asteroidrainfall

European Union regulators have opened an official investigation into Amazon’s proposed $1.7 billion acquisition of iRobot, the company behind the popular Roomba lineup of robot vacuum cleaners.

In a press release, the European Commission said it’s concerned that “the transaction would allow Amazon to restrict competition in the market for robot vacuum cleaners (‘RVCs’) and to strengthen its position as online marketplace provider.” The European Commission is also looking at how getting access to iRobot users’ data may give Amazon an advantage “in the market for online marketplace services to third-party sellers (and related advertising services) and / or other data-related markets.”

“We continue to work through the process with the...

A federal judge yesterday ordered the Biden administration to halt a wide range of communications with social media companies, siding with Missouri and Louisiana in a lawsuit that alleges Biden and his administration violated the First Amendment by colluding with social networks "to suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content."

Finding a good recipe isn’t as simple as it should be. Photos can’t always be trusted and estimated cooking times can be a bit too optimistic for the everyda...

“I was raising my hand as if to say, ‘I’m about to die; someone save me,’” Tim “Fireball” Lawrence says. He was about to drown in a swimming pool. While wearing a Yoshi costume, no less.

“The head was vacuum-formed, but Yoshi’s whole body was solid foam,” adds Kathy Lawrence, the costume designer responsible for creating the mascots for dozens of Nintendo’s TV spots in the ʼ90s and 2000s.

“It went from a costume that weighed about 35 pounds to over 200 pounds,” Fireball says. “The foam, like a sponge, just absorbed the water, and I just started to sink.” Mistaking his outreached hand for a thumbs up, Kathy and the crew were excited as they watched her husband fight for his life…

Sony on Microsoft buying Activision

From: Chris Deering
Sent: 19 January 2022 13:20
To: Jim Ryan
Subject: MS acquisition of Activision.

Phil Spencer was in CNBC saying that the acquisition would cement MS as a player in mobile games. Strikes me as more of a King play than COD. But King sold to Bobby for $5Billion and has now grown to be worth £50 Billion. If it was a Xbox exclusivity play. Spencer could have locked up MS console exclusivity for the next 3 COD releases for maybe £5 Billion.

Sony on Microsoft buying Activision

From: Chris Deering
Sent: 19 January 2022 13:20
To: Jim Ryan
Subject: MS acquisition of Activision.

Phil Spencer was in CNBC saying that the acquisition would cement MS as a player in mobile games. Strikes me as more of a King play than COD. But King sold to Bobby for $5Billion and has now grown to be worth £50 Billion. If it was a Xbox exclusivity play. Spencer could have locked up MS console exclusivity for the next 3 COD releases for maybe £5 Billion.

Original post on Mastodon
Federated post on Kbin

This is hilarious. It appears that Twitter is DDOSing itself. The Twitter home feed's been down for most of this morning. Even though nothing loads, the Twitter website never stops trying and trying. In the first video, notice the error message that I'm being rate limited. Then notice the jiggling scrollbar on the right. The second video shows why it's jiggling. Twitter is firing off about 10 requests a second to itself to try and fetch content that never arrives because Elon's latest genius innovation is to block people from being able to read Twitter without logging in. This likely created some hellish conditions that the engineers never envisioned and so we get this comedy of errors resulting in the most epic of self-owns, the self-DDOS. Unbelievable. It's amateur hour. #TwitterDown #MastodonMigration #DDOS #TwitterFail #SelfDDOS

An Overwatch mini-series is heading to YouTube. The first episode, called “Genesis - Part One: Dawn,” will be released on July 6, and Blizzard put up a trailer Friday showing off some of the characters we’ll meet. It looks like this particular episode will focus on the original Omnic Crisis, and we see Reaper, Reinhardt, and Ana fighting through the war that threatened humanity.

Ralph Ineson is 2023’s video game “it” guy. The English actor, who’s made a sizable career out of supporting roles across television and film, managed to nab leading roles in two of this year’s biggest games, Diablo IV and Final Fantasy XVI.

Alessandro Paluzzi, a developer who routinely digs into app code to expose unreleased features, tweeted early this morning that Meta’s Twitter clone, Thread, had been released into the Google Play store. It appears as though that was a mistake, however, because the app is nowhere to be found now.

Today we’re happy to reveal the PlayStation Plus Monthly Games for July. The Monthly Games lineup of Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, Alan Wake Remastered and Endling – Extinction is Forever will be available to PlayStation Plus members on Tuesday, July 4 until Monday July 31.

Let’s take a closer look at each of the games in turn.

February 13, 2012
6:51 PM

Matt Cohler
so, not surprisingly, zuck pinged me to say "i'm not sure if this is a good idea yet, but i think maybe facebook should buy instagram, what do you think?" i obviously want to discuss with you before i reply to him

Kevin Systrom
got it
you know him better than I do
a) will he go into destroy mode if I say no
b) will he understand if we choose to raise instead
c) will he understand that I don't want to shutter the product and that doesn't align with what FB does with companies
…