After an eleventh hour delay late last week, Samsung One UI 4 is ready for public beta testing. If you live in the US, you can sign up to take part in the beta by registering through the Samsung Members app on your Galaxy S21 starting on the morning of September 14th.

Once it becomes available later this year, One UI 4 will be the first version of Samsung’s skin based on Android 12, the latest iteration of Google’s mobile operating system. Google released the final Android 12 beta last week, and most signs point to an official release on October 4th. 

Ahead of today’s announcement, Samsung told Engadget One UI 4 features many of Android 12’s most notable tweaks. For instance, you can customize your phone’s home screen, notifications and wallpapers. It also includes redesigned widgets, as well as new emoji to discover and use.

Instagram is working on a tool that could give people more control over its famously obtuse feed algorithm. Mobile developer Alessandro Paluzzi recently shared screenshots of an in-development feature called Favorites. Those images suggest the tool will allow you to add friends, family members and creators to a list of accounts you want the software to prioritize when you’re scrolling through your feed.

Since Instagram switched from a chronological feed to an algorithmic one back in 2016, people have consistently complained the app doesn’t do an adequate job of showing them the images and videos they want to see the most. Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, tried to speak to those concerns recently when he wrote a blog post about how the platform's various algorithms work. Currently, the feed algorithm tends to look at the popularity of a post, in addition to your recent activity and history of interacting with someone, when deciding how to prioritize the content it shows you.

It’s unclear if Favorites will become an official feature within Instagram. A spokesperson for Instagram told Engadget the company is currently testing the tool internally but offered no further details on when we might see an external test, if at all.

One day before its next major event, Apple has released iOS 14.8, iPadOS 14.8, watchOS 7.6.2 and macOS Big Sur 11.6. All four are minor updates that don’t add new features to their respective operating systems but include important security fixes. As such, Apple recommends all users download them as soon as they can.

Depending on the update, it addresses as many as two issues. One relates to the CoreGraphics framework in iOS, iPadOS and macOS, while the other stems from Apple’s WebKit browser engine. In both instances, the company says it’s aware of at least one report where the vulnerabilities may have been actively exploited to execute arbitrary code.

On an iPhone or iPad, you can manually check for iOS 14.8 and iPadOS 14.8 by opening the Settings app on your device, tapping “General” and then “Software Update.” On macOS, meanwhile, open the System Preferences menu and then click on “Software Update.”

Zoom held its annual Zoomtoopia conference today, providing a glimpse at some of the features it’s working on bringing to its video conferencing software. There are almost too many enhancements to count, but some of the more notable ones have the potential to change how you use the service.

The first of those is an expansion of Zoom's automated closed captioning system. At the start of the year, Zoom announced it was making the feature available to all of its users by the fall of 2021. Now, the company plans to make it work in a total of 30 languages. It’s also adding live translation support for 12 languages. Both expansions will occur over the next year and come after the company bought a startup that specializes in real-time translation.

Zoom is also working on an expanded Whiteboard experience that will make the feature available on the web and outside of meetings and calls. To that end, you’ll find a separate Whiteboard tab once the experience rolls out in beta later this year. Then, sometime next year, Zoom plans to work with Facebook to bring its video conferencing software and Whiteboard feature to the company’s Horizon Workrooms to allow you to access them both in virtual reality.

Zoom is also working on several smaller but still notable features. For instance, support for end-to-end encryption is coming to Zoom Phone, which will allow you to keep phone calls you make over Zoom secure. Check out the company’s blog post to see everything it’s working on at the moment.

Steve Wozniak has started a company called Privateer Space. The Apple co-founder announced the private space firm on late Sunday. Unfortunately, other than to promise his company would be “unlike the others,” Woz didn’t provide many details on the venture.

A teaser Privateer released on YouTube mentions the startup was co-founded by former Apple engineer Alex Fielding. Wozniak and Fielding have collaborated frequently over the years. Back in 2002, they co-founded a company called Wheels of Zeus (WoZ), which worked on GPS smart tags. Wozniak later sat on the board of directors of Ripcord Networks, the robotics startup Fielding founded after Wheel of Zeus shut down in 2006.

On its website, Privateer says it will have more to share at the upcoming AMOS tech conference in Maui, Hawaii that’s scheduled to start on September 14th. What's clear is Woz and company are about to enter a highly competitive market that is dominated by billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. That's not an easy space to succeed in. 

The Analogue Pocket has been delayed yet again. The $199 handheld console can play Game Boy, Game Gear, Neo Geo Pocket Color and Atari Lynx games. It was most recently supposed to release sometime next month, but has slipped to the end of the year. Pre-orders will ship “at the latest” in December, according to an announcement Analogue posted on Friday.

As with both previous delays, the company is blaming this latest one on the coronavirus pandemic and related supply chain issues. “Unfortunately, due to new Covid restrictions with our assembly partners, their capacity to deliver within our agreed timeframe has been affected,” Analogue said. “This has created a domino effect of delays beyond our control in what would otherwise be a seamless process.”

Analogue is offering full refunds to anyone who pre-ordered the system and doesn’t want to wait until December. In the same announcement, the company said it hopes to have hands-ons and reviews published before the console comes out later this year. “We understand how frustrating this is,” the company said. “It’s very frustrating for us, too.”

Back in June, Bird announced its first-ever e-bike. At the time, the company said it planned to bring the EV to select cities in North America, Italy, Spain, Germany and France throughout 2021. On Friday, Bird announced the Bird Bike will first appear in San Diego. The company has partnered with San Diego State University to bring the e-bike, along with its Bird Two and Three scooters, to the school’s 280-acre campus. Students and faculty staff can ride the bicycle starting this month.

The pedal-assist e-bike features a top speed of 15.5 miles per and can travel up to 56 miles on a single charge. It also comes with Bird’s geofencing technology, which can automatically cap the speed of the bike in certain areas. As with the company’s electric scooters, a network of fleet managers will care for and manage the bikes. The company said SDSU students will have access to the Bird Bike at reduced prices. Bird has also put in place incentives to encourage safe riding and responsible parking.   

After months of testimony and deliberation, we got an initial decision earlier today in the legal battle between Apple and Epic. As a Fortnite player, you may wonder what it all means in terms of playing the game on an iOS device. The short answer is not much.

The long answer is neither side came away from the contest with a decisive win. Judge Gonzales Rogers may have ruled in Epic’s favor when on the issue of allowing App Store developers to direct users to alternate payment systems, but on every other count, she sided with Apple. That includes the question of whether the company was right to terminate Epic’s App Store developer account when it added a direct payment option in Fortnite last year.

On that matter, Judge Gonzales Rodgers said Apple’s decision was “valid, lawful and enforceable.” It’s therefore up to the company whether or not to allow the game back on the App Store. Based on the fact the tech giant rejected Epic’s request to reinstate its developer license after South Korea passed a law that will require both Apple and Google to allow alternative payment systems on their app stores, and the fact Epic says it will appeal the ruling, it’s unlikely the game will return to iOS anytime soon.

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney made that much clear following the decision. “Fortnite will return to the iOS App Store when and where Epic can offer in-app payment in fair competition with Apple in-app payment, passing along the savings to consumers,” he said on Twitter.

It’s hard to put a timeline on when we might see a new development in the situation. Court cases involving tech companies can take months and sometimes years to resolve. In the meantime, Fortnite is still available on other platforms, including PC, PlayStation and Xbox.

For much of the last month and a half, Twitch has fought a losing battle against a phenomenon called “hate raids.” These attacks see malicious individuals use an army of bots to spam a streamer’s chat with hateful language, and almost always they target creators from marginalized communities. This week, Twitch filed a suit against some of those involved in the harassment campaigns.

The legal action comes after a variety of Twitch streamers stepped away from the platform on September 1st in protest of the company’s ineffective handling of the situation. The suit, first spotted by Wired, only names two defendants: CruzzControl and CreatineOverdose. Twitch does not identify the two individuals beyond their usernames but notes it believes they’re both based out of Europe.

In the complaint, Twitch alleges CruzzControl is responsible for a network of approximately 3,000 bots that have been involved in hate raids against streamers in the Black and LGBTQIA+ communities. In addition to overwhelming those channels with racist, homophobic and sexist spam, the company says CruzzControl has shown how the bots work so that others can deploy them toward a similar end. Of CreatineOverdose, the company alleges it has directly linked them to several incidents, including one August 15th episode in which they claimed they were a member of the “K K K.”

“We hope this complaint will shed light on the identity of the individuals behind these attacks and the tools that they exploit, dissuade them from taking similar behaviors to other services, and help put an end to these vile attacks against members of our community,” a spokesperson for Twitch told Wired. 

The company told The Verge the lawsuit is only one part of the response it has planned to hate raids, with more platform-level action forthcoming. “Our teams have been working around the clock to update our proactive detection systems, address new behaviors as they emerge, and finalize new proactive, channel-level safety tools that we’ve been developing for months,” a Twitch spokesperson said.

While the legal action has yet to stop hate raids from occurring, some of those most affected by them say it’s a step in the right direction for the company. “I feel hopeful,” Raven, a streamer whose Twitch handle is RekItRaven, told Wired. “The people who are behind this need to be held accountable for their actions. They've terrorized hundreds if not thousands of people. If this were to happen in a physical location we'd expect the same. It shouldn't be any different online.”

When Apple announced the iPhone 12 Pro and Pro Max last fall, the company talked up the HDR capabilities of its new phones. In addition to playing Dolby Vision content, the devices can capture it as well. But despite the fact the iPhone 12 Pro and Pro Max have been on the market for almost a year, we're only now seeing platforms take advantage of those capabilities.

Starting today, all Vimeo users, including those with free accounts, can upload Dolby Vision content to the platform. While you can watch the content on any device, support for playback in Dolby Vision is currently limited to Apple products. 

On iOS, an iPhone 8 or newer or second-generation iPad Pro will do. On desktop, meanwhile, support goes as far back as some Macs released in 2018. Provided it's connected to a compatible Dolby Vision TV, you can also watch the content on an Apple TV 4K. When browsing the Vimeo website, you'll see a badge that denotes whether someone shot the video in Dolby Vision. As long as you have a compatible device, the video will automatically default to the format.