Month: July 2026

Sony Announces Closure of PlayStation Store for PS3, Says Digital Distribution Is the Future ⇥ blog.playstation.com

Sony’s Sid Shuman:

As consumer preferences and the broader entertainment industry continue to shift away from physical discs to digital, physical game disc production for all new games releasing on PlayStation consoles will be discontinued starting January 2028.  Following this date, new games will be available on PlayStation Store and at retailers in digital formats only. […]

Also Sony’s Sid Shuman:

After nearly two decades of supporting the PS3 console generation, we wanted to let you know we will be closing the PlayStation Store on PS3, as well as on PS Vita. […]

Incredibly, these announcements were made on the very same day, as if to illustrate the fragility and centralized control of the digital-only distribution Sony says is the new standard. At least physical versions of PS3 and Vita games will continue to function. Remember how, in 2023, Sony said it would yank access to media purchased by users because Sony did not renew its license with Discovery? If we cannot actually own something, I find it difficult to believe an unpaid reproduction of that thing is actually tantamount to theft.

Update: Just this week, Sony said it would remove hundreds more titles from users’ accounts in the U.K. due to its licensing with StudioCanal expiring. (Also, Sony and Discovery struck a new agreement in 2023.)

Is There a New Quantum Processor or Is Microsoft Lying? ⇥ mathewingram.com

Mathew Ingram:

So what, I can hear you thinking. I don’t know or care what anyons are, or how gallium arsenide works. Me neither! The interesting part of this story for me is that Microsoft — a company that has a market value of $2.7 trillion and almost single-handedly created the personal computing industry — has repeatedly claimed that its Majorana processor uses these particles, and that its new version is a thousand times more reliable, and yet some other theoretical physicists have called BS on these claims, not once but several times. In other words, Microsoft keeps putting out press releases saying it has done this, and that it will build a working quantum computer using said particles within the next three years, and a number of prominent members of the industry keep saying that the company and its research scientists are full of you-know-what.

It is fascinating to see academics call out one of the world’s most valuable companies for making claims that are “perhaps even ‘fraudulent’”.

Apple Has Known About a Hide My Email Vulnerability for Over a Year ⇥ easyoptouts.com

Tyler Murphy and Ben, co-founders of EasyOptOuts:

We’ve discovered vulnerabilities in Hide My Email that allow attackers to discover the meant-to-be-hidden address behind a Hide My Email address. We reported the issue to Apple over a year ago, and as of June 30, 2026, it still hasn’t been fixed. About a month ago, we realized that the vulnerabilities’ severity and scope are greater than we initially thought. […]

Apple replied — twice — that it had fixed these vulnerabilities, but Joseph Cox of 404 Media was able to reproduce the problem as recently as earlier this week. Very few details are available right now. I have seen speculation that the original email address is revealed when someone replies using their hidden email address, but the impression I get from Cox’s reporting is that no user interaction is necessary:

To test the issue I generated a new Hide My Email address and provided it to Murphy. Around five minutes later, he replied with my real email address linked to my Apple account which was supposed to be hidden.

I am also unclear about how, as of May, the EasyOptOuts guys found the “vulnerability may have greater severity and scope” than initially reported. Ominous, though.

Also, it is pretty shameful Apple has known about this for a year and has not actually fixed it. This seems to be a common occurrence when reporting bugs of any kind. There are plenty of times I have received responses to years-old bug reports claiming a fix was delivered recently, despite the issue still being easily reproducible. And those are little things; this is a bug that, if you believe this EasyOptOuts write-up and Cox’s reporting, fundamentally undermines a privacy feature that costs money.