You feel that? The butterflies in your gut? The clenched butt? Of course you do — because today is an Apple event day.

If you’re intrigued about what the company is potentially going to announce, we’ve got you. If you want to know how to watch it, friend, we’ve got you.

In this piece though, we’re looking at the possibility that today’s event isn’t a standalone extravaganza. Instead, it’s most likely one of a pair of events.

Excuse me while I button up my trenchcoat, find my magnifying glass, and kick-off a drinking problem. It’s detective time, pals. Here’s our first clue that today’s Apple event may be part of a pair:

There will be two events, and I’d expect the latter to be Mac + iPad. iPhone/Watch Tuesday. https://t.co/xfAjhUkigC

— Mark Gurman (@markgurman) September 12, 2021

The 💜 of EU tech

The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol’ founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It’s free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!

Okay, yeah, this isn’t exactly a bit of Sherlockian analysis, but a clue is still a clue — even if it just gives us the answer straight away.

Thankfully though, this adventure doesn’t end there. We’ve got some more evidence to comb through.

A look at last year’s Apple events

If we stretch our minds back to 2020 (OH GOD NO), you’ll remember there were three Apple events at the rear end of the year. There was the September 15 one where the company announced new Apple Watches and iPads.

Next up was the October 13 Apple event. This is where the company announced the iPhone 12 range. Finally, we have the Apple event which took place on November 10. This was where the company launched its new Macs with the M1 chip.

Don’t worry, there is a point to listing all these events: Apple has recent history of spreading its product announcements over several events. This means that having a follow-up show after this one has precedence.

The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced of what a good idea it is.

Let’s ponder this it from Apple’s perspective. Now the events are fully digital, there’s no need to worry about getting people in a room. For the public, it’s also much easier to understand a couple of products being updated, rather than dozens.

Then you have the media. Basically, every damn media outlet will cover the ins-and-outs of each event, meaning Apple will receive huge amounts of coverage for just… splitting up a video? Sending out some RSVPs?

It’s really a genius bit of PR and marketing.

I’d say then it’s pretty likely we’ll be getting at least one more Apple event after today. It’s tough to know the precise product split — or whether it’ll be in October or November — but Gurman is probably right: one event that’s Apple Watch and iPhone, then another that’s iPad and Macs.

And lord, I can’t wait.

The Russian government is trying to block WhatsApp in the country as its crackdown on communication platforms outside its control intensifies.

WhatsApp announced the action against it on X, calling it “a backwards step” that “can only lead to less safety for people in Russia.”

WhatsApp assured its Russian users that it will continue doing everything it can to keep them connected.

According to Russian media, the country’s internet watchdog, Roskomnadzor, had recently excluded the domains whatsapp.com and web.whatsapp.com from the National Domain Name System, citing the official explanation of countering crime and fraud.

In practice, excluding the domains from domestic DNS routing made WhatsApp services accessible only to users who use VPN tools or external resolvers.

However, more aggressive measures are reportedly now in place, with the latest attempt to fully block WhatsApp in Russia. The instant messenger’s parent company, Meta, has been designated as an “extremist” entity in Russia since 2022.

WhatsApp saw its first restrictions in the country in August 2025, when Roskomnadzor began throttling voice and video calls. In October 2025, the authorities attempted to block new user registrations.

Presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov reportedly stated that the authorities are open to allowing WhatsApp to resume operations in the country, provided that Meta complies with local legislation.

WhatsApp blocks came shortly after similar action was taken against Telegram, which was reportedly aggressively throttled earlier this week in Russia.

Telegram’s founder, Pavel Durov, responded to the situation by stating that Russia is trying to encourage its citizens to use the Kremlin-controlled MAX messenger app.

MAX is a controversial communications platform developed by VK, which became mandatory on all electronic devices sold in the country since September 2025.

Although MAX is promoted as a secure app that safeguards national communications from foreign surveillance, several independent reviewers have raised concerns about encryption weaknesses, government access, and extensive data-collection risks.

For now, users in Russia may be able to continue accessing their messengers of choice by using VPN tools, though those are not immune to the government’s crackdown either.

Modern IT infrastructure moves faster than manual workflows can handle.

In this new Tines guide, learn how your team can reduce hidden manual delays, improve reliability through automated response, and build and scale intelligent workflows on top of tools you already use.

Get the guide

Nintendo took a chance in 2001 with the Pokemon Mini, the world’s smallest cartridge-based platform to date. This teeny-tiny device was smaller than a matchbox and only held ten official games before fading into obscurity. Game makers had to get creative with the tiny 160×100 monochrome LCD screen driven by an Epson S1C88 CPU running at 4.194304 MHz, resulting in charming, simplified Pokémon adventures. Four AAA batteries kept the fun going for about 20 hours before needing a recharge, with cartridges containing a maximum of 2 MB of ROM, but the hardware was so constrained that game programmers had to get somewhat creative with the design.

Homebrew enthusiasts recognized the potential for restoring this historical relic. They began developing emulators, assemblers, and even flash carts after gathering a plethora of information through reverse engineering and community tools. Websites like pokemon-mini.net have become troves of downloads, ranging from full games and demonstrations to development kits. Programmers working on the Mini often utilize C or assembly language using the open-source c88-pokemini toolchain on GitHub, or they can obtain a genuine Epson SDK from the past, which includes a minimal simulator for testing code.

Inkbox entered the fray with Pokémon Ambulation, their version on Frogger’s iconic ‘river-crossing hurdle. The game allows you to choose from eight different Pokémon; whether you want to speed across as lightning-quick Pikachu or plod along as lumbering Snorlax, you must guide them through a succession of scrolling lanes laden with hazards. There are automobiles zipping along horizontally, logs sliding across the water, and gators snapping shut in irritation. Collision means you have to start over, but reaching the far bank earns you points and advances you to the next level.

Assembly code is crucial to the S1C88 core’s operation. Inkbox began as a fairly simple application to get the system up and running and manage interrupts. When it came to visuals, they used 4-bit grayscale tiles, which means they had 256 possible shades to work with to cover the 20×16 screen grid. Backgrounds scroll quite smoothly thanks to some smart fiddling with hardware registers, and sprites, such as the Pokémon itself, can be superimposed on top of backdrops to make them appear more believable. A basic tone generator generates sound effects, such as beeps to indicate that you’ve leaped and a crash to indicate that you’ve failed, all of which are synced to the frame rate.

Getting down to the nitty-gritty of constructing the tiles for their game required precision. Inkbox developed an online editor, which is still hosted at notin.tokyo/pminiTiles, that allows you to draw and then export your creations directly into the game. The LCD panel doesn’t have many shades to play with, so it takes some smart pixel-dithering to make it appear that there are more than just the 16 or so shades available. Every frame is scanned for collision detection, which occurs at a staggering 60 frames per second. Input comes from the usual suspects, four buttons and a D-pad, but to avoid jitters, the code debounces the buttons.

Instead of running large amounts of code on an emulator, testing was done directly on hardware. Emulators such as PokeMini can help ensure that the code works, but timing and LCD refresh issues imply that the thing must still be run on actual hardware. Inkbox effectively inserted an RP2040 microcontroller into a bespoke cartridge shell, which was configured to simulate ROM via SPI flash and was connected to the Mini’s bus like an actual game cartridge. When you turn it on, the Nintendo logo appears on the screen, Ambulation loaded, and the game begins; the buttons click with a pleasing ‘click’, and the screen glows low-key in the dark.
[Source]

CISA ordered U.S. government agencies on Thursday to secure their systems against a critical Microsoft Configuration Manager vulnerability patched in October 2024 and now exploited in attacks.

Microsoft Configuration Manager (also known as ConfigMgr and formerly System Center Configuration Manager, or SCCM) is an IT administration tool for managing large groups of Windows servers and workstations.

Tracked as CVE-2024-43468 and reported by offensive security company Synacktiv, this SQL injection vulnerability allows remote attackers with no privileges to gain code execution and run arbitrary commands with the highest level of privileges on the server and/or the underlying Microsoft Configuration Manager site database.

“An unauthenticated attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending specially crafted requests to the target environment which are processed in an unsafe manner enabling the attacker to execute commands on the server and/or underlying database,” Microsoft explained when it patched the flaw in October 2024.

At the time, Microsoft tagged it as “Exploitation Less Likely,” saying that “an attacker would likely have difficulty creating the code, requiring expertise and/or sophisticated timing, and/or varied results when targeting the affected product.”

However, Synacktiv shared proof-of-concept exploitation code for CVE-2024-43468 on November 26th, 2024, almost two months after Microsoft released security updates to mitigate this remote code execution vulnerability.

While Microsoft has not yet updated its advisory with additional information, CISA has now flagged CVE-2024-43468 as actively exploited in the wild and has ordered Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies to patch their systems by March 5th, as mandated by the Binding Operational Directive (BOD) 22-01.

“These types of vulnerabilities are frequent attack vectors for malicious cyber actors and pose significant risks to the federal enterprise,” the U.S. cybersecurity agency warned.

“Apply mitigations per vendor instructions, follow applicable BOD 22-01 guidance for cloud services, or discontinue use of the product if mitigations are unavailable.”

Even though BOD 22-01 applies only to federal agencies, CISA encouraged all network defenders, including those in the private sector, to secure their devices against ongoing CVE-2024-43468 attacks as soon as possible.

Modern IT infrastructure moves faster than manual workflows can handle.

In this new Tines guide, learn how your team can reduce hidden manual delays, improve reliability through automated response, and build and scale intelligent workflows on top of tools you already use.

Get the guide

from the ready-fire-aim dept

At some point, we, as a society, are going to realize that farming copyright enforcement out to bots and AI-driven robocops is not the way to go, but today is not that day. Long before AI became the buzzword it is today, large companies have employed their own copyright crawler bots, or employed those of a third party, to police their copyrights on these here internets. And for just as long, those bots have absolutely sucked out loud at their jobs. We have seen example after example after example of those bots making mistakes, resulting in takedowns or threats of takedowns of all kinds of perfectly legit content. Upon discovery, the content is usually reinstated while those employing the copyright decepticons shrug their shoulders and say “Thems the breaks.” And then it happens again.

It has to change, but isn’t. We have yet another recent example of this in action, with Microsoft’s copyright enforcement partner using an AI-driven enforcement bot to get a video game delisted from Steam over a single screenshot on the game’s page that looks like, but isn’t, from Minecraft. The game in question, Allumeria, clearly is partially inspired by Minecraft, but doesn’t use any of its assets and is in fact its own full-fledged creative work.

On Tuesday, the developer behind the Minecraft-looking, dungeon-raiding sandbox announced that their game had been taken down from Valve’s storefront due to a DMCA copyright notice issued by Microsoft. The notice, shared by developer Unomelon in the game’s Discord server, accused Allumeria of using “Minecraft content, including but not limited to gameplay and assets.”

The takedown was apparently issued over one specific screenshot from the game’s Steam page. It shows a vaguely Minecraft-esque world with birch trees, tall grass, a blue sky, and pumpkins: all things that are in Minecraft but also in real life and lots of other games. The game does look pretty similar to Minecraft, but it doesn’t appear to be reusing any of its actual assets or crossing some arbitrary line between homage and copycat that dozens of other Minecraft-inspired games haven’t crossed before. 

It turns out the takedown request didn’t come from Microsoft directly, but via Tracer.AI. Tracer.AI claims to have a bot driven by artificial intelligence for automatic flagging and removal of copyright infringing content.

It seems the system failed to understand in this case that the image in question, while being similar to those including Minecraft assets, didn’t actually infringe upon anything. Folks at Mojang caught wind of this on BlueSky and had to take action.

While it’s unclear if the claim was issued automatically or intentionally, Mojang Chief Creative Officer Jens Bergensten (known to most Minecraft players as Jeb) responded to a comment about the takedown on Bluesky, stating that he was not aware and is now “investigating.” Roughly 12 hours later, Allumeria‘s Steam page has been reinstated.

“Microsoft has withdrawn their DMCA claim!” Unomelon posted earlier today. “The game is back up on Steam! Allumeria is back! Thank you EVERYONE for your support. It’s hard to comprehend that a single post in my discord would lead to so many people expressing support.”

And this is the point in the story where we all go back to our lives and pretend like none of this ever happened. But that sucks. For starters, there is no reason we should accept that this kind of collateral damage, temporary or not. Add to that there are surely stories out there in which a similar resolution was not reached. How many games, how much other non-infringing content out there, were taken down for longer from an erroneous claim like this? How many never came back?

And at the base level, the fact is that if companies are going to claim that copyright is of paramount importance to their business, that can’t be farmed out to automated systems that aren’t good at their job.

Filed Under: ai, allumeria, copyright, copyright detection, dmca, minecraft, steam

Companies: microsoft, tracer.ai, unomelon, valve