Month: August 2024
This startup wants to be the iTunes of AI content licensing
TollBit
The 28-year-old founders of TollBit, a New York-based startup that is all of six months old, think we’re living in the “Napster days” of AI. Just like people of a certain generation downloaded digital music, companies are ripping off vast swaths of the internet without paying the rights holders. They want TollBit to be the iTunes of the AI world.
“It’s kind of the Wild West right now,” Olivia Joslin, the company’s co-founder and chief operating officer, told Engadget in an interview. “We want to make it easier for AI companies to pay for the data they need.” Their idea is simple: create a marketplace that connects AI companies that need access to fresh, high-quality data to the publishers who actually spend money creating it.
AI companies have, indeed, only recently started paying for (some of) the data they need from news publishers. OpenAI kicked off an arms race at the end of 2022, but it was only a year ago that the company signed the first of its many licensing deals with the Associated Press. Later that year, OpenAI announced a partnership with German publisher Axel Springer, which operates Business Insider and Politico in the US. Multiple publishers including Vox, the Financial Times, News Corp and TIME, have since signed deals with OpenAI and Google.
But that still leaves countless other publishers and creators out in the cold — without the option to strike this Faustian Bargain even if they want to. This is the “long tail” of publishers that TollBit wants to target.
“Powerful AI models already exist and they have already been trained,” Toshit Panigrahi, TollBit’s co-founder and CEO told Engadget. “And right now, there are thousands of applications just taking these existing models off the shelves. What they need is fresh content. But right now, there’s no infrastructure — neither for them to buy it, nor for content-makers to sell it in a way that is seamless.”
Both Joslin and Panigrahi weren’t particularly knowledgeable about the media industry. But they both knew how online marketplaces and platforms operated – they were colleagues at Toast, a platform that lets restaurants manage billing and reservations. Panigrahi watched both the deals — and the lawsuits — pile up in the AI sector, then called on Joslin.
Their early conversations were about RAG, which stands for Retrieval-Augmented Generation in the AI world. With RAG, AI models first look up information from specific databases (like the scrapable portions of the internet) and use that information to synthesize a response instead of simply relying on training data. Services like ChatGPT don’t know current home prices, or the latest news. Instead, they fetch that data, typically by looking at websites. That absence of fresh data is why AI chatbots are often stumped by queries about breaking news events — if they don’t scrape the latest data, they simply can’t keep up.
“We thought that using content for RAG was something fundamentally different than using it for training,” said Panigrahi.
TollBit
By some estimations, RAG is the future of search engines. More and more, people are asking questions on the internet and expecting complete answers in return instead of a list of blue links. In just over a year, startups like Perplexity, backed by Jess Bezos and NVIDIA among others, have burst onto the scene with ambitions of taking on Google. Even OpenAI has plans to someday let ChatGPT become your search engine. In response, Google has sprung into action — it now culls relevant information from search results and presents it as a coherent answer at the top of the results page, a feature it calls AI Overviews. (It doesn’t always work well, but is seemingly here to stay).
The rise of RAG-based search engines has publishers shaking in their boots. After all, who would make money if AI reads the internet for us? After Google rolled out AI Overviews earlier this year, at least one report estimated that publishers would lose more than $2 billion in ad revenue because fewer people would have a reason to visit their websites. “AI companies need continuous access to high quality content and data too,” said Joslin, “but if you don’t figure out some economic model here, there will be no incentive for anyone to create content, and that’ll be the end of AI applications too.”
Instead of cutting one-off checks, TollBit’s model aims to compensate publishers on an ongoing basis. Hypothetically, if someone’s content was used in a thousand AI-generated answers, they would get paid a thousand times at a price that they set and which they can change on the fly.
Each time an AI company accesses fresh data from a publisher through TollBit, it can pay a small fee set by the publisher that Panigrahi and Joslin think should be roughly equivalent to whatever a traditional page view would have made the publisher. And the platform can also block AI companies who haven’t signed up from accessing publishers’ data.
So far, the founders claim to have onboarded a hundred publishers and are in pilots with three AI companies since TollBit launched in February. They refused to reveal which publishers or AI companies had signed on so far, citing confidentiality clauses, but did not deny speaking with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta. So far, they say that no money has changed hands between AI companies and publishers on their platform.
TollBit
Until that happens, their model is still a giant hypothetical — although one that investors have so far poured $7 million into. TollBit’s investors include Sunflower Capital, Lerer Hippeau, Operator Collective, AIX and Liquid 2 Ventures, and more investors are currently “pounding down their door,” Joslin claimed. In April, TollBit also brought on Campbell Brown as a senior adviser, a former television anchor who previously acted as Meta’s head of news partnerships for the better part of a decade.
In spite of some high-profile lawsuits, AI companies are still scraping the internet for free and largely getting away with it. Why would they have any incentive to actually pay publishers for this data? There are three big reasons, the founders say: more websites are taking steps to prevent their content from being scraped ever since generative AI went mainstream, which means that scraping the web is getting harder and more expensive; no one wants to deal with ongoing copyright lawsuits; and, crucially, being able to easily pay for content on an as-needed basis lets AI companies tap into smaller and more niche publications because it isn’t possible to strike individual licensing deals with every single website. Joslin also pointed out that multiple TollBit investors have also invested in AI companies which they worry might face litigation for using content without permission.
Getting AI companies to pay for content could provide a recurring revenue stream for not just large publishers but to potentially anyone who publishes anything online. Last month, Perplexity — which was accused of illegally scraping content from Forbes, Wired and Condé Nast — launched a Publishers’ Program under which it plans to share a cut of any revenue it earns with publishers if it uses their content to generate answers with AI. The success of the program, however, hinges on how much money Perplexity makes when it introduces ads in the app later this year. Like Tollbit, it’s another complete hypothetical.
“Our thesis with TollBit is that if you lose a page view today, you should be compensated for it immediately rather than a few years after when a tech company figures out its ads program,” said Panigrahi about Perplexity’s initiative.
Despite all the existing licensing deals and technical advances, AI-powered chatbots still make for terrible news sources. They still make up facts and confidently conjure up entire links to stories that don’t actually exist. But technology companies are now stuffing AI chatbots in every crevice they can, which means that many people will still get their news from one of these products in the not-so-distant future.
A more cynical take on TollBit’s premise is that the startup is effectively offering hush money to publishers whose work is more likely than not to be sausaged into misinformation. Its founders, naturally, don’t agree with the characterization. “We are careful about the AI partners we onboard,” Panigrahi said. “These companies are very mindful about the quality of input material and correctness of responses. We’re seeing that paying for content – even nominal amounts – creates incentive to respect the raw inputs into their systems instead of treating it as a free, replaceable commodity.”This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/this-startup-wants-to-be-the-itunes-of-ai-content-licensing-162942714.html?src=rss
The 28-year-old founders of TollBit, a New York-based startup that is all of six months old, think we’re living in the “Napster days” of AI. Just like people of a certain generation downloaded digital music, companies are ripping off vast swaths of the internet without paying the rights holders. They want TollBit to be the iTunes of the AI world.
“It’s kind of the Wild West right now,” Olivia Joslin, the company’s co-founder and chief operating officer, told Engadget in an interview. “We want to make it easier for AI companies to pay for the data they need.” Their idea is simple: create a marketplace that connects AI companies that need access to fresh, high-quality data to the publishers who actually spend money creating it.
AI companies have, indeed, only recently started paying for (some of) the data they need from news publishers. OpenAI kicked off an arms race at the end of 2022, but it was only a year ago that the company signed the first of its many licensing deals with the Associated Press. Later that year, OpenAI announced a partnership with German publisher Axel Springer, which operates Business Insider and Politico in the US. Multiple publishers including Vox, the Financial Times, News Corp and TIME, have since signed deals with OpenAI and Google.
But that still leaves countless other publishers and creators out in the cold — without the option to strike this Faustian Bargain even if they want to. This is the “long tail” of publishers that TollBit wants to target.
“Powerful AI models already exist and they have already been trained,” Toshit Panigrahi, TollBit’s co-founder and CEO told Engadget. “And right now, there are thousands of applications just taking these existing models off the shelves. What they need is fresh content. But right now, there’s no infrastructure — neither for them to buy it, nor for content-makers to sell it in a way that is seamless.”
Both Joslin and Panigrahi weren’t particularly knowledgeable about the media industry. But they both knew how online marketplaces and platforms operated – they were colleagues at Toast, a platform that lets restaurants manage billing and reservations. Panigrahi watched both the deals — and the lawsuits — pile up in the AI sector, then called on Joslin.
Their early conversations were about RAG, which stands for Retrieval-Augmented Generation in the AI world. With RAG, AI models first look up information from specific databases (like the scrapable portions of the internet) and use that information to synthesize a response instead of simply relying on training data. Services like ChatGPT don’t know current home prices, or the latest news. Instead, they fetch that data, typically by looking at websites. That absence of fresh data is why AI chatbots are often stumped by queries about breaking news events — if they don’t scrape the latest data, they simply can’t keep up.
“We thought that using content for RAG was something fundamentally different than using it for training,” said Panigrahi.
By some estimations, RAG is the future of search engines. More and more, people are asking questions on the internet and expecting complete answers in return instead of a list of blue links. In just over a year, startups like Perplexity, backed by Jess Bezos and NVIDIA among others, have burst onto the scene with ambitions of taking on Google. Even OpenAI has plans to someday let ChatGPT become your search engine. In response, Google has sprung into action — it now culls relevant information from search results and presents it as a coherent answer at the top of the results page, a feature it calls AI Overviews. (It doesn’t always work well, but is seemingly here to stay).
The rise of RAG-based search engines has publishers shaking in their boots. After all, who would make money if AI reads the internet for us? After Google rolled out AI Overviews earlier this year, at least one report estimated that publishers would lose more than $2 billion in ad revenue because fewer people would have a reason to visit their websites. “AI companies need continuous access to high quality content and data too,” said Joslin, “but if you don’t figure out some economic model here, there will be no incentive for anyone to create content, and that’ll be the end of AI applications too.”
Instead of cutting one-off checks, TollBit’s model aims to compensate publishers on an ongoing basis. Hypothetically, if someone’s content was used in a thousand AI-generated answers, they would get paid a thousand times at a price that they set and which they can change on the fly.
Each time an AI company accesses fresh data from a publisher through TollBit, it can pay a small fee set by the publisher that Panigrahi and Joslin think should be roughly equivalent to whatever a traditional page view would have made the publisher. And the platform can also block AI companies who haven’t signed up from accessing publishers’ data.
So far, the founders claim to have onboarded a hundred publishers and are in pilots with three AI companies since TollBit launched in February. They refused to reveal which publishers or AI companies had signed on so far, citing confidentiality clauses, but did not deny speaking with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta. So far, they say that no money has changed hands between AI companies and publishers on their platform.
Until that happens, their model is still a giant hypothetical — although one that investors have so far poured $7 million into. TollBit’s investors include Sunflower Capital, Lerer Hippeau, Operator Collective, AIX and Liquid 2 Ventures, and more investors are currently “pounding down their door,” Joslin claimed. In April, TollBit also brought on Campbell Brown as a senior adviser, a former television anchor who previously acted as Meta’s head of news partnerships for the better part of a decade.
In spite of some high-profile lawsuits, AI companies are still scraping the internet for free and largely getting away with it. Why would they have any incentive to actually pay publishers for this data? There are three big reasons, the founders say: more websites are taking steps to prevent their content from being scraped ever since generative AI went mainstream, which means that scraping the web is getting harder and more expensive; no one wants to deal with ongoing copyright lawsuits; and, crucially, being able to easily pay for content on an as-needed basis lets AI companies tap into smaller and more niche publications because it isn’t possible to strike individual licensing deals with every single website. Joslin also pointed out that multiple TollBit investors have also invested in AI companies which they worry might face litigation for using content without permission.
Getting AI companies to pay for content could provide a recurring revenue stream for not just large publishers but to potentially anyone who publishes anything online. Last month, Perplexity — which was accused of illegally scraping content from Forbes, Wired and Condé Nast — launched a Publishers’ Program under which it plans to share a cut of any revenue it earns with publishers if it uses their content to generate answers with AI. The success of the program, however, hinges on how much money Perplexity makes when it introduces ads in the app later this year. Like Tollbit, it’s another complete hypothetical.
“Our thesis with TollBit is that if you lose a page view today, you should be compensated for it immediately rather than a few years after when a tech company figures out its ads program,” said Panigrahi about Perplexity’s initiative.
Despite all the existing licensing deals and technical advances, AI-powered chatbots still make for terrible news sources. They still make up facts and confidently conjure up entire links to stories that don’t actually exist. But technology companies are now stuffing AI chatbots in every crevice they can, which means that many people will still get their news from one of these products in the not-so-distant future.
A more cynical take on TollBit’s premise is that the startup is effectively offering hush money to publishers whose work is more likely than not to be sausaged into misinformation. Its founders, naturally, don’t agree with the characterization. “We are careful about the AI partners we onboard,” Panigrahi said. “These companies are very mindful about the quality of input material and correctness of responses. We’re seeing that paying for content – even nominal amounts – creates incentive to respect the raw inputs into their systems instead of treating it as a free, replaceable commodity.”
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/this-startup-wants-to-be-the-itunes-of-ai-content-licensing-162942714.html?src=rss
Ring’s flexible Pan-Tilt Indoor Cam is on sale for the first time today
Ring’s latest wired security camera is a lot like the Ring Indoor Cam, only with a motorized base and a lengthy USB-C power cable. | Image: Ring
Many of today’s indoor security cameras are great, but unless you have multiple cameras positioned throughout your home at different angles, it can be tough to keep an eye on your pet, porch, and other happenings while you’re away. Enter Ring’s new Pan-Tilt Indoor Cam, which is now available in either black or white at Amazon, Best Buy, and Ring’s online storefront for a new low of $59.99 ($20 off).
In most respects, Ring’s first integrated pan and tilt camera is an iterative update of Ring’s second-gen Indoor Cam, which remains a cheap solution for monitoring the interior of your home. The wired camera offers 1080p HD video and color night vision, as well as two-way talk, a built-in siren, 2.4GHz Wi-Fi connectivity, and a physical privacy cover that lets you block the camera and microphone. The big update, though, is the camera’s motorized base, which allows you to point it up or down and rotate it a full 360 degrees using Ring’s accompanying mobile app. It also comes with a 10-foot USB-C cable and two separate mounts — a ceiling mount and a wall mount — making it a bit easier to eliminate unwanted blind spots in your home.
The biggest downside, as is the case with all Ring cameras, is that you’ll need to sign up for a Ring Protect plan (from $4.99 a month) for person detection, rich notifications, and recorded video. Otherwise, you’ll only be able to take advantage of motion alerts and a live video feed.
Read our hands-on impressions.
Some additional ways to save
Despite once flagging it as a limited-time deal, Walmart is still selling the Animal Crossing-themed Switch Lite — which includes a digital copy of Animal Crossing: New Horizons — for an all-time low of $159 ($41 off). Yes, it’s somewhat of an odd time to pick up Nintendo’s aging handheld given that the Switch 2 will reportedly arrive next year; however, upcoming games like Mario & Luigi: Brothership, The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, and Super Mario Party Jamboree might make for the perfect swan song for the Switch when they launch in the fall. Read our review.
REI has officially kicked off its Labor Day sale and clearance event, which will end on September 2nd. It’s somewhat slim pickings on the tech front, though Coleman’s Cascade Classic Camp Stove is nearly matching its lowest price to date at $74.99 ($25 off). The relatively compact two-burner stove is pretty basic, as the name implies, but it’s long been my go-to for picnics and car camping, as it offers adjustable windscreens, a matchless igniter, and enough cooking power for most meals (if you’re willing to wait).
Although a gimbal-less sequel to the Insta360 Link is rumored to be in the works, you can still grab the first-gen model from Amazon, B&H Photo, and Insta360 for $199.99 (100 off), which matches its best price to date. The fun, 4K-ready webcam offers great software customization and an array of shooting modes, all of which rely on a capable 0.5-inch sensor and a motorized, three-axis arm that’s designed to keep you centered in the frame while on video calls or livestreams. Read our review.
Ring’s latest wired security camera is a lot like the Ring Indoor Cam, only with a motorized base and a lengthy USB-C power cable. | Image: Ring
Many of today’s indoor security cameras are great, but unless you have multiple cameras positioned throughout your home at different angles, it can be tough to keep an eye on your pet, porch, and other happenings while you’re away. Enter Ring’s new Pan-Tilt Indoor Cam, which is now available in either black or white at Amazon, Best Buy, and Ring’s online storefront for a new low of $59.99 ($20 off).
In most respects, Ring’s first integrated pan and tilt camera is an iterative update of Ring’s second-gen Indoor Cam, which remains a cheap solution for monitoring the interior of your home. The wired camera offers 1080p HD video and color night vision, as well as two-way talk, a built-in siren, 2.4GHz Wi-Fi connectivity, and a physical privacy cover that lets you block the camera and microphone. The big update, though, is the camera’s motorized base, which allows you to point it up or down and rotate it a full 360 degrees using Ring’s accompanying mobile app. It also comes with a 10-foot USB-C cable and two separate mounts — a ceiling mount and a wall mount — making it a bit easier to eliminate unwanted blind spots in your home.
The biggest downside, as is the case with all Ring cameras, is that you’ll need to sign up for a Ring Protect plan (from $4.99 a month) for person detection, rich notifications, and recorded video. Otherwise, you’ll only be able to take advantage of motion alerts and a live video feed.
Read our hands-on impressions.
Some additional ways to save
Despite once flagging it as a limited-time deal, Walmart is still selling the Animal Crossing-themed Switch Lite — which includes a digital copy of Animal Crossing: New Horizons — for an all-time low of $159 ($41 off). Yes, it’s somewhat of an odd time to pick up Nintendo’s aging handheld given that the Switch 2 will reportedly arrive next year; however, upcoming games like Mario & Luigi: Brothership, The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, and Super Mario Party Jamboree might make for the perfect swan song for the Switch when they launch in the fall. Read our review.
REI has officially kicked off its Labor Day sale and clearance event, which will end on September 2nd. It’s somewhat slim pickings on the tech front, though Coleman’s Cascade Classic Camp Stove is nearly matching its lowest price to date at $74.99 ($25 off). The relatively compact two-burner stove is pretty basic, as the name implies, but it’s long been my go-to for picnics and car camping, as it offers adjustable windscreens, a matchless igniter, and enough cooking power for most meals (if you’re willing to wait).
Although a gimbal-less sequel to the Insta360 Link is rumored to be in the works, you can still grab the first-gen model from Amazon, B&H Photo, and Insta360 for $199.99 (100 off), which matches its best price to date. The fun, 4K-ready webcam offers great software customization and an array of shooting modes, all of which rely on a capable 0.5-inch sensor and a motorized, three-axis arm that’s designed to keep you centered in the frame while on video calls or livestreams. Read our review.
The MacRumors Show: The Latest Rumors for iPhone, Mac, and More in 2024
On this week’s episode of The MacRumors Show, we catch up on all of the latest Apple rumors for the remainder of 2024.
Subscribe to The MacRumors Show YouTube channel for more videos
We discuss the iPhone 16 Pro’s rumored “Desert Titanium” color option that’s expected to replace Blue Titanium, the two fourth-generation AirPods variants coming later this year both with and without active noise cancellation, the Mac mini complete redesign with the M4 and M4 Pro chips, and M4 MacBook Pro refresh. We also take a look at rumors surrounding the third-generation AirPods Pro, the fourth-generation iPhone SE, and the likelihood of Apple Intelligence moving to a subscription model to boost Apple’s services revenue.
The MacRumors Show has its own YouTube channel, so make sure you’re subscribed to keep up with new episodes and clips:
Subscribe to The MacRumors Show YouTube channel!
You can also listen to The MacRumors Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, or your preferred podcasts app. You can also copy our RSS feed directly into your podcast player.
If you haven’t already listened to the previous episode of The MacRumors Show, catch up for our discussion about Apple’s unusual iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1 betas that introduce Apple Intelligence for the first time.
Subscribe to The MacRumors Show for new episodes every week, where we discuss some of the topical news breaking here on MacRumors, often joined by interesting guests such as Luke Miani, Matthew Cassinelli, Brian Tong, Quinn Nelson, Kevin Nether, Jared Nelson, Eli Hodapp, Mike Bell, Sara Dietschy, iJustine, Jon Rettinger, Andru Edwards, Arnold Kim, Ben Sullins, Marcus Kane, Christopher Lawley, Frank McShan, David Lewis, Tyler Stalman, Jon Prosser, Sam Kohl, John Gruber, Federico Viticci, Thomas Frank, Jonathan Morrison, Ross Young, Ian Zelbo, and Rene Ritchie.
The MacRumors Show is on X @MacRumorsShow, so be sure to give us a follow to keep up with the podcast. You can also head over to The MacRumors Show forum thread to engage with us directly. Remember to rate and review the podcast, and let us know what subjects and guests you would like to see in the future.Tag: The MacRumors ShowThis article, “The MacRumors Show: The Latest Rumors for iPhone, Mac, and More in 2024” first appeared on MacRumors.comDiscuss this article in our forums
On this week’s episode of The MacRumors Show, we catch up on all of the latest Apple rumors for the remainder of 2024.
We discuss the iPhone 16 Pro‘s rumored “Desert Titanium” color option that’s expected to replace Blue Titanium, the two fourth-generation AirPods variants coming later this year both with and without active noise cancellation, the Mac mini complete redesign with the M4 and M4 Pro chips, and M4 MacBook Pro refresh. We also take a look at rumors surrounding the third-generation AirPods Pro, the fourth-generation iPhone SE, and the likelihood of Apple Intelligence moving to a subscription model to boost Apple’s services revenue.
The MacRumors Show has its own YouTube channel, so make sure you’re subscribed to keep up with new episodes and clips:
You can also listen to The MacRumors Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, or your preferred podcasts app. You can also copy our RSS feed directly into your podcast player.
If you haven’t already listened to the previous episode of The MacRumors Show, catch up for our discussion about Apple’s unusual iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1 betas that introduce Apple Intelligence for the first time.
Subscribe to The MacRumors Show for new episodes every week, where we discuss some of the topical news breaking here on MacRumors, often joined by interesting guests such as Luke Miani, Matthew Cassinelli, Brian Tong, Quinn Nelson, Kevin Nether, Jared Nelson, Eli Hodapp, Mike Bell, Sara Dietschy, iJustine, Jon Rettinger, Andru Edwards, Arnold Kim, Ben Sullins, Marcus Kane, Christopher Lawley, Frank McShan, David Lewis, Tyler Stalman, Jon Prosser, Sam Kohl, John Gruber, Federico Viticci, Thomas Frank, Jonathan Morrison, Ross Young, Ian Zelbo, and Rene Ritchie.
The MacRumors Show is on X @MacRumorsShow, so be sure to give us a follow to keep up with the podcast. You can also head over to The MacRumors Show forum thread to engage with us directly. Remember to rate and review the podcast, and let us know what subjects and guests you would like to see in the future.
This article, “The MacRumors Show: The Latest Rumors for iPhone, Mac, and More in 2024” first appeared on MacRumors.com
Discuss this article in our forums
Black Myth: Wukong is too mediocre for all this drama
Image: Game Science
A perfectly fine action game has become saddled with a lot of baggage. Black Myth: Wukong is a hit: breaking all-time peak player count records on Steam, beating out Counter-Strike and Palworld to become the second most-played game on the platform, and selling more than 10 million copies across all platforms. In the few days after its release, it has become one of the most talked-about games of the summer — but for all the wrong reasons.
Discussion of Wukong on social media has been dominated by people arguing about what constitutes a valid criticism of a piece of art. Reviewers of the game have become the target of harassment, and the general tenor of conversation has reached a level of toxicity that would likely make any potentially curious player run screaming for the safety of yonder Fortnite hills — myself included.
Despite that trepidation, I wanted to know what, if anything, about Black Myth: Wukong as a game was worth all the digital ink being spilled on its behalf. And while no game is worth any kind of harassment, a few hours with Wukong have left me wondering: this is it? Wukong is a gorgeous game, but its simplistic combat drags down the experience into something that’s beautiful to look at but aggressively just OK to play.
Image: Game Science
Black Myth: Wukong is a retelling of the classical Chinese fantasy novel Journey to the West. Its opening moments feature a flashy combination of cinematics and gameplay that has Sun Wukong, the monkey king, facing off against a godlike foe while a pantheon of Chinese gods and their celestial armies observe menacingly in the distance. It goes incredibly hard and tickled all my wuxia / Chinese historical drama-loving bits. However, Sun Wukong is defeated, and the game starts in earnest with the player being given control of a new character tasked with finding the relics that will awaken the monkey king from his centuries-long slumber.
Wukong has some elements of a soulslike game. There are various user interface elements that remind me of Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. Death causes enemies to respawn and resets player progress back to checkpoints called shrines, but it does not cause the player to lose leveling-up currency. The Destined One (DO), as he’s called in the game, can string together combos of light and heavy attacks. There’s a dodge system that rewards you with essentially more powerful attacks when executing perfect dodges. You also have magic at your disposal that lets you freeze enemies for a short amount of time or transform into creatures that have their own combat capabilities.
I respect that the developers built moments into the game specifically to appreciate that beauty
I’ve been playing on the Steam Deck, which probably isn’t the best device for the game. (Wukong isn’t labeled as Steam Deck certified, but that hasn’t stopped it from being the most-played game on the platform over the last week.) In some spots, it chugged ferociously, even at the lowest settings. Nevertheless, the game’s environments are wonderful to behold, and I respect that the developers built moments into the game specifically to appreciate that beauty. Early on, I found a spot where DO can meditate, and the camera pulled back to show off an utterly gorgeous vista of a mountainous forest.
Despite its bombastic opening, the next few hours of the game did not come close to those initial heights — and combat is to blame. Enemies were trivially simple, and beyond one aberration of an encounter very early in the game, the bosses were, too.
Black Myth: Wukong players are struggling with this boss pic.twitter.com/ahXhgsk26c— Dexerto (@Dexerto) August 22, 2024
After suffering ass-beating after ass-beating in Shadow of the Erdtree, I didn’t mind Wukong’s button-mashy combat style, but after a while, it got boring. The game’s narrative offset my boredom enough to keep me going. There’s a bestiary with highly descriptive entries that read like fairytales. Every time I defeated a new enemy, I’d immediately pause to read the new entry and see the enemy’s portrait that looked like a traditional woodblock painting.
It’d be nice if the conversation about the game ended here, but unfortunately, Black Myth: Wukong has launched with a lot of baggage. In 2020, the game was introduced in the West with a slick, 13-minute trailer highlighting graphics and action that were impressive for a game still early in development. However, in November of last year, IGN released a report on Game Science, the studio making Wukong, that featured sexist comments from the game’s developers made on Chinese social media. When asked about those comments in recent interviews with other outlets, Game Science’s response has been “no comment.”
Then, in the run-up to the game’s launch earlier this week, screenshots of a document from Game Science began circulating on social media featuring instructions on what influencers were and were not allowed to discuss. The prohibited topics included covid-19, politics, the Chinese game industry, fetishization, “feminist propaganda,” and “other content that instigates negative discourse.”
Prerelease embargoes are common, though they’re usually limited to things like special character appearances, boss fights, plot twists, or anything the developers want to keep as a surprise for players. But it’s odd for a developer to dictate how a reviewer can talk about a game.
Image: Game Science
Some of the interesting monster designs from Black Myth: Wukong.
This strange move has made Wukong a cause celebre within certain video game communities on social media. There is a small but loud contingent of gamers who applaud Game Science’s refusal to speak on the sexist comments made by its employees, seeing the game’s success as a repudiation of what they call the “woke” video game industry and its concerted efforts to include the opinions and perspectives of marginalized identities. So much so that reviewers who don’t enthusiastically praise the game, or bring up its developers’ history of making sexist comments, have received Gamergate-levels of harassment.
In Screen Rant’s review, the author’s byline was removed “for their safety.” The IGN reporter who wrote the initial report on Game Science was also subject to harassment, including since-deleted fabricated quotes saying they were “devastated” Wukong had amassed so many players. This level of violent response feels really silly for a game that’s already sold millions and is sitting comfortably at an 81 on Metacritic.
Curiosity is a powerful enticement, and I’m glad mine led me to try Black Myth: Wukong rather than dismissing it out of hand for the unfortunate discourse. As I’ve said earlier, I love Chinese historical dramas, consuming them voraciously wherever I can get them. They have a tendency to run long — sometimes upwards of 100 episodes — and, unfortunately, not all of them can be bangers.
Playing Wukong felt like those middle episodes of a Chinese drama when the plot is spinning its wheels on the same conflict between the heroine and her evil stepmother / empress / sister / concubine. Nothing’s happening, but it’s still too damn pretty to put down.
Image: Game Science
A perfectly fine action game has become saddled with a lot of baggage.
Black Myth: Wukong is a hit: breaking all-time peak player count records on Steam, beating out Counter-Strike and Palworld to become the second most-played game on the platform, and selling more than 10 million copies across all platforms. In the few days after its release, it has become one of the most talked-about games of the summer — but for all the wrong reasons.
Discussion of Wukong on social media has been dominated by people arguing about what constitutes a valid criticism of a piece of art. Reviewers of the game have become the target of harassment, and the general tenor of conversation has reached a level of toxicity that would likely make any potentially curious player run screaming for the safety of yonder Fortnite hills — myself included.
Despite that trepidation, I wanted to know what, if anything, about Black Myth: Wukong as a game was worth all the digital ink being spilled on its behalf. And while no game is worth any kind of harassment, a few hours with Wukong have left me wondering: this is it? Wukong is a gorgeous game, but its simplistic combat drags down the experience into something that’s beautiful to look at but aggressively just OK to play.
Image: Game Science
Black Myth: Wukong is a retelling of the classical Chinese fantasy novel Journey to the West. Its opening moments feature a flashy combination of cinematics and gameplay that has Sun Wukong, the monkey king, facing off against a godlike foe while a pantheon of Chinese gods and their celestial armies observe menacingly in the distance. It goes incredibly hard and tickled all my wuxia / Chinese historical drama-loving bits. However, Sun Wukong is defeated, and the game starts in earnest with the player being given control of a new character tasked with finding the relics that will awaken the monkey king from his centuries-long slumber.
Wukong has some elements of a soulslike game. There are various user interface elements that remind me of Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. Death causes enemies to respawn and resets player progress back to checkpoints called shrines, but it does not cause the player to lose leveling-up currency. The Destined One (DO), as he’s called in the game, can string together combos of light and heavy attacks. There’s a dodge system that rewards you with essentially more powerful attacks when executing perfect dodges. You also have magic at your disposal that lets you freeze enemies for a short amount of time or transform into creatures that have their own combat capabilities.
I’ve been playing on the Steam Deck, which probably isn’t the best device for the game. (Wukong isn’t labeled as Steam Deck certified, but that hasn’t stopped it from being the most-played game on the platform over the last week.) In some spots, it chugged ferociously, even at the lowest settings. Nevertheless, the game’s environments are wonderful to behold, and I respect that the developers built moments into the game specifically to appreciate that beauty. Early on, I found a spot where DO can meditate, and the camera pulled back to show off an utterly gorgeous vista of a mountainous forest.
Despite its bombastic opening, the next few hours of the game did not come close to those initial heights — and combat is to blame. Enemies were trivially simple, and beyond one aberration of an encounter very early in the game, the bosses were, too.
Black Myth: Wukong players are struggling with this boss pic.twitter.com/ahXhgsk26c
— Dexerto (@Dexerto) August 22, 2024
After suffering ass-beating after ass-beating in Shadow of the Erdtree, I didn’t mind Wukong’s button-mashy combat style, but after a while, it got boring. The game’s narrative offset my boredom enough to keep me going. There’s a bestiary with highly descriptive entries that read like fairytales. Every time I defeated a new enemy, I’d immediately pause to read the new entry and see the enemy’s portrait that looked like a traditional woodblock painting.
It’d be nice if the conversation about the game ended here, but unfortunately, Black Myth: Wukong has launched with a lot of baggage. In 2020, the game was introduced in the West with a slick, 13-minute trailer highlighting graphics and action that were impressive for a game still early in development. However, in November of last year, IGN released a report on Game Science, the studio making Wukong, that featured sexist comments from the game’s developers made on Chinese social media. When asked about those comments in recent interviews with other outlets, Game Science’s response has been “no comment.”
Then, in the run-up to the game’s launch earlier this week, screenshots of a document from Game Science began circulating on social media featuring instructions on what influencers were and were not allowed to discuss. The prohibited topics included covid-19, politics, the Chinese game industry, fetishization, “feminist propaganda,” and “other content that instigates negative discourse.”
Prerelease embargoes are common, though they’re usually limited to things like special character appearances, boss fights, plot twists, or anything the developers want to keep as a surprise for players. But it’s odd for a developer to dictate how a reviewer can talk about a game.
Image: Game Science
Some of the interesting monster designs from Black Myth: Wukong.
This strange move has made Wukong a cause celebre within certain video game communities on social media. There is a small but loud contingent of gamers who applaud Game Science’s refusal to speak on the sexist comments made by its employees, seeing the game’s success as a repudiation of what they call the “woke” video game industry and its concerted efforts to include the opinions and perspectives of marginalized identities. So much so that reviewers who don’t enthusiastically praise the game, or bring up its developers’ history of making sexist comments, have received Gamergate-levels of harassment.
In Screen Rant’s review, the author’s byline was removed “for their safety.” The IGN reporter who wrote the initial report on Game Science was also subject to harassment, including since-deleted fabricated quotes saying they were “devastated” Wukong had amassed so many players. This level of violent response feels really silly for a game that’s already sold millions and is sitting comfortably at an 81 on Metacritic.
Curiosity is a powerful enticement, and I’m glad mine led me to try Black Myth: Wukong rather than dismissing it out of hand for the unfortunate discourse. As I’ve said earlier, I love Chinese historical dramas, consuming them voraciously wherever I can get them. They have a tendency to run long — sometimes upwards of 100 episodes — and, unfortunately, not all of them can be bangers.
Playing Wukong felt like those middle episodes of a Chinese drama when the plot is spinning its wheels on the same conflict between the heroine and her evil stepmother / empress / sister / concubine. Nothing’s happening, but it’s still too damn pretty to put down.
A new macOS data stealer is going after Apple users
Cthulhu Stealer is capable of grabbing passwords, system data, and more, but it isn’t particularly stealthy.
Cybersecurity experts from Cado Security have uncovered a new information-stealing malware, targeting Apple macOS endpoints.
The malware is called Cthulhu Stealer, and is capable of stealing all sorts of data – system information, iCloud Keychain passwords (using an open-source tool called Chainbreaker), other login credentials, web browser cookies, and Telegram account information.
Furthermore, it prompts victims to enter their system password, as well as login details for the popular MetaMask cryptocurrency wallet.
A copy of Atomic Stealer
“The main functionality of Cthulhu Stealer is to steal credentials and cryptocurrency wallets from various stores, including game accounts,” Cado Security’s researchers said in their report.
“The functionality and features of Cthulhu Stealer are very similar to Atomic Stealer, indicating the developer of Cthulhu Stealer probably took Atomic Stealer and modified the code. The use of osascript to prompt the user for their password is similar in Atomic Stealer and Cthulhu, even including the same spelling mistakes.”
Victims are usually tricked into downloading the malware, the researchers added, as it is advertised as legitimate software and games, posing as the likes of CleanMyMac, Grand Theft Auto IV, and Adobe GenP (an open source tool that allows Adobe users to work around Creative Cloud services and activate the software without a serial key).
For the malware to work, the victims need to give explicit consent (since the infostealer needs to make it past Gatekeeper protections). However, since they expect legitimate software, most victims probably grant this consent.
Once Cthulhu, which apparently costs $500 a month to run and works on both x86_64, and Arm architecture, grabs all the interesting information, it compresses it into a .ZIP archive and then exfiltrates, by unknown means, to a command-and-control (C2) server.
The good news is that the malware isn’t particularly advanced, and will probably picked up by most of the best antivirus products available today.
More from TechRadar Pro
Mac users targeted in new malvertising campaign delivering Atomic StealerHere’s a list of the best firewall software around todayThese are the best endpoint security tools right now
A bank exec stole $47 million for a crypto scam, and now he’s going to jail
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge; Getty Images
A Kansas man was sentenced to 24 years in prison after pouring $47.1 million into a pig butchering scam — using money from the bank he was in charge of. Shan Hanes, the former CEO of the small Heartland Tri-State Bank, pleaded guilty to embezzlement after routing the funds to scammers’ crypto accounts, causing the bank to collapse.
As reported by NBC News, Hanes fell for a pig butchering scam that had him purchasing crypto “to unlock the supposed returns on his investments,” which he never received.
In recent years, pig butchering scams have become increasingly common, with a recent study showing victims lost over $75 billion to the ruse globally. Google even sued two alleged scammers earlier this year over accusations they uploaded dozens of apps to the Play Store to carry out their schemes.
Pig butchering scams typically involve a scammer finding and contacting a victim through a messaging app, a dating service, or a social media platform. They’ll then try to form a relationship — often a romantic one — with their victim before eventually luring them into making a series of crypto investments.
From May to June 2023, Hanes set up 11 wire transfers using the bank’s stolen funds. He also embezzled money from a local church, an investment club, and his daughter’s college savings account. The Heartland Tri-State Bank, which was insured by the FDIC at the time, was one of the five banks to close in 2023.
“Hanes’ greed knew no bounds,” US Attorney Kate E. Brubacher says in a statement. “He trespassed his professional obligations, his personal relationships, and federal law. Not only did Shan Hanes betray Heartland Bank and its investors, but his illegal schemes also jeopardized confidence in financial institutions.”
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge; Getty Images
A Kansas man was sentenced to 24 years in prison after pouring $47.1 million into a pig butchering scam — using money from the bank he was in charge of. Shan Hanes, the former CEO of the small Heartland Tri-State Bank, pleaded guilty to embezzlement after routing the funds to scammers’ crypto accounts, causing the bank to collapse.
As reported by NBC News, Hanes fell for a pig butchering scam that had him purchasing crypto “to unlock the supposed returns on his investments,” which he never received.
In recent years, pig butchering scams have become increasingly common, with a recent study showing victims lost over $75 billion to the ruse globally. Google even sued two alleged scammers earlier this year over accusations they uploaded dozens of apps to the Play Store to carry out their schemes.
Pig butchering scams typically involve a scammer finding and contacting a victim through a messaging app, a dating service, or a social media platform. They’ll then try to form a relationship — often a romantic one — with their victim before eventually luring them into making a series of crypto investments.
From May to June 2023, Hanes set up 11 wire transfers using the bank’s stolen funds. He also embezzled money from a local church, an investment club, and his daughter’s college savings account. The Heartland Tri-State Bank, which was insured by the FDIC at the time, was one of the five banks to close in 2023.
“Hanes’ greed knew no bounds,” US Attorney Kate E. Brubacher says in a statement. “He trespassed his professional obligations, his personal relationships, and federal law. Not only did Shan Hanes betray Heartland Bank and its investors, but his illegal schemes also jeopardized confidence in financial institutions.”
Apple Will Allow Users To Delete Its Most Valuable App, The App Store
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