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Engineer creates first custom motherboard for 1990s PlayStation console

12 June 2025 at 18:51

Last week, electronics engineer Lorentio Brodesco announced the completion of a mock-up for nsOne, reportedly the first custom PlayStation 1 motherboard created outside of Sony in the console's 30-year history. The fully functional board accepts original PlayStation 1 chips and fits directly into the original console case, marking a milestone in reverse-engineering for the classic console released in 1994.

Brodesco's motherboard isn't an emulator or FPGA-based re-creationโ€”it's a genuine circuit board designed to work with authentic PlayStation 1 components, including the CPU, GPU, SPU, RAM, oscillators, and voltage regulators. The board represents over a year of reverse-engineering work that began in March 2024 when Brodesco discovered incomplete documentation while repairing a PlayStation 1.

"This isn't an emulator. It's not an FPGA. It's not a modern replica," Brodesco wrote in a Reddit post about the project. "It's a real motherboard, compatible with the original PS1 chips."

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Elden Ring: Nightreign is an epic RPG squeezed into delicious bite-size capsules

28 May 2025 at 14:00

At this point, Elden Ring is well-known for its epic sense of scale, offering players dozens of hours of meticulous exploration, gradual character progression, and unforgiving enemy encounters that require deliberate care and strategy. On its face, this doesn't seem like the best basis for a semi-randomized multiplayer action game spin-off with strict time limits and an ever-encroaching physical border in a tightly constrained map.

Somehow, though, Elden Ring: Nightreign makes the combination work. The game condenses all the essential parts of Elden Ring down to their barest essence, tweaking things just enough to distill the flavor of a full-fledged Elden Ring playthrough into zippy runs of less than an hour each. The result is a fast-paced, quick-hit shot of adventuring that is well suited to repeated play with friends.

Fort-elden Ring-nite

The initial moments of each Nightreign run draw an almost comical comparison to Fortnite, with each player dropping into the game's singular map by hanging off the talons of a great spectral eagle. Once on the ground, players have to stay inside a circular "safe zone" that will slowly contract throughout each of two quick in-game days, forcing your party toward an eventual encounter with a mini-boss at the end of each day. If you survive both days, you take on one of the several extremely punishing Nightlords you chose to face at the beginning of that run.

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ยฉ Bandai Namco

Tariffs won't bring manufacturing jobs back to America, Wells Fargo analysts say

23 May 2025 at 02:31
U.S. President Trump delivers remarks on tariffs, at the White House
Wells Fargo says in a report that President Donald Trump's tariffs won't bring manufacturing back.

Carlos Barria/REUTERS

  • Wells Fargo said in a report that President Donald Trump's tariffs won't bring manufacturing back.
  • High labor costs and a lack of workers would make building more factories an "uphill battle."
  • US manufacturing needs $2.9 trillion in investment to reach 1979 employment levels.

President Donald Trump's push to revive American manufacturing through tariffs may face some hurdles.

Despite some high-profile commitments, including Nvidia's plans for a US-based supercomputer plant and Apple's pledge to invest $500 billion domestically, a new report from Wells Fargo economists predicts that bringing back offshored manufacturing jobs will be an "uphill battle."

"An aim of tariffs is to spur a durable rebound in US manufacturing employment," Wells Fargo analysts wrote in the report. "However, a meaningful increase in factory jobs does not appear likely in the foreseeable future, in our view."

The report attributes the potentially low factory job growth to high labor costs, a lack of suitable workers to fill vacant positions, and a subdued population growth from lower fertility rates and slower immigration.

"Higher prices and policy uncertainty may weigh on firms' ability and willingness to expand payrolls," the analysts added.

The tariffs are part of Trump's broader economic agenda to revive American manufacturing as a pathway toward middle-class prosperity. The tariffs are meant to hike the costs of imports to incentivize companies to make goods domestically.

"Jobs and factories will come roaring back into our country," Trump said while announcing tariffs on April 2. "And ultimately, more production at home will mean stronger competition and lower prices for consumers."

Some tariffs imposed on April 2 have been temporarily paused or greatly reduced, including tariffs on China. The 10% across-the-board tariff remains, as do some specific tariffs on Mexico and Canada, plus 30% in duties on China. Duties at their current level are still the highest they have been since the 1940s.

"In order for manufacturing employment to return to its historic peak, we estimate at a minimum $2.9 trillion in net new capital investment is required," Wells Fargo analysts wrote. "Assuming businesses are willing and able to invest such ample sums, questions over staffing remain."

The Wall Street bank says that US manufacturing employment currently stands at 12.8 million, down from its 1979 peak of 19.5 million. To get back to that mark, the US would need to add roughly 6.7 million jobs. Wells Fargo added that the figure is nearly the same as the entire pool of unemployed Americans, which in April was 7.2 million, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

"Population aging, negative perceptions, and skill mismatches also underpin workforce concerns," Wells Fargo analysts wrote. "New jobs will require different skills than those previously lost."

In 2024, Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC said it delayed the opening of its Arizona chip factory due to a shortage of skilled workers. A report released in April 2024 by Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute also found that nearly half of the 3.8 million new manufacturing jobs anticipated by 2033 could remain unfilled due to skill gaps and other population factors.

"Tariffs must be high enough to make the cost of domestic production competitive in the US market, and they also must be kept in place long enough for producers to bring on additional workers and expand capacity," the report concluded. "If the economic or political costs are deemed too high, the current administration could quickly dial-back prevailing duties further."

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comments.

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Alt Carbon scores $12M seed to scale carbon removal in India

22 May 2025 at 03:00
From a struggling family tea estate to an innovative climate venture, Alt Carbon has raised $12 million in a seed round as it plans to scale its carbon dioxide removal work in the South Asian nation. The climate-tech startup, which locks away carbon for thousands of years through enhanced rock weathering on farmlands, attracted investment [โ€ฆ]

Telegram bans $35B black markets used to sell stolen data, launder crypto

15 May 2025 at 18:15

On Thursday, Telegram announced it had removed two huge black markets estimated to have generated more than $35 billion since 2021 by serving cybercriminals and scammers.

Blockchain research firm Elliptic told Reuters that the Chinese-language markets Xinbi Guarantee and Huione Guarantee together were far more lucrative than Silk Road, an illegal drug marketplace that the FBI notoriously seized in 2013, which was valued at about $3.4 billion.

Both markets were forced offline on Tuesday, Elliptic reported, and already, Huione Guarantee has confirmed that its market will cease to operate entirely due to the Telegram removal.

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ยฉ Bloomberg / Contributor / Bloomberg

Latest Oura Ring features focus on metabolic health improvement

6 May 2025 at 14:43
The Oura Ring 4 is rapidly becoming the center piece of your efforts to lead a healthier life, and the introduction of two new features designed to improve metabolic health back this up. The app now has an AI-powered food tracking feature called Meals, and integration with the Dexcom Stelo, the first glucose monitor available [โ€ฆ]

14 reasons why Trumpโ€™s tariffs wonโ€™t bring manufacturing back

16 April 2025 at 19:56

On April 2, 2025, our president announced major new taxes on imports from foreign countries (โ€œtariffsโ€), ranging from 10 percent to 49 percent. The stated goal is to bring manufacturing back to the United States and to โ€œmake America wealthy again.โ€

These tariffs will not work. In fact, they may even do the opposite, fail to bring manufacturing back, and make America poorer in the process.

This article gives the 14 reasons why this is the case, how the United States could bring manufacturing back if it were serious about doing so, and what will ultimately happen with this wrongheaded policy.

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ยฉ Bloomberg / Getty Images

โ€œThe girl should be calling men.โ€ Leak exposes Black Bastaโ€™s influence tactics.

8 April 2025 at 20:47

A leak of 190,000 chat messages traded among members of the Black Basta ransomware group shows that itโ€™s a highly structured and mostly efficient organization staffed by personnel with expertise in various specialties, including exploit development, infrastructure optimization, social engineering, and more.

The trove of records was first posted to file-sharing site MEGA. The messages, which were sent from September 2023 to September 2024, were later posted to Telegram in February 2025. ExploitWhispers, the online persona who took credit for the leak, also provided commentary and context for understanding the communications. The identity of the person or persons behind ExploitWhispers remains unknown. Last monthโ€™s leak coincided with the unexplained outage of the Black Basta site on the dark web, which has remained down ever since.

โ€œWe need to exploit as soon as possibleโ€

Researchers from security firm Trustwaveโ€™s SpiderLabs pored through the messages, which were written in Russian, and published a brief blog summary and a more detailed review of the messages on Tuesday.

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ยฉ Getty Images

Cybersecurity Professor Faced China-Funding Inquiry Before Disappearing, Sources Say

2 April 2025 at 17:31
A lawyer for Xiaofeng Wang and his wife says they are โ€œsafeโ€ after FBI searches of their homes and Wangโ€™s sudden dismissal from Indiana University, where he taught for over 20 years.

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