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Business, Financial

Microsoft Store completely bans the sale of open source software

Microsoft has now announced that it will ban the sale of open source software in the Microsoft Store. The change will officially come into effect on July 16.

Image: Microsoft Store

The Microsoft Store is known for its many illegitimate apps. Numerous open source programs have been offered for sale in the past without the rightful developers of the project being compensated or involved in any way. The group had announced that it would take action. And they seem to have opted for the worst possible compromise.

Microsoft bans the sale of all open source programs from its store. So that they can only be offered there for free or not at all. Many projects had previously used the store for funding by paying for the program on the store while at the same time making it available for free through the official site. Developers were disappointed with the move and have already given their opinion on Twitter. Projects like WinSCP or Krita make paid versions of their open source programs available in the store. They ask for a small sum in the store, which can be considered a donation, to support the development of the application.

Developers are asking Microsoft to revise the policy and provide actual open source developers with a way to make their apps available through the Store for a fee. In-store sales can help projects get better funding, which will also benefit the programs themselves.

Comes Next, Gaming

Set sail: Skull and Bones is scheduled for release in November!

Ubisoft has finally announced the release date of the pirate game Skull and Bones. This year you can go on a digital loot hunt. We summarize the most important information for you.

Skull and Bones is scheduled for release in November. Image © Ubisoft

When is the game out?

Five years have passed since Skull and Bones was first presented at E3. Now the release is imminent. Towards the end of the year you can finally set sail – on November 8th, 2022 to be precise. The game will be available for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Stadia and PC. On the PC you have the choice between the Epic Games Store and Ubisoft’s in-house shop. Crossplay and cross-progression have already been officially confirmed.

The Premium Edition will include The Ballad of Bloody Bones Collection, a variety of ship and character cosmetic items, additional digital content including two extra missions, a digital art book and soundtrack, and a Letter of Marque token. Pre-orderers also get access to the High Seas Pack, which includes the Infamous Rift and Coronation Celebration Fireworks.

What game will it be?

Skull and Bones will be a pirate multiplayer game with survival elements. With up to two friends you can set sail together to search for treasure or to board enemy ships. “From accepting contracts and gathering resources to navigating important trade routes and attacking wealthy merchant ships, every choice will affect the player’s journey, with varying degrees of risk and reward,” the announcement reads.

In principle, the world of Skull and Bones can also be explored alone. However, Ubisoft emphasizes that the game would be more fun in multiplayer. Whether you prefer to forge alliances in the good old PvE manner or activate the PvP mode to compete with other players on the server is up to you. The video linked above gives us a first glimpse of what is happening in the game.

So that the gameplay doesn’t get boring in the long run, Ubisoft has come up with a few little things. The more adventures you complete with your crew, the more fame you gain. New items can be unlocked and little by little you can expand your own fleet and adapt it to your own playing style. In addition, a plan for the time after the release of the game has already been worked out. Regular free updates with new content, activities and challenges are designed to keep players happy.

Gaming

Klonoa Phantasy Reverie Series: Asian region cosmetic DLC sees Klonoa wearing Bandai-Namco headgear

Image: Klonoa Phantasy Reverie Series. © BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment Inc.

Today is the day: The Klonoa Collection with the name Klonoa Phantasy Reverie Series appears in stores and lets the titles Klonoa: Door to Phantomile and Klonoa 2: Lunatea’s Veil shine in new splendor. DLCs ​​or other external content were not announced, so the following listings surprise the fan community. A DLC pack with cosmetic items is shown in the Microsoft store in Singapore, but also on the title ‘s official Japanese website . This allows Klonoa to wear various headgear from Bandai Namco Entertainment’s history. These include a Pac Man hat , a Taiko no Tatsujin mask and a katamari headgear   . Please take a look at the following picture:

Image: Klonoa Phantasy Reverie Headgear © Bandai Namco Entertainment

The DLC should currently cost 400 yen in Japan – that’s the equivalent of around 3$. However, a western release is not yet confirmed.

Crypto, Security

Why a secure VPN is extremely important in these times

The past three years have been interesting and intense, if one can say so succinctly – but despite the turbulence, a positive outcome of these years is the widespread availability of remote work. But as remote work increases, so do more gaps in the network security of many organizations.

Today, the probability of being a victim of a cyber attack is greater than that of a car accident or a burglary. Criminals know that cybercrime has a much higher ROI – which means it poses a much higher risk to you.

If you don’t protect your company’s network, you risk a massive outage. Fortunately, there is a very simple solution: use a reputable corporate VPN. Not only does it give your employees easy access to company resources, but it also mitigates many risks posed by cybercriminals. So let’s take a look at why a web VPN is so important.

What is a business VPN?

A Virtual Private Network (VPN) offers your company a securely encrypted connection to your network over the public internet. It adds an important part of the security layer that is essential for protecting your data. A VPN gives you the ability to remotely access important network resources and connect your company’s offices and locations around the world.

Why should I use a VPN?

The past few weeks have highlighted the importance of having secure remote working capabilities. From global pandemics and natural disasters to power outages and unploughed roads, there are just too many situations that could keep people from getting to the office. For many individuals and businesses, this downtime can be detrimental. Businesses around the world are realizing that work cannot and should not be dependent on a specific location. Flexibility is key to success, and a VPN can provide just the flexibility businesses around the world need to keep working no matter the circumstance.

Benefits of a VPN

remote access

A VPN for remote access means your employees can log into your corporate network from anywhere with internet access. Whether they’re at a coffee shop, traveling, or (hopefully) socially isolating at home, a VPN gives your employees access to all the resources they need to do their jobs.

access control

With a VPN, you should be able to control who has access to your network and its resources. You obviously want to restrict who can log in and what they can access. Not all employees need access to the same resources. Your marketing team probably doesn’t need access to supply chain management tools, and your HR team doesn’t need access to systems infrastructure. With access control, you can set these limits step by step.

cybersecurity

If you need access to your private network, you can establish an encrypted, private communication session with a VPN. With a VPN session, you can securely send data over public networks thanks to encrypted tunnels . The only access is through a device with the VPN client software installed and configured to connect to your VPN servers.

Comes Next, Gaming

Now.gg introduces new Fungible Games Platform

Mobile cloud company Now.gg recently launched its Now.gg Fungible Games (NFG) mobile gaming platform. The NFG platform allows for “unbundling” of game assets such as game code, game events and game graphics, meaning that each asset can be owned by different people. The games are later reassembled via the cloud using “dynamic recomposition” and then delivered to the user.

Reasons for introducing NFG

“Games today are like movies. What if you could link them to matter, avatars, space and time,” says Now.gg Founder and CEO Rosen Sharma.

Matter means elements such as weapons in a game, avatars are the heroes we know, maps with portals act as space, for example, and time means the player’s time. With the computing power of the mobile cloud and the dynamic compositing of games, this is possible today.

Yang Guo, Founder and CEO of Heya added, “NFG is a groundbreaking new platform. It will change the way games are developed in the future and how games interact with their players. It also offers existing mobile developers a path to Web 3.0 that builds on their existing business. This would not have been possible without the mobile cloud.”

What does NFG bring to game developers?

Basically, NFG offers completely new possibilities in the development of games. For example, it becomes possible to split a game into different sectors such as code, events and graphics, whereby the ownership of these sectors can be divided among different people. In this way, existing games can be changed as desired, with the software querying individual sectors and reintegrating them in a modified form, supplementing them, or replacing them completely. The modified sectors can come from many different developers. In the end, it becomes the so-called fungible game.

There is also the possibility of a variety of new interactions between developers and players. For the latter it can e.g. For example, it can be very exciting to find new segments in games and integrate them into their gaming experience.

The mobile simulation game Heya is a current example of the use of NFG . The software can query the user’s wallet and in this context registers which assets he owns. He can then place these assets on the walls of a room and share the completely personalised, digital room with others. Experts view this merging of the real and virtual world with great fascination, as it offers undreamt-of possibilities for the future in the development of games that clearly stand out from what has been known and widespread up to now. In the future, the player will delve even deeper into the virtual world and the line between fiction and reality will continue to blur.

Recently, Yahaha Games secured a $50 million investment to build a metaverse with user-generated content that requires no programming skills from the user. So the future for gamer is going to be exciting.