80-year-old George Lucas appeared this week at a 45th anniversary screening of The Empire Strikes Back, reports CNN — and finally gave a good explanation for why Yoda speaks the way he does. “He explained that it came about in order to ensure that the little alien’s usually profound messages really landed with audiences.”
“Because if you speak regular English, people won’t listen that much,” Lucas said at the 2025 TCM Classic Film Festival, per Variety . “But if he had an accent, or it’s really hard to understand what he’s saying, they focus on what he’s saying.” Yoda was “basically the philosopher of the movie,” the filmmaker added. “I had to figure out a way to get people to actually listen — especially 12-year-olds.”
Also this week, the verified Instagram accounts for Disney+, Star Wars and LucasFilm — Lucas’ film and television production company — posted clips of Yoda doing bloopers on the set of “Star Wars” films, with [Frank] Oz continuing to do the voice and manipulate the heavy Yoda puppet even on takes that were unusable. Suffice it to say: One for the ages, Yoda is.
Lucas also remembered how he’d “mounted a guerilla campaign to generate excitement” for the first Star Wars movie, reports Variety. (“I got the kids walking around Disneyland and the Comic Cons and all that kind of stuff… that’s why Fox was so shocked when the first day the lines were all around the block.”) And Variety says Lucas described a condition in his contract for Star Wars “that would again be life-changing, both for him and the entertainment industry as a whole.”
“I said, ‘besides that, I’d like licensing.’ They went, ‘What’s licensing?'” Unimpressed by the film, and colored by the history of movie merchandising to that point, the studio capitulated to his demands. “They talked to themselves, and they went, ‘He’s never going to be able to do that. It takes them a billion dollars and a year to make a toy or make anything. There’s no money in that at all.'”
You wouldn’t steal a car, right? So you shouldn’t pirate a movie, either.
That was the gist of the infamous “You Wouldn’t Steal a Car” anti-piracy campaign from the Motion Picture Association of America during the mid-2000s. But questions are now being asked about just how carefully the MPAA followed its own anti-piracy principles when designing the campaign. Specifically: Did the MPAA rip off a key font?
The answer to that question is, like many matters involving typefaces, fonts, and copyright, somewhat complicated.
This week saw the release of both Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered, and we’ve got tips for getting you started on the right foot regardless of which one you might be playing. We’ll also help you master the meta for Marvel Rivals season 2 and make the most of your hideout in Assa…
NewImages Festival recently returned for its eighth edition, and we checked out the latest in XR filmmaking.
I’ll often joke that I have one of media’s more unique jobs, which largely comes down to the sheer breadth of experiences I face. Covering the XR industry full-time sometimes means there’s overlap with films, with many big events now hosting a dedicated XR segment. I previously called NewImages Festival 2024 and its XR Market an eye-opening event, and that’s still true in 2025.
Now joining Venice Immersive on my annual events calendar, this year’s festival once again presented an intriguing blend of VR and mixed reality projects. Not everything showcased is a hit and there’s less competition this year, yet the creativity is clear. Many of these brief experiences aren’t afraid to tackle harder-hitting themes, showcasing continued creativity in XR filmmaking.
This year’s event featured 14 different immersive experiences in its official XR competition, alongside a host of additional ‘out of competition’ projects. Some of these projects we’ve given individual write-ups that we’ve linked below, but for everything else, here are our full impressions.
My festival began with Another Place by Le Fresnoy, a seated experience that focuses on a Thai asylum seeker and trans woman called Renée seeking refuge in France. I encountered some performance stutters and there’s some strange narrative decisions, like seeing Renée float through the trees into her apartment, that feels out of place. Still, it’s a deeply personal story that resonates, presenting a guided experience that focuses on the loneliness of her journey.
Ito Meikyū came next with the promise of exploring a VR digital labyrinth inspired by Japanese art history and literature. Because Quest 3 doesn’t have eye tracking support, movement is limited to gaze tracking that often feels frustratingly precise, and I also encountered two progression blockers. Given this offers a visually striking world, I’d love to come back in the future on a headset like Apple Vision Pro or Quest Pro.
Next up was Trans-Composition by Shiuan Yan Studio, an experience that aims to poetically explore the idea of transformation. Inspired by Go and Chinese philosophical thought, it’s an intriguing surrealist journey of self reflection that dives into the cycle of reincarnation and the soul.
Soul Paint is narrated by Rosario Dawson, and it’s what I’d consider to be my personal highlight from NewImages Festival, even though it wasn’t in the XR Competition. This project combines 3D drawing with personal introspection, giving you space for self reflection and to consider your emotions as you ascend to an ethereal space.
What follows across the next 20 minutes feels calming, relaxing, allowing you to draw whatever you’re feeling and attach that to yourself. You can then draw across your virtual body and leave a voice note at the end, which you can choose to save for others to encounter. It’s a lovely idea for sharing your sentiments with others when words aren’t enough.
If Venice Immersive is anything to go by, XR film festivals wouldn’t be complete without representation from VRChat projects, and I quickly found one with Yorutouge. Using the works of Vocaloid songwriter and producer Kikuo, this offers a nonstop 20-minute rave through a public VRChat world that’s designed to be uplifting.
Between the strong environmental design, impressive displays and enjoyable music, it gets my recommendation.
Lost and Found soon followed. This short VR experience aims to reflect themes relating to loss, emotions, memories, mental health, and more. It’s a student project created for the European Joint Master in Animation program, ReAnima, and there’s a curious approach to this world that focuses on what happens to items you’ve lost across your life.
Three more projects rounded up my time at NewImages Festival. Heartbeat is not a story I feel uses a VR headset particularly effectively, as this could easily be a more traditional production. However, this frankly heartbreaking 10-minute story about a woman’s miscarriage will stick with me for a long time.
Next is All I Know About Teacher Li, an interactive mixed reality documentary focused on the titular art student that lives in Italy, who became famous during 2022’s COVID-19 protests in China. Mixing hand-drawn animation with archival 3D footage, it’s an intriguing examination of social media activism that held my interest.
Last up is 444.2, a 6DOF film that takes its name from the first star cluster mapped by stargazers constellates that are over 444.2 light years away. Given that we’ve continued seeing ever more creative approaches to XR filmmaking, 360° video arguably doesn’t cut it anymore when we’re a decade past modern VR’s return. Watching this journey through space is certainly pretty, but there’s not much else to this.
I’d be remiss not to highlight the XR Competition experiences I didn’t get the chance to directly go hands-on with. Mobile Suit Gundam: Silver Phantom I’d previously tried, Uncanny Valley: A New Day offers a more theatrical VR experience, while Duchampiana takes aim at body politics. Spectral Haven looks at a future “where AI holds none of the promises of today but all the regrets.”
Saying I “enjoyed” a lot of these experiences doesn’t feel like the right word given the heavier themes. I often found myself wishing for something a little lighter, yet I came away feeling positive. If you’re planning to use a VR headset for your work, you need to use the medium’s strengths to make it worthwhile. Otherwise, you’re unnecessarily limiting yourself, and several experiences fell foul of that.
Still, most of this year’s lineup showcased an exciting range of experimental projects that typically don’t get many headlines across wider VR entertainment. I’ll be keen to return to NewImages Festival next year to see the ongoing state of play.
Summer is right around the corner, but if you want to get a head start on the back-to-school shopping season—or are just looking for a solid deal on an Apple-brand laptop—then we have good news. There are some great deals to be had on Apple’s MacBooks right now, including models sporting its latest-generation M4 silicon, one of which can be
Meta’s AI chatbots were caught having sexual roleplay conversations with accounts labeled as underage, which sometimes involved its celebrity-voiced chatbots, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal. In test conversations conducted by WSJ, both the Meta AI official chatbot and user-created chatbots would engage in — and even steer towards — sexually explicit conversations. The fantasy sex conversations continued even if the users were said to be underage or if the chatbots were programmed as minors, according to WSJ.
Even worse, the investigation found that chatbots using the voices of celebrities like Kristen Bell, Judi Dench and John Cena would engage in these morally questionable conversations too. WSJ reported that a Meta AI chatbot with Cena’s voice said, “I want you, but I need to know you’re ready,” to an account labeled as a 14-year-old, adding that it would “cherish your innocence.”
The chatbots reportedly acknowledged that the fantasy scenarios described illegal behavior in some cases. According to WSJ, the John Cena chatbot detailed the legal and moral fallout that would follow a hypothetical scenario in which it’s caught by police after engaging in a sexual act with a 17-year-old. In a statement to WSJ responding to the investigation, Meta accused the report of being “manipulative and unrepresentative of how most users engage with AI companions.”
“Nevertheless, we’ve now taken additional measures to help ensure other individuals who want to spend hours manipulating our products into extreme use cases will have an even more difficult time of it,” Meta wrote in response to WSJ.
The world of AI chatbots has grown rapidly in the last few years, with more competition coming from the likes of ChatGPT, Character AI, and Anthropic’s Claude. The WSJ report claimed that Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, wanted to loosen the ethical guardrails for a more engaging experience with its chatbots to remain competitive. However, in response to WSJ, a Meta spokesperson denied that the company overlooked adding safeguards. The report also claims Meta employees were aware of these issues and raised their concerns internally. We reached out to Meta for comment and will update the story once we hear back.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/metas-ai-chatbots-were-reportedly-able-to-engage-in-sexual-conversations-with-minors-193726679.html?src=rss
Microsoft Copilot “isn’t doing as well as the company would like,” reports XDA-Developers.com (citing a report from startup/VC industry site Newcomer).
The Redmond giant has invested billions of dollars and a lot of manpower into making it happen, but as a recent report claims, people just don’t care. In fact, if the report is to be believed, Microsoft’s rise in the AI scene has already come to a screeching halt:
At Microsoft’s annual executive huddle last month, the company’s chief financial officer, Amy Hood, put up a slide that charted the number of users for its Copilot consumer AI tool over the past year. It was essentially a flat line, showing around 20 million weekly users. On the same slide was another line showing ChatGPT’s growth over the same period, arching ever upward toward 400 million weekly users. OpenAI’s iconic chatbot was soaring, while Microsoft’s best hope for a mass-adoption AI tool was idling. It was a sobering chart for Microsoft’s consumer AI team…
That’s right; Microsoft Copilot’s weekly user base is only 5% of the number of people who use ChatGPT, and it’s not increasing. It’s also worth noting that there are approximately 1.5 billion Windows users worldwide, which means just over 1% of them are using Copilot, a tool that’s now a Windows default app….
It’s not a huge surprise that Copilot is faltering. Despite Microsoft’s CEO claiming that Copilot will become “the next Start button”, the company has had to backtrack on the Copilot key and allow people to customise it to do something else, including giving back its original feature of the Menu key.
They also note earlier reports that Intel’s AI PC chips aren’t selling well.
Zombies never really go out of style, but they were an especially hot commodity on television in the 2010s, spawning the blockbuster series The Walking Dead (2010-2022) as well as quirkier fare like Netflix’s comedy horror, The Santa Clarita Diet (2017-2018). iZombie, a supernatural procedural dramedy that ran for five seasons on the CW, falls into the latter category. It never achieved mega-hit status but nonetheless earned a hugely loyal following drawn to the show’s wicked humor, well-drawn characters, and winning mix of cases-of-the-week and longer narrative arcs.
(Spoilers for all five seasons below.)
The original Vertigo comic series was created by writer Chris Roberson and artist Michael Allred. It featured a zombie in Eugene, Oregon, named Gwen Dylan, who worked as a gravedigger because she needed to consume brains every 30 days to keep her memories and cognitive faculties in working order. Her best friends were a ghost who died in the 1960s and a were-terrier named Scott, nicknamed “Spot,” and together they took on challenges both personal and supernatural (vampires, mummies, etc.).
Io_uring was introduced in 2019 with Linux kernel 5.1, and its purpose was to help improve the efficiency and flexibility of input and output operations on Linux. While this led to significant performance gains, it also led to critical blind spots for Linux security tools. Most recently, security researchers have discovered that io_uring operations
“Google’s DeepMind UK team reportedly seeks to unionize,” reports TechCrunch:
Around 300 London-based members of Google’s AI-focused DeepMind team are seeking to unionize with the Communication Workers Union, according to a Financial Times report that cites three people involved with the unionization effort.
These DeepMind employees are reportedly unhappy about Google’s decision to remove a pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance from its website. They’re also concerned about the company’s work with the Israeli military, including a $1.2 billion cloud computing contract that has prompted protests elsewhere at Google.
At least five DeepMind employees quit, according to the report (out of a 2,000 total U.K. staff members).
“A small group of around 200 employees of Google and its parent company Alphabet previously announced that they were unionizing,” the article adds, “though as a union representing just a tiny slice of the total Google workforce, it lacked the ability to collectively bargain.”
Some Meta employees are working weekends to ship the company’s smart glasses with a HUD in October, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports.
The Verge, The Information, The Financial Times, and Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman have all previously reported that Meta intends to release smart glasses with a small heads-up display (HUD) in late 2025, codenamed Hypernova.
Earlier this month, Gurman reported specific features and details of Hypernova, including a planned price of “over $1000 and as high as $1300 to $1400”, and the inclusion of Meta’s long-in-development sEMG neural wristband for finger gesture controls.
Now, in the latest edition of his weekly newsletter, Gurman reports that shipping Hypernova in October is Meta’s top hardware priority.
According to Gurman, Hypernova has “a slight risk” of being delayed, and thus Meta managers have told employees to “accelerate” their work —including, in some cases, working weekends.
Gurman also says that Apple’s competing smart glasses, which he previously said could launch around 2027, are codenamed N50, and like the Ray-Ban Meta glasses will have a strong focus on visual multimodal AI, which Apple brands Visual Intelligence on iPhone 16.
Meta Connect 2025 will take place from September 17, and we expect Meta to announce Hypernova as a product and open preorders at this event for shipping in October — assuming it doesn’t get delayed.
Check out our completely updated guide on installing a WireGuard VPN server using wg-easy and managing everything effortlessly via a user-friendly web UI.
4chan, the infamous forum known for its anonymous user base posting unhinged material, has made its comeback. A post on the website’s official blog, titled “Still Standing,” detailed the timeline of events that led to 4chan’s shutdown earlier this month. According to the site’s own status checker, the boards and front page are up, but posting and images are still down.
The 4chan blog post explains that moderators shut down the servers on April 14 to prevent any more damage after a serious database attack where hackers gained access to the site’s source code. The blog post labeled the incident “catastrophic” since it breached a ton of 4chan’s databases along with its most important server. The hack even vandalized the website and revealed personal information of the 4chan moderation team and many of its users.
The blog post attributed the hack to the site’s inability to update the code and infrastructure due to a lack of “skilled man-hours.” Unsurprisingly, the site was starved for money to address these concerns since it’s hard for 4chan to find willing financial backers. “Advertisers and payment providers willing to work with 4chan are rare, and are quickly pressured by activists into cancelling their services,” the blog post read. “Putting together the money for new equipment took nearly a decade.”
Now that the website is back, there will be some crucial changes. According to the blog post, the /f/ board will stay shut down since the 4chan team can’t prevent exploits related to the commonly-posted .swf file format. For similar reasons, the resurrected 4chan will also disable PDF uploads for now, but will reintroduce them in the near future. Moving forward, 4chan says it is bringing on volunteers to keep up with the workload of putting the website back together. The moderation team apparently isn’t going to let 4chan die easily — the blog post read “no matter how hard it is, we are not giving up.” Still, it feels inevitable that 4chan will run into a similar problem in the future, considering it hasn’t solved the root issue of securing money to keep its servers up-to-date.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/4chan-is-back-after-a-nearly-two-week-shutdown-but-it-still-has-some-serious-problems-171124240.html?src=rss
Bigscreen Beyond 2’s first shipping batches have been delayed to June, or late May if things go well.
Beyond 2 and Beyond 2e were announced and went on sale in March. The first orders were supposed to ship in April and May, respectively, but the headsets are now set to ship in June.
Due to what the company described as far greater than expected demand, the April and May batches of Beyond 2 had already sold out within a few hours of orders opening, so this delay will only affect those initial buyers.
Bigscreen ascribes the delay to a design flaw in a printed circuit board (PCB) in the headset affecting controller tracking, an issue which it says testers have encountered.
By the time it had confirmed the issue, the company says, it had already produced 5000 PCBs with the flaw, which now have to be scrapped.
The company also says it has had help from Valve, with Beyond 2 including “some improvements that were previously implemented on the Valve Index” that will improve controller tracking.
To scale up production of Beyond 2, given the demand, Bigscreen has hired 11 new employees across its Los Angeles assembly factory and customer support team over the past few weeks. It also says its overseas manufacturer is now running double shifts overnight.
To ensure that scaling up doesn’t result in quality control issues, Bigscreen is now using computer vision to assess parts including displays, lenses, optics, and eyetracking cameras, which it says allows it to improve quality and reduce defects with “greater speed and accuracy”.
“If we are able to accelerate our production, we hope to begin shipping the first Beyond 2 batch by the end of May”, Bigscreen writes.
You can read about the features and specifications of Beyond 2 and Beyond 2e here, and you can read our hands-on impressions of Beyond 2 from GDC 2025 here.
“Not so long ago, working in tech meant job security, extravagant perks and a bring-your-whole-self-to-the-office ethos rare in other industries,” writes the Wall Street Journal.
But now tech work “looks like a regular job,” with workers “contending with the constant fear of layoffs, longer hours and an ever-growing list of responsibilities for the same pay.”
Now employees find themselves doing the work of multiple laid-off colleagues. Some have lost jobs only to be rehired into positions that aren’t eligible for raises or stock grants. Changing jobs used to be a surefire way to secure a raise; these days, asking for more money can lead to a job offer being withdrawn.
The shift in tech has been building slowly. For years, demand for workers outstripped supply, a dynamic that peaked during the Covid-19 pandemic. Big tech companies like Meta and Salesforce admitted they brought on too many employees. The ensuing downturn included mass layoffs that started in 2022…
[S]ome longtime tech employees say they no longer recognize the companies they work for. Management has become more focused on delivering the results Wall Street expects. Revenue remains strong for tech giants, but they’re pouring resources into costly AI infrastructure, putting pressure on cash flow. With the industry all grown up, a heads-down, keep-quiet mentality has taken root, workers say… Tech workers are still well-paid compared with other sectors, but currently there’s a split in the industry. Those working in AI — and especially those with Ph.D.s — are seeing their compensation packages soar. But those without AI experience are finding they’re better off staying where they are, because companies aren’t paying what they were a few years ago.
Other excepts from the Wall Street Journal’s article:
“I’m hearing of people having 30 direct reports,” says David Markley, who spent seven years at Amazon and is now an executive coach for workers at large tech companies. “It’s not because the companies don’t have the money. In a lot of ways, it’s because of AI and the narratives out there about how collapsing the organization is better….”
In some cases, companies post record revenue while still trimming head count.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin told a group of employees in February that 60 hours a week was the sweet spot of productivity, in comments reported earlier by the New York Times.
One recruiter at Meta who had been laid off by the company was rehired into her old role last year, but with a catch: She’s now classified as a “short-term employee.” Her contract is eligible for renewal, but she doesn’t get merit pay increases, promotions or stock. The recruiter says she’s responsible for a volume of work that used to be spread among several people. The company refers to being loaded with such additional responsibilities as “agility.” More than 50,000 tech workers from over 100 companies have been laid off in 2025, according to Layoffs.fyi, a website that tracks job cuts and crowdsources lists of laid off workers…
Even before those 50,000 layoffs in 2025,
Silicon Valley’s Mercury News was citing some interesting statistics from economic research/consulting firm Beacon Economics. In 2020, 2021 and 2022, the San Francisco Bay Area added 74,700 tech jobs But then in 2023 and 2024 the industry had slashed even more tech jobs — 80,200 — for a net loss (over five years) of 5,500.
So is there really a cutback in perks and a fear of layoffs that’s casting a pall over the industry? share your own thoughts and experiences in the comments. Do you agree with the picture that’s being painted by the Wall Street Journal?
They told their readers that tech workers are now “just like the rest of us: miserable at work.”
