Attackers are always looking to get targets coming and going. As such you have a very rich ecosystem of attack types to cover as much ground as possible. A concerning one has always been direct supply chain attacks. These attacks seek to compromise software during the development stage, so the malicious pieces get bundled into the released code and signed with a trusted certificate. The highly publicized attack on SolarWinds is one of those types of attacks and shows just how effective and dangerous they can be. Supply chain attacks some in multiple flavors including (but certainly not limited to) compromising code repositories, poisoned plugins or open-source packages, and targeting of developer systems.

Yesterday we talked about how the Microsoft Activision Blizzard deal had been approved by the European Commission (on antitrust) touting licensing deals that were pro competition. As we stated in that article, the licensing agreements only extend to cloud gaming services, they exclude consoles and other non-Microsoft controlled hardware. The EC and Microsoft are calling this very pro-competition even though cloud gaming represents around 1% of the market.

There is a quote from the movie “The Matrix” that has always stuck with me. It was a scene where Morpheus (Lawrence Fishburne) is explaining to Neo (Keanu Reeves) the state of the real world and the history that allowed it to get there. The line is “We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AI.” There is another important line from the HBO series “From the Earth to the Moon. This line take place when Frank Borman (David Andrews) was asked what caused the Apollo One fire, he replied “A failure of imagination.” These two lines compete for how I view the state of AI development. As we marvel at our own magnificence, we should not stop thinking about the potential risks involved as we push to advance AI. Yet that seems to be what is happening.

It looks like the folks at the European Commission have decided that Microsoft buying out Activision Blizzard for $69 billion (with a B) is not going to be a violation of their antitrust rules. The approval means that there are only a few roadblocks to the deal going through. South Korea and China have not decided yet, while the US and UK have challenged it. The deal has been called the world’s biggest gaming takeover and is viewed by many as a bad thing for competition as it would leave Microsoft in control of a majority of game development groups.