Apple Removes Telegram Again, Leaves X App Store Alone
Apple briefly banned Telegram over child sexual abuse material this week, while X stayed online despite a months-long Grok deepfake scandal. The gap raises questions about how app store rules really work.
If app store removal depends partly on political weight rather than policy alone, what does that mean for platform accountability going forward? Apple enforces CSAM rules strictly against smaller or less politically connected apps, yet gave X and Grok private warnings and time to fix violations instead of removal. As more of daily life, communication, payments, and eventually AR interfaces route through a handful of app stores, who decides which violations are severe enough to warrant removal, and on what basis?
Camp Miasma: How Fake Props Built a Real Slasher Myth
A new film invents a fake 30 year slasher franchise using nothing but props, posters, and a playable board game, and makes it feel completely real.
How much physical detail does a fictional world need before audiences accept it as real? Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma answers with fake VHS tapes and a playable board game, not special effects. As virtual and augmented worlds compete for attention, the same question applies to them, whether believability depends on technical accuracy or on something closer to memory, the fragmented, imperfect way people recall media they grew up with.
BTX changes its proof-of-work tonight, at block 185,000
⛏️ BTX changes its proof-of-work tonight, at block 185,000 We are roughly 2 hours away, so somewhere around 01:40 to 02:10 UTC. WHAT CHANGES Mining stops being a lottery and becomes a computation. Today your GPU makes millions of cheap guesses per second. After block 185,000, one attempt is a single large exact calculation that takes about 30 seconds on some of the fastest hardware in the world. That is not a typo. One attempt. Not a million. WHAT YOU NEED TO DO Update easyBTX to v0.13.0. It is rolling out over auto-update now, and restarting the app is the fastest way to get it. That is the whole list. v0.13.0 downloads and verifies a fork-ready mining engine, shows a live countdown, switches pools automatically if one stops accepting work, and tells you honestly if it is running but not earning. THREE THINGS NOT TO PANIC ABOUT 1. Network difficulty will appear to collapse at the fork, by a factor of about 120,000. This is deliberate and it settles within the hour. 2. Your pool may go quiet for a few minutes just before the switch. That is the pool being careful, not breaking. 3. Your wallet, your balance and your coins are completely unaffected. Nothing about them changes. OLDER GPUS, THE HONEST PART The new work needs Ampere or newer, so RTX 30-series and up. GTX 10-series, GTX 16-series and the RTX 2070 can mine right up to block 185,000 and we expect them to stop there. We are sorry to be the ones saying it. It is a decision by the mining engine authors rather than the chain itself, so if that changes we will tell you. Mac and browser mining are still in testing. We will post when they are live. FULL RESEARCH ARTICLE We read the consensus source, ran the fork on a private test chain before it happened, and wrote up exactly what changes and why: https://easybtx.com/research/matmul-v4-7-fork It includes something we found in the test run that matters for anyone writing mining software, and one uncomfortable fact about how the upgrade is arriving that we decided not to leave out. #BTX #ProofOfWork #GPUMining
Taiwanese retailer PChome24h is bundling Nvidia RTX 5090 GPUs with motherboards and other parts, echoing crypto-era GPU scalping tactics reported by Tom's Hardware.
Will bundling tactics like PChome24h's spread to other markets as RTX 5090 demand grows, or will Nvidia and retailers find ways to prevent forced-purchase schemes? The bigger question is whether GPU scarcity, once tied mainly to crypto mining, will keep resurfacing with each new hardware generation regardless of the underlying demand driver, including AI and emerging AR devices.