Kalakshar US

T-Mobile has been fined $60 million for failing to both report and stop data breaches, as indicated by Bloomberg. The hefty fine was levied by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US (CFIUS) and represents the largest such financial penalty the organization has ever issued. T-Mobile is owned by Deutsche Telekom, a company based in Germany, which is why CFIUS got involved.

These penalties have their origins in the terms of a 2020 deal in which T-Mobile purchased Sprint. CFIUS put some conditions on the purchase, including some related to protecting consumer data. The Committee found that T-Mobile didn’t comply with these conditions by failing to secure data and then by failing to report unauthorized access to this data, as reported by Reuters.

The data breaches occurred in 2020 and 2021. T-Mobile has blamed the breaches on technical issues that occurred during its post-merger integration with Sprint. The company says that the breaches targeted “information shared from a small number of law enforcement information requests.”

It also says that the data stayed within the law enforcement community, even after the breaches. T-Mobile claims that the breaches were reported “in a timely manner” and that they were “quickly addressed.”

CFIUS has been getting more aggressive in recent months with regard to fines and affiliated penalties. It issued six large penalties in the past year or so, though none get close to the $60 million fine T-Mobile was just hit with. This is approximately three times the number of penalties it has issued during any other similar timeframe throughout its existence, from 1975 until 2022.

“The $60 million penalty announcement highlights the committee’s commitment to ramping up CFIUS enforcement by holding companies accountable when they fail to comply with their obligations,” a US official told Reuters.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/t-mobile-fined-60-million-for-failing-to-stop-data-breaches-170438570.html?src=rss 

Dragon Age: The Veilguard will be released on October 31. The BioWare action RPG is the first installment in the franchise since 2014’s Dragon Age: Inquisition. That’s right. We’ve been waiting ten long years for this game and now it’s almost here. Check out the release date trailer below.

This is the fourth major game in the franchise and there’s a lot of hype around it, despite the (relatively) lukewarm response to Inquisition. We had a chance to see the game in action back in June and came away impressed, though cautious. The character creation tool is, as expected, robust and the various landscapes are easy on the eyes.

We actually watched a playthrough of the entire opening chapter of the game and immediately noticed a more cartoonish style when compared to its predecessors. It’s not quite Fable, but it’s getting there. The game does, however, bring back fan favorite characters like Varric and Solas. The latter looks to be the primary antagonist this time around.

It also looks to play a bit faster than the earlier titles, though you can still pause the game to consider tactics. There’s a quick launch menu for activating hotkeys and, of course, a decision wheel for making narrative and dialogue choices that will no doubt come back to bite you in the butt at a later part of the game.

Like previous entries, this is an action RPG. Parries seem to make up the core defense mechanic and party members will work to strip away armor and magical protections before going in to do actual damage. There will be a diverse array of accessibility options, including standard difficulty modes but also custom settings to make select aspects of the game more forgiving.

As for the “caution” mentioned above, we only got a brief look at the game in action, so there are still plenty of unknowns. In any event, we don’t have long to find out. Dragon Age: The Veilguard will be available for PS5, Xbox Series X/S and PC. Preorders are available right now. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/dragon-age-the-veilguard-comes-out-on-october-31-161317701.html?src=rss 

The Plucky Squire has been one of my most anticipated games ever since it started popping up in showcases a couple of years ago. It was delayed out of 2023 and into this year, unfortunately, but the long wait to play it is almost over. Publisher Devolver Digital and developer All Possible Futures have revealed that The Plucky Squire is coming to PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch on September 17. It’ll be available in the PlayStation Plus Game Catalog for Extra and Premium members at no additional cost on day one.

The action centers around a storybook. After the evil Humgrump realizes he’s the villain of his own tale, he removes the titular squire (aka Jot) from the pages to try and change the narrative. Jot has to navigate 3D and 2D environments as he leaps between planes on his journey to save his friends and make sure there’s a happy ending to the saga.

The visuals look absolutely adorable in both 2D and 3D formats. It looks like a mashup of top-down Zelda games, modern Mario and LittleBigPlanet. The first project from All Possible Futures (one of the heads of which is a former Pokémon artist) is an absurdly promising one. I can’t wait to check it out next month. 

Meanwhile, Sony has unveiled some new details about a couple of other indie games. A new version of the first point-and-click Broken Sword game, The Shadow of the Templars, is coming to PS5 on September 19, 28 years after the original incarnation debuted. Revolution Software has reanimated the game in 4K with over 50 times the resolution of the original PlayStation version. 

Last but not least, Sulfur is a stylized first-person shooter with a lot of playstyle flexibility. There are said to be more than 35 million weapon and modification combos available. The next project from developer Perfect Random is coming to to PS4 and PS5 in 2025.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/cute-adventure-game-the-plucky-squire-arrives-on-september-17-163651349.html?src=rss 

Google is expanding AI Overviews, the feature that summarizes answers to complex questions from the web and presents them at the top of traditional search results, to six more countries — India, Japan, Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil and the United Kingdom — from Thursday with support for local languages as well as English.

That’s less than three months after AI Overviews launched in the United States and promptly told people to eat rocks and put glue on their pizzas. Bringing them to millions more people begs the question: How do you prevent another glue pizza fiasco in a foreign country?

“It’s a challenging space,” Hema Budaraju, senior director of product management for Search at Google, told Engadget in an interview. “Understanding quality at the scale of the web across all these languages is a hard problem, and integrating LLMs (large language models) is not easy to do. Using AI to better understand languages is pretty critical.”

To prevent a glue pizza situation in, say, Hindi or Japanese, Google plans to do language-specific testing of AI Overviews as well as red-teaming, a technique used by the tech industry to stress-test how systems might behave under attack from bad actors. “We are focused on addressing potential issues and we are committed to listening and acting quickly,” Budaraju said. In May, Google put additional guardrails on AI Overviews after its outlandish responses, such as limiting the inclusion of satire and humor content and restricting the types of queries that triggered the feature to begin with.

In addition to expanding the feature to more countries, Google is also making one more big change to AI Overviews: it will now prominently display links to sources on the right-hand side of each AI-generated answer, making it easier for people to click through to the actual website where the answer came from. 

It’s also testing adding links directly within the text of AI Overviews, although the feature is currently limited to people who sign up for Search Labs, the company’s platform for trying out upcoming features ahead of their general release.

“This experiment has shown early positive results and we are able to drive more traffic with links directly in the text,” Budaraju said. Making this feature available more broadly could allay concerns from publishers about losing traffic to AI that reads the internet for people, reducing the need to click through to actual web pages.

Search Labs users also get to play with a couple of additional features — the ability to “save” a specific AI Overview for future reference, as well as an option to simplify the language of an AI-generated answer, something that Google previewed earlier this year.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/google-brings-the-ai-feature-that-told-americans-to-eat-rocks-to-six-more-countries-160025221.html?src=rss