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Surround sound systems are not cheap, especially if you want to go for flagship options like Bose, Sonos, or JBL. However, one brand offers a complete surround sound system that is still on-par with the rest as far as quality, but offers a much better bang for your buck—that’s Samsung’s HW-Q990F/ZC, and right now it’s 58% off on Woot for a new system. You can get it for $847.99 (originally $1,997.99), the lowest price I’ve seen it on sale.

Samsung HW-Q990F/ZC Soundbar

$847.99
at Woot

$1,997.99
Save $1,150.00

$847.99
at Woot

$1,997.99
Save $1,150.00

The Q990F is a 2025 upgrade on the Q990D, which Samsung released in 2023. It’s not much different except for a few tweaks that were the biggest cons on reviews. The Q990F added HDMI 2.1 with support for 4K at 120 Hz passthrough and VRR, which is ideal for serious gamers who want the lowest input lag possible. Samsung also added Wireless Dolby Atmos with compatible Samsung TVs, meaning you can have uncompressed Atmos audio without needing to hook up the HDMI cable to the eARC, sending it over wifi instead. The subwoofer was also improved with a tighter, more controlled sound. And of course, the overall tuning and audio technology are also better overall.

The Q990F comes with a soundbar, subwoofer, and two rear speakers, and it’s honestly the best surround sound system at this price that you can get. As you can read in PCMag’s “outstanding” review, the system is powerful, elegant, and has impressive surround-sound audio. There is also a useful companion app that brings all of the settings and any tweaks that you can think of needing right on your phone.

Amazon is discontinuing its Amazon One palm recognition ID system for stores later this year, the company informed users. From a report: The company will discontinue Amazon One services at retail businesses on June 3, 2026, according to a support page for the service and email messages to customers. “In response to limited customer adoption, we’re discontinuing Amazon One, our authentication service for facility access and payment,” an Amazon spokesperson said. “All customer data associated with Amazon One will be securely deleted after the service ends.”

The move coincides with a sweeping pullback from Amazon’s physical retail experiments. Amazon announced Tuesday that it’s closing all of its Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh locations, a total of 72 stores nationwide, concentrating its efforts instead on its Whole Foods Market locations and grocery delivery from Amazon.com. Amazon One launched in 2020 as a way to help speed up in-store entry and payments, identifying customers who opted-in and eliminating the need for them to present a credit card to pay. It often worked in conjunction with the company’s Just Walk Out technology, which uses cameras and sensors to let customers avoid using a checkout line.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SpaceX has made a new set of demands on state governments that would ensure Starlink receives federal grant money even when residents don’t purchase Starlink broadband service.

SpaceX said it will provide “all necessary equipment” to receive broadband “at no cost to subscribers requesting service,” which will apparently eliminate the up-front hardware fee for Starlink equipment. But SpaceX isn’t promising lower-than-usual monthly prices to consumers in those subsidized areas. SpaceX pledged to make broadband available for $80 or less a month, plus taxes and fees, to people with low incomes in the subsidized areas. For comparison, the normal Starlink residential prices advertised on its website range from $50 to $120 a month.

SpaceX’s demands would also guarantee that it gets paid by the government even if it doesn’t reserve “large portions” of Starlink network capacity for homes in the areas that are supposed to receive government-subsidized Internet service. Moreover, SpaceX would not be responsible for ensuring that Starlink equipment is installed correctly at each customer location.

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We’ve somehow almost reached the end of January already, which means it’s time for Sony to divulge the list of PlayStation Plus Monthly Games for February. They are Undisputed, Subnautica: Below Zero, Ultros and Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown. If you have a PS Plus subscription on any tier, you can claim these starting on February 3. After claiming them, these games will stay in your library as long as your PS Plus plan remains active. 

Undisputed (PS5) is a 2024 boxing game with dozens of licensed fighters across several weight classes. They include legendary figures like Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Robinson as well as modern greats including Canelo Alvarez and Oleksandr Usyk. 

Subnautica: Below Zero (PS4 and PS5) is a spin-off from adventure survival game Subnautica. It has more land-based areas to explore than the original game and you’ll need to keep an eye on a body temperature meter to make sure you stay warm enough. 

I’ve been meaning to check out Ultros (PS4 and PS5) for a while and its inclusion here is almost enough to make me want to re-subscribe to PS Plus. It’s a Metroidvania with a striking neon palette. As for Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown (PS4), that could be a good way for folks to dip back into the long-running combat flight sim series (or try it for the first time) before Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve arrives later this year.

PS Plus subscribers still have until February 2 to add the Monthly Games for January to their library. Those are Need For Speed Unbound, Disney Epic Mickey: Rebrushed and Core Keeper.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/playstation/februarys-ps-plus-monthly-games-include-undisputed-and-subnautica-below-zero-205100847.html?src=rss

The housing shortages plaguing Western cities today stem partly from the abandonment of a 19th century urban governance model that enabled cities like Berlin, New York and Chicago to expand rapidly while keeping real house prices flat and homes increasingly affordable.

A new analysis by Works in Progress argues that Victorian-era urban management wasn’t laissez-faire but rather a system carefully designed to align private profit with public benefit. Infrastructure monopolies — whether privately franchised, operated as concessions or municipally owned — funded themselves entirely through user fees rather than public subsidies, and were structured so that building more capacity was the path to greater returns.

Landowners enjoyed a fundamental right to build when profitable, and height limits applied uniformly across entire cities rather than varying by neighborhood, meaning dense development remained legal everywhere. The system began collapsing after 1914, however. Inflation proved fatal to self-funding transport because governments found it politically impossible to raise controlled prices year after year. By the 1960s, trams had vanished from Britain, France and the U.S.

Meanwhile, differential zoning gradually banned densification in established neighborhoods, and rent controls decimated private homebuilding in many countries. In Britain, average house prices fell from twelve times earnings in 1850 to four times by 1914. They have since climbed back to nine times earnings. The article argues roughly 80% of postwar price increases trace directly to restrictions on building.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Patreon creators will need to make some changes soon, thanks to Apple. On Wednesday, Patreon said Apple has renewed its requirement that all Patreon creators must move to subscription billing. The deadline to do so is November 1, 2026.

Patreon’s blog post announcing the change made it clear that it had no other choice. “We strongly disagree with this decision,” the company wrote. “Creators need consistency and clarity in order to build healthy, long-term businesses. Instead, creators using legacy billing will now have to endure the whiplash of another policy reversal — the third such change from Apple in the past 18 months.”

Up to this point, Patreon’s billing model has operated in a gray area, allowing its creators to charge fans outside the App Store without paying Apple’s fees. This was because some of the content people were paying for could be consumed in-app, while others couldn’t.

But now Apple has reimposed its subscription mandate, eliminating the gray area. “We know that Apple is serious about enforcing this mandate,” Patreon wrote. “Late last year, they blocked a Patreon app update and made it clear that in order to remain in the App Store, we have to comply with their billing requirement. Because millions of fans use iOS as their primary way to access Patreon and connect with creators, having our app blocked — or not available in the App Store at all — isn’t an option.”

Patreon’s “whiplash” description isn’t hyperbole. Apple first announced the mandate in 2024. At that time, the deadline for all Patreon creators to make the switch was set to November 2025 — one that Patreon grudgingly accepted. But according to the company, Apple told it last May that the original 2025 deadline was no longer in effect. Now, it appears to have reversed that again.

If there’s a silver lining, TechCrunch notes that only 4 percent of Patreon creators are using the affected (legacy) billing models. And fans can still bypass Apple’s fees on iOS by joining via their iPhone’s web browser. Patreon has much more detail for creators in its announcement post.

Chip Somodevilla via Getty Images

As for Apple, well, this familiar role of “Big, Bad App Store Taxman” pales in comparison to some of its other recent headlines. For starters, there was its removal of the ICEBlock app (and another that logged ICE arrest recordings) in October. At least as concerning is an app category that the “Privacy is a human right” company won’t remove. Grok, X and (reportedly) dozens of other apps now allow iPhone owners to “digitally undress” real people, including children. 28 advocacy groups even called on the company to remove them, to no avail.

To top it all off, Tim Cook decided that Saturday — the day Alex Pretti was shot and killed by federal agents — would be a good time to attend the screening of Melania at the White House. He even posed for a selfie with accused rapist Brett Ratner, the film’s director.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/patreon-creators-have-to-switch-to-subscription-billing-by-november-thanks-to-apple-203759852.html?src=rss

Moltbot (formerly known as Clawdbot) is the most viral AI product I’ve seen in a while. The personal AI assistant runs locally and connects via a chat app, like WhatsApp or iMessage. Once you give Moltbot access to your entire device, it can do things on that device for you. This the sort of thing that excites agentic AI pioneers, but worries privacy and security enthusiasts like myself.

And indeed, I have significant concerns about the risks installing Moltbot on your personal machine. Since agentic AI will autonomously perform tasks based on prompts, bad actors can take advantage of the situation by surreptitiously feeding those bots malicious prompts of their own. This is called prompt injection, and it can impact any type of agentic AI system, whether an AI browser, or an AI assistant like Moltbot.

But it’s not just prompt injection that presents an issue for Moltbot users.

Someone has already created a malicious Moltbot extension

As spotted by The Hacker News, Moltbot already has its first malicious extension, dubbed “Clawdbot Agent – AI Coding Assistant” (“clawdbot.clawdbot-agent.”) It seems to have been developed before the bot’s name change. This extension is designed for Visual Studio Code, Microsoft’s open source AI code editor. What’s worse, it was hosted on Microsoft’s official Extension Marketplace, which no doubt gave it legitimacy to Moltbot users looking for a Visual Studio Code extension.

The extension advertised itself as a free AI coding assistant. When you install it, it executes a series of commands that ends up running a remote desktop program (The Hacker News says it’s “ConnectWise ScreenConnect”) on your device. It then connects to a link that lets the bad actor gain remote access to your device. By just installing this extension, you essentially give the hacker the tools to take over your computer from wherever they are.

Luckily, Microsoft has already taken action. The extension is no longer available on the marketplace as of Tuesday. Moltbot has no official Visual Studio Code extension, so assume any you see are illegitimate at best, and malicious at worst. If you did install the extension, researchers have detailed instructions for removing the malware and blocingk any of its processes from running on your device. Of course, to first thing to do is uninstall the extension from Visual Studio Code immediately.

Moltbolt has more security issues too

The Hacker News goes on to highlight findings from security researcher Jamieson O’Reilly, who discovered hundreds of unauthenticated Moltbot instances readily available on the internet. These instances reveal Moltbot users’ configuration data, API keys, OAuth credentials, and even chat histories.

Bad actors could use these instances for prompt injection: They could pretend to be a Moltbot user, and issue their own prompts to that user’s Moltbot AI assistant, or manipulate existing prompts and responses. They could also upload malicious “skills,” or specific collections of context and knowledge, to MoltHub and use them to attack users and steal their data.

Speaking to The Hacker News, security researcher Benjamin Marr explains that the core issue is how Moltbot is designed for “ease of deployment” over a “secure-by-default” set up. You can poke around with Moltbot and install sensitive programs without the bot ever warning you about the security risks. There should be firewalls, credential validation, and sandboxing in the mix, and without those things, the user is at greater risk.

To combat against this, The Hacker News recommends that all Moltbot users running with the default security configurations take the following steps:

• remove any connected service integrations

• check exposed credentials

• set up network controls

• look for any signs of attack

Or, you could do what I’m doing, and avoid Moltbot altogether.

A federal judge in Virginia ruled Tuesday that the City of Norfolk’s use of nearly 200 automated license plate readers (ALPRs) from Flock is constitutional and can continue, dismissing the entire case just days before a bench trial was set to begin.

The case, Schmidt v. City of Norfolk, was originally filed in October 2024 by two Virginians who claimed that their rights were violated when the Flock network of cameras captured their cars hundreds of times, calling the entire setup a “dragnet surveillance program.”

However, in a 51-page ruling, US District Court Judge Mark S. Davis disagreed, finding that the “…plaintiffs are unable to demonstrate that Defendants’ ALPR system is capable of tracking the whole of a person’s movements.”

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For decades, researchers have noted that cancer and Alzheimer’s disease are rarely found in the same person, fuelling speculation that one condition might offer some degree of protection from the other. Nature: Now, a study in mice provides a possible molecular solution to the medical mystery: a protein produced by cancer cells seems to infiltrate the brain, where it helps to break apart clumps of misfolded proteins that are often associated with Alzheimer’s disease. The study, which was 15 years in the making, was published on 22 January in Cell and could help researchers to design drugs to treat Alzheimer’s disease.

“They have a piece of the puzzle,” says Donald Weaver, a neurologist and chemist at the Krembil Research Institute at the University of Toronto in Canada, who was not involved in the study. “It’s not the full picture by any stretch of the imagination. But it’s an interesting piece.” […] A 2020 meta-analysis of data from more than 9.6 million people found that cancer diagnosis was associated with an 11% decreased incidence of Alzheimer’s disease. It has been a difficult relationship to unpick: researchers must control for a variety of external factors. For example, people might die of cancer before they are old enough to develop symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, and some cancer treatments can cause cognitive difficulties, which could obscure an Alzheimer’s diagnosis.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Alarming critics, the acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Madhu Gottumukkala, accidentally uploaded sensitive information to a public version of ChatGPT last summer, Politico reported.

According to “four Department of Homeland Security officials with knowledge of the incident,” Gottumukkala’s uploads of sensitive CISA contracting documents triggered multiple internal cybersecurity warnings designed to “stop the theft or unintentional disclosure of government material from federal networks.”

Gottumukkala’s uploads happened soon after he joined the agency and sought special permission to use OpenAI’s popular chatbot, which most DHS staffers are blocked from accessing, DHS confirmed to Ars. Instead, DHS staffers use approved AI-powered tools, like the agency’s DHSChat, which “are configured to prevent queries or documents input into them from leaving federal networks,” Politico reported.

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The 2026 Winter Olympics will kick off in Milano Cortina, Italy, beginning on Friday, Feb. 6. With more than 3,200 hours of winter sports coverage spread across broadcast, cable, and digital streaming platforms, finding what you want to watch can feel like a full-time job. So here’s where and when you can watch the Olympics.

Watching the Olympics is a deeply personal experience. Some love the technical precision of a perfect luge run; others dig the emotional narrative of an underdog’s journey to the podium; and some just want to catch the meme of the week as it happens. Because everyone’s “perfect Olympics” is unique, I’ve also put together a viewing guide designed for the way you might want to experience the 2026 Games.

How to watch the Olympics on broadcast and cable TV

NBCUniversal has the exclusive rights to show the Olympics in the U.S. this year, and the network is practically going all-Olympics from the opening ceremony on Feb. 6 to the closing on Feb. 22. If you’re watching the Olympics in the old-school “turn on the TV” way, the 2026 Winter Olympics are on broadcast channel NBC and cable channels CNBC and USA Network. If you’re streaming the games, you’ll be doing it from Peacock.

NBC’s broadcast Olympics coverage

During primetime, NBC is showing Primetime in Milan, three hours of curated Olympics coverage, nightly, beginning at 8 p.m. ET/PT, except Super Bowl Sunday, when Primetime in Milan will start at 10:45 p.m. ET.

In the daytime, NBC will be broadcasting five hours of coverage daily focusing mainly on more popular Winter Olympics coverage like snowboarding, skiing, figure skating, and hockey. Daytime Olympics programming will begin at 7 a.m. ET most days, and continue through the early afternoon, depending on the daily lineup.

NBC is also airing a nightly wrap-up of each day’s events after the local news; the Olympics’ opening ceremony on Friday, Feb. 6, at 2 p.m. ET; live coverage of the closing ceremonies at 2:30 p.m. on Feb. 22, with an encore showing at 9 p.m.; and 4K Olympics coverage on Super Bowl Sunday, beginning at 7 a.m. ET.

Cable television Olympics coverage

NBC-owned cable networks USA Network and CNBC will also feature Olympics content during the games.

• USA Network: USA Network will be devoted to Olympics coverage nearly 24/7 during the games, showing a mix of live events and encore showings of past events. Because of the six-hour time difference from Italy to the U.S., USA Network will show live Olympic events nightly beginning around 2 a.m. ET, and feature continuing coverage through the early afternoon.

• CNBC: CNBC is devoted to curling (really). The cable network plans to broadcast a nightly “Best of Curling” show on weeknights at 5 p.m. ET, with long form coverage on weekends.

Where to stream the 2026 Olympics

If you are planning to stream the Olympics, you’ll be doing it on Peacock, NBC’s streaming platform. Peacock will stream every single session of all 116 medal events live, as well as offering full-event replays of every event available on-demand.

How to watch the Olympics if you’re a casual viewer

“I want to be part of the conversation, but I don’t need to watch biathlon at 4 a.m.”

If you want high production values, dramatic stories of inspiring athletes, and exciting contests curated by sports broadcasting pros, the mainstream coverage is for you. Don’t miss the opening ceremonies on Feb. 6, at 2 p.m. ET, and catch as much of NBC’s primetime coverage as you have time for. It’s bound to be packed with crowd-pleasing events, give you lots of background on different athletes, and Olympics breaking news, but without a lot of obscure or boring sports.

Pro tip: Subscribe to the Two Guys, Five Rings podcast; Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang’s Olympics coverage is bound to be hilarious.

How to watch the Olympics if you’re a single-sport fan

“I’m only here for the luge.”

If you religiously follow a single sport in the Olympics, be it hockey or snowboarding, and you really don’t care about, say, inspirational ice-dancer stories, your best bet is Peacock’s Sports Hub, where you can watch every qualifying heat and every medal contest of only the sport you like, either live or on-demand.

Pro tip: Coordinate your calendar with NBC’s interactive schedule to make sure you know when everything is happening.

How to watch the Olympics if you’re a gossip

“Half the fun of the Olympics is dishing about it.”

If the Olympics is better as a shared experience, watch NBC.com’s broadcast coverage in one window, and check out the social media feeds of NBC’s “Creator Collective,” where TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube influencers like Kylie Kelce, Anna Sitar, and Jordan Howlett will be watching along.

Pro tip: Don’t sleep on Reddit communities r/olympics and r/WinterOlympics2026.

How to watch the Olympics if you’re curious

“I’m irrationally passionate about a sport I’d never heard of before today.”

If you love to discover strange new sports, the Winter Olympics are going to be fun. Skip the mainstream coverage on NBC and browse through Peacock’s Sports Hub catalog for sports you’ve never heard of.

Pro tip: Don’t miss the debut of Ski Mountaineering (“SkiMo”), the only brand-new sport at the 2026 Games. It’s a grueling hybrid where athletes who hate ski lifts for some reason hike up steep mountains before carving down high-speed technical descents.

How to watch the Olympics if you’re a completist

“I absolutely cannot get enough Olympics and I want to watch as much as is humanly possible.”

If you have a lot of time on your hands and want to see literally everything, you’ll need Peacock, and to get familiar with its “Discovery Multiview” feature, which lets you watch up to four sporting events at the same time.

Pro tip: Go to the NBC Olympics Full Schedule and use the “My Stuff” feature to build a personalized calendar before the games start to plan your epic Olympic binge.

How to watch the Olympics if you’re a tech-head

“I want to feel the snow in my face without leaving my house.”

If you want the highest resolution, most immersive Olympic experience possible without traveling to Italy, do not miss 4K All-Day on NBC and Peacock on Sunday, Feb. 8 for 17 hours of 4K HDR coverage of both the Olympics and the Super Bowl. And download the Peacock app for your Meta Quest 3 or 3S headset to watch the Olympics in augmented reality, or check out the “spatial cinema” broadcast of the Olympics on your Apple Vision Pro.

Pro tip: NBC is rolling out a new streaming feature called Rinkside Live for Olympic hockey and figure skating. It lets viewers choose from multiple curated feeds of “immersive, never-before-seen views.”

When asked directly whether people actually like Experian, Alex Lintner, the credit bureau’s CEO of Software and Technology, offered an unusual defense in an interview: “First of all, we’re not Palantir, so we don’t do reputation scores.” Speaking on The Verge’s podcast, Lintner conceded that consumers who have poor credit scores through “life’s circumstances” sometimes direct their frustration at Experian, though he argued the company enables vital access to credit for 247 million Americans.

The 10-year company veteran said Experian has built its own large language model and about 200 AI agents for internal use, but consumer data remains entirely walled off from public AI systems. On security, Lintner said Experian hasn’t experienced a data breach in a decade — the last occurred two weeks into his tenure. When competitor Equifax suffered its massive breach, Equifax actually paid Experian to help protect affected consumers’ identities.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Not to be outdone by Apple’s “Lockdown Mode,” Meta is rolling out new security features for WhatsApp designed to protect high-risk users—journalists, activists, and government officials, for example—from cyber attacks. Strict Account Settings is a “lockdown-style” mode that builds on the platform’s existing end-to-end encryption, adding stronger privacy features and additional restrictions against unknown contacts.

For most WhatsApp users, this level of lockdown is overkill. However, people with access to sensitive data that is potentially valuable to threat actors actually have been targeted with spyware campaigns through messaging platforms like WhatsApp, so for users like that, it may be a lifesaver. (In the last year, WhatsApp has also patched multiple zero-day exploits that allowed spyware to proliferate.)

As noted, the new WhatsApp settings are similar to Apple’s Lockdown Mode, an OS-level feature that blocks attachments, link previews, and communication from unknown contacts alongside some other settings changes. It also disables wired connections to external devices and a range of web features. Android’s Advanced Protection offers similar functionality.

How WhatsApp’s Strict Account Settings protects high-risk users

Strict Account Settings automatically enables existing privacy and security settings and adds a host of restrictions to users’ communication and visibility on WhatsApp.

• Two-step verification and security notifications, which alert you if a contact’s security code changes, are turned on.

• Link previews are disabled

• High volumes of messages from unknown accounts are blocked

• Only your contacts or those added to a pre-established list can see information about you, including your last seen and online, profile photo, about details, and links on your profile.

• Only known contacts or those on your pre-established list can add you to groups.

How to enable Strict Account Settings on WhatsApp

These controls can be enabled by going to Settings > Privacy > Advanced and toggling on Strict account settings. Settings must be changed on your primary device and cannot be updated on the web. Note that the feature will roll out gradually over the coming weeks, and may not be immediately available.

On January 12, EA shut down the official servers for Anthem, making Bioware’s multiplayer sci-fi adventure completely unplayable for the first time since its troubled 2019 launch. Last week, though, the Anthem community woke up to a new video showing the game at least partially loading on what appears to be a simulated background server.

The people behind that video—and the Anthem revival project that made it possible—told Ars they were optimistic about their efforts to coerce EA’s temperamental Frostbite engine into running the game without access to EA’s servers. That said, the team also wants to temper expectations that may have risen a bit too high in the wake of what is just a proof-of-concept video.

“People are getting excited [about the video], and naturally people are going to get their hopes up,” project administrator Laurie told Ars. “I don’t want to be the person that’s going to have to deal with the aftermath if it turns out that we can’t actually get anywhere.”

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There are reports that a legitimate Microsoft email address — which Microsoft explicitly says customers should add to their allow list — is delivering scam spam. ArsTechnica: The emails originate from no-reply-powerbi@microsoft.com, an address tied to Power BI. The Microsoft platform provides analytics and business intelligence from various sources that can be integrated into a single dashboard. Microsoft documentation says that the address is used to send subscription emails to mail-enabled security groups. To prevent spam filters from blocking the address, the company advises users to add it to allow lists.

According to an Ars reader, the address on Tuesday sent her an email claiming (falsely) that a $399 charge had been made to her. âoeIt provided a phone number to call to dispute the transaction. A man who answered a call asking to cancel the sale directed me to download and install a remote access application, presumably so he could then take control of my Mac or Windows machine (Linux wasn’t allowed),” she said.

Online searches returned a dozen or so accounts of other people reporting receiving the same email. Some of the spam was reported on Microsoft’s own website. Sarah Sabotka, a threat researcher at security firm Proofpoint, said the scammers are abusing a Power Bi function that allows external email addresses to be added as subscribers for the Power Bi reports. The mention of the subscription is buried at the very bottom of the message, where it’s easy to miss.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Music hardware and software manufacturer Native Instruments has entered into preliminary insolvency proceedings, according to a report by Create Digital Music. This is the company behind iconic software like Massive, Traktor and Kontakt and hardware like Maschine+. Native Instruments also owns the brands iZotope, Brainworx and Plugin Alliance.

We don’t have many specifics as to what this entails and what the future of the company will look like. We do know that an administrator has been appointed to handle restructuring and, potentially, to sell off existing assets. Native Instruments employs hundreds of people and their fates also remain uncertain.

A private equity firm called Francisco Partners owns a majority stake in the company. It also owns majority stakes in entities like GoodRX and Verifone, among others. This isn’t the first time Native Instruments has been forced into major restructuring. The company experienced plenty of layoffs and uncertainty between 2019 and 2020 before being purchased by private equity.

Again, we have no idea how this will shake out. It’s possible that new investors will jump on board and it goes back to business as usual. It’s also possible everything will be scrapped for parts and sold to the highest bidder.

We do know that subsidiary Plugin Alliance seems to be unaffected. It issued a statement on Facebook saying that it isn’t involved with the proceedings and that operations will continue as normal. This means new plugins will be released, along with updates for current software.

Everything else is still up in the air. This is troubling for those who have heavily invested in the company’s ecosystem of products. I’m one of them. Any hope I had for a hardware refresh of the Maschine+ just went out the window.

If the company’s robust line of software goes up for sale, Akai is likely the best bet. It has already begun incorporating Native Instruments software into MPC machines.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/audio/native-instruments-enters-into-insolvency-proceedings-leaving-its-future-uncertain-183206826.html?src=rss