Here are 5 important things happening in tech around the world today.
The maker of Tetris criticised a new White House digital game that mimics its classic puzzle by having players build a wall to stop migrants from crossing the US border.
“P.S. The Tetris Company was not involved in the creation of ‘Build the Wall,'” the company posted on X Friday. “P.P.S. We take copyright infringement very seriously.”
Build the Wall is one of five games the White House released this week that inserted Trump administration themes into versions of old-school video games.
It asks players to “protect the border from the coming horde” by building a wall with blocks resembling Tetris pieces as pixelated extraterrestrial-like figures approach.
“At Tetris, we believe in the power of connection and bringing people together, not dividing them,” the company wrote in its post.
Another game, Rio Run, resembles the old mobile phone game Snake, featuring a balding, white-haired character in a suit tasked with picking up “every crosser.”
Each person collected adds to the player’s deportee score. Other games play off themes including the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again standards and the Trump Accounts savings program.
The White House unveiled Arcade.gov on social media through animated clips styled after the loading screens of Microsoft’s Xbox, Sony’s PlayStation and Nintendo.
One of the animations reworked the Japanese company Sega’s logo into “MAGA”, a nod to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan.
Microsoft, Xbox, Sony, PlayStation and Nintendo didn’t respond to a request for comment from Bloomberg News. Sega acknowledged the request, but didn’t provide a comment.
Tetris joins a group of artists and rights holders who have objected to the Trump administration’s use of their intellectual property in government social media posts without their consent, including Olivia Rodrigo, Sabrina Carpenter, and Kids Can Press, the publisher of Franklin the Turtle. [Bloomberg]
**X loses “tweet” trademark: **A federal court in Delaware has ruled in favour of Elon Musk’s X, blocking rival Operation Bluebird from using the Twitter name. However, it also ruled that X likely abandoned the “tweet” trademark and the Twitter bird logo. [TechCrunch]
**Microsoft announces Project Zenith: **Microsoft has announced a streamlined Windows 11 experience designed for developers and known as Project Zenith. However, users will require powerful hardware with at least 64GB of RAM. It will support AI development, including running 30-billion-plus parameter models, while providing developer tools and settings by default. [Engadget]
**New AMD workstation packs 576GB of GPU memory: **AMD has unveiled the Threadripper Halo Station, a liquid-cooled desktop PC that can run AI models with more than one trillion parameters locally. It packs a 96-core Threadripper Pro CPU, 4 Instinct MI350P accelerators with 288GB of combined HBM3E memory, and 2TB of system RAM. AMD said it would support up to 4 accelerators, pushing the graphics memory figures up to 576GB. [Digital Trends]
OpenAI agents discussed escaping their sandbox on a public wiki: OpenAI agents posted around 18,000 messages to a German wiki, apparently using it to collaborate during internal hacking tests. Agents shared answers, explored their environment, discussed ways to bypass sandbox restrictions, and suggested XSS and moderator impersonation techniques. OpenAI later confirmed the agents were its own. [Ars Technica]
**AI cloud computing firm seeks $3.5 billion (R56 billion): **Nscale, a cloud computing firm focused on AI, is seeking up to $3.5 billion (R56 billion) in financing ahead of a planned IPO. This includes $1.5 billion (R24 billion) through convertible notes and around $2 billion (R32 billion) from Nvidia. [Bloomberg]
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