Enlarge (credit: ALAIN JOCARD / Contributor | AFP )

There's currently a surge in cryptocurrency and phishing scams proliferating on X (formerly Twitter)—hiding under the guise of gold and gray checkmarks intended to mark "Verified Organizations," reports have warned this week.

These scams seem to mostly commandeer dormant X accounts purchased online through dark web marketplaces, according to a whitepaper released by the digital threat monitoring platform CloudSEK. But the scams have also targeted high-profile X users who claim that they had enhanced security measures in place to protect against these hacks.

This suggests that X scammers are growing more sophisticated at a time when X has launched an effort to sell even more gold checks at lower prices through a basic tier announced this week.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

The FBI is advising potential NFT buyers to be on the lookout for malicious websites that use “drainer smart contracts” to surreptitiously loot cryptocurrency wallets.

The websites present themselves as outlets for legitimate NFT projects that provide new offerings. They’re promoted by compromised social media accounts belonging to known NFT developers or accounts made to look like such accounts. Posts frequently try to create a sense of urgency by using phrases such as “limited supply” or by referring to the promotion as a “surprise” or the result of a previously unannounced token minting.

“The spoofed websites invite victims to connect their cryptocurrency wallets and purchase the NFT,” FBI officials wrote in a Friday advisory . “The victims unknowingly connect their cryptocurrency wallets to a drainer smart contract, resulting in the transfer of cryptocurrency and NFTs to wallets operated by criminals.”

Enlarge / An artifact from an earlier time in GameStop's crypto enthusiasm, the launch of its NFT marketplace in July 2022. (credit: GameStop)

GameStop will still sell you NFTs, but you now have to store and secure them yourself. The game store is ending the wallet app it offered for iOS devices and Chrome browsers as of November 1 and is telling customers to double-check their "Secret Passphrase."

GameStop's notice at the top of its wallet page and other crypto-related sub-sites cites "the regulatory uncertainty of the crypto space" for the removal of its wallet extension and app. The Securities and Exchange Commission sued Binance and Coinbase in June, citing the exchanges' failure to provide protections for customers, keep records, and accept inspection by the SEC.

As noted by Game Developer , though, the decision may have been in the works before that. December 2022 layoffs at GameStop heavily impacted the team working on the Ethereum-based blockchain wallet.

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Enlarge (credit: Winamp/Andrew Cunningham)

If you'd asked me in January to make some predictions about what 2022 would bring, I don't think "multiple significant updates to the Winamp player" would have been on the list. But the release candidate for version 5.9.1 of the software builds on the groundwork laid by August's 5.9 update to fix some bugs and add new features to the reanimated music player. Most of these are straightforward updates or improvements to existing features, but because it's 2022, one of the only new features is support for music NFTs.

My rudimentary understanding (gleaned mostly from sites like NFT Now that are focused almost exclusively on the purported benefits rather than the downsides) is that music NFTs operate like NFT images, except that the NFT provides a link to a digital music file instead of a link to a JPG. The benefits, according to advocates, are that artists can earn more money by creating scarcity (releasing unique or limited-run tracks, for example) and by getting a cut of secondhand sales of the NFT that happen between fans.

But being an updated version of a Windows 98-era music player, the support for NFT music in Winamp is a bit roundabout. People with NFT music libraries will need to export them from whatever platform they use and then import them into Winamp as an .m3u playlist. Winamp provided a video of this process, which we've included below.

Enlarge / An example of an NFT world token that the NFT Worlds team says will be playable in their own Minecraft clone in the future. (credit: OpenSea )

Last Wednesday, Microsoft-owned Mojang announced that NFTs and blockchain technology would no longer be allowed to "integrate" with Minecraft . That was bad news for NFT Worlds , which has spent months building an entire crypto-economy on top of a collection of the randomized seeds needed to make specific Minecraft maps.

Now, the team behind NFT Worlds announced it will create a new game that's "based on many of the core mechanics of Minecraft " but which will be "completely untethered from the policy enforcement Microsoft and Mojang have over Minecraft ." NFT Worlds promises its new Minecraft -style game will be built "from the ground up" to be familiar to Minecraft players, but now with "the modernization and active development Minecraft has been missing for years."

Don’t worry, everything’s gonna work out just fine

NFT Worlds' game itself will always be free to play, the team says, and users won't need a credit card to purchase any additional content. That content will presumably be purchased instead with the NFT Worlds token, whose value has plummeted over 60 percent in a week following Mojang's announcement.

Enlarge / Crypto projects built on top of Minecraft , like NFT Worlds, have been left scrambling by Mojang's decision. (credit: NFT Worlds )

Minecraft will continue to be about blocks and not about the blockchain. That's according to a new official blog post from Microsoft subsidiary Mojang stressing that "integrations of NFTs with Minecraft are generally not something we will support or allow."

While players have long been able to charge for access to private Minecraft servers they control, the company's usage guidelines stress that "all players should have access to the same functionality" in those servers. That's in conflict with the main point of NFTs, which Mojang characterizes as "digital ownership based on scarcity and exclusion, which does not align with Minecraft values of creative inclusion and playing together."

Aside from those kinds of philosophical problems, Mojang also expresses concerns about "instances where NFTs were sold at artificially or fraudulently inflated prices" and situations where NFT assets "may require an asset manager who might disappear without notice." These kinds of issues mean that "some third-party NFTs may not be reliable and may end up costing players who buy them," Mojang warns.

Enlarge / Sony has taken steps to allay hex-shaped NFT fears about its new "rewards" service. (credit: Sony Interactive Entertainment / Sam Machkovech)

On Thursday, Sony Interactive Entertainment posted a surprise announcement about a new service coming to PlayStation consoles. Most of the details about the new " PlayStation Stars " initiative, which resembles other gaming services' "rewards" perks, sound promising, but at Ars Technica, Sony's choice of a two-word phrase instantly put fear into our hearts: "digital collectibles."

Thankfully, members of the SIE PR team were quick to the draw with an email reply to allay our fears: No, this is not Sony's stab at NFTs.

“They are not one-of-a-kind”

The new service, slated to launch "later this year," will cost nothing to join and will exist outside the PlayStation Plus subscription family. PlayStation Stars, as vaguely described in Sony's Thursday announcement, revolves around a soup of connected concepts, but on its face, it basically resembles the Microsoft Rewards system in the modern Xbox console family. The TL;DR version: get digital rewards for playing video games.

Enlarge (credit: Meta )

Meta will shut down its pilot of the Novi digital wallet, one of the last remnants of the company's beleaguered cryptocurrency push, in September, Bloomberg reported this week.

Novi users in parts of the US and Guatemala will no longer be able to log in starting on September 1.

And as of July 21, they won't be able to add to the wallets. In fact, Novi's website urges users to empty their accounts "as soon as possible." Novi says it will "attempt to transfer your balance to the bank account or debit card you’ve added to Novi" if you still have money in your account after the pilot ends.