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Amazon's Big Spring Sale ended earlier this week, but a handful of the better tech discounts we saw during the event are still kicking. We've also found a few new deals of note, including all-time lows on the newest MacBook Air, the best price to date for an Apple AirTags four-pack, a larger-than-usual drop for the top pick in our webcam buying guide and more. Here are the best tech deals from this week that you can still get today.

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/apples-macbook-air-m3-hits-an-all-time-low-plus-the-rest-of-the-weeks-best-tech-deals-163049166.html?src=rss

Enlarge / A Cold War-era arcade cabinet that serves as an example of what happened the last time Russia was forced to create a home-grown video game market. (credit: Arcade Blogger)

It's been over two years since major players in the international game industry united to largely cut off the Russian market in response to a request from a beleaguered Ukraine. The relative isolation has apparently forced Vladimir Putin's government to contemplate the kind of homegrown gaming hardware and software that characterized Cold War gaming behind the Iron Curtain.

PC Gamer brings word of a series of recently approved Russian economic orders from the Kremlin. Amid talk of airport and museum funding, ocean shipping, and road construction is the somewhat bewildering instruction for the government to (machine translation):

consider the issue of organizing the production of stationary and portable game consoles and game consoles, as well as the creation of an operating system and a cloud system for delivering games and programs to users

Oh, is that all?

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I had a favorite version of Mulan growing up (Anita Yuen in the 1998 Taiwanese TV series). I obsessed over Chinese period TV series like Legend of the Condor Heroes, My Fair Princess and The Book and the Sword. I consider myself fairly well-versed in Chinese historical figures, especially those represented in ‘90s and 2000s entertainment in Asia. So when I found out that a UK-based studio had made a VR game called The Pirate Queen based on a forgotten female leader who was prolific in the South China Sea, I was shocked. How had I never heard of her? How had the Asian film and TV industry never covered her?

I got to play a bit of the game this week, which was released on the Meta Quest store and Steam on March 7th. The titular character Cheng Shih is voiced by actor Lucy Liu, who also executive produced this version of the game with UK-based Singer Studios’ CEO and founder Eloise Singer. Liu and Singer sat with me for an interview discussing The Pirate Queen, Cheng Shih, VR’s strengths and the importance of cultural and historical accuracy in games and films.

Cheng Shih, which translates to “Madam Cheng” or “Mrs Cheng,” was born Shi Yang. After she married the pirate Cheng Yi (usually romanized as Zheng Yi), she became known as Cheng Yi Sao, which translates to “wife of Cheng Yi.” Together they led the Guangdong Pirate Confederation in the 1800s. Upon her husband’s death in 1807, she took over the reins and went on to become what South China Morning Post described as “history’s greatest pirate.”

Singer Studios

How did Singer Studios learn about Cheng Shih and decide to build a game (and upcoming franchise including a film, podcast and graphic novels) around her? According to Singer, it was through word of mouth. “It was a friend of mine who first told me the story,” Singer said. “She said, ‘Did you know that the most famous pirate in history was a woman?’”

Cheng Shih had been loosely referenced in various films and games before this, like the character Mistress Ching in the 2007 film Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End and Jing Lang in Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. As Singer pointed out, Cheng Shih had also appeared in a recent episode of Doctor Who.

Singer said that her team started developing the project as a film at the end of 2018. But the pandemic disrupted their plans, causing Singer to adapt it into a game. A short version of The Pirate Queen later debuted at Raindance Film Festival, and shortly after, Meta came onboard and provided funding to complete development of the game. Liu was then approached when the full version was ready and about to make its appearance at Tribeca Film Festival 2023.

“The rest is history,” Liu said, “But not forgotten history.” She said Cheng Shih was never really recognized for being the most powerful pirate. “It seems so crazy that in the 19th century, this woman who started as a courtesan would then rise to power and then have this fleet of pirates that she commanded,” Liu added. She went on to talk about how Cheng Shih was ahead of the time and also represented “a bit of an underdog story.” For the full 15-minute interview, you can watch the video in this article or listen to this week’s episode of The Engadget Podcast and learn more about Liu and Singer’s thoughts on VR and technology over the last 20 years.

Capturing the historical and cultural details of Cheng Shih’s life was paramount to Liu and Singer. They said the team had to create women’s hands from scratch to be represented from the player’s perspective in VR, and a dialect coach was hired to help Liu nail the pronunciation for the Cantonese words that Cheng Shih speaks in the game. Though I’m not completely certain if Cheng Shih spoke Mandarin or Cantonese, the latter seems like the more accurate choice given it’s the lingua franca in the Guangdong region.

Singer Studios

All that added to the immersiveness of The Pirate Queen, in which players find themselves in an atmospheric maritime environment. The Meta Quest 3’s controllers served as my hands in the game, and I rowed boats, climbed rope ladders and picked up items with relative ease. Some of the mechanics, especially the idea of “teleportation” as moving around, were a little clunky, but after about five minutes I got used to how things worked. You’ll have to point the left controller and push the joystick when you’ve chosen a spot, and the scene changes around you. This probably minimizes the possibility of nausea, since you’re not standing still while watching your surroundings move. It’s also pretty typical of VR games, so those who have experience playing in headsets will likely be familiar with the movement.

You can still walk around and explore, of course. I scrutinized the corners of rooms, inspected the insides of cabinets and more, while hunting for keys that would unlock boxes containing clues. A lot of this is pretty standard for a puzzle or room escape game, which is what I used to play the most in my teens. But I was particularly taken by sequences like rowing a boat across the sea and climbing up a rope ladder, both of which caused me to break a mild sweat. Inside Cheng Shih’s cabin, I lit a joss stick and placed it in an incense holder — an action I repeated every week at my grandfather’s altar when I was growing up. It felt so realistic that I tried to wave the joss stick to put out the flame and could almost smell the smoke.

It’s these types of activities that make VR games great vehicles for education and empathy. “We didn’t want to have these combat elements that traditional VR games do have,” Singer said, adding that it was one of the challenges in creating The Pirate Queen.

“It’s nice to see and to learn and be part of that, as opposed to ‘Let’s turn to page 48,’” Liu said. “That’s not as exciting as doing something and being actively part of something.” When you play as a historical character in a game, and one that’s as immersive as a VR game, “you’re living that person’s life or that moment in time,” Liu added.

While The Pirate Queen is currently only available on Quest devices, Singer said there are plans to bring it to “as many headsets as we possibly can.” Singer Studios also said it is “extending The Pirate Queen franchise beyond VR into a graphic novel, film and television series.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-pirate-queen-interview-how-singer-studios-and-lucy-liu-brought-forgotten-history-to-life-160007029.html?src=rss

Enlarge / Edmunds surveyed 300 car buyers who were considering a new EV in January 2024. (credit: Getty Images)

There is a significant mismatch between the people who want to buy electric vehicles and the people who want to sell them. That's according to data from a new survey by Edmunds, which polled people shopping for new cars in January. These prospective buyers want affordable sedans and SUVs, segments of the market that are being ignored by automakers. Instead, they're being offered expensive EVs, including plenty of trucks, for which there is little demand.

Almost half (47 percent) of the 300 people surveyed said they want to spend less than $40,000 on a new EV. And just over 1 in 5 (22 percent) said that they don't want to pay more than $30,000. But currently, no new EV is on sale below this price, and only a handful of EVs (Mini Cooper SE, Fiat 500e, Hyundai Kona Electric, Nissan Leaf, and Tesla Model 3) are on sale for less than $40,000.

According to Edmunds' data, the average transaction price of a new EV was $61,702 in 2023, compared to $47,450 for other vehicles.

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Last year, Polestar announced its most practical EV yet in the Polestar 4. But this week, during the vehicle’s North American debut at the New York International Auto Show, we finally got an official launch price and a chance to check out its most controversial feature.

Positioned as a slightly smaller and more affordable version of the Polestar 3, the company's latest EV SUV has a lot riding on it as it looks to be Polestar's most appealing mainstream offering to date. The good news is that while the cost was initially said to be around $60,000, launch pricing actually comes in slightly below that. The Polestar 4 starts at $56,300 (including destination) for the standard long-range single-motor version with around 300 miles of range while the dual-motor AWD variant with around 270 miles will set you back $64,300.

Photo by Sam Rutherford/Engadget

Granted, that’s still significantly higher than many of its rivals including the Tesla Model Y which starts at $43,900 (before federal incentives) or the Hyundai Ioniq 5 at $47,400. But after talking to Polestar CEO Thomas Ingenlath, I got the sense that the company is kind of OK with that, as they view the 4 as a more approachable but still very premium offering among EV SUVs.

On the outside, the Polestar 4 retains the rakish good looks we’ve seen on its larger sibling but with a few twists. Its nose is a bit pointier and more sloped, and it’s a bit less complicated too as it doesn’t have a front wing like the 3. The Polestar 4 is still based on the low-slung coupe-like SUV shape that’s all the rage right now. However, to ensure that rear-seat passengers have ample room, Polestar has forgone a rear window entirely, opting instead for a simple sheet of metal along with cameras and a rearview mirror with an embedded display.

Photo by Sam Rutherford/Engadget

At first, this might seem like a step too far, even for an EV that might not be beholden to the same burden of tradition as gas cars. But Ingenlath explained that there are a lot of advantages that come from this design change. By not having a rear window, Polestar was able to push the rear seats back further while maintaining ample headroom despite the sloping roofline, which creates a spacious cabin. I had no trouble climbing in and out and even with the front seats pushed as far back as possible, I still had ample legroom in the back. Furthermore, unlike most cars, the Polestar 4’s rear seats can recline, which adds even more of a loungey feel.

Another major advantage is one of practicality. As it is, the rear windows on a lot of coupe SUVs are so small they don’t provide much in the way of useful visibility. And that’s before you consider any passengers or luggage that might further obstruct your view. By replacing the rear window and mirror with a camera and a display, the Polestar 4 can offer an unobstructed perspective out of the back of the car. But perhaps most importantly, the idea of a car not having a rear window isn’t really unheard of, as there are thousands of cargo vans on the road today without a viewport in back.

So while the idea might still seem nerve-wracking, Ingenlath remains confident. He simply asked customers to “try it.” He added “There's so much about psychology and people being naturally opposed to change. But innovation is about asking what have been the rules in the past that don't necessarily need to be the rules in the future.”

The company’s Scandinavian heritage shows through with a streamlined interior. That said, Ingenlath said the goal isn’t minimalism for minimalism’s sake. By creating a new fabric made from recycled plastic bottles called Soft Tech, Polestar was able to line the cabin with a sustainable 3D material that allows ambient lighting to shine through while still being quite durable. Up top, the fixed glass roof is electrochromic, which allows it to switch from transparent to opaque with the touch of a button.

Photo by Sam Rutherford/Engadget

One thing that stuck out to me was that like all of Polestar’s vehicles, the 4 feels like a designer’s car. As someone who got his start in the industry creating cars for VW, Audi and others before becoming the CEO of Polestar, Ingenlath said the company really cares about small details like the font and typography. You can see this in things like the text on the driver’s side door, which features both the name of the car and the size of its battery, resulting in a label that’s both pretty and informative. Alternatively, there are features like the ambient lighting, which uses a naming standard based on planets in the solar system (blue with a hint of green for Earth, red for Mars, etc.). Ingenlath said “We simply love what we're doing, and we love indulging that passion. And we have to find the people who share the same passion for that type of quality and technology.”

Unfortunately, we haven’t had the chance to take the 4 out for a drive just yet. But as the competition among EVs continues to increase, it’s clear Polestar is carving out a niche as a manufacturer that embraces innovation through its vehicles. With pre-orders going live sometime in April and deliveries slated for Q4 2024, it shouldn’t be long until we get a chance to experience how the Polestar 4 feels on the road.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/polestar-4-first-look-when-no-rear-window-makes-for-a-better-car-150052884.html?src=rss

In 2014, WIRED asked me to write a few lines about my most-used app as part of an internship application. I wrote about WhatsApp because it was a no-brainer. I was an international student from India, and it was my lifeline to my family and to my girlfriend, now my wife, who lived on the other side of the world. “This cross-platform messenger gets all the credit for my long-distance relationship of two years, which is still going strong,” I wrote in my application. “Skype is great, Google+ Hangouts are the best thing to have happened since Gmail but nothing says ‘I love you’ like a WhatsApp text message.”

A few months into that internship, Facebook announced it was buying WhatsApp for a staggering $19 billion. In WIRED’s newsroom, there were audible gasps at this seemingly minor player's price tag. American journalists weren’t exactly unfamiliar with WhatsApp. But much of the country was still locked in a battle between green and blue bubbles, even as the rest of the world had switched to an app created by two former Yahoo! engineers in WIRED’s Mountain View backyard.

Text messaging was one of the few things you could do on WhatsApp in 2014. There were no emoji you could react with, no high-definition videos you could send, no GIFs or stickers, no read receipts until the end of that year and certainly no voice or video calling. And yet, more than 500 million people around the world were hooked, reveling in the freedom of using nascent cellular data to swap unlimited messages with friends and family instead of paying mobile carriers per text.

WhatsApp’s founders, Jan Koum and Brian Acton, launched the app in 2009 simply to display status messages next to people’s names in a phone’s contact book. But after Apple introduced push notifications on the iPhone later that year, it evolved into a full-blown messaging service. Now, 15 years later, WhatsApp has become a lot more — an integral part of the propaganda machinery of political parties in India and Brazil, a way for millions of businesses to reach customers, a way to send money to people and merchants, a distribution platform for publications, brands and influencers, a video conferencing system and a private social network for older adults. And it is still a great way for long-distance lovers to stay connected.

“WhatsApp is kind of like a media platform and kind of like a messaging platform, but it’s also not quite those things,” Surya Mattu, a researcher at Princeton who runs the university’s Digital Witness Lab, which studies how information flows through WhatsApp, told Engadget. “It has the scale of a social media platform, but it doesn’t have the traditional problems of one because there are no recommendations and no social graph.”

Indeed, WhatsApp’s scale dwarfs nearly every social network and messaging app out there. In 2020, WhatsApp announced it had more than two billion users around the world. It’s bigger than iMessage (1.3 billion users), TikTok (1 billion), Telegram (800 million), Snap (400 million) and Signal (40 million.) It stands head and shoulders above fellow Meta platform Instagram, which captures around 1.4 billion users. The only thing bigger than WhatsApp is Facebook itself, with more than three billion users .

WhatsApp has become the world’s default communications platform. Ten years after it was acquired, its growth shows no sign of stopping. Even in the US, it is finally beginning to break through the green and blue bubble battles and is reportedly one of Meta’s fastest-growing services. As Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told the New York Times last year, WhatsApp is the “next chapter” for the company.

Will Cathcart, a longtime Meta executive, who took over WhatsApp in 2019 after its original founders departed the company, credits WhatsApp’s early global growth to it being free (or nearly free — at one point, WhatsApp charged people $1 a year), running on almost any phone, including the world’s millions of low-end Android devices, reliably delivering messages even in large swathes of the planet with suboptimal network conditions and, most importantly, being dead simple, free of the bells and whistles that bloat most other messaging apps. In 2013, a year before Facebook acquired it, WhatsApp added the ability to send short audio messages.

“That was really powerful,” Cathcart told Engadget, “People who don’t have high rates of literacy or someone new to the internet could spin up WhatsApp, use it for the first time and understand it.”

In 2016, WhatsApp added end-to-end encryption, something Cathcart said was a huge selling point. The feature made WhatsApp a black box, hiding the contents of messages from everyone — even WhatsApp — except the sender and the receiver. The same year, WhatsApp announced that one billion people were using the service every month.

That explosive growth came with a huge flip side: As hundreds of millions of people in heavily populated regions, like Brazil and India, came online for the first time, thanks to inexpensive smartphone and data prices, WhatsApp became a conduit for hoaxes and misinformation to flow freely. In India, currently WhatsApp’s largest market with more than 700 million users, the app overflowed with propaganda and disinformation against opposition political parties, cheerleading Narendra Modi, the country’s nationalist Prime Minister accused of destroying its secular fabric.

Then people started dying. In 2017 and 2018, frenzied mobs in remote parts of the country high on baseless rumors about child abductors forwarded through WhatsApp, lynched nearly two dozen people in 13 separate incidents. In response to the crisis, WhatsApp swung into action. Among other things, it made significant product changes, such as clearly labeling forwarded messages — the primary way misformation spread across the service — as well as severely restricting the number of people and groups users could forward content to at the same time.

In Brazil, the app is widely seen as a key tool in the country’s former President Jair Bolsonaro’s 2018 win. Bolsonaro, a far-right strongman, was accused of getting his supporters to circumvent WhatsApp’s spam controls to run elaborate misinformation campaigns, blasting thousands of WhatsApp messages attacking his opponent, Fernando Haddad.

Since these incidents, WhatsApp has established fact-checking partnerships with more than 50 fact-checking organizations globally (because WhatsApp is encrypted, fact-checkers depend on users reporting messages to their WhatsApp hotlines and respond with fact checks). It also made additional product changes, like letting users quickly Google a forwarded message to fact-check it within the app. “Over time, there might be more things we can do,” said Cathcart, including potentially using AI to help with WhatsApp’s fact-checking. “There’s a bunch of interesting things we could do there, I don’t think we’re done,” he said.

Recently, WhatsApp has rapidly added new features, such as the ability to share large files, messages that auto-destruct after they’re viewed, Instagram-like Stories (called Statuses) and larger group calls, among other things. But a brand new feature rolled out globally in fall 2023 called Channels points to WhatsApp’s ambitions to become more than a messaging app. WhatsApp described Channels, in a blog post announcing the launch, as “a one-way broadcast tool for admins to send text, photos, videos, stickers and polls.” They’re a bit like a Twitter feed from brands, publishers and people you choose to follow. It has a dedicated tab in WhatsApp, although interaction with content is limited to responding with emoji — no replies. There are currently thousands of Channels on WhatsApp and 250-plus have more than a million followers each, WhatsApp told Engadget. They include Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny (18.9 million followers), Narendra Modi (13.8 million followers), FC Barcelona (27.7 million followers) and the WWE (10.9 million followers). And even though it’s early days, Channels is fast becoming a way for publishers to distribute their content and build an audience.

“It took a year for us to grow to an audience of 35,000 on Telegram,” Rachel Banning-Lover, the head of social media and development at the Financial Times (155,000 followers) told Nieman Lab in November. “Comparatively, we [grew] a similar-sized following [on WhatsApp] in two weeks.”

WhatsApp’s success at consistently adding new functionality without succumbing to feature sprawl has allowed it to thrive, both with its core audience and also, more recently, with users in the US. According to data that analytics firm Data.ai shared with Engadget, WhatsApp had nearly 83 million users in the US in January 2024, compared to 80 million a year before. A couple of years ago, WhatsApp ran an advertising campaign in the US — its first in the country — where billboards and TV spots touted the app’s focus on privacy.

It’s a sentiment shared by Zuckerberg himself, who, in 2021, shared a “privacy-focused vision for social networking” on his Facebook page. “I believe the future of communication will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident that what they say to each other stays secure and their messages and content won’t stick around,” he wrote. “This is the future I hope we will help bring about.”

Meta has now begun using WhatsApp’s sheer scale to generate revenue, although it’s unclear so far how much money, if any, the app makes. “The business model we’re really excited about and one that we’ve been growing for a couple of years successfully is helping people talk to businesses on WhatsApp,” Cathcart said. “That’s a great experience.” Meta monetizes WhatsApp by charging large businesses to integrate the platform directly into existing systems they use to manage interactions with customers. And it integrates the whole system with Facebook, allowing businesses to place ads on Facebook that, when clicked, open directly to a WhatsApp chat with the business. These have become the fastest-growing ad format across Meta, the company told The New York Times.

A few years ago, a configuration change in Facebook’s internal network knocked multiple Facebook services, including WhatsApp, off the internet for more than six hours and ground the world to a halt.

“It’s like the equivalent of your phone and the phones of all of your loved ones being turned off without warning. [WhatsApp] essentially functions as an unregulated utility,” journalist Aura Bogado reportedly wrote on X (then Twitter). In New Delhi and Brazil, gig workers were unable to reach customers and lost out on wages. In London, crypto trades stopped as traders were unable to communicate with clients. One firm claimed a drop of 15 percent. In Russia, oil markets were hit after traders were unable to get in touch with buyers in Europe and Asia placing orders.

Fifteen years after it was created, the messaging app now runs the world.

To celebrate Engadget's 20th anniversary, we're taking a look back at the products and services that have changed the industry since March 2, 2004.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/how-whatsapp-became-the-worlds-default-communication-app-144520113.html?src=rss

Enlarge / Hertz currently has more than a thousand Bolt EUVs for sale as they leave its rental car fleet. (credit: Chevrolet)

Electric vehicles have many advantages over cars that still use internal combustion engines. They're far more efficient, they're quieter, and they usually have much more torque than their gasoline-powered equivalents. But we're still far from achieving price parity between powertrains. In other words, EVs are expensive.

One place you can find some bargains, though, is the rental company Hertz, which currently has more than 2,100 EVs for sale, more than half of which are affordable enough to qualify for the IRS used clean vehicle tax credit.

Hertz has been adding a lot of EVs to its fleet as part of the company's decarbonization plan. In 2021, it revealed plans to purchase 100,000 Teslas. However, the controversial car maker had delivered fewer than half of those two years later, and long repair times for customer-inflicted damage have seen the rental agency divest itself of many of those Tesla and diversify its fleet, adding plenty of Polestars, Kias, and Chevrolets.

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Enlarge (credit: iStock via Getty Images)

OpenAI has launched a charm offensive in Hollywood, holding meetings with major studios including Paramount, Universal, and Warner Bros Discovery to showcase its video generation technology Sora and allay fears the artificial intelligence model will harm the movie industry.

Chief Executive Sam Altman and Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap gave presentations to executives from the film industry giants, said multiple people with knowledge of the meetings, which took place in recent days.

Altman and Lightcap showed off Sora, a new generative AI model that can create detailed videos from simple written prompts.

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This week, it’s all about cars and Lucy Liu in VR. Devindra chats with Senior Writer Sam Rutherford about his visit to the New York International Auto Show, where he saw the Polestar 4, a unique new EV without a rear window. Also, Cherlynn pops in to chat with Lucy Liu about her new VR game, The Pirate Queen. We also explore the issues around Florida’s bill banning young kids from social media sites, and Sam tells us why he likes Netflix’s Avatar: The Last Airbender adaptation.

Listen below or subscribe on your podcast app of choice. If you've got suggestions or topics you'd like covered on the show, be sure to email us or drop a note in the comments! And be sure to check out our other podcast, Engadget News!

Topics

• Sam Rutherford on what’s new in EVs and car tech from the New York Auto Show – 0:57

• Cherlynn Low interviews Lucy Liu about her new VR game The Pirate Queen – 34:39

• Florida Governor signs bill banning young children from social media – 54:55

• Intel confirms Copilot will eventually run locally – 58:33

• There’s finally a version of Chrome that runs well on ARM-based Windows machines – 1:02:43

• Canadian researchers have created a camera that takes 156.3 trillion frames per second – 1:05:06

• Working on – 1:07:08

• Pop culture picks – 1:12:44

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Credits 

Hosts: Devindra Hardawar and Sam Rutherford
Guest: Cherlynn Low and Lucy Liu
Producer: Ben Ellman
Music: Dale North and Terrence O'Brien

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/engadget-podcast-us-tiktok-ban-123047573.html?src=rss

Elon Musk's answer to ChatGPT is getting an update to make it better at math, coding and more. Musk's xAI has launched Grok-1.5 to early testers with "improved capabilities and reasoning" and the ability to process longer contexts. The company claims it now stacks up against GPT-4, Gemini Pro 1.5 and Claude 3 Opus in several areas. 

Going by xAI's numbers, Grok-1.5 appears to be a large improvement over Grok-1. It shot up to 50.6 percent in the MATH benchmark, over double the previous score. It also climbed to 90 percent and 74.1 percent in GSM8K (math word problems) and HumanEval (coding), respectively, compared to 62.9 percent and 63.2 percent before. Those numbers are within shouting distance of Gemini Pro 1.5, GPT-4 and Claude 3 Opus — in fact, the HumanEval coding score beats all rivals except Claude 3 Opus.

xAI

It can also process long contexts of up to 128K tokens within its context window, meaning it can amalgamate data from more sources to understand a situation. "This allows Grok to have an increased memory capacity of up to 16 times the previous context length, enabling it to utilize information from substantially longer documents," the company said.

xAI didn't detail Grok's progress in other areas, though, where it still may be lagging (academic scores, multimodal and others). And Grok-1.5 may not keep its position for long. ChatGPT 5 is set to arrive sometime this summer, promising a feature set that "makes it feel like you are communicating with a person rather than a machine," according to OpenAI. 

Currently, Grok is only available for users of the Premium+ tier on X (formerly Twitter), though Elon Musk recently promised to open it up to X's regular Premium users. The company also recently open sourced its Grok chatbot, after Musk sued OpenAI and Sam Altman for allegedly abandoning its non-profit mission. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/elon-musks-updated-grok-ai-claims-to-be-better-at-coding-and-math-120056776.html?src=rss

Enlarge / The final Delta IV Heavy rocket is seen on the launch pad in Florida. (credit: United Launch Alliance)

Welcome to Edition 6.37 of the Rocket Report! The big story this week is the final launch of the Delta IV Heavy rocket, which is one of the biggest spectacles to enjoy lifting away from the planet. Because of a scrub on Thursday, there is still time to clear your calendar for a second attempt on Friday at 1:37 pm ET in Florida.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Orbex patents reusable rocket tech. The British launch company said this week it has patented a "REFLIGHT" technology that enables the recovery of the first stage of its small Prime rocket. Essentially, Orbex designed an interstage that will function somewhat like grid fins on the Falcon 9 rocket's first stage. "After Stage 1 detaches from Stage 2, the interstage on top of Stage 1 reconfigures into four ‘petals’ which fold out and create drag forces that passively reorients and slows the spent rocket stage’s descent to Earth," the company stated.

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Enlarge / NASA's and Lockheed Martin's X-59 experimental supersonic jet is unveiled during a ceremony in Palmdale, California, on January 12, 2024. (credit: Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images)

When Chuck Yeager reached Mach 1 on October 14, 1947, the entire frame of his Bell X-1 aircraft suddenly started to shake, and the controls went. A crew observing the flight in a van on the ground reported hearing something like a distant, rolling thunder. They were probably the first people on Earth to hear a boom made by a supersonic aircraft.

The boom felt like an innocent curiosity at first but soon turned into a nightmare. In no time, supersonic jets—F-100 Super Sabers, F-101 Voodoos, and B-58 Hustlers—came to Air Force bases across the US, and with them came the booms. Proper, panes-flying-off-the windows supersonic booms. People filed over 40,000 complaints about nuisance and property damage caused by booming jets, which eventually ended up with the Federal Aviation Administration imposing a Mach 1 speed limit for flights over land in 1973.

Now, NASA wants this ban to go. It has started the Quesst mission to go fast over American cities once more. But this time, it wants to do it quietly.

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The major players in live TV streaming are YouTube TV, Hulu + Live TV, FuboTV, Sling and DirecTV Stream, with Philo rounding things out as a good budget option. Each one purports to replicate cable with vast channel offerings, local news, sports and linear programming — and most services promise to be cheaper than cable, too. That’s true in some cases, but depending on which and how many add-ons and packages you get in addition to the base service, it can also end up being far more expensive than basic cable. To help you get the most bang for your buck, we break down just what live TV services offer and suggest the best ones for different viewers.

What to look for in a live TV streaming service How to stream live TV

Streaming live TV is a lot like using Netflix. You get access through apps on your phone, tablet, smart TV or streaming device and the signal arrives over the internet. A faster and more stable connection tends to give you a better experience. Most live TV apps require you to sign up and pay via a web browser. After that, you can activate the app on your device.

Price

When I started my cord-cutting research, I was struck by the price difference between live TV and a standard streaming app like Netflix or Peacock. Where the latter cost between $5 and $20 per month, many live TV services hit the $75 mark and can go higher than $200 with additional perks, channel packages and premium extras. The higher starting price is mostly due to the cost of providing multiple networks – particularly sports and local stations. And, in the past year or so, every service except Philo and Sling has raised base plan prices.

Local channels

Only two of the services we tried don’t include full local channel coverage for subscribers and one of those makes no effort at carrying sports. That would be Philo and, as you might guess, it’s the cheapest. The next most affordable option, Sling, only carries three local stations, and only in larger markets, but it still manages to include some of the top sports channels.

When you sign up with any provider that handles local TV, you’ll enter your zip code, ensuring you get your area’s broadcast affiliates for ABC, CBS, FOX and NBC. Of course, you can also get those stations for free. Nearly all modern television sets support a radio frequency (RF) connection, also known as the coaxial port, which means if you buy an HD antenna, you’ll receive locally broadcast stations like ABC, CBS, FOX and NBC. And since the signal is digital, reception is much improved over the staticky rabbit-ears era.

Sports

One reality that spun my head was the sheer number and iterations of sports networks in existence. Trying to figure out which network will carry the match-up you want to see can be tricky. Google makes it a little easier for sports fans by listing out upcoming games (just swap in NFL, MLB, NHL and so on in the search bar). When you click an event, the “TV & streaming” button will tell you which network is covering it.

That just leaves figuring out if your chosen service carries that regional sports network. Unfortunately, even with add-ons and extra packages, some providers simply don’t have certain channel lineups. It would take a lawyer to understand the ins and outs of streaming rights negotiations, and networks leave and return to live TV carriers all the time. That said, most major sporting events in the US are covered by ESPN, Fox Sports, TNT, USA and local affiliates.

It's also worth noting that traditional streaming services have started adding live sports to their lineups. Peacock carries live Premier League matches and Sunday Night Football. Max now airs select, regular season games from the NHL, MLB, NCAA and NBA with a $10-per-month add-on. You can watch MLS games with an add-on through the Apple TV app, and Apple TV+ includes some MLB games. And finally, if you subscribe to Paramount Plus, you can see many of the matches you’d see on CBS Sports. While these options won’t cover as much ground as live TV streamers, they could scratch a sports itch without too much added cost.

Amy Skorheim / Engadget Traditional cable networks

Dozens of linear programming networks were once only available with cable TV, like Bravo, BET, Food Network, HGTV, CNN, Lifetime, SYFY and MTV. If you only subscribe to, say, Netflix or Apple TV+, you won’t have access to those. But as with sports, standard streamers are starting to incorporate this content into their offerings. After the Warner Bros. merger, Max incorporated some content from HGTV, Discovery and TLC. Peacock has Bravo and Hallmark shows, and Paramount+ has material from Nickelodeon, MTV and Comedy Central.

Other channels like AMC+ have stand-alone apps. The Discovery+ app gives you 15 channels add-free for $9 per month. And a service called Frndly TV costs a mere $7 per month and streams A&E, Lifetime, Game Show Network, Vice and about 35 others. Of course, most live TV streaming options will deliver more sizable lists of cable networks, but just note that you may already be paying for some of them — and if all you need is a certain channel, you could get it cheaper by subscribing directly.

How to stream live TV for free

We also tested a few apps that offer free ad-supported TV (FAST) including Freevee, Tubi, PlutoTV and Sling Freestream. They let you drop in and watch a more limited selection of live networks at zero cost. Most don’t even require an email address, let alone a credit card. And if you have a Roku device, an Amazon Fire TV Stick or a Samsung TV, you already have access to hundreds of live channels via the Roku Channel, the live tab in Fire TV or through the Samsung TV Plus app.

Digital video recordings (DVR)

Every option we’ve included offers cloud DVR storage, so you don’t need a separate physical device like you often do with traditional cable. You’ll either get unlimited storage for recordings that expires after nine months or a year, or you’ll get a set number of hours (between 50 and 1,000) that you can keep indefinitely. Typically, all you need to do is designate what you want to record and the DVR component will do all the hard work of saving subsequent episodes for you to watch later.

Aside from being able to watch whenever it’s most convenient, you can also fast-forward through commercials in recorded content. In contrast, you can’t skip them on live TV or video-on-demand (VOD).

Most live TV subscriptions include access to a selection of VOD content including movies and shows that are currently airing on your subscribed networks. This typically doesn’t cover live events, local shows and news programming. But it does let you watch specific episodes of ongoing shows like Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives or BET’s Sistas. Just search the on-demand library for the program, pick an episode and hit play.

Tiers, packages and add-ons

Comparing price-to-offering ratios is a task for a spreadsheet. I… made three. The base plans range from $25 to $80 per month. From there, you can add packages, which are usually groups of live TV channels bundled by themes like news, sports, entertainment or international content. Premium VOD extras like Max, AMC+ and Starz are also available. Add-ons cost an extra $5 to $20 each per month and simply show up in the guide where you find the rest of your live TV. This is where streaming can quickly get expensive, pushing an $80 subscription to $200 monthly, depending on what you choose.

How we tested

When I begin testing for a guide, I research the most popular and well-reviewed players in the category and narrow down which are worth trying. For the paid plans, just six services dominate so I tried them all. There are considerably more free live TV contenders so I tested the four most popular. After getting accounts set up using my laptop, I downloaded the apps on a Samsung smart TV running the latest version of Tizen OS. I counted the local stations and regional sports coverage, and noted how many of last year's top cable networks were available. I then weighed the prices, base packages and available add-ons.

I then looked at how the programming was organized in each app’s UI and judged how easy everything was to navigate, from the top navigation to the settings. To test the search function, I searched for the same few TV shows on BET, Food Network, HGTV and Comedy Central, since all six providers carry those channels. I noted how helpful the searches were and how quickly they got me to season 6, episode 13 of Home Town.

I used DVR to record entire series and single movies and watched VOD shows, making sure to test the pause and scan functions. On each service with sports, I searched for the same four upcoming NHL, NBA, MLS and NCAA basketball matches and used the record option to save the games and play them back a day or two later. Finally, I noted any extra perks or irritating quirks.

Here’s the full list of everything we tried:

• Philo

• Sling

• YouTube TV

• Hulu + Live TV

• DirecTV Stream

• FuboTV

Free ad-supported live TV:

• Freevee

• Tubi

• PlutoTV

• Sling Freestream

Best free live TV streaming services

Many standard streaming apps have added live components to their lineups. You’re paying for the service, so it’s not technically “free,” but you can get a dose of live TV without spending more than necessary. Peacock includes some regional NBC stations and Paramount+ subscribers can watch on-air CBS programming. The standard Hulu app has a live ABC news channel and Max now includes a live CNN outlet with its service.

Amazon Prime Video contains a live TV tab, as does the Fire TV interface. And, if you use Roku or Samsung as your smart OS of choice, their built-in, proprietary services include hundreds of live channels at no extra cost. Plus there are free apps from Plex and PBS — even NASA has a free streaming service.

But if you want a full suite of live TV networks, and don’t want to sign up for any paid service, there are a number of free ad-supported TV services that have live TV. Here's the best of what we tried:

Frequently asked questions What streaming service is best for live TV?

FuboTV does the best job of letting you organize live channels to help you find just what you want to watch. The interface is uncluttered and when you search for something, the UI clearly tells you whether something is live now or on-demand. YouTube TV also does a good job making that info clear. Both have just over 100 live channels on offer.

What is the most cost effective TV streaming service?

Free TV streaming services like PlutoTV, Plex, Tubi and FreeVee show plenty of ad-supported TV shows and movies without charging you anything. Of course, they won’t have the same channels or content that more premium subscriptions have. Ultimately it depends on what you want to watch and finding the service that can supply that to you in the most streamlined form so you’re not paying for stuff you don’t need.

Is it cheaper to have cable or streaming?

A basic cable package used to be more expensive than the base-level live TV streaming service. But now that nearly all major providers have raised their prices to over $75 per month, that’s no longer the case. And with add-ons and other premiums, you can easily pay over $200 a month for either cable or a live TV streaming service.

What streaming service has all the TV channels?

No service that we tested had every available channel. Hulu + Live TV and DirecTV Stream carry the highest number of the top rated channels, according to Neilsen. Hulu’s service will also get you Disney+ fare, which you can’t get elsewhere. FuboTV has the most sports channels and YouTube TV gives you the widest selection of add-ons.

What is the most popular live TV streaming platform?

YouTube TV has the most paying customers. According to this year’s letter from the company’s CEO, the service has over eight million subscribers. Disney’s 2023 fourth quarter earnings put the Hulu + Live TV viewer count at 4.6 million. Sling reported two million patrons and FuboTV claimed 1.1 million, both in respective year-end reports.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/best-live-tv-streaming-service-133000410.html?src=rss

Thread hijacking attacks. They happen when someone you know has their email account compromised, and you are suddenly dropped into an existing conversation between the sender and someone else. These missives draw on the recipient’s natural curiosity about being copied on a private discussion, which is modified to include a malicious link or attachment. Here’s the story of a recent thread hijacking attack in which a journalist was copied on a phishing email from the unwilling subject of a recent scoop.

In Sept. 2023, the Pennsylvania news outlet LancasterOnline.com published a story about Adam Kidan, a wealthy businessman with a criminal past who is a major donor to Republican causes and candidates, including Rep. Lloyd Smucker (R-Pa).

The LancasterOnline story about Adam Kidan.

Several months after that piece ran, the story’s author Brett Sholtis received two emails from Kidan, both of which contained attachments. One of the messages appeared to be a lengthy conversation between Kidan and a colleague, with the subject line, “Re: Successfully sent data.” The second missive was a more brief email from Kidan with the subject, “Acknowledge New Work Order,” and a message that read simply, “Please find the attached.”

Sholtis said he clicked the attachment in one of the messages, which then launched a web page that looked exactly like a Microsoft Office 365 login page. An analysis of the webpage reveals it would check any submitted credentials at the real Microsoft website, and return an error if the user entered bogus account information. A successful login would record the submitted credentials and forward the victim to the real Microsoft website.

But Sholtis said he didn’t enter his Outlook username and password. Instead, he forwarded the messages to LancasterOneline’s IT team, which quickly flagged them as phishing attempts.

LancasterOnline’s Executive Editor Tom Murse said the two phishing messages from Mr. Kidan raised eyebrows in the newsroom because Kidan had threatened to sue the news outlet multiple times over Sholtis’s story.

“We were just perplexed,” Murse said. “It seemed to be a phishing attempt but we were confused why it would come from a prominent businessman we’ve written about. Our initial response was confusion, but we didn’t know what else to do with it other than to send it to the FBI.”

The phishing lure attached to the thread hijacking email from Mr. Kidan.

In 2006, Kidan was sentenced to 70 months in federal prison after pleading guilty to defrauding lenders along with Jack Abramoff, the disgraced lobbyist whose corruption became a symbol of the excesses of Washington influence peddling. He was paroled in 2009, and in 2014 moved his family to a home in Lancaster County, Pa.

The FBI hasn’t responded to LancasterOnline’s tip. Messages sent by KrebsOnSecurity to Kidan’s emails addresses were returned as blocked. Messages left with Mr. Kidan’s company, Empire Workforce Solutions, went unreturned.

No doubt the FBI saw the messages from Kidan for what they likely were: The result of Mr. Kidan having his Microsoft Outlook account compromised and used to send malicious email to people in his contacts list.

Thread hijacking attacks are hardly new, but that is mainly true because many Internet users still don’t know how to identify them. The email security firm Proofpoint says it has tracked north of 90 million malicious messages in the last five years that leverage this attack method.

One key reason thread hijacking is so successful is that these attacks generally do not include the tell that exposes most phishing scams: A fabricated sense of urgency. A majority of phishing threats warn of negative consequences should you fail to act quickly — such as an account suspension or an unauthorized high-dollar charge going through.

In contrast, thread hijacking campaigns tend to patiently prey on the natural curiosity of the recipient.

Ryan Kalember, chief strategy officer at Proofpoint, said probably the most ubiquitous examples of thread hijacking are “CEO fraud” or “business email compromise” scams, wherein employees are tricked by an email from a senior executive into wiring millions of dollars to fraudsters overseas.

But Kalember said these low-tech attacks can nevertheless be quite effective because they tend to catch people off-guard.

“It works because you feel like you’re suddenly included in an important conversation,” Kalember said. “It just registers a lot differently when people start reading, because you think you’re observing a private conversation between two different people.”

Some thread hijacking attacks actually involve multiple threat actors who are actively conversing while copying — but not addressing — the recipient.

“We call these mutli-persona phishing scams, and they’re often paired with thread hijacking,” Kalember said. “It’s basically a way to build a little more affinity than just copying people on an email. And the longer the conversation goes on, the higher their success rate seems to be because some people start replying to the thread [and participating] psycho-socially.”

The best advice to sidestep phishing scams is to avoid clicking on links or attachments that arrive unbidden in emails, text messages and other mediums. If you’re unsure whether the message is legitimate, take a deep breath and visit the site or service in question manually — ideally, using a browser bookmark so as to avoid potential typosquatting sites.

Snapchat has a new AI-powered perk for subscribers: Bitmoji versions of your pet. The feature, which is unfortunately not called “petmoji,” allows users to snap a photo of their four-legged friend to create a cartoon-like avatar to accompany their Bitmoji in the Snap Map.

Based on screenshots shared by the company, it seems users will be able to choose from a few different variations of the AI-generated images after sharing a photo of their pet. That’s considerably less customization than what you can do with your own human-inspired Bitmoji,though it should allow users to create something that looks similar to their IRL pet. (No word on if Snap could one day introduce branded pet accessories for animal avatars like they do for human Bitmoji.)

The addition is also the latest example of how Snap has embraced AI features in its subscription offering. Since debuting Snapchat+ in 2022, the company has used the premium service to experiment with generative AI features, including its MyAI assistant as well as camera-powered features like Dreams and AI-generated snaps. Snapchat+ has more than 7 million subscribers, the company announced in December.

Elsewhere, Snap added some updates for non-subscribers, too. The app is adding a new template feature to make it easier to edit clips, and new swipe-based gestures to send and edit snaps more quickly. Snapchat will also support longer video uploads for Stories and Spotlight. In-app captures can now be three minutes long, while the app will support uploads of up to five minutes.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/snapchats-latest-paid-perk-is-an-ai-bitmoji-of-your-pet-235027028.html?src=rss

• All the available Immersive Video launch content fit on a small strip in the TV app. [credit: Samuel Axon ]

Tonight, Apple will debut some new Immersive Video content for the Vision Pro headset—the first sports content for the device. It doesn't seem like much after two months of no new content, though.

Starting at 6 pm PT/9 pm ET, Vision Pro users will be able to watch a sports film captured for the platform's Immersive Video format. The video will be a series of highlights from last year's Major League Soccer (MLS) playoffs, and according to Six Colors, it will run just five minutes. It will be free for all Vision Pro users.

On February 2, Apple released what appeared to be the first episodes of three Immersive Video series: Adventure, Prehistoric Planet, and Wildlife. Each debuted alongside the Vision Pro's launch with one episode labeled "Episode 1" of "Season 1."

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Enlarge (credit: LifeSpan)

I enjoy getting my exercise, but hate doing it indoors. I'd much rather get some fresh air and watch the world drift past me as I cycle or hike somewhere than watch a screen while sweating away on something stationary.

To get a bit more of what I like, I've invested in a variety of gear that has extended my cycling season deeper into the winter. But even with that, there are various conditions—near-freezing temperatures, heavy rains, Canada catching fire—that have kept me off the roads. So, a backup exercise plan has always been on my to-do list.

The company LifeSpan offers exercise equipment that fits well into a home office and gave me the chance to try its Ampera model. It's a stationary bike that tucks nicely under a standing desk and has a distinct twist: You can pedal to power the laptop you're working on. Overall, the hardware is well-designed, but some glitches, software issues, and design decisions keep it from living up to its potential.

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President Biden hosts a star-studded campaign event with former presidents Clinton and Obama. Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn) discusses President Biden's reelection bid and fundraising efforts. The National Transportation Safety Board investigators release new details about the Francis Scott Key bridge collapse as the Baltimore Orioles observes a moment of silence on Opening Day. House Republicans plan the next steps for impeachment inquiries into Homeland Secretary Mayorkas and President Biden. Sam Bankman-Fried is sentenced to 25 years in prison. The White House announces it is working to reschedule an Israeli delegation's visit to Washington to discuss Israel's planned ground invasion into Rafah.

Apple will finally launch new iPads in early May, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. Expected are a new iPad Pro with an OLED display and a faster iPad Air, including a 12.9-inch model for the first time in that lineup. The details of the upcoming iPad models have been consistent, circulating through the rumor mill since last year.

The new iPad Pro models will reportedly add OLED displays (offering deeper blacks and richer colors) and run on the new M3 chip, already found in several Macs. The new tablets are said to launch alongside a redesigned Apple Pencil and Magic Keyboard. Other than a white color option, the latter has remained unchanged since its arrival four years ago.

Meanwhile, the iPad Air will supposedly run on a new processor. Bloomberg didn’t specify which, but — considering the current model uses the M1, and Apple likely wants to reserve the M3 for the more expensive Pro — the M2 sounds like a safe bet. The 12.9-inch screen option would mark the first time the iPad Air line has offered a display larger than 10.9 inches. Although Apple will charge more for that model than the smaller sibling expected alongside it, that would be the cheapest way yet to get a supersized iPad screen.

Gurman said early this month that the new tablets would launch alongside the M3 MacBook Air, but the laptop arrived without any iPads in tow. He now reports that Apple’s release schedule was pushed back to finish working on the devices’ software and ironing out the kinks from the “complex new manufacturing techniques” they require.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/an-oled-ipad-pro-and-the-first-big-screen-ipad-air-will-reportedly-arrive-in-may-204056132.html?src=rss

Enlarge / A promotional image for Sorry for Your Loss, which was a Facebook Watch original scripted series. (credit: Facebook)

Last April, Meta revealed that it would no longer support original shows, like Jada Pinkett Smith's Red Table Talk talk show, on Facebook Watch. Meta's streaming business that was once viewed as competition for the likes of YouTube and Netflix is effectively dead now; Facebook doesn't produce original series, and Facebook Watch is no longer available as a video-streaming app.

The streaming business' demise has seemed related to cost cuts at Meta that have also included layoffs. However, recently unsealed court documents in an antitrust suit against Meta [PDF] claim that Meta has squashed its streaming dreams in order to appease one of its biggest ad customers: Netflix.

Facebook allegedly gave Netflix creepy privileges

As spotted via Gizmodo, a letter was filed on April 14 in relation to a class-action antitrust suit that was filed by Meta customers, accusing Meta of anti-competitive practices that harm social media competition and consumers. The letter, made public Saturday, asks a court to have Reed Hastings, Netflix's founder and former CEO, respond to a subpoena for documents that plaintiffs claim are relevant to the case. The original complaint filed in December 2020 [PDF] doesn’t mention Netflix beyond stating that Facebook “secretly signed Whitelist and Data sharing agreements” with Netflix, along with “dozens” of other third-party app developers. The case is still ongoing.

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