company’s growing number of users, particularly admins and mods, have been asking it to implement for a while. Before today, those individuals had to turn to third-party services like Patreon to monetize access to their servers.

By contrast, the Premium Memberships tool creates a streamlined interface for that same purpose. A new tab under the “Community” heading in the app’s setting’s menu allows server owners to do things like set price tiers and view related analytics. The feature similarly streamlines the process of signing up for paid channels for users. If you want to support a community, you don’t need to leave Discord to do so. When you tap on a premium channel, indicated by the new “sparkle” icon in the sidebar, the client will tell how much you need to pay for access, as well as what perks you’ll gain for doing so.

Discord

As for pricing, Discord says it will encourage server owners to experiment. As a baseline, the company will recommend a monthly fee of $2.99 as a minimum and $99.99 as a maximum. When it comes to most of the channels you visit, you probably won’t pay more than $5 or $10 a month for access. The top end of the price range is a reflection of how much Discord has changed since the start of the pandemic to accommodate a more diverse group of communities. Discord isn’t exclusively a place for gaming anymore.

“Access to a channel can seem simplistic, but it’s a foundational piece that someone can build a lot of flexibility on top of,” said Jesse Wofford, group product marketing manager at Discord, in an interview with Engadget. One of the server owners the company is working with on this week’s soft launch is someone who runs gaming bootcamps. According to Wofford, they’ve built an entire business around private lessons. The company wants to give those people the opportunity to create a sustainable business on its platform. 

Whatever someone decides to charge for access to their channels, the company plans to take a 10 percent cut of the subscription. “It's an important stake in the ground for us that this product, like a lot of other ones, is built around creator success,” Wofford said. Additionally, for people who want to continue to use services like Patreon to monetize their channels, Discord won’t stop them from doing so. “One of the important things here is that we’re still investing in those relationships,” said Wofford. “We want to create an ecosystem that gives creators as many options to succeed as possible.”

Discord

Premium Memberships is something Discord has been working on for a while. “There’s probably a world where we could have released this a while ago,” Wofford told me. “We wanted to make sure we took in the right feedback from a diverse set of creators and built it in a way that we felt confident would deliver value.” To that end, the company plans to take its time testing the feature before it rolls it out more widely.

British-American vehicle manufacturer Arrival today announced it plans to establish an $11.5 million battery plant in Charlotte, North Carolina. The factory will be the company’s third overall facility in the city. It will be located just steps away from its soon-to-be-complete North American headquarters. Once the plant is operational, it will supply batteries to the company’s Van “Microfactory,” creating approximately 150 additional jobs. 

“By bringing the assembly of our proprietary High Voltage Battery Modules in-house, we’re striving to be as vertically integrated as possible,” Arrival CEO Mike Ableson said. “This will enable us to have even greater control over the functionality and cost of our products and pass those cost savings on to the customer while also working toward our goal of zero waste production.” The company told TechCrunch the facility should have a production capacity of up to 350,000 battery modules per year. 

Arrival has a lot riding on the success of its Van EV. In 2020, UPS ordered 10,000 electric trucks from the automaker, with the option to buy an additional 10,000 vehicles if everything goes well. The announcement comes on the same day Toyota said it would build a $1.29 billion battery plant in central North Carolina.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating Tesla following a whistleblower complaint alleging the company failed to disclose a variety of safety risks associated with rooftop solar panels from its SolarCity division. Per Reuters, the agency acknowledged the probe in a Freedom of Information Act request made by Steven Henkes (pictured above), a former Tesla employee. 

He contacted the SEC in 2019 after the automaker allegedly ignored his pleas to notify consumers and regulators about the safety issues with its solar panels. One of those involved defective electrical connectors that could cause fires.

In 2020, Henkes later sued Tesla, alleging the company had dismissed him in retaliation for his actions. "The top lawyer cautioned any communication of this issue to the public as a detriment to the Tesla reputation,” Henkes said in his complaint. According to the lawsuit, more than 60,000 residential customers were affected by the issues Henkes documented in his complaint.

The investigation follows several years of reports of safety concerns with Tesla’s solar panels. In 2019, Walmart sued the company after its solar panels led to seven store fires. While the two companies eventually settled, Walmart claimed at the time Tesla regularly sent inspectors who “lacked basic solar training and knowledge." It also asserted the company’s panels were plagued by visible defects. That same year, the Tesla solar panels at an Amazon warehouse in California reportedly caught fire as well.

Toyota has selected a site for its proposed $1.29 billion US battery manufacturing facility. On Monday, the automaker said it would build the plant on the Greensboro-Randolph Megasite, a tract of land located in Randolph County in central North Carolina. When the facility is complete sometime in 2025, it will consist of four production lines, each capable of producing batteries for 200,000 vehicles per year. Toyota plans to eventually expand the facility to produce enough power cells to support up to 1.2 million cars annually.

The plant is part of a broader $3.4 billion investment the automaker has earmarked to expand its battery production capabilities in the US. When Toyota first announced the $1.29 billion facility, it said it would create approximately 1,750 jobs. The company notes it picked Greensboro-Randolph Megasite for a handful of reasons. One of the more notable ones is that it’s a location with access to renewable energy. Toyota says it’s “committed” to using 100 percent clean energy to produce batteries at the facility.

The scale of the project is an acknowledgment by the automaker that it needs to diversify its electrification strategy. More so than any other automaker, Toyota invested significantly into fuel cell technology. So far, it has little to show for its efforts. Outside of California, you can’t buy its Mirai fuel-cell sedan. However, the company’s latest plan is to offer 70 different electric models, including 15 battery electric vehicles, by 2025.

Mozilla is introducing a new security feature it claims will make Firefox the most secure browser available to consumers. Dubbed RLBox and available through today's Firefox 95 update, it’s a new sandboxing tool the company developed in collaboration with the University of California San Diego and the University of Texas.

All modern browsers use sandboxing to protect users against malicious code. The problem is that many of the most advanced exploits chain together two vulnerabilities to bypass those protections. With RLBox, Firefox will compile a process into WebAssembly and then convert it into native code. According to Mozilla, this approach presents two significant advantages. It prevents code from jumping between different parts of a program and limits access to specific areas of your system’s memory.

With today’s release, Mozilla will use RLBox to isolate five components of Firefox, including the browser’s Graphite font rendering engine and Ogg multimedia module. If the system works as expected, the company says “even a zero-day vulnerability in any of [the five components] should pose no threat to Firefox.”

Mozilla is quick to note it won’t be able to use RLBox to protect every component of Firefox. For instance, it’s not suitable for modules that depend on sharing memory with the rest of the program to function. However, the company is hopeful that other developers will use the technology to make their software safer. In the meantime, RLBox is now rolling out to all desktop and mobile versions of Firefox.

With so many different ways to build a computer, one of the trickiest aspects of PC gaming is knowing whether a game you’re about to install will play well on your machine. Microsoft is testing a feature that could make that easier. As spotted by The Verge, the Xbox app on Windows now includes a label that will tell you if a game will “play great” on your PC.

Tom Warren/The Verge

Since there are some titles where the app says “performance check not available yet,” it doesn’t appear Microsoft is comparing the listed system requirements against the components in your PC. Instead, it would seem the company is building a database where it tests a game against various different machines. If you want to test the labels, you can do so by downloading the Xbox Insider app and opting into the Windows gaming preview. 

If the system works well, it could solve a common pain point for PC gamers. In recent years, we’ve seen some developers share more granular system requirements for their games, telling you not just the minimum and recommended spec but also hardware that will deliver the best experience at Full HD, QHD and 4K respectively. Unfortunately, there hasn’t been anything close to standardization across the industry, and that’s even before you consider the fact some developers list overly optimistic requirements for their games.

On December 9th, Epic Games will release The Matrix Awakens, an interactive tie-in to The Matrix Resurrections. You can preload the demo to your PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X/S console ahead of its debut at The Game Awards. Epic built the experience using Unreal Engine 5, and you can see what the next-generation engine is capable of in a teaser the company shared today. “How do we know what is real?” asks a life-like Keanu Reeves partway through the clip.

It’s a rare movie experience that’s any good, but that might not matter with The Matrix Awakens. For most people, this will be their first chance to see UE5 in action. Epic previewed the latest iteration of its popular game engine part way through last year with a stunning PS5 demo that showed off what it could do. In May, the company released an early access version of UE5 to PC, but the system requirements meant most people couldn’t experience the Valley of the Ancient demo with the hardware they had.

If you missed a chance to pick up an Amazon Fire tablet on the cheap during Black Friday, worry not: they’re on sale again. Ahead of the winter holidays, Amazon has discounted the Fire 7 to $35, while the Fire HD 8 and Fire HD 10 are currently on sale for $55 and $100, respectively. While none of the three tablets are priced as low as they were over the Thanksgiving weekend, they’re still a decent pickup, particularly if you’re looking for a last-minute gift for someone.

Of the three, we think the Fire HD 8 is the best fit for most people. We awarded it a score of 81 on the back of its refined design, all-day battery life, decent performance and new USB-C port. You can configure the Fire 8 HD with up to 64GB of internal storage. The included microSD slot allows you to add up to 1TB of additional storage. Like all of Amazon’s Fire tablet, the HD 8 is best seen as a media consumption device, but if you want the best possible experience, then it’s worth spending the extra $45 to pick up the Fire HD 10. It has the best display of the trio thanks to a 1,920 x 1,200 resolution panel. It’s also the fastest due to the inclusion of an 2.0GHz octa-core processor and 3GB of RAM. And if all you want is something affordable, it’s hard to go wrong with the Fire 7, especially when it costs less than $50.

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