A lost Maxis “Sim” game has been discovered by an Ars reader, uploaded for all

Wow. It may only be an incomplete prototype, but in a breathtaking span of time, SimRefinery has gone from a seemingly lost legend to a playable, downloadable video game. (That's its real, full-resolution opening screen, as captured using a DOSBox emulator.) And it's all thanks to an Ars Technica commenter. (credit: archive.org / Maxis / Chevron)

We at Ars Technica are proud to be members of video game archiving history today. SimRefinery, one of PC gaming's most notoriously "lost" video games, now exists—as a fully playable game, albeit an unfinished one—thanks to an Ars Technica reader commenting on the story of its legend.

Two weeks ago, I reported on a story about Maxis Business Solutions, a subdivision of the game developer Maxis created in the wake of SimCity's booming success. Librarian and archivist Phil Salvador published an epic, interview-filled history of one of the game industry's earliest examples of a "serious" gaming division, which was formed as a way to cash in on major businesses' interest in using video games as work-training simulators.

As Salvador wrote in May:

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Jio Platforms Gets Rs. 9,093.60 Crore Investment From Abu Dhabi Sovereign Investor

Reliance Industries said on Friday that Abu Dhabi state fund Mubadala Investment Company will buy a 1.85 percent stake in its digital unit, Jio Platforms, for Rs. 9,093.60 crores. https://ift.tt/2BBnZ59

Infinix Hot 9 Pro to Go on Sale in India for the First Time Today

Infinix Hot 9 Pro is all set to go on sale in India at 12pm (noon) today via Flipkart. The e-commerce giant is offering no-cost EMI options to buyers. https://ift.tt/2A6yqxd

PhonePe to hire upto 550 people this year

PhonePe is looking to add roles across the board, including engineering, corporate functions, sales, business development, and marketing https://ift.tt/3dAsf2X https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has a message for Amazon

"Time to break up Amazon. Monopolies are wrong!" Musk said in a tweet. https://ift.tt/3eR4fIZ

Google explains why it removed Mitron and 'anti-China' app

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Bharti Airtel says "no activity" on report of stake sale to Amazon

Sources familiar with Airtel's strategy denied any stake sale talks with Amazon https://ift.tt/2AKOLHF https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Mubadala to invest $1.2 billion in India’s Reliance Jio Platforms

Abu Dhabi-based sovereign firm Mubadala has become the latest investor in Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Jio Platforms, joining five American firms including Facebook and Silver Lake that have secured stakes in India’s biggest telecom operator at the height of a once-in-a-century global pandemic.

Mubadala said it had agreed to invest $1.2 billion in Reliance Jio Platforms for a 1.85% stake in the firm. The deal valued the Indian telecom operator, which launched in the second half of 2016, at $65 billion.

A subsidiary of Reliance Industries, the most valued firm in India whose core businesses are in oil refining and petrochemicals, Reliance Jio Platforms has raised $11.5 billion in the last seven weeks.

“Through my longstanding ties with Abu Dhabi, I have personally seen the impact of Mubadala’s work in diversifying and globally connecting the UAE’s knowledge-based economy. We look forward to benefitting from Mubadala’s experience and insights from supporting growth journeys across the world,” Mukesh Ambani, the chairman and managing director of Reliance Industries, said in a statement.

India’s richest man built a telecom operator everyone wants a piece of

More to follow…

Abu Dhabi's Mubadala to invest $1.2 billion in Jio Platforms

Reliance has now sold 19% interest in Jio Platforms, which houses movie, music apps and Infocomm. https://ift.tt/3gOm7WK https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Slack revenue growth fails to impress

Slack's Q1 2021 sales rose 50%, compared with a 49% increase in Q4 2020 and a 67% jump from Q1 2020 last year. https://ift.tt/2ACfztV https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Realme Narzo 10A Second Sale Will Take Place Today at Noon via Flipkart

Realme Narzo 10A is set to go on sale in India for the second time today at 12pm (noon). The new Realme smartphone that was launched alongside the Realme Narzo 10 earlier in May will be available for... https://ift.tt/2Y8YuQq

Realme Watch First Sale Starts at 12 Noon via Flipkart, Realme Website

Realme Watch will go on its first sale today via Flipkart and Realme India website at 12pm (noon). Launched late last month, it is the first smartwatch by the company and comes at a fairly budget... https://ift.tt/3eSkQw9

Google Research to take guess work out of pandemic policy

The research project may help policymakers design strategies that will help contain pandemic situations https://ift.tt/30bHagi https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Iran- and China-backed phishers try to hook the Trump and Biden campaigns

Enlarge (credit: Marco Verch Professional Photographer and Speaker)

State-backed hackers from Iran and China recently targeted the presidential campaigns of Republican President Donald Trump and Democrat Joe Biden, a Google threat analyst said on Thursday.

The revelation is the latest evidence of foreign governments attempting to gain intelligence on US politicians and potentially disrupt or meddle in their election campaigns. An Iran-backed group targeted the Trump campaign and China-backed attackers targeted the Biden campaign, said Shane Huntley, the head of Google’s Threat Analysis Group on Twitter. Both groups used phishing emails. There’s no indication that either attack campaign succeeded.

Kittens and Pandas

Huntley identified the Iranian group that targeted Trump’s campaign as APT35, short for Advanced Persistent Threat 35. Also known as Charming Kitten, iKittens, and Phosphorous, the group was caught targeting an unnamed presidential campaign before, Microsoft said last October. In that campaign, Phosphorous members attempted to access email accounts campaign staff received through Microsoft cloud services. Microsoft said that the attackers worked relentlessly to gather information that could be used to activate password resets and other account-recovery services Microsoft provides.

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A detective hunts a costumed vigilante in Major Grom: Plague Doctor trailer

Major Grom: Plague Doctor is adapted from the Russian comics of the same name.

A rogue detective who doesn't always play by the rules hunts a costumed vigilante serial killer in the first English-language trailer (well, subtitled) for a Russian superhero film called Major Grom: Plague Doctor, directed by Oleg Trofim (Ice). There's some pretty strong The Punisher vibes here, as well as V for Vendetta. The Major Grom comic books, created by Artem Gabrelyanov, have been likened to the early Batman comics in tone, which might explain the Dark Knight overtones as well.

(Some spoilers for the Russian comics below.)

The original Major Grom comics were published between 2012 and 2015, later spawning several spinoffs. The protagonist is Major Igor Grom, a detective in St. Petersburg who has mean martial arts skills and takes part in the occasional amateur boxing competition (aka Russian Fight Club). He has a tendency to bend the rules, which irritates his young rookie partner, Dmitry "Dima" Dubin, who prefers to play things by the book. Grom's love interest is an investigative reporter named Yulia Pchelkina, whose skill set proves useful in helping solve Grom's various comic book cases. A billionaire social media mogul named Sergey Razumovsky is Grom's archnemesis. Razumovsky is a philanthropist by day but murders homeless people by night, all in the name of cleaning up St. Petersburg.

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