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Members of the Recording Industry Association of Japan had taken legal action in the U.S. to demand information on Hikari No Akari’s operator from California-based Cloudflare, whose content delivery network the site had used.

“We’ll use information that Cloudflare will disclose to hold the website operator responsible and take other legal action,” an RIAJ spokesperson said.

The website received roughly 15 million visits over the past year, 75% of which were from countries outside Japan, such as Indonesia, the U.S. and France.

“Unlike videos or published materials, pirated works of music don’t need to be translated for anyone to enjoy,” says Hiroyuki Nakajima, an attorney versed in content piracy.

The RIAJ took a similar step in 2023, forcing the closure of another piracy website that August via legal action in the U.S.

This site, which had linked to illegal downloads of J-pop for more than two years, had not shut down as the trade group had demanded.

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Major record labels sued Verizon on Friday, alleging that the Internet service provider violated copyright law by continuing to serve customers accused of pirating music.

They say that “Verizon has knowingly contributed to, and reaped substantial profits from, massive copyright infringement committed by tens of thousands of its subscribers.”

Cox received support from groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which warned that the big money judgment could cause broadband providers to disconnect people from the Internet based only on accusations of copyright infringement.

While judges in the Cox case reversed a vicarious liability verdict, they affirmed the jury’s additional finding of willful contributory infringement and ordered a new damages trial.

“Yet rather than taking any steps to address its customers’ illegal use of its network, Verizon deliberately chose to ignore Plaintiffs’ notices, willfully blinding itself to that information and prioritizing its own profits over its legal obligations.”

The lawsuit also complains that Verizon hasn’t made it easier for copyright owners to file complaints about Internet users:

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A South Korean media outlet has alleged that local telco KT deliberately infected some customers with malware due to their excessive use of peer-to-peer (P2P) downloading tools.

The number of infected users of “web hard drives” – the South Korean term for the online storage services that allow uploading and sharing of content – has reportedly reached 600,000.

Malware designed to hide files was allegedly inserted into the Grid Program – the code that allows KT users to exchange data in a peer-to-peer method.

The incident has reportedly drawn enough attention to warrant an investigation from the police, which have apparently searched KT’s headquarters and datacenter, and seized evidence, in pursuit of evidence the telco violated South Korea’s Communications Secrets Protection Act (CSPA) and the Information and Communications Network Act (ICNA).

The investigation has reportedly uncovered an entire team at KT dedicated to detecting and interfering with the file transfers, with some workers assigned to malware development, others distribution and operation, and wiretapping.

Of course, given files shared on P2P are notoriously targeted by malware distributors, perhaps KT the telco assumed its web hard drive users wouldn’t notice a little extra virus here and there.

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Leaks of this white Xbox Series X suggested that Microsoft may have upgraded the heatsink used to cool the console, but we may have to wait on teardowns to confirm that.

The new Galaxy Black special edition Xbox Series X will come with a disc drive for $599.99 when it launches later this year.

The existence of a white Xbox Series X appears to confirm that Microsfot has canceled or pushed back the refreshed version of the Xbox Series X console that appeared in FTC v. Microsoft documents last year.

Codenamed Brooklin, the unannounced Xbox Series X refresh featured a more cylindrical design than the existing console, and it also would have had no disc drive.

Microsoft described that console as “adorably all digital” in internal documents, and it was supposed to ship with a new controller and Xbox Wireless 2 connection.

“It is hard to see our team’s work shared in this way because so much has changed and there’s so much to be excited about right now, and in the future,” said Spencer in a post on X in September.

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Albino, who is also a popular Twitch streamer, complained that his YouTube video playing through Fallout was demonetized because a Samsung washing machine randomly chimed to signal a laundry cycle had finished while he was streaming.

To Albino it was obvious that Audego didn’t have any rights to the jingle, which Dexerto reported actually comes from the song “Die Forelle” (“The Trout”) from Austrian composer Franz Schubert.

Albino suggested that YouTube had potentially allowed Audego to make invalid copyright claims for years without detecting the seemingly obvious abuse.

"Ah okay, yes, I’m sure they did this in good faith and will make the correct call, though it would be a shame if they simply clicked ‘reject dispute,’ took all the ad revenue money and forced me to risk having my channel terminated to appeal it!!

YouTube also acknowledged in 2021 that “just one invalid reference file in Content ID can impact thousands of videos and users, stripping them of monetization or blocking them altogether.”

“That rings hollow,” EFF reported in 2021, noting that “huge conglomerates have consistently pushed for more and more restrictions on the use of copyrighted material, at the expense of fair use and, as a result, free expression.”

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For some listeners on the call, it was a surprising goal: Microsoft had just shut down the Japanese developer Tango Gameworks, which was coming off the small, prestigious hit title Hi-Fi Rush.

When rumors swirled that it wasn’t doing well commercially, Aaron Greenberg, vice president of Xbox games marketing, wrote on X that Hi-Fi Rush “was a break out hit for us and our players in all key measurements and expectations.”

“While there are titles we can’t announce yet,” Spencer said in the September 2023 interview, translated by VGC, “we are currently developing new games in collaboration with Japanese companies.” It’s worth wondering if that’s still the plan now that Tango is shut down.

Even the original Hades is climbing back up the Steam charts, breaking its all-time peak player count record just today almost four years after its initial release.

While we don’t know exactly what sales goals Microsoft had for Hi-Fi Rush, clearly there is a demonstrated appetite for this kind of game, with Tango Gameworks positioned perfectly to deliver it.

With Hi-Fi Rush, Tango Gameworks gave Microsoft just what Booty says he wants: a small, creatively unique, highly praised, award-winning game.

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But a recent video from Displaced Gamers takes the idea from private theory to public execution, going into painstaking detail on how to get NES Tetris to start reading the game’s high score tables as machine code instructions.

But players can manipulate this jump thanks to a little-known vagary in how Tetris handles potential inputs when running on the Japanese version of the console, the Famicom.

As it happens, the area of RAM that Tetris uses to process this extra controller input is also used for the memory location of that jump routine we discussed earlier.

That means only a small portion of the NES’s available opcode instructions can be “coded” into the high score table using the available attack surface.

Of course, the lack of a battery-backed save system means hackers need to achieve these high scores manually (and enter these complicated names) every time they power up Tetris on a stock NES.

With that kind of full control, a top-level player could theoretically recode NES Tetris to patch out the crash bugs altogether.

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Bluesky had announced last month that it would use some portion of its funds to fuel efforts in the developer ecosystem via the AT Protocol Grant program.

Notes SkyBridge’s developer @videah.net on Bluesky, the project is currently undergoing a significant rewrite from Dart to Rust, which is why its GitHub repo hasn’t seen much activity lately.

“It’s already proving to be much more stable, hoping to show it off soon,” videah posted on Bluesky when sharing the news of the grant.

Instagram Threads (which is integrating with ActivityPub) now has more than 150 million monthly active users, Meta announced this week during earnings.

Another software developer, Ryan Barrett, was the recipient of some backlash on GitHub when building another bridge called Bridgy Fed, which would be opt-out by default — meaning Mastodon posts would show up on Bluesky even if the post’s author hadn’t opted into this.

He readjusted his plans to build a discoverable opt-in instead, which would allow users to request to follow accounts on the different networks.

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In the early 2000s, Olivia Packenham would get home from school, listen to the familiar sound of the dial up tone as her family computer connected to the internet, and navigate her AOL browser to the virtual gaming world of Neopets.

A crude social network that predated Facebook, the site allowed users to add friends, message one another, trade resources or virtual currency, and battle.

That was until the entrepreneur and investing consultant Dominic Law, who joined NetDragon in 2020 as director of new markets, launched an internal campaign to revive the Neopets brand, which he called “a major leap of faith”.

In addition to prioritizing drawing lapsed users back to the site, Neopets is flirting with licensing its intellectual property for a trading card game and a branded Monopoly board.

Law said rebalancing the Neopets economy was a top priority for the company, and acknowledged that many hackers and black market traders had emerged because the site was neglected for so long.

Such efforts to connect with Neopians have given many users hope that their experiences will be considered, particularly after the parent company experienced major backlash over a 2021 attempt to dive into NFTs and cryptocurrency.

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Another classic has been given the open source treatment, with Descent 3 from Outrage Entertainment now available under the MIT license.

This release was put up on GitHub by Kevin Bentley, one of the original developers.

It has a bit of an interesting history as it was originally ported to Linux way back in 2000 from Loki Entertainment, which didn’t age particularly well.

This includes the ‘1.5’ patch that Jeff Slutter and Kevin Bentley wrote several years ago.

Some proprietary sound and video libraries from Interplay have been stripped out (the ACM and MVE format).

A lot of this code was written by a really great team, but keep in mind we were much younger and less experienced back then.

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In January this year, Turkey’s TCA said it would be issuing Meta with an additional $160,000 fine each day for non-compliance with the previous order.

For context, Facebook’s sibling company, Instagram, launched Threads last summer, in large part to capitalize on the exodus of Twitter users following Elon Musk’s controversial takeover.

Turkish regulators had announced the investigation on the way Meta linked Threads with Instagram in December, concluding last month that there was a strong case to answer for.

This leads us to today’s announcement that Meta will pull Threads, temporarily at least, pending further discussions and legal resolutions with Turkey.

“We disagree with the interim order, we believe we are in compliance with all Turkish legal requirements, and we will appeal,” Meta wrote in a blog post today.

In the build up to April 29, everyone using Threads in Turkey will receive a notification about the impending closure, and they will be given a choice to either delete or deactivate their profile.

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Now you can add one more startup to that lineup: Lyrak, a new X rival that aims to differentiate itself by focusing on real-time news and monetization options for creators, as on X, but with fediverse integrations, similar to Instagram’s Threads.

With Lyrak, the plan is to take the best of what Twitter has to offer and combine it with ActiviyPub integration, allowing users to interact with a wider audience on other federated social networks, like Mastodon and others.

Founded by London-based web designer and marketer Rishi Siva, Lyrak is named for a lead character in the TV show “His Dark Materials,” Lyra.

At one point, Siva also created a Thumbtack-like app, but the COVID-19 pandemic impacted its ability to grow as many local tradespeople were unable to work at the time.

To attract them, Lyrak will allow Verified journalists to share content to users’ home feeds based on their interests and offer tools to send them notifications to people who regularly click their links.

The company plans to generate revenue through ads, like X, but also by taking a 10% cut from paid posts, subscriptions, tips, digital products and other AI features, in time.

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Playtron and Mysten Labs have announced the SuiPlay0X1, a new Steam Deck-alike that is being billed as “the world’s first blockchain native handheld games console.”

BREAKING: announcement from onstage at #SuiBasecamp: we’re excited to share the first handheld gaming device with native Web3 capabilities – the SuiPlay0X1, powered by @PLAYTR0N!

For the SuiPlay 0X1, that means tight integration with the Sui blockchain, which claims lower fees, faster transaction speeds, and easier scalability than some other crypto coins.

Playtron is “attempting to extract the PC gaming ecosystem from Windows and recontextualize in our own operating system,” CEO Kirt McMaster told VentureBeat.

Maybe Sui has fixed these problems, but so far, evidence suggests that cryptocurrency is still more useful as a speculative asset than an everyday payment option.

Without even vague gestures toward key details like specs, price, or planned release date (beyond “2025”), it’s hard to even evaluate how the 0X1 would work as a gaming device.

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The MPA will “work with members of Congress” to require Internet service providers to block piracy websites, he said during a “state of the industry” address at CinemaCon 2024 in Las Vegas, a convention for movie theater owners.

“So today, here with you at CinemaCon, I’m announcing the next major phase of this effort: the MPA is going to work with members of Congress to enact judicial site-blocking legislation here in the United States.”

A site-blocking law would let copyright owners “request, in court, that Internet service providers block access to websites dedicated to sharing illegal, stolen content,” he said.

Consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge urged Congress to reject the MPA push, saying that a site-blocking law would threaten the open Internet.

The MPA’s latest push for a site-blocking law comes about two weeks before a Federal Communications Commission vote to restore net neutrality rules that prohibit ISPs from blocking and throttling websites.

Rose said the MPA’s requested law would be similar to the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) that was shelved after major protests over a decade ago.

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During CinemaCon in Las Vegas, MPA CEO Charles Rivkin announced that the organization plans on working with Congress to pass rules blocking websites with pirated content.

The MPA is a trade association representing Hollywood studios, including Paramount, Sony, Universal, and Disney (it’s also behind the ratings board that gives you an R if you say curse words too often).

In his speech on Tuesday, Rivkin highlights what a major problem piracy in the US has become, saying it costs “hundreds of thousands of jobs” and “more than one billion in theatrical ticket sales.”

He adds that the ideal process would allow creatives across the film, TV, music, and book industries to go to court, where they can request that internet service providers block access to websites with pirated content.

It helped hatch the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in 2012, which would’ve restricted access to websites containing pirated content.

In a statement provided to The Verge, Katharine Trendacosta, a director of policy and advocacy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says it’s “fundamentally wrong for the MPA to claim to take the 1st amendment seriously in one breath and threaten the expression of so many others in the next.”

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The official US president Threads account, currently helmed by President Joe Biden, has begun using Meta’s ActivityPub integration, making Biden the first sitting US president to post on the decentralized networking protocol.

The account turning on fediverse posting comes only a couple of weeks after Threads rolled out its beta ActivityPub integration for users in the US, Canada, and Japan.

Biden may not be able to see replies and follows as they pour in from the fediverse — and with some servers blocking connections to Meta, not everyone there will be able to see his posts — as those features weren’t part of Threads’ integration when it opened up beta testing last month.

So far, only Biden’s official POTUS account appears to have toggled Threads’ fediverse integration on.

Neither Dr. Jill Biden’s nor Vice President Kamala Harris’ accounts showed up in a search.

And none of them appear to have joined Bluesky yet, a competing decentralized social network running on its own AT protocol that recently opened general signups.

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Improved temporal stability at rest and in movement – less flickering and/or shimmering and “Fizziness” around objects in motion.

Improved temporal stability at rest and in movement – less flickering and/or shimmering and “Fizziness” around objects in motion.

Makes it easier for developers to debug and allows forward compatibility with updated versions of FSR.

Makes it easier for developers to debug and allows forward compatibility with updated versions of FSR.

They also once again reminded people that a 60FPS minimum is needed before Frame Generation will give the best experience in image quality and input latency.

Various other games have been announced to be getting AMD FSR 3 on top of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart including Cyberpunk 2077, Dragon’s Dogma 2, Dying Light 2 Stay Human, Frostpunk 2, Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut, NARAKA: BLADEPOINT, and Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2.

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In an interview with TechCrunch, the hacker Destroyer2009 took credit for the hacks, saying that he did it “just for fun,” and with the goal of forcing the Apex Legends’ developers to fix the vulnerability he exploited.

The only thing Destroyer2009 said regarding the technique he used was that the vulnerability “has nothing to do with the server and I’ve never touched anything outside of the Apex process,” and that he did not hack the two players’ computers directly.

Destroyer2009 said that the window is part of a real cheat software, but not one that is public, and whose menu was slightly modified for the hacks on Sunday.

On Tuesday, Respawn, the studio that develops Apex Legends posted a statement on X (formerly Twitter), addressing the incidents.

All I can say is, the care and love shown from parties involved makes me thankful for the coworkers and devs on this game,” wrote Ford.

Easy Anti-Cheat, the developers of the anti-cheat engine used in Apex Legends (and several other games), said in a statement on Monday that it was “confident that there is no RCE vulnerability within EAC being exploited.” An RCE, or remote code execution, is a security flaw that allows a hacker to run malicious code on a target’s device remotely, such as over the internet.

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During the FediForum conference on Tuesday, Meta’s Peter Cottle showed off a brief demo of how users will eventually be able to connect their accounts and posts to the fediverse.

As you can see in the video below, which FediForum shared with The Verge, Cottle can navigate to his Threads account settings and toggle on an option called “fediverse sharing.” Meta will then show a pop-up explaining what exactly the fediverse is, along with some disclaimers Meta will flag to users so they know what they’re getting into.

First, Meta notes that users will need to have a public profile to toggle on the feature, something Instagram head Adam Mosseri has already mentioned.

In other words, your post may still be visible on, say, a linked Mastodon server, even if you decide to delete it with Threads.

“I think this is a downside of the protocol that we use today, but I think it’s important to let people know that if you post something and another server grabs a copy, we can’t necessarily enforce it,” Cottle says.

The FediForum is an online event that gives developers the opportunity to show off what they’re working on in the fediverse.

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On Sunday, two competitive esports players appeared to get hacked during a live streamed game, prompting the organizers to postpone the tournament.

Before that, for a split moment, a window appears on their screen, with what looks like a menu for a tool to enable cheats, titled “TSM HALAL HOOK.”

At the same time, the game’s chatbot shows a message that appears to come from the hackers: “Apex hacking global series, by Destroyer2009 &R4andom.”

In the other match, something similar happens to another competitive Apex Legends player, ImperialHal, who also posted the sequence on their X account.

“Due to the competitive integrity of this series being compromised, we have made the decision to postpone the [North America] finals at this time.

We will continue to work closely with our partners for any follow up support needed,” the official Easy Anti-Cheat account posted on X.

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