Good news, Arrested Development fans. You can continue watching the highly acclaimed sitcom on Netflix. As The Verge outlines, all five seasons of the show, including the two financed by Netflix, were set to leave the service on March 15th. However, the series is now staying put, thanks to a licensing agreement the company reached with Disney-owned 20th Century Fox, the show’s original rights holder.

According to Vulture, the new deal will see Netflix gain exclusive streaming rights to the series. As a result, the show’s first three seasons will not be available to watch on Hulu as of later this year. Notably, the deal reportedly gives Disney the option to sell the linear TV rights for all five seasons of Arrested Development. That means the show could end up on network television, much like BoJack Horseman did in 2018. Losing Arrested Development would have been a tough blow for Netflix. After Fox canceled the series in 2006, it found a home on the streaming service and was one of its early draws. It was also one of the first Netflix Originals after the company and Fox commissioned a new season in 2011.

Elon Musk values Twitter at about $20 billion, according to an email seen by The Information and The New York Times. Musk shared the valuation, a significant drop from the $44 billion he paid to buy the company last fall, in a memo he sent to Twitter employees on Friday announcing a new stock compensation program. The billionaire reportedly warned Twitter’s significantly diminished workforce that the website was still in a precarious financial position. “Twitter is being reshaped rapidly,” he wrote, adding the company had, at one point, been four months away from running out of cash.

According to Platformer’s Zoë Schiffer, Musk additionally told employees he sees a “clear but difficult path” to a $250 billion valuation, a hypothetical outcome that would make the company’s current stock grants worth 10 times as much in the future. Musk said Twitter would allow staff to sell stock every six months, a policy similar to one in place at SpaceX. According to Musk, the program would give employees “liquid stock” while shielding them from the “price chaos” that comes with equity at a publicly traded company.

To put Musk’s valuation in context, at $20 billion, Twitter would be worth more than Snapchat creator Snap, a company with nearly 140 million more daily active users. It’s also worth noting that the estimate likely reflects the difficulties Twitter has faced as a direct result of Musk’s decisions. At the start of 2023, the company’s daily revenue was reportedly down 40 percent from a year ago after more than 500 of its top advertising partners had paused spending on the platform. Many of those companies left following the firm’s messy relaunch of Twitter Blue, which saw verified trolls abuse the service to impersonate brands. Based on recent reporting from The Information, there were only about 180,000 Twitter Blue subscribers in the US at the beginning of February, suggesting the service is nowhere close to making up for the financial downturn Twitter has experienced since Musk’s takeover.

The European Union has agreed to make a carveout for synthetic fuels in its proposed 2035 ban on the sale of new combustion engine cars. Per the Associated Press, the bloc made a deal with Germany on Saturday to allow automakers to sell new ICE cars past 2035, provided those vehicles run on climate-neutral fuels only. The agreement ends a dispute that had threatened to scuttle the EU’s signature climate change policy. At the start of March, the European Parliament delayed a vote that would have codified the proposed ban after Germany, with support from automakers, said it would not back the mandate without an exemption for synthetic fuels.

“We have found an agreement with Germany on the future use of e-fuels in cars,” Frans Timmermans, the executive vice president of European Green Deal, posted to Twitter on Saturday. “We will work now on getting the CO2 standards for cars regulation adopted as soon as possible.” Environmental group Greenpeace criticized the agreement. “This lazy compromise undermines climate protection in transport, and it harms Europe,” the organization wrote in a statement.

As The Guardian notes, making synthetic fuels is incredibly energy intensive. Moreover, without direct air capture tech, e-fuel cars produce almost as many greenhouse emissions as their conventional ICE counterparts. According to one estimate published before Saturday’s announcement, a carveout for synthetic fuels could result in as many as 46 million fewer cumulative EV sales in Europe by 2050 “without providing any additional CO2 savings.” It’s also worth noting that no company is producing synthetic fuels at scale yet. That’s a significant point because e-fuels are unlikely to save European drivers money. By 2030, Transport & Environment estimates the average EU driver will pay €782 a year more to fill their car's tank with synthetic fuel than conventional gas.

One of Engadget’s favorite pair of noise-canceling headphones is on sale at Amazon. After a nearly $85 discount, you can get the Sennheiser Momentum 4 for $265. If you’re not fussy about color, the white model is an additional $6 off. Either way, that’s a new all-time low for Sennheiser’s flagship Bluetooth headphones.

Engadget Senior Editor Billy Steele awarded the Momentum 4 a score of 82. He came away with their audio quality, noting they were among the best-sounding Bluetooth headphones he tested in 2022. Also impressive was their ANC performance and battery life. With noise cancellation turned on, Steele found he could get up to 60 hours of playtime on a single charge. That’s double what most noise-canceling headphones offer. If you don’t mind the Momentum 4’s somewhat forgettable design, they’re a great pair of headphones. I'll also note here Amazon has a handful of other Sennheiser products on sale, including the company's excellent HD 599 SE headphones. 

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In 2020, Epic Games publicly demoed Unreal Engine 5 for the first time. Nearly three years later, gamers are still waiting for the tech to go mainstream. Outside of Fortnite and The Matrix Awakens, there aren’t any UE5 games you can play right now, and the first salvo probably won’t arrive until the end of the year at the earliest. None of that stopped Epic from showcasing the engine’s latest capabilities with a handful of new demos during its recent State of Unreal keynote at GDC 2023.

Arguably the most impressive one saw Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 developer Ninja Theory show off Epic’s new MetaHuman Animator. The tool promises to make realistic facial capture accessible to indie developers by allowing them to use an iPhone, instead of dedicated equipment, to capture facial performances. As you can see from the two demos Epic shared, the tool makes it possible to quickly and accurately transform a closeup video of an actor into something a studio can use in-game. Epic said the animator would launch this summer.

Separately, Epic showed off some of the enhancements coming to Unreal Engine 5.2 with a demo that featured, of all things, a digital recreation of Rivian’s R1T electric truck. The EV turned out to be the perfect showcase for UE 5’s new Substrate shading system. The technology allows artists to create different shading models and layer them as they see fit. In the demo, Epic gave the R1T an opal body to show how Substrate can allow different material layers to interact with one another without creating lighting artifacts. The demo was also a showcase for Epic’s new set of Procedural Content Generation tools. They allow artists to create expansive, highly detailed levels from a small set of hand-crafted assets.

If all goes according to plan, it won’t be much longer before the first slate of Unreal Engine 5 games arrive. Provided it’s not delayed again, Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl is slated to release this year. Lords of the Fallen and Black Myth: Wukong, two other UE5 projects, don’t have a release date yet but have been in development for a few years now.

Microsoft has released a pair of emergency updates to address the “aCropalypse” security flaw found within its native Windows 10 and 11 screenshot editing apps. As Bleeping Computer reports, the company began testing a fix for the vulnerability earlier this week shortly after it was discovered by retired software engineer Chris Blume.

On Friday evening, Microsoft began rolling out public updates for Windows 11’s Snipping Tool as well as Windows 10’s Snip & Sketch app. You can manually prompt Windows to patch the app you use by opening the Microsoft Store and clicking on “Library,” followed by “Get Updates.” Microsoft recommends all users install the updates.

The aCropalypse flaw was first discovered on Pixel devices, and subsequently addressed by Google in Android’s recent March security update. In the case of Windows 11’s Snipping Tool, it turned out the utility wasn’t properly overwriting cropped PNG data. The issue did not affect all PNG files, but the concern was that bad actors could exploit the vulnerability to partially recover edited images, particularly those that had been cropped to omit sensitive information. As with Google's March Android update, Microsoft's patches won't protect images that were previously created with its screenshot tools. 

A federal judge has ruled against the Internet Archive in its high-profile case against a group of four US publishers led by Hachette Book Group. Per Reuters, Judge John G. Koeltl declared on Friday the nonprofit had infringed on the group’s copyrights by lending out digitally scanned copies of their books.

The lawsuit originated from the Internet Archive’s decision to launch the “National Emergency Library” during the early days of the pandemic. The program saw the organization offer more than 1.4 million free ebooks, including copyrighted works, in response to libraries worldwide closing their doors due to coronavirus lockdown measures.

Before March 2020, the Internet Archive’s Open Library program operated under what’s known as a “controlled digital lending” system, meaning there was often a waitlist to borrow a book from its collection. When the pandemic hit, the Internet Archive lifted those restrictions to make it easier for people to access reading material while stuck at home. The Copyright Alliance was quick to take issue with the effort. And in June 2020, Hachette, as well as HarperCollins, Penguin Random House and John Wiley & Sons, sued The Internet Archive, accusing the organization of enabling “willful mass copyright infringement.” That same month, the Internet Archive shuttered the National Emergency Program early.

Going into this week’s trial, the Internet Archive argued the initiative was protected by the principle of Fair Use, which allows the unlicensed use of copyrighted works under some circumstances. As The Verge notes, HathiTrust, an offshoot of the Google Books Search project, successfully used a similar argument in 2014 to fend off a legal challenge from The Authors Guild. However, Judge Koeltl rejected the Internet Archive’s stance, declaring “there is nothing transformative” about lending unauthorized copies of books. "Although [the Internet Archive] has the right to lend print books it lawfully acquired, it does not have the right to scan those books and lend the digital copies en masse," he wrote. Maria Pallante, the president and CEO of the Association of American Publishers, said the ruling “underscored the importance of authors, publishers, and creative markets in a global society."

On Saturday, the Internet Archive said it would appeal the decision. “Libraries are more than the customer service departments for corporate database products. For democracy to thrive at global scale, libraries must be able to sustain their historic role in society — owning, preserving, and lending book,” the nonprofit wrote in a blog post. “This ruling is a blow for libraries, readers, and authors and we plan to appeal it.”

Later today, Blizzard will open the gates to Diablo IV's long-awaited open beta, allowing anyone to play the action RPG before its June 6th release date. I had a chance to check out the beta during the early access window the studio offered last weekend and came away more excited than ever to play the final game. Nearly three months from release, there's a lot to like about Diablo IV. Combat is fun and impactful, and the game gives you a lot of freedom to play your character the way you want to play them. Add to that a compelling world with top-notch art direction and sound design, and you have what could be the best Diablo game yet. Still, there's more work Blizzard could do around the user interface, and some dungeons could use more variety. 

If you're jumping into the beta today, Blizzard has said players should be ready for lengthy queue times, particularly on Friday afternoon. Long login times and disconnects were an issue on the first day of the early access weekend, but Blizzard eventually addressed those technical hiccups.  

The rumors were true: Valve has just taken the wraps off of Counter-Strike 2, announcing a limited beta that is available to select members of the game’s community. The studio says the sequel will overhaul every system, piece of content and part of the Counter-Strike experience. As expected, Valve is moving the game to the latest version of its in-house Source 2 engine, leading to a noticeable leap in graphical fidelity.

The game will feature sharper textures, more life-like lighting and additional geometry. Valve says the Counter-Strike 2 team is taking a three-tier approach to level design. “Touchstone” maps like Dust 2 will, for the most part, be left untouched outside of tweaks to their lighting and readability. “Upgrade” maps, meanwhile, will take advantage of Source 2’s enhanced lighting pipeline for more realistic-looking materials and reflections. Lastly, Valve plans to fully overhaul a handful of levels, taking advantage of everything its engine has to offer.

The move to Source 2 will also bring with it gameplay enhancements. Starting, most notably, with how smoke grenades function. As Valve explains in a behind-the-scenes video, smoke grenades will now live as volumetric 3D objects within the game world, making them responsive to other gameplay elements and allowing players to momentarily shape sightlines with bullets and explosions.

Valve is also overhauling the game’s server architecture. It says Counter-Strike 2 will support sub-tick updates, a feature the studio claims will allow the game’s servers to know the instant a player move, fires their weapon or throws a grenade. In theory, that should make the new entry feel like the most responsive Counter-Strike to date.

When the full version of the game arrives this summer, Counter-Strike 2 will be a free upgrade to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Any cosmetics you’ve collected in CS:GO will carry over to the new game (and look better than ever). Valve is inviting players to the limited beta based on a handful of factors, including recent playtime and Steam account standing. The studio promised to share more information about Counter-Strike 2 closer to release.

When looking back at past console generations, the conversation often turns to graphical fidelity. And for good reason. Who could, for example, forget the first time they left the confines of Kokiri Forest for the wide expanse of Hyrule Field in The Ocarina of Time? It was a moment where you felt like you were experiencing the future of gaming.

But as video games have become more complex, so too have the peripherals we use to play them. Over on Engadget’s YouTube channel, Senior Producer Brandon Quintana recently took a look back at the evolution of console controllers, tracking their development all the way from the 1970s to the modern day. It’s an overview that includes everything from the Coleco Telstar to the PlayStation 5 and its Dual Sense controller.