Surely I wasn’t the only one caught off guard that this trailer featuring Milo Ventimiglia, a cybernetic butterfly and a tentacly upside-down hell world turned out to be the announcement of Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, right? Nevertheless, that just happened at the conclusion of the Xbox Games Showcase, and Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 is officially on the way. Today’s teaser comes ahead of an official reveal that’s slated for this summer.

The game is set in the year 2035, when “the world is on the brink of chaos, ravaged by conflict and psychological warfare following the narrative events of Black Ops 2 and Black Ops 6.” According to Activision, it’s “the first-ever consecutive release within the series, set more than 40 years after the events of Black Ops 6.” It’s all kinds of futuristic, and will see David Mason and crew facing “a manipulative enemy who weaponizes fear above all else.”

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 will be available on Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, Xbox PC, Xbox Cloud, Xbox Play Anywhere, Battle.net, Steam, PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4. Xbox Game Pass subscribers will also get it on launch day.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/xbox/heres-our-first-look-at-call-of-duty-black-ops-7-184709483.html?src=rss

Asobo Studio announced at the Xbox Games Showcase that its new entry in the Plague Tale series is a prequel set 15 years before its last game. Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy is focused on the smuggler Sophia from A Plague Tale: Requiem, and is scheduled to be released in 2026.

Based on the brief description from the game’s trailer, Resonance follows a young Sophia as she “seeks her independence as a fierce plunderer in the unforgiving world of the 14th century.” The trailer shows Sophia on the run, escaping conflict, exploring mysterious ruins, and generally being pursued by danger, alongside more ominous vignettes showcasing Asobo’s typically lush visuals.

If surviving a plague made the first two games seem grim, escaping a flaming ship or battling in a gladiatorial arena doesn’t make Sophia’s past adventures seem all that more for fun. Still, there’s very little to go on, and quite a bit more to learn before Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy comes out in 2026. 

Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy is currently set to be released on Xbox Series X / S, PS5, PC and Xbox Cloud Streaming. It’ll also be available from day one through Xbox Game Pass.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/xbox/asobo-studios-next-plague-tale-game-is-a-prequel-arriving-in-2026-183305421.html?src=rss

The Persona 4 remake is real and its going to be called Persona 4 Revival. Atlus shared a trailer for the game during the Xbox Games Showcase, confirming its upgraded, likely Unreal Engine 5-powered visuals, and that it’s coming to Xbox platforms.

The trailer is remarkably short, all you really get are shots of Persona 4’s small-town countryside setting, snippets of the game’s score, some spooky TVs and the gray-haired player character running around. But if you’ve played the beloved RPG, you don’t need much more to get the gist.

Persona 3 Reload was released in 2024, featuring the Tokyo-set third game in the franchise, but with new graphics powered by Unreal. This next remake seems like its going to continue the trend with the fourth game in the franchise. Notably, without the voice talent of Yuri Lowenthal or Erin Fitzgerald, who both confirmed the existence of the remake and that they wouldn’t be in it at the end of May.

Persona 4 Revival is coming to Xbox Series X / S, PC, Xbox Cloud Streaming and PS5. It’ll also be available on Xbox Game Pass at launch.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/xbox/persona-4-revival-is-real-and-coming-to-ps5-pc-and-xbox-182120544.html?src=rss

Last month, Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn “shared on LinkedIn an email he had sent to all staff announcing Duolingo was going ‘AI-first’,” remembers the Financial Times.

“I did not expect the amount of blowback,” he admits….

He attributes this anger to a general “anxiety” about technology replacing jobs. “I should have been more clear to the external world,” he reflects on a video call from his office in Pittsburgh. “Every tech company is doing similar things [but] we were open about it….”

Since the furore, von Ahn has reassured customers that AI is not going to replace the company’s workforce. There will be a “very small number of hourly contractors who are doing repetitive tasks that we no longer need”, he says. “Many of these people are probably going to be offered contractor jobs for other stuff.” Duolingo is still recruiting if it is satisfied the role cannot be automated. Graduates who make up half the people it hires every year “come with a different mindset” because they are using AI at university.
The thrust of the AI-first strategy, the 46-year-old says, is overhauling work processes… He wants staff to explore whether their tasks “can be entirely done by AI or with the help of AI. It’s just a mind shift that people first try AI. It may be that AI doesn’t actually solve the problem you’re trying to solve…..that’s fine.” The aim is to automate repetitive tasks to free up time for more creative or strategic work.

Examples where it is making a difference include technology and illustration. Engineers will spend less time writing code. “Some of it they’ll need to but we want it to be mediated by AI,” von Ahn says… Similarly, designers will have more of a supervisory role, with AI helping to create artwork that fits Duolingo’s “very specific style”. “You no longer do the details and are more of a creative director. For the vast majority of jobs, this is what’s going to happen….” [S]ocietal implications for AI, such as the ethics of stealing creators’ copyright, are “a real concern”. “A lot of times you don’t even know how [the large language model] was trained. We should be careful.” When it comes to artwork, he says Duolingo is “ensuring that the entirety of the model is trained just with our own illustrations”.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We’ve been hearing rumors for what feels like an eternity about Microsoft working with ASUS’ ROG division on a gaming handheld device and we got confirmation during the Xbox Games Showcase at Summer Game Fest. There are two variants of the handheld: the ROG Xbox Ally and ROG Xbox Ally X. 

Microsoft didn’t reveal pricing, but the handhelds are coming this holiday. Details on how much the systems cost, pre-orders, accessories and more are coming soon, the company said. The Xbox Ally will initially be available in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom and, shockingly enough, the US.

Xbox head Sarah Bond says that every game included in the showcase will be playable on the Xbox Ally, but didn’t make clear whether all of those would run natively on the devices. The reveal trailer also included a notable focus on Hollow Knight: Silksong, for what it’s worth.

Critically, Microsoft and ROG aren’t locking the devices to only playing Xbox games (though you can do that natively, via the cloud or by accessing an Xbox console remotely). You’ll be able to play games from Battle.net and “other leading PC storefronts” too. 

Microsoft has designed a full-screen Xbox user interface for the handhelds. Naturally, the systems run on Windows 11. Microsoft says it has optimized the operating systems for the devices, with easy access to game and app options through Game Bar, as well as devices and input controls via ASUS’ Armoury Crate. The company added that “the lock screen and task switcher have also been adjusted for easy navigation with a controller.” Your games will be modable as well.

The Xbox Ally is powered by the AMD Ryzen Z2 A Processor, and has 16GB of RAM and 512GB of SSD storage. The Xbox Ally X is the more powerful model. It has a AMD Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme processor, 24GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. They each have a microSD card reader, so you won’t need to worry about shelling out for proprietary storage options to have extra space for your games.

The two models seem to have the same screen, a seven-inch 1080p, 16:9 display with a 120Hz refresh rate and 500 nits of brightness. The anti-reflection displays will feature Corning Gorilla Glass Victus and support FreeSync Premium.

Both systems boast “HD haptics” and have a dedicated Xbox button. The Xbox Ally has hall effect analog triggers, while the Xbox Ally X has “impulse triggers for enhanced control.” It sounds a little like Microsoft and ASUS are taking a page out of the PlayStation DualSense playbook there. Anyway, both of the Xbox Ally systems have two assignable back buttons and 6-axis IMU — a fancy way of saying that they’ll probably have gyro controls. Blessedly, both of the handhelds have a 3.5mm combo audio jack, along with Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.4.

The Xbox Ally and Xbox Ally X are exactly the same size at 290.8 x 121.5 x 50.7mm . They each weigh more than the Nintendo Switch 2 (534 g or 1.18lbs with Joy-Con 2 attached) and PlayStation Portal (520 g or 1.15 lbs). The Xbox Ally is marginally heavier than the Steam Deck (669g or 1.47lbs) at 670g. The Xbox Ally X is even beefier at 715g (1.58lbs). 

So, they’re both chonksters, but at least those grips look more ergonomic than those on the Nintendo Switch 2 (which is already cramping my hands) or even the Steam Deck. For the record, the ROG Ally is 608g (1.34 lbs) and the Ally X is 678 grams (1.5 lbs).

Both systems should be capable of outputting video to a TV or monitor, as they have two USB-C ports with support for DisplayPort 2.1 and Power Delivery 3.0. One of the Xbox Ally X’s USB-C ports is compatible with ThunderBolt 4. It also has a larger battery, with a capacity of 80Wh compared with the Xbox Ally’s 60Wh battery. Both models come with a charging stand.

This story is developing, refresh for updates…

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/xbox/rog-xbox-ally-handheld-gaming-devices-are-real-and-coming-this-holiday-171550555.html?src=rss

Xbox kicked off its Summer Game Fest showcase by revealing the release date to The Outer Worlds 2, the sci-fi first-person RPG from Obsidian Entertainment, via a new trailer. The sequel is coming out on October 29, 2025 and Xbox plans to follow-up its stream with an in-depth look at the game.

Like the original The Outer Worlds, the sequel continues its satire of end-times capitalism, focusing in the trailer on the player character’s Earth Directorate agent working against various companies vying for destructive, dangerous technology. What that looks like in practice is freezing and exploding enemies with a variety of out-of-this-world weapons — shrink rays included. Knowing Obsidian’s output, there’s bound to be plenty of non-lethal ways to get what you want, too.

The Outer Worlds 2 is coming out on October 29, 2025 for Xbox Series X / S, PS5, PC and streaming through Xbox Cloud Streaming.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/xbox/the-outer-worlds-2-arrives-on-october-29-172540150.html?src=rss

Apple‘s next big UI overhaul, reportedly called “Liquid Glass,” is ready for its big reveal. According to Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman, the upcoming interface redesign will feature “sheen and see-through visuals of a glassy surface.” More specifically, Apple’s new design language will have “transparency and shine effects” in its toolbars, in-app interfaces and controls.

It may sound like a superficial makeover, but it’s rare that Apple makes such a major change to its UI. The last big change for iPhones came from iOS 7 when Apple ditched its iconic skeumorphism design in favor of a more simplified design we have today.

However, Gurman reported that Apple could be getting Liquid Glass ready for the eventual 20th anniversary of the iPhone next year. According to Gurman, the upcoming 20th anniversary release of the iPhone will have “curved glass sides around the entire phone, even at the edges.” On top of that, this special iPhone will have “extraordinarily slim bezels and no cutout section in the screen” to better match the upcoming redesign. 

It’s not the first time we’re hearing about Apple’s rumored redesign, which was expected to draw inspiration from the Apple Vision Pro. With this Liquid Glass design, Apple could unify the look of its interfaces across all of its devices and make it less of a dramatic visual shift when switching between your Vision Pro and iPhone. This big visual change is expected to align across the board with iOS 26, macOS, watchOS, iPadOS, and tvOS. We’re expecting to see Apple’s Liquid Glass debut during WWDC 2025 which will kick off on June 9, 1PM ET/10AM PT.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/apple-will-reportedly-demo-its-liquid-glass-interface-redesign-with-see-through-visuals-at-wwdc-165823089.html?src=rss

The New York Times reports:
California State University announced this year that it was making ChatGPT available to more than 460,000 students across its 23 campuses to help prepare them for “California’s future A.I.-driven economy.” Cal State said the effort would help make the school “the nation’s first and largest A.I.-empowered university system…” Some faculty members have already built custom chatbots for their students by uploading course materials like their lecture notes, slides, videos and quizzes into ChatGPT.
And other U.S. campuses including the University of Maryland are also “working to make A.I. tools part of students’ everyday experiences,” according to the article. It’s all part of an OpenAI initiative “to overhaul college education — by embedding its artificial intelligence tools in every facet of campus life.”

The Times calls it “a national experiment on millions of students.”

If the company’s strategy succeeds, universities would give students A.I. assistants to help guide and tutor them from orientation day through graduation. Professors would provide customized A.I. study bots for each class. Career services would offer recruiter chatbots for students to practice job interviews. And undergrads could turn on a chatbot’s voice mode to be quizzed aloud ahead of a test. OpenAI dubs its sales pitch “A.I.-native universities…” To spread chatbots on campuses, OpenAI is selling premium A.I. services to universities for faculty and student use. It is also running marketing campaigns aimed at getting students who have never used chatbots to try ChatGPT…

OpenAI’s campus marketing effort comes as unemployment has increased among recent college graduates — particularly in fields like software engineering, where A.I. is now automating some tasks previously done by humans. In hopes of boosting students’ career prospects, some universities are racing to provide A.I. tools and training…

[Leah Belsky, OpenAI’s vice president of education] said a new “memory” feature, which retains and can refer to previous interactions with a user, would help ChatGPT tailor its responses to students over time and make the A.I. “more valuable as you grow and learn.” Privacy experts warn that this kind of tracking feature raises concerns about long-term tech company surveillance. In the same way that many students today convert their school-issued Gmail accounts into personal accounts when they graduate, Ms. Belsky envisions graduating students bringing their A.I. chatbots into their workplaces and using them for life.

“It would be their gateway to learning — and career life thereafter,” Ms. Belsky said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It’s no longer a hypothetical question, writes the Washington Post. “In recent years, scientists have devised powerful genetic tools that may be able to eradicate mosquitoes and other pests once and for all.”

But along with the ability to fight malaria, dengue, West Nile virus and other serious diseases, “the development of this technology also raises a profound ethical question: When, if ever, is it okay to intentionally drive a species out of existence…?”

When so many wildlife conservationists are trying to save plants and animals from disappearing, the mosquito is one of the few creatures that people argue is actually worthy of extinction. Forget about tigers or bears; it’s the tiny mosquito that is the deadliest animal on Earth. The human misery caused by malaria is undeniable. Nearly 600,000 people died of the disease in 2023, according to the World Health Organization, with the majority of cases in Africa… But recently, the Hastings Center for Bioethics, a research institute in New York, and Arizona State University brought together a group of bioethicists to discuss the potential pitfalls of intentionally trying to drive a species to extinction. In a policy paper published in the journal Science last month, the group concluded that “deliberate full extinction might occasionally be acceptable, but only extremely rarely…”

It’s unclear how important malaria-carrying mosquitoes are to broader ecosystems. Little research has been done to figure out whether frogs or other animals that eat the insects would be able to find their meals elsewhere. Scientists are hotly debating whether a broader “insect apocalypse” is underway in many parts of the world, which may imperil other creatures that depend on them for food and pollination… Instead, the authors said, geneticists should be able to use gene editing, vaccines and other tools to target not the mosquito itself, but the single-celled Plasmodium parasite that is responsible for malaria. That invisible microorganism — which a mosquito transfers from its saliva to a person’s blood when it bites — is the real culprit.

A nonprofit research consortium called Target Malaria has genetically modified mosquitoes in their labs (which get core funding from the Gates Foundation and from Open Philanthropy, backed by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife). ), and hopes to deploy them in the wild within five years…

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Associated Press reports that on Friday, U.K. High Court justice Victoria Sharp and fellow judge Jeremy Johnson ruled on the possibility of false information being submitted to the court. Concerns had been raised by lower-court judges about “suspected use by lawyers of generative AI tools to produce written legal arguments or witness statements which are not then checked.”
In a ruling written by Sharp, the judges said that in a 90 million pound ($120 million) lawsuit over an alleged breach of a financing agreement involving the Qatar National Bank, a lawyer cited 18 cases that did not exist. The client in the case, Hamad Al-Haroun, apologized for unintentionally misleading the court with false information produced by publicly available AI tools, and said he was responsible, rather than his solicitor Abid Hussain. But Sharp said it was “extraordinary that the lawyer was relying on the client for the accuracy of their legal research, rather than the other way around.”
In the other incident, a lawyer cited five fake cases in a tenant’s housing claim against the London Borough of Haringey. Barrister Sarah Forey denied using AI, but Sharp said she had “not provided to the court a coherent explanation for what happened.” The judges referred the lawyers in both cases to their professional regulators, but did not take more serious action.
Sharp said providing false material as if it were genuine could be considered contempt of court or, in the “most egregious cases,” perverting the course of justice, which carries a maximum sentence of life in prison.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ask me what I’m reading at any given moment and I’ll probably rattle off at least three titles, not to mention comics and the occasional textbook I may also be chipping away at in the background. Reading multiple books simultaneously might sound chaotic (at least, people always tell me it is), but there is a degree of organization to it all: each book in my pile of current reads is in a different format. I’ll have one physical, paper book, an ebook and an audiobook in progress at a time, so I always have something on hand to read no matter where I am.

While I used to carry around a dedicated ereader, I’ve shifted more toward using my phone for the job these days, especially since getting a foldable. Consequently, I’ve tried out a bunch of different apps for reading and logging my books. These are the ones I like most.

Libro.fm

Audiobooks have really grown on me over the last few years, almost entirely replacing podcasts as the thing I’ll throw on when I’m cleaning, taking a walk or going for a long drive. While I tried to make do at first by only borrowing audiobooks from the library, I quickly found that the extremely limited selection from my library system coupled with really long wait times just wouldn’t cut it if I wanted to stay up on new releases. After researching all the options, I settled on Libro.fm, an audiobook platform that shares a portion of profits (about half, according to a 2022 interview) with independent bookstores. And even better, you get to pick which bookstore to support with your purchases.

I wasn’t expecting to find my favorite local bookstore — a tiny shop in a small town in New York’s Hudson Valley — on Libro.fm, so I was pleasantly surprised when it turned up in the search. With that, and the fact that all audiobooks from Libro.fm are Digital Rights Management (DRM) free, so you can actually download the files and do with them as you please, I was sold. You have a few options for buying audiobooks through Libro.fm: you can subscribe for $15 per month, which gives you one audiobook credit and a 30 percent discount on all purchases; you can buy credit bundles to save on purchases without a subscription; and you can purchase individual titles at their full, non-member price. There are also plenty of free books to choose from.

Bookshop.org app

The moment I found out that Bookshop.org had launched ebooks and an app to read them on, I made the site my sole destination for buying digital books and haven’t looked back. Just like Libro.fm, Bookshop.org lets you choose a local bookseller to support with your purchases. It’s been doing this for physical book sales for the last five years — and according to its tally has raised over $38 million for independent bookstores in that time — but until now, there hasn’t been a similar option for ebooks. The new app is a no-frills ereader app where you can browse the Bookshop.org catalog to save titles to your wishlist (purchases have to be made on the site) and read all the ebooks you’ve bought. There are some things I’d love to see it gain in the future, like comics and the option to display pages side by side for reading book-style on a foldable, but it’s a great start as it is, especially if your primary concern is supporting small businesses.

Right now Bookshop.org’s ebook service doesn’t sync with any of the mainstream ereader devices, so you’re locked into reading on Android, iOS or a web browser, but the company said it’s working on Kobo integration and we could see that happen before the end of this year.

Libby

Libby, aka the library app, is my app of choice for older, less in-demand ebooks and audiobooks, or for when I don’t have anything particular in mind and just want to browse the catalog to see what jumps out at me. It lets you link multiple library cards, meaning you potentially have a huge pool to pull from, and since you’re borrowing books rather than buying them, it’s entirely free. Libby also connects with Kindle, and you can have your titles automatically sent to your ereader. Some Kobo devices support OverDrive (the distributor behind Libby) too.

While using an app may not be quite as satisfying as perusing the stacks IRL, I really like Libby’s tag system, which lets you organize your borrowed books and To Be Read titles in whatever way works best for you. You can have a dedicated TBR tag, or create several different tags to group things by genre, mood, etc. Libby is also a great place to find magazines.

Moon+ Reader (Android only)

Moon+ Reader is the best app I’ve used yet for instances where I have the actual file for a book or document. It supports a ton of different file types — including ePUB, PDF, AZW3, MOBI and many more — and allows you to highlight and annotate text, in addition to offering auto scroll and text-to-speech so the text can be read aloud to you. It’s really customizable, too. You can choose things like font, font color, background, margin width, line spacing and more for each document, and save the final build as a theme so you can use it again later. Designwise, the app feels almost like a relic of a bygone digital era, organizing all of your books in a skeuomorphic virtual bookshelf, and I love it. There are a few style options for the bookshelf too, or you can turn off the bookshelf and just see your books in a standard grid.

There’s both a free and paid version of the Moon+ Reader, and this is a situation where getting the paid version (Moon+ Reader Pro) is actually worth it. It’s a one-time purchase of $10, and going that route will get rid of ads and open up more customization options. In addition to importing your own files into the app, Moon+ Reader has Project Gutenberg integrated so you can directly access that library of over 75,000 free books.

The Storygraph

Naturally, I need a way to keep up with all the reading I’m doing, and that’s where The StoryGraph comes in. The StoryGraph is a data-focused app for keeping track of everything you’re currently reading, everything you’ve read and the ever-growing list of titles you want to read. It even allows you to mark books as “did not finish.” I love that I can have five in-progress books logged at a time, and can even update each entry to note how far along I am, which is nice for those I’m dragging my feet on completing.

When you leave a review, you have the option to be really detailed about it, going beyond a star rating and a blurb. Reviewers can indicate whether the book would appeal to readers who like a particular mood, with over a dozen options. You rate the pace and answer basic questions about the plot and characters, like whether there’s character development or if the characters are even likeable. There’s also the option to add content warnings.

Where The StoryGraph really shines, though, is in the stats. There are tons of actual graphs built into the experience to show you a comprehensive breakdown of your reading habits, from the genres, moods and pacing you prefer, to how much fiction you’ve read versus nonfiction. You can set challenges for yourself, like a yearly reading goal, and you’ll be shown a Reading Wrap-up at the end of the year. It’ll tell you how long it takes you to finish a book on average, and compare your reading stats to previous years.

There is a mild social component to the app, but it’s tucked away in its own tab and not shoved in your face, which I appreciate as someone who tends to shy away from those things. If you want, though, you can participate in or create readalongs, start buddy reads and book clubs (and even write out a code of conduct for the latter) or just see what other people with similar interests to yours are reading. The StoryGraph team also really seems to take users’ feedback into consideration, and is constantly adding new things to the app and tweaking existing ones to improve the experience, which is always nice to see.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/the-best-apps-for-reading-tracking-and-listening-to-books-120047705.html?src=rss

Last year’s Pentagon report reviewing UFO reports “left out the truth behind some of the foundational myths about UFOs,” reports the Wall Street Journal.
“The Pentagon itself sometimes deliberately fanned the flames, in what amounted to the U.S. government targeting its own citizens with disinformation.”

The congressionally ordered probe took investigators back to the 1980s, when an Air Force colonel visited a bar near Area 51, a top-secret site in the Nevada desert. He gave the owner photos of what might be flying saucers. The photos went up on the walls, and into the local lore went the idea that the U.S. military was secretly testing recovered alien technology. But the colonel was on a mission — of disinformation. The photos were doctored, the now-retired officer confessed to the Pentagon investigators in 2023. The whole exercise was a ruse to protect what was really going on at Area 51: The Air Force was using the site to develop top-secret stealth fighters, viewed as a critical edge against the Soviet Union. Military leaders were worried that the programs might get exposed if locals somehow glimpsed a test flight of, say, the F-117 stealth fighter, an aircraft that truly did look out of this world. Better that they believe it came from Andromeda.
That’s not the only example. The Journal spoke to Robert Salas, now 84, who in 1967 was a 26-year-old Air Force captain “sitting in a walk-in closet-sized bunker, manning the controls of 10 nuclear missiles in Montana.” Suddenly all 10 missiles were disabled after reports of “a glowing reddish-orange oval was hovering over the front gate… The next morning a helicopter was waiting to take Salas back to base. Once there he was ordered: Never discuss the incident.”
58 years later, the Journal reports….
The barriers of concrete and steel surrounding America’s nuclear missiles were thick enough to give them a chance if hit first by a Soviet strike. But scientists at the time feared the intense storm of electromagnetic waves generated by a nuclear detonation might render the hardware needed to launch a counterstrike unusable. To test this vulnerability, the Air Force developed an exotic electromagnetic generator that simulated this pulse of disruptive energy without the need to detonate a nuclear weapon… But any public leak of the tests at the time would have allowed Russia to know that America’s nuclear arsenal could be disabled in a first strike. The witnesses were kept in the dark. To this day Salas believes he was party to an intergalactic intervention to stop nuclear war which the government has tried to hide.
“We were never briefed on the activities that were going on, the Air Force shut us out of any information,” Salas tells the Journal.

But it’s not just secrecy. Some military men were told directly that they were working on alien technology, according to Pentagon investigator Sean Kirkpatrick:

A former Air Force officer was visibly terrified when he told Kirkpatrick’s investigators that he had been briefed on a secret alien project decades earlier, and was warned that if he ever repeated the secret he could be jailed or executed. The claim would be repeated to investigators by other men who had never spoken of the matter, even with their spouses.

It turned out the witnesses had been victims of a bizarre hazing ritual. For decades, certain new commanders of the Air Force’s most classified programs, as part of their induction briefings, would be handed a piece of paper with a photo of what looked like a flying saucer. The craft was described as an antigravity maneuvering vehicle. The officers were told that the program they were joining, dubbed Yankee Blue, was part of an effort to reverse-engineer the technology on the craft. They were told never to mention it again. Many never learned it was fake. Kirkpatrick found the practice had begun decades before, and appeared to continue still… Investigators are still trying to determine why officers had misled subordinates, whether as some type of loyalty test, a more deliberate attempt to deceive or something else. After that 2023 discovery, Kirkpatrick’s deputy briefed President Joe Biden’s director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, who was stunned… “We are talking about hundreds and hundreds of people. These men signed NDAs. They thought it was real.”

The article also notes that rep9rts of Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon “skyrocketed” after May of 2023 — but that “Many pilot accounts of floating orbs were actually reflections of the sun from Starlink satellites, investigators found.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For years, gray market services known as “bulletproof” hosts have been a key tool for cybercriminals looking to anonymously maintain web infrastructure with no questions asked. But as global law enforcement scrambles to crack down on digital threats, they have developed strategies for getting customer information from these hosts and have increasingly targeted the people behind the services with indictments. At the cybercrime-focused conference Sleuthcon in in Arlington, Virginia on Friday, researcher Thibault Seret outlined how this shift has pushed both bulletproof hosting companies and criminal customers toward an alternative approach.

Rather than relying on web hosts to find ways of operating outside law enforcement’s reach, some service providers have turned to offering purpose-built VPNs and other proxy services as a way of rotating and masking customer IP addresses and offering infrastructure that either intentionally doesn’t log traffic or mixes traffic from many sources together. And while the technology isn’t new, Seret and other researchers emphasized to WIRED that the transition to using proxies among cybercrminals over the last couple of years is significant.

“The issue is, you cannot technically distinguish which traffic in a node is bad and which traffic is good,” Seret, a researcher at the threat intelligence firm Team Cymru, told WIRED ahead of his talk. “That’s the magic of a proxy service—you cannot tell who’s who. It’s good in terms of internet freedom, but it’s super, super tough to analyze what’s happening and identify bad activity.”

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An anonymous reader shared this report from The New York Times:

Russian counterintelligence agents are analyzing data from the popular Chinese messaging and social media app WeChat to monitor people who might be in contact with Chinese spies, according to a Russian intelligence document obtained by The New York Times. The disclosure highlights the rising level of concern about Chinese influence in Russia as the two countries deepen their relationship. As Russia has become isolated from the West over its war in Ukraine, it has become increasingly reliant on Chinese money, companies and technology. But it has also faced what the document describes as increased Chinese espionage efforts.

The document indicates that the Russian domestic security agency, known as the F.S.B., pulls purloined data into an analytical tool known as “Skopishche” (a Russian word for a mob of people). Information from WeChat is among the data being analyzed, according to the document… One Western intelligence agency told The Times that the information in the document was consistent with what it knew about “Russian penetration of Chinese communications….” By design, [WeChat] does not use end-to-end encryption to protect user data. That is because the Chinese government exercises strict control over the app and relies on its weak security to monitor and censor speech. Foreign intelligence agencies can exploit that weakness, too…

WeChat was briefly banned in Russia in 2017, but access was restored after Tencent took steps to comply with laws requiring foreign digital platforms above a certain size to register as “organizers of information dissemination.” The Times confirmed that WeChat is currently licensed by the government to operate in Russia. That license would require Tencent to store user data on Russian servers and to provide access to security agencies upon request.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from SFGate about a lawsuit alleging a “warrantless drone surveillance program” that’s “trampling residents’ right to privacy”:

Sonoma County has been accused of deploying hundreds of drone flights over residents in a “runaway spying operation”… according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday by the American Civil Liberties Union. The North Bay county of Sonoma initially started the 6-year-old drone program to track illegal cannabis cultivation, but the lawsuit alleges that officials have since turned it into a widespread program to catch unrelated code violations at residential properties and levy millions of dollars in fines. The program has captured 5,600 images during more than 700 flights, the lawsuit said…

Matt Cagle, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU Foundation of Northern California, said in a Wednesday news release that the county “has hidden these unlawful searches from the people they have spied on, the community, and the media….” The lawsuit says the county employees used the drones to spy on private homes without first receiving a warrant, including photographing private areas like hot tubs and outdoor baths, and through curtainless windows.
One plaintiff “said the county secretly used the drone program to photograph her Sonoma County horse stable and issue code violations,” according to the article.

She only discovered the use of the drones after a county employee mentioned they had photos of her property, according to the lawsuit. She then filed a public records request for the images, which left her “stunned” after seeing that the county employees were monitoring her private property including photographing her outdoor bathtub and shower, the lawsuit said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AppleInsider reports:

The engineer behind much of the Mac’s early graphical user interfaces, QuickDraw, MacPaint, Hypercard and much more, William D. “Bill” Atkinson, died on June 5 of complications from pancreatic cancer…
Atkinson, who built a post-Apple career as a noted nature photographer, worked at Apple from 1978 to 1990. Among his lasting contributions to Apple’s computers were the invention of the menubar, the selection lasso, the “marching ants” item selection animation, and the discovery of a midpoint circle algorithm that enabled the rapid drawing of circles on-screen.
He was Apple Employee No. 51, recruited by Steve Jobs. Atkinson was one of the 30 team members to develop the first Macintosh, but also was principle designer of the Lisa’s graphical user interface (GUI), a novelty in computers at the time. He was fascinated by the concept of dithering, by which computers using dots could create nearly photographic images similar to the way newspapers printed photos. He is also credited (alongside Jobs) for the invention of RoundRects, the rounded rectangles still used in Apple’s system messages, application windows, and other graphical elements on Apple products.
Hypercard was Atkinson’s main claim to fame. He built the a hypermedia approach to building applications that he once described as a “software erector set.” The Hypercard technology debuted in 1987, and greatly opened up Macintosh software development.

In 2012 some video clips of Atkinson appeared in some rediscovered archival footage. (Original Macintosh team developer Andy Hertzfeld uploaded “snippets from interviews with members of the original Macintosh design team, recorded in October 1983 for projected TV commercials that were never used.”)

Blogger John Gruber calls Atkinson “One of the great heroes in not just Apple history, but computer history.”

If you want to cheer yourself up, go to Andy Hertzfeld’s Folklore.org site and (re-)read all the entries about Atkinson. Here’s just one, with Steve Jobs inspiring Atkinson to invent the roundrect. Here’s another (surely near and dear to my friend Brent Simmons’s heart) with this kicker of a closing line: “I’m not sure how the managers reacted to that, but I do know that after a couple more weeks, they stopped asking Bill to fill out the form, and he gladly complied.”

Some of his code and algorithms are among the most efficient and elegant ever devised. The original Macintosh team was chock full of geniuses, but Atkinson might have been the most essential to making the impossible possible under the extraordinary technical limitations of that hardware… In addition to his low-level contributions like QuickDraw, Atkinson was also the creator of MacPaint (which to this day stands as the model for bitmap image editorsâ — âPhotoshop, I would argue, was conceptually derived directly from MacPaint) and HyperCard (“inspired by a mind-expanding LSD journey in 1985”), the influence of which cannot be overstated.

I say this with no hyperbole: Bill Atkinson may well have been the best computer programmer who ever lived. Without question, he’s on the short list. What a man, what a mind, what gifts to the world he left us.

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During a showcase at Summer Games Fest, developer Dinosaur Polo Club announced that it will be adding a creative mode to Mini Motorways. The new mode will be available in a free game update coming to Apple Arcade, Steam, and Nintendo Switch on August 26, so you can get imaginative on whatever platform you’ve been playing this excellent strategy game.

Like its predecessor Mini Metro, the core gameplay of Mini Motorways has a lot of calm, meditative elements in the experience of placing those first few roads. But as your city grows and the street network gets more convoluted, things can turn hectic real quick. And if you’re like me, you’ve definitely run out of road tiles because you just couldn’t stand making painfully illogical city plans. Creative Mode offers the welcome option to focus on aesthetics, letting players recolor, move and pivot houses and destinations to develop a city with more order. Or with more chaos, you do you!

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/mini-motorways-is-getting-a-creative-mode-233031208.html?src=rss

Is copyrighted material a requirement for training AI? asks the Washington Post. That’s what top AI companies are arguing, and “Few AI developers have tried the more ethical route — until now.

“A group of more than two dozen AI researchers have found that they could build a massive eight-terabyte dataset using only text that was openly licensed or in public domain. They tested the dataset quality by using it to train a 7 billion parameter language model, which performed about as well as comparable industry efforts, such as Llama 2-7B, which Meta released in 2023.”

A paper published Thursday detailing their effort also reveals that the process was painstaking, arduous and impossible to fully automate. The group built an AI model that is significantly smaller than the latest offered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini, but their findings appear to represent the biggest, most transparent and rigorous effort yet to demonstrate a different way of building popular AI tools….

As it turns out, the task involves a lot of humans. That’s because of the technical challenges of data not being formatted in a way that’s machine readable, as well as the legal challenges of figuring out what license applies to which website, a daunting prospect when the industry is rife with improperly licensed data. “This isn’t a thing where you can just scale up the resources that you have available” like access to more computer chips and a fancy web scraper, said Stella Biderman [executive director of the nonprofit research institute Eleuther AI]. “We use automated tools, but all of our stuff was manually annotated at the end of the day and checked by people. And that’s just really hard.”

Still, the group managed to unearth new datasets that can be used ethically. Those include a set of 130,000 English language books in the Library of Congress, which is nearly double the size of the popular-books dataset Project Gutenberg. The group’s initiative also builds on recent efforts to develop more ethical, but still useful, datasets, such as FineWeb from Hugging Face, the open-source repository for machine learning… Still, Biderman remained skeptical that this approach could find enough content online to match the size of today’s state-of-the-art models… Biderman said she didn’t expect companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic to start adopting the same laborious process, but she hoped it would encourage them to at least rewind back to 2021 or 2022, when AI companies still shared a few sentences of information about what their models were trained on.

“Even partial transparency has a huge amount of social value and a moderate amount of scientific value,” she said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TweakTown writes that the Switch 2 “has reportedly beaten the record for the most-sold console within 24 hours and is on track to shatter the two-month record,” selling over 3 million units and tripling the PlayStation 4’s previous launch day sales.
So Nintendo’s first console in 8 years becomes “one of the most successful hardware releases of all time,” writes Barron’s, raising hopes for the future:

[2017’s original Switch] ultimately sold more than 152 million units… Switch 2’s big advantage is its backward compatibility, allowing it to play current-generation Switch games and giving gamers solace that their large investments in software are intact… Many older Switch games also play better on the Switch 2, taking advantage of the extra horsepower.

Bloomberg writes that its bigger screen and faster chip “live up to the hype:

Despite the hype and a $150 increase over the launch price for the original, the second-generation system manages to impress with faster performance, improved graphics, more comfortable ergonomics and enough tweaks throughout to make this feel like a distinctly new machine… This time, it’s capable of outputting 4K resolution and more impactful HDR video to your TV screen… It’s a bigger, faster, more polished version of a wildly successful gadget.
The “buzzy launch drew long lines” at retailers like Walmart, Target, Best Buy, and Gamestop, according to the article. (See the photos from AOL.com and USA Today.) “The era of spending hours waiting in line for the latest iPhone is long gone, but the debut of a new video game console is still a rare enough event that Nintendo fans didn’t think twice about driving to retailers in the middle of the night to secure a Switch 2.”

The Verge also opines that “the Switch 2’s eShop is much better,” calling it “way faster… with much less lag browsing through sections and loading up game pages.”

Or, as Barron’s puts it, “Ultimately, Nintendo is winning because it has a different strategy than its competition, the Sony PlayStation and Microsoft Xbox. Instead of trying to appeal to tech snobs like me, who are obsessed with graphics resolution and hardware statistics like teraflops, Nintendo focuses on joy and fun.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.