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Another notable game is set to vanish from digital storefronts. Developer Playground Games says Forza Horizon 4 will be delisted from the Microsoft Store and Steam on December 15, making it no longer available for digital purchase on either Xbox or PC. You may still be able to snap up a physical copy.

Xbox will run frequent sales on the game on both storefronts until the delisting. The standard edition is currently 80 percent off on Steam ($12). Forza Horizon 4 will go on sale on the Microsoft Store on July 14.

Playground says the delisting is due to licensing agreements expiring. Forza Horizon 4 has digital versions of a ton of real-life cars as well as many licensed songs. It’s a pity that it’s being removed from sale — especially given Xbox’s stated commitment to game preservation and that Forza Horizon 4 was well-received — but unless developers are able to snag licenses for deeply integrated aspects of their games in perpetuity, delisting is a sad inevitability. All the more reason to dive into the excellent sequel, Forza Horizon 5, if you haven’t already.

The studio, which is busy working on Fable these days, has also announced that Forza Horizon 4‘s Festival Playlists are winding down. The last one will commence on July 25 when Series 77 goes live and it will end on August 22. This will be your last chance to earn achievements that are linked to the Festival Playlist. After Series 77 ends, it won’t be possible to do anything on the playlist tab, other than to view the festival playlist history. Daily and weekly challenges will still be available, though.

All of the Forza Horizon 4 DLC, including a neat Lego one, has been delisted already, but there’s some good news if you bought any of the expansions and you were playing the open-world racing title via Game Pass. If you had an active and fully paid (i.e. not discounted) Xbox Game Pass subscription on June 25 and you had purchased Forza Horizon 4 DLC, you’ll receive a token that you can redeem for the base game. Playground notes that it might take a while for your code to hit your Xbox Message Center, but you’ll have until June 25, 2026 to redeem it.

There’s one other shimmer of light in the darkness here as the game’s servers will remain online for the foreseeable future. As such, other than Festival Playlists, Forza Horizon 4 will remain playable as normal, including online multiplayer modes.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/forza-horizon-4-will-be-pulled-from-digital-stores-and-game-pass-in-december-134510642.html?src=rss 

Amazon Prime Day 2024 is fast approaching, but there are already a bunch of solid deals on tech products in the leadup to the giant annual sale. Case in point: a quality set of active noise cancelling (ANC) wireless earbuds is currently $100 off. The Bose QuietComfort II earbuds typically retail for $279, but it’s available in Soapstone and Triple Black colorways for $179. That marks an all-time-low price for these earbuds.

Admittedly, this isn’t the latest set of ANC earbuds in Bose’s lineup. The most recent model, Bose QuietComfort Ultra, is among our picks for the best wireless earbuds. However, a set of those costs $299. The QuietComfort II buds offer similar features at what’s currently a significantly lower price, though it’s an older model.

At the time of Engadget’s review in September 2022, senior reporter Billy Steele declared that the QuietComfort II was the top choice for anyone seeking earbuds with top-of-the-line noise blocking (our current recommendation for the best ANC earbuds is the QuietComfort Ultra, as it happens). The QuietComfort II’s ANC capabilities are better than on the original model, while Bose made improvements to the audio quality and ambient sound mode. The buds personalize ANC and audio performance for your ears too.

On the downside, six hours of battery life is a little on the low side (even by 2022 standards). The lack of useful, increasingly common features such as multipoint pairing and wireless charging proved disappointing too. Still, if you’re looking for a set of earbuds that do a strong job of blocking out background noise without breaking the bank, the Bose QuietComfort II is by and large a terrific option.

Your Prime Day Shopping Guide: See all of our Prime Day coverage. Shop the best Prime Day deals on Yahoo Life. Follow Engadget for Prime Day tech deals. Hear from Autoblog’s experts on the best Amazon Prime Day deals for your car, garage, and home, and find Prime Day sales to shop on AOL, handpicked just for you.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-bose-quietcomfort-ii-earbuds-are-100-off-right-now-141044904.html?src=rss 

Amazon is allegedly working on a new chatbot codenamed “Metis,” Business Insider reports, citing an internal document and unnamed sources familiar with the project. It would be powered by a new AI model, Olympus, rather than Amazon’s previously released Titan.

With Metis, Amazon is reportedly aiming to use an approach known as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). As the company describes it, RAG “redirects the LLM to retrieve relevant information from authoritative, pre-determined knowledge sources. Organizations have greater control over the generated text output, and users gain insights into how the LLM generates the response.”

Basically, RAG allows systems to retrieve data outside of pre-loaded information from sources like APIs and document repositories. This data can be updated separately without having to retrain a model and could allow it to access up-to-date information, thus providing more accurate, clear responses (ideally).

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy and Rohit Prasad, its AGI team’s head scientist and a senior vice president, are working directly on the development of Metis. The team also reportedly includes many veteran Alexa AI workers, and their work on Metis seems to borrow from technology they developed for the forthcoming  “Remarkable Alexa” voice assistant.

Amazon tentatively plans to release Metis in September, around the time the company typically has its product launch event. However, one of the sources stated: “Technically it will work, I guess, but the question is if it’s already too late.” OpenAI first launched ChatGPT at the end of November 2022, and Google launched Bard (now known as Gemini) in March 2023 — to name just two of the big players that Amazon will face. Amazon’s Titan isn’t as powerful as its competitors, though the company has been trying to reach more customers with options like a business-centric model, Q.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/amazon-is-reportedly-working-on-a-new-ai-chatbot-132948672.html?src=rss 

The team behind Rabbitude, the community-formed reverse engineering project for the Rabbit R1, has revealed finding a security issue with the company’s code that leaves users’ sensitive information accessible to everyone. In an update posted on the Rabbitude website, the team said it gained access to the Rabbit codebase on May 16 and found “several critical hardcoded API keys.” Those keys allow anybody to read every single response the R1 AI device has ever given, including those containing the users’ personal information. They could also be used to brick R1 devices, alter R1’s responses and replace the device’s voice. 

The API keys they found authenticate users’ access to ElevenLabs’ text-to-speech service, Azure’s speech-to-text system, Yelp (for review lookups) and Google Maps (for location lookups) on the R1 AI device. In a tweet, one of Rabbitude’s members said that the company has known about the issue for the past month and “did nothing to fix it.” After they posted, they said Rabbit revoked Elevenlabs’ API key, though the update broke R1 devices for a bit. 

In a statement sent to Engadget, Rabbit said it was only made aware of an “alleged data breach” on June 25. “Our security team immediately began investigating it,” the company continued. “As of right now, we are not aware of any customer data being leaked or any compromise to our systems. If we learn of any other relevant information, we will provide an update once we have more details.” It didn’t say if it revoked the keys the Rabbitude team said it found in the company’s code. 

Rabbit’s R1 is a standalone AI assistant device designed by Teenage Engineering. It’s meant to help users accomplish certain tasks, like placing food delivery orders, as well as to quickly look up information like the weather. We gave it a pretty low score in our review, because we found that its AI functionality often didn’t work. Further, users can simply use their phone instead of having to spend an extra $199 to buy the device.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/rabbit-r1-security-issue-allegedly-leaves-sensitive-user-data-accessible-to-anybody-120024215.html?src=rss