Slashdot Mirror

China's Tencent will soon require gamers to prove their ages and identities against police records, according to a new official statement yesterday. Under the new system, users will need to register their Chinese national IDs in order to play any games from Tencent. The Verge reports: Ten mobile games will get the new verification system by the end of the year, and all games offered by Tencent, including PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds and League of Legends, will get the system by 2019. Tencent has been criticized by state-run People's Daily, which called Arena of Valor "poison," after reports that students were ditching their homework to play the mobile game.

Tencent has also faced direct regulatory pressure this summer, after President Xi Jinping pointed out that too many children were nearsighted and said the government was taking action. Beijing officially ruled to ban new games, cementing an unofficial pause that started back in March, costing Tencent up to $1.5 billion in lost revenue as it was unable to launch games it had been developing. In September, Tencent imposed the new verification system on Arena of Valor and created a feature that blurs the screen if minors look too closely at it. The new system simply enforces rules that Tencent had in place since last year: barring gamers who are 12 and under from playing more than an hour a day and establishing a curfew of 9PM. Those who are 13 to 18 can play up to two hours a day. Still, the system won't prevent minors from borrowing the phones of their parents and other adults.

A Chinese court has ruled that despite the country's central bank's ban on cryptocurrency trading, bitcoin should be legally protected as a property with economic values. CoinDesk reports: The Shenzhen Court of International Arbitration published a case analysis on Thursday via WeChat, detailing its ruling on a recent economic dispute that involved a business contract relating to possession and transfer of crypto assets. According to the case analysis, the unnamed plaintiff signed a contract agreement with the defendant, which allowed the latter to trade and manage a pool of cryptocurrencies on the plaintiff's behalf. However, the plaintiff said the defendant failed and refused to return the cryptocurrencies after an agreed deadline. As a result, they brought the case to the arbitrator, seeking the return of the assets with interest. The court concluded that, whether bitcoin is a legal tender or not, does not have an impact on the fact that bitcoin ownership should be protected legally based on China's contract law, adding: "Bitcoin has the nature of a property, which can be owned and controlled by parties, and is able to provide economic values and benefits."

A hacker is selling the personal details of over 130 million hotel guests for 8 Bitcoin ($56,000) on a Chinese Dark Web forum. From a report: The breach was reported today by Chinese media after several cyber-security firms spotted the forum ad [1, 2, 3, 4]. The seller said he obtained the data from Huazhu Hotels Group Ltd (Huazhu from hereafter), one of China's largest hotel chains, which operates 13 hotel brands across 5,162 hotels in 1,119 Chinese cities. According to a description the hacker posted online, the stolen data is 141.5GB in size, contains 240 million records, with information on roughly 130 million hotel guests that stayed at one of Huazhu hotels.

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from a short article at Geek.com, based on this Chinese newspaper report (Google translation) that thousands of students have been (figuratively) press-ganged into assembling PlayStation 4 consoles, ahead of the PS4's November launch. From the article: "The students involved were offered internships at the company while studying an IT engineering course. But those that accepted aren't being assigned work that matches their course or skill set. Instead, they are being put on the production lines. The reason it is being called a forced internship is because if any of the students refuse to do the work they are assigned, six credits will be deducted from their course total. Without those six credits it's thought to be impossible to pass, meaning the students have to do the work or risk losing their qualification."