After seven years, Lego has finally unveiled a new Mindstorms kit, reports PC Magazine -- the Lego Mindstorms Robot Inventor, available this fall for $359: The Robot Inventor kit lets kids (or adults) build five different robot models out of 949 pieces, ranging from a four-legged walker to a bipedal wheeled robot that can give high-fives. All of these robots can be programmed to perform different tricks, like grabbing items, firing plastic projectiles, avoiding obstacles, and playing various sports with a ball.

The kit includes four low-profile, medium-angular motors; a color and light sensor; and a distance sensor, which work together with the Intelligent Hub block to power these robots and execute commands. Of course, like all Mindstorms kits, you can build your own robotic creations with the tools at hand, and add Lego Technic and System pieces for more complex projects.

The Intelligent Hub serves as the brain of Lego Mindstorms, and the block that houses the Mindstorms Robot Inventor Kit is the most advanced one yet. It features six input/output ports for sensors and motors, a six-axis gyro/accelerometer, a speaker, and a five-by-five LED matrix. The Intelligent Hub and all robots built with it can be controlled wirelessly over Bluetooth with the Lego Mindstorms Robot Inventor app for Android, iOS, Windows 10, and macOS. The app supports programming in both the tile-based Scratch language and in Python, for more complex projects that require the precision of written code.

The Verge reports that WarnerMedia is getting rid of the HBO Go app in an attempt to reduce some of the confusion about which app is for which purpose. From the report: HBO Max is AT&T's new streaming service that lets you access the entire HBO library plus additional content like Cartoon Network shows and the Studio Ghibli movies. You can subscribe to HBO Max directly for a $14.99 monthly fee, but it's also offered for free from many cable providers if you subscribe to HBO, and it's free as part of some AT&T wireless, internet, or TV plans. A key thing to know is that HBO Max is really an expanded and rebranded version of HBO Now, the company's previous streaming-only service. On most platforms, like Apple TV, the HBO Now app was directly updated to become HBO Max.

Before HBO Max existed, cable subscribers could stream HBO shows using an app called HBO Go. WarnerMedia will be getting rid of that app (or "sunsetting" it, in WarnerMedia's language) from "primary platforms" as of July 31st. If you previously relied on HBO Go, many cable providers will already let you log in to HBO Max. You can see that full list here. That "primary platforms" language is important, because WarnerMedia still hasn't struck deals to bring HBO Max to Roku or Amazon streaming devices. On those platforms, WarnerMedia is not upgrading the HBO Now app to become HBO Max. Instead, it's rebranding to simply be "HBO," where it will still cost $14.99, even though you'll only be able to watch HBO content on it and not the expanded HBO Max catalog. This branding switch will be happening over the coming months, according to WarnerMedia.

"It looks like Twitch streamers are the latest targets for coordinated DMCA attacks," writes Slashdot reader stikves. "What is more concerning is that these could potentially cripple their accounts." Engadget reports: The company has acknowledged (via Evening Standard) a "sudden influx" of DMCA takedown requests against streamers for allegedly violating music copyright in clips captured by viewers between 2017 and 2019. As each request potentially represents a strike against an account, this raises the threat of permanent bans for streamers who might get three strikes with relatively little warning -- and for clips they didn't even choose to create.

The Amazon-owned service is recommending that broadcasters delete any affected clips. However, it's a very slow process. You can only delete a handful at a time, and popular streamers may have thousands of clips. Twitch said it was working to "make this [process] easier," but didn't elaborate how.

On Wednesday, Magic: The Gathering publisher Wizards of the Coast took unprecedented measures to remove racist cards from its game. Seven cards in all, dating back to 1994, are now banned from play. Their images will also being removed from the game's official online database. Polygon reports: "The events of the past weeks and the ongoing conversation about how we can better support people of color have caused us to examine ourselves, our actions, and our inactions," Wizards said in a statement. "We appreciate everyone helping us to recognize when we fall short. We should have been better, we can be better, and we will be better." The list of now-banned cards is: Invoke Prejudice, Cleanse, Stone-Throwing Devils, Pradesh Gypsies, Jihad, Imprison, and Crusade.

One card in particular, Invoke Prejudice, was singled out. It shows a hooded executioner with a black axe. "If opponent casts a Summon spell that does not match the color of one of the creatures under your control, that spell is countered," says the card. It effectively kills off creatures that don't look like the creatures already on the table. Gatherer, the official online database of every Magic card ever published, displays the card at a web URL ending in "1488," numbers that are synonymous with white supremacy. All cards will be replaced online with a note that calls out their racist depictions, text, or a combination thereof.

At a live event today, Sony officially unveiled its PlayStation 5 console. Eurogamer reports: The sleek and curved box will come in two flavors -- one with a disc drive, and one without. Meet the PlayStation 5, and PlayStation 5 Digital Edition. No pricing or launch date details were announced today. The white-colored console can be orientated horizontally or vertically. Both versions have a USB and USB-C port in the front. Also shown: a controller charging station which docks two DualSense pads, a headset featuring 3D audio support and noise-cancelling microphones and a media remote with built-in microphone. You can watch the PS5 hardware reveal trailer here. Sony also offered a first extended look at actual games running on the upcoming hardware.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Nearly three months after laying out some of the PlayStation 5's technological underpinnings, Sony today offered a first extended look at actual games running on the upcoming hardware during a live event. The event started off with a glimpse of an "expanded and enhcanced" version of Grand Theft Auto V, which is coming to the PlayStation 5 in 2021, in case you need an excuse to buy the game again. PlayStation 5 owners will also get GTA Online free at launch in 2021, while PS4 owners of GTAV will get $1 million in monthly online GTA Cash every month until the PS5 version launches.

A follow-up to last year's Spider-Man featuring Miles Morales will be hitting the PS5 in Holiday 2020. "A hero is just someone who doesn't give up," an unseen narrator says over the footage. "Your dad said that. He was right. Now it's your turn. Go be a hero Miles." Though the footage shown is tagged with a "captured on PS5," (and a ""Be greater, be yourself" slogan), it's unclear if it will also be available on older PS4 systems. Ratchet and Clank are back for more madcap run and gun mayhem in Rift Apart, a game that seems focused on warping quickly between dimensions that are randomly collapsing in on one another. The trailer shows the duo riding dragons, facing pirates, sliding down futuristic buildings, and more. And one dimension even features a female member of Ratchet's species, which is sure to satisfy a particular type of fan. Other games mentioned in the report that are coming to Sony's next-gen console include: Square Enix and Luminous Productions' Project Athia, Annapurna's Stray, Housemarque and PlayStation Studios' Returnal, LittleBigPlanet's A Big Adventure, Destruction Allstars, Ember Lab's Kena: Bridge of Spirits, Goodbye Volcano High, Soulstorm, Ghostwire Tokyo, Superbrothers' The Far Shore, Gearbox and Counterplay Games' Godfall, Solar Ash, Hitman 3, Astro's Playroom, and Little Devil Inside.

Developing...

European police busted an illegal streaming ring that provided service to 2 million people and was so sophisticated that it had its own customer-service team. From a report: The criminal network operated for over five years and offered more than 40,000 channels, movies, documentaries and other content, according to European police coordination agency Europol. The scale of the operation shows how the big streaming platforms still struggle to deal with content theft as criminals find new ways to hack their anti-piracy systems. The group offered a technical assistance service and high standards of quality control, earning an estimated 15 million euros ($17 million) through PayPal payments, bank transfers and cryptocurrencies, the agency said. The threat to legal streaming may grow if Netflix, Walt Disney Co. and others gradually raise prices in coming years to capitalize on their fast-growing subscriber bases and viewers seek out cheaper, illegal alternatives.

California counties, including Los Angeles County, could decide to reopen movie theaters as early as Friday. The Los Angeles Times reports: Each local health officer has the authority to decide whether to move forward with relaxing restrictions on reopening theaters. While the state provides guidance on how businesses can reopen, counties decide when they occur. The new rules would limit the number of guests in a movie theater to 25% of theater capacity or a maximum of 100 attendees, whichever is lower. Also, theaters would need to implement a reservation system to limit the number of attendees entering the theater at a time when possible. "Designate arrival times as part of reservations, if possible so that customers arrive at and enter the theater in staggered groups," the state's rules say.

To keep guests six feet away from others, theaters are to close or otherwise remove seats from use, which may require seating every other row or blocking off seats in a checkerboard style, in which no one is sitting directly behind other patrons. The rules would ask patrons to wear face coverings when not eating or drinking. Staff would need to be available to help usher people before the show begins and at its conclusion to reduce crowding when entering or exiting. The guidelines also suggest using disposable or washable seat covers in theaters, "particularly on porous surfaces that are difficult to properly clean. Discard and replace seat covers between each use," the guidelines say.

Los Angeles, San Diego, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura are among 51 California counties that will be given the option by the state to allow movie theaters to reopen. All but seven of California's 58 counties have filed attestation paperwork to reopen their economies at an accelerated pace. Six of the counties that have not done so are in the San Francisco Bay Area -- Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara -- and the seventh is Imperial County east of San Diego, which is facing a bad outbreak. Deadline notes that while some independently owned cinemas could open their doors again, "many notable chains won't."

Not only do movie theaters need more time to prep, but many have paused their leases with landlords. "Also, while a 30%-50% capacity auditorium level is doable financially for most theater owners, a 25% cap is stretching it for some," the report adds. "Chains in California we hear aren't reopening Friday include AMC, Regal, Cinemark (which has outlined a three-phase approach beginning June 19 in Dallas), Alamo Drafthouse, Arclight Cinemas, Laemmle, Cinepolis and Landmark."

With the Xbox Series X on the horizon, Microsoft's head of videogame hardware sees a future where consoles may no longer be front and center. Wired reports: Despite its massive push for the Xbox Series X, Microsoft is hedging its bets that a decade from now more and more gamers will be taking a "no gods, no masters" approach to where and how they play. Phil Spencer, head of Xbox, thinks whether consoles will exist in 10 years is the wrong question to ask. "In the long run, to me, it's a question about the viability of the television," said Spencer last week in an interview with WIRED. "There's this calculus, this chess match we're playing," says Spencer. "It's no longer checkers." Spencer's chess match isn't against Sony or Nintendo; it's against the ever-changing trends in how two billion gamers worldwide consume media. When the Xbox Series X arrives in stores later this year, it will become a part of Xbox's chimera approach -- alongside its cloud gaming service, Project xCloud, and Xbox Play Anywhere -- to capture gamers wherever they are. With xCloud, you'll pay a currently undefined subscription to stream AAA games onto your mobile phone and tablet. With Xbox Play Anywhere, you can buy, say, Forza Horizon 4 and play it on both Xbox One and Windows 10 on PC.
[...]
Spencer paints the Xbox Series X and the "game anywhere on stuff you have" pitches as complementary rather than cannibalistic. "I don't think it's 'hardware agnostic' as much as it's 'where you want to play," he says. Which makes sense: The more ways to play, and the more services Microsoft provides, the more repeatable revenue flowing into Microsoft's coffers. After the hype around the Xbox Series X cools down and the hardware-content singularity approaches, it's possible that many of the people opting to play Xbox games will do so on everything except the Xbox. It seems fair to ask whether this generation of dedicated consoles will be the last. "I like watching TV. I like playing games on TV. It's where I play most of the time," says Spencer. "I think there will be -- for a long time -- a world where people want to play on a television, and we're committed to that and we will deliver great console experiences. I don't think Xbox series X is our last console. I think we will do more consoles to make that great television play experience work and be delightful."

And if not, well, the company still has options. "The nice thing about being in a company the scale of Microsoft is we're able to make bets across a lot of those fronts and we're not really dependent upon any one of those individual kinds of businesses or relationships to succeed," says Spencer.

Space Force, the branch of the US armed services established by the Trump administration last December, now shares a name with a Netflix comedy starring Steve Carrell. From a report: The military reportedly isn't too concerned about possible confusion over the fictional show's name. Netflix, however, has reportedly secured trademark rights in Europe, Australia, Mexico and elsewhere for Space Force. Currently, the Air Force only owns a pending application for registration of the name Space Force in the US based on intent to use, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Records obtained by the publication showed that Netflix was submitting applications for the name "Space Force" internationally back in January 2019.

One of the issues with the NBA's plan to restart its season in July is playing games without fans in the arena. According to a report from The Athletic, there's a proposal to pipe in crowd noise from the NBA 2K video game. Engadget reports: NBA 2K also serves as the platform for the league's official esports series and has already simulated its own end to the 2019-2020 regular season, and its attention to details of the basketball experience may help fill in the blanks. Some leagues that have returned to action during the coronavirus pandemic already use piped-in sound, including Bundesliga soccer, and Sky Sports is planning to use EA's FIFA 20 game to a similar effect on Premier League broadcasts.

Sarah Whitten writes via CNBC: The coronavirus pandemic has fundamentally changed the entertainment industry. With movie theaters shuttered, studios have been forced to either delay their film releases or turn to on-demand and streaming options to present their content to audiences. While cinemas are preparing to reopen this month, eagerly awaiting new films in July, it's still unclear if there is enough demand to keep these businesses profitable. [...] Industry members worry that if films begin to shift towards on-demand and streaming that all of the metrics that were used to gauge success could disappear.

It's easy to figure out if a film is successful because studios give out all of the necessary information. You know the production budget, can ascertain that the marketing budget was about half of the production budget and then you see the box office receipts. If the box office numbers are larger than the production and marketing budgets, then the movie was a success. If that number is smaller, it was a flop. There's even data about how many screens a film was shown on in a given weekend and the average that film made per screen. These metrics not only help studios determine the profitability of a movie, but can also aid in its marketing. [...] In the world of streaming, and even on-demand and home video, that level of transparency is not present. There are very few sources that track the home entertainment market and even fewer companies that share their data on the subject.

Of course, the model for subscriptions services is very different from that of theatrical releases. Consumers pay up front a flat fee for a month's worth of content on a service like Netflix or Disney+, whereas theaters charge per view. So, it's difficult to assign a monetary amount to a movie released on a streaming service. The strongest measure of success for streaming services is total number of subscribers. This figure can be used to persuade content makers to work with one platform instead of another because of the potential reach they could have with an audience. It's not a guarantee that all of those subscribers will watch the content, but they will be exposed to it. [...] [However] it's very difficult to determine if someone signed up for a service just to watch one program. The report notes that Netflix counts a "view" as someone who chose to watch a program for at least two minutes, which is "pretty useless," according to Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter. "Who cares how many people watched a particular movie (other than them and the press)? It doesn't translate to revenue unless the movie is the reason to join the streaming service."

"Netflix gauges the success of shows by calculating how many viewers it was getting compared with the cost of the show," reports CNBC. "Without viewership data from any of Netflix's shows, it's difficult to determine how big of an audience a show on the platform needs to achieve in order to be considered viable by the company."

Rockstar Games, 2K games, and their parent company Take-Two Interactive announced on Thursday that they will shut down the servers for games such as Grand Theft Auto Online, Red Dead Online, and NBA 2K for two hours on Thursday afternoon "to honor the legacy of George Floyd." Polygon reports: "Black Lives Matter," said Rockstar Games on its official Twitter account. "To honor the legacy of George Floyd, today, 6/4/20, from 2:00-4:00 p.m. ET, we will be shutting down access to our online games, Grand Theft Auto Online and Red Dead Online." "Following the memorial," Rockstar added in a follow-up tweet, "we hope you will join us in further honoring the many victims of America's racial injustices by supporting their families, black-owned businesses, those marching on the streets, and coalitions." Rockstar ended its thread with a link to Charity Navigator, a nonprofit organization that maintains a vetted list of civil rights-focused charities.

In addition to Rockstar's titles, additional games from 2K Games and Social Point will go offline as well from 2-4 p.m. EDT on Thursday, Take-Two Interactive said in a statement to Polygon. The list includes NBA 2K, Dragon City, and Monster Legend. Private Division, whose portfolio includes The Outer Worlds and Kerbal Space Program, will also "suspend" its activities during the window. "George Floyd's memory will serve as a reminder that racism and the violence it incites cannot be tolerated," Take-Two Interactive said. "We are committed to supporting efforts to eradicate racial injustice and stand in solidarity with the Black community against this systemic issue that causes conflict and division in our society."

AMC Theatres, the world's biggest movie theater chain, said on Wednesday that it has "substantial doubt" it can remain in business after closing locations across the globe during the coronavirus pandemic. From a report: The theater chain, which closed its theaters earlier this year, expects to have lost between $2.1 billion and $2.4 billion in the first quarter. The company also said that its revenue fell to $941.5 million, which was down roughly 22% from $1.2 billion in the same quarter last year. This quarter, the situation has gotten substantially worse. "We are generating effectively no revenue," the company said in a regulatory filing Wednesday.

AMC will continue to monitor the "potential lifting of various government operating restrictions," but added that the chain has serious challenges even if restrictions are lifted. That includes studios holding back new films from being shown. "Even if governmental operating restrictions are lifted in certain jurisdictions, distributors may delay the release of new films until such time that operating restrictions are eased more broadly domestically and internationally, which may further limit our operations," the company said. The company said that it had a cash balance of $718.3 million as of April.

Streaming platform Roku has removed a channel dedicated to the QAnon conspiracy theory movement after facing criticism for letting it slip through its review and moderation processes last month. The Verge reports: The show, called "Q Channel - QAnon Channel," was hosted by popular QAnon supporter Dave Hayes and advertised as a "opinion based shows for getting the truth out, as we know it, about the Qanon movement." A Roku spokesperson tells The Verge, "The channel is no longer on our platform." But the company would not elaborate on why it allowed the show to launch last month.

Roku is best known as a streaming set-top box maker that also produces interface software for smart TVs. In addition to supporting other streaming services, Roku also allows anyone to create a channel that shows up on its platform as if it were any other legitimate source -- like Hulu, Netflix, or scores of verified news channels. That's what Hayes, who goes by the online handle "Praying Medic," did after he began advertising the launch of his dedicated QAnon opinion show in late May. MediaMatters reports the channel was live for nearly two weeks, promoting prominent QAnon voices and the movement's regular slate of rampant misinformation, conspiracy theories, and other false and manipulated news reports. Hayes also said he would be bringing the channel to other streaming platforms, too. Last week, Google removed three apps related to the QAnon conspiracy theory movement from the Play Store.

"Just about the entire cast of The Lord of the Rings gathered their Zoom screens together for a reunion nearly two decades after the end of the epic fantasy film trilogy," reports CNET:

io9 notes that it was comic actor-singer Josh Gad who "gathered the hobbits, the wizards, the elves, and the wicked menfolk to go to Isen — YouTube, where they joke, talk shop, reminisce, and just seem to really thoroughly enjoy each others' presence. In this stream are Elijah Wood [Frodo], Sena Astin [Sam], Ian McKellen [Gandalf], Orlando Bloom [Legolas], Viggo Mortensen [Aragorn], Liv Tyler [Arwen], and more, along with director Peter Jackson and, presumably, the kind doting ghost of J.R.R. Tolkien just off-screen."

The Wrap has more details, including the fact that the event was to support No Kid Hungry, a charity in support of ending childhood hunger, and some ways they changed J.R.R. Tolkein's book for the movie: "Gandalf does not say, 'You shall not pass!' in the book," McKellen notes. "He says, 'You will not pass." [Co-writer Philippa] Boyens also notes that Gandalf's first line in the trilogy was one she came up with herself, instead of coming from Tolkien: "A wizard is never late, Frodo Baggins. Nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he means to."

Another moment from the trilogy that gained Internet immortality was Boromir's famous "One does not simply" speech, where he warns the Council of Elrond that trying to sneak into Mordor to destroy the One Ring is impossible. Jackson admits that the speech was written the day before the council scene was filmed and while Sean Bean's speech was done so well that it became a meme, he needed some help to remember it.

"What Sean did, which I thought was really clever, is he got a print-out of the speech taped to his knee," Jackson said, pointing out Bean places his hand to his head to display Boromir's sense of despair. "If you watch the scene now, you'll see every time that Sean has to check his script."

Ridley Scott was the fifth choice to direct the 1979 film Alien, remembers the Los Angeles Times, "meaning that no one was expecting the film to become as important and influential as it now is."

This week they chronicled some more remembrances about the film from 82-year-old Ridley Scott: The central role of Ellen Ripley — also portrayed by Sigourney Weaver in three subsequent sequels — was originally written as a man... "I think it was Alan Ladd [then president of 20th Century Fox] who said, 'Why can't Ripley be a woman?' And there was a long pause, that at that moment I never thought about it. I thought, why not, it's a fresh direction, the ways I thought about that. And away we went... I found Sigourney by word of mouth. Somebody had been told that Siourney was on an off-Broadway stage doing something, that I should meet. And I did," Scott said. "And there it was, she was perfect. In terms of scale, size, intelligence, her acting is just fantastic. And so it was made for her, really."

The film's notorious chest-burster scene, in which an alien creature emerges from within actor John Hurt's chest, is now among the classic scenes in modern horror cinema. It was shot with multiple cameras because Scott could only really perform the full effect once, "because once I blew blood all over that set, there was no cleaning it up... I kept it very much from the actors and I kept the actual little creature, whatever that would be, from the actors. I never wanted them to see it," Scott said. "Remember there was no digital effects in those days at all. I'm going to somehow bring that creature out of his chest...."

Scott recalled the influence that Star Wars had on him at the time, noting, "It opened the gate for me feeling comfortable that science fiction was no longer silly fantasy but actually had a reality to it... So I was blown away... My hat still comes off to George," Scott said of Lucas for the first Star Wars. "Without question his was by far the best, still."
Scott directed the 2017 film Alien: Covenant, the Times notes, "And he may not be done yet.

"What I always thought when I was making it, the first one, why would a creature like this be made and why was it traveling in what I always thought was a kind of war-craft, which was carrying a cargo of these eggs. What was the purpose of the vehicle and what was the purpose of the eggs? That's the thing to question — who, why, and for what purpose is the next idea, I think."

wyattstorch516 writes: Comcast has spun off its blockchain division and is now partnering with Spectrum Reach (the advertising sales division of Charter Communications) and Viacom. Customized ad delivery in the TV space has significantly lagged the technology for online video providers such as Youtube. Blockgraph holds out the promise that will allow advertisers to target key demographics while safeguarding subscriber information. Can this help prop up the declining broadcast video market? One-third of Blockgraph will now be owned by each company. Blockgraph Chief Executive Jason Manningham says the platform will help brands and ad-inventory sellers match data sets without sharing too much personal data on the viewers.

"For instance, if a car maker buys a data set of people in the market for a car, it could use Blockgraph's technology to match that list up with cable subscribers based on their home address," reports The Wall Street Journal, citing Manningham. "The car company could use this data either to learn which programs and time of day draw more viewers from their desired audience, or to buy ads targeted only at households on the in-market list."

Just like nearly everything else on the internet, streaming services are ruled by recommendation algorithms that are designed to predetermine what people want before they ask for it. WarnerMedia is trying to accomplish the opposite with HBO Max. From a report: The company's new streaming service, which will allow for three concurrent streams, is positing itself as a human-first platform -- the opposite of Netflix's strategy. As streaming becomes more of a centerpiece in people's homes and more platforms find their way to people's television sets, focusing on improving the actual curation system subscribers use is just as important as available content, Sarah Lyons, senior vice president of product experience, told The Verge. CNET adds: Like rivals Netflix and Disney Plus, HBO Max has a sprawling catalog of hit shows and movies, plus a big-budget slate of exclusive originals packed with stars. But HBO Max is the most expensive of the bunch. New subscribers can sign up and pay a simple $15 a month subscription after a week-long free trial, the same price HBO already charges for its linear channel on most pay-TV providers and for its preexisting standalone streaming service, HBO Now. But if you're already paying for HBO in some form, the amount you'll have to pay for Max now, or whether you have to pay anything extra at all... well, it's complicated. "The question is: Does your provider have to deal with us for Max and do you move over? That answer will be fairly simple, and then beyond that it gets a little more complicated," Andy Forssell, the general manager of WarnerMedia's streaming operation, said in an interview last week. "We've got really broad distribution, and ... midnight next Tuesday we'll be where we are -- not that that's an end point, if there any discussions undone." To entice you to give it a try, HBO Max has padded itself with more content than you'll find on either the regular HBO channel or HBO Now.

Last week, Kotaku reported on a new project, called Insignia, "that aims to recreate the original Xbox Live service, potentially restoring online play to many dozens of classic Xbox games that fell offline when the original Xbox Live service closed on April 15, 2010." From the report: The project's announcement on the r/originalxbox subreddit came from SoullessSentinel, a screen name of one Luke Usher. Usher is well known in the vintage Xbox community as the lead developer of Cxbx-Reloaded, arguably the most advanced PC-based emulator of the 2001 Xbox hardware. (Microsoft's classic console has proven notoriously tricky to emulate over the years.)

As a demonstration of Insignia's progress, Usher shared a video depicting the creation of a new Xbox Live account via the Xbox's system UI. It's a cool trick, as this process has not been technically possible since the online service's April 2010 closure. (In a cheeky touch, the video names the newly created account HiroProtagonist, the Gamertag of Xbox co-creator J Allard.) Insignia will work with normal, unmodded consoles, provided the user can perform a one-time process to retrieve their unit's internal encryption keys. Long-existing Xbox soft-mod techniques, which require physical copies of exploitable games like Splinter Cell or MechAssault but do not necessarily alter the console's hardware or operating system, should suffice for accomplishing this key retrieval. Once that initial setup's completed, Usher envisions a more or less vanilla Xbox Live experience, complete with matchmaking, voice chat, messaging, and almost everything else you might remember. (One exception would come in a lack of proprietary game DLC, which Insignia and its developers lack rights to distribute.) Anti-cheating measures are also in the works, as well as reporting and banning mechanisms for truly bad actors. The project works by using a DNS man-in-the-middle maneuver to redirect all of Xbox Live's original server calls to new addresses that point to Insignia's work-in-progress infrastructure.

"The current plan is for Insignia to be a centralized service run by Usher and associates," reports Kotaku. "He believes keeping it centralized will prevent player populations from diluting across multiple third-party servers, and that it will not be much of a resource burden." "The server," he noted, "is used for authentication, matchmaking, storing friends lists, etc. but actual game traffic is usually P2P between Xboxes, so the requirements for our server are pretty low."