Roblox has been banned in Türkiye following a decision made by the government yesterday.

As reported by our sister site Eurogamer, the country's Minister of Justice Yılmaz Tunç announced on social media that the platform had been banned "due to content that could lead to the exploitation of children."

In response, Roblox said: "We respect the laws and regulations in countries where we operate and share local lawmakers' commitment to children. We look forward to working together to ensure Roblox is back online in Türkiye as soon as possible."

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Roblox has been banned in Turkey, with a government agency citing concerns over "child exploitation."

The decision to ban all access to the game and platform was taken by the Turkish Information and Communication Technologies Authority (BTK), who also blocked access to Instagram in the country earlier this week.

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Roblox has been banned in Turkey, with a government agency citing concerns over "child exploitation."

The decision to ban all access to the game and platform was taken by the Turkish Information and Communication Technologies Authority (BTK), who also blocked access to Instagram in the country earlier this week.

Read more

I'm not sure how funny Buster Keaton movies are these days - I assume there are moments that still work as pure gags. But these films of his remain wonderful, because Keaton was kind of the Tom Cruise of his age - or rather Cruise, who namechecks Keaton often in interviews - is the closest thing we have to the original. Keaton's gags were almost always stunts, dangerous, brilliant, clearly visual stunts that moved the action forward while giving audiences something to gasp at. There's nothing on the surface to make me think of the World of Goo games, and yet I think of Keaton constantly when I play.

Keaton's world moves. I think that's it. Its physics are dependable - and predictable, which is important for gags and for games - but the ground itself cannot be trusted. If Keaton's sat on a steamboat's wheel and he thinks he's safe, we know that wheel's going to start turning. If he's climbing a ladder, we know that the ladder itself will start sinking into the mud. What then? Keaton has to vamp - to make the moment work. He has to over-engineer things to create a sense of new stability. That's where you get the gag, where you get the fun.

This is everywhere in World of Goo. At the heart of the first game, which helped usher in the Indie era, and at the heart of the second, which has just arrived, bringing with it both new ideas and a lot of fond memories - at the heart of both you're dealing with treacherous foundations. These games are bridge builders at their simplest. (Granted, they never stay simple for very long.) You have a pile of black goo lumps, and you can extend the lumps outwards to create rudimentary frames. The goal for each level is a pipe you have to reach, which will suck in any remaining goo balls. So build upwards in a tower to a pipe that's lurking above you! Build outward as a bridge across a nasty gap.

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The Outlast Trials isn't your usual horror game; rather it offers an extreme sensory deprivation chamber full of human darkness for players to endure. Three minutes in, and I felt as if I'd stepped straight into a nightmare: naked bodies sprawling everywhere were hidden by sheer horror... Sexual imagery? Check. Every form of abuse? Yep! These developers didn't hold back in throwing every insult at us to see which would stick - trust me; many do! 

An Unpredictable Reality 

It's a strange game. But here is the thing: it works. This barrage of depravity doesn't feel empty; rather it serves a greater purpose: creating an unpredictable reality where nothing makes any sense and paranoia reigns supreme. This is the way it goes and you should buy The Outlast Trials. Where no matter who we trust or what's real around the next corner it could lead to something truly horrific originating in twisted scientific experiments conducted by Murkoff Corporation during Cold War times - we were lab rats used as part of their experiments!

Nightmare Experiments

Paranoia runs deep; you never know who or what horror could spring forth next from the experiments by Murkoff Corporation during Cold War times with whom nobody trusted and never knowing who could trust or what could come out of scientific nightmare experiments in mind of Murkoff Corporation during that era Cold War times we saw some truly horrific things and monstrosities produced within, from scientific nightmare abound.

The First-Person Perspective

Its true charm lies in the first-person perspective: everything is seen through your character's terrified eyes as every creak of floorboards or flicker of fluorescent lighting could spell disaster for them. There's no Ramboing your way out here; survival relies upon cunning, resourcefulness, and remaining rational as soon as possible. It makes you feel the pain and scare... it feels personal. If you buy PS5 horror games, The Outlast Trials is there, at the top, with the best! Desperation can be palpable as other test subjects cling desperately to any hope Murkoff offers, even if that means participating in horrific "therapies". It's an unnerving commentary on human resilience - or lack thereof.

A Brutal Game for Horror Fants

The Outlast Trials may not be for everyone; its brutal, disturbing gameplay may leave you questioning both your own sanity and that of your character. But for horror enthusiasts looking for an immersive horror experience that forces them to confront humanity's darker forces head-on then this should definitely be played; just ensure your schedule allows enough playback time, or have someone on speed dial for assistance should something arise that may need therapy afterward.

A Haunting Atmosphere

Atmospheres of desperation reeks with fear, yet are haunted with longing. Acts so repugnant to our humanity make one part of ourselves recoil in horror while another part can't tear itself away, riveted to what's unfolding horrors around them. We stand witness to acts so revolting they bring tears of horror down on ourselves yet we still cannot look away; some things simply cannot be turned off our attention!

Conclusion

The Outlast Trials presents players with an unparalleled cinematic horror experience as they plunge headlong into their personal darkness, forcing them to explore every twisted corridor of human psychology and confront its shadowy depths head-on. There is no way fans of survival horror games will skip this game, even those who usually buy cheap PS5 games will have to consider playing it. A visceral encounter beyond mere entertainment; its unforgettable impact will remain with all brave enough to experience its dark depths.

Roblox CFO Michael Guthrie is stepping down.

Guthrie – who has worked at Roblox since 2018 and played a key role in the company's stock market listing in 2021 – will stay on until a replacement is selected, after which he'll depart to spend more time on his personal interests.

For the three months ended June 30, 2024:

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Roblox reported over 13,000 incidents of child exploitation to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in 2023, with around 24 predators arrested for grooming and abusing victims on the hugely popular social game platform in the US.

That's up from 3,000 the year before.

Roblox serves around 77 million players every day, 40% of which are under the age of 13. And as it's available on PlayStation, PC, and a host of mobile devices, it's extraordinarily accessible for children, too.

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Following yesterday's bombshell news that Valve could be developing a new Half-Life game, Valve expert Tyler McVicker has stepped forward to say he too believes it's true.

Codenamed "HLX", McVicker asserts the new game "seems to be a fully-fledged non-VR Half-Life game, something that seems too good to be true".

I'll go into some of the details after the video embedded below, but please be mindful there may be spoilers for this new game.

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Update 5th August, 2024: Natasha Chandel's website is currently down after it exceeded the bandwidth limit.

Just before the website went down, it had been updated, and all references to Valve's "Project White Sands" had been scrubbed.

Original story follows.

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As Hamlet requested of Horatio, it is time to once again absent myself from felicity awhile, and in this harsh world draw my breath in pain to tell you that the Half-Life 3 speculators are at it again. Over the weekend, the discovery of a mystery Valve project called "White Sands" on a voice actor's portfolio has set tongues and fingers wagging about potential Half-Life news in the offing.

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As Hamlet requested of Horatio, it is time to once again absent myself from felicity awhile, and in this harsh world draw my breath in pain to tell you that the Half-Life 3 speculators are at it again. Over the weekend, the discovery of a mystery Valve project called "White Sands" on a voice actor's portfolio has set tongues and fingers wagging about potential Half-Life news in the offing.

Read more

There’s growing evidence, via datamining and voice actor leaks, that Valve is working on a brand new, yet-to-be-announced Half-Life video game. And before you go running to tell folks that, finally, Half-Life 3 is confirmed, keep in mind that we don’t know if that’s true.

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The first World Of Goo was a cheerful parade of goopy engineering with a sense of never-ending novelty (well, never-ending for about four hours). Every level would introduce a new goo type or a twist on the basic bridge-building puzzle that challenged you to get a gaggle of gurgling balls to the nearest pipe. World Of Goo 2 pursues that sense of novelty with just as much twitchy eagerness as its predecessor, throwing new toys and goos at the player in an effort to keep you on your sludge-coated toes. That pursuit doesn't always result in pleasing new levels, though. There is a "hit and miss" feeling to things this time around. But those hits are hits. For anyone who has spent the last 16 years yearning for more sticky structure-building: I hope you like comically unpredictable fluids.

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It's not often that a trailer release alone is enough to justify a post around here, but World Of Goo 2 ought to be bigger on everyone's radar. A sequel to one of the best games ever made ought to be cause for an international holiday. It's being released next Friday, on August 2nd, and the new trailer below will gloop your tower with glimpses fo the puzzling tower-building to be found therein.

Read more

The first World Of Goo was a cheerful parade of goopy engineering with a sense of never-ending novelty (well, never-ending for about four hours). Every level would introduce a new goo type or a twist on the basic bridge-building puzzle that challenged you to get a gaggle of gurgling balls to the nearest pipe. World Of Goo 2 pursues that sense of novelty with just as much twitchy eagerness as its predecessor, throwing new toys and goos at the player in an effort to keep you on your sludge-coated toes. That pursuit doesn't always result in pleasing new levels, though. There is a "hit and miss" feeling to things this time around. But those hits are hits. For anyone who has spent the last 16 years yearning for more sticky structure-building: I hope you like comically unpredictable fluids.

Read more

It's not often that a trailer release alone is enough to justify a post around here, but World Of Goo 2 ought to be bigger on everyone's radar. A sequel to one of the best games ever made ought to be cause for an international holiday. It's being released next Friday, on August 2nd, and the new trailer below will gloop your tower with glimpses fo the puzzling tower-building to be found therein.

Read more

BAE Systems and GlobalFoundries are teaming up to strengthen the supply of chips for national security programs, aligning technology roadmaps and collaborating on innovation and manufacturing. Focus areas include advanced packaging, GaN-on-silicon chips, silicon photonics, and advanced technology process development.

Onsemi plans to build a $2 billion silicon carbide production plant in the Czech Republic. The site would produce smart power semiconductors for electric vehicles, renewable energy technology, and data centers.

The global chip manufacturing industry is projected to boost capacity by 6% in 2024 and 7% in 2025, reaching 33.7 million 8-inch (200mm) wafers per month, according to SEMI‘s latest World Fab Forecast report. Leading-edge capacity for 5nm nodes and below is expected to grow by 13% in 2024, driven by AI demand for data center applications. Additionally, Intel, Samsung, and TSMC will begin producing 2nm chips using gate-all-around (GAA) FETs next year, boosting leading-edge capacity by 17% in 2025.

At the IEEE Symposium on VLSI Technology & Circuits, imec introduced:

• Functional CMOS-based CFETs with stacked bottom and top source/drain contacts.
• CMOS-based 56Gb/s zero-IF D-band beamforming transmitters to support next-gen short-range, high-speed wireless services at frequencies above 100GHz.
• ADCs for base stations and handsets, a key step toward scalable, high-performance beyond-5G solutions, such as cloud-based AI and extended reality apps.

Quick links to more news:

Global
In-Depth
Market Reports
Education and Training
Security
Product News
Research
Events and Further Reading

Global

Wolfspeed postponed plans to construct a $3 billion chip plant in Germany, underscoring the EU‘s challenges in boosting semiconductor production, reports Reuters. The North Carolina-based company cited reduced capital spending due to a weakened EV market, saying it now aims to start construction in mid-2025, two years later than 0riginally planned.

Micron is building a pilot production line for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) in the U.S., and considering HBM production in Malaysia to meet growing AI demand, according to a Nikkei report. The company is expanding HBM R&D facilities in Boise, Idaho, and eyeing production capacity in Malaysia, while also enhancing its largest HBM facility in Taichung, Taiwan.

Kioxia restored its Yokkaichi and Kitakami plants in Japan to full capacity, ending production cuts as the memory market recovers, according to Nikkei. The company, which is focusing on NAND flash production, has secured new bank credit support, including refinancing a ¥540 billion loan and establishing a ¥210 billion credit line. Kioxia had reduced output by more than 30% in October 2022 due to weak smartphone demand.

Europe’s NATO Innovation Fund announced its first direct investments, which includes semiconductor materials. Twenty-three NATO allies co-invested in this over $1B fund devoted to address critical defense and security challenges.

The second meeting of the U.S.–India Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology (iCET) was held in New Delhi, with various funding and initiatives announced to support semiconductor technology, next-gen telecommunications, connected and autonomous vehicles, ML, and more.

Amazon announced investments of €10 billion in Germany to drive innovation and support the expansion of its logistics network and cloud infrastructure.

Quantum Machines opened the Israeli Quantum Computing Center (IQCC) research facility, backed by the Israel Innovation Authority and located at Tel Aviv University. Also, Israel-based Classiq is collaborating with NVIDIA and BMW, using quantum computing to find the optimal automotive architecture of electrical and mechanical systems.

Global data center vacancy rates are at historic lows, and power availability is becoming less available, according to a Siemens report featured on Broadband Breakfast. The company called for an influx of financing to find new ways to optimize data center technology and sustainability.

In-Depth

Semiconductor Engineering published its Manufacturing, Packaging & Materials newsletter this week, featuring these top stories:

• Single Vs. Multi-Patterning Advancements For EUV
• Precise Control Of Copper Plating And CMP
• Ruthenium Interconnects On Tap
• Opportunities Grow For GPU Acceleration

More reporting this week:

• IC Industry’s Growing Role In Sustainability
• What’s Missing In Test

Market Reports

Renesas completed its acquisition of Transphorm and will immediately start offering GaN-based power products and reference designs to meet the demand for wide-bandgap (WBG) chips.

Revenues for the top five wafer fab equipment (WFE) companies fell 9% YoY in Q1 2024, according to Counterpoint. This was offset partially by increased demand for NAND and DRAM, which increased 33% YoY, and strong growth in sales to China, which were up 116% YoY.

The SiC power devices industry saw robust growth in 2023, primarily driven by the BEV market, according to TrendForce. The top five suppliers, led by ST with a 32.6% market share and onsemi in second place, accounted for 91.9% of total revenue. However, the anticipated slowdown in BEV sales and weakening industrial demand are expected to significantly decelerate revenue growth in 2024. 

About 30% of vehicles produced globally will have E/E architectures with zonal controllers by 2032, according to McKinsey & Co. The market for automotive micro-components and logic semiconductors is predicted to reach $60 billion in 2032, and the overall automotive semiconductor market is expected to grow from $60 billion to $140 billion in the same period, at a 10% CAGR.

The automotive processor market generated US$20 billion in revenue in 2023, according to Yole. US$7.8 billion was from APUs and FPGAs and $12.2 billion was from MCUs. The ADAS and infotainment processors market was worth US$7.8 billion in 2023 and is predicted to grow to $16.4 billion by 2029 at a 13% CAGR. The market for ADAS sensing is expected to grow at a 7% CAGR.

Security

The CHERI Alliance was established to drive adoption of memory safety and scalable software compartmentalization via the security technology CHERI, or Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions. Founding members include Capabilities Limited, Codasip, the FreeBSD Foundation, lowRISC, SCI Semiconductor, and the University of Cambridge.

In security research:

• Japan and China researchers explored a NAND-XOR ring oscillator structure to design an entropy source architecture for a true random number generator (TRNG).
• University of Toronto and Carleton University researchers presented a survey examining how hardware is applied to achieve security and how reported attacks have exploited certain defects in hardware.
• University of North Texas and Texas Woman’s University researchers explored the potential of hardware security primitive Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF) for mitigation of visual deepfakes.
• Villanova University researchers proposed the Boolean DERIVativE attack, which generalizes Boolean domain leakage.

Post-quantum cryptography firm PQShield raised $37 million in Series B funding.

Former OpenAI executive, Ilya Sutskever, who quit over safety concerns, launched Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI).

EU industry groups warned the European Commission that its proposed cybersecurity certification scheme (EUCS) for cloud services should not discriminate against Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, reported Reuters.

Cyber Europe tested EU cyber preparedness in the energy sector by simulating a series of large-scale cyber incidents in an exercise organized by the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA).

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued a number of alerts/advisories.

Education and Training

New York non-profit NY CREATES and South Korea’s National Nano Fab Center partnered to develop a hub for joint research, aligned technology services, testbed support, and an engineer exchange program to bolster chips-centered R&D, workforce development, and each nation’s high-tech ecosystem.

New York and the Netherlands agreed on a partnership to promote sustainability within the semiconductor industry, enhance workforce development, and boost semiconductor R&D.

Rapidus is set to send 200 engineers to AI chip developer Tenstorrent in the U.S. for training over the next five years, reports Nikkei. This initiative, led by Japan’s Leading-edge Semiconductor Technology Center (LSTC), aims to bolster Japan’s AI chip industry.

Product News

UMC announced its 22nm embedded high voltage (eHV) technology platform for premium smartphone and mobile device displays. The 22eHV platform reduces core device power consumption by up to 30% compared to previous 28nm processes. Die area is reduced by 10% with the industry’s smallest SRAM bit cells.​

Alphawave Semi announced a new 9.2 Gbps HBM3E sub-system silicon platform capable of 1.2 terabytes per second. Based on the HBM3E IP, the sub-system is aimed at addressing the demand for ultra-high-speed connectivity in high-performance compute applications.

Movellus introduced the Aeonic Power product family for on-die voltage regulation, targeting the challenging area of power delivery.

Cadence partnered with Semiwise and sureCore to develop new cryogenic CMOS circuits with possible quantum computing applications. The circuits are based on modified transistors found in the Cadence Spectre Simulation Platform and are capable of processing analog, mixed-signal, and digital circuit simulation and verification at cryogenic temperatures.

Renesas launched R-Car Open Access (RoX), an integrated development platform for software-defined vehicles (SDVs), designed for Renesas R-Car SoCs and MCUs with tools for deployment of AI applications, reducing complexity and saving time and money for car OEMs and Tier 1s.

Infineon released industry-first radiation-hardened 1 and 2 Mb parallel interface ferroelectric-RAM (F-RAM) nonvolatile memory devices, with up to 120 years of data retention at 85-degree Celsius, along with random access and full memory write at bus speeds. Plus, a CoolGaN Transistor 700 V G4 product family for efficient power conversion up to 700 V, ideal for consumer chargers and notebook adapters, data center power supplies, renewable energy inverters, and more.

Ansys adopted NVIDIA’s Omniverse application programming interfaces for its multi-die chip designers. Those APIs will be used for 5G/6G, IoT, AI/ML, cloud computing, and autonomous vehicle applications. The company also announced ConceptEV, an SaaS solution for automotive concept design for EVs.

Fig. 1: Field visualization of 3D-IC with Omniverse. Source: Ansys

QP Technologies announced a new dicing saw for its manufacturing line that can process a full cassette of 300mm wafers 7% faster than existing tools, improving throughput and productivity.

NXP introduced its SAF9xxx of audio DSPs to support the demand for AI-based audio in software-defined vehicles (SDVs) by using Cadence’s Tensilica HiFi 5 DSPs combined with dedicated neural-network engines and hardware-based accelerators.

Avionyx, a provider of software lifecycle engineering in the aerospace and safety-critical systems sector, partnered with Siemens and will leverage its Polarion application lifecycle management (ALM) tool. Also, Dovetail Electric Aviation adopted Siemens Xcelerator to support sustainable aviation.

Research

Researchers from imec and KU Leuven released a +70 page paper “Selecting Alternative Metals for Advanced Interconnects,” addressing interconnect resistance and reliability.

A comprehensive review article — “Future of plasma etching for microelectronics: Challenges and opportunities” — was created by a team of experts from the University of Maryland, Lam Research, IBM, Intel, and many others.

Researchers from the Institut Polytechnique de Paris’s Laboratory of Condensed Matter for Physics developed an approach to investigate defects in semiconductors. The team “determined the spin-dependent electronic structure linked to defects in the arrangement of semiconductor atoms,” the first time this structure has been measured, according to a release.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory-led researchers developed a small enclosed chamber that can hold all the components of an electrochemical reaction, which can be paired with transmission electron microscopy (TEM) to generate precise views of a reaction at atomic scale, and can be frozen to stop the reaction at specific time points. They used the technique to study a copper catalyst.

The Federal Drug Administration (FDA) approved a clinical trial to test a device with 1,024 nanoscale sensors that records brain activity during surgery, developed by engineers at the University of California San Diego (UC San Diego).

Events and Further Reading

Find upcoming chip industry events here, including:

Upcoming webinars are here.

Semiconductor Engineering’s latest newsletters:

Automotive, Security and Pervasive Computing
Systems and Design
Low Power-High Performance
Test, Measurement and Analytics
Manufacturing, Packaging and Materials

The post Chip Industry Week In Review appeared first on Semiconductor Engineering.

Chaos and comedy. Death and rebirth. Luck and, uh, running out of luck. A good roguelike doesn't treat the player like other games do. Roguelikes won't guide you helpfully along a path, or let you cinematically snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. They're more likely to dangle you deep between the jaws of defeat and fumble the rope until you go sliding down defeat's hungry gullet. This is their beauty, and it's a part of why we keep coming back for another go. Next time everything will go right. Next time you'll find the right pair of poison-proof loafers, the perfect co-pilot for your spaceship, a stash of stronger, better ropes. Next time.

Here's our list of the 19 best roguelikes on PC you can play in 2024.

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Chaos and comedy. Death and rebirth. Luck and, uh, running out of luck. A good roguelike doesn't treat the player like other games do. Roguelikes won't guide you helpfully along a path, or let you cinematically snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. They're more likely to dangle you deep between the jaws of defeat and fumble the rope until you go sliding down defeat's hungry gullet. This is their beauty, and it's a part of why we keep coming back for another go. Next time everything will go right. Next time you'll find the right pair of poison-proof loafers, the perfect co-pilot for your spaceship, a stash of stronger, better ropes. Next time.

Here's our list of the 19 best roguelikes on PC you can play in 2024.

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Flashy action-RPG Stellar Blade looks like it could be the next PlayStation 5 exclusive to find its way over to PC, as developers Shift Up say they’re pondering a PC release. They’re also thinking about a sequel - probably not much of a surprise given the first game has sold well on just the one platform, by all accounts - while working on a new game that should also be headed to PC, codenamed Project Witches.

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Today I learned Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert is working on a new game, which he describes as "Classic Zelda meets Diablo meets Thimbleweed Park". Well, hello there!

Work on this project actually started several months ago, but it only came to my attention this afternoon thanks to TimeExtension. I have since done more browsing, and come across some posts on Terrible Toybox, as well as Gilbert's own Mastodon page.

Now, admittedly there still isn't a huge amount of information on Gilbert's upcoming project at this time. The game doesn't even have a proper name yet, and rather has been labelled as Game Name TBD on Terrible Toybox's website. Meanwhile, Gilbert has been using the hashtag #rpgtbd to tag his social media posts.

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Sundays are for wheeling my old gamer chair to the curb, before flopping back in my new ergonomic office chair with the same awful posture and whining, "Why doesn't it work?! Who knew that furniture named things like Titan, Pro and Conquer aren't the most conducive to lumbar support?" Before I go, "Aaaaaaahhhhhhh" so loudly I give the local cats tiny heart attacks, let's read this week’s best writing about games (and game related things!)

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Genuinely legendary game designer Ron Gilbert – whose works include the classic adventure game Monkey Island, the RTS Total Annihilation (as producer), and the term “cutscenes” – is making a new game.

The Terrible Toybox website describes it as “Classic Zelda meets Diablo meets Thimbleweed Park”, and one of the other people working on it is Elissa Black, co-designer and writer of the wonderful Objects In Space… who is also, I’ve just learned from her personal website, working on a retro 90s style turn-based spaceship command game influenced by the 1971 mainframe adaptation of Star Trek. Argh, so many good things in one article.

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Streaming giant Netflix has teamed up with Roblox to launch its own "digital theme park" on the gaming platform.

It's called Nextworld, and essentially acts as a hub where players can access areas, characters and games based on Netflix properties, such as Stranger Things (header image above) and One Piece (see image below).

Mini games include the likes of Is It Cake?, which is where players have to - yes - guess whether objects shown in the game are cake or not. It also has a Cobra Kai Miyagi-Do Balancing Board mini game.

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Recently, because I hate myself, I was browsing Twitter (I’m not calling it X) and I stumbled across an incredible conceptual video from an artist named DEVINK that shows what they imagine a potential Fortnite X Fallout crossover could look like.

This crossover seems like a bit of a no-brainer to me and I wouldn't be surprised if something like this happened in the future, but what about Fallout crossovers from the past? Well that's what I'm exploring in today's video (above) so please do give it a click and see if you remember any of the seven forgotten Fallout crossovers that feature within.

These crossovers range from an excellent and highly detailed Minecraft mash-up and some fairly fancy, but almost definitely forgotten cosmetics for Brink, through to what can only be described as one of the most haunting pieces of headwear for the Xbox 360 Avatars that I ever did see.

Read more

Streaming giant Netflix has teamed up with Roblox to launch its own "digital theme park" on the gaming platform.

It's called Nextworld, and essentially acts as a hub where players can access areas, characters and games based on Netflix properties, such as Stranger Things (header image above) and One Piece (see image below).

Mini games include the likes of Is It Cake?, which is where players have to - yes - guess whether objects shown in the game are cake or not. It also has a Cobra Kai Miyagi-Do Balancing Board mini game.

Read more

Recently, because I hate myself, I was browsing Twitter (I’m not calling it X) and I stumbled across an incredible conceptual video from an artist named DEVINK that shows what they imagine a potential Fortnite X Fallout crossover could look like.

This crossover seems like a bit of a no-brainer to me and I wouldn't be surprised if something like this happened in the future, but what about Fallout crossovers from the past? Well that's what I'm exploring in today's video (above) so please do give it a click and see if you remember any of the seven forgotten Fallout crossovers that feature within.

These crossovers range from an excellent and highly detailed Minecraft mash-up and some fairly fancy, but almost definitely forgotten cosmetics for Brink, through to what can only be described as one of the most haunting pieces of headwear for the Xbox 360 Avatars that I ever did see.

Read more

Streaming giant Netflix has teamed up with Roblox to launch its own "digital theme park" on the gaming platform.

It's called Nextworld, and essentially acts as a hub where players can access areas, characters and games based on Netflix properties, such as Stranger Things (header image above) and One Piece (see image below).

Mini games include the likes of Is It Cake?, which is where players have to - yes - guess whether objects shown in the game are cake or not. It also has a Cobra Kai Miyagi-Do Balancing Board mini game.

Read more

Recently, because I hate myself, I was browsing Twitter (I’m not calling it X) and I stumbled across an incredible conceptual video from an artist named DEVINK that shows what they imagine a potential Fortnite X Fallout crossover could look like.

This crossover seems like a bit of a no-brainer to me and I wouldn't be surprised if something like this happened in the future, but what about Fallout crossovers from the past? Well that's what I'm exploring in today's video (above) so please do give it a click and see if you remember any of the seven forgotten Fallout crossovers that feature within.

These crossovers range from an excellent and highly detailed Minecraft mash-up and some fairly fancy, but almost definitely forgotten cosmetics for Brink, through to what can only be described as one of the most haunting pieces of headwear for the Xbox 360 Avatars that I ever did see.

Read more

Stellar Blade is set to get a Boss Challenge mode in future.

The news was confirmed in an interview with developer Shift Up's CEO Hyung-tae Kim by Korean outlet Nate (via Games Radar).

The game already received a New Game Plus mode in a day one patch, which adds expanded gear levels, new costumes for protagonist Eve, and new skills. Plans for further DLC are yet to be decided, but a Boss Challenge mode is being planned, the interview reads.

Read more

A technical paper titled “Enhancing Functional Safety in Automotive AMS Circuits through Unsupervised Machine Learning” was published by researchers at University of Texas at Dallas, Intel Corporation, NXP Semiconductors, and Texas Instruments.

Abstract:

“Given the widespread use of safety-critical applications in the automotive field, it is crucial to ensure the Functional Safety (FuSa) of circuits and components within automotive systems. The Analog and Mixed-Signal (AMS) circuits prevalent in these systems are more vulnerable to faults induced by parametric perturbations, noise, environmental stress, and other factors, in comparison to their digital counterparts. However, their continuous signal characteristics present an opportunity for early anomaly detection, enabling the implementation of safety mechanisms to prevent system failure. To address this need, we propose a novel framework based on unsupervised machine learning for early anomaly detection in AMS circuits. The proposed approach involves injecting anomalies at various circuit locations and individual components to create a diverse and comprehensive anomaly dataset, followed by the extraction of features from the observed circuit signals. Subsequently, we employ clustering algorithms to facilitate anomaly detection. Finally, we propose a time series framework to enhance and expedite anomaly detection performance. Our approach encompasses a systematic analysis of anomaly abstraction at multiple levels pertaining to the automotive domain, from hardware- to block-level, where anomalies are injected to create diverse fault scenarios. By monitoring the system behavior under these anomalous conditions, we capture the propagation of anomalies and their effects at different abstraction levels, thereby potentially paving the way for the implementation of reliable safety mechanisms to ensure the FuSa of automotive SoCs. Our experimental findings indicate that our approach achieves 100% anomaly detection accuracy and significantly optimizes the associated latency by 5X, underscoring the effectiveness of our devised solution.”

Find the technical paper here. Published April 2024 (preprint).

Arunachalam, Ayush, Ian Kintz, Suvadeep Banerjee, Arnab Raha, Xiankun Jin, Fei Su, Viswanathan Pillai Prasanth, Rubin A. Parekhji, Suriyaprakash Natarajan, and Kanad Basu. “Enhancing Functional Safety in Automotive AMS Circuits through Unsupervised Machine Learning.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.01632 (2024).

Related Reading
Creating IP In The Shadow Of ISO 26262
Automotive regulations can turn an interesting chip design project into a complex and often frustrating checklist exercise. In the case of ISO 26262, that includes a 12-part standard for automotive safety.
Shifting Left Using Model-Based Engineering
MBSE becomes useful for identifying potential problems earlier in the design flow, but it’s not perfect.

The post Framework For Early Anomaly Detection In AMS Components Of Automotive SoCs appeared first on Semiconductor Engineering.

Are you playing Another Crab’s Treasure and wondering which shell is the best one? They all have their utilities, so there isn’t a one-size-fits-all shell, but Another Crab’s Treasure does have one that comes pretty damn close, and you can unlock it relatively early on if you play your cards right. The valve shell,…

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Just in time for its second anniversary, indie RPG Citizen Sleeper is getting a tabletop RPG (TTRPG) actual play set in the game’s universe. A collaboration between developer Jump Over The Age and games journalist Quintin Smith (of People Make Games), the actual play will air on May 7. It’s an exciting celebration for…

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Stellar Blade will be "uncensored" in all regions, including Japan.

That's according to the game's official social media account on X, which announced the news earlier today.

"Stellar Blade offers the same uncensored version in all countries, including the Japanese version," the tweet said in both English and Japanese, appending the message with a pixellated image with red X emblazoned across it, and the words "uncensored all countries".

Read more

According to a new survey by the Game Developer Collective, 70 percent of developers have concerns about the sustainability of live service games.

For the survey, 600 developers were interviewed between February and March this year and defined live-service games as online games featuring frequent updates and in-app purchases.

As shared by Game Developer, 39 percent of participants had mild worries about live-service business models, while 31 percent were very concerned - totalling 70 percent. The remaining participants had either no concerns or were unsure.

Read more

A new technical paper titled “Combining Power and Arithmetic Optimization via Datapath Rewriting” was published by researchers at Intel Corporation and Imperial College London.

Abstract:
“Industrial datapath designers consider dynamic power consumption to be a key metric. Arithmetic circuits contribute a major component of total chip power consumption and are therefore a common target for power optimization. While arithmetic circuit area and dynamic power consumption are often correlated, there is also a tradeoff to consider, as additional gates can be added to explicitly reduce arithmetic circuit activity and hence reduce power consumption. In this work, we consider two forms of power optimization and their interaction: circuit area reduction via arithmetic optimization, and the elimination of redundant computations using both data and clock gating. By encoding both these classes of optimization as local rewrites of expressions, our tool flow can simultaneously explore them, uncovering new opportunities for power saving through arithmetic rewrites using the e-graph data structure. Since power consumption is highly dependent upon the workload performed by the circuit, our tool flow facilitates a data dependent design paradigm, where an implementation is automatically tailored to particular contexts of data activity. We develop an automated RTL to RTL optimization framework, ROVER, that takes circuit input stimuli and generates power-efficient architectures. We evaluate the effectiveness on both open-source arithmetic benchmarks and benchmarks derived from Intel production examples. The tool is able to reduce the total power consumption by up to 33.9%.”

Find the technical paper here. Published April 2024.

Samuel Coward, Theo Drane, Emiliano Morini, George Constantinides; arXiv:2404.12336v1.

The post Merging Power and Arithmetic Optimization Via Datapath Rewriting (Intel, Imperial College London) appeared first on Semiconductor Engineering.

We’ve had plenty of posts discussing all manner of behavior from the Los Angeles Police Dept. and/or the LAPD union here at Techdirt. As you might imagine if you’re a regular reader here, the majority of those posts haven’t exactly involved fawning praise for these supposed crimefighters. In fact, if you went on a reading blitz of those posts, you might even come away thinking, “You know what? Fuck the LAPD!”

Well, if you wanted to display your sentiments while you went about your day, you might go over to the Cola Corporation’s website to buy one particular shirt it had on offer there before they completely sold out.

Now, it’s not uncommon for misguided entities to issue intellectual property threat letters over t-shirts and apparel, even when it is of the sort that is obviously fair use. Given that, you might have thought it would be the Los Angeles Lakers that sent a nastygram to Cola Corp. After all, the logo in question is clearly a parody of the LA Lakers logo.

Nope!

It was the Los Angeles Police Foundation via its IMG representatives. The LAPF is something of a shadow financier of the LAPD for equipment, including all manner of tech and gear. We have no idea how an entertainment agency like IMG got in bed with these assbags, but it was IMG sending the threat letter you can see below, chock full of all kinds of claims to rights that the LAPF absolutely does not and could not have.

If you can’t see that, it’s a letter sent by Andrew Schmidt, who represents himself as the Senior Counsel to IMG Worldwide, saying:

RE: Request to Remove Infringing Material From www.thecolacorporation.com
Dear Sir/Madam:

I am writing on behalf of IMG Worldwide, LLC (“IMG”), IMG is the authorized representative of Los Angeles Police Foundation CLAPF) LAPF is one of two exclusive holders of intellectual property rights pertaining to trademarks, copyrights and other licensed indicia for (a) the Los Angeles Police Department Badge; (b) the Los Angeles Police Department Uniform; (c) the LAPD motto “To Protect and Serve”; and (d) the word “LAPD” as an acronym/abbreviation for the Los Angeles Police Department (collectively, the “LAPD IP”). Through extensive advertising, promotion and the substantial sale of a full range of licensed products embodying and pertaining to the LAPD IP, the LAPD IP has become famous throughout the world; and as such, carries immeasurable value to LAPF.

We are writing to you regarding an unauthorized use of the LAPD IP on products being sold on your website, www.thecolacorporation.com (the “Infringing Product”). The website URL and description for the Infringing Product is as follows:
https://www.thecolacorporation.com/products fack-the- lupd pos-1&sid=435934961&&variant=48461787234611 FUCK THE LAPD
For the avoidance of doubt, the aforementioned Infringing Product and the image associated therewith are in no way authorized or approved by LAPF or any of its duly authorized representatives.

This letter hereby serves as a statement that:

1. The aforementioned Infringing Product and the image associated therewith violate LAPF’s rights in the LAPD IP
2. These exclusive rights in and to the LAPD IP are being violated by the sale of the Infringing Product on your website at the URL mentioned above;
3. [Contact info omitted]
4. On information and belief, the use of the LAPD IP on the Infringing Products is not authorized by LAPF, LAPF’s authorized agents or representatives or the law.
5. Under penalty of perjury, I hereby state that the above information is accurate and I am duly authorized to act on on behalf of the rights holder of the intellectual. property at issue I hereby request that you remove or disable access the above-mentioned materials and their corresponding URL’s as they appear on your services in as expedient a manner as possible.
   

So, where to begin? For starters, note how the letter breezily asserts copyright, trademark, and “other licensed indicia” without ever going into detail as to what it thinks it actually holds the rights to? That’s an “indicia” of a legal threat that is bloviating, with nothing to back it up. If you know what rights you have, you clearly state them. This letter does not.

If it’s a copyright play that the LAPF is trying to make, it’s going to go absolutely nowhere. The use is made for the purposes of parody and political commentary. It’s clearly fair use, and there are plenty of precedents to back that up. Second, what exactly is the copyright claim here? It’s not the logo. Again, if anything, that would be the Lakers’ claim to make. The only thing possibly related to the LAPD would be those letters: LAPD. And, no, the LAPD does not get to copyright the letters LAPD.

If it’s a trademark play instead, well, that might actually work even less for the LAPF, for any number of reasons. Again, this is parody and political commentary: both First Amendment rights that trump trademarks. More importantly, in trademark you have the question of the likelihood of confusion. We’re fairly sure the LAPF doesn’t want to make the case that the public would be confused into thinking that the Los Angeles Police Foundation was an organization that is putting out a “Fuck the LAPD” t-shirt. Finally, for there to be a trademark, there has to be a use in commerce. Is the LAPF selling “Fuck the LAPD” t-shirts? Doubtful.

But that’s all sort of besides the point, because the LAPF doesn’t have the rights IMG asserted in its letter. Again, the only possible claim that the LAPF can make here is that it has ownership to the letters LAPD. And it does not. Beyond the fact that it had no “creative” input into LAPD, the LAPD is a city’s law enforcement agency and you cannot copyright or trademark such a thing. And, as we’ve discussed multiple times in the past, government agencies don’t get to claim IP on their agency names. The only restrictions they can present are on deceptive uses of logos/seals/etc.

But that is clearly not the case here. And we already have some examples from a decade ago of government agencies demanding the removal of parody logos and… it not ending very well for the government. 

So, what is actually happening here is that the LAPF/LAPD (via IMG) is pretending it has the right to screw with private citizens in ways it absolutely does not, and is using those false rights to harass those private persons with threatening behavior to intimidate them into doing what the LAPF wants. Which, if I’m being totally honest here, is certainly on brand as roughly the most police-y thing it could do in response to a simple t-shirt that is no longer even for sale.

Now, you might imagine that the Cola Corporation’s own legal team would reply to the silly threat letter outlining all of the above, crafting a careful and articulate narrative responding to all the points raised by the LAPF, and ensuring that their full legal skills were on display.

Instead, the company brought on former Techdirt podcast guest, lawyer Mike Dunford, who crafted something that is ultimately even better.

If you can’t read that, you’re not missing much. It says:

Andrew,

Lol, no.

Sincerely,
Mike Dunford

Perfect. No notes. May it go down in history alongside Arkell v. Pressdam, or the infamous Cleveland Browns response to a fan complaining about paper airplanes, as the perfect way to respond to absolutely ridiculous legal threat letters.

For what it’s worth, Dunford’s boss, Akiva Cohen, noted that this letter was “a fun one to edit.” We can only imagine.

This was a fun one to edit

[image or embed]

— AkivaMCohen (@akivamcohen.bsky.social) Apr 18, 2024 at 2:47 PM

According to a new survey by the Game Developer Collective, 70 percent of developers have concerns about the sustainability of live service games.

For the survey, 600 developers were interviewed between February and March this year and defined live-service games as online games featuring frequent updates and in-app purchases.

As shared by Game Developer, 39 percent of participants had mild worries about live-service business models, while 31 percent were very concerned - totalling 70 percent. The remaining participants had either no concerns or were unsure.

Read more

Stellar Blade is better than NieR: Automata, according to the latter's esteemed director Yoko Taro.

Shift Up's forthcoming action game has been compared to Taro's work since its reveal and now IGN Japan has put the two together in an interview between Taro and Stellar Blade creative director Hyung-Tae Kim.

So why does Taro think Stellar Blade is superior? The "next-gen quality" graphics and "cute female characters", among other reasons as the pair pat each other on the back.

Read more

A new technical paper titled “Combining Power and Arithmetic Optimization via Datapath Rewriting” was published by researchers at Intel Corporation and Imperial College London.

Abstract:
“Industrial datapath designers consider dynamic power consumption to be a key metric. Arithmetic circuits contribute a major component of total chip power consumption and are therefore a common target for power optimization. While arithmetic circuit area and dynamic power consumption are often correlated, there is also a tradeoff to consider, as additional gates can be added to explicitly reduce arithmetic circuit activity and hence reduce power consumption. In this work, we consider two forms of power optimization and their interaction: circuit area reduction via arithmetic optimization, and the elimination of redundant computations using both data and clock gating. By encoding both these classes of optimization as local rewrites of expressions, our tool flow can simultaneously explore them, uncovering new opportunities for power saving through arithmetic rewrites using the e-graph data structure. Since power consumption is highly dependent upon the workload performed by the circuit, our tool flow facilitates a data dependent design paradigm, where an implementation is automatically tailored to particular contexts of data activity. We develop an automated RTL to RTL optimization framework, ROVER, that takes circuit input stimuli and generates power-efficient architectures. We evaluate the effectiveness on both open-source arithmetic benchmarks and benchmarks derived from Intel production examples. The tool is able to reduce the total power consumption by up to 33.9%.”

Find the technical paper here. Published April 2024.

Samuel Coward, Theo Drane, Emiliano Morini, George Constantinides; arXiv:2404.12336v1.

The post Merging Power and Arithmetic Optimization Via Datapath Rewriting (Intel, Imperial College London) appeared first on Semiconductor Engineering.

We’ve had plenty of posts discussing all manner of behavior from the Los Angeles Police Dept. and/or the LAPD union here at Techdirt. As you might imagine if you’re a regular reader here, the majority of those posts haven’t exactly involved fawning praise for these supposed crimefighters. In fact, if you went on a reading blitz of those posts, you might even come away thinking, “You know what? Fuck the LAPD!”

Well, if you wanted to display your sentiments while you went about your day, you might go over to the Cola Corporation’s website to buy one particular shirt it had on offer there before they completely sold out.

Now, it’s not uncommon for misguided entities to issue intellectual property threat letters over t-shirts and apparel, even when it is of the sort that is obviously fair use. Given that, you might have thought it would be the Los Angeles Lakers that sent a nastygram to Cola Corp. After all, the logo in question is clearly a parody of the LA Lakers logo.

Nope!

It was the Los Angeles Police Foundation via its IMG representatives. The LAPF is something of a shadow financier of the LAPD for equipment, including all manner of tech and gear. We have no idea how an entertainment agency like IMG got in bed with these assbags, but it was IMG sending the threat letter you can see below, chock full of all kinds of claims to rights that the LAPF absolutely does not and could not have.

If you can’t see that, it’s a letter sent by Andrew Schmidt, who represents himself as the Senior Counsel to IMG Worldwide, saying:

RE: Request to Remove Infringing Material From www.thecolacorporation.com
Dear Sir/Madam:

I am writing on behalf of IMG Worldwide, LLC (“IMG”), IMG is the authorized representative of Los Angeles Police Foundation CLAPF) LAPF is one of two exclusive holders of intellectual property rights pertaining to trademarks, copyrights and other licensed indicia for (a) the Los Angeles Police Department Badge; (b) the Los Angeles Police Department Uniform; (c) the LAPD motto “To Protect and Serve”; and (d) the word “LAPD” as an acronym/abbreviation for the Los Angeles Police Department (collectively, the “LAPD IP”). Through extensive advertising, promotion and the substantial sale of a full range of licensed products embodying and pertaining to the LAPD IP, the LAPD IP has become famous throughout the world; and as such, carries immeasurable value to LAPF.

We are writing to you regarding an unauthorized use of the LAPD IP on products being sold on your website, www.thecolacorporation.com (the “Infringing Product”). The website URL and description for the Infringing Product is as follows:
https://www.thecolacorporation.com/products fack-the- lupd pos-1&sid=435934961&&variant=48461787234611 FUCK THE LAPD
For the avoidance of doubt, the aforementioned Infringing Product and the image associated therewith are in no way authorized or approved by LAPF or any of its duly authorized representatives.

This letter hereby serves as a statement that:

1. The aforementioned Infringing Product and the image associated therewith violate LAPF’s rights in the LAPD IP
2. These exclusive rights in and to the LAPD IP are being violated by the sale of the Infringing Product on your website at the URL mentioned above;
3. [Contact info omitted]
4. On information and belief, the use of the LAPD IP on the Infringing Products is not authorized by LAPF, LAPF’s authorized agents or representatives or the law.
5. Under penalty of perjury, I hereby state that the above information is accurate and I am duly authorized to act on on behalf of the rights holder of the intellectual. property at issue I hereby request that you remove or disable access the above-mentioned materials and their corresponding URL’s as they appear on your services in as expedient a manner as possible.
   

So, where to begin? For starters, note how the letter breezily asserts copyright, trademark, and “other licensed indicia” without ever going into detail as to what it thinks it actually holds the rights to? That’s an “indicia” of a legal threat that is bloviating, with nothing to back it up. If you know what rights you have, you clearly state them. This letter does not.

If it’s a copyright play that the LAPF is trying to make, it’s going to go absolutely nowhere. The use is made for the purposes of parody and political commentary. It’s clearly fair use, and there are plenty of precedents to back that up. Second, what exactly is the copyright claim here? It’s not the logo. Again, if anything, that would be the Lakers’ claim to make. The only thing possibly related to the LAPD would be those letters: LAPD. And, no, the LAPD does not get to copyright the letters LAPD.

If it’s a trademark play instead, well, that might actually work even less for the LAPF, for any number of reasons. Again, this is parody and political commentary: both First Amendment rights that trump trademarks. More importantly, in trademark you have the question of the likelihood of confusion. We’re fairly sure the LAPF doesn’t want to make the case that the public would be confused into thinking that the Los Angeles Police Foundation was an organization that is putting out a “Fuck the LAPD” t-shirt. Finally, for there to be a trademark, there has to be a use in commerce. Is the LAPF selling “Fuck the LAPD” t-shirts? Doubtful.

But that’s all sort of besides the point, because the LAPF doesn’t have the rights IMG asserted in its letter. Again, the only possible claim that the LAPF can make here is that it has ownership to the letters LAPD. And it does not. Beyond the fact that it had no “creative” input into LAPD, the LAPD is a city’s law enforcement agency and you cannot copyright or trademark such a thing. And, as we’ve discussed multiple times in the past, government agencies don’t get to claim IP on their agency names. The only restrictions they can present are on deceptive uses of logos/seals/etc.

But that is clearly not the case here. And we already have some examples from a decade ago of government agencies demanding the removal of parody logos and… it not ending very well for the government. 

So, what is actually happening here is that the LAPF/LAPD (via IMG) is pretending it has the right to screw with private citizens in ways it absolutely does not, and is using those false rights to harass those private persons with threatening behavior to intimidate them into doing what the LAPF wants. Which, if I’m being totally honest here, is certainly on brand as roughly the most police-y thing it could do in response to a simple t-shirt that is no longer even for sale.

Now, you might imagine that the Cola Corporation’s own legal team would reply to the silly threat letter outlining all of the above, crafting a careful and articulate narrative responding to all the points raised by the LAPF, and ensuring that their full legal skills were on display.

Instead, the company brought on former Techdirt podcast guest, lawyer Mike Dunford, who crafted something that is ultimately even better.

If you can’t read that, you’re not missing much. It says:

Andrew,

Lol, no.

Sincerely,
Mike Dunford

Perfect. No notes. May it go down in history alongside Arkell v. Pressdam, or the infamous Cleveland Browns response to a fan complaining about paper airplanes, as the perfect way to respond to absolutely ridiculous legal threat letters.

For what it’s worth, Dunford’s boss, Akiva Cohen, noted that this letter was “a fun one to edit.” We can only imagine.

This was a fun one to edit

[image or embed]

— AkivaMCohen (@akivamcohen.bsky.social) Apr 18, 2024 at 2:47 PM

The future of physical media took another blow as Target confirmed previously reported plans that it would stop offering physical DVDs in store and transition to only carrying a select number of films in brick-and-mortar locations during specific, limited times. However, the retail giant said games would be—for…

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Puppies are curious creatures. And sometimes that curiosity leads to them getting destructive, as one unlucky Steam Deck owner learned recently.

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Last time, you decided that gliding powers are better than Dragon's Dogma 2's Unmaking Arrow. Honestly I'm surprised it was that close (66% vs 33%—don't sweat the rounding), and I'm proud of your ability to weigh a whole concept against a single-game implementation. We are so good at this. Onwards! This week, I ask you to choose between placing things in two very different ways. What's better: a 'put back' action, or standing atop another player's head in an FPS?

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