The report comes just days after fellow tech giant Facebook announced the launch of Libra. According to Bloomberg, which cites people close to the matter, Line could receive its license this month, with exchange operations expected to begin a few weeks after it gets the green light. The exchange will be called BitMax (not to be confused with long-serving exchange BitMEX) and will enable Line’s 80 million users in Japan to purchase and trade cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Link (not $LINK), the company’s token....

It might surprise you to know that despite whopping masses of funding, profits are less than prolific: ❌ Lime was founded in 2017 in the US and received $1.5B in funding. ❌ Dott was founded in 2018 in the Netherlands and raised $210.8M. The company is not profitable at company level so far, as its focus has been product investment. ❌ Swappable battery company Swobbee was founded in 2017 in Germany and raised $6M in a single investment from an energy company....

If you haven’t had enough stories about contractors listening in on your conversations, good news: we’ve found even more of them. This time the contractors in question work for Microsoft and have been listening to you through your trusty Xbox One. The new report from Motherboard reveals that contractors listened to commands that were supposed to be triggered by the words “Xbox” and “Hey Cortana,” but were sometimes captured by accident....

Smith said the ban shouldn’t have taken place without “sound basis in fact, logic, and the rule of law.” He added that Microsoft has asked the US authorities to explain the reasons for the ban. In May, Huawei was included in the US entity list resulting in bans from leading US companies such as Google, Intel, and Qualcomm. That meant the company can’t use products such as Qualcomm’s chips or Google’s services including Android for its upcoming products....

The figures come from the quarterly Schwab Report, which benchmarks the activity of retirement plan investors within self-directed brokerage accounts. Schwab’s figures show that millennials (25-39 years old) hold 1.84 percent of their assets in the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC). The GBTC is an investment product — from Digital Currency Group — that sells shares in the fund to accredited investors. The fund is managed for investors by Grayscale and trades and holds Bitcoin directly....

ZDNet reports that, earlier this week, a hacker leaked a 1 GB file, which contained the usernames and passwords of 22,982,319 accounts. According to anonymous sources, the actual breach occurred earlier this month. Ganz, the company behind Webkinz, said in a subsequent statement that it’d patched the vulnerability. Read: Who the heck bought the $1,900 Death Stranding jacket? It also said, in a news alert on its site (and I wish all news alerts were delivered with such an adorable dog avatar): “Your account security is of utmost importance to us, and we are investigating thoroughly....

Here’s what we’ve found. 1. Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, has said the Ethereum Foundation made approximately $100 million after selling Ether during the cryptocurrency’s last all-time high, which saw it trade close around the $1,400 mark, CryptoGlobe reports. Buterin made the comments on a podcast with Eric Weinstein, Thiel Capital’s managing director. “I did get the Ethereum Foundation to sell 70,000 ETH like basically at the top and that’s doubled our runway now, so it was one good decision that had a lot of impact,” Buterin added....

Here’s this week’s edition. Enjoy! South Korean electronics giant LG is reportedly prepping to launch “blockchain-friendly” smartphones, reports The Block citing local media sources. The move is considered to be a response to its competitor, Samsung, and its recent pandering to the crypto-crowd. Financial.org, an unregulated UK firm that once sponsored a Formula One team, has shut down. According to Reuters, the “company” converted all its investors’ dollar accounts into its own cryptocurrency (FOIN) in June last year, later blocking them from withdrawing their funds....

There’s a lot to consider when you’re starting a business. In fact, there’s too much to consider. And when you take into account the impact that all those early decisions across a whole swath of disciplines can have, it’s pretty intimidating. And no matter how learned or seasoned you are, there’s a good chance you’ll eventually stray into some uncharted waters. Since few of us have mastered everything, MSTRMND Academy is a way of diving in and drinking up all the information you need in a whole variety of business areas....

If you’re an investor, user, or Twitter employee, it could be a really confusing time to understand where the company’s headed. I want to help you make sense of what’s happening with the deal, and try and understand if it’s going to go through. Here’s my best shot. Elon, Twitter, and robots Last week, Musk said the Twitter acquisition deal is on hold until the company can prove that less than 5% of its users are bots....

I won’t spoil any of Ori 2‘s major moments, or even what it’s like to play, except to say that, if you loved the original, I can almost guarantee you’ll like this one. It builds on the original’s jewel-bright foundation, making something so spectacularly beautiful it’ll move you to tears. And it’s still fun! It also fixes one of the biggest problems I had with the original: namely, that the world you were in was empty, save for Ori himself....

Facing increased competition, falling subscriber numbers, and loss of content, Netflix and TikTok are having to diversify. And for this, they’re turning to games. With more than three billion players worldwide and an estimated market share of US$200 billion, the gaming industry is both popular and lucrative. Netflix introduced mobile gaming last year for all its subscribers. This included two notable Stranger Things tie-ins. Meanwhile, TikTok has offered games to select users since 2019 and seems very likely to expand these offerings....

Fret no more: Netflix is testing a timer feature on Android that will let you pause a show after a certain time has elapsed. As reported by the Verge –Netflix confirmed the feature to the publication — the timer function allows you to choose to stop playback after 15, 30, or 45 minutes — or until the end of your current episode. The feature can be accessed from a timer button on the upper right of video playback....

Betelgeuse began to noticeably dim in late 2019, with the red supergiant’s estimated drop in brightness currently at around 36% of its normal output. This is a change so extreme it is noticeable with the naked eye. Astronomers and researchers across the globe are clamoring to learn more about this drop in brightness and what it signifies for the star. Enter Miguel Montargès, an astronomer at KU Leuven in Belgium, and his team....

The ultra-thin film is comprised of nanometre-scale crystals that transform infrared light into images that people can see. Per the study paper: The researchers say the tech could one day be applied to standard glasses and other lenses, and powered by a tiny built-in laser. They also envision employing machine learning to simultaneously enhance the light-matter interactions. [Read: Why entrepreneurship in emerging markets matters] Dragomir Neshev, a professor in physics at the Australian National University (​ANU), said the prototype tech is the first of its kind: Neshev’s bold prediction is based on the tech’s low cost, light weight, and ease of producing, which could make them accessible to everyday users....

Digital ownership and originality NFTs are scarce, digital representations of a unique good or asset. BTC or ETH are also scarce but as monetary assets they have to be fungible – every unit is arbitrarily exchangeable for any other unit. NFTs are a horizontal piece of infrastructure that can be used to issue digital representations of art, music, collectibles, essays, books, virtual fashion or financial assets like invoices, warehouse receipts or real estate units....

With Nintendo Switch Online though, this appears to be changing. But, to really take the fight to its competitors, it needs one thing: N64 game support. First, let’s backtrack. When the Switch was first released, the online features were free. This meant you could boot up Mario Kart and smash suckers across the globe for no extra cost. That all changed on September 8 2018 — the date Nintendo Switch Online became a paying service....

If you have even the slightest interest in video games, you’ve probably heard that Cyberpunk 2077 is a buggy mess. Not since the release of Assassin’s Creed: Unity have we seen a game so broken, and Cyberpunk is a lot worse. It runs like shit on the PS4 and Xbox One. Slightly better on PS4 Pro and Xbox One X. It’s not even optimized for PS5 and Xbox Series X....

Now, six years since the show’s season nine finale, actors Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey, who played the roles of Pam Beesly and Angela Martin respectively, are teaming up on a podcast about the series called Office Ladies – and I can’t wait. A post shared by Jenna Fischer (@msjennafischer) on Sep 11, 2019 at 4:35pm PDT The duo will re-watch episodes of the show and share trivia, stories from behind the scenes, and other anecdotes from their lives on set, as well as from their years-long friendship that’s outlasted the series....

They were coded by Dave, your colleague developer. The classes are full of formatting errors, poor indentation, and weird one letter variables. There are so many dependencies you need to scroll down for minutes to escape the bloated constructor. Shacking, you open the unit tests to understand how it should work… but they don’t exist. Horror and misfortune! You could ask Dave to come to your desk, yelling at him that you never saw anywhere such a crappy code, cursing him and his family for generations to come....