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The developers behind popular multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) League of Legends now belong entirely to Tencent, the Chinese conglomerate behind similarly popular QQ instant messenger. The news was actually revealed tangentially, when Riot released an article explaining that there would be changes to the company’s equity program.

The succinct post detailed how they will be moving from a “Riot equity program” to a “cash-based incentive program” that would allow employees to share in Riot’s successes. What this entails exactly has not been clarified. But Tencent’s move to purchase the remaining equity shares is not surprising given Riot Games’ track record.

In 2014, it was reported that League of Legends had about 67 million monthly players and more than 7.5 million concurrents, making it arguably the biggest name in e-sports. So big, in fact, that BBC Three saw fit to cover the League of Legends World Championships semi-finals. VentureBeat writes that the game netted $946 million (£633 million) in in-game spending revenues last year, a number that is likely to rise as Riot Games works on an overhaul for League of Legends.

As friendly of an online advertisement as you'll find.

In mid-August, the first commercially available ZFS cloud replication target became available at rsync.net. Who cares, right? As the service itself states, "If you're not sure what this means, our product is Not For You."

Of course, this product is for someone—and to those would-be users, this really will matter. Fully appreciating the new rsync.net (spoiler alert: it's pretty impressive!) means first having a grasp on basic data transfer technologies. And while ZFS replication techniques are burgeoning today, you must actually begin by examining the technology that ZFS is slowly supplanting.

A love affair with rsync

Revisiting a first love of any kind makes for a romantic trip down memory lane, and that's what revisiting rsync—as in "rsync.net"—feels like for me. It's hard to write an article that's inevitably going to end up trashing the tool, because I've been wildly in love with it for more than 15 years. Andrew Tridgell (of Samba fame) first announced rsync publicly in June of 1996. He used it for three chapters of his PhD thesis three years later, about the time that I discovered and began enthusiastically using it. For what it's worth, the earliest record of my professional involvement with major open source tools—at least that I've discovered—is my activity on the rsync mailing list in the early 2000s.