Welcome back to Toy Aisle, io9’s regular round-up of the latest toy news on the internet. This week, Hot Toys’ Star Wars shelf grows with a little help from The Mandalorian’s finest sheriff, the best Metroid suit gets an incredible action figure, and Hasbro rings in the season with some Star Wars cheer. Check it out!
Source: Gizmodo – This Week’s Toys Are All in on Space Daddy
Today, Activision Blizzard announced three programs coming to Overwatch 2’s competitive and casual scene. These aim to foster a healthy environment, with a focus on its new and returning LGBTQ+ player base.
Source: Kotaku – Activision Blizzard Announces New LGBTQ+ Friendly Overwatch 2 Competitive And Shoutcaster Programs
Enlarge / Nothing weird going on here. No siree. (credit: https://www.nintendo.com/store/products/chaos-head-noah-switch/)
Japanese publisher Spike Chunsoft announced that the first official English translation of visual novel Chaos;Head Noah won’t be coming to Steam as planned “due to Steam’s guideline-required changes to the game’s content.” But while the game is apparently too risqué for Steam, the family-friendly folks at Nintendo apparently have no problem with a Switch version that Spike Chunsoft says will still launch in the US on October 7 as scheduled.
“Spike Chunsoft, Inc. believes these [Steam guideline-required] changes would not allow the game to be released to its standards,” the publisher said in its announcement. “The company is looking into delivering the title through alternative storefronts, and when details are decided will make another formal announcement. Until then your patience and understanding is appreciated.”
Nintendo says this scene is appropriate for its store page, so we figure you readers can handle it. (credit: Nintendo)
Chaos;Head Noah was initially listed for Steam pre-sale in April, but that page was taken down in August, according to tracking site SteamDB. At the time, that led to some concerns about the eventual fate of the Steam version, which Spike Chunsoft finally confirmed today.
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Source: Ars Technica – Nintendoes what Valve don’t: Game barred from Steam will launch on Switch
The consequences for Pacific Gas & Electric’s negligent involvement in the ignition of multiple deadly wildfires across California continue to mount. A group of 20 former executives at the utility company reached a $117 million settlement regarding the 2017 North Bay fires and 2018 Camp fire Thursday, the Los Angeles…
Source: Gizmodo – Ex-PG&E Execs Agree to 7 Million Wildfire Settlement
AI text-to-image generators have been making headlines in recent months, but researchers are already moving on to the next frontier: AI text-to-video generators. From a report: A team of machine learning engineers from Facebook’s parent company Meta has unveiled a new system called Make-A-Video. As the name suggests, this AI model allows users to type in a rough description of a scene, and it will generate a short video matching their text. The videos are clearly artificial, with blurred subjects and distorted animation, but still represent a significant development in the field of AI content generation.
“Generative AI research is pushing creative expression forward by giving people tools to quickly and easily create new content,” said Meta in a blog post announcing the work. “With just a few words or lines of text, Make-A-Video can bring imagination to life and create one-of-a-kind videos full of vivid colors and landscapes.” In a Facebook post, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg described the work as “amazing progress,” adding: “It’s much harder to generate video than photos because beyond correctly generating each pixel, the system also has to predict how they’ll change over time.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Meta’s New Text-to-Video AI Generator is Like DALL-E for Video
Last year, Cloudflare, a company that provides DDoS mitigation, content delivery network (CDN) services, and many others, published a blog post declaring its intention to kill CAPTCHAs. Now about a year and a half later, the company is introducing an alternative to standard CAPTCHAs that should be much faster and fulfill the CAPTCHA namesake.
Source: Hot Hardware – Cloudflare Releases Turnstile Challenge System As A Gridless CAPTCHA Alternative
Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Capcom)
A YouTube creator has gone on the offensive after facing an increasingly common problem on the platform: moderation and enforcement that leaves creators confused by the logic and short on their videos’ revenue potential.
The trouble centers on a longtime YouTube video host whose content is popular among the retro-gaming devotees at Ars Technica’s staff. The creator, who goes by the online handle “Summoning Salt,” chronicles the history of various classic games’ speedrunning world records. His hour-plus analyses demonstrate how different players approach older games and exploit various bugs. The games in question are typically cartoony 2D fare instead of violent or M-rated titles.
Summoning Salt asks why his YouTube video was age-restricted.
On Friday, Summoning Salt took to social media to claim that his latest 78-minute documentary about 1989’s Mega Man 2, which went live in mid-September, has been “age-restricted” by YouTube’s moderation system. Bizarrely, the video had been age-restricted roughly one week ago, only for YouTube to relent to the creator’s appeal and claim that the restriction had been placed in error.
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Source: Ars Technica – YouTube age-restriction quagmire exposed by 78-minute Mega Man documentary
MultiVersus has been getting tons of new characters, with drunk scientist Rick Sanchez from the time-hopping adult cartoon Rick & Morty being the latest addition to the Warner Bros. crossover fighter. The roster’s expansion won’t stop there, though, as datamining has suggested for some time that characters including…
Source: Kotaku – It Sure Sounds Like Mark Hamill Is Playing The Joker In MultiVersus
What’s your favorite thing about AirPods Pro? For those of us who need to stay alert while listening to music, Transparency Mode might take the cake. And fortunately for us, Apple has made Transparency Mode so much better that it might be worth picking up a pair for this feature alone.
Source: LifeHacker – This Feature Makes AirPods Pro Worth the Cost
The USB standard’s forward and backward compatibility is one of its handiest features. That means that you can plug a USB device into another USB device with a matching connector, and it’s almost a guarantee that it’ll work, regardless of their USB version revisions. Consumers don’t need to know whether it’s a USB 3.1 Gen 2 or a USB 4 Ver
Source: Hot Hardware – USB-IF Finally Updates Branding So Consumers Know What Speed They’re Getting
Nick Holonyak Jr., an electrical engineer who became known as the godfather of the LED lighting that illuminates flat-screen TVs and laptop computers, and who also developed lasers that enabled DVD and CD players, bar code scanners and medical diagnostic devices, died on Sept. 18 in Urbana, Ill. He was 93. From a report: His death, at a nursing home, was announced by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, his alma mater, where he taught from 1963 until he retired in 2013. The day after he died, the campus’s State Farm Center arena was bathed in red to commemorate his invention of the first visible light-emitting diode in 1962.
Professor Holonyak (pronounced huh-LON-yak) was among the first scientists to predict that incandescent bulbs, which heat metal filaments to create energy, and fluorescent lamps, which use ionized gas, would eventually be replaced by LEDs, semiconductor chips the size of a grain of sand that emit photons of light when electric current is applied to them. Professor Holonyak described the LED as the “ultimate lamp” because, he said, “the current itself is the light.” LEDs radiate less heat than incandescent bulbs, consume less energy and last longer. They are also environmentally safer than fluorescent lamps, which contain mercury. The Department of Energy has estimated that by the end of the decade, LEDs will account for more than 80 percent of all lighting purchases and will pare Americans’ electric bills by some $30 billion annually. From 2014: No Nobel For Nick Holonyak Jr, Father of the LED.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Nick Holonyak Jr., Pioneer of LED Lighting, Is Dead at 93
I’ve never been more distracted than when I wasn’t using Focus Mode on my corral of smartphones. Phones are my thing here at Gizmodo, and since I tend to run a handful of devices concurrently, you can imagine that most of my work days are peppered with random choruses of vibrating aluminum. It makes it so that I can’t…
Source: Gizmodo – How to Set Up Focus Mode on Android and iOS
When I’m writing, I make my own rules. The words and the punctuation marks do what I tell them to, and I don’t need The Man imposing limitations on me. I’ll use punctuation marks you’ve never heard of. Look: ❦ That’s a hedera! I don’t even know what it means!
Source: LifeHacker – 9 Outdated Grammar Rules You Can Finally Ignore
Enlarge / Ars originally liked the Stadia controller, describing it as “solidly built, with springy, responsive inputs.” It could still be that way without a giant USB cord if Google unlocked its full Bluetooth capabilities. (credit: Kyle Orland)
Google’s Stadia game-streaming service will die a nearly inevitable death early next year. Google is refunding players the cost of all their hardware and game purchases. But, so far, Google is also leaving Stadia players with controllers that, while once costing $70, will soon do less than a $20 Bluetooth gamepad.
Stadia’s controllers were custom-made to connect directly to the Internet, reducing lag and allowing for instant firmware updates and (sometimes painful) connections to smart TVs. There’s Bluetooth inside the Stadia controller, but it’s only used when you’re setting up Stadia, either with a TV, a computer with the Chrome browser, or a Chromecast Ultra.
The Google Store’s page for the Stadia controller states in a footnote: “Product contains Bluetooth Classic radio. No Bluetooth Classic functionality is enabled at this time. Bluetooth Classic may be implemented at a later date.” (Bluetooth Classic is a more traditional version of Bluetooth than modern low-energy or mesh versions.)
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Source: Ars Technica – Stadia controllers could become e-waste unless Google issues Bluetooth update
Tesla is holding another AI Day, and it’ll be particularly easy to tune in. The automaker is streaming its 2022 event tonight at 9:15PM Eastern on YouTube (below) as well as its website. Elon Musk has warned the presentation will be “highly technical” and could last six hours, but you may have multiple reasons to watch even if you’re not fond of diagrams and in-depth explanations.
Notably, Musk said in June that Tesla pushed AI Day to September 30th in hopes of having a functional Optimus humanoid robot. It would just be a prototype, but it would show that the company’s vision of an autonomous helper exists beyond pretty 3D renders. The machine is meant to handle dangerous or monotonous tasks without requiring step-by-step instructions.
You could also see improvements to Tesla’s vehicle technology. The company’s Full Self-Driving feature is still rough, and Tesla might explain how it plans to refine the system. You could also see upgrades to Autopilot driver assistance. Behind the scenes, the company may expand the capabilities of the Dojo supercomputer it uses to train vision-based AI systems.
Source: Engadget – Watch Tesla’s AI Day 2022 event at 9:15PM ET
Last year Google announced the Lyra voice codec for low bit-rates that combined with the open AV1 codec could lead to voice chats on 56kbps connections. Lyra makes use of machine learning and other techniques for extremely low bit-rate speech compression that can function at 3kbps. Google last year open-sourced the Lyra code while today they announced the availability of Lyra V2…
Source: Phoronix – Google Announces Lyra V2 Low Bit-Rate Voice Codec
It feels like it was only yesterday when Shigeru Miyamoto pulled the goomba rug out from under our collective gamer asses with the surprise announcement of the bizarre Hollywood cast of the upcoming Super Mario Bros. movie. While the casting of Chris Pratt in the starring role horrified many, it served as the…
Source: Kotaku – Mamma Mia, Someone’s Remaking Super Mario Bros. With A Realistic Chris Pratt
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
Microsoft late Thursday confirmed the existence of two critical vulnerabilities in its Exchange application that have already compromised multiple servers and pose a serious risk to an estimated 220,000 more around the world.
The currently unpatched security flaws have been under active exploit since early August, when Vietnam-based security firm GTSC discovered customer networks had been infected with malicious webshells and that the initial entry point was some sort of Exchange vulnerability. The mystery exploit looked almost identical to an Exchange zero-day from 2021 called ProxyShell, but the customers’ servers had all been patched against the vulnerability, which is tracked as CVE-2021-34473. Eventually, the researchers discovered the unknown hackers were exploiting a new Exchange vulnerability.
“After successfully mastering the exploit, we recorded attacks to collect information and create a foothold in the victim’s system,” the researchers wrote in a post published on Wednesday. “The attack team also used various techniques to create backdoors on the affected system and perform lateral movements to other servers in the system.”
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Source: Ars Technica – High-severity Microsoft Exchange 0-day under attack threatens 220,000 servers
CopyQ is an advanced clipboard manager that is written in C++ and published under an open-source license. Learn more about CopyQ here.
The post Excellent Utilities: CopyQ – advanced clipboard manager appeared first on Linux Today.
Source: Linux Today – Excellent Utilities: CopyQ – advanced clipboard manager
