Atari has decentralized gaming for 45 years. Now it’s creating altcoins.

Atari recently announced the development of two new cryptocurrencies, Atari Token and Pong Token. If you’re too young to remember the company, the important thing to know is that it was part of a movement to decentralize arcade games. It succeeded then; will it now?

The company announced a partnership with blockchain pro Infinity Networks to create tokens as part of an investment deal.

According to a French press release , the Atari Token is specifically for entertainment:

While the second one, Pong Token, is all about a different type of gaming:

You just have to love those names, never before has a cryptocurrency been so nostalgia-inducing. Calling them “tokens” instead of “coins” is a stroke of brilliance.

While this may seem weird, let’s not forget Atari has been at the front of a burgeoning technology market before. Until it disrupted the industry, video games were “centralized” at the arcade. Game cartridges are like crypto-coins right? Alright, it’s weird, but let’s at least wait until we see a whitepaper.

As a final note, it’s worth pointing out Atari seems to be fairly concerned with regulation:

There’s not a whole lot of information at this point, but we’ll update you as we learn more. We’ve reached out to Atari to see if our high-score for Pitfall still holds up, and to ask about this whole crypto-thing it’s doing.

Wikipedia co-founder wants to put the world’s knowledge on the blockchain

Everipedia today announced Wikipedia co-founder Dr. Larry Sanger would be joining the company as it prepares to bring its online encyclopedia to the blockchain.

Blockchain is best known as the technology that Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies run on, but its applications go far beyond simply making the Winklevoss twins rich . Bjork is using it to incentivize her album , others have used it to send Dennis Rodman around the world as an ambassador for peace .

By comparison, its much easier to wrap our heads around a decentralized encyclopedia. The world needs knowledge and right now centralized places of information, like Wikipedia and Everipedia, are subject to censorship in places like China and Russia.

Everipedia co-founder and CEO Theodor Forselius told TNW:

With the influx of companies launching ICOs (seems like there’s one for everything ), or otherwise using blockchain as a way to make money, it’s easy to shrug off the idea as another grab — but we’re not talking about a system where anyone is being promised riches.

The tokens for Everipedia will reflect its current merit system called “IQ” which rewards users with points for creating and updating articles. Using tokens provides a way to reward or incentivize engagers — and ensures that everyone who uses the platform is a ‘shareholder’ on it.

Those tokens, also named “IQ,” will be used to provide access, enact revisions, and power the system. For example, if a user doesn’t like an update they can spend tokens to challenge it. If the community agrees with the dissenter, the edits will be made and the challenger’s tokens will be returned.

Everipedia on the blockchain represents an interesting new twist in the Wiki-world. And encyclopedia hobbyists (of which there are actually millions ) will have an all-new opportunity to connect with people in places where editing online articles isn’t really an option. Wikipedia, for example, is completely banned in Turkey.

According to Forselius, the blockchain represents an end to that kind of censorship:

Everipedia is the largest online english encyclopedia in the world, partially because it sourced all of the articles on Wikipedia (which sourced articles from Britannica, according to Dr. Sanger). Giving the world access to all of this knowledge could change things for researchers, academics, and interested citizens in countries that have banned and blocked information for political or religious reasons.

If knowledge is power, Everipedia is about to become ‘Wikipedia on steroids’ for billions of people. The token system it intends to unveil could provide incentive for millions of people to engage in a collective effort to go beyond the current broad strokes of Encyclopedia Brittanica and Wikipedia’s work.

Dr. Sanger believes blockchain is the best way to do this. He told TNW:

With the new system, Everipedia is hoping that putting information in a peer-to-peer network, which eliminates hosting fees, will alleviate the need to support its content with ads or donations.

MEGA’s Chrome extension laced with cryptocurrency-stealing malware

The threats to your cryptocurrency are coming in quick! File-sharing service MEGA has been hacked to steal private keys and passwords, TorrentFreak reports.

MEGA has given details of a targeted attack, in which hackers managed to upload a malicious version of its Chrome browser extension to Google’s Web Store. For five hours, any user who ran the official installer had their accounts compromised.

Services affected include popular cryptocurrency wallet services MyEtherWallet (MEW), MyMonero, and decentralized asset exchange IDEX. Tech giants Amazon, Microsoft, and Google were also specifically targeted. There is currently no reliable information regarding how many accounts were directly compromised.

What’s curious is that MEGA seem to be implying that this is the result of a hacked Google account. An attacker was somehow able to use an official login to push an update that was laced with cryptocurrency-stealing malware. MEGA also notes that the stolen data appeared to be en route to a server in the Ukraine.

“On 4 September 2018 at 14:30 UTC, an unknown attacker uploaded a trojaned version of MEGA’s Chrome extension, version 3.39.4, to the Google Chrome webstore. Upon installation or autoupdate, it would ask for elevated permissions (read and change all your data on the websites you visit) that MEGA’s real extension does not require,” reads the statement . “Please note that if you visited any site or made use of another extension that sends plain-text credentials […] while the trojaned extension was active, consider that your credentials were compromised on these sites and/or applications.”

MyEtherWallet (MEW), in particular, is no stranger to these attacks. Over a seven month period, it fell victim to a series of hacks. First, users were targeted by tricksters who had uploaded a fake app, pre-loaded with dodgy private keys. Then, users were duped into visiting a hacked version of the website that saw more than 200 ETH ($56,000) stolen directly from user wallets.

This also isn’t the first time hackers have managed to pull off a scheme such as this.

The same thing has happened to Hola’s Chrome extension. Customers of the popular streaming service were treated to a hacked version of its browser extension, which was found to contain a backdoor like the one just found in MEGAs.

Again, for five hours, any user who used MEW while running Hola’s Chrome extension had their private keys completely compromised, and were urged to move their funds as soon as possible.

Is no browser extension safe?

Exactly how it all happened is not immediately clear. MEGA’s official statement signs off by stating it is “currently investigating the exact nature of the compromise of our Chrome webstore account,” so I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what internal investigations reveal.

( Edit: This post has been updated to properly reflect the malicious app was uploaded to the Google Chrome Web Store, not its Play Store, as was originally reported.)