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EA continues to consolidate and shut down online servers for games, with four games due to close their doors for good on Friday, May 24.
Players of these four mobile games will be able to enjoy them until the 24th, but they have been removed from app stores already so no new players can play. In-app purchases have also been suspended.
According to a post by a moderator on the developer forum for EA Sports MLB Tap Sport Baseball 2023, if players have purchased an in-game subscription they will need to manually terminate subscriptions with the app store provider.
The games shutting down are:

EA Sports MLB Tap Sports Baseball 2023, a licensed baseball game for mobile
MLB Tap Sports Baseball 2022
F1 Mobile Racing, a licensed F1 game for mobile
Lord of the Rings: Heroes of Middle-earth, a licensed RPG for mobile

What other games has EA shut down this year?
It’s been a tough year to be a fan of EA’s mobile offerings as these four shutdowns are just the latest in a line that will continue later through the year as well.
Some of the shutdowns have been for games over a decade old in franchises with a new addition annually, which doesn’t seem too bad, but the shuttering of MLB Tap Sports Baseball 2023, a game from March 2023, and Lord of the Rings: Heroes of Middle-earth which released in May 2023, has been a little harder to swallow for some fans. One Reddit user said they will “never play another CG [Capital Games, the EA subsidiary who developed the Lord of the Rings game] again.”
So far this year EA has shuttered these games, mostly in March:

F1 2011
F1 2012
F1 2013
F1 2014
F1 Race Stars
Micromachines World Series
Rocket Arena
Kim Kardashian Hollywood
Madden NFL 20

There are also four more shutdowns planned for later this year:

Super Mega Baseball 2 – planned shutdown date July 24
Disney Sorcerers Arena – planned shutdown date July 31
NHL 20 – planned shutdown date September 16
FIFA 22 – planned shutdown date November 4

EA is trying to cut costs across its business and has been part of the recent ongoing mass layoffs in the gaming industry.
Featured image credit: EA Capital Games
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Gray Zone Warfare is a game about getting in, getting the job done, and extracting out with the minimum of fuss possible. Of course, it’s not always possible to not cause a scene and a scene is what you are going to cause when you carry out an assassination on the Criminal Boss in First Hit.
How to complete First Hit
As ever Handshake is the vendor at Base Camp dealing out the missions so accept it and off we go. Whatever faction you have joined has pretty much the same job to do and your nearby town will contain a marketplace where your target will be hanging out.
Being the bossman though means he is likely to be, and by that means is, and heavily too, guarded by henchmen.
The idea is not to get into a firefight until necessary, you can scout around the marketplace and you are looking for a shady-looking dude wearing shades and a red beret. He has to be taken down to complete First Hit.
There is no set place for the boss to appear so you could find yourself looking for a while or could come across him immediately so stay on your toes. If it does all kick off in advance you will have to shoot your way through the marketplace, take out the boss, and retreat to extraction.
Call in your chopper and get out of there back to Base Camp and seal the deal with Handshake to get the task rewards.
Task rewards
Completing First Hit will reap the following rewards.

4,500 in-game USD
400 XP
Helmet
100 Reputation with Handshake

Other Gray Zone Warfare pages you might like

Gray Zone Warfare vs Escape from Tarkov
How to complete the Radio Silence task
How to complete the Little Bird Down task
Best factions and how to swap between them
How to complete the Little Bird Down task
How to complete the New Neighbours task

The post Gray Zone Warfare: How to complete the First Hit task appeared first on ReadWrite.

Microsoft has continued to stand firm in its stance against law enforcement using its Azure OpenAI Service for generative artificial intelligence (AI) that performs facial recognition, joining other tech giants such as Amazon and IBM in similar decisions.
The Washington-based tech giant amended the terms of service of its Azure OpenAI offering to explicitly prohibit its use ‘by or for’ police departments for facial recognition in the US.
Also now explicitly prohibited is the use of “real-time facial recognition technology on mobile cameras used by any law enforcement globally to attempt to identify an individual [sic] in uncontrolled, ‘in the wild’ environments, which includes (without limitation) police officers on patrol using body-worn or dash-mounted cameras using facial recognition technology to attempt to identify individuals present in a database of suspects or prior inmates.”
The company has since claimed its original change to the terms of service contained an error. They told TechCrunch the ban applies only to facial recognition in the U.S. rather than an outright ban on police departments using the service.
Why has Microsoft banned facial recognition with their generative AI service?
This update to Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI terms of service has been made just a week after an announcement from Axon, a military tech and weapons company, announced a tool built using OpenAI’s GPT-4 to summarize body camera audio.
Functions that use generative AI like this have many pitfalls, such as the propensity for these tools to ‘hallucinate’ and make false claims (OpenAI is currently subject to a privacy complaint due to its failure to correct inaccurate data from ChatGPT), and the rampant racial bias present in facial recognition caused by racist training data (such as late last year where incorrect facial recognition led to a false imprisonment of an innocent black man).
These recent changes reinforce a stance that Microsoft has maintained for several years. In 2020 during the Black Lives Matter protests, speaking to The Washington Post, Microsoft President Brad Smith said, “We will not sell facial-recognition technology to police departments in the United States until we have a national law in place, grounded in human rights, that will govern this technology.”
The current spate of protests across the world over the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza has prompted a renewed commitment to the protection of human rights by tech companies, as issues of police brutality towards protestors arise in the press.
Featured image credit: generated with Ideogram
The post New rules from Microsoft ban use of AI for facial recognition by law enforcement appeared first on ReadWrite.

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s payments firm Block has announced plans to plow 10% of profits from its products back into Bitcoin each month.
The initiative, unveiled in Block’s latest quarterly report, is the latest move from the enigmatic billionaire to underline his faith in the cryptocurrency.
The fintech firm first embraced Bitcoin in 2020 with a $220 million investment. Those holdings have since surged 160% to reach $573 million by the close of Q1 2024. CEO Jack Dorsey emphasized his belief in Bitcoin’s potential in the report and stated, “Going forward, each month we will be investing 10% of our gross profit from Bitcoin products into Bitcoin purchases.”
He added, “Historically and moving forward, our investment in Bitcoin transcends technology; it is an investment in a future where economic empowerment is the norm.”
Addressing the question of ‘why Bitcoin?’ in the report, Dorsey wrote: “But why spend time on Bitcoin at all? We believe the world needs an open protocol for money, one that’s not owned or controlled by any single entity. We believe Bitcoin is the best and only candidate to be that protocol, and to ultimately become the native currency of the internet. ”

block is DCA’ing bitcoin every month. here’s how your company can do it too: https://t.co/xabpCVZdn8
— jack (@jack) May 2, 2024

Block currently dedicates less than 3% of resources to Bitcoin projects.  The company posted robust Q1 results, with gross profit jumping 22% year-over-year to $2.09 billion. Net income skyrocketed to $472 million, or 74 cents per share, dwarfing the $98.3 million, or 16 cents per share, from a year earlier.
Alongside the earnings beat, Block raised its Q2 adjusted EBITDA forecast to $690 million and boosted its full-year adjusted core earnings guidance to at least $2.76 billion. Investors cheered the strong performance and bullish outlook, sending Block’s stock up 5% to close at $70.30.
What is next for Jack Dorsey’s Block
Much of Block’s success stems from its Cash App unit, which generated $1.26 billion in Q1 gross profit, up 25% year-over-year. However, the mobile payment platform faces mounting regulatory scrutiny. Federal prosecutors are probing alleged compliance lapses at Cash App and working with whistleblowers to investigate the company’s compliance practices, reported NBC News on Wednesday (May).
In spite of this, Block is advancing its Bitcoin mining ambitions. The firm completed the design of a cutting-edge 3 nanometer mining chip and partnered with a major semiconductor foundry to manufacture it. This development marks Block’s evolution from designing individual chips to engineering comprehensive mining systems.
Featured image: Ideogram
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Leakers gonna leak. After rumors of a delay to the Resident Evil 9 game that has been in development for seven years, it seems, at least according to one Capcom leaker that the game could be set for an imminent announcement with a release date as early as January next year.
AestheticGamer aka Dusk Golem said in a series of posts on their X account, “I have good news/rumors to deliver on Resident Evil 9. The possible delay I had heard murmurs about can be pushed aside. RE9 should be revealed pretty soon & release next year. If what I heard previously holds true, should be in January. It’ll have had about 7 years in dev.”

I have good news/rumors to deliver on Resident Evil 9. The possible delay I had heard murmurs about can be pushed aside. RE9 should be revealed pretty soon & release next year. If what I heard previously holds true, should be in January. It’ll have had about 7 years in dev.
— AestheticGamer aka Dusk Golem (@AestheticGamer1) May 3, 2024

They went on to say, “January 2025 I hadn’t heard now, just been a date I’d heard previously they probably are still aiming for, but never know in game dev.
I won’t leak/rumor any other details of the game, just let Capcom do their thing & let them surprise people. Just to explain something, RE9 started early dev in early 2018 as a possible RE8. Village has started dev as RE8, then became a spin-off title, then ultimately became RE8 again. This game became RE9 ultimately, & yes, RE8 & RE9 were in dev at the same time.
Dust Golem has been feeding news on Res Evil for a long time now and has come to be a bit of an authority on the subject.
Resident Evil 9 meanwhile is rumored to be the first Resident Evil game that will take place in an open-world setting, similar to Capcom stablemate Dragon’s Dogma 2.
With an upcoming PlayStation showcase also doing the rounds of the rumor mill, you could get over-excited and put two and two together, but we are not doing that just yet. In game announcement and release terms, January seems awfully close for such a big title. Time will tell.
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