Some gamers are concerned about the future of game ownership after Sony's announcement today that it won’t produce physical discs for PlayStation games as of January 2028. On that date, “new games will be available on PlayStation Store and at retailers in digital formats only,” Sony said in a blog post.

Ditching discs is “a natural direction” for Sony “to adapt to consumer trends as the general preference for digital media significantly outpaces physical discs," the post said.

During Sony’s fiscal year ending on March 31, 2026, digital downloads accounted for 78 percent of full-game unit purchases, up from 76 percent in fiscal 2024.

“We’ll continue to prioritize our resources to drive innovation in how players can access games and provide choices as to where players prefer to purchase new games, whether that’s at retailers or PlayStation Store,” the blog said.

No companies other than Sony subsidiary Sony Digital Audio Disc Corporation make PlayStation discs, so today’s announcement signals the end of physical copies of PlayStation games and marks Sony’s evolution toward a licensing-only sales model.

You don’t own digital copies

Digital copies of games can make it easier to quickly acquire and play games, receive updates, own many games without needing much physical space, and can help reduce waste. The gaming industry has already mostly moved to this model.

However, buying a digital download is not the same as owning a game. Per PlayStation’s terms of service:

When you order or purchase a product from PlayStation Store, you buy a personal license to use that product for private, non-commercial use. That license is not transferable unless your local applicable laws say it must be. This means you can use a product in the ways described in the license, but do not own the product.

Gaming companies rarely delete previously purchased games from customers’ libraries, but it is possible. In 2013, Valve pulled copies of Order of War: Challenger from customers’ libraries after the game's servers shut down, rendering those copies useless. It would be shocking and unpopular for Sony to remove purchased games from gamers’ digital libraries, but considering that you “do not own the product,” as Sony puts it, the risk remains.

Furthering this concern, Sony also announced today that it will close the PlayStation Store on PlayStation 3 and PS Vita, with the US losing access in July 2027. Although the number of gamers relying on those stores is declining, it remains notable that Sony shied from committing to making previously purchased PlayStation 3 and PS Vita games downloadable for customers’ lifetime.

“To ease the transition, players will still be able to download previously purchased content after the closing date for the foreseeable future,” Sony said.

Both blog posts have comments decrying Sony’s announcements and their implications for ownership and long-term access to PlayStation games.

One user going by Mosquito53, for example, commented:

Another disappointing decision made in the same day. No matter how many users still use these stores, they should remain open. So much content released digital-only, even on these platforms, these games will be lost to time.

Imagine what will happen in the future when this same decision is made for PS4 or PS5 or even the eventual PS6, which now looks to be all digital with the announcement of no more physical disc production.

We will own nothing, it’s truly sad.

Sony has repeatedly reminded PlayStation customers that digital libraries can be temporary. In September, users in the United Kingdom will lose access to previously purchased titles from movie and show production and distribution company StudioCanal. Sony previously pulled StudioCanal content from customers’ PlayStation libraries in Germany and Australia. And in 2024, Sony deleted customers’ Funimation digital libraries despite Funimation previously claiming that customers would be able to access these digital copies “forever but” with “some restrictions.”

Sony has also shown a wavering commitment to its digital stores. In 2021, it stopped selling movie and show rentals/purchases. Leaving the door ajar for customers to potentially lose access to digital games they bought for PlayStation 3 or PS Vita doesn’t boost confidence around the digital-only future.

Further, the removal of storefronts could mean beloved games released only digitally become virtually impossible to find. We’ve seen this happen with Nintendo 3DS and Wii U games. After those digital storefronts closed in 2023, the number of Game Boy games released during Game Boy’s lifetime that were still available dropped from 155 out of 1,873 to 25, according to a 2023 report from the Video Game History Foundation.

“This is why physical media matters,” a user named Radgatt commented on Sony’s PS3 and PS Vita announcement. “More and more proof that you’re just buying a license that can be taken away whenever companies feel like it.

Read full article

Comments

Sony recently informed its PlayStation customers in the United Kingdom that they will no longer be able to watch previously purchased movies and shows from production and distribution company StudioCanal. As of September 1, affected customers will no longer be able to stream 551 titles from the PlayStation Store.

In a legal notice first spotted by gaming news outlet PlayStation LifeStyle, Sony said that affected customers will lose the ability to stream titles including Outrage: Way of the Yakuza, Paddington, Paddington 2, Pan’s Labyrinth, Rambo 3, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas “due to our content licensing agreements.” As of September, Sony will remove any affected titles that UK users bought from their PlayStation library, per the notice.

It’s possible that Sony may still make a deal with StudioCanal by September 1, or even after, that would allow users to keep watching the content they bought. This happened in 2023, when Sony said it would have to pull 1,318 seasons of Discovery shows from customers’ libraries. A few weeks after its announcement, Sony said that it would not pull the content because it had updated its licensing arrangements with Discovery.

Still, affected customers shouldn’t keep their hopes too high. Sony already pulled 314 StudioCanal titles from libraries in Germany and Austria in 2022. More recently, Sony deleted people’s Funimation digital libraries after it decided to merge the anime streaming service with Crunchyroll. Sony has also been scaling down its digital store and stopped selling movie and show rentals and purchases in August 2021. Even if StudioCanal were willing to make a deal with Sony, it’s feasible that Sony has less interest in retaining digital titles than before.

Regardless, the incident is a reminder that we don’t own the stuff we purchase digitally . Instead, digital rentals and purchases are merely long-term licenses that are only valid for as long as the streaming service has the right to distribute said content. Often, that’s a finite amount of time.

Still, Sony's announcement has frustrated some, including those who believe Sony should offer refunds or who think digital stores should stop using terms like "purchase" for long-term rentals. 

Read full article

Comments

Federal authorities are offering a reward of up to $10 million for information leading to the identification or location of a Russian state cyber group that has compromised thousands of Signal and WhatsApp accounts belonging to investigative reporters and US government employees.

The operation has been active since at least March, when the FBI published an advisory warning of ongoing phishing campaigns targeting high-value targets by attackers associated with Russian intelligence services. Messages masquerading as automated support communications ask that users click a link or provide verification codes or account passcodes. In the event the user complies, they unknowingly link the attacker's device to their account or have their account completely taken over and are locked out.

Thousands of accounts already compromised

With that, the attackers can read any new messages sent to the compromised account. A safety feature built into Signal, however, prevents the attackers from reading any previous conversations. The messages are sent to “individuals of high intelligence value, such as current and former US government officials, military personnel, political figures, and journalists.”

Last week, the FBI published an update that said the campaign had evolved. In addition to trying to post as support bots trying to trick recipients into linking their account to an attacker device, the messages also urge users to create a backup of all previous communications following the directions here. A follow-up message then instructs the targets to send the long passcode that’s used to encrypt backups stored on Signal servers. With that, the attackers have access to past Signal conversations. The update said two Russian government groups responsible were tracked as UNC5792 and UNC4221.

One message has text similar to this:

Signal is here

Recently, attempts to hack users of our messenger with the connection of third-party devices to the account have become more frequent.

An investigation conducted jointly with the US government and European partners revealed that the attacks on accounts were carried out by hackers from Iran and post-Soviet countries.

In this regard, Signal updates Terms of Service & Privacy Policy, and introduces Mandatory Two-factor Verification for users.

Not to lose your messages and media, set up your Signal Backup (Settings -> Backups -> Enable backups -> View recovery key -> Copy to clipboard -> Next -> Enter the recovery key -> Next -> Continue -> Choose your backup plan).

Click the "Accept" button in the pop-up and stay tuned for security updates on our messenger.

Stay safe and thank you for using the most secure messenger with end-to-end encryption.

If you have any questions, send /help

Other text looks like this:

Action Required: Data Recovery Needed

Your Signal Account data (messages and media) is at risk of permanent loss due to a sync issue.

To avoid losing your messages and media:

Go to Settings -> Backups -> Configure -> Enable Backups -> View Recovery Key.

Copy the recovery key to your clipboard.

Paste the key into this chat.

This links your existing backup to your account. Failure to do this may result in losing access to your account and all stored data.

On Monday, the US State Department said it was offering up to $10 million for information on the identities or locations of any of the people involved in the campaign. The reward is being offered under the State Department’s Reward for Justice program, or simply RFJ. The post said that in some cases, the attackers were abusing a Signal feature that allows users to create links to invite others to group discussions.

“Under this reward offer, RFJ is seeking information on UNC5792, a malicious cyber group associated with the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) Border Guards and UNC4221, a malicious group of cyber actors working on behalf of the Russian military services,” Monday’s post read. “UNC5792 has conducted widespread phishing campaigns targeting Signal and WhatsApp accounts of US government officials, military leadership, and allied personnel.” The post continued:

In some instances, UNC5792 actors altered legitimate “group invite” pages to redirect users to a malicious URL that linked a UNC5792-controlled device to the victim’s Signal account. Although these malicious cyber activities did not exploit any security vulnerability in the platforms’ encryption protections, they have compromised thousands of individual commercial messaging application accounts.

The RFJ went on to say that the campaign has already compromised thousands of messenger accounts.

It may be hard for many to fathom the possibility of US intelligence officers, diplomats, or journalists falling for the scam. The fact remains that it only takes a moment for someone who is fatigued, sleep-deprived, or otherwise unguarded to act on the messages. Phishing remains one of the most effective means of gaining access to accounts, despite the relatively unsophisticated technical prowess required.

If someone provides their backup key in their response, they must generate a new backup recovery key. “To mitigate this risk, the user must generate a new Backup Recovery Key within the Settings control; this action will invalidate the previous key for all future backup downloads,” the FBI said in last week’s advisory. “However, please note that this does not prevent the actor from having already downloaded a backup of the original account.”

Messenger users should note that:

• • Legitimate CMA support services will not request verification codes within the application.
  • CMA support services do not send users links to "verify" or "restore" accounts.
  • They should never provide a verification code without confirming the request comes from a legitimate CMA communication channel.

As always, it’s a good idea to resist taking on the feeling of urgency that’s often conveyed in such messages. There is rarely a penalty for waiting an extra hour or two to act, even when responding to legitimate requests.

Read full article

Comments

German physicist Max Planck was one of the pioneers of quantum mechanics in the early 20th century, earning the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of quanta. There has never been a whisper of scandal about the man's integrity or his scientific work. So a pair of science historians were puzzled when they discovered that a scientific journal had inexplicably retracted two of Planck's papers from the 1940s.

The journal in question is Naturwissenschaften, now known as The Science of Nature. The journal typically adds a large RETRACTED notice across digital papers that have been retracted, leaving them available for download. But it has removed the two Planck papers entirely, leaving just a blank page (and empty PDFs) with a brief note saying the articles had been "withdrawn due to article violation.”

Physics historian Yves Gingras of the University of Quebec in Montreal was browsing the blog Retraction Watch's list of Nobel Prize winners who have had scientific papers retracted, just out of curiosity. Gingras was shocked to see Planck's name on the list and enlisted fellow historian Mahdi Khelfaoui, of the University of Quebec at Trois-Rivieres, to investigate why the two papers had been retracted. They outlined their findings in a preprint posted to the physics arXiv.

The journal's current editor-in-chief, Suzanne Scarlata of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, told Science reporter Sam Kean that she had not known the papers had been retracted prior to Kean contacting her for comment. “That’s crazy,” she said. “I don’t understand why they were flagged. I think it just happened with their algorithm. It’s a mistake they should probably rectify.” (Kean claims Springer Nature is still selling the empty PDFs for $39.95 a pop, but I had no trouble downloading both empty files for free, for what it's worth.)

A question of copyright?

Gingras and Khelfaoui suspected that the retractions occurred due to the journal publisher's "misunderstanding, or ignorance, of past publication practices." The specific reason for the retractions was copyright violation, so there was nothing wrong with the actual papers from a scientific standpoint. (Both are "philosophical reflections on the nature of scientific knowledge.") They were able to retrieve metadata showing that the DOI records for both papers had been created in April 2005, coinciding with the large-scale switch to electronic publishing that occurred across most journals. Over time, those journals also integrated historical studies into their searchable online archives.

Gingras and Khelfaoui suspect the retraction decision was made around this time. "All this clearly suggests that some lawyer at Springer was overshadowing the process and considered these papers as problematic forms of 'duplicate publications,'" they wrote. The first retracted paper ("Meaning and Limits of Exact Science"), was published in 1942, based on a lecture Planck delivered in Berlin the prior year. It was also published as a booklet, in another journal, and included in an anthology of Planck's essays and lectures.

The second retracted paper ("Natural Science and the Real External World") appeared in 1940. It had not been published or reprinted elsewhere. But a scientist named Aloys Muller published a critique of Planck's 1931 essay on positivism that year, to which Planck responded in the same journal using the same title just a few months later. Gingras and Khelfaoui suspect the retraction was the result of a "cataloguing ambiguity" since there were two separate papers by different authors in the same journal with identical titles. This would have confused any algorithmic tool used to catch instances of duplication or "self-plagiarism," for example.

The real issue is whether publishers of scientific journals should retroactively apply contemporary standards regarding duplicate publication or self-plagiarism to historical papers. The journal publishing norms in the early 20th century were substantially different. The emphasis was on achieving the widest dissemination of knowledge across a fragmented scientific community separated by language and geographical distance, publishing in many different journals. As a result, the boundaries were heavily blurred between lectures, conference proceedings, booklets, collected essays, published journal articles, and so forth.

The scientific enterprise has since evolved to the point where it is dominated by large commercial publishing groups that are much more sensitive to protecting copyrights and turning a profit. Duplication/self-plagiarism is also more of an issue now, when publications are a major factor when it comes to hiring and promoting scientists, as well as acquiring research fundings. Applying these contemporary standards can be problematic for the "digital circulation of historical texts," the authors concluded.

The journal's publisher, Springer Nature, killed an editorial Scarlata planned to run addressing the issue. Springer Nature also declined to comment for the Science article, merely telling Kean through a representative that “detailed information about specific retractions is usually confidential and can only be shared with the relevant authors.”

Given that Planck died in 1947, he can't get a direct answer either. Both papers are now in the public domain in most countries, so it's not like copyright violation is even an issue anymore. It's still possible to access both papers via the Internet archive. But as Gingras and Khelfaoui argue in their preprint, removing the two papers distorts the historical record. "Whoever did it, I don’t care,” Gingras told Science. “Just put them [back] in the database. Intellectually, it’s not acceptable.”

Read full article

Comments

The electric car brand Polestar's days in the US are seriously numbered. Today, the company revealed that the US Commerce Department has declined to authorize imports of new Polestars from model year 2027 onward as part of a rule banning connected cars from automakers with Chinese links.

Polestar says it will continue to sell its existing stock of Polestar 3 and Polestar 4 SUVs and "will continue to support customers, including providing access to its service network." But we can forget about the Polestar 5 sedan, the Polestar 6 roadster, or any future models making it to these shores.

The automaker was spun out of Volvo Cars several years ago as a pure EV brand by its corporate parent, Zhejiang Geely Holding, a Chinese company that also owns OEMs like Lynk and Co and Zeekr. And just weeks ago, Commerce authorized Volvo to import MY27 vehicles. At the time, Polestar told Ars that it was continuing to work with US authorities to meet the regulations; that work was evidently in vain.

US domestic auto manufacturing interests have been wildly successful in raising support for protectionist measures from across the political spectrum, although ironically, the Polestar 3 SUV is built in South Carolina at the Volvo plant near Charleston. Polestar 4s destined for the US were built in South Korea, although much of Polestar's manufacturing is in China.

"The automotive industry is entering a new phase, based on regional dynamics. Our strategy reflects that, with Europe being our largest growth engine and our plan to manufacture Polestar 7 in Europe," said Michael Lohscheller, Polestar's CEO. "Our record sales in 2025 and the first quarter of 2026 show that we are making strong progress, with several new market launches taking place in Europe this year. In addition, we will continue to invest in markets where we have opportunities to continue to grow, like Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Canada.”

Read full article

Comments

The White House is drastically shortening the deadline for government agencies and organizations to adopt new quantum-resistant encryption systems that will withstand attacks that use quantum computers, as the federal government seeks to protect decades’ worth of secrets belonging to militaries, banks, governments, and most individuals on Earth.

The executive order, titled Securing the Nation against Advanced Cryptographic Attacks, requires computing systems for “high-value assets” and “high-impact systems” to transition to post-quantum cryptographic key establishment schemes by December 31, 2030, and to quantum-safe digital signature schemes by December 31, 2031.

Heading off a significant threat

The new deadline, which for many organizations is about five years sooner than the previous one, comes on the heels of recent research showing that the resources and cost for building a cryptographically relevant quantum computer are far less than previous consensus estimates. In response, Google, Cloudflare, and other companies recently tightened their timelines for moving off vulnerable systems to 2029.

“The advent of large-scale quantum computers, particularly in the hands of adversaries, will pose a significant threat to widely used cryptographic security systems,” Monday’s executive order stated. “Ongoing cyber activity against our Nation also presents the risk of adversaries collecting United States information now, and decrypting it later once large-scale quantum computers are operational.”

Under a timeline the National Security Agency published in 2022, “National Security Systems”—a class including only defense and intelligence systems under the authority of the agency—were under orders to be quantum-ready between 2030 and 2033. Most other organizations had until 2035 to complete the transition. Now, many of them will be required to transition much sooner.

“So, for any system that falls into this new bucket of high-value assets and high-impact systems, their transition timelines just got shortened by 4-5 years (from 2035 to 2030/2031),” Brian LaMacchia, a cryptography engineer who oversaw Microsoft's post-quantum transition from 2015 to 2022 and now works at Farcaster Consulting Group, told Ars. “That is a significant shortening of the transition timeline for these systems, and it follows similar timeline revisions from Google and Cloudflare that we saw announced back in late March/early April.”

The order also:

• Establishes a government-wide transition coordination process to be led by the Director of the Office of Management and Budget and the National Cyber Director. Each federal agency will designate a point person responsible for reporting quantum transition progress to them.
• Directs the Secretary of State to work with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Department of Defense and Homeland Security, the National Cyber Director, and the Director of National Intelligence to “identify and engage foreign governments and industry groups in key countries to encourage their transition to PQC algorithms standardized by NIST.”
• Directs NIST and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to issue guidance on the release of a CBOM (cryptographic bill of materials), which lists all components, libraries, and modules in an encryption system.
• Establishes new procurement rules that appear to be aimed at requiring “covered contractors” to meet the same quantum-readiness deadlines and implement vulnerability disclosure policies.

“Critical infrastructure owners and operators can now expect support in developing their PQC migration plans,” Jordan Kenyon, senior quantum scientist at Booz Allen, told Ars. “Covered contractors could face future requirements from proposed rules to incorporate PQC compliant algorithms required by FIPS by the end of 2030 and incorporate reports of cryptographic vulnerabilities in their disclosures.” FIPS is short for Federal Information Processing Standards, a set of standards shepherded by NIST for use in computer systems of non-military US government agencies and contractors.

No one knows when a cryptographically relevant quantum computer will arrive. Experts have made wide-ranging guesses for more than three decades. A key barrier is creating a system with the required number of qubits—the quantum equivalent of a bit in classical computing—that operates correctly even in the presence of errors that occur when they interact with their environment.

In March, researchers said they discovered a way to break ECC-256, used to secure the bitcoin and ethereum blockchains, using only 30,000 physical qubits in 10 days.

That same month, a Google research team said it developed two quantum circuits that could solve the elliptic-curve discrete logarithm problem using roughly 500,000 physical qubits, half of what the same team estimated last June was needed to break 2048-bit RSA, which has a much larger key size.

In 2012, most estimates were that breaking a 2048-bit RSA key would require a billion physical qubits. By 2019, the estimate was lowered to 20 million physical qubits. The steady march of progress, as demonstrated by these latest research papers, is prodding organizations with the most to lose to err on the side of Q Day—the day a cryptographically relevant quantum computer arrives—coming sooner rather than later.

Two of the most widely used public key cryptography algorithms—RSA and elliptic curve cryptography—are based on factoring composites, which are the product of two or more primes, and the discrete logarithm, respectively. These mathematical problems are simple to solve in one direction and nearly impossible in the other. A quantum computer with sufficient resources can run Shor’s algorithm to solve these problems in polynomial time, specifically cubic time, far faster than the exponential time provided by today’s classical computers. The post-quantum algorithms replacing RSA and elliptic curve cryptography are based on problems that quantum computers have no advantage over classical computers in solving.

Contrary to what many people assume, substituting quantum vulnerable algorithms for PQC ones is anything but a drop-and-replace exercise. Public key sizes for ML-KEM—one of the replacements for RSA—are roughly three times bigger. The difficulty and scale of the work ahead is the reason the federal government is taking the move so seriously.

Separately, the White House published a second executive order directing the federal government, in partnership with private industry, to support quantum computing. Among other things, it established a “national effort” to develop the world’s first quantum computer powerful enough to “initiate the era of quantum-enabled scientific discovery.”

Read full article

Comments