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Razer is releasing an Xbox Edition of its popular Kishi V2 mobile gaming controller. The device is available in two SKUs, for iPhone and Android phones, and brings plenty of Xbox-centric features into the mix. For instance, the controllers boast iconic Xbox branding and a white color-way to tie it all together.

The Xbox integration isn’t just cosmetic. There’s updated companion software to make the most out of brand collaboration, including full integration with Game Pass and new haptics that correlate to AAA Xbox titles. That gives these controllers cross-compatibility with hundreds of games available via the platform and the magic of cloud streaming. Razer says this refresh has been optimized to ensure lag-free gaming and the various inputs have been enhanced for improved control and precision. There’s also a dedicated Xbox button for powering on the controller and for initiating Game Pass.

The exterior has been switched up for improved ergonomics during those lengthy Game Pass sessions. The analog bumper triggers are more pronounced and the whole thing has a soft feel that should make it rest easy in the hands during use.

Of course, you aren’t tied to Xbox games here. This is still a standard Kishi Pro controller that’s powered by the Razer Nexus app, so you can play PC games, smartphone titles and more. To that end, there’s a virtual controller mode that lets you map out buttons to match a specific game.

Razer’s Kishi controllers have been a big hit for the company, starting with an Android model and eventually including an iPhone version. This newest release accompanies a broader launch for the Kishi V2 Pro model, that features a headphone jack and the aforementioned haptics. The Pro controller isn't new, exactly, but it used to be exclusively tied to the Razer Edge gaming handheld device. Now you can buy it standalone in this Xbox format or via plainer options. 

208 episodes of The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels. Three Tales of the Jedi shorts. Two episodes of The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett. One movie. That's everything you'll need to see to truly understand everything going on in the new Ahsoka series on Disney+. For Star Wars diehards, especially those raised on the animated shows spearheaded by Ahsoka creator Dave Filoni, it's everything they've hoped for. Everyone else, though, may find themselves adrift.

Ahsoka deftly brings animated characters to live action — Rosario Dawson remains a beguiling Ahsoka, and she's joined by Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Hera Syndulla, and Natasha Liu Bordezzo as the impulsive Sabine Wren — and it wastes no time introducing intriguing villains (especially Baylan Skoll, a former Jedi portrayed by the late Ray Stevenson). The series is a direct sequel to Rebels in almost every way. But while that's great news for fans, the downside is that newcomers to the wider Rebels verse, even those who've seen Ahsoka in The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett, will have a hard time finding any emotional stakes.

Photo by Lucasfilm

With the previous live action Star Wars TV shows (including the enjoyable-yet-unneccessary Obi-Wan Kenobi series), Filoni and co-producer Jon Favreau tried to ease general audiences into deeper aspects of Star Wars lore. That was most successful in the first season of The Mandalorian, which was filled with new characters and simple emotional stakes. (Protect Baby Yoda, no matter what it takes!) But Filoni eventually managed to bring in some characters from his animated shows, including the nefarious bounty hunter Cad Bane.

For better or worse, Ahsoka feels like a riskier project than any of those other live action shows. Almost everyone refers to events and major characters from Rebels, without explaining much about who they are. We know that Grand Admiral Thrawn seems like a major new antagonist, but the show never says why. We later learn that Ahsoka is driven to find him because that may reveal the location of Ezra Bridger, the main character of Rebels who disappeared at the end of that series. Sabine and Ahsoka share some pensive moments reflecting on their lost friend, but we don't get much about their shared relationship beyond that.

Photo by Lucasfilm

At times watching Ahsoka is like being invited to a party where everyone else are old friends, and who refuse to explain their in-jokes or shared history. It's not their problem if you're not having as much fun as them. Deal with it. I had similar issues with The Mandalorian's third season relying too much on The Book of Boba Fett, but at least those were shows airing in close proximity. Ahsoka hinges on direct continuity from an animated series that began in 2014 and ran for four years.

Of course, the series may get better down the line. Ahsoka is Filoni's baby, after all, and he's too talented of a storyteller to have her tread water for a season. And I'll admit, even the excellent Andor took a few episodes to really rev things up. I just hope this show weaves character motivations into its plot more effectively moving forward.

In the first two episodes, Ahsoka is basically sent on a fetch quest when a new trio of villains pops up. There’s some investigative work that sheds light on the post-Empire world (would former members of the Empire really want to support the New Republic?), but much of the time I felt like I was waiting for something, anything to happen. At least the handful of action scenes spice up the proceedings – Dawson’s months of training really show in her lightsaber duels. And there are hints of interesting character dynamics moving forward. 

In the years since Rebels ended, it turns out Ahsoka started training Sabine as a Jedi, but then abandoned her. It’s a reflection of Ahsoka’s own story, where she started as Anakin Skywalker’s padawan before a (very complicated) series of events pushed her out of the Jedi Order. Can Ahsoka make up for her mistakes, or is she doomed to fail her student like her master failed her?

At the very least, Ahsokai’s first two episodes are far more intriguing than the Book of Boba Fett or Obi-Wan’s intros. Both of those shows felt superfluous – did we really need Boba Fett’s backstory and redemption tale? Did seeing another Obi-Wan and Darth Vader duel really accomplish anything? At least Ahsoka is trying to push Star Wars into new territory. It’s just too bad that everyone isn’t invited for that journey.

Google TV is about to get a heavy dose of NFL Sunday Ticket. The service, which Google won the bidding rights for last year, will soon be available (and likely promoted with gusto) on the platform. Google also offers the NFL subscription service on YouTube and YouTube TV.

“Starting this football season, NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube and YouTube TV will be fully integrated into Google TV in the U.S.,” Google TV product managers Nick Staubach and Sal Altayyar wrote in an announcement blog post. “This means you can now access live out-of-market Sunday afternoon games, see top highlights and get recommendations for top games of the week, all right on your Google TV home screen.” The authors added that YouTube TV subscribers who add an NFL Sunday Ticket subscription would soon see the service in the app’s live tabs.

Google won the rights to NFL Sunday Ticket, reportedly outbidding Apple and Amazon in late 2022 after DirecTV held the rights for nearly three decades. Annual packages for the service currently start at $399 through YouTube or $299 when bought alongside a separate ($73 / month) YouTube TV membership. Packages that include the NFL RedZone channel (for “whip-around coverage of every game on Sunday afternoon”) add an extra $40 onto each plan.

Google also announced today that it’s adding more than 25 new free channels to Google TV. The company (strangely) didn’t specify the channels, but it mentioned that it would include shows like Top Gear and Baywatch. The unknown networks will join Google TV’s lineup of over 800 FAST (free ad-supported streaming television) channels.

WhatsApp will now let you create small groups without first naming them. Mark Zuckerberg announced the new feature in a Facebook post (viaTechCrunch). You previously had to choose your group’s name when setting it up.

TechCrunch reports that unnamed groups have a cap of six members instead of the named groups’ limit of 1,024 participants. In addition, WhatsApp will reportedly auto-generate placeholder names for unnamed groups based on their members. (For example, “Rocco & Li-Chen” for a chat between them in Zuckerberg’s sample image below.) Depending on how they've saved members’ contacts, the group name will also appear differently for each member.

Meta / Mark Zuckerberg

When joining an unnamed group that includes people who haven’t saved your contacts, it will reportedly display your phone number to the group. This suggests the feature is designed more for established friends, family or colleagues and less for strangers.

TechCrunch reports that the feature will roll out globally “over the next few weeks.”

Dr. Mario did not prepare us for this. In a pioneering effort, researchers from UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley, in partnership with Edinburgh-based Speech Graphics, have devised a groundbreaking communications system that allows a woman, paralyzed by stroke, to speak freely through a digital avatar she controls with a brain-computer interface.

Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) are devices that monitor the analog signals produced by your gray matter and convert them into the digital signals that computers understand — like a mixing soundboard’s DAC unit but what fits inside your skull. For this study, researchers led by Dr. Edward Chang, chair of neurological surgery at UCSF, first implanted a 253-pin electrode array into speech center of the patient’s brain. Those probes monitored and captured the electrical signals that would have otherwise driven the muscles in her jaw, lips and tongue, and instead, transmitted them through a cabled port in her skull to a bank of processors. That computing stack housed a machine learning AI which, over the course of a few week’s training, came to recognize the patient's electrical signal patterns for more than 1,000 words.

But that’s only the first half of the trick. Through that AI interface, the patient is now able to write out her responses, much in the same way Synchron’s system works for folks suffering from locked-in syndrome. But she can also speak, in a sense, using a synthesized voice trained on recordings of her natural voice from before she was paralyzed — same as we’re doing with our digitally undead celebrities.

What’s more, the researchers teamed up with Speech Graphics, the same company that developed the photorealistic facial animation technology from Halo Infinite and The Last of Us Part II, to create the patient’s avatar. SG’s tech “reverse engineers” the necessary musculoskeletal movements a face would make based on analysis of the audio input, then feeds that data in real-time to a game engine to be animated into a lagless avatar. And since the mental signals from the patient were mapped directly to the avatar, she could express emotion and communicate nonverbally as well.

“Creating a digital avatar that can speak, emote and articulate in real-time, connected directly to the subject’s brain, shows the potential for AI-driven faces well beyond video games,” Michael Berger, CTO and co-founder of Speech Graphics, said in a press statement Wednesday. “Restoring voice alone is impressive, but facial communication is so intrinsic to being human, and it restores a sense of embodiment and control to the patient who has lost that.“

BCI technology was pioneered in the early 1970s and has been slowly developing in the intervening decades. Exponential advancements with processing and computing systems have recently helped reinvigorate the field, with a handful of well-funded startups currently vying to be first through the FDA’s regulatory device approval process. Brooklyn-based Synchron made headlines last year when it was the first company to successfully implant a BCI in a human patient. Elon Musk’s Neuralink entered restricted FDA trials earlier this year after the company was found to have killed scores of porcine test subjects in earlier testing rounds.

Epic Games is trying to secure more exclusive titles for its PC storefront with its latest proposals to third-party developers. The company is offering the makers of eligible games and apps 100 percent of net revenue for six months. After the exclusivity window ends, developers and publishers will still take away 88 percent of their projects' revenue, with Epic receiving a cut of 12 percent.

The company, which says its launcher and store has 68 million monthly active users, will also give participants of the Epic First Run program extra exposure to get their wares in front of more eyes. The games and apps will receive "exclusive" badging and spots on the homepage. Epic will include them in various collections and promotions too.

The program will be open to developers and publishers who are releasing eligible products on or after October 16th. A product will be eligible if it hasn't appeared on another third-party PC store or subscription services on said storefronts. Games and apps that already have exclusivity deals with Epic aren't eligible.

Developers and publishers will still be able to sell games and apps that are included in the program directly to users via their own launchers and websites. They can also list their products on stores such as Green Man Gaming and Humble Store via the Epic Games Store’s keyless redemption program.

Epic already offered developers and publishers a more generous split of game and app sales than the likes of Valve, which takes a 30 percent cut of Steam sales. The promise of vacuuming up all net revenue for six months and getting extra promotion on the Epic Games Store might be compelling enough for more developers and publishers to take the exclusivity plunge there.

Don’t tell anyone, but the Nintendo Switch emulation scene has been thriving pretty much since day one, due to an early hardware vulnerability. It’s relatively simple to pirate Switch titles and play them on PCs, portable consoles like the Steam Deck and even lower-powered Android phones. This is a problem for the big N, and it’s addressing it by partnering up with cybersecurity company Irdeto and its anti-tampering software suite Denuvo.

Denuvo is one of the more popular software suites to minimize tampering and associated emulation. This is a middleware that developers pay for and integrate into the actual game code, thus making it much harder to emulate on other devices. The tools are common with PC titles but, until now, were unavailable for Switch developers.

Though Denuvo is useful beyond the prevention of emulation, that seems to be the primary intent here, with Irdeto touting a new dev portal called the Nintendo Switch Emulation Protection program. The company calls it a “revolutionary technology to protect games launching on Nintendo Switch from piracy.” It also notes that Switch piracy hurts PC sales as well, as the games pirated from Nintendo’s console are playable on PC, bypassing Steam, Epic and other official online retailers.

Now, this might be good news for Switch devs, but Denuvo has a spotty track record, despite boasting that it has protected more than 1,000 games from emulation. This is DRM software, plain and simple, so it’s known to slow down performance when installed, leading some publishers to actually remove the middleware post-launch. Additionally, there’s been some high-priority misfires with the software, with hackers cracking Middle-Earth: Shadow of War in less than a day, and that’s with Denuvo installed. It’s also known for being quite expensive, likely putting the software out of reach for smaller studios and development teams.

The Nintendo Switch is over six years old, with a successor expected in the nearish future. In other words, why did this take so long? Nobody knows. Like it or not, the developers portal goes live this week.

Apptronik unveiled a new workforce robot today. Named Apollo, the machine is designed to “work in environments designed for, and directly alongside, humans.” The android is initially intended to move and carry cases and totes in logistics and manufacturing settings. But the Austin-based Apptronik sees Apollo expanding into “construction, oil and gas, electronics production, retail, home delivery, elder care” and more. Apollo follows Xiaomi’s reveal of the CyberOne robot last year, which looked remarkably similar to the still-unreleased Tesla Bot.

The 5-foot-8, 160-lb Apollo can lift up to 55 lbs. (Apptronik says it optimized efficiency by making its arms lighter than the weight they can lift.) It uses swappable batteries — running up to four hours per pack — which should provide more flexibility than robots that require wall charging before springing back into action. “In short, this battery-based approach means greater work output for Apollo and greater operational efficiency for customers,” Apptronik wrote in a press release today.

Apptronik

Apptronik views Apollo as a robot that can adapt to the job. The company says it built “modularity into Apollo’s design, empowering users to decide whether Apollo is best used for their applications as a true bi-pedal walking humanoid, a torso that operates on wheels or one mounted in a stationary location.” The robot has digital panels on its face and chest to provide a “friendly, human-like countenance” to make workers feel comfortable working alongside it (as it potentially moves towards automating their jobs).

Apptronik hasn’t announced public pricing for the robot. You can read more about Apollo on the company’s product page.

Solo Stove might just come to your aid if you're hoping for a smoke-free fire in your backyard (or at the beach) this Labor Day weekend. The company is steeply discounting its fire pits ahead of the holiday, both for devices and bundles. The core Bonfire 2.0 is down to just $240, or 40 percent off. If you need more gear to improve portability and protection, the Backyard Bonfire Bundle 2.0 is nearly 50 percent off at $425 (normally $840) with an included lid, shield, stand and weather shelter.

The Bonfire 2.0 is one of our favorite pieces of outdoor tech for the fall. You can burn virtually any wood you have in a clean, smokeless fire pit that's compact enough to fit on a patio. It's ideal if you're hoping to stay warm outside as the evenings get cooler, or to roast marshmallows without making a conventional pit. The Backyard bundle includes what you need to use the Bonfire on heat-sensitive surfaces, guard against stray embers and keep the fire going in less-than-pleasant conditions.

The Bonfire is the medium pit, so you'll want to look at the Ranger 2.0 for greater portability or the Yukon 2.0 if you want the largest possible option. For most uses, though, Solo Stove's mid-tier model is more than enough.

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Former OpenSea employee Nathanial Chastain has been sentenced to three months in prison over an NFT (non-fungible token) insider trading scheme. Chastain, who was found guilty of wire fraud and money laundering, used "confidential information about which NFTs were going to be featured on OpenSea’s homepage for his personal financial gain," according to the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York.

Back in 2021, an X (then known as Twitter) user claimed that Chastain was buying NFT drops before the public could get their hands on the digital items. Chastain, who selected which NFTs would appear on OpenSea's homepage, was accused of selling the tokens he bought in advance for a profit after they became broadly available and interest in them soared. OpenSea admitted that Chastain had carried out such a scheme and said it would ban employees from using confidential information to trade NFTs.

The incident caught the attention of federal prosecutors, who treated the case in a similar fashion to regular insider trading. The US Attorney's Office noted that Chastain sold the NFTs for between two and five times the original purchase price.

Along with his prison sentence, Chastain must serve three months of home confinement and three years of supervised release. He also needs to pay a $50,000 fine and forfeit the Ethereum he obtained from his illicit NFT trading.

"Nathanial Chastain faced justice today for violating the trust that his employer placed in him by using OpenSea’s confidential information for his own profit," US attorney Damian Williams said in a statement. "Today’s sentence should serve as a warning to other corporate insiders that insider trading — in any marketplace — will not be tolerated.”