Xbox players are growing increasingly frustrated at being forced to play against PC gamers. While crossplay was initially a popular request from Xbox and PC players that Microsoft has backed strongly for years, those playing first-person shooters on Xbox are struggling to opt out of the experience to avoid PC cheaters. From a report: Games like Call of Duty: Warzone and Halo Infinite force Xbox players to match against PC gamers in a variety of playlists. You don’t have to look very far to see why people are angry about it. “Now that cheating in Halo is confirmed on PC, can we have to option to opt out of cross-play?” asked one Reddit post in November, just weeks after the multiplayer version of Halo Infinite launched. “Forced crossplay is a scam by Microsoft,” reads another post in Microsoft’s Halo Waypoint forums. “Forced crossplay is a mistake,” says another Redditor, and the list goes on, and on, and on.

Halo Infinite and Call of Duty: Warzone are both suffering from an influx of cheating, largely because they’re free-to-play titles so it’s easy for hackers to create a new account following a ban. While there’s an option to disable crossplay in Warzone, if you try to load into a playlist on Xbox it will ask you to re-enable it. Whereas on PlayStation you can simply dismiss the prompt and continue to the playlist with crossplay still disabled. Warzone players on Xbox have been complaining about this forced crossplay for more than a year, with various forum posts and YouTube videos highlighting how irritating it is to be forced into crossplay. Most of the issues are related to PC cheaters, who have plagued Warzone for years before Activision finally added a new anti-cheat system in October with a kernel-level driver to catch PC cheaters. Now that cheaters are already ruining Halo Infinite multiplayer games, the call to remove forced crossplay is certainly growing louder.

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Source: Slashdot – Xbox Players Are Fed Up With Forced Crossplay Against PC Gamers

Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, told lawmakers on Tuesday that a rapidly healing economy no longer needed as much help from the central bank and that keeping inflation in check — including by raising interest rates — would be critical for enabling a stable expansion that benefits workers. From a report: Mr. Powell, whom President Biden recently nominated for a second term as chair, is confronting a complicated economic moment as he moves toward another four-year stint as head of the world’s most powerful central bank. He provided his latest thoughts on the Fed’s challenge during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Banking Committee.

The economy is growing swiftly, but it has been buffeted by repeated waves of the coronavirus and by a surge in inflation that has proved stronger and longer lasting than economists had expected. Workers are finding jobs and winning wage increases, but the rising costs of housing, gas, food and furniture are pinching shoppers and tanking consumer confidence. The Fed is charged with maintaining price stability, and its officials have recently signaled that they could raise interest rates several times this year to try to cool the economy and prevent rapidly rising prices from becoming permanent. Mr. Powell — who is widely expected to win confirmation — reiterated that commitment on Tuesday.

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Source: Slashdot – Jerome Powell Says the Fed is Prepared To Raise Rates To Tame Inflation

Bernalillo County filed an emergency notice in federal court last week because a ransomware attack made the Metropolitan Detention Center unable to comply with terms of a settlement agreement in a years-running lawsuit over jail conditions. From a report: The county last Wednesday announced its offices and systems were the victims of a cyberattack, affecting a wide variety of county government operations. Most county buildings were closed until further notice. As a result, the county-operated MDC has been unable to access its cameras since the attack, which is one of the reasons it has fallen out of compliance in the McClendon v. City of Albuquerque lawsuit, which centers on jail conditions. The attack has limited how much time inmates can spend out of their cells, and also reduced their access to telephones and tablets, according to the filing. The county also has been unable to gather data required as a condition of the settlement agreement. No visitors have been allowed. The county said in the filing that its inability to access cameras is one of the more concerning aspects of the cyberattack, which has caused the facility to be on “lockdown” since Wednesday.

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Source: Slashdot – Ransomware Attack Leads To Jail Lockdown