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LastPass CEO Karim Toubba has revealed that the password manager has been breached again. Toubba said the company detected an unusual activity within a third-party cloud storage service that it shares with its parent company GoTo, which was formerly known as LogMeIn. To investigate the incident, LastPass has teamed up with security firm Mandiant. Together, they've determined that the unauthorized party got into LastPass' cloud service by using information obtained from the security breach it suffered in August this year. Further, they've discovered that the bad actor was able to access "certain elements" of its customers' information.

If you'll recall, LastPass was hacked back in August, and Toubba admitted after an investigation that the unauthorized party had internal access to its systems for four days. The hacker was able to steal some of the password manager's source code and technical information, but LastPass said customers' data and encrypted password vaults remained untouched. Apparently, the hacker's access was limited to the service's development environment. While the unauthorized party was able to access some user information this time, LastPass said customers' passwords remain safely encrypted. 

In an announcement of its own, remote work and collaboration tools provider GoTo has admitted that bad actors gained entry into its development environment. Like LastPass, the company has assured customers that its products and services are fully functional despite the breach. The password manager and its parent company are still investigating the incident to understand its scope, so we'll likely hear more details in the coming months. 

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It’s been six years since Tesla, SpaceX (and now Twitter) CEO Elon Musk co-founded brain-control interfaces (BCI) startup, Neuralink. It’s been three years since the company first demonstrated its “sewing machine-like” implantation robot, two years since the company stuck its technology into the heads of pigs — and just over 19 months since they did the same to primates, an effort that allegedly killed 15 out of 23 test subjects. After a month-long delay in October, Neuralink held its third “show and tell” event on Wednesday where CEO Elon Musk announced, "we think probably in about six months, we should be able to have a Neuralink installed in a human."

Neuralink has seen tumultuous times in the previous April 2021 status update: The company’s co-founder, Max Hodak, quietly quit just after that event, though he said was still a “huge cheerleader” for Neuralink’s success. That show of confidence was subsequently shattered this past August after Musk reportedly approached Neuralink’s main rival, Synchron, as an investment opportunity. 

Earlier in February, Neuralink confirmed that monkeys had died during prototype testing of its BCI implants at the ​​University of California, Davis Primate Center but rejected accusations by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine of animal cruelty. In July, Synchron beat Neuralink to market when doctors at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York successfully installed the company's inch-and-a-half long device into a person living with ALS. The patient, who has lost their ability to move and communicated independently, should be able to surf the web and send text messages using the device to translate their thoughts into computer commands. That same month, an affair Musk had with a Neuralink executive, who is now pregnant with his twins, also came to light. 

Neuralink is still working towards gaining FDA approval for its implant, though the company was awarded the agency's Breakthrough Device Designation in July 2020. This program allows patients and caregivers more "timely access" to promising treatments and medical devices by fast tracking their development and regulatory testing. As of September, 2022 the FDA has granted that designation to 728 medical devices. 

The FDA has also updated its best practices guidance regarding clinical and nonclinical BCI testing in 2021. "The field of implanted BCI devices is progressing rapidly from fundamental neuroscience discoveries to translational applications and market access," the agency asserted in its May guidance. "Implanted BCI devices have the potential to bring benefit to people with severe disabilities by increasing their ability to interact with their environment, and consequently, providing new independence in daily life."

“In many ways it’s like a Fitbit in your skull, with tiny wires,” Musk said of Neuralink's device during the 2021 livestream event. The device relies on as many as 1,024, 5-micron diameter leads "sewn" into a patient's grey matter to form connections with the surrounding neurons, providing high-resolution sampling of the brain's electrical emissions and translating between analog electrical impulses and digital computer code. Theoretically, at least. So far, all Neuralink has accomplished is getting a monkey to play Pong without a joystick.

“We hope to have this in our first humans, which will be people that have severe spinal cord injuries like tetraplegics, quadriplegics, next year, pending FDA [Food and Drug Administration] approval,” Musk told the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council summit in January. 

Developing...

Elon Musk and Tim Cook have apparently made up following a dustup over the status of Twitter’s iOS app. Musk, who earlier this week, claimed that Apple had “threatened to withhold’ Twitter from the App Store,” said he and Cook had a “good conversation” during a meeting at Apple’s headquarters.

“Among other things, we resolved the misunderstanding about Twitter potentially being removed from the App Store,” Musk wrote. “Tim was clear that Apple never considered doing so.” Musk never said what the original source of Apple’s issue with Twitter’s app was. But Twitter's former head of trust and safety has stated that Apple had flagged various issues during the app review process in the past.

Of note, Musk’s latest tweets don't mention if Cook addressed any of Musk’s other recent complaints. In addition to the App Store issue, Musk had also joined the growing ranks of developers to criticize the App Store’s 30 percent “secret tax” on in-app purchases. Musk reportedly delayed the re-launch of Twitter Blue subscriptions in order to avoid the fees, according to the newsletter Platformer.

Musk had also called out Cook for halting much of Apple’s advertising on Twitter, claiming that the iPhone maker had “mostly stopped” ad campaigns on the platform. The company is currently trying to reassure brands amid a broader pullback in advertising from the platform.

Twitter is now pushing more tweets from accounts users don’t already follow into their timelines. The company revealed that it’s now surfacing recommendations to all its users, even people who had successfully avoided them in the past.

“We want to ensure everyone on Twitter sees the best content on the platform, so we’re expanding recommendations to all users, including those who may not have seen them in the past,” the company wrote in a tweet.

It’s not clear if this means recommendations will begin to appear in the “latest” timeline, which sorts tweets chronologically and has historically not included recommendations, or if Twitter is simply making recommendations more prominent in other parts of the app. In its tweet, the company pointed to a blog post from September, which states that “recommendations can appear in your Home timeline, certain places within the Explore tab, and elsewhere on Twitter.”

Anecdotally, it seems some users are already reportingnoticeablechanges to their timelines, with the appearance of new topic suggestions and many tweets from seemingly random accounts.

Though the change may feel jarring, it’s not the first time the company has experimented with adding more suggested content. Twitter has been pushing recommendations into various parts of its service for years, though it has sometimes tweaked how often these suggestions appear. In the past, Twitter has also been careful to note that it bars certain types of content from recommendations in order to avoid amplifying potentially harmful or low-quality content, though it’s not entirely clear if that’s still the case. The company no longer has a communications team.

Interestingly, Twitter’s current CEO, Elon Musk, hasn’t always spoken favorably about the platform’s recommendation algorithms. Back in May, he tweeted that using the app’s “latest” timeline was crucial to “fix” Twitter’s feed. “You are being manipulated by the algorithm in ways you don’t realize,” he said at the time. Musk, who has also spoken about his desire to open source Twitter’s algorithms, hasn’t yet weighed in on the new expansion of recommendations, or how the feature works.

Google tweeted today that it’s beginning to process refunds for Stadia hardware bought on the Google Store. The company announced in September that its cloud gaming service was joining the long list of projects buried in the “Google graveyard.”

Google is refunding purchases for the Stadia controller and bundles that included a Chromecast Ultra with the WiFi-connected gamepad. Earlier this month, it began reimbursing users for Stadia game purchases, ensuring most users recoup the money they’d sunk into the service. However, Google isn’t refunding subscription fees for Stadia Pro (its answer to PS Plus and Xbox Game Pass) or Stadia hardware bought from Best Buy.

The company says it will process the refunds automatically. It expects most of them to complete by the time the cloud-gaming service shuts down on January 18th. If the company can’t refund your original form of payment automatically, it will email you through the Google account you used for the purchase(s).

Although Stadia’s demise disappointed its small but devoted band of enthusiasts, the shutdown wasn’t exactly shocking. The writing had been on the wall since the company began scaling back its investment in the platform barely over a year after its launch.

So much for giggling at robots falling down. Researchers at the University of Lorraine have developed a "Damage Reflex" system (aka D-Reflex) that has a humanoid TALOS robot prop itself against a wall when one of its legs is broken, much like a human who just lost their balance. The neural network-based system uses its experience (in this case, 882,000 training simulations) to quickly find a point on the wall most likely to provide stability. The robot doesn't need to know how it was damaged, and can reach out roughly as quickly as a person.

The result, as IEEE Spectrumnotes, is the anti-comedy you'd expect. Instead of a tumble to the ground, the robot braces itself against the wall like someone who just sprained their ankle. It's not particularly graceful and requires that the robot stops its hand the moment it makes contact, but it's effective in three out of four tests.

D-Reflex isn't guaranteed to prevent a fall, if partly because it can't account for every possible position or surface. It also doesn't help the robot recover once it averts catastrophe — you won't see the automaton limping along a wall until it finds help. The current approach is also based around a stationary bot, and won't help if an actuator fails mid-stride.

Researchers hope to make a system that's useful on the move, however, and envision robots that can grab chairs and other complex objects when a fall is imminent. This could save the cost of replacing worker robots that would otherwise plunge to their doom, and might lead to more 'natural' bots that learn to use their environments to their advantage. One thing's for sure: if the robopocalypse happens, tripping the machines won't stop them for long.

Google is working to fix an issue that is causing the YouTube mobile app to repeatedly crash for some iOS users. “Hi, we’re aware that many of you using the YouTube app on iOS devices may be experiencing crashes,” the company said in a tweet caught by The Verge. “We’re so sorry about this & have begun working on a fix! Updates soon.”

As of the writing of this article, YouTube has yet to share more information on the situation. Google did not immediately respond to a comment request from Engadget. We’ll update this article once there’s more information to share. It’s unclear how widespread the problem is among iOS users. On my iPhone, I was able to watch this incredible video of the Artemis 1 launch synced to “Free Bird” without issue during my lunch break. However, Downdetector indicates there have been more than 7,500 reports in the US of the app not working.

Sony's December free games for PlayStation Plus Essential include Mass Effect: Legendary Edition. Subscribers can play remastered versions of the classic trilogy at no extra charge. The collection, released in May 2021, includes Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3 with modernized 4K graphics and tighter gameplay.

Developer BioWare saved the biggest upgrades for the 15-year-old original. While the non-remastered version is nearly unplayable by modern standards, the remaster is friendlier for modern gamers with more consistent weapon accuracy, tighter camera controls, a dedicated melee button and snappier combat. BioWare also tweaked its handling of the trilogy’s endings, ditching the original approach that required a separate app download to get the best finale. In the new version, your final outcome is based exclusively on your decisions across all three titles.

Other free PS Plus Essential games for December include third-person platform fighter Divine Knockout: Founder's Edition and open-world RPG Biomutant. In addition to new free games added each month (yours to keep as long as you remain subscribed), PlayStation Plus Essential gives you access to online matchmaking in paid titles. The service costs $9.99 per month or $59.99 per year. It replaced the standard PS Plus earlier this year, when Sony added more expensive Extra and Premium tiers to compete with Xbox Game Pass.

One month into Elon Musk’s chaotic takeover of Twitter, the company is once again trying to reassure advertisers and users about the direction of the platform. In its first blog post since Musk’s acquisition, the company attempted to explain what “Twitter 2.0” means for the company.

Twitter is right now facing a massive decline in ad revenue as major advertisers have halted spending amid concerns over policy changes instituted by Musk. In the blog post, though, Twitter says that “brand safety is only possible when human safety is the top priority” and that “none of our policies have changed.”

However, it’s difficult to square that claim with the company’s recent confirmation that it will stop enforcing its COVID-19 misinformation rules, and the recent reinstatements of previously banned accounts. “Our approach to policy enforcement will rely more heavily on de-amplification of violative content: freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach,” the blog post says, without elaborating.

Musk has previously said that “negative” tweets will be “deboosted” and only visible to those searching for them. It’s not clear if these changes have been implemented. Twitter no longer has a communications team.

The blog post also notes that Twitter’s Trust and Safety team “continues its diligent work to keep the platform safe from hateful conduct, abusive behavior, and any violation of Twitter's rules.” The post, signed by “The Twitter Team,” comes one day after the company’s former head of Trust and Safety said the platform is less safe under Musk’s leadership. Yoel Roth, a longtime policy executive at Twitter who had worked closely with Musk in the days immediately following his takeover, said in an interview that Musk ignored warnings from the Trust and Safety team ahead of the disastrous rollout of Twitter Blue’s paid verification.

The blog post is the latest sign of how badly Musk needs to win back Twitter’s advertisers. The company has already lost at least half of its top 100 advertisers, according to a recent report in Media Matters. And newsletter Platformer reported Tuesday that ad revenue is down 15 percent in Europe and the Middle East, in addition to the mounting losses in the US ad market. The Financial Times recently reported that Musk has resorted to personally calling the CEOs of major brands “in order to berate them” for pulling back on ad spending. Musk has also publicly called out Apple CEO Tim Cook for "mostly" halting its advertising on the platform.

Much like Musk's "town hall" with advertisers earlier this month, it's unclear if Twitter's latest statements will be enough reassurance for brands to start spending again. In addition to Musk's chaotic policy changes and the Twitter Blue fiasco, the mass layoffs and resignations have also gutted the teams that typically work closely with ad agencies and brands, which has only further complicated the already strained relationships.