For the second time this year, Square Enix is delaying Forspoken. Following a delay that pushed the title from its original May 24th release date, the upcoming action RPG from Final Fantasy XV studio Luminous Productions was scheduled to hit PlayStation 5 and PC on October 11th, 2022. It will now instead come out on January 24th, 2023, the publisher announced on Wednesday.

“As a result of ongoing discussions with key partners, we have made the strategic decision to move the launch date of Forspoken to January 24, 2023,” Square Enix said on Twitter. “All game elements are now complete, and development is in its final polishing phase.”

The delay comes on the same day Sony announced the release date for God of War: Ragnarok. The latest project from the company’s Santa Monica studio will arrive on PS5 and PS4 on November 9th. With Forspoken pushed back to 2023, Sony’s fall release schedule now only includes Ragnarok and The Last of Us Part I – the latter is due on September 2nd. The last time we got an extended look at Forspoken was during a hands-off preview Square Enix held at the end of last year. The publisher promised to show off more of the fantasy game later this summer.

Insulting someone online could land an individual in Japan a one-year prison term under an amendment to the country’s penal code enacted on Thursday morning. Following the apparent suicide of Hana Kimura and a paltry ¥9,000 (around $81) fine for one of the men accused of bullying the Terrace House star in 2020, government officials began a review of Japan’s cyberbullying laws. Under the previous version of the country’s penal code, the punishment for posting online insults was a fine of ¥10,000 or less and fewer than 30 days in prison. Now, the law allows for financial penalties of up to ¥300,000 or about $2,200.

Despite pressure from the public on the government to tackle cyberbullying, the bill that introduced the amendment was controversial. CNNreports it only passed after Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party added a provision that calls on the government to review the law in three years to examine its impact on freedom of expression. As The Verge points out, there are also concerns the law isn’t specific enough about what counts as an insult.

The country’s penal code defines insults as an effort to demean someone without referencing specific facts about them – defamation, by contrast, includes reference to specific traits. "There needs to be a guideline that makes a distinction on what qualifies as an insult," Seiho Cho, a criminal lawyer in Japan, told CNN. “At the moment, even if someone calls the leader of Japan an idiot, then maybe under the revised law that could be classed as an insult.”

Microsoft will have to satisfy more than just the Federal Trade Commission to complete its $68.7 billion deal to buy Activision Blizzard. On Wednesday, the United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority announced it would investigate the proposed merger. The watchdog says it seeks to determine whether the agreement would create a “substantial lessening of competition” within the UK. The CMA could announce a decision on whether it will move forward with a probe as early as September 1st. With today’s announcement, the public has until July 20th to submit comment.

Microsoft was most likely ready for the deal to be intensely scrutinized, and in recent months it has made moves seemingly designed to placate regulators. In June, for instance, the company announced a labor neutrality agreement with the Communications Workers of America, the organization that seeks to represent the quality assurance workers who recently voted to unionize at Activision’s Raven Software studio. Just how effective such gestures will be is hard to say. At the start of the year, NVIDIA abandoned its proposed $40 billion deal to buy chip designer ARM after the FTC sued to block the purchase. At the time, the agency called the outcome “signifcant” because it represented “the first abandonment of a litigated vertical merger in many years."

Meta is taking legal action against two prolific data scrapers. On Tuesday, the company filed separate federal lawsuits against a company called Octopus and an individual named Ekrem Ateş. According to Meta, the former is the US subsidiary of a Chinese multinational tech firm that offers data scraping-for-hire services to individuals and companies.

Octopus also sells software people can use to carry out their own data collection campaigns. According to Meta, this program first compromises the Facebook and Instagram accounts of the user by providing their authentication information to Octopus before proceeding to scrape all the data accessible to that individual’s accounts. The software can then obtain phone numbers, dates of birth and other personal information about every Facebook and Instagram friend connected to a particular Octopus customer. Meta alleges Octopus violated its terms of service and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by offering an automated scraping service and attempting to avoid detection by the company.

“Companies like Octopus are part of an emerging scraping industry that provides automation services to any customer — regardless of who they target and for what purpose they scrape,” Meta said. “This industry makes scraping available to individuals and companies that otherwise would not have the capabilities.”

As for Ekrem Ateş, the individual Meta sued, the company says he used automated Instagram accounts to collect information on more than 350,000 Instagram users and later published that data on a series of clone sites where one could view the data of those individuals without their consent. Since the start of 2021, Meta says it has taken multiple enforcement actions against Ateş, including sending him a cease and desist letter and revoking his access to its services. This isn’t the first time Meta has used legal action to try and stop data scraping. In 2020, for instance, the company sued a Turkish national who scraped more than 100,000 Instagram profiles. 

After more than a year of rising tensions over the country’s sweeping 2021 IT law, Twitter is suing India’s government. The New York Times reports the company filed a complaint on Tuesday with the Karnataka High Court in Bangalore to challenge a recent order to censor content within the country. According to Twitter, it had until Monday to block about a dozen accounts and posts or face possible criminal action. While the company complied with the order, it’s now also seeking legal relief.

Twitter declined to comment. The challenge comes after the company reportedly told the Indian government last summer it was compliant with the country’s IT rules. As part of the law, Twitter was required to hire a domestic compliance officer and a point of contact for local authorities.

Before that point, Twitter’s relationship with India had been strained for much of 2021. In February, the government threatened to jail Twitter employees unless the company removed content related to the farmer protests held that year. Two months later, India ordered Twitter to pull tweets that criticized the country’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

More recently, the government ordered Twitter to block tweets from Freedom House, a nonprofit organization that said India was an example of a country where freedom of the press is on the decline. “Freedom House is concerned that the Indian government ordered Twitter to restrict our tweets last year,” the group said. “We think that both governments and tech companies should uphold free expression, privacy and other fundamental freedoms.”

After years of delays, Ubisoft is finally ready to offer a fresh look at Skull and Bones. The publisher announced on Tuesday it plans to host a showcase dedicated to the open-world multiplayer pirate game on July 7th at 2PM ET. Ubisoft will livestream the event on YouTube and Twitch.

The company is widely expected to announce a new release date then. If you haven’t kept track of Skull and Bones’ troubled development, we don’t blame you. Ubisoft first announced the title at E3 2017, with an original release window planned for 2018. It then pushed the game back to 2019, mid-2020, 2021 and then finally its fiscal 2022-2023 year.

In 2020, Elisabeth Pellen, the game’s creative director, attributed the delays to a change of vision. The original premise of Skull and Bones was simple. It was supposed to adapt the sailing mechanics from 2013’s Assassin’s Creed IV:Black Flag and strip all the narrative threads and stealth mechanics that made that game unapproachable for some.

“The answer is that we simply needed more time. We dreamt something bigger for Skull and Bones, and these ambitions naturally came with bigger challenges,” Pellen said at the time. “As Skull and Bones evolved from its original idea to what it is now, it was also necessary to have some fresh eyes join the team.” Ubisoft also announced today it plans to hold a separate event on September 10th that will feature multiple games and projects from the company's teams.

As of October 2022, Microsoft will stop offering free Xbox 360 titles through Games with Gold. The company announced the change in an email sent out to Xbox Live Gold subscribers in the US, Canada and other parts of the world. “We have reached the limit of our ability to bring Xbox 360 games to the catalog,” the company states in the message. “However, Games with Gold will continue to include exciting Xbox One titles and exclusive savings each month.”

The email adds that Xbox users can redownload any 360 titles they claimed through Games with Gold regardless of whether they continue to subscribe to Xbox Live Gold. Microsoft did not immediately respond to Engadget’s comment request.

Introduced in 2013, Microsoft added Games with Gold to Xbox Live Gold in response to the success of Sony’s PS Plus service, which was the first to offer free monthly games to customers. Microsoft later extended the perk to include the Xbox One. In recent years, the allure of the bonus has waned with the introduction of Xbox Game Pass. After Microsoft recently dropped the Xbox Live Gold requirement to play free-to-play games online, it felt like the company was preparing to reconfigure the service, and this announcement adds to that. See the full email from Microsoft below.

Microsoft

The music of Crosby, Stills and Nash is once again available to stream on Spotify. In February, the supergroup left the platform to protest Spotify’s inaction against Joe Rogan, who was accused of spreading COVID-19 misinformation through his podcast. According to Billboard, the trio plan to donate their Spotify earnings to COVID-19 charities for “at least a month.”

Crosby, Stills and Nash were among a handful of musicians who left Spotify in response to Rogan’s interview with vaccine skeptic Dr. Robert Malone. The exodus, such that it was, began with Neil Young and later came to include Joni Mitchell, as well as author Brené Brown.

In the end, Spotify did not drop Rogan. Instead, the company said it would add a content advisory to any episode that includes a discussion about COVID-19. The protest’s effect on Spotify’s bottom line appears to have been minimal, with the company recently reporting that it grew to 422 million monthly users.

Despite the return of Crosby, Stills and Nash to Spotify, don’t expect to see all of the music the trio helped created on the platform. As The Verge point outs, Young’s continued absence from the service means not every song from Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young is available. For instance, tracks like “Helpless” and “Country Girl” are missing from the band’s 1970 album Déjà Vu, 

The British army is investigating an apparent hack after its official Twitter and YouTube accounts were compromised on Sunday. News of the breach was first reported by Web3 is Going Great. According to the blog, both accounts were simultaneously compromised to promote two different cryptocurrency scams.

Although it has since been scrubbed, the army’s verified Twitter account was briefly changed to look like a page for The Possessed, a project involving a collection of 10,000 animated NFTs with a price floor of 0.58 Ethereum (approximately $1,063). During that time, the account tweeted out multiple links to a fake minting website. It’s possible the hack is part of a broader campaign to leverage the recent popularity of The Possessed. On Saturday, the project’s official Twitter account warned its followers of another verified account that was similarly hacked to promote a NFT scam using The Possessed brand.

Igor Bonifacic / Engadget

Over on YouTube, the army’s channel has been made to look like a page for Ark Invest. As of the writing of this article, the channel is livestreaming videos that repurpose old footage of Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey and Ark CEO Katie Wood discussing cryptocurrency. The clips feature an overlay promoting “double your money” Bitcoin and Ethereum scams. According to Web3 is Going Great, a similar scheme netted scammers $1.3 million this past May. It’s unclear who is behind the attacks.

“We are aware of a breach of the army’s Twitter and YouTube accounts and an investigation is underway,” an army spokesperson told The Guardian. “We take information security extremely seriously and are resolving the issue. Until the investigation is complete it would be inappropriate to comment further.”

While 2022 has seen its share of crypto hacks, few have targeted government organizations like the British army. To date, most have involved groups like Yuga Labs, the creator of the popular Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection. In April, the project’s official Instagram account was compromised in a $2.4 million phishing scam. BAYC’s Discord community has also fallen to two separate phishing attacks in 2022.

Germany’s Kraftfahrt-Bundesamt traffic regulator is calling on Tesla to recall more than 59,000 vehicles over a software issue. On June 29th, the KBA published a notice on its website notifying Model Y and 3 owners of a bug with the eCall safety system on those cars, according to Reuters. The glitch prevents the tool from automatically calling first responders in the event of a serious accident.

The KBA said the problem affects 59,129 vehicles globally, including Model Y crossovers manufactured at the automaker’s recently opened Berlin Gigafactory. German media first reported on the notice on Saturday.

Before this week, three of the 11 recalls Tesla issued this year involved a software bug. Most recently, the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced a recall involving approximately 130,000 vehicles over a glitch that could cause the infotainment system in 2021 and 2022 Tesla cars to overheat. The news of a new safety issue comes after Tesla reported a nearly 18 percent decline in vehicle deliveries on Saturday.