Tesla has stopped including a complimentary Mobile Connector Bundle with new vehicle orders. The change was first spotted by Twitter user Tesla_Adri, and later confirmed by CEO Elon Musk. The accessory, currently priced at $275 on its own, allows you to connect your Tesla to a wall outlet and get about two to three miles of range after an hour of charging.

“Usage statistics were super low, so seemed wasteful,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk said in response to someone commenting on the news after it was shared more widely by investor Sawyer Merritt. “On the (minor) plus side, we will be including more plug adapters with the mobile connector kit.”

Musk later tweeted that Tesla would reduce the price of the mobile connector to $200 and make it easier to order the accessory alongside a new car. He was also quick to note you don’t need an adapter to charge your Tesla at one of the company’s Superchargers or a Tesla Wall Connector installed in your home. At the moment, the charging bundle is listed as out of stock on the Tesla website.

As Electrek notes, this isn’t the first time Tesla has removed a charging cable. the company previously shipped both Level 1 and Level 2 connectors with every new car, but later stopped bundling the latter adapter. 

This week, WhatsApp began rolling out emoji reactions. And it looks like the company could soon implement another overdue feature. With the latest beta release of its iOS app, WhatsApp has added an option that allows users to limit specific individuals from seeing their “Last Scene” status, according to WABetaInfo.

If you’re not familiar with that part of WhatsApp, it’s the feature that indicates when someone last checked the app, and it’s a way to find out if a contact may have potentially seen your message even if they have read receipts turned off. For a while now, WhatsApp has allowed you to limit who sees your status to only your contacts. You can also disable the feature altogether, but you haven’t had the ability to prevent specific individuals from seeing that information.

However, WhatsApp iOS beta version 22.9.0.70 adds a new “My Contacts Except…” option under the Last Seen section of the app’s privacy settings. According to WABetaInfo, adding an individual to that list also prevents you from seeing their status. The outlet says WhatsApp is also implementing more granular privacy controls for both profile photos and about sections. With the feature now in beta testing on both Android and iOS, it likely won’t be long until it’s officially available in WhatsApp.

Even since Twitter confirmed it was working on an edit button, there have been questions about how the company would limit potential abuse of the feature. And we may now have an answer. In a tweet spotted by The Verge, developer Jane Manchun Wong, who’s known for reverse engineering apps to find new features, suggests the forthcoming tool could create a new tweet whenever someone tweaks something they wrote.

“Looks like Twitter’s approach to Edit Tweet is immutable, as in, instead of mutating the Tweet text within the same tweet (same ID), it re-creates a new Tweet with the amended content, along with the list of the old Tweets prior to that edit,” Manchun Wong said.

What that list looks like is unclear at the moment.

In a separate series of tweets, a handful of other developers, including Alessandro Paluzzi, were able to enable the functionality before its official rollout. In screenshots and GIFs shared by those individuals, the edit option is accessible through the three-dots menu.

Tapping that button leads to an interface that looks similar to the platform’s existing composition window – the one major difference being that button you press to post the tweaked message says “Update,” instead of “Tweet.” Notably, the screenshots circulating online don’t show a tweet’s edit history, though that could be because Twitter has yet to implement that part of the feature.

Whatever form Twitter’s edit functionality takes could be ultimately decided by the outcome of Elon Musk’s bid to buy the company. After purchasing a 9.2 percent stake in the social media giant and deciding not to join its board of directors, the Tesla and SpaceX executive offered to buy Twitter for $43 billion. On Friday, the board unanimously approved a poison pill strategy in an attempt to ward off the bid.

After debuting exclusively on Nintendo Switch last year, No More Heroes 3 is coming to PC and home consoles. In a tweet spotted by The Verge, publisher XSeed Games said on Friday it plans to release Suda 51’s latest project on PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and PC sometime this fall. The new versions will feature improved high-definition visuals, better framerates and faster loading times, according to the company. That’s good news considering the Switch version sometimes struggles with performance issues.

Travis Touchdown’s latest misadventure sees the master assassin tasked with fighting off an alien invasion of Earth. XSeed has yet to announce pricing for the new versions, but it looks like fans can look forward to the company offering limited-edition physical copies of the game that come bundled with a handful of extra goodies, including a soundtrack with cover art that references Akira. XSeed will share more information about the digital release later.

China has signaled it will begin actively enforcing regulation that forbids the livestreaming of unauthorized games. Per Reuters, the country’s National Radio and Television Administration said on Friday all internet platforms are “strictly forbidden” from streaming titles that the government has not approved.

According to video game industry analyst Daniel Ahmad, China has always required that games be officially licensed before they can be distributed or streamed within the country, but it rarely enforced the latter ban. That behavior allowed games such as Elden Ring, a title that’s not officially approved for sale in China, to find substantial audiences on platforms like Huya. Ahmad notes that FromSoftware’s latest garnered approximately 17 million cumulative daily average viewers in its first week of release.

“What this means in practice is that unless your game is approved by the [National Radio and Television Administration], it is going to be very difficult for it to get visibility via live streaming, short video, advertisement or other platforms [and] channels,” Ahmad said.

China has become increasingly tough on video games in recent years. Last summer, the country began enforcing a three-hour weekly limit on the amount of time children can play online video games. At the time of the ban, a state-owned news outlet described the medium as “spiritual opium.” The National Radio and Television Administration employed similar rhetoric, claiming issues like teenage addiction necessitated the need for urgent action on video game livestreaming.

The James Webb Space Telescope is one step closer to probing the depths of the universe. On Wednesday, NASA announced that it was ready to start taking test images and aligning the optics of the JWST after the telescope’s instrumentation reached its final operating temperature of minus 448 degrees Fahrenheit (or minus 267 degrees Celsius) partway through last week.

The JWST has been gradually cooling down ever since its successful December 25th launch, but the telescope took a major step forward on that front when it deployed its massive 70-foot sunshield at the start of the year. That component allowed JWST’s systems, including its critical Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), to drop to a temperature of approximately minus 298 degrees Fahrenheit (or about minus 183 degrees Celsius). 

Getting the JWST to its final operating temperature required NASA and the European Space Agency to activate the telescope’s electric “cryocooler.” That in itself involved passing a technical hurdle dubbed the “pinch point,” or the stage at which the James Webb’s instruments went from minus 433 degrees Fahrenheit to minus 448 Fahrenheit.

“The MIRI cooler team has poured a lot of hard work into developing the procedure for the pinch point,” said Analyn Schneider, MIRI project manager for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “The team was both excited and nervous going into the critical activity. In the end, it was a textbook execution of the procedure, and the cooler performance is even better than expected.”

Part of the reason the James Webb needs to be so cold before it can begin its mission is so that its electronics generate the least amount of infrared light possible and are thereby less likely to interfere with its instruments when astronomers turn them toward distant cosmic bodies. The cold temperatures are also required to avoid something called “dark current,” an electrical force that’s generated when the atoms in the telescope’s detectors vibrate. That movement can create false signals that make it more difficult for the telescope to get an accurate picture of a celestial body.

Wizards of the Coast owner Hasbro is buying D&D Beyond, one of the most popular digital toolsets for playing Dungeons and Dragons. In a press release spotted by Gizmodo, the publisher said on Wednesday it had agreed to pay $146.3 million to acquire the platform from current owner Fandom. In a post over on the toolset’s official forums, the D&D Beyond team said the purchase would not change how players use the toolset to run their campaigns. “Wizards of the Coast has no plans to stop supporting D&D Beyond. Ever,” the team said.

In a way, today’s announcement effectively sees D&D Beyond return home. The toolset came out of a partnership Wizards of the Coast announced in 2017 with Curse, a gaming company that was then best known for its World of Warcraft addon manager. In 2018, Curse, following its 2016 acquisition by Twitch, sold D&D Beyond, among other media assets, to Fandom.

Outside of the origin story, the acquisition makes a lot of practical sense for Hasbro. The company notes the royalties Fandom paid to operate D&D Beyond represented “a significant contribution” to the revenue it was making from Dungeons and Dragons. What's more, the deal puts Hasbro where many of its fans are already heading. In 2021, more than 80 percent of D&D fans played the game virtually, according to the company. 

A former lawyer with California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing has accused Governor Gavin Newsom of interfering with the agency’s sexual harassment lawsuit against Activision Blizzard. According to an email seen by Bloomberg, DFEH assistant chief counsel Melanie Proctor said Tuesday she was resigning her position to protest the abrupt firing of Janette Wipper, the watchdog’s chief counsel.

“The Office of the Governor repeatedly demanded advance notice of litigation strategy and of next steps in the litigation,” Proctor writes in her resignation. “As we continued to win in state court, this interference increased, mimicking the interests of Activision’s counsel.” Proctor alleges Wipper was “abruptly terminated” for attempting to protect the DFEH’s independence. According to the email, the former chief counsel is considering “all avenues of legal recourse,” including a claim under California’s Whistleblower Protection Act.

We’ve reached out to the Office of Governor Newsom for comment.

News of the resignation comes little more than two weeks after a federal judge ordered Activision Blizzard to pay $18 million to settle a US Equal Opportunity Commission lawsuit accusing the publisher of fostering a discriminatory workplace. Before that complaint was filed, California's fair employment agency launched its own lawsuit against Activision Blizzard following a two-year investigation into sexual harassment allegations at the publisher. The DFEH case is currently scheduled to go to trial in February 2023, but the allegations put forward by Proctor are likely to raise questions about the ultimate fate of the lawsuit.

Amazon’s IMDb TV is rebranding. Beginning April 27th, the ad-supported streaming service will be known as Freevee, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Amazon’s Studios division told the outlet the new name is designed to better reflect how much it costs to access the platform.

As part of the rebranding, Amazon said it would also invest more into original programming, with a promise to offer 70 percent more exclusive content than it does currently. Among the shows Amazon plans to debut on the platform is High School, a coming of age series from indie duo Tegan and Sara. The company will announce additional details about Freevee’s upcoming slate of originals at its NewFronts presentation on May 2nd.

We know from reporting from The Information that Amazon had been mulling a rebranding of IMDb TV since at least the start of last fall. At the time, company executives had reportedly considered names like “Zon,” along with “Free TV” and “Free Streaming TV,” as potential options. The thought among executives was that the existing name was too difficult for people to pronounce and was thereby hurting its popularity.

If you’re in the market for a lightweight gaming mouse, you have plenty of options if first-person shooters are what you play most often. Between products like the Logitech G Pro X Superlight and Razer Viper Ultimate, there’s no shortage of mice designed to give you an edge when trying to line up the perfect headshot in Valorant or Overwatch. But if you’re more of a World of Warcraft or Dota 2 player, your options are more limited. Enter SteelSeries with its new Aerox 5 and Aerox 9 mice.

SteelSeries

Announced today, they borrow the design of the company’s existing Aerox 3 line. That means they feature a perforated honeycomb-like pattern of square holes to reduce weight. With its new wired Aerox 5 mouse, SteelSeries says it has produced the lightest “multi-genre” mouse on the market. Coming in at a claimed 66-grams, it features nine programmable buttons and the company’s TrueMove Air sensor. It also comes with PTFE skates and its PrismSync RGB lighting system. As with the company's existing Aerox mice, it’s also IP54-certified against water and dust. So it’s splash-resistant despite being riddled with holes.

SteelSeries will also offer a wireless variant of the Aerox 5 that weighs approximately 74-grams. It features a battery capable of powering the mouse for 180 hours on a single charge and fast charging that allows you to get about 40 hours of use after 15 minutes connected to your computer. It includes both Bluetooth connectivity and the company’s Quantum 2.0 wireless protocol.

And if nine programmable buttons isn’t enough for you, then there’s the Aerox 9. It comes with 12 such buttons. It has a claimed weight of 89-grams. All three mice feature Golden Micro IP54 switches, which SteelSeries says are rated for 80 million clicks. The Aerox 5, Aerox 5 Wireless and Aerox 9 Wireless are available to buy today for $80, $140 and $150, respectively.