Kalakshar US

Microsoft and the UK’s antitrust regulator have conditionally been granted a two-month pause on their legal battle as the company looks to resolve the Competition and Markets Authority’s (CMA) concerns over its proposed $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Judge Marcus Smith of the Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT), which hears appeals on the CMA’s decisions, wants proof from the watchdog that this is the right course of action, but still paused the legal battle for now.

Smith wants the CMA to justify its adjournment application by providing evidence that shows a material change in circumstances or “special reasons” for delaying the litigation. He also wants the regulator to detail any new consultation process it plans to undertake “so that everybody is clear as to how it will work,” according to Reuters. The judge asked the CMA to submit evidence on Thursday.

Microsoft appealed the CMA’s decision in April to block the merger over cloud gaming concerns. The CAT was due to hear that case starting on July 28th. However, shortly after the Federal Trade Commission lost an attempt to stall the acquisition in the US last week, the CMA said it would consider a modified merger agreement from Microsoft. The CMA, Microsoft and Activision all asked the CAT for more time and the tribunal has granted the request.

CMA lawyer David Bailey told the CAT that the FTC’s court loss “formed no part of the CMA’s thinking” in terms of its willingness to review a new proposal from Microsoft. “Based upon the discussion to date, both sides — Microsoft and the CMA — have confidence that Microsoft notifying a restructured transaction is capable of addressing the concerns that the CMA has identified,” he said.

It emerged during Monday’s hearing that Microsoft has yet to submit an amended proposal to the CMA, even though the deadline for the merger is tomorrow, July 18th. It seems unlikely that everything will be resolved by then. If not, Microsoft and Activision will either have to agree to an extension of their current agreement (the most likely outcome given how eager they are to get the deal over the line) or renegotiate terms. Otherwise, Activision can walk away from the deal with a fat $3 billion breakup check from Microsoft in its pocket.

Reports have suggested Microsoft may sell some cloud gaming rights in the UK to satisfy the CMA’s concerns. Microsoft has signed deals with third-party cloud gaming companies to offer its games on their platforms, which was enough for the European Union to approve the merger.

Meanwhile, the FTC is still slated to hold its own evidentiary hearing over the acquisition starting on August 2nd. The agency sued to block the merger and it sought a preliminary injunction to prevent Microsoft and Activision Blizzard from closing the deal until it could bring the case to trial, but it was unsuccessful.

As such, Microsoft and Activision will surely be eager to seal things up by the beginning of August. There were suggestions that they’d try to close the merger by the initial deadline despite the CMA dispute and find a workaround to keep doing business in the UK, but with all parties willing to find an amicable resolution, that seems unlikely at this point. The CMA has given itself an extra six weeks, until August 29th, to make a final decision on the case.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/microsoft-and-a-uk-regulator-have-been-granted-more-time-to-resolve-activision-merger-issues-191354797.html?src=rss 

A typo has reportedly routed millions of US military emails — some containing highly sensitive information — to Mali. The problem stems from entering .ML instead of .MIL for the receiving email address domain. As reported by the Financial Times, the one-letter mistake has exposed data like “diplomatic documents, tax returns, passwords and the travel details of top officers” — and much more. Although the misdirected emails have (so far) landed with a contractor tasked with managing Mali’s country domain, control of .ML will soon revert to Mali’s government, which has ties to Russia.

The “typo leak” was exposed by Johannes Zuurbier, a Dutch contractor managing Mali’s country domain. Zuurbier says he made numerous attempts to warn the United States about the issue — beginning in 2014 — urging it to take it seriously; he says he hasn’t had any luck. He claims he started collecting the email this year as his contract’s expiration date (and handover of the domain, including the misfired emails, to the Malian government) approaches, as a last-ditch attempt to persuade the US to act with urgency. In a letter to the US in early July, Zuurbier wrote, “This risk is real and could be exploited by adversaries of the US.” He says he has collected around 117,00 emails, and nearly 1,000 more arrived last Wednesday alone.

Although Zuurbier says none of the messages were marked as classified, they still contain sensitive data about US military personnel, contractors and families. Reported contents include the travel plans for a May trip by US Army Chief of Staff, General James McConville, for a May trip to Indonesia. Other exposed information includes maps of installations, photos of bases, identity documents (including passport numbers), crew lists of ships, tax and financial records, medical data, ships’ crew lists, naval inspection reports, contracts, criminal complaints against personnel, internal bullying investigations and bookings. One email from an FBI agent included a Turkish diplomatic letter to the US, warning about possible operations by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

“If you have this kind of sustained access, you can generate intelligence even just from unclassified information,” former NSA head and retired four-star US Navy Admiral Mike Rogers told FT. Rogers says this isn’t uncommon, noting that people making mistakes isn’t out of the norm. However, he adds, “The question is the scale, the duration and the sensitivity of the information.”

Lt. Cmdr Tim Gorman, speaking for the Pentagon, told FT that the Department of Defense “is aware of this issue and takes all unauthorised disclosures of controlled national security information or controlled unclassified information seriously.” He said emails sent from .MIL to .ML address “are blocked before they leave the .mil domain and the sender is notified that they must validate the email addresses of the intended recipients,” which suggests the misdirected emails may have come from US military workers’ personal accounts.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/an-email-typo-has-reportedly-sent-millions-of-us-military-messages-to-mali-193515052.html?src=rss 

Meta’s Threads app is coming back down to Earth after a blockbuster first week that saw the app become the fastest growing of all time. New data from analytics firm SimilarWeb suggests that the app’s engagement has since declined from initial highs despite its status as the fastest-growing app of all time.

Threads saw daily active users decline from 49 million on July 7th, to 23.6 million on July 14th, SimilarWeb writes in a new report. And in the United States, which reportedly saw the highest engagement, usage declined from 21 minutes per day to just over six minutes in the same time period.

While SimilarWeb cautions that its data is based only on Android usage of Threads, its findings line up with those of other companies. Market intelligence firm Sensor Tower reported a similar decline in engagement, writing in a report that the app “has experienced a double-digit decline in DAUs [daily active users] and user engagement since launch.”

On some level, the drop-off is expected. Threads launched at a moment when many Twitter users were seeking alternatives, and its ties to Instagram made it extraordinarily easy for users to sign up and port over their existing social graph. At the same time, the app is missing a lot of basic features, including a non-algorithmic feed not easily dominated by brands and influencers.

In a Threads post on Friday, Instagram’s top exec, Adam Mosseri, suggested the company wasn’t particularly focused on engagement metrics at this stage. “Our focus right now is not engagement, which has been amazing, but getting past the initial peak and trough we see with every new product, and building new features, dialing in performance, and improving ranking,” he wrote.

Whether or not Meta is able to fully take advantage of those conditions though will likely depend on how quickly it can add new features to keep its users coming back, as well as whether it’s able to launch within the European Union. The company is also dealing with issues around spam, according to Mosseri, who said Threads would be putting rate limits and other protections. “Spam attacks have picked up so we’re going to have to get tighter on things like rate limits, which is going to mean more unintentionally limiting active people (false positives),” he wrote.

While the declining engagement with Threads may seem like good news for Twitter, the company still has plenty of reasons to worry about its latest competitor. As SimilarWeb’s Senior Insights Manager David Carr writes, there are “some signs” that at least some of Threads’ engagement has come at the expense of Twitter’s. “In the first two full days that Threads was generally available, Thursday and Friday, web traffic to twitter.com was down 5% compared with the same days of the previous week and Android app usage, by time spent, was down 4.3%,” Carr says. He also notes that “Twitter user retention has been on the decline” since last year.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/threads-users-are-already-spending-less-time-in-the-app-182738755.html?src=rss 

Developers are taking another shot at a One Punch Man game, but this one is very different than the last major attempt. Anime service Crunchyroll has announcedOne Punch Man: World, an online multiplayer action title headed to Android, iOS and PC. The free-to-play game has you and friends joining the Hero Association to fight a growing wave of villains through missions and raids. You can unlock and play as heroes from the TV show’s first season, including Saitama’s faithful sidekick Genos, Mumen Rider and Puri-Puri Prisoner. You can relive key moments from the show, too.

Where Bandai Namco’s A Hero Nobody Knows was a fighting game, this is more of a Devil May Cry-style action title with combos, dodges and ultimate attacks. You’ll spend much of your time ranking up, including through side missions and mini games elsewhere in Z-City. 

One Punch Man: World arrives later this year. You can pre-register for the PC version now. Crunchyroll is working on the game alongside Perfect World, the studio responsible for Persona 5: The Phantom X and Tower of Fantasy.

It’s too soon to say how well the game works in practice, including in-app purchases. Having said this, the creators face the same problem Bandai Namco did: how do you balance a game where the main hero, Saitama, can defeat anyone with a single hit? The answer seems to involve holding him back (a video on the official site shows Saitama using many punches to fell an enemy), but you’ll likely have to wait for the finished product to know how powerful he really is.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/crunchyroll-is-making-a-one-punch-man-online-game-for-pc-and-mobile-171733850.html?src=rss 

Niche music gadget manufacturer Artiphon is back with a new instrument called the Chorda. This unique bit of gear is a combo meal of sorts, bundling together the form factor of the Instrument 1 with the standalone functionality and looper of the Orba 2. The Chorda builds upon the multi-instrument technology of the Instrument 1, with access to a diverse array of instruments, from guitar to drums and piano.

However, the Instrument 1 was tied to a phone or tablet, whereas the Chorda is fully standalone, making it an attractive entry in the burgeoning field of DAWless recording gadgets. There are “hundreds” of built-in sounds and corresponding control methods that actually resemble playing the analog version of the instrument. The device plays via micro-gestures that incorporate an array of control parameters. There are 12 pads that each respond to control methods like tapping, tilting, strumming, vibrato and more, via capacitive sensing technology and Midi Polyphonic Expression (MPE).

There’s also a new bridge section that allows non-musicians to automatically play chords, thus letting folks play along with their favorite songs. This bridge integrates with the built-in arpeggiator for changing the tempo and the key. The integrated looper lets you layer tracks as you see fit. Though there’s not much by way of sound design on the device itself, you can access an affiliated app to access the inner workings of the sound engine.

As for connectivity, the Chorda can control any MIDI-based software and hardware instruments via USB-C or Bluetooth. The device also automatically integrates with most DAWs, including GarageBand, Ableton, Logic, Pro Tools, Cubase and FL Studio. It also supports any standard MIDI and MPE-compatible mobile app or hardware. The battery life isn’t winning any awards, however, at four hours of use per charge. 

The Artiphon Chorda is available for preorder via Kickstarter and is available in three colors: black, white and blue. The early bird pricing is locked in at around $200, but as the tiers sell out, the cost goes up. The instruments ship in November.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/artiphons-chorda-band-in-a-box-allows-you-to-produce-beats-just-about-anywhere-173851795.html?src=rss