Monthly Archives: January 2022

Article note: Remember when the write line for the nominally-ROMs on computers had a physical jumper? Some Chromeboooks do it with an accessible screw that bridges some pads, it's a pretty good solution. It cuts down a lot on this kind of bullshit, or at least promotes it to requiring an evil-maid element.

Article note: That's a neat little survey. I'm more interested in physically-different keyboards than remaps for marginal RSI gains at great retraining cost, but there's a lot of neat stuff covered. I hadn't seen the QWYRFM layout before, it's interesting how much it has in common with the old Blickensderfer DHIATENSOR layout from the late 1800s - I guess relative letter frequencies in English and relative finger strength are stable phenomena so it shouldn't be surprising.

Article note: Ah life under kleptocracy. Urgent + Lucrative = Fraud.

Enlarge / A person takes a rapid COVID-19 test. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

Federal and state investigations into a large national chain of COVID-19 testing sites have turned up tests that were never labeled with patients' names, tests piled into trash bags stored for long periods at room temperature, tests that were never processed, and test results that were clearly fake.

Behind the testing sites are two Illinois-based companies: Center for COVID Control (CCC) and Doctors Clinical Laboratory, Inc., which is said to carry out COVID PCR testing for CCC. The two companies share the same address, though CCC is owned by Chicago-area couple Akbar Syed and Aleya Siyaj, while the clinical company is owned by Mohammed Shujauddin.

Together, the companies claim to provide rapid and PCR testing for COVID-19, with fast turnaround times and no appointments necessary. So far, they have collected more than 400,000 samples from over 300 locations across the US. And they have billed the federal government over $113 million for running many of those tests.

Article note: That's some interesting ephemera that ties together some of the tales of the era. They actually got their cert _much_ later than I remember they implied.

Article note: They smelled weakness in the management and went for it? Or they just like eating major studios with "B" names (Bungie, Bethesda, [Activision]Blizzard), who knows?

Enlarge

Microsoft this morning announced plans to purchase gaming mega-publisher Activision Blizzard for a record-setting $68.7 billion. The move, when finalized, would bring franchises like Call of Duty, Overwatch, Diablo, World of Warcraft, Starcraft, and many more under the umbrella of the Xbox maker.

Today's announcement follows on Microsoft's $7.8 billion acquisition of Bethesda, announced just 15 months ago. After some initial confusion about what that meant for Bethesda's multiplatform titles, it has since become clear that most of Bethesda's biggest franchises, such as Elder Scrolls, will not be appearing on competing consoles such as the PlayStation 5.

The same could definitely happen for Activision Blizzard's big-name games. Microsoft notes in its announcement that Activision Blizzard games would become a part of its Game Pass program, which currently enjoys 25 million subscribers. "With Activision Blizzard’s nearly 400 million monthly active players in 190 countries and three billion-dollar franchises, this acquisition will make Game Pass one of the most compelling and diverse lineups of gaming content in the industry," the company said. "Upon close, Microsoft will have 30 internal game development studios, along with additional publishing and esports production capabilities."

Article note: I enjoy how the tech press is more cognizant that touchscreens are unsuitable for most tasks when watching them be a problem on TV than experiencing it.

Article note: "Warrior Mindset" meets COVID comorbidities.

Enlarge (credit: Samsung / Ron Amadeo)

So here's a crazy story. Samsung was supposed to have a big SoC launch today, but that launch did not happen. Samsung didn't cancel or delay the event. The January 11 date was announced, and we even wrote about it, but when the time for the event came, nothing happened! Samsung pulled a no-call no-show for a major product launch. It's the end of the day now, and the company has yet to respond to what must be hundreds of press inquiries that are no-doubt flooding its email inbox, including ours! Samsung stood up the entire tech industry, and now it won't say why. Nobody knows what is going on.

The Exynos 2200 was (?) shaping up to be a major launch for Samsung. It is, after all, the first Samsung SoC with the headline-grabbing feature of having an AMD GPU. The two companies announced this deal a year ago, and we've been giddy about it ever since. The Exynos 2200 is (or was) going to debut in the Galaxy S22. That launch event is currently scheduled for February 8, assuming Samsung doesn't ghost everyone again.

Samsung announced the Exynos 2200 event just 12 days ago, saying, "Stay tuned for the next Exynos with the new GPU born from RDNA 2. January 11, 2022." (RDNA 2 is an AMD GPU architecture). In addition to a tweet from the official, verified, @SamsungExynos account, the company also cut a promo video ending with the January 11 2022 date. You can still watch it at archive.org. The closest thing Samsung has done to communicate about the status of the Exynos 2200 is to delete its tweets promoting the show.

Article note: Because Zynga are ruthless whale hunters that make Rovio look principled and ethical, and freemium mobile shit is proving to be the optimal way to turn entertainment products into profits.

Enlarge / The company that publishes Grand Theft Auto now owns all of these goofballs, too... (credit: Zynga)

Major console game publisher Take-Two has acquired social and mobile gaming giant Zynga for a whopping $12.7 billion in cash and stock, making the deal the largest acquisition of a single gaming company in history.

That might seem like a ludicrous price if your familiarity with Zynga is limited to FarmVille, CityVille, and other Zynga games that came to dominate the "social gaming" fad of the early 2010s (and led to the creation of some excellent books, if I do say so myself). But while the original FarmVille merely limped along until 2010, Zynga has successfully transitioned into a casual mobile gaming powerhouse by spending billions of dollars on acquisitions like Gram Games (1010) and Small Giant Games (Empire & Puzzles) in 2018, as well as Peak Games (Toon Blast) and Rollic (Go Knots 3D) in 2020. Last year, the company even dipped into PC games with the acquisition of Torchlight studio Echtra Games.

With those companies gathered under the Zynga umbrella, the company now attracts over 168 million monthly users and made $706 million in revenue in the latest reporting quarter.

Article note: Oof, I expected the "Everything about the node ecosystem is dumb" and "I realized I've been enabling profit-seeking parasites and objected" parts of the story. I'm not even super shocked by the the oddly placed but (only in the broad sense, not the specifics) vaguely reasonable middle-fingers-up-for-Aaron connection. But then it veers in a whole new crazy Qnut flavored direction that wasn't even an option until a few years ago.

Enlarge (credit: James Brey / iStockPhoto / Getty Images)

The developer who sabotaged two of his own open source code libraries, causing disruptions for thousands of apps that used them, has a colorful past that includes embracing a QAnon theory involving Aaron Swartz, the well-known hacktivist and programmer who died by suicide in 2013.

Marak Squires, the author of two JavaScript libraries with more than 21,000 dependent apps and more than 22 million weekly downloads, updated his projects late last week after they remained unchanged for more than a year. The updates contained code to produce an infinite loop that caused dependent apps to spew gibberish, prefaced by the words “Liberty Liberty Liberty.” The update sent developers scrambling as they attempted to fix their malfunctioning apps.

What really happened with Aaron Swartz?

Squires provided no reason for the move, but in a readme file accompanying last week’s malicious update, he included the words “What really happened with Aaron Swartz?”