Marcus Mendes:

Last April, Brazilian officials notified Apple and Google over an alleged lack of age controls in betting apps on their respective app stores.

9to5Mac:

Brazilian users browsing the App Store rankings in categories such as Navigation, Travel, and Weather have noticed a growing number of poorly made games appearing among the top results, many of them featuring AI-generated illustrations of animals as their app icons. Many carry an AL age rating, making them available to users of all ages, including children.

As it turns out, these are so-called jacket apps, which are just a front for hidden betting and gambling apps.

[…]

The repository also includes explicit instructions intended to prevent the apps from being flagged as suspicious during App Store review. These include giving each app uniquely named startup and remote-configuration codes, making it harder for reviewers to identify them as part of the same group.

Ironically, the App Store’s own recommendation system appears to have little trouble grouping the apps together, as the “You Might Also Like” section on several of these apps points users toward other suspicious apps more frequently than they point to genuine apps.

John Gruber (Mastodon):

Obviously the main problem is that these apps disguise themselves Trojan Horse-style, and slip through App Store review undetected. I don’t think it’s reasonable to think App Store review could catch every attempt at this sort of thing though — if the horses are disguised well-enough, some of them are going to slip through. That’s actually fine.

I agree that it’s unreasonable to expect App Review to catch all those, but then Apple should not be pretending that it can. This was all obvious from day one. The public perception of App Review is completely at odds with what it actually can and does do.

But the first example 9to5Mac cites isn’t well disguised at all. What sense does it make that “PotatoPlot Puzzle” — a game featuring a rabbit potato farmer — is a weather app? How is that not a red flag right there?

[…]

I always mention that the point of such a squad shouldn’t be to make the App Store 100 percent scammer-free — which I believe is an impossible goal that would set the team up for failure. The point should be only to make the App Store free of successful scams. Focus on the most popular apps and the most lucrative apps.

The App Store is more than 18 years old. The idea of patrolling the top charts probably occurred to Apple before it even shipped. They just don’t want to do it.

Nick Lockwood:

Apple only took 24 hours to approve my iOS app update that crashed instantly on launch. Such a blessing to have that extra level of reliability and security that only a manual review process can provide 🙏

Incidentally, the crash was due to a missing dylib - something that could easily have been detected by the automated scan process, if only that scan were designed to protect users’ and developers’ interests instead of Apple’s.

Kyle Hughes:

There is simply no other way to maintain a modern, healthy software ecosystem without making sure that apps that have been around for 7 years and 20 major versions can’t get a build looked at within 48 hours. There’s no other way. Probably needs to be longer, honestly.

I had to file an Expedited Review Request because this update is a legitimate emergency. Four hours later, App Review rejected the build because they didn’t follow the first sentence of the testing instructions (which haven’t changed in 7 years). Back to Waiting for Review! There’s no other way.

Previously:

• Chrome Browser Default at the Top of the Mac App Store
• Sparrow Wallet Lawsuit
• Sirius Pomodoro
• The App Store Scammer Strikes Back
• Brazil: App Marketplaces and External Payments
• Scam Authenticator App Steals QR Codes
• Sketchy ChatGPT App Soars Up App Store Charts
• Gambling Ads on App Store Product Pages
• Schneier on Sideloading
• The App Store Isn’t Catching the Most Egregious Scams
• Scammy KeyWatch and Trezor Apps
• Widgetsmith and The Case of the Missing App Store Bunco Squad
• Big Fish Casino
• Apps Removed in Ban of Gambling-Related Apps

Update (2026-07-30): Kyle Hughes:

We got rejected in the Expedited Review again, this time for not having an account deletion feature. Except we do, and it’s one button press away from the screen that the reviewer was on. And it has always existed. Is this how the expedited review works? Malicious incompetence?

Update (2026-07-31): Kyle Hughes:

If you were wondering how long one of the “you can ask us to approve this build and can fix this issue in the next release” App Review errors takes to resolve when you’re in the Expedited Review Queue… me too! So far, 18 hours. (Ignoring the fact that we have the feature the rejection was for.)

Kyle Hughes:

Certainly it means “within a week,” right? “Within a month,” please? “In your lifetime,” I can only hope.

Um dos jogos mais cultuados de todos os tempos, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time — lançado originalmente em 1998 para o console Nintendo 64 —, agora pode ser jogado nativamente em iPhones e iPads.

Essa opção se tornou uma realidade graças ao projeto de código aberto HarkinianPad, do desenvolvedor Karis [@chrissotraidis]. Criado com a ajuda do Codex 5.6 Sol, ele é baseado em outro projeto que ganhou certa notoriedade há alguns anos: Ship of Harkinian — versão decompilada de Ocarina of Time capaz de rodar em dispositivos com macOS, Windows, Linux e Android — bem como os consoles Nintendo Switch e Nintendo Wii U.

Ocarina of Time, running natively on iOS and iPadOS for the first time.

Not an emulator. Ship of Harkinian has run on Windows, Linux, macOS, Switch, Wii U, and Android. Never iOS. Now it runs on iPad, with iPhone in the build too.

The game was decompiled to C and rebuilt as a… pic.twitter.com/7J62JwGRHq

— Kahris (@chrissotraidis) July 27, 2026

Segundo Karis, o jogo foi decompilado para a linguagem de programação C e, então, reconstruído como uma aplicação ARM64 (a arquitetura dos processadores da Apple) nativa. Ele também garante que nenhum elemento do hardware do Nintendo 64 é simulado pelo seu projeto, que renderiza o game via Metal — framework proprietário da Maçã.

Por se tratar de uma versão nativa, é possível colocar Ocarina of Time para rodar em widescreen, na resolução completa do iPhone/iPad e a 60 quadros por segundo. Para efeito de comparação, o console da Nintendo roda o game a 240p e com uma taxa de quadros de aproximadamente 20qps.

Configurar tudo no seu smartphone ou tablet, no entanto, não é exatamente simples, já que, para rodar, o HarkinianPad precisa, primeiro, ser assinado por uma Conta Apple ou por um time de desenvolvimento. A página do projeto no GitHub, no entanto, oferece um passo a passo (em inglês) bem completo com várias opções de instalação.

Você também vai precisar extrair a ROM ¹Read-only memory, ou memória somente de leitura. de uma edição física do jogo para rodá-lo no seu dispositivo, já que o projeto não vem com uma cópia por questões legais.

Uma vez que tudo for configurado, no entanto, é possível aproveitar Ocarina of Time em sua completude, embora seja possível que você esbarre em alguns problemas de áudio dependendo do dispositivo escolhido. O HarkinianPad também conta com suporte a controles de videogame, teclados e mouses — além dos controles adaptados para a tela sensível ao toque.

Boa jogatina! 🎮

via Wccftech

Notas de rodapé

• 1
  Read-only memory, ou memória somente de leitura.

Xbox Game Pass, Assinatura Xbox: descubra se o serviço vale a pena em 2026 e entenda os benefícios que vão além dos jogos tradicionais.

O post Vale a pena assinar o Xbox Game Pass em 2026? Veja os principais motivos apareceu primeiro em Blog do Edivaldo - Informações e Notícias sobre Linux.

Xbox Game Pass atualiza seu catálogo com novos jogos imperdíveis, ampliando a experiência para assinantes em Xbox Series X, PC e na nuvem.

O post Xbox Game Pass ganha novos jogos e amplia ainda mais o catálogo para assinantes apareceu primeiro em Blog do Edivaldo - Informações e Notícias sobre Linux.

Se você curte o Sonic e os games clássicos dele, conheça e veja como instalar o jogo Sonic Robo Blast 2 no Linux via Flatpak.

Leia o restante do texto "Como instalar o jogo Sonic Robo Blast 2 no Linux via Flatpak"

O post Como instalar o jogo Sonic Robo Blast 2 no Linux via Flatpak apareceu primeiro em Blog do Edivaldo - Informações e Notícias sobre Linux.

One of the longest-running debates in modern American archaeology involves how the first people who arrived in the New World survived amid the many challenges they faced while migrating into an unfamiliar environment during the final years of the Ice Age. At the heart of that debate is a simple question: what did the earliest Americans rely on as their primary source of food?

Without question, migrations that would ultimately carry humans across two continents are the kind of activity that will burn a lot of calories. Hence, archaeologists have long wondered whether these ancient hunter-gatherers primarily survived by hunting a wide variety of plants and animals, or whether they specialized in pursuing giant megafauna that roamed the Americas, which would have offered a much higher-protein diet.

Now, in a significant new study published in Science Advances, an international team of archaeologists says the evidence strongly points to the latter scenario, meaning that the earliest Paleoindian Americans were likely to be highly specialized hunters whose success depended on their ability to stalk and bring down enormous creatures like mammoths, giant ground sloths, and other late-Pleistocene megafauna.

The study, led by Ben Potter of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, with contributions from Todd Surovell and Robert Kelly of the University of Wyoming, looked at a synthesis of zooarchaeological evidence from sites spanning Eastern Beringia, North America, and South America.

The team’s research now presents a major discovery: that at least 98 percent of the diets of these early populations focused on massive megafaunal herbivores, which would have provided an exceptional source of protein during the early colonization of the New World.

Multiple Lines of Evidence Support a Highly Specialized Diet

The team’s findings challenge the view that the earliest Americans were broad-spectrum hunter-gatherers. Among the best evidence for this, they say, is food remains that were left behind thousands of years ago at locations that would become recognized today as Paleoindian archaeological digs.

“The most direct proxy for paleodiets are the food remains left at archaeological sites,” Potter told The Debrief in an email. “These are most closely connected with the animals targeted, butchered, and consumed.”

Potter adds that the zooarchaeological record of East Beringians, Clovis, and Fishtail Projectile Point Complexes “demonstrates a clear focus on megafauna, no matter how one measures it: bone elements, minimum number of individual animals, or associated edible biomass.”

Potter says that “multiple lines of evidence point to the same conclusion,” which include isotopic data directly obtained from Anzick-1, a Paleoindian child’s remains uncovered in central Montana in 1968 that are still recognized as the only Clovis-era human remains ever found in the Americas, dated to 12,990–12,840 years ago.

Additional evidence comes from “toolkit homogeneity across continents, high residential mobility and limited/no site reuse, and lethal weapon technology, clearly and repetitively associated with megafauna,” Potter explains.

Wide Dispersal in a Short Span of Time

Potter and his coauthors say the dietary specialization evidenced by the available archaeological data helps to explain how humans were able to disperse across the Americas within a relatively short timeframe—possibly just a few centuries.

A key element to the success of these early American hunters would have been the consistency in hunting methods that could be employed with large herbivores across great geographic distances, from as far north as modern-day Alaska to as far south as Patagonia.

“There are a number of reasons this adaptation facilitated rapid expansion into unfamiliar territories,” Potter told The Debrief. Among these is the fact that larger megafauna rich in fat yield far more calories than their smaller counterparts.

“Megaherbivores have large territories and are found through multiple ecosystems,” Potter says. “This focus on megaherbivores allowed tracking their preferred prey into additional regional ecosystems, enabling rapid dispersal across the Americas.” Additional factors he cites include the fact that animal meat and fat offer abundant sources of macro- and micronutrients, and that there would have been relatively little competition from other late-Pleistocene megacarnivore predators.

This adaptation, Potter says, “was a continuation of earlier Beringian strategies, necessitating no major technological innovations or adjustments when encountering radically different habitats,” ranging from geographic locales as diverse as modern Alaska, to Virginia, Florida, and Mexico.

“Mapping onto these few taxa allows for rapid expansion rather than the generations-long time needed to learn each local region with its own endemic plants, animals, fish, shellfish, and birds,” Potter adds. “The overall strategy supports moving into new areas with higher densities (encounter rates) of megafauna, facilitating rapid expansion.”

Clues Pointing to Shared Cultural Traditions

From such evidence, Potter says, another “logical extension of the data and patterns” he and his team observed is potential evidence for shared cultural traditions carried by these ancient migrating populations.

“This is supported by multiple datasets,” Potter told The Debrief, which he says include genetic information supporting a single clade’s rapid expansion sometime after roughly 14,000 years before present, “suggesting a single source population expanding rapidly through the continents.”

Potter also points to the timing of early continent-wide cultural manifestations, which he says are “consistent with the genetics,” and “the cultural connections between Clovis points and Fishtail points,” the latter referring to an early Paleoindian American projectile point type that, in many cases, are fluted in the same manner as Clovis points.

Finally, Potter says the zooarchaeological record he and his colleagues examined, as well as the “time-transgressive nature of megaherbivore extinctions, earlier in the north, later in the south,” all provide additional support for a widespread dispersal within a short period of time, helped by early Paleoindian hunters’ prowess in hunting large herbivorous megafauna.

“In short, Early Paleoindians expanded into Eastern Beringia (~14,000-13,300 cal BP) using the same toolkits that allowed them to migrate throughout northeast Asia (microblades, composite points), continuing a long-standing tradition of woolly mammoth hunting,” Potter told The Debrief. “Woolly mammoth habitat extends from Alaska through the Ice Free Corridor, open at least by 14,000 cal BP, into the Great Lakes Region.”

“There, one group, SNA, encountered a related species, Columbian mammoth, and hunted them throughout North America to Mesoamerica (13,400-12,800 cal BP), where they developed Fishtail fluted points and predated other proboscideans they encountered (Gomphotheres) as well as very large ground sloths (12,900-11,600 cal BP).

Support for the “Overkill” Hypothesis?

Finally, the team’s findings also lend support to the controversial hypothesis that human hunting played a significant role in the extinction of many Ice Age megafauna between roughly 11,000 and 13,000 years ago.

As those giant animals disappeared, Potter and his colleagues argue, Paleoindian populations were forced to diversify their diets, adapting to locally available resources such as bison, birds, fish, shellfish, and plants.

“After these megafauna became extinct, ~13,300 cal BP in Beringia, ~12,800 cal BP in North America, and ~11,600 cal BP in South America, SNA descendents diversified into many regional cultures, focused on locally abundant food resources,” Potter says.

Fundamentally, Potter and his team’s study challenges the long-held view that the first Americans were broad-spectrum foragers, instead portraying them as highly adaptable big-game specialists whose pursuit of megafauna shaped both their extraordinary continental expansion and the course of early human history in the Americas.

The team’s new paper, “Hemisphere-wide evidence of Early Paleoindian megaherbivore specialization,” appeared in Science Advances on July 8, 2026.

Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.

Researchers at Binghamton University have applied a 70-year-old theory of information to the viral word game Wordle, revealing how a carefully chosen first guess can dramatically improve a player’s chances of solving the puzzle.

The post Scientists Use Math to Solve Viral Word Game ‘Wordle’ with 99% Success Rate appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

Operators spend weeks comparing sweepstakes software options on lobby speed and bonus variety. Those elements affect sign-ups. The

The current trends indicate a significant rise in the price of gold, particularly in Australian dollars. Analysis of gold prices reveals historical patterns and signals that a potential bull market began in March 2024. Could this be the 'moon shot' we’ve been waiting for?

I has been writing about creation science and biblical issues for over 20 years, with a blog launched in 2013. Its content shifted towards COVID-related topics in 2020, leading to a massive spike in viewership and after that an exponential waning. What caused that spike? Are we now back to normal?

Tongits remains one of the most competitive and skillful card games, particularly popular among Filipino players. This game, rooted in strategy, memory, and decision-making, has extended its reach into the world of digital platforms like Tongits Go APK and GameZone (also referred to as GZone). These platforms allow players to improve their gameplay, sharpen their […]

The post Level Up Your Tongits Skills: Tongits Go APK Guide & GameZone appeared first on Strange Sounds.