An anonymous reader shares a report: In October, PUBG and Subnautica 2 publisher Krafton announced that it would be undergoing a “complete reorganization” to become an “AI-first” company, planning to invest over 130 billion won ($88 million) in agentic AI infrastructure and deployment beginning in 2026. This week, as it boasts record-breaking quarterly profits, the Korean publisher has followed that strategic shift by launching a voluntary resignation program for its domestic employees, according to Business Korea reporting.

The program, announced internally, offers substantial buyouts for domestic Krafton employees based on their length of employment at the publisher. Severance packages range from 6 months’ salary for employees with one year or less of service to 36 months’ salary for employees who’ve worked at Krafton for over 11 years. The voluntary resignation program follows a November 4 earnings call in which Krafton announced a record quarterly profit of $717 million. During the call, Krafton CFO Bae Dong-geun indicated that Krafton had also halted hiring for new positions, telling investors that “excluding organizations developing original intellectual property and AI-related personnel, we have frozen hiring company-wide.”

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A small upgrade can make an old TV feel new again, and the Amazon Fire TV Stick HD is the kind of plug-and-play streaming device that does exactly that. It’s down to $17.99 right now (from $34.99), which price-tracking sites confirm is its lowest recorded price.

Amazon Fire TV Stick HD (1080p)

$17.99
at Amazon

$34.99
Save $17.00

$17.99
at Amazon

$34.99
Save $17.00

PCMag calls it “the best 1080p media hub” for folks sticking to Full HD, and that lines up with how simple it is to set up. The stick slides straight into an HDMI port, and Amazon also includes a short extender in case your TV’s ports are too tight. It runs in 1080p and supports HDR10, so shows and movies mastered for HDR look a bit richer, even on older screens. I wouldn’t expect a dramatic jump in picture quality, but scenes with a lot of contrast—the kind with bright signage or dark backgrounds—look more defined. It also supports Dolby Atmos, which helps when you pair it with a soundbar that can handle it.

Using it day to day feels familiar if you’ve used any recent Fire TV interface. You get all the usual streaming services—Prime Video, Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, YouTube, Apple TV+, even Crunchyroll and Twitch. The Alexa button on the remote works like it does on other Fire devices: press, talk, let it find what you want. The remote itself feels simple enough to use, and the built-in volume rocker is helpful if your TV remote is long gone. It relies on a quad-core 1.7GHz processor, 1GB RAM, and 8GB of storage. That’s enough for the basics, but you’ll feel its limits from time to time. The interface can get choppy, especially when you jump across tabs quickly or open a large library. Reviews also point out that the stick still uses wifi 5 instead of wifi 6, which matters if your home has a lot of devices fighting for bandwidth.

This is strictly a 1080p device, so if you have a 4K TV (or plan to get one), the Fire TV Stick 4K is just $7 more and offers smoother performance, better wifi, and Dolby Vision. It also doesn’t support AirPlay or Google Cast, so sending videos from an iPhone or Android phone isn’t as seamless. Still, for someone with an older TV who wants the modern streaming apps in one place, the current $18 price makes it feel like a low-risk upgrade.

One of the most common viruses in the world could be the cause of lupus, an autoimmune disease with wide-ranging symptoms, according to a new study. From a report: Until now, lupus was somewhat mysterious: No single root cause of the disease had been found, and while there is no cure, there are medications that can treat it.

The research, published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, suggests that Epstein-Barr virus — which 95% of people acquire at some point in life — could cause lupus by driving the body to attack its own healthy cells.

It adds to mounting evidence that Epstein-Barr is associated with multiple long-term health issues, including other autoimmune conditions. As this evidence stacks up, scientists have accelerated calls for a vaccine that targets the virus.

“If we now better understand how this fastidious virus is responsible for autoimmune diseases, I think it’s time to figure out how to prevent it,” said Dr. Anca Askanase, clinical director of the Lupus Center at Columbia University, who wasn’t involved in the new research.

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MacOS is great in all kinds of ways, but it’s far from the most customizable operating system out there. Sure, it’s not locked down to the extent iOS and iPadOS are, but compared to Linux and even Windows, macOS really doesn’t let you change the look and feel very much.

But that isn’t to say there’s no room to tweak the operating system to make it the way you like—if you know where to look. Here are a few third-party tools that let you make macOS your own.

Use a custom cursor

It’s pretty easy to change how the mouse pointer looks on Windows and Linux—you just need to dig around in the settings. On macOS, you can only change the size of the pointer.

Unless, that is, you install the free and open source Mousecape. This application lets you create a cursor, then use it in place of the default system ones. You can also install cursors made by others. There’s no centralized collection of cursors for this, unfortunately, but I found a fun hand on Github, some Wii cursors, and a decent collection on DeviantArt. You could also try your hand at creating your own set.

Note that Tahoe users will have to download an updated fork in order to use Mousecape—the main build doesn’t work at the moment. You’ll need to install a pre-release download as of this writing.

Use any website as your wallpaper

Credit: Justin Pot

Some great wallpapers, including dynamic ones, are included with macOS. There’s also the option to use your own photos. But what macOS doesn’t offer are custom, animated wallpapers.

Enter Plash. This free application lets you turn any website into a macOS wallpaper, which opens up all kinds of interactive possibilities. A few sites included let you look out a random stranger’s window, see real-time weather data, or take in some animated pixel art, but you can use any website you can think of. It’s a lot of fun to play around with.

Clean up the menu bar

Credit: Justin Pot

The macOS menu bar is a bit of a mess. Windows makes it relatively easy to hide icons by dragging them to a secondary area. Apple hasn’t offered anything like this until Tahoe, which added a way to disable any icon in the settings. The problem: it’s all or nothing. Hide an icon in the settings and there’s no quick way to access it other than going back into the settings and turning it back on.

For that, you’ll need a third party app. I personally recommend Ice, which is the best free app for cleaning up your menu bar. My coworker Pranay recommends Barbee, another great option. Both make it easy to hide menu bar icons in a secondary bar accessible by hitting an icon, similar to how it works on Windows. Every Mac user should install some sort of tool like this.

Change your folder icons

Credit: Justin Pot

This one isn’t unofficial, exactly, but it’s so buried it might as well be. You can change the icon for any folder, document, or even application by right-clicking it, clicking “Get Info”, then dragging an image to the icon in the window that opens. Weird, right? But it works, meaning you can customize folders to look however you want. I talked about this in an article with more details.

This gets really fun if you install Fancy Folders, a free application seen in the image above which allows you to create folder icons in the color of your choice, complete with either the text or icon of your choice. It’s a lot of fun to play with, and can be very useful for visually keeping things organized.

This week Valve surprised us all with the announcement of three new devices: The tiny Steam Machine PC gaming desktop, the Steam Frame VR headset and a new Steam Controller. In this episode, Devindra and Engadget’s gaming reporter Jessica Conditt discuss how these devices fit into the PC gaming world, which has already been reshaped by Valve’s Steck Deck portable. Also, we discuss our favorite games of 2025, as well as the upcoming titles we’re looking forward to.  

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Topics

• Valve reshapes PC gaming with a new Steam Machine, Steam Frame VR headset and updated Steam Controller – 1:10

• It’s not just Silksong! A look at our favorite indie games of 2025 with Jess Conditt – 25:25

• Michael Burry places his next big short on Palantir and NVIDIA – 46:09

• WSJ Report: OpenAI faces 7 lawsuits claiming ChatGPT encouraged user suicides – 50:57

• Apple unveils Digital IDs for iPhones, to hold passports and other IDs – 59:35

• Deezer-Ipsos survey says 97% of people can’t tell if music is AI generated – 1:01:37

• Around Engadget – 1:07:18

• Working on – 1:08:42

• Pop culture picks – 1:09:10

Credits

Host: Devindra Hardawar
Guest: Jessica Conditt
Producer: Ben Ellman
Music: Dale North and Terrence O’Brien

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pc/engadget-podcast-did-valve-just-reshape-pc-gaming-again-143000931.html?src=rss

A few months ago, Anthropic published a report detailing how its Claude AI model had been weaponized in a “vibe hacking” extortion scheme. The company has continued to monitor how the agentic AI is being used to coordinate cyberattacks, and now claims that a state-backed group of hackers in China utilized Claude in an attempted infiltration of 30 corporate and political targets around the world, with some success.

In what it labeled “the first documented case of a large-scale cyberattack executed without substantial human intervention,” Anthropic said that the hackers first chose their targets, which included unnamed tech companies, financial institutions and government agencies. They then used Claude Code to develop an automated attack framework, after successfully bypassing the model’s training to avoid harmful behavior. This was achieved by breaking the planned attack into smaller tasks that didn’t obviously reveal their wider malicious intent, and telling Claude that it was a cybersecurity firm using the AI for defensive training purposes.

After writing its own exploit code, Anthropic said Claude was then able to steal usernames and passwords that allowed it to extract “a large amount of private data” through backdoors it had created. The obedient AI reportedly even went to the trouble of documenting the attacks and storing the stolen data in separate files. 

The hackers used AI for 80-90 percent of its operation, only occasionally intervening, and Claude was able to orchestrate an attack in far less time than humans could have done. It wasn’t flawless, with some of the information it obtained turning out to be publicly available, but Anthropic said that attacks like this will likely become more sophisticated and effective over time.

You might be wondering why an AI company would want to publicize the dangerous potential of its own technology, but Anthropic says its investigation also acts as evidence of why the assistant is “crucial” for cyber defense. It said Claude was successfully used to analyze the threat level of the data it collected, and ultimately sees it as a tool that can assist cybersecurity professionals when future attacks happen.

Claude is by no means the only AI that has benefited cybercriminals. Last year, OpenAI said that its generative AI tools were being used by hacker groups with ties to China and North Korea. They reportedly used GAI to assist with code debugging, researching potential targets and drafting phishing emails. OpenAI said at the time that it had blocked the groups’ access to its systems.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/anthropics-ai-was-used-by-chinese-hackers-to-run-a-cyberattack-142313551.html?src=rss

The rocket company founded a quarter-century ago by billionaire Jeff Bezos made history Thursday with the pinpoint landing of an 18-story-tall rocket on a floating platform in the Atlantic Ocean.

The on-target touchdown came nine minutes after the New Glenn rocket, built and operated by Bezos’ company Blue Origin, lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, at 3:55 pm EST (20:55 UTC). The launch was delayed from Sunday, first due to poor weather at the launch site in Florida, then by a solar storm that sent hazardous radiation toward Earth earlier this week.

“We achieved full mission success today, and I am so proud of the team,” said Dave Limp, CEO of Blue Origin. “It turns out Never Tell Me The Odds (Blue Origin’s nickname for the first stage) had perfect odds—never before in history has a booster this large nailed the landing on the second try. This is just the beginning as we rapidly scale our flight cadence and continue delivering for our customers.”

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Meta has announced that BirdyChat and Haiket are the first third-party messaging services that will have interoperability with WhatsApp in the European Union. The company has been working on enabling third-party chats since 2023 after the rules of the bloc’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) came into effect. It apparently held small scale tests over the past few months to make sure WhatsApp does work with BirdyChat and Haiket, and it will roll out integration with the services across Europe “soon.”

Users will be able to send messages, images, voice messages, videos and files between the messaging services whether they’re on Android or iOS. To those wondering, any messaging service Meta teams up with will need to have the same level of end-to-end encryption as WhatsApp under DMA’s rules. Users will see a notification in their Settings tab on WhatsApp over the coming months when BirdyChat and Haiket integration becomes available, telling them how they can opt-in to third-party chats. They can choose not to enable the feature at all or to switch it off anytime they want.

When Meta released details detailing how WhatsApp will work with other messengers, the company said that users will be able to create group chats with their friends on its partner apps. That feature won’t be available at launch, though, and will come later when Meta’s partners are ready to support the capability. Meta also said that it will continue expanding WhatsApp’s interoperability with more apps, as it’s required to do so under the DMA.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apps/whatsapp-enables-interoperability-with-two-other-messengers-in-the-eu-140000835.html?src=rss