Steve's News

A new report says that when the Securities and Exchange Commission sued Elon Musk less than a week before Tweety McTreason’s inauguration, only one member—the current chairman—voted against filing the lawsuit. The vote behind closed doors was 4–1, with three Democrats and Republican Hester Peirce joining to support the lawsuit over Musk’s late disclosure of a Twitter stock purchase in early 2022, Reuters reported today. The one dissent reportedly came from Republican Mark Uyeda, who was subsequently named acting SEC chairman by Trump. Uyeda also asked SEC enforcement staff “to declare that a case they wanted to bring against Elon Musk was not motivated by politics, an unusual request that the staffers refused,” Bloomberg reported last month. Reuters said its sources confirmed that “staff refused to sign the pledge, as it is not typical SEC practice.” Read full article Comments

Back in 2004, the launch of Half-Life 2 would help launch Steam on the path to eventually becoming the de facto digital rights management (DRM) system for the vast majority of PC games. But years before that, with the 1998 launch of the original Half-Life, Valve cofounder and then-CMO Monica Harrington said she was inspired to take DRM more seriously by her nephew’s reaction to the purchase of a new CD-ROM burner. PC Gamer pulled that interesting tidbit from a talk Harrington gave at last week’s Game Developers Conference. In her remembering, Harrington’s nephew had used funds she had sent for school supplies on a CD replicator, then sent her “a lovely thank you note essentially saying how happy he was to copy and share games with his friends.” That was the moment Harrington said she realized this new technology was leading to a “generational shift” in both the availability and acceptability of PC game piracy. While game piracy and DRM definitely existed prior to CD burners (anyone else remember the large codewheels that cluttered many early PC game boxes?), Harrington said the new technology—and the blasé attitude her nephew showed toward using it for piracy—could “put our entire business model at risk.” Read full article Comments

Just five months after surpassing ASML, German software giant SAP has overtaken Novo Nordisk to become Europe’s most valuable listed company. SAP’s shares rose 1.6% on Monday, bringing its market cap to €313bn. That was just enough to nudge Danish weight loss drugmaker Novo off the top spot.  SAP’s stock has risen more than 40% in the past year, amid booming demand for its AI-driven enterprise resource planning software (ERP). The cloud-based software centralises business data, allowing multiple departments to access and share information in one place. In contrast, Novo is having a tougher time on the stock market. Novo’s… This story continues at The Next Web