Category: Technology

A teenage boy may be responsible for a ransomware attack that shut down MGM Resorts in Las Vegas last year. The West Midlands Police Department in England confirmed that they arrested an unidentified 17-year-old on Thursday from the town of Walsall who allegedly shut down the resort and casino on the Las Vegas strip last year.

The teenager was arrested on suspicion of blackmail and violating the UK’s Computer Misuse Act. He was released on bail, according to a statement from the police department.

Police officials tracked the teenage suspect as part of a joint investigation with the UK’s National Crime Agency and the FBI. The police department said they recovered evidence at the teenager’s address including “a number of digital devices which will undergo forensic examination.”

The statement also said the teenager was part of a “global cyber online crime group” but did not specify which group. The ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware group announced their responsibility for the MGM Resorts cyber outage. The attack happened on Sep. 12, 2023 allegedly with a simple 10 minute phone call to a Help desk employee using information obtained from LinkedIn. The group has also claimed responsibility for a similar ransomware attack on the beauty brand Esteé Lauder.

“All ALPHV ransomware group did to compromise MGM Resorts was hop on LinkedIn, find an employee, then call the Help Desk,” the organization wrote in a post on X.

MGM Resorts’ system shutdown lasted for nine days and created a massive outage across all of its casinos on the Las Vegas Strip. News later surfaced that other casinos like Caesars were also targeted by a different group but chose to pay the hackers tens of millions of dollars to prevent private company data from being released.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/police-arrest-a-teenage-boy-in-connection-with-the-mgm-resorts-ransomware-attack-223906246.html?src=rss 

Twitch has confirmed that former president and current Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s three-year ban on the gaming stream platform has been reversed. A statement from Twitch confirmed the news about the status of Trump’s ban from the platform.

“We reinstated former President Trump’s Twitch channel,” the statement read. “We believe there is value in hearing from Presidential nominees directly, when possible. Trump is now the official Republican nominee for US President.”

The Amazon-owned platform first issued a temporary suspension on President Trump’s account in 2020 for violating its hateful conduct and harassment policies and restored it two weeks later. Twitch disabled the account following the Jan. 6 riot on the US Capitol in 2021 due to “the current extraordinary circumstances and the President’s incendiary rhetoric” before issuing an indefinite suspension two weeks later, according to a Twitch spokesperson.

Four people died and 174 police officers were injured during the attack. Three more police officers involved in the riot died in the days and weeks following Jan. 6, according to the New York Times.

Twitch is the latest Internet platform to lift a ban on one of Trump’s accounts. Meta rolled back Trump’s restrictions on Facebook and Instagram a week ago.

Trump first joined Twitch in 2019 during his presidential campaign against President Joe Biden. His campaign team used the platform to stream his rallies and other events starting with a stump speech in Minneapolis.

Since then, politics has carved out a notable corner of Twitch with live broadcasts of moments like the recent Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and even its own official category. Pundits and commentators on both sides of the political aisle also regularly broadcast live streams of political events and speeches and host debates on Twitch.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/twitch-restores-former-president-trumps-twitch-account-204327050.html?src=rss 

A group of international researchers at the University of Cologne in Germany recently discovered one of the rarest types of black holes in the universe. The researchers were observing a cluster of stars in the vicinity of a supermassive black hole named Sagittarius A (Sgr A) at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. They then discovered signs of an intermediate-mass black hole, a type of black hole that’s sometimes referred to as the “missing link” of black holes, according to NASA.

Black holes range in size from supermassive to primordial and the intermediate sits above primordial in size. They are believed to have formed just after the Big Bang and act as “seeds” for creating supermassive black holes.

The star cluster believed to be the latest intermediate-mass black hole dubbed IRS 13 moved in an orderly pattern when they expected them to be randomly arranged. The researchers concluded that the star cluster had to be interacting with the supermassive black hole and “there must be something inside the cluster for it to be able to maintain its observed compact shape,” according to a statement from the University of Cologne. 

Plans are underway to conduct further observations on the intermediate black hole. They will use the James Webb Space Telescope and the Extremely Large Telescope in Chile that’s currently under construction (and yes, that is its real name).

Scientists discovered the first intermediate-mass black hole in 2020 using the Hubble Space Telescope when they found the waves created by its formation. Until then, intermediate-mass black holes were considered to be a “missing link” between stellar-mass and supermassive black holes and could provide more insights on the formation of black holes and the universe.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/another-missing-link-black-hole-discovered-near-the-center-of-the-galaxy-175859313.html?src=rss 

Schim is one of the games I was most looking forward to this year, and I generally had a pleasant time with it. It’s a pretty platformer in which every object and living thing has a soul called a Schim. These frog-like critters live in the shadow of their host but can become lost when its object or creature is neglected, damaged or going through something life-changing.

You play as a Schim that gets separated from its person, who is going through a difficult spell in their life. There are no prizes for guessing that the goal is to reconnect with them. You’ll have to navigate some treacherous environments to do so, but the catch is that you can only swim through shadows and jump from one inky blob to another. If you miss a jump, you can take one extra little hop to reach it.

Developers Ewoud van der Werf and Nils Slijkerman play around with this idea in some joyful ways. You might hop between the shadows of trees and animals one minute and use a bounce house to travel some extra distance the next. None of this was incredibly difficult, though it took me a while to nail down the timing of jumps between conveyor belts in a factory level. I found some other mechanics mildly frustrating, such as getting to grips with how to launch the Schim in the correct direction from a spinning rotary clothesline.

The game is at its most creative and compelling when it plays around with inconsistent light sources and distended and disappearing shadows. There are some inventive ideas here, many of which are executed flawlessly. While there’s a fundamental joyfulness to Schim (which is styled as SCHiM), there’s a surprisingly affecting narrative that touches on mental health concerns and how regular folks struggle to get by.

Unfortunately, I felt that Schim was too repetitive overall. It doesn’t quite do enough with its core mechanic, and. tThere were too many stages set in urban environments with too similar objects to jump between. This bogged down what could have been a tighter and more rewarding experience. By the halfway point, I was more than ready for the Schim to reconnect with its human — not a great sign for a game that only takes about three hours to finish.

My main takeaway will be the impeccable aesthetics. Each stage uses a couple of main colors and various shades of black to denote the shadows, objects and characters. The music, animations and backgrounds combine in gorgeous fashion. It often felt like I was playing a piece of living art. The visuals make for true lockscreen material and speak to the beauty that can emerge from minimalist, stylized renderings.

There are a ton of great ideas in Schim, which has a touching and rewarding ending. I just wish the journey to get there was more consistently enjoyable.

Schim is out now on PC, PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo Switch. (It runs smoothly on Steam Deck too.)

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/schim-is-an-inventive-beautiful-platformer-thats-just-a-little-too-repetitive-170019349.html?src=rss 

Mario and Donkey Kong have been rivals, frenemies, go-kart competitors and tennis partners. The Italian plumber once kidnapped Donkey Kong’s son. DK once, uh, took over Mario’s toy company (?) and stole a bunch of little figurines for some reason. They have history. What they haven’t done, however, is appear as playable characters in one another’s platforming adventures. Thanks to a nifty bit of hacking, that just changed.

Mario is a playable character in a hacked version of the SNES classic Donkey Kong Country, due to a ROM programmer called RainbowSprinklez. It’s appropriately named DKC X Mario and this is not a simple sprite swap. We wouldn’t waste your time with that. Mario had to be completely engineered into the game, as his moveset doesn’t exist in the original code. Donkey Kong is a lumbering beast. He doesn’t spin around, double jump and carry items. Check out the video and prepare to be impressed.

This is a Mario that has been pulled from Super Mario World, with regard to both sprites and controls. There are mushrooms to make him grow, fire flowers and, of course, everyone’s favorite dino-thingie Yoshi. Otherwise, this is Donkey Kong Country. The levels are the same. The enemies, consisting primarily of King K. Rool and his army of Kremlings, are the same. If you’re really familiar with the layout of the original DKC, this could be a way to breathe some new life into the ancient platformer.

The music also looks to be altered, replacing the original tracks with songs from Mario, Zelda and Mega Man games. RainbowSprinklez wrote that the hack was “made for no other reason than I like Mario” in a document released alongside the ROM. You can download the whole thing right here to give it a go, and this should probably be done sooner than later. Nintendo isn’t shy about sicking lawyers on projects like this.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/a-nifty-hack-made-mario-a-playable-character-in-1994s-donkey-kong-country-164036806.html?src=rss 

NASA and the European Space Agency have released an image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope of a dwarf irregular galaxy that they admit looked “unexciting” at first glance. However, there’s more going on than might initially meet the eye. The agencies say that a great deal of research is going into the “complicated structure” of NGC 5238, which is 14.5 million light-years away in the Canes Venatici constellation. In fact, astronomers believe the distribution of stars in NGC 5238 may have been distorted after it swallowed up another galaxy.

They reckon that due to NGC 5238’s star population (which Hubble is adept at helping to image), it had a “close encounter” with another galaxy perhaps as recently as a billion years ago. But since there isn’t a galaxy close enough to have distorted the star distribution in this fashion, it’s more likely that NGC 5238 merged with a smaller galaxy. Along with hosting many stars, the galaxy is home to globular clusters, which NASA describes as “glowing, bright spots both inside and around the galaxy swarmed by even more stars.”

Astronomers plan to dig deep into the data to learn about NGC 5238’s past. If they find groups of stars that have different properties from most of the galaxy’s other stars, that’s a clear indication that a merger has occurred. They’ll also try to determine whether there was a “burst of star formation” that suddenly took place after the galaxies would have come together.

NASA notes that a dwarf irregular galaxy merging with a smaller satellite galaxy is just the kind of thing that could have spurred galaxy assembly in the early era of our universe. As such, the agency says that the data Hubble captured from NGC 5238 may help researchers to test fundamental ideas about the evolution of the universe.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/why-an-unexciting-galaxy-could-provide-clues-about-the-universes-evolution-144754342.html?src=rss 

Starting on August 23 this year, when someone clicks on a goo.gl link, it could first take them to a page with a warning that says the link “will no longer work in the near future” before taking them to the website they want to visit. Google shut down its goo.gl URL shortening service way back in 2018 and stopped users from being able to create new links. Now, the company has announced that it will stop supporting all existing goo.gl links altogether: The URLs will return a “404 page not found” result by August 25, 2025. 

Google is giving developers ample time to move to other shorteners by displaying the aforementioned warning page to visitors over the next year. It will only show up for a percentage of existing links at first, but that percentage will keep growing until it appears for most, if not all, goo.gl links by their shutdown date. The company warns that the interstitial warning pages could cause disruptions and prevent users from getting to the URL they actually want to go to, so it’s advising developers to change their shortened links as soon as possible. 

The goo.gl link shortener service joins quite a large number of old features and services in Google’s ever-growing product graveyard. They include the Hangouts chat app, the Stadia cloud gaming service and Google+, which once tried to take on Facebook. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/google-is-turning-off-its-googl-shortener-links-next-year-130030435.html?src=rss 

Microsoft has made changes to its Xbox Game Pass service that are “exactly the sort of consumer harm” from its Activision acquisition that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) was worried about, the agency wrote in a letter addressed to the US Appeals Court. The FTC’s letter focused on a recent price hike for the Xbox Game Pass and pointed out that the Game Pass Ultimate now costs $20 a month, which is $3 more per month than before and represents a 17 percent year-over-year increase.  

In addition, the agency called attention to Microsoft’s decision to discontinue the $11 Console Game Pass plan. The agency added a new Game Pass Standard tier, but it costs more at $15 a month. While it’s a step up from the barebones Core plan, it doesn’t include access to day-one releases, leading the FTC to call it a “degraded product.” Microsoft will fully discontinue the Console tier just before the launch of the next Call of Duty game, the FTC said. Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 will be playable via Game Pass from its release date on October 25, which means subscribers who want to access it on day one will have to pay for the $20-a-month tier. 

The company promised that the “acquisition would benefit consumers by making [CoD] available on Microsoft’s Game Pass on the day it is released on console (with no price increase for the service based on the acquisition),” the FTC wrote. But Microsoft’s actions show a firm that’s “exercising market power post-merger,” it noted.

The FTC repeatedly challenged Microsoft’s purchase of Activision Blizzard, but a judge rejected its request for an injunction. At the time, the judge ruled that the FTC failed to demonstrate how the merger would lessen competition and even said that there was “record evidence” pointing to “more consumer access to Call of Duty and other Activision content.” 

Microsoft, which officially closed the $69 billion deal in October 2023 after that ruling and after the blessing of regulators in the EU and the UK, now officially owns Activision Blizzard. But the FTC still isn’t done opposing the merger and filed an appeal in an attempt to the block the already-closed deal, telling the court that it can prove its case by showing that Microsoft has the ability and incentive to withhold Activision’s games. Back in February, the agency also accused Microsoft of going against its pledge to allow Activision Blizzard to operate independently post-acquisition after the company laid off nearly 2,000 employees in its gaming division. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-ftc-is-as-mad-about-the-xbox-game-pass-price-increase-as-you-are-120031248.html?src=rss