Category: Technology

The ID.3 isn’t even three years old, but that isn’t stopping Volkswagen from giving its well-known EV a makeover. After months of teasers, the company has introduced a second-generation ID.3 that addresses criticisms of the first model. The new compact car offers a “sharper” design with improved aerodynamics and a higher-quality (and heavily recycled) interior. More importantly, VW has upgraded the technology — including its software, which garnered a long list of complaints from drivers.

The second-gen ID.3 includes the “latest software,” with a simpler layout, better performance and over-the-air updates. The 12-inch infotainment display is now standard. You also have access to a Travel Assist feature that uses “swarm” data to aid driving — the crowdsourced info can keep you in your lane on a backroad even if there’s just one known lane marking. Charging should be easier, too, between an automatic charge start (at compatible stations) and a route planner that factors in the availability and capacity of stations along the way. Your car won’t direct you to a busy station with slow chargers.

Don’t expect huge changes in performance. The new ID.3 uses the same 201HP motor system and battery options as before. That nets up to 265 miles of range (using the WLTP testing method) with the base 58kWh battery and 339 miles with the 77kWh pack. Those are still very healthy figures for an EV this size, however, and VW has teased a smaller battery for those who only need a commuter car.

Production is slated to start in fall 2023. VW hasn’t outlined pricing or country-by-country availability, but we wouldn’t count on this reaching the US. Like the original ID.3, the revamp is aimed primarily at European customers where North America gets larger vehicles like the ID.4 crossover and upcoming ID.Buzz.

Even larger software improvements are in store, regardless of where you live. VW’s Cariad unit has unveiled an app store (pictured at middle) for the automaker’s brands, including Audi and Porsche. The platform will help third parties bring apps to a wide range of cars with relatively little fuss, including over-the-air-updates. Major early partners tend to be driving-oriented services like Spotify, TuneIn, The Weather Channel and Plugshare. However, you’ll also find TikTok, Cisco’s Webex meeting app and even Vivaldi’s web browser.

The app store debuts in several Audi models (including EVs like the E-Tron GT and Q8 E-Tron) this summer for European and North American customers. More models and VW brands are coming later. Don’t expect to upgrade your existing ride, though, as VW cautions that the shop will only be available in cars produced from summer onward.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/vw-unveils-second-gen-id3-ev-and-an-app-store-for-its-cars-154817061.html?src=rss 

In recent years, we’ve seen an influx of self-proclaimed “cozy games,” video games explicitly designed to invoke good vibes. Being cozy, however, isn’t the same as being good. To help those who could use some help winding down, we’ve rounded up a selection of games that purposefully deemphasize fail states, violence, overwhelming grinds, intense competition and other aggressive urges, but aren’t overly cute for the sake of it or so stripped-down that they’re boring.

Stardew Valley

Apart from being one of our favorite couch co-op games, the farming life sim Stardew Valley is also notable for its relaxing qualities. It’s a game that’s willing to meet you at your pace: If you want to putter around your farm, casually chat up townsfolk, brew beer or fish for a few hours, you can. (On the flipside, if you want to turn your land into a model of ruthless efficiency as soon as possible, the experience will be more overwhelming, and the story will have a darker undercurrent.) It all starts a bit slow, but there’s no external force rushing you, and the game’s trajectory of progress always points upward. It’s an alternate little life, one that gives you the choice to take it easy.

Buy for: Switch, PS4, Xbox, PC
Length: 90 hours

Tetris Effect

Tetris Effect is, in essence, a prettier version of the falling-block puzzle game that has compelled the globe since the mid-’80s. Its spacey pop soundtrack and themed boards have an ethereal, almost spiritual quality, one that fits neatly with the trance-like condition Tetris can induce. (This helps explain where the title comes from.)

To be clear, Tetris is not the most relaxing game in the abstract. The way it makes you scramble to fix your past decisions is part of its magic, and several modes in Tetris Effect specifically thrive on stress. Others, however, are explicitly designed to tap into the game’s zen aspects. “Chill Marathon,” for one, simply resets your score upon failure instead of giving you a game over. And since Tetris itself comes as second-nature to an unusually large amount of people, we’ll make an exception for it here. It can be difficult, but even in failure, Tetris Effect induces a mind-freeing state like few games can.

Buy for: Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox, PC, Meta Quest

Dorfromantik

Dorfromantik is a puzzle game in which you lay down tiles to create an idyllic countryside. The tiles come in distinct types: forests, fields, rivers, railroads, little houses and so on. The idea is to chain similar pieces together, and the game will give you little “quests” to connect a certain number of matching tiles to grow your overall stack. Since you can only see a few tiles at once, exactly what your landscape looks like differs from game to game.

The need to keep gaining tiles creates a contingent sort of pressure, but even still, Dorfromantik is a game that encourages slowness. There’s no time limit, and no way to even really “win.” You’re led to consider each piece, look at the land and see how it all fits. When the tiles run out, you’ve usually created a beautiful little scene. And if you just want to build a landscape without any restrictions, there’s a separate mode for that.

Buy for: Switch, PC

A Short Hike

A Short Hike is a lovely little adventure game that is completely in tune with itself. You play as Claire, a young bird in a world of anthropomorphic animals, who is staying in a small yet bustling provincial park. Something is weighing on her, and she needs to make a phone call, but the only place with cellular reception is the top of the mountain at the park’s center. Your only real objective in the two-hour game is to get her there.

There is a conventional core to A Short Hike that involves doing light fetch quests for other park-goers and collecting golden feathers to climb higher and double-jump more. But most of these tasks are straightforward, and it quickly becomes apparent that you can (literally) soar around most of the park as you please, taking in the sights and interacting with the other park visitors as they go about their lives. Apart from simply feeling nice, this freedom ties beautifully into the game’s themes: That mountain is calling, but you don’t have to climb it right away. When you do, the world will still be there for you to explore.

Buy for: Switch, PS4, Xbox, PC
Length: 2 hours

Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker

Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker is an adorable puzzle-platformer from Nintendo that has you navigate a series of contained, diorama-like levels, each with a gold star at its end. It’s technically a spin-off of the Super Mario games, but here, you can’t jump. Instead, you need to explore the game’s densely-packed spaces from new angles, shifting the camera to find hidden pathways and bonus treasures.

The whole thing is neither overlong nor super difficult, but it is determined, in that delightful Nintendo way, to constantly hit you with new ideas, each as playful and meticulous as the last. While it doesn’t reach the creative heights of the best Mario games — some of which were developed by the same team — it is similarly amiable and more easygoing.

Buy for: Switch
Length: 11 hours

Desert Golfing

Desert Golfing is exactly what its title says and nothing more. There is a ball, a hole, and some procedurally generated desert land in between. That’s it. No par, no club selection, no music, no items, no pause menu, no restarts, not even a physical avatar. Only dragging a cursor back to determine the next shot’s angle and power, and an attempt to get A to B. Once you do, a new hole appears, and you go on, infinitely. (The game technically has an “ending,” but may God have mercy on anyone who plays long enough to see it.)

Desert Golfing reads as overly simple on paper, and sure, it makes sense as a sneaky critique of time-sucking, player-debasing mobile games. Actually playing it, though, borders on meditative. The game’s radical minimalism makes everything and nothing matter all at once. There’s a shot counter at the top, but it’s functionally meaningless, merely signifying how long you’ve played. You may spend 60 shots on one hole, but there’s no invisible eye judging you. Instead, you’re allowed to focus entirely on the simple pleasure of arcing a ball through the air, seeing it kick up sand and eventually making it plonk in the hole. It’s about the act of play more than the rules of a game: golfing, not golf. And when something new does pop up — a well of water, a setting sun, a cactus — it feels momentous.

Buy for: PC, iOS, Android

The Ramp

Much like Desert Golfing, The Ramp is a successful experiment in minimalism. It’s a skateboarding game, but its approach is a far cry from the Tony Hawk series. It doesn’t burden you with high scores, skill points, objectives, camera adjustments or a HUD, and it respects you enough to unlock all of its courses and characters after a brief tutorial.

While it takes a moment to get the hang of its controls, The Ramp excels at conveying the joy of motion and momentum in vert skating, from launching at speed, to that brief moment of weightlessness in the sky, to the rush of gravity pulling you back down. There’s a handful of tricks to pull off, some chill music to help set the tone, and no real penalty for biffing it.

The Ramp doesn’t have much “depth” by conventional gaming standards; its developer describes it as a “digital toy,” which sounds about right. But what it does, it does well, and it’s uncompromising in its focus.

Buy for: Switch, PC

Euro Truck Simulator 2

Euro Truck Simulator 2 lets you drive a bunch of big trucks across a condensed version of Europe, delivering cargo and eventually growing your own trucking business. It’s a simulator, not a GTA game, so you’re expected to follow traffic laws, refuel your vehicle and complete your deliveries on time with as little damage as possible.

It doesn’t have the gentlest learning curve, and its management elements aren’t as interesting as the actual trucking. But Euro Truck Simulator2’s pleasures are similar to those of real-life driving: cruising down a long road, tapping your thumb to the radio, checking out the scenery, going where the route takes you. You’ll get there when you get there. As an aside: All of this is most fun with a wheel, but one isn’t required.

Buy for: PC
Length: 117 hours

Wide Ocean Big Jacket

There’s been no shortage of easy-to-play “walking simulators” in recent years, but Wide Ocean Big Jacket stands out among them for telling a particularly warm short story. It’s crudely animated and maybe an hour long, but it develops more identifiable and human characters in that time than most big-budget games do in 30 hours.

The story follows the camping trip of a young couple, Brad and Cloanne, their 13-year-old niece Mord and her friend Ben, and the subsequent lessons they learn about love and each other. It has the air of an indie comedy: a little quirky, funny but not mean-spirited, honest but not long-winded, and moving when it’s time to bring the story home. Its world isn’t ending, and there’s no combat. It’s a game about these characters in this specific moment, and it’s presented like a series of memories, something its bold colors amplify.

The game’s approach to interactivity plays a big role in selling all of this. Instead of merely controlling a specific character, you’re often in charge of the camera, a sort of director role that brings you closer to each scene but distances you, the player, from the action (or what qualifies as action in this case).

Buy for: Switch, PC
Length: 1 hour

Hidden Folks

Hidden Folks is like a digital take on those Where’s Waldo? puzzle books you might’ve had as a kid. It presents you with a series of living scenes, each brimming with detail and micro-narratives. You get a set of things to uncover, and once you find enough, you can move to the next stage. The monochrome art is hand-drawn, and all the sound effects derive from people’s voices. It’s cute, intimate and often funny.

Trying to find the proverbial needle in a haystack may get frustrating if you’re in the wrong headspace, but this is a game that demands you slow down and be patient. There’s no rush; nobody on the screen is going anywhere.

Buy for: Switch, PC, iOS, Android
Length: 6 hours

PowerWash Simulator

You know those oddly satisfying YouTube videos of people deep-cleaning rugs, driveways, old electronics and the like? PowerWash Simulator is the video game version of those. You take on a range of power washing jobs around the town of “Muckingham,” slowly but steadily erasing the grime from various objects in each gig. There’s no time limit or score to meet, and each dirty thing has a corresponding progress bar to complete.

There’s more meat to PowerWash Simulator than you might expect: You can earn money to spend on upgraded power washing equipment, and there’s a narrative mode that goes places, literally and metaphorically. It probably doesn’t need to do quite as much as it does, but PowerWash Simulator’s pleasures are layered: the immediate satisfaction of making dirty things pristine, and the larger one of systematically “working” toward a job well done.

Buy for: Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox, PC
Length: 43 hours

Unpacking

Unpacking is a stripped-down puzzler about unpacking boxes. You methodically work your way through each collection of knick-knacks, placing them around different rooms in a sequence of homes. The game is nearly wordless, but it manages to tell a story almost entirely through its isometric environments: The boxes you unpack all belong to the same character, and each move takes place in a different year of their life. This, combined with the pixelated visuals, gives the game a vaguely wistful tone.

Unpacking is still a puzzle game, so it’ll make items glow red until you put them in a “correct” location. This feels like a misstep: If I want to leave my bookbag off to the side of my bed and just be done with things, why can’t I? Isn’t moving messy? Still, even if Unpacking is a bit too gamified, there’s a quiet catharsis to its fantasy of putting everything in its right place. If nothing else, it’s far less stressful than moving in real life.

Buy for: Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox, PC
Length: 4 hours

Please, Touch the Artwork

Please, Touch the Artwork is a set of three earnest puzzle games, each inspired by abstract art. The specifics of the games differ: One has you mechanically recreate Mondrian-style paintings, another turns Broadway Boogie Woogie into a little love story, and the third reframes New York City as a metaphor for adjusting to life in, well, a big new city. Only the first can get particularly difficult, but the game tells you right upfront that it’s made to be a low-stress experience, with no timers, and hints and redo buttons there if you need them.

What intrigues about Please, Touch the Artwork isn’t what it says about De Stijl and abstract art (as if such works could ever be “solved”). Rather, it’s what it conveys about the experience of taking in art itself, and how close it brings you to the lone developer (Thomas Waterzooi) behind the game. The whole project has an intensely personal feel, like peering into someone’s brain and seeing how this kind of art speaks to them. Some may see that as unbearably pretentious, but even on a mechanical level, Please, Touch the Artwork is welcoming, bold and sincere.

Buy for: Switch, PC, iOS, Android
Length: 4 hours

Zen Bound 2

Like most games on this list, Zen Bound 2 has a simple premise: You get a rope and a series of 3D sculptures, and your goal is to wrap the rope around each sculpture until it’s covered completely, coating it with paint in the process. The sculptures themselves can be more difficult than they first seem, however, with many hidden gaps and sharp angles.

Playing Zen Bound 2 demands slow contemplation, almost like meditating on the object you’re binding. This, in turn, may lead you to reflect on the physical nuances of the things you tie yourself to in real life. But even if that sounds pompous, just know that Zen Bound 2 offers a thoughtful way to zone out.

Buy for: Switch, PC
Length: 8 hours

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/best-relaxing-video-games-140048572.html?src=rss 

This is a good moment to buy a smartwatch to track your early spring runs. Amazon is once again selling the 41mm Product Red Apple Watch Series 8 at a record low price of $329, or a sizeable $70 off. While you won’t have your choice of case sizes or colors, you probably won’t mind if you were otherwise looking at a Watch SE (or clearance Series 7) to save money.

The Apple Watch Series 8 remains our pick for the best overall smartwatch, and for good reason. While it’s only a slight improvement over the Series 7, that still makes it fast, with a robust app ecosystem and extensive health and fitness features. The most recent model adds temperature tracking for people monitoring their ovulation cycles, and crash detection that can alert first responders.

The iPhone requirement rules out Android users. And if you don’t crave the always-on display or advanced health monitoring, the latest-generation Apple Watch SE may still be the better value. At this price, however, the Series 8 is hard to top if you want a good all-rounder that can handle everything from workouts through to music streaming and navigation.

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apple-watch-series-8-record-low-price-143047556.html?src=rss 

LastPass posted an update on its investigation regarding a couple of security incidents last year, and they sound worse than we thought. The hackers infiltrated a company DevOps engineer’s home computer by exploiting a third-party media software package. They implanted a keylogger into the software and captured the engineer’s master password for an account with access to the LastPass corporate vault. After they got in, they exported the vault’s entries and shared folders with decryption keys. The company insisted all sensitive customer vault data, aside from some exceptions, “can only be decrypted with a unique encryption key derived from each user’s master password.” The company added it doesn’t store users’ master passwords.

– Mat Smith

The Morning After isn’t just a newsletter – it’s also a daily podcast. Get our daily audio briefings, Monday through Friday, by subscribing right here.

The biggest stories you might have missed

Windows 11 Phone Link supports limited iPhone syncing in preview

LG’s 2023 OLED TVs arrive in late March, starting at $1,299

Polar is bringing its fitness tracking tech to rival watches

A first look at Tecno’s Phantom V Fold, a surprisingly affordable foldable phone

White House’s $39 billion in chip manufacturing incentives are now up for grabs

Tesla selects Monterrey, Mexico, as the site of its next Gigafactory

Samsung Galaxy S23+ review

A solid phone that’s probably not worth the upgrade.

We’ve already reviewed the Galaxy S23 Ultra which, thanks to a large screen, onboard S-Pen and 200-megapixel camera, is aggressively targeted at power users. For everyone else looking to get a new Android phone, there’s the Galaxy S23+ or the S23. We tested the plus model and were impressed by the battery life, screen and, well, all the areas Samsung typically delivers on. But with few meaningful changes, the S23+ isn’t a hugely worthy upgrade if you’re using an S22 or S21.

Continue reading.

Bing AI is coming to the Windows 11 taskbar, of course

That didn’t take long.

Three weeks after introducing the new AI-infused Bing, Microsoft is ready to shove it into a Windows 11 update today. If you’re in the Bing AI preview, you’ll be able to access all of its new features from the search box in the Windows 11 taskbar. Just imagine a slightly more streamlined version of what we saw with the Bing AI on Edge: In addition to general web searching, you can ask Bing natural language queries, and its intelligent chatbot will reply conversationally.

Continue reading.

Xiaomi’s 300W demo fully charges a phone in 5 minutes

It’s with a slightly smaller battery, but impressive nonetheless.

Realme’s 240W phone charging tech was big news last month. Given it’s MWC week, today Xiaomi has swiftly responded with a whopping 300W demo, which brought the charging time down to a little under five minutes. The charger is the same size as the 200W equivalent. The phone reached 20 percent in a little over one minute and hit 50 percent in two minutes 12 seconds.

Continue reading.

OnePlus will launch its first foldable smartphone later this year

It promises to release more details in the coming months.

As well as revealing its latest experimental phone, which it envisions to have liquid cooling capabilities, OnePlus announced it’ll launch its first foldable smartphone in the second half of 2023. In the background at the OnePlus 11 event earlier this month, the company teased a mysterious Q3 2023 launch with what seemed to be silhouettes of devices that fold, but it fell short of saying what exactly they would be.

Continue reading.

FTX co-founder Nishad Singh pleads guilty to fraud and conspiracy charges

Singh has agreed to cooperate with the case against Sam Bankman-Fried.

Nishad Singh, a co-founder of collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX, has pleaded guilty to US federal fraud and conspiracy charges. Singh, who was FTX’s director of engineering, is the third member of Sam Bankman-Fried’s inner circle to agree to cooperate with prosecutors in the case against him. Singh admitted to making illegal donations to political candidates and PACs under his name using funds from Alameda Research (FTX’s sibling hedge fund and crypto trading firm).

Continue reading.

Elden Ring’s first expansion is called Shadow of the Erdtree

FromSoftware says it’s already in the works.

Developer FromSoftware has confirmed the rumors circulating since earlier this year: Elden Ring is getting a big chunk of DLC. In an announcement posted on the game’s Twitter account, the Japanese developer said an upcoming expansion entitled Shadow of the Erdtree is currently in development.

Continue reading.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-morning-after-hackers-broke-into-a-lastpass-employees-pc-to-steal-the-companys-password-vault-121516607.html?src=rss 

The DownDetector pages for Twitter are exploding in activity — again — and users are sharing that the social network seems to be broken for them. Over the past couple of hours, thousands of users reported having issues accessing the website and its apps. Many trying to access Twitter.com have reported seeing a “Welcome to Twitter” message, while both Android and iOS timelines remained stuck in the past. 

Twitter’s Support account has yet to issue a statement, but some parts of the website are working just fine. Users can still tweet if they want to, or read and respond to their notifications. If they need to see the latest tweets ASAP, they can switch over to Tweetdeck to see them. The outage comes shortly after the company reportedly laid off more employees. 

According to various sources, Twitter released around 200 people on Saturday night, a week after the company’s Slack was taken offline. Twitter Blue head Esther Crawford is believed to be one of the affected personnel. It’s unclear at the moment if the layoffs have anything to do with the outage, but since Twitter has no PR team, we’ll have to wait for the company to issue a statement. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/twitter-faces-another-global-outage-122800803.html?src=rss 

TikTok is introducing new settings that are meant to reduce how much time teens are spending in the app. In an update, the company says it will automatically default teens under the age of 18 to a daily screen time limit of 60 minutes.

With the change, teens will still be able to bypass the daily limit, but they’ll be required to enter a passcode, “requiring them to make an active decision to extend that time,” the company says. Additionally, if teens opt to turn off the screen time limit altogether, TikTok will further prompt them to set a limit if they spend more than 100 minutes in the app.

The company is also adding new parental control features via the app’s “Family Pairing” feature, which allows parents to monitor their children’s activity on TikTok. Parents will be able to set their own custom screen time limits, and view a dashboard that details stats about their child’s time in the app, like how often they open it and what times of the day they use it most. Parents can also set a schedule for when their children can receive notifications, and choose to filter topics they don’t want to appear in their For You feeds.

The update comes as lawmakers in the United States have renewed their efforts to ban TikTok entirely. In addition to national security concerns, Congress has also criticized the company for not doing enough to protect its youngest users.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/tiktok-will-automatically-limit-screen-time-for-teens-110056722.html?src=rss 

There’s been a resurgence of interest in the moon, now that we’re getting closer to re-establishing a foothold on the celestial body. Space agencies and private companies around the world have been scheduling their own lunar missions to take place over the coming years, and it will be quite complicated having to coordinate with each other when they use different time zones. During a meeting at the European Space Agency’s ESTEC technology center in the Netherlands last year, space organizations talked about the “importance and urgency of defining a common lunar reference time.” In a new announcement, ESA navigation system engineer Pietro Giordano said a “joint international effort is now being launched towards achieving this.”

At the moment, different space organizations still use their own time zones for their onboard chronometers and their two-way communications systems. The ESA said doing so “will not be sustainable” in the new era of lunar exploration. Missions from different countries will be doing joint observations, and they may have to communicate with each other even if they’re not directly working together if they’re on the moon at the same time. 

Deciding on and keeping lunar time won’t be easy, though, and they will come with a unique set of challenges. As the ESA notes, “accurate navigation demands rigorous timekeeping,” which is why one of the topics the international group of space organizations will have to discuss is if there should be a single organization responsible for maintaining the moon’s time zone. Further, they’ll have to decide whether to keep lunar time synchronized with Earth’s or not, because clocks on the moon run faster based on the satellite’s position. While they have a lot of factors to consider, whatever they come up with will have to practical for astronauts orbiting or stepping on the lunar surface in the end. 

Bernhard Hufenbach, a member of the ESA’s Directorate of Human and Robotic Exploration’s Moonlight Management Team, said: “This will be quite a challenge on a planetary surface where in the equatorial region each day is 29.5 days long, including freezing fortnight-long lunar nights, with the whole of Earth just a small blue circle in the dark sky. But having established a working time system for the moon, we can go on to do the same for other planetary destinations.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/moon-own-time-zone-esa-113547009.html?src=rss 

The threat actors who infiltrated News Corp., the company that owns The Wall Street Journal and other news outlets, apparently had access to its network for two full years. In February last year, News Corp. admitted that it had discovered a security breach a month earlier and that hackers broke into a third-party cloud service that contained employees’ information. Now, according to Ars Technica, the company has sent a breach notification letter (PDF) to at least one affected personnel. In it, the company has admitted that “an unauthorized party” gained access to business documents and emails in some employees’ accounts between February 2020 and January 2022.

When News Corp. announced the breach, the security firm (Mandiant) that investigated the intrusion said it believes the threat actor was connected to the Chinese government. Further, it said the company was most likely attacked to gather intelligence for the country. In an email to Ars, a representative said News Corp. continues to believe “that this was an intelligence collection,” but didn’t respond to a question asking if investigators still think the hackers were linked to China. 

The company has revealed in the letter, though, that the bad actors may have gotten a hold of employees’ names, birth dates, Social Security number, driver’s license and passport numbers, as well as their financial, medical and heath insurance information. “Not all of this information was impacted for each affected individual,” it added. News Corp. said that it hasn’t heard any incidents of identity theft or fraud resulting from the security breach so far, but it’s offering affected employees two years of identity protection and credit monitoring. 

“Our investigation indicates that this activity does not appear to be focused on exploiting personal information,” News Corp. wrote in its letter. However, it didn’t reveal that details of the documents and emails the threat actors were able to access, and it didn’t say if they were specifically looking for information connected to the company’s reporting. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/news-corp-hackers-access-two-years-095301729.html?src=rss 

Meta has shared its latest augmented and virtual reality hardware roadmap with employees, and according to The Verge, it’s planning to launch its first full-fledged AR glasses in 2027. While the company intends to release other AR glasses before then, the device it’s launching in four years’ time is the same one Mark Zuckerberg believes could become Meta’s “iPhone moment.” That is, he thinks it could shake up the industry and could become as popular as the iPhone. 

The glasses will reportedly have the capability to project avatars as high-quality holograms superimposed on top of the real world — they’re also expected to be quite expensive. Employees will get the chance to take first crack at testing the device in 2024 before it makes its way to the public as Meta’s “Innovation” line of advanced smart glasses for the earliest adopters. 

The company also discussed the other AR and VR devices it’s launching before its full-fledged AR glasses are ready, The Verge says. This fall, it’s apparently releasing a follow-up to Ray-Ban Stories, which it developed in partnership with Luxottica. The Quest 3 headset, which is expected to be twice as thin and as powerful as the Quest 2, will also be available later this year. In 2024, Meta also plans to launch a VR headset codenamed “Ventura,” which it intends to sell “at the most attractive price point in the VR consumer market.” 

A year after that, in 2025, Meta plans to launch the third-generation Ray-Ban Stories. It will feature a display called the “viewfinder” designed to view incoming texts, scan QR codes and translate messages to other languages in real time. Users will reportedly be able to control the glasses with hand movements and will eventually be able to type messages using a virtual keyboard. In addition, Meta is developing a smartwatch to go with these particular glasses.

Meta isn’t the only big technology company with plans to launch AR and VR glasses and headsets over the next few years. Apple is believed to be debuting its long-awaited mixed reality headset at WWDC in June. It’s expected to have advanced features, such as dual 4K displays and controller-free input, and to cost as much as $3,000. However, reports suggest that Apple is working on a cheaper version that more people will be able to afford.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/meta-first-true-ar-glasses-2027-060946419.html?src=rss 

Twitter is once again tightening its rules around what users are permitted to say on the platform. The company introduced an updated “violent speech” policy, which contains some notable additions compared with previous versions of the rules.

Interestingly, the new policy prohibits users from expressing “wishes of harm” and similar sentiments. “This includes (but is not limited to) hoping for others to die, suffer illnesses, tragic incidents, or experience other physically harmful consequences,” the rules state. That’s a reversal from Twitter’s previous policy, which explicitly said that “statements that express a wish or hope that someone experiences physical harm” were not against the company’s rules.

“Statements that express a wish or hope that someone experiences physical harm, making vague or indirect threats, or threatening actions that are unlikely to cause serious or lasting injury are not actionable under this policy,” Twitter’s previous policy stated, according to the Wayback Machine.

That change isn’t the only addition to the policy. Twitter’s rules now also explicitly protects “infrastructure that is essential to daily, civic, or business activities” from threats of damage. From the rules:

You may not threaten to inflict physical harm on others, which includes (but is not limited to) threatening to kill, torture, sexually assault, or otherwise hurt someone. This also includes threatening to damage civilian homes and shelters, or infrastructure that is essential to daily, civic, or business activities.

These may not seem like particularly eyebrow-raising changes, but they are notable given Elon Musk’s previous statements about how speech should be handled on Twitter. Prior to taking over the company, the Tesla CEO stated that his preference would be to allow all speech that is legal. “I think we would want to err on the side of, if in doubt, let the speech exist,” he said at the time.

It’s also not the first time Twitter’s rules have become more restrictive since Musk’s takeover. The company’s rules around doxxing changed following his dustup with the (now suspended) @elonjet account, which shared the whereabouts of Musk’s private jet.

Twitter didn’t explain its rationale for the changes, but noted in a series of tweets that it may suspend accounts breaking the rules or force them to delete the tweets in question. The company no longer has a communications team to respond to requests for comment.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/twitter-updates-violent-speech-policy-to-ban-wishes-of-harm-214320985.html?src=rss