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Apple became the fourth biggest gaming company in the world in 2018, a new report picked up by Cult of Mac said.  In total, it earned around $9.453 billion from games during 2018. This is all before the launch of Apple Arcade, which is set to arrive soon.

It is ranked higher than gaming giants like Nintendo, EA, and Activision — thanks mostly to the popularity of mobile gaming on iPhone. Apple is estimated to have earned $9.453 billion from games during 2018 alone. Apple isn’t a name you might typically consider when you think about gaming. Many gamers won’t accept the iPhone or iPad as real gaming devices, and the Mac is famously bad at being a gaming PC. But whether you like it or not, Apple has become a behemoth in the gaming industry. The rise of the App Store and the increasing popularity of iOS games means the iPhone-maker is now the fourth-largest gaming company.

Three Facebook moderators have broken their NDAs and told The Verge what they saw at the company’s moderation sites. It is a gripping, horrifying, read.

[Kevin] Utley worked the overnight shift at a Facebook content moderation site in Tampa, FL, operated by a professional services vendor named Cognizant. The 800 or so workers there face relentless pressure from their bosses to better enforce the social network’s community standards, which receive near-daily updates that leave its contractor workforce in a perpetual state of uncertainty. The Tampa site has routinely failed to meet the 98 percent “accuracy” target set by Facebook. In fact, with a score that has been hovering around 92, it is Facebook’s worst-performing site in North America. The stress of the job weighed on Utley, according to his former co-workers, who, like all Facebook contractors at the Tampa site, must sign a 14-page nondisclosure agreement. “The stress they put on him — it’s unworldly,” one of Utley’s managers told me. “I did a lot of coaching. I spent some time talking with him about things he was having issues seeing. And he was always worried about getting fired.” On the night of March 9th, 2018, Utley slumped over at his desk.

Craig Wright says he is Satoshi Nakamoto – the inventor of Bitcoin.  Many dispute his claim. That includes Ether creator Vitalik Buterin. The two men clashed a conference and now Mr. Wright is going to court, Bloomberg News reported.

The supposed fraud is Craig Wright, an Australian-born technologist who gained notoriety three years ago when he declared himself the inventor of Bitcoin. The provocateur is Vitalik Buterin, a baby-faced Russian-Canadian programmer who helped create another popular digital currency called Ether. No one disputes Buterin’s role in Ether; many reject Wright’s claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious genius behind Bitcoin…At some point, Wright determined the courts could be a useful venue for achieving his own goals. Wright, who says he holds a master’s degree in law from Northumbria University in the U.K., hopes a series of lawsuits can establish himself as the father of Bitcoin. “This will give me the chance to prove my credentials in front of a judge, rather than being judged by Twitter,” Wright told Bloomberg in an email.

AppleInsider writes:

Apple aimed the new Mac Pro at the most demanding of all high-end users, so we went to users like that and asked what they thought. Video editors, medical experts and the Department of Defense are all considering this new Mac closely.

Hearing the reactions and purchase plans from pro users carries enormous weight.

A new popup warning users when they are about to delete an app with an active subscription was spotted in the second beta of iOS 13. Cult of Mac reported that the pop also features a “Manage Subscription” button so users cancel any subscriptions they no longer want.

The new popup, spotted in the second iPadOS beta by Federico Viticci, asks “Do you want to keep your subscription for this app?” The prompt explains that you can continue to use your subscription on other devices, and reminds you when the subscription will renew. If you want to cancel, you can tap the “Manage Subscription” button.This will take you directly to the subscriptions section in the App Store, where you can cancel any subs you no longer need

Facebook provided a first look at its forthcoming cryptocurrency, Libra, Tuesday. It said the service could be with users as early as 2020. The Guardian posted on a rundown of the announcement.

Libra is being touted as a means to connect people who do not have access to traditional banking platforms. With close to 2.4 billion people using Facebook each month, Libra could be a financial game changer, but will face close scrutiny as Facebook continues to reel from a series of privacy scandals. It could also be a welcome lift to Facebook’s profits: analysts are suggesting Libra could be a huge moneymaker for Facebook, arriving as its growth slows. Technology to make transactions with Libra will be available as a standalone app – as well as on WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger platforms – as early as 2020. It will allow consumers to send money to each other as well as potentially pay for goods and services using the Facebook-backed digital currency instead of their local currency.

NASA has an amazing archive of items from its various missions. Following five years of begging for access, photographer Benedict Redgrove is set to publish over 200 photos of the archive in a new book, Nasa – Past and Present Dreams of the Future. It will launch on Kickstarter on July 20 – the 50th anniversary of man setting foot on the Moon for the first time reported Wired.

Redgrove has spent nine years photographing items from the space agency’s rich history in loving detail. It took him five years just to arrange access, and to persuade Nasa to open up archives that had been left untouched since the original missions. “Some items were so fragile I was nervous just putting the lights near them,” he says. Others, like some of the gloves and helmets, were in cabinets that hadn’t been opened in five years and had to be broken into.

Washington has turned its fire on Big Tech in recent months. Big names on the Democratic side have been keen to put forward policy proposals during their runs for the White House. However, a freshman Republican is also making waves. Missouri Senator Josh Hawley gave an interesting interview to Fast Compay on a variety of tech issues, including privacy.

I think we need to be deeply concerned about the level of privacy invasion and violation that we’re seeing from these tech companies. My concern is that it’s baked deeply into their business model of extracting data from consumers without telling them, and then monetizing that data, and then also working to ensure they have very large numbers of people online for large portions of the day so that you can make these ads profitable. I mean, that really is the model for Facebook, for the Google platforms, and for Twitter in many ways.

Cult of Mac writes: “The cheese grater jokes will eventually die down, so Ikea’s Bulgaria stores this week quickly joined the fun of teasing Apple for its new Mac Pro.

Dead Cells is now available to pre-order for iOS,  Cult of Mac reported. The popular console game costs $9.99, or $7.99 if you order now.

Dead Cells is a roguelike-metroidvania game that has been incredibly well received by fans and critics. It boats a “very positive” rating on Steam after more than 23,500 reviews, and has sold 1 million copies on the Switch alone. If you haven’t already had a chance to play it, you’ll soon have no excuse. Having Dead Cells in your pocket means you can play it anywhere, at almost any time.

Monzo plans to launch in the U.S. Yahoo Finance reported. It will be the first time the app-only bank has ventured outside of the UK. It could potentially be a challenger to the forthcoming Apple Card as it offers some similar facilities.

“We’ve just crossed 2m customers, our TV ad is going great, we should have a quarter of a million new customers this month, and we’re contribution margin positive here in the UK, so it feels like the UK business is on track to be really successful,” Tom Blomfield, the CEO and founder of Monzo told Yahoo Finance UK. “Now feels like the right time to start thinking about our next market.” Blomfield said sign-up events will be held in LA, San Fransisco, New York, and other major US cities before rolling out online applications.

Telegram said China was behind a massive cyber attack on it during recent protests in Hong Kong.  The firm’s founder Pavel Durov tweeted the accusations, Bloomberg News reported.

The encrypted messaging app said it experienced a powerful distributed denial of service attack after “garbage requests” flooded its servers and disrupted legitimate communications. Most of those queries came from Chinese internet protocol addresses, founder Pavel Durov said in a subsequent Twitter post. This case was not an exception,” he tweeted without elaborating. Hong Kong is in the throes of political unrest as the Beijing-backed government attempts to force through controversial legislation that would for the first time allow extraditions to China, which protesters fear could be used to squelch government opposition.