Sony pulls the plug on PlayStation discs

Sony will stop making PlayStation discs in 2028

Google loses its last appeal over a record EU fine

SK Hynix and Samsung pour $150B into central Korea

Games already released on disc, or coming out on disc before January 2028, aren't affected, Sony's blog post says. Sony calls it a "natural direction" as players' preference for digital far outpaces discs.

Around 80% of PS5 games sold are already digital, according to Sony's latest financial results from May. Last week, Rockstar said GTA VI's boxed copies will hold only a download code.

Sony also said it'll start winding down the digital stores for the PS3 and PS Vita. The Verge says that shows the risk: once a store closes, its games can disappear too.

Digital games let players pre-load downloads and grab frequent sales. But buyers can't resell used copies or lend one to a friend, and publishers skip the cost of making discs.

Back in 2018, the European Commission fined Google €4.34B over deals that forced phone makers to pre-install Google Search, Chrome and the Play Store. A lower court trimmed it to €4.1B in 2022.

Europe's highest court, the Court of Justice of the EU, confirmed the penalty, and Google has no further right to appeal, CNBC reported. The fine is about $4.67B.

Google says the ruling ignores its investment in keeping Android open, interoperable and free. It adds that it changed its agreements to comply with the original decision back in 2018.

Google has racked up close to €11B in EU fines over the last decade. A Swedish court also ordered it this week to pay about $1.5B in damages to Klarna-owned PriceRunner.

SK Hynix will spend 80 trillion won on a NAND flash memory factory in Cheongju by 2029, Reuters reported. Another 20 trillion won goes to a chip packaging plant there by late 2027.

Samsung Display will spend 67 trillion won in Asan and Cheonan. Samsung Electronics will invest 56 trillion won in packaging plants for high-bandwidth memory chips.

SK Hynix's projects are part of a broader $2.1 trillion plan it and Samsung Electronics unveiled this week. South Korea hopes the spending will double the country's memory chip production capacity within five years.

SK Hynix shares closed down 15% and Samsung's fell 9% the same day, hit by a global chip selloff. SK Hynix warned its plans could change with global chip demand.

LayerX tricked six AI browsers, including ChatGPT Atlas, Comet and the Claude Chrome plugin, into ignoring their safety rules with a fake puzzle game. Only OpenAI has shipped a working fix since LayerX reported the attack last October.

Apple's Hide My Email can expose a user's real address through the fake one it creates, 404 Media reports. EasyOptOuts co-founder Tyler Murphy says he told Apple about the bug more than a year ago, but it's reportedly still unfixed.

Apple is working on a redesigned entry-level 14-inch MacBook Pro that could launch as soon as the first half of 2027, Bloomberg reports. It's also testing four new iPad Pros for spring, focused on internal improvements.

Meta is weighing a cloud business that would sell access to AI models running on its own infrastructure, Bloomberg reports. It could also let customers buy computing power directly, much like CoreWeave does.

SpaceX showed investors a phone prototype slimmer than an iPhone before its IPO, the Wall Street Journal reported. Elon Musk called the report "utterly false," though he's said SpaceX would make a phone if it had to.

Super Micro said two workers at its Taiwan unit were detained in a probe into alleged illegal exports to China of AI servers with Nvidia chips. Super Micro says it isn't a target of the investigation.

Microsoft joined Lightstorm, Tata Communications, Singtel and others to build I-2SEA, a 3,600km undersea cable linking India with Malaysia and Singapore. It's built for AI and cloud traffic and should be running by late 2029.

Krafton settled with Subnautica 2 studio Unknown Worlds after a fight over a potential $250M bonus. Terms weren't disclosed, but Bloomberg says bonuses will go to all staff over three years, and CEO Ted Gill is leaving.

Xbox staff are testing a disc-to-digital feature that turns Xbox One and Series X discs into digital copies, The Verge reports. Each digital license is tied to its disc, so it moves with the disc if you lend it out.

Lamborghini revealed the Urus SE Performante, a plug-in hybrid SUV with 812 horsepower and a top speed of 194 mph. It calls it the "fastest Super SUV in the world," after scrapping plans for pure EVs.

Oxmiq raised $35M to build chip designs and software that cut the cost of running AI apps. Led by former Intel chief architect Raja Koduri, it wants to license its designs the way Arm does.

Europe's chip industry faces a "bleak future" unless it moves fast to shore up supplies, an EU-funded report found. It cites Chinese export controls on critical minerals, the risk of war over Taiwan and reliance on US technology.

GitHub is previewing stacked pull requests, which split a big code change into a chain of smaller, dependent PRs. Each layer can be reviewed and merged on its own, but access is still limited to a private preview waitlist.

F-Droid argues that Google's Android Developer Verifier, which blocks apps from developers who haven't registered with Google, works like malware. Over 70 groups, including the EFF and ACLU, have signed an open letter against the program.