Netflix is about to bring its fight against account sharing to the US. “In Q1, we launched paid sharing in four countries and are pleased with the results,” the company wrote in its Q1 letter to shareholders. “We are planning on a broad rollout, including in the US, in Q2.”

Since February, Netflix has offered paid account sharing in Canada, New Zealand, Portugal and Spain. The add-on allows primary account holders to pay an additional fee every month to share their Netflix service with up to two people outside of their household. As the main owner of an account, you can still watch on your phone and sign into the service on a device outside your home, like a smart TV at a hotel. Netflix also allows secondary users to convert their profiles into new accounts.

“A Netflix account is meant to be shared in one household (people who live in the same location with the account owner),” the company says on a support page. “People who are not in your household will need to sign up for their own account to watch Netflix.”

In the past, Netflix has estimated more than 100 million non-paying households have access to its service through free account sharing. The company says the practice limits its ability to invest in new content. It’s also aware the decision to restrict account sharing is likely to lead to cancelations. The expansion of paid account sharing comes on the same day Netflix said it would sunset its DVD rental business in September.

After years of resistance, Instagram is allowing users to add more than one link to their profile page. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the change on Tuesday through his broadcast channel. “You can now add up to five links in your Instagram bio,” he said. “Probably one of the most requested features we’ve had.”

As a refresher, you can add a link to your Instagram profile by tapping the “Edit profile” button that appears above your photo grid and highlights. With the change rolling out to users, Instagram will even prompt you to add multiple links. The interface Meta designed for displaying the links isn’t the most elegant thing the company has ever released but it’s functional. If you put more than one link on your profile, Instagram will truncate the first one and state how many more follow. Tapping the first link that appears brings up a selection screen that allows you to see all the links at once.

If I had to guess, those who were already using services like Linktree to direct people to their other social profiles will continue doing so because those platforms offer more customization and allow you to include more than five links. In filling out my profile page, I didn’t run into any restrictions where Instagram told me I could not add a specific link, though I only attempted to link to my Engadget page and Twitter profile. I’ve reached out to Meta for more information.

Just like that, a new Harry Potter game is on its way. On Monday, WB Games revealed Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions, a title the Hogwarts Legacy publisher is billing as a “fast-paced, competitive multiplayer” game that will be available on PC and consoles. According to the company, Unbroken Studios, best known for its work supporting the recently delayed Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, has been working on Quidditch Champions for the past “several years,” making the sport’s absence from Hogwarts Legacy make a lot more sense.

"Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions is a complete, standalone Quidditch experience," a newly published FAQ says of the project, noting fans will need an online connection to play the game. "It engages players in the sport of Quidditch and other broomstick adventures alongside friends in a competitive, multiplayer setting." The FAQ additionally states J.K Rowling was not involved in the creation of Quidditch Champions, and that the game is not a direct adaption of any of the existing Harry Potter books or films.

For the past few years, Rowling has been controversial for her transphobic views. Ahead of the release of Hogwarts Legacy, some fans chose not to buy or play the game for that reason. In addition to a new game, WB Games parent Warner Bros. Discovery is working on a new live-action adaption of all seven books in the Harry Potter series. Quidditch Champions does not have a release date. For now, WB Games is accepting signups for “limited” playtests.

In an 89-page complaint unsealed on Monday, the Justice Department alleges 34 current and former members of China’s 912 Special Project Working Group carried out a multi-year campaign to harass critics of Xi Jinping’s regime and discredit American policies. The task force, part of China’s domestic security agency, created thousands of fake social media profiles, including on Twitter and Facebook, to target Chinese dissidents in the US.

In its attempt to disseminate official government propaganda, the group created thousands of fake online personas. Judging from screenshots shared by the Justice Department, many of the profiles did not have more than a dozen accounts following them, but a common thread among them is that they tried to pass as authentic American voices. As The Wall Street Journal points out, one account claimed to be “Susan Miller,” a woman from New York. Another said they were “Julie Torres,” a native of Wisconsin. According to the Justice Department, China’s Ministry of Public Security tracked the performance of the agents involved in the operation and rewarded those who successfully ran multiple online personas without being detected by Twitter and Facebook.

In addition to targeting Chinese dissidents, the group, taking a page from Russia’s disinformation playbook, sought to discredit the US government by exploiting divisions among the American public. For instance, it spread disinformation about George Floyd, the Black Man whose murder by Minneapolis police in 2020 sparked Black Lives Matter protests across the country. The group also amplified Russian propaganda about the war in Ukraine.

“As alleged, the PRC government deploys its national police and the 912 Special Project Working Group not as an instrument to uphold the law and protect public safety, but rather as a troll farm that attacks persons in our country for exercising free speech in a manner that the PRC government finds disagreeable, and also spreads propaganda whose sole purpose is to sow divisions within the United States,” said US attorney Breon Peace, referring to the acronym for the People’s Republic of China.

According to the Justice Department, all 34 of the agents remain at large. This isn’t the first time the US has detailed an effort by China to target overseas dissidents. At the end of last year, US Attorney General Merrick Garland detailed a case involving a multi-year campaign by Chinese operatives to force a US resident to return to China.

Former Halo scribe Joseph Staten has joined Netflix’s burgeoning gaming division. On Monday, Staten tweeted that he will serve as the creative director on a new AAA game and original intellectual property from the streaming giant. “In my work life, there’s nothing I love more than collaborating with others to build worlds filled with iconic characters, deep mysteries, and endless adventures,” Staten wrote on Twitter. "So today, I'm thrilled to announce that I've joined Netflix Games as Creative Director for a brand-new AAA multiplatform game and original IP. Let's go!"

The announcement comes less than two weeks after Staten announced his departure from Microsoft. Before joining the tech giant in 2013, he worked as a writer and director of cinematics on Bungie’s first three Halo games. Staten later helped write and co-direct Destiny, but left the studio before the game’s release in 2014. Following his return to the Microsoft fold (Bungie was a Microsoft studio before it went independent in 2007), Staten worked as senior creative director on the Xbox Game Studios team for a number of years before moving to 343 Industries in 2020 to assist in the development of Halo Infinite. This past January, Microsoft reassigned Staten away from 343 at the same time it cut “at least” 95 jobs at the troubled developer.

On Monday, Staten said the game he’s working on at Netflix would be a “multiplatform” release. To date, the company’s gaming strategy has primarily centered around obtaining mobile publishing rights to respected indie titles like Into the Breach and Terra Nil. Funding the development of a multiplatform AAA game is significantly more ambitious.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged Bittrex and former CEO William Shihara with operating an unregistered securities exchange. In a complaint filed on Monday, the SEC alleges the crypto exchange, once one of the largest in the US, earned at least $1.3 billion in revenue between 2017 and 2022 while offering the services of a broker, exchange and clearing agency. It did so without registering with the Commission, in violation of federal law, the SEC alleges.

Additionally, the SEC claims Bittrex “coordinated” with crypto issuers to delete “problematic statements” Shihara believed would prompt a regulator like the SEC to investigate the exchange. In one instance, the Commission states Shihara instructed a potential issuer to erase comments that referenced “price predictions” and “expectation of profit.”

“Today’s action, yet again, makes plain that the crypto markets suffer from a lack of regulatory compliance, not a lack of regulatory clarity,” said SEC Chair Gary Gensler. “As alleged in our complaint, Bittrex and issuers that it worked with knew the rules that applied to them but went to great lengths to evade them by directing issuer-applicants to ‘scrub’ offering materials of information indicating that certain crypto assets were securities.”

As Coindesk notes, Bittrex, citing “continued regulatory uncertainty,” announced last month it would exit the US market at the end of April. Over the weekend, the company told The Wall Street Journal it was recently notified by the SEC of potential enforcement action by the Commission. David Maria, the company’s general counsel, said Bittrex would challenge the lawsuit unless the Commission offered “a reasonable settlement offer.” Last year, the US Treasury fined Bittrex $29 million for previously failing to comply with US money laundering and sanction laws.

When Rode began offering gaming-specific audio equipment at the end of last year, two of the three products the company announced, the XDM-100 and XCM-50, repurposed existing designs. Its newest Rode X device, the Streamer X, offers something different. It combines an audio interface with an external capture card.

You can connect XLR and line-level microphones and headsets to the Streamer X, with a built-in Rode Revolution preamp offering all the power you need. At the same time, the device can capture and stream footage at 4K and 30 frames per second or 2K at 60 frames per second. It also offers video passthrough at up to 4K and 60 frames per second or 2K and 120 frames per second.

The front of the console features a set of four customizable buttons you can set up to trigger specific sounds and actions on your computer. A pair of USB-C connections allow you to connect the Streamer X to two separate PCs at the same time. Out of the box, the device is fully compatible with Rode’s suite of software tools, including Unify, Rode Central and Rode Connect.

Rode

Separately, Rode also announced the Rodecaster Duo, a new audio interface that brings together all of the features found in the company’s Rodecaster Pro II but puts them into a more compact package. That means it should be able to drive even the most power-hungry mics without the need for an in-line signal booster, and offer Bluetooth connectivity for audio monitoring. Rode did not announce pricing details for the Streamer X and Rodecaster Duo, but said both devices would arrive in the coming weeks. Engadget has reached out to the company for more information, and we’ll update this article when we hear back from it.

Facing renewed competition from Microsoft and OpenAI, Google is reportedly “racing” to build an “all-new” AI-powered search engine. According to The New York Times, the company is in the early stages of creating a search service that will attempt to anticipate what you want from it in hopes of offering “a far more personalized experience.” The project has “no clear timetable.” However, knowing that Google is also developing a suite of new AI features for its existing search engine under the codename “Magi.”

Among the features Google is developing is a chatbot that can answer software engineering questions and generate code snippets. The company has also experimented with a feature that would allow people to search for music through a chatbot conversation. According to The Times, the company has assigned more than 160 employees to the redesign.

Other new additions “in various stages of development” include a Chrome feature dubbed "Searchalong." It would allow a chatbot to scan the webpage you’re reading to offer contextual information. For example, if you were looking for a place to stay on Airbnb, you could ask the chatbot to tell you what to see and do near your planned accommodations. “GIFI” and “Tivoli Tutor,” another pair of experimental features, would allow users to prompt Google Image Search to generate images and converse with a chatbot to learn a new language. It’s worth noting many of these are features that Google has either demoed in the past or exist on other platforms like Duolingo. For instance, image generation is already available in Slides.

Google reportedly plans to announce Magi next month before introducing additional new features sometime in the fall. That timing suggests the project will make an appearance at I/O 2023. The company plans to offer Magi’s features to one million people in the US before expanding availability to 30 million users by the end of the year.

“We’ve been bringing AI to Google Search for years to not only dramatically improve the quality of our results, but also introduce entirely new ways to search, such as Lens and multisearch,” a Google spokesperson told Engadget when asked about the report. “We’ve done so in a responsible and helpful way that maintains the high bar we set for delivering quality information. Not every brainstorm deck or product idea leads to a launch, but as we’ve said before, we’re excited about bringing new AI-powered features to Search, and will share more details soon.”

Underscoring the importance of Magi for Google, Samsung reportedly told the company last month it was considering making Bing the default search on its devices. The declaration reportedly sent Google into a “panic.” The company’s search agreement with Samsung is worth approximately $3 billion annually. This year, its lucrative search agreement with Apple, the subject of frequent antitrust scrutiny, is also up for renewal.

One of the most notorious ransomware gangs appears to have recently begun targeting Mac computers for the first time. In a series of tweets spotted by 9to5Mac, a group of security researchers known as the MalwareHunterTeam said on Saturday they recently found evidence of a Lockbit ransomware build designed to compromise macOS devices. As far as the group is aware, Saturday’s announcement marks the first public notice that Lockbit’s ransomware could be used against Apple computers, though it appears the gang has offered that capability since last fall.

“I think this is the first time one of the major ransomware players has taken aim at Apple’s OS,” security analyst Brett Callow said, pointing to the significance of the disclosure. As 9to5Mac notes, the LockBit gang has historically focused on Windows, Linux and virtual host machines. The reason being those operating systems are overwhelmingly used by the businesses the group’s partners target. For those who don’t know, the Lockbit gang runs what’s known as a “ransomware-as-a-service” operation. The group doesn’t directly involve itself in the business of extracting ransoms from businesses. What it does do is build and maintain the malware affiliates can pay to use against an organization. According to an indictment the US Department of Justice unsealed last fall, LockBit is “one of the most active and destructive ransomware variants in the world." As of late 2022, the software has infected the computer systems of at least 1,000 victims, including a Holiday Inn hotel in Turkey. It’s believed the gang’s partners have claimed tens of millions of dollars from victims.

Ahead of its April 19th release date, Sony and Guerrilla Games on Friday shared a new trailer for Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores. The DLC is set to tell the next chapter of Aloy’s story. The trailer offers a fresh look at the Burning Shores, a volcanic archipelago that was once home to Los Angeles. We also get a closer look at the Metal Devil boss fight that was teased at the end of the announcement trailer Sony and Guerrilla released last year.

That battle is one of the reasons Horizon Forbidden West:Burning Shores won’t be available on PlayStation 4, even though you can play the original game on Sony’s last generation console. “The cityscape ruins of LA and its surroundings are highly detailed and require a lot of processing power as well as fast streaming technology to run properly,” Horizon Forbidden West Game Director Mathijs de Jonge told the PlayStation Blog last month. He went on to add there’s “a particular battle scene that requires a LOT of memory and processing power.”