Technology

Free-to-play games are hugely successful (in 2020, PUBG Mobile reportedly made $2.8 billion in China alone), but that success attracts unscrupulous developers who earn their own small fortunes helping players cheat. If you’ve ever wanted a peek inside that kind of operation before it implodes, Motherboard’s feature on the rise and fall of an infamous game cheating ring for PUBG Mobile which authorities call Chicken Drumstick is worth a read. It features a rare account from “Catfish,” the software engineer who claims to be behind the $77 million business — and who ultimately decided to bring it to an end. Catfish became interested in making cheats for PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) on PC after dealing with cheaters himself, Motherboard’s Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai writes. When the ...

The next God of War game has been pushed to 2022. The game, intended for PS5, was originally planned to launch sometime in 2021. Head of PlayStation Studios Hermen Hulst confirmed the news in a post shared on the PlayStation blog, saying “we’ve made the decision to push that game out to next year, to ensure that Santa Monica Studio can deliver the amazing God of War game that we all want to play.” We also learned today that a PS4 version of the next God of War is in development. The studio posted a tweet confirming the delay. Where does this leave Sony’s other big-budget single-player game, Horizon Forbidden West? Hulst says the team is tentatively planning on a holiday 2021 release, but the team won’t nail down a release date. He says that the development of both Horizon and God of War ha...

No Man’s Sky is getting yet another big update, this time focused on the way the sci-fi adventure looks. The update is called “Prisms,” and developer Hello Games describes it as “a visual overhaul” of the game. It’s available starting today. The changes include new weather effects, volumetric lighting, furry aliens, skies full of stars, and more. The studio also says that PC and next-gen versions of the game will get “detailed reflections, improved lighting quality, more detailed biomes, and more.” You can get a good rundown in the trailer above. As part of the update, No Man’s Sky is also getting a very cool new feature: flying pets that you can ride. These include giant beetles, flying worms, and huge butterflies. As always, the update is available for free. Thanks to a steady stream of ...

With photogrammetry, hundreds of still photos can be transformed into an incredibly realistic 3D model of a real place on Earth — assuming you capture them all. This Memorial Day weekend, a self-flying robot cameraman did that entire job for me. I simply designated where to fly and where not to fly, kicked back in a chair, and a Skydio 2 drone nabbed those photos all by itself. Today, Skydio is launching Skydio 3D Scan, an optional software suite for its self-flying drones that lets them build incredibly detailed models for far more important tasks than my holiday backyard BBQ. We’re talking about scanning bridges that might be in need of structural repair, accident reporting at crash sites, and allowing clients to inspect construction sites from most any angle, anywhere in the world, duri...

Riot is bringing its tactical shooter Valorant to mobile devices. There aren’t a lot of details yet — such as when it will launch, on what hardware, or how it will differ from the main game — but Riot says the new version will simply be called Valorant Mobile. The developer claims that the PC version of the game, which launched last year, currently averages 14 million monthly players. Valorant is also coming off of its biggest competitive tournament to date, with an event in Iceland, and Riot says that more than 1 million concurrent viewers tuned in to the finals on May 31st. The news shouldn’t be too surprising. Earlier this year, Riot made a similar move with League of Legends, launching a mobile-focused spinoff called Wild Rift. Meanwhile, some of the most popular shooters in the world ...

DNA sleuthing helped scientists spot early outcrops of a spreading snail invasion in Pennsylvania. The method could be used to spot the unwanted critters before they cause serious damage. That way, conservationists can stop them from conquering even more places. New Zealand mud snails became a global pest in part because they can reproduce asexually — just one snail in a new area can essentially clone itself until there are 500,000 snails in a single square yard. They’re about the length of a pencil eraser so they’re hard to find until there are so many in a location that it’s nearly impossible to stop their spread. “It opens the door for us to be able to use this technology to detect the snail at a much wider scale” “It’s kind of weird because as an invasive ecologist, I never really want...

The Securities and Exchange Commission believes Elon Musk has violated his 2018 settlement agreement twice, according to correspondence obtained by The Wall Street Journal between the SEC and Tesla. The agreement requires a lawyer to approve his tweets about the company. Tesla lawyers didn’t review Musk’s May 2020 tweet about how Tesla’s stock price was “too high imo” before he published it. The company’s lawyers also didn’t approve a July 2019 tweet about Musk’s goal to make 1,000 of Tesla’s solar roofs per week by the end of that year. The SEC sent the letters to Tesla in 2019 and 2020 shortly after each tweet, but has not taken any apparent enforcement action against Musk or the company. “Tesla has abdicated the duties required of it by the court’s order.” Musk originally found himself ...

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has blamed supply chain price pressure for incremental price increases the company has made to its Model 3 and Model Y vehicles over the past several months. “Prices increasing due to major supply chain price pressure industry-wide,” the CEO tweeted in response to a complaint about the changes. “Raw materials especially.” Today, the CEO followed up to say that “microcontroller chips” are a particular challenge right now. But although Musk said that he’s “never seen anything like it,” he added that he doesn’t expect this to be a long-term issue. “Fear of running out is causing every company to overorder – like the toilet paper shortage, but at epic scale.” Musk had previously indicated in an April earnings call that Tesla was well placed to weather the global chip shorta...

Facebook employees are circulating an internal petition calling for the company to investigate content moderation systems that led many Palestinians and allies to say their voices were being censored, the Financial Times reports. The news comes weeks after Israeli airstrikes killed more than 200 people in Gaza, including at least 63 children. Israel and Hamas have now reached a cease fire. Palestinian activists and allies have long accused social media companies of censoring pro-Palestinian content — and the issue has only gotten worse during the recent conflict. At Facebook, content moderation decisions are made by third-party contractors and algorithms, and the process is less than perfect, particularly in non-English speaking countries. After Instagram restricted a hashtag referring to ...

Twitter has reopened verification applications after pausing them last week, Twitter announced on Tuesday. The pause, which went in place on Friday, came just eight days after the formal relaunch of verification applications on May 20th. When Twitter first reopened verification applications in May, it said that responses to applications would come back “within a few days,” but warned that they might take up to “a few weeks” depending on the volume of applications the company received. It’s not clear if you should expect similar timelines for a response following the pause and reopening. Requests are open! Sorry about that pause –– now you can get back to your quest for a blue badge. — Twitter Verified (@verified) June 1, 2021 Twitter didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment. With ...

Nintendo has announced that its Uji Ogura plant will be turned into a public gallery to “showcase the many products Nintendo has launched over its history.” The factory, located in the Ogura district of Uji, a city just outside Kyoto, was built in 1969 and was mainly used for manufacturing playing cards and hanafuda cards, which is how Nintendo got started as a business in the 19th century. “Nintendo has been discussing the possibility of building a gallery, as a way to share Nintendo’s product development history and philosophy with the public,” the company says in a statement. “To this end, the Nintendo Uji Ogura Plant will be renovated to accommodate the gallery, a decision reached after taking consideration of The City of Uji’s plan of re-developing the nearby Ogura Station area.” Nint...