Category: Technology

We may see the M4 MacBook Air as soon as March. In the Power On newsletter this weekend, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that Apple is readying itself for the launch of the upgraded laptop next month. The company is “preparing its marketing, sales and retail teams for the debut,” according to Gurman’s sources, and it’s letting inventory of the existing models wind down. The M4 MacBook Air is expected to come in two sizes, 13-inch and 15-inch, like the previous model.

Apple introduced the M3 MacBook Air last March, and unveiled its new M4 chip a few months later, bringing that first to the iPad Pro. In October, it refreshed the iMac, Mac mini and MacBook Pros with the M4 family of chips. The MacBook Air is now due for its turn. While the laptop didn’t get the M4 chip in the fall, Apple did announce a long-awaited memory boost for the lineup at that time, with the M2 and M3 now starting at 16GB of RAM.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/apples-m4-macbook-air-could-be-here-in-just-a-few-weeks-153004599.html?src=rss 

South Korean game development studio Pixelity says it’s working on a series of XR games based on Neon Genesis Evangelion, and the first one will be released next year. In an emailed announcement, the studio said it’s planning a trilogy “based on the world and events of all 26 episodes” of the beloved anime.

We don’t have much in the way of details just yet, but Pixelity says, “Players will experience the narrative through the eyes of an original character, exploring the world of Neon Genesis Evangelion, taking on quests, and engaging in thrilling battles — all while following the timeline and key events of the anime.” The trilogy will offer “interactive and cooperative gameplay with familiar characters.” The developer hasn’t revealed what platforms the games will be available on.

Pixelity has previously made games for the Meta Quest family of headsets, as well as Pico and other platforms. It also recently launched a couple of titles for Apple Vision Pro, Shooting Break and Rolling Buddy.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ar-vr/an-xr-game-trilogy-based-on-neon-genesis-evangelion-is-in-the-works-222629986.html?src=rss 

There’s a lot to take in in the announcement trailer for Shotgun Cop Man: the wide-bodied, thumb-headed protagonist; Satan in the style of Handsome Squidward; a demon boss with a lethal fart(?) stream; intense, action-heavy platforming with shotgun-based movement. The upcoming new game from DeadToast Entertainment, the solo developer behind My Friend Pedro, looks absolutely unhinged. Its hero’s core mission? “Go to Hell, arrest Satan.”

Publisher Devolver Digital dropped the trailer on Friday, and while there’s no firm release date just yet, it’s slated to come out sometime this year. The game is described as a “punchy, crunchy, son-of-a-gun precision platformer.” But rather than jumping between platforms, players will rely on shotgun blasts to propel themselves and mow down enemies. The main campaign has about 150 levels, and there will be a built-in level editor so players can create and share custom levels.

Shotgun Cop Man will be available for PC and Nintendo Switch once it’s released. You can download the demo from Steam now to get a taste of the action.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/my-friend-pedro-creator-new-game-deadtoast-devolver-digital-shotgun-cop-man-181525492.html?src=rss 

In What We’re Listening To, Engadget editors and writers discuss the new music we can’t get enough of.

Bad Bunny – DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS

You don’t need me to tell you to go listen to Bad Bunny’s DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS — if you’re on the internet enough, you’ve been told to do so already. But I’ll add to the pile-on and say that this is Bad Bunny’s most personal work yet. It showcases how modern pop, rap and R&B can be seamlessly combined with old-school, traditional sounds from different cultures (in this case, Puerto Rico) in a way that celebrates both camps. Bad Bunny has always been deeply connected to his island home and it’s come through in his music, but DTMF is on a whole other level. 

For me, there are no skips on this album — but if you’re going to listen to just one song, make it the salsa hit “BAILE INoLVIDABLE.” Aside from that, my favorites are “NUEVAYoL” (if you live in the five boroughs, be prepared to hear this all summer long), “KETU TeCRÉ,” “CAFé CON RON” and “EoO.” — Valentina Palladino, Deputy Editor, Buying Advice

The Weeknd – Hurry Up Tomorrow

The Weeknd is certainly going out with a bang with Hurry Up Tomorrow. Supposedly the pop star’s final record under his current pseudonym, Hurry Up Tomorrow also completes the trilogy that started with 2020’s After Hours and continued with 2022’s Dawn FM. It’s a massive (literally, at 22 tracks), cinematic album that serves as The Weeknd’s magnus opus, and without a doubt, his most personal project yet. His attitudes toward fame, legacy, suicide, past substance abuse, the fear of being alone and much more are all laid bare for listeners to hear, but in typical Weeknd fashion, he disguises it all in moody synths, thumping bass and top-tier vocals.

The first things I noticed during my initial listen were the transitions: they’re beyond smooth on this album, and they’re one of the reasons why the first five tracks make up one of the most energizing sequences I’ve heard start an album recently. I’d personally extend that to include the next two tracks, the final of which is “Open Hearts,” a song that’s cut from a similar cloth as “Blinding Lights” and will, no doubt, be a standout single from the record. My other top tracks are “Wake Me Up,” “Cry for Me,” “São Paulo,” and “Niagara Falls.” — V.P.

FKA twigs – EUSEXUA

FKA twigs is truly in a league of her own. I’ve been mentally prepared to be changed by the new album ever since she released the genuinely jaw-dropping “Eusexua” music video back in September (which features two tracks, “Drums of Death” and “Eusexua”), but it’s even more magnificent than I was ready for. FKA twigs has described the state of “eusexua” as “pure presence. It’s a moment of nothingness. Or it’s the moment before a really incredible idea… it’s this ego-less presence which is just filled with this kind of tingling clarity.” Call me corny, but listening to this album is a spiritual experience every time.

Eusexua ebbs and flows over the course of its 11 tracks, starting out almost angelic with the title track before transporting you right onto a throbbing, disorienting club dance floor with “Drums of Death” and “Room of Fools,” then back down to a softer, emotionally raw place with “Sticky.” “Childlike Things” feels like the onset of unexpected joy, almost out of place in between “Keep It, Hold It” and “Striptease” but in a way that’s really grown on me. 

“Perfect Stranger,” toward the beginning, and the penultimate song “24hr Dog” almost feel like two sides of the same coin, the latter hitting like the vulnerable comedown from the former. I love every song on this album, but I especially can’t stop listening to “Girl Feels Good,” which sounds like it’s been transplanted into 2025 from the ‘90s and hits me in just the right way. Eusexua has kind of taken over my personality for the time being. — Cheyenne MacDonald, Weekend Editor

Honorable mentions: A bunch of singles have come out lately that have me so hyped for albums we’re going to see later this winter and spring. I’m apologizing in advance for the person I’ll become when Lady Gaga’s Mayhem drops, because “Abracadabra” has reawakened something in me. On the opposite end of the spectrum, I’ve been obsessively listening to Bria Salmena’s brooding indie track, “Stretch the Struggle,” ahead of her debut album’s release at the end of March, along with “Sugar in the Tank” by Julien Baker and Torres, who have a country-leaning collaboration album coming out in April that I cannot wait for. All of the new SZA from SOS Deluxe: Lana (Deluxe?) has been a real treat too. — C.M.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/music/what-were-listening-to-bad-bunny-the-weeknd-fka-twigs-and-more-170429948.html?src=rss 

ASUS has launched a new mouse that comes with an built-in fragrance compartment that can be filled with aromatic essential oils. We don’t know why you’d want a mouse that’s also an oil diffuser, but, well… the option (for some reason) now exists. If you want to change scents, you can just wash the vial and refill it with a different one. Just take note that the vial is in a bottom compartment, so you’ll have to take care not to accidentally damage it and smear aromatic oils on your desk. You also cannot use 100 percent pure essential oils and will have to refill the vial with oils for reed diffusers, ultrasonic diffusers and aroma stones.

The ASUS Fragrance Mouse has three adjustable DPI levels at 1200dpi, 1600dpi and 2,400dpi, letting you change sensitivity as needed across different screen resolutions or across different games. You’d want to use a higher DPI for games that need quick responses like first-person shooters. It also has both 2.4GHz wireless and Bluetooth connectivity that you can use to connect to different laptops and PCs. The mouse isn’t rechargeable, but ASUS says an AA battery can power it for a year. In addition, the company says the model’s switches can last for up to 10 million clicks. ASUS has yet to announce how much the Fragrance Mouse will cost and when it will be available, but you can easily get a diffuser from Amazon if you’re after the fragrance part of the product.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/accessories/asus-new-mouse-has-a-built-in-aromatic-oil-diffuser-153100716.html?src=rss 

OpenAI has banned the accounts of a group of Chinese users who had attempted to use ChatGPT to debug and edit code for an AI social media surveillance tool, the company said Friday. The campaign, which OpenAI calls Peer Review, saw the group prompt ChatGPT to generate sales pitches for a program those documents suggest was designed to monitor anti-Chinese sentiment on X, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and other platforms. The operation appears to have been particularly interested in spotting calls for protests against human rights violations in China, with the intent of sharing those insights with the country’s authorities.

“This network consisted of ChatGPT accounts that operated in a time pattern consistent with mainland Chinese business hours, prompted our models in Chinese, and used our tools with a volume and variety consistent with manual prompting, rather than automation,” said OpenAI. “The operators used our models to proofread claims that their insights had been sent to Chinese embassies abroad, and to intelligence agents monitoring protests in countries including the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom.”

According to Ben Nimmo, a principal investigator with OpenAI, this was the first time the company had uncovered an AI tool of this kind. “Threat actors sometimes give us a glimpse of what they are doing in other parts of the internet because of the way they use our AI models,” Nimmo told The New York Times.

Much of the code for the surveillance tool appears to have been based on an open-source version of one of Meta’s Llama models. The group also appears to have used ChatGPT to generate an end-of-year performance review where it claims to have written phishing emails on behalf of clients in China.

“Assessing the impact of this activity would require inputs from multiple stakeholders, including operators of any open-source models who can shed a light on this activity,” OpenAI said of the operation’s efforts to use ChatGPT to edit code for the AI social media surveillance tool.

Separately, OpenAI said it recently banned an account that used ChatGPT to generate social media posts critical of Cai Xia, a Chinese political scientist and dissident who lives in the US in exile. The same group also used the chatbot to generate articles in Spanish critical of the US. These articles were published by “mainstream” news organizations in Latin America and often attributed to either an individual or a Chinese company.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/openai-bans-chinese-accounts-using-chatgpt-to-edit-code-for-social-media-surveillance-230451036.html?src=rss 

It’s not clear that anyone was asking for a company to build a muscular, sinewy robot or to see a video of it dangling, helpless from a hook, but life is full of surprises and this YouTube video of Clone Robotics’ “Protoclone” is here all the same.

The Protoclone appears to be a prototype version of the “Clone” robot the aptly named Clone Robotics is working to build. The video shows the Protoclone flexing its arms and legs, with visible artificial muscle fibers moving underneath its white “skin.” Based on Clone Robotic’s video description, the impressive part here is that fact that the Protoclone has “over 200 degrees of freedom, over 1,000 Myofibers, and over 200 sensors,” and also that the robot is “faceless,” for some reason.

The end goal for the startup is to build an android that’s anatomically correct, with synthetic nervous, skeletal, muscular and vascular systems powering its movement. The “Myofibers” included in the Protoclone are a custom Clone Robotics creation with “the desirable qualities of mammalian skeletal muscle.” For the eventual Clone robot’s purposes, those qualities are the ability to “respond in less than 50 ms with a bigger than 30 percent unloaded contraction” and “at least a kilogram of contraction force for a single, three gram muscle fiber,” according to Clone Robotics’ website. 

That the Protoclone is dangling in the video rather than roaming around of its own accord is a reflection of its prototype nature. Robots are often hung or propped up with a support arm until they can support their own body weight, something that can be hard to achieve without all of the right materials.

Clone Robotics is not unique in pursuing a human-like robot that could theoretically replace human workers. Figure is exploring a similar idea, minus the muscles. Tesla started off on the wrong foot with a person in a spandex suit, but it’s serious about robots, too. Even the largest of tech companies have turned their attention to robots: Both Meta and Apple are reportedly exploring robotics as a future product category. It’s fair to say Clone Robotics is winning when it comes to posting videos of muscular robots, though.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/can-somebody-let-this-robot-down-222011506.html?src=rss 

While 20th-century heists involved scoping out a location, recruiting a person on the inside and having a daredevil getaway driver waiting outside, the 21st-century version looks more like what Bybit experienced today. A hacker stole nearly $1.5 billion in Ethereum (ETH) and staked Ethereum from one of the exchange’s offline wallets, nabbing the largest cryptocurrency haul ever. One blockchain security expert said it’s likely the all-time biggest heist of any kind, not just crypto.

Bybit CEO Ben Zhou posted on X that the hacker took control of one of the exchange’s cold (offline) wallets, manipulating a planned transfer and sending it to an unknown party. “The signing message was to change the smart contract logic of our ETH cold wallet,” Zhou wrote. He explained that the hacker “took control of the specific ETH cold wallet we signed and transferred all ETH in the cold wallet to this unidentified address.”

Rob Behnke, co-founder and executive chairman of blockchain security company Halborn, told Bloomberg the heist was likely the “largest incident ever, not just crypto.”

The Bybit hack eclipses the previous record crypto thefts, including $620 million taken in 2022 from the Ronin Network and $610 million from Poly Network in 2021. There was also the infamous Mt. Gox hack of 2011, which took 850,000 Bitcoins. That translated to around $450 million in losses at the time. But one asterisk on Bybit’s “biggest ever” title is that the Mt. Gox haul would be worth significantly more today: over $81 billion. It’s hard to imagine what numbers for similar incidents could look like in a decade.

According to Bloomberg, Bybit had around $16.2 billion in assets before the hack, averaging over $36 billion in daily trading. Friday’s theft accounted for around nine percent of its total assets. As news of the heist spread, Ether dropped as much as 6.7 percent from its high of the day. Bitcoin also shaved about three percent off its high on Friday.

In what sounds like the ultimate embodiment of the “This is fine” meme, Zhou capped his X post by reassuring customers that everything is okie-dokie at Bybit. “Please rest assured that all other cold wallets are secure,” he posted. “All withdraws are NORMAL.” (Normal in all caps is most definitely a sign that things are peachy.)

To be fair, Zhou said Bybit had already secured around 80 percent of the funding needed to cover the loss through partner bridge loans. So, perhaps the Dubai-based exchange will recover from the incident better than one would imagine. “Your money is safe, and our withdrawals are still open,” he added on a livestream.

On the other hand, Bybit’s X account posted a request for help. After stating that its security team and blockchain forensic experts were on the case, it added, “Any teams with expertise in blockchain analytics and fund recovery who can assist in tracing these assets are welcome to collaborate with us.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cybersecurity/bybit-hacked-for-almost-15-billion-in-the-biggest-crypto-theft-ever-212248349.html?src=rss 

Apple is set to give News+ subscribers more than a soupçon of fresh material. When iOS 18.4 and iPadOS 18.4 arrive in April, the company will add a Food section to News+.

This will include tens of thousands of recipes, along with stories curated by Apple News editors about healthy eating, restaurants, kitchen essentials and so on. Apple says “the world’s top food publishers” — including Allrecipes, Bon Appétit, Food & Wine, Good Food and Serious Eats — will supply the recipes and stories.

One notable omission from that list is The New York Times, which has a separate subscription for its famed Cooking app. As such, it seems Apple is trying to go toe-to-toe with one of the country’s papers of record on another front after it added games for News+ subscribers. Of course, there are plenty of other places you can go on the web for recipes and cooking tips.

Non-News+ subscribers will have access to a limited number of stories and recipes. An appetizer, if you will, to encourage folks to sign up for the full buffet.

New recipes will be added to the Recipe Catalog every day. You’ll be able to browse, search and filter the library. Apple says the format makes it easy to review the lists of ingredients and directions. There’s an option to view step-by-step instructions in full screen mode (which looks a bit like a lyrics screen in Apple Music). You can also save recipes for offline access, which could be useful for meal planning if you like to go off-grid once in a while.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apps/apple-is-adding-tens-of-thousands-of-recipes-to-news-194518874.html?src=rss