An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: As part of the Apple Lisa's 40th birthday celebrations, the Computer History Museum has released the source code for Lisa OS version 3.1 under an Apple Academic License Agreement. With Apple's blessing, the Pascal source code is available for download from the CHM website after filling out a form. Lisa Office System 3.1 dates back to April 1984, during the early Mac era, and it was the Lisa equivalent of operating systems like macOS and Windows today. The entire source package weighs is about 26MB and consists of over 1,300 commented source files, divided nicely into subfolders that denote code for the main Lisa OS, various included apps, and the Lisa Toolkit development system. First released on January 19, 1983, the Apple Lisa remains an influential and important machine in Apple's history, pioneering the mouse-based graphical user interface (GUI) that made its way to the Macintosh a year later. Despite its innovations, the Lisa's high price ($9,995 retail, or about $30,300 today) and lack of application support held it back as a platform. A year after its release, the similarly capable Macintosh undercut it dramatically in price. Apple launched a major revision of the Lisa hardware in 1984, then discontinued the platform in 1985. [...] Lisa OS defined important conventions that we still use in windowing OSes today, such as drag-and-drop icons, movable windows, the waste basket, the menu bar, pull-down menus, copy and paste shortcuts, control panels, overlapping windows, and even one-touch automatic system shutdown.

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Google is laying off 12,000 workers, or about 6% of its workforce, becoming the latest tech company to trim staff as the economic boom that the industry rode during the COVID-19 pandemic ebbed. From a report: CEO Sundar Pichai informed staff Friday at the Silicon Valley giant about the cuts in an email that was also posted on the company's news blog. The firings adds to tens of thousands of other job losses recently announced by Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook parent Meta and other tech companies as they tighten their belts amid a darkening outlook for the industry. Just this month, there have been at least 48,000 job cuts announced by major companies in the sector. "Over the past two years we've seen periods of dramatic growth," Pichai wrote. "To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today." He said the layoffs reflect a "rigorous review" carried out by Google of its operations. The jobs being eliminated "cut across Alphabet, product areas, functions, levels and regions," Pichai said. In a regulatory filing late last year, the company said that it employed nearly 187,000 people. Pichai said that Google, founded nearly a quarter of a century ago, was "bound to go through difficult economic cycles."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Owners of Yuga Labs' infamous "Bored Ape" non-fungible tokens (and related crypto tokens) get free access to a simple endless runner/tunnel racing game called Dookey Dash today. But some members of the "exclusive" Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) are already selling a chance to play the time-limited game for thousands of dollars on the secondary market. Listings on the OpenSea exchange show a current floor price of 1.49 ETH (about $2,293) for a "Sewer Pass" NFT that grants access to Dookey Dash until February 8. In less than 24 hours, the exchange has seen 8,394 ETH (about $12.8 million) in Sewer Pass transactions, with some passes selling for as much as 5.75 ETH (about $8,770). While wash trading and/or crypto laundering could be driving some of those those Sewer Pass transactions, some players are clearly clamoring for access to Dookey Dash and are willing to spend to get it. But that demand isn't being driven by any sort of novel or transcendent gameplay experience that Yuga Labs is offering. Instead, NFT speculators are trying to use the game to get in on the ground floor of what they hope will be the next artificially scarce, high-demand digital asset. In an extensive FAQ, Yuga Labs describes Dookey Dash as a "skill-based mint." That means a player's highest score in Dookey Dash is tied to the player's Sewer Pass NFT (one Sewer Pass allows as many attempts as a player can tolerate before the February 8 deadline arrives). Sewer Pass holders will then be able to trade their pass for a mysterious "Power Source" NFT during "The Summoning," which starts on February 15. The quality of those Power Sources will apparently be tied to each Sewer Pass' relative position on the game's final leaderboard, with rarer "traits" being associated with higher scores. The player at the very top of the leaderboard will be the only one to get the "Ultimate Power Source," whatever that means. [...]

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"When people talk about crypto mining the first thing usually mentioned is the amount of electricity it uses," writes Slashdot reader quonset. "What few realize is how loud rack after rack of servers and fans for cooling running 24/7 can be. The people of Murphy, North Carolina found out, and are not happy about it." From a report: When Judy Stines first heard about cryptocurrency, "I always thought it was smoke and mirrors," she said. "But if that's what you want to invest in, you do you." But then she heard the sound of crypto, a noise that neighbor Mike Lugiewicz describes as "a small jet that never leaves" and her ambivalence turned into activism. The racket was coming from stacks and stacks of computer servers and cooling fans, mysteriously set up in a few acres of open farm field down on Harshaw Road. Once they fired up and the noise started bouncing around their Blue Ridge Mountain homes, sound meters in the Lugiewicz yard showed readings from 55-85 decibels depending on the weather, but more disturbing than the volume is the fact that the noise never stopped. "There's a racetrack three miles out right here," Lugiewicz said, pointing away from the crypto mine next door. "You can hear the cars running. It's cool!" "But at least they stop," Stines chimed in, "And you can go to bed!" [...] The mine in Murphy is just one of a dozen in Kentucky, Tennessee and North Carolina owned by a San Francisco-based company called PrimeBlock, which recently announced $300 million in equity financing and plans to scale up and go public. But a year and a half after crypto came to this ruby red pocket of Republican retirees and Libertarian life-timers, anger over the mine helped flip the balance of local power and forced the Board of Commissioners to officially ask their state and federal officials to "introduce and champion legislation through the US Congress that would ban and/or regulate crypto mining operations in the United States of America."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: The ultraviolet nail polish drying devices used to cure gel manicures may pose more of a public health concern than previously thought. Researchers at the University of California San Diego have studied these ultraviolet (UV) light emitting devices, and found that their use leads to cell death and cancer-causing mutations in human cells. The devices are a common fixture in nail salons, and generally use a particular spectrum of UV light (340-395nm) to cure the chemicals used in gel manicures. While tanning beds use a different spectrum of UV light (280-400nm) that studies have conclusively proven to be carcinogenic, the spectrum used in the nail dryers has not been well studied. Using three different cell lines -- adult human skin keratinocytes, human foreskin fibroblasts, and mouse embryonic fibroblasts -- the researchers found that the use of these UV emitting devices for just one 20-minute session led to between 20 and 30 percent cell death, while three consecutive 20-minute exposures caused between 65 and 70 percent of the exposed cells to die. Exposure to the UV light also caused mitochondrial and DNA damage in the remaining cells and resulted in mutations with patterns that can be observed in skin cancer in humans. [...] The researchers caution that while the results show the harmful effects of the repeated use of these devices on human cells, a long-term epidemiological study would be required before stating conclusively that using these machines leads to an increased risk of skin cancers. However, the results of the study were clear: The chronic use of these nail polish drying machines is damaging to human cells. "We saw multiple things: first, we saw that DNA gets damaged," said Ludmil Alexandrov, a professor of bioengineering as well as cellular and molecular medicine at UC San Diego, and corresponding author of the study published in Nature Communications. "We also saw that some of the DNA damage does not get repaired over time, and it does lead to mutations after every exposure with a UV-nail polish dryer. Lastly, we saw that exposure may cause mitochondrial dysfunction, which may also result in additional mutations. We looked at patients with skin cancers, and we see the exact same patterns of mutations in these patients that were seen in the irradiated cells." "Our experimental results and the prior evidence strongly suggest that radiation emitted by UV-nail polish dryers may cause cancers of the hand and that UV-nail polish dryers, similar to tanning beds, may increase the risk of early-onset skin cancer," add the researchers. "Nevertheless, future large-scale epidemiological studies are warranted to accurately quantify the risk for skin cancer of the hand in people regularly using UV-nail polish dryers. It is likely that such studies will take at least a decade to complete and to subsequently inform the general public."

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A new draft of the Dungeons & Dragons Open Gaming License, dubbed OGL 1.2 by publisher Wizards of the Coast, is now available for download. Polygon reports: The announcement was made Thursday by Kyle Brink, executive producer of D&D, on the D&D Beyond website. According to Wizards, this draft could place the OGL outside of the publisher's control -- which should sound good to fans enraged by recent events. Time will tell, but public comment will be accepted beginning Jan. 20 and will continue through Feb. 3. [...] Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that, by its own description, "helps overcome legal obstacles to the sharing of knowledge and creativity to address the world's most pressing challenges." As such, a Creative Commons license once enacted could ultimately put the OGL 1.2 outside of Wizards' control in perpetuity. "We're giving the core D&D mechanics to the community through a Creative Commons license, which means that they are fully in your hands," Brink said in the blog post. "If you want to use quintessentially D&D content from the SRD such as owlbears and magic missile, OGL 1.2 will provide you a perpetual, irrevocable license to do so." So much trust has been lost over the last several weeks that it will no doubt take a while for legal experts -- armchair and otherwise -- to pour over the details of the new OGL. These are the bullet points that Wizards is promoting in this official statement: - Protecting D&D's inclusive play experience. As I said above, content more clearly associated with D&D (like the classes, spells, and monsters) is what falls under the OGL. You'll see that OGL 1.2 lets us act when offensive or hurtful content is published using the covered D&D stuff. We want an inclusive, safe play experience for everyone. This is deeply important to us, and OGL 1.0a didn't give us any ability to ensure it - TTRPGs and VTTs. OGL 1.2 will only apply to TTRPG content, whether published as books, as electronic publications, or on virtual tabletops (VTTs). Nobody needs to wonder or worry if it applies to anything else. It doesn't. - Deauthorizing OGL 1.0a. We know this is a big concern. The Creative Commons license and the open terms of 1.2 are intended to help with that. One key reason why we have to deauthorize: We can't use the protective options in 1.2 if someone can just choose to publish harmful, discriminatory, or illegal content under 1.0a. And again, any content you have already published under OGL 1.0a will still always be licensed under OGL 1.0a. - Very limited license changes allowed. Only two sections can be changed once OGL 1.2 is live: how you cite Wizards in your work and how we can contact each other. We don't know what the future holds or what technologies we will use to communicate with each other, so we thought these two sections needed to be future-proofed. A revised version of this draft will be presented to the community again "on or before February 17." "The process will extend as long as it needs to," Brink said. "We'll keep iterating and getting your feedback until we get it right."

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According to the latest official Android distribution numbers from Google, Android 13 is running on 5.2% of all devices less than six months after launch. 9to5Google reports: According to Android Studio, devices running Android 13 now account for 5.2% of all devices. Meanwhile Android 12 and 12L now account for 18.9% of the total, a significant increase from August's 13.5% figure. Notably, while Google's chart does include details about Android 13, it doesn't make a distinction between Android 12 and 12L. Looking at the older versions, we see that usage of Android Oreo has finally dropped below 10%, with similar drops in percentage down the line. Android Jelly Bean, which previously weighed in at 0.3%, is no longer listed, while KitKat has dropped from 0.9% to 0.7%. Android 13's 5.2% distribution number "is better than it sounds," writes Ryan Whitwam via ExtremeTech: These numbers show an accelerating pickup for Google's new platform versions. If you look back at stats from the era of Android KitKat and Lollipop, the latest version would only have a fraction of this usage share after half a year. That's because the only phones running the new software would be Google's Nexus phones, plus maybe one or two new devices from OEMs that worked with Google to deploy the latest software as a marketing gimmick. The improvements are thanks largely to structural changes in how Android is developed and deployed. For example, Project Treble was launched in 2017 to re-architect the platform, separating the OS framework from the low-level vendor code. This made it easier to update devices without waiting on vendors to provide updated drivers. We saw evidence of improvement that very year, and it's gotten better ever since.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: For nearly a year and a half, a Massachusetts high school has been lit up around the clock because the district can't turn off the roughly 7,000 lights in the sprawling building. The lighting system was installed at Minnechaug Regional High School when it was built over a decade ago and was intended to save money and energy. But ever since the software that runs it failed on Aug. 24, 2021, the lights in the Springfield suburbs school have been on continuously, costing taxpayers a small fortune. "We are very much aware this is costing taxpayers a significant amount of money," Aaron Osborne, the assistant superintendent of finance at the Hampden-Wilbraham Regional School District, told NBC News. "And we have been doing everything we can to get this problem solved." Osborne said it's difficult to say how much money it's costing because during the pandemic and in its aftermath, energy costs have fluctuated wildly. "I would say the net impact is in the thousands of dollars per month on average, but not in the tens of thousands," Osborne said. That, in part, is because the high school uses highly efficient fluorescent and LED bulbs, he said. And, when possible, teachers have manually removed bulbs from fixtures in classrooms while staffers have shut off breakers not connected to the main system to douse some of the exterior lights. But there's hope on the horizon that the lights at Minnechaug will soon be dimmed. Paul Mustone, president of the Reflex Lighting Group, said the parts they need to replace the system at the school have finally arrived from the factory in China and they expect to do the installation over the February break. "And yes, there will be a remote override switch so this won't happen again," said Mustone, whose company has been in business for more than 40 years.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The European Union's digital policy chief warned TikTok's boss Thursday that the social media app will have to fall in line with tough new rules for online platforms set to take effect later this year. EU Commissioner Thierry Breton held a video call with Shou Zi Chew, the CEO of TikTok, the popular Chinese-owned video sharing app that's coming under increasing scrutiny from Western authorities over fears about data privacy, cybersecurity and misinformation. The two discussed the company's plans to comply with the bloc's Digital Services Act, which is set to take effect for the biggest online companies in September. The act is a set of sweeping rules that will require platforms to reduce harmful online content and combat online risks. "With younger audiences comes greater responsibility," Breton said, according to a readout of the call. "It is not acceptable that behind seemingly fun and harmless features, it takes users seconds to access harmful and sometimes even life-threatening content." Breton added that, with millions of young users in Europe, TikTok has a "special responsibility" to ensure its content is safe. [...] Breton said he is also concerned about allegations TikTok is spying on journalists and transferring reams of personal user data outside of Europe, in violation of the 27-country bloc's strict privacy rules. Bretaon said he "explicitly conveyed" to Shou that TikTok needs to "step up efforts to comply" with EU rules on data protection, copyright as well as the Digital Services At, which includes provisions for heavy fines or even a ban from the EU for repeat offenses that threaten the people's lives or safety. "We will not hesitate to adopt the full scope of sanctions to protect our citizens if audits do not show full compliance," he said.

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Microsoft has started testing Tabs in Notepad with Windows Insiders on the Dev Channel today. Thurrott reports: The update to the Notepad will start rolling out to all Dev Channel testers today alongside the new Windows 11 preview build 25281, which brings a couple of other changes. Tabs in Notepad was "a top requested feature from the community," the Windows Insider team emphasized today. The app now supports dragging a tab out into a separate window, and a new setting also lets users choose whether files should open in a new tab or a new window by default. "There are also new keyboard shortcut keys to support managing tabs as well as some improvements to managing unsaved files, like automatically generating the file name/tab title based on content and a refreshed unsaved changes indicator," the Windows Insider team explained. Microsoft is still working to fix issues causing some keyboard shortcuts to not work as expected, and performance will also remain a priority for the team.

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The nation's second-largest wireless carrier on Thursday disclosed that a "bad actor" took advantage of one of its application programming interfaces to gain data on "approximately 37 million current postpaid and prepaid customer accounts." CNET reports: In an 8K filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the carrier says that it was able to trace and stop the "malicious activity" within a day of learning about it. T-Mobile also says that the API that was used does not allow for access to "any customer payment card information, Social Security numbers/tax IDs, driver's license or other government ID numbers, passwords/PINs or other financial account information." According to the filing, the carrier believes that the breach first occurred "on or around" Nov. 25, 2022. The carrier didn't learn that a "bad actor" was getting data from its systems until Jan. 5. The company's API, however, did reveal other user information, including names, billing addresses, email addresses, phone numbers and birth dates of its customers, their T-Mobile account numbers, and information on which plan features they have with the carrier and the number of lines on their accounts. The company said in the SEC filing that it has "begun notifying customers whose information may have been obtained by the bad actor in accordance with applicable state and federal requirements." In 2021, T-Mobile suffered a data breach that exposed data of roughly 76.6 million people. "T-Mobile agreed to a $500 million settlement in the case in July, with $350 million going to settle customer claims from a class action lawsuit and $150 million going to upgrade its data protection system," adds CNET.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft's Windows 10 operating system has been available on the retail market for over seven years and was superseded by Windows 11 in October 2021. However, despite its age, Windows 10 remains the most popular version of Windows, with a global market share of 67.95% in December 2022 compared to 16.97% for Windows 11, according to StatCounter. But it now looks like Microsoft is ready to put the brakes on issuing new Windows 10 licenses to everyday consumers. Microsoft's official product pages for Windows 10 Home and Windows 10 Pro now include the following disclaimer: "January 31, 2023 will be the last day this Windows 10 download is offered for sale. Windows 10 will remain supported with security updates that help protect your PC from viruses, spyware, and other malware until October 14, 2025."

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FTX's new chief executive, John J. Ray III, said he is looking into the possibility of reviving the bankrupt crypto exchange as he works to return money to the failed company's customers and creditors. From a report: In his first interview since taking over FTX in November, Mr. Ray said that he has set up a task force to explore restarting FTX.com, the company's main international exchange. Although top FTX executives have been accused of criminal misconduct, some customers have praised its technology and suggested that there would be value in rebooting the platform, he said. "Everything is on the table," Mr. Ray said. "If there is a path forward on that, then we will not only explore that, we'll do it." FTX's bankruptcy filing marked the largest of several failures of cryptocurrency platforms last year that froze millions of users' access to their accounts. FTX, Celsius Network, Voyager Digital and BlockFi have used the chapter 11 process to explore restarting their businesses and selling their platforms to stronger rivals. Another option is to simply close up shop and return crypto holdings to customers as quickly as possible. Mr. Ray said he would look into whether reviving FTX's international exchange would recover more value for the company's customers than his team could get from simply liquidating assets or selling the platform. "There are stakeholders we're working with who've identified what they see is a viable business," he said.

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Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings announced on Thursday he will step down as chief executive, handing the reins of the streaming service to his longtime partner and co-CEO, Ted Sarandos, and the company's chief operating officer, Greg Peters. Reuters reports: Sarandos and Peters will share the title of chief executives, with Hastings serving as executive chairman. The change is effective immediately, representing the culmination of a decade of succession planning by the board. Both Peters and Sarandos were promoted in July 2020, amid a challenging time for the company. "It was a baptism by fire, given Covid and recent challenges within our business," Hastings wrote in a blog post announcing his departure. "But they've both managed incredibly well ... so the board and I believe it's the right time to compete my succession."

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Last week, Reed Wilen, an elite gamer who uses the handle "Chicago" in Rocket League, a popular vehicular-soccer game, encountered a strange and troubling new opponent. From a report: The player seemed like a novice at first, moving their rocket-powered vehicle in a hesitant and awkward way. Then they caught and balanced the ball perfectly on the hood of their car, and dribbled it with superhuman skill towards the goal at high speed. Not only was the other driver clearly a bot -- it was also ridiculously good. "It is very confusing to play against," Wilen says. "Its perfect dribbling would cause havoc on almost every player." Wilen is one of a number of elite Rocket League players to have recently encountered the bot in competitive play. It is not yet good enough to beat all comers, but it can play to a high level, allowing less skilled players to cheat their way to a higher ranking. Rocket League is frenetic and extremely tricky to play. Each player controls a car capable of impossible acrobatics inside an arena where gravity and physics are apparently set to ludicrous mode. The objective is to use your vehicle to maneuver a giant ball past your opponent and into their goal, a task that requires considerable skill and patience. Sometimes two players work together as a team, making huge leaps, desperate parries, and accidentally colliding, all while trying to anticipate and counter their opponents' own antics. Top Rocket League players will often launch their cars through the air to move the ball toward the goal, but Wilen says the bot he faced appears to have been trained specifically to carry it on the ground. "The bot doesn't really flip around too often and doesn't jump in the air," he says, apparently because it hasn't been programmed to, or learned how to do so. "Instead, it waits for the ball to come down, where it catches it on top of the car and performs a perfect dribble towards the opposing team's net," Wilen says. The bot that Wilen and others have come up against is called Nexto. It picked up the ability to dribble and score using an artificial intelligence approach known as reinforcement learning, which has underpinned research breakthroughs that let computers master other difficult games such as Go and Starcraft. The technique has also been applied to more practical areas, including chip design and data center cooling in recent years. Reinforcement learning entails creating a program that can perform a task at a basic level and improve by responding to feedback as it practices. The company behind Rocket League, Psyonix, part of Epic Games, allows players to deploy bots to practice against. In 2020 it made an application programming interface (API) available to help developers build bots more easily. Last April, a group of Rocket League enthusiasts with coding skills announced RLGym, an open source library for building reinforcement-learning bots for Rocket League. Later in the year, the group released several open source AI bots -- including an especially skilled dribbler called Nexto.

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Fewer companies that are infected with ransomware are coughing up extortion payments demanded by hackers, according to new research from Chainalysis. From a report: In findings published on Thursday, the blockchain forensics firm estimated that ransom payments -- which are almost always paid in cryptocurrency -- fell to $456.8 million in 2022 from $765.6 million in 2021, a 40% drop. "That doesn't mean attacks are down, or at least not as much as the drastic dropoff in payments would suggest," according to the report. "Instead, we believe that much of the decline is due to victim organizations increasingly refusing to pay ransomware attackers." Chainalysis also said the actual totals could be much higher, as there are cryptocurrency addresses controlled by ransomware attackers that its researchers haven't yet identified.

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The U.S. State Department is going sans serif: It has directed staff at home and overseas to phase out the Times New Roman font and adopt Calibri in official communications and memos, in a bid to help employees who are visually impaired or have other difficulties reading. From a report: In a cable sent Tuesday and obtained by The Washington Post, Secretary of State Antony Blinken directed the department to use a larger sans-serif font in high-level internal documents, and gave the department's domestic and overseas offices until Feb. 6 to "adopt Calibri as the standard font for all requested papers." "The Times (New Roman) are a-Changin," read the subject line. Blinken's cable said the shift to Calibri will make it easier for people with disabilities who use certain assistive technologies, such as screen readers, to read department communication. The change was recommended by the secretary's office of diversity and inclusion, but the decision has already ruffled feathers among aesthetic-conscious employees who have been typing in Times New Roman for years in cables and memos from far-flung embassies and consulates around the world. "A colleague of mine called it sacrilege," said a Foreign Service officer in Asia, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal policy changes. "I don't mind the decision because I hate serifs, but I don't love Calibri."

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Google has been dealt a significant blow in one of its key overseas markets. India's Supreme Court on Thursday declined to block an antitrust order that requires the Android-maker to make a series of changes that could topple its financial viability. From a report: India's apex court rejected to block the ruling against Google by the nation's antitrust watchdog Competition Commission of India. The court extended the deadline for enforcement of CCI's order by one week, however. The matter will now go back to the country's appellate tribunal, the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT), where Google previously failed to secure any relief. The Supreme Court has directed NCLAT to make its decision by March 31. The challenge for Google is that unless NCLAT reaches a decision in Google's favor by this month, the tech giant will have to make a series of changes to Android. [...] The CCI has ordered Google to not require licensing of its Play Store to be linked with mandating installation of several Google apps such as Chrome and YouTube. The watchdog has also ordered Google to allow removal of all its apps from phones and give smartphone users the ability to change their search engine provider. The CCI also fined Google $162 million in its first order.

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The cases could significantly affect the power and responsibilities of social media platforms. From a report: For years, giant social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have operated under two crucial tenets. The first is that the platforms have the power to decide what content to keep online and what to take down, free from government oversight. The second is that the websites cannot be held legally responsible for most of what their users post online, shielding the companies from lawsuits over libelous speech, extremist content and real-world harm linked to their platforms. Now the Supreme Court is poised to reconsider those rules, potentially leading to the most significant reset of the doctrines governing online speech since U.S. officials and courts decided to apply few regulations to the web in the 1990s. On Friday, the Supreme Court is expected to discuss whether to hear two cases that challenge laws in Texas and Florida barring online platforms from taking down certain political content. Next month, the court is scheduled to hear a case that questions Section 230, a 1996 statute that protects the platforms from liability for the content posted by their users. The cases could eventually alter the hands-off legal position that the United States has largely taken toward online speech, potentially upending the businesses of TikTok, Twitter, Snap and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram. "It's a moment when everything might change," said Daphne Keller, a former lawyer for Google who directs a program at Stanford University's Cyber Policy Center.

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Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot faced tough questions from some exhausted and fed-up staff about recent missteps and future plans in a company-wide Q&A session on Wednesday. The meeting comes just a week after the Assassin's Creed publisher announced new cancellations, delays, and cost-cutting measures, and told employees "the ball is in your court" to help get the $3 billion company back on track. From a report: "The ball is now in our court -- for years it has been in your court so why did you mishandle the ball so badly so we, the workers, have to fix it for you?" read one upvoted question on a list submitted in advance through corporate communication channels and viewed by Kotaku. It was a reference to a now infamous email Guillemot sent to staff last week that appeared to shift blame for the publisher's recent mistakes and hold lower-level employees accountable for fixing the situation. Guillemot opened the meeting by apologizing. "I heard your feedback and I'm sorry this was perceived that way," Guillemot said, according to sources present who were not authorized to speak to press. "When saying 'the ball is in your court' to deliver our lineup on time and at the expected level of quality, I wanted to convey the idea that more than ever I need your talent and energy to make it happen. This is a collective journey that starts of course with myself and with the leadership team to create the conditions for all of us to succeed together." While that clarification resonated with some developers, others who spoke with Kotaku still feel management is out of touch and found little in the meeting to reassure them.

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