In the nearly 40 years since Alexey Pajitnov created Tetris, the game has inspired many permutations. The latest example is Tetris Beat, an Apple Arcade exclusive that adds rhythm elements to the title's classic line-clearing formula. In the game’s beat mode, the more you keep to the rhythm of a song, the more points you’ll earn. However, if you want a more traditional Tetris experience, the included Marathon mode offers that. As with all Apple Arcade titles, Tetris Beat does not include any in-app ads or purchases.

With today’s launch, the game features 18 exclusive songs, with more to come every month. Some of the current contributors include well-known artists like Alison Wonderland, Hannah Diamond, and my personal favorite among the group, Dauwd. What’s more, if you own a pair of AirPods Pro or Max, the game supports Apple’s Spatial Audio technology, so you can look forward to a more immersive experience.

You can download Tetris Beat on iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple TV starting today. An Apple Arcade subscription costs $5 per month. It’s also included in the company’s Apple One membership.

NBC has shared the first trailer for Frogger. As expected, the show is a mix of Takeshi’s Castle and Wipeout. The clip offers a look at some of the whimsical sets contestants will need to traverse in order to claim a grand prize of $100,000. 

When NBC announced it was adapting Konami’s seminal 1981 video game into a Peacock series, it said the initial season would feature 13 hour long episodes and 12 different obstacle courses. One unexpected treat is that Damon Wayans Jr. of Happy Endings is on co-hosting duties.

Frogger will debut on September 9th, with new episodes to follow every Thursday. While we wait, you can play Frogger in Toy Town, the latest game in the series, on Apple Arcade.

Conducting an APK teardown of the latest version of the Peloton Android app, 9to5Google found evidence the company is preparing the software to support a rowing machine in the near future. The outlet found various code snippets that mentioned a device codenamed "Caesar" and "Mazu." The latter is a reference to a Chinese sea goddess. Like the company's stationary bike, it appears the rowing machine will include a "scenic rides" feature that will showcase waterways from around the globe. And if you want to just row, that will be an option too.

Another set of snippets reference the four positions of a proper rowing technique. "This is the drive position of your stroke," the app explains. "Sit tall on the rower with your arms straight and your back upright. Your knees should be just above the ankles." Digging deeper into the updated software, 9to5 also found code suggesting the app will track metrics like your average and max stroke rates.

A rowing machine is something Peloton has been rumored to be working for a while now, with a recent job listing mentioning the device. We've reached out to Pelton for confirmation, but we'll note here what we say with all APK teardowns: the fact there's code pointing to a new hardware release doesn't mean a company will follow through on that work or that a launch is imminent. 

China has passed a new data protection law, according to the country’s Xinhua state media outlet. The newly enacted Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL) lays out a comprehensive set of rules around how companies collect, process and protect user data. Like GDPR, the law enshrines data minimization, the practice of limiting data collection to only the information needed for a specific purpose. It also mandates companies give users control over how their personal information is used. For instance, they’re allowed to opt out of targeted advertising.

Per Reuters, another requirement put forward by PIPL is that companies designate someone who is personally responsible for user data protection. Platforms must also submit themselves to periodic audits to ensure compliance. Any foreign company operating in the country that handles the data of Chinese citizens must comply with those same rules, making the law extraterritorial in much the same way that GDPR is.

PIPL comes as China has worked to rein in its tech giants. The company recently sued Tencent over WeChat’s “youth mode,” alleging the feature violates laws protecting children. What’s more, the country recently implemented new anti-monopoly measures aimed at companies like Alibaba, Didi and Tencent. PIPL is slated to go into effect on November 1st.

Since Apple announced it was working on a technology for detecting child sexual abuse material (CSAM), the system has been a lightning rod for controversy. Now, two Princeton University academics say they know the tool Apple built is open to abuse because they spent years developing almost precisely the same system. “We wrote the only peer-reviewed publication on how to build a system like Apple’s — and we concluded the technology was dangerous,” assistant professor Jonathan Mayer and graduate researcher Anunay Kulshrestha wrote in an op-ed The Washington Post published this week.

The two worked together on a system for identifying CSAM in end-to-end encrypted online services. Like Apple, they wanted to find a way to limit the proliferation of CSAM while maintaining user privacy. Part of their motivation was to encourage more online services to adopt end-to-end encryption. “We worry online services are reluctant to use encryption without additional tools to combat CSAM,” the researchers said.

The two spent years working on the idea, eventually creating a working prototype. However, they quickly determined there was a “glaring problem” with their tech. “Our system could be easily repurposed for surveillance and censorship,” Mayer and Kulshrestha wrote. “The design wasn’t restricted to a specific category of content; a service could simply swap in any content-matching database, and the person using that service would be none the wiser.”

That’s not a hypothetical worry either, they warn. The two researchers point to examples like WeChat, which the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab found uses content-matching algorithms to detect dissident material. “China is Apple’s second-largest market, with probably hundreds of millions of devices. What stops the Chinese government from demanding Apple scan those devices for pro-democracy materials?” Mayer and Kulshrestha ask, pointing to several instances where Apple acquiesced to demands from the Chinese government. For example, there’s the time the company gave local control of customer data over to the country.

“We spotted other shortcomings,” Mayer and Kulshrestha continue. “The content-matching process could have false positives, and malicious users could game the system to subject innocent users to scrutiny.” Those are concerns privacy advocates have also raised about Apple’s system.

For the most part, Apple has attempted to downplay many of the concerns Mayer and Kulshrestha iterate in their opinion piece. Senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi recently attributed the controversy to poor messaging. He rejected the idea the system could be used for scanning for other material, noting the database of images comes from various child safety groups. And on the subject of false positives, he said the system only triggers a manual review after someone uploads 30 images to iCloud. We've reached out to Apple for comment on the op-ed. 

Despite those statements, Mayer and Kulshrestha note their reservations don’t come from a lack of understanding. They said they had planned to discuss the pitfalls of their system at an academic conference but never got a chance because Apple announced its tech a week before the presentation. “Apple’s motivation, like ours, was to protect children. And its system was technically more efficient and capable than ours,” they said. “But we were baffled to see that Apple had few answers for the hard questions we’d surfaced.”

While Apple may have released Siri before Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa, in many ways its voice-activated assistant is the least advanced of the three. A lot of that has to do with the amount of data and training digital assistants need to understand different languages, dialects and speech patterns. In an effort to improve its digital assistant, Apple recently launched a study to collect speech data and feedback with the help of an app called Siri Speech Study.

“The Siri Speech Study app allows participants to send certain data to Apple for product improvement, as detailed in the informed consent form,” the company says in a listing spotted by TechCrunch. The software is available in the US, Canada, Germany, France, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand and Taiwan. According to data from analytics firm Sensor Tower, Apple uploaded Siri Speech Study to the App Store on August 9th, and recently updated the software on August 18th.

Apple isn’t being exactly secretive about the app, but nor is it advertising its existence either. You can’t find the software by searching for it, nor is it listed as one of the apps published by Apple. Similarly, you can’t join the study simply by installing the software on your phone; you need an invite from Apple to participate. We've reached out to Apple for more information on the app. 

Notably, the app allows those involved to choose what Siri requests they send to the company. That's an important point. In 2019, The Guardian published a report that detailed an Apple program where third-party contractors listened to anonymized Siri recordings to analyze the assistant’s responses. A whistleblower told the outlet there had been “countless instances” where graders listened to private conversations, including some that involved criminal dealings and sexual encounters. Apple subsequently moved the program in-house, and switched to opt-in transcripts.

Last year, Motorola returned to the high-end phone market with the Edge Plus, a device that was a mostly middling affair. It later followed it up with the more affordable and compelling Edge. The company's newest phone, announced today, falls somewhere in between those two devices. It’s not quite a flagship, but nor is it entirely a mid-range device either. Internally, the 2021 Edge features up to 8GB of RAM, up to 256GB of internal storage and a Snapdragon 778G processor.

That’s a step down from the Snapdragon 865 Motorola included with the Edge Plus, but what the 2021 Edge has going for it over its predecessors is a 6.8-inch display with a 144Hz refresh rate panel. Both the 2020 Edge and Edge Plus were limited to 90Hz, which should make the new model feel more responsive even with its mid-range processor.

Motorola

Motorola also reworked the camera module on the 2021 Edge. The phone now features a primary 108-megapixel sensor that uses pixel-binning technology to improve performance in low-light situations. Supporting the main camera is an 8-megapixel wide-angle camera with a lens that features a 119-degree field of view. Rounding out the camera array is a 2-megapixel depth sensor. For selfies, there’s a 32-megapixel shooter that can also take advantage of pixel binning.

The 2021 Edge comes with support for a variety of global LTE and sub-6GHz bands. It also comes with WiFi 6E, Bluetooth 5.2 and NFC connectivity, as well as C-band support, which will come in handy as Verizon (Engadget’s parent company) and AT&T use the spectrum in their ongoing 5G build-outs. Speaking of Verizon, the carrier plans to offer a mmWave model later in the year.

Powering everything is a 5,000mAh battery Motorola says should provide up to two days of uptime. On the software front, the phone will ship with Android 11 and the company’s My UX skin. Motorola plans to support the phone with two major platform updates and two years of bi-monthly security patches.

What you won’t find on the 2021 Edge is support for wireless charging or robust waterproofing. It’s only IP52-certified. Most high-end phones these days feature either IP67 or IP68 water resistance.

Like it did with the Edge, the company plans to sell the 2021 model at a $200 discount for a “limited time.” Motorola hasn’t said how long the phone would cost $500. Pre-orders for the unlocked model open on August 23rd, with general availability to follow on September 2nd. Verizon and Spectrum Wireless will start selling the phone at a later date.

Twitter is introducing several tweaks to its direct messaging functionality, with the improvements set to roll out in the coming weeks. To start, you can now share the same tweet with up to 20 different accounts separately. As the company points out, that’s an improvement that should lead to fewer accidental group chats. The feature is currently rolling out now to iOS and web users, with an expansion on Android to follow “soon.”

On mobile, the company is also adding a quick-scroll button so you can quickly jump to the most recent message in a conversation when glancing over any past correspondence. As an iOS owner, you will also find Twitter has cleaned up timestamps by grouping messages by date. Additionally, if you long press on something someone sends you, there's a new reaction picker.

While none of the tweaks Twitter announced today are groundbreaking, they’re handy all the same. They should also be less controversial than the font change the company pushed out last week.

QuakeCon may have not happened last year due to the pandemic, but id Software found a way to more than make up for cancelation with the announcement of a Quake remaster. What’s more, you can buy it today for $10 on PC, Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo Switch. The studio overhauled the game to add support for widescreen resolutions up to 4K, dynamic lighting, anti-aliasing, depth of field and new models. The remaster comes almost two months after the game celebrated its 25th birthday on June 22nd. 

In addition to the original campaign, the remaster includes every expansion released for Quake. It also comes with an entirely new expansion created by Wolfenstein: The New Order and The New Colossus developer MachineGames called the Dimension of the Machine. You can play all the single-player content with up to three other players either online or over split-screen co-op. When it comes to multiplayer, you can play up to seven other players online, or up to three other players in the case of local split-screen. On that front, dedicated server support is included, as is crossplay between platforms.

There’s a scene in 2014’s Wolfenstein: The New Order where J, a character inspired by Jimi Hendrix, explains to the game’s white protagonist, BJ Blazkowicz, why he’s not fighting. After Blazkowicz talks back, J tells him: "You don't get it, do you? Before all this, before the Germans, before the war, back home, man, you were the Nazis."

What I love about that scene is the way it complicates the easy narrative we so often tell ourselves about the Second World War. The New Order understands World War II better than almost any other game inspired by the conflict. Nazism, then as now, was never an ideology that only existed in Hitler's Germany. And in internment camps across the US and Canada and cities like Dresden and Hiroshima, the Allies committed countless injustices of their own.

It's that scene my mind returned to as Sledgehammer Games revealed Call of Duty: Vanguard, the next entry in Activision's long-running first-person shooter series, during an online event last week. Like 2017's Call of Duty: WWII, the studio's previous project as lead developer on the franchise, Vanguard takes the series back to where it all started: the Second World War.

After talking about the studio's commitment to diversity and creating a safe space for all employees, essentially repeating the same company line Activision Blizzard executives have been saying ever since California filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against the publisher, Sledgehammer studio head Aaron Halon introduced Vanguard director Josh Bridge and campaign director David Swenson. Bridge told us how the studio came out of Call of Duty: WWII feeling like it had only scratched the surface of the stories the conflict had to tell. "We see [Vanguard] as being rooted in but not beholden to history. There is no revisionist history here," he said, a bullet point on his Powerpoint presentation reiterating the statement.

Sledgehammer Games / Activision

After showing the game's cinematic trailer and a snippet of gameplay, Swenson talked about the game's story. Like The New Order, Vanguard uses an alternate reality of the war to tell its story, but it appears a much less ambitious retelling on the surface. In a return to the way Infinity Ward did things when the series first started, Vanguard’s campaign will feature four playable characters, each loosely based on a different historical person.

In Polina Petrova, Sledgehammer took inspiration from Lyudmila Pavlichenko, a Soviet sharpshooter who was known as Lady Death for her 309 confirmed kills, the most of any female sniper in history. Wade Jackson, one of the other characters, is based on Vernon L. Micheel, a US Navy pilot who bombed two Japanese aircraft carriers during the Battle of Midway. Then there's Lucas Riggs. He draws from Charles Upham, the only soldier in World War II to earn two Victoria Cross medals.

Finally, you have Arthur Kingsley. His inspiration is Sidney Cornell, a Black British paratrooper who earned a Distinguished Conduct Medal for his actions in Normandy. To Sledgehammer's credit, the studio enlisted the help of science fiction writer Tochi Onyebuchi to write Kingsley's character and cast Chike Okonkwo, best known for his role as Will in The Birth of a Nation, to give him his voice.

Sledgehammer Games / Activision

Initially, those four find themselves in different theaters of the war, but they're eventually brought together to take part in a fictional mission called Operation Phoenix. The Nazis, under the guidance of a character named Heinrich Freisinger, have hatched a plan to survive the end of the war and it's up to the newly formed special forces team of Petrova, Jackson, Riggs and Kingsley to stop them. Like the four protagonists, Freisinger has a historical counterpart. He's based on the infamous Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller.

Bridge said the studio sees the title as "a filmic blockbuster, with a contemporary lens on history." The throughline that connects both the story and multiplayer components of the game is how the Second World War saw the birth of the modern idea of the special forces. This is World War II reframed as an entry point into the expanded Call of Duty universe. I won't say that's unexpected, but after Sledgehammer tried to tell a more nuanced story about PTSD in CoD: WW2, I had hoped it would set its sights even higher.

At the reveal event, Sledgehammer spent far more time talking about Vanguard’s story than letting the game speak for itself. Of the single-player campaign, the developer only showed a brief snippet of an early level that features Kingsley taking part in Operation Tonga, which saw British paratroopers land near the city of Caen during the Allied invasion of Normandy. If you've seen Band of Brothers, you already know exactly how this segment plays out.

Sledgehammer Games / Activision

You jump out of a plane as part of a pre-scripted sequence in which you lose your rifle before landing on the ground. After a series of quick time events, your character finds himself in front of a field, an objective marker telling the player to make their way to a windmill in the distance. For part of the level, you have to sneak your way through enemy lines.

Other than an unexpected moment toward the end of the clip, nothing about what I saw struck me as something the franchise hasn't done before, but the execution was still compelling. True to the conditions Allied paratroopers found themselves in during the D-Day invasion, much of the mission takes place in suffocating fog and darkness. That gave the level more of a sense of atmosphere than your typical CoD mission. In particular, the use of lighting was intentional in a way I hadn't seen from the series in a while, the effect made more realistic by the work Sledgehammer and the other CoD studios did to update Modern Warfare's IW 8.0 engine.

What also struck me about this sequence was the stolen Kar98K Kingsley used to dispatch his Nazi pursuers. When he fired the bolt-action rifle, it let out a deafening blast and left enemies crumpled against the floor and walls. There was more physicality to the weapon than the assault rifles that usually dominate the CoD metagame. That "down the barrel" gameplay is something the studio said it spent a lot of the nearly four years since CoD: WW2 perfecting.

Sledgehammer Games / Activision

It's hard to say if the rest of the single-player campaign adopts the more methodical pace to gunplay Sledgehammer showed off in the snippet I saw. However, I can state that multiplayer will feel familiar to current Black Ops Cold War and Warzone players. What you will find is that Sledgehammer designed the maps to feature more destructibility and interactive elements. A clip the studio shared showed off how you could shoot bookshelves, tables and boarded-up windows to open sightlines as a match progresses.

At launch, Vanguard will feature 20 multiplayer maps, 16 of which will support up to 12 players for six-on-six matches. Additionally, Sledgehammer is bringing Gunsmith back, a fan-favorite feature that allows you to customize your weapons with different attachments and ammo types. Naturally, Treyarch's Zombies mode is making a comeback, and it will connect to the lore established in Black Ops Cold War. Oh, and Raven Software is working on a Warzone map and update that will feature an all-new anti-cheat system. Sledgehammer promised to share more information about the multiplayer component of Vanguard, including details on a new mode called Champion Hill that the studio says will offer something new for players to experience, in the coming weeks.

That will give Call of Duty fans time to see if Vanguard is worth another trip to World War II before the game lands on Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 4, PS5 and PC via Battle.net on November 5th.