Nintendo has filed a lawsuit against the creators of a popular Switch emulator called Yuzu, which gives users a way to play games developed for the platform on their PCs and Android devices. In the lawsuit, the company argues Yuzu violates the anti-circumvention and anti-trafficking provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
While Nintendo taking down online offenders isn't new, this case could set a precedent for future lawsuits against emulators, which aren't themselves illegal. Nintendo is arguing their very nature is unlawful. It could be a big deal.
Nintendo says it protects its games with encryption and other security features meant to prevent people from playing pirated copies: "Without Yuzu's decryption of Nintendo's encryption, unauthorized copies of games could not be played on PCs or Android devices," the company wrote in its complaint.
Nintendo revealed The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom was illegally distributed a week and a half before its official release. It was apparently downloaded over a million times from pirated websites, which specifically noted people can play the game file through Yuzu. The company also mentioned that Yuzu's creators are making money from their emulator: $30,000 a month from their Patreon supporters and around $50,000 from the paid version of their Google Play app.
In a fun bleak imagining of future late-stage capitalism, President Joe Biden is issuing an executive order to limit the mass sale of Americans' personal data to "countries of concern," including Russia and China. The order specifically targets the bulk sale of geolocation, genomic, financial, biometric, health and other personally identifying information.
Researchers and privacy advocates have long warned about the national security risks posed by the largely unregulated multibillion-dollar data broker industry. Last fall, researchers at Duke University reported that they could easily buy troves of personal and health data about US military personnel by posing as foreign agents. The loophole: This order will do nothing to slow the bulk sale of Americans' data to countries or companies not deemed to be a security risk.
LG's 2024 OLED evo TVs finally have prices. They'll start at $1,500 for the midrange C4 models and go up to an impressive $25,000 for the 97-inch G4 flagship. The big theme this year is AI, and the company's latest Alpha 11 processor is supposed to boost graphics performance by 70 percent, but it'll only be in the high-end G4 series. The C4 models, meanwhile, will get the updated Alpha 9 Gen 7 chip. Both promise improved brightness (150 percent for the G4 compared to the G3), along with more AI features, like upscaling.
Samsung's upcoming microSD card will not only cram in 256GB of space but will offer a dramatic speed boost. The company's 256GB SD Express microSD — Samsung's first SD Express card — can read data at up to 800 MB/s, significantly faster than the microSDs you can buy today. However, we don't yet know how much it will cost, and the card won't be available until later this year. It will probably be pricey, but it may be worth the premium depending on how you use microSDs.
After roughly a decade, multiple leadership changes and a regular spot in Apple rumor reports, the Apple Car project, internally known as Project Titan, could well be dead. A new report from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman says Apple has officially canceled the car, breaking the news to nearly 2,000 employees working on it.
Apple will reportedly move "many employees working on the car" to the company's artificial intelligence division where they will focus on generative AI projects, which Apple is expected to share more about later this year.
Leaks over the years revealed the company's ambitions to expand into a brand-new product category. At the beginning of the project in 2014, Apple wanted to build a fully self-driving car without pedals or a steering wheel, with a remote command center ready to take over for a driver. More recently, Apple pared down its ambitions, with the most recent reports suggesting Apple's car would be a more standard electric vehicle.
Now, we may never know. Would you have bought an Apple car?
The Pokémon Company revealed the franchise's latest Legends entry on Tuesday. Pokémon Legends: Z-A returns the series to Lumiose City, last seen as a region in Pokémon X and Y on the Nintendo 3DS. The Pokémon Legends: Z-A trailer — an extended teaser — doesn't show any gameplay footage, and its shots of Lumiose City use wireframe models to tease a city in mid-development, according to the announcement.
TikTok is being forced to take down more music from its platform. Universal Music Group (UMG) recently yanked recordings it owns or distributes from TikTok, including tracks from superstars like Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish and The Weeknd. The standoff is now impacting songs published by UMG, with millions more tracks to be muted on TikTok by the end of this week. Due to an issue called split copyrights, if a Universal Music Publishing Group-contracted writer has contributed to a song, that track may have to be removed from TikTok. So artists who have collaborated with Taylor Swift, Adele, Justin Bieber, Mariah Carey, Ice Spice, Elton John, Harry Styles and SZA may see their songs disappear from TikTok too.
Google has quietly struck deals with publishers to use new generative AI tools to publish stories. The deals, reportedly worth tens of thousands of dollars a year, are apparently part of the Google News Initiative (GNI), a six-year-old program that funds media literacy projects, fact-checking tools and other resources for newsrooms. Adweek says publishers can use the beta tools to create aggregated content more efficiently, indexing recently published reports generated by other organizations, like government agencies and neighboring news outlets, then summarizing and publishing them as a new article.
Publishers in the program are apparently not required to disclose their use of AI nor are the aggregated websites informed that their content is used to create AI-written stories on other sites. Publications likeCNETandSports Illustratedhave been widely criticized for attempting to pass off AI-authored articles as written by human staffers.
Lenovo's Project Crystal is definitely sci-fi tech come to life. Currently, there are no plans to turn the concept laptop into a retail product. Yet. Instead, its ThinkPad division commissioned an exploration into the potential of transparent microLED panels and, sigh, AI integration.
Engadget
The most obvious use for the transparent laptop display would be sharing info at a doctor's office or hotel desk. Instead of needing to flip a screen around, you could simply reverse the device's output via software. According to Sam Rutherford, the transparency effect is bewildering. When closed or turned off, Project Crystal's screen almost looks like an ordinary piece of glass with a brownish tint. But at a moment's notice, the whole thing lights up like a battleship. It's definitely the most intriguing thing so far at MWC 2024. Catch all the announcements right here. No tricorders, though.
If you've been paying through Apple, you will now have to pay directly.
If you've been paying Netflix through iTunes, you'll soon have to say goodbye to your discounted rates. The company has confirmed to The Verge that it's started removing users' access to their iTunes billing plan for the streaming service. Members on the basic plan paying through iTunes will now have to pay the company directly using a credit or a debit card. Netflix stopped letting new customers sign up for in-app subscriptions on Apple devices way back in 2018 to avoid giving the latter a commission.
NVIDIA unveiled its latest laptop GPUs and, what a surprise, they're largely to assist AI processing. The RTX 500 and 1000 Ada Generation graphics cards are primarily for thin and light laptops. While they won't offer as much TOPS AI performance as current higher-end mobile GPUs, they could be handy for on-the-go AI processing for researchers, content creators and video editors. These are workstation GPUs, so they're not for your gaming demands. The company says the GPUs, based on the Ada Lovelace architecture, offer up to twice the ray-tracing performance of previous-gen GPUs (they employ third-gen ray-tracing cores). Fourth-gen Tensor Cores, meanwhile, deliver up to twice the throughput of previous GPUs.
Landscaping technology company Husqvarna just announced the game will run on some of its robot lawnmowers. So you can mow down hellspawn and… grass. You play the game using the lawnmower's onboard display. Rotating the control knob turns your character left and right and pressing the knob makes you shoot. Holding down the start button initiates forward movement.
After complaints that Google's image generator built into its Gemini AI was (ugh) woke, Google explained why it may have overcorrected for diversity. Prabhakar Raghavan, the company's senior vice president for knowledge and information, said Google's efforts to ensure a wide range of people generated in images "failed to account for cases that should clearly not show a range."
Users criticized Google for depicting specific white figures or historically white groups of people as racially diverse individuals. In Engadget's tests, asking Gemini to create illustrations of the Founding Fathers resulted in images of white men with a single person of color or woman among them. When we asked the chatbot to generate images of popes through the ages, we got photos depicting Black women and Native Americans as the leader of the Catholic Church. The Verge reported that the chatbot also depicted Nazis as people of color, but we couldn't get Gemini to generate Nazi images. "I am unable to fulfill your request due to the harmful symbolism and impact associated with the Nazi Party," the chatbot responded.
Raghavan said Google didn't intend for Gemini to refuse to create images of any particular group or to generate historically inaccurate photos. He also reiterated Google's promise to improve Gemini's image-generation abilities.
However, that entails "extensive testing" before the company switches the feature back on.
MWC 2024 kicks off this week, and while Engadget is covering it all remotely — no tapas for Mathew — this is one we'd be unlikely to book a meeting for. HMD (or Human Mobile Devices) has been making Nokia phones for the past few years and announced at MWC it'll release an official Barbie Flip Phone this summer, in partnership with Mattel. It'll be pink, obviously, with a dash of "sparkle." It'll be a feature phone, not a smartphone, with HMD marketing it as an accessory geared toward "style, nostalgia and a much-needed digital detox." That also means it should be cheap.
Samsung has put its Galaxy Ring on public display for the first time at its booth at MWC, which starts today. The health and wellness device, available in platinum silver, gold and ceramic black, will go on sale later this year. The company said little about the Galaxy Ring when it first displayed a render of the device at Unpacked last month. We learned that it would be a wellness-oriented wearable to rival Oura, and it would have a suite of unknown sensors.
Journalists weren't allowed to photograph it, but some additional images from Samsung show it to be a chonky, concave ring about the same size as the Oura. The extra girth isn't surprising, given the electronics cached inside. The company described the Galaxy Ring as "a new health form factor that simplifies everyday wellness, supporting smarter and healthier living via a more connected digital wellness platform." So, a smart ring then?
No one is suggesting Microsoft should stop making video-game hardware. But should Microsoft keep making generationally distinct consoles in the traditional hardware cycle? Does Xbox need a box? The company calls its cloud game streaming service xCloud for a reason, right?
Every gram counts in commercial flight. Material scientists from Kobe University have discovered "nanospheres" that are near-invisible silicone crystals. The particles can reflect light thanks to very large and efficient scattering, research published in the ACS Applied Nano Matter journal details. The result could mean covering a surface in vibrant color while only adding 10 percent of the weight of painting an aircraft for the same effect.
Minoru and Hiroshi's discovery focuses on structural rather than pigment color to exhibit and maintain hues. The former absorbs wavelengths while reflecting those the human eye picks up. Structural colors, on the other hand, are intense and bright as light interacts with micro- and nanostructures. While the headline commercial benefits are for planes, the paint could have many more uses simply for its brightness.
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth takes the characters and world reintroduced with Remake and does a better job at scaling it all up. Instead of playing in a single metropolis, Midgar, this time, it's a world tour. There's also an expanded roster of playable characters, almost doubling Remake's total, each with a unique play style, once again. But does Aerith survive?
The Xiaomi 14 Ultra is the latest Leica-branded smartphone, featuring a second-gen one-inch camera sensor. Xiaomi is finally catching up with the competition by picking up Sony's newest mobile camera sensor, the LYT-900. The Xiaomi 14 Ultra has a slight edge on rival phones with the same sensor, with its faster main variable aperture at up to f/1.63, beating the Oppo Find X7 Ultra's f/1.8 — on paper, at least.
Pick the parts you want and install them yourself.
Framework is selling its cheapest modular laptop. It has dropped the price of its B-stock Factory Seconds systems (which are built with excess parts and new components). As such, it's now offering a Framework Laptop 13 barebones configuration for under $500 for the very first time. The 13-inch machine comes with an 11th-gen Intel Core i7 processor with Iris Xe graphics. So the CPU should be sufficient for most basic tasks and some moderate gaming. However, you'll need to add RAM, storage, a power supply, an operating system and (probably) even a Wi-Fi card.
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