It is the City of London Police that is involved in this case. The City of London Police are a territorial police force for the financial district of the City. The Metropolitan Police are a completely different organisation.

Cheating between grandmasters in an over-the-board game doesn't really need a system requiring electronics. Kasparov once said many years ago, that all he would need to get an edge is to know that there is a devastating move to find. Once you know that such a move exists, you can concentrate your time (chess at this level is really a game of time management) on the key move. The grandmaster can find the solution themselves from there. Communicating that type of information is very cheap and easy. It's just one bit of information - normal move vs critical move. It could be done very effectively by someone sat in the audience holding a water bottle. Hold it in the left hand normally, and then hold it in the right hand to indicate the critical move. It sounds ridiculous but this is something that has worried grandmasters for decades. In the 1978 World Championship, Korchnoi objected to tubs of yogurt being bought out for his opponent Karpov. It was eventually agreed that he could have the same flavoured yogurt bought out at the same time every match, thereby eliminating any information being transmitted by flavour or time. Once you realise the possibilities of signalling in this way, it's very easy to see how a player can be driven to distraction or paranoia; and I suppose in extreme cases, madness. "If it's not the tub of yogurt or the bottle of water, maybe it's the flicking of the lights, or the cough in the background or the sound of aeroplanes flying overhead..." The possibilities are almost endless. So while there's no evidence of it happening in Niemann vs Carlsen, cheating (for a limited definition of cheating) in live events is not as difficult as it first appears. My own opinion is that Carlsen is simply paranoid but given Niemann's admitted history, it's not completely unjustified.

Excellent. I've not seen this video.

This is quite an old article.

Discord were using Go v1.9.2 which was two years old at the time of this post (Feb 2020). So they were comparing an old version of a language with the bleeding edge of another language.

All power to them, Rust is a fine language, but it seems strange to me that they never bothered trying the latest version of Go before putting the effort into porting to a new language.

FWIW, Go's performance since v1.9 has improved dramatically. And there are performance improvements which will hopefully be added in the next version later this year (register based arguments and return values, as opposed to stack based)

Understood. However, I would say that encrypting this sort of personal information on a per-customer basis is worth the resource hit. We shouldn't want that information cached even by accident.

Without knowing more details, I think your analysis sounds correct.

What I want to know is, why isn't this information encrypted apart from the SSL connection? There should be a public-private key pair for every customer managed by the Steam infrastructure and which is used to encrypt these sensitive details. In other words, personal information is encrypted long before it gets anywhere near the caches. That way, if there is a caching problem, the problem is minimal.

I don't like the idea of relying on SSL to protect this information.

Shrugs. I don't know (none of us do at this point) but I'll be very interested to hear what the cause of all this is.

Thanks for the info. That sounds like a pretty good system. Just one question. What does the E stand for in PCI-E? I know PCI stands for Payment Card Industry but after a cursory search, I can't find what the E stands for.

Isn't first to file REALLY bad? It helps patent trolls doesn't it?

Yes. It's a disaster. In effect if you invent something you now have to patent it or possibly suffer the consequences from a patent troll. It's a money spinner for the patent office if nothing else.

This attack could render the product unusable at important times and extend or limit its functionality without the manufacturer's permission.

Surely that should read, "without the user's permission".

This Lemmings clone dates back to 2004 so it's not HTML 5 but it's pretty good all the same.

http://www.elizium.nu/scripts/lemmings/

I think the demo video for Natal went to ridiculous extremes to showcase the technology. The "hand buzzer" thing to which you refer being one, the invisible steering wheel being another. It's an interesting technology but I agree with Natal's detractors in that tactile feedback is important in many gaming situations.

In my opinion, equating Natal with "hands free" is potentially a marketing mistake. But then again, "hands free" is more casual and that's a huge market so perhaps Microsoft is right. The beauty of Natal though is that it can, like the tech in this patent, do "hands on" too.

That said, Sony's patent seems to be something else entirely. It claims to be able to recognise objects in 3d space and presumably, orientation of those objects. I'm afraid however that that is where my imagination fails me. I can't understand how that level of tech could be more effective in a gaming environment than what is already available (or soon to be). Anyone have any ideas?

The system looks similar to Microsoft's Project Natal, but instead of driving with an imaginary steering wheel, players can use an everyday item like a plate.

You can hold "everyday item's like a plate" with Natal too. The difference is that you don't have to for it to work.