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When it announced the Android 12L beta in October, Google promised the software for larger screens would be ready early this year. It’s not here just yet, but the company still expects it to land in 2022. And while we don’t have device specifics, we could see existing devices like the Galaxy Z Fold, Z Flip and Surface Duo pick up the new interface, adding features like home and lock screens optimized for larger displays. 

Engadget

Android has long faced criticism for still being an unintuitive system for tablets, leading to a dearth in real competition for Apple's iPads — Samsung’s efforts aside. But hey, at least with Android 12L, Google is trying to make it better. Are you an unloved Android tablet user who's intrigued? We tested the Android 12L beta here.

— Mat Smith

The biggest stories you might have missed

• After Apple’s big March event, watch our post-match analysis here!

• What to expect from Apple's Peek Performance event

• AI discovery could advance the treatment of spinal cord injuries

• Google says the latest Chrome on Mac outperforms Safari

• How Telegram found itself at the heart of the Ukrainian conflict

• Ubisoft and Take-Two are the latest game companies to halt sales in Russia

• UAE's Hope probe tracked a massive dust storm across Mars

• Apple TV+ is now available on Comcast Xfinity

• Engadget Deals: Sony's best ANC headphones are up to 46 percent off right now

Samsung confirms hackers compromised its systems and stole Galaxy source code

South American hacking group Lapsus$ previously claimed responsibility.

Samsung confirmed yesterday some of its data was stolen during a cyberattack over the weekend. In a statement to Bloomberg, the company admitted "some source code relating to the operation of Galaxy devices" was taken, but customer and employee credentials were not impacted. Although Samsung has not revealed the actors behind the compromise, South American hacking group Lapsus$ has claimed responsibility. The organization shared a 190GB torrent file that reportedly includes bootloader source code for all of Samsung's recent devices, as well as code related to biometric authentication and on-device encryption for Galaxy devices.

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Kia's 2022 Sorento plug-in is no Telluride

But it's still a posh SUV.

KIA

Kia's 2022 Sorento plug-in hybrid (PHEV) is a capable mid-size SUV with some hybrid pep, three rows of seats and a slightly ho-hum aesthetic. It suffers a little from comparisons to the Telluride, Kia's larger and far more fashionable family SUV. The Sorento is decidedly more basic, but with plenty of charm. Devindra Hardawar test drove it for a bit.

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Cities turn to tech to keep sewers free of fatbergs

These pipe-blocking globs can outweigh an elephant.

It’s a little early to go into too much detail on fatbergs, but once you’ve had your coffee and are fully awake, this is an intriguing insight into how cities are fighting the issue, exacerbated by the boom in wet wipes over the years. Weapons to tackle them include high-pressure water cannons, remote-operated cameras and even sonar tech.

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'God of War' might also get a TV series adaptation

‘The Last of Us’ is already on its way.

SIE

Amazon Studios and Sony’s PlayStation Productions unit are in talks to produce a live-action TV series adaptation of God of War, according to Deadline. The outlet reports that Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby, best known for their work on The Expanse and Children of Men, are involved in the project.

In case you’re not keeping count, Sony’s recently established PlayStation Productions unit is already working with HBO to produce a TV series based on Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us. It’s also working on a Ghost of Tsushima movie and a Twisted Metal series that will stream on Peacock. There was also that Uncharted movie. Ahem.

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Google has todayannounced that it has signed an agreement to buy Mandiant, a notable cybersecurity company, for $5.4 billion. The unit, once acquired, will be folded into Google’s Cloud team to ensure that it can offer an “end-to-end security operations suite” for its business customers. Mandiant CEO Kevin Mandia says that the deal will enable “organizations [to] effectively, efficiently and continuously manage and configure their complex mix of security products.” Google's cloud platform is used by a number of major companies, and an outage towards the end of 2021 briefly knocked out Spotify, Snapchat, Etsy and Discord, amongst others.

Mandiant isn’t likely to be a name on everyone’s lips, but it’s one of those companies who gets called in whenever bad things go down. It discovered the SolarWinds hack, and it was hired by Equifax to look into its security practices after its massive security snafu in 2017, and T-Mobile entered into partnership with the company after its 2021 breach. It also works with major banks and governments to work on high-profile attacks involving state actors. Mandiant was previously a part of FireEye after being acquired in 2013, but the company was spun back out last year.

The news comes just a month after Bloomberg reported that Microsoft might be interested in acquiring the company. It said that any deal would enable its new buyer to offer “unparalleled cybersecurity knowledge,” although Microsoft — obviously — subsequently pulled out of negotiations. But Google clearly feels that the deal is worth it, and is the second most expensive purchase the company has ever made, after its $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola.

Anyone can be harassed online, but it's an inevitability for activists and journalists covering contentious topics and challenging their country's authorities — especially if they're women. Google's Jigsaw unit has released the open source code for a web app called Harassment Manager that can help them review, sort and export the toxic comments they get on social media. Developers can build on the code to create their own version of the tool, but Jigsaw does have implementation partners, including Thomson Reuters Foundation that's rolling out a functional web app for its journalists in June.

In its current form, Harassment Manager works on Twitter, which teamed up with Jigsaw for the project. It uses the unit's Perspective API to detect comments that are most likely to be harmful and allows users to easily document and hide those responses, as well as to mute or block the accounts harassing them. Jigsaw has been training Perspective to detect online harassment since at least 2017 by feeding it comments identified as toxic by human reviewers. 

As The Verge reports, Perspective gives Harassment Manager the power to check the messages a user gets and to sort them into high, possible and unknown levels of harmfulness. The user can then process them in batches instead of dealing with them one by one, and they can blur toxic messages if they don't want to read them.

According to Jigsaw's research, 70 percent of female journalists receive threats online, and more than 40 percent of them stopped reporting their story as a result. The unit is hoping that the code can give developers what they need to be able to create a tool to protect people who "deal with disproportionately high toxicity online," especially "female journalists, activists, politicians and other public figures." Jigsaw says open sourcing the tool is just a step towards helping people who constantly deal with online harassment. It will continue working with NGOs in the journalism and human rights space to figure out how Harassment Manager's technology can help keep their communities safe.

Have you been noticing random performance stutters, slow loading and other issues on AMD Ryzen-powered Windows 10 or 11 machines? AMD has revealed that they could be caused by issues with the firmware trusted platform modules (fTPMs) located in the BIOS on Ryzen motherboards, TechPowerUp has reported.

Last year, Microsoft announced that TPM 2.0 chips would essentially be required for Windows 11. They serve as a hardware encryption system, authenticating Windows background memory transactions. AMD found that "select AMD Ryzen system configurations may intermittently perform extended fTPM-related memory transactions in SPI flash memory (“SPIROM”) located on the motherboard," essentially causing your system to stutter until the transaction completes. 

The company announced that it's working on a fix, and offered an immediate workaround. You can switch from fTPM to a discrete TPM module (dTPM) installed in the dedicated TMP 2.0 header on your motherboard. If you decided to do that, you'll unfortunately have to pay: they cost somewhere around $50-100 on Amazon, according to TechPowerUp. You'll also need to be sure to disable Bitlocker before switching between fTPM and dTPM, if it's enabled. 

The other option is to simply wait for a fix that AMD said will arrive some time in early May. It will be distributed by PC or motherboard vendors and "will require a motherboard system BIOS (sBIOS) update containing enhanced modules for fTPM interaction with SPIROM," according to AMD.

The fTPM issue is not the first we've seen with AMD's Ryzen chips. Last year, AMD was forced to issue updates for two significant bugs, one of which was slowing popular eSports games by up to 15 percent. 

A charity bundle on Itch.io organized by Necrosoft Games offers a collection of 991 indie games, soundtracks, books, comics, tabletop RPGs and gaming tools for a minimum of donation of $10 — and all proceeds will go to organizations helping relief efforts in Ukraine. The bundle includes games like Baba is You, 2064 Read Only Memories, Celeste, Skatebird and Towerfall Ascension. It also includes text message adventure game Bury Me My Love, which tells the story of a Syrian refugee couple, and military RPG Long Gone Days that focuses on the human cost of war.

Necrosoft only added paid products to the bunch, and 600 of them have never been in a major bundle before. In all, the items in the bundle cost around $6,500 when you add up their regular retail prices. Everything the developer gets after card processing fees will go to two charity organizations in particular, one of which is the International Medical Corps. It's a humanitarian nonprofit that's currently working in Ukraine to increase access to medical services, including mental health support, and to help contain the spread of COVID-19. The other beneficiary is the Ukrainian organization Voices of Children, which sets up shelters and helps children cope with the horrors of war. 

While Necrosoft is only asking for a minimum of $10 for all 991 items, it's urging donors to pay more if they can. The company is hoping to raise $1 million for the causes it supports until March 17th. 

Canon plans to more than double its RF mirrorless lens lineup by 2025, producing around 32 more models over the next four years, according to its latest earnings report spotted by Canon Rumors. One chart showed that it planned to keep up the "same pace" of lens releases, which amounted to eight new models in 2020-21. If it can stick to that, it would have nearly 60 full-frame RF lenses in about four years time. 

Chairman and CEO Fujio Mitarai said that the overall market continues to shrink due to the decline of entry-level models (thanks, smartphones), but demand for higher-end models is still high. As such, Canon has been working on developing more of those types of cameras and lenses to go with them. The company now feels it's capable of gunning for Sony in the mirrorless market share race.

"Overall, the market seems to be bottoming out," he said. "Over the past several years, we have worked to raise the appeal of the EOS R system by enhancing our lineup with highly competitive full-frame mirrorless cameras and RF lenses. As a result, we have established a solid position in mirrorless cameras, and are now in a situation where we can target the top market share position."

Canon also plans to improve its profitability with increased factory automation, while further pursuing "concept" camera designs like the weird table-mounted PowerShot PX. It's also planning to mass produce SPAD sensors that can take high-quality color photos with almost no light, used in applications like "advanced monitoring."

A number of Amazon’s Chinese suppliers are linked to forced Uyghur labor camps from China’s Xinjiang region, according to a new report from the Tech Transparency Project. The organization found that five of Amazon’s suppliers have been directly accused by watchdog groups and journalists of relying on workers from China’s many “reeducation centers”, which it uses to detain Uyghur Muslims, Kazakhs and other ethnic minorities. The suppliers produce Amazon devices and Amazon-branded products, such as the Amazon Basics line of home goods and tech accessories.

“The findings raise questions about Amazon’s exposure to China’s repression of minority Uyghurs in Xinjiang—and the extent to which the e-commerce giant is adequately vetting its supplier relationships," wrote the authors of the report. "Amazon says that its suppliers 'must not use forced labor' and that it 'does not tolerate suppliers that traffic workers or in any other way exploit workers by means of threat, force, coercion, abduction, or fraud.' But its supplier list tells a different story.” 

Two of the suppliers named in the report—Luxshare Precision Industry and AcBel Polytech—were also used by Apple, according to an investigation last year from The Information. Both Amazon and Apple have denied working with forced labor suppliers, despite evidence that suggests otherwise.

“Amazon complies with the laws and regulations in all jurisdictions in which it operates, and expects suppliers to adhere to our Supply Chain Standards. We take allegations of human rights abuses seriously, including those related to the use or export of forced labor. Whenever we find or receive proof of forced labor, we take action,” Amazon spokesperson Erika Reynoso said in a statement to NBC.

The Australian Institute of Strategic Policies found that many major global brands deployed forced labor from China, including Adidas, Gap, H&M, Microsoft, Nike, Sony, Victoria’s Secret and Zara. Amnesty International estimates that China is currently holding roughly 1 million prisoners in internment camps, where they are reportedly forced to renounce their religion and subject to hard labor in factories. The camps are mostly in the Western China region of Xinjiang, and have been in place since 2017.

Both the US and the EU imposed sanctions on China in 2021, barring any imports from Xinjiang until businesses can prove that they no longer use forced labor. But the report found that many Amazon-branded products are still produced in the Xinjiang region. For example, the report found that a couple of towel brands still listed on Amazon advertise using “China-long staple cotton” from the Xinjiang region.

“Amazon’s continued use of companies with well-documented ties to forced labor in Xinjiang cast doubt on the tech giant’s stated intolerance of human rights abuses in its supply chain,” wrote the report’s authors.

Russia's ongoing campaign to block social apps during the invasion of Ukraine now includes voice clients. ZDNetreports Russia's telecom regulator Roskomnadzor has banned the walkie-talkie app Zello over claims users were spreading "false information" about the invasion (which Russia falsely labels a "special operation"). Officials said they asked Zello to block transmissions of the offending messages on March 4th, but that it "did not comply" with the request.

Russia blocked Zello in 2017 after it didn't obey a 2016 law requiring storage of user and chat data inside the country. Zello defied the move, developing a workaround that kept the software usable. The app has been popular among protesters despite its work-oriented focus. Before the invasion of Ukraine, vaccine mandate opponents in Canada and elsewhere used Zello to coordinate their protests.

The crackdown was virtually expected. Russia has rushed to cut access to numerous major social platforms, including Facebook and Twitter, while also making it illegal for media outlets to share anything beyond the Putin administration's official narrative on Ukraine. Zello has also surged in popularity since the invasion started. The ban theoretically helps Russia silence political dissent, especially when it involves coordination between Ukrainians and sympathetic Russians.

Amazon Studios and Sony’s PlayStation Productions unit are in talks to produce a live-action TV series adaptation of God of War, according to Deadline. The outlet reports that Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby, best known for their work on The Expanse and Children of Men, are involved in the project. Beyond those details, Deadline didn’t have much other information to share about the adaption and both Sony and Amazon declined to comment on the outlet’s reporting.

God of War is one of Sony’s longest-running franchises, spanning seven mainline games across four consoles. The most recent entry in the series was 2018’s God of War, which acted as a soft reboot of the franchise by introducing players to Atreus, the son of protagonist Kratos, and the pantheon of Norse gods. The sequel to God of War is currently in development at Santa Monica Studio and is expected to come out sometime this year.

If the report is accurate, it would be the fourth gaming property to get the film and or television treatment from Sony’s recently established PlayStation Productions unit. The division currently has three projects officially underway. Most notably, it’s working with HBO to produce a TV series based on Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us that will star Pedro Pascal, Bella Ramsey and Nick Offerman. It’s also working on a Ghost of Tsushima movie and a Twisted Metal series that will stream on Peacock.

Instagram isn't just waving goodbye to its IGTV app. As TechCrunchreports, social media consultant Matt Navarra and various Twitter users (including KenSchillinger and WFBrother) have all noticed that Instagram's dedicated Boomerang and Hyperlapse apps have disappeared from the Apple and Google app stores. Boomerang was still available for Android on Google Play through a direct link as of this writing, but searches no longer produce results.

In a statement to Engadget, parent brand Meta said Instagram pulled the software to "better focus [its] efforts on the main app." Apptopia data suggests Instagram pulled Boomerang and Hyperlapse from app stores after March 1st. Boomerang (the only one of the two available on both Android and iOS) was still relatively popular, according to Apptopia, with an average of 26,000 downloads per day before it left. Layout is still available if you want to create collages.

The removal isn't exactly surprising. The launches of Hyperlapse in 2014 and Boomerang in 2015 offered stabilized timelapse and looping videos at a time when Instagram tried to keep its app relatively lean, particularly given the lesser performance of some phones at the time. In 2022, however, Instagram is content to include a flurry of features as it fends off rivals, ranging from Snapchat-like Stories through to TikTok-style Reels. Boomerang and Hyperlapse are now just camera options. Toss in faster smartphones and there's little need for standalone apps revolving around single features.

The departures also make sense in the context of IGTV's exit. At the time, Instagram said it wanted to improve the video experience for both creators and viewers. This latest move is just an extension of the earlier strategy — it wants to save you from juggling apps just to produce a clip.