Kalakshar US

Apple has expanded its self-repair program once again. As noted by Six Colors and The Verge, folks in the US can now try to fix issues with the M1 iMac, M1 Mac mini, Mac Studio and Apple Studio Display themselves with genuine parts, repair manuals and tools.

The self-repair program is designed for those who have the time, patience, skills and confidence to carry out fixes at home, rather than taking their busted device to an Apple Store or third-party repair shop, or shipping it to Apple. You can buy all the parts and rent the tools you need, but at checkout you’ll need to enter a code from the relevant manual to show that you’ve actually read the document.

Apple debuted the Self Service Repair program in April by offering manuals and parts for select iPhone models in the US. Since then, it has expanded the program to Mac laptops and more territories. 

Apple introduced the program ahead of right-to-repair rules likely coming into force in the US and Europe. In 2021, President Joe Biden signed an executive order focused on bolstering competition in the US economy, partly in the tech sector. Among other things, it urged the Federal Trade Commission to ban “anticompetitive restrictions on using independent repair shops or doing DIY repairs of your own devices and equipment.” 

The agency has taken a stronger stance on such issues. In July, it announced settlements with three companies (including Weber and Harley-Davidson), which it accused of threatening to unlawfully void warranties if consumers used third-party repair parts or independent repair shops.

 

OpenAI, the Elon Musk-founded artificial intelligence startup behind popular DALL-E text-to-image generator, announced on Tuesday the release of its newest picture-making machine POINT-E, which can produce 3D point clouds directly from text prompts. Whereas existing systems like Google’s DreamFusion typically require multiple hours — and GPUs — to generate their images, Point-E only needs one GPU and a minute or two.

3D modeling is used across a variety industries and applications. The CGI effects of modern movie blockbusters, video games, VR and AR, NASA’s moon crater mapping missions, Google’s heritage site preservation projects, and Meta’s vision for the Metaverse all hinge on 3D modeling capabilities. However, creating photorealistic 3D images is still a resource and time consuming process, despite NVIDIA’s work to automate object generation and Epic Game’s RealityCapture mobile app, which allows anyone with an iOS phone to scan real-world objects as 3D images. 

Text-to-Image systems like OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 and Craiyon, DeepAI, Prisma Lab’s Lensa, or HuggingFace’s Stable Diffusion, have rapidly gained popularity, notoriety and infamy in recent years. Text-to-3D is an offshoot of that research. Point-E, unlike similar systems, “leverages a large corpus of (text, image) pairs, allowing it to follow diverse and complex prompts, while our image-to-3D model is trained on a smaller dataset of (image, 3D) pairs,” the OpenAI research team led by Alex Nichol wrote in Point·E: A System for Generating 3D Point Clouds from Complex Prompts, published last week. “To produce a 3D object from a text prompt, we first sample an image using the text-to-image model, and then sample a 3D object conditioned on the sampled image. Both of these steps can be performed in a number of seconds, and do not require expensive optimization procedures.”

If you were to input a text prompt, say, “A cat eating a burrito,” Point-E will first generate a synthetic view 3D rendering of said burrito-eating cat. It will then run that generated image through a series of diffusion models to create the 3D, RGB point cloud of the initial image — first producing a coarse 1,024-point cloud model, then a finer 4,096-point. “In practice, we assume that the image contains the relevant information from the text, and do not explicitly condition the point clouds on the text,” the research team points out. 

These diffusion models were each trained on “millions” of 3d models, all converted into a standardized format. “While our method performs worse on this evaluation than state-of-the-art techniques,” the team concedes, “it produces samples in a small fraction of the time.” If you’d like to try it out for yourself, OpenAI has posted the projects open-source code on Github.

 

Soccer megastar Lionel Messi finally secured the one prize that had eluded him during his illustrious career this weekend when Argentina won the World Cup. Afterward, the best player of the 21st century (yeah, I said it) added another record to his resume, as he now has the most-liked post on Instagram.

Messi posted a slideshow of him and his teammates celebrating after winning the World Cup. At the time of writing, the post has more than 65.8 million likes. The previous record-holder, a stock photo of an egg, claimed the top spot in early 2019 and currently has north of 57.3 million likes.

It’s not super surprising that Messi broke the Instagram record. As The Verge points out, the majority of the most-liked posts on the platform are from footballers, with the Paris Saint-Germain forward holding eight of the top 20 spots. 

Messi is also the second most-followed person on the platform with 404 million followers. Instagram’s own official account has the most followers overall. In second place, one spot ahead of Messi, is his old rival Cristiano Ronaldo with 520 million followers. Bet he’d rather have a World Cup, though.

 

National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) researchers have developed a way to monitor breathing based on tiny changes in WiFi signals. They say their BreatheSmart deep-learning algorithm could help detect if someone in the household is having breathing issues.

WiFi signals are almost ubiquitous. They bounce off of and pass through surfaces as they try to link devices with routers. But any movement will alter the signal’s path, including how the body moves as we breathe, which can change if we have any issues. For instance, your chest will move differently if you’re coughing.

Other researchers have explored the use of WiFi signals to detect people and movements, but their approaches required dedicated sensing devices and their studies provided limited data. A few years ago, a company called Origin Wireless developed an algorithm that works with a WiFi mesh network. Similarly, NIST says BreatheSmart works with routers and devices that are already available on the market. It only requires a single router and connected device.

The scientists changed the firmware on a router so that it would check “channel state information,” or CSI, more frequently. CSI refers to the signals that are sent from a device, such as a phone or laptop, to the router. CSI signals are consistent and the router understands what they should look like, but deviations in the environment, such as the signal being affected by surfaces or movement, modify the signals. The researchers got the router to request these CSI signals up to 10 times per second to gain a better sense of how the signal was being modified.

The team simulated several breathing conditions with a manikin and monitored changes in CSI signals with an off-the-shelf router and receiving device. To make sense of the data they collected, NIST research associate Susanna Mosleh developed the algorithm. In a paper, the researchers noted that BreatheSmart correctly identified the simulated breathing conditions 99.54 percent of the time.

Mosleh and Jason Coder, who heads up NIST’s research in shared spectrum metrology, hope developers will be able to use their research to create software that can remotely monitor a person’s breathing with existing hardware. “All the ways we’re gathering the data is done on software on the access point (in this case, the router), which could be done by an app on a phone,” Coder said. “This work tries to lay out how somebody can develop and test their own algorithm. This is a framework to help them get relevant information.”

 

This is likely the final photo that NASA’s Mars InSight lander will ever send back to Earth. The robot has been snapping pics and gathering data about the Martian environment since landing on the planet in November 2018 — and it’s been steadily accumulating dust on its solar panels that entire time. As NASA predicted earlier this year, the layer of debris has finally become too thick for the solar panels to operate. The InSight Twitter account officially said goodbye on December 19th with a final image from the surface of Mars.

“My power’s really low, so this may be the last image I can send,” the tweet reads. “Don’t worry about me though: my time here has been both productive and serene. If I can keep talking to my mission team, I will – but I’ll be signing off here soon. Thanks for staying with me.”

You’re welcome, metal astronaut.

InSight touched down on Mars on November 26th, 2018. It set up a seismometer on the Martian surface and collected data about marsquakes, which helped NASA scientists compile a clearer picture of the planet’s interior structure. Over the past four years, InSight provided data on more than 500 quakes and at least one meteoroid impact. From these reports, NASA researchers concluded Mars’ core is about half the size of Earth’s and likely composed of lighter elements than previously thought.

NASA announced in May 2022 that InSight would likely go dark by the end of the summer, due to the dust settling on the lander’s solar panels. InSight had recently celebrated its fourth anniversary on Mars when it stopped communicating with NASA. In a blog update on December 19th, the agency said the following:

“On Dec. 18, 2022, NASA’s InSight did not respond to communications from Earth. The lander’s power has been declining for months, as expected, and it’s assumed InSight may have reached its end of operations. It’s unknown what prompted the change in its energy; the last time the mission contacted the spacecraft was on Dec. 15, 2022. The mission will continue to try and contact InSight.”

 

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg misled Congress and the American public about how early he knew about the threat Cambridge Analytica posed to Facebook user privacy, according to a newly published US Securities and Exchange Commission document. The sworn deposition was obtained by Zamaan Qureshi, a policy advisor with the Real Facebook Oversight Board. 

In 2019, Zuckerberg told the SEC he was aware of Cambridge Analytica at least as early as 2017. At the start of that year, Zuckerberg sent an email to Facebook staff asking about an article Motherboard published about the data firm. The Vice News outlet was one of the first English-language publications to detail Cambridge Analytica’s use of online data to build psychographic profiles. 

The SEC asked Zuckerberg if that was the first time he had become aware of the firm. “I think that’s probably right,” he told the Commission. “My guess is I heard of them before. And that this was after seeing a couple of mentions of what they were claiming to do, I wanted to ask people who I trusted what their assessment was.”  

Zuckerberg also considered explicitly calling out Cambridge Analytica in a statement he made about Facebook’s attempts to combat Russian election meddling in the fall of 2017. His first draft called for him to state: “We are already looking into foreign actors including Russian intelligence actors in other Soviet states and organizations like Cambridge Analytica.” However, on the day of the livestream, he at best alluded to the firm, saying Facebook was investigating “organizations like the campaigns, to further our understanding of how they used our tools.”

The timeline Zuckerberg provided to the SEC contradicts the one he gave during sworn testimony before the House Financial Services Committee in 2019. “I’m not sure of the exact time, but it was probably around the time it became public, I think it was around March of 2018. I could be wrong, though,” he told Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.  

When asked to comment on Real Facebook Oversight Board’s findings, Meta pointed Engadget to its 2019 Federal Trade Commission settlement, which saw the company agree to pay $5 billion in financial penalties and implement new privacy measures. “This has been a settled case for over three years,” a Meta spokesperson added. The office of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did not immediately respond to Engadget’s comment request.

The findings are likely to prompt new questions about Facebook’s handling of Cambridge Analytica. To this day, the scandal is the largest in Meta’s history. The data firm harvested information from as many as 87 million Facebook profiles and may have passed on that data to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Brexit campaign.

 

Amazon has agreed to change some business practices in the European Union as part of legally binding commitments with the bloc’s executive branch. The European Commission said the deal will put antitrust investigations over how Amazon treats third-party sellers to bed for the time being. Amazon will need to abide by the commitments for between five and seven years or it could face hefty fines.

“Today’s decision sets new rules for how Amazon operates its business in Europe. Amazon can no longer abuse its dual role [as both marketplace and seller] and will have to change several business practices,” Margrethe Vestager, the Commission’s executive vice-president in charge of competition policy, said in a statement. “They cover the use of data, the selection of sellers in the Buy Box and the conditions of access to the Amazon Prime Program. Competing independent retailers and carriers as well as consumers will benefit from these changes opening up new opportunities and choice.”

The deal includes several preliminary commitments Amazon made in July. Among other things, it will rank all sellers equally in the Buy Box, which displays an item from a specific seller so customers can quickly purchase it. Amazon said it will display a second Buy Box if another seller offers the product with a significantly different price and/or delivery time.

Third-party sellers in the EU will be able to offer their products through Prime without having to use Amazon’s delivery or logistics services. Additionally, Amazon will not use any non-public data relating to third-party sellers to benefit its own business, including logistics or creating copycat versions of popular products.

The final deal includes some additional commitments, such as making it easier for third-party sellers to directly contact their Amazon customers so they can provide similar delivery services to those offered by Amazon. The company will also need to create a way for sellers and carriers to file complaints if they suspect it isn’t complying with the commitments.

Amazon said it disagreed with some of the Commission’s preliminary conclusions. However, it told the Associated Press that, “We are pleased that we have addressed the European Commission’s concerns and resolved these matters.”

The settlement applies for five years in most cases. The Prime and second Buy Box commitments will last for seven years. The deal is legally enforceable in the European Economic Area save for Italy. That country’s competition authority has imposed its own penalties on Amazon.

If EU regulators determine that Amazon isn’t sticking to the terms of the deal, the Commission can fine the company up to 10 percent of its global annual revenue without having to find an infringement of antitrust rules. Based on Amazon’s 2021 revenue, that fine could be as much as $47 billion. Alternatively, the EC could fine Amazon five percent of its daily turnover for every day that it doesn’t comply with the terms of the deal.

EU regulators brought formal antitrust charges against Amazon in November 2020, accusing the company of abusing its dual position. The Commission opened an investigation over the use of non-public data the previous year. In a separate investigation, the EC found that Amazon “abused its dominance on the French, German and Spanish markets for the provision of online marketplace services to third-party sellers.” Amazon is still facing scrutiny on these issues in the US and the UK.

 

A series of missteps put Microsoft in second place before the Xbox One even came out. With the launch of the Xbox Series X and S, though, Microsoft is in a great position to compete. Both are well-priced, well-specced consoles with a huge library of games spanning two decades.

Microsoft’s console strategy is unique. Someone with a 7-year old Xbox One has access to an almost-identical library of games as the owner of a brand-new Xbox Series X. That makes it difficult to maintain meaningfully different lists for its various consoles — at least for now. But while “next-gen” exclusives may be few and far between, with PS4 outselling Xbox One by a reported two-to-one, there are a lot of gamers who simply haven’t experienced much of what Microsoft has had to offer since the mid ‘10s.

It’s with that frame of mind that we approach this list: What games would we recommend to someone picking up an Xbox today — whether it’s a Series X, a Series S, One X or One S — after an extended break from Microsoft’s consoles?

This list then, is a mixture of games exclusive to Microsoft’s consoles and cross-platform showstoppers that play best on Xbox. We’ve done our best to explain the benefits Microsoft’s systems bring to the table where appropriate. Oh, and while we understand some may have an aversion to subscription services, it’s definitely worth considering Game Pass Ultimate, which will allow you to play many of the games on this list for a monthly fee.

Deathloop

Deathloop, from the studio that brought you the Dishonored series, is easy enough to explain: You’re trapped in a day that repeats itself. If you die, then you go back to the morning, to repeat the day again. If you last until the end of the day, you still repeat it again. Colt must “break the loop” by efficiently murdering seven main characters, who are inconveniently are never in the same place at the same time. It’s also stylish, accessible and fun.

While you try to figure out your escape from this time anomaly, you’ll also be hunted down by Julianna, another island resident who, like you, is able to remember everything that happens in each loop. She’ll also lock you out of escaping an area, and generally interfere with your plans to escape the time loop. (The online multiplayer is also addictive, flipping the roles around. You play as Julianna, hunting down Colt and foiling his plans for murder. )

As you play through the areas again (and again) you’ll equip yourself with slabs that add supernatural powers, as well as more potent weapons and trinkets to embed into both guns and yourself. It’s through this that you’re able to customize your playstyle or equip yourself in the best way to survive Julianna and nail that assassination. Each time period and area rewards repeat exploration, with secret guns, hidden conversations with NPCs and lots of world-building lore to discover for yourself.

Originally a timed PlayStation exclusive, Deathloop landed on Xbox in September 2022.

Overwatch 2

Even though Blizzard has improved the onramp for new players this time around, Overwatch 2 still has a steep learning curve. Stick with it, though, and you’ll get to indulge in perhaps the best team shooter around. Overwatch 2 has a deceptively simple goal — stand on or near an objective and keep the other team away long enough to win. It’s much more complex in practice. To the untrained eye, matches may seem like colorful chaos, but Overwatch 2 has a deceptively simple goal — stand on or near an objective and keep the other team away long enough to win.

It’s much more complex in practice. Blizzard reduced the number of players on each team from six to five. That, along with across-the-board character tweaks, has made gameplay faster-paced and more enjoyable compared with the original Overwatch. There’s a greater emphasis on individual impact, but you’ll still need to work well with your teammates to secure a victory.

Now featuring a cast of more than 30 heroes, each with distinct abilities and playstyles, you’ll surely find a few Overwatch 2 characters that you can connect with. The first batch of new heroes are all a blast to play. There are many great (though often fairly expensive) new skins to kit them out with too. The game looks and sounds terrific too, thanks to Blizzard’s trademark level of polish. At least until you figure out how to play Overwatch 2, you can marvel at how good it looks.

Control

Take the weird Twin Peaks narrative of Alan Wake, smash it together with Quantum Break‘s frenetic powers and gunplay, and you’ve got Control. Playing as a woman searching for her missing brother, you quickly learn there’s a thin line between reality and the fantastical. It’s catnip for anyone who grew up loving The X-Files and the supernatural. It’s also a prime example of a studio working at their creative heights, both refining and evolving the open-world formula that’s dominated games for the past decade.

Control on the last-gen Xbox is a mixed affair, with the One S struggling a little, but the One X being head-and-shoulders above the PS4 Pro when it comes to fidelity and smoothness. With the launch of the next-gen consoles, an ‘Ultimate Edition’ emerged which brought the ray-tracing and higher frame rates that PC gamers enjoyed to console players. Although you’ll only get those benefits as a next-gen owner, it also includes all the released DLC and is the edition we recommend buying, even if you’re not planning to immediately upgrade.

Halo Infinite

Master Chief’s latest adventure may not make much sense narratively, but it sure is fun to play. After the middle efforts from 343 Industries over the last decade, Halo Infinite manages to breathe new life into Microsoft’s flagship franchise, while also staying true to elements fans love. The main campaign is more open than ever, while also giving you a new freedom of movement with the trusty grappling hook. And the multiplayer mode is wonderfully addictive (though 343 still needs to speed up experience progression), with a bevy of maps and game modes to keep things from getting too stale. The only thing keeping it from greatness is its baffling and disjointed story, but it’s not like Xbox fans have many options when it comes to huge exclusives right now.

Forza Horizon 5

Forza Horizon 5 deftly walks a fine line by being an extremely deep and complex racing game that almost anyone can just pick up and play. The game has hundreds of cars that you can tweak endlessly to fit your driving style, and dozens of courses spread all over a gorgeous fictional corner of Mexico. If you crank up the difficulty, one mistake will sink your entire race, and the competition online can be just as fierce.

But if you’re new to racing games, Forza Horizon 5 does an excellent job at getting you up and running. The introduction to the game quickly gives you a taste at the four main race types you’ll come across (street racing, cross-country, etc.), and features like the rewind button mean that you can quickly erase mistakes if you try and take a turn too fast without having to restart your run. Quite simply, Forza Horizon 5 is a beautiful and fun game that works for just about any skill level. It’s easy to pick up and play a few races and move on with your day, or you can sink hours into it trying to become the best driver you can possibly be.

Gears 5

Gears 5 tries to be a lot of things, and doesn’t succeed at them all. If you’re a Gears of War fan, though, there’s a lot to love here. The cover-shooter gameplay the series helped pioneer feels great, and the campaign, while not narratively ambitious, is well-paced and full of bombastic set pieces to keep you interested. As they stand, the various multiplayer modes are not great, but Gears 5 is worth it for the campaign alone.

It’s also a true graphical showcase, among the best-looking console games around. Microsoft did a great job optimizing for all platforms and use-cases, with high-resolution and ultra-high (up to 120fps on series consoles) frame rates.

Nier: Automata

It took more than a while to get here, but Nier: Automata finally arrived on Xbox One in the summer of 2018. And boy, was it worth the almost-18-month wait. Nier takes the razor-sharp combat of a Platinum Games title and puts it in a world crafted by everyone’s favorite weirdo, Yoko Taro. Don’t worry, you can mostly just run, gun and slash your way through the game, but as you finish, and finish and finish this one, you’ll find yourself pulled into a truly special narrative, one that’s never been done before and will probably never be done again. It’s an unmissable experience, and one that feels all the more unique on Xbox, which has never had the best levels of support from Japanese developers.

On Xbox One X and Series X, you effectively have the best version of Nier: Automata available, short of a fan-patched PC game. On Series S and One S… not so much, but you do at least get consistent framerates on the Series S and a passable experience on the One S. 

Ori and the Blind Forest

Arriving at a time when “Gears Halo Forza” seemed to be the beginning, middle and end of Microsoft’s publishing plans, Ori and the Blind Forest was a triumph. It’s a confident mash of the pixel-perfect platforming popularized by Super Meat Boy, and the rich, unfolding worlds of Metroidvania games. You’ll die hundreds of times exploring the titular forest, unlocking skills that allow you to reach new areas. It looks and sounds great — like, Disney great — and its story, while fairly secondary to the experience, is interesting. Ori might not do much to push the boundaries of its genres, but everything it does, it does so right. Its sequel, Ori and the Will of the Wisps, is very much “more of everything,” so if you like Blind Forest, it’s well worth checking out too.

Red Dead Redemption 2

Red Dead Redemption 2 is the kind of game no one but Rockstar, the team behind the GTA series, could make. Only when a studio is this successful can it pour millions of dollars and development hours into a game. Rockstar’s simulation of a crumbling frontier world is enthralling and serves as a perfect backdrop to an uncharacteristically measured story. While the studio’s gameplay may not have moved massively forward, the writing and characters of RDR2 will stay with you.

While Rockstar hasn’t deemed fit to properly upgrade Red Dead Redemption 2 for the next-gen yet, Series X owners will at least benefit from the best last-gen (Xbox One X) experience with the addition of improved loading times. The Series S, on the other hand, gets the One S version, but with an improved 30 fps lock and swifter loading.

Resident Evil Village

Resident Evil Village is delightful. It’s a gothic fairy tale masquerading as a survival-horror game, and while this represents a fresh vibe for the franchise, it’s not an unwelcome evolution. The characters and enemies in Village are full of life — even when they’re decidedly undead — and Capcom has put a delicious twist on the idea of vampires, werewolves, sea creatures, giants and creepy dolls. The game retains its horror, puzzle and action roots, and it has Umbrella Corporation’s fingerprints all over it. It simply feels like developers had fun with this one, and so will you.

A word of caution before you run to buy it, though: This game doesn’t play great on every Xbox. On Series X, things are great: There’s the option to turn on ray-tracing with the occasional frame rate issue, or to keep it off and have perfect 4K/60 presentation. With the Series S, while there is a ray-tracing mode, it’s almost unplayable. With ray-tracing off, the Series S does a decent job, though. The One X’s 1080p/60 mode is also fantastic, although its quality mode feels very juddery. If you own a base Xbox One or One S, though, there’s really no mode that actually feels enjoyable to play.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice isn’t just another Dark Souls game. FromSoftware’s samurai adventure is a departure from that well-established formula, replacing slow, weighty combat and gothic despair for stealth, grappling hooks and swift swordplay. Oh, and while it’s still a difficult game, it’s a lot more accessible than Souls games — you can even pause it! The result of all these changes is something that’s still instantly recognizable as a FromSoftware title, but it’s its own thing, and it’s very good.

This is one game that’s really not had a lot of love from its developer or publisher, as, despite the fact next-gen consoles should be easily able to run this game at 60 fps, the Series S is locked to an inconsistently paced 30 fps, while the Series X doesn’t quite hold to 60 either. With that said, it’s more than playable.

Lost Judgement

This is private eye Takayuki Yagami’s second adventure; a spin-off of Sega’s popular, pulpy and convoluted Yakuza saga. He lives in the same Kamurocho area, the same yakuza gangs roam the streets, and there’s the very occasional crossover of side-story characters and, well, weirdos. But instead of punching punks in the face in the name of justice or honor, which was the style of Yakuza protagonist Kazuya Kiryu, Yagami fights with the power of his lawyer badge, drone evidence and… sometimes (read: often) he kicks the bad guys in the face.

The sequel skates even closer to some sort of serialized TV drama, punctuated by fights, chases and melodrama. For anyone that’s played the series before, it treads familiar ground, but with a more serious (realistic) story that centers on bullying and suicide problems in Japanese high schools, which is tied into myriad plots encompassing the legal system, politics and organized crime.

Yagami has multiple fighting styles to master, while there are love interests, batting cages, mahjong, skate parks and more activities to sink even more hours into. On the PS5, Lost Judgment looks great. Fights are fluid and the recreated areas in Tokyo and Yokohama are usually full of pedestrians, stores and points of interest. While Yakuza Like a Dragon takes the franchise in a new (turn-based, more ridiculous) direction, Lost Judgment retains the brawling playstyle of the Yakuza series, with a new hero who has, eventually, charmed us.

Xbox Game Pass Ultimate

We already mentioned this one but it’s difficult to overemphasize how good a deal Game Pass is for Xbox owners. For $15 a month you get access to a shifting and growing library of games. The company does a good job explaining what games are coming and going in advance, so you won’t get caught out by a game disappearing from the subscription service just as you’re reaching a final boss. There are 11 games mentioned in this guide, and seven of them are currently available with Game Pass. The full library is broad, and, while still Microsoft’s cloud service is still just in beta, you’ll have access to many of the games on your tablet, phone or browser through xCloud at no extra fee.

 

Sifu’s long-awaited Arenas mode will arrive next March. Developer Sloclap made the announcement through IGN, which shared a trailer for the upcoming DLC. The studio first teased the mode last April when it published a free content roadmap for Sifu. At the time, Sloclap said the update would arrive in the winter of 2022. However, true to its initial promise, the mode will include new outfits for players to unlock.

“Successfully completing the arenas will progressively unlock a massive new modifiers batch, which doubles the current game’s amount and notably brings alternative moves to the Kung Fu palette of our main character,” Sloclap told IGN. “Completing the new Arenas challenges will also unlock new cheats and exclusive new outfits.” If you haven’t had a chance to play Sifu yet because it’s not available on Xbox, there’s more good news. The arrival of the Arenas mode update will coincide with the game’s release on Xbox and Steam. Sloclap promised to share more information about both news items soon.

 

The United States Postal Service said it expects to buy more than 66,000 electric vehicles by the end of 2028 in a significant change from previous plans. In February, the USPS said it would purchase 5,000 fully electric versions of the Next Generation Delivery Vehicle, with gas-powered trucks accounting for the remaining 45,000 of the initial order. After pushback from the Biden administration and resistance to that from the USPS, the agency has graduallyincreased the proportion of EVs in the order.

Now, the postal service aims to buy at least 60,000 Next Generation Delivery Vehicles by 2028, at least 75 percent of which will be electric models. Starting in 2026, the USPS expects that all NGDV acquisitions will be electric versions. The NGDVs are expected to start operating on delivery routes late next year. In addition, the agency plans to buy another 21,000 off-the-shelf EVs through 2028.

Overall, the USPS plans to buy 106,000 delivery vehicles by the end of 2028 to start replacing its aging, inefficient and not-as-safe fleet of more than 220,000 vehicles. That means the agency still expects to buy around 40,000 gas-powered models over the next six years. The USPS said in a statement that the feasibility of fully electrifying the fleet “will continue to be explored.” However, it believes there will be more EV availability in the future, which will certainly help.

The agency expects to spend $9.6 billion on these vehicle purchases and related infrastructure, $3 billion of which is from Inflation Reduction Act funding. “The $3 billion provided by Congress has significantly reduced the risk associated with accelerating the implementation of a nationwide infrastructure necessary to electrify our delivery fleet,” Postmaster General Louis DeJoy said. “While most of the electric vehicle funding will continue to come from Postal Service revenues, we are grateful for the confidence that Congress and the Administration have placed in us to build and acquire what has the potential to become the largest electric vehicle fleet in the nation.”