Enlarge / In three months, Epic Games’ online “action MOBA” game Paragon will be… para-gone. (credit: Epic Games)

Ten days after eerie-sounding news for the free-to-play online game Paragon, the series’ creators at Epic Games confirmed fans’ looming suspicions: the game will soon shut down.

Paragon‘s late-Friday announcement gives the game exactly three more months of life until its servers go dark on April 26. That means the game will have barely passed the two-year mark for its lifespan after a March 2016 “pay for early access” launch. The news comes with a frank admission of the “action MOBA” game’s failings and an even more frank apology to its fans.

“After careful consideration, and many difficult internal debates, we feel there isn’t a clear path for us to grow Paragon into a MOBA that retains enough players to be sustainable,” the post, authored by “the Paragon team,” says. “We didn’t execute well enough to deliver on the promise of Paragon. We have failed you—despite the team’s incredibly hard work—and we’re sorry.”

A 3D XPoint wafer. (credit: Intel)

As part of Intel’s fourth quarter financials release, CEO Brian Krzanich promised that chips shipping this year would include true hardware fixes for the Spectre and Meltdown attacks.

The promise to ship chips immune to the attack leaves many questions unanswered. It’s not clear if the fixes will be revisions of current generation Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake, and Skylake parts, or if the modifications will be constrained to the Cannon Lake processors that are expected to ship this year. Nor is it clear what form the fix will take: better, higher-performance versions of the microcode and workarounds already being rolled out, or deeper modifications to the processor’s speculative execution and branch prediction behavior.

The company’s delayed transition to a 10nm manufacturing process also remains murky. At CES, Intel claimed that it had shipped some unspecified chips built on 10nm last year. The first half of this year will see low volume production, ramping to high volume in the second half. But exactly what processors—in what configurations, when, and in what volumes—remains unknown. Both Cannon Lake, built on the 10nm process, and Ice Lake, built on the refined “10nm+” process, are planned, but the company has said little concrete about exact timelines.

Enlarge / It’s where the money is. (credit: iStock/Getty Images)

The Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Coincheck has shut down trading and withdrawals from accounts after a reported theft of more than 500 million XEM—the blockchain-based cryptocurrency created by the NEM Foundation. At the time of the theft, 500 million XEM was worth approximately $400 million US. Police were reportedly at Coincheck’s offices.

Coincheck announced the shutdown of NEM deposits at about noon Japan Standard Time Friday (10:00pm Eastern Time on Thursday). In a follow-up announcement four hours later, a company spokesperson expanded the shutdown to all currencies, and by 6pm JST all payment processing had been suspended. “We sincerely apologize for these inconveniences and will continue to do our best to be back to normal operations as soon as possible,” the spokesperson wrote. At about the same time, police were seen at Coincheck’s offices.

さっき事務所にいったら、
コインチェックさんの前にパトカーが、、！！#リップラー八木 #仮想通貨 pic.twitter.com/91zJxpiy8e

— ぷちぱ☆ 八木ひなた 3.21ワンマン (@yagihinata) January 26, 2018

Ars attempted to reach representatives of Coincheck and the NEM Foundation without success. Lon Wong, the president of the NEM Foundation, was quoted by Sead Fadilpašić and Stuart Garlick of Cryptonews.com as saying, “This is the biggest theft in the history of the world.” Wong told Cryptonews that NEM’s technology was not responsible and that Coincheck did not implement NEM’s multi-signature smart contract, “and that’s why they could have been hacked. They were very relaxed with their security measures.” It is not clear if there was actually a “hack” at this point.