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A live-action TV series based on Final Fantasy 14 is no longer happening. The project is now dead, according to Dinesh Shamdasani, the co-founder of Hivemind, one of the production companies involved.

"We took around a fantastic pilot script by Ben Lustig and Jake Thornton along with a multi-season plan they built with our show runners but got rejected across the board," Shamdasani wrote on X, as spotted by Eurogamer. "The size and scale needed to do it right proved too much for anyone to want to risk."

Amazon, which spent a billion dollars on a Lord of the Rings TV show that drew large viewership figures but barely made a dent in the cultural zeitgeist, seemingly came closest to spinning up the project. Evidently, it decided against getting on board.

COVID-19 also played against the show's chances, according to screenwriter Thornton. "We took it out just as studios began to zip up their purse strings," Thornton wrote on X.

The series was announced back in 2019 as a collaborative effort between Hivemind (which makes the Netflix series The Witcher) and Sony Pictures Television. Although Sony doesn't own the rights to Final Fantasy — that would be Square Enix — the Final Fantasy series is closely affiliated with PlayStation.

Sony has found success in adapting other PlayStation games for the big and small screen over the last few years, such as The Last of Us and Uncharted. But it seems turning a sprawling MMO into a TV show was just too tall of an order.

It probably doesn't help that the Final Fantasy 14 base game is notoriously a bit of a slog. So much so that players can pay to skip the first 80 levels and get to the good stuff. It feels like the equivalent of having to watch a season and a half of a TV show before it really gets going. Maybe Hivemind and Sony should try adapting a Final Fantasy game that's good right out of the gate, such as FF16.

The Samsung Galaxy S24 isn’t taking Google’s Gemini AI with it to China. CNBC reported Friday that the Chinese version of the flagship phone uses Baidu’s Ernie chatbot to power the phone’s AI-powered features. Ernie arrived last August after reportedly receiving Chinese government approval. 

“Now featuring Ernie’s understanding and generation capabilities, the upgraded Samsung Note Assistant can translate content and also summarize lengthy content into clear, intelligently organized formats at the click of a button, streamlining the organization of extensive text,” Baidu and Samsung told CNBC in a joint statement.

Samsung’s description of the Galaxy S24 series on its Chinese website advertises many of the same Google-powered features it debuted last week in its San Jose, CA, launch event. These include a version of Circle to Search, real-time call translation, a transcription helper and a photo assistant. The Chinese Galaxy S24 product pages don’t have any references to Google, which has limited operations in the country.

Samsung

A recent report suggests Apple recently ended Samsung’s 14-year run as the global smartphone shipment leader. In addition, IDC published data this week suggesting the iPhone maker claimed the top spot in the Chinese market (with a 17.3-percent market share) for the first time in 2023. Samsung didn’t make the top five.

Engadget has tried the Galaxy S24 series, including the standard, Plus and Ultra variants. Samsung’s 2024 flagship phone lineup launches in the US on January 31.

To the surprise of just about everyone — seemingly including the studio behind it — virtual reality game Ultrawings 2 has hit PlayStation VR2 earlier than expected. Developer Bit Planet Games wrote on X that "shadow dropping Ultrawings 2 on PS VR2 today was not on our 2024 bingo card but, well, here we are." (A shadow drop refers to a surprise release of a product as soon as it's announced, like Hi-Fi Rush.)

It's unclear exactly how Ultrawings 2, which debuted on Steam and Meta Quest in 2022, arrived on PS VR2 ahead of schedule. Bit Planet had wanted to bring the aerial adventure title to that platform by the end of 2023 but was unable to. It instead promised to release Ultrawings 2 on PS VR2 early this year. On January 9, Bit Planet noted it had started the submission process.

Nevertheless, the studio says the PS VR2 debut was "unforeseen." While the developers say the current version of the game has some "relatively minor issues," those have been resolved and were planned to be fixed in a day-one patch. That's more likely to be a day-five update, but the studio said Ultrawings 2 is "solid" as is.

In any case, at least there's one more game for folks to try on PS VR2. In the 11 months that the headset has been around, Sony itself has only published three VR experiences on the platform.

The MicroKorg 2 has some big britches to fill. The original MicroKorg is one of, if not the best selling synthesizer of all time. It's also probably the longest continuously manufactured synth, having hit the market in 2002. Of course, technology has advanced quite a lot in the last 22 years and it was time to give what is arguably the first classic synth of the 21st century an update.

The new version that Korg announced just ahead of NAMM 2024 stays largely true to the original design. It's small, but solidly built. The mini keys might bother those with sausage fingers, but my slightly smaller than average hands didn't have much issue. I did occasionally miss my mark slightly, but that has as much to do with my terrible keyboard skills as it does the compact keybed. The keybed itself is fine. Nothing to write home about, that's for sure. But it's also not worth getting up in arms about. I've played plenty worse.

The knobs and buttons, even on this prototype felt solid. And the big rotary knob, which is kind of what gives a MicroKorg its visual identity, has very satisfying detents as you change the genre of your patch selection. While there are big signs in the Korg booth proclaiming that the MicroKorg 2 is still a prototype, the hardware already feels quite refined.

Even the interface seems like its at least nearly complete. The screen itself is bright and colorful with decent viewing angles. It did get a little washed out at extreme angles under the glare of the Anaheim Convention Center's lights, but it's unlikely to cause an issue in regular use. 

Terrence O'Brien / Engadget

The UI is already looking pretty nice, with some stylish animations as you change parameters. And changing parameters is a lot easier than it was on the original MicroKorg, which had two edit selection knobs and a table you needed to look up what the five knobs across the top were controlling. On the MicroKorg 2 things are much quicker. For example, pressing the button below the second knob cycles through the settings for oscillator one, two, three and the noise source. And the screen tells you what parameters are assigned to those knobs, depending on the page you've selected. 

It's hardly knob per function but it could be much worse.

Terrence O'Brien / Engadget

The one area where it was obvious that the MicroKorg 2 was still in prototype stage was in the presets. There were only eight preprogrammed into the unit I tried. And the NAMM show floor wasn't exactly the ideal environment to do deep sound design. 

I did kick the tires on it a bit though, and was pretty quickly able to throw together a couple of decent sounding patches. And the handful of presets that Korg did have ready to go were bright and loaded with character. They were decidedly digital but didn't feel clinical. Unfortunately the convention hall was even less conducive to testing out the vocoder and harmonizer features. It was just impossible to get a clean enough signal with all the cacophony going on around me.

Terrence O'Brien / Engadget

In general the eight-voice (or four-voice in bi-timbral mode), three-oscillator synth engine seems like a big upgrade from the original. It's got not just your standard virtual analog waves, but a selection of single cycle waveforms and even samples that can be combined to create relatively complex sounding patches. 

The one thing that the original has over its successor though is price. Where you can still go pick up a MicroKorg from most music retailers for $430, the MicroKorg 2 will set you back $699 when it goes on sale later this year.

We've reached the end of another week, so it's time for a roundup of the best deals we could find on tech we like. Happily, a couple of the items we saw at CES (and named among the best) are already seeing decent discounts. So those who want to smoke meat indoors or invest in home back up batteries are in luck. As for smaller gadgets, we saw a deal on our favorite Bluetooth tracker, found a sale on Anker batteries and chargers and noted that Apple's AirPods Pro (which will work with the upcoming Vision Pro) are still hovering at their all-time low price. This also may be the last week to take advantage of pre-order promotions on the soon-to-be-released Samsung Galaxy S24 smartphones. Here are the best tech deals from this week that you can still get today.

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

George Carlin’s estate has filed a lawsuit against the makers of an hour-long comedy special featuring an AI replica of the comedian, as reported by NBC News. The late comedian’s estate, including his daughter Kelly Carlin, filed the suit in a Los Angeles federal court last night. It claims the online media company that posted the video, Dudesy, violated the performer’s right to publicity and infringed on a copyright.

The video’s called “George Carlin: I'm Glad I'm Dead” and features an hour of new “material” by the comedian, who died in 2008. As AI replications go, it’s certainly not going to break any records. It’s audio only and, honestly, doesn’t even sound that much like Carlin. It sounds like a below average impression of the comedian. Also, it’s very, very bad. Carlin had an extremely unique voice and this video is mostly basic punchlines you can see coming from a mile away. There’s very little outlandish wordplay. There’s no righteous fury. There are, however, a lot of jokes comparing Donald Trump to poop.

"I understand and share the desire for more George Carlin. I, too, want more time with my father. But it is ridiculous to proclaim he has been ‘resurrected’ with AI,” Kelly Carlin wrote in a statement. She went on to write that the Carlin in that video is a “poorly-executed facsimile cobbled together by unscrupulous individuals.”

The estate's attorney, Josh Schiller, went on to warn that AI risked becoming "a tool that allows bad-faith actors to replace creative expression, to exploit the already existing work of creators, and to get rich at the expense of others."

Dudesey, the channel that created and posted the video, is actually run by the popular comedian Will Sasso and author Chad Kultgen. They didn’t write the material here. The AI was trained on thousands of hours of Carlin routines to create the facsimile, according to a report by NPR. Sasso and Kultgen are, however, named in the suit. The pair behind Dudesy liken the AI-created Carlin to an impressionist who impersonates a public figure.

Sasso suggested in a podcast last week that the AI version was no replacement for the real thing, going on to say that it was “interesting how heated people get about it.” The lawsuit calls the video a “piece of computer-generated click-bait which detracts from the value of Carlin’s comedic works and harms his reputation.”

The complaint seeks unspecified damages and the immediate removal of “any video or audio copies” of the hour-long special. So, if you’re curious to hear a pretty bad Carlin impression make obvious jokes about Taylor Swift, you had better get on that while you have the chance.

Of course, this is just the latest salvo in the ongoing war between AI algorithms and humans that create works of value. This issue was at the very heart of last year’s Hollywood writers’ strike and the recent spate of AI-created celebrities used to scam consumers. This is just the beginning. It’s an election year, after all, and bad actors have already used an AI replication of President Biden’s voice to urge New Hampshire residents not to vote in last week’s primary.

Swedish electric car company Polestar is slashing its workforce by 15 percent globally. About 450 employees are expected to be let go due to “challenging market conditions.” The news comes despite its six percent increase in global car deliveries compared to 2022, according to its recent fourth quarter global fiscal report.

The company did, however, warn that it would reduce its headcount back in May 2023 which was around the same time it announced its production goals were disappointingly off by 10,000 to 20,000 cars from its initial goal. Polestar defended its decisions and explained it was “intensifying its focus” on cutting costs to make the business more efficient.

Despite delays in shipments last year, the 2024 Polestar 2 lineup is coming in strong with a suite of new upgrades, including longer mileage and faster charging. However, the company is faced with the issue that buyers might be turned off by its nearly $50,000 price tag when they can get newer models produced by rivals like Tesla for more than $10,000 less.

Job cuts across the EV sector have become commonplace, with rivals like Lucid Motors’ announcement to cut 18 percent of its workforce last year and Rivian slashing six percent. These trends might be due to the fact that supply chain issues are a huge problem in the EV industry, coupled with buyer hesitancy to invest in electric cars.

Last year, the European Union implemented new laws to make big tech open up its platforms to competitors. The deadline for compliance is March, and all eyes were on how Apple, which is famous for not playing nicely with others, would react. Now the company has set out how it will comply with the law, and the result is the sort of malicious compliance everyone was expecting. Similarly, the reaction from the coalition of well-heeled critics who were all hoping to get a slice of Apple’s pie for free has been similarly predictable.

The Digital Markets Act

In 2023, the EU laid down a new regime to prevent big tech throwing all of its weight around in the bloc. The Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act govern what it calls “gatekeepers,” the big platforms who get between users and businesses. That includes Meta, Alphabet, Apple, Amazon and (TikTok owner) ByteDance, who all have big user bases, deep pockets and a lot of power. One key provision of the law was to get platform holders like Apple and Google to open their systems and allow competing services, such as alternative app stores, a topic we covered in depth back in 2020.

On January 25, Apple published a statement explaining how the DMA would impact iOS, Safari and the App Store. The document is laced with references to how the law makes iOS less secure and that Apple needs to take steps to mitigate those risks. And while Apple does not say how much each part of its business makes specifically, the App Store is a key part of its services division which earned a combined $22 billion in its most recent quarter. Consequently, Apple will happily let you set up a competing iOS app store, but in order to do so, you will have to vault Mount Everest, dig a tunnel to the center of the Earth and front a million dollars in cash.

Okay, not quite that.

You can compete, but you won’t want to

The creators of a would-be rival app store can’t simply turn up and sell their wares without any oversight. It was obvious from the get-go that even if Apple did open up its platforms, no third party app store would be allowed to do an end-run around the company’s basic rules. If you were hoping to run Honest Doug’s App Store (Not A Scam) and take the world for a ride, then you’re out of luck.

Would-be rivals will still need to meet Apple’s Notarization requirements and have tight rules and moderation tools governing quality, piracy, fraud and payment disputes. (Notarization will mean these apps will be checked by Apple to look for “known malware”, with the ability to shut the app down if any is detected.) They will need key rules around data collection and to offer users the same level of control they enjoy in the App Store proper. Not to mention complying with the Digital Services Act, GDPR and a number of other acronym-heavy EU regulations around digital services and online privacy. Essentially, if you want to run your own App Store, you’ll need to do it to the same level that Apple does.

Apple has also said app stores need to ensure they can meet their obligation to pay app developers. In this case, it means sharing a letter from a top financial institution with proof they have access to a minimum of €1,000,000 (around $1.1 million) in credit. And to avoid third party app stores taking advantage of Apple’s platform without Apple benefiting, developers will need to pay a Core Technology Fee once an app has been downloaded more than a million times. This is a per-install fee of €0.50 (around 54 cents) which renews every 12 months the app is installed for. You can decide for yourself if this reminds you of Unity’s aborted Runtime Fee payment scheme.

At the present time, Apple charges developers either $99 or $299, depending on if they are for an individual or a company. Apple then takes a flat commission on any transaction, either to buy the app itself or with an in-app purchase. For small developers making less than $1 million per year, Apple takes a 15 percent cut, while bigger names pay 30 percent. There are exceptions, including “reader” apps which are downloaded for free and tie to subscriptions elsewhere. So far it's not clear under what circumstances the sideloading fees might be preferable (if ever) to the vanilla "Apple tax" through its proprietary storefront.

The Expected Response

Naturally, Apple’s statement and all of the explanatory detail in its developer notes was controversial. Its critics, many of whom feel that Apple has too much power over its platform, were incensed.

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, who has previously sued the company about this matter, was quick to denounce the changes. He said the new rules were “a devious new instance of malicious compliance.” Adding that it is forcing app developers to pick between App Store exclusivity or an “anticompetitive scheme rife with new junk fees on downloads and new Apple taxes on payments they don’t process.”

The Coalition for App Fairness, a lobby group backed by Epic, Spotify and Match Group, was quick to support one of its biggest backers. Executive director and former Republican spokesperson Rick Vanmeter said Apple had “no intention” to comply with the DMA. And added the move was a “shameless insult to the European Commission and the millions of European consumers they represent,” and urged officials to reject the move.

Despite Sweeney’s personal objection and that of his lobbyists, Epic Games has already said Fortnite – which was pulled from the Apple Store when Epic deliberately violated Apple’s Terms of Service – will return to iOS. The company said it would launch its own Epic Games Store for iOS in 2024, through which it would distribute its own titles. It added in the announcement tweet it would continue to “argue to the courts and regulators that Apple is breaking the law.”

But it’s not just Apple’s well-heeled rivals who feel the company is thumbing its nose at the EU with these changes. Andy Yen, the founder of privacy service Proton, told Engadget that Apple’s compliance with the DMA is “done in bad faith,” and that the iPhone maker is “fighting tooth and nail to maintain its profits and monopoly." Yen added that the “strings attached to Apple’s new policies mean that in practice it will be impossible for developers to benefit from them.” And that the moves erode “the fundamental rights of users by giving Apple the ability to review apps downloaded outside the App Store.” He added that the “European Commission can’t let this blatant bending of the rules fly.”

But despite the chorus of calls demanding the European Commission to Do Something, the body hasn’t budged just yet. “We take note of Apple’s announcements ahead of the compliance deadline,” a commission spokesperson told Engadget “We do not comment on these announcements.” The spokesperson added they “strongly encourage designated gatekeepers to test their proposals with third parties.” And that these comments were “without prejudice to the Commission’s own assessment of these proposals.”

At the time of writing, there has not yet been a comment from any high-profile EU figures about the matter. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Margrethe Vestager, who handles technology and competition matters, have been active on social media but not about this topic. Similarly, we are waiting to hear back from Spotify and Deezer, who have both previously urged the European Union to act. Not to mention that, before Apple’s announcement, Spotify published its own announcement saying it will offer app downloads directly from its site.

The National Security Agency’s director has confirmed that the agency buys Americans’ web browsing data from brokers without first obtaining warrants. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) blocked the appointment of the NSA’s inbound director Timothy Haugh until the agency answered his questions regarding its collection of Americans’ location and Internet data. Wyden said he’d been trying for three years to “publicly release the fact that the NSA is purchasing Americans’ internet records.”

In a letter dated December 11, current NSA Director Paul Nakasone confirmed to Wyden that the agency does make such purchases from brokers. "NSA acquires various types of [commercially available information] for foreign intelligence, cybersecurity, and other authorized mission purposes, to include enhancing its signals intelligence (SIGINT) and cybersecurity missions," Nakasone wrote. "This may include information associated with electronic devices being used outside and, in certain cases, inside the United States."

Nakasone went on to claim that the NSA "does not buy and use location data collected from phones known to be used in the United States either with or without a court order. Similarly, NSA does not buy and use location data collected from automobile telematics systems from vehicles known to be located in the United States."

An NSA spokesperson told Reuters that the agency uses such data sparingly but that it has notable value for national security and cybersecurity purposes. "At all stages, NSA takes steps to minimize the collection of US [personal] information, to include application of technical filters," the spokesperson said.

Wyden has called the practice unlawful. "Such records can identify Americans who are seeking help from a suicide hotline or a hotline for survivors of sexual assault or domestic abuse," he said.

The senator urged Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines to order US intelligence agencies to stop buying Americans’ private data without consent. He also asked Haines to direct intelligence agencies to "conduct an inventory of the personal data purchased by the agency about Americans, including, but not limited to, location and internet metadata." Wyden said that any data that does not comply with Federal Trade Commission standards regarding personal data sales should be deleted.

Wyden pointed to an FTC settlement that this month banned a data broker from selling location data. The agency alleged that the information, which it claimed was sold to buyers including government contractors, "could be used to track people’s visits to sensitive locations such as medical and reproductive health clinics, places of religious worship and domestic abuse shelters."

The FTC stated in its complaint against the broker, formerly known as X-Mode Social, that by "failing to fully inform consumers how their data would be used and that their data would be provided to government contractors for national security purposes, X-Mode failed to provide information material to consumers and did not obtain informed consent from consumers to collect and use their location data."

The settlement was the first of its kind with a data broker. In a statement, Wyden, who has been investigating the data broker industry for several years, said he was "not aware of any company that provides such a warning to users [regarding their consent] before collecting their data."

The issue of US federal agencies buying phone location data isn't exactly new. In 2020, it emerged that Customs and Border Protection had been doing so. The following year, Wyden claimed the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon bought and used location data from Americans’ phones.

Tesla is recalling 200,000 vehicles in the US due to a malfunctioning backup camera. There were reports that the cameras wouldn’t engage when the cars were in reverse, which is a pretty big safety issue and the whole point of those cameras in the first place. Tesla has processed 81 warranty claims potentially related to the issue, according to Autoblog.

The recall includes certain Model Y, Model S, and Model X vehicles from 2023. Tesla says it delivered 1.8 million vehicles in 2023, so this recall accounts for more than 10 percent of the company’s yearly output. The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) released a statement on the matter and said that a software issue was to blame for the problem, according to Reuters.

To that end, all of the recalled vehicles feature Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” computer 4.0 and run software version 2023.44.30 through 2023.44.30.6, or 2023.44.100. Tesla owners can check to see what software versions they’re running. The company has released an over-the-air (OTA) software update to fix the glitch, according to the NHTSA.

Tesla became aware of the problem in December and decided on a recall on January 12. Customers will receive a letter alerting them to the problem by March 22. The company says that it’s not aware of any crashes, injuries or deaths associated with the malfunction.

This latest recall comes just six weeks after Tesla recalled over two million vehicles after serious safety issues regarding its Autopilot advanced driver-assistance system. That was also addressed via an OTA software update.