from the pointless dept

It’s been a while since we checked in on the Nintendo patent suit in Japan against Pocketpair, the company behind the hit game Palworld. If you need a quick refresher, here you go.

Pocketpair made a game that was clearly inspired by the Pokémon series of games, but which also did no direct copying of any of those games. We argued it was a fantastic example of the idea/expression dichotomy in most copyright laws, though we also expected Nintendo to try to do something about it anyway because, well, it’s Nintendo. Nintendo did in fact sue Pocketpair in Japan, but for patent infringement instead of copyright. The patents in question were for generic gaming mechanics that enjoy plenty of examples of prior art. While Pocketpair fought back in the suit, the company also began quickly patching out the content in its game that Nintendo was complaining about in the lawsuit, while also seeking to invalidate Nintendo’s nonsense patents. Nintendo also attempted to file additional patents to use in the suit after filing it, one of which was rejected.

That year and a half journey got us to the present, where there are hearings in Japan set to be held and a court opinion to be issued in November. And nobody seems to think that Nintendo is going to get much out of the suit, if it gets anything at all.

If you need an illustration of what the sunk cost fallacy is, you could do worse than look in the direction of Nintendo’s Japanese copyright infringement lawsuit against Palworld developer Pocketpair, which appears to be heading to its final stages and, in the opinion of legal analysis by Games Fray’s Florian Mueller, a meager result for the Big N.

Mueller reports that in November 2025, Nintendo amended the scope of what it seeks in court to only focus on the older versions of the survival sandbox, as Pocketpair made updates through Palworld’s early access that changed mechanics that were specifically argued as patent infringing, like summoning captured critters from balls and using them for transportation.

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The problem for Nintendo here is that the limited scope of the patent infringement suit also limits any potential damages it could be awarded. There are two things working against Nintendo here. First, some of the patents that it is relying on in the suit didn’t exist at the time Palworld was released, so those initial sales of the game won’t figure into the damages according to Mueller’s analysis of Japanese law. Second, so to would damages not apply to later versions of the game when the supposedly infringing material was patched out of the game. That narrows the window of time for which Nintendo could seek damages to a very limited scope. The same applies to the injunction that Nintendo has been seeking, which wouldn’t even apply to the present version of the game.

In Mueller’s estimation, this basically hamstrings any real monetary relief that Nintendo could possibly get. Assuming that it clears all of the legal hurdles needed to win its case, it may result in a settlement of ¥5M, or $30K US at most, which amounts to “chump change” for both parties or “a rounding error” compared to Nintendo’s litigation expenses.

“This litigation is no longer about anything serious in commercial terms,” Mueller concludes. “It’s about a hypothetical injunction that doesn’t apply to current product versions and (if anything) a small damages award for a period during which Pocketpair generated limited new sales in Japan.”

I can’t imagine anything more Nintendo than this. A lawsuit that harasses a competitor that isn’t actually infringing on copyright, over patents that never should have been granted and should in fact be invalidated, for an amount of money that is dwarfed by the cost of time, money, and energy that was spent on the lawsuit in the first place.

And that’s assuming Nintendo wins any part of this and doesn’t instead end up with a handful of nixed patents on its hands for all of its trouble. This suit should have been settled months and months ago, but I suppose Nintendo is going to Nintendo.

Filed Under: japan, palworld, patents, pokemon

Companies: nintendo, pocketpair

Software

A final humiliation for Australia’s Securities Exchange and its attempts to run a bourse on distributed ledgers

The attempt by Australia’s Securities Exchange (ASX) to replace its core trading platform with a blockchain-based system has ended with an A$20.5 million fine ($14.2 million/£10.6 million), further humiliation after the project flopped.

The ASX runs a platform called the Clearing House Electronic Subregister System (CHESS) to process and track trades on its exchange. In 2017, the ASX decided to replace CHESS, citing difficulties maintaining the application, which the bourse coded in COBOL and ran in OpenVMS on Itanium processors.

The ASX is a listed company so its own shares trade on CHESS.

The organization decided to replace CHESS with blockchain-based architecture. As explained in its 2019 annual report [PDF], the ASX believed its decision would help it “develop new services that improve the efficiency and standardisation of processes, reduce operational risk, and create new opportunities for growth and innovation.”

That optimism was utterly misplaced because the project foundered and missed deadline after deadline.

But in February 2022, the ASX issued a statement [PDF] in which it described the project as “progressing well, with the fully integrated industry test environment open and operating successfully.”

In the months that followed, the organization issued a string of statements about difficulties with the project and expected deployment delays. The ASX ended up abandoning the project.

In 2024, financial regulator the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) sued, alleging that claim all was well with the CHESS replacement was a misleading statement. The regulator argued that as both the market operator, and a listed company itself, any misleading statements from ASX had the potential to undermine confidence in the entire Australian securities market.

ASX and ASIC settled the matter in June, and the bourse admitted [PDF] to having misled investors.

Australia’s Federal Court today handed down its judgement in the matter, noted that the ASX admitted its errors, but still ordered the bourse pay the A$20.5 million fine, plus ASIC’s A$3 million ($2.1 million/£1.55 million) costs.

A parliamentary report [PDF] on the project found three reasons why it failed. One was that the ASX didn’t properly define its objectives. Another was that the company kept adding new requirements but started building the CHESS replacement anyway, meaning the planning and deployment phases of the project overlapped.

The report also found “scalability risks were not properly identified and managed; with the result that it was never clear whether the proposed blockchain technology could in fact adequately replace the existing CHESS system.”

Those problems weren’t apparent to the outside world, where the Blockchain community regarded the ASX’s decision as a sign distributed ledger technology was suitable for even the mission-critical role of running a stock exchange.

The Register offers that assessment based on this account of AWS investigating whether it should get into the blockchain business. The author, a former AWS exec, explains how he was sent to Wall Street to research Blockchain, and often heard the opinion that the ASX’s project meant the technology must have merit.

AWS did not become a major blockchain player. And the ASX clearly regrets making the attempt. ®

Security researchers have confirmed that a European politician had his phone hacked with the Pegasus spyware while serving on an investigatory committee probing abuses of the notorious surveillance tool. This has reigniting fresh controversy over governments abusing spyware to collect information about their critics.

The researchers at the University of Toronto’s digital rights unit The Citizen Lab say the confirmed phone hacking of Greek journalist and former politician Stelios Kouloglou during 2022 and 2023 marks the first time that a member of the European Parliament’s PEGA committee, tasked with investigating phone spyware attacks by European governments, has been publicly identified as a victim of spyware.

Kouloglou told TechCrunch in a phone call that the deliberate compromise of his phone was “reckless.” One serving European lawmaker described the hacking of Kouloglou’s phone as a “direct attack on the rule of law,” and called on the European Commission to take concrete action by imposing strict limits on the use of spyware across the 27 member-state bloc.

While spyware attacks on lawmakers are rare, the timing and targeting of a committee investigator by way of the very spyware under his investigation suggests an intense focus on the committee’s inner workings ahead of a widely anticipated report detailing its findings. The hacks open fresh questions about how governments use spyware ostensibly needed for identifying serious crime, but then caught spying on the communications of journalists, lawmakers, and critics.

Citizen Lab’s researchers did not attribute the phone hacking to a specific country, but said that the government customer used the same Pegasus-loaded email address that was used in a previous campaign that hacked into the phones of journalists across Europe. The customer’s identity is not known, but the reuse of the same attacking email address implies that the customer had NSO Group’s authorization to use its Pegasus spyware to snoop on phones across multiple countries in Europe.

A spokesperson for the European Commission did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment. NSO Group also did not respond to a request for comment about the Citizen Lab report prior to publication.

In its report out Friday, Citizen Lab said Kouloglou was hacked in October 2022 and at least twice during March 2023 using an exploit that compromised a security vulnerability in Apple’s iPhone software. This vulnerability had been patched but the fix was not yet installed on Kouloglou’s phone. The exploit was a “zero-click” bug, meaning the spyware broke in and stole his data without needing any interaction on his part.

The bug abused a previously discovered flaw in Apple’s smart home software used in iPhones. It allowed the spyware to grab private data from Kouloglou’s phone without his knowledge, such as his text messages and other correspondence, location data, and photos.

The timing of the October 2022 hack coincides with intense discussions over email and text message throughout October and November 2022, ahead of the delivery of a first draft describing spyware abuses focusing in Cyprus, Greece, Hungary, Poland, and Spain. 

The hack also lines up at the exact time that Kouloglou was in the hospital at the time for a pre-scheduled surgery, which may have allowed the spyware operators to listen in to ambient audio discussing his healthcare or other conversations he had with visitors at the time.

Months later on March 6 and 7, Citizen Lab said Kouloglou’s phone was hacked again by the same Pegasus operator while Kouloglou traveled from Athens to Brussels, during a period of committee hearings and months prior to the committee finalizing and adopting their written draft report.

In a call, Kouloglou told TechCrunch that he didn’t know why he was specifically targeted but that he believes it was due to his work on the European Parliament’s committee investigating Pegasus abuses.

He described anger when he learned that his phone had been hacked. 

“You realize that all of your personal data [was taken] — not all the professional exchanges or messages with ministers — but also the very private things, like the happy moments and the sad moments,” he told TechCrunch.

Kouloglou said he plans to sue NSO Group, the Israeli-headquartered spyware maker. NSO remains largely banned from use in the United States following a Biden-era executive order that outlawed the government’s use of spyware that could violate people’s human rights. 

Last year, the spyware maker confirmed an unnamed American investment group funneled tens of millions of dollars into the company, likely as part of an effort to rehabilitate NSO’s beleaguered brand associated with enabling human rights abuses.

Kouloglou said he was going public with his story “for democracy, human rights, and the fight against corruption.”

“Corruption concerns everybody,” he said.

Come 15 September, multipurpose crawlers used by the likes of Google, Microsoft and Apple will be blocked by default according to Cloudflare’s new rules.

IT and network services provider Cloudflare has announced new rules designed to give website owners more control over the types of web crawlers that will be allowed on or blocked from their sites – along with plans to block multipurpose crawlers by default on ad-supported pages.

Traditionally, search engines and websites maintained a sort of “symbiotic relationship”, as Cloudflare puts it, whereby web owners allowed search engines to crawl their sites and in return, search engines sent users back to their pages.

The company explained that this crawl-to-referral process, when balanced, would help sites generate the pageviews needed to sustain advertising, affiliate revenue and subscriptions.

However, the rise of AI crawlers and agents changed things, as AI chatbots scrape sites to synthesise answers and bypass original sources – often leading to imbalanced crawl-to-referral ratios. Cloudflare’s own research from last year noted ratios ranging from 118:1 up to nearly 50,000:1 – meaning an AI crawler could have scraped a site tens of thousands of times and only sent back a single user.

Nowadays, many of these crawlers are used for multiple purposes – including AI training and search indexing – which puts website owners in a difficult position, as turning off all automation and crawler access to their sites could diminish their chances of showing up on search results.

Cloudflare hopes to tackle this issue with its new rules, which include options for managing crawler access by establishing three categories of crawler purposes: Search, Agent and Training.

‘Search’ refers to crawlers that are used for search indexing, ‘Agent’ refers to automated behaviours used by the likes of chatbots and browser-use agents, and ‘Training refers to crawlers that scrape content for fine-tuning AI models.

With these three classifications, website owners will be able to selectively allow or block crawlers that are used for each of the three classifications – meaning that if a web owner wanted to allow Search crawlers but block Agent and Training crawlers, they will now be able to do so

As part of these new rules, Cloudflare will also block Training and Agent crawlers by default on pages that display ads.

The default block settings, which will apply to any new domain onboarded to Cloudflare from 15 September, won’t apply to crawlers used for search indexing, while multipurpose crawlers – specifically those used for both search and training purposes – will be allowed or blocked “according to all of their behaviours”.

As a result, multipurpose crawlers used by the likes of Google, Microsoft and Apple will be blocked by default come 15 September.

“We believe it should be simple for all website owners to manage access for these three AI-centred use cases,” read a blogpost by Cloudflare. “We believe that bot operators should separate their crawlers because that creates more transparency for website owners, allowing them to better understand why a given crawler is visiting them as well as to better manage the access they extend to that crawler.

“If a company runs automation that builds Search indexes, acts as an Agent, and collects data to Train their models, then we strongly encourage that company to separate the automation into three separate crawlers.”

In the lead-up to the September default deadline, Cloudflare customers can opt out of the default settings if they want to.

Cloudflare’s new rules are the latest in the company’s attempts to curb crawler misuse.

This time last year, the company introduced new crawler controls for website owners, including a ‘pay per crawl’ system designed to integrate with existing web infrastructure and leverage HTTP status codes and established authentication mechanisms to create a framework for paid content access.

The year before that, Cloudflare introduced a tool that allowed website owners to block all bots at once.

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TikTok Singapore has laid off employees on Jul 1 as part of a global reorganisation.

According to a report from Mothership, a TikTok spokesperson said the changes are meant to strengthen the company’s global operating model for its Trust & Safety team, which oversees content moderation.

An affected employee told the publication that around 20 people from their team were impacted. Employees reportedly received an email on the morning of Jul 1, and the office atmosphere was described as “hectic.”

TikTok did not disclose the total number of employees affected.

The company said it is providing support consistent with local laws and regulations. It added that it is committed to ensuring affected employees receive the information, resources and benefits available to them during the transition.

Layoffs in Indonesia, Dublin and Malaysia

The layoffs weren’t limited to Singapore. On the same day, TikTok confirmed job cuts in Indonesia as it realigns its R&D organisation for long-term growth.

Bloomberg also reported that the tech firm is considering cutting about 300 jobs at its European hub in Dublin.

Meanwhile, several former employees in Malaysia also shared on social media that they had been retrenched.

The TikTok spokesperson who spoke to Mothership said that the company is centralising parts of its workforce into key operating hubs and evolving the way it operates to keep teams scalable and agile, while advancing platform safety through the latest technological innovations.

The spokesperson added that TikTok’s priority is to treat affected employees with respect, care and transparency throughout the process.

Vulcan Post has reached out to TikTok for more information.

Featured Image Credit: Getty Images/TNS

The research stops short of naming any government that may have used Pegasus against Kouloglou, noting in particular that it found no indication of Greek government involvement. But Citizen Lab does say it found overlaps between the attacks on Kouloglou’s phone and the use of Pegasus against seven Russian- and Belarusian-speaking journalists and activists between August 2020 and January 2023.

“They did not only target an MEP, they spied on the investigation into spyware abuse itself. That shows the whole absurdity of the situation,” Hannah Neumann, a Green MEP who served on the spyware committee, tells WIRED.

A spokesperson for the European Parliament did not directly comment on the findings when asked about them by WIRED, but says it has a “spyware screening system” that is available to all MEPs and has recently adopted measures to expand its protections.

Kouloglou’s phone was first infected while he happened to be in the hospital on October 21, 2022, according to the findings from Citizen Lab. While recovering from elective surgery, he was visited by Greek investigative journalist Thanasis Koukakis, who had previously been hacked with Predator spyware. The following week, the PEGA Committee held several hearings on the impact of spyware and how it could interfere with human rights. Members of the committee, including Kouloglou, then visited Cyprus and Greece as part of its investigations.

On March 6 and 7, 2023, according to the findings, Kouloglou’s phone was infected with Pegasus spyware again. Neumann, who was also part of the investigation, says that around the time of the first compromise of Kouloglou’s phone, the committee was heading into “key hearings,” including questioning companies operating within the spyware industry.

At the time of the 2023 incident, Neumann says, the group was finalizing and conducting negotiations on its findings. “Looking at the dates, it’s pretty obvious that somebody was not just randomly spying on him, but really targeted the committee’s work,” Neumann says.

“I got angry because you realize that your private life, including messages not only with politicians, friends, but your personal life with relatives, kids, wives, et cetera has been monitored by somebody,” Kouloglou says. “It’s not a matter only about privacy, it’s also a matter about justice, democracy and the corruption fight.”

Citizen Lab found, as part of its forensic analysis, that Kouloglou’s phone received three notifications from Apple, in March and August 2023 and April 2024, alerting him that he was likely being targeted with spyware. These notifications are not issued in real time and Kouloglou says he does not have a recollection of seeing them.

Kouloglou and other MEPs tell WIRED they are concerned that other members of the committee could also have been targeted and that the group’s recommendations—including creation of an EU-based tech lab focused on forensic device analysis and a spyware taskforce for elections—have not been adopted years after the committee completed its report.

“Europe has a mountain of spyware abuses, and nothing has happened—it’s an embarrassment for European institutions,” says Citizen Lab’s Scott-Railton. “It leaves Europeans unprotected even as AI promises to turbocharge the mercenary spyware threat by lowering costs and barriers to entry.”

He notes, too, that some countries, including the United States, have made progress combating spyware use through sanctions, visa bans, executive orders, and other deterrents.

“There is no lack of awareness of the problems that come with mercenary spyware,” says Neumann. “That’s what the Pegasus Committee wrote the whole report about. There is no lack of recommendations on how to fix it. It’s just a matter of, can you please now do it?”

The hosting platform wants sites to have more control over how AI companies use their content.

“Legally, we have to say this is a direct parody of Alex Jones and all this bullshit, until we’re allowed to take over all his stuff,” Collins tells WIRED. “But until then, we’re having a lot of fun.” Jones’ attorneys did not return requests for comment from him; messages to Infowars email accounts were returned as undeliverable.

Lawson calls the seizure of the Infowars name “karmic justice” for the Sandy Hook families, who have yet to receive any settlement money from Jones. The Onion plans to initially give $100,000 from merch sales directly to the families, Collins told the Associated Press.

The Infowars parody also meets business and cultural needs, Lawson explains.

“We kind of realized at some point we need some satirical product that is natively internet satire,” Lawson says. “But the problem is the internet is so hard to satirize because there is no one internet. In order to make satire, you need a shared understanding of some medium that you break.”

When Collins conceived of the stunt acquisition of Infowars, they began to see it as an opportunity to target one all-too-common digital format: “These blowhard assholes who have a million listeners [and] will say and do anything to make a buck,” Lawson says. “It’s these podcasters, they’re the thing you can satirize, the Joe Rogans and the Alex Joneses.”

The idea, Collins says, is to ridicule the conspiracist internet brain rot that has infected the entire social media ecosystem. “It allows us to like break down how fucking stupid everything is and how people talk now,” he explains. “People are just constantly trying to find the big secret thing that is running the world, but in reality, the big secret thing that’s running the world is right fucking in front of us, it’s the big grafty fucking asshole government that we live under the thumb of.”

Besides Heidecker, the livestreams will include other familiar faces and voices. Tim Robinson of I Think You Should Leave and The Chair Company calls in as “Tim from Ohio” in the premiere episode, leading to a debate as to whether Bozo the Clown was actually several different people. Fictional newscaster Jim Haggerty (Brad Holbrook) returns as well, having abandoned his anchor job at the Onion News Network to spout paranoid crackpot views while advertising products like “Hog Water.”

And a delirious opening theme is provided by comedian-musician Nick Lutsko, who has frequently gone viral with tunes mocking Jones and other right-wing personalities. This song is immediately derailed when Lutsko’s idea for a cartoon “Infowars Elf” mascot is rejected by corporate higher-ups—but he keeps forcing the character back into the theme anyway.

“This is very much like, an ‘Avengers, assemble’ sort of thing for everybody who’s been making fun of these assholes for years,” Collins says. “I do think if [this cast] had been direct foils all along to Trumpism that we probably wouldn’t have Trumpism.” Adds Lawson, “I do worry about democracy, and I think that satire is the answer to that, being able to point out the things that we look around and say, ‘This isn’t right.’”