ArduinoMania

• Read more about Renesas Electronics Soon to Acquire Altium to Provide Digital Device Design to Customers
• Log in or register to post comments

The parents of a teenager who was killed in Florida’s Parkland school shooting in 2018 have started a bold new project called The Shotline to lobby for stricter gun laws in the country. The Shotline uses AI to recreate the voices of children killed by gun violence and send recordings through automated calls to lawmakers, The Wall Street Journal reported. 

The project launched on Wednesday, six years after a gunman killed 17 people and injured more than a dozen at a high school in Parkland, Florida. It features the voice of six children, some as young as ten, and young adults, who have lost their lives in incidents of gun violence across the US. Once you type in your zip code, The Shotline finds your local representative and lets you place an automated call from one of the six dead people in their own voice, urging for stronger gun control laws. “I’m back today because my parents used AI to recreate my voice to call you,” says the AI-generated voice of Joaquin Oliver, one of the teenagers killed in the Parkland shooting. “Other victims like me will be calling too.” At the time of publishing, more than 8,000 AI calls had been submitted to lawmakers through the website.

“This is a United States problem and we have not been able to fix it,” Oliver’s father Manuel, who started the project along with his wife Patricia, told the Journal. “If we need to use creepy stuff to fix it, welcome to the creepy.”

To recreate the voices, the Olivers used a voice cloning service from ElevenLabs, a two-year-old startup that recently raised $80 million in a round of funding led by Andreessen Horowitz. Using just a few minutes of vocal samples, the software is able to recreate voices in more than two dozen languages. The Olivers reportedly used their son’s social media posts for his voice samples. Parents and legal guardians of gun violence victims can fill up a form to submit their voices to The Shotline to be added its repository of AI-generated voices.

The project raises ethical questions about using AI to generate deepfakes of voices belonging to dead people. Last week, the Federal Communications Commission declared that robocalls made using AI-generated voices were illegal, a decision that came weeks after voters in New Hampshire received calls impersonating President Joe Biden telling them to not vote in their state’s primary. An analysis by security company called Pindrop revealed that Biden’s audio deepfake was created using software from ElevenLabs.

The company’s co-founder Mati Staniszewski told the Journal that ElevenLabs allows people to recreate the voices of dead relatives if they have the rights and permissions. But so far, it's not clear whether parents of minors had the rights to their children's likenesses.

Sony may shrink the gap between the launches of its PlayStation exclusives and PC ports. Company president Hiroki Totoki suggested in a post-earnings call Q&A session Wednesday (via VGC) that he wants PlayStation to go “aggressive on improving our margin performance,” with “multi-platform” games playing a significant role. He clarified in the talk that, by multi-platform, he meant on PlayStation and PC — not Xbox or Switch.

When asked about Sony’s profits not keeping up with increasing gross income, he said hardware and first-party games were two areas of focus. He noted that hardware cost reduction this console cycle was “difficult to come by,” suggesting we won’t see any permanent console price drops.

“I personally think there are opportunities out there for improvement of margin, so I would like to go aggressive on improving our margin performance,” he continued. Totoki hinted one way to get there is to cash in more on its (often critically acclaimed and commercially successful) PlayStation Studios titles, like Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 and God of War: Ragnarok.

“In the past, we wanted to popularize consoles, and a first-party title’s main purpose was to make the console popular,” Totoki said in the Q&A. “This is true, but there’s a synergy to it, so if you have strong first-party content — not only on our console but also other platforms, like computers — a first-party [game] can be grown with multi-platform, and that can help operating profit to improve, so that’s another one we want to proactively work on.”

Naughty Dog / Sony

That’s a clear shift from PlayStation Studios head Herman Hulst’s thoughts in 2022. He said then that PC gamers would have to wait “at least a year” before seeing first-party PlayStation games (minus live service titles) on their computers. God of War (2018) and the first Marvel’s Spider-Man had about a four-year gap between their PS4 and PC launches. The latter’s Miles Morales spin-off saw about a two-year turnaround.

On February 8, Sony launched Helldivers 2 on PS5 and Windows simultaneously. VGC notes the game led to PlayStation Studios’ highest concurrent Steam player count — beating God of War (2018), The Last of Us Part I and Horizon Zero Dawn. Helldivers 2 was developed by Arrowhead Games with Sony Interactive Entertainment publishing.

It isn’t clear if Totoki meant we can expect future PlayStation tentpoles like the upcoming Wolverine game or the ever-popular Spider-Man, God of War or various Naughty Dog franchises to appear on PC on the same day as console. But a strategy shift is underway regardless, and Totoki will have the leverage to put the plan into action: He takes over for Jim Ryan as interim CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment in April.

Baseball fans who've had to stay glued to their computer to watch several MLB games simultaneously will soon be able to kick back in front of their TV and do the same thing. The league has announced several updates for MLB.TV for this upcoming season. For one thing, the MLB apps on supported Apple TV, Fire TV and Google TV devices will let you watch up to four games simultaneously in Multiview.

Until now, Apple TV users, for instance, were restricted to watching a maximum of two games at once through picture-in-picture. The upgrade should become especially useful later in the season as the race for playoff spots comes down to the wire and fans can watch multiple teams play for a post-season slot simultaneously with more ease. You'll also be able to stream more than 7,000 Minor League Baseball games, featuring affiliates from all 30 MLB teams.

In addition, MLB.TV is bringing Catchup Mode to certain streaming platforms this season, but did not specify which. This mode will feature in-game highlights for key moments and plays you might have missed, so if you missed the first few innings of a game that's in progress, you can quickly get up to speed.

Fans can expect new episodes of original shows such as Carded and Inside Stitch, along with more documentaries and live programming. Select teams will provide local pregame and postgame coverage, while MLB Big Inning will deliver the top action from around the league with highlights and live look-ins. Those who authenticate subscriptions through TV providers will be able to stream every post-season game, as well as the 2024 All-Star Game.

The MLB All Teams Yearly subscription is the same price as last year at $150. It includes access to every out-of-market regular season game and some Spring Training games with no blackout restrictions, both live and on-demand. A monthly subscription is also available for $30.

X has allowed dozens of sanctioned individuals and groups to pay for its premium service, according to a new report from the Tech Transparency Project (TTP). The report raises questions about whether X is running afoul of US sanctions.

The report found 28 verified accounts belonging to people and groups the US government considers to be a national security threat. The group includes two leaders of Hezbollah, accounts associated with Houthis in Yemen and state-run media accounts from Iran and Russia. Of those, 18 of the accounts were verified after X began charging for verification last spring.

“The fact that X requires users to pay a monthly or annual fee for premium service suggests that X is engaging in financial transactions with these accounts, a potential violation of U.S. sanctions,” the report says. As the TTP points out, X’s own policies state that sanctioned individuals are prohibited from paying for premium services. Some of the accounts identified by the TTP also had ads in their replies, according to the group, “raising the possibility that they could be profiting from X’s revenue-sharing program.”

Changing up Twitter’s verification policy was one of the most significant changes implemented by Elon Musk after he took over the company. Under the new rules, anyone can pay for a blue checkmark if they subscribe to X Premium. X doesn’t require users to submit identification, and the company has at times scrambled to shut down impersonators.

X also offers gold checkmarks to advertisers as part of its “verified organizations” tier, which starts at $200 a month. The TTP report found that accounts belonging to Iran’s Press TV and Russia’s Tinkoff Bank — both sanctioned entities — had gold checks. X has also given away gold checks to at least 10,000 companies. As the report points out, even giving away the gold badge to sanctioned groups could violate US government policies.

X didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, but it appears that the company has removed verification from some of the accounts named in the TTP’s report. “X, formerly known as Twitter, has removed the blue check and suspended the paid subscriptions of several Iranian outlets,” Press TV tweeted from its account, which still has a gold check. The Hezbollah leaders’ accounts are also no longer verified.

In an absolutely bananas turn of events, a typo in an earnings report caused Lyft shares to skyrocket nearly 70 percent after Tuesday’s closing stock market bell, as reported by CBS. There was an extra zero in the report that suggested a five percent margin expansion in 2024, instead of a .5 percent margin. This sent investors into a tizzy, as the company has long struggled to turn a profit.

The mistake was even present in Lyft’s slide deck, which was part of that earnings report, and an accompanying press release. The company quickly corrected the mistake, calling it a clerical error, but the stock surge had already begun. Lyft CFO Erin Brewer addressed the issue in an earnings call yesterday evening which caused the stocks to reverse course. It’s worth noting that the earnings report was still good news for Lyft, even without that mistake, so the stock price experienced a more stable increase of around 35 percent.

Now, onto the blame game. Lyft CEO David Risher appeared on CNBC’s Squawk Box to take responsibility for the mistake, saying “look, it was a bad error, and that’s on me.” Risher went on to note that it was “super frustrating” for everyone on the team and said that he could see a fellow employee’s “jaw drop” when discovering the issue.

The good news? Even with that adjustment, this is Lyft’s best day since the company’s initial IPO offering back in 2019. Yesterday’s earnings report indicated $1.22 billion in revenue for the quarter, an increase of four percent from last year. Bookings increased 17 percent for the quarter, accounting for $3.7 billion. Risher called it a “great quarter.”

A misplaced zero on a spreadsheet isn’t the ridesharing giant’s only concern. Thousands of Lyft and Uber drivers are going on strike today to demand better pay and safer working conditions. The striking workers are primarily clustered around ten major US airports, though it’s only planned to last for a few hours.

Nintendo’s next first-party Switch title is almost here. Princess Peach: Showtime will be available on March 22 and the company just dropped a brand new trailer to keep the hype train rolling. The game’s primary hook is that the oft-kidnapped princess can transform into a number of different professions, each with its own move sets and challenges.

The new trailer gives us a look at four never-before-seen transformations, including a figure skater, a superhero, a thief and a mermaid. Each transformation shakes up the gameplay, so while figure skater Peach stars in a 2.5D platformer, superhero Peach pummels her way through a side-scrolling beat-em-up. Mermaid Peach seems to spend most of her time singing.

A previously-released trailer showed Peach turning into a swordfighter, a detective, a pastry chef and a kung-fu master. It remains to be seen just how many other jobs the princess has experience with. Nintendo has shown off ten so far, but it’s likely keeping several as a surprise. Peach sure has a diverse resume, and she does all of it while running a kingdom filled with excitable little fungi. Meanwhile, Mario golfs and plays tennis on his days off.

Princess Peach: Showtime will cost $60 when it hits next month, and pre-orders are open now. To commemorate the release, Nintendo is also dropping a pair of pastel pink Joy-Cons. The controllers will be available on March 22, alongside the game, and will set you back $80.

If you can’t wait until March to dive into some Mario-adjacent tomfoolery, a remake of the Game Boy Advance puzzle platformer Mario vs. Donkey Kong releases this Friday. This updated version includes local co-op.

Sony said Wednesday it won’t launch any new blockbuster first-party PlayStation exclusives until at least early 2025. “While major projects are currently under development, we do not plan to release any new major existing franchise titles next fiscal year like God of War Ragnarök and Marvelʼs Spider-Man,” Sony President Hiroki Totoki wrote (via Polygon) in the company’s Q3 2023 financial results. Sony’s 2024 fiscal year begins on April 1 and ends on March 31, 2025.

The PlayStation division will instead focus on third-party software sales, which Totoki expects to grow gradually. Square Enix’s upcoming Final Fantasy VII Rebirth launches as a PS5 exclusive on February 29. Konami’s Silent Hill 2 remake, a console exclusive on the PS5 that will also launch on PC, is scheduled to arrive later this year. Other upcoming third-party tentpoles include Stellar Blade and Rise of the Ronin.

Meanwhile, the platform’s first-party exclusive Wolverine game may not arrive until 2026 if leaked documents from a hack are any indication.

“We expect third-party software sales to continue to expand gradually due to the expansion of the PS5 installed base and the high level of user engagement,” Totoki wrote. Totoki will replace Jim Ryan as Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO in April.

YOSHIKAZU TSUNO via Getty Images

As for why PlayStation ended up with such a long gap between first-party flagship games — Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 launched in October 2023, leaving a roughly 18-month gap or more — VGC reports that Totoki said in an earnings call (through a translator) that the company’s creative teams can can improve their development turnarounds.

“When it comes to the business, I think there is room for improvement,” Totoki said of its first-party studios after complimenting their creativity and vision. “And that’s to do with how to use money, the schedule of development, and how to fulfill one’s accountability towards development — those are my frank impressions. I will continue to engage in dialogue with the people so that we can find the right way to proceed.”

PS5 console sales, which reached 8.2 million units in Q3 2023, missed their target in the quarter. The company has adjusted its fiscal year projections of PS5 sales from 25 million units sold to 21 million. Sony expects a gradual decline to continue. “Regarding the PS5 hardware, which will enter its fifth year since launch, partially due to its entering the latter half of the console cycle, we aim to optimize sales with a greater emphasis on the balance with profits, so we anticipate a gradual decline in unit sales from next fiscal year onwards,” he wrote.

There's no denying that Apple's AirPods Max are a solid set of premium over-ear headphones that include all of the best features of in-ear AirPods. However, the main drawback with the AirPods Max is its high regular price of $550. A new sale on Amazon mitigates some of that sticker shock, as it takes $100 off the typical price. That means the AirPods Max have dropped to as low as $450, depending on the color. The green, pink and silver versions are all available for that price. The space gray version is $525, while the sky blue model comes in at $529. In any case, $450 is the best price we've seen for the AirPods Max since the 2023 holiday shopping season.

We gave the AirPods Max a score of 84 in our review. We appreciated the balanced sound, active noise cancellation performance, controls and battery life of up to 20 hours (with ANC and spatial audio switched on). Easy pairing to Apple devices and hands-free Siri access are nice to have too. The price was our biggest gripe, but if a $100 discount is enough to sway you, then Amazon's current sale is worth paying attention to.

Also on sale is one of our top picks for a set of wireless Bluetooth headphones. For our money, Bose's QuietComfort Headphones are the best noise canceling wireless headphones around. You can enjoy a comfortable fit and adjust the ANC levels to your liking. This model is also $100 off at $249.

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

There aren't enough games with queer characters and themes — and GLAAD, the world's largest LGBTQ media advocacy group, has the statistics to prove it. GLAAD's first annual report on the video game industry found that nearly 20 percent of all players in the United States identify as LGBTQ, yet just 2 percent of games contain characters and storylines relevant to this community. The report highlights three critical truths: Representation matters a lot to LGBTQ players, the remaining gaming audience largely welcomes these themes, and new generations of gamers are only becoming more open to queer content.

GLAAD has the numbers, so let's take a deeper look alongside a few bits of gaming news from the past week:

This week's stories

Xbox rumor mill

Xbox is preparing to address a bunch of rumors on Thursday about the company’s plans to bring its exclusive games to PlayStation, Switch and other platforms. The rumors have centered on major releases like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle and Starfield, but according to The Verge’s Tom Warren, the first titles scheduled to make the leap are Hi-Fi Rush and Pentiment. Nothing has been confirmed yet, but Xbox’s top gaming executives, Phil Spencer, Sarah Bond and Matt Booty, will chat about all of it on the next installment of the Official Xbox Podcast, which drops at 3PM ET on Thursday.

Ubisoft pledges to be good again

Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot said on an investor call last week that the studio is officially going to make good games again. Talking about the company’s positive third quarter, Guillemot said it “marks the beginning of our turnaround to consistently creating and delivering high-quality, long-lasting games,” which sounds like a tacit admission that Ubisoft hasn’t been producing great games recently. This is something I’ve talked about a lot — it feels like the studio has been coasting on NFTs and free-to-play mobile titles since a period of financial turmoil in 2015, and I’m actually excited to see a return to its weird, more focused roots. Assassin’s Creed Mirage and Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown were great first steps. Ubisoft plans to reveal more details about Star Wars Outlaws, the new Assassin’s Creed set in Japan and its mobile lineup in May.

Gaming has never been gayer

“The game industry is out of step with contemporary media in terms of LGBTQ representation, and it is failing its LGBTQ customers.” That’s one of the breakout lines from GLAAD’s first annual gaming report, which analyzes the state of the video game industry from the perspective of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender players in the United States.

In its survey, GLAAD — the world’s largest LGBTQ media advocacy group — found that 17 percent of the total gaming audience identifies as LGBTQ, or about one in every five players. This figure falls in line with statistics for Gen Z. Still, just 2 percent of all games on the market contain LGBTQ content, a saturation level that falls miserably short of those in film, TV and other forms of media.

GLAAD ran the numbers itself: In November 2023, the Xbox store had 146 games with LGBTQ content, while PlayStation offered a list of 90 titles with these themes, and the Switch eShop had 50 games tagged LGBT. Steam had 2,302 English-language games under its LGBTQ+ tag, but that figure dropped to 1,506 when filtering out “adult only sexual content” titles. All told, queer games composed roughly 2 percent of the stores’ libraries.

In contrast, GLAAD found that almost one in three films from the top distributors in 2022 contained an LGBTQ character, and LGBTQ characters appeared as series regulars in 10 percent of primetime scripted broadcast shows in 2022 and 2023. GLAAD Associate Director of Gaming Blair Durkee said that, with queer representation at just 2 percent, gaming remains woefully behind other entertainment industries.

The report also tried to identify why this gap exists. It suggested some developers simply don’t think about including LGBTQ people, or they worry about pushing away a core audience that they assume is hostile toward LGBTQ content. However, the report says, “This imagined core audience is a myth,” considering LGBTQ people compose nearly 20 percent of the market on their own. Critically, GLAAD found that more than 60 percent of non-LGBTQ players weren’t bothered by queer protagonists in their games, and 70 percent said they were fine with titles that presented the option to play as an LGBTQ character.

So this type of representation doesn’t bother most straight, cisgender people, but it means a lot to LGBTQ players. 72 percent of LGBTQ players said that seeing characters of their gender identity or sexual orientation portrayed well made them feel better about themselves, and this number was even higher among younger players. Overall, 36 percent of LGBTQ players reported that video games helped them discover their sexual orientation or gender identity, and this percentage rose to 41 percent among LGBTQ players of color. More than 40 percent of queer players said video games helped them cope with a lack of acceptance in the real world. These issues are more prominent than ever amid an avalanche of anti-LGBTQ legislation: Already in the first few weeks of 2024, more than 500 anti-LGBTQ bills have been proposed or passed in the US, a majority of which target transgender youth.

While GLAAD found that 66 percent of all LGBTQ gamers said they use gaming to express themselves in ways they don’t feel comfortable doing in the real world, this statistic rose to 75 percent for players living in states with proposed or active anti-LGBTQ bills.

The real key is that more gamers identify as LGBTQ than ever before, and resistance toward these themes is waning with each new generation of players. I’m part of the LGBTQ community, and I can say that overall, the GLAAD report rings true. It feels like the industry is saturated with games that weren’t made for me, and there’s an immense joy that comes with discovering a new title that speaks to my own life or lets me play in a world that doesn’t involve traditionally straight-male power fantasies. Queer people have fantasies, too, and the GLAAD report highlights how forgotten these stories have been in games. It’s not a matter of LGBTQ people asking for all games to be gay — we just want proportional access to fantasy and escape. Personally, I’d love to see more LGBTQ people in positions of authority in video games, a recommendation that GLAAD makes in its report as well.

And really quickly because I can already hear the keyboards melting: Woke ideas will not destroy the gaming industry, but stagnation will, and as the GLAAD report points out, we’re much closer to that reality than anything else.

Bonus content

• FromSoftware's parent company has acquired Acquire, the team behind Octopath Traveller.

• The FTC accused Microsoft of lying about its intentions with Activision Blizzard after enacting a huge round of layoffs at the end of January, and the FTC is continuing to investigate potential antitrust issues around the acquisition. Microsoft responded by saying its plans changed, so there.

• Microsoft’s gaming layoffs included 86 jobs at Skylanders developer Toys for Bob, effectively shutting down the studio.

Now playing

Children of the Sun is a dark and trippy puzzle game that makes shooting a mechanic of elegance. Players find an angle, set up the shot and then control the path of a single bullet as it takes out every enemy on-screen. This is my kind of shooter. Children of the Sun is available on Steam as a demo only for now, and it comes from solo developer René Rother, published by Devolver Digital.