The iconic spacefaring adventure "Mass Effect" is back today with "Mass Effect: Legendary Edition," a single, remastered version of all three games. From a report: There is no series like "Mass Effect" -- even when it comes to BioWare's other choice-driven RPGs like "Dragon Age." "Mass Effect" is a big ol' space adventure first and foremost, but it's also about loyalty, love, and tough calls. "Mass Effect" follows Commander Shepard -- a hero players can customize for looks and gender -- across three games as they wage war against a galactic threat known as the Reapers. Key choices carry through all three games, whether it's who survives, or who you ally yourself with.

"Mass Effect" (2007) is a classic sci-fi thriller, where Shepard races to stop a turncoat operative hungry for power.
"Mass Effect 2" (2010) is a miscreant adventure centered on building a ragtag squad, culminating in a final "suicide" mission where everyone's survival is on the line.
"Mass Effect 3" (2012) brings the trilogy to a close through a more somber, war-focused story about loss and consequence.

"Chromium-based web browser Opera is all set to fully integrate with blockchain domain name provider Unstoppable Domains," reports TechRadar, "in a bid to provide millions of its users with decentralized web access." Opera users will now be able to access decentralized websites hosted via the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) using Unstoppable Domains' popular .crypto NFT addresses from the Opera browser. This will include platforms such as iOS, Android, Windows, Mac or Linux. Right now, Opera has over 320 million monthly active users across its offerings, following the addition of a crypto wallet to its browsers in 2019.

Unstoppable Domains was launched in 2018 and provides domain names to users with no renewal fees. Users of Unstoppable Domains are granted full ownership and control when they claim a domain because it is minted as an NFT on the Ethereum blockchain. Domain names such as .crypto replace complex wallet addresses for payments across over 40 cryptocurrency wallets and exchanges in addition to accessing the decentralized web through Opera.

Maciej Kocemba, Product Director at Opera said that the company believes in giving all people the ability to access the full web, regardless of the technology behind it.
The Opera product director was further quoted by Business Insider: "We have always supported web innovation, and the decentralized web or Web3 is the natural next wave. Making Unstoppable Domains accessible in the Opera browsers means our users can try blockchain technologies for themselves. Registering your .crypto domain, which is forever yours, is a great first step into Web3," the company's product director Maciej Kocemba said.

Opera is quickly becoming a leader in pushing for the adoption of Web 3.0, also often described as the decentralized web.

An Indian security researcher has published today proof-of-concept exploit code for a recently discovered vulnerability impacting Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and other Chromium-based browsers like Opera and Brave. From a report: The researcher, Rajvardhan Agarwal, told The Record today that the exploit code is for a Chromium bug that was used during the Pwn2Own hacking contest that took place last week. During the contest, security researchers Bruno Keith (@bkth_) & Niklas Baumstark (@_niklasb) of Dataflow Security used a vulnerability to run malicious code inside Chrome and Edge, for which they received $100,000. Per contest rules, details about this bug were handed over to the Chrome security team so the bug could be patched as soon as possible. While details about the exact nature of the bug were never publicly disclosed, Agarwal told The Record he spotted the patches for this bug by looking at the source code commits to the V8 JavaScript engine, a component of the Chromium open-source browser project, which allowed him to recreate the Pwn2Own exploit, which he uploaded earlier today on GitHub, and shared on Twitter. However, while Chromium developers have patched the V8 bug last week, the patch has not yet been integrated into official releases of downstream Chromium-based browsers such as Chrome, Edge, and others, which are still vulnerable to attacks.

Medium's tech site OneZero reports on "Rest of World" [dot org], which they call "a news site dedicated to telling technology stories about what's happening outside of North America and Europe," but founded as a nonprofit by the daughter of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt: Sophie Schmidt: We have big intractable problems in the tech and society category: misinformation, disinformation, surveillance, privacy, you name it. We're creating panels, and commissions, and we're shaking our fists at big platforms and saying, "Please fix it." And it feels a little bit helpless. But the thing that's not coming up is that every other country in the world is also dealing with it in slightly different ways.

What if the solutions to our problems lie in the sharing of those experiences, and ideas, and learnings? Expanding the dataset. It's honestly baffling. We have billions of people in the world all using technology all the time. I think the last data I saw said there's almost 5 billion people online. And depending on how you count Western versus non-Western, something like 80% of all humans live outside of the Western bubble. That means that you have almost an infinite number of parallel experiments, playing out simultaneously all around us just outside of you. So, why aren't we comparing experiences...?
Some of the interview's highlights:

• On the topic of emotion recognition software, a Rest of World senior editor points out "it's basically junk science. It's not based on any fundamental facts about human behavior... There's a lot of companies across China who are trying to use this faulty science for a number of different applications."

• The senior editor argues that our conception of the social credit score in China was off. "Some of the Chinese researchers I talked to were like, 'We got this idea from you. I have no idea why you guys are so upset about it.'"

• The senior editor agrees Clubhouse might change the way that politics works globally. "But I think the second option, which we're already seeing glimmers of, is that it's going to get banned in more places. And the places where it doesn't get banned, it's going to be very closely surveilled."

• Schmidt is proud of their follow-up on OKash, an African mobile-lending company partially owned by Opera that was accused of predatory loans through Android apps. "We did some digging and the Filipino SEC had banned, I think, 24 similar types of apps just a few months before that. And those ones were inspired by something that came out of China.
  
  "...the things that can happen outside of regulated environments tell us what the limits of tech are. They tell us what tech can be."

"A pro-China network of fake and impostor accounts found a global audience on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to mock the U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic," reports the Associated Press, "as well as the deadly riot in Washington that left five dead, new research published Thursday found."

Slashdot reader schwit1 shared their report: Messages posted by the network, which also praised China, reached the social media feeds of government officials, including some in China and Venezuela who retweeted posts from the fake accounts to millions of their followers. The international reach marked new territory for a pro-China social media network that has been operating for years, said Ben Nimmo, head of investigations for Graphika, the social media analysis firm that monitored the activity. "For the very first time, it started to get a little bit of audience interaction," Nimmo said...

The posts appear to target social media users outside of the United States, gaining traction in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Venezuela — places where Chinese and U.S. diplomatic or financial interests have increasingly come into conflict. "The overall message is: America is doing very badly. China is doing very well," Nimmo said. "Who do you want to be like?" The network used photos of Chinese celebrities on the accounts and, in one case, hijacked the verified Twitter account of a Latin American soap opera show to post messages, according to Graphika's report... "There's this cherry-picking of narratives and events that make the U.S. look really bad," Nimmo said.

Last month, YouTube announced that it had removed more than 3,000 YouTube channels in December that were identified as part of Graphika's investigation into influence campaigns linked to China. Other Facebook and Twitter accounts identified in Graphika's report were also removed.

Opera has acquired YoYo Games, a British game development platform best known for GameMaker Studio 2, and is launching its Opera Gaming division. Engadget reports: Opera has bought the company for a simple reason: Opera GX. The gamer-focused web browser was launched in early access back in June 2019. Its headline feature is a slide-out control panel that lets you limit the browser's bandwidth and see which tabs are demanding the most CPU and RAM resources. Opera says it will create a new division, sensibly called Opera Gaming, by combining the Opera GX and GameMaker teams.

"We have always had big plans for improving GameMaker across all platforms, both from the perspective of improving accessibility and further developing the features available to commercial studios," Stuart Poole, General Manager of YoYo Games said. "And now we can't wait to see them arrive much sooner."

CNET reports: With the next version of Chrome, Google is moving ahead with a plan to improve privacy and security by reining in some abilities of extensions used to customize the browser. The move had angered some developers who expected earlier it would cripple ad blockers. Manifest v3, the programming interface behind Google's security plans, will arrive with Chrome 88 in mid-January, Google said Wednesday at the Chrome Dev Summit. Extensions using the earlier Manifest v2 will still work for at least a year...

Among other things, Manifest v3 limits the number of "rules" that extensions may apply to a web page as it loads. Rules are used, for example, to check if a website element comes from an advertiser's server and should therefore be blocked. Google announced the changes two years ago. Reducing the number of rules allowed angered creators of extensions like the uBlock Origin ad blocker and the Ghostery tracking blocker. They said the rules limits will stop their extensions from running their full lists of actions to screen ads or block tracking. That could let websites bypass extensions — and the preferences of people who installed them...

The shift brought on by Manifest V3 will spread to all browsers, to the detriment of ad blocking software, predicted Andrey Meshkov, co-founder and chief technology officer of AdGuard, an ad-blocking extension... Ghostery is working to update its extension for Manifest V3 but would rather spend its time on "real privacy innovations," President Jeremy Tillman said in a statement Wednesday. "We still have real misgivings that these changes have more to do with Google protecting its bottom line than it does with improving security for Chrome users...."

The importance of the Chrome team's choices are magnified by the fact that other browsers, including Microsoft Edge, Vivaldi , Opera and Brave, are built on its Chromium open-source foundation. Microsoft said it will embrace Manifest v3, too.
"Another Manifest v3 change is that extensions no longer may update their abilities by downloading code from third-party sites.

"The entire extension now must be distributed through the Chrome Web Store, a measure Google says improves security screens and speeds reviews."

In a report published today by cyber-security firm Rapid7, the company said it worked with Pakistani security researcher Rafay Baloch to disclose ten new address bar spoofing vulnerabilities across seven mobile browser apps. From a report: Impacted browsers include big names like Apple Safari, Opera Touch, and Opera Mini, but also niche apps like Bolt, RITS, UC Browser, and Yandex Browser. The issues were discovered earlier this year and reported to browser makers in August. The big vendors patched the issues right away, while the smaller vendors didn't even bother replying to the researchers, leaving their browsers vulnerable to attacks. "Exploitation all comes down to 'JavaScript shenanigans'," said Rapid7's Research Director, Tod Beardsley. The Rapid7 exec says that by messing with the timing between when the page loads and when the browser gets a chance to refresh the address bar URL, a malicious site could force the browser to show the wrong address.

Wired has highlighted several browser extensions that "are a simple first step in improving your online privacy." Other steps to take include adding a privacy-first browser and VPN to further mask your web activity. An anonymous reader shares the report: Privacy Badger is one of the best options for blocking online tracking in your current browser. For a start, it's created by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a US-based non-profit digital rights group that's been fighting online privacy battles since 1990. It's also free. Privacy Badger tracks all the elements of web pages you visit -- including plugins and ads placed by external companies. If it sees these appearing across multiple sites you visit then the extension tells your browser not to load any more of that content.

DuckDuckGo is best-known for its anonymous search engine that doesn't collect people's data. DuckDuckGo also makes an extension for Chrome. The Privacy Essentials extension blocks hidden third-party trackers, showing you which advertising networks are following you around the web over time. The tool also highlights how websites collect data through a partnership with Terms of Service Didn't Read and includes scores for sites' privacy policies. It also adds its non-tracking search to Chrome.

The Ghostery browser extension blocks trackers and shows lists of which ones are blocked for each site (including those that are slow to load), allows trusted and restricted sites to be set up and also lets people you block ads. The main Ghostery extension is free but there's also a paid for $49 per month subscription that provides detailed breakdowns of all trackers and can be used for analysis or research. There are Ghostery extensions for Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge and Opera.

Unlike other tools here, Adblock Plus is primarily marketed as an ad blocking tool -- the others don't necessarily block ads by default but aim to be privacy tools that may limit the most intrusive types of ads. Using an ad blocker comes with a different set of ethical considerations to tools that are designed to stop overly intrusive web tracking; ad blockers will block a much wider set of items on a webpage and this can include ads that don't follow people around the web. Adblock Plus is signed up to the Acceptable Ads project that shows non-intrusive ads by default (although this can be turned off). On a privacy front Adblock Plus's free extensions block third party trackers and allow for social media sharing buttons that send information back to their owners to be disabled.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Microsoft's acquisition talks with TikTok and its Chinese parent company ByteDance "ballooned" this summer after President Donald Trump intervened, according to a report from The New York Times, citing people familiar with the situation. ByteDance is being forced to sell TikTok's U.S. business by the Trump administration, which says the app's current ties to China make it a national security threat. An executive order signed by Trump on Aug. 6 means a sale must go through before Sept. 15. However, TikTok sued the U.S. government on Monday, alleging it was deprived of due process. The lawsuit could delay the ban, giving TikTok more time to get a better deal for the sale.

When the deal talks began, Microsoft is said to have been reluctant to do any kind of large TikTok acquisition, due in part to the rising tensions between the U.S. and China, according to the Times report. However, a minority stake in the wildly popular video sharing app was viewed positively as it may lead to TikTok ditching Google Cloud, which it currently uses, and signing up to Microsoft Azure, instantly making it one of Microsoft's largest cloud customers. TikTok could also be integrated with Microsoft's $7 billion advertising business. Microsoft issued a statement on Aug. 2 about its pursuit to buy TikTok's U.S. business. However, on Aug, 3, Trump said he'd rather Microsoft, valued at $1.6 trillion, purchase the app that is used by 100 million Americans in its entirety. "I think buying 30% is complicated," Trump told reporters in the Cabinet Room at the White House. There are now several other bidders competing with Microsoft, with the main one being enterprise software firm Oracle. Netflix and Twitter have also been contacted by bankers and investors, but it's not clear if they're interested, according to the Times. In any case, deal talks between the parties have "morphed into a big, messy, political soap opera," according to the report.

July's statistics from web analytics firm Net Applications showed continuing changes in the most frequently-used web browsers. Softpedia reports: Last month, Google Chrome increased its market share from 70.19% to 71.00%, while Microsoft Edge jumped from 8.07% to 8.46%... The migration to the Chromium engine allowed Microsoft to turn Edge into a cross-platform browser, and this is one of the reasons that contributed to the growth of the new app. Edge is now available not only on Windows 10, but also on Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, and even macOS. At the same time, Microsoft is also working on a Linux version of the browser, and a preview build is expected by the end of the year.

But what made Microsoft Edge the second most-used desktop browser out there so fast after the switch to Chromium is definitely Microsoft offering it as the default browser in Windows 10.
But what about Firefox? And Opera, and Apple's Safari? Computerworld reports: A decade ago, Mozilla's browser may have dreamed of upsetting the then-order of things, taking its April 2010 share of 25.1% and parlaying it into victory over IE — down to 61.2% by then... But that was Firefox's peak.

At the end of July, Firefox stood at 7.3%, down three-tenths of a percentage point from the previous month... Firefox let its second-place spot (far, far behind Chrome) slip away in March, when Edge snatched it. That did not change in July. The gap between the two more than doubled, in fact, to 1.2 points. On almost every browser share metric, Firefox is in trouble... Since the end of January, Firefox has been stuck in the 7s; for the eight months before that, it was mired in the 8s; and between May 2018 and March 2019, Firefox floundered in the 9s. The trend is crystal clear...

Elsewhere in Net Applications' numbers, Apple's Safari plunged to 3%, a loss of six-tenths of a point, its lowest mark since late 2008. Opera software's Opera also took a dive, ending July at 0.8%, a decline of three-tenths of a point. Those numbers have to be frightening to both those browsers' makers.

It may seem obvious, with double-digit unemployment and plunging economic output. But if there was any remaining doubt that the U.S. is in a recession, it's now been removed by the official scorekeepers at the National Bureau of Economic Research. From a report: The NBER's Business Cycle Dating Committee -- the fat lady of economic opera -- says the expansion peaked in February after a record 128 months, and we've been sliding into a pandemic-driven recession ever since. In making the announcement, the committee pointed to the "unprecedented magnitude of the decline in employment and production, and its broad reach across the entire economy." At the same time, the committee noted the recession could be short-lived. The U.S. added 2.5 million jobs last month, after losing more than 22 million in March and April. Many forecasters expect economic output to begin growing again in the third quarter.

Websites are still capable of detecting when a visitor is using Chrome's incognito (private browsing) mode, despite Google's efforts last year to disrupt the practice. From a report: It is still possible to detect incognito mode in Chrome, and all the other Chromium-based browsers, such as Edge, Opera, Vivaldi, and Brave, all of which share the core of Chrome's codebase. Furthermore, developers have taken the scripts shared last year and have expanded support to non-Chrome browsers, such as Firefox and Safari, allowing sites to block users in incognito mode across the board. Currently, there is no deadline for a new Chrome update to block incognito mode detections, however, today, Google might be interested more than ever in fixing this issue.

Vivaldi, the browser launched by former Opera CEO Jon von Tetzchner, has long positioned itself as a highly customizable alternative to Chrome and Firefox for power users. Today, the team is launching version 3.0 of its desktop browser, with built-in tracker and ad blockers, and it's bringing its Android browser out of beta. From a report: I've long been a fan of Vivaldi, but the company was relatively late to the tracking protection game. Now it's doubling down by integrating a blocklist powered by DuckDuckGo's Tracker Radar. Like competing browsers, Vivaldi offers three blocking levels that users can easily toggle on and off for individual websites. Those blocking levels are relatively blunt, though, with the options to either block trackers, block trackers and ads, or disable blocking. Competitors like Edge offer slightly more nuanced options for blocking trackers, though I would expect Vivaldi to adopt a similar scheme over time.

Opera has updated its lightweight browser for Android so that it can access unofficial .crypto domains, primarily to exchange cryptocurrency. The Register reports: Support for .crypto in Opera will "bring the blockchain-browsing experience to a new level," the Norwegian software maker gushed on Monday. Crucially, dot-crypto simply doesn't exist in the global domain name system, and is not recognized by DNS overseer ICANN nor the world's DNS resolvers. It is a renegade generic top-level domain masterminded by Unstoppable Domains.

By using a domain, such as sendmemoneee.crypto, linked to a blockchain, sending and receiving cryptocurrency becomes much easier as you only need to recall a domain name (ending in .crypto) rather than a long wallet ID. In its effort to carve a niche in the browser market, Opera has been embracing cryptocurrency. Back in December 2018, it added a built-in crypto wallet to its Android browser and then later to its desktop browser. It then extended that to allow for purchases with cryptocurrency. As such, adding a simple addressing system makes sense. It is also a vote of confidence in Unstoppable Domains and Ethereum's alternate root approach.

Several pundits criticized Google for warning Edge users to switch to Chrome if they wanted to use Chrome extensions "securely". "In Chrome, a plugin can be remotely disabled by the Chrome team if it's considered unsafe for whatever reason," notes PC World. "Google lacks the ability to remotely disable the same plugin within Edge, prompting Google to recommend switching to Chrome, a source close to Google said."

Though PC World notes that Google isn't giving the same warning to Opera users...

Yet now when you try to add Chrome Extensions to Edge, Microsoft also gives you a warning of its own -- that extensions installed from sources other than the Microsoft Store "are unverified [by Microsoft], and may affect browser performance." And while Google.com is still displaying an ad for Chrome to web surfers using Edge, now if you search for "Chrome web store" on Bing, the first result is an ad ("promoted by Microsoft") for Microsoft's own Edge browser.

ZDNet's Chris Matyszczyk asked both Google and Microsoft for a comment: [N]othing from Google. But suddenly, a confirmation from Microsoft that it wouldn't offer official comment. My sniffings around Google suggest the company may have been taken aback by the positive public reaction to Edge... My nasal probings around Redmond offer the reasoning that, well, Microsoft hasn't tested or verified extensions that arrive from places other than they Microsoft Edge add-ons website. Why, they're far too busy to do that. And, well, it's the Chrome web store. Who knows what you'll find over there? Oh, and Edge gives you more control over your data, so there.

Could it be, then, that Google is being vacuously childish and trying to scare people into resisting the lures of Microsoft's browser handiwork? Could it also be that Microsoft is doing something rather similar in either retaliation or merely homage to the brutally competitive instincts of social activist Bill Gates?

Could it be that both of these companies should pause to examine their consciences, go sit in a corner and embrace their customers' needs and choices a touch more fully?

In Microsoft's Chromium-based Edge browser, Chrome's extensions "work as good as they work on Chrome browsers," argues the MS Power User blog.

But guess what happens when you use Edge to visit Chrome's "Web Store" for downloading extensions? According to Google, internet users should use Google Chrome instead of Microsoft Edge if they want to use browser extensions securely. On visiting the Chrome web store on Microsoft Edge, you'll be displayed a banner with a yellow background color saying "Google recommends switching to Chrome to use extensions securely" at the top of the page.
A later article points out that Opera visitors don't receive that same warning -- and that's just the beginning: While Google doesn't show anything on Opera or Chrome, when you access Google.com, Drive and Docs on Edge, the websites show a pop-up asking you to switch to Chrome... Google went as far as saying Chrome helps you hide ads and protect from malware...

[W]e can't really blame them for doing it. Google and Microsoft have a history of fighting over their own software. Microsoft has pushed users towards Edge on Windows 10 in the past and in a way Google seems to be returning the favour

Waterfox is an open-source web browser for x64, ARM64, and PPC64LE systems, "intended to be speedy and ethical, and maintain support for legacy extensions dropped by Firefox, from which it is forked," according to Wikipedia. (Its tabs also still have angled sides with rounded corners.)

Friday Waterfox's original creator, 24-year-old Alexandros Kontos, announced that the browser "now has funding and a development team, so Waterfox can finally start to grow!" after its acquisition by a company called System1. I started Waterfox when I was 16. It was a way for me to understand how large software projects worked and the Mozilla documentation was a great introduction... I've touted Waterfox as an ethical and privacy friendly browser... I never wanted Waterfox to be a part of the hyper-privacy community. It would just feel like standards that would be impossible to uphold, especially for something such as a web browser on the internet. Throughout the years people have always asked about Waterfox and privacy, and if they've ever wanted more than it can afford, I've always pushed them to use Tor. Waterfox was here for customisations and speed, with a good level of privacy...

I wasn't doing anything with Waterfox except developing it and making some money via search. Why I kept going throughout the years, I'll never know... System1 has been to Waterfox a search syndication partner. Essentially a way to have a search engine partnership (such as Bing) is through them, because companies such as Microsoft are too big and too busy to talk to small players such as Waterfox... It's probably the one easy way a browser can make money without doing anything dodgy, and it's a way I've been happy to do it without having to compromise Waterfox (and will be the same way System1 makes money from Waterfox -- nothing else). People also don't seem to understand what System1 does...
"Now I can finally focus on making Waterfox into a viable alternative to the big browsers," Kontos concludes.

Long-time Slashdot reader Freshly Exhumed contextualized the news with this brief history of the alternate browser ecosystem: As the usage share of web browsers continues to show a lopsideded dominance by Google Chrome, many previously-independent browsers have fallen by the wayside or have been reinvented as Chrome variants (i.e. Opera, Edge, Brave). Apple forges on with its Safari browser while other, smaller projects tend to be quite limited for multi-platform users, such as Dolphin and Bromite.

Mozilla continues independently with Firefox for almost every platform, while variants such as Pale Moon and Sea Monkey have attempted to provide products that avoid drastic and/or controversial changes made by Mozilla but sometimes do not match the multi-platform support of Firefox. Let us not forget Tor, the Firefox-based anonymity-focused browser.

Alex Kontos is a developer who attempted to provide continuity with dropped Firefox capabilities in his multi-platform Waterfox browser, proudly declaring that Firefox's user data sharing and telemetry collection was not included. For that privacy focus a certain popularity of Waterfox occurred. Now Kontos has revealed that his Waterfox project has been sold to System1, a company describing itself as "a consumer internet and applications company with the most powerful audience expansion platform in the industry."

"Lazy Loading" would augment HTML's <img> tag (and <iframe> tag) with two new attributes -- "eager" (to load immediately) and "lazy" (to load only when it becomes relevant in the viewport).

Felix Arntz, a developer programs engineer at Google (and a WordPress core committer) notes the updates in the HTML specification for the lazy loading attributes, adding that it's "already supported by several browsers, including Chrome and Edge" and also the Android browser and Opera.

And lazy loading can now also be toggled on for Firefox 75 Nightly users, reports Neowin, though it's disabled by default: It's not clear if it will be enabled by the time Firefox 75 reaches the stable branch but according to comments on the Bugzilla thread, it's in high demand. Previously, websites could employ lazy loading by using JavaScript but now lazy loading syntax is supported directly in the web browser.

The implementation in Firefox comes after Google added the feature to its browser.
Google's Arntz has also written a post describing a proposal to begin lazy-loading images by default in Wordpress. The proposed solution is available as a feature plugin WP Lazy Loading in the plugin repository. The plugin is being developed on GitHub. Your testing and feedback will be much appreciated.

"It's no secret that Opera isn't doing so well in the era of Chrome dominance," reports Android Police. "According to a report published by Hindenburg Research, the company's losses in browser revenue have apparently led it to create multiple loan apps with short payment windows and interest rates of ~365-876%, which are in violation of new Play Store rules Google enacted last year."

The apps are aimed at India, Kenya and Nigeria, reports Engadget:
The apps would claim to offer maximum annual percentage rate (APR) of 33 percent or less, but the actual rates were much higher, climbing to 438 percent in the case of OPesa. And while they publicly offered reasonable loan terms of 91 to 365 days, the real length was no more than 29 days (for OKash) and more often 15 days -- well under Google's 60-day minimum. The conditions only got worse for borrowers who missed their payments. Falling short by just a day could raise the APR as high as 876 percent.

Also, the apps reportedly scraped phone contacts to harass family, friends and others with calls and texts in hopes this would pressure customers into paying up. These same notices often threatened legal action.
Android Police points out that Opera became a public company in mid-2017, shortly after it was purchased by a China-based investor group.

But since then, "Opera's market share has continued to fall, due to the increasing dominance of Chrome."