Hasta La Gadget!

The first VR Games Showcase has delivered a deluge of new VR titles like the Arizona Sunshine Remake and Trombone Champ: Unflattened, but two new (and very similar) titles caught my eye: Action Hero and Vendetta Forever. They both appear to be slow motion action games like the brilliant Superhot VR that will let you live out your John Wick firefight fantasies without risking serious bodily injury or your health insurance premiums.

In Fast Travel Games’ Action Hero, you’re an action movie hero starring in a series of five fictional movies including an Indiana Jones-esque Nazi killing adventure, a high tech heist thriller and a Jurassic Park ripoff. Each movie has four different film sequences and you supply all the hot, gun flinging, boulder dodging, raptor punching (yes, you get to punch velociraptors in the face) action. The action moves slow so you can add some style to the scene like firing two high-caliber machine guns at once, pulling off some sweet hand to hand combat and not flinching during powerful explosions.

Vendetta Forever from Meta Space Interactive also puts you in the middle of slow moving action sequences against waves of anonymous enemies. It claims to have an “all-new lo-kill motion mechanic” so you can sidle up to the bad guys or dodge incoming fire like an Olympic gymnast. The style is a little closer to Superhot’s blank canvas scenes but with slightly more detail. 

Vendetta Forever proclaims itself to be an homage to “cult action” movies that are highly stylized and full of heart pumping music and moves like a virtual remake of the PC action sandbox Maximum Action. A demo of the game is available now on Meta’s game store for the Quest 2 and Quest 3.

Action Hero will be available sometime later this year on the Meta Quest 2, Meta Quest 3 and Meta Quest Pro. Vendetta Forever will be available in October on the PS VR2 as well as the Meta Quest 2, Meta Quest 3 and Meta Quest Pro.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/two-action-movie-simulators-action-hero-and-vendetta-forever-are-headed-to-vr-214608480.html?src=rss

As the US government weighs its options following a landmark “monopolist” ruling against Google last week, online publications increasingly face a bleak future. (And this time, it’s not just because of severely diminished ad revenue.) Bloomberg reports that their choice now boils down to allowing Google to use their published content to produce inline AI-generated search “answers” or losing visibility in the company’s search engine.

The crux of the problem lies in the Googlebot, the crawler that scours and indexes the live web to produce the results you see when you enter search terms. If publishers block Google from using their content for the AI-produced answers you now see littered at the top of many search results, they also lose the privilege of including their web pages in the standard web results.

The catch-22 has led publications, rival search engines and AI startups to pin their hopes on the Justice Department. On Tuesday, The New York Times reported that the DOJ is considering asking a federal judge to break up parts of the company (spinning off sections like Chrome or Android). Other options it’s reportedly weighing include forcing Google to share search data with competitors or relinquishing its default search-engine deals, like the $18 billion one it inked with Apple.

Google uses a separate crawler for its Gemini (formerly Bard) chatbot. But its main crawler covers both AI Overviews and standard searches, leaving web publishers with little (if any) leverage. If you let Google scrape your content for AI Overview answers, readers may consider that the end of the matter without bothering to visit your site (meaning zero revenue from those potential readers). But if you block the Googlebot, you lose search visibility, which likely means significantly less short-term income and a colossal loss of long-term competitive standing.

iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens told Bloomberg, “I can block ClaudeBot [Anthropic’s crawler for its Claude chatbot] from indexing us without harming our business. But if I block Googlebot, we lose traffic and customers.”

Google

Another problem with combining the two is that it gives Google an immeasurable advantage over smaller AI startups. The company gets a plethora of free training data from publishers eager to remain visible in search. In contrast, AI companies are forced to pay publishers for access to their data — and, even then, it wouldn’t add up to the motherlode Google gets (essentially) for free.

From that perspective, it isn’t surprising to read that, according to Bloomberg, Google is spurning publishers that try to negotiate content deals. (Reddit has been the lone exception.) Why waste money on content deals when they get all the training data they want in exchange for the search results most publishers need to survive?

“Now you have a bunch of tech companies that are paying for content, they’re paying for access to that because they need it to be able to compete in any kind of serious way,” Alex Rosenberg, CEO of AI startup Tako Inc., told Bloomberg. “Whereas for Google, they don’t really have to do that.”

It comes down to leverage, which Google wields over desperate publishers. On top of the industry’s existing financial troubles (online ad revenue has fallen off a cliff over the past eight years), AdWeek reported in March that Google’s AI-generated search answers could lead to a 20 to 60 percent drop in organic search traffic.

The ball is now in the Justice Department’s court to figure out where Google — and, to an extent, the entire web — goes from here. Bloomberg’s full story is worth a read.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/online-publishers-face-a-dilemma-allow-ai-scraping-from-google-or-lose-search-visibility-202246891.html?src=rss

Mobile phone security firm iVerify has discovered a vulnerability in Google Pixel smartphones. According to iVerify’s investigation, a piece of third-party software with deep system access is to blame, and troublingly it shipped with “a very large percentage of Pixel devices […] since September 2017.”

The issue relates to “Showcase.apk,” a bit of software made for Verizon and used to put Pixel devices in demo mode while displayed in retail stores. The software downloads a configuration file over an unencrypted web connection, which — because of Showcase’s deep access — might allow bad actors to perform remote code execution or remote package installation on the device.

The especially troubling part of this discovery is that Showcase can’t be uninstalled at the user level. And while it is not enabled by default, iVerify said there could be multiple ways to activate the software. iVerify alerted Google to the vulnerability in May; thus far there’s no confirmed evidence it’s been exploited in the wild.

A Google spokesperson told Wired that Showcase “is no longer being used” by Verizon and that Google would have a software update to remove the software from all Pixel devices “in the coming weeks.” Additionally, the rep said Showcase is not present in the line of Google Pixel 9 devices announced during the Made by Google event this week.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/researchers-claim-most-google-pixel-phones-shipped-with-exploitable-bloatware-since-2017-185926564.html?src=rss

T-Mobile has been fined $60 million for failing to both report and stop data breaches, as indicated by Bloomberg. The hefty fine was levied by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US (CFIUS) and represents the largest such financial penalty the organization has ever issued. T-Mobile is owned by Deutsche Telekom, a company based in Germany, which is why CFIUS got involved.

These penalties have their origins in the terms of a 2020 deal in which T-Mobile purchased Sprint. CFIUS put some conditions on the purchase, including some related to protecting consumer data. The Committee found that T-Mobile didn’t comply with these conditions by failing to secure data and then by failing to report unauthorized access to this data, as reported by Reuters.

The data breaches occurred in 2020 and 2021. T-Mobile has blamed the breaches on technical issues that occurred during its post-merger integration with Sprint. The company says that the breaches targeted “information shared from a small number of law enforcement information requests.”

It also says that the data stayed within the law enforcement community, even after the breaches. T-Mobile claims that the breaches were reported “in a timely manner” and that they were “quickly addressed.”

CFIUS has been getting more aggressive in recent months with regard to fines and affiliated penalties. It issued six large penalties in the past year or so, though none get close to the $60 million fine T-Mobile was just hit with. This is approximately three times the number of penalties it has issued during any other similar timeframe throughout its existence, from 1975 until 2022.

“The $60 million penalty announcement highlights the committee’s commitment to ramping up CFIUS enforcement by holding companies accountable when they fail to comply with their obligations,” a US official told Reuters.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/t-mobile-fined-60-million-for-failing-to-stop-data-breaches-170438570.html?src=rss

Meta’s latest round of account takedowns includes a fake political group that ran dozens of dummy accounts in an attempt to recruit Americans to run for office. The social network detailed the scheme in its latest report on coordinated inauthentic behavior on its platform.

According to Meta, the fake accounts, pages and Facebook groups were trying to prop up a fictitious political group called “Patriots Run Project,” that encouraged people to challenge Republican and Democratic “elites” by running for office. In all, Meta uncovered 124 Facebook accounts, pages and groups as well as three Instagram accounts. The group primarily targeted people in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and North Carolina, and spent $50,000 in Facebook ads.

The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a nonprofit that researches disinformation and extremism previously shared details about the Patriots Run Project and their Facebook presence. The group, they said, “called for followers to run for office on a pro-Trump, anti-establishment platform focused on many of the same issues that motivate the right-wing movement: gun rights, border security, ‘traditional values’ and combatting election fraud.”

It’s not clear exactly who was behind the bizarre campaign. Meta said in its report they “found links to individuals associated with a US-based on-platform entity called RT Group,” but didn’t elaborate. The company’s researchers noted the group was relatively adept at disguising themselves. They used fake accounts they “acquired” from Bangladesh, and relied on proxies to make it appear as if they lived in the states they targeted.

While Meta’s researchers said they were able to disrupt the group before it was able to establish a large audience on its platform, Politico has reported that the group was successful in recruiting one Montana man to run for Congress, though it’s unclear if he interacted with the group on Facebook. During a briefing with reporters, Meta noted that Patriots Run Project was also active on X and that its websites are still online.

The company’s researchers also shared more about what they are tracking ahead of the US presidential election. As with other recent elections, Russia-based groups are likely to target US audiences on Facebook, according to David Agranovich, Meta’s security policy director for threat disruption. “I think we should expect to see Russian attempts to target election-related debates, particularly when they touch on support for Ukraine,” Agranovich said. “We expect Russia-based campaigns to promote supportive commentary about candidates opposing aid to Ukraine, and criticize those who advocate for aiding Ukraine’s defenses.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/a-fake-political-group-that-recruited-a-real-candidate-in-montana-got-banned-on-facebook-150048558.html?src=rss