Rockstar Source Code Leaked
On December 24th, local time, during the Christmas holiday, a large amount of source code for Rockstar games was leaked to a Discord channel. According to YouTuber SKizzle, who discovered and publicized the news, the leak includes all of the source code for GTA 5, the RAGE engine, parts of the sequel to Bully, and parts of the sequel to the GTA series codenamed Project Americas. There are speculations that this leak is concurrent with last year’s Rockstar live gameplay leak, which has only now been made public.
Beeper Drops iMessage Support Update and Open Sources Code
On December 22nd, aggregated chat software developer Beeper announced via its official blog that it will stop updating the iMessage-compatible Beeper Mini service after the last update, will not provide a fix even if it is banned by Apple again, and will open-source the code of the related components. Beeper says it’s ready to return its focus to the development of aggregated chat. The article also refutes previous questions about the service from both Apple and outsiders, reiterating that Beeper Mini is simply a reimplementation of the original iMessage authentication mechanism, and that it doesn’t introduce security risks, nor is it a free ride on Apple’s service.
In a feature update released on the same day, Beeper Mini imposed a relatively strict set of prerequisites, requiring users to sign up with a Mac or jailbroken iPhone and suggesting that those without the means to do so should consider renting an old iPhone, as opposed to the reverse-engineered iMessage authentication mechanism that Beeper Mini used when it was first released on the 5th of this month, where users could sign up without any additional configuration. In contrast, when Beeper Mini was first released on the 5th of this month, it used a reverse-engineered iMessage authentication mechanism that allowed users to send and receive iMessages on Android phones without any additional configuration, but that method was quickly blocked by Apple; Beeper’s subsequent attempts have also been unsuccessful.
According to the New York Times, the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have stepped up their antitrust investigations into Apple over the issue, with the FTC criticizing the denial of compatibility with other technologies on the basis of “privacy and security” in an unnamed article published on Thursday.
Other News
According to a new blog post published on the Pretendo blog, new users will no longer be able to play any online games on the Wii U and 3DS from December 2023, with new users currently seeing error code 106-0303 on the Wii U and 006-0303 on the 3DS, with no solution available at this time as the problem lies on the server side. In October of this year, Nintendo announced that it would be officially shutting down network services for the WiiU and 3DS platforms from April 2024 onwards.
According to the New York Times, Apple has approached a number of major publishing companies about licensing the ability to train AI on newspaper and magazine content, and has been contacted by publishers including Condé Nast, NBC News, and IAC in a deal worth at least $50 million. While some publishers were lukewarm to Apple’s offer, others were happy to provide a license because other AI companies were using their content for training without permission. Apple has shown a recent interest in large language models.20 Its research department released two papers discussing how to generate 3D avatars from video clips and how to run larger scale models on small memory devices.21 In October, Apple and Columbia University researchers released the open source model Ferret.
Galaxy Unpacked will take place on January 18, where the Galaxy S24, Galaxy S24 Plus, and Galaxy S24 Ultra will be announced, all powered by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, according to an official specification image posted by Evan Blass along with a tweet.The image was subsequently blocked due to reporting.
