Niantic talks about the ban wave:

In order to promote fair gameplay and preserve the integrity of the game, we have identified and banned 8,000 accounts that violated our Niantic Terms of Service. Specifically:

- Farming items for item sellers
- Delivering or distributing items for item sellers
- Purchasing or sharing items from item sellers

Please note that TOS violations like these will result in immediate action and may not receive a three-strikes warning, even when our changes to policy enforcement are enabled in an upcoming update to Ingress Prime.

Additionally, we have removed high-value items obtained through unauthorized item sellers. Any items purchased through third-party websites or services will be removed from players’ inventories — even if these items were dropped and passed to other players.

Purchasing or sharing items from unauthorized item sellers is a violation of our TOS, and we’ll continue to investigate item sellers, buyers, and associated accounts.

Finally, we have reviewed each appeal received through the Ingress Help Center, and 99.6% of enforcement decisions have been upheld. If you believe your account was banned in error and haven’t already appealed, please submit an appeal through the Ingress Help Center here.

Source: https://community.ingress.com/en/discussion/3056/nia-ops-update-item-seller-bans

@IUENG

Agents worldwide!

As you know, Telegram has recently introduced for channels the possibility of connecting a discussion group, so we decided to create one to make it easier for us and you to communicate with the whole Ingress community and know Agents everywhere!

On the bottom bar, you will find a new "Discuss" button that will give you access to our group. We recommend that you read the few but fundamental rules that you find pinned in there, but the most important is this one: if you decide to enter, the faction remains out. The group is crossfaction like as our channel!

What are you waiting for? Come and join us!

(The group will remain muted for the first 24 hours so no discussion will be overrun by join notifications)

- The staff of @IUENG

The Lore of the newly-started Nemesis Series sees the Niantic Researchers stuck in a limbo, the Substrate, after being killed by the unknown organization called Nemesis. In the recent days, they've been trying to seek for our help (cf. In the Nemesis Trailer, Jarvis and Devra say "We have a secret weapon. Ingress agents, thousands of them.") with encrypted messages that the Investigators at Operation: Essex received and decoded.

The latest one comes from Dr. Wright, the founder of Operation: Essex.
"Dr Kureze believes she's close to finding a way to send a transmission out. We're going to attempt a transmission on Tuesday, 8/13, at 10 AM Pacific time. Tune in if you can."

As we saw in the media hacked at the IFS Events of August 3rd, Aurora - the next threat from Nemesis - has declared its will to destroy the glyphs: "biological interface for exogenous instructions" capable of being a communication mean between us and the Researchers. Will the Aurora Event start at that time and date? Stay tuned for more updates!

Thanks @PiPrime and Operation: Essex Investigators!

@IUENG

Andrew Krug undisclosed a couple interesting things the future holds for Ingress Prime in our Discussion Group:

• A restricted Beta Program will be put in place in the near future. A small amount of Agents will be able to test the bleeding edge versions of Ingress Prime!
• A "contrast slider" will be added in the next UI update for Prime. This should make reading the map in the sun way easier.
• Loading times are going to be even better on the next Ingress Prime release!

Thanks for taking the time to answer a few questions, Andrew!

@IUENG

If you have questions about Ingress, now it's the time to ask them! The AMA session for August is now open!

Ask your questions at this link!

@IUENG

Niantic has selected the winners of the first Ingress First Saturday Artwork Competition for September, October, and November this year! More than 50 submissions were sent, but these three will be available as a Media Item at First Saturdays on next months!
The agents you'll be seeing artwork from are:

September: Schrammschramm from Bruchköbel, Germany
October: Rikka6 from Hokkaido, Japan
November: xXx5ync from Espoo, Finland

Artworks won't be revealed until they'll be hacked by Agents in their scanners!

Source: https://community.ingress.com/en/discussion/3145/ifs-artwork-competition-winners

@IUENG

Release Notes for Ingress Prime v.2.29.2

Feature: Added Lighting Dynamics to automatically or manually adjust lighting.
Feature: Added a three-strike policy for violations of our TOS or Community Guidelines.
UI: Removed extra padding in icons, and updated UI element layout to be more evenly distributed.
UI: Various adjustments to button size, width and spacing.
UI: Tweaked additional visibility values for to increase map visibility.
UX: Portal buttons are disabled if a pending hack or glyph hack is active.
UX: Added COMM Alert if a Portal Link is destroyed by decay.
UX: Added an item count to the recycle confirmation.
UX: New Link system that improves Link loading times and provides better performance for densely linked areas and Starburst scenarios.
UX: Added a button to the main menu during the tutorial to allow player to end the tutorial early.
UX: Changed Key Locker sorting to not take into account whether a Key Locker is empty or not.
Bug: Fixed a bug preventing an Agent from taking any actions.
Bug: Fixed a problem causing the game stop responding when a player fails to login or cancels a login.
Bug: Resolved some issues that makes glyphing slower than anticipated.
Bug: Fixed an issue with the position of the map view not being correct in edge cases.
Bug: Fixed an issue causing haptic feedback to continuously be provided after actions were no longer being taken.
Bug: Fixed an issue with the application not responding after a player clicks on a banned Agents profile.
Bug: Stores untruncated version of username that can be used to make rpc call
Bug: Fixed items not being displayed immediately after purchase.
Bug: Fixed an error that caused the hacking to no longer work if you exited a Portal view too fast.
Bug: Fixed an issue causing at shield hit-effect to be either missing or offset from the portal.
Bug: Fixed a bug where dropping/recycling/capsuling a Portal's key would prevent recharging the Portal at close range.
Bug: Fixed a bug where missions were not being added to the end of the list when users tapped the load more missions button.
Bug: Fixed an issue where a Portal is shown as an option to link to after it has already been linked.
Bug: Fix an issue where a new beacon/fracker can’t be deployed on a Portal if there is a stuck beacon/fracker on the Portal already that should have expired.
Bug: Fixed an issue where some elements of the Portal did not fully display or sometimes did not appear at all.
Bug: Fixed an issue causing the game to not respond when dropping a Key.
Bug: Long agent names are now truncated with ellipses.

Important note: Version 2.28 wasn’t released, all previously planned updates for 2.28 have been rolled into this release.

Source: https://community.ingress.com/en/discussion/3147/ingress-prime-v-2-29-2-release-notes#latest

@IUENG

Researcher Devra Bogdanovich will host a question-answering session on Facebook on August 13th at 17:00 UTC! Tune in at facebook.com/Ingress!

Source: https://twitter.com/ingress/status/1161052677612158977

@IUENG

Agents are reporting that the blue tint on XM to celebrate Resistance's victory in the Osiris Anomaly Series is now gone. XM is back to its original colour.

@IUENG

In 20 minutes the Devra Bogdanovich Q&A session on Facebook will begin!

If you wish to ask her questions, tune in at this link!

AIf you don't have Facebook, there is an unofficial mirror of the livestream on YouTube, but the chat won't be read by Devra. Link

@IUENG

#Aurora #GlyphHack #Challenge

All Agents have to perform as many Glyph hacks as possible between August 15th at 5pm UTC and August 26th at 5pm UTC.

Portals offer Glyph sentences that can be between one and five characters in length depending on the level of the Portal. Each successfully completed Glyph hack sentence will earn an Agent one point if the Agent correctly draws all of the Glyph characters in the sentence on the first attempt. An Agent can earn a maximum of five points per Portal, one for each sentence length. However, if an Agent is not able to successfully complete a sentence on the first try, they will no longer be able to earn a point for that Glyph sentence length on that specific Portal.

For example:

- Agent Smith Glyph hacks Portal A and successfully completes the one character Glyph hack sentence. They earn one point.
- Agent Smith upgrades Portal A and successfully completes the two character Glyph hack sentence. They earn another point.
- Agent Smith upgrades Portal A again and does NOT successfully complete the three character Glyph hack sentence. Agent Smith does not earn a point. Glyph hacking Portal A again and successfully completing the three character Glyph hack sentence will NOT earn Agent Smith a point.
- Agent Smith and a friend upgrades Portal A again and successfully completes the four character Glyph hack sentence. They earn another point.
- Agent Smith upgrades Portal A and successfully completes the five character Glyph hack sentence. They earn another point.
- Agent Smith has earned four points out of a maximum of five from Portal A.


By August 26th at 5pm UTC, Agents must meet a global challenge threshold of 36,000,000 combined Glyph points in order to stop Aurora. We have also created an Aurora Global Challenge Status Report which can be viewed here, http://bit.ly/AuroraGlobalChallenge, and will be updated every 12 hours according to the schedule in the report.

If the objective is met, items obtained by Glyph hacking will increase by approximately 33% from August 27th at 5pm UTC to September 4th at 5pm UTC. If unsuccessful, the output from Glyph hacking will be reduced by 33%.

If the global challenge threshold is achieved successfully, there will also be a limited time reward from August 28th at 5pm UTC to September 2nd at 5pm UTC that will enable Glyph hacking to provide 1.5x the normal AP. In addition, we are very close to understanding several new Glyphs. By successfully achieving the global threshold, we believe that enough data will be collected that would unlock these new Glyphs as well.

An individual scanner achievement medal can also be earned if players successfully earns 100, 500, or 1000 total challenge points during the event. There will be a new event metric enabled in scanners for the duration of the event to track how many points you have earned during this challenge.

Source: https://community.ingress.com/en/discussion/3187/aurora-glyph-hack-challenge

@IUENG

New Anomaly Events are available on the Ingress Live Events website!

February 22nd, 2020
Bratislava, Slovakia
Christchurch, New Zealand
Colombo, Sri Lanka
Fort Worth, TX, USA
Macau, Macao
Minsk, Belarus
Sao Paolo, Brazil
St Louis, MO, USA
Valencia, Spain

April 11th, 2020
Los Angeles, CA, USA

April 18, 2020
Kobe, Japan

April 25, 2020
Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Thanks to @pmmmwh for the fast type!

@IUENG

Now Krug has posted this message:

"If you were a keen observer, you may have noticed that dates and cities for Anomalies in February and April were posted on our events page. These were posted erroneously.

We are considering some of these cities and some of these dates. But it is extremely likely that there will be changes to the final schedule and cities from what was revealed today. As an unintended consequence, we received a bunch of useful feedback.

Look for a final list to be published in the near future. Official announcements will always come with a social media campaign of some sort."

Source: https://community.ingress.com/en/discussion/3191/future-anomaly-dates-an-error#latest

@IUENG

Agent @MrChics, from Mexico created this infographic to explain the Aurora Glyph Challenge in a simple way!

Thank you, it's extremely useful!

@IUENG

In this gif provided by Agent @PiPrime we can see the Lighting Dynamic slider in action: this is one of the main new features in Ingress Prime v2.29.2, coming to your devices in the next hours!

@IUENG

Keeping Ingress Fun and Fair

We’d like to share an update on some of our recent efforts to stop and prevent cheating:

- Three Strikes Discipline Policy introduced from Pokémon GO to ensure a fun and fair gameplay experience.

- We’ve improved detection of rooted and jailbroken devices to curb bad actors from sideloading cheating apps or modified versions of our apps. As a reminder, rooted Android devices and jailbroken iOS devices are not supported in Prime.

- 22K Ingress accounts banned that were found to be supporting and participating in the illicit trade of in-game items.

Please be sure to only use the official version of the app, available via the Google Play Store, the Apple App Store, and the Samsung Galaxy Store.

Source: https://nianticlabs.com/blog/cheatingupdate-081419/

@IUENG

Today, Agent boga4 (@b0ga4), will start a bicycle journey from Uzhhorod (Ukraine) to Lisbon, Cabo da Roca (Portugal). This low-cost trip will last until October 25. Without hotels, hostels, with wild camping everywhere possible!

He'll be glad to meet agents along the way and, if possible, create a link-snake linking back to the previous visited locations!
Enclosed, is the path of his incredible endeavour: if you happen to be there, go find him!

You can follow his travel at these links:
Telegram
Facebook
Youtube
Steemit
Instagram

@IUENG

An Aurora Bundle was introduced by Niantic in the Ingress In-app Store to help Agents in the Glyph Challenge, which will start in about 4.5 hours! Be ready to glyph, Agents!

@IUENG

The Aurora glyph challenge has officially started!

@IUENG

As a lot of you are asking, the event counter is not visible for now in the scanner. We are sure that Niantic knows the problem and will correct it as soon as possible, don't be worried!

@IUENG

And here it is! Just needed to wait a bit, now go out and have fun!

@IUENG