Samsung has used advanced computer modeling to accelerate the development of Selector-Only Memory (SOM), a new memory technology that combines non-volatility with DRAM-like read/write speeds and stackability.

Building on the company’s earlier research in the field, SOM is based on cross-point memory architectures, similar to phase-change memory and resistive RAM (RRAM), where stacked arrays of electrodes are used. Typically, these architectures require a selector transistor or diode to address specific memory cells and prevent unintended electrical pathways.

The online gaming industry in India has been on a transformational journey with a promising growth trajectory, despite regulatory ambiguities and a high tax rate. Not only has it been a major contributor to the broader media & entertainment space but has also become an integral component of the Animation, Visual Effects, Gaming & Comics (AVGC) sector in India, drawing significant government support, with many states crafting their own AVGC policies to give a boost to the sector.

With over 1,400 homegrown online gaming companies, India’s online gaming sector is uniquely positioned to support the goals of our country’s economic growth ambitions, attract large foreign investments, generate sizeable employment, and spur innovation. Consequently, it has the potential and the necessary elements to become a global supplier and establish itself to become India’s soft power on the global front.

India hosts the second-largest community of gamers globally and has become a popular choice in the entertainment sector, which clearly reflects a transformative shift in the entertainment consumption pattern. With this being said, the online gaming industry goes beyond the premises of entertainment; it opens up opportunities in various other allied industries such as UI/UX design, data engineering, development, programming, testing, sales, branding & marketing, etc. It also fuels innovation in emerging sectors like AI/ML, cybersecurity & cloud, and fintech.

Currently, this sector alone provides over 1 lakh jobs to the skilled workforce of the country and is expected to add 1.5 lakh more by 2025. Further, with only 31% of the rural population using the internet compared to 67% of urban residents, as per the India Inequality Report 2022, there is a significant economic opportunity to increase internet access and digital inclusion in rural areas.

A recent report by the EGROW foundation and Primus Partners states that there has been a 20-fold increase in the workforce between 2018-2023, with a 97.56% compounding annual growth rate. In terms of workforce participation, the industry has significant male participation and was mostly viewed as a male-dominant industry for the longest time. But what truly stands out is the evolving gender dynamics in this space, with female workforce participation far outpacing male workforce participation, achieving a massive 103.15% CAGR in the same period.

Moreover, there has been a steady increase in female participation in gaming. As of 2022, about 43% of women engaged in online gaming daily, with most female participation from non-metro cities. Furthermore, the sector not only recognizes the contribution that women bring to the creative and business processes but also fosters a more inclusive environment for them to thrive. This is evident in the surge in female gaming content creators and streamers in the country.

The findings of the report also highlight the sector’s contribution to the AVGC industry, which is projected to rise 68% by 2026. The government has provided much-needed impetus to the industry by charting out a forward-looking path, constituting a task force, and setting up the first National Centre of Excellence solely dedicated to the AVGC industry.

However, for the industry to thrive and enter the next phase of growth, the government must come out with a national AVGC policy that has been in the works for some time.

Despite the tremendous growth seen by the industry, certain concerns pertaining to excessive screen time, addiction and financial fraud remain. This becomes even more critical in the context of teenagers and young adults who need to be made aware of responsible gaming practices. In this regard, the recent installation of ‘Beware of Smartphone Zombies’ signboards in Bengaluru is a stark reminder of the growing epidemic of digital distraction. While some of these concerns are being addressed by the industry, more can be done to safeguard vulnerable consumers. For instance, to limit exposure to screen time and mitigate financial risk for the consumer, features such as time limits, monetary limitations and exclusions have been introduced by several gaming platforms with the aid of technology.

Further online gaming platforms often require personal information such as name, age, contact details, and in case of real money gaming, also financial information. With this comes the risk of data breaches and related concerns such as identity theft leading to financial fraud. In this context, Know Your Customer (KYC) procedures play a critical role in helping protect both consumers as well as businesses from fraud. Further, online gaming intermediaries are required to process and store digital personal and non-personal data in compliance with the applicable data protection laws of India. However, until the Digital Personal Data Protection Act comes into force, this remains a voluntary effort.

Last but not the least, a sector which holds substantial economic promise deserves regulatory backing and clarity. For much of its existence, the industry has operated self-sufficiently, wherein the collective efforts of the industry have led the way for a more robust, responsible, and accountable ecosystem. However, regulatory ambiguities and uncertainties have time and again created roadblocks for Indian gaming startups, and therefore, it is necessary that regulatory clarity be provided, and as a first step, the amended IT rules be implemented.

With an encouraging regulatory environment, the online gaming industry, which has seen a 27.45% CAGR between 2019 to 2022, in its contribution towards the country’s GDP, can further enhance India’s growth story and solidify its position as a disrupter in the global gaming landscape.

(The author is a Member of Parliament, Rajya Sabha, and former Minister of State for GAD, Education, Health, Maharashtra).

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of THE WEEK. 

Mark Millar’s limited series Wanted, loosely adapted in 2008 into an atrocious movie, imagined a dystopian world where all the superheroes are dead and the supervillains have won. That’s kind of how the multiplex feels right now. Comic-book cinema, which towered over the competition a mere five years ago (it reached its popular peak in 2019, the year of Avengers: Endgame and Joker), has entered a state of ongoing commercial decline. Capes and cowls are no longer a sure thing at the box office; increasingly, it feels like we’ve stepped into a post-superhero age. And in the absence of the virtuously costumed, it’s supervillains — and antiheroes — who have fought for dominance over the screens of 2024.

This weekend, for example, marks the theatrical return of Venom, the erstwhile Spider-Man arch-nemesis, again divorced of any relationship to Marvel’s friendly neighborhood web-slinger. Venom: The Last Dance, which just opened in theaters everywhere, rounds out a whole trilogy of starring vehicles for Tom Hardy’s take on hapless journalist Eddie Brock and the trash-talking, long-tongued extraterrestrial who’s made a home inside his bulky body. 

Need another fix of bad? The Last Dance arrives on the heels of Joker: Folie à Deux, the majorly underperforming musical sequel to Todd Phillips’ origin story for the most infamous madman from Batman’s gallery of rogues, the Clown Prince of Crime. And it anticipates another Sony spotlight for a Spidey foe, Kraven the Hunter, which is due this Christmas and belongs to the same weird, misbegotten franchise of Spider-Man movies without Spider-Man as the Venom series and this past spring’s baffling bit-player flop Madame Web. Hell, even the one bona fide comic-book-movie hit of the year, Deadpool & Wolverine, stars a character who began his fictional life as a villain, a quipping adversary of various X teams.

Not so long ago, any of these characters getting their very own movie would have been inconceivable. The mere existence of Kraven the Hunter is proof of how deeply Hollywood bought into the lie that anything Marvel- or DC-related could be a giant hit. Starring vehicles for supervillains feels like the natural next step (or maybe the last step, the point of termination) for a cash-cow genre that’s looked to back issues and more obscure corners of comicdom for available source material. You don’t get this year’s crop of bad-guy spectacles without the previous decade’s experiments in making second stringers into A-listers. There would likely be no Venom trilogy without the success of Guardians of the Galaxy or Suicide Squad.

To some extent, superhero cinema has worked back around to the ’90s, when the genre was basically Batman sequels and adaptations of cult comics like The Crow and Tank Girl and Judge Dredd. That was also the era when the big two publishers were lining up their own starring vehicles for the heavies of their respective universes. Again, Venom and Deadpool were both villains before they proved popular enough to get the antihero makeover, and to headline their own limited and ongoing series. In truth, this was always kind of a letdown. Venom, that slobbering rage monster, made for a pretty scary Spidey rival. Softening him into an “edgy” vigilante, a so-called “lethal enforcer,” was a waste of a good adversary.

This year’s unlikely supervillain movies suffer from a similar problem. They soften and brighten characters whose whole appeal was their rough edges and their darkness. The Venom movies are not without their pleasures, most of them courtesy of Hardy’s valiant effort to forge a screwball buddy comedy out of the symbiotic relationship between Eddie and his alien guest. But Venom has always been cooler as a villain, a vengeful anti-Spider-Man, and the movies never approach the fearsomeness that made him such a popular character in the first place. Imagine flashing back to 1988 and telling a reader that not only would Venom one day get his own trilogy of movies but that he’d be reduced to a one-man Midnight Run, a glorified mismatched-partner routine.

Likewise, Joker: Folie à Deux buys so fully into the idea that Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck is a misunderstood misfit — destined for infamy only because he was abandoned by the system — that it leeches the character of all his psychotic power. You don’t have to be an incensed fanboy to recognize that turning the Joker into a pitiable sadsack is a delating approach to one of the most flavorfully outsized villains in all of comics. And if Deadpool has been a superhero for a lot longer than he was a supervillain, it’s still odd to see his trilogy of movies undercut their anarchic, sarcastic spirit with warm-and-fuzzies. Who was clamoring for a Deadpool with big feels? Are we really supposed to care about the crime-fighting dreams of a psychotic assassin who breaks the fourth wall at every opportunity?

The Venom and Joker films — along with Suicide Squad and Morbius and one must presume the forthcoming Kraven the Hunter — run into the same daunting obstacle, which is that it’s hard to build a conventional movie around characters that work best in opposition to the superhero, as a distorting mirror or foil or hurdle. All of them get around that problem by essentially turning their villains into more virtuous, upstanding, or even conflicted versions of themselves… which ends up violating what’s special about them. It’s actually hard to imagine a Venom or Joker movie that embraced the more twisted (or #twisted) aspects of either, because where would the rooting interest lie? You’d have something like The Fly or Natural Born Killers — which, no, that sounds pretty good, actually. What we got instead was de facto superhero movies in supervillain drag.

These films evoke the grimdark ’90s in another way, one that should be much less comforting for studio executives. That decade wasn’t just the era when comics were locked in an arms race of excessive edginess, with both Marvel and DC — along with Image, a publisher that was edginess all the time — pushing superheroes into the ethically cloudy arena of antiheroism. It was also a time of boom and bust for the comics industry, when an explosion of big sales and collector investment earlier in the decade lead to a rapid decline in interest, culminating in Marvel filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy at the end of 1996. Maybe superhero cinema is following a similar trajectory, sputtering out with a run of stories for the tortured bad boys of their roster. At the end of the parade, the rapscallions briefly take the spotlight.

But in the words of one of the genre’s biggest and best hits, maybe the night is darkest before the dawn. Which is to say, maybe there’s a glimmer of something brighter on the horizon, past these (mostly unsuccessful) flirtations with the dark side of the superhero industrial complex. The bad guys had their moment this year. Don’t be surprised if the medium’s most iconic character, a man who puts the super in superhero, kicks off a comeback for the good guys next year.

Venom: The Last Dance is now playing in theaters everywhere. Joker: Folie à Deux is playing in a dwindling number of theaters everywhere. For more of A.A. Dowd’s writing, visit his Authory page.

UnitedHealth has admitted that the health data of more than 100 million Americans was exposed in a hack. This is the first time the multinational health insurance and services company, has attributed a specific number to the cyberattack that took place earlier this year.

UnitedHealth admits health data of 100 million US citizens was compromised

UnitedHealth Group (UHG) acquired Change Healthcare in 2022. The two companies are now part of the same healthcare organization under the UnitedHealth brand.

In February this year, Change Healthcare suffered a massive data breach. However, the company did not mention the number of individuals whose data was exposed.

In May, UnitedHealth CEO Andrew Witty indicated that “maybe a third” of all American’s health data was exposed in the attack. A month later, Change Healthcare published a data breach notification, wherein the company merely stated that the ransomware attack exposed a “substantial quantity of data” for a “substantial proportion of people in America.”

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has updated the “Data Breach” portal. The column for Change Healthcare hack reportedly mentions that 100 million individuals are affected.

Largest American healthcare data breach in recent years

The FAQ section on the OCR website now mentions “On October 22, 2024, Change Healthcare notified OCR that approximately 100 million individual notices have been sent regarding this breach.”

Needless to say, with 100 million American citizens impacted, the ransomware attack could be one of the largest in recent years. What’s even more concerning apart from the number of civilians, is how the data breach was handled.

According to Bleeping Computer, threat actors stole 6TB of data from Change Healthcare. The attackers then encrypted computers on the network. As a remedial measure, the UnitedHealth subsidiary shut down its IT systems. This led to widespread outages in the U.S. healthcare system.

The BlackCat ransomware group, which conducted the attack, may have received about $22 million from UnitedHealth Group. The company allegedly paid to receive a decryption key and ensure the ransomware group deleted the stolen data.

The affiliate that worked with the ransomware group didn’t delete the data immediately. However, the entry for Change Healthcare has mysteriously disappeared from the affiliate’s website. This suggests UnitedHealth may have paid a second ransom demand.

It is not clear how UnitedHealth will be penalized. T-Mobile recently paid a paltry fine of $31.5 million for multiple data breaches. The carrier will get half the money to invest in tech to improve cybersecurity.

Update 10/26/24 9am ET: The deal below has expired, but you can get a similar deal on the Pixel Tablet at Wellbots right now. The Pixel Tablet with its charging speaker dock is $110 off and down to $489 when you use the code ENGPIX110 at checkout. You can use the same code to get $110 off the 256GB Pixel Tablet on its own, bringing the final price down to $389.

Tablets might be a cheaper alternative to laptops but they can still cost a good chunk of money. Sales make all the difference and, right now, the 128GB Google Pixel Tablet is available for $275, down from $399. The 31 percent discount brings this tablet to a new all-time low price. The sale is only available if you get the tablet in Porcelain and doesn’t come with the speaker dock (though that combo is 11 percent off).

Google released this Pixel Tablet in summer 2023 and gave us things we really liked and others we weren’t wowed with. We gave it an 84 in our review thanks, in large part, to its smart home features. Our reviewer, Cherlynn Low, already had a Nest Mini in her room, but was impressed with how much better the tablet worked. The sound is great — though that was thanks to the Speaker Dock — and its Hub Mode is very useful. It shows you all the devices throughout your home, including camera feeds and switch lamps.

If you want this device for entertainment and ease then it could be great. However, there were a few aspects that we weren’t as keen on. Some of the movements aren’t very intuitive and we didn’t use it much without the stand. But, it has great battery if you do get it without a dock, lasting 21 and a half hours with 50 percent brightness on our test.

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Velan Studios announced its VR pinball game Bounce Arcade is available for pre-order on Meta Quest and will debut on November 21.

In the game, you enter the machine and play pinball like you’ve never seen before. It has multiple themed pinball tables full of challenges. Players must strive to survive, unlock mini-games, and chase high scores in action gameplay.

Velan Studios, started by brothers Guha and Karthik Bala in 2016, is known for a wide range of game types with mostly original intellectual property. It also launched the Hot Wheels: Rift Rally title that used augmented reality and real toy cars.

Bounce Arcade mixes pinball classics like multiball with new ball control mechanics like “attract” and “guide“. Bounce Arcade enhances the pinball experience with mini-games only possible in VR. For pre-ordering the game, players will receive a 10% discount off the game’s $20 price, bringing it down to $18.

In Bounce Arcade, players will enter the machine and be transported into an immersive 3D table arenas featuring classic pinball-inspired mechanics like rails and bumpers, while navigating level specific mechanics.

Players will start with a set number of balls, and, using their paddles, they must keep the ball in play to rack up points. Players can use paddles to deflect or attract balls and even control balls in mid-flight with the “guide” mechanic to direct the ball to their target.

In Bounce Arcade, players are transported inside immersive 3D table arenas, featuring classic pinball-inspired mechanics like rails and bumpers, along with new tricks and secrets to uncover. Each of the table arenas has a distinct theme and presentation, including the space themed Asteroid Outpost and the western themed Gunpowder Gulch, plus two more to be announced at a later date.

The game keeps players on their toes as the difficulty can increase with multi-ball game play. Certain events within a level will cause multiple balls to be added to the environment which creates a period of more intense action.