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Rockstar: future GTA games could arrive faster than GTA VI's 13-year wait

In a Bloomberg report on GTA VI's development, Rockstar technical lead Phil Hooker said the engine, tools and team built for GTA VI should let future projects move faster. He compared the situation to the one-year gap between GTA III and Vice City, when Rockstar reused existing frameworks. The report also detailed a new NPC-focused studio created mid-development and denied claims that GTA VI cost more to make than the Burj Khalifa.

Delaware jury finds Arm breached Qualcomm licensing deal, awards $2

A Delaware jury ruled that Arm breached its Architectural License Agreement with Qualcomm by withholding software patches and tools, and found it intentionally interfered with Qualcomm's business dealings with Meta. Despite siding with Qualcomm on these two claims, the jury awarded just $1 in damages for each, totaling $2, while ruling in Arm's favor on four other claims. Both companies issued statements claiming satisfaction with the verdict.

Hardware backdoors found in Ledger wallets sold through authorized retailers after $102M theft

Ledger confirmed that hardware implants planted in some Ledger Nano X wallets sold by Malaysian reseller CryptoBilis allowed attackers to steal roughly $102 million in crypto. Since then, a European buyer and other researchers have reported finding similar implants in Nano X, Flex and Stax devices purchased from a major German electronics chain, suggesting the tampering extends beyond the single reseller Ledger initially named.

Researchers Build Economic Complexity Map of the Roman Empire from Latin Inscriptions

A team including Petra Heřmánková, Matteo Mazzamurro, Tom Brughmans and the author published a study in npj Complexity applying economic complexity analysis to the Roman Empire. The work draws on LIST, a large dataset of Latin inscriptions with geographic coordinates and transcribed text, using professions mentioned in funerary and honorific inscriptions as proxies for economic activity across locations.

Harvard survey finds men overstate AI knowledge, cite fake experts as real

A Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center survey of over 5,400 Americans found 53 percent of men claimed familiarity with two fictional AI figures, Susan Milner and Craig Dalton, compared with 40 percent of women. The same survey found men use AI more often and answer factual questions about it correctly slightly more often, but largely because women are more likely to say they don't know an answer rather than guess wrong.

Newsletter details how Amazon's seller fees inflate prices across online retailers

The newsletter Not-Ship reports that Amazon's combined fees—referral commissions, fulfillment charges and advertising costs—can take nearly half of a seller's sale price, even though its base commission of about 15% matches eBay and Walmart. It notes these fee structures are central to the US Federal Trade Commission's pending antitrust case against Amazon.

Phil Zimmermann's 1991 essay explains motivation for creating PGP encryption

In this reprinted 1991 guide (updated 1999), Phil Zimmermann describes why he built Pretty Good Privacy, arguing that email and electronic communication lack the inherent privacy once guaranteed by face-to-face conversation. He contends that government surveillance of digital communication is far cheaper and easier than intercepting paper mail or phone calls, prompting him to create software letting ordinary people encrypt their messages.

Delft researchers build whisker-like sensor for drones to navigate without sight

Engineers at Delft University of Technology developed a lightweight tactile sensor modeled on animal whiskers, allowing small drones to detect obstacles by touch rather than vision. The design targets ultra-compact rescue drones, which often operate in smoke-filled or dark environments where cameras and lidar fail. Professor Salwa Hamaza said the sensor must be lightweight, low-latency and low-power to work on such drones.

Microsoft and Japan's NPA dismantle Chinese phishing network behind 1B messages

Microsoft and Japan's National Police Agency disrupted a cybercrime ecosystem that sent over a billion phishing messages to more than 75,000 organizations in 150 countries, including over 750 million targeting Microsoft customers this year. The investigation traced the activity to a marketplace called YAM Store, linked to phishing kits CoGUI, Haozi and Iron Man System, which sold compromised Microsoft and Google accounts and hijacked domains to impersonate real organizations.

Lawsuit accuses OpenAI of harvesting minors' data without parental consent

A proposed class action filed in San Francisco federal court on behalf of two minors, aged 12 and 16, alleges OpenAI collected personal secrets and health information from child users of ChatGPT to train its models and build profiles on them, despite terms of use barring users under 13. The complaint cites a 12-year-old Hawaii plaintiff who disclosed her age to ChatGPT but says the chatbot continued engaging her on sensitive personal topics. Plaintiffs are seeking financial compensation for minors whose data was allegedly collected.

Free DroidDeck app runs PC Steam games locally on Snapdragon Android phones

An open-source app called DroidDeck lets supported Snapdragon Android devices run Valve's ARM64 Linux Steam client locally in Big Picture mode, without streaming, root access, or replacing Android's OS. Windows titles run via Proton with FEX handling x86 translation, and users can download games from their existing Steam libraries directly onto the device. It requires Android 9 or newer, Adreno 730+ graphics (6xx experimental), and several gigabytes of storage for the runtime and optional components.

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