Hashtag Trending January 31 – Sega leaves the arcades; T-Mobile to lay off unvaccinated employees; crypto dev a former scammer

Sega is exiting the arcade business, T-Mobile is laying off unvaccinated employees by April, and a key member of a popular crypto protocol has been revealed to be a former fraudster.

It’s all the tech news that’s trending right now, welcome to Hashtag Trending. Today is Monday, January 31, and I’m your host, Tom Li.

Many of us have part of our childhood roots in arcades, so it’s sad to hear that Sega, one of the biggest game companies in Japan, has officially left the arcade business after more than 50 years. According to Eurogamer, Sega has been planning the move since 2020 when it sold 85% of its arcade stock. He has now unloaded the rest. Sega’s departure from the industry is no surprise. With the proliferation of games on phones, PCs, and a plethora of consoles, they have long since replaced arcade machines in popularity. Flashing lights in arcades are now a rare sight to behold and emblematic of a bygone era.

T-Mobile will lay off unvaccinated employees by April 2, says Bloomberg, which obtained a memo sent to T-Mobile employees. The note would contain several deadlines. First, employees who have not yet received their first dose of the vaccine by February 21 will be placed on unpaid leave, and ultimately fired if they are not fully vaccinated by April 2. access to T-Mobile offices, reports the article. T-Mobile has confirmed the vaccination deadline since the report was published. The company also said it would apply limited exemptions for certain legally mandated roles and amenities.

A key developer of a multi-billion dollar cryptocurrency protocol has been revealed to have a history of fraud, according to a Vice item. The co-founder of the Wonderland DeFi protocol, which powers the TIME token, was revealed to be Michael Patryn. Patryn had a checkered history with money-related issues. He was the co-founder of QuadrigaCX, a Canadian crypto exchange that collapsed after Patryn’s partner, Gerald Cotten, died in India with the exchange’s only private key, locking up users’ money. After Cotten’s untimely death, the platform could not meet all of its users’ withdrawal requests and crashed. Towards the end of its life, it was revealed that QuadrigaCX was being used as a Ponzi scheme. Besides the exchange fiasco, Patryn himself was convicted of computer fraud and credit fraud. Daniele Sestagalli, the founder of Wonderland, asked Patryn to step down following the revelation.

And now for something a little different. Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, allegedly modified a line of the Linux kernel, supposedly revealing himself to be the legendary Satoshi Nakamoto. Satoshi Nakamoto is the pseudonym of the inventor of bitcoin, whose true identity has not yet been revealed. There have been many speculations about who Nakamoto might be and, while many claimed to be behind the name, none were concrete. Could Torvald’s hidden note have big implications or is it just a sense of humor? We will let you be the judge.

It’s all the technological news that is in fashion at the moment. Hashtag Trending is part of the ITWC Podcast Network. Add us to your Alexa Flash Briefings or Google Home Daily Briefing. Be sure to sign up for our Daily IT Wire newsletter to get all the news that matters straight to your inbox every day. Also, if you have any suggestion or advice, write to us in the comments or via email. Thanks for listening to me, I’m Tom Li.