New York Attorney General Letitia James has accused Valve of promoting illegal gambling through its video games in a lawsuit filed by her office. According to the AG’s announcement, her office conducted an investigation and had concluded that Valve enabled gambling by enticing users to pay for a chance at rare items from loot boxes in Counter-Strike 2, Team Fortress 2and Dota 2. In the lawsuit, the New York AG stressed that Valve’s loot boxes are “particularly pernicious,” because the games are popular among children and teenagers.
The lawsuit described the loot box model, which requires a player to open a mystery chest for the possibility of winning rare items, as “quintessential gambling.” It argued that people introduced to gambling at an early age are at a significantly higher risk of developing gambling addictions later on, based on research. In addition, it explained that gambling is mostly illegal in New York.
Players have to pay for chests or boxes and the keys to be able to open them in Valve’s games, and the company has reportedly sold billions of dollars’ worth of keys for Counter-Strike alone. The lawsuit said that Valve has made tens of millions of dollars in fees from the sale of virtual items on the Steam Community Market, as well. In addition to being able to sell items on Steam for funds directly credited to their Steam Wallet, players can also sell on third-party marketplaces for cash.
According to James’ office, Valve facilitates and even assists third-party marketplaces in their operations, based on its investigation. Engadget has asked Valve for a statement about the lawsuit, but we have yet to hear back. However, the company previously denied being involved with third-party marketplaces that allow the sales of its game items for real-world money. In a response to an inquiry by the Danish Gambling Authority, Valve explained that those third-party websites create sock puppet accounts to sell and receive items on Steam in exchange for cash. “[T]his behavior is in violation of our terms of service,” Valve said.
The lawsuit also pointed out that there’s a huge market for Counter-Strike skins and referenced a Bloomberg article from 2025, which reported that the market for those skins had already surpassed $4.3 billion. As an example of in-game items sold for real money, it cited the sale of a Counter-Strike 2 AK-47 skin in 2024 for $1 million. The Attorney General’s Office wants the court to stop Valve from violating New York laws, to give up money it allegedly earned from illegal activities and to pay a fine three times what it allegedly earned from illegal business practices.
The most expensive skin in Counterstrike history was publicly sold this morning, a StatTrak Factory New AK-47 Blue Gem pattern 661
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/ny-ag-valves-loot-boxes-can-get-kids-hooked-on-gambling-122503556.html?src=rss
Following the US Supreme Court’s ruling that Trump’s ‘liberation day’ tariffs are unlawful, a growing number of bike brands are joining major US corporations including retailer Costco to recover tariffs they’ve paid over the past year.
Headline cycling industry names filing suits with the Court for International Trade include Shimano, Specialized and Trek. They join outdoor brands including GoPro, Patagonia and retailer REI, and major corporations such as FedEx, Toyota and Goodyear in filing suits.
In fact, so many companies have now sued the US administration for return of monies paid, with interest, that the court has stopped accepting new suits. Instead, it’s keeping a list of plaintiffs for settlement once a final ruling had been made. It’s been suggested that companies that have filed a suit may be at the front of the queue for any eventual refunds, however.
According to Dr Totis Kotsonis of international law firm Pinsent Masons: “The immediate question that this ruling poses for businesses in the process of importing goods is what rate of tariff will they now have to pay at the US border.”
Bike industry impacted
Trek and Specialized have joined the race for tariff refunds. Tim de Waele / Getty Images
Trump’s tariffs have already had a marked effect on the cycling industry. Before they were struck down, effective tariff rates on bicycles manufactured in China fluctuated to as high as 66%, with US cycle industry trade association PeopleForBikes publishing an open letter to the US president claiming the tariffs would be devastating for the US cycle industry.
The levies on aluminium and steel, major elements of bicycle parts, would also raise prices. SRAM has issued a statement and sought to galvanise cycle retailers to protest against the tariffs.
Last year, both Trek and Specialized raised their US prices in response to the tariffs, while other cycling brands have decided to limit imports to the US or cancelled shipments.
On Friday, Trump responded to the striking down of his tariff authority by announcing a 10% blanket tariff under different legislation. The next morning, he raised this to 15%, but the rate implemented on Tuesday 24 February was 10%.
Legal experts suggest these tariffs may also be unlawful and need to be repealed and refunded, adding to business uncertainty.
Brompton tilts towards China
Brompton’s CEO, Will Butler-Adams, says the folding bike brand is limiting its exposure to the US market. Brompton
While US companies are suing for the return of the tariffs they’ve paid, the uncertainty over the tariffs is causing some bike brands to adjust their longer-term plans.
According to UK business magazine Business Matters, London-based folding bike maker Brompton has already closed its branded stores in New York and Washington.
Speaking to The Telegraph last April, Brompton’s managing director, Will Butler-Adams, said the company had also paused plans for stores in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and was likely to raise US prices by between 5% and 10%.
Instead, Brompton is tilting its bricks-and-mortar presence to China, opening a store in Shenzhen and doubling the size of its Shanghai store.
Rapha has decided to close four of its clubhouses in the US. Andy Matthews
Butler-Adams said the decision was a direct response to US policy unpredictability, making long-term commitment to the US market difficult.
He said Brompton would continue to invest in the US, but would be more cautious. But China, where Brompton has been selling its bikes for 17 years, is now more important to the company than the US.
Business Matters quotes Butler-Adams as saying: “It’s our largest market and we know where we stand.”
The brand has three of its own stores in China, as well as 14 franchised outlets, according to Business Matters.
Tariffs have already hit Brompton’s bottom line, with Butler-Adams citing global economic uncertainty as a factor when he recently reported a £2 million loss for Brompton in 2025.
Rapha, too, is lowering its physical presence in the US, with four of five of its clubhouses slated for closure located in the country. At the same time, though, it has left the door open to the US market, partnering with USA Cycling as it looks to the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028 to offer a showcase for the brand.
An anonymous reader shares a report: In its 250th year, is America, land of immigration, becoming a country of emigration? Last year the U.S. experienced something that hasn’t definitively occurred since the Great Depression: More people moved out than moved in. The Trump administration has hailed the exodus — negative net migration — as the fulfillment of its promise to ramp up deportations and restrict new visas. Beneath the stormy optics of that immigration crackdown, however, lies a less-noticed reversal: America’s own citizens are leaving in record numbers, replanting themselves and their families in lands they find more affordable and safe.
Since the Eisenhower administration, the U.S. hasn’t collected comprehensive statistics on the number of citizens leaving. Yet data on residence permits, foreign home purchases, student enrollments and other metrics from more than 50 countries show that Americans are voting with their feet to an unprecedented degree. A millions-strong diaspora is studying, telecommuting and retiring overseas. The new American dream, for some of its citizens, is to no longer live there.
In the cobblestoned streets of Lisbon, so many Americans are snapping up apartments that the newest arrivals complain they mostly hear their own language — not Portuguese. One of every 15 residents in Dublin’s trendy Grand Canal Dock district was born in the U.S., according to realtors, higher than the percentage of Americans born in Ireland during the 19th-century influx following the Potato Famine. In Bali, Colombia and Thailand, the strains of housing American remote workers paid in dollars have inspired locals to mount protests against a wave of gentrification. More than 100,000 young students are enrolled abroad for a more affordable university degree. In nursing homes mushrooming across the Mexican border, elderly Americans are turning up for low-cost care.
[…] The U.S. experienced net negative migration — an estimated loss of some 150,000 people — in 2025, and the outflow will likely increase in 2026, according to calculations by the Brookings Institution, a public-policy think tank. The number could be larger or smaller because official U.S. data doesn’t yet fully capture the number of people leaving, Brookings analysts noted. The total in-migration was between around 2.6 and 2.7 million in 2025, down from a peak of almost 6 million in 2023. The U.S. saw 675,000 deportations and 2.2 million “self-deportations” last year, according to data from the Department of Homeland Security. A Wall Street Journal analysis of 15 countries providing full or partial 2025 data showed that at least 180,000 Americans joined them — a number likely to be far higher when other countries report full statistics.
Instagram is adding a new alert for the parents of teen users of its social media platform. The network will alert the adult if their child repeatedly searches for terms about suicide or self-harm in a short time frame. From that notification, the parent will optionally be able to access resources for having conversations with their teen about these topics. These alerts will begin rolling out for parental supervision users in the US, UK, Australia and Canada next week, with later regions to be added in the future.
“We chose a threshold that requires a few searches within a short period of time, while still erring on the side of caution,” Instagram’s blog post explains. “While that means we may sometimes notify parents when there may not be real cause for concern, we feel — and experts agree — that this is the right starting point, and we’ll continue to monitor and listen to feedback to make sure we’re in the right place.”
The platform reiterated that search results for terms connected to suicide and self-harm are blocked for teen younger users, and content about those topics is not shown to them under its current policies. Instagram also noted that a similar parental alert feature is in the works for its AI tools, but news on that isn’t expected until later this year.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/instagram-will-alert-parents-if-teens-repeatedly-search-for-suicide-or-self-harm-content-120000156.html?src=rss
Big news for Rockchip users: Upstream Linux now supports VDPU381 and VDPU383 hardware decode! This brings mainline H.264/HEVC acceleration, improved IOMMU-reset recovery, and new HEVC V4L2 controls that work with Vulkan Video.
French AA gaming developer and accessory manufacturer Nacon has filed for insolvency after its majority shareholder Bigben failed to make a loan repayment, the company said in a press release. “To date, the company reports available assets do not allow it to meet its liabilities,” Nacon wrote. The objective with insolvency, it said, was to allow “continued operation, protect employees and maintain jobs while renegotiating with its creditors.”
Nacon is behind the games Styx: Blades of Greed and was set to publish Terminator: Survivors before that title was delayed. It published Hell is Us last year to some praise, but Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown was buggy on release and failed to find much of an audience. The company will stream its next Nacon Connect presentation on March 4, and will supposedly show off some new games and footage for previously revealed games like Endurance Motorsport Series and Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss.
The company also makes hardware like controllers and headsets and racing sim accessories via its Revosim brand. Those products never really caught on with mainstream gamers but did have some success with the pro gaming crowd.
With Nacon’s insolvency, the future of those games and accessories is now in question. A court will decide on the company’s insolvency request at a hearing in early March, but in the meantime, trading of its shares is suspended.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/gaming-accessory-maker-and-publisher-nacon-files-for-insolvency-104832702.html?src=rss
AlmaLinux as one of the leading, modern and community-minded alternatives to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) continues enjoying very nice growth. In their 2025 Year In Review they provided a look at their growth with now having more than two million systems per week checking in for software updates…
Building off January’s GStreamer 1.28 release with many new features, GStreamer 1.28.1 was released today as a point release bringing various fixes and minor additions to this open-source multimedia framework…
British bikepacking specialist Restrap has been developing the Switch rack for more than two years and it’s finally out in the wild.
The thru-axle mounting rack system isn’t new, with brands such as Tailfin and Topeak offering similar solutions.
However, Restrap’s new rack has a generous 30kg capacity that incorporates the Switch mount system, a collaboration with UK bike security specialist Hiplok.
The Switch rack support struts offer multi-mount points with Switch-compatible brackets. Warren Rossiter / Ourmedia
That means a wide range of accessories and bags from Restrap is already available, with more to come. The range includes the new 10-litre Switch Panniers and a Switch rack cage.
As well as bikepacking trips, you can use the Switch-compatible panniers for commuting and one of the Switch mounts to secure a Switch-compatible Hiplok folding lock.
The rack cage can be mounted on the sides or the top bar. Sitting on the top of the rack, it provides flexibility for fitting a dry bag, extra water, camping mat, tent or other bikepacking gear.
The new rack cages click on and off in seconds and can be used horizontally or vertically on the rack. Warren Rossiter / Ourmedia
Alongside being compatible with any Switch multi-mount product, the rack can also be used with any 64mm-spaced mounting accessories, such as bottle cages.
The Restrap Switch rack has a quick-flip top bar that helps provide a wide range of fit options and wheel-size compatibility. Warren Rossiter / Ourmedia
Price: £124.99 / $189.99 / €149.99
64mm-spaced bolting on the rack legs for cages, Restrap Switch Panniers or other compatible accessories
Top bar compatible with new Restrap Switch products
Made from 7075-T6 aluminium
12mm-diameter axles in 1mm, 1.5mm and 1.75mm thread-pitch options
Spare axles available separately (High Grade 7075-T6 aluminium axles in 1mm, 1.5mm and 1.75mm thread pitch)
25mm Velcro strap to fit all seatpost sizes and shapes
Quick-flip system provides maximum wheel clearance across all bike sizes
ISO tested up to 30kg load
Weight 395g (without axle and bolts)
Fitting the rack simply requires replacing your existing thru-axle with a compatible thread-pitch Restrap option, then sliding the rack supports over the axle ends and securing with an M5 bolt. Finally, use the Velcro strap mount to attach the rack to your seatpost.
The Switch rack has a clever quick-flip system that enables you to flip the top bar to increase wheel clearance and provide a range of seatpost or frame-mounting points.
Lots more Switch-compatible products are on the way, including this unreleased top bag with a generous capacity. Warren Rossiter / Ourmedia
Restrap says that gives the rack a wide range of compatibility across road, gravel and mountain bike frames.
An adaptor is available for bikes with a SRAM Universal Derailleur Hanger, and an adaptor for SRAM Full-Mount derailleurs is coming in April according to Restrap.
Continental has announced the Terra Competition, an aero-optimised all-road tyre that “blurs the lines between road and gravel”.
Claimed to be the brand’s new fastest off-road tyre, the Terra Competition uses a design optimised for low weight, rolling resistance and aerodynamic drag.
Compared to the brand’s previous fastest gravel tyre, the Terra Speed, Continental claims the new Terra Competition is up to 16 per cent lighter and rolls up to 17 per cent faster (depending on size and pressure).
Available now with Continental’s Race or Trail casing, prices for the Terra Competition start from £59.30 / $76.26 / €68.95.
Going against current trends for ever wider gravel bike tyres, however, the Continental Terra Competition is available in 700×35, 40 and 45c sizes. This leaves a hole in the brand’s line-up for a ‘larger than 45c’ (but smaller than 2.2in) gravel race tyre, which suggests the brand may not believe wider is always faster when it comes to mixed surface riding.
Conti’s first aero off-road tyre
The Terra Competition bucks the ‘wider is faster’ trend that’s taken hold of gravel racing in recent years. Continental
According to Continental, however, the new Terra Competition uses a “light-knobbed” tread pattern designed to reduce drag, as well as to provide grip on rough roads and “light gravel”.
This isn’t the first time Continental has launched a tyre with an aero tread pattern, of course. Continental’s Aero 111 road tyre is claimed to significantly reduce drag compared to a standard GP5000 S TR.
The tread has a distinctive V-shape, with an semi-slick central portion transitioning to slightly taller knobs towards the tyre’s shoulders.
The V-shaped tread is said to be key to the tyre’s aero characteristics, but Continental declined to put any numbers on the potential gains. Continental
Although it also includes notches for “soil interaction” and “drainage”, Continental notes the tyre is best suited to “dry to moist conditions” – and the tyre’s looks appear to confirm this, as the tread is minimal compared to most gravel tyres.
At the time of writing, Continental hasn’t published any figures for how much energy you can expect to save thanks to this aero-optimisation, and it declined to do so when asked.
Nevertheless, it claims to have found “savings in aerodynamic drag for all tested velocities for yaw angles from -20 to +20 degrees [of yaw]”, compared to the Terra Speed.
Faster and lighter
As well as being more aerodynamic, Continental says the Terra Competition is lighter and rolls faster. Continental
We do have figures for the claimed reductions in weight and rolling resistance, though.
The new Terra Competitions are 16 per cent lighter compared to Terra Speeds – although this is highly dependent on which size you opt for:
Tyre size
Terra Competition (g)
Terra Speed (g)
Difference (g)
700x35c
345
413
-68
700x40c
420
445
-25
700x45c
470
516
-46
As for rolling resistance (Crr), the headline figure is a reduction of 17 per cent, for a 35c Terra Competition (Race casing) compared to an equivalent Terra Speed. According to Continental, that’s worth 4.52 watts.
This was tested on a smooth steel drum with a 50kg load.
It’s worth noting the 17 per cent improvement in Crr was measured at a relatively high tyre pressure of 5 bar / 72.5 psi, and that the improvement drops in line with tyre pressure:
Tyre pressure
Terra Competition (watts at 30kph)
Terra Speed (watts at 30kph)
Difference (watts at 30kph)
5 bar / 72.5 psi
21.89
26.41
-4.52
4 bar / 58 psi
23.68
27.73
-4.05
3 bar / 43.5 psi
27.37
30.17
-2.8
Casings and puncture protection
The Terra Competition is available in Race or Trail casings, and you can have tan sidewalls on the Trail casing. Continental
All models of the Terra Competition use a 3×330 TPI (Threads Per Inch) construction, but Continental is offering it in two casing types – Race and Trail.
As the names suggest, the Race casing is designed for low weight and rolling resistance, while the trail casing uses a slightly more robust, but slower, construction.
Both casings feature a puncture protection belt beneath the tread, although the one on the trail casing spans a greater width of the tyre.
Both types of casing are tubeless-ready and compatible with hookless rims.
Where does the Terra Competition fit with modern gravel trends?
XC mountain bike tyres have been one of gravel racing’s hottest trends in recent years. Sam Andrews / Our Media
When news of the new Terra Competition dropped into my inbox, and as a wannabe go-fast gravel rider, I was excited that Continental might finally be about to catch up with gravel’s hottest trend.
Thanks to influential riders like Dylan Johnson, average tyre sizes have ballooned at key races such as the Traka or Unbound, with many turning to cross-country mountain bike tyres in the vacuum created by a lack of gravel-specific options over 45mm wide.
I’d imagined an updated Terra Speed in 50 and 55c sizes, with the new and improved compound and casings, plus variants with more aggressive tread patterns to better suit different conditions.
The launch of the Terra Adventure last March, which comes in 45 to 55c sizes, only added fuel to that fire.
Instead, Continental seems not to have the same faith in the whole ‘wider is faster’ mantra as everyone else, at least for now.
The Terra Competition is marketed as all-road tyre, but it does leave a gap in Continental’s gravel racing line-up. Continental
Conceptually, the new Terra Competition – with its low profile, aero-optimised tread and limited size range – feels akin to Merida’s latest Mission gravel bike, which controversially tops out at ‘just’ 40mm of tyre clearance.
That didn’t stop former world champion, Matej Mohorič, from securing a podium aboard the Mission on the (mostly) dry and dusty UCI gravel world’s course in Limburg last October, of course, and those are likely the kinds of races and conditions Continental is targeting here.
In fairness to Continental, it does also pitch the Terra Competition as more of an all-road tyre, than a pure gravel tyre. And perhaps it’s simply happy to keep ‘gravel racing’ at 35 to 45c, and let anyone in search of something wider opt for XC tyres like its popular Race King.
But with that tyre is only available in a 2.2in / 55mm size with the fastest ‘ProTection’ casing, though, Continental is left with something of a hole in its range, and the appearance that it may have missed the boat on this trend.
Anthropic fixed the flaws – but the AI-enabled attack surfaces remainSecurity vulnerabilities in Claude Code could have allowed attackers to remotely execute code on users’ machines and steal API keys by injecting malicious configurations into repositories, and then waiting for a developer to clone and open an untrustworthy project.…
An anonymous reader shares a report: Some Uber employees have built an AI clone of CEO Dara Khosrowshahi — internally dubbed “Dara AI” — and have been using it to rehearse and fine-tune presentations before delivering them to the actual Khosrowshahi, he revealed on a recent podcast.
Khosrowshahi said a team member told him that some teams “make the presentation to the Dara AI as a prep for making a presentation to me,” and that the bot helps them adjust their slides and sharpen their delivery. Asked by the podcast host whether employees might eventually show Dara AI to the board, Khosrowshahi laughed but noted that AI models still can’t process and act on new information the way executives do. “When the models can learn in real-time, that is the point at which I’m going to think that, yeah, we are all replaceable,” he said.
Anthropic last week promoted Claude Code Security, a research preview capability that uses its Claude Opus 4.6 model to hunt for software vulnerabilities, claiming its red team had surfaced over 500 bugs in production open-source codebases — but security researchers say the real bottleneck was never discovery.
Guy Azari, a former security researcher at Microsoft and Palo Alto Networks, told The Register that only two to three of those 500 vulnerabilities have been fixed and none have received CVE assignments. The National Vulnerability Database already carried a backlog of roughly 30,000 CVE entries awaiting analysis in 2025, and nearly two-thirds of reported open-source vulnerabilities lacked an NVD severity score.
The curl project closed its bug bounty program because maintainers could no longer handle the flood of poorly crafted reports from AI tools and humans alike. Feross Aboukhadijeh, CEO of security firm Socket, said discovery is becoming dramatically cheaper but validating findings, coordinating with maintainers, and developing architecture-aligned patches remains slow, human-intensive work.
Uses Vite and Claude to sidestep Vercel lock-in with a new open source build toolA Cloudflare engineer says he has implemented 94 percent of the Next.js API by directing Anthropic’s Claude, spending about $1,100 on tokens.…
Kalshi, the prediction market platform regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, has for the first time publicly disclosed the results of an insider trading investigation, naming an editor for YouTube’s biggest creator as the offender.
The company identified Artem Kaptur, an editor for MrBeast, who it says traded around $4,000 on markets tied to the streamer and achieved “near-perfect trading success” on low-odds bets — a pattern investigators flagged as suspicious. Kalshi froze Kaptur’s account before he could withdraw any profits, fined him $20,000, suspended him for two years, and reported the case to the CFTC.
The b4 tool used for managing patch workflows to the Linux kernel has been seeing a lot of work recently on b4 review as the text user interface (TUI) to help expedite the patch review process for the Linux kernel. The b4 review TUI has been integrating AI agent code review helpers powered by the likes of Claude Code too for trying to help enhance the efficiency for Linux kernel patch reviews. That b4 review work is quickly approaching a pre-alpha state…
