Month: November 2022

Enlarge / The CAPSTONE payload is seen here, atop an Electron rocket in New Zealand. (credit: Rocket Lab)

After a journey of nearly five months, taking it far beyond the Moon and back, the little CAPSTONE spacecraft has successfully entered into lunar orbit.

"We received confirmation that CAPSTONE arrived in near-rectilinear halo orbit, and that is a huge, huge step for the agency," said NASA's chief of exploration systems development, Jim Free, on Sunday evening. "It just completed its first insertion burn a few minutes ago. And over the next few days they'll continue to refine its orbit, and be the first cubesat to fly and operate at the Moon."

This is an important orbit for NASA, and a special one, because it is really stable, requiring just a tiny amount of propellant to hold position. At its closest point to the Moon, this roughly week-long orbit passes within 3,000 km of the lunar surface, and at other points it is 70,000 km away. NASA plans to build a small space station, called the Lunar Gateway, here later this decade.

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)

Twitter already faces a class-action lawsuit from some staff that the company laid off without providing federally required notice. Now, rather than realize the error of its ways, Twitter decided this weekend that its next round of layoffs should come with no notice at all.

On Saturday, Platformer’s Casey Newton tweeted that a large number of Twitter contract workers based inside and outside the US had been laid off. This decision was seemingly made so abruptly that not even the contractors’ managers were told they’d be losing workers. Business Insider published the email sent out to contract workers, coldly informing them that Monday would be their last day and no work was required of them that day. The Verge estimated that 4,500 to 5,500 workers were affected from content moderation, marketing, engineering, and other teams. By some estimates, this represents 80 percent of all Twitter contract workers.

"One of my contractors just got deactivated without notice in the middle of making critical changes to our child safety workflows," one manager wrote in Slack, according to Newton’s tweet thread.

Back in April, indie developer Tyson Butler-Boschma released a free, Unreal Engine 5-powered "Superman Style Flight Experience" on itch.io. Now, he says scammers have been selling a stolen version of that demo on Steam for weeks without permission or any apparent action from Valve.

Heroes City Superman Edition launched on Steam on November 1, with developer Hero Game Studios describing the game as "a unique experience where you can choose your own hero and have an adventure on a large realistically prepared map." Since then it has been sold for up to $35 despite appearing to be a carbon-copy of Butler-Boschma's longstanding free demo.

After noting the Steam version as a "scam" in a November 1 tweet, Butler-Boschma posted a November 9 Steam review alleging that Steam developer Hero Game Studios "just downloaded, stole, and passed this work off as their own."

Enlarge (credit: Financial Times)

Created by a Vietnamese gaming studio, Axie Infinity offers players the chance to breed, trade and fight Pokémon-like cartoon monsters to earn cryptocurrencies including the game’s own “Smooth Love Potion” digital token. At one stage, it had more than a million active players.

But earlier this year, the network of blockchains that underpin the game’s virtual world was raided by a North Korean hacking syndicate, which made off with roughly $620 million in the ether cryptocurrency.

The crypto heist, one of the largest of its kind in history, was confirmed by the FBI, which vowed to “continue to expose and combat [North Korea’s] use of illicit activities—including cyber crime and cryptocurrency theft—to generate revenue for the regime.”