Richard Lawler

Senior News Editor

Richard LawlerDec 28, 2022

Amazon Prime Sports?

Disney will tout its ESPN Plus bundle, Apple TV Plus has MLS and baseball, and Google / YouTube just snagged NFL Sunday Ticket, but Amazon has plenty of sports content too, and now The Information reports it’s building a standalone sports streaming app.

The self-contained sports app would declutter Amazon’s main Prime Video app and better highlight the company’s sports offerings, which include exclusive rights to the NFL’s Thursday Night Football franchise, as well as some Premier League soccer matches in the U.K. and Yankees baseball games in the New York region.

Amazon Plans a Stand-Alone Sports App as Andy Jassy Doubles Down on Prime Video

[The Information]

Richard LawlerDec 28, 2022

If you think about it, bank robbery could be described as a “highly profitable trading strategy.”

Reuters reports that authorities in Puerto Rico have arrested Avraham Eisenberg for the October incident referenced in his tweet below.

By his own admission, he used a cryptocurrency protocol for the MNGO token in a way that flattened the Mango Markets exchange, draining $110 million before negotiating the return of $67 million to Mango to make its users whole.

While some might say this is legal because “code is law,” the FBI apparently disagrees. Eisenberg faces charges of commodities fraud and commodities manipulation, which you can read in the now-unsealed complaint (pdf).

Richard LawlerDec 27, 2022

Inside the Cadillac of EVs.

A good way to get a good feel for the 2023 Cadillac Lyriq is this quick video tour guided by Andrew Hawkins.

Cadillac’s first Ultium-powered EV gets points for a dazzling moonroof, although its gear stalk and door handles weren’t as amazing.

From the full review:

Overall, the Lyriq is a long-legged, compellingly priced, sumptuously appointed EV draped with enough high-tech features to make any Tesla owner reconsider their life choices.

Richard LawlerDec 27, 2022

Workers at Activision Blizzard’s Proletariat studio are organizing.

Less than a month after a second group of Activision Blizzard workers voted to unionize, the Communications Workers of America announced the latest group filing for a union representation election.

The 57 workers in the unit include animators, designers, engineers, producers and quality assurance workers. Earlier this year, quality assurance workers at Activision’s Raven Software studio in Wisconsin and Blizzard Albany won their union elections, despite Activision Blizzard’s repeated attempts to prevent workers from voting.
“Everyone in the video game industry knows Activision Blizzard’s reputation for creating a hostile work environment, so earlier this year, when we heard that Blizzard was planning to acquire Proletariat, we started to discuss how we could protect the great culture we have created here,” said Dustin Yost, a Software Engineer at Proletariat. “By forming a union and negotiating a contract, we can make sure that we are able to continue doing our best work and create innovative experiences at the frontier of game development.”

Proletariat Workers Become Third Group of Activision Blizzard Workers to Form Union with Communications Workers of America

[Communications Workers of America]

Richard LawlerDec 27, 2022

The new Benoit Blanc movie was number one on Netflix over the weekend.

Rian Johnson is “pissed off” that the Glass Onion official title is tagged with “Knives Out” at the end, but a lot of you seem to have watched it anyway.

I loved it, and Andrew Webster’s review is a pretty good indication of why. Still, through three days, The Hollywood Reporter notes it hasn’t cracked the top five debuts as tracked by Netflix’s viewing hours metric.

Netflix:

After only three days, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery was the #1 film around the world and with 35M household views (82.1M view hours divided by 2.3 hours of runtime) from over 93 countries, everyone was trying to solve the mystery and figure out whodunit.

Glass Onion solidifies Knives Out as the next great mystery franchise

Andrew Webster

Sep 12

Richard LawlerDec 27, 2022

Green light.

Welcome to the odd vortex that falls between Christmas and New Year’s Day / CES, which is traditionally filled by cold weather causing issues as well as LG press releases for home appliances and speakers.

We will keep bringing you our hottest dual-wristing takes in the meantime.

Richard LawlerDec 26, 2022

How much time did you spend with Vampire Survivors or Elden Ring this year?

Steam’s year-in-review stats are now available, as Valve goes against the strategy of Spotify Wrapped by actually waiting until the year is nearly over to provide some sharable data breakdowns. The activity represented is drawn from January 1st through December 14th.

These quick posts of ours have comments now, so you can show off yours if below if you like, although mine just shows how much time I haven’t spent on my Steam Deck so far.

If you prefer other platforms, there are similar setups for PlayStation and Nintendo gamers. Xbox doesn’t have anything official, but TrueAchievements built a third-party recap.

FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried is back in the US, released on $250 million bail

Richard LawlerDec 23, 2022

Richard LawlerDec 22, 2022

Okta confirms source code for its security software was stolen earlier this month.

On Wednesday, BleepingComputer reported Okta had been sending a “confidential” security incident notification to partners, and now the company has confirmed someone stole data from GitHub repositories for the Okta Workforce Identity Cloud (WIC) product in early December.

In a statement on its website, Okta said it had alerted law enforcement, and:

Our investigation concluded that there was no unauthorized access to the Okta service, and no unauthorized access to customer data. Okta does not rely on the confidentiality of its source code for the security of its services. The Okta service remains fully operational and secure.

Okta's source code stolen after GitHub repositories hacked

[BleepingComputer]