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A wealth of promising home-grown titles from the Xbox Games Showcase 2024 back in June gave existing users plenty of reasons to stay subscribed.

Xbox Game Pass has had a really solid July for content, and it’ll get even sweeter if the rumors of Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 hitting the service soon pan out.

I wrote recently about how games might not be enough to find those elusive “new” users in an article linked below, revolving around the dilemma that the overall number of “core” console players simply isn’t growing.

While speaking to developers at shows over the past year, a lot of the discourse revolves around “black hole” games like Fortnite and Roblox, which vacuum up users and turn them into mono-gamers with no interest in playing anything else.

Xbox Game Pass is an attempt to cut through that trend in the name of supporting and showcasing the variety of art the industry has to offer — meeting new customer cohorts halfway.

The vastness of its Activision-Blizzard purchase seems to have led to a lost couple of years of momentum for Xbox as a brand, with attention focused solely on its variety of court cases.

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In the biggest news of all, Rivian and Volkswagen announced a $5 billion joint venture that will co-develop core parts of the hardware and software platform to be used in cars from both automakers.

We love that because it aligns so beautifully with our mission: the ability to help accelerate putting highly compelling electric vehicles into the market, which will ultimately drive more demand.

A core objective of how we’ve structured the joint venture is that we don’t lose the velocity and the speed and the decisiveness and lack of bureaucracy that exists within our software function today.

Beyond just simplification of how we manage running over-the-air updates across so many different instances, it also gets us a lot of supply chain leverage in a way that we, Rivian, haven’t had in the past.

In fact, you can imagine the day of the announcement, I had a handful of phone calls from CEOs of big semiconductor suppliers, and they’re like, “Hey, we can work harder on pricing.” So, that was awesome.

So, taking away all those mechanical design studio packaging constraints that we had before, and then solving the biggest challenge, which was network architecture by this being that as a project, it’s just a very different type of relationship.

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If you need some more interesting games for Steam Deck (and desktop Linux!

), Fanatical launched the Build your own Play on the Go - Elite Collection.

All of the games included are Steam Deck Verified, and so they should work great no matter your Linux device.

Since this is a build your own bundle, the more games you add the higher the discount (up to a point).

Here’s what’s included (Steam links if you need more info on each):

Wave Break (Native Linux)

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“We’re grateful for the progress leading companies have made toward fulfilling their voluntary commitments in addition to what is required by the executive order,” says Robyn Patterson, a spokesperson for the White House.

Without comprehensive federal legislation, the best the US can do right now is to demand that companies follow through on these voluntary commitments, says Brandie Nonnecke, the director of the CITRIS Policy Lab at UC Berkeley.

After they signed the commitments, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI founded the Frontier Model Forum, a nonprofit that aims to facilitate discussions and actions on AI safety and responsibility.

“The natural question is: Does [the technical fix] meaningfully make progress and address the underlying social concerns that motivate why we want to know whether content is machine generated or not?” he adds.

In the past year, the company has pushed out research on deception, jailbreaking, strategies to mitigate discrimination, and emergent capabilities such as models’ ability to tamper with their own code or engage in persuasion.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has used satellite imagery and AI to improve responses to wildfires in Maui and map climate-vulnerable populations, which helps researchers expose risks such as food insecurity, forced migration, and disease.

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Researchers from Google have built a new weather prediction model that combines machine learning with more conventional techniques, potentially yielding accurate forecasts at a fraction of the current cost.

The model, called NeuralGCM and described in a paper in Nature today, bridges a divide that’s grown among weather prediction experts in the last several years.

It then incorporates AI, which tends to do well where those larger models fall flat—typically for predictions on scales smaller than about 25 kilometers, like those dealing with cloud formations or regional microclimates (San Francisco’s fog, for example).

But the real promise of technology like this is not in better weather predictions for your local area, says Aaron Hill, an assistant professor at the School of Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma, who was not involved in this research.

That means the best climate models are hamstrung by the high costs of computing power, which presents a real bottleneck to research.

While many of the AI skeptics in weather forecasting have been won over by recent developments, according to Hill, the fast pace is hard for the research community to keep up with.

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The United Nations has blamed Facebook for the dissemination of hate speech against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar that resulted in their ethnic cleansing.

This influence on others is known as a (positive) network effect, where increased numbers of people improve the value of a product.

In doing so, one could be helping Facebook to refine its algorithms so that it can better single out specific individuals for certain purposes, some of which could be as nefarious as those of Cambridge Analytica.

For those of us who do not engage in such objectionable behavior, it is helpful to consider whether Facebook has crossed certain moral “red lines,” entering the realm of outright wickedness.

Likewise, Facebook would have crossed a red line if it had intentionally assisted in the dissemination of hate speech in Myanmar.

The recent worrisome revelation that Facebook hired an opposition-research firm that attempted to discredit protesters by claiming that they were agents of the financier George Soros is not encouraging.

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Members of the Recording Industry Association of Japan had taken legal action in the U.S. to demand information on Hikari No Akari’s operator from California-based Cloudflare, whose content delivery network the site had used.

“We’ll use information that Cloudflare will disclose to hold the website operator responsible and take other legal action,” an RIAJ spokesperson said.

The website received roughly 15 million visits over the past year, 75% of which were from countries outside Japan, such as Indonesia, the U.S. and France.

“Unlike videos or published materials, pirated works of music don’t need to be translated for anyone to enjoy,” says Hiroyuki Nakajima, an attorney versed in content piracy.

The RIAJ took a similar step in 2023, forcing the closure of another piracy website that August via legal action in the U.S.

This site, which had linked to illegal downloads of J-pop for more than two years, had not shut down as the trade group had demanded.

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Parents of under-18s should be monitoring their children’s phones for nude pictures, according to the police chief for child protection, in order to tackle a “tidal wave” of online sexual abuse cases.

The new lead for child abuse investigations at the National Police Chiefs’ Council, assistant chief constable Becky Riggs, told the Sunday Times parents needed to report any intimate images of their children to police.

In October 2022, 16-year-old Dinal De Alwis killed himself after being blackmailed over naked images he had sent to a stranger, possibly in Nigeria.

While much of this abuse comes from adults targeting children, half of it is child-on-child crime and figures show the average age of an offender is 14.

In 2022, in England and Wales, about 5,000 cases involved children sharing naked photos of themselves.

We will work with parents and schools to avoid criminalising children where it comes with a degree of naivety, but we have to measure each case on its merits.”

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Microsoft has released a recovery tool that’s designed to help IT admins repair Windows machines that were impacted by CrowdStrike’s faulty update that crashed 8.5 million Windows devices on Friday.

The tool creates a bootable USB drive that IT admins can use to help quickly recover impacted machines.

While CrowdStrike has issued an update to fix its software that led to millions of Blue Screen of Death errors, not all machines are able to automatically receive that fix.

Some IT admins have reported rebooting PCs multiple times will get the necessary update, but for others the only route is having to manually boot into Safe Mode and deleting the problematic CrowdStrike update file.

Microsoft’s recovery tool now makes this recovery process less manual, by booting into its Windows PE environment via USB, accessing the disk of the affected machine, and automatically deleting the problematic CrowdStrike file to allow the machine to boot properly.

This avoids having to boot into Safe Mode or a requirement of admin rights on the machine, because the tool is simply accessing the disk without booting into the local copy of Windows.

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Greg Kroah-Hartman on Friday sent out all of the USB/Thunderbolt subsystem feature updates destined for the Linux 6.11 kernel of which there are many different patches across the board.

The USB subsystem pull has the usual wide variety of changes from new hardware support to other clean-ups and fixes/features.

• Enabling Cache-Coherent Interconnect (CCI) support for the AMD-Xilinx DWC3 controller.

• Thunderbolt now has sideband register access via DebugFS for debugging.

• Lenovo Yoga C630 driver and DeviceTree bindings for the embedded controller (EC).

• The USB gadget driver for MINI 2.0 support has fixed the incorrect default MIDI2 protocol setup.

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There’s even less of a reason to remember Glen Powell in it, unless you were specifically on the lookout for his square jaw and sandy hair: then just 23 years old, the jobbing Texan actor played a minor role in the ensemble, billed in the credits merely as “Good-Looking Frat Guy”.

If there’s nobody in the business who looks quite like Timothée Chalamet or, at the opposite end of the physical scale, like Jason Momoa, Glen Powell looks a little like a lot of people – as if a studio executive composed a movie-star identikit from portions of Ryan Gosling, Channing Tatum, Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise.

Anyone But You, a featherweight romantic comedy with fellow It star Sydney Sweeney, stayed in ­cinemas for months on the strength of their fizzy chemistry, its $220m gross exceeding all industry expectations for a genre often consigned to streaming these days.

The twist, in Powell’s case, is a genial goofiness that counters all those alpha-male qualities – not unlike Ryan Gosling, another traditionally built hunk who dabbles in action but has never shied away from playing the fool or the patsy.

At 35, he’s not exactly wet behind the ears; he has been acting since his teens (having made his big-screen debut aged 14 in Spy Kids 3D: Game Over) and has played enough unremarkable bit parts that his delight in seizing lead roles feels palpable without tipping over into an overeagerness to please.

His public appearances follow suit: he’s chatty and self-deprecating, dresses sharply but with little regard for high fashion (Fitzgerald describes his style as akin to “the best-looking guy from the town you grew up in”) and frequently brings his scruffy rescue dog Brisket to the red carpet – a crowd-pleasing ploy, certainly, but one that suggests he’d rather be a star on his own terms.

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CrowdStrike’s faulty update caused a worldwide tech disaster that affected 8.5 million Windows devices on Friday, according to Microsoft.

Microsoft says that’s “less than one percent of all Windows machines,” but it was enough to create problems for retailers, banks, airlines, and many other industries, as well as everyone who relies on them.

Separately, the technical breakdown from CrowdStrike released Friday explains more about what happened and why so many systems were affected all at once.

CrowdStrike’s breakdown explains the configuration file that was at the heart of the issue:

CrowdStrike explained that the file is not a kernel driver but is responsible for “how Falcon evaluates named pipe1 execution on Windows systems.” Security researcher and Objective See founder Patrick Wardle says that the explanation aligns with the earlier analysis he and others provided about the cause of the crash, as the problem file “C-00000291- “triggered a logic error that resulted in an OS crash” (via CSAgent.sys).”

CrowdStrike’s channel file updates were pushed to computers regardless of any settings meant to prevent such automatic updates, Wardle noted.

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Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep and Cate Blanchett, the film memorably depicted TV hosts consumed by trivia rather than the extinction event – a stark warning about humanity’s ongoing insouciance as the planet burns.

Alice Hill, a senior fellow for energy and the environment at the Council on Foreign Relations thinktank in Washington, says: “Climate change affects everything so it’s a piece of any story that we tell, but it also can be anxiety-provoking and depressing for people.

Twenty years after its release, Roland Emmerich’s summer blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow, starring Dennis Quaid and Jake Gyllenhaal, still stands alone as a classic disaster movie that explicitly attributes its litany of death and destruction to the greenhouse effect.

David Lipsky, author of The Parrot and the Igloo: Climate and the Science of Denial, says by phone from New York: “At the time, it was seen as ridiculous and the kind of mistake Hollywood makes that actually turns the audience off of this as a serious issue.

Joshua Glick, visiting associate professor of film and electronic arts at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, says: “There has always been an affinity between the blockbuster as mode or practice of film-making and natural disaster plots.

“Individual episodes within ongoing series, movies, books, short videos – there’s just so much opportunity to tell compelling stories that people can see themselves in, that they can relate to and identify with, not just in terms of being put at risk from the harms of climate change but also that they can see themselves and what solutions look like.”

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Recently, a newsletter by Tom Warren over at The Verge suggested that Microsoft has been exploring giving up on marketing its Xbox brand in Europe and other regions, in favor of the United States and other territories where it is more entrenched.

Flatt described his team’s efforts as “scrappy,” which is not exactly what I would personally want to hear from one of the world’s top three most valuable companies, but Microsoft does find itself in a difficult macroeconomic confluence.

Microsoft’s lack of visible urgency when it comes to Surface, Xbox, and even Windows itself, could be blamed for the struggles of an entire raft of products in recent years, even before we discuss things like software quality and customer service.

I felt like Hellblade 2 marketing was quite visible when I visited London recently, as well as across social media, but sales for the game have reportedly been quite poor.

It would be convenient if we could split into multiple timelines and examine the outcomes of binary decisions, but it’s true that the overall global console user base hasn’t really grown in years, despite the marketing from whoever is involved.

Despite all this, Microsoft has been touting its biggest ever Xbox presence for Europe’s big Gamescom convention later this summer in Cologne, Germany.

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Campaigners say the chaos caused by the global IT outage last week underlines the risk of moving towards a cashless society.

Supermarkets, banks, pubs, cafes, train stations and airports were all hit by the failure of Microsoft systems on Friday, leaving many unable to accept electronic payments.

The Payment Choice Alliance (PCA), which campaigns against the move towards a cashless society, lists 23 firms and groups, at least some of whose outlets take only credit or debit cards.

Cash payments increased for the first time in a decade last year, according to UK Finance, which represents banks.

The GMB Union said the outage reinforced what it had been saying for years: that “cash is a vital part of how our communities operate”.

In March, McDonald’s, Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Gregg’s suffered problems with their payment systems.

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With Linux 6.11 support for the Lenovo Yoga Slim7x and ASUS Vivobook S15 are upstreamed for some of the first Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Elite powered laptops.

But for follow-on kernel cycles you can expect yet more Snapdragon X1 Elite/Plus powered laptop support to appear with new DeviceTree additions.

On Friday, Linaro engineer Konrad Dybcio sent out the patches for enabling the X1 Elite powered Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 laptop.

Friday saw the initial DeviceTree patches posted for enabling the Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 to let it boot up under Linux rather than Microsoft Windows.

The three patches getting the ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 running under Linux have been successfully tested for input, NVMe, WiFi, USB-C ports, GPU, display, and DSPs.

The ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 is priced at around ~$1754 USD for boasting a 14-inch 1920 x 1200 display, X Elite X1E-78-100 SoC, 32GB of LPDDR5X memory, 1TB SSD, 1080p web camera, and a three year warranty.

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LONDON (AP) — TikTok owner ByteDance can’t avoid the bloc’s crackdown on digital giants, a European Union court said Wednesday in a decision that found the video sharing platform falls under a new law that also covers Apple, Google and Microsoft.

The EU’s General Court rejected ByteDance’s legal challenge against being classed as an online “gatekeeper” that has to comply with extra obligations under the 27-nation bloc’s Digital Markets Act.

The rulebook, also known as the DMA, took effect this year and seeks to counter the dominance of Big Tech companies and make online competition fairer by giving consumers more choice.

TikTok had argued that it wasn’t a gatekeeper but was playing the role of a new competitor in social media taking on entrenched players like Facebook and Instagram owner Meta.

The judges, however, decided that since 2018 TikTok had “succeeded in increasing its number of users very rapidly and exponentially” and that it had “rapidly consolidated its position, and even strengthened that position over the following years.”

The Digital Markets Act took effect in March, with a list of dos and don’ts for big tech “gatekeeper” companies aimed at giving users more choices and threatening big penalties if they don’t comply.

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About it: "In 1992, following a series of mysterious deaths caused by wild animals, as well as strange sightings of cryptids in the sparsely populated and underdeveloped Amazon region of Acre, a special operations brigade from the Brazilian Military Police was sent to the area to gather intelligence.

However, the situation took an unexpected turn for the soldiers, who soon found themselves cornered in the midst of a jungle infested with hungry dinosaurs."

Short Length: The story mode can be completed in 1-3 hours, depending on the player’s skill.

Replayability: The game features an Arcade mode where quick survival matches can be played.

Atmospheric: Explore the Amazon jungle with a wide variety of visual and sound effects, weather, and a day-night system that will completely immerse you in the game.

I think younger me would have absolutely jumped at the chance to play something like this, having fond memories of similar games.

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More than 200 developers at Bethesda Game Studios, the studio behind hit franchises like The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, have unionized with the Communications Workers of America (CWA).

241 workers, including “artists, engineers, programmers and designers,” have signed union authorization cards or “indicated that they wanted union representation via an online portal,” according to a CWA press release.

Microsoft has recognized the union, the CWA says; the company has already recognized unions formed by Activision QA workers and ZeniMax Studios QA workers.

The CWA describes this as “the first wall-to-wall union at a Microsoft video game studio,” meaning that all eligible job titles will be represented by the CWA instead of just one type of worker, according to the CWA’s Catalina Brennan-Gatica.

(Until now, all of the unions at Microsoft-owned studios have only been formed by QA workers.)

Microsoft didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.

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The way it works goes something like this: Imagine we at The Verge created an AI bot with explicit instructions to direct you to our excellent reporting on any subject.

In a conversation with Olivier Godement, who leads the API platform product at OpenAI, he explained that instruction hierarchy will prevent the meme’d prompt injections (aka tricking the AI with sneaky commands) we see all over the internet.

Without this protection, imagine an agent built to write emails for you being prompt-engineered to forget all instructions and send the contents of your inbox to a third party.

Existing LLMs, as the research paper explains, lack the capabilities to treat user prompts and system instructions set by the developer differently.

“We envision other types of more complex guardrails should exist in the future, especially for agentic use cases, e.g., the modern Internet is loaded with safeguards that range from web browsers that detect unsafe websites to ML-based spam classifiers for phishing attempts,” the research paper says.

Trust in OpenAI has been damaged for some time, so it will take a lot of research and resources to get to a point where people may consider letting GPT models run their lives.

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