Category: 4. Technology

Sega president and COO Shuji Utsumi recently spoke about the company’s push for making its Games as a Service (GAAS) business model global, as it’s a sign of a company’s “good record.”

In an interview with The Game Business, Utsumi said that game companies with “a good record tend to have a strong [global] GAAS business.” In regards to Sega, while the console and PC standalone business is “getting better,” the publisher and developer is still working on making its GAAS business global. “That’s one of the biggest challenges,” he added.

Currently, Sega’s GAAS focus is on free-to-play mobile games, including the likes of Sonic Rumble, which is free to play but offers in-app purchases. In a 2024 interview with Automaton, which was translated from Japanese, game director Makoto Tase said that “monetization models that use gacha mechanics have not been very successful when it comes to games targeted towards worldwide audiences of all ages,” and that these mechanics “tend to be shunned overseas,” leading to ultimately deciding not to include them in Rumble.

While Utsumi didn’t specifically mentioned gacha mechanics, he sees developer Rovio, which Sega acquired back in August 2023, as the candidate for this business push. “Rovio has deep knowledge of the global mobile business, and very strong IP with Angry Birds,” Utsumi said. “We feel like the fit between Rovio and Sega is good. We are working closely with Rovio to have a Sonic mobile game, and we are giving them access to IPs, including Sonic, to come up with nice, welcoming GAAS titles.”

Related:Unity senior client partner Rod Stafford jailed for 22 years over sexual offenses

Sega’s plans of expansion also include developing properties beyond games, with Utsumi referencing the success of the Sonic movies, which topped $1 billion at the global box office on January of this year. According to the president, the films have had a major impact on the franchise, leading to a significant boost to Sonic game sales.

“When I started to get involved in the video game business, I picked up Crash Bandicoot and started asking some of the movie studios if they were interested in turning that property into a movie,” he said. “But I was treated like… ‘hey, video games is like a toy business’. They didn’t really take it seriously.”

Live service games aren’t going through a healthy phase

Even though Utsumi said that game companies with strong GAAS business show a good record, studios have been struggling around live service launches.

Sony reportedly poured $200 million into live service shooter Concord, which was released late last year and pulled from sale within weeks, shuttering the studio behind it in the process. In January of this year, it canceled two first-party live service titles in development at Bluepoint Games and Bend Studio. Weeks later, contractors were reportedly cut at the latter.

Related:Nintendo is about to alter the price of the original Switch in Canada

Mere weeks later, Warner Bros. Games announced it would be shutting down free-to-play brawler Multiversus on May 30. There’s still an interest around live-service models—Pragma, a backend engine for live-service games like Spectre Divide and Predecessor, secured a $12.75 million investment in March. Despite the decisions in the preceding months, previous PlayStation Studios boss Hermen Hulst said that Bungie’s upcoming live-service shooter, Marathon, won’t be making the same mistakes as Concord.

“I think that some really good work went into that title,” Hulst said during a fireside chat aimed at investors. “Some really big efforts. But ultimately that title entered into a hyper-competitive segment of the market. I think it was insufficiently differentiated to be able to resonate with players. So we have reviewed our processes in light of this to deeply understand how and why that title failed to meet expectations—and to ensure that we are not going to make the same mistakes again.”

Related:The Alters developer apologizes for not disclosing use of generative AI

Mohali: Three men involved in a brazen robbery case in which they threw chilli powder into a woman’s eyes to incapacitate her before snatching a bag containing cash have been arrested. The crime, which triggered panic in the city, occurred near Mohali’s Kamla Market in Phase 1. Those arrested have been identified as Parvinder Singh, Chandan Gupta and Sachin Kumar. Police have recovered Rs 1.6 lakh from the three, SSP Harmandeep Singh Hans said.Deputy Superintendent of Police (City-1) Prithvi Singh Chahal, while addressing the media, said that under the directions of the SSP, Mohali Police launched a special drive to clamp down on thefts and snatching incidents in the city. As part of this initiative, Police Station Phase-1 cracked the high-profile chilli powder robbery case within days of its occurrence.The incident took place when Jamuna Devi was returning home after helping her niece, Anjala Sarma, close their confectionery shop in Kamla Market. While they were walking near the Mechanic Market area in village Mohali, three unidentified men on a motorcycle attacked them. One of them threw chilli powder in Anjala’s eyes, after which they snatched the cash bag and fled.Based on Jamuna Devi’s complaint, Police Station Phase-1 initially registered a case under Section 304 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) against unknown persons. The case caused widespread fear among residents, especially women.Inspector Sukhbir Singh, SHO of Police Station Phase-1, led the team that traced and arrested the accused. During interrogation, the trio confessed to their involvement and revealed that they had initially identified the victims while travelling in an auto-rickshaw. After spotting the women walking alone, they planned and executed the snatching using a motorcycle.Police said the case has since been updated to include Sections 309(4) and 317(2) of the BNS based on further investigation. The trio are now in police custody, and further interrogation is underway to determine their involvement in other similar crimes. MSID:: 122185760 413 |

Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg confirmed that the company is no longer working on migrating its Tumblr blogging platform to WordPress, as previously announced. The exec shared the news on The Verge’s Decoder podcast, published on Monday, saying that the project is “on hold” for an indefinite period.

“What we decided is that we want to focus as much on the things that are going to be noticeable to users and that users are asking for,” he told the site. “This was more like an infrastructure thing, kind of like any big re-architecture. I still want to do it. It’s just cleaner. But right now, we’re not working on it.”

The announcement also raises questions about what this means for Tumblr’s integration with the open social web, known as the fediverse. By migrating its infrastructure to WordPress, it would have become a federated app. Mullenweg admits that was one of the arguments for making the move, but hints that it’s no longer a priority.

“…in the meantime, I think if there was a big push to implement fediverse, we would just do it on the Tumblr code base,” he said.

Mullenweg also reiterated that Tumblr is not profitable, and is sustained from the profits of other Automattic products. Still, he said he believed in Tumblr’s future and plans to give it the runway it needs to figure things out.

SIM swapping is a popular type of fraud in which someone transfers your mobile number to a SIM in their own device. By intercepting any messages or phone calls sent to you, they’re able to access your two-factor authentication codes and other sensitive information. Now, AT&T is offering customers a way to combat this kind of crime.

Available starting today, Wireless Account Lock is an option for AT&T subscribers with postpaid or prepaid wireless accounts. Simply by turning on a switch in the myAT&T app, you can enable Account Lock to prevent unauthorized changes to your account and phone lines.

Also: Your Android phone is getting a big security upgrade for free – here’s what’s new

Wireless Account Lock prevents a variety of actions, including:

• Upgrading your device to a new one
• Changing a SIM card or eSIM
• Changing a phone number
• Transferring a phone number to a different device
• Changing your billing information
• Changing the authorized users for your account

Certain actions are still allowed with Wireless Account Lock turned on. These include:

• Making a payment
• Setting up payment arrangements
• Enrolling in AutoPay
• Making changes to your plans and add-ons
• Suspending your service
• Unlocking a device
• Managing NumberSync
• Changing your E911 address
• Changing your voicemail password

You can apply Wireless Account Lock to any device on your postpaid or prepaid mobile account with AT&T, including smartphones, tablets, smartwatches, hotspots, and laptops. You need to be the account owner or have primary or secondary access to the account to do this.

1. To get started, download the myAT&T app for iOS or Android if you don’t already have it.
2. Sign in to the app and select the number that you want to lock.
3. Tap Continue, select Profile & Settings, and then tap Account Info & Preferences.
4. Under Wireless Account Lock, turn on the switch to enable it. Here, you can also disable it when you want to make any otherwise blocked changes to your account.
5. In response, AT&T will send a confirmation email to your email address and a text to your mobile device.

Also: 7 ways to lock down your phone’s security – before it’s too late

Wireless Account Lock isn’t just for consumers. AT&T offers the same feature for business accounts. Like the consumer version, the business variant will prevent device upgrades, SIM or eSIM changes, number transfers, and other actions.

To enable or disable Account Lock in this instance, sign in to your AT&T business account. Select Account lock settings and turn on Account lock. Here, you’re also able to include or exclude specific features when Account Lock is enabled.

AT&T now joins the other two major US mobile carriers in trying to help customers combat SIM swapping attacks.

T-Mobile offers a SIM Protection feature for both postpaid and prepaid accounts. Using the T-Mobile website or the T-Life app for iOS or Android, you’re able to flip the switch to enable this protection. 

Also: How I upgraded my home Wi-Fi with a VPN-ready router (and why it makes such a big difference)

Verizon’s SIM Protection and Number Lock features are also accessible to postpaid and prepaid subscribers. Instructions and controls for enabling both options are available on the My Verizon website and the My Verizon app.

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When Linus Torvalds posted his now-legendary 1991 announcement about a “hobby” operating system kernel, no one would have predicted that Linux would become the backbone of modern computing. In a speech at the Open-Source Summit, North America, Jonathan Corbet, executive editor of LWN and longtime kernel developer, recounted the Linux kernel’s remarkable journey, highlighting its disruptive beginnings, its unique development model, and the challenges that have shaped its evolution.

Linux just keeps growing

Today, as Corbet said, “We are up to just over 40 million lines of code at this point. It’s fair to say that, indeed, Linux has become big and professional.” The first thing he noted was that, no matter what else was happening in the world, Linux had just kept growing.

Also: 7 things every Linux beginner should know – before downloading their first distro

In a graph of Linux kernel growth, Corbet observed, “If you look at this line, it’s really monotonically upward. It’s always increasing. We’re always building on the kernel, despite the fact that a lot of things were happening in the world over these three decades. We had the dotcom crash in 2000. We had the SCO lawsuit. In 2008, there was the global economic crisis. And of course, we had the COVID pandemic. But you don’t really see an effect on the development speed of Linux from any of these events. We have somehow managed to sustain everything we can do despite all the stuff that has happened in the world.”

How has Linux managed this? 

Corbet believed that what has set Linux apart is its radical openness. 

Unlike the centralized, exclusive development of other Unix-like systems, now largely forgotten, Linux welcomed contributions from anyone willing to submit code. This openness, combined with the GNU General Public License (GPL) 2.0, fostered a unified codebase and prevented fragmentation. “Anybody could be a part of it,” Corbet emphasized, “and as a result, Linux developed a community that you didn’t find in other open projects at that time.” You really won’t find it anywhere else, even now.

Also: This city is dumping Microsoft Office and Windows for OnlyOffice and Linux – here’s why

Of course, for years, no one took Linux seriously. It was dismissed as a toy in an era when Unix fragmentation and the rise of Windows NT dominated industry thinking. The prevailing wisdom held that only large corporations could build operating system kernels, leaving little attention for a community-driven initiative. Yet, as Corbet noted, Linux exemplified Clayton Christensen’s concept of disruptive innovation: a technology dismissed as inferior that quietly matures until it overtakes established players.

Another factor, Corbet explained, was that in the early 1990s, the BSD Unix systems were much more mature than Linux; they were capable of doing more and were more usable. Still, their permissive BSD license model led to a whole bunch of forks. None of them gained the critical mass in terms of either the development community or adoption to dominate Linux. 

Instead, the Linux kernel stayed one thing. It stayed together, in part because its GPLv2 copyright policy meant everybody retains their copyright under the same license. It means that nobody owns Linux, or everybody owns Linux. It is not a company project. It’s not something somebody can pull out from under you, and that makes a huge difference.

Also: Want to ditch Windows? This Linux distro makes that transition easy

Linux was also successful, Corbet believes, because “Linus had no pride. He threw open the door to everybody, and anybody who could send him a patch could participate. And so we’d take it; we’d throw away a lot of stuff. It didn’t work. It seemed wasteful in ways, but there were no boundaries. Anybody could be a part of it. It was a lot more fun, and it was a lot more open.”

You can see how that approach was successful, he added, after the late 1990s when “Linux caught the attention of industry giants. IBM’s 2001 billion-dollar investment marked a turning point, shifting perceptions from skepticism to serious engagement. The dot-com boom fueled a Linux bubble, with startups and venture capital flooding the ecosystem. Yet, when the bubble burst, kernel development continued unabated, underscoring Linux’s independence from any single corporate patron.”

Corbet continued, “Much of the commercial structure around Linux self-destructed over the course of about a month in 2000, but development of the Linux kernel did not slow down. Nothing really changed there, which was perhaps the first object lesson that Linux is truly independent of its corporate patrons.”

Linux’s modular approach

Another reason Linux has been successful is its modular approach. By focusing solely on the kernel while leaving user-space utilities and distributions to others, it accelerated innovation and allowed parallel experimentation. Corbet cited the emergence of Beowulf clusters in the late 1990s. By stringing together commodity PCs running Linux to create supercomputers, Linux began its rise as the only supercomputer operating system and the dominant operating system of today’s data centers and clouds.

Also: I put Linux on this 8-inch mini laptop, and unlocked a new way of computing

Corbet remembered, “I worked in a supercomputing center when this was happening, and I went to them and I said, ‘Hey, we should really be looking at this.’ And they said, “No, no, we have these Crays over here, and that’s all that we’re ever going to need.” That really didn’t age very well. Now, people don’t really talk about Beowulf clusters anymore, for a simple reason. We just call them data centers.”

All of this development was happening over e-mail lists. Today, almost all of Linux’s key development occurs over the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML). Sometimes old technology is the best technology.

Beginning with the first Linux Kernel Summit in San Jose, California, on March 30 to March 31, 2001, developers began meeting face-to-face. That was when it became clear that while mailing lists are invaluable, personal connections are still vital. However, Corbet worries that current US visa policies will hamper such gatherings going forward.

A major shift

Corbet then turned his attention to the technical side of the Linux kernel. The Linux kernel’s development model underwent a major shift. “At the 2004 Kernel Summit. We adopted what was called, what we called the new kernel development model. Now it’s just the kernel development model where the first two weeks of every development cycle are what’s called the merge window, where all the new code, new features go in, then for the following weeks we fix the problems. This works well enough at this point that every release takes nine or 10 weeks in total. You can set your clock by the last 15 years; there have been exactly two exceptions.”

Also: The Linux 6.15 kernel arrives – and it’s big a victory for Rust fans

As Linux scaled, its development process faced bottlenecks. The biggest was the reliance on Torvalds to manually apply every patch. The adoption of BitKeeper, a proprietary source code management tool, temporarily alleviated these issues but introduced new dependencies.

Then, in April 2005, things went badly wrong. The “BitKeeper license was abruptly withdrawn, and overnight, we found ourselves without the software tool on which we had built the entire development process. So this brought everything to a halt. We were all kind of sitting there looking at each other, saying, ‘Now what?’ So Torvalds responded by creating Git in 10 days. Today this free and open source version control manager has revolutionized not only Linux development but software collaboration worldwide.

Also: I’ve used virtually every Linux distro, but this one has a fresh perspective

This approach, now used by many projects, enables rapid innovation without sacrificing reliability. Each year, 4,000 to 5,000 developers contribute over 80,000 commits, supported by a diverse array of companies, none of which dominate the project.

Corbet also highlighted the importance of embracing new technologies, such as the Rust programming language, to ensure the kernel’s long-term health and attract new contributors. “If you come back in five or ten years,” he predicted, “you’re going to see a very different looking kernel source base, and I think that’s really important for our sustainability.”

Get the morning’s top stories in your inbox each day with our Tech Today newsletter.

Microsoft Intune administrators may face a few days of stress after Redmond acknowledged a problem with security baseline customizations.

The problem? Those customizations might not be saved during the update process, and the current workaround is to manually reapply customizations after updating baseline policies.

Microsoft Intune is a cloud-based endpoint management service that allows organizations to manage fleets of devices, including configuration and updates. Many admins use Intune for patch and policy management as an alternative to on-premises tools like Windows Server Update Services (WSUS), which was noted as being “no longer in development” with the release of Windows Server 2025.

The biz also has Microsoft Configuration Manager, which has its roots in the venerable Systems Management Server of the 1990s and is an on-premises product to manage a wide variety of products, including servers. The two are sometimes used together.

A security baseline in Intune is a template consisting of configuration settings. Microsoft generally issues a default baseline with recommended values, and an administrator can then tweak those values (or not) depending on the needs of their organization. However, those values not being maintained during the update process is less than ideal, particularly if there are a lot of customizations.

The new problem occurs if an administrator customizes the security baseline, and “affects customers who are updating their baseline version to a more recent version. For example, updating the security baseline from version 23H2 to version 24H2.” Microsoft, it appears, knows best, and the changes will be discarded in favor of the Microsoft-recommended defaults. This is fine for administrators who are happy to blithely accept whatever Microsoft sets as a default, but it is not so good for organizations that want to make their own tweaks.

The current workaround is also a pain – “While we work on the fix,” said the Redmond gang, “we recommend that admins manually reapply their customizations after updating their baseline policies.”

Reports of administrators rolling their eyes so hard that the Earth has shifted slightly on its axis are likely exaggerated. ®

The nights surrounding the first quarter moon phase on June 2 present a good opportunity to spot colossal ‘X’ and ‘V’ features emblazoned on the lunar surface.

This month’s first quarter phase occurs at 11:41 p.m. EDT on June 2 (0341 GMT on June 3), at which time the right side of the half-lit lunar disk will be illuminated by direct sunlight from the perspective of viewers in the northern hemisphere on Earth.