Month: September 2022

Enlarge / I'm not 18 yet, so I can do whatever I want here... right?

A serial Destiny 2 cheater currently facing a lawsuit from Bungie is arguing in court that his status as a minor means he can effectively opt out of the game's license agreement, including any anti-cheating provisions he may have violated. Ironically, though, trying to make use of this loophole may have opened the defendant up to much more serious copyright infringement claims.

In a motion to dismiss filed earlier this month (as noted by TorrentFreak), the plaintiff in the cheating case (referred to in court documents as L.L. to protect his real identity) argues that he is not subject to Bungie's Limited Software License Agreement (LSLA). That's because, as a minor, L.L. has the right to "disaffirm" that contract, which means it is "legally treated as if it was never formed." L.L. did just that on September 8, filing documents disaffirming "any and all contracts between himself and Bungie."

In his motion to dismiss, L.L. argues that this move means he is retroactively not subject to LSLA clauses that prevent players from "hack[ing] or modify[ing]" the game or "us[ing] any unauthorized software programs to gain advantage in any online or multiplayer game modes." Thus, Bungie's claims based on breach of that contract should be dismissed.

Enlarge / What do you think of the individual camera lenses? Minimal? Generic? (credit: OnLeaks and Digit.in)

The Galaxy S23 is probably five months away, but we now have some idea of what it will look like. The ever-reliable OnLeaks has a new set of renders for the device. These are usually based on the CAD files released to case and accessory manufacturers, so while some small details like the placement of logos might be off, the major components should be correct.

OnLeaks has a render of the base model S23, and the big news is that it's doing away with the camera bump. The S21 and S22 had a large raised block growing out of the corner, but this S23 render shows only three naked camera lenses popping out of the back. This design change would bring the base model (and presumably "Plus" model) phones in line with the S22 Ultra, which has a similar lens-only camera protrusion. The S22 Ultra's individual camera lenses looked great in person, but like any corner camera setup, the bump makes the phone unstable if it's lying on a flat surface.

The report has the phone at "roughly" 146.3×70.8×7.6 mm with a 6.1-inch display. It should come with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC, 120 Hz display, and hopefully an upgrade for the tiny 3700 mAh battery the S22 shipped with this year.

Enlarge (credit: matrix.org)

Developers of the open source Matrix messenger protocol are releasing an update on Thursday to fix critical end-to-end encryption vulnerabilities that subvert the confidentiality and authentication guarantees that have been key to the platform's meteoric rise.

Matrix is a sprawling ecosystem of open source and proprietary chat and collaboration clients and servers that are fully interoperable. The best-known app in this family is Element, a chat client for Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android, but there's a dizzying array of other members as well.

(credit: Hodgson)

Matrix roughly aims to do for real-time communication what the SMTP standard does for email, which is to provide a federated protocol allowing user clients connected to different servers to exchange messages with each other. Unlike SMTP, however, Matrix offers robust end-to-end encryption, or E2EE, designed to ensure that messages can't be spoofed and that only the senders and receivers of messages can read the contents.