This is a long video, but if you want to understand crypto, NFTs and how it’s all a scam, this is a must watch video.

Microsoft is acquiring Activision, the troubled publisher of Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, and Diablo. The deal will value Activision at $68.7 billion, far in excess of the $26 billion Microsoft paid to acquire LinkedIn in 2016. It’s Microsoft’s biggest push into gaming, and the company says it will be the “third-largest gaming company by revenue, behind Tencent and Sony” once the deal closes. source

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Having Google give other companies advice on a messaging strategy is a laughable idea though, since Google probably has the least credibility of any tech company when it comes to messaging services. If the company really wants to do something about iMessage, it should try competing with it. As we recently detailed in a 25,000-word article, Google’s messaging history is one of constant product startups and shutdowns. Thanks to a lack of product focus or any kind of top-down mandate from Google’s CEO, no division is really “in charge” of messaging.

86% of iOS devices are running a recent enough version of the software to be presented with ATT prompts, according to an October report from AppsFlyer. Of the people who see the pop-up, 38% are opting-in, and 62% are opting-out. Overwhelmingly people do not want to be tracked online for the chance of “personalized” ads. source (Apple News)

The handheld PC will first start shipping to fans in February 2022, two months past its original schedule. Valve blamed the global supply chain for the device’s delay. source

Kuo explained that the “simplest scenario” for providing LEO connectivity to users is if individual network operators work with Globalstar. This means that customers of a partner network operator could use Globalstar’s satellite communication service on the ‌iPhone 13‌ directly through their network operator with no additional contracts or payments required. source

While the foundation says it kept the concept of a “regret” vague on purpose, it judged that 12.2 percent of reported videos violated YouTube’s own rules for content, and noted that about nine percent of them (nearly 200 in total) have been removed from YouTube Not good source

Windows 11 will only officially support 8th Gen and newer Intel Core processors, alongside Apollo Lake and newer Pentium and Celeron processors. That potentially rules out millions of existing Windows 10 devices from upgrading to Windows 11 with full support, and even devices like Microsoft’s own Surface Studio 2 which the company is still selling right now for $3,499. Pretty sure the CPU in my desktop is not supported considering I bought the machine 7+ years ago.

Signal at it again We created a multi-variant targeted ad designed to show you the personal data that Facebook collects about you and sells access to. The ad would simply display some of the information collected about the viewer which the advertising platform uses. Facebook was not into that idea. source

Looking at both UFED and Physical Analyzer, though, we were surprised to find that very little care seems to have been given to Cellebrite’s own software security. Industry-standard exploit mitigation defenses are missing, and many opportunities for exploitation are present. And For example, by including a specially formatted but otherwise innocuous file in an app on a device that is then scanned by Cellebrite, it’s possible to execute code that modifies not just the Cellebrite report being created in that scan, but also all previous and future generated Cellebrite reports from all previously scanned devices and all future scanned devices in any arbitrary way (inserting or removing text, email, photos, contacts, files, or any other data), with no detectable timestamp changes or checksum failures.

The Rich Communication Services (RCS) rollout continues to be a hopeless disaster. A year and a half ago, the cellular carriers created the “Cross-Carrier Messaging Initiative (CCMI),” a joint venture between AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon that would roll out enhanced messaging to the masses in 2020. Now, Light Reading is reporting that initiative is dead, meaning that the carriers have accomplished basically nothing on the RCS front in the past 18 months.

Really digging my new mask

With its moves today, Google has now invited every other country to pursue a similar protection racket. Parliament members in Canada and the European Union have already endorsed measures similar to Australia’s. And a basic tenet of the open web — that hyperlinks can be freely displayed on any website — just took a body blow source

This is so good source

So if impeachment were taken off the table for Trump, every time an incumbent president was not re-elected, they would automatically attempt to overthrow and assassinate Congress. Why not? It might work, and there’s no penalty for trying. This is excatly right. source

“Beeper has two ways of enabling Android, Windows and Linux users to use iMessage: we send each user a jailbroken iPhone with the Beeper app installed which bridges to iMessage, or if they have a Mac that is always connected to the internet, they can install the Beeper Mac app which acts as a bridge,” The lengths people will go to in order to use iMessage. source

Historic

Perhaps most notably, Kuo believes the new Pro laptops will backtrack on some of the controversial changes Apple made with the current generation. The OLED Touch Bar, for example, is said to have been replaced altogether by physical function keys. Kuo also says that there’ll be a wider range of ports reducing the need for dongles, though he doesn’t get specific. And a MagSafe magnetic charging connector is also set to return.

Here’s what Thompson did: he hid a program in his compiler that would check to see whether you were compiling an operating system or a compiler. If you were compiling an OS, it hid a secret login for him inside of it. If you were compiling a compiler, it hid the program that looked for compilers or operating systems inside of it. Think about what this means: every OS you compiled had an intentional security defect that the OS itself couldn’t detect.