Black Friday is just a couple of weeks away, but you don’t need to bide your time to check out some significant discounts on an array of devices. If you’re an Amazon Prime member, you can snag a bundle of Blink cameras for $140, which is 61 percent off the regular price of $360. It includes two Outdoor 4 cameras, one Wired Floodlight Camera, one Mini Pan-Tilt Camera and one Sync Module 2.

It’s a deal worth considering if you’re looking to set up a home security system without breaking the bank. The discount is available for three days.

The bundle will effectively give you a full indoor and outdoor camera system. You’ll also get three mounting kits, four AA batteries, two USB cables and two power adapters. You could always add more Blink devices to your set up if you feel the need to. It's worth bearing in mind that Blink devices only work with Alexa, so they may not be suitable if you're, for instance, already heavily invested in Google's smart home ecosystem.

In our guide to the best smart home devices, we highlighted the new Blink Outdoor 4 as our favorite wireless security camera. It can be placed indoors and it'll run for up to two years before you need to replace the AA batteries. The Blink Outdoor 4 has support for night vision, motion detection and two-way audio (via the Blink app and devices like Echo Show). It's weather resistant too.

The bundle comes with a 30-day trial of the Blink Subscription Plan, which you'll need if you prefer to store clips in the cloud. Alternatively, you can save clips locally on the included Blink Sync Module 2 or a USB flash drive (which you'll need to buy separately).

You'll receive an alert when the cameras detect movement. If you have the Blink Subscription Plan, you'll also be alerted when the Outdoor 4 and Wired Floodlight Camera detect a person using their computer vision features.

Meanwhile, the Outdoor 4 and Wired Floodlight Camera both support customizable privacy zones. This feature enables you to select areas that the cameras don't record at all. You might want to use this to avoid viewing your neighbor's door or yard. Alternatively, if you use the Outdoor 4 indoors, you may wish to block out the area between your bathroom and bedroom for post-shower privacy.

Your Black Friday Shopping Guide: See all of Yahoo’s Black Friday coverage, here. Follow Engadget for Black Friday tech deals. Learn about Black Friday trends on In The Know. Hear from Autoblog’s experts on the best Black Friday deals for your car, garage, and home, and find Black Friday sales to shop on AOL, handpicked just for you.

The Overwatch League (OWL) appears to be no more after six seasons. A Blizzard spokesperson told Engadget that "We are transitioning from the Overwatch League and evolving competitive Overwatch in a new direction." That's not to say the publisher is pulling out of Overwatch esports altogether. "We are grateful to everyone who made OWL possible and remain focused on building our vision of a revitalized esports program," the statement read. "We are excited to share details with you all in the near future."

In July, Activision Blizzard laid off around 50 esports staff and revealed that, after the 2023 season, OWL team owners would hold a vote to determine whether they'd continue with the league. Activision Blizzard said that if teams opted out, it would pay each of them a termination fee of $6 million. Blizzard has not said whether the vote has taken place and, if so, what the results were.

However, earlier on Wednesday, the owner of OWL team Toronto Defiant confirmed it was leaving the league. OverActive Media said it had ended its team participation agreement, and that it would receive a $6 million termination payment from Activision Blizzard. The company plans to stay involved in Overwatch esports.

"As we transition into the next phase of Overwatch esports, we look forward to the opportunities that lie ahead," Adam Adamou, cofounder and CEO of OverActive Media, said in a statement. "We are eager to share more about our vision for Toronto Defiant and our plans to return to Overwatch esports. We expect more information to come on this front soon.”

The Defiant are the second team to leave OWL. The Chengdu Hunters did not participate in the 2023 season after Overwatch 2 and other Blizzard games were shut down in China. The team confirmed partway through the year that it was departing from OWL.

Several other teams have been releasing players and others have suspended operations entirely amid OWL's uncertain future. All of the Florida Mayhem's players and staff went into free agency just 19 days after winning the 2023 OWL championship. On October 2, the day after the Grand Finals, Blizzard said it was "focusing on building our vision of a revitalized esports program."

The writing has been on the wall for OWL for some time as the original vision of a global home-and-away league format never panned out. The first two seasons of OWL matches were held almost exclusively in a studio in California. Weeks after Blizzard started on its grand plan to run matches in each team's city every week, it was forced to shift to an online-only format due to COVID-19 lockdowns. That prevented teams from pulling in much-sought-after live event revenue.

Viewership struggles, sponsors dropping out and the sexual harassment and discrimination scandal at Activision Blizzard may have played a factor in OWL's demise as well. Although OWL broadcasts and matches were polished and entertaining, there were just too many factors playing against it.

The future of the professional Overwatch scene is unclear, but reports suggest that a return to a more open format could be next. According to esports reporter Jacob Wolf, Activision Blizzard has been in talks with Saudi Arabian state-owned ESL FACEIT Group for the latter to run the 2024 pro Overwatch season. In the meantime, a Blizzard-backed Overwatch 2 tournament that features regional prize pools of $50,000 and veteran OWL players is getting underway this weekend.

Winter is almost upon us and Airbnb has announced a new feature that could help folks avoid fumbling for keys while wearing a bunch of layers. Starting in the US and Canada later this year, Airbnb hosts who are in the invite-only Early Access program will be able to link compatible smart locks to their Airbnb account and generate a unique code for each reservation. Guests will then be able to input the code in the Airbnb app to open the lock. At the outset, Airbnb will support some models from Schlage, August and Yale.

That could make some Airbnb pain points much easier to deal with. Hosts won't have to worry about bad actors sharing entry codes with other people after they check out, and guests should find it more straightforward to find and enter their code. They also won't have to download a separate app if they're staying at a place that uses a compatible smart lock.

Airbnb is making a string of other changes as part of its winter update. You'll be able to access a collection of the 2 million most-loved homes on the platform. These Guest Favorites all have an average rating of above 4.9 with high marks for things like value, the check in process, cleanliness, listing accuracy, host communication and location. Hosts of Guest Favorites will all have strong track records of reliability and almost two-thirds of the listings are from Superhosts.

You'll soon start seeing a badge denoting a listing as a Guest Favorite on the listing page and in search results. There'll also be an option to filter results by Guest Favorites.

Elsewhere, you'll be able to sort reviews by recency or rating, while a new chart should make the distribution of reviews on the five-star scale easier to grok. When you leave a review, you'll be able to include more details that may be useful for context, such as where you're from, how long you stayed and whether you traveled with family, another group or pets. Airbnb is starting to roll out the reviews and Guest Favorites updates this week.

Since last year, Airbnb has been making its pricing more transparent. To that end, service fees will now be included in the prices that hosts set. According to Airbnb, that will give hosts a better idea of how much guests are paying overall. It should be easier for hosts to compare their prices to similar listings through the calendar too.

Hosts will have access to other new listing tools, such as an Ai-powered photo tour. Airbnb says its AI engine can recognize photos and assign them to up to 19 rooms to help guests better understand the layouts of properties. Hosts will be able to edit the photo tour whenever they like and pinpoint amenities in each room.

If you happen to open up a gift containing an iPhone 15 Pro, a iPad or even an M3-powered MacBook Pro this holiday season, you'll be able to play one of this year's biggest games on your new device pretty swiftly. Capcom has announced that the Resident Evil 4 remake will hit iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max, as well as iPads and Macs powered by an M1 or later chipset, on December 20. The Separate Ways expansion will be available on the same day.

The remake of the 2005 survival horror classic will have Universal Purchase support, so you'll only need to buy it once to play it across iPhone, iPad and Mac. There's cross-progression too, so when you don't feel like sitting in front of your iMac anymore, you can move to your couch and continue where you left off on your iPhone or iPad.

You can try a chunk of the game for free before you decide to take the plunge and buy it. That'll give you a chance to see how well Resident Evil 4 runs on your device and figure out whether the touch controls on iPhone and iPad work for you, though there's controller support as well. You'll be able to play using a keyboard and mouse on Mac, if you prefer.

Apple has been focusing a bit more on bringing high-profile games to its devices as of late. Resident Evil Village is also available on iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max and Apple Silicon-powered iPads, while it emerged this week that 2022 hit Stray is coming to Mac in December. Assassin's Creed Mirage and Death Stranding are among the other games slated to hit Apple devices in the coming months.

Samsung has joined the generative AI rat race by announcing its own model. Developed by Samsung Research, Gauss (named after mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss) will power several on-device AI technologies and could make its public debut in the next few months.

Samsung Gauss Language can handle tasks like translations and summarizing documents. The tech will be able to write emails for you too, Samsung says. Samsung Gauss Code is a coding assistant, while Samsung Gauss Image is a generative image model. The latter can whip up images based on prompts and handle edits like style changes and additions. It can upscale low-resolution images too.

Samsung employees are currently using Gauss in-house to bolster productivity, but the company plans to make it available to the public “in the near future.” According to The Korea Times, Samsung is likely to include it in Galaxy S24 devices, which should debut early next year.

Running generative AI features on-device could help give Samsung a leg up over the likes of ChatGPT, which requires cloud connectivity. Qualcomm recently announced the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset, which supports on-device GAI operations and is likely to be used in Galaxy S24 phones. Google's Tensor 3, which is used in the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro, handles certain GAI tasks on-device too.

Meanwhile, Samsung says it is working on “various activities that ensure safe AI usage.” Its AI Red Team is bearing in mind “the principles of AI ethics” as it focuses on potential privacy and security issues including data collection and the GAI model’s output. The company also flagged AI model development and service deployment as possible pitfalls.

Still, this is another instance of Samsung attempting to forge its own path, despite alternatives being available. Bixby never really took off, and despite its users by and large wanting Google Assistant instead, Samsung insisted on making its voice assistant as prevalent as possible on its devices. The list goes on, with things like the Chromium-based Samsung Internet Browser when Chrome is right there.

In fairness, Samsung wants to make its devices distinct from other Android phones and tablets and give them a unique selling point. Its generative AI tech will largely run in the background too, so its not like users will see heavy Samsung branding when they ask Gauss to generate an image. But shareholders who might be feeling skittish about recent financial results may have questions about why Samsung has been investing in its own GAI tech instead of using one of the many other available options.

It's been quite some time coming, but Annapurna Interactive has revealed when Mac gamers can get their paws on one of the most adorable titles of the last few years. Stray is coming to macOS on December 5 via the Mac App Store and Steam. You'll need a fairly recent system, though. Stray will be compatible with Macs that have an Apple Silicon chipset, so if you have an Intel-based machine you're out of luck (unless you check it out on a cloud service or another platform).

Stray debuted on PC and PlayStation in July 2022 and it arrived on Xbox this August. It's one of Engadget's favorite games of last year, and it's neat that more people will soon get to check out this absorbing cyberpunk adventure on Mac before it's adapted into a movie.

Apple has been making a slightly bigger push into gaming, and some notable publishers are bringing their titles to Mac (and even iPhone). Resident Evil Village arrived on iPhone 15 Pro and some iPad models last week, while Assassin's Creed Mirage, Death Stranding and the Resident Evil 4 remake are all coming to the Apple ecosystem in the coming months.

Another Meta whistleblower has testified before Congress regarding safety issues on the company's platforms. On the same day that Frances Haugen told Congress in 2021 how Meta could fix some of its safety problems, Arturo Béjar, a former director of engineering for Protect and Care at Facebook, sent CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other executives an email regarding the harms that young people may face while using the company's products.

Two years later, Béjar was the sole witness in a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing titled "Social Media and the Teen Mental Health Crisis." In his testimony, Béjar claimed he was subpoenaed earlier this year to testify regarding emails he sent Meta higher-ups. He said he realized that since he sent them, nothing had changed at the company.

"Meta continues to publicly misrepresent the level and frequency of harm that users, especially children, experience on the platform," Béjar told the Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law in prepared remarks. "And they have yet to establish a goal for actually reducing those harms and protecting children. It’s time that the public and parents understand the true level of harm posed by these 'products' and it’s time that young users have the tools to report and suppress online abuse."

Béjar was an engineering director at Meta between 2009 and 2015, during which time he was responsible for protecting Facebook users. He supported a team that worked on "bullying tools for teens, suicide prevention, child safety and other difficult moments that people go through," according to his LinkedIn profile.

He testified that he initially left Meta feeling "good that we had built numerous systems that made using our products easier and safer." However, he said that, since they were 14, his daughter and her friends "repeatedly faced unwanted sexual advances, misogyny and harassment" on Instagram. According to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported on Béjar's claims, he stated that Meta's systems typically ignored reports they made or responded to say that the harassment they faced didn't break the rules.

Those issues prompted him to return to Meta in 2019, where he worked with Instagram’s well-being team. "It was not a good experience. Almost all of the work that I and my colleagues had done during my earlier stint at Facebook through 2015 was gone," Béjar said in his testimony. "The tools we had built for teenagers to get support when they were getting bullied or harassed were no longer available to them. People at the company had little or no memory of the lessons we had learned earlier."

Béjar claimed that Instagram and internal research teams gathered data showing that younger teens dealt with "great distress and abuse." However, "senior management was externally reporting different data that grossly understated the frequency of harm experienced by users," he told senators.

In a 2021 email to Zuckerberg and other executives laying out some of his concerns, Béjar wrote that his then-16-year-old daughter uploaded a car-related post to Instagram only for a commenter to tell her to "get back to the kitchen." Béjar said his daughter found this upsetting. “At the same time the comment is far from being policy violating, and our tools of blocking or deleting mean that this person will go to other profiles and continue to spread misogyny," Béjar wrote. "I don’t think policy/reporting or having more content review are the solutions.”

Béjar said that along with his daughter's experiences with the app, he cited data from a research team indicating that 13 percent of users aged between 13 and 15 reported that they received unwanted sexual advances on Instagram within the previous seven days. While former chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg offered sympathy toward his daughter for her negative experiences and Instagram head Adam Mosseri asked to set up a meeting, according to Béjar, Zuckerberg never responded to the email.

"That was unusual," Béjar said in his testimony. "It might have happened, but I don’t recall Mark ever not responding to me previously in numerous communications, either by email or by asking for an in-person meeting."

Béjar told the Associated Press that Meta has to change its approach to moderating its platforms. This, according to Béjar, would require the company to place a greater onus on tackling harassment, unwanted sexual advances and other issues that don't necessarily break the company's existing rules.

He noted, for instance, that teens should be able to tell Instagram that they don't want to receive crude sexual messages, even if those don't violate the app's current policies. Béjar claims it would be easy for Meta to implement a feature through which teens could flag sexual advances that were made to them. "I believe that the reason that they're not doing this is because there's no transparency about the harms that teenagers are experiencing on Instagram," he told the BBC.

Béjar laid out several other steps that Meta could take to reduce harm users face on its platform that "do not require significant investments by the platforms in people to review content or in technical infrastructure." He added that he believes adopting such measures (which primarily focus on improving safety tools and getting more feedback from users who have experienced harm) would not severely impact the revenues of Meta or other companies that adopt them. "These reforms are not designed to punish companies, but to help teenagers," he told the subcommittee. "And over time, they will create a safer environment."

"My experience, after sending that email and seeing what happened afterwards, is that they knew, there were things they could do about it, they chose not to do them and we cannot trust them with our children," Béjar said during the hearing. "It's time for Congress to act. The evidence, I believe, is overwhelming."

“Countless people inside and outside of Meta are working on how to help keep young people safe online," Meta spokesman Andy Stone told The Washington Post on Tuesday. "Working with parents and experts, we have also introduced over 30 tools to support teens and their families in having safe, positive experiences online. All of this work continues.”

Béjar hopes his testimony will help spur Congress to “pass the legislation that they've been working on” regarding the online safety of younger users. Two years ago, Haugen disclosed internal Facebook research indicating that Instagram was "harmful for a sizable percentage of teens." Growing scrutiny led Meta to halt work on a version of Instagram for kids.

Since Haugen's testimony, Congress has made some efforts to tackle online safety issues for kids, but those have stuttered. The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) twice advanced from a Senate committee (in the previous Congress and earlier this year), but it hasn't reached a floor vote and there's no companion bill in the House. Among other things, the bill seeks to give kids aged under 16 the ability to switch off "addictive features and algorithm-based recommendations, as well as having more protections for their data. Similar bills have stalled in Congress.

Last month, attorneys general from 41 states and the District of Columbia sued Meta over alleged harms it caused to young users. “Meta designed and deployed harmful and psychologically manipulative product features to induce young users’ compulsive and extended Platform use, while falsely assuring the public that its features were safe and suitable for young users," according to the lawsuit. Béjar said he consulted with the attorneys general and provided them with documents to help their case.

"I'm very hopeful that your testimony, added to the lawsuit that's been brought by state attorneys general across the country ... added to the interest that I think is evidenced by the turnout of our subcommitee today, will enable us to get the Kids Online Safety Act across the finish line," subcommittee chair Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) told Béjar. Blumenthal, one of KOSA's original sponsors, expressed hope that other legislation "that can finally break the straitjacket that Big Tech has imposed on us" will be enacted into law.

Over the last few years and amid the rise of TikTok, Meta has once again been focusing on bringing younger users into its ecosystem, with Zuckerberg stating in 2021 (just a couple of weeks after Haugen's testimony) that the company would refocus its “teams to make serving young adults their North Star rather than optimizing for the larger number of older people.” Recently, the company lowered the minimum age for using its Meta Quest VR headsets to 10 through the use of parent-controlled accounts.

Waze's latest feature focuses on safety and will give you the knowledge needed to make an informed choice about the route you're taking. The Google-owned navigation app has launched crash history alerts, which will send you a notification if you're driving along a crash-prone road. Waze will publish a prompt that says "history of crashes" in-app before you reach, say, a curve that's particularly tricky to navigate. That way, you can slow down or be on the lookout for anything that could derail your vehicle. 

Waze

The app decides whether to show you a notification based on reports from the Waze community and an AI analysis of your route, such as its traffic levels, its elevation and whether it's a highway or a smaller local road. It will not show you crash alerts for routes you usually take in order to minimize distractions, which suggests that its main purpose is to give you a heads up if you should drive with more caution than usual in places you're not familiar with. 

Waze has released several protective features intended to keep you safe on the route you're planning to take over the years. A few years ago, it started sending out real-time accident data so that you can take an alternate route if needed and first responders can get to accident sites sooner. In 2020, it also rolled out guidance prompts telling you to get in the right spot for an upcoming merge or exit before you get there. 

Nintendo's digital game sales are helping the company continue to perform well as the Switch nears the end of its tenure as its flagship console. In its latest earnings report (PDF) from March to September 2023, Nintendo has revealed that it sold 19.5 million copies of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, which was released in May. It also sold 2.61 million units of Pikmin 4 after it came out in July, while Mario Kart 8 Deluxe posted 3.22 million more in unit sales after The Super Mario Bros. Movie was shown in April. Nintendo has sold 57.01 million copies of the kart racing game so far.

The gaming company says other Switch titles also continued to grow steadily, including those from other publishers, and that there were 16 games that posted sales of millions of units for the aforementioned period alone. In all, the company's digital sales amounted to 217.5 billion Yen ($1.45 billion) from March to September, which is almost 16 percent higher than its digital sales for the same timespan last year. 

"As a result of these factors," Nintendo says, its unit sales for the entire Switch family rose by 2.4 percent year-on-year to 6.84 million units. The only model that sold well and brought the average up, however, was the Switch OLED console. Nintendo sold 32.8 percent more Switch OLEDs this period compared to last year, but it only moved 1.25 million units of the basic Switch model, representing a 44 percent decrease in sales year-on-year. The decrease in sales for the Switch Lite wasn't quite as dramatic, but Nintendo still sold 1.9 percent fewer units.

Going forward, Nintendo intends to release more games so as to entice people to keep playing on the Switch and to buy more than one console for their homes. For this holiday season, it has a few releases in pipeline, including WarioWare: Move It!, Super Mario RPG and add-on content for Pokémon Scarlet and Pokémon Violet. Nintendo is expected to release its new flagship console sometime next year and has reportedly started showing developers the upcoming device's ray-tracing capabilities and other more advanced technologies. 

Xbox has teamed up with a startup called Inworld AI to create a generative AI toolset that developers can use to create games. It's a multi-year collaboration, which the Microsoft-owned brand says can "assist and empower creators in dialogue, story and quest design." Specifically, the partners are looking to develop an "AI design copilot" that can turn prompts into detailed scripts, dialogue trees, quests and other game elements in the same way people can type ideas into generative AI chatbots and get detailed scripts in return. They're also going to work on an "AI character runtime engine" that developers can plug into their actual games, allowing players to generate new stories, quests and dialogues as they go. 

On Inworld's website, it says its technology can "craft characters with distinct personalities and contextual awareness that stay in-world." Apparently, it can provide developers with a "fully integrated character engine for AI NPCs that goes beyond large language models (LLMs)." The image above was from the Droid Maker tool it developed in collaboration with Lucasfilm's storytelling studio ILM Immersive when it was accepted into the Disney Accelerator program. As Kotaku notes, though, the company's tech has yet to ship with a major game release, and it has mostly been used for mods. 

Developers are understandably wary about these upcoming tools. There are growing concerns among creatives about companies using their work to train generative AI without permission — a group of authors, including John Grisham and George R.R. Martin, even sued OpenAI, accusing the company of infringing on their copyright. And then, of course, there's the ever-present worry that developers could decide to lay off writers and designers to cut costs. 

Xbox believes, however, that these tools can "help make it easier for developers to realize their visions, try new things, push the boundaries of gaming today and experiment to improve gameplay, player connection and more." In the brand's announcement, Haiyan Zhang, General Manager of Gaming AI, said: "We will collaborate and innovate with game creators inside Xbox studios as well as third-party studios as we develop the tools that meet their needs and inspire new possibilities for future games."