Month: June 2024

Enlarge / For an unreleased game, Star Citizen still has some really pretty ships... (credit: RSI)

At this point in Star Citizen's drawn-out, 11-plus-year development cycle, we're usually reminded of the game when it hits some crowdfunding microtransaction milestone or updates its increasingly convoluted alpha development roadmap. So last week's announcement that developer Cloud Imperium Games (CIG) has banned over 600 cheaters from its servers is a notable reminder that some people are actually enjoying—and exploiting—the unpolished alpha version of the game.

Shortly after the May release of Star Citizen's Alpha 2.23.1 update, players started noticing that they could easily make extra money by storing a freight ship, selling their cargo, and then returning to the ship to find the cargo ready to be sold a second time. As knowledge of this "money doubling" exploit spread, players reported that the price of basic in-game resources saw significant inflation in a matter of days.

Now, Cloud Imperium Games Senior Director of Player Relations Will Leverett has written that the developer has investigated "multiple exploits within Star Citizen that compromised stability and negatively impacted the in-game economy." In doing so, CIG says it "identified and suspended over 600 accounts involved in exploitative behaviors while also removing the illicitly gained aUEC [in-game currency] from the Star Citizen ecosystem."

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Proton, the secure-minded email and productivity suite, is becoming a nonprofit foundation, but it doesn't want you to think about it in the way you think about other notable privacy and web foundations.

"We believe that if we want to bring about large-scale change, Proton can’t be billionaire-subsidized (like Signal), Google-subsidized (like Mozilla), government-subsidized (like Tor), donation-subsidized (like Wikipedia), or even speculation-subsidized (like the plethora of crypto “foundations”)," Proton CEO Andy Yen wrote in a blog post announcing the transition. "Instead, Proton must have a profitable and healthy business at its core."

The announcement comes exactly 10 years to the day after a crowdfunding campaign saw 10,000 people give more than $500,000 to launch Proton Mail. To make it happen, Yen, along with co-founder Jason Stockman and first employee Dingchao Lu, endowed the Proton Foundation with some of their shares. The Proton Foundation is now the primary shareholder of the business Proton, which Yen states will "make irrevocable our wish that Proton remains in perpetuity an organization that places people ahead of profits." Among other members of the Foundation's board is Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of HTML, HTTP, and almost everything else about the web.

Enlarge / Apple bragged about the thinness of the M4 iPad Pro; it's apparently a template for the company's designs going forward. (credit: Apple)

Though Apple has a reputation for prioritizing thinness in its hardware designs, the company has actually spent the last few years learning to embrace a little extra size and/or weight in its hardware. The Apple Silicon MacBook Pro designs are both thicker and heavier than the Intel-era MacBook Pros they replaced. The MacBook Air gave up its distinctive taper. Even the iPhone 15 Pro was a shade thicker than its predecessor.

But Apple is apparently planning to return to emphasizing thinness in its devices, according to reporting from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman (in a piece that is otherwise mostly about Apple's phased rollout of the AI-powered features it announced at its Worldwide Developers Conference last week).

Gurman's sources say that Apple is planning "a significantly skinnier iPhone in time for the iPhone 17 line in 2025," which presumably means that we can expect the iPhone 16 to continue in the same vein as current iPhone 15 models. The Apple Watch and MacBook Pro are also apparently on the list of devices Apple is trying to make thinner.