Earlier this month, Apple added the M4 Mac mini and MacBook Pro to its refurbished store. But the M4 iMac—which launched at the same time—was mysteriously absent. Now, however, the full M4 Mac lineup is available.
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A new month is almost upon us, which means Sony is about to refresh the lineup of games that all PlayStation Plus members can claim and keep in their collection as long as they maintain their subscription. Between March 4 and March 31, you'll be able to snag Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Sonic Colors: Ultimate and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard (PS5) is the clear headliner this time around. Fans had to wait a decade between new installments in BioWare's series, partly because the studio rebooted its work on the latest title several times. Veilguard, an action RPG, is a direct sequel to 2014's Dragon Age Inquisition. It garnered generally positive reviews and we appreciated the visuals and BioWare's attention to detail with the game's characters.
However, Dragon Age: The Veilguard failed to meet BioWare parent EA's sales expectations. In its first two months, the game brought in 1.5 million players, which is about half of what EA expected in that timeframe. That player count includes those who checked out the game on the EA Play Pro subscription service, so it's not clear how many copies of the game EA has actually sold so far. That disappointing sales performance is perhaps one reason why Dragon Age: The Veilguard is joining the PS Plus Monthly Games lineup a hair over four months after it was released.
Sonic Colors: Ultimate (PS4) is a remaster of a platformer that was originally released on the Wii back in 2010. As for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection (PS4 and PS5), that includes 13 classic TMNT games Konami released between 1989 and 1994, such as the all-time great Turtles in Time. The collection has a number of quality of life features, including online and local multiplayer, a rewind option, the ability to save at any point and button remapping. There's also concept art and "historic TMNT media content."
Until this trio joins the PS Plus Essential lineup on March 4, you can still snag February's games. Those are Payday 3, High on Life and Pac-Man World Re-Pac.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/playstation/the-ps-plus-monthly-games-for-march-include-dragon-age-the-veilguard-181028013.html?src=rss©
© BioWare
Bybit has already paid more than $4 million to bounty hunters who helped trace and freeze some of the stolen funds.
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The surveillance company Flock sent the creator of a website that maps its license plate-reading cameras a cease and desist letter demanding that he immediately stop using the name “DeFlock” on his website.
404 Media previously wrote about DeFlock, an open source mapping project created by Will Freeman that tracks the locations of automated license plate readers (ALPRs) from Flock and other companies. DeFlock currently maps more than 16,000 ALPRs around the world, which includes both Flock cameras as well as many created by Motorola.
Late last month, Flock’s lawyers sent Freeman a letter demanding that he immediately “Cease and desist all use of the name ‘DEFLOCK’ or any variation thereof, remove all instances of ‘DEFLOCK’ from your Website, advertisements, promotional materials, and any other content, and Refrain from adopting any trademarks, trade names, or branding continue to or likely to cause dilution by blurring, dilution by tarnishment, and false advertising with respect to the Flock Marks in the future.” 404 Media has obtained a copy of the letter and uploaded it here.
“It has come to our attention that you are maintaining a website and promoting a project entitled DEFLOCK, which purports to track automated license plate readers across the country, and discusses the alleged dangers of [the surveillance]. While Flock believes in open debate, it takes misuses of its intellectual property seriously,” the letter, written by Sarah M. Katz of the law firm Adelman Matz, says. “While Flock does not object to the free dissemination of truthful information, your use of the Flock Marks as part of your brand DEFLOCK is being wrongfully used to make false statements about Flock and its products and is damaging both its reputation and the goodwill associated with the Flock Marks.”
It is not clear what “false statements” Freeman is making about Flock. The letter says that it should not be called DeFlock because not all of the cameras tracked by DeFlock are Flock cameras (some are Motorola), and says “the website also implies that various license plate readers are vulnerable to security hacks, which given that all of the readers are being imputed to Flock, provides a false impression about the security of Flock Products.” On the front page of DeFlock, there is a link to a 404 Media article about a security vulnerability in Motorola ALPRs. A security researcher on YouTube and Freeman previously showed that certain Motorola ALPRs are leaking data online, and 404 Media wrote about that research. The DeFlock site says “BREAKING: Anyone Can Access Motorola ALPR Data” and links to our article, but makes no claims about Flock ALPR security.
Freeman is being represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and is not going to change his website, Cara Gagliano, a senior staff attorney at the EFF said in a response to Flock: “The claims alleged in your letter are groundless, and Mr. Freeman will not be complying with your demands,” the EFF’s letter says. “Because there is no legal basis for your demands, my client declines to comply with them.”
The cease-and-desist letter shows that Flock is both aware of the DeFlock website and is threatening Freeman with legal action. Flock’s letter argues that DeFlock is causing the “dilution” of Flock’s trademarks rather than “infringement” of them. This is a crucial distinction, Gagliano said.
Companies can sue for trademark infringement when they believe that a consumer is likely to confuse the infringing product for the real one; dilution cases only apply to “famous” trademarks and can be pursued when a similar product would undermine or tarnish the brand of the original. Gagliano says in her letter that DeFlock is not diluting the Flock brand because it was specifically made for the noncommercial criticism of the surveillance company.
“Federal anti-dilution law includes express carve-outs for any noncommercial use of a mark and for any use in connection with criticizing or commenting on the mark owner or its products,” Gagliano wrote, adding that a false advertising claim made in Flock’s letter does not apply because DeFlock is a noncommercial website.
“DeFlock is a grassroots project that aims to ‘shine a light on the widespread use of ALPR technology, raise awareness about the threats it poses to personal privacy and civil liberties, and empower the public to take action.’ It pursues that mission by providing information about ALPRs and maintaining an interactive, crowd-sourced map of ALPR installations,” she added. “The name ‘DeFlock’ references the project’s goal of ending ALPR usage and Flock’s status as one of the most widely used ALPR providers.”
Gagliano told 404 Media that Flock’s attempt to go after Freeman and DeFlock on a dilution claim raises serious free speech concerns. “Flock's choice to claim dilution rather than infringement is telling. Infringement requires showing that consumers are likely to be confused by the use; Flock clearly realizes how implausible that is here,” she said. “Dilution is a much more nebulous concept that we think raises serious constitutional questions. It's fortunate that dilution laws typically have enough explicit exceptions for claims to fail in their face in cases like this, but it's still much too broad a doctrine with little to justify it.”
Flock did not respond to a request for comment.
No, Friday didn’t come early and you didn’t get fired. Slack and a bunch of other online services are just going in and out for everyone.
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Spotify CEO Daniel Ek is not very happy about Apple’s current compliance with the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA). In a new interview with Bloomberg, he criticizes Apple and calls on EU regulators to bring swift action against the company.
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According to a letter seen by 9to5Mac, the Trump Administration is investigating whether the UK may have broken a bilateral agreement when secretly demanding that Apple build a global backdoor into iCloud.
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The DJI Osmo Action 5 Pro Adventure Combo bundle is on sale via Amazon for $369. This is 18 percent off and represents a record low price, as the normal cost is $449. The bundle includes the well-regarded Action 5 Pro camera, a trio of rechargeable batteries, a protective frame, a lens cover, an extension rod and more.
We heaped praise on the Osmo Action 5 Pro camera in our official review, calling it “a worthy GoPro rival.” The battery life here is next-level, allowing for over two hours of use when shooting 4K 60p video and four hours when shooting in 1080p. Again, this bundle comes with three batteries, which means twelve full hours of continuous shooting in 1080p. That’s a whole lot of ski jumps or whatever.
There’s also 47GB of internal storage, in addition to a microSD slot. Most action cameras don’t even have internal storage, so this is a much-appreciated upgrade. The Action 5 Pro is lightweight and waterproof down to 66 feet. There’s a waterproof case that extends this limit to 200 feet, but that doesn’t ship with this particular bundle.
As for the actual footage, we found it to be serviceable, but thought the color was slightly oversaturated. The video is also a bit less sharp than what’s produced with rival cameras. Other than these minor nitpicks, however, this is a near-perfect action camera, and those accessories sure sound useful.
The Adventure Combo isn’t the only bundle on sale right now, though it is the best value. The Essential and Standard bundles are also on sale, at $319 and $329 respectively.
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/deals/this-dji-osmo-action-5-pro-bundle-is-cheaper-than-ever-175747696.html?src=rss©
© Steve Dent for Engadget
In an utterly shocking, consumer-friendly move, Max won't charge for something previously offered for free. Warner Bros. Discovery said on Wednesday that it's shelving its previously announced plan to charge an extra $10 monthly for sports and news content. Instead, it's cutting the content from the ad-supported tier next month, which sounds reasonable enough.
In 2023, Max said its Bleacher Report (B/R) Sports Add-On tier would only be free until February 2024, when it would become a $10 add-on for all tiers. But that date came and went (and then went some more) without news of the extra fees. Viewers waited silently like students who hoped their teacher would forget their homework assignment. Then, last September, Bloomberg reported that the $10 fee was still in the works — and could arrive as soon as that month. Uh oh.
But today's news puts those concerns to rest, at least for paying subscribers. Ad-supported members will lose access to B/R Sports and CNN Max (the news network's streaming redo) on March 30. Warner says those on that tier who want to retain access to sports and news can visit the Max Help Center for more info. So far, that page says nothing about it, so you'll probably want to check back closer to the cutoff date.
B/R Sports streams more than 1,700 live games and events annually across leagues like the NBA (although it loses those rights after this season), MLB, NHL, NCAA, NASCAR and more. Meanwhile, CNN Max is Warner CEO David Zaslav's latest attempt to turn a CNN streaming service into a revenue stream — something the debt-ridden company direly needs. This month alone, it made sweeping cuts to its games division and began offering some of its movies on YouTube.
Although Max subscribers will welcome today's announcement, there's reason to question whether the free integration will be permanent. In its press release, where you have to assume words were chosen carefully and pored over by layers of management, Max only said it won't pursue that path… "for now."
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© Max
Less than two weeks before Donald Trump’s inauguration, Meta announced sweeping changes to its content moderation procedures, reportedly at the behest of Mark Zuckerberg and a small group of advisors. Among those caught off guard was the company’s own Oversight Board, the independent organization created by Meta to help shape its most sensitive policy decisions. The group is now looking to examine those changes, and in doing so, will test the enforceability of its own powers.
The changes Meta has enacted drastically reshape how the company polices content across Facebook, Instagram and Threads. It ended its fact-checking program in the US, and rolled back hate speech rules that protected immigrants and LGBTQ users on its apps. Unlike its previously proactive approach, it also reoriented its content moderation procedures so that many types of rule-breaking posts will only be removed if other users reported them.
The changes have raised questions about the role of the Oversight Board, which was created, Zuckerberg once said, because “Facebook should not make so many important decisions about free expression and safety on our own.” If that’s what Meta is now doing, critics have asked, what exactly is the point of an ostensibly independent Oversight Board?
But the Oversight Board is already working to address Meta’s rewritten “hateful conduct” policy, according to board member Paolo Carozza, who spoke to Engadget. When Zuckerberg announced the changes in early January, the board already had four open cases involving Meta’s hate speech rules. The board now plans to use those cases to examine the new policies, which were rewritten to allow people to use dehumanizing language to describe immigrants and accuse LGBTQ people of being mentally ill.
“We deliberately delayed the decision of those cases after January 7, precisely so that we could go back to Meta again and ask a new round of questions,” Carozza, a law professor at Notre Dame who joined the Oversight Board in 2022, told Engadget. “We're trying as much as possible to use the tools that we have to find out more information, bring more transparency and more certainty to how it's going to play out in practice.”
The board, according to Carozza, has already had briefings with Meta as it pushes for more details about the new hate speech policies. But it could still be some time before its findings are made public. The open cases deal with several aspects of Meta’s hate speech rules, including immigration, gender identity, hateful symbols and incitement of violence.
In addition to the questions surrounding each case, Carozza said that the board is also grappling with how to prioritize the case decisions given the renewed importance of the underlying policies. “There are competing concerns about being quick and efficient versus being more thoughtful and deliberative,” he said.
But while the board may hope to provide more transparency about Meta’s decision-making, it’s unclear how much influence the board will ultimately end up having. Under its rules, Meta is only required to comply with the group’s decisions surrounding individual posts. The board’s policy recommendations are non-binding and Meta has a mixed track record at implementing its suggestions.
It’s also unclear how the board might be able to weigh in on Meta’s other changes, like the shuttering of fact-checking programs or shift away from proactive content moderation. “We were quite critical of the fact checking program in general, but our ordinary cases make it a little bit hard to get at that problem because it doesn't come up through an appeals process within the scope of the kinds of cases that we get,” Carozza says. The board, he notes, could write a policy advisory opinion as it has with rules around COVID-19 misinformation and Meta’s cross-check rules for celebrities. But the board is only empowered to make those kinds of non-binding recommendations at Meta's request.
That gets at one of the fundamental tensions of the Oversight Board: it may operate independently, but Meta ultimately dictates how much influence it can wield. “It would be unrealistic to expect that the standard for value and success of the board is that Meta, 100% of the time, does everything we ever tell them to do,” Carozza says, “We’re one piece of a complicated jigsaw puzzle of accountability and oversight.”
Still, the fact that the group wasn’t consulted on such major policy moves has raised some uncomfortable questions for the board. Dozens of civil society groups recently signed an open letter urging board members to resign in protest. In a letter to Zuckerberg, some members of Congress said the board “is rendered toothless” when Meta refuses to follow its own principles.
Carozzo acknowledges the Oversight Board’s limitations, but says that the billions of people on Meta’s apps are ultimately better off with the board intervening where it can. “If everybody were to resign en masse … the only people who would lose are Meta’s end users, especially those who are in especially vulnerable situations [and] communities around the world.”
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/the-oversight-board-will-weigh-in-on-metas-new-hate-speech-policies-174044682.html?src=rss©
© ASSOCIATED PRESS
As Google's 2024 antitrust loss proved, the company has worked very, very hard to ensure its search engine is the primary roadmap for the Internet. Google scours the Internet for data about everything—even you. And if you don't want your personal info to wind up in Google search results, you can use the just-redesigned "Results About You" tool. The tool, which began its rollout in 2022, is easier to use now, and some of the most useful features are now better integrated with search results.
The first step in using Results About You—which has not changed—is a bit alarming when you've set out to obscure your personal information. Just head to the new hub for Results About You and enter your personal information. Google probably already knows your phone number, email, and even physical address, but this tells the tool what specific information to pluck out of search results. If that data is out there, Google has it whether or not you remove it from search results.
Before this update, most of the Results About You features were limited to this console, but the most important features are now integrated with the search results. They're not exactly prominently displayed, though. When scrolling through a Google search (after the AI overview, ads, knowledge graph, and more ads), you can use the three-dot menu next to a result to get data about it. This menu now includes options to remove the result right at the top.
Though Max has always said that it planned to charge more for access to its CNN and Bleacher Report Sports add-ons, the price hikes are coming in a roundabout way targeted at subscribers to the streamer’s cheapest tier.
Max announced today that it no longer intends to charge subscribers to its Standard ($16.99/month or $169.99/year) and Premium ($20.99/month or $209.99/year) tiers an extra $9.99 a month for CNN Max and Bleacher Reports Sports. The add-ons will be removed from Max’s ad-supported tier ($9.99/month or $99.99/year) beginning on March 30th, however, meaning that subscribers will have to move up to more expensive tiers should they want to keep watching live sports and news.
As The Hollywood Reporter notes, Max’s decision reads very much like a sign of the streamer prioritizing live sports as part of its bundling strategy and responding to competitors like Peacock and Netflix getting more serious about live sports programming of their own. In a statement about the pivot, WBD head of global streaming and games JB Perrette said that Max’s new plan of action came after a year of assessing how users were engaging with sports content on the platform.
“We believe that the best place for that content for now is within the Standard and Premium tiers,” Perrette said. “This update ensures that subscribers can continue to enjoy that coveted access within Max, while also enabling ongoing investment in our premium sports and news portfolio.”
In a move promoted as supporting freedom of speech, The Washington Post will no longer publish opinion columns that oppose the core views of Post owner and Amazon executive chair Jeff Bezos, Bezos has reportedly told staff. New York Times reporter Benjamin Mullin and Semafor reporter Max Tani published details about the move on Wednesday, noting that changes also include the departure of current opinion editor David Shipley. The memo from Bezos and another from Washington Post CEO Will Lewis were leaked during an Amazon event announcing new features for its Alexa assistant.
“We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” Bezos wrote in an email, according to a screenshot from Mullin. “A big part of America’s success has been freedom in the economic realm and everywhere else. Freedom is ethical — it minimizes coercion — and practical; it drives creativity, invention and prosperity.” Opinion articles that oppose these two pillars, Bezos says, “will be left to be published by others.” He concludes that “I’m confident that free markets and personal liberties are right for America,” saying he is excited to fill a “void” of coverage supporting them.
Lewis’ email praises Bezos for his email’s “clarity and transparency,” saying a replacement for Shipley will be “announced in due course.”
“Freedom is ethical”
Bezos acquired The Washington Post in 2013, but he began shaping it more visibly shortly before the 2024 presidential election, when he reportedly nixed a planned endorsement of Democratic candidate Kamala Harris. (The Post issued a denial that did not actually deny the reports.) While this was commercially detrimental to the paper, it avoided a move that could have incensed victorious Republican candidate and current President Donald Trump, who holds significant power over the fate of Bezos’ e-commerce and aerospace endeavors, as well as its potential acquisition of TikTok. Lewis’ email tells employees that the new shift is “not about siding with any political party.”
Neither Lewis nor Bezos indicated there would be changes to the Post’s news coverage, which is distinct from its opinion section. Bezos also says the opinion section will continue to cover topics unrelated to his two pillars.
The Post’s changes under Bezos mirror billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong’s similar hands-on approach as owner of The Los Angeles Times, where Soon-Shiong blocked a Harris endorsement and declared a rightward editorial shift.
All news outlets, of course, have implicit or explicit boundaries for their opinion coverage — and free speech is a central value for many journalists. It’s not even uncommon for opinion writers to publish stories that significantly conflict with their news reporting. But newspaper owners have traditionally allowed their editorial staff to make those decisions, in part to clearly establish their independence. Bezos’ direct involvement raises questions about how independent the Post is from an owner with many other financial interests. In current cultural parlance, terms like “free speech” can also be defined in ways that include direct government regulation of speech.
Fortunately, America is facing numerous urgent and timely questions that fit Bezos’ new, personally issued directive. Are major tech companies like Amazon monopolies that distort fair market competition, and should the US government pursue sweeping antitrust cases that could break them up? Will the administration led by Trump, whose inauguration received a $1 million Amazon donation and was attended prominently by Bezos, continue attempts to censor media outlets by leveraging its regulatory power and access to information? The possibilities are nearly endless.
ElevenLabs, an AI startup that just raised a $180 million mega funding round, has been primarily known for its audio generation prowess. The company took a step in another technological direction by launching its first standalone speech-to-text model called Scribe. The startup, valued at $3.3 billion, has aided many other companies in providing speech-to-text services […]
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Amazon just unveiled its new “Alexa+” upgrade for its long-running voice assistant which brings AI upgrades and a $20 price tag, but you don’t have to pay that if you have Prime, which is a much bigger, yet cheaper service.
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