If Hollywood has taught us anything, it’s that a blockbuster that makes bank will get a sequel (or seven). Enter A Minecraft Movie, with its surprisingly effective humor and $957 million box office payday. (Who had “Jack Black will anchor a nearly billion-dollar movie” on their 2025 bingo card?) So, it’s no surprise that Warner Bros. has officially greenlit a sequel.

Variety reports that Warner Bros. has penciled in the sequel for a July 23, 2027, premiere date. That would place it around two years after the original, which is the second-highest-grossing film of the year so far. (Disney’s Lilo & Stitch is in first, with a cool $1.03 billion at the box office.)

Warner Bros. / X

The sequel will reportedly bring back director Jared Hess. The Napoleon Dynamite creator will also co-write the screenplay with Chris Galletta. Producers are said to include Mary Parent, Cale Boyter, Roy Lee, Eric McLeod, Kayleen Walters, Torfi Frans Ólafsson and Jason Momoa.

Engadget was among the many publications taken aback by how good A Minecraft Movie was. After all, a film about an open-ended building game, starring one of the leads of the crummy Borderlands, didn’t sound promising. But we found it surprisingly funny, with just the right degree of winking self-awareness. On top of that, Devindra Hardawar said it “delivers a decent message about championing creativity in a world that wants to beat down free-thinking non-conformists.” Amen to that.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/a-minecraft-movie-is-getting-a-minecraft-sequel-203509569.html?src=rss

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Last week, Peloton unveiled a fleet of new equipment and major software updates to go along with it. The updates immediately reflected on the Peloton app and the interfaces of the company’s existing at-home workout equipment, so even if you don’t upgrade to a new Bike or Tread, you’ll still benefit. One of the biggest updates is the new “personalized plan,” which uses information based on your preferred workout types, goals, and available times to create a weekly workout schedule for you. I tested it for a week and found it a lot easier to use than I was expecting.

What the Peloton personalized plan does

With the new update, you can log into the Peloton app on your mobile device and you’ll see the personalized plan option right at the top. Tapping it brings you to a series of questions about your goals (like gaining strength or supporting weight loss or maintenance), what types of exercises you prefer (like cycling or walking), how experienced you are at working out, and how many days per week you can devote to exercise. There’s even a question about what you’d like to do on rest and recovery days, like stretching, meditating, or yoga. You can change your answers at any time.

Once you fill it all out, the app generates your personal plan, which updates every Monday and includes something to do each day, even if it’s a rest day. My original plan included cardio on Monday, upper body and core work on Tuesday, recovery on Wednesday, intervals on Thursday, lower body and core on Friday, a full-body day on Saturday, and a rest day on Sunday.

Credit: Peloton

After the plan is generated based on your inputs, you’ll always find it at the top of the screen when you open the app. Your suggested classes for the day will appear there, but you can tap See your weekly plan to pull up the full schedule. You can tap the classes recommended for the day to start working out or work ahead or backward. It’s not super rigid; it’s more of a broad overview of all the things your week should include to align with your goals, scheduled in a way that makes the most sense. But you can override whatever you want.

Credit: Peloton

For instance, you don’t have to take a certain class if you don’t want to. It recommends particular cycling classes to me frequently, but I’ve found that any cycling class I take “counts” toward completing a personalized plan class. The other day, I took a yoga class in a studio and used my Peloton app to track a non-Peloton strength workout. To my surprise, it counted that as one of my “plan” classes for the day, since I was supposed to do strength that day. I didn’t do the exact class it recommended, but that didn’t matter.

Why I like this more than I thought I would

I am a big fan of my app streaks, as gamifying the tasks I need to do every day motivates me a lot. (I have a 206-day streak on Peloton right now, for the record.) I was initially worried the personalized plan would be too structured and throw me off. Would I be penalized for not doing cardio on a day it told me to? Would this somehow affect my streak? The answers are no. There is no penalty for not following the plan. In fact, it’s quite flexible. Like I said, any workout you do can count toward the plan, not just the workouts it suggests. Moreover, it doesn’t matter if you take a class or track a workout that doesn’t count toward it. You’re still in charge of what you use the app for and how you work out. This is just meant to help you schedule a little better.

After announcing its intentions to make an XR device in 2023, and revealing the design and intended use-cases for the headset alongside the announcement of Android XR in 2024, Samsung has shared precious few details about Project Moohan. A new leak from Android Headlines is set to change that, detailing not only the specs of Samsung’s new headset, but also a final name and new controller accessories ahead of the device’s rumored launch later this fall.

Samsung’s Project Moohan — officially called “Samsung Galaxy XR” per Android Headlines — is a marriage of sorts between the discontinued Meta Quest Pro and an Apple Vision Pro. It features an adjustable headband, primarily acts as passthrough goggles to the world around you and supports an external battery pack. While Samsung’s demos of the Project Moohan focused on the headset’s ability to accept voice commands and track eye and hand movements through built-in microphones and cameras, Android Headlines reports the headset will also support two controller accessories that look a lot like Meta’s Touch Plus controllers for the Quest 3.

Android Headlines

More expected are the internals and software experience on the new device. Project Moohan will use a Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 chip to power its One UI-ified version of Android XR, just as Qualcomm promised when it announced the new processor in 2024. Samsung appears to be taking a lighter touch when it comes to software. Screenshots shared by Android Headlines show an app grid with the company’s browser, photos and camera apps, but the rest lines up with what Google’s shown of Android XR. 

The headset will also reportedly feature one high-resolution 4K micro-OLED screen per eye, as previously rumored by Korean publication The Elec, and around a two hours of battery life, which is comparable to the Vision Pro. Importantly, Project Moohan is also lighter. The headset reportedly weighs 545 grams, a good bit less than the over 600-gram Apple headset.

The only thing really missing now is a price for Project Moohan and a release date. Samsung shared in its Q2 2025 earnings that it still expected to ship the headset in 2025, but hasn’t announced an event to introduce the new device. Whenever it does launch, it sounds like it’ll be expensive. In August 2025, rumors pointed to Project Moohan costing anywhere from 2,500,000 to 4,000,000 Korean won (around $1,700 to $2,800).

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ar-vr/the-final-details-of-samsungs-android-xr-headset-have-been-all-but-confirmed-200915560.html?src=rss

Dave W. Plummer, the Microsoft developer who created Task Manager and helped build Windows Product Activation, has revealed the origins of Windows XP’s most notorious product key. The alphanumeric string FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8 was not cracked through clever hacking but leaked as a legitimate volume licensing key five weeks before XP’s October 2001 release.

A warez group distributed the key alongside special corporate installation media. Windows Product Activation generated hardware IDs from system components and sent them to Microsoft for validation. The leaked volume licensing key bypassed this entirely. The system recognized it as corporate licensing and skipped phone-home activation. Users could install XP without activation prompts or 30-day timers. Microsoft later blacklisted the key.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New York Comic Con (NYCC) has kicked off with an extended teaser for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, a new Game of Thrones spinoff series based on George R.R. Martin’s novella series, Tales of Dunk and Egg.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms adapts the first novella in the series, The Hedge Knight, and is set 50 years after the events of House of the Dragon. Per the official premise:

A century before the events of Game of Thrones, two unlikely heroes wandered Westeros: a young, naïve but courageous knight, Ser Duncan the Tall, and his diminutive squire, Egg. Set in an age when the Targaryen line still holds the Iron Throne and the last dragon has not yet passed from living memory, great destinies, powerful foes and dangerous exploits all await these improbable and incomparable friends.

Peter Claffey co-stars as Ser Duncan the Tall, aka a hedge knight named “Dunk,” along with Dexter Sol Ansell as Prince Aegon Targaryen, aka “Egg,” a child prince and Dunk’s squire. The main cast also includes Finn Bennett as Egg’s older brother, Prince Aerion “Brightflame” Targaryen; Bertie Carvel as Egg’s uncle, Prince Baelor “Breakspear” Targaryen, heir to the Iron Throne; Tanzyn Crawford as a Dornish puppeteer named Tanselle; Daniel Ings as Ser Lyonel “Laughing Storm” Baratheon, heir to House Baratheon; and Sam Spruell as Prince Maekar Targaryen, Egg’s father.

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For gamers of a certain age, gibberish character sequences like idkfa, torg, ABACABB, and UUDDLRLRBA are akin to long-lost magical incantations. They evoke an era where game developers frequently and routinely let players use cheat codes to customize their gameplay experience with everything from infinite health and instant level selection to full debug menus or gigantic anime-style giant-headed avatars. There were even external cheat devices that let players hack console games with cheat codes the developers never intended.

While the cheat code’s heyday is long in the past, the idea of letting players manipulate their gameplay experiences in similar ways is coming back into fashion for some developers. Last month, Square Enix announced that upcoming Switch 2 and Xbox ports of Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade would include new “streamlined progression” features. As the name implies, the new options menu will give players the opportunity to blaze through the game with infinite health, magic, and money, quicker leveling, maximum damage attacks, and more.

“Constant Max HP” is a funny way to spell and pronounce “god mode.”
Credit:
Reddit / Square Enix

While some responded negatively to what they derisively called a “cheat mode,” director Naoki Hamaguchi defended the new options in a recent interview with Automaton. “Personally, I like to try many different games just to keep myself up to date, but I don’t really have the time, so I only get so far,” he said. “I personally believe that, with digital entertainment today, the player should have the choice in how they interact with content. That’s why I pushed for it.”

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A few weeks ago, Google told US Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) that it would allow creators banned for COVID and election misinformation to rejoin the platform. It didn’t offer many details in the letter, but now YouTube has explained the restoration process. YouTube’s “second chances” are actually more expansive than the letter made it seem. Going forward, almost anyone banned from YouTube will have an opportunity to request a new channel. The company doesn’t guarantee approval, but you can expect to see plenty of banned creators back on Google’s video platform in the coming months.

This program appears much broader than Google’s letter to Jordan suggested. YouTube will now allow any banned creator to request reinstatement, but this is separate from appealing a ban. If a channel is banned, creators continue to have the option of appealing the ban. If successful, their channel comes back as if nothing happened. After one year, creators will now have the “second chance” option.

“We know many terminated creators deserve a second chance,” the blog post reads. The option for getting a new channel will appear in YouTube Studio on the desktop, and Google expects to begin sending out these notices in the coming months. However, anyone terminated for copyright violations is out of luck—Google does not forgive such infringement as easily as it does claiming that COVID is a hoax.

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The Internet Archive must block access to books in its Open Library project for Belgian users after negotiations with publishers failed. A Brussels Business Court issued a site-blocking order in July targeting several shadow libraries and the Internet Archive. A Belgian government department paused the order for the U.S. nonprofit and urged both parties to negotiate. The talks over recent weeks were unsuccessful.

The Department for Combating Infringements of Copyright concluded last week that the Internet Archive hosts the contested books and has the ability to render them inaccessible. Publishers must supply a list of books to be blocked. The nonprofit then has 20 calendar days to implement the measures and prevent future digital lending of those works in Belgium. The order includes a one-time penalty of $578,000 for non-compliance and remains in place until July 16 next year. The Internet Archive operates Open Library by purchasing physical copies and digitizing them to lend out one at a time. Publishers previously won a U.S. federal court case against the project.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Artificial intelligence companies have been working at breakneck speeds to develop the best and most powerful tools, but that rapid development hasn’t always been coupled with clear understandings of AI’s limitations or weaknesses. Today, Anthropic released a report on how attackers can influence the development of a large language model.

The study centered on a type of attack called poisoning, where an LLM is pretrained on malicious content intended to make it learn dangerous or unwanted behaviors. The key finding from this study is that a bad actor doesn’t need to control a percentage of the pretraining materials to get the LLM to be poisoned. Instead, the researchers found that a small and fairly constant number of malicious documents can poison an LLM, regardless of the size of the model or its training materials. The study was able to successfully backdoor LLMs based on using only 250 malicious documents in the pretraining data set, a much smaller number than expected for models ranging from 600 million to 13 billion parameters. 

“We’re sharing these findings to show that data-poisoning attacks might be more practical than believed, and to encourage further research on data poisoning and potential defenses against it,” the company said. Anthropic collaborated with the UK AI Security Institute and the Alan Turing Institute on the research.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/researchers-find-just-250-malicious-documents-can-leave-llms-vulnerable-to-backdoors-191112960.html?src=rss

Apple yesterday announced a plan to comply with a Texas age verification law and warned that changes required by the law will reduce privacy for app users.

“Beginning January 1, 2026, a new state law in Texas—SB2420—introduces age assurance requirements for app marketplaces and developers,” Apple said yesterday in a post for developers. “While we share the goal of strengthening kids’ online safety, we are concerned that SB2420 impacts the privacy of users by requiring the collection of sensitive, personally identifiable information to download any app, even if a user simply wants to check the weather or sports scores.”

The Texas App Store Accountability Act requires app stores to verify users’ ages and imposes restrictions on those under 18. Apple said that developers will have “to adopt new capabilities and modify behavior within their apps to meet their obligations under the law.”

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A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit by the National Retail Federation challenging a New York state law that requires retailers to tell customers when their personal data are used to set prices, known as surveillance pricing. From a report: U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff in Manhattan said the world’s largest retail trade group did not plausibly allege that New York’s Algorithmic Pricing Disclosure Act violated its members’ free speech rights under the Constitution’s First Amendment.

The first-in-the-nation law required retailers to disclose in capital letters when prices were set by algorithms using personal data, or face possible civil fines of $1,000 per violation. Governor Kathy Hochul said charging different prices depending on what people were willing to pay was “opaque,” and prevented comparison-shopping.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last week was a good one for Tesla, as it beat analysts’ estimates for the number of cars it could sell in the third quarter of the year. This week is probably a less good week for Tesla, since the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Office of Defects Investigation has opened yet another preliminary probe into the automaker—the third this year alone.

2025 hadn’t been going long before NHTSA announced an investigation following multiple crashes involving Tesla’s remote parking features. And last month, the agency started a second, concerning multiple deaths after the company’s signature retractable door handles became inoperative after a crash.

Now it’s the controversially named “Full Self-Driving” feature in the crosshairs, after dozens of reports of Teslas breaking traffic laws while using this partially automated driving assist.

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