Category: Technology

Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, has issued a statement in support of efforts aiming to restrict the use of smartphones in schools within the state. As The New York Times reports, the governor aired his stance merely hours before board members at the Los Angeles Unified School District voted to pass a proposal for a school phone ban. Newsom said he will work with lawmakers “to restrict the use of smartphones during the school day” this summer, because children and teens “should be focused on their studies — not their screens.”

The governor also mentioned and agreed with the US Surgeon General’s op-ed published by The Times, wherein he said that social media platforms should be required to display warning labels from his office because they can significantly harm teenagers’ mental health. In his piece, Vivek Murthy explained that the label “which requires congressional action, would regularly remind parents and adolescents that social media has not been proved safe.”

Newsom said the rules he develops will build upon the directive he signed in 2019, which authorizes (but doesn’t require) districts to adopt phone bans. If California does pass a law to ban the use of phone during school hours, it’ll join Florida and Indiana in the list of states with similar legislation. Florida’s schools are required to prevent their students from using their phones during class time, and some districts even require them to ban phone use until it’s time for the students to go home. Other states are poised to follow suit. New York City designated social media as a public health hazard earlier this year, and Governor Kathy Hochul previously said that she would pursue phone restrictions for schools in the New York state next year.

While LA’s board members ultimately passed the proposal for a phone ban, two members voted against it. One told The Times that he voted no because teachers are already having difficulties imposing existing restrictions in schools. Perhaps more importantly, he said that parents need to be able to contact their children during emergencies, like school shootings, echoing the concerns of parents who opposed phone bans in the past. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/california-governor-gavin-newsom-wants-to-restrict-phone-use-in-schools-120012532.html?src=rss 

Amazon Games has revealed when it will bring free-to-play MMO Throne and Liberty to the Americas, Europe and Japan. The company will release the NCSoft-developed title in those regions on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S on September 17. There will be full cross-platform support. An open beta will take place in July and you can sign up for that through the game’s website.

Throne and Liberty, which was originally supposed to be a direct sequel to the original Lineage, debuted in Korea last year after a lengthy development process. It has both player vs. player and player vs. environment combat, and you can join guilds and form alliances to help you succeed. Amazon says battles can accommodate thousands of players at the same time.

The action takes place in an open world called Solisium, where the weather can impact the effectiveness of your weapons and even open up new routes. Your character can shapeshift into creatures that can navigate the sea and air more quickly. You’ll even be able to transform into slain bosses to help out your side in battles.

Amazon signed a deal with NCSoft in 2023 to publish Throne and Liberty in North America, South America, Europe and Japan on the heels of Lost Ark’s success. That game, from South Korean developer Smilegate, turned out to be a huge hit, with a peak of 1.3 million concurrent players on Steam. Over two years later, Lost Ark is still going strong, with an average Steam concurrent player count of nearly 56,000 in May.

Despite how well Lost Ark (and before that, New World) performed for Amazon Games, the division has gone through some rough spells over the last several years. Soon after its first in-house game Crucible debuted in May 2020, Amazon pulled it back into beta status before completely shutting down the free-to-play shooter outright a few months later. Last year, Amazon laid off around 300 workers from its games division as part of a broader downsizing.

Even so, Amazon has some other notable games in its pipeline. It’s working on a Lord of the Rings MMO and it’s publishing the next Tomb Raider game (it’s bringing a live-action Tomb Raider series to Prime Video too).

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/amazons-throne-and-liberty-mmo-is-coming-to-the-west-in-september-123028015.html?src=rss 

No Tech for Apartheid (NOTA), a coalition of tech workers demanding big tech companies to drop their contracts with the Israeli government, is close to reaching its goal for a campaign asking students not to work with Google and Amazon. As Wired reports, more than 1,100 people who identified themselves as STEM students and young workers have taken the pledge to refuse jobs from the companies “for powering Israel’s Apartheid system and genocide against Palestinians.” Based on its website, NOTA’s goal is to gather 1,200 signatures for the campaign. 

“As young people and students in STEM and beyond, we refuse to have any part in these horrific abuses. We’re joining the #NoTechForApartheid campaign to demand Amazon and Google immediately end Project Nimbus,” part of the pledge reads. Google and Amazon won a $1.2 billion contract under Project Nimbus to provide the Israeli government and military with cloud computing, machine learning and artificial intelligence services. A Google spokesperson previously denied that the company’s Nimbus contract deals with “highly sensitive, classified or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.”

As two of the biggest tech companies on the planet, Google and Amazon are also two of the biggest employees of STEM graduates. Wired says the campaign’s pledgers include undergraduate and graduate students from Stanford, UC Berkeley, the University of San Francisco and San Francisco State University — institutions located in the same state as Google’s HQ. 

NOTA had also organized actions protesting tech companies’ involvement with Israel in the past, including sit-ins and office takeovers that had led Google to fire dozens of workers. In March, one of its organizers was fired from Google after interrupting one of its executives at an Israeli tech conference in New York and loudly proclaiming that he refuses to “build technology that powers genocide or surveillance.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/more-than-1000-students-pledge-not-to-work-at-google-and-amazon-due-to-project-nimbus-042439081.html?src=rss 

Finnish developer Sulake has officially launched Habbo Hotel: Origins on Mac today, reviving the 2005 PC game in all its nostalgic glory. If you never played Habbo Hotel 20 years ago, the game is an online community that is very much a pixelated version of Roblox or Club Penguin where your avatar can chat with your friends in the virtual hotel lobby, spend in-game credits on furniture and accessories, decorate your Guest Room with said digital furniture and invite people over to your Guest Room for a chat. You could also message your friends with a little virtual phone. Now you can experience the game as it was originally made in Habbo Hotel: Origins thanks to the game’s creator Macklebee stumbling across the files by sweet serendipity.

“After discovering an old decrepit server with some long-lost files at the beginning of this year, over the past six months or so long-time Habbo developer and player Macklebee has lovingly restored an old version of Habbo Hotel first released in 2005,” the developer said in a blog post.

Sulake said Habbo Hotel: Origins is developed with a “fresh, community-led approach.” This means they have converted Infobus Park from the original game into a “kind of democratic forum” where they’ll answer players’ questions about the game’s development and direction. Infobus Park was a Public Room that served as a waiting area for players to board the bus, which only operated for a few hours a day.

Habbo Hotel: Origins sets the age limit to create a new account for 18 instead of 13. This is because the chat rooms in the original game were filled with pornographic and graphic messages, as a Channel 4 News reporter discovered while playing the game posing as an 11-year-old girl in 2012. There were also phishing scams, one of which resulted in a Dutch teenager getting arrested for stealing €4,000 worth of virutal furniture. If you played Habbo Hotel back then, you’ll probably want to keep your kids away from this revival.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/habbo-hotel-origins-brings-the-original-pc-game-back-to-life-205536943.html?src=rss 

The Federal Trade Commission has referred its complaint against TikTok to the Justice Department after a long-running investigation into the company’s privacy and security practices. “Our investigation found reason to believe that TikTok is violating or about to violate the FTC Act and the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA),” FTC Chair Lina Khan said in a post on X.

In a longer statement shared by the FTC, the regulator noted its investigation into TikTok after a 2019 privacy settlement related to Musical.ly, the app acquired by ByteDance that eventually became TikTok. The FTC “also investigated additional potential violations of COPPA and the FTC Act,” it said. It’s not clear exactly what the FTC turned up, though Politico reported earlier this year that the regulator was also looking into whether TikTok had misled users about whether their personal data was accessible to people in China.

The statement itself is a somewhat unusual move for the FTC, which acknowledged that it doesn’t typically publicize its referral decisions. It said it believed doing so in this case “was in the public interest.” The referral is likely to ramp up pressure on TikTok, which is also fighting a legal battle against the US government to avoid a potential ban. Lawmakers and other officials have alleged the app poses a national security threat due to its ties to China.

A TikTok spokesperson told Engadget in a statement that the company was “disappointed” with the FTC’s decision. “We’ve been working with the FTC for more than a year to address its concerns,” the spokesperson said. “We’re disappointed the agency is pursuing litigation instead of continuing to work with us on a reasonable solution. We strongly disagree with the FTC’s allegations, many of which relate to past events and practices that are factually inaccurate or have been addressed. We’re proud of and remain deeply committed to the work we’ve done to protect children and we will continue to update and improve our product.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-ftc-has-referred-its-child-privacy-case-against-tiktok-to-the-justice-department-211542778.html?src=rss 

Netflix announced that Dalla and King of Prussia, Pennsylvania will host the first incarnations of its Netflix House entertainment complex concept. The Netflix blog Tudum posted the announcement Tuesday morning along with an artist’s rendering of one of the locations. Both will open sometime next year.

Netflix House is the streaming giant’s first attempt at a brick-and-mortar retail business. The Dallas and King of Prussia locations will offer dining, live events and interactive sets and experiences based on some of Netflix’s most popular shows and movies.

The “experiential entertainment venue” will let fans of shows like Bridgerton, Money Heist, Stranger Things and Squid Game interact with some of its most iconic scenes and settings. The announcement promises that guests can do things like “waltzing with your partner to an orchestral cover of a Taylor Swift song on a replication of the Bridgerton set.” Then you can enter another area of Netflix House and “compete in the Glass Bridge challenge from Squid Game” presumably without experiencing a really messy death in the end.

Presumably, no high concept entertainment experience is complete without taking a forced path through a gift shop. You can pick up special merchandise like a Hellfire Club T-shirt, a copy of The Queen’s Gambit board game or an “I survived a rich guy’s game of death” coffee mug from Squid Game. Don’t forget to check out the clearance bin for a Too Hot to Handle oven mitt.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/netflix-house-will-open-two-locations-in-texas-and-pennsylvania-in-2025-213033751.html?src=rss 

Paradox Tectonic, the Berkeley, California studio behind the unreleased life simulator game Life By You, has been shuttered by its parent company Paradox Interactive. All 24 employees have lost their jobs, according to a press release.

The news of Paradox Tectonic’s closure comes just one day after Paradox Interactive announced its decision to cancel the release of Life By You. The game’s troubled development was punctuated by blown deadlines on three different early access release windows before the title was scrapped entirely.

“This is difficult and drastic news for our colleagues at Tectonic, who’ve worked hard on Life By You’s Early Access release,” Paradox Interactive Chief Executive Officer Fredik Wester said in a released statement. “Sadly, with cancellation of their sole project we have to take the tough decision to close down the studio. We are deeply grateful for their hard work in trying to take Paradox into a new genre.” Wester said in a separate statement that the life simulation did not “meet our expectations” and could not deliver a version “that we’d be satisfied with” in time for release.

Paradox Interactive has good reason to be wary of releasing a bad game. The studio is still feeling the blowback from Colossal Order’s Cities: Skylines II. The game had a number of bugs following its release in October that put a huge strain on PC graphics cards making it difficult to play in 4K. The sequel also failed to launch with promised features like mod support, and its Beachfront Property asset led to an “Overwhelmingly Negative” review on Steam that forced Colossal Order to issue refunds.

It’s also the third major publisher to close a game studio in just the last week. Embracer Group announced on Monday that it would close Pieces Interactive following its release of the Alone in the Dark reboot. Galvanic Games, the Seattle based developer behind Wizard with a Gun, announced its dissolvement on Friday.

These closings are also just the latest bits of bad news in a year that’s already full of layoffs and studio closures. Obsidian Publishing’s Games Industry Layoffs tracker estimates that this year will see 10,800 layoffs, an alarming number that’s already outpacing last year’s totals.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/paradox-interactive-closes-life-by-yous-studio-after-canceling-the-life-sim-game-201135761.html?src=rss 

The California Labor Commissioner’s office has fined Amazon $5,901,700 for infractions related to a law designed to protect warehouse workers. Under the state’s AB-701 law, large companies are required to tell warehouse or distribution center workers in writing what their expected quotas are, including how often they should perform particular tasks, and what consequences they may face for failing to meet those quotas.

This law was a reaction to stories from Amazon workers who said they would skip bathroom breaks or risk injury in order to maximize their output. “The hardworking warehouse employees who have helped sustain us during these unprecedented times should not have to risk injury or face punishment as a result of exploitative quotas that violate basic health and safety,” Governor Gavin Newsom said when he signed the bill in 2021.

According to the California Labor Commissioner, Amazon failed to meet those rules at two of its facilities in the cities of Moreno Valley and Redlands, with 59,017 violations logged during the labor office’s inspections. It’s one of the first big fines levied thanks to AB-701, which took effect in January 2022. The tech giant said it would appeal the fines and claimed it did not need to provide written information because it uses a “peer-to-peer system.”

“The peer-to-peer system that Amazon was using in these two warehouses is exactly the kind of system that the Warehouse Quotas law was put in place to prevent,” Labor Commissioner Lilia García-Brower said in an official statement. “Undisclosed quotas expose workers to increased pressure to work faster and can lead to higher injury rates and other violations by forcing workers to skip breaks.”

The AB701 bill was passed by the state in September 2021, headed up by State Assembly rep Lorena Gonzalez. She was also a part of passing California’s AB-5 bill in 2019 to seek better protections for gig workers at companies such as Uber and Lyft.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/amazon-faces-nearly-6b-in-fines-over-california-labor-law-violations-203238513.html?src=rss 

Meta is finally making the Threads API available to developers. The company began testing the developers tools with a handful of companies back in March, but is now throwing the door open to more creators and app makers.

For now, the Threads API functionality is somewhat limited. It enables third-party apps to publish posts to Threads and view and manage replies and interactions with their posts. So far, this has enabled Threads integrations with social media management software like Hootsuite and Sprout Social. The Threads API has also enabled tech news aggregator Techmeme to automatically post to the platform.

These kinds of tools are widely used by brands, marketers and power users who rely on more advanced analytics and other specialized capabilities. Interestingly, Meta also suggests that creators could also be interested in using the new Threads API for their own “unique integrations” with the platform.

Meta hasn’t talked much about its future plans for the Threads API, or if it would ever support third-party client apps the way that Twitter did before Elon Musk’s take over of the service. The API could also play an eventual role in Meta’s plans to interoperate with the fediverse, though Meta has said it’s still early days for its plans to make Threads interoperable with decentralized platforms.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/meta-makes-the-threads-api-available-to-all-developers-174946709.html?src=rss