It's a game that encourages people to 'get a life' -- build a house, make a Sim and fulfil their dreams. So why are so many players intent on murder? From a report: The Sims has far evolved from its humble beginnings in 2000, where you created characters and tended to their needs, like a slightly more demanding Tamagotchi. As the games became more advanced, The Sims provided opportunities for the lives of your characters to more closely mirror reality: they now have lifetime goals and desires, can feel disappointment and joy, and now even do their own laundry. But whether they live a rich and fulfilling life, or an existence defined by endless suffering, the Sims' destiny is entirely in your hands. Of course many players choose not to be benevolent Gods in the Sims world -- and instead aim to kill and torture as many Sims as possible. Death has hugely evolved over 21 years of gameplay; we're no longer just sticking Sims in a swimming pool and selling a ladder to watch them drown. Instead, we're watching them explode in rocket ships, choke on pufferfish or even be eaten by the 'Cowplant' -- a mutant Venus flytrap with a cow head for a face. "The Sims see you controlling a little society, but that doesn't mean you're making it better. It reminds me of Bruce Almighty, where the role of God is handed over but that doesn't necessarily mean that's strictly a good thing. It's rather therapeutic just killing Sims, and being quite an irresponsible God," 26-year-old Dubliner RTGame (real name Daniel), who has 2.6 million subscribers on YouTube says. "I feel like a kid with a magnifying glass on the small ants. It sounds quite twisted but it's quite fun to do things like that in games like The Sims to see what happens. But yes, I do have a lot of Sims blood on my hands." He's far from alone. While many in the Sims streaming community focus their content on cutesy legacy-style playthroughs or intricate design challenges, there's an increasing interest in more boundary-pushing content. RTGame credits the popularity of his bizarre Sims series for helping him jump into streaming as a full-time career, while other YouTubers such as CallMeKevin and Plumbella count speed runs where they kill entire neighbourhoods among some of their most viewed content.

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More confirmation that today's blockbuster news about Trump is about the crazy place we were in six months ago. I don't get reporters who think that's acceptable. Their job is to know (and tell us) what crazy place we're in right now.

Same with the military. The Joint Chiefs guy thought Trump might be doing a Reichstag fire. Great. So WHY THE FUCK DIDN'T HE PREPARE THE MILITARY TO KNOCK IT DOWN BEFORE IT STARTED AND SHIP THE INSURRECTIONISTS OFF TO GITMO. ISN'T THAT WHAT WE DO WITH TERRORISTS?

When are some reporters going to get into the present and deal with today's truth. Stop praising the military for *saying* how fukced up everthing is. Praise them for keeping it from getting that way.

Let's hope Biden, first thing when he got on the job, sat down with the military and told them they fucked up big, and they better be prepared next time. I suspect he didn't because he hasn't fired any of these nincompoops.

We need to stop thinking like pussycats and start getting in front of this. We're getting our asses whipped every time, and we're the United States dammit.

Today was a total programming day, followed by a bike ride on the rail trail. I have a new feature coming for Scripting News.

Nvidia's Shield TVs are some of the best streaming video boxes on the market, but following a recent update to Android TV, Shield TV users are starting to see ads on their home screen and they aren't happy about it. From a report: The latest update to Android TV on Shield TV devices began rolling out earlier this month and featured a small UI redesign that added large banner images to Android TV's home screen, similar to what you get when using Google TV devices like the Chromecast with Google TV. Now technically, Google calls these banner images "recommendations," as they are regularly updated and rotated to help users find new streaming content Google thinks they might enjoy. However, a number of Shield TV users consider these images to be advertisements (especially when they recommend shows on services users aren't even subscribed to), and as such, have taken to showing their displeasure with the recent update by review bombing the listing for the Android TV Home app, which now has a one-star rating across more than 800 reviews.

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Zoom, the video-conferencing platform that became hugely popular during the Covid-19 pandemic, is spending a whopping $14.7 billion on cloud-based software company Five9 to boost its appeal with business clients. From a report: Zoom announced the acquisition Sunday night. In a statement, it said the move will "help enhance Zoom's presence with enterprise customers and allow it to accelerate its long-term growth opportunity." Five9 provides software to customer service centers for over 2,000 clients around the globe. Eric Yuan, Zoom's billionaire CEO and founder, said the addition of Five9 was a natural fit. "Enterprises communicate with their customers primarily through the contact center, and we believe this acquisition creates a leading customer engagement platform that will help redefine how companies of all sizes connect with their customers," he said in a statement.

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OpenAI has disbanded its robotics team after years of research into machines that can learn to perform tasks like solving a Rubik's Cube. Company cofounder Wojciech Zaremba quietly revealed on a podcast hosted by startup Weights & Biases that OpenAI has shifted its focus to other domains, where data is more readily available. From a report: "So it turns out that we can make a gigantic progress whenever we have access to data. And I kept all of our machinery unsupervised, [using] reinforcement learning -- [it] work[s] extremely well. There [are] actually plenty of domains that are very, very rich with data. And ultimately that was holding us back in terms of robotics," Zaremba said. "The decision [to disband the robotics team] was quite hard for me. But I got the realization some time ago that actually, that's for the best from the perspective of the company." In a statement, an OpenAI spokesperson told VentureBeat: "After advancing the state of the art in reinforcement learning through our Rubik's Cube project and other initiatives, last October we decided not to pursue further robotics research and instead refocus the team on other projects. Because of the rapid progress in AI and its capabilities, we've found that other approaches, such as reinforcement learning with human feedback, lead to faster progress in our reinforcement learning research."

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It covers south-west England and large parts of Wales as the UK experiences a prolonged hot spell.

Apple has removed Fakespot, a well-known app for detecting fake product reviews, from its App Store after Amazon complained the app provided misleading information and potential security risks. From a report: Fakespot's app works by analyzing the credibility of an Amazon listing's reviews and gives it a grade of A through F. It then provides shoppers with recommendations for products with high customer satisfaction. Amazon said it reported Fakespot to Apple for investigation after it grew concerned that a redesigned version of the app confused consumers by displaying Amazon's website in the app with Fakespot code and content overlaid on top of it. Amazon said it doesn't allow applications to do this. An Amazon spokesperson claimed, "The app in question provides customers with misleading information about our sellers and their products, harms our sellers' businesses, and creates potential security risks." By Friday afternoon, following a review from Apple, the app was no longer available on the App Store.

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President Joe Biden walked back some of his criticism of Facebook, saying Monday he meant to accuse a dozen users, but not the social media platform itself, of spreading deadly lies about Covid vaccines. From a report: "Facebook isn't killing people," Biden said. Biden added that he hopes Facebook will do more to fight "the outrageous misinformation" about coronavirus vaccines being spread on its platform "instead of taking it personally that somehow I'm saying Facebook is killing people." Last week, Biden appeared to say just that: Asked outside the White House what his message was to platforms like Facebook regarding Covid disinformation, Biden said, "They're killing people. I mean they really, look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated, and that's -- they're killing people," Biden said Friday.

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The U.S. and a coalition of allies on Monday formally attributed the sweeping campaign against Microsoft Exchange email servers to hackers affiliated with China's Ministry of State Security. From a report: The group assessed with "high confidence" that Beijing-linked digital operators carried out the attack that ensnared hundreds of thousands of systems worldwide, a senior Biden administration official told reporters on Sunday. In addition, the partners alleged the ministry -- which oversees the civilian arm of Beijing's intelligence gathering operations -- has utilized contract hackers to conduct other malicious cyber activities around the globe, including a ransomware attack on an American company, and other pursuits to line the pockets of MSS officials. The use of such hired muscle "was really eye-opening and surprising for us," said the official, who was only authorized to speak anonymously. The coalition includes the U.S., the so-called "Five Eye" nations, Japan, the European Union and NATO. Monday's announcement marks the first time the transatlantic alliance has condemned Chinese digital activities, the official said. The massive Exchange hack was first disclosed in March -- at the same time the Biden administration was dealing with the SolarWinds breach that has since been formally attributed to Russia's foreign intelligence service.

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Dear braintrust: I need to find double-square bracketed tags in some text. I believe I have a regular expression that does this. Please check it out. I want to be sure.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has shut down infrastructure and accounts linked to Israeli surveillance vendor NSO Group, Amazon said in a statement. From a report: The move comes as a group of media outlets and activist organizations published new research into NSO's malware and phone numbers potentially selected for targeting by NSO's government clients. "When we learned of this activity, we acted quickly to shut down the relevant infrastructure and accounts," an AWS spokesperson told Motherboard in an email.

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The Bootleg Fire has burned an area larger than New York City and forced thousands to evacuate.

Billionaire Jeff Bezos will launch into space in the first crewed flight of his rocket ship.

International investigation finds 23 Apple devices that were successfully hacked. From a report: The text delivered last month to the iPhone 11 of Claude Mangin, the French wife of a political activist jailed in Morocco, made no sound. It produced no image. It offered no warning of any kind as an iMessage from somebody she didn't know delivered malware directly onto her phone -- and past Apple's security systems. Once inside, the spyware, produced by Israel's NSO Group and licensed to one of its government clients, went to work, according to a forensic examination of her device by Amnesty International's Security Lab. It found that between October and June, her phone was hacked multiple times with Pegasus, NSO's signature surveillance tool, during a time when she was in France. The examination was unable to reveal what was collected. But the potential was vast: Pegasus can collect emails, call records, social media posts, user passwords, contact lists, pictures, videos, sound recordings and browsing histories, according to security researchers and NSO marketing materials. The spyware can activate cameras or microphones to capture fresh images and recordings. It can listen to calls and voice mails. It can collect location logs of where a user has been and also determine where that user is now, along with data indicating whether the person is stationary or, if moving, in which direction. And all of this can happen without a user even touching her phone or knowing she has received a mysterious message from an unfamiliar person -- in Mangin's case, a Gmail user going by the name "linakeller2203." These kinds of "zero-click" attacks, as they are called within the surveillance industry, can work on even the newest generations of iPhones, after years of effort in which Apple attempted to close the door against unauthorized surveillance -- and built marketing campaigns on assertions that it offers better privacy and security than rivals. [...] Researchers have documented iPhone infections with Pegasus dozens of times in recent years, challenging Apple's reputation for superior security when compared with its leading rivals, which run Android operating systems by Google. The months-long investigation by The Post and its partners found more evidence to fuel that debate. Amnesty's Security Lab examined 67 smartphones whose numbers were on the Forbidden Stories list and found forensic evidence of Pegasus infections or attempts at infections in 37. Of those, 34 were iPhones -- 23 that showed signs of a successful Pegasus infection and 11 that showed signs of attempted infection.

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