Hasta La Gadget!

Diem, the ambitious crypto project funded by Facebook has collapsed. The Diem Association confirmed that it’s selling its assets to Silvergate, the bank that had previously partnered with the group, and that it would “begin the process of winding down.” Bloomberg had reported talks of a sale last week. A Diem Association spokesperson alleged at the time that the report had unspecified “factual errors.”

Now that the sale is official, it marks the end of a more than two year effort to launch the stablecoin championed by Mark Zuckerberg. Though the Diem Association was a separate organization from Facebook and parent company Meta, much of its funding came from Facebook. “I believe that this is something that needs to get built, but I get that I’m not the ideal messenger for this right now,” Zuckerberg told Congress in a 2019 hearing about his cryptocurrency ambitions.

The group previously known as the Libra Association had reportedly hoped to launch its stablecoin last January. But it ran into repeated roadblocks from lawmakers and regulators around the world, and the project was delayed and scaled back numerous times. Among officials’ top concerns was that Diem could be used for money laundering and other illicit purposes.

In a statement, Diem CEO Stuart Levey blamed US regulators for Diem’s demise, and defended the organization’s work to minimize risk with “industry-leading controls to protect consumers and combat financial crime.”

“Despite giving us positive substantive feedback on the design of the network, it nevertheless became clear from our dialogue with federal regulators that the project could not move ahead,” Levey. “As a result, the best path forward was to sell the Diem Group’s assets, as we have done today to Silvergate.”

It’s unclear what this means for Facebook’s cryptocurrency wallet Novi, which launched a “small pilot” last year with the Pax Dollar stablecoin. At the time, Facebook’s former crypto chief David Marcus said the company remained committed to launching Diem. Marcus left the company a month later. Facebook didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

It’s been over a year since we last saw Luci the demon, Elfo the elf, and Bean the newly crowned Queen of Dreamland on Netflix, and things weren’t looking good. Luci had died and gone to heaven. Elfo had been carried away by angry ogres for blinding their prince. And poor Bean had been dragged off to hell by her evil…

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Just when you thought having TV shows based on Star Wars, Marvel, DC, The Lord of the Rings, Halo, and about 50 other major franchises wasn’t enough, one of the biggest and baddest is finally rolling its way into the mix. eOne just announced that Rawson Marshall Thurber, the writer and director behind Netflix’s smash…

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There’s always been a strict wall in World of Warcraft between Alliance and Horde players — you can only cooperate with people from your own side. Blizzard is ready to (partly) remove that barrier, though. As Polygonexplains, WoW‘s 9.2.5 update will allow cross-faction dungeon crawls, raids and rated PvP matches. You won’t be cut off from your friends just because they chose the ‘wrong’ allegiance for their characters.

You’ll have the option to both directly invite people from an opposing faction or join premade groups in the Group Finder listings for a given event type. Group leaders can limit instances to same-faction players, however. And don’t expect to be living in harmony with rivals outside of these controlled circumstances. Guilds, matchmaking-based events and the regular world will behave as usual, so you’ll still need to be on your guard most of the time.

The feature is available regardless of level, although there will be a few old instances where multi-faction parties can’t enter, such as Battle of Dazar’alor, Trial of the Crusader and Icecrown Citadel. They’ll need to be “reworked” to eliminate single-faction elements, Blizzard said.

There’s no release date for the 9.2.5 update at this stage. It’s a long-requested update, and it’s well-timed in a post-Battle for Azeroth environment where the Alliance and Horde have reached a delicate truce. Whether or not it boosts player counts is another story. Dexertonotes Blizzard’s total monthly active base dropped by 20 million between 2017 and 2021, and WoW likely played a large role in that drop. Toss in an ongoing sexual harassment scandal and cross-faction WoW may only have a limited effect, even as it fulfills the hopes of many subscribers.

Computer researchers have discovered a new, experimental way to track you across the internet using information culled from your computer or phone’s graphics processing unit.

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