Nintendo has confirmed that it’s working on a live-action adaptation of The Legend of Zelda, directed by Wes Ball and produced by Zelda creator Shigeru Miyamoto. The Verge reports: “This is Miyamoto. I have been working on the live-action film of The Legend of Zelda for many years now with Avi Arad-san, who has produced many mega hit films,” Miyamoto said in a statement posted on X, formerly Twitter. We might be waiting a while for the movie, however; Miyamoto said, “It will take time until its completion, but I hope you look forward to seeing it.” While there aren’t many details on the movie itself, Nintendo says that it will be co-financed by itself and Sony, with Nintendo footing more than 50 percent of the bill.

“By producing visual contents of Nintendo IP by itself, Nintendo is creating new opportunities to have people from around the world to access the world of entertainment which Nintendo has built, through different means apart from its dedicated game consoles,” the company said in a statement about the Zelda film. “By getting deeply involved in the movie production with the aim to put smiles on everyone’s faces through entertainment, Nintendo will continue its efforts to produce unique entertainment and deliver it to as many people as possible.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Nintendo Is Making a Live-Action ‘Legend of Zelda’ Movie

Rockstar Games, a division of Take-Two Interactive Software, plans to announce the next highly anticipated Grand Theft Auto game as early as this week, according to Bloomberg. From a report: The company plans to then publish a trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI next month to celebrate Rockstar’s 25th anniversary, said the people, who asked to not be identified because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. A spokesperson for Rockstar didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment sent after business hours.

No video game has driven more fervor from fans and investors than Grand Theft Auto VI, which is expected to be one of the most significant entertainment releases of the decade. Its predecessor, Grand Theft Auto V, has sold more than 185 million copies and is the second-best selling video game of all time, behind Minecraft, which had the advantage of also being playable on phones.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Rockstar Plans To Announce Much Anticipated ‘Grand Theft Auto VI’

AmiMoJo shares a report from the BBC: Europe’s Euclid telescope is ready to begin its quest to understand the greatest mysteries in the Universe. Exquisite imagery from the space observatory shows its capabilities to be exceptional. Over the next six years, Euclid will survey a third of the heavens to get some clues about the nature of so-called dark matter and dark energy. The 1.4 billion euro Euclid telescope went into space in July. Since then, engineers have been fine-tuning it. There were some early worries. Initially, Euclid’s optics couldn’t lock on to stars to take a steady image. This required new software for the telescope’s fine guidance sensor. Engineers also found some stray light was polluting pictures when the observatory was pointed in a certain way. But with these issues all now resolved, Euclid is good to go — as evidenced by the release of five sample images on Tuesday. “No previous space telescope has been able to combine the breadth, depth and sharpness of vision that Euclid can,” notes the BBC. “The astonishing James Webb telescope, for example, has much higher resolution, but it can’t cover the amount of sky that Euclid does in one shot.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Euclid Telescope: First Images Revealed From ‘Dark Universe’ Mission

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: [A] new tech startup, Prophetic, aims to bring lucid dreams to a much wider audience by developing a wearable device designed to spark the experience when desired. Prophetic is the brainchild of Eric Wollberg, its chief executive officer, and Wesley Louis Berry III, its chief technology officer. The pair co-founded the company earlier this year with the goal of combining technologies, such as ultrasound and machine learning models, “to detect when dreamers are in REM to induce and stabilize lucid dreams” with a device called the Halo according to the company’s website. […]

Prophetic does not make any medical claims about its forthcoming products — Halo is tentatively slated for a 2025 release — though Wollberg and Berry both expressed optimism about broader scientific research that suggests lucid dreams can reduce PTSD-related nightmares, promote mindfulness, and open new windows into the mysterious nature of consciousness. To explore those links further, Prophetic has partnered with the Donders Institute, a research center at Radboud University in the Netherlands that is focused on neuroscience and cognition, to generate the largest dataset of electroencephalogram (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) observations of lucid dreamers, according to the company. The collaboration will also explore one of central technologies behind Prophetic’s vision, known as transcranial focused ultrasound (TUS). This non-invasive technique uses low-intensity ultrasound pulses to probe the brain, and interact with neural activity, with a depth and precision that cannot be achieved with previous methods, such as transcranial electrical stimulation or transcranial magnetic stimulation.

At this point, both the possibilities and limits of Prophetic’s concept remain unclear. While ultrasound devices have been widely used in medicine for decades, the process of stimulating parts of the brain with TUS is a relatively new development. Within the past few years, scientists have shown that TUS “has the potential to be used both as a scientific instrument to investigate brain function and as a therapeutic modality to modulate brain activity,” according to a 2019 study, and “could be a useful tool in the treatment of clinical disorders characterized by negative mood states, like depression and anxiety disorders,” according to a 2020 study. What is not known, yet, is whether TUS can induce or stabilize lucid dreams, though the Prophetic team is banking on a positive answer to this open question. Its wearable headband prototype, the Halo, was developed with the company Card79 and can currently read EEG data of users. Over the next year, Prophetic aims to use the dataset from their partnership with the Donders Institute to train machine learning models that will stimulate targeted neural activity in users with ultrasound transducers as a means of inducing lucid dreams.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Scientists Are Researching a Device That Can Induce Lucid Dreams On Demand

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy reports via The Verge: The Chamberlain Group — owners of the MyQ smart garage door controller tech — has announced it’s shut off all “unauthorized access” to its APIs. The move breaks the smart home integrations of thousands of users who relied on platforms such as Homebridge and Home Assistant to do things like shut the garage door when they lock their front door or flash a light if they leave their door open for 10 minutes, or whatever other control or automation they wanted to do with the device they bought and paid for.

The move comes a year after Chamberlain discontinued its official Apple HomeKit integration and a few months after it finally killed support for Google Assistant. It’s sadly another example of how the company continues to be hostile to the interoperable smart home. Last week, in a blog post, Dan Phillips, chief technology officer of Chamberlain, explained the reasons behind its latest move: “Chamberlain Group recently made the decision to prevent unauthorized usage of our myQ ecosystem through third-party apps. This decision was made so that we can continue to provide the best possible experience for our 10 million+ users, as well as our authorized partners who put their trust in us. We understand that this impacts a small percentage of users, but ultimately this will improve the performance and reliability of myQ, benefiting all of our users.” When asked what customers that relied on these now-defunct integrations do, a spokesperson for the company said: “We have a number of authorized partners that we will be happy for people to use,” pointing to its partner webpage.

“However, those partners are primarily smart security companies with monthly subscriptions (such as Alarm.com and Vivint) and car manufacturers,” notes The Verge. Some alternatives to a MyQ smart garage controller are mentioned in the report, such as Tailwind’s $90 iQ3 Pro smart garage controller, Meross’ $60 Smart Wi-Fi Garage Door Opener, iSmartgate’s $40 iSmartgate Mini, and Ratgdo’s $30 Wi-Fi control board.

The moral for smart home users, as summed up by Home Assistant founder Paulus Schoutsen, is: “Buy products that work locally and won’t stop functioning when management wants an additional revenue stream.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Chamberlain Shuts Off Access To MyQ’s APIs, Breaking Smart Home Integrations

According to the Wall Street Journal, Intel may receive billions in U.S. government funding to build secret facilities that produce microchips for the military. SiliconANGLE reports: The facilities, which have not yet been disclosed, would be designated as a “secure enclave” to reduce the military’s dependence on chips imported from East Asia, particularly Taiwan, which is at risk of a future invasion from China. The funding for the new facilities would come from the $52.7 billion allocated under the Chips Act, signed into law by President Biden in August 2022. The Chips Act, which had bipartisan support, promotes chipmaking and scientific research through funding and tax credits. The law is aimed at encouraging domestic manufacturing of semiconductors and helping U.S. companies compete with China in developing cutting-edge technologies.

The new Intel facilities, presuming they go ahead, could reside partly at Intel’s Arizona factory complex, according to sources referenced in the Journal report. The exact amount of funding that will be made available is not yet known, but “people familiar with the situation” tell the Journal that they could cost about $3 billion to $4 billion, which would come from the $39 billion set aside in the Chips Act for manufacturing grants. Officials from the Commerce Department, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Defense Department are said to be negotiating the project with Intel but have not yet made a final decision.

The first manufacturing grants under the Chip Act are expected to be announced in the coming weeks. The program was reported to have had more than 500 entities express interest and more than 130 have submitted applications or pre-applications for funding.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Intel To Build ‘Secure Enclave’ Chip Facilities For Defense Applications

Lora Kolodny reports via CNBC: Cruise CEO and founder Kyle Vogt posted comments on Hacker News on Sunday responding to allegations that his company’s robotaxis aren’t really self-driving, but instead require frequent help from humans working in a remote operations center. First, Vogt confirmed that the General Motors-owned company does have a remote assistance team, in response to a discussion under the header, “GM’s Cruise alleged to rely on human operators to achieve ‘autonomous’ driving.” The CEO wrote, “Cruise AVs are being remotely assisted (RA) 2-4% of the time on average, in complex urban environments. This is low enough already that there isn’t a huge cost benefit to optimizing much further, especially given how useful it is to have humans review things in certain situations.”

Cruise recently took the drastic move of grounding all of its driverless operations following a collision that injured a pedestrian in San Francisco on October 2. The collision and Cruise’s disclosures around it led to state regulators stripping the company of its permits to operate driverless vehicles in California, unless there is a driver aboard. […] A New York Times story followed last week diving into issues within Cruise that may have led to the safety issues, and setback for Cruise’s reputation and business. The story included a stat that at Cruise, workers intervened to help the company’s cars every 2.5 to five miles. Vogt explained on Hacker News that the stat was a reference to how frequently Cruise robotaxis initiate a remote assistance session.

He wrote, “Of those, many are resolved by the AV itself before the human even looks at things, since we often have the AV initiate proactively and before it is certain it will need help. Many sessions are quick confirmation requests (it is ok to proceed?) that are resolved in seconds. There are some that take longer and involve guiding the AV through tricky situations. Again, in aggregate this is 2-4% of time in driverless mode.” CNBC asked Cruise to confirm and provide further details on Monday. The Cruise spokesperson wrote in an e-mail, that a “remote assistance” session is triggered roughly every four to five miles, not every 2.5 miles, in Cruise’s driverless fleet. […] CNBC also asked Cruise for information about typical response time for remote operations, and how remote assistance workers at Cruise are trained. “More than 98% of sessions are answered within 3 seconds,” the spokesperson said. As far as the ratio of remote assistance advisors to driverless vehicles on the road, the Cruise spokesperson said, “During driverless operations there was roughly 1 remote assistant agent for every 15-20 driverless AVs.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Cruise Confirms Robotaxis Rely On Human Assistance Every Four To Five Miles

Long-time Slashdot reader UnknowingFool writes: Coinbase, America’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, has announced they are completely removing all support for Bitcoin SV (BSV) by January 9. All current holders of that cryptocurrency on the exchange will need to withdraw or the assets will be liquidated after that date. Bitcoin SV is not the original Bitcoin but a fork supported by Craig Wright. This removal follows a delisting in 2021 after the cryptocurrency suffered a “51% attack.” Since that time clients have not been about to buy or sell Bitcoin SV on the exchange. According to CoinGecko, Bitcoin SV is currently the 53rd biggest digital assets, with a market cap of $967 million.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Coinbase Will Completely Remove Bitcoin SV By January 9

Long-time Slashdot reader RobHart writes: During the night, the entire Optus mobile network went down and remains down. This is the second largest mobile network in Australia and it is the first time a network has gone down nationwide. It is affecting the trains in Melbourne and any business across Australia that uses the Optus service for phones or data. “Optus is aware of an issue that may be impacting some of our mobile and internet customers,” the company wrote in a statement. “We are currently working to identify the cause and apologize for any inconvenience. In case of an emergency customers can still call triple zero.”

Authorities are checking whether the outage is the result of a cyberattack, although they don’t believe it is.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Optus Outage Leaves Millions of Australians Without Mobile and Internet Services