Free Republic

LAFAYETTE, IN — A local 10-year-old boy has died tragically of severe trauma due to his mother taking away his Nintendo Switch for a few days. According to sources, 10-year-old Camden Connor passed away shortly after his mother told him: "Camden, I've had it with your bad attitude today. Give me the Switch and go outside and play!" "I have never seen such abuse," said one paramedic who arrived on the scene. "To force an innocent 10-year-old boy to be parted from Super Mario Odyssey, or The Legand of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, or Minecraft for hours is bad...

WASHINGTON, D.C. — During a tense Congressional Hearing, deductive polymath Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez put a widespread conspiracy theory to rest when she vocally insisted that there were no hysterectomies being performed on minors because most of them are too busy working in the mines anyway. The truth-filled gavel drop utterly destroyed the claim by conservatives that the Boston Children's Hospital was performing the irreparable surgeries on minors. "How can minors find the time to travel via minecart to far-away Boston when they're busy mining for coal, iron, and lapis lazuli," explained Ocasio-Cortez to an awestruck chamber. "And it's not just...

A Minecraft user has reportedly recreated Toto's hit song "Africa" on the gaming platform. Minecraft is a 3D video game in which players can build various structures across different settings. Users can also work with "note blocks" that emit a sound when manipulated. A Minecraft creator called "Stacinator" has used those elements to create Toto's "Africa" in 3D format, a process that took them three months. "Honestly, I started at the same place, and little parts of concepts just eventually started clicking after tons of practice and failing," Stacinator explained on Reddit. You can watch a video of the creation...

AMISH IN SARASOTA, FLORIDA As with elsewhere in Florida, snowbirds are a regular sight here. But intermixed with the more stereotypical visitors to Sarasota, a city and county on the Gulf of Mexico coast in southwest Florida, is a large community of Amish. Like other snowbirds, the Amish come from locales with cold winters. Think central Ohio, northern Indiana and, of course, the unofficial Amish capital of Lancaster County in Pennsylvania. At the height of the season, about 5,000 winter-weary Amish and Mennonites call Pinecraft, an enclave about 20 minutes from the popular St. Armand’s Circle, home. In the summer,...

A Russian teenager was sent to prison on Thursday for supposedly "training" for terrorist activities and other charges that included blowing up a virtual government intelligence building on the video game Minecraft. A military court in Siberia sentenced the boy, 16-year-old Nikita Uvarov, to five years for the charges -- which stemmed from anti-government leaflets he'd handed out and videos on cellphones belonging to Uvarov and at least two others. Authorities also said they'd uncovered a plot by the teens to blow up a virtual building belonging to the Russian Federal Security Service, or FSB, that they'd built in the...

Massive data breaches have become so common that we’ve gotten numb to reports detailing another hack or 0-day exploit. That doesn’t reduce the risk of such events happening, as the cat-and-mouse game between security experts and hackers continues. As some vulnerabilities get fixed, others pop up requiring attention from product and service providers. The newest one has a name that will not mean anything to most people. They call the hack Log4Shell in security briefings, which doesn’t sound very scary. But the new 0-day attack is so significant that some people see it as the worst internet hack in history.......

The vulnerability is in Java-based software known as "Log4j" that large organizations, including some of the world's biggest tech firms, use to configure their applications. Apple's cloud computing service, security firm Cloudflare and one of the world's most popular video games, Minecraft, are among the organizations that run Log4j, according to security researchers. The vulnerability can offer a hacker a relatively easy way to access an organization's computer server. From there, an attacker could devise other ways to access systems on an organization's network. Security experts say that the fallout from the software flaw could continue for days and weeks...

PHILADELPHIA – First Assistant United States Attorney Jennifer Arbittier Williams announced that Geoffrey Hines, 34, of Upper Darby, PA, was arrested and charged by Indictment with 29 counts of child pornography offenses. The defendant made his initial appearance in federal court this afternoon in front of United States Magistrate Court Judge Richard Lloret, who ordered him detained pending trial.The Indictment charges Hines with multiple counts each of enticing a minor to engage in sexually explicit conduct, manufacturing and attempting to manufacture child pornography, and possession of child pornography. According to court documents, for at least five years, the defendant preyed...

Microsoft is massively expanding Xbox’s original games portfolio: The software giant announced plans to acquire ZeniMax Media, the parent company of Bethesda Softworks — one of the biggest privately held game developers and publishers in the world — for $7.5 billion in cash. The deal will give Microsoft’s Xbox games division ownership of top-selling games including “Fallout,” “The Elder Scrolls,” “Doom,” “Quake,” “Wolfenstein,” “Prey” and “Dishonored.” Microsoft plans to add Bethesda’s franchises to its Xbox Game Pass cloud-based service, which has over 15 million subscribers, including future titles like the buzzy space RPG “Starfield.” With the addition of Bethesda, Microsoft...

“Minecraft” creator Marcus “Notch” Persson, who sold the title to Microsoft for $2.5 billion in 2014, won’t be part of 10-year anniversary plans for the game because of his “comments and opinions,” Microsoft tells Variety.

As humans, we make intuitive choices every day about how to empty the bin, sort laundry or the best way to get to work.  But robots have a far more difficult time choosing from a never-ending list of possible actions.  To make robots respond in a more human-like way to tasks, researchers have developed an algorithm and are teaching machines to use it through an unlikely source - playing Minecraft. The algorithm was developed by computer scientists at Brown University.  It is designed to help robots better plan their actions in complex environments and use these skills in the real...

Microsoft Corp. plans to spend $2.5 billion to buy what it called the most popular online game on Xbox, the building adventure title "Minecraft." “Minecraft is more than a great game franchise – it is an open world platform, driven by a vibrant community we care deeply about, and rich with new opportunities for that community and for Microsoft," Satya Nadella, Microsoft's chief executive, said in a statement Monday. The purchase of the game maker Stockholm, Sweden-based Mojang is expected to close late this year. Compared with Microsoft's blockbuster "Halo" franchise, "Minecraft" should give the company a younger audience to...

The digital age continues to confuse and confound a generation of adults who have learned to participate in it, but lack the ability for what Ethel Merman as Annie Oakley called "doin' what comes naturally." We still think a microwave is for heating coffee and thawing frozen food, never the name of a computer game. We weren't born to researching on Wikipedia or Googling for facts. Our fingers can text, but often strike two letters on the Android, making for some strange communications. We despair of catching up with the tools at hand and wonder what it all means...

Notch, the creator of Minecraft and upcoming game Scrolls, is having to deal with a rather problematic legal issue at the moment. Because his new game is called Scrolls, Bethesda has a problem with it. Notch received a 15 page legal document earlier this month asking him to refrain from using the name because it infringed the Elder Scrolls trademark somehow. Bethesda is a big company with a healthy bank balance, where as Notch may be doing well from sales of Minecraft, but certainly doesn’t want to have to fund a court case. So he has come up with a...