engadget-rss

Sonos has laid off around 100 employees on Wednesday, according to The Verge. Workers from the company’s marketing department allegedly bore the brunt of the hit. The cuts come as Sonos tries to simultaneously sell the public on its new Ace headphones and fix the rebuilt Sonos mobile app, which CEO Patrick Spence admitted was the result of his push for development speed.
The company confirmed the layoffs to The Verge. “We made the difficult decision to say goodbye to approximately 100 team members representing 6 percent of the company,” Spence said in a statement. The company is also reportedly “winding down” some customer support offices, including one in Amsterdam scheduled for shutdown later this year. Sonos’ LinkedIn page reports 1,800 employees worldwide, and the six-percent figure quoted in the statement would put it at about 1,650 workers. The company’s last layoffs, in June 2023, slashed seven percent of its workforce.
Although Engadget’s review was largely impressed with the company’s new Ace headphones, the app complaints largely overshadowed the highly anticipated hardware launch. Designed to address “performance and reliability issues” and rebuild the developer platform with “modern programming languages that will allow us to drive more innovation faster,” the app launch has been a debacle. It’s created headaches for the company’s most loyal customers and threatened to drag down the brand as it pushes into new product categories. It even led to the delay of two new products that were otherwise ready to roll.
The new Sonos app for Android, iOS and desktop launched in May without core functionality like sleep timers and alarms. Customers reported problems rearranging speakers in different rooms, some only working intermittently and problems completing other basic tasks. Others even said they often couldn’t load the app on the first try.
Sonos
For a taste of how broken the app is, Spence laid out a timeline to repair it in a blog post late last month. July and August were dedicated to improving stability when adding new products and implementing Music Library improvements. An August and September window is reserved for improving volume responsiveness, user interface, stability and error handling. September and October will include tweaks to alarm consistency and reliability, and the restoration of editing playlists and queues. Improvements to settings will also be addressed. (Phew!)
Today’s announcement wasn’t received well by the company’s Reddit community, which has been vocal about the app’s problems since its launch. Some viewed today’s reported layoffs as targeting 100 workers when one high-profile one would’ve done the trick. “I have to say that, I didn’t have both feet in the door to fire Patrick Spence, but any CEO who leaves his employees hung out to dry and then signs the paper that lays them off is a scumbag piece of shit,” u/teryan2006 wrote.
“Since I took over as CEO, one of my particular points of emphasis has been the imperative for Sonos to move faster,” Spence said on a July earnings call. “That is what led to my promise to deliver at least two new products every year — a promise we have successfully delivered on. With the app, however, my push for speed backfired.”This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/audio/sonos-still-trying-to-fix-its-broken-app-reportedly-lays-off-100-employees-203224705.html?src=rss

Sonos has laid off around 100 employees on Wednesday, according to The Verge. Workers from the company’s marketing department allegedly bore the brunt of the hit. The cuts come as Sonos tries to simultaneously sell the public on its new Ace headphones and fix the rebuilt Sonos mobile app, which CEO Patrick Spence admitted was the result of his push for development speed.

The company confirmed the layoffs to The Verge. “We made the difficult decision to say goodbye to approximately 100 team members representing 6 percent of the company,” Spence said in a statement. The company is also reportedly “winding down” some customer support offices, including one in Amsterdam scheduled for shutdown later this year. Sonos’ LinkedIn page reports 1,800 employees worldwide, and the six-percent figure quoted in the statement would put it at about 1,650 workers. The company’s last layoffs, in June 2023, slashed seven percent of its workforce.

Although Engadget’s review was largely impressed with the company’s new Ace headphones, the app complaints largely overshadowed the highly anticipated hardware launch. Designed to address “performance and reliability issues” and rebuild the developer platform with “modern programming languages that will allow us to drive more innovation faster,” the app launch has been a debacle. It’s created headaches for the company’s most loyal customers and threatened to drag down the brand as it pushes into new product categories. It even led to the delay of two new products that were otherwise ready to roll.

The new Sonos app for Android, iOS and desktop launched in May without core functionality like sleep timers and alarms. Customers reported problems rearranging speakers in different rooms, some only working intermittently and problems completing other basic tasks. Others even said they often couldn’t load the app on the first try.

For a taste of how broken the app is, Spence laid out a timeline to repair it in a blog post late last month. July and August were dedicated to improving stability when adding new products and implementing Music Library improvements. An August and September window is reserved for improving volume responsiveness, user interface, stability and error handling. September and October will include tweaks to alarm consistency and reliability, and the restoration of editing playlists and queues. Improvements to settings will also be addressed. (Phew!)

Today’s announcement wasn’t received well by the company’s Reddit community, which has been vocal about the app’s problems since its launch. Some viewed today’s reported layoffs as targeting 100 workers when one high-profile one would’ve done the trick. “I have to say that, I didn’t have both feet in the door to fire Patrick Spence, but any CEO who leaves his employees hung out to dry and then signs the paper that lays them off is a scumbag piece of shit,” u/teryan2006 wrote.

“Since I took over as CEO, one of my particular points of emphasis has been the imperative for Sonos to move faster,” Spence said on a July earnings call. “That is what led to my promise to deliver at least two new products every year — a promise we have successfully delivered on. With the app, however, my push for speed backfired.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/audio/sonos-still-trying-to-fix-its-broken-app-reportedly-lays-off-100-employees-203224705.html?src=rss

Read More 

The Sleep Room in The Outlast Trials is named after a real-life space at McGill University’s Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal, where from 1957 to 1964, doctors conducted mind-control experiments on patients as part of the CIA’s MK-Ultra initiative. Led by Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron, these tests included electroshock therapy, sensory deprivation and heavy doses of psychedelic drugs. One patient, Linda MacDonald, went to McGill seeking help for symptoms of postpartum depression after giving birth to her fifth child. She was placed in a drug-induced coma for 86 days in the Sleep Room, and records show she was treated with 109 rounds of shock therapy. MacDonald lost her identity, memories and motor skills; she had to be toilet trained all over again.
Another patient, Robert Logie, was 18 years old when he went to McGill with leg pain. He ended up in the Sleep Room, where he was injected with LSD every other day for weeks, his syringe sometimes spiked with sodium amytal — “truth serum” — and other drugs. A speaker positioned under his pillow played the phrase, “You killed your mother,” on a constant loop for 23 days. Meanwhile, his mom was alive and well. Logie left McGill with amnesia, insomnia and a painful leg.
The old McGill hospital is just two miles away from the Red Barrels offices, where the Outlast games are made.

“The name of the Sleep Room in Outlast Trials, we took that from McGill hospital,” Outlast series writer JT Petty said. “In the 1960s, they had the Sleep Room where they would treat trauma with LSD and induced comas. It was insane. And the people who came out of that came out severely damaged, in worse shape than they were before.”
“There are still active lawsuits going on because of these events,” Red Barrels co-founder Philippe Morin added. (And he’s correct.)
Like all of Red Barrels’ games, The Outlast Trials draws from dark and true stories of government-backed inhumanity, religious manipulation and capitalistic greed, particularly during the 20th century. Trials is a cooperative four-player horror experience where participants, called Reagents, are trapped in the secret Sinyala Facility run by the Murkoff Corporation. The goal is to graduate therapy by completing objectives and surviving monstrous villains in various maps, including an orphanage, courthouse, police station and toy factory. As in the other Outlast titles, gameplay mainly involves running and hiding from prowling, deranged sadists, though this time you’re not alone.
“The first Outlast, it goes back to the oldest games, you’re playing hide and seek,” Morin said. “In Outlast Trials, it’s like you’re stuck in a haunted house with friends. And it’s, how do we get out of here? That was the initial premise.”
Red Barrels
Trials exists in a world familiar to Outlast fans. It’s a prequel to the original Outlast, which came out in 2013, and Outlast 2, which landed in 2017. Trials replaces the series’ camcorder with a pair of night-vision goggles, and the Sleep Room is the game’s lobby. Here, players can purchase prescriptions for upgrades, arm wrestle other Reagents, customize their cell and prepare for the missions ahead. Bulbous black-and-white TVs are mounted in one corner of each cell, displaying messages like, “no religion,” and, “free yourself,” in a jarring rhythm.
Trials entered early access in May 2023, went fully live in March 2024 and received its first major DLC drop in July, introducing the docks and a new baddie named Franco “Il Bambino” Barbi. Franco is a New Orleans mafia nepo baby with a degradation kink and a gun obsession, plus he has a habit of murdering his sexual partners. He’s eager to do the same to the Reagents trapped in Sinyala.
Franco joins two other Prime Assets, or bosses, in The Outlast Trials. There’s Mother Gooseberry, a deranged former children’s-show host who carries a duck puppet with a giant dental drill inside its beak, and Leland Coyle, a white supremacist and corrupt police officer with an insatiable desire to torture and kill people with his stun rod. Every enemy in the Outlast series employs a unique brand of violent cruelty, their favored forms of torture shaped by generational traumas and dangerous societal norms.
“We do a lot of work trying to make the characters kind of iconic and human despite being monsters, and that kind of love for horror characters — I feel like you know when you’re doing it right,” Petty said. “I’m a 1980s kid, I grew up on Freddy and Jason and all those guys and it’s, I think comfort is the right word.”

It’s easy to see the demented priests, sadistic doctors, demonic cult leaders and free-swinging penises in the Outlast games and write it all off as edgelord shit, nothing more. But especially with McGill hospital looming just beyond Red Barrels’ front door, the commentary is clear, and this brand of gruesome social analysis was the plan from the start.
“All the games are about extremists,” Morin said. “People who take something and just go too far with it, whether it’s religion, science, money, weapons, whatever it is.”
Outlast 2 tells a story about cult members who believe the antichrist is about to be born, resulting in a wave of ritual sacrifice, abuse and mass murder in the Arizona desert. The original Outlast takes place inside Mount Massive Asylum, an even-more-twisted stand-in for the McGill hospital.
“In the first Outlast, there’s a lot about the archetypes of 20th century history,” Petty said. “There’s a character who’s a soldier, there’s a character who’s a businessman, there’s a character who’s a priest, representing these big, cultural moments of the 20th century. I don’t want to get too grand with it, but there is the notion that everybody’s so apocalyptic right now. Like, how did we end up here? I feel like that’s the subtext of what Outlast is always about. Who made money getting us here?”
The original Outlast was a cult hit in 2013.Red Barrels
As the main writer for all Outlast games, Petty’s job is to take the team’s wildest, most potentially offensive ideas and make them palatable for a horror audience. He works with motifs of murder, torture, neglect, mental illness, sexual violence, bigotry and religion, and through comedy and hyperbole, transforms them into caricatures of greed, ego and oppression. There’s an undercurrent of humor in the Outlast games, strategically deployed to further highlight the terror.
“We have to come up with the worst, most horrible, most perverse thing that could possibly happen to you,” Petty said. “And then like two months later, it feels like, come up with something slightly worse and more horrible.”
“You know, for kids!” Morin joked. Later in the conversation he said, “The reality is, we know we’re not surgeons operating on brains…. We’re creating entertainment. You need to have fun with it.”
There are no hard boundaries when the Red Barrels team is brainstorming new characters or themes, but Petty and Morin adhere to the same general wisdom when approaching sensitive topics: Don’t punch down.
“We don’t want to victimize people who are already victims,” Petty said. “We’re dealing with a lot of sensitive issues — mental illness, sexuality and violence, all of this stuff. And I just want to make sure we’re always sympathetic.”
Red Barrels
This approach to extremism has resonated with millions of players, allowing Red Barrels to turn Outlast into an enduring horror franchise encompassing single-player narrative games, a multiplayer live-service experience and a graphic novel series over the past 11 years. The first two Outlast games sold a combined 15 million units and pulled in $45 million for Red Barrels, while The Outlast Trials has been purchased by more than 1 million players already. There’s a healthy community of content creators playing and dissecting the games on Twitch and YouTube, too.
Supporting The Outlast Trials is a lot of work, especially for such a small team. The prototype alone took two years of conceptualizing and coding, and the project spent six years in development before going live in early access in 2023. As a living game, Red Barrels not only has to maintain the experience they shipped with The Outlast Trials, but players now expect new content, monsters, missions and mechanics on a regular basis.
Most online multiplayer experiences that look like The Outlast Trials — meaning AAA-level games — have teams of hundreds of developers, and many are backed by companies worth billions. Red Barrels has just 65 employees, and 20 of them joined just in the past year.
“We’re now in a war of content creation,” Morin said. “We have to ship content as quickly and efficiently as possible. And to be honest, we’re still learning how to do that because a lot of us are used to, once you ship a game, you get a big downtime, conception phase and all that. But there’s none of that right now.”
Red Barrels
Red Barrels is only now expanding because they need people with expertise in multiplayer and live-service design. Morin and Red Barrels co-founders David Chateauneuf and Hugo Dallaire worked at EA and Ubisoft for years before going indie, managing large teams as senior developers. They founded Red Barrels because they wanted to get hands-on with game development again, ideally with a small crew of passionate horror fiends. (Also, Ubisoft turned down all their horror pitches. Thankfully — can you imagine if Ubisoft had greenlit the original Outlast? It probably would’ve been called something like Dr. Murkoff’s Manifesto and the gore would’ve been dialed way, way down. It might’ve given Miles a gun. Maybe, instead of sadistic psychiatric staff, its enemies would’ve been animatronic Rabbids. It could’ve gotten a Just Dance tie-in. Truly, the horror.)
Nowadays, Morin is doing less and less design as his studio becomes more complex, but he’s still involved in the creative process. Red Barrels just recently hired another writer, Jonathan Morrel, meaning Petty is no longer the entirety of the narrative department. The studio has a flat internal structure, where there aren’t harsh distinctions between roles like level designer and game designer. “We’re just all designers,” Morin said.
It’s hard to overstate just how small Red Barrels is, particularly considering the AAA quality of the Outlast series.
“I do remember the moment where, for IT support, I stopped going to one of the company’s founders,” Petty said. “Hugo used to basically be IT for the company, as well as art director, co-founder. And it was pretty recent, right? It was like eight years into Red Barrels where he stopped being the IT guy.”
Morin added, “He just didn’t want anybody else to do it.”
Morin said that larger studios are always sniffing around Red Barrels, looking to acquire its talent and IP, but none of their pitches have looked better than independence so far. Red Barrels ended up creating the original Outlast with personal savings, loans and a $1 million investment from the Canada Media Fund. Even back then, there was an offer on the table from a major company that would have resulted in a few extra months of production time.
Red Barrels
“But at that point, we had been working so hard to try to make this game on our own and didn’t want to give up our independence,” Morin said. “We were not ready to do that, we were so close to shipping the game. So we just doubled down and worked our asses off to be able to ship the game without needing extra money. But there were options. So I think it’s, ‘Never say never,’ but up until now, no. We never felt the need to go get more financing to be able to make the games we wanted to make on our own. We’ll see if we can keep on doing that.”
For Red Barrels, the focus right now is The Outlast Trials. There isn’t time for anything else — but maybe there will be in the future.
“Ultimately, our goal would be to have two IPs, two projects in parallel, and have them be different enough so that people who need a change of scenery can go from one to another,” Morin said. “I mean, I love the world of Outlast and the reality is that you could narratively make [the second project] fit inside the same world and just do a different kind of gameplay experience. That could always be done as well. But I think creating an IP is a very hard thing, and so when you have success, you don’t want to waste it.”
The Outlast Trials is available now on PC, PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/cia-brainwashing-experiments-helped-make-outlast-an-iconic-horror-series-195055899.html?src=rss

The Sleep Room in The Outlast Trials is named after a real-life space at McGill University’s Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal, where from 1957 to 1964, doctors conducted mind-control experiments on patients as part of the CIA’s MK-Ultra initiative. Led by Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron, these tests included electroshock therapy, sensory deprivation and heavy doses of psychedelic drugs. One patient, Linda MacDonald, went to McGill seeking help for symptoms of postpartum depression after giving birth to her fifth child. She was placed in a drug-induced coma for 86 days in the Sleep Room, and records show she was treated with 109 rounds of shock therapy. MacDonald lost her identity, memories and motor skills; she had to be toilet trained all over again.

Another patient, Robert Logie, was 18 years old when he went to McGill with leg pain. He ended up in the Sleep Room, where he was injected with LSD every other day for weeks, his syringe sometimes spiked with sodium amytal — “truth serum” — and other drugs. A speaker positioned under his pillow played the phrase, “You killed your mother,” on a constant loop for 23 days. Meanwhile, his mom was alive and well. Logie left McGill with amnesia, insomnia and a painful leg.

The old McGill hospital is just two miles away from the Red Barrels offices, where the Outlast games are made.

“The name of the Sleep Room in Outlast Trials, we took that from McGill hospital,” Outlast series writer JT Petty said. “In the 1960s, they had the Sleep Room where they would treat trauma with LSD and induced comas. It was insane. And the people who came out of that came out severely damaged, in worse shape than they were before.”

“There are still active lawsuits going on because of these events,” Red Barrels co-founder Philippe Morin added. (And he’s correct.)

Like all of Red Barrels’ games, The Outlast Trials draws from dark and true stories of government-backed inhumanity, religious manipulation and capitalistic greed, particularly during the 20th century. Trials is a cooperative four-player horror experience where participants, called Reagents, are trapped in the secret Sinyala Facility run by the Murkoff Corporation. The goal is to graduate therapy by completing objectives and surviving monstrous villains in various maps, including an orphanage, courthouse, police station and toy factory. As in the other Outlast titles, gameplay mainly involves running and hiding from prowling, deranged sadists, though this time you’re not alone.

“The first Outlast, it goes back to the oldest games, you’re playing hide and seek,” Morin said. “In Outlast Trials, it’s like you’re stuck in a haunted house with friends. And it’s, how do we get out of here? That was the initial premise.”

Trials exists in a world familiar to Outlast fans. It’s a prequel to the original Outlast, which came out in 2013, and Outlast 2, which landed in 2017. Trials replaces the series’ camcorder with a pair of night-vision goggles, and the Sleep Room is the game’s lobby. Here, players can purchase prescriptions for upgrades, arm wrestle other Reagents, customize their cell and prepare for the missions ahead. Bulbous black-and-white TVs are mounted in one corner of each cell, displaying messages like, “no religion,” and, “free yourself,” in a jarring rhythm.

Trials entered early access in May 2023, went fully live in March 2024 and received its first major DLC drop in July, introducing the docks and a new baddie named Franco “Il Bambino” Barbi. Franco is a New Orleans mafia nepo baby with a degradation kink and a gun obsession, plus he has a habit of murdering his sexual partners. He’s eager to do the same to the Reagents trapped in Sinyala.

Franco joins two other Prime Assets, or bosses, in The Outlast Trials. There’s Mother Gooseberry, a deranged former children’s-show host who carries a duck puppet with a giant dental drill inside its beak, and Leland Coyle, a white supremacist and corrupt police officer with an insatiable desire to torture and kill people with his stun rod. Every enemy in the Outlast series employs a unique brand of violent cruelty, their favored forms of torture shaped by generational traumas and dangerous societal norms.

“We do a lot of work trying to make the characters kind of iconic and human despite being monsters, and that kind of love for horror characters — I feel like you know when you’re doing it right,” Petty said. “I’m a 1980s kid, I grew up on Freddy and Jason and all those guys and it’s, I think comfort is the right word.”

It’s easy to see the demented priests, sadistic doctors, demonic cult leaders and free-swinging penises in the Outlast games and write it all off as edgelord shit, nothing more. But especially with McGill hospital looming just beyond Red Barrels’ front door, the commentary is clear, and this brand of gruesome social analysis was the plan from the start.

“All the games are about extremists,” Morin said. “People who take something and just go too far with it, whether it’s religion, science, money, weapons, whatever it is.”

Outlast 2 tells a story about cult members who believe the antichrist is about to be born, resulting in a wave of ritual sacrifice, abuse and mass murder in the Arizona desert. The original Outlast takes place inside Mount Massive Asylum, an even-more-twisted stand-in for the McGill hospital.

“In the first Outlast, there’s a lot about the archetypes of 20th century history,” Petty said. “There’s a character who’s a soldier, there’s a character who’s a businessman, there’s a character who’s a priest, representing these big, cultural moments of the 20th century. I don’t want to get too grand with it, but there is the notion that everybody’s so apocalyptic right now. Like, how did we end up here? I feel like that’s the subtext of what Outlast is always about. Who made money getting us here?”

The original Outlast was a cult hit in 2013.

As the main writer for all Outlast games, Petty’s job is to take the team’s wildest, most potentially offensive ideas and make them palatable for a horror audience. He works with motifs of murder, torture, neglect, mental illness, sexual violence, bigotry and religion, and through comedy and hyperbole, transforms them into caricatures of greed, ego and oppression. There’s an undercurrent of humor in the Outlast games, strategically deployed to further highlight the terror.

“We have to come up with the worst, most horrible, most perverse thing that could possibly happen to you,” Petty said. “And then like two months later, it feels like, come up with something slightly worse and more horrible.”

“You know, for kids!” Morin joked. Later in the conversation he said, “The reality is, we know we’re not surgeons operating on brains…. We’re creating entertainment. You need to have fun with it.”

There are no hard boundaries when the Red Barrels team is brainstorming new characters or themes, but Petty and Morin adhere to the same general wisdom when approaching sensitive topics: Don’t punch down.

“We don’t want to victimize people who are already victims,” Petty said. “We’re dealing with a lot of sensitive issues — mental illness, sexuality and violence, all of this stuff. And I just want to make sure we’re always sympathetic.”

This approach to extremism has resonated with millions of players, allowing Red Barrels to turn Outlast into an enduring horror franchise encompassing single-player narrative games, a multiplayer live-service experience and a graphic novel series over the past 11 years. The first two Outlast games sold a combined 15 million units and pulled in $45 million for Red Barrels, while The Outlast Trials has been purchased by more than 1 million players already. There’s a healthy community of content creators playing and dissecting the games on Twitch and YouTube, too.

Supporting The Outlast Trials is a lot of work, especially for such a small team. The prototype alone took two years of conceptualizing and coding, and the project spent six years in development before going live in early access in 2023. As a living game, Red Barrels not only has to maintain the experience they shipped with The Outlast Trials, but players now expect new content, monsters, missions and mechanics on a regular basis.

Most online multiplayer experiences that look like The Outlast Trials — meaning AAA-level games — have teams of hundreds of developers, and many are backed by companies worth billions. Red Barrels has just 65 employees, and 20 of them joined just in the past year.

“We’re now in a war of content creation,” Morin said. “We have to ship content as quickly and efficiently as possible. And to be honest, we’re still learning how to do that because a lot of us are used to, once you ship a game, you get a big downtime, conception phase and all that. But there’s none of that right now.”

Red Barrels is only now expanding because they need people with expertise in multiplayer and live-service design. Morin and Red Barrels co-founders David Chateauneuf and Hugo Dallaire worked at EA and Ubisoft for years before going indie, managing large teams as senior developers. They founded Red Barrels because they wanted to get hands-on with game development again, ideally with a small crew of passionate horror fiends. (Also, Ubisoft turned down all their horror pitches. Thankfully — can you imagine if Ubisoft had greenlit the original Outlast? It probably would’ve been called something like Dr. Murkoff’s Manifesto and the gore would’ve been dialed way, way down. It might’ve given Miles a gun. Maybe, instead of sadistic psychiatric staff, its enemies would’ve been animatronic Rabbids. It could’ve gotten a Just Dance tie-in. Truly, the horror.)

Nowadays, Morin is doing less and less design as his studio becomes more complex, but he’s still involved in the creative process. Red Barrels just recently hired another writer, Jonathan Morrel, meaning Petty is no longer the entirety of the narrative department. The studio has a flat internal structure, where there aren’t harsh distinctions between roles like level designer and game designer. “We’re just all designers,” Morin said.

It’s hard to overstate just how small Red Barrels is, particularly considering the AAA quality of the Outlast series.

“I do remember the moment where, for IT support, I stopped going to one of the company’s founders,” Petty said. “Hugo used to basically be IT for the company, as well as art director, co-founder. And it was pretty recent, right? It was like eight years into Red Barrels where he stopped being the IT guy.”

Morin added, “He just didn’t want anybody else to do it.”

Morin said that larger studios are always sniffing around Red Barrels, looking to acquire its talent and IP, but none of their pitches have looked better than independence so far. Red Barrels ended up creating the original Outlast with personal savings, loans and a $1 million investment from the Canada Media Fund. Even back then, there was an offer on the table from a major company that would have resulted in a few extra months of production time.

“But at that point, we had been working so hard to try to make this game on our own and didn’t want to give up our independence,” Morin said. “We were not ready to do that, we were so close to shipping the game. So we just doubled down and worked our asses off to be able to ship the game without needing extra money. But there were options. So I think it’s, ‘Never say never,’ but up until now, no. We never felt the need to go get more financing to be able to make the games we wanted to make on our own. We’ll see if we can keep on doing that.”

For Red Barrels, the focus right now is The Outlast Trials. There isn’t time for anything else — but maybe there will be in the future.

“Ultimately, our goal would be to have two IPs, two projects in parallel, and have them be different enough so that people who need a change of scenery can go from one to another,” Morin said. “I mean, I love the world of Outlast and the reality is that you could narratively make [the second project] fit inside the same world and just do a different kind of gameplay experience. That could always be done as well. But I think creating an IP is a very hard thing, and so when you have success, you don’t want to waste it.”

The Outlast Trials is available now on PC, PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/cia-brainwashing-experiments-helped-make-outlast-an-iconic-horror-series-195055899.html?src=rss

Read More 

Apple appears to be going full steam ahead on an iPad-like tabletop device from which you may be able to manage smart home products, oversee household security and take part in video calls. The device, which could debut as soon as 2026, is said to have a thin robotic arm that moves around a large display. Apple’s riff on products like the Google Nest Hub and Amazon’s Echo Show may be able to tilt the screen up and down using actuators and rotate 360 degrees. It’s slated to be running on an offshoot of iPadOS for the time being.
Apple is said to have greenlit the device in 2022 but work on it intensified in recent months after the company scuttled its multi-billion boondoggle car project. Indeed, Kevin Lynch, Apple’s vice president of technology who oversaw the car project and until recently was in charge of smartwatch and health software, is in charge of the device’s development, according to Bloomberg.
Hundreds of Apple employees are now said to be working on the tabletop system, which the company reportedly sees as a way to take advantage of its Apple Intelligence tools. Siri and Apple Intelligence are expected to be the main control methods for the device. With a voice command, you may be able to turn the display to face you. It was reported earlier this year that Apple was planning a push into the realm of personal robotics, an effort that includes the tabletop device.
However, there’s said to be some internal concern over whether consumers will actually want this product, especially given that Apple already has a strong foothold in the tablet market. Pricing could have an impact on demand as well, with the company aiming to sell the device for around $1,000.
This is one of several devices Apple is working on as it aims to further diversify its offerings and boost its bottom line, Bloomberg notes. While the iPhone still accounts for about half of Apple’s revenue, sales have been relatively lagging in recent quarters. This year’s lineup, expected to arrive in September, is slated to have relatively modest hardware upgrades with Apple placing more focus on software updates such as Apple Intelligence features.
The other products Apple is reportedly working on include smart glasses and AirPods with built-in cameras. Foldable iPhones and iPads may also be in the works.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/home/apple-is-reportedly-forging-ahead-with-a-rotating-ipad-like-tabletop-device-193236425.html?src=rss

Apple appears to be going full steam ahead on an iPad-like tabletop device from which you may be able to manage smart home products, oversee household security and take part in video calls. The device, which could debut as soon as 2026, is said to have a thin robotic arm that moves around a large display. Apple’s riff on products like the Google Nest Hub and Amazon’s Echo Show may be able to tilt the screen up and down using actuators and rotate 360 degrees. It’s slated to be running on an offshoot of iPadOS for the time being.

Apple is said to have greenlit the device in 2022 but work on it intensified in recent months after the company scuttled its multi-billion boondoggle car project. Indeed, Kevin Lynch, Apple’s vice president of technology who oversaw the car project and until recently was in charge of smartwatch and health software, is in charge of the device’s development, according to Bloomberg.

Hundreds of Apple employees are now said to be working on the tabletop system, which the company reportedly sees as a way to take advantage of its Apple Intelligence tools. Siri and Apple Intelligence are expected to be the main control methods for the device. With a voice command, you may be able to turn the display to face you. It was reported earlier this year that Apple was planning a push into the realm of personal robotics, an effort that includes the tabletop device.

However, there’s said to be some internal concern over whether consumers will actually want this product, especially given that Apple already has a strong foothold in the tablet market. Pricing could have an impact on demand as well, with the company aiming to sell the device for around $1,000.

This is one of several devices Apple is working on as it aims to further diversify its offerings and boost its bottom line, Bloomberg notes. While the iPhone still accounts for about half of Apple’s revenue, sales have been relatively lagging in recent quarters. This year’s lineup, expected to arrive in September, is slated to have relatively modest hardware upgrades with Apple placing more focus on software updates such as Apple Intelligence features.

The other products Apple is reportedly working on include smart glasses and AirPods with built-in cameras. Foldable iPhones and iPads may also be in the works.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/home/apple-is-reportedly-forging-ahead-with-a-rotating-ipad-like-tabletop-device-193236425.html?src=rss

Read More 

Set between the original Alien and its more bombastic sequel, Aliens, Fede Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus echoes the the greatest elements of those films, while also delivering his own spin on the 45-year-old franchise. There’s the elegant interplay of light and shadow from Alien, along with nods to Ridley Scott’s artful aesthetic. And there are finely crafted set pieces evoking the horror and sheer badassery of James Cameron’s Aliens. But Alvarez also expands the Alien universe by focusing on a group of twenty-somethings who were raised in a decrepit Weyland-Yutani colony, and whose main goal is to escape the bureaucratic clutches of their corporate overlords.

While it’s easy to dismiss Alien: Romulus as a mere rehash meant to appeal to younger audiences, it’s hard to deny the sheer level of craft on display. Alvarez’s eye for composition was clearly influenced by the series auteurs, from the opening shot of a field of stars that reveals a crashed ship rendered invisible by the blackness of space, to later sequences set alongside a planet’s ice-filled rings. And he can masterfully orchestrate tension for both action and horror, another skill borrowed from Scott and Cameron. Just like Alvarez’s hyper violent (and excellent!) Evil Dead remake, he’s able to put his own spin on an iconic horror franchise without being a slavishly devoted fanboy.
Murray Close
Our Ripley counterpart for Alien: Romulus is Rain (Cailee Spaeny), a young woman who recently lost both of her parents to a Weyland-Yutani mining operation. The only family she has left at a sun-less backwater colony is her brother Andy (David Jonsson), a malfunctioning android who’s directed to care for her.
After Rain’s request to leave her colony is denied and her mandatory work commitment is unjustifiably extended by several years, she joins a group of friends to covertly head off-world. The plan involves stealing cryostasis pods from a decommissioned space station — which, as you might expect, houses untold horrors. As Rain and her friends explore the station, they encounter facehuggers, get a quick lesson in Xenomorph biology and find themselves being hunted down one by one.
20th Century Studios
Admittedly, we’ve seen much of this before, but I still think there’s value in introducing an entirely new generation to the Alien franchise. Scott’s Prometheus and Alien: Covenant were intriguing for longtime fans, but they were also bogged down by the director’s own fascination with androids and Weyland-Yutani backstory. They weren’t exactly the best entry-point into the series. And sure, Alien and Aliens are easy to find and remain fantastic films, but I’ve personally found it tough to get some younger audiences to engage with older films.
By focusing on a twenty-something crew instead of older, world-weary space truckers or colonists, Alien: Romulus also better captures the viewpoint of a new generation of viewers. But Millennials and Gen Z are well aware the Earth is dying, and they’ve seen how global corporations got us into this mess.
20th Century Studios
It’s not hard to see the parallels between Weyland-Yutani sending workers to their doom to unearth the secrets of the Xenomorphs – creatures that could potentially wipe out all of humanity – to the fossil fuel companies ignoring the climate crisis they helped create. The human cost doesn’t matter, not when there’s massive profit potential and shareholder value on the horizon.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/tv-movies/alien-romulus-is-a-magnificent-return-to-form-193025453.html?src=rss

Set between the original Alien and its more bombastic sequel, Aliens, Fede Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus echoes the the greatest elements of those films, while also delivering his own spin on the 45-year-old franchise. There’s the elegant interplay of light and shadow from Alien, along with nods to Ridley Scott’s artful aesthetic. And there are finely crafted set pieces evoking the horror and sheer badassery of James Cameron’s Aliens. But Alvarez also expands the Alien universe by focusing on a group of twenty-somethings who were raised in a decrepit Weyland-Yutani colony, and whose main goal is to escape the bureaucratic clutches of their corporate overlords.

While it’s easy to dismiss Alien: Romulus as a mere rehash meant to appeal to younger audiences, it’s hard to deny the sheer level of craft on display. Alvarez’s eye for composition was clearly influenced by the series auteurs, from the opening shot of a field of stars that reveals a crashed ship rendered invisible by the blackness of space, to later sequences set alongside a planet’s ice-filled rings. And he can masterfully orchestrate tension for both action and horror, another skill borrowed from Scott and Cameron. Just like Alvarez’s hyper violent (and excellent!) Evil Dead remake, he’s able to put his own spin on an iconic horror franchise without being a slavishly devoted fanboy.

Our Ripley counterpart for Alien: Romulus is Rain (Cailee Spaeny), a young woman who recently lost both of her parents to a Weyland-Yutani mining operation. The only family she has left at a sun-less backwater colony is her brother Andy (David Jonsson), a malfunctioning android who’s directed to care for her.

After Rain’s request to leave her colony is denied and her mandatory work commitment is unjustifiably extended by several years, she joins a group of friends to covertly head off-world. The plan involves stealing cryostasis pods from a decommissioned space station — which, as you might expect, houses untold horrors. As Rain and her friends explore the station, they encounter facehuggers, get a quick lesson in Xenomorph biology and find themselves being hunted down one by one.

Admittedly, we’ve seen much of this before, but I still think there’s value in introducing an entirely new generation to the Alien franchise. Scott’s Prometheus and Alien: Covenant were intriguing for longtime fans, but they were also bogged down by the director’s own fascination with androids and Weyland-Yutani backstory. They weren’t exactly the best entry-point into the series. And sure, Alien and Aliens are easy to find and remain fantastic films, but I’ve personally found it tough to get some younger audiences to engage with older films.

By focusing on a twenty-something crew instead of older, world-weary space truckers or colonists, Alien: Romulus also better captures the viewpoint of a new generation of viewers. But Millennials and Gen Z are well aware the Earth is dying, and they’ve seen how global corporations got us into this mess.

It’s not hard to see the parallels between Weyland-Yutani sending workers to their doom to unearth the secrets of the Xenomorphs – creatures that could potentially wipe out all of humanity – to the fossil fuel companies ignoring the climate crisis they helped create. The human cost doesn’t matter, not when there’s massive profit potential and shareholder value on the horizon.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/tv-movies/alien-romulus-is-a-magnificent-return-to-form-193025453.html?src=rss

Read More 

The Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) crackdown on fabricated reviews and fake consumer and celebrity testimonials has produced new official federal regulations to prevent the use of these practices on websites and e-commerce hubs. The FTC approved the new rules against the buying and selling of fake reviews and product testimonials with a 5-0 vote on Wednesday. The rules will become effective in 60 days.
The new FTC rules address the practice of buying and selling fake consumer reviews, including the use of AI-generated consumer and celebrity testimonials for products or services. They also prevent “providing compensation or other incentives conditioned on the writing of consumer reviews expressing a particular sentiment, either positive or negative” and prohibit “a business from misrepresenting that a website or entity it controls provides independent reviews or opinions” about products or services, according to a statement released by the FTC.
The formal ban also comes with stiff penalties for violators of the new rules. Fines could reach as high as $50,000 per violation.
The FTC officially announced its intent to seek new rules for such practices last October. The Commission has been trying to get control of fake online reviews and testimonials for years. The first such case was resolved in 2019 against the Amazon seller Cure Encapsulations Inc. The company was accused of paying for fake feedback for its weight-loss products from the amazonvierifiedreviews.com website, and the FTC slapped them with a $12.8 million fine. The FTC has also investigated similar cases against the supplement maker The Bountiful Company for “review hijacking” its products’ reviews and ratings on Amazon that ended with a $600,000 fine, and the skincare maker Sunday Riley that created fake online reviews by ordering employees to write them.
The government isn’t the only entity trying to discourage the buying and selling of fake reviews. The service recommendation website Yelp created a database that lists businesses who received warnings for posting or buying fake reviews for its Yelp page.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/general/the-ftc-finalizes-its-rules-clamping-down-on-fake-online-reviews-191339646.html?src=rss

The Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) crackdown on fabricated reviews and fake consumer and celebrity testimonials has produced new official federal regulations to prevent the use of these practices on websites and e-commerce hubs. The FTC approved the new rules against the buying and selling of fake reviews and product testimonials with a 5-0 vote on Wednesday. The rules will become effective in 60 days.

The new FTC rules address the practice of buying and selling fake consumer reviews, including the use of AI-generated consumer and celebrity testimonials for products or services. They also prevent “providing compensation or other incentives conditioned on the writing of consumer reviews expressing a particular sentiment, either positive or negative” and prohibit “a business from misrepresenting that a website or entity it controls provides independent reviews or opinions” about products or services, according to a statement released by the FTC.

The formal ban also comes with stiff penalties for violators of the new rules. Fines could reach as high as $50,000 per violation.

The FTC officially announced its intent to seek new rules for such practices last October. The Commission has been trying to get control of fake online reviews and testimonials for years. The first such case was resolved in 2019 against the Amazon seller Cure Encapsulations Inc. The company was accused of paying for fake feedback for its weight-loss products from the amazonvierifiedreviews.com website, and the FTC slapped them with a $12.8 million fine. The FTC has also investigated similar cases against the supplement maker The Bountiful Company for “review hijacking” its products’ reviews and ratings on Amazon that ended with a $600,000 fine, and the skincare maker Sunday Riley that created fake online reviews by ordering employees to write them.

The government isn’t the only entity trying to discourage the buying and selling of fake reviews. The service recommendation website Yelp created a database that lists businesses who received warnings for posting or buying fake reviews for its Yelp page.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/general/the-ftc-finalizes-its-rules-clamping-down-on-fake-online-reviews-191339646.html?src=rss

Read More 

If you weren’t sated by last year’s dramatic retelling of the BlackBerry story, you’ll have another chance to witness the rise and fall of the once-iconic smartphone. Filmmaker Eddie Schmidt, one of the directors behind Netflix’s Ugly Delicious, is prepping a documentary about the handset, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
The documentary is currently in production and is being made by Unrealistic Ideas, which is a production company founded by Mark Wahlberg aka the guy from Fear. This team was behind HBO’s McMillions, a documentary miniseries about the infamous McDonald’s Monopoly promotion scam.
The project is currently untitled and there’s no release date, but we do know that the filmmakers have been given exclusive access to the Research In Motion Alumni Association. So there will be plenty of interviews with former executives who were involved in the BlackBerry story in one way or another. The film will also include “an array of never-before-seen archival footage.”
Director Schmidt shared a statement and said that he is excited to “explore this unpredictable real-life saga at the intersection of technology and popular culture.” One thing the documentary won’t have, however, is actor Glenn Howerton absolutely crushing it as former Research In Motion CEO Jim Balsillie. 

BlackBerry was a legitimately good movie. We highly recommend it, particularly for the scene embedded above. I mean, come on! This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/tv-movies/theres-another-blackberry-movie-coming-out-and-this-ones-a-documentary-173618810.html?src=rss

If you weren’t sated by last year’s dramatic retelling of the BlackBerry story, you’ll have another chance to witness the rise and fall of the once-iconic smartphone. Filmmaker Eddie Schmidt, one of the directors behind Netflix’s Ugly Delicious, is prepping a documentary about the handset, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

The documentary is currently in production and is being made by Unrealistic Ideas, which is a production company founded by Mark Wahlberg aka the guy from Fear. This team was behind HBO’s McMillions, a documentary miniseries about the infamous McDonald’s Monopoly promotion scam.

The project is currently untitled and there’s no release date, but we do know that the filmmakers have been given exclusive access to the Research In Motion Alumni Association. So there will be plenty of interviews with former executives who were involved in the BlackBerry story in one way or another. The film will also include “an array of never-before-seen archival footage.”

Director Schmidt shared a statement and said that he is excited to “explore this unpredictable real-life saga at the intersection of technology and popular culture.” One thing the documentary won’t have, however, is actor Glenn Howerton absolutely crushing it as former Research In Motion CEO Jim Balsillie. 

BlackBerry was a legitimately good movie. We highly recommend it, particularly for the scene embedded above. I mean, come on! 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/tv-movies/theres-another-blackberry-movie-coming-out-and-this-ones-a-documentary-173618810.html?src=rss

Read More 

Chances are you’ve got a couple of old video game consoles gathering dust in your closet right now. Would you be able to hook all of them up to your TV without some kind of adapter? Meet a guy who owns 444 game consoles and has them all hooked up to a single television, according to the Guinness Book of World Records.
Ibrahim Al-Nasser of Riyadh holds a Guinness World Record for the most video game consoles hooked up to a single television. His collection includes some of the classics such as the first Sony PlayStation, the Nintendo 64 and (his personal favorite) the Sega Genesis, complete with the 32x and Sega CD expansions. He also owns and can play games on those handheld plug-and-play consoles with arcade classics like Ms. Pac-Man and Dig Dug that you find in Target, classic and modern handhelds like the Hyperkin SuperBoy and obscure consoles like the Magnavox Odyssey.

Al-Nasser uses a series of switchers to play each console on a single screen. He keeps track of their location and powering procedure on an Excel spreadsheet. He’s even organized his collection so the cables aren’t showing or creating the kind of tangled mess most of us have to deal with when we have just two consoles hooked up to a single television.
That may sound like a lot of video game consoles for one collection but it’s far from the actual record. Linda Guillory of Garland, Texas currently holds the record for the largest collection of playable gaming systems with her collection of 2,430 items, according to Guinness World Records.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/meet-the-man-who-set-a-world-record-by-hooking-up-444-consoles-to-one-tv-171848639.html?src=rss

Chances are you’ve got a couple of old video game consoles gathering dust in your closet right now. Would you be able to hook all of them up to your TV without some kind of adapter? Meet a guy who owns 444 game consoles and has them all hooked up to a single television, according to the Guinness Book of World Records.

Ibrahim Al-Nasser of Riyadh holds a Guinness World Record for the most video game consoles hooked up to a single television. His collection includes some of the classics such as the first Sony PlayStation, the Nintendo 64 and (his personal favorite) the Sega Genesis, complete with the 32x and Sega CD expansions. He also owns and can play games on those handheld plug-and-play consoles with arcade classics like Ms. Pac-Man and Dig Dug that you find in Target, classic and modern handhelds like the Hyperkin SuperBoy and obscure consoles like the Magnavox Odyssey.

Al-Nasser uses a series of switchers to play each console on a single screen. He keeps track of their location and powering procedure on an Excel spreadsheet. He’s even organized his collection so the cables aren’t showing or creating the kind of tangled mess most of us have to deal with when we have just two consoles hooked up to a single television.

That may sound like a lot of video game consoles for one collection but it’s far from the actual record. Linda Guillory of Garland, Texas currently holds the record for the largest collection of playable gaming systems with her collection of 2,430 items, according to Guinness World Records.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/meet-the-man-who-set-a-world-record-by-hooking-up-444-consoles-to-one-tv-171848639.html?src=rss

Read More 

Sony has revealed the next slate of additions to the PlayStation Plus Game Catalog for Extra and Premium subscribers. There’s a clear headliner this month in the shape of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. CD Projekt Red’s immensely popular action RPG is often on sale for just a few bucks, but PS Plus Extra and Premium subscribers won’t have to pay anything extra to check it out if they haven’t already played it. Both PS4 and PS5 versions will be available.
Cult of the Lamb, one of the standout indie games of the last couple of years, is coming to the Game Catalog as well. It’s adorable and brutal, and now you can play with a friend in local co-op mode. Other additions for both Extra and Premium subscribers in August include Wild Hearts (EA’s take on the Monster Hunter series), Watch Dogs 2, Ride 5, Sword Art Online: Last Recollection, Naruto to Boruto: Shinobi Striker, Sword Art Online: Alicization Lycoris, Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet and Sword Art Online: Hollow Realization.
Sony is bringing some very fun classics to the mix for Premium members in the form of the TimeSplitters series from the PS2 era. TimeSplitters, TimeSplitters 2 and TimeSplitters: Future Perfect will all join the lineup. It’s still a bummer that Free Radical Design, a studio that was working on a reboot of the series, has been shut down but at least the original trilogy still exists.
Elsewhere, PS3 title Sword Art Online: Lost Song will be available through the Game Catalog but only via cloud streaming. There will also be a PS VR and PS VR2 game for Premium members in the shape of Vacation Simulator.
Note that these additions may differ depending on your region. So it’s worth double checking the Game Catalog lineup when Sony introduces the latest additions on August 20, just in case there are any surprises.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/playstation/ps-plus-game-catalog-additions-for-august-include-the-witcher-3-and-cult-of-the-lamb-165608880.html?src=rss

Sony has revealed the next slate of additions to the PlayStation Plus Game Catalog for Extra and Premium subscribers. There’s a clear headliner this month in the shape of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. CD Projekt Red’s immensely popular action RPG is often on sale for just a few bucks, but PS Plus Extra and Premium subscribers won’t have to pay anything extra to check it out if they haven’t already played it. Both PS4 and PS5 versions will be available.

Cult of the Lamb, one of the standout indie games of the last couple of years, is coming to the Game Catalog as well. It’s adorable and brutal, and now you can play with a friend in local co-op mode. Other additions for both Extra and Premium subscribers in August include Wild Hearts (EA’s take on the Monster Hunter series), Watch Dogs 2, Ride 5, Sword Art Online: Last Recollection, Naruto to Boruto: Shinobi Striker, Sword Art Online: Alicization Lycoris, Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet and Sword Art Online: Hollow Realization.

Sony is bringing some very fun classics to the mix for Premium members in the form of the TimeSplitters series from the PS2 era. TimeSplitters, TimeSplitters 2 and TimeSplitters: Future Perfect will all join the lineup. It’s still a bummer that Free Radical Design, a studio that was working on a reboot of the series, has been shut down but at least the original trilogy still exists.

Elsewhere, PS3 title Sword Art Online: Lost Song will be available through the Game Catalog but only via cloud streaming. There will also be a PS VR and PS VR2 game for Premium members in the shape of Vacation Simulator.

Note that these additions may differ depending on your region. So it’s worth double checking the Game Catalog lineup when Sony introduces the latest additions on August 20, just in case there are any surprises.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/playstation/ps-plus-game-catalog-additions-for-august-include-the-witcher-3-and-cult-of-the-lamb-165608880.html?src=rss

Read More 

Apple isn’t just opening up Near-Field Communication (NFC) access in the European Union; it’s offering third-party access to functions like tap-to-pay in the US and other regions. The company posted a notice on Wednesday announcing that third-party developers can start implementing their own contactless transaction systems through an API in the upcoming iOS 18.1.
The move follows Apple’s “legally binding” agreement with the European Commission last month to comply with EU regulations — specifically, the Digital Markets Act (DMA). That followed a four-year investigation by the governing body that found Apple liable for restricting rival mobile wallet developers from accessing the iPhone’s underlying payment tech.
Once iOS 18.1 arrives, developers can offer contactless payments (and other transactions) using the iPhone’s Secure Element, which Apple Pay also uses. The Secure Element is a dedicated chip designed for storing sensitive information accessed via the Secure Enclave, which handles encryption and biometric data.
In addition to tap-to-pay systems, NFC handles functions like digital car keys, transit cards, compatible home locks, hotel keys, student IDs, event tickets and retail loyalty and reward cards. Apple says government IDs will be “supported in the future.”
The API will initially be available not only in the US and EU regions but also in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Japan and New Zealand.
Developing…This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/apple-is-finally-opening-up-nfc-to-third-party-developers-in-ios-181-164028928.html?src=rss

Apple isn’t just opening up Near-Field Communication (NFC) access in the European Union; it’s offering third-party access to functions like tap-to-pay in the US and other regions. The company posted a notice on Wednesday announcing that third-party developers can start implementing their own contactless transaction systems through an API in the upcoming iOS 18.1.

The move follows Apple’s “legally binding” agreement with the European Commission last month to comply with EU regulations — specifically, the Digital Markets Act (DMA). That followed a four-year investigation by the governing body that found Apple liable for restricting rival mobile wallet developers from accessing the iPhone’s underlying payment tech.

Once iOS 18.1 arrives, developers can offer contactless payments (and other transactions) using the iPhone’s Secure Element, which Apple Pay also uses. The Secure Element is a dedicated chip designed for storing sensitive information accessed via the Secure Enclave, which handles encryption and biometric data.

In addition to tap-to-pay systems, NFC handles functions like digital car keys, transit cards, compatible home locks, hotel keys, student IDs, event tickets and retail loyalty and reward cards. Apple says government IDs will be “supported in the future.”

The API will initially be available not only in the US and EU regions but also in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Japan and New Zealand.

Developing…

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/apple-is-finally-opening-up-nfc-to-third-party-developers-in-ios-181-164028928.html?src=rss

Read More 

Waymo driverless cars in San Francisco have been coming back online at night and honking at each other, as reported by CBS News. Videos have begun circulating showing dozens of the vehicles sitting in the same parking lot and just honking away without a care in the world. This has, obviously, irked some human neighbors who need sleep.

Is this a sign of the forthcoming AI apocalypse or is it some robotaxis learning how to flirt? Unfortunately for those looking for a “robots in love” narrative, it’s neither. It’s just an error within the security software. Simply put, the software mandates a honk when another car gets too close. These particular Waymo taxis sit right next to one another in a cramped parking lot when not in use and, well, there you go.
“We recently introduced a useful feature to help avoid low-speed collisions by honking if other cars get too close while reversing toward us,” the company said in a statement. “It has been working great in the city, but we didn’t quite anticipate it would happen so often in our own parking lots.”
Waymo says that it has updated the software to address the issue, noting that “our electric vehicles should keep the noise down for our neighbors moving forward.” So that’s that. Another mystery solved.
Despite this brief foray into vehicular anthropomorphism, Waymo is still expanding its taxi service. It’s currently available to anyone with the app who’s located in San Francisco, Phoenix and a small section of Los Angeles. The company recently touted that these robotaxis complete 50,000 paid trips per week.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/waymo-driverless-cars-have-gotten-inexplicably-chatty-honking-at-one-another-all-night-162115440.html?src=rss

Waymo driverless cars in San Francisco have been coming back online at night and honking at each other, as reported by CBS News. Videos have begun circulating showing dozens of the vehicles sitting in the same parking lot and just honking away without a care in the world. This has, obviously, irked some human neighbors who need sleep.

Is this a sign of the forthcoming AI apocalypse or is it some robotaxis learning how to flirt? Unfortunately for those looking for a “robots in love” narrative, it’s neither. It’s just an error within the security software. Simply put, the software mandates a honk when another car gets too close. These particular Waymo taxis sit right next to one another in a cramped parking lot when not in use and, well, there you go.

“We recently introduced a useful feature to help avoid low-speed collisions by honking if other cars get too close while reversing toward us,” the company said in a statement. “It has been working great in the city, but we didn’t quite anticipate it would happen so often in our own parking lots.”

Waymo says that it has updated the software to address the issue, noting that “our electric vehicles should keep the noise down for our neighbors moving forward.” So that’s that. Another mystery solved.

Despite this brief foray into vehicular anthropomorphism, Waymo is still expanding its taxi service. It’s currently available to anyone with the app who’s located in San Francisco, Phoenix and a small section of Los Angeles. The company recently touted that these robotaxis complete 50,000 paid trips per week.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/waymo-driverless-cars-have-gotten-inexplicably-chatty-honking-at-one-another-all-night-162115440.html?src=rss

Read More