Category: Technology

SpaceX first asked the Federal Communications Commission for permission to deploy 29,988 second-generation Starlink satellites back in 2020. Now, the FCC has granted its request — partially, at least. The commission has given the company the go-ahead to build, deploy and operate up to 7,500 satellites for its Gen2 constellation at the altitudes of 525 km, 530 km and 535 km. In its announcement, the FCC said approving 7,500 satellites for the constellation will allow SpaceX to provide broadband internet to users worldwide, even those living in far-flung areas. 

The FCC is limiting the number of satellites SpaceX can deploy for now, though, to address concerns about orbital debris and space safety. It says the limited grant will help maintain a safe space environment and protect other satellite and terrestrial operators from harmful interference. Several companies and even NASA previously raised concerns about SpaceX’s plan to deploy an additional 30,000 satellites, considering the FCC already granted it permission to launch 12,000 first-gen Starlink satellites. 

In NASA’s letter to the commission, it talked about an expanded constellation’s potential impacts to its science and human spaceflight missions. A massive number of Starlink satellites, it said, could cause an increase in collision risks and lead to fewer launch windows. That said, the FCC is only deferring “action on the remainder of SpaceX’s application” for now, so it may approve additional deployments. 

SpaceX chief Elon Musk previously revealed that the second-gen Starlink satellites will be much bigger than their predecessor and will need to be launch on the company’s Starship launch vehicle. One of the reasons they’re bigger is because of their massive antennas that will have the capability to communicate with phones here on Earth, like mobile towers in the sky. Indeed, the the collaboration T-Mobile and SpaceX announced in August will depend on Starlink’s second-gen satellites. The companies aim to end mobile deadzones with their partnership and to provide connectivity wherever there’s a clear view of the sky, even if it’s in the middle of the ocean. 

Mandalorian fans, you can now fire up your calendars and add a very important reminder for March 1st, 2023. The third season of The Mandalorian will premiere that day and will be available for streaming on Disney+, the show’s official Twitter account has revealed. Disney was originally aiming for a February 2023 release date, as Ars Technica notes, but a short delay isn’t too bad. 

The company released its first teaser trailer for the show at this year’s D23 Expo in September, showing Grogu (formerly known as baby Yoda on the internet) and Mando (or Din Djarin) reunited. If you’ll recall, the Grogu left with Luke Skywalker by the end of season 2 to finish his Force training at the latter’s Jedi Temple. The trailer also gives us a glimpse of Mando dealing with the consequences of removing his helmet and showing his face to other people, which is a huge no-no for members of his religious sect. 

By the time season 3 comes out, it would’ve been over two years after the release of the show’s second season. That said, Mando and Grogu were featured in The Book of Boba Fett, which was a spin-off of The Mandalorian released last year. Grogu also got the Hayao Miyazaki treatment for the Lucasfilm-Studio Ghibli animated short Zen – Grogu and Dust Bunnies that was released for streaming in November. 

The Callisto Protocol is beautiful. Please keep this fact in mind while consuming the numerous criticisms that follow in this review. When I mention how imprecise the mechanics are during horde combat, know that the ensuing death screens are pristine. As I talk about my protagonist stalling at the base of a short wall while I frantically mash the vault button, remember that the festering wounds of the monster that rips off my head are juicy and gorgeously rendered. While I try and fail to swap weapons or dodge, remember, through all of this frustration, The Callisto Protocol is stunning on PlayStation 5. Unfortunately, it’s just not a great video game.

I had high hopes for The Callisto Protocol. I played an hour-long preview a few months ago, and I walked away with stars in my eyes and visions of blood-soaked mutants dancing through my head. The portion that I tried was horrific, mechanically satisfying and gorgeous, and it laid the foundation for an expansive world of familiar sci-fi terror. The Callisto Protocol comes from Striking Distance Studios and Dead Space co-creator Glen Schofield, and it shares DNA with that classic horror hit, including its lack of a HUD, the stomping and gravity-controlling abilities, and a de-emphasis on headshots overall.

Despite these touchstones, Callisto doesn’t feel like Dead Space for long. It eventually introduces a snowy alien world and a massive mining operation, but the first third of the game is the most familiar: tight metal corridors dotted with debris and dead bodies, sparking wires, malfunctioning security systems and vents where mutated creatures can hide. This section is set in Black Iron, a prison colony on Jupiter’s moon that’s run by an evil organization with grand plans for the future of humanity. A mysterious plague has swept through the prison, transforming inmates and guards into violent monsters, and smothering some areas in fleshy alien goo.

This is the section I played in preview and it’s easily the best part of the game. The Callisto Protocol steadily introduces enemies, abilities, weapons and beautiful, mazelike environments – until, eventually, the game collapses under the weight of its own mechanics.

Dodging is a core aspect of Callisto, and this is the move that disappointed me most clearly and most often. There’s no dodge button; you hold left or right before an enemy hits you, and then hold the opposite direction if there’s another attack incoming. It’s a simple back-and-forth mechanic, but it’s inconsistent, especially when surrounded by multiple enemies. Dodges just don’t land sometimes, even when the animation goes through. This is incredibly frustrating when most bosses kill you in one hit. It’s not only dodging, either: Vaulting over short walls doesn’t always work on the first tap, and this seems to be an issue with an overly sensitive camera.

Other basic mechanics, like melee attacks, firing a gun or swapping weapons, are often too sluggish to be effective, or they simply don’t happen, or their timing is variable for no discernable reason at all. This isn’t every time, but it’s enough to destroy the rhythm of the game. Callisto quickly abandons its sci-fi horror foundation and tries to become an action experience with horde rushes and boss fights against overly powerful enemies, but imprecise mechanics drag the whole thing down.

The first weapon players get is an electro-charged baton. Striking Distance has been clear that Callisto is supposed to be a melee-heavy experience, with “about half” of its combat based on baton-swinging, though there’s just one such weapon in the game. The baton is upgradable, as are the five guns that the protagonist picks up over time. There’s also the GRP glove, which unlocks telekinesis abilities. The GRP ability is exceedingly useful (and fun!), allowing players to throw projectiles and lob enemies into environmental hazards like fans, spike walls and rotating motors, securing an instant kill in the process. However, the gravity glove doesn’t have a ton of battery and it recharges slowly, even when maxed out at the upgrade station. There are also some enemies that simply can’t be picked up with this ability, and the only way to discern which is to give it a try during a fight.

Now, if five guns sounds like a lot for a game that’s designed to emphasize close-combat melee, that’s because it is. I have myriad issues with Callisto’s gun-management system, starting with the fact that there are too many firearms in the first place. The game’s main battle mechanic revolves around securing melee combos until a reticle locks onto the enemy, allowing players to get in a few quick shots with a gun. At least, that’s the idea. In practice, the reticle system is inconsistent, at times lingering on an enemy and other times disappearing in a flash, offering no time to actually shoot. This combo simply doesn’t feel powerful, even when the extra shots actually connect.

There’s also no quick way to see how much ammo your weapon has before shooting – there’s no HUD in this game, so no persistent ammo or loadout indicators – and swapping among weapons is enraging. Pressing left on the D-pad transitions between two guns only, so even if you have five weapons in your inventory, you won’t find them no matter how many times you spam the swap button. Pressing right pulls up a mini gun menu with your full arsenal, but this is difficult to parse. Small handguns can only be swapped for small handguns, and large for large, though there’s no clear distinction between the two types in the pop-up menu. It’s difficult to manage this system in moments of quiet, and nearly impossible in the middle of combat. Too often I found myself smashing the left button, uselessly swapping between two guns with zero ammo and frustrated that I couldn’t access my additional weapons.

In the middle of fights with multiple enemies, the reticle and ammo guessing game is often lethal, and it’s an exceedingly annoying way to die.

Maybe this is all by design. Maybe by making the gun system annoying as hell, developers thought it would drive players to rely on melee moves. But then why make shooting a core part of the melee experience, and why offer so many damn guns, each with a unique ammo type? An unreliable lock-on system actively discourages close-quarters fighting, there are ammo drops all over the place, and there’s nothing to indicate when a basic melee attack is actually the most powerful move in your arsenal. Not to mention, dodging is dodgy as hell. This turns some boss and horde battles into frustrating, drawn-out sequences with dozens of death screens, until you randomly use a basic melee attack at the right moment and the fight starts progressing at speed.

In the end, it feels like the game provides resources it doesn’t actually want you to use, and then punishes you for using them. Melee combat isn’t smooth or powerful enough to emerge as the obvious solution in any situation. Striking Distance may have been clear that Callisto is a melee experience, but the game itself does not.

The main ideas here could have worked, if only there were a hint of on-screen feedback. Callisto doesn’t have a HUD – just like Dead Space – and it eschews common video game features like glowing weak points (at least until the literal last fight) and persistent on-screen text. This is ostensibly with the goal of creating an immersive experience, but instead the lack of information pulled me out of the flow more than anything else. My tip is to max out the GRP glove and focus on environmental kills – and when in doubt, try a basic melee attack.

The biggest tragedy of The Callisto Protocol is the fact that it’s just not scary. There are some deliciously gruesome death scenes and moments of high tension – I particularly enjoyed the stealth moments – but these are overshadowed by rage-inducing gameplay issues. Its story beats are generic and so is the protagonist (played by Josh Duhamel), while the setting feels like a 1980s Hollywood vision of sci-fi dystopia, with a splash of Resident Evil’s monster design and The Last of Us’ clicky audio cues. This isn’t to say that generic ideas are automatically bad: All of these references could have easily coalesced into an engaging, even scary, game – if only the actual mechanics were functional.

But please, remember: The Callisto Protocol is beautiful. I emerged from multiple annoying boss fights frustrated and filled with ick, only to step into the next environment and go, “Wow, that’s pretty.” It’s just not that scary – or enjoyable.

Five years after CEO Elon Musk officially unveiled his Semi, Tesla’s electrified tractor trailer, the company delivered its first official production vehicle to Pepsi on Thursday during its “Semi Delivery Event” held at Tesla’s Nevada Gigafactory. The beverage maker has ordered 100 of the vehicles in total.

First shown off in 2017, the Tesla Semi originally was set to retail for $150,000 and $180,000 for the 300- and 500-mile versions, respectively. Those prices are significantly higher than the $60k a standard diesel cab runs but Tesla estimates that its vehicles can operate 20 percent more efficiently (2kWh per mile, Musk revealed Thursday), and save up to $250,000 over the million-mile life of the Semi.

Each rig is “designed like a bullet,” Musk said at the vehicle’s unveiling, and would come equipped with a massive 1MW battery pack. This reportedly offers a 20-second 0-60, which is impressive given that these vehicles are towing up to 80,000 pounds at a time, and a spent-to-80 percent charge time of just 30 minutes. The Semis are also outfitted with Enhanced Autopilot capabilities, as well as jackknife-mitigation systems, blind-spot sensors and data-logging for fleet management.

As reservations opened in 2017, Musk said at the time, deliveries would begin two short years later, in 2019. By April 2020, Tesla had officially pushed that delivery date back to 2021, citing production delays and supply chain issues brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, just two months after that, in May of 2020, Musk sent a company-wide email reading, “It’s time to go all out and bring the Tesla Semi to volume production. It’s been in limited production so far, which has allowed us to improve many aspects of the design,” as seen by CNBC. In the same email he confirmed that production would take place in Tesla’s Nevada Gigafactory.

Cut to July, 2021, and the new delivery date has been pushed again, this time to 2022, citing both the ongoing global processor shortage and its own pandemic-limited battery production capability for the new 4680 style cells as contributing factors.

“We believe we remain on track to build our first Model Y vehicles in Berlin and Austin in 2021,” Musk said during the company’s Q2, 2021 investor call. “The pace of the respective production ramps will be influenced by the successful introduction of many new product and manufacturing technologies, ongoing supply-chain-related challenges and regional permitting.”

“To better focus on these factories, and due to the limited availability of battery cells and global supply chain challenges, we have shifted the launch of the Semi truck program to 2022,” he continued. Beginning in May of this year, Tesla started actively taking reservations again for a $20,000 deposit. “And first deliveries are now,” Musk said on Thursday before welcoming Kirk Tanner, CEO PepsiCo Beverages North America, and Steven Williams, CEO PepsiCo Foods North America, on stage for high fives and handshakes.

Cadillac Racing says its first electric race car is almost ready for the 24 Hours of Daytona event in January after passing critical testing and development milestones. Since July, the V-LMDh has gone through nearly 12,000 miles (19,000 km) of on-track testing, including a 24-hour test at Sebring International Raceway.

Cadillac collected data on nighttime operation and durability on the bumpy 3.7-mile circuit. Program manager Laura Wontrop Klauser claimed Sebring was the perfect testing ground for the V-LMDh ahead of its competitive debut at Daytona. “To complete that endurance test was extra motivation for our team and provided a sense of accomplishment,” Klauser said in a statement. “We still have a lot to do in a short time, but we are at the point where we are fine-tuning many things.”

The car is also slated to take part in the 24-hour race at Le Mans in June. Cadillac plans to run it in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship and the FIA World Endurance Championship. A final test will take place next week at Daytona as part of mandatory evaluations for all manufacturers intending to take part in the IMSA’s new Grand Touring Prototype class. Cadillac Racing will reveal the final competition version of the three V-LMDh race cars, including liveries (and hopefully a new name), in mid-January.

Meta’s election integrity efforts on Facebook may not have been as robust as claimed. Researchers at New York University’s Cybersecurity for Democracy and the watchdog Global Witness have revealed that Facebook’s automatic moderation system approved 15 out of 20 test ads threatening election workers ahead of last month’s US midterms. The experiments were based on real threats and used “clear” language that was potentially easy to catch. In some cases, the social network even allowed ads after the wrong changes were made — the research team just had to remove profanity and fix spelling to get past initial rejections.

The investigators also tested TikTok and YouTube. Both services stopped all threats and banned the test accounts. In an earlier experiment before Brazil’s election, Facebook and YouTube allowed all election misinformation sent during an initial pass, although Facebook rejected up to 50 percent in follow-up submissions.

In a statement to Engadget, a spokesperson said the ads were a “small sample” that didn’t represent what users saw on platforms like Facebook. The company maintained that its ability to counter election threats “exceeds” that of rivals, but only backed the claim by pointing to quotes that illustrated the amount of resources committed to stopping violent threats, not the effectiveness of those resources.

The ads wouldn’t have done damage, as the experimenters had the power to pull them before they went live. Still, the incident highlights the limitations of Meta’s partial dependence on AI moderation to fight misinformation and hate speech. While the system helps Meta’s human moderators cope with large amounts of content, it also risks greenlighting ads that might not be caught until they’re visible to the public. That could not only let threats flourish, but invite fines from the UK and other countries that plan to penalize companies which don’t quickly remove extremist content.

Epic Games released RealityScan for iOS today. The free app, previously available in a closed beta, lets anyone scan real-world objects with their phone and turn them into high-fidelity 3D models.

The app is the fruit of Epic’s purchase of Capturing Reality, a company specializing in photogrammetry software. Like the company’s desktop software, RealityScan combines 2D images to make seamless 3D assets for games and other virtual environments. The idea is to enable game developers and other creatives to scan real-world objects at any time and any place for their projects. (If the metaverse ever takes off, you can imagine tools like this becoming essential.)

The scanning process begins with signing into your Epic Games account and taking at least 20 photos of an object from all sides. As you move your phone around, a real-time quality map shows how well you’ve covered it: green denotes well-covered areas, yellow could use more attention and red needs the most additional photos. It visualizes the places from which you’ve snapped each picture as something akin to little Polaroids floating around your item.

The app uploads and automatically aligns the images in the cloud as you take the photos. You can preview the model through the camera view and switch between the quality map and an in-progress, full-color render. When you want to crop it, it pops up 3D handles for you to drag around, ensuring it captures only the item, not the floor beneath it or background objects.

The process works best with simple items captured in even, indirect lighting (reflective or wet surfaces won’t capture well). It also appears to work best with larger objects, as my attempt to capture a small Mr. T action figure resulted in something that looks more like a pointillistic painting than a usable model.

Once you’re happy with the capture, you can export it to Sketchfab (a 3D asset platform Epic bought last year), where you can use it for 3D, virtual reality and augmented reality projects. Optionally, if you’ve captured something unique, you could try to sell your 3D model. Game developers needing a specific item for a virtual environment are the most logical audience here.

RealityScan is available today as a free download for iOS and iPadOS on the App Store. Earlier this year, Epic said an Android version would arrive later in the year, although the company is running short on time to meet that deadline.

Ye is no longer buying Parler, the controversial social media app that’s billed itself as a “free speech” alternative to Twitter. Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, originally struck a deal with Parlement Technologies in October to buy the company for an undisclosed amount.

That deal is now off, according to the company. “Parlement Technologies has confirmed that the company has mutually agreed with Ye to terminate the intent of sale of Parler,” a spokesperson for Parler said in a statement. “This decision was made in the interest of both parties in mid-November. Parler will continue to pursue future opportunities for growth and the evolution of the platform for our vibrant community.”

The spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to questions about why the acquisition was terminated. News of the deal imploding comes just hours after Ye praised Nazis and said, “I like Hitler,” during an appearance on Alex Jones’ podcast.

Ye had first announced he would buy Parler after he was suspended from Twitter following a series of antisemitic tweets. (Twitter CEO Elon Musk later welcomed him back to the platform.) At the time, Parlement technologies CEO George Farmer said that “the proposed acquisition will assure Parler a future role in creating an uncancelable ecosystem where all voices are welcome.”

After a year of testing, Discord is ready to let more creators offer subscriptions. The community platform has enabled Server Subscriptions for all eligible server owners in the US. Your favorite streamer or social media star can now offer exclusive content and features at multiple price tiers they set themselves. You might get bonus videos, early access to merch or voting rights for influential polls, for instance.

Discord stresses that creators will get 90 percent of their subscription fee. They can also use a newly launched promo webpage feature to promote their paid options. Any server owner qualifies as long as they’re based in the US, agrees to policies and doesn’t have any “recent” violations.

The long testing period reflects Discord’s caution around launching Server Subscriptions. As company marketing manager Jesse Wofford told Engadget last year, the feature is meant to allow sustainable businesses on the platform — theoretically, a creator can generate meaningful profit (even if it’s purely supplemental) from their Discord community.

Whether or not this represents a good value may depend on the services a creator is already using to charge for Discord access. Patreon asks for as little as 5 percent of monthly income before payment processing, but membership tiers and some other perks aren’t available until a creator gives up 8 or 12 percent. Moreover, server owners still have to split their attention between two services — Discord’s move potentially simplifies subscriptions.

Frictional Games thinks it has a way to shake up the Amnesia horror formula — throw out most of the predictability. The studio has unveiledAmnesia: The Bunker, a “semi-open” survival horror title that takes place during the First World War. You play a French soldier (an amnesiac, of course) who has little more than a revolver and flashlight to defend themselves against a mysterious creature hunting them down. There are “hardly any” scripted events, and frequently multiple ways to overcome the game’s hurdles.

The new release also promises new forms of interaction, with elements of sandbox games despite the presence of a story. You can also expect improved lighting effects and “carefully” crafted sound. And yes, you’ll still get Frictional’s signature extra-gloomy environments.

Amnesia: The Bunker releases on PlayStation, Xbox and PC (via Epic Games Store and Steam) sometime in 2023. It’s too soon to say if the open world format will help, or simply introduce the problems that sometimes creep up in those games — it won’t be very frightening if you’re wandering aimlessly. If nothing else, the approach should improve the replayability compared to other horror projects. You can come back knowing the scares won’t always pop up at the same places.