According to the Wall Street Journal, the videogame giant Electronic Arts is nearing a $50 billion deal to go private. A group of investors, including private-equity firms Silver Lake and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, may announce a deal for Electronic Arts as soon as next week. The report says it “would likely be the largest leveraged buyout of all time.”
Developing…
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: A team of suspected Chinese hackers has infiltrated US software developers and law firms in a sophisticated campaign to collect intelligence that could help Beijing in its ongoing trade fight with Washington, cybersecurity firm Mandiant said Wednesday. The hackers have been rampant in recent weeks, hitting the cloud-computing firms that numerous American companies rely on to store key data, Mandiant, which is owned by Google, said. In a sign of how important China’s hacking army is in the race for tech supremacy, the hackers have also stolen US tech firms’ proprietary software and used it to find new vulnerabilities to burrow deeper into networks, according to Mandiant.
[…] In some cases, the hackers have lurked undetected in the US corporate networks for over a year, quietly collecting intelligence, Mandiant said. The disclosure comes after the Trump administration escalated America’s trade war with China this spring by slapping unprecedented tariffs on Chinese exports to the United States. The tit-for-tat tariffs set off a scramble in both governments to understand each other’s positions. Mandiant analysts said the fallout from the breaches — the task of kicking out the hackers and assessing the damage — could last many months. They described it as a milestone hack, comparable in severity and sophistication to Russia’s use of SolarWinds software to infiltrate US government agencies in 2020.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Microsoft has a fix for long shader compilation wait times. The system is called Advanced Shader Delivery, and it’s being first introduced for ASUS ROG Xbox Ally handhelds and games listed on the Xbox app.
Just about every PC gamer knows the feeling of booting up a highly anticipated new AAA title, excited to explore its sprawling environments or open world, only to be hit with “compiling shaders” and a progress bar that seems to move at a snail’s pace. Depending on what specs you’re rocking and what game you’ve just installed, the wait could be as much as one to two hours for those with slower CPUs and older systems.
While it seems increasingly common that huge games are using these shader compilation screens before even getting to the main menu (looking at you Hogwarts Legacy), games that choose not to use them still need to load and compile shaders. If they aren’t done ahead of time, then they must be done during gameplay, which can lead to in-game stuttering that many gamers are also familiar with.
Advanced Shader Delivery would preempt this by doing the entire compilation process ahead of time and storing those compiled shaders in the cloud. The catch is that shader compilation is hardware-specific, and since there are myriad GPU and driver combos, it would take a few dozen sets of compiled shaders to cover all the most common setups, and that’s per game. Extrapolate that out even just to all the AAA titles released yearly, and you’ve got yourself a massive database.
This is similar to how shader compilation works on consoles, but you’re talking about at most two or three versions per console, or even fewer in the case of the Nintendo Switch. In fact, that’s precisely why Microsoft is starting with the ASUS ROG Xbox Ally handhelds, which comprises only two hardware configurations.
Microsoft’s Agility SDK for game developers now supports Advanced Shader Delivery, meaning devs could start building it into new games already. In practice, it can take years to fully capitalize on new technologies like this.
That’s exactly what we’ve seen with Direct Storage, another Microsoft technology meant to reduce asset load times. Three years after its release, we still see only a handful of big titles incorporating Direct Storage. It might be a long time before we see Advanced Shader Delivery incorporated into most popular games and available on different store fronts like Steam.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pc/microsofts-fix-for-pc-shader-compilation-stutter-could-take-years-to-fully-implement-183904449.html?src=rss
It was also a much smaller game at one point before growing in scope and becoming the hit game we know today
The post <i> Helldivers 2</i> Could Have Ended Up As A Free-To-Play Game appeared first on Kotaku.
Did you know you can customize Google to filter out garbage? Take these steps for better search results, including adding my work at Lifehacker as a preferred source.
The nearly universal adoption of smartphones in the late 2000s changed more than how we waste time while waiting in lines. With nearly everyone carrying a high-quality camera and microphone in their pocket—and the ability to instantly broadcast anything to a potential audience of millions—our collective concept of privacy has been permanently altered. If you’re not a little concerned with how what you do in public would play on YouTube, you’re not paying attention.
As smart glasses equipped with cameras and mics edge closer to mainstream adoption, we’re facing another, subtler shift. Unlike smartphones, where it’s obvious when someone is recording, smart glasses can capture video or audio nearly invisibly—raising fresh legal, ethical, and moral concerns. Here’s what you should be aware of, whether you’re currently rocking smart glasses or plan to in the future.
What the general public thinks of as “privacy” may have shifted, but the law may not have kept pace. “Current laws do not provide the protection that most people would probably expect that they should,” says David B. Hoppe, an international transactional lawyer who specializes in emerging legal issues in media and technology.
Some statutes have been written to account for new technology—prohibitions on revenge porn, for instance—but the overarching legal framework concerning privacy was developed for a pre-smartphone, pre-smart glasses world. So let’s dig into it.
State and federal laws have criminalized some kinds of recordings in public, like shooting videos up people’s skirts, but in general, the First Amendment provides broad protection of people’s right to take photos and videos of whatever they can see. “In general, our presumption is that capturing photos, videos, or other data from public spaces is unrestricted,” says Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law and Co-Director of the High Tech Law Institute.
That presumption applies to smart glasses, so if you’re in a public space, you can usually record what you’d like. “As a general matter, the video function could be used in a public setting,” Hoppe says.
How you use a recording matters, though. “An issue that could arise is whether or not there’s a commercial aspect to its use,” Hoppe says. “In many states there could be an obligation to have cleared the publicity rights from any individuals who are identifiable in the video.”
The meaning of “commercial,” though, can be tricky. Something like filming an advertisement would likely be considered commercial speech and have less legal protection, in terms of privacy, than something like making an art movie for your film class. Somewhere in the middle is earning money from a social media video. Monetizing doesn’t automatically remove legal free speech protection, but it could shift content toward commercial speech, and local filming laws could apply to what you shoot as well. It’s complicated, so if you have any doubts, talk to a lawyer.
Courts have largely held that a patron in a private business that is open to the public, like a store or a restaurant, can expect more privacy than they have while on a public sidewalk, but less than they’d have if they were somewhere really private, like their home. “It gets into expectations of privacy,” explains Goldman. “A restaurant could be anywhere from family-seating, where that expectation would be unreasonable, to a private booth that has 50 feet in any direction from any other seat, which might be a more reasonable expectation of privacy.”
While a person can generally legally capture images in a business that’s open to the public, it’s within the owners’ rights to prohibit filming. “Normally businesses can set rules for how their customers engage with each other,” Goldman says. “The recourse would be banning you from their premises.”
So if you turn on your Ray-Ban Metas in the gym, you probably won’t be arrested, but the gym could/should have a “no photography” policy that it could enforce by having you banned from the premises and calling the cops if you won’t leave. Of course, recording in private areas of any business, like the locker room of said gym, is illegal everywhere in the U.S.
Recording sound from a pair of smart glasses could expose you to legal risks that shooting video may not. While images taken in public of anything in plain view are generally legal, audio is a different story. Just like a conversation in a restaurant, the key factor is the “reasonable expectation of privacy.” Two people having a quiet conversation on a park bench likely expect a level of privacy that a guy shouting on a street corner does not.
Courts have largely agreed that recording conversations in public is protected by the Constitution, as long as everyone in the conversation knows they are being recorded and agrees to it. The opposite situation—a third party recording a private conversation without the participants’ knowledge—would often be considered “eavesdropping,” and that’s often a crime.
It gets tricky when only one party consents to a recording. “In general, there are some states that have required that any recording of a conversation between two parties requires the consent of both parties,” Goldman says. “So if the glasses are being used in those conversations, without consent from the other party, that would be a violation in those states.”
Here’s a breakdown of one-party consent states and all-party consent states. If you have any doubts about the legality of a recording, consult with a lawyer, or just don’t hit record.
Maybe you bought a pair of smart glasses to record your life, but make no mistake: you are the one being recorded. When you click “agree” on that terms of service screen, you could be allowing a big data company to collect your GPS data, biometric data (like eye movements and health information), contact lists, messages, political views, what you see, what you say, who you talk to, and more. And it’s legal because you agreed to it. Usually.
“Some [data collected by your smart glasses] is controlled by contract,” Goldman says. “So Meta would disclose its privacy policies in some disclosure to the consumer, and then those might be the rules that apply. There are some places where there may be limits on the ability of Meta to access that data,” Goldman says.
Bottom line: you have some protections over your personal data that aren’t necessarily signed away with a click. A patchwork of federal laws provide specific protections: HIPAA protects the privacy of your medical records, FCRA protects your credit reports, and other federal laws protect financial information children’s privacy. But more meaningful consumer privacy protection comes from California state law. In the last 10 years, Cali has enacted relatively robust privacy protection laws that give Californians the right to know what personal data companies collect, the right to delete that data, and the right to opt out of their data being sold.
“But I live in Ohio,” you might be saying. First, sorry about that. Secondly, we have your back anyway! Big tech companies have largely adopted California’s privacy laws as their baseline for data collection. So while the amount of data being collected from your glasses isn’t ideal, at least you can claw some of it back.
Check out this video of a recent concert from O.G. trip hop band Massive Attack:
The band is turning facial recognition technology on its audience, displaying audience members along with what seems to be their professions. The technology to instantly identify a stranger and scrape publicly available databases on that person is possible with existing technology in smart glasses, and is, in theory, perfectly legal. Even if the person being filmed doesn’t know you’re doing it. Again, how you use information you collect might not be legal.
According to Hoppe, the laws in place just weren’t written with smart glasses in mind. “The basic standard, that comes from common law times, was that if you’re in a public place, you don’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy, but at that point in time—and up until the last two decades—being in a public place meant you could be observed, but that you would simply be a memory in a human mind somewhere. It wouldn’t be recorded in video format that could immediately be published to the entire world.” Hoppe said.
Right now, privacy laws in the U.S. are largely reactive and evolve after new technology has reshaped how we live. But what might it look like if we got ahead of the curve (or at least tried harder to catch up?) Like everything, it’s complicated.
Hoppe imagines one extreme: a “privacy maximalist” set of laws, where no one could be recorded without their consent, even in public. “That would make sense, right? But the challenge you then have is things like security cameras and other stationary devices that are simply recording everything. Is that really a privacy threat?” Hoppe says. “And if so, isn’t it outweighed by the beneficial effects to society as as a whole, in terms of protection of crime prevention and protection of property and so forth?”
And there’s that whole “freedom” thing. “The idea that there is a public sphere where we are free to capture and record and share our views about what we see, is an essential part of free speech,” Goldman says. “And if privacy laws were to overly restrict that, it would take our away our ability not only to express ourselves and and react to the world that we see, but it would have significant power implications on the ability of people to control conversations in a way that would ultimately take power away from us as people…We cannot let the concerns about people’s desire to control what people know about them override the ability of people to have organic, healthy, pro-social conversations.”
If you’re living your life in a halfway ethical manner (and you’re not providing cultural commentary in concert form like Massive Attack) you probably aren’t keen to privately dox everyone on the bus, and social norms are probably more important to you than potential legal penalties. Maybe you won’t be hauled away in cuffs for recording people eating dinner on the outdoor patio of a restaurant, but you will be met with scorn from just about every diner—especially if you’re sticking a phone in their face. Smart glasses, being less obvious than iPhones, change the equation somewhat. The etiquette around their use is evolving, leaving us all in a gray area where what’s legal and what’s socially acceptable don’t always line up.
Even if they’re not encoded in law, we’ve (mostly) collectively agreed upon some norms when it comes to cell phones—don’t film others in the gym, don’t stick your phone in a stranger’s face, etc.—and we’re getting there with smart glasses, but until we arrive, it’s going to be a bit tricky.
Smart glasses make recording less obtrusive and more natural-feeling, but they also make it easier to cross lines without realizing it. So it’s best to err on the side of courtesy: respect people in public, respect private spaces, and be cautious of what you’re recording in private/public spaces—taking pictures of your meal and friends is cool; taking pictures of strangers is not. Getting it wrong probably won’t end up with being thrown into jail, but being known as “that creep with the damn Meta glasses” might ultimately be a worse fate.
Companies must realize they can be more than pure consumers, and public sector ought to go beyond ‘promotion’Feature It is 2025. Linux will turn 34 and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) 40. For the EU and Europe at large, which is famously experimental with government deployments of open source tech, behind initiatives to promote open licensing, and whose governments promote equal opportunity for FOSS vendors in public tendering, it’s a crunch point.…
An Ebola outbreak in a southwestern province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo is escalating quickly, as some health responders say they have less than a tenth of the funding needed to contain the deadly disease.
The first case was identified in a 34-year-old pregnant woman on August 20, when she sought care at a local hospital in the Kasai province for fever, bloody vomiting, and hemorrhages. She died on August 25. Officials declared an outbreak on September 4, when the case tally was up to 28 with 15 deaths. As of this week, there have been at least 57 cases and 35 deaths—a 61 percent fatality rate, according to the World Health Organization.
Officials in DR Congo are struggling to respond to the outbreak, which is in a province known for its poor road networks, according to reporting by The Associated Press. Treating Ebola can require extensive resources, including protective equipment, medicines, and transportation to reach remote areas. Health facilities in the area of the outbreak are already overwhelmed and quickly running low on critical resources, including clean water and protective equipment. The only treatment center in the epicenter of the outbreak, the Bulape health zone, is at 119 percent capacity, the AP reported, citing information from the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies Africa (IFRC).
Back in June it was announced by Canonical that for the Ubuntu 25.10 release they would be raising the RISC-V baseline to the RVA23 profile even with barely any available RISC-V platforms supporting that newer RISC-V profile. That change is still going ahead and leaves Ubuntu 25.10 on RISC-V currently only supporting the QEMU virtualized target…
Satoru Shibata isn’t afraid to dance, sing, or hype his handheld collection
The post Nintendo Of America’s New CEO Seems Like A Fun Guy appeared first on Kotaku.
Mixed reality is quickly becoming a medium where we’re seeing more tabletop-inspired strategy and RPG games popping up. With that in mind, I picked up my Quest 3 and went hands-on with Successor, which recently came to the Meta Horizon Store. Read on for my impressions.
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After spending some time with Successor, I can already see the appeal in its tiny battles and the way it lets you manipulate a living slice of the game world across your play space. I’m normally not drawn to games in the strategy categories, but just like Banners & Bastions, this one delivers a satisfying sense of roguelite RPG snackability and an easier learning curve. You don’t feel like you’ll need to commit hours of your life to overseeing this tiny war, which takes place on a highly detailed augmented tabletop game board in front of you.
What makes Successor approachable is how quickly the basics fall into place. The learning curve feels surprisingly light, and once my party grew past two members, the tactical depth started kicking in a bit more. Every move demands increasing thoughtfulness, while the back-and-forth flow starts taking on the feel and familiar tension of some of my favorite classic 90s RPGs like the Final Fantasy series.
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Map manipulation is another highlight. Being able to resize and reposition it on the fly keeps the action comfortable and focused regardless of where I’m sitting or standing while playing. Playing around with the map for me is part of the fun… Just shifting the world around, then resizing it, and leaning in to get a better vantage point while my tiny heroes did battle is a cool experience in itself.
Now, it’s not all smooth terrain on the journey through Successor. I hit a strange bug where the map suddenly becomes a blacked-out silhouette if I push it too far past the midpoint of my position in the room. Oddly enough, this bug doesn’t appear on camera, making it impossible for me to demonstrate it here; however, it’s distracting but not game-breaking since I can simply keep the play area confined to a set space. Performance also dipped a few times during larger encounters, with noticeable slowdowns while multiple actions were triggered at once.
Furthermore, aliasing is heavy in certain spots, noticeably on text. World map tags, in particular, are so jagged-looking to my aging eyes that they are sometimes unreadable. With everything else in the game popping off nicely against the mixed reality backdrop, seeing text like this is the sort of rough edge that just stands out more in mixed reality, where clarity is crucial.
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Gameplay captured by UploadVR
Despite a few rough patches, the approachable mechanics with satisfying party-driven combat and mixed reality gameplay make it easy to recommend for fans of tabletop-style RPGs. The game already nails the fundamentals by providing tactical battles with an old-school RPG vibe. So with a bit more polish on performance, visual clarity for text, and the addition of more narrative depth, Successor could easily become a standout in the genre.
Successor is a game I’ll be keeping a closer eye on going forward, so look for updates here as they become available. If you’re ready to start your adventure now, you can grab a copy from the Meta Horizon Store here, and it’s also coming to PC VR at a later date.
Beginner racers fall into one of two categories: those who have raced IRL but not on Zwift, and those who haven’t raced indoors or out, but want to give it a try in a safe place like Zwift. Zwift Beginner Racing (ZBR) is a new club hosting events to help both types of riders better understand the sport in a club-neutral environment.
To help both groups of riders, ZBR hosts group rides where the ride leader shares their experience and knowledge of racing on Zwift. For example, their next event is Monday’s “Zwift Beginner Racing The Ins and Outs of Sprinting” in which “The ride leader is an experienced Zwift racer and will provide insight into how to set up for sprints and all the key points to get you over that line as fast as possible.“
Currently. ZBR events are held on Mondays and Wednesdays and rotate between the following:
See upcoming events at https://www.zwift.com/events/tag/zbr >
ZBR ride leaders message the group during events and are also on a Discord voice channel (https://discord.gg/PpCQzfuFdW) so event participants can communicate via either method.
In addition to hosting events to introduce people to racing, ZBR provides new racers with a Facebook and Discord presence to discuss racing and to provide visibility for events that are focused on beginner racers. (ZBR defines Beginner events as those with a pen supporting a Zwift Racing Score (ZRS) of 0-150 or Category D with 0-1.7 w/kg.)
Zwift Beginner Racing is open to anyone interested in learning about racing and trying it out.
In addition, ZBR would love to add new ride leaders interested in sharing their knowledge of racing!
Share below!
YouTube just announced YouTube Labs, which is being described as a “new way for users to take our cutting edge AI experiments for a test drive.” This looks like a YouTube-centric version of the pre-existing Google Labs, which is another place for folks to test out experimental AI tools.
There’s already something new to play with here. YouTube Labs is testing AI hosts for its Music app. These hosts are designed to deepen a listening experience by providing “relevant stories, fan trivia and fun commentary about your favorite music.” This is just the latest music-streaming platform to introduce AI hosts, as Spotify introduced an AI DJ earlier this year.
YouTube Labs is only available for Premium members. Sign-ups are open right now, but just for a “limited number of US-based participants.” We don’t have any data as to how many people will get accepted to join the AI tomfoolery.
Regular YouTube users have probably noticed the proliferation of AI slop on the platform these past several months. It’s becoming a whole thing. While the prospect of virtual music hosts is rather innocuous, it will likely lead to even more AI being forced on the platform.
YouTube recently added a boatload of AI tools for creators, including the ability to turn spoken dialogue into a slop-filled song. It’s also handing over age verification to AI and is testing its own version of Google’s famous (or infamous) AI overviews.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/youtube/youtube-music-is-testing-ai-hosts-that-present-relevant-stories-trivia-and-commentary-174042191.html?src=rss
These users have been thrown a lifeline with an extra
Contrary to what some may think, FF7 Rebirth’s sales have not hindered part three’s development
The post Live-Action <i>Beauty And The Beast</i> Was An Inspiration For <i>FF7 Remake</i> Trilogy , Says Director appeared first on Kotaku.
With Linux 6.17 expected for release this weekend, the Linux 6.18 merge window will in turn kick-off for its usual two week dance. Here is a look at some of the features on our radar that are expected to be merged for Linux 6.18, which is also likely to be the 2025 LTS kernel version…
Save up to 28% on the 2024 model of Samsung Galaxy tablet for a limited time at Amazon.
The post Forget Pricey Tablets From Apple and Samsung, This Galaxy Tab A9+ Plus Is Going for Nothing Before October Prime Day appeared first on Kotaku.
Vandal Hearts 2 had a reference to Konami’s shoot ’em up no one knew how to unlock until now
The post The 26-Year-Old Mystery Behind A Cult-Classic SRPG’s Gradius Sword Has Finally Been Solved appeared first on Kotaku.