‘A Billion-Dollar Crypto Gaming Startup Promised Riches and Delivered Disaster’

“Even many Axie regulars say it’s not much fun, but that hasn’t stopped people from dedicating hours to researching strategies, haunting Axie-themed Discord channels and Reddit forums, and paying for specialized software that helps them build stronger teams…”

Bloomberg pays a visit to the NFT-based game Axie Infinity with a 39-year-old player who’s spent $40,000 there since last August — back when you could actually triple your money in a week. (“I was actually hoping that it could become my full-time job,” he says.)

The reason this is possible — or at least it seemed possible for a few weird months last year — is that Axie is tied to crypto markets. Players get a few Smooth Love Potion (SLP) tokens for each game they win and can earn another cryptocurrency, Axie Infinity Shards (AXS), in larger tournaments. The characters, themselves known as Axies, are nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, whose ownership is tracked on a blockchain, allowing them to be traded like a cryptocurrency as well….

Axie’s creator, a startup called Sky Mavis Inc., heralded all this as a new kind of economic phenomenon: the “play-to-earn” video game. “We believe in a world future where work and play become one,” it said in a mission statement on its website. “We believe in empowering our players and giving them economic opportunities. Welcome to our revolution.” By last October the company, founded in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, four years ago by a group of Asian, European, and American entrepreneurs, had raised more than $160 million from investors including the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and the crypto-focused firm Paradigm, at a peak valuation of about $3 billion. That same month, Axie Infinity crossed 2 million daily users, according to Sky Mavis.

If you think the entire internet should be rebuilt around the blockchain — the vision now referred to as web3 — Axie provided a useful example of what this looked like in practice. Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit and an Axie investor, predicted that 90% of the gaming market would be play-to-earn within five years. Gabby Dizon, head of crypto gaming startup Yield Guild Games, describes Axie as a way to create an “investor mindset” among new populations, who would go on to participate in the crypto economy in other ways. In a livestreamed discussion about play-to-earn gaming and crypto on March 2, former Democratic presidential contender Andrew Yang called web3 “an extraordinary opportunity to improve the human condition” and “the biggest weapon against poverty that we have.”

By the time Yang made his proclamations the Axie economy was deep in crisis. It had lost about 40% of its daily users, and SLP, which had traded as high as 40 cents, was at 1.8 cents, while AXS, which had once been worth $165, was at $56. To make matters worse, on March 23 hackers robbed Sky Mavis of what at the time was roughly $620 million in cryptocurrencies. Then in May the bottom fell out of the entire crypto market. AXS dropped below $20, and SLP settled in at just over half a penny. Instead of illustrating web3’s utopian potential, Axie looked like validation for crypto skeptics who believe web3 is a vision that investors and early adopters sell people to get them to pour money into sketchy financial instruments while hackers prey on everyone involved.

The article does credit the company for building its own blockchain (Ronin) to provide cheaper and faster NFT transactions. “Purists might have taken issue with the decision to abandon the core blockchain precept of decentralization, but on the other hand, the game actually worked.”

But the article also chronicles a fast succession of highs and lows:

“In Axie’s biggest market, the Philippines, the average daily earnings from May to October 2021 for all but the lowest-ranked players were above minimum wage, according to the gaming research and consulting firm Naavik.”

Axie raised $150 million to reimburse victims of the breach and repair its infrastructure. “But nearly two months later the systems compromised during the hack still weren’t up and running, and the executives were vague about when everything would be repaired. (A company spokesperson said on June 3 that this could happen by midmonth, pending the results of an external audit….): Days after the breach it launched Axie: Origin, a new alternate version with better graphics/gameplay — and without a cryptocurrency element. About 75% of the 39-year-old gamer’s co-players have “largely” stopped playing the game. “But at least one was sufficiently seduced by Axie’s potential to take a significant loan to buy AXS tokens, which he saw as a way to hedge against inflation of the Argentine peso. The local currency has indeed lost value since he took out the loan, but not nearly as much as AXS.”

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Parker Lewis for sharing the article

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Museum Restores 21 Rare Videos from Legendary 1976 Computing Conference

At Silicon Valley’s Computer History Museum, the senior curator just announced the results of a multi-year recovery and restoration process: making available 21 never-before-seen video recordings of a legendary 1976 conference:

For five summer days in 1976, the first generation of computer rock stars had its own Woodstock. Coming from around the world, dozens of computing’s top engineers, scientists, and software pioneers got together to reflect upon the first 25 years of their discipline in the warm, sunny (and perhaps a bit unsettling) climes of the Los Alamos National Laboratories, birthplace of the atomic bomb.

Among the speakers:

– A young Donald Knuth on the early history of programming languages

– FORTRAN designer John Backus on programming in America in the 1950s — some personal perspectives

– Harvard’s Richard Milton Bloch (who worked with Grace Hopper in 1944)

– Mathematician/nuclear physicist StanisÅaw M. Ulam on the interaction of mathematics and computing
– Edsger W. Dijkstra on “a programmer’s early memories.”

The Computer History Museum teases some highlights:

Typical of computers of this generation, the 1946 ENIAC, the earliest American large-scale electronic computer, had to be left powered up 24 hours a day to keep its 18,000 vacuum tubes healthy. Turning them on and off, like a light bulb, shortened their life dramatically. ENIAC co-inventor John Mauchly discusses this serious issue….
The Los Alamos peak moment was the brilliant lecture on the British WW II Colossus computing engines by computer scientist and historian of computing Brian Randell. Colossus machines were special-purpose computers used to decipher messages of the German High Command in WW II. Based in southern England at Bletchley Park, these giant codebreaking machines regularly provided life-saving intelligence to the allies. Their existence was a closely-held secret during the war and for decades after. Randell’s lecture was — excuse me — a bombshell, one which prompted an immediate re-assessment of the entire history of computing. Observes conference attendee (and inventor of ASCII) IBM’s Bob Bemer, “On stage came Prof. Brian Randell, asking if anyone had ever wondered what Alan Turing had done during World War II? From there he went on to tell the story of Colossus — that day at Los Alamos was close to the first time the British Official Secrets Act had permitted any disclosures. I have heard the expression many times about jaws dropping, but I had really never seen it happen before.”

Publishing these original primary sources for the first time is part of CHM’s mission to not only preserve computing history but to make it come alive. We hope you will enjoy seeing and hearing from these early pioneers of computing.

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Short-Sightedness Was Rare. In Asia, It Is Becoming Ubiquitous

Researchers have found that being outside drastically reduces the risk of developing short-sightedness. From a report: In the early 1980s Taiwan’s army realised it had a problem. More and more of its conscripts seemed to be short-sighted, meaning they needed glasses to focus on distant objects. “They were worried that if the worst happened [ie, an attack by China] their troops would be fighting at a disadvantage,” says Ian Morgan, who studies myopia at Australian National University, in Canberra. An island-wide study in 1983 confirmed that around 70% of Taiwanese school leavers needed glasses or contact lenses to see properly. These days, that number is above 80%. But happily for Taiwan’s generals, the military disparity has disappeared. Over the past few decades myopia rates have soared across East Asia (see chart 1 in the linked story). In the 1960s around 20-30% of Chinese school-leavers were short-sighted. These days they are just as myopic as their cousins across the straits, with rates in some parts of China running at over 80%.

Elsewhere on the continent things are even worse. One study of male high-school leavers in Seoul found 97% were short-sighted. Hong Kong and Singapore are not far behind. And although the problem is worst in East Asia, it is not unique to it. Reliable numbers for America and Europe are harder to come by. But one review article, published in 2015, claimed a European rate of between 20% and 40% — an order of magnitude higher than that which people working in the field think is the “natural,” background rate. For most of those affected, myopia is a lifelong, expensive nuisance. But severe myopia can lead to untreatable vision loss, says Annegret Dahlmann-Noor, a consultant ophthalmologist at Moorfields Eye Hospital, in London. A paper published in 2019 concluded that each one-dioptre worsening in myopia was associated with a 67% increase in prevalence of myopic maculopathy, an untreatable condition that causes blindness. (A dioptre is a measure of a lens’s focusing power.) In some parts of East Asia, 20% of young people have severe myopia, defined as -6 dioptres or worse (see chart 2 in linked story). “This is storing up a big problem for the coming decades,” says Kathryn Rose, head of orthoptics at the University of Technology, Sydney.

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UK Regulator Plans To Launch Probe Into Google’s and Apple’s Mobile Duopoly

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has concluded that Google and Apple “hold all the cards” when it comes to mobile phones a year after taking a closer look at their “duopoly.” It’s now consulting on the launch of a market investigation into the tech giants’ market power in mobile browsers, as well as into Apple’s cloud gaming restrictions. From a report: In addition, the CMA has launched a separate investigation into Google’s Play Store rules — the one that requires certain app developers to use the tech giant’s payment system for in-app purchases, in particular. The CMA has concluded after its year-long study that the tech giants do indeed exhibit an “effective duopoly” on mobile ecosystems. A total of 97 percent of all mobile web browsing in the UK is powered by Apple’s and Google’s browser engines. iPhones and Android devices typically come with Safari and Chrome pre-installed, which means their browsers have the advantage from the start. Further, Apple requires developers to make sure their iOS and iPadOS apps are using its WebKit engine to browse the web. That limits the incentives Apple may have to invest in Safari, the CMA said.

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Jack Dorsey’s TBD Announces Web3 Competitor: Web5

Jack Dorsey’s beef with Web3 has never been a secret. In his view, Web 3 — blockchain boosters’ dream of a censorship resistant, privacy-focused internet of the future — has become just as problematic as the Web2 which preceded it. Now, he’s out with an alternative. From a report: At CoinDesk’s Consensus Festival here in Austin, TBD — the bitcoin-focused subsidiary of Dorsey’s Block (SQ) — announced its new vision for a decentralized internet layer on Friday. Its name? Web5. TBD explained its pitch for Web5 in a statement shared with CoinDesk: “Identity and personal data have become the property of third parties. Web5 brings decentralized identity and data storage to individual’s applications. It lets devs focus on creating delightful user experiences, while returning ownership of data and identity to individuals.”

While the new project from TBD was announced Friday, it is still under open-source development and does not have an official release date. A play on the Web3 moniker embraced in other corners of the blockchain space, Web5 is built on the idea that incumbent “decentralized internet” contenders are going about things the wrong way. Appearing at a Consensus panel clad in a black and bitcoin-yellow track suit emblazoned with the numeral 5, TBD lead Mike Brock explained that Web5 — in addition to being “two better than Web3” — would beat out incumbent models by abandoning their blockchain-centric approaches to a censorship free, identity-focused web experience. “This is really a conversation about what technologies are built to purpose, and I don’t think that renting block space, in all cases, is a really good idea for decentralized applications,” Brock said. He continued: “I think what we’re pushing forward with Web5 — and I admit it’s a provocative challenge to a lot of the assumptions about what it means to decentralize the internet — really actually is back to basics. We already have technologies that effectively decentralize. I mean, bittorrent exists, Tor exists, [etc].” The full presentation is here.

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GitHub Sunsets Atom, Its Text Editor for Software Development

Plasma Ignition System Can Increase Engine Efficiency By 20%

In 2019, Ars Technica reported on a new advanced ignition system from Transient Plasma Systems that replaces the conventional spark plugs in a vehicle’s engine with an ignition module that uses very short duration pulses of plasma to ignite the fuel/air mixture within the cylinder. Now, about three years later, the system is “almost ready for production after validation testing has confirmed its potential to increase fuel efficiency by up to 20 percent when fitted to an existing engine.” From the report: TPS’s plasma ignition system is designed to drop into existing cars with very little modification. An ignition module replaces the regular spark plugs, and there’s a power module to control it, but otherwise the only other modifications are in software, as the engine requires remapping to take advantage of the new technology. “A lot of the OEMs we’ve been working with are freezing their engine designs, they’re saying, ‘No more new engine block, we might change some parts out, but we’re freezing the design.’ So it has to basically just drop into the holes that already exist, which this technology does,” [said Dan Singleton, founder and CEO of TPS]. […]

The final stage of testing for TPS’s system is to prove its durability, but Singleton expects this won’t be a problem. “The technology uses all solid-state, high-voltage switches — these are switches that are used in applications where they’re run for millions and millions of shots. If you just did an analysis of the parts, you would say no problem, right? The testing that still needs to be done is, once you’ve put it into a package where it’s going to go to altitude and extreme heat, extreme cold, you just have to do some design validation and tweaking,” he said. […]

As for when we might see the first cars fitted with plasma ignition on the road, Singleton was optimistic. “We are currently in discussions with a couple of Tier 1s and OEMs that are interested in acquiring the technology or working with us to take this to market. The most aggressive timeline that one of those companies has told us is that they could get it to market in 18 months from the start of a deal. That’s aggressive. And typically it takes longer in automotive to do testing, but if they say they can do it, this is their world, not mine. So 18 months, I would say, from the start of a partnership,” Singleton said. Why develop a new internal combustion engine technology when we’re going all in on electric vehicles? Here’s what Singleton told Ars: “[W]e do think that the future is going to be EVs. But the question is, what do we do while we’re ramping up? And I think if you look at the data, it’s pretty compelling that the best thing you can do is to start getting CO2 emissions down now. So that’s really where we see this fitting in is if you put this technology to market immediately. That’s what our data shows is that there’s immediate, meaningful CO2 reductions.”

Ars also notes that “it’s going to be many years before countries like the US stop selling new internal combustion-powered vehicles and longer still until they’re no longer allowed on our roads.”

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US: Chinese Government Hackers Breached Telcos To Snoop On Network Traffic

Several US federal agencies today revealed that Chinese-backed threat actors have targeted and compromised major telecommunications companies and network service providers to steal credentials and harvest data. BleepingComputer reports: As the NSA, CISA, and the FBI said in a joint cybersecurity advisory published on Tuesday, Chinese hacking groups have exploited publicly known vulnerabilities to breach anything from unpatched small office/home office (SOHO) routers to medium and even large enterprise networks. Once compromised, the threat actors used the devices as part of their own attack infrastructure as command-and-control servers and proxy systems they could use to breach more networks.

“Upon gaining an initial foothold into a telecommunications organization or network service provider, PRC state-sponsored cyber actors have identified critical users and infrastructure including systems critical to maintaining the security of authentication, authorization, and accounting,” the advisory explains. The attackers then stole credentials to access underlying SQL databases and used SQL commands to dump user and admin credentials from critical Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service (RADIUS) servers.

“Armed with valid accounts and credentials from the compromised RADIUS server and the router configurations, the cyber actors returned to the network and used their access and knowledge to successfully authenticate and execute router commands to surreptitiously route, capture, and exfiltrate traffic out of the network to actor-controlled infrastructure,” the federal agencies added. The three federal agencies said the following common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) are the network device CVEs most frequently exploited by Chinese-backed state hackers since 2020. “The PRC has been exploiting specific techniques and common vulnerabilities since 2020 to use to their advantage in cyber campaigns,” the NSA added. Organizations can protect their networks by applying security patches as soon as possible, disabling unnecessary ports and protocols to shrink their attack surface, and replacing end-of-life network infrastructure that no longer receives security patches.

The agencies “also recommend networks to block lateral movement attempts and enabling robust logging and internet-exposed services to detect attack attempts as soon as possible,” adds BleepingComputer.

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Microsoft Trying To Kill HDD Boot Drives By 2023, Report Says

A recent executive brief from data storage industry analyst firm Trendfocus reports that OEMs have disclosed that Microsoft is pushing them to drop HDDs as the primary storage device in pre-built Windows 11 PCs and use SSDs instead, with the current deadlines for the switchover set for 2023. Tom’s Hardware reports: Interestingly, these actions from Microsoft come without any firm SSD requirement listed for Windows 11 PCs, and OEMs have pushed back on the deadlines. […] Microsoft’s most current(opens in new tab) list of hardware requirements calls for a ’64 GB or larger storage device’ for Windows 11, so an SSD isn’t a minimum requirement for a standard install. However, Microsoft stipulates that two features, DirectStorage and the Windows Subsystem for Android(opens in new tab), require an SSD, but you don’t have to use those features. It is unclear whether or not Microsoft plans to change the minimum specifications for Windows 11 PCs after the 2023 switchover to SSDs for pre-built systems.

As always, the issue with switching all systems to SSDs boils down to cost: Trendfocus Vice President John Chen tells us that replacing a 1TB HDD requires stepping down to a low-cost 256 GB SSD, which OEMs don’t consider to be enough capacity for most users. Conversely, stepping up to a 512 GB SSD would ‘break the budget’ for lower-end machines with a strict price limit. “The original cut-in date based on our discussions with OEMs was to be this year, but it has been pushed out to sometime next year (the second half, I believe, but not clear on the firm date),” Chen told Tom’s Hardware. “OEMs are trying to negotiate some level of push out (emerging market transition in 2024, or desktop transition in 2024), but things are still in flux.”

The majority of PCs in developed markets have already transitioned to SSDs for boot drives, but there are exceptions. Chen notes that it is possible that Microsoft could make some exceptions, but the firm predicts that dual-drive desktop PCs and gaming laptops with both an SSD for the boot drive and an HDD for bulk storage will be the only mass-market PCs with an HDD. […] It’s unclear what measures, if any, Microsoft would take with OEMs if they don’t comply with its wishes, and the company has decided not to comment on the matter. Trendfocus says the switchover will have implications for HDD demand next year.

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