For decades now, the Microsoft Flight Simulator franchise has been associated with Microsoft’s own DOS/Windows operating systems and, more recently, Xbox consoles (weird exceptions like this 1986 Macintosh port notwithstanding). However, that era seems set to end as Sony announced during this evening’s State of Play livestream that Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 will come to the PlayStation 5 on December 8.

No, that’s not a typo.
Credit:
Sony

The move isn’t entirely shocking for modern Microsoft, which has been publishing previous Xbox exclusives on competing consoles in increasing numbers for a while now. And Flight Simulator 2024 has been available on Xbox Series S/X for almost a year now, as the name suggests, giving Xbox owners a “timed exclusive” at least.

Still, it’s a bit striking to see a franchise that literally has the Microsoft brand name integrated into its title moving to a major non-Microsoft platform like this. The impact is a little bit like seeing a Sonic game on a Nintendo console for the first time in 2001, after years of Sega selling itself as the anti-Nintendo.

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Sony’s lineup of gaming-focused audio devices is growing with the addition of the PlayStation Pulse Elevate wireless speakers. They work with PC, Mac, PlayStation 5 and PlayStation Portal, and they support Bluetooth and Sony’s proprietary PlayStation Link Wireless connection scheme. The Pulse Elevate speakers come in white or black, and they’re due to hit the market in 2026. There’s no word on price just yet.

The Pulse Elevate speakers can be set on charging stands when playing at your desk, or they can be disconnected and used in portable mode. When not docked, they have (an unspecified number of) “hours of battery life,” according to Sony’s hype trailer. The speakers support 3D audio, they can be tilted back, and they have an integrated mic with noise reduction, planar magnetic drivers and a built-in woofer.

The PlayStation Pulse Elevate speakers join Sony’s Pulse Elite gaming headset and Pulse Explore earbuds. The earbuds retail for $200 and the headset goes for $150.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/playstation/playstation-pulse-elevate-portable-speakers-are-coming-for-your-desktop-in-2026-215320963.html?src=rss

Just in time for all your Halloween gaming projects, Alan Wake 2 will be the free to play for members of the PS Plus program in October. The news was announced during Sony’s State of Play presentation. 

The recent remake of the game showcases Remedy Entertainment’s skill with tell eerie, surreal interactive stories. And the fans have responded; it’s Remedy’s fastest-selling game to date. If you’re one of those people who hasn’t already bought a copy, now might be the time to join Alan and Saga in solving their supernatural murder mystery.

The new batch of PS Plus games, which also includes the compelling puzzle game Cocoon and Goat Simulator 3, will be available starting October 7. And in case you haven’t gotten enough of Joel, Ellie and the gang, Sony is also adding The Last of Us Part II to the PS Plus game catalog. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/playstation/alan-wake-2-will-be-free-on-ps-plus-in-october-213539815.html?src=rss

Microsoft is bring yet another of its formerly exclusive games to PlayStation. During Sony’s latest State of Play, the company announced that Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is coming to PS5 on December 8, 2025.

Based on the trailer showed during Sony’s event, the PS5 version of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, will carry over the same graphical detail and giant commercial aircraft of the original, along with support for the PS VR 2 headset for even more immersive cockpit gameplay. Along with accurately simulating real-life airplanes, Flight Simulator also uses real geographical and weather data for its maps, making flight as peaceful or difficult as they would be in real life.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 joins a growing collection of former Xbox and PC exclusives that Microsoft has brought to Sony’s console. The company started with games like Sea of Thieves and Pentiment, but now even bigger titles like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle come to PS5 eventually. 

It’s all part of Microsoft ongoing Game Pass and game streaming strategy, but it’s also working for Sony, too. Helldivers 2 was originally a PS5-exclusive, but when it came to Xbox it almost immediately became one of the best-selling games on the platform.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/playstation/microsoft-flight-simulator-2024-is-coming-to-ps5-on-december-8-213203456.html?src=rss

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It seems like iOS 26 just dropped, and yet, Apple is back at it with another update. As of Monday, iOS 26.1 is officially in beta testing, which means developers and public testers can try out Apple’s next update early.

“Point updates” like iOS 26.1 are never as feature-filled as the main releases, though 26.1 seems particularly small in scope. Apple seems to have done most of what it planned to do with iOS 26, saving just smaller changes for this upcoming update. Still, there are some interesting new additions in this latest beta, and more could come in subsequent releases. Here’s what’s new.

Apple Music gestures

If you want to skip a song in Apple Music, you hit the forward button. If you want to get back to the previous song, or restart the current song, you hit the back button. With iOS 26.1, however, you’ll have the option to swipe to switch between songs.

In the current beta, you can swipe right and left on the Now Playing bar to switch back and forth through your queue. With it, Apple has removed the skip forward button from the Now Playing bar. (The back button wasn’t present.) It’s a small but cool feature, but one that might take a little time to get used to.

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Video playback bar

In the current version of iOS 26, the video playback bar in the Photos app is flush with the UI. You might love or hate it, but it can be a bit difficult to make it out, depending on the video in question. The play button and mute button, for example, can disappear when iOS can’t change their colors to stand out from the background.

iOS 26.1 beta 1, however, introduces a new video playback bar that is separate from the UI. It looks good, and is easy to see at all times. Again, a small change, but a smart one.

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Live Translation languages

Live Translation for AirPods is a fantastic new feature that automatically translates conversations you’re having with someone who speaks a language you don’t understand. So long as you have an iPhone 15 Pro or newer, as well as AirPods Pro 2, AirPods Pro 3, or AirPods 5 with Active Noise Cancellation, you’ve been able to try it out since iOS 26’s launch.

Apple initially rolled out support for French, German, Portuguese (Brazil), and Spanish (Spain), but plans to expand the list in the future. With iOS 26.1, it adds four new options, including:

• Chinese (Mandarin, simplified)

• Chinese (Mandarin, traditional)

• Italian

• Japanese

• Korean

Eight new languages for Apple Intelligence

Users with an iPhone 15 Pro and newer, listen up: Apple Intelligence supports eight new languages in iOS 26.1. As of this first beta, that includes the following:

• Chinese (traditional)

• Danish

• Dutch

• Norwegian

• Portuguese (Portugal)

• Swedish

• Turkish

• Vietnamese

Liquid Glass comes to the Phone’s keypad

Liquid Glass, Apple’s new design language, isn’t everywhere in iOS 26. While much of the UI now has a glassy look, some elements still look like iOS 18 and earlier. The Phone app’s keypad was one such example: While the app itself is very much changed with this update, switch to the keypad, and it looks the same as ever.

That changes with iOS 26.1. The beta brings Liquid Glass to the keypad, which, while consistent with most of iOS 26’s design, does reduce the visibility of the keys a bit, especially in light mode. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Apple workshop this one a bit.

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Calendar

Whenever you have Calendar in List view in iOS 26.1, you’ll see your daily events color-coded by their respective calendars, rather than simply listed against the same white background.

References to third-party smartwatch support

If you have an iPhone, you know the only smartwatch that really works well with it is the Apple Watch. Some watches offer notification support, but most simply don’t jive well with iOS.

That might be changing in the future. Code within the iOS 26.1 beta references a new “Notification Forwarding” feature, that might allow you to choose a third-party device to send your iPhone alerts to. In addition, an unfinished “AccessoryExtension” option might be the framework that lets you pair a third-party watch to your iPhone.

These are just references in code, not something that you can actively test out in the 26.1 beta, but it’s worth noting. Apple is experimenting with supporting third-party watches on iOS, though it could just be to appease the EU’s “Digital Markets Act.”

BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: Cloudflare has unveiled the Content Signals Policy, a free addition to its managed robots.txt service that aims to give website owners and publishers more control over how their content is accessed and reused by AI companies. The idea is pretty simple: robots.txt already lets site operators specify which crawlers can enter and where. Cloudflare’s new policy adds a layer that signals how the data may be used once accessed, with plain-language terms for search, AI input, and AI training. “Yes” means allowed, “no” means not allowed, and no signal means no preference.

Matthew Prince, Cloudflare’s co-founder and CEO, said: “The Internet cannot wait for a solution, while in the meantime, creators’ original content is used for profit by other companies. To ensure the web remains open and thriving, we’re giving website owners a better way to express how companies are allowed to use their content.” Cloudflare says more than 3.8 million domains already use its robots.txt tools to signal they don’t want their content used for AI training. Now, the Content Signals Policy makes those preferences clearer and potentially enforceable. Further reading: Cloudflare Flips AI Scraping Model With Pay-Per-Crawl System For Publishers

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One thing that Sony confirmed in advance for its September State of Play stream was a first look at gameplay for Saros, the next game from Housemarque (Returnal, Resogun). This is the first completely new project from the developer since it joined PlayStation Studios in 2021, and it opened the livestream.

Creative director Gregory Louden took viewers through a peek at the journey of Arjun Devraj (Rahul Kohli), who’s seeking answers on a shape-shifting planet called Carcosa. The combat looks very much in the vein of Returnal, with lots of lasers, projectiles and other nasty stuff to avoid. 

Arjun can trigger a shield to defend himself and redirect incoming projectiles to juice up a power weapon. He also gets a second chance to survive an encounter as there’s a revival ability he can use after his first death, but you’ll need to unlock the option to do that as it’s part of the permanent progression system. You’ll be able to upgrade your combat suit and other abilities too. Unsurprisingly, it all looks extremely pretty. 

Along with the first glimpse at gameplay, we got a release date. Saros will hit PS5 on March 20, 2026.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/playstation/housemarques-saros-will-hit-ps5-on-march-20-2026-211504381.html?src=rss

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This week I did over a dozen workouts with Apple’s new Workout Buddy. I ran, I walked, I strength trained, and even did a little indoor cycling. I’ve learned a few things, but the strangest is that I didn’t need an Apple Watch for any of it. 

Workout Buddy is an AI-powered feature that sends a little voice into your headphones to motivate and congratulate you as you’re working out. Apple touted Workout Buddy as a feature of WatchOS 26 and promoted it among the features of the new Series 11 Apple Watch, so you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s part of of the Apple Watch, specifically. But that’s not what I found. 

How to use Workout Buddy without an Apple Watch

But as I found when I took a supported Apple Watch out for a trail run with an old iPhone (a 12 Mini), Workout Buddy requires a phone that supports Apple Intelligence, so I didn’t have access to it. OK, fine, it needs a newer watch and a newer phone. (Or so I thought.) Eventually I got my hands on a 16 Pro and, yep, was able to enable and use Workout Buddy. 

But this week—with a Series 11 Apple Watch on my wrist and WatchOS 26 installed—I discovered something. I could power off the watch, or even leave it at home, and still get Workout Buddy. Here are a few things I tried, all of which got me Workout Buddy: 

• Starting a workout from the Series 10 or Series 11 Apple Watch

• Starting a workout from the Fitness app (you can do that now!) with the Powerbeats Pro 2 headphones paired

• Starting a workout from the Fitness app without any other Apple products in range, just a Coospo heart rate monitor and some Shokz headphones

• Starting a workout from the Fitness app with just Shokz headphones paired (no heart rate monitor, since it was a GPS-enabled walk)

The only configuration that wouldn’t give me Workout Buddy was using the Fitness app without headphones paired. It’s serious about needing headphones, but they can be paired to either the Watch or the iPhone. 

Workout Buddy is more of a chipper sidekick than a coach

I hoped Workout Buddy might provide some kind of coaching or workout guidance, but found that’s not quite what it’s there for. The biggest difference between having Workout Buddy on versus off during a run is that, with Workout Buddy, you get your splits read to you in a more conversational voice.

The main advantage of Workout Buddy is that it gives you a check-in at the beginning and end of your workout to let you know where you stand on your goals and progress for the day and the week, and it will call out any notable recent achievements. 

For example, at the start of pretty much every workout this week—whether running, walking, or strength–it congratulated me on running my fastest-ever 5K last Tuesday. It also let me know I logged at least 16 workouts every week for the past four weeks, which is very consistent of me. 

The workout count seems to be correct (I log a lot of short workouts for device testing), but the 5K callout is wrong. Last Tuesday I earned a 5K badge, but that’s just for logging a run of more than five kilometers, not for running my fastest 5K. According to the Fitness app—remember, the same app that contains Workout Buddy—my fastest 5K was in July of 2021. 

Besides those hallucinations, the information seems to be reasonable. The overly-enthusiastic voice of the Workout Buddy always tells me at the start of each workout where I stand on my ring-closing goals. I need 22 more minutes to close my Exercise ring, it might say, or 37 more calories to close the Move ring. At the start of a run, it will tell me how many miles I’ve already run this week. And if I have music playing, it will name-check the band—seemingly just to let me know it can read that data. “Get into the rhythm with Fleetwood Mac!” it told me once, just as a Fleetwood Mac song was fading out. 

Overall, I find the goal-oriented check-ins useful; knowing I have 22 minutes left on my exercise goal does make me more likely to extend my workout if I was only going to do a 20-minute one. The conversational voice giving me my mile splits is a bit nicer than hearing the generic, more robot-like voice. And if I had run my fastest 5K recently, I’d probably love to be reminded about it at every opportunity. 

Following the announcement of its first smart glasses with a built-in display, Meta is opening several temporary retail locations where you’ll be able to demo the Meta Ray-Ban Display, their Meta Neural Band controller and the rest of the company’s Reality Labs products. These new “Meta Lab” locations will offer another way to see the company’s new $799 smart glasses, which currently aren’t available for purchase without an in-person demo and fitting.

For the rollout of the Meta Ray-Ban Display, Meta Lab locations will be available to visit in Las Vegas starting on October 16, Los Angeles starting on October 24 and New York starting on November 13. Meta also says interested Bay Area customers will  be able to demo and purchase the new smart glasses at the company’s existing Meta Store location in Burlingame, which has been rebranded as a “Meta Lab.”

While the appeal of having the face-mounted camera and speakers of the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses is easy to understand, Meta clearly believes adding a display into the mix changes that calculus. The company says interest in the new glasses is part of the reason it’s opening these new retail locations. “Demand for in-person demos of Meta Ray-Ban Display and the Meta Neural Band is strong, with appointments in many major cities already booked out through mid-October,” according to Meta. Interestingly, Meta also plans to test selling its Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses from vending machines, not unlike Snap did with its Spectacles.

These new Meta Labs join Ray-Ban, Verizon, Best Buy and LensCrafters stores as the only official places where you can try Meta’s new wearable. It’s hard to say if demand for demos will translate into actual sales, but clearly the positive buzz the company’s Connect showing was able to drum up has caught some people’s interest. You can book a demo at a Meta Lab through the company’s website.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/wearables/meta-lab-pop-ups-will-let-you-try-on-the-companys-new-smart-glasses-for-yourself-205756155.html?src=rss

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: After deflecting the US Department of Justice’s attack on its illegal monopoly in online search, Google is facing another attempt to dismantle its internet empire in a trial focused on abusive tactics in digital advertising. The trial that opened Monday in an Alexandria, Virginia, federal court revolves around the harmful conduct that resulted in US district Judge Leonie Brinkema declaring parts of Google’s digital advertising technology to be an illegal monopoly in April. The judge found that Google has been engaging in behavior that stifles competition to the detriment of online publishers that depend on the system for revenue.

Google and the justice department will spend the next two weeks in court presenting evidence in a “remedy” trial that will culminate in Brinkema issuing a ruling on how to restore fair market conditions. If the justice department gets its way, Brinkema will order Google to sell parts of its ad technology — a proposal that the company’s lawyers warned would “invite disruption and damage” to consumers and the internet’s ecosystem. The justice department contends a breakup would be the most effective and quickest way to undercut a monopoly that has been stifling competition and innovation for years. […]

The case, filed in 2023 under Joe Biden’s administration, threatens the complex network that Google has spent the past 17 years building to power its dominant digital advertising business. Digital advertising sales account for most of the $305 billion in revenue that Google’s services division generates for its corporate parent Alphabet. The company’s sprawling network of display ads provide the lifeblood that keeps thousands of websites alive. Google believes it has already made enough changes to its “ad manager” system, including providing more options and pricing options, to resolve the problems Brinkema flagged in her monopoly ruling.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Texas officials are telling residents to check their pets and livestock, and insisting on immediate use of pesticide bait after officials in Mexico confirmed an infection with the flesh-eating New World Screwworm (NWS) less than 70 miles from the US border.

NWS is a horrifying parasitic fly that attacks warm-blooded animals, laying hundreds of eggs in any openings or wounds, even minute ones. The resulting larvae both look and act like screws, boring and twisting into the animal while feasting on its living flesh. The ravenous larvae create ghastly wounds that can be deadly to livestock and wild animals.

Long ago, this ferocious fly was endemic in the US and stymied the livestock industry. However, in the 1950s, eradication efforts using sterile male flies and livestock monitoring began to push the fly population southward. By around 1966, it was cleared from the US, and Mexico zapped the population in the 1980s. By 2006, it was pushed out of Central America, with Panama declaring it eradicated and holding the flies at bay at the Darién Gap at the border with Colombia. However, in 2022, the gap was breached, and the flies have been steadily moving northward.

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