The Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG AFTRA) has announced a new deal which it claims will protect actors from unauthorized AI replications of their voices.
21.12.2023 - 13:12 / tech.hindustantimes.com
Narcotics police the world over are sprucing up their video game skills, as cartels go increasingly online to sell drugs and recruit dealers.
"Cartels have been incredibly tech savvy over recent years, reaching vast audiences," Benjamin Shultz, foreign malign influence analyst at Deloitte, told a Council of Europe meeting.
"The Sinaloa Cartel has a Twitter account with almost 200,000 followers and they tend to post nearly daily, engaging and posting images and other contents that glorify what they do," he said. The account has since been shut down.
To bring greater attention to the role of online gaming in the drug trade, the Council of Europe's Pompidou Group, which works on international drug issues, held a forum in Mexico City on December 19 and 20.
Online games such as "Grand Theft Auto" or "World of Warcraft" provide perfect cover for cartels to discreetly sell drugs or find personnel.
"The darknet has been decreasing in popularity for cartels, law enforcement has gotten pretty good at getting into the darknet, whereas video games garner really untapped resources and are very unmonitored," Shultz said.
In online games, users can connect with almost anyone, teenagers can talk to strangers, and there are not many controls, he explained.
The games' internal messaging systems are extremely difficult to intercept, particularly when traffickers communicate with emoticons or emojis.
An entire conversation can be carried out with symbols, avoiding any suspect words that could trigger attention.
Within drug circles in the United States, the electric plug emoji means "dealer," a small palm tree means "marijuana," and a key stands for "cocaine."
Mexican police were the first to notice the practice, with an early case involving three adolescents aged 11 to 14 who were recruited while playing "Garena Free Fire" and offered $200 a week to be lookouts in Mexico City.
The three were arrested just before boarding a bus that their recruiter had bought them tickets for.
"This type of transaction and dealing is still much more common on Instagram or Snapchat, and most of the cases with video games have been localised near the US-Mexico border," Shultz said.
"In Europe video games are very unregulated, they're not monitored so this could be very well percolating under the surface," he added.
Thomas Kattau, deputy executive secretary of the Council of Europe's Pompidou Group, said "it is a global issue, and the idea is you need to have a forum where we can make law enforcement and governments aware of the phenomenon."
"Mexico is the country that has taken the lead on this issue and brought it to the attention of law enforcement," he said.
"And now we have seen similar things occurring in the UK and other countries, and therefore we
The Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG AFTRA) has announced a new deal which it claims will protect actors from unauthorized AI replications of their voices.
Bandai Namco just released a very special five-minute recap of the history of the Mishima clan, to hype us up for Tekken 8’s release on January 26. And it’s narrated by none other than Succession‘s own Brian Cox.
For a long time, video games have been the top dog when it comes to entertainment revenue, having been the most lucrative industry for well over 10 years. You'd have thought that with how good we had it with video game releases last year that this trend would continue, but it turns out revenue from video-based content was higher than that of video games in the United Kingdom for the first time in over a decade.
Sam Barlow's Immortality — an epic mystery of self-reference and cinema — is coming to PlayStation 5 later this motnh
The the first time in over ten years, video games is not the UK's biggest entertainment medium.
The products discussed here were independently chosen by our editors. GameSpot may get a share of the revenue if you buy anything featured on our site.
Apple has announced that their Vision Pro headset will launch in the US next month on 2nd February 2024, with pre-order going live on 19th January.
The video game begins with a disturbing scene: a city almost entirely underwater. The city's developers must reclaim land from the sea in order to build new infrastructure, but too much digging will trigger earthquakes and raw materials are scarce. Survival is contingent on finding workarounds, and on installing tidal turbines and other technologies that can harness renewable energy. Squaring such big circles might not sound like a fun way to spend a Saturday. But when Terra Nil — a city-building strategy game from Cape Town-based Free Lives — hit the market last year, players from all over the globe signed up to give it a go. Within a week of the game's debut, more than 300,000 people played it.
A number of staff at Bossa Games, the UK game studio behind the Surgeon Simulator games, I Am Bread and more have recently been impacted by layoffs, it’s been confirmed.
Welcome to 2024, everyone! With our Game of the Year coverage just about wrapped up, we've put together this handy article in which we're going to recap all of 2023's winners. Indeed, it's time to put that last 12 months behind us and look ahead to what should be another exciting year for PlayStation fans.
This is not investment advice. The author has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Wccftech.com has a disclosure and ethics policy.
Actor Jack Black has joined the cast of Warner Bros and Legendary's "Minecraft", a live-action movie based on the popular video game from the studio. Black joins "Aquaman" star Jason Momoa as well as actors Emma Myers and Danielle Brooks in the project, which will be directed by Jared Hess of ”Napoleon Dynamite” fame, reported entertainment news outlet Variety.