Qualcomm unveiled its Snapdragon X2 Elite and Extreme chips, claiming they’re the “fastest and most efficient processors for Windows PCs.” Built on 3nm with up to 18 cores and a 5GHz Arm CPU boost, the chips promise 31% more CPU power, up to 2.3x GPU performance, stronger AI processing, and “multi-day battery life,” with devices expected in the first half of 2026. The Verge reports: There’s also a new 80 TOPS Hexagon NPU, for AI tasks, that offers 37 percent more performance with a 16 percent power consumption improvement, the company claims. Qualcomm’s characterizing all of this as a “legendary leap in performance,” claiming the Elite Extreme in particular offers “up to 75 percent faster CPU performance” at the same power. But it doesn’t say who the competition is, or which chip it was up against, at least not in the press release. And while Qualcomm claims these power savings will lead to “multi-day battery life,” that’s also what the company said about last year’s Snapdragon X Elite.

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Neon Mobile, now the No. 2 social networking app in Apple’s U.S. App Store, pays users up to $30 per day to record their phone calls and sell the data to AI companies. The app claims to only capture one side of a call unless both parties use Neon, but its terms grant sweeping rights over recordings. TechCrunch reports: The app, Neon Mobile, pitches itself as a money-making tool offering “hundreds or even thousands of dollars per year” for access to your audio conversations. Neon’s website says the company pays 30 cents per minute when you call other Neon users and up to $30 per day maximum for making calls to anyone else. The app also pays for referrals.

According to Neon’s terms of service, the company’s mobile app can capture users’ inbound and outbound phone calls. However, Neon’s marketing claims to only record your side of the call unless it’s with another Neon user. That data is being sold to “AI companies,” the company’s terms of service state, “for the purpose of developing, training, testing, and improving machine learning models, artificial intelligence tools and systems, and related technologies.”

Despite what Neon’s privacy policy says, its terms include a very broad license to its user data, where Neon grants itself a: “…worldwide, exclusive, irrevocable, transferable, royalty-free, fully paid right and license (with the right to sublicense through multiple tiers) to sell, use, host, store, transfer, publicly display, publicly perform (including by means of a digital audio transmission), communicate to the public, reproduce, modify for the purpose of formatting for display, create derivative works as authorized in these Terms, and distribute your Recordings, in whole or in part, in any media formats and through any media channels, in each instance whether now known or hereafter developed.” That leaves plenty of wiggle room for Neon to do more with users’ data than it claims. The terms also include an extensive section on beta features, which have no warranty and may have all sorts of issues and bugs. Peter Jackson, cybersecurity and privacy attorney at Greenberg Glusker, told TechCrunch: “Once your voice is over there, it can be used for fraud. Now, this company has your phone number and essentially enough information — they have recordings of your voice, which could be used to create an impersonation of you and do all sorts of fraud.”

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In a bid to slash red tape, the European Commission wants to eliminate one of its peskiest laws: a 2009 tech rule that plastered the online world with pop-ups requesting consent to cookies. From a report: It’s the kind of simplification ordinary Europeans can get behind. European rulemakers in 2009 revised a law called the e-Privacy Directive to require websites to get consent from users before loading cookies on their devices, unless the cookies are “strictly necessary” to provide a service. Fast forward to 2025 and the internet is full of consent banners that users have long learned to click away without thinking twice.

“Too much consent basically kills consent. People are used to giving consent for everything, so they might stop reading things in as much detail, and if consent is the default for everything, it’s no longer perceived in the same way by users,” said Peter Craddock, data lawyer with Keller and Heckman. Cookie technology is now a focal point of the EU executive’s plans to simplify technology regulation. Officials want to present an “omnibus” text in December, scrapping burdensome requirements on digital companies. On Monday, it held a meeting with the tech industry to discuss the handling of cookies and consent banners.

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The pressure is mounting on business leaders to harness AI to make work faster, cheaper, and more efficient. That may thrill investors, but for employees, it could mean fewer jobs around the world. From a report: At the $320 billion software giant SAP, there will likely be a need for fewer engineers to deliver the same — or even greater — output, according to the company’s CFO Dominik Asam.

“There’s more automation, simply,” Asam told Business Insider. “There are certain tasks which are automated and for the same volume of output we can afford to have less people.” As a C-suite exec at Europe’s most valuable software company, Asam cautioned that this reality will only come true if the corporate world implements the technology properly. After all, a recent MIT study found that 95% of generative AI pilots have not met the mark. “I will be brutal. And I also say this internally. For SAP and any other software company, AI is a great catalyst. It can be either great or catastrophe,” Asam warned. “It will be great if you do it well, if you are able to implement it and do it faster than others. If you are left behind, you will have a problem for sure. We work day and night to not fall behind.”

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Cloudflare blocked the largest-ever DDoS attack against a European network infrastructure company, which peaked at 22.2 Tbps and 10.6 Bpps. The hyper-volumetric attack has been linked to the Aisuru botnet and lasted just 40 seconds, but was double the size of the previous record. SecurityWeek reports: Cloudflare told SecurityWeek that the attack was aimed at a single IP address of an unnamed European network infrastructure company. Cloudflare has yet to determine who was behind the attack, but believes it may have been powered by the Aisuru botnet, which was also linked earlier this year to a massive 6.3 Tbps attack on the website of cybersecurity blogger Brian Krebs. Aisuru has been around for more than a year. The botnet is powered by hacked IoT devices such as routers and DVRs that have been compromised through the exploitation of known and zero-day vulnerabilities.

According to Cloudflare, the 22 Tbps attack was traced to over 404,000 unique source IPs across over 14 ASNs worldwide. “Based on internal analysis using a proprietary system, the source IPs were not spoofed,” the company explained. The security firm described it as a UDP carpet bomb attack targeting an average of 31,000 destination ports per second, with a peak of 47k ports, all of a single IP address. Cloudflare revealed in July that the number of DDoS attacks it blocked in the first half of 2025 had already exceeded all the attacks mitigated in 2024.

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The first astronauts set to fly to the Moon in more than 50 years will do so in Integrity.

NASA’s Artemis II crew revealed Integrity as the name of their Orion spacecraft during a news conference on Wednesday at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

“We thought, as a crew, we need to name this spacecraft. We need to have a name for the Orion spacecraft that we’re going to ride this magical mission on,” said Reid Wiseman, commander of the Artemis II mission.

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One of the surprise announcements during Sony’s State of Play presentation today was the debut of a literary-themed game titled Chronoscript: The Endless End. It’s an action-adventure game with a very cool hand-drawn art aesthetic. Players will navigate the 3-dimensional world of a mysterious manor as well as the 2-dimensional world of illustrated manuscript pages.

The trailer mostly focused on those 2D sections, showing combat and platforming and seriously did I mention the very cool hand-drawn art? I would have been interested in this for the visuals alone, but throw in a story about writers and editors and I’m hooked.

Perhaps fittingly for this writerly endeavor, the game’s publisher is Shueisha, which is a heavyweight in publishing manga, including the popular Shonen Jump. The developer is DeskWorks, and the studio’s last project also boasted a lovely, illustrative style. We’ll have a little longer to wait before we can dive into the inky world of Chronoscript, however, because this game isn’t expected to arrive on the PlayStation 5 until some time in 2026.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/playstation/check-out-the-intricate-inky-world-of-ps5-game-chronoscript-the-endless-end-221820822.html?src=rss

Fossil fuel burning is not just damaging the world’s climate; it is also threatening the health of at least 1.6 billion people through the toxic pollutants it produces, data shows. From a report: Carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas from fossil fuel burning, does not directly damage health, but leads to global heating. However, coal and oil burning for power generation, and the burning of fossil fuels in industrial facilities, pollute the air with particulate matter called PM2.5, which has serious health impacts when breathed in.

A new interactive map from Climate Trace, a coalition of academics and analysts that tracks pollution and greenhouse gases, shows that PM2.5 and other toxins are being poured into the air near the homes of about 1.6 billion people. Of these, about 900 million are in the path of “super-emitting” industrial facilities — including power plants, refineries, ports and mines — that deliver outsize doses of toxic air.

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The rumors of Marvel’s Wolverine showing up during Sony’s September State of Play turned out to be true after all. The trailer was our first decent look (well, first official one, anyway) at the game since it was announced back in 2021. Sony and Insomniac Games revealed a release window too: Marvel’s Wolverine is coming to PS5 in fall 2026.

A gruff-sounding Liam McIntyre (Spartacus: Vengeance, JD Fenix in Gears of War 4 and Gears 5) is taking on the mantle of Logan here. As creative director Marcus Smith reminded us, Logan is an unreliable narrator with a patchy memory, which should make for an interesting wrinkle as the story plays out.

Unlike in Insomniac’s Spider-Man games, bad guys aren’t going to be magically webbed to the side of a tall building after you kick them off the roof. Oh, no no. Wolverine rips an enemy apart in fury with his adamantium claws within the first 30 seconds of this trailer. Not long after, he thrusts them upwards through a goon’s skull. We see him slicing off limbs too. Yeah, this isn’t going to be a game for younger kids. 

Wolverine will encounter some familiar faces on his travels, including Mystique and Omega Red. And that’s not to mention a certain giant robot that shows up at the end of the trailer. 

“We aim to deliver the ultimate Wolverine fantasy built on Insomniac staples like fast, fluid, and ferocious combat; exhilarating, action-packed set pieces; robust accessibility features; and a gripping story that taps into the core tenets of one of the most compelling comic book characters of all time,” Insomniac senior community manager Aaron Jason Espinoza wrote on the PlayStation Blog. “We’re breaking new ground with Wolverine, yes, but our penchant for telling stories about heroes overcoming colossal odds is as strong as ever. We’re eager to explore Logan’s story with you and tap into his signature spin on heroism, which is much darker and more brutal than you might expect from Insomniac.”

Although we’re a year or so away from Marvel’s Wolverine coming to PS5 and PS5 Pro, we won’t have to wait quite that long for more details. Insomniac promises to reveal additional info in spring 2026.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/playstation/marvels-wolverine-slices-his-way-onto-ps5-in-fall-2026-220250305.html?src=rss

For decades now, the Microsoft Flight Simulator franchise has been associated with Microsoft’s own DOS/Windows operating systems and, more recently, Xbox consoles (weird exceptions like this 1986 Macintosh port notwithstanding). However, that era seems set to end as Sony announced during this evening’s State of Play livestream that Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 will come to the PlayStation 5 on December 8.

No, that’s not a typo.
Credit:
Sony

The move isn’t entirely shocking for modern Microsoft, which has been publishing previous Xbox exclusives on competing consoles in increasing numbers for a while now. And Flight Simulator 2024 has been available on Xbox Series S/X for almost a year now, as the name suggests, giving Xbox owners a “timed exclusive” at least.

Still, it’s a bit striking to see a franchise that literally has the Microsoft brand name integrated into its title moving to a major non-Microsoft platform like this. The impact is a little bit like seeing a Sonic game on a Nintendo console for the first time in 2001, after years of Sega selling itself as the anti-Nintendo.

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Sony’s lineup of gaming-focused audio devices is growing with the addition of the PlayStation Pulse Elevate wireless speakers. They work with PC, Mac, PlayStation 5 and PlayStation Portal, and they support Bluetooth and Sony’s proprietary PlayStation Link Wireless connection scheme. The Pulse Elevate speakers come in white or black, and they’re due to hit the market in 2026. There’s no word on price just yet.

The Pulse Elevate speakers can be set on charging stands when playing at your desk, or they can be disconnected and used in portable mode. When not docked, they have (an unspecified number of) “hours of battery life,” according to Sony’s hype trailer. The speakers support 3D audio, they can be tilted back, and they have an integrated mic with noise reduction, planar magnetic drivers and a built-in woofer.

The PlayStation Pulse Elevate speakers join Sony’s Pulse Elite gaming headset and Pulse Explore earbuds. The earbuds retail for $200 and the headset goes for $150.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/playstation/playstation-pulse-elevate-portable-speakers-are-coming-for-your-desktop-in-2026-215320963.html?src=rss

Just in time for all your Halloween gaming projects, Alan Wake 2 will be the free to play for members of the PS Plus program in October. The news was announced during Sony’s State of Play presentation. 

The recent remake of the game showcases Remedy Entertainment’s skill with tell eerie, surreal interactive stories. And the fans have responded; it’s Remedy’s fastest-selling game to date. If you’re one of those people who hasn’t already bought a copy, now might be the time to join Alan and Saga in solving their supernatural murder mystery.

The new batch of PS Plus games, which also includes the compelling puzzle game Cocoon and Goat Simulator 3, will be available starting October 7. And in case you haven’t gotten enough of Joel, Ellie and the gang, Sony is also adding The Last of Us Part II to the PS Plus game catalog. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/playstation/alan-wake-2-will-be-free-on-ps-plus-in-october-213539815.html?src=rss

Microsoft is bring yet another of its formerly exclusive games to PlayStation. During Sony’s latest State of Play, the company announced that Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is coming to PS5 on December 8, 2025.

Based on the trailer showed during Sony’s event, the PS5 version of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, will carry over the same graphical detail and giant commercial aircraft of the original, along with support for the PS VR 2 headset for even more immersive cockpit gameplay. Along with accurately simulating real-life airplanes, Flight Simulator also uses real geographical and weather data for its maps, making flight as peaceful or difficult as they would be in real life.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 joins a growing collection of former Xbox and PC exclusives that Microsoft has brought to Sony’s console. The company started with games like Sea of Thieves and Pentiment, but now even bigger titles like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle come to PS5 eventually. 

It’s all part of Microsoft ongoing Game Pass and game streaming strategy, but it’s also working for Sony, too. Helldivers 2 was originally a PS5-exclusive, but when it came to Xbox it almost immediately became one of the best-selling games on the platform.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/playstation/microsoft-flight-simulator-2024-is-coming-to-ps5-on-december-8-213203456.html?src=rss

BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: Cloudflare has unveiled the Content Signals Policy, a free addition to its managed robots.txt service that aims to give website owners and publishers more control over how their content is accessed and reused by AI companies. The idea is pretty simple: robots.txt already lets site operators specify which crawlers can enter and where. Cloudflare’s new policy adds a layer that signals how the data may be used once accessed, with plain-language terms for search, AI input, and AI training. “Yes” means allowed, “no” means not allowed, and no signal means no preference.

Matthew Prince, Cloudflare’s co-founder and CEO, said: “The Internet cannot wait for a solution, while in the meantime, creators’ original content is used for profit by other companies. To ensure the web remains open and thriving, we’re giving website owners a better way to express how companies are allowed to use their content.” Cloudflare says more than 3.8 million domains already use its robots.txt tools to signal they don’t want their content used for AI training. Now, the Content Signals Policy makes those preferences clearer and potentially enforceable. Further reading: Cloudflare Flips AI Scraping Model With Pay-Per-Crawl System For Publishers

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It seems like iOS 26 just dropped, and yet, Apple is back at it with another update. As of Monday, iOS 26.1 is officially in beta testing, which means developers and public testers can try out Apple’s next update early.

“Point updates” like iOS 26.1 are never as feature-filled as the main releases, though 26.1 seems particularly small in scope. Apple seems to have done most of what it planned to do with iOS 26, saving just smaller changes for this upcoming update. Still, there are some interesting new additions in this latest beta, and more could come in subsequent releases. Here’s what’s new.

Apple Music gestures

If you want to skip a song in Apple Music, you hit the forward button. If you want to get back to the previous song, or restart the current song, you hit the back button. With iOS 26.1, however, you’ll have the option to swipe to switch between songs.

In the current beta, you can swipe right and left on the Now Playing bar to switch back and forth through your queue. With it, Apple has removed the skip forward button from the Now Playing bar. (The back button wasn’t present.) It’s a small but cool feature, but one that might take a little time to get used to.

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Video playback bar

In the current version of iOS 26, the video playback bar in the Photos app is flush with the UI. You might love or hate it, but it can be a bit difficult to make it out, depending on the video in question. The play button and mute button, for example, can disappear when iOS can’t change their colors to stand out from the background.

iOS 26.1 beta 1, however, introduces a new video playback bar that is separate from the UI. It looks good, and is easy to see at all times. Again, a small change, but a smart one.

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Live Translation languages

Live Translation for AirPods is a fantastic new feature that automatically translates conversations you’re having with someone who speaks a language you don’t understand. So long as you have an iPhone 15 Pro or newer, as well as AirPods Pro 2, AirPods Pro 3, or AirPods 5 with Active Noise Cancellation, you’ve been able to try it out since iOS 26’s launch.

Apple initially rolled out support for French, German, Portuguese (Brazil), and Spanish (Spain), but plans to expand the list in the future. With iOS 26.1, it adds four new options, including:

• Chinese (Mandarin, simplified)

• Chinese (Mandarin, traditional)

• Italian

• Japanese

• Korean

Eight new languages for Apple Intelligence

Users with an iPhone 15 Pro and newer, listen up: Apple Intelligence supports eight new languages in iOS 26.1. As of this first beta, that includes the following:

• Chinese (traditional)

• Danish

• Dutch

• Norwegian

• Portuguese (Portugal)

• Swedish

• Turkish

• Vietnamese

Liquid Glass comes to the Phone’s keypad

Liquid Glass, Apple’s new design language, isn’t everywhere in iOS 26. While much of the UI now has a glassy look, some elements still look like iOS 18 and earlier. The Phone app’s keypad was one such example: While the app itself is very much changed with this update, switch to the keypad, and it looks the same as ever.

That changes with iOS 26.1. The beta brings Liquid Glass to the keypad, which, while consistent with most of iOS 26’s design, does reduce the visibility of the keys a bit, especially in light mode. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Apple workshop this one a bit.

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Calendar

Whenever you have Calendar in List view in iOS 26.1, you’ll see your daily events color-coded by their respective calendars, rather than simply listed against the same white background.

References to third-party smartwatch support

If you have an iPhone, you know the only smartwatch that really works well with it is the Apple Watch. Some watches offer notification support, but most simply don’t jive well with iOS.

That might be changing in the future. Code within the iOS 26.1 beta references a new “Notification Forwarding” feature, that might allow you to choose a third-party device to send your iPhone alerts to. In addition, an unfinished “AccessoryExtension” option might be the framework that lets you pair a third-party watch to your iPhone.

These are just references in code, not something that you can actively test out in the 26.1 beta, but it’s worth noting. Apple is experimenting with supporting third-party watches on iOS, though it could just be to appease the EU’s “Digital Markets Act.”

One thing that Sony confirmed in advance for its September State of Play stream was a first look at gameplay for Saros, the next game from Housemarque (Returnal, Resogun). This is the first completely new project from the developer since it joined PlayStation Studios in 2021, and it opened the livestream.

Creative director Gregory Louden took viewers through a peek at the journey of Arjun Devraj (Rahul Kohli), who’s seeking answers on a shape-shifting planet called Carcosa. The combat looks very much in the vein of Returnal, with lots of lasers, projectiles and other nasty stuff to avoid. 

Arjun can trigger a shield to defend himself and redirect incoming projectiles to juice up a power weapon. He also gets a second chance to survive an encounter as there’s a revival ability he can use after his first death, but you’ll need to unlock the option to do that as it’s part of the permanent progression system. You’ll be able to upgrade your combat suit and other abilities too. Unsurprisingly, it all looks extremely pretty. 

Along with the first glimpse at gameplay, we got a release date. Saros will hit PS5 on March 20, 2026.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/playstation/housemarques-saros-will-hit-ps5-on-march-20-2026-211504381.html?src=rss

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This week I did over a dozen workouts with Apple’s new Workout Buddy. I ran, I walked, I strength trained, and even did a little indoor cycling. I’ve learned a few things, but the strangest is that I didn’t need an Apple Watch for any of it. 

Workout Buddy is an AI-powered feature that sends a little voice into your headphones to motivate and congratulate you as you’re working out. Apple touted Workout Buddy as a feature of WatchOS 26 and promoted it among the features of the new Series 11 Apple Watch, so you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s part of of the Apple Watch, specifically. But that’s not what I found. 

How to use Workout Buddy without an Apple Watch

But as I found when I took a supported Apple Watch out for a trail run with an old iPhone (a 12 Mini), Workout Buddy requires a phone that supports Apple Intelligence, so I didn’t have access to it. OK, fine, it needs a newer watch and a newer phone. (Or so I thought.) Eventually I got my hands on a 16 Pro and, yep, was able to enable and use Workout Buddy. 

But this week—with a Series 11 Apple Watch on my wrist and WatchOS 26 installed—I discovered something. I could power off the watch, or even leave it at home, and still get Workout Buddy. Here are a few things I tried, all of which got me Workout Buddy: 

• Starting a workout from the Series 10 or Series 11 Apple Watch

• Starting a workout from the Fitness app (you can do that now!) with the Powerbeats Pro 2 headphones paired

• Starting a workout from the Fitness app without any other Apple products in range, just a Coospo heart rate monitor and some Shokz headphones

• Starting a workout from the Fitness app with just Shokz headphones paired (no heart rate monitor, since it was a GPS-enabled walk)

The only configuration that wouldn’t give me Workout Buddy was using the Fitness app without headphones paired. It’s serious about needing headphones, but they can be paired to either the Watch or the iPhone. 

Workout Buddy is more of a chipper sidekick than a coach

I hoped Workout Buddy might provide some kind of coaching or workout guidance, but found that’s not quite what it’s there for. The biggest difference between having Workout Buddy on versus off during a run is that, with Workout Buddy, you get your splits read to you in a more conversational voice.

The main advantage of Workout Buddy is that it gives you a check-in at the beginning and end of your workout to let you know where you stand on your goals and progress for the day and the week, and it will call out any notable recent achievements. 

For example, at the start of pretty much every workout this week—whether running, walking, or strength–it congratulated me on running my fastest-ever 5K last Tuesday. It also let me know I logged at least 16 workouts every week for the past four weeks, which is very consistent of me. 

The workout count seems to be correct (I log a lot of short workouts for device testing), but the 5K callout is wrong. Last Tuesday I earned a 5K badge, but that’s just for logging a run of more than five kilometers, not for running my fastest 5K. According to the Fitness app—remember, the same app that contains Workout Buddy—my fastest 5K was in July of 2021. 

Besides those hallucinations, the information seems to be reasonable. The overly-enthusiastic voice of the Workout Buddy always tells me at the start of each workout where I stand on my ring-closing goals. I need 22 more minutes to close my Exercise ring, it might say, or 37 more calories to close the Move ring. At the start of a run, it will tell me how many miles I’ve already run this week. And if I have music playing, it will name-check the band—seemingly just to let me know it can read that data. “Get into the rhythm with Fleetwood Mac!” it told me once, just as a Fleetwood Mac song was fading out. 

Overall, I find the goal-oriented check-ins useful; knowing I have 22 minutes left on my exercise goal does make me more likely to extend my workout if I was only going to do a 20-minute one. The conversational voice giving me my mile splits is a bit nicer than hearing the generic, more robot-like voice. And if I had run my fastest 5K recently, I’d probably love to be reminded about it at every opportunity.