This week, Apple is charging for nothing, Nintendo is looking for 5 years, and RIAA is looking for a HitPiece.
Scott is a developer who has worked on projects of varying sizes, including all of the PLUGHITZ Corporation properties. He is also known in the gaming world for his time supporting the rhythm game community, through DDRLover and hosting tournaments throughout the Tampa Bay Area. Currently, when he is not working on software projects or hosting F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Scott can often be found returning to his high school days working with the Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), mentoring teams and helping with ROBOTICON Tampa Bay. He has also helped found a student software learning group, the ASCII Warriors, currently housed at AMRoC Fab Lab.
Avram's been in love with PCs since he played original Castle Wolfenstein on an Apple II+. Before joining Tom's Hardware, for 10 years, he served as Online Editorial Director for sister sites Tom's Guide and Laptop Mag, where he programmed the CMS and many of the benchmarks. When he's not editing, writing or stumbling around trade show halls, you'll find him building Arduino robots with his son and watching every single superhero show on the CW.
At the end of 2021, Apple was required to implement 3rd party payments for developers in their App Store policies. In the 2 months since Apple managed to get an extension on the implementation, a lot of questions have surrounded the new rules. The most important question, though, is how will Apple treat developers who decide to use payment systems that Apple does not have anything to do with. Some rumblings from the company suggested that they would attempt to charge a commission on external payments, but nothing was set in stone. Now, after a similar implementation in the Netherlands, we have some new fears.
Any time an ecosystem is locked, it creates an external ecosystem of pirated content. This is not to say that it's a good situation, but it has always happened. The music industry refused to adjust to digital players and Napster, Morpheus, and Kazaa were born. Apple refuses to allow an open mobile operating system and jailbreaking was born. One industry that has remained locked down to try and prevent cheating, however, has been gaming, and it is also a big target for piracy. One group of notorious gaming pirates, Team Xecutor, is facing some steep penalties for their activity.
One of the dominant features of Reddit is its users' ability to decide what is and is not important through the upvote and downvote feature. For every post on the site, users can mark it as up or down, thereby helping to determine what is the most valuable content on the site. Twitter has been testing a similar feature over the past few months, and now they are ready to turn it from a limited test into a "global experiment."
Over the past year, NFTs (non-fungible tokens) have become both a hit and a miss, depending on how you look at them. Any time a new technology comes into the public consciousness, there are bound to be scams and new ways to take advantage of people who simply do not understand. For NFTs, the latest scam has been selling tokens for things that you do not own, and HitPiece has been the face of this nonsense.