Mario Is Moving Away From Mobile Games

In an exclusive interview with Variety, legendary video game designer, Nintendo fellow and self-proclaimed “Mario’s mom”, Shigeru Miyamoto, said: “Mobile apps will not be the primary path of future Mario games.” From the report: After two moderately successful but dwindling iOS games, plus another that shuttered after two years, Nintendo is pulling Mario away from the mobile market. Released in 2016, Super Mario Run grossed $60 million in its first year, while 2019’s Mario Kart Tour has generated $300 million (compared to Mario Kart 8’s $3 billion and counting). Without explanation, Nintendo removed 2019’s Dr. Mario World from app markets two years after its release.

“First and foremost, Nintendo’s core strategy is a hardware and software integrated gaming experience,” said Miyamoto, who played a pivotal role in designing the Wii, among other Nintendo consoles. “The intuitiveness of the control is a part of the gaming experience. When we explored the opportunity of making Mario games for the mobile phone — which is a more common, generic device — it was challenging to determine what that game should be. That is why I played the role of director for Super Mario Run, to be able to translate that Nintendo hardware experience into the smart devices.”

Elaborating on the merits of Run and Tour, Miyamoto continued, “Having Mario games as mobile apps expands the doorway for far more audience to experience the game, and also expands the Mario gaming experience, where you only need your thumb on one hand.” Referencing the innovation of the Super Mario Maker series and Super Mario Odyssey, which Miyamoto called “the ultimate evolution of a Mario adventure game on a typical 3D platformer,” the Nintendo exec laid out how the company begins to develop a Mario game: “We try to define what is the gameplay, what is the method, and then define what devices we go on.” When asked when fans can expect the next mainline Mario game, Miyamoto chuckled and said: “All I can say is please stay tuned for future Nintendo Directs.”

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False Memories Can Form Within Seconds, Study Finds

In a new study, scientists found that it’s possible for people to form false memories of an event within seconds of it occurring. This almost-immediate misremembering seems to be shaped by our expectations of what should happen, the team says. Gizmodo reports: “This study is unique in two ways, in our opinion. First, it explores memory for events that basically just happened, between 0.3 and 3 seconds ago. Intuitively, we would think that these memories are pretty reliable,” lead author Marte Otten, a neuroscientist at the University of Amsterdam, told Gizmodo in an email. “As a second unique feature, we explicitly asked people whether they thought their memories are reliable — so how confident are they about their response?” To do this, they recruited hundreds of volunteers over a series of four experiments to complete a task: They would look at certain letters and then be asked to recall one highlighted letter right after. However, the scientists used letters that were sometimes reversed in orientation, so the volunteers had to remember whether their selection was mirrored or not. They also focused on the volunteers who were highly confident about their choices during the task.

Overall, the participants regularly misremembered the letters, but in a specific way. People were generally good at remembering when a typical letter was shown, with their inaccuracy rates hovering around 10%. But they were substantially worse at remembering a mirrored letter, with inaccuracy rates up to 40% in some experiments. And, interestingly enough, their memory got worse the longer they had to wait before recalling it. When they were asked to recall what they saw a half second later, for instance, they were wrong less than 20% of the time, but when they were asked three seconds later, the rate rose as high as 30%.

According to Otten, the findings — published Wednesday in PLOS One — indicate that our memory starts being shaped almost immediately by our preconceptions. People expect to see a regular letter, and don’t get easily fooled into misremembering a mirrored letter. But when the unexpected happens, we might often still default to our missed prediction. This bias doesn’t seem to kick in instantaneously, though, since people’s short-term memory was better when they had to be especially quick on their feet. “It is only when memory becomes less reliable through the passage of a tiny bit of time, or the addition of extra visual information, that internal expectations about the world start playing a role,” Otten said.

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Saudi Arabia’s Savvy Games To Acquire Gaming Company Scopely For $4.9 Billion

Museum Puts Decades-Old Cobalt RaQ Back On the Internet

FBI Seizes Bot Shop ‘Genesis Market’

Several domain names tied to Genesis Market, a bustling cybercrime store that sold access to passwords and other data stolen from millions of computers infected with malicious software, were seized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) today. KrebsOnSecurity reports: Sources tell KrebsOnsecurity the domain seizures coincided with “dozens” of arrests in the United States and abroad targeting those who allegedly operated the service, as well as suppliers who continuously fed Genesis Market with freshly-stolen data. Active since 2018, Genesis Market’s slogan has long been, “Our store sells bots with logs, cookies, and their real fingerprints.” Customers could search for infected systems with a variety of options, including by Internet address or by specific domain names associated with stolen credentials.

But earlier today, multiple domains associated with Genesis had their homepages replaced with a seizure notice from the FBI, which said the domains were seized pursuant to a warrant issued by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin. But sources close to the investigation tell KrebsOnSecurity that law enforcement agencies in the United States, Canada and across Europe are currently serving arrest warrants on dozens of individuals thought to support Genesis, either by maintaining the site or selling the service bot logs from infected systems. The seizure notice includes the seals of law enforcement entities from several countries, including Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom. […]

One feature of Genesis that sets it apart from other bot shops is that customers can retain access to infected systems in real-time, so that if the rightful owner of an infected system creates a new account online, those new credentials will get stolen and displayed in the web-based panel of the Genesis customer who purchased that bot. “While some infostealers are designed to remove themselves after execution, others create persistent access,” reads a March 2023 report from cybersecurity firm SpyCloud. “That means bad actors have access to the current data for as long as the device remains infected, even if the user changes passwords. SpyCloud says Genesis even advertises its commitment to keep the stolen data and the compromised systems’ fingerprints up to date. “According to our research, Genesis Market had more than 430,000 stolen identities for sale as of early last year — and there are many other marketplaces like this one,” the SpyCloud report concludes.

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Chrome 112 Released With WASM Garbage Collection Trial, CSS Nesting

Google today promoted the Chrome 112 web browser to their stable channel on all supported platforms. Phoronix reports: Starting as an origin trial with Chrome 112 is WebAssembly (WASM) Garbage Collection support. Yes, garbage collection to allow for efficient support for high-level managed languages with WebAssembly. This trial support allows for compilers targeting WASM to integrate with a garbage collector in the host VM. Also on the WebAssembly front with today’s Chrome browser update is making WebAssembly tail call support available out of the box. This adds explicit tail call and indirect tail call opcodes. This support is useful for correct/efficient implementations of languages that require tail call elimination, compilation of control constructs that can be implemented with it, and other computations being expressed as WASM functions.

Meanwhile by default in Chrome 112 is now CSS nesting support as the ability to nest CSS style rules inside other style rules for increasing modularity and maintainability of style sheets. Chrome 112 also adds support for the CSS animation-composition property. Behind a developer flag is also the background-blur feature that allows using a native platform’s API for camera background segmentation. This is intended for use with web-based video conferencing applications running within the web browser to make use of native platform APIs. A full list of changes is available on the Chrome Releases blog.

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A Collection of Fun Databases For Programming Exploration

Longtime Slashdot reader Esther Schindler writes: When you learn a new tool/technology, you need to create a sample application, which cannot use real in-house data. Why not use something fun for the sample application’s data, such as a Star Wars API or a data collection about World Cup contests? Esther Schindler, Slashdot user #16185, assembled a groovy collection of datasets that may be useful but also may be a source of fascinating internet rabbit holes. For those interested in datasets, Esther also recommends the Data is Plural newsletter and the website ResearchBuzz, which shares dataset descriptions as well as archive-related news and tools.

“Google Research maintains a search site for test datasets, too, if you know what you’re looking for,” adds Esther. There’s also, of course, Kaggle.com.

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120Hz ProMotion Rumored to Expand to Non-Pro iPhones in Two Years

Apple will expand ProMotion to the standard iPhone models in two years, according to Ross Young, CEO of Display Supply Chain Consultants. ProMotion was first introduced on the iPhone 13 Pro models in 2021 and remains exclusive to Pro models for now. MacRumors reports: In a tweet today, Young provided a roadmap outlining various display-related technologies coming to future iPhones. Notably, the roadmap indicates that low-power LTPO display technology will be expanded to the standard iPhones in 2025, which Young said will enable ProMotion on these devices, allowing the display to ramp up to a 120Hz refresh rate for smoother scrolling and video content when necessary.

ProMotion would also allow the display to ramp down to a more power-efficient refresh rate. iPhone 13 Pro models can ramp down to 10Hz, while iPhone 14 Pro models can go as low as 1Hz, allowing for an always-on display that can show the Lock Screen’s clock, widgets, notifications, and wallpaper even when the device is locked. All in all, the roadmap suggests that the so-called “iPhone 17” and “iPhone 17 Plus” will feature ProMotion, and likely an always-on display too. Young also claimed the “iPhone 17 Pro” will be the first iPhone to feature under-panel Face ID technology.

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Google Now Guarantees Some Flight Prices Or Your Money Back

For flights, Google already showed you whether the flight price you were looking at was high, low, or typical compared to historical prices. Now it’s going a step further by putting a guarantee on those predictions. Android Police reports: Now, whenever Google thinks a flight is priced as low as it’s going to go, it will put a “Price Guarantee” badge beside the price indicating it doesn’t think that price will drop any further. If you decide to book a flight with a price guarantee through Google and the price does go down, the company will reimburse you for the difference in price via Google Pay similar to the promotion it ran in 2019. The price guarantee was announced in a blog post today alongside new features for researching hotels.

“Now when you search for a hotel on mobile, you’ll be able to swipe through full-screen images of the hotel similar to how you might view a story on Instagram,” reports Android Police. “From that photo page, you can also quickly tap into reviews to see if a property is as good as it looks and learn more about the area where a potential hotel is located. There’s also a link to the hotel’s website right on the page when you’re ready to book.”

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Capita, Company Providing UK’s Nuclear Submarine Training, Says It’s Successfully Contained ‘Cyber Incident’

Capita, the United Kingdom’s largest outsourcing company, confirmed Monday that an IT outage which left staff locked out of their accounts on Friday was caused by “a cyber incident.” The Record reports: Staff attempting to login were erroneously told their usual passwords were “incorrect” according to reports, fueling speculation that a cyberattack was to blame, although not all of Capita’s 61,000 employees were affected. At the time, a Capita spokesperson said the company was investigating “a technical issue.”

In an update on Monday about the incident sent to the Regulatory News Service, the company confirmed it “experienced a cyber incident primarily impacting access to internal Microsoft Office 365 applications.” The nature of the incident has not been disclosed. While financially motivated ransomware attacks remain a prevalent threat for organizations in Britain, Capita also provides services to the British government that may be of interest to state-sponsored espionage groups.

Capita’s numerous contracts include several with the Ministry of Defence. Last year, a consortium it leads took control over engineering and maintenance support of training simulators for the Royal Navy’s nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines used as part of the U.K.’s nuclear deterrent. In its statement, Capita said: “Immediate steps were taken to successfully isolate and contain the issue,” which was “limited to parts of the Capita network.”

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