Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed, a four vs. one multiplayer game, will arrive in the midst of spooky season. The game will hit the Epic Games Store, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S on October 18th.

You can either play as a ghost or one of four Ghostbusters trying to hunt it down with the help of gadgets like the PKE Meter, Particle Thrower and Ghost Trap. The ghost can slime and stun the humans, teleport between rifts and possess objects.

There's full multiplayer support across all platforms, though you'll need a PS Plus or Xbox Live Gold membership to play online on PlayStation or Xbox. If you'd rather play solo as either a ghost or Ghostbuster, AI bots can fill out the other four slots.

Preorders are now open for Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed, which is from Predator: Hunting Grounds studio Illfonic. If you lock in a digital preorder, you'll get advance access to a custom Particle Thrower and Proton Pack, Slimer and special clothing colorways.

HBO Max is looking to beef up its subscriber numbers with a solid discount on the annual plan. You can save 30 percent if you sign up for a year (or over 40 percent compared with a monthly plan). If you don't mind dealing with ads, the service will cost $70 for 12 months, down from the usual $100. If you prefer not to see ads on HBO Max, you can pay $105, which is $45 off the regular price.

The offer is available through October 30th and it only applies to the first year of a subscription. A monthly plan costs $10 with ads and $15 without for a total of $120 or $180 per year. So, you can save quite a bit if you're willing to commit to a one-year membership.

HBO Max is introducing the offer just days before the Game of Thrones spin-off show House of the Dragon premieres. You'll also be able to stream the original show in 4K HDR.

In the past, we held up HBO Max as one of the best streaming services around, in large part thanks to its extensive content library. However, executives at newly merged parent Warner Bros. Discovery have been culling content and canceling high-profile original movies as part of a major cost-cutting drive. Meanwhile, HBO Max and Discovery+ will merge into a single streaming service next year.

It's been less than four months since Snap unveiled a selfie drone called Pixy, but it seems the company is already giving up on the device. CEO Evan Spiegel told employees that Snap is halting further work on Pixy amid a reprioritization of resources, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The $250 drone can take off from and land in your hand. It has four preset flight paths and can capture photos and videos that you can transfer to and share on Snapchat. For now, at least, Pixy is still available to buy from Snap's website. The Journal suggests Snap will keep selling Pixy for the time being. Engadget has asked Snap for comment.

Like many other companies, Snap has been feeling the brunt of a broader economic slowdown. In July, it posted its weakest quarterly sales growth to date, which sunk its share price by around 40 percent. Snap's stock has fallen by around 80 percent over the last year. The company also said last month that it would significantly slow down hiring.

Several major tech companies have been shifting priorities in recent months. Meta, for instance, reportedly shelved plans for a smartwatch with two cameras and it's said to be refocusing Portal devices as enterprise products. Others have slowed downhiring plans and laidoffemployees.

Honda's Acura division has pulled back the curtain on a sleek Precision EV concept at Monterey Car Week. Acura took inspiration from Italian power boats for the design, which it says shows "a future vision of electrified vehicles with distinct manual and full driving automation experiences."

The Prologue, which will be Honda's first electric SUV, is scheduled to arrive in 2024 and will use this design language. The concept has a front end that fully lights up and 23-inch wheels, along with an exterior design that's intended to convey Acura's emphasis on performance. The brand says it has "a wide, athletic stance, expressive silhouette and sharp character lines dressed in eye-catching Double Apex Blue with a matte finish."

As for the interior, Acura took a cue from the cockpit of a Formula 1 car. The concept has a yoke-style steering wheel, a low driving position and what Acura describes as "high-performance driver sightlines."

The brand plans to offer two driving modes. The Instinctive Drive option is designed to highlight performance driving, with racing-style digital instrumentation along with red ambient and pipe lighting. When the Spiritual Lounge mode is enabled for autonomous use, the SUV will retract the steering wheel, switch to calming lighting with an underwater-style animated projection and pump in soothing scents for a more laid-back experience.

There's a focus on sustainability as well. Acura utilized marbled recycled plastic trim and 100 percent biomass leather. All the aluminum, along with the green cast acrylic used for the steering wheel secondary controls, was made from recycled materials. The concept also has a wide and curved transparent display with haptic feedback.

Honda

Google says it's doing more to downrank low-quality content that's designed primarily to generate traffic through search engine optimization. Over the coming months, it will roll out several updates to Search aimed at making it easier for people to find helpful content created primarily for humans rather than the attention of algorithms.

Starting next week, Google will unleash what it's calling the Helpful Content Update. This is designed to downgrade unoriginal content deemed to be of low quality. In particular, it will try to surface better-quality educational materials, along with more useful entertainment, shopping, and tech-related content.

As an example, the company notes that folks searching for info about a new movie will be more likely to see results for feature authentic and fresh information, rather than ones that offer aggregated reviews with no unique perspectives or details. In general, the aim is to surface more results with in-depth insights and better quality content. Google says that, as with its other systems, it plans to refine this approach over time. 

The company has offered some guidance to content creators in terms of what its search engine prioritizes. Google has long urged them to publish content designed for people while still using SEO best practices. Among the factors the company suggests they keep in mind is whether their intended audience would find the content useful and showing first-hand expertise and in-depth knowledge of a subject. 

It suggests avoiding "extensive automation" to churn out content on a broad range of topics or writing something with a specific word count in mind after hearing that's what Google looks for. Removing unhelpful content from elsewhere on a website will help too.

In addition, Google is planning another update for Search with the goal of surfacing original and high-quality product reviews (such as the ones you'll find on Engadget). This measure, which the company will roll out in the coming weeks, follows a series of updates Google rolled out last year to bubble up more useful and in-depth reviews in results.

Improving Search is an ongoing mission for Google. The company notes that it made thousands of changes to its Search systems last year. It said those were based on the results of hundreds of thousands of quality tests, some of which incorporated feedback from human reviewers.

Cameo is now offering users a way to chat with celebrities via longer video calls. Last year, the company started offering virtual meet and greets that last two minutes. It's expanding on that with Cameo Live, a feature that enables fans to speak with stars for 10 minutes. What’s more, they can invite up to nine friends and family members to join the call.

The company said it built Cameo Live based on feedback from fans and its celebrity users. You'll be able to suggest three time slots for the call. Thousands of well-known names will be available for Cameo Live calls, such as Sean Astin (The Lord of the Rings and Stranger Things), Chaka Khan, Brooke Lynn Hytes (RuPaul’s Drag Race) and St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Adam Wainwright.

Cameo is rolling out the service only a few months after it laid off a quarter of its employees. According to reports, CEO Steven Galanis told staff that Cameo hired people too fast while failing to hit revenue expectations.

Airbnb is starting to test anti-party technology in the US and Canada. It announced a permanent ban on all parties and events at host properties worldwide back in June. Airbnb brought in such rules on a temporary basis after the COVID-19 pandemic hit to abide by social distancing restrictions.

The company began trialing similar tech in Australia last October. Airbnb says it was able to reduce the number of unauthorized parties in areas where it was using the tools by 35 percent. It's now rolling out the system more broadly in that country.

The anti-party tools look at several factors to detect "potentially high-risk reservations." They consider elements such as how long the prospective guest has had an Airbnb account, how far away the listing is from where they're based and their history of positive reviews. The system will also bear in mind the length of the trip and whether someone is trying to make a booking during the week or at the weekend.

It may, for instance, flag a planned stay of one or two nights over a weekend in the same city where the guest lives. Airbnb says that users who are precluded from staying at an entire home because of these measures can still book a hotel room or a private room. The host is more likely to be at the property in the latter case.

The company says it's trying to tackle unauthorized parties to the best of its ability. This system builds on tools that had a narrower focus on guests aged under 25, particularly those who wanted to stay nearby and didn't have positive reviews. Airbnb noted that the tools can't entirely prevent parties from taking place at listings. It has a tip line for neighbors to contact staff if they believe a party is taking place at a nearby host property or they have other concerns.

"We anticipate that this new system will help prevent more bad actors on our platform while having less of a blunt impact on guests who are not trying to throw a party," Airbnb wrote in a blog post. "While we are consistently willing to make trade-offs in the interests of building trust, our goal is to make these systems as precise and fair as possible to support our hosts and guests." Looking ahead, the company says it will detail the results of the test in the US and Canada and reveal other measures it plans to take to stamp out unauthorized parties.

Despite some missteps with Instagram, Meta is marching forward with its plan to make Reels a bigger component of its apps in an attempt to better compete with TikTok. It's rolling out several updates to Reels, particularly on Facebook's side. For one thing, everyone can now cross-post Reels from Instagram to Facebook with the tap of a button. Meta suggests that this may help creators to grow their audiences on the apps and monetize their content across both platforms.

In addition, Facebook now offers a way to automatically create Reels using Stories you have already shared. The idea is to help folks create Reels with little additional effort. On top of that, Facebook has gained more Reels remix options, which Meta previously introduced to Instagram. You can now show your video after the original Reel that you're remixing in addition to having the side-by-side option.

Elsewhere, the Add Yours sticker that became popular in Stories is coming to Reels on Instagram and Facebook. The idea is to nudge other users to take part in a trend. If you create your own Add Yours prompt, every Reel that uses the sticker will appear on a dedicated page. The person who created the prompt will be displayed prominently on the page as well. So, if an Add Yours trend takes off and you're behind it, that could help you to grow your audience.

Meanwhile, the Facebook Stars tipping feature will soon be available to all eligible creators on the platform. Creators will also have access to more Reels insights via Creator Studio (with metrics including reach, minutes viewed and average watch time) to help them figure out what content is working for their audiences.

Meta has a long way to go to catch up to TikTok, but perhaps these features will help, especially since engagement with Reels is growing across both platforms. TikTok is gobbling up almost every other social media app's lunch. A recent Pew Research report suggested that 16 percent of US teens "almost constantly" use the app, compared with 10 percent for Instagram and two percent for Facebook. 

Oracle has put TikTok's algorithms and content moderation models under its microscope in an attempt to make sure Chinese officials aren't meddling with them. TikTok is in the process of moving all of the data it has on US users to Oracle cloud storage based in the country. Oracle's audit is said to have started last week, after TikTok started routing all new traffic from US users through the former's systems.

A spokesperson told Axios that the reviews examine how TikTok's algorithms — the app's secret sauce — bubble up content "to ensure that outcomes are in line with expectations and that the models have not been manipulated in any way." Engadget has asked Oracle for clarification on what it means by manipulation in this context. On the moderation side, Oracle will regularly look at TikTok's practices related to both automation and human content reviewers.

In 2020, the Trump administration attempted to force through a sale of TikTok to a US company. Former President Donald Trump gave tentative approval to a deal that would have seen Oracle and Walmart run the American side of the business, but that didn't transpire.

Meanwhile, TikTok has committed to being more transparent and it's trying to convince regulators and lawmakers that US user data is secure. CEO Shou Zi Chew recently wrote in a letter to nine Republican senators that TikTok was "working with Oracle on new, advanced data security controls that we hope to finalize in the near future."

The senators asked a question about engineers at TikTok's parent company ByteDance playing a part in shaping the app's algorithms. "ByteDance engineers around the world may assist in developing those algorithms, however our solution with Oracle will ensure that training of the TikTok algorithm only occurs in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and will also ensure appropriate third-party security vetting and validation of the algorithm," Chew wrote in his response. 

In June, BuzzFeed News reported that China-based ByteDance engineers repeatedly accessed non-public US user data. Chew said those workers were only able to access such information with "robust cybersecurity controls and authorization approval protocols overseen by our US-based security team" in place.

The report led to Brendan Carr, the Federal Communication Commission's senior Republican commissioner, urging Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores. Amid the scandal, TikTok's global security chief stepped down last month.

Dozens of workers at a key Amazon Air cargo hub in California walked out mid-shift on Monday to protest pay and safety conditions. More than 150 of the 1,500 employees at the San Bernardino facility took part in the stoppage, according to The Washington Post. Amazon has disputed that figure by claiming that roughly 74 people walked off the job.

This was said to be the first coordinated labor action in the company's air freight division, taking place at the largest Amazon Air hub in California. The action was led by workers who are organizing as a group called Inland Empire Amazon Workers United.

The alliance has urged Amazon to increase the base pay rate from $17 per hour to $22 at the facility, which is known as KSBD. Amazon said that full-time workers have benefits and can earn up to $19.25 per hour.

Inland Empire Amazon Workers United has also called out working conditions, claiming that temperatures reached 95 degrees at the airport on 24 days in July, as CNBC reports. Managers are said to have opened more rest areas after previous complaints about the heat. “They say there is air conditioning, but you can only feel it in some sections," Daniel Rivera, a leader of the stoppage, told the Post. An Amazon spokesperson claimed the highest recorded temperature in the hub is 77 degrees.

The workers who walked out don't currently have plans to file for a union election with the National Labor Relations Board, but they are open to the idea amid a wave of unionization efforts across the company. Amazon has appealed against a union victory in Staten Island, New York. The results of a second election at a warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, were too close to call and hundreds of votes have been challenged.