prisoninmate shares a report from 9to5Linux: Dubbed Questing Quokka, Ubuntu 25.10 is powered by the latest and greatest Linux 6.17 kernel series for top-notch hardware support and ships with the latest GNOME 49 desktop environment, defaulting to a Wayland-only session for the Ubuntu Desktop flavor, meaning there’s no other session to choose from the login screen. Ubuntu Desktop also ships with two new apps, namely GNOME’s Loupe instead of Eye of GNOME as the default image viewer, as well as Ptyxis instead of GNOME Terminal as the default terminal emulator. Also, there’s a new update notification that will be shown with options to open Software Updater or install updates directly.’

Other highlights of Ubuntu 25.10 include sudo-rs as the default implementation of sudo, Dracut as the default initramfs-tools, Chrony as the default NTP (Network Time Protocol) client, Rust Coreutils as the default implementation of GNU Core Utilities, and TPM-backed FDE (Full Disk Encryption) recovery key management. Moreover, Ubuntu 25.10 adds NVIDIA Dynamic Boost support and enables suspend-resume support in the proprietary NVIDIA graphics driver to prevent corruption and freezes when waking an NVIDIA desktop. For Intel users, Ubuntu 25.10 introduces support for new Intel integrated and discrete GPUs. Ubuntu 25.10 is available for download here.

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This is a video of LEGO builder STRIKE17 Builds providing a tour of the Disneyland Haunted Mansion ride he created. The amount of details inside and out are very impressive. I felt like I was practically riding the ride! Which is great considering I just read an article that Disneyland increased their single-day, single-park adult ticket price to $224 during peak season (specifically, the weeks of Christmas and New Years). And that’s for anybody over age 10! Non-adults (anybody who’s still single digits in Disney’s eyes) are a whopping $10 less. Talk about a racket. “You’ve been kicked out of Disney, haven’t you?” And they didn’t give me my money or flask back!

YouTube has launched a “second chance” program allowing some creators previously banned for COVID-19 or election misinformation to apply for new channels, as long as their violations were tied to policies that have since been deprecated. Bans for copyright or severe misconduct still remain permanent. The Verge reports: Under political pressure, the company had said last month that it was going to set up this pilot program for “a subset of creators” and “channels terminated for policies that have been deprecated.” […] The new pilot program kicks off today and will roll out to “eligible creators” over the “next several weeks,” YouTube says. “We’ll consider several factors when evaluating requests for new channels, like whether the creator committed particularly severe or persistent violations of our Community Guidelines or Terms of Service, or whether the creator’s on- or off-platform activity harmed or may continue to harm the YouTube community.”

The pilot won’t be available if you were banned for copyright infringement or for violating YouTube’s Creator Responsibility policies, the company says. If you deleted your YouTube channel or Google account, you won’t be able to request a new channel “at this time.” And YouTube notes that if your channel has been banned, you won’t be eligible to apply for a new one until one year after it was terminated. “We know many terminated creators deserve a second chance — YouTube has evolved and changed over the past 20 years, and we’ve had our share of second chances to get things right with our community too,” YouTube says. “Our goal is to roll this out to creators who are eligible to apply over the coming months, and we appreciate the patience as we ramp up, carefully review requests, and learn as we go.”

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An October meeting of a key federal vaccine advisory committee has been canceled without explanation, sparing the evidence-based childhood vaccination schedule from more erosion—at least for now.

The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was planning to meet on October 22 and 23, which would have been the committee’s fourth meeting this year. But the meeting schedule was updated in the past week to remove those dates and replace them with “2025 meeting, TBD.”

Ars Technica contacted the Department of Health and Human Services to ask why the meeting was canceled. HHS press secretary Emily Hilliard offered no explanation, only saying that the “official meeting dates and agenda items will be posted on the website once finalized.”

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The Programmed Data Processor-1 (PDP-1) is perhaps most recognizable as the home of Spacewar!, one of the world’s first video games, but as the video above proves, it also works as an enormous and very slow iPod, too.

In the video, Boards of Canada’s “Olson” is playing off of paper tape that’s carefully fed and programmed into the PDP-1 by engineer and Computer History Museum docent Peter Samson. It’s the final product of Joe Lynch’s PDP-1.music project, an attempt to translate the short and atmospheric song into something the PDP-1 can reproduce. 

As Lynch writes on GitHub, the “Harmony Compiler” used to translate “Olson” to paper tape was actually created by Samson to play audio through four of computer’s lightbulbs while he was a student at MIT in the 1960s. He used it to recreate classical music, but it’ll work with ’90s electronic music in a pinch, too.

“While these bulbs were originally intended to provide program status information to the computer operator,” Lynch writes, “Peter repurposed four of these light bulbs into four square wave generators (or four 1-bit DACs, put another way), by turning the bulbs on and off at audio frequencies.” The signal from each bulb is then downmixed into stereo audio channels, transcribed via an emulator and merged into a single file that has to be manually punched into the paper tape that’s fed into the PDP-1.

It’s a laborious process for playing even the simplest of songs, but it’s worth it to hear Boards of Canada’s already nostalgic music from an even older classic computer.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/audio/someone-programmed-a-65-year-old-computer-to-play-boards-of-canadas-olson-220857441.html?src=rss

Scraping the open web for AI training data can have its drawbacks. On Thursday, researchers from Anthropic, the UK AI Security Institute, and the Alan Turing Institute released a preprint research paper suggesting that large language models like the ones that power ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude can develop backdoor vulnerabilities from as few as 250 corrupted documents inserted into their training data.

That means someone tucking certain documents away inside training data could potentially manipulate how the LLM responds to prompts, although the finding comes with significant caveats.

The research involved training AI language models ranging from 600 million to 13 billion parameters on datasets scaled appropriately for their size. Despite larger models processing over 20 times more total training data, all models learned the same backdoor behavior after encountering roughly the same small number of malicious examples.

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This is a series of sexy Sesame Street Muppet inspired Halloween costumes available from Yandy. Guaranteed to win an honorable mention in any costume contest, they’re available in “Cookie Jar Monster”, “Big And Fluffy Yellow Bird”, “Tickled In Red Furry Monster” and “Grouchy Trash Can Cutie”, varieties. I got the Cookie Monster one for my girlfriend just for the cookie bra alone. Just this morning I was wondering what my life was missing, and the very same day I find it! COOKIE BRAS. Somebody make a note in the history books. A doodle of some b00bs in the margin should suffice.

It’s getting near Halloween, the perfect time to stream some horror movies. I dug up 15 of the scariest, weirdest, freakiest, and funniest flicks from horror-only streaming service Shudder. I’m leaving off the obvious choices like Psycho and Halloween—if you subscribe to Shudder, you’ve probably seen all the “classics” at least twice—to focus on movies guaranteed to make you hide your eyes, laugh out loud, or say “what even is this?”

A Dark Song (2016)

If you like intelligent, slow-burn horror, check out A Dark Song. Like its characters, the debut feature from director Liam Gavin goes places few films dare to tread. Sophia is a grieving mother whose longing for her murdered child compels her to hire Joseph, a self-proclaimed occultist, to try and bring him back through an arcane ritual. Locked in a house together for months, the pair enact a series of grueling rites that grows increasingly dreadful.

Mads (2024)

Mads feels dangerous. This frantic nightmare of a movie follows a group of fast-living French teenagers who snort a drug that turns them into bloodthirsty killers. Or maybe they’ve been infected with a contagion, and the armed troops hunting them are trying to stop a world-ending event. Or maybe the mayhem is all a product of their drug-addled imaginations. Whatever the case, the story unfolds in a single frenzied take that grows more and more unhinged as the world slides off its moorings.

The Crazy Family (1985)

If you want to watch something obscure but unforgettable, check out The Crazy Family. Until recently, this Japanese horror/comedy was all but unknown in the United States: after a limited theatrical run in the mid 1980s, the violent, pitch-dark family comedy was never released on any format here. But it’s a great film. The social commentary in this tale of a family becoming unglued just as they achieve material success probably landed harder in 1980s Japan, but it’s still a hilarious and unnerving family portrait unlike anything else ever made.

Oddity (2024)

Unlike some movies on this list, Oddity doesn’t try to reinvent the horror wheel. It’s a good, old-fashioned gothic ghost story about a blind psychic searching for the man who murdered her sister. Oddity is filled with creepy characters, unexpected plot twists, and a palpable sense of rising dread that’s almost suffocating until it’s released in the finale. It may not be the most novel movie, but Oddity’s intelligent writing, confident performances, and taut direction add up to a wonderfully creepy little scare flick.

Late Night With the Devil (2023)

This is one of the best horror films I’ve seen in the last decade. Late Night With the Devil purports to be the final broadcast of 1970s late night talk show Night Owls With Jack Delroy. To win his perpetual ratings war with Johnny Carson, Delroy invites a possessed girl to his Halloween broadcast. She proves to be a terrible guest. Late Night With the Devil‘s innovative found footage concept, slavish attention to period detail, and top-rate performances (particularly David Dastmalchian’s starring turn) add up to a must-see horror movie.

Irréversible (2003)

Cinematic provocateur Gaspar Noé’s harrowing masterpiece Irréversible is the scariest movie on this list, and maybe the scariest movie ever made. It’s not scary in a fun way—there’s nothing fun about Irreversible—it’s scary because its violence feels real. We’ve all seen countless brutal crimes in movies and on TV, but the atrocities in Irréversible make the viewer feel the queasy, empty, insanity that you should feel if you see someone truly harmed. Don’t put it on for a Halloween party, but if you want to go to a very dark place, Irréversible will take you there and make you sorry you asked to go.

Grabbers (2013)

Grabbers is the opposite of Irréversible. Delightful from frame one to frame last, Grabbers is a hilarious and scary tribute to monster movies, the soul of Ireland, and the power of positive drinking. When gooey, murderous tentacle monsters invade an isolated Irish village, the townspeople learn that the only way to keep from being grabbed and eaten is to poison their blood with alcohol, so everyone locks themselves into the local to get proper fluthered, meanwhile, the grabbers are gathering outside. Good horror-comedies are an almost impossible tonal tightrope walk, but Grabbers makes balancing between scary and funny look effortless.

The House of the Devil (2009)

The House of the Devil is set around 1983, and if you didn’t know better, you’d think it was shot in the early ’80s too. Tai West’s first feature has a classic setup: College student Samantha takes a babysitting job at a remote country house, and the weird creeps who hire her reveal that they don’t actually have a baby, but Mother is sleeping upstairs, and she should not be disturbed. From there, the slow-burn tension and dread builds. It’s a master class in horror movie pacing and mood that you shouldn’t miss.

Slaxx (2021)

Given the number of horror movies like Death Bed: The Bed that Eats, it’s not hard to believe that someone shot a horror movie about a possessed pair of jeans, but that Slaxx is actually good is a huge surprise. A horror-comedy that satirizes the fashion industry, modern employment, and horror movies themselves, Slaxx’s rises above the “Attack of the Killer Whatever” genre by managing to actually be both clever and scary.

Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (2021)

If you’re the type who takes horror seriously, you’ll love Woodlands Dark & Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror. This exhaustively researched, three-and-a-half-hour-long documentary takes a deep dive into horror heavy on rural settings, paganism, and the clash between ancient and modern belief. It’s the kind of movie that will make horror nerds pull out a notebook: if you’re a fan of Midsommar, The Wicker Man (original only), and/or The Witch, Woodlands Dark will introduce you to the dozens of movies that inspired them.

Frankie Freako (2024)

Self-aware, campy parody movies are difficult to pull off, but Frankie Freako sticks the landing perfectly. An homage to rubber-puppet movies of the 1980s like Gremlins, Ghoulies, and Critters, Frankie Freako tells the story of a nerdy square who invites a gang of “freakos” into his life, with disastrous results. Filled with inventively cheesy practical effects and propelled by a funny script and great performances, this nostalgia trip is definitely worth a watch.

In a Violent Nature (2024)

If you’ve even heard of slasher movies, you know the plot of In a Violent Nature already: a masked lunatic in the woods murders a group of teenagers in gruesomely inventive ways. But In a Violent Nature turns the genre upside-down by telling that tale exclusively from the point-of-view of the killer. It’s not exactly a scary movie—slasher movies aren’t suspenseful to the slasher; what’s he got to be scared of?—but it is a fascinating and hypnotic film that wins bonus points for one of the most gruesomely original kills ever filmed. (If you’ve seen it, you know the one I’m talking about.)

Dog Soldiers (2002)

If The Howling and The Evil Dead had a baby, it would be Dog Soldiers. When a squad of hapless British soldiers on a training exercise in the Scottish Highlands find themselves trapped in a remote cabin by a pack of murderous werewolves, things go off-the-chain crazy. Dog Soldiers blends claustrophobic survival horror, dry British humor, and just enough story so you care about who is getting eaten, and the result is an all-time favorite for fans of action-horror.

V/H/S: Halloween (2025)

The eighth(!) movie in the V/H/S franchise may be the best. A collection of six found footage shorts loosely themed around Halloween, V/H/S Halloween comes off like a group of talented filmmakers were given total freedom to shoot their most twisted visions. The tone veers wildly with each short, from the horror-comedy in Casper Kelly‘s “Fun Size” to Alex Ross Perry’s grueling and bleak “KidPrint,” but the quality is consistently high, putting V/H/S Halloween a cut above most anthology movies.

Rare Exports (2010)

It’s not going to be October forever, so consider Rare Exports a bridge between Halloween and Christmas. In it, a mining company digs an ancient frozen corpse from beneath the ice in Northern Finland, but when they melt him, they learn he’s not dead, and he’s not a man. He’s an elf and he’s bringing death instead of toys, especially when he learns the mining company is also defrosting his terrifying boss: Santa.

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It’s scary how realistic AI-generated videos are getting. What’s even scarier, however, is how accessible the tools to create these videos are. Using something like OpenAI’s Sora app, people can create hyper-realistic short-form videos of just about anything they want—including real people, like celebrities, friends, or even themselves.

OpenAI knows the risks involved with an app that makes generating realistic videos this easy. As such, the company places a watermark on any Sora generation you create via the app. That way, when you’re scrolling throughout your social media feeds, if you see a little Sora logo with a cute cloud with eyes bouncing around, you know it’s AI-generated.

You can’t trust a Sora watermark

My immediate worry when OpenAI announced this app was that people would find a way to remove the watermark, sowing confusion across the internet. I wasn’t wrong: There are already plenty of options out there for interested parties who want to make their AI slop even more realistic. But what I didn’t expect was the opposite: people who want to add the Sora watermark to real videos, to make them look as if they were created with AI.

I was recently scrolling—or, perhaps, doomscrolling—on X when I started seeing some of these videos, like this one featuring Apple executive Craig Federighi: The post says “sora is getting so good,” and includes the Sora watermark, so I assumed someone made a cameo of Federighi in the app and posted it on X. To my surprise, however, the video is simply pulled from one of Apple’s pre-recorded WWDC events—one where Federighi parkours around Apple HQ.

Later, I saw this clip, which also uses a Sora watermark. At first glance, you might be fooled into thinking it’s an OpenAI product. But look closer, and you can tell the clip uses real people: The shots are too perfect, without the fuzziness or glitching that you tend to see from AI video generation. This clip is simply spoofing the way Sora tends to generate multi-shot clips of people talking. (Astute viewers may also notice the watermark is a little larger and more static than the real Sora watermark.)

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As it turns out, the account that posted that second clip also made a tool for adding a Sora watermark to any video. They don’t explain the thinking or purpose behind the tool, but it’s definitely real. And even if this tool didn’t exist, I’m sure it wouldn’t be too hard to edit a Sora watermark into a video, especially if you weren’t concerned about replicating the movement of Sora’s official watermark.

To be clear, people were already posting like this before adding the watermark tool. The joke is to say you made something with Sora, but post a popular or infamous clip instead—say, Drake’s Sprite ad from 15 years ago, Taylor Swift dancing at The Eras Tour, or an entire Sonic the Hedgehog movie. It’s a funny meme, especially when it’s obvious that the video wasn’t made by Sora.

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Real or not real?

But this is an important reminder to be constantly vigilant when scrolling through videos on your feeds. You have to be on the lookout for both clips that aren’t real, as well as clips that are actually real, but are being advertised as AI-generated. There are a lot of implications here. Sure, it’s funny to slap a Sora watermark on a viral video, but what happens when someone adds the watermark to a real video of illegal activity? “Oh, that video isn’t real. Any videos you see of it without the watermark were tampered with.”

At the moment, it doesn’t seem like anyone has figured out how to perfectly replicate the Sora watermark, so there will be signs if someone actually tries to pass a real video off as AI. But this is still all a bit concerning, and I don’t know what the solution could be. Maybe we’re heading towards a future in which internet videos are simply treated as untrustworthy across the board. If you can’t determine what’s real or fake, why bother trying?

The Entertainment Software Association has released its Power of Play report, which presents a snapshot of who is playing video games, and why, all around the world. There are a lot of interesting data points here from more than 24,000 respondents, all of whom are older than 16 and play at least weekly. The doubters who think gaming is just for kids may be surprised to learn that the average age of the respondents is 41 years old, and the gender split is nearly even between men and women.

One of the most intriguing aspects to the report were the benefits people said they received from playing games. The top answer was that games offered mental stimulation, which 81 percent of the respondents said. Eighty percent said games provided stress relief, 73 percent said games made them feel happier and 64 percent said games connected them with other people which helped them feel less isolated or lonely. 

ESA

And although having fun was the top reason respondents gave for playing (66 percent), they also said gaming could improve their skills. Seventy-seven percent said gaming increased creativity, 76 percent said it improved problem-solving and 74 percent said gaming upped both cognitive skills and teamwork or collaboration.

The report also points to how popular mobile gaming still is. Overall, 55 percent of the respondents said mobile was their favorite gaming platform. Half of the respondents under age 35 play on mobile, and an impressive 61 percent of the over 50 gamers also play on mobile.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-esas-power-of-play-report-paints-a-portrait-of-the-the-worlds-gamers-205105064.html?src=rss

Doug Whitney carries a genetic mutation that guaranteed he would develop Alzheimer’s disease in his late forties or early fifties. His mother and nine of her thirteen siblings died from the disease. His oldest brother died at 45. The mutation has decimated his family for generations. Whitney is now 76 and remains cognitively healthy. The New York Times has a fascinating long read on Whitney and things happening around him.

Scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have studied Whitney for 14 years. They extract his cerebrospinal fluid and conduct brain scans during his periodic visits from Washington State. His brain contains heavy amyloid deposits but almost no tau tangles in regions associated with dementia. Tau accumulation correlates directly with cognitive decline. Whitney accumulated tau only in his left occipital lobe, an area that does not play a major role in Alzheimer’s.

Researchers identified several possibly protective factors in Whitney’s biology. His immune system produces a lower inflammatory response than other mutation carriers. He has unusually high levels of heat shock proteins, which prevent proteins from misfolding. Scientists believe his decade working in Navy engine rooms at temperatures reaching 110 degrees may have driven this accumulation. He also carries three gene variants his afflicted relatives lack. His son Brian inherited the mutation and remains asymptomatic at 43. Brian received anti-amyloid drugs in clinical trials. Researchers published their findings on Whitney in Nature Medicine. They described the study as a call for other scientists to help solve the case.

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If Hollywood has taught us anything, it’s that a blockbuster that makes bank will get a sequel (or seven). Enter A Minecraft Movie, with its surprisingly effective humor and $957 million box office payday. (Who had “Jack Black will anchor a nearly billion-dollar movie” on their 2025 bingo card?) So, it’s no surprise that Warner Bros. has officially greenlit a sequel.

Variety reports that Warner Bros. has penciled in the sequel for a July 23, 2027, premiere date. That would place it around two years after the original, which is the second-highest-grossing film of the year so far. (Disney’s Lilo & Stitch is in first, with a cool $1.03 billion at the box office.)

Warner Bros. / X

The sequel will reportedly bring back director Jared Hess. The Napoleon Dynamite creator will also co-write the screenplay with Chris Galletta. Producers are said to include Mary Parent, Cale Boyter, Roy Lee, Eric McLeod, Kayleen Walters, Torfi Frans Ólafsson and Jason Momoa.

Engadget was among the many publications taken aback by how good A Minecraft Movie was. After all, a film about an open-ended building game, starring one of the leads of the crummy Borderlands, didn’t sound promising. But we found it surprisingly funny, with just the right degree of winking self-awareness. On top of that, Devindra Hardawar said it “delivers a decent message about championing creativity in a world that wants to beat down free-thinking non-conformists.” Amen to that.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/a-minecraft-movie-is-getting-a-minecraft-sequel-203509569.html?src=rss

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Last week, Peloton unveiled a fleet of new equipment and major software updates to go along with it. The updates immediately reflected on the Peloton app and the interfaces of the company’s existing at-home workout equipment, so even if you don’t upgrade to a new Bike or Tread, you’ll still benefit. One of the biggest updates is the new “personalized plan,” which uses information based on your preferred workout types, goals, and available times to create a weekly workout schedule for you. I tested it for a week and found it a lot easier to use than I was expecting.

What the Peloton personalized plan does

With the new update, you can log into the Peloton app on your mobile device and you’ll see the personalized plan option right at the top. Tapping it brings you to a series of questions about your goals (like gaining strength or supporting weight loss or maintenance), what types of exercises you prefer (like cycling or walking), how experienced you are at working out, and how many days per week you can devote to exercise. There’s even a question about what you’d like to do on rest and recovery days, like stretching, meditating, or yoga. You can change your answers at any time.

Once you fill it all out, the app generates your personal plan, which updates every Monday and includes something to do each day, even if it’s a rest day. My original plan included cardio on Monday, upper body and core work on Tuesday, recovery on Wednesday, intervals on Thursday, lower body and core on Friday, a full-body day on Saturday, and a rest day on Sunday.

Credit: Peloton

After the plan is generated based on your inputs, you’ll always find it at the top of the screen when you open the app. Your suggested classes for the day will appear there, but you can tap See your weekly plan to pull up the full schedule. You can tap the classes recommended for the day to start working out or work ahead or backward. It’s not super rigid; it’s more of a broad overview of all the things your week should include to align with your goals, scheduled in a way that makes the most sense. But you can override whatever you want.

Credit: Peloton

For instance, you don’t have to take a certain class if you don’t want to. It recommends particular cycling classes to me frequently, but I’ve found that any cycling class I take “counts” toward completing a personalized plan class. The other day, I took a yoga class in a studio and used my Peloton app to track a non-Peloton strength workout. To my surprise, it counted that as one of my “plan” classes for the day, since I was supposed to do strength that day. I didn’t do the exact class it recommended, but that didn’t matter.

Why I like this more than I thought I would

I am a big fan of my app streaks, as gamifying the tasks I need to do every day motivates me a lot. (I have a 206-day streak on Peloton right now, for the record.) I was initially worried the personalized plan would be too structured and throw me off. Would I be penalized for not doing cardio on a day it told me to? Would this somehow affect my streak? The answers are no. There is no penalty for not following the plan. In fact, it’s quite flexible. Like I said, any workout you do can count toward the plan, not just the workouts it suggests. Moreover, it doesn’t matter if you take a class or track a workout that doesn’t count toward it. You’re still in charge of what you use the app for and how you work out. This is just meant to help you schedule a little better.

After announcing its intentions to make an XR device in 2023, and revealing the design and intended use-cases for the headset alongside the announcement of Android XR in 2024, Samsung has shared precious few details about Project Moohan. A new leak from Android Headlines is set to change that, detailing not only the specs of Samsung’s new headset, but also a final name and new controller accessories ahead of the device’s rumored launch later this fall.

Samsung’s Project Moohan — officially called “Samsung Galaxy XR” per Android Headlines — is a marriage of sorts between the discontinued Meta Quest Pro and an Apple Vision Pro. It features an adjustable headband, primarily acts as passthrough goggles to the world around you and supports an external battery pack. While Samsung’s demos of the Project Moohan focused on the headset’s ability to accept voice commands and track eye and hand movements through built-in microphones and cameras, Android Headlines reports the headset will also support two controller accessories that look a lot like Meta’s Touch Plus controllers for the Quest 3.

Android Headlines

More expected are the internals and software experience on the new device. Project Moohan will use a Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 chip to power its One UI-ified version of Android XR, just as Qualcomm promised when it announced the new processor in 2024. Samsung appears to be taking a lighter touch when it comes to software. Screenshots shared by Android Headlines show an app grid with the company’s browser, photos and camera apps, but the rest lines up with what Google’s shown of Android XR. 

The headset will also reportedly feature one high-resolution 4K micro-OLED screen per eye, as previously rumored by Korean publication The Elec, and around a two hours of battery life, which is comparable to the Vision Pro. Importantly, Project Moohan is also lighter. The headset reportedly weighs 545 grams, a good bit less than the over 600-gram Apple headset.

The only thing really missing now is a price for Project Moohan and a release date. Samsung shared in its Q2 2025 earnings that it still expected to ship the headset in 2025, but hasn’t announced an event to introduce the new device. Whenever it does launch, it sounds like it’ll be expensive. In August 2025, rumors pointed to Project Moohan costing anywhere from 2,500,000 to 4,000,000 Korean won (around $1,700 to $2,800).

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ar-vr/the-final-details-of-samsungs-android-xr-headset-have-been-all-but-confirmed-200915560.html?src=rss

Dave W. Plummer, the Microsoft developer who created Task Manager and helped build Windows Product Activation, has revealed the origins of Windows XP’s most notorious product key. The alphanumeric string FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8 was not cracked through clever hacking but leaked as a legitimate volume licensing key five weeks before XP’s October 2001 release.

A warez group distributed the key alongside special corporate installation media. Windows Product Activation generated hardware IDs from system components and sent them to Microsoft for validation. The leaked volume licensing key bypassed this entirely. The system recognized it as corporate licensing and skipped phone-home activation. Users could install XP without activation prompts or 30-day timers. Microsoft later blacklisted the key.

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New York Comic Con (NYCC) has kicked off with an extended teaser for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, a new Game of Thrones spinoff series based on George R.R. Martin’s novella series, Tales of Dunk and Egg.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms adapts the first novella in the series, The Hedge Knight, and is set 50 years after the events of House of the Dragon. Per the official premise:

A century before the events of Game of Thrones, two unlikely heroes wandered Westeros: a young, naïve but courageous knight, Ser Duncan the Tall, and his diminutive squire, Egg. Set in an age when the Targaryen line still holds the Iron Throne and the last dragon has not yet passed from living memory, great destinies, powerful foes and dangerous exploits all await these improbable and incomparable friends.

Peter Claffey co-stars as Ser Duncan the Tall, aka a hedge knight named “Dunk,” along with Dexter Sol Ansell as Prince Aegon Targaryen, aka “Egg,” a child prince and Dunk’s squire. The main cast also includes Finn Bennett as Egg’s older brother, Prince Aerion “Brightflame” Targaryen; Bertie Carvel as Egg’s uncle, Prince Baelor “Breakspear” Targaryen, heir to the Iron Throne; Tanzyn Crawford as a Dornish puppeteer named Tanselle; Daniel Ings as Ser Lyonel “Laughing Storm” Baratheon, heir to House Baratheon; and Sam Spruell as Prince Maekar Targaryen, Egg’s father.

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For gamers of a certain age, gibberish character sequences like idkfa, torg, ABACABB, and UUDDLRLRBA are akin to long-lost magical incantations. They evoke an era where game developers frequently and routinely let players use cheat codes to customize their gameplay experience with everything from infinite health and instant level selection to full debug menus or gigantic anime-style giant-headed avatars. There were even external cheat devices that let players hack console games with cheat codes the developers never intended.

While the cheat code’s heyday is long in the past, the idea of letting players manipulate their gameplay experiences in similar ways is coming back into fashion for some developers. Last month, Square Enix announced that upcoming Switch 2 and Xbox ports of Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade would include new “streamlined progression” features. As the name implies, the new options menu will give players the opportunity to blaze through the game with infinite health, magic, and money, quicker leveling, maximum damage attacks, and more.

“Constant Max HP” is a funny way to spell and pronounce “god mode.”
Credit:
Reddit / Square Enix

While some responded negatively to what they derisively called a “cheat mode,” director Naoki Hamaguchi defended the new options in a recent interview with Automaton. “Personally, I like to try many different games just to keep myself up to date, but I don’t really have the time, so I only get so far,” he said. “I personally believe that, with digital entertainment today, the player should have the choice in how they interact with content. That’s why I pushed for it.”

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A few weeks ago, Google told US Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) that it would allow creators banned for COVID and election misinformation to rejoin the platform. It didn’t offer many details in the letter, but now YouTube has explained the restoration process. YouTube’s “second chances” are actually more expansive than the letter made it seem. Going forward, almost anyone banned from YouTube will have an opportunity to request a new channel. The company doesn’t guarantee approval, but you can expect to see plenty of banned creators back on Google’s video platform in the coming months.

This program appears much broader than Google’s letter to Jordan suggested. YouTube will now allow any banned creator to request reinstatement, but this is separate from appealing a ban. If a channel is banned, creators continue to have the option of appealing the ban. If successful, their channel comes back as if nothing happened. After one year, creators will now have the “second chance” option.

“We know many terminated creators deserve a second chance,” the blog post reads. The option for getting a new channel will appear in YouTube Studio on the desktop, and Google expects to begin sending out these notices in the coming months. However, anyone terminated for copyright violations is out of luck—Google does not forgive such infringement as easily as it does claiming that COVID is a hoax.

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