Perhaps taking inspiration from blockbuster music experiences in Fortnite, Warner Music Group is creating a performance venue in the metaverse. It's teaming up with The Sandbox to create a "hybrid of musical theme park and concert venue" on the platform.

Some of WMG's vast roster of artists (which includes the likes of Ed Sheeran, Green Day and Dua Lipa) are expected to play shows and take part in music experiences on the virtual stage. At a later date, The Sandbox will offer ardent fans the chance to buy virtual property next to WMG's section of the metaverse.

The deal will result in The Sandbox's first music-themed world. The platform has teamed up with artists including Snoop Dogg, Deadmau5 and Steve Aoki on an individual basis, but this is its biggest music partnership to date. WMG and The Sandbox didn't say when the virtual venue will debut.

Other major music companies have started making moves in the metaverse. Last month, Universal Music Group joined the bandwagon with official metaverse avatars for its artists.

Almost five years since it released its first security camera, Wyze is putting the device out to pasture. The company says it will retire Wyze Cam v1 on February 1st, because the camera is unable to support a required security update.

Wyze told customers in an email that they'll still be able to use the camera after the end of this month, but it won't "sell, improve or maintain" it as of February 1st. The company added that "your continued use of the Wyze Cam v1 after February 1, 2022 carries increased risk, is discouraged by Wyze and is entirely at your own risk," though it didn't offer more details.

As a thank you for buying its first product, Wyze offered customers a coupon for $3 off their next camera. The Wyze Cam v3 typically costs $36.

Earlier this month, Wyze announced a pay-what-you-want plan for its cameras. Users will need to opt into the new Cam Plus Lite service (which they don't need to pay for) or the Cam Plus plan to retain access to cloud storage features as of February 15th. It's unclear whether this change played a role in the decision to retire Wyze Cam v1. 

Engadget has contacted Wyze for comment. 

Thanks, Scott!

Two Point Campus, Sega and Two Point Studios' follow up to Two Point Hospital, will arrive on May 17th. The quirky college life simulator is coming to PC, PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch. Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass subscribers can play at no extra cost on launch day.

You'll be able to build a dream (or nightmare) college campus from the ground up, from residence halls and classrooms to ornamental pathways and forests. Players will be able to give students a college experience packed with relationships and extracurricular activities, such as concerts and a sport called Cheese Ball, and possibly even an education.

Students can take classes such as gastronomy and robotics, and they each have their own character traits to be catered to. Keeping students happy and helping them earn strong grades can boost your college's prestige, allowing you to enroll more students and boost the institution's bank balance.

Pre-orders for most platforms are open today, and will be available on the Switch eShop later. Locking in a pre-order will net you in-game goodies for not only Two Point Campus, but Two Point Hospital as well.

Sega/Two Point Studios

The CEO of ID.me, a service used by dozens of states to verify unemployment benefits claimants as well as several federal agencies, has walked back previous claims that the company does not use a more powerful method of facial recognition.

"ID.me uses a specific '1 to Many' check on selfies tied to government programs targeted by organized crime to prevent prolific identity thieves and members of organized crime from stealing the identities of innocent victims en masse," Blake Hall said in a statement. "This step is internal to ID.me and does not involve any external or government database."

That contrasts with comments Hall made earlier this week. "Our 1:1 face match is comparable to taking a selfie to unlock a smartphone," he said. "ID.me does not use 1:many facial recognition, which is more complex and problematic."

The 1:many approach involves matching images against those in a database, whereas 1:1 is a case of ensuring someone matches their own photo. For 1:1 matching, ID.me compares a user's selfie against a piece of government ID that they upload.

Privacy advocates have criticized both approaches. Research has indicated that some facial recognition systems struggle to identify people with darker skin tones, and concerns have been raised about the security risks of storing biometric data.

Hall said ID.me's 1:many check "occurs once during enrollment, and exists to make sure a single attacker is not registering multiple identities. This step is not tied to identity verification. It does not block legitimate users from verifying their identity, nor is it used for any other purpose other than to prevent identity theft."

He claimed data shows that dropping the 1:many check "would immediately lead to significant identity theft and organized crime. The 1:1 Face Match step is the only step used to verify identity as explained in our earlier reports."

According to Cyberscoop, some ID.me workers expressed concern that the company's public statements didn't align with what it was actually doing. "We could disable the 1:many face search, but then lose a valuable fraud fighting tool. Or we could change our public stance on using 1:many face search,” an engineer is said to have posted to an ID.me Slack channel this week. “But it seems we can’t keep doing one thing and saying another as that’s bound to land us in hot water.”

“If companies and the government have to lie about facial recognition in an effort to avoid public scrutiny, they shouldn’t be using it,” Fight for the Future campaign director Caitlin Seeley George said in a statement. “We already know this company is willing to say anything in order to get more government contracts. The CEO of ID.me has been peddling erroneous numbers about unemployment benefit fraud, but the fact that the IRS knew about this discrepancy is a big problem. The only responsible thing for the IRS and any other state or federal agency using ID.me to do is to stop these contracts immediately.”

ID.me came back under the spotlight recently after cybersecurity reporter Brian Krebs tried to set up an account, which will be required to log into the Internal Revenue Service's online portal by this summer. Krebs ran into difficulties during the verification process, and ID.me placed him in a queue to join a video call with a live agent. The system gave Krebs an estimated wait time of three hours and 27 minutes.

Hall said ID.me works with 10 federal agencies, 30 states and 540 companies. Last year, some users reported having to wait months to receive their benefits after the system failed to verify their identity. In some cases, folks said they had no success with the video chat system either.

The White House wants the government to adopt a security model called Zero Trust within the next two years. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released a finalized federal strategy that lays out the initial details of the shift.

It told agencies to each designate a strategy implementation lead within 30 days. Agencies were given 60 days to submit an implementation plan to the OMB and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). 

"This memorandum sets forth a federal Zero Trust architecture (ZTA) strategy, requiring agencies to meet specific cybersecurity standards and objectives by the end of fiscal year (FY) 2024 in order to reinforce the government’s defenses against increasingly sophisticated and persistent threat campaigns," OMB acting director Shalanda D. Young wrote in the memo. "Those campaigns target federal technology infrastructure, threatening public safety and privacy, damaging the American economy and weakening trust in government."

The Zero Trust approach is based on the notion that local devices and connections can't be completely trusted. Users need to be authorized, authenticated and continuously validated. Organizations usually have control over Zero Trust setups, and users and devices are often only granted access to essential data, apps and services.

Google offers a Zero Trust solution called BeyondCorp. Last week, a company called Sikur revealed a smartphone it designed using Zero Trust principles.

The release of the strategy follows an executive order President Joe Biden signed last year with the aim of improving the country's cybersecurity, as well as a draft strategy that the OMB published in September.

The finalized strategy lays out a vision for the government in which staff have "enterprise-managed accounts, allowing them to access everything they need to do their job while remaining reliably protected from even targeted, sophisticated phishing attacks." The devices would be continuously monitored and each agency's system would be isolated, with reliable encryption for internal network traffic and sending data to other agencies.

Under this approach, enterprise applications would be tested internally and externally before staff could access them over the cloud. The OMB also said federal security teams and data teams would work together "to develop data categories and security rules to automatically detect and ultimately block unauthorized access to sensitive information."

The strategy directs agencies to harness strong, phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication, perhaps using physical methods like Personal Identity Verification cards. The OMB also told agencies to have a full inventory of devices that are authorized and used for official business and to make sure they meet CISA standards.

The White House cited the Log4j vulnerability that recently emerged as the latest proof that "adversaries will continue to find new opportunities to get their foot in the door."

"This strategy is a major step in our efforts to build a defensible and coherent approach to our federal cyber defenses,” national cyber director Christopher Inglis said in a statement. “We are not waiting to respond to the next cyber breach. Rather, this administration is continuing to reduce the risk to our nation by taking proactive steps towards a more resilient society."

Unpacking is a lovely, relaxing puzzle game made by a small team. It's beautifully designed and manages to tell a compelling story with very little text. Unfortunately, its core mechanic — unpacking boxes and placing items in a new home — isn't exactly difficult to copy. One clone quickly found an audience on iOS and Android before it was removed.

Unpacking Master, which was published by a company called SayGames, was said to be a near-identical copy of Witch Beam Games' title. It adopted a freemium model (users could pay a one-time fee to remove ads) and it briefly topped App Store charts less than a week after it was released. As Game Developer notes, Unpacking Master is no longer available on Apple's App Store or the Google Play Store.

Earlier this month, a spate of Wordle clones barged onto the App Store with copycat developers looking to cash in on the success of the viral hit word game. Those apps were removed as well. These incidents highlight a long-running problem that studios behind popular games (particularly indies) have grappled with.

Knockoff games have plagued mobile app stores for years. For instance, the developers of 2048 made some minor changes to the formula of puzzle game Threes and became a hit. In 2018, publisher Voodoo adopted the central idea of the quirky Donut County (players move around a hole in the ground and swallow up objects) with Hole.io, which soared to the top of App Store and Google Play charts.

In the case of Unpacking, Witch Beam suggested SayGames' clone used almost identical items and very similar level layouts. It said that while other clones failed to find much success, Unpacking Master took off in the wake of an ad campaign on TikTok and Instagram.

"It's demoralizing for a small team like ours to see content we spent literally years planning, refining and handcrafting be hastily reproduced in an opportunistic ad-riddled app a mere 3 months after our launch," the team wrote on Twitter. "We're a tiny indie team and even with the success we have achieved, we still don't have the resources to pursue companies trying to use our game's distinct look and feel to make a quick buck. We have to rely on storefronts like the App Store to better curate their content."

At least for now, the original Unpacking isn't available via mobile app stores, though you can pick it up on PC, Mac, Nintendo Switch and Xbox. It's on Game Pass as well, so you can play over the cloud if you're eager to check it out on a phone or tablet.

Huawei is set to start selling the P50 Pro and foldable P50 Pocket smartphones it announced last year outside of China. The flagship Pro device costs €1,199 and the P50 Pocket starts at €1,299. Those convert to around $1,353 and $1,466 respectively, but don’t expect to get your hands on these in the US.

Along with preventing Huawei devices from easily being sold in the US, sanctions imposed by the country mean that the P50 Pro and P50 Pocket don’t ship with Google apps and services, such as Gmail, Chrome, Maps and the Play Store. That’s despite Huawei basing its HarmonyOS on an open source version of Android. 

Sanctions also inhibit Huawei from sourcing 5G components, so the P50 Pro and P50 Pocket are 4G handsets. Those are significant tradeoffs that might make the P50 Pro and P50 Pocket hard sells, given that they'll likely be more expensive than flagship Apple, Samsung and Google devices in many markets. The next Galaxy S devices are right around the corner too.

Huawei

The P50 Pro has a 6.6-inch OLED display with a resolution of 2700 x 1228 and a 120Hz refresh rate, as well as support for 1.07 billion colors. There are four cameras on the rear: a 50MP True-Chroma main camera, 40MP mono camera, 64MP telephoto and 13MP ultrawide. There's also a 13MP selfie camera.

The 4,369 mAh battery supports up to 66W wired fast charging and 50W wireless charging. The P50 Pro comes with 8 GB RAM and 256 GB of storage.

The P50 Pocket, meanwhile, has a clamshell foldable design akin to Samsung's Galaxy Z Flip devices. When unfolded, users can access the 6.9-inch OLED display with a resolution of 2700 x 1228 and a 120Hz refresh rate, along with support for 1.07 billion colors and P3 wide color gamut.

Huawei

There's a 10.7MP selfie camera and a triple-camera array on the rear. Along with the main 40MP True-Chroma sensor, there's a 32MP ultra spectrum camera and 13MP ultra-wide lens. One interesting feature in the Mirror app enables users to visualize their sunscreen application and check for spots they may not have covered up. 

There's a small, circular display positioned below the camera array, which can display things like notifications and the weather. It allows control over features like music playback and the cameras. The foldable also comes with up to 12 GB RAM and 512 GB of storage. The 4000 mAh battery supports 40W charging.

The two handsets both run on the Snapdragon 888 4G chipset. They'll go on sale in "key markets" in Europe, Asia Pacific, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America as part of phase one of an international rollout. Huawei didn't disclose the specific markets or when exactly the phones will be available to purchase.

President Joe Biden has offered some more backing to right to repair rules, following an executive order he signed last summer. He acknowledged that many companies have made it difficult for consumers to fix their own devices. Biden also nodded to Apple and Microsoft for changing their right to repair policies ahead of the Federal Trade Commission taking more action on the matter.

Among dozens of other issues the executive order covered, it encouraged "the FTC to issue rules against anticompetitive restrictions on using independent repair shops or doing DIY repairs of your own devices and equipment." The agency said later that month it would tackle unlawful right to repair restrictions by enforcing existing laws and doing more to help consumers and small repair shops fix products.

"Denying the right to repair raises prices for consumers, means independent repair shops can’t compete for your business," Biden said. "Too many areas, if you own a product, from a smartphone to a tractor, you don’t have the freedom to choose how or where to repair that item you purchased."

The president noted that, in many cases, consumers need to go to a dealer or the manufacturer and pay their asking price for repairs. He added that he was pleased to hear the FTC unanimously voted to "ramp up enforcement against illegal repair restrictions."

Toward the end of last year, both Apple and Microsoft announced programs that would help consumers repair their own iPhones, iPads and Surfaces. "What happened was a lot of these companies said, 'You’re right. We’re going to voluntarily do it. You don’t have to order us to do it,'" Biden said. "For example, Apple and Microsoft are changing their policies so folks will be able to repair their phones and laptops themselves — although I’m not sure I know how to do that."

The president added that moves such as ones made by Apple and Microsoft, as well as possible regulations at state and federal level, will "make it easier for millions of Americans to repair their electronics instead of paying an arm and a leg to repair or just throwing the device out."

Stadia Pro members will be able to claim a couple of notable games at no additional cost next week. Following a delay, Square Enix's Life is Strange Remastered and Life is Strange: Before the Storm Remastered will hit various platforms (but not Switch) on February 1st, and subscribers can snag them on the same day. 

The most recent game in the well-regarded, narrative-heavy series, Life is Strange: True Colors, landed on Stadia and elsewhere on September 10th.

Five other games will join the Stadia Pro lineup on February 1st: Cosmic Star Heroine, Nanotale, Merek's Market, Phogs and One Hand Clapping. Subscribers can add those titles to their library and play them for as long as their Stadia Pro membership remains active.

It emerged earlier this month that Stadia users will soon have another way to access the platform. Samsung's 2022 TVs will allow players to access some cloud gaming services, like Stadia, without the need for dedicated hardware, such as a Chromecast dongle. You'll just need a compatible controller. Other TVs, including some LG models, offer direct access to Stadia as well.

Three YouTube executives are moving on from the platform, including head of gaming Ryan Wyatt. Senior director of creator partnerships Jamie Byrne and vice president and global head of product partnerships Heather Rivera are departing too.

“Like many other companies, we’ve seen some of our people choose a new direction in the new year,” YouTube told Tubefilter. “We are also fortunate to have a deep bench of talented leaders to take our business forward. We thank Heather, Jamie, and Ryan for their incredible contribution to YouTube over the years and can’t wait to see what they do next.”

Wyatt, who also led YouTube's virtual and augmented reality projects, joined Google in 2014 after a career in esports and live events. He said on Twitter that he's leaving YouTube in the coming weeks to join Polygon Technology, a company in the Web3 space, where he'll head up the Polygon Studios division.

Wyatt wrote that he'll be "focused on growing the developer ecosystem through investment, marketing and developer support." He'll oversee gaming, entertainment, fashion, news, sports and other areas for Polygon Studios.

During Wyatt's tenure, YouTube has added a number of features to cater to gaming-focused creators and viewers, such as subscriptions, Super Chat and clips. In 2020, YouTube secured the rights to stream Call of Duty League and Overwatch League events for three years. The service has also lured several high-profile streamers away from Twitch over the last few years, including Jack "CouRage" Dunlop, Rachell "Valkyrae" Hofstetter, Tim "TimTheTatman" Betar and Benjamin “DrLupo” Lupo.

Byrne had been with YouTube since 2006 and most recently was overseeing areas like creator acquisitions and Shorts partnerships. According to Tubefilter, he's joining NFT endeavor Bright Moments to lead operations and partnerships — just as it seems YouTube may be getting into NFTs. Rivera, meanwhile, was involved in growing ad-supported and subscription businesses, such as YouTube TV.