Month: September 2019

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  Those floating bodies? Yeah, they're everywhere. And sometimes they fight back.

At this point, we know Epic is committed to paying a lot of money for exclusive games to attract players to its Epic Games Store. Now, we seem to know how much it paid up front for at least one of those exclusives: €9.49 million (about $10.45 million at today's exchange rates).

The EGS exclusive in question is Remedy and 505 Games' supernatural shooter Control, and the number in question comes buried in an Italian earnings report from 505 Games parent company Digital Bros. (as noticed by analyst Daniel Ahmad). That figure is listed in two tables in the document, corresponding to total revenue from Control and total revenue from the Epic Games Store, both for the period ending June 30, 2019.

"Revenue come[s] from the computer version of Control," the report reads, according to a rough translation of a portion of the document. "The game was released on August 27 but the structure of the marketplace who requested the PC exclusivity has made possible to gain the revenue starting from this quarter."

Enlarge / The Amazon logo at the entrance of a logistics center in France, July 2019. (credit: Denis Charlet | AFP | Getty )

It's no secret that retailers who compete with Amazon for consumer dollars want regulators to take a closer look at the way their titanic, globe-spanning rival works. They've openly said so, many times. And yet, three major firms reportedly spent a great deal of time and effort obscuring their ties to a nonprofit that exists to rally support against Amazon.

The nonprofit, called the Free and Fair Markets Initiative, describes itself as "a nonprofit watchdog committed to scrutinizing Amazon’s harmful practices and promoting a fair, modern marketplace that works for all Americans." According to a new report today from The Wall Street Journal, however, the group is funded by rivals, including Walmart, Oracle, and mall-owner Simon, who all have a strong financial interest in dethroning Amazon.

All three are competing fiercely with Amazon in their own market sectors. Walmart, the nation's biggest big-box store, competes in retail, selling goods and groceries. Oracle competes in Internet services and has been fighting against Amazon, for example, to secure a $10 billion government contract. And Simon, the country's largest mall owner, is at the front and center of the retail apocalypse and all the dead malls that retail bankruptcies leave in their wake.

Enlarge / That "premiering with 24 cores" fine print is our only concrete clue about November's Threadripper launch. (credit: AMD)

AMD announced in a surprise email today that its Ryzen 9 3950X, originally slated for launch this month, has been delayed until November, when it and new Zen 2 Threadripper CPUs will debut:

We are focusing on meeting the strong demand for our 3rd generation AMD Ryzen processors in the market and now plan to launch both the AMD Ryzen 9 3950X and initial members of the 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen Threadripper processor family in volume this November. We are confident that when enthusiasts get their hands on the world’s first 16-core mainstream desktop processor and our next-generation of high-end desktop processors, the wait will be well worth it.

The 3950X will be a 16-core, 32-thread desktop CPU running with a 4.7GHz boost clock, with a suggested retail price of $749. Details on the Threadrippers debuting next month are thinner, although graphics describe it as "premiering with 24 cores." Presumably, we'll eventually see Zen 2 Threadrippers with 32 cores and 64 threads to match the last generation's 2990WX. Although there haven't been any official statements, rumors are floating around about one existing Threadripper 3000 32-core CPU—user benchmarks claiming to be from an engineering sample showed up at Geekbench last month.

The delay of Ryzen 9 3950X's launch—along with extreme shortages of the already-launched Ryzen 9 3900X—leads to obvious supply line speculation. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the foundry AMD uses for its Zen 2 processors (and Apple uses for the 7nm A13 CPU in the iPhone 11), recently increased its lead time for new orders from two months to six. This increased lead should not directly affect the 3950X or Threadripper launches, since the silicon for those processors would have been ordered months ago.But it is an indication that TSMC may be approaching production or binning limits.

Enlarge / Robert Grant, Crown Sterling CEO and founder, emcee'd a demonstration of crypto-cracking at an event yesterday. Cryptographers were not impressed. (credit: Crown Sterling, via YouTube)

On September 19, in a conference room at the Pelican Hill Resort in Newport Beach, California, Crown Sterling CEO Robert Grant, COO Joseph Hopkins, and a pair of programmers staged a demonstration of Grant's claimed cryptography-cracking algorithm. Before an audience that a Crown Sterling spokesperson described as "approximately 100 academics and business professionals," Grant and Hopkins had their minions generate two pairs of 256-bit RSA encryption keys and then derive the prime numbers used to generate them from the public key in about 50 seconds.

In a phone interview with Ars Technica today, Grant said the video was filmed during a "business session" at the event. The "academic" presentation, which went into math behind his claims and a new paper yet to be published, was attended by "mostly people from local colleges," Hopkins said. Grant said that he didn't know who attended both sessions, and the CEO added that he didn't have access to the invitation list.

During the presentation, Grant called out to Chris Novak, the global director of Verizon Enterprise Solutions' Threat Research Advisory Center, naming him as a member of Crown Sterling's advisory board. The shout-out was during introductory remarks that Grant made about a survey of chief information security officers that the company had conducted. The survey found only 3% had an understanding of the fundamental math behind encryption.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | SOPA Images)

AT&T is trying to force customers into arbitration in order to avoid a class-action complaint over the telecom's former practice of selling users' real-time location data.

In a motion to compel arbitration filed last week, AT&T said that plaintiffs agreed to arbitrate disputes with AT&T when they entered into wireless service contracts. The plaintiffs, who are represented by Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) attorneys, will likely argue that the arbitration clause is invalid.

The case is pending in US District Court for the Northern District of California. In March 2018, a judge in the same court ruled that AT&T could not use its arbitration clause to avoid a class-action lawsuit over the company's throttling of unlimited mobile data plans. That's because the California Supreme Court had ruled in McGill v. Citibank "that an arbitration agreement that waives the right to seek the statutory remedy of public injunctive relief in any forum is contrary to California public policy and therefore unenforceable," the District Court judge wrote at the time.

Enlarge (credit: Jose Rodriguez)

Apple released iOS 13 with a bunch of new features. But it also released the new OS with something else: a bug disclosed seven days ago that exposes contact details without requiring a passcode or biometric identification first.

Independent researcher Jose Rodriguez published a video demonstration of the flaw exactly one week ago. It can be exploited by receiving a FaceTime call and then using the voiceover feature from Siri to access the contact list. From there, an unauthorized person could get names, phone numbers, email addresses, and any other information stored in the phone’s contacts list.

Rodriquez’s video was the topic of more than 100 news articles over the past week. Since iOS 13 was in beta when it first appeared, I assumed Apple developers would fix the bypass in time for yesterday's release. Alas, they didn’t, and it’s not clear why.

Enlarge / PURDUE PHARMA, STAMFORD, CT, UNITED STATES - 2019/09/12: Members of P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) and Truth Pharm staged a protest on September 12, 2019 outside Purdue Pharma headquarters in Stamford, over their recent controversial opioid settlement. (credit: Getty | Erik McGregor)

Lawyers for OxyContin-maker Purdue Pharma filed a new complaint late Wednesday threatening that the company’s mega-rich owners, the Sackler family, could pull out of a proposed multi-billion-dollar opioid settlement deal if a bankruptcy judge doesn’t shield the family from outstanding state lawsuits.

Purdue’s lawyers argue that if the lawsuits continue, the Sacklers will have to waste “hundreds of millions of dollars” on legal costs that could otherwise go to claimants in the settlement. The family's lawyers added that in that event, the family “may be unwilling—or unable—to make the billions of dollars of contributions” to the proposed settlement.

State attorneys general, however, argue that the tactic is yet another move designed to shield the Sacklers and their ill-gotten wealth.