Tesla has long hidden hints in its code that it's giving owners live view access to its EVs' Autopilot cameras — now, the automaker is finally rolling out the feature. Its latest software update includes a feature called Sentry Mode Live Camera Access, which will allow owners to remotely view their car's surroundings when parked. Sentry Mode is Tesla's integrated surveillance system that uses a 360 dash cam to record damage and any attempted break-in. It has resulted to arrests of people who attempted to steal Teslas in the past, but owners haven't been able to use it to view their car's current surroundings until now.

In its update notes, Tesla says the live camera function is end-to-end encrypted and cannot be accessed by the company. To enable or disable it, owners need to go under Safety & Security in Controls. According to Electrek, however, owners must have an active Premium Connectivity subscription to activate live view. The subscription package gives them access to satellite maps and live traffic visualizations, as well as media streaming and web browsing on data. It does cost $10 a month, but owners can sign up for free trial before paying for the service.

At this point in time, live camera is only available to iOS users who can view the footage around their cars via Tesla's app. The automaker has unfortunately yet to announce when its Android app will also get the capability.

The third quarter of 2021 was a record breaker for Samsung, which posted a revenue of 73.98 trillion Korean won or US$63.1 billion. That's 10 percent higher from the same period last year. It also reported an operating profit of 15.82 trillion Korean won or U$13.5 billion, which is 26 percent higher than the previous quarter's. 

Despite the pandemic, the tech giant's semiconductor business posted 26.4 trillion won or US$22.6 billion in revenue, thanks to a strong demand for computers due to companies implementing work-from-home arrangements. Its DRAM sales, mainly for servers, continue to grow and is the leading factor for the division's stellar performance. Samsung says it was able to do business as usual despite the global shortage in chip components "by flexibly operating its product mix."

In addition to its chip business, Samsung's mobile division also contributed greatly to its record-breaking third quarter. It saw an improvement from the previous quarter, with its 28.42 trillion won or U$24.2 billion in revenue, thanks to strong sales of its mass-market lineup and its flagship models. The latter includes its new foldable devices, the Galaxy Z Fold 3 and Galaxy Z Flip 3, though the company admitted that the bigger marketing investments for its foldables affected the division's total profits. 

It's also thanks to the high demand for its phones that Samsung's display business was able to post 8.86 trillion won or US$7.5 billion in revenue. Display earnings were up from the previous quarter primarily due to the higher demand for small to medium OLED panels despite a sluggish demand for bigger panels.

Samsung remains optimistic for the fourth quarter, as well as for next year, but it didn't provide specific guidance for its chip business due to the ongoing component supply issue affecting various industries. It expects continued high demand for PCs and servers, nonetheless. For the fourth quarter specifically, it's expecting even higher earnings "due to expanded supply of SoCs and related products for launches of new 5G smartphones in 2022."

MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is ready to deploy the autonomous passenger boat it's been developing over the past six years. The vehicle, called the Roboat, has been through multiple iterations — just last year, the lab tested a version that can carry two passengers. This year, Roboat's creators are launching its full-scale version, which can carry up to five passengers, collect waste and deliver goods, in Amsterdam. 

The current Roboat has futuristic looks with its black and grey design and two seats facing each other. It's fully electric with 10 hours of battery life on a single charge and has wireless charging capabilities. MIT CSAIL Director Daniela Rus says it's more precise and has more robust perception, navigation and control systems that its predecessors. It also comes with new features, including close proximity approach mode that makes docking to a port or connecting to another boat easier, as well as better dynamic positioning that will help it better navigate real-world waters.

The vehicle's autonomous driving technology is similar to ones used by self-driving cars, according to CSAIL, and operates by using GPS to decide on a safe route from point A to point B. Roboat also uses LIDAR and several cameras to enable a 360-degree view that gives it a way to determine its path and avoid crashing into obstacles. The vehicle can operate on its own round-the-clock, but an onshore operator will monitor it remotely from a control center: A single operator will be able to monitor up to 50 Roboat units. 

The new Roboats will debut on October 28th in the waters of Amsterdam. Stephan van Dijk, Director of Innovation at Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions, said: "The historic centre of Amsterdam is the perfect place to start, with its capillary network of canals suffering from contemporary challenges, such as mobility and logistics."

Most of the Harry-and-Meghan hate you see on Twitter comes from a relatively small number of accounts, according to Bot Sentinel. The Twitter analytics service has published a report examining activity on the website related to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and found that around 70 percent of the hateful and negative comments about the couple originated from 83 accounts. That signifies targeted harassment against the Sussexes, mostly against Meghan Markle.

Bot Sentinel CEO Christopher Bouzy told BuzzFeed News that the anti-Meghan campaign on the website isn't like anything his team has ever seen before. Why? Because there's no motive. It's not like the #StopTheSteal movement that aims to overturn the results of the 2020 US Presidential Elections. "Are these people who hate her? Is it racism? Are they trying to hurt [Harry and Meghan's] credibility? Your guess is as good as ours," he said.

And by "people," he means actual people. The accounts aren't bots, but actual users who know how to manipulate the platform's algorithms. They avoid detection and avoid being banned for violating Twitter's Terms of Service, for instance, by pairing negative comments about Harry and Meghan with positive ones about William and Kate. "This level of complexity comes from people who know how to do this stuff, who are paid to do this stuff," Bouzy said.

Bot Sentinel sampled 114,000 tweets with hashtags and keywords related to the Sussexes, such as #HarryandMeghan and #MeghanMarkle. In the end, it identified a total of 55 accounts to be the ones primarily responsible for negative content against the Sussexes, while the rest (28 accounts) were mostly used to amplify the content they produced. Bouzy called the content they generate "organic hate," which can fly under the radar and evade detection by automated systems.

According to BuzzFeed News, Twitter has already suspended four of the accounts named in the report, while six more set their profiles to private. 

Netflix has previously given us glimpses of its live-action adaptation of the classic anime Cowboy Bebop. Its latest trailer, however, shows actual footage from the series for the first time. You'll see scenes of the crew in action, from the time they met and decided to team up to the time they start hunting criminals in exchange for bounty. It shows fight scenes with Spike Spiegel (John Cho), Jet Black (Mustafa Shakir) and Faye Valentine (Daniella Pineda), their spaceship (the Bebop) and their corgi Ein. No Ed yet, unfortunately.

The streaming giant first announced its live-action adaptation way back in 2018, but it wasn't until earlier this year that production wrapped for season one. While the cast and crew have been shooting since 2019, production was paused after Cho got injured on set, and the coronavirus pandemic delayed things even further. Since then, Netflix has been preparing for its debut. In addition to releasing teasers for the show, the company has added all 26 episodes of the anime to its catalogue, so you can marathon all things Cowboy Bebop without having to hop services. (The anime is also available on Hulu.) 

Netflix's live-action adaptation of Cowboy Bebop will start streaming on November 19th.

Pokémon Go's creator has a new augmented reality mobile game, and this time, it's all about Pikmin. Niantic is now rolling out Pikmin Bloom worldwide, starting with Singapore and Australia where it's already live. Similar to Pokémon Go, you'll have to go out and interact with the real world enjoy the game. It's really more of a fun and colorful companion for daily walks or hikes, though, since it doesn't have battles and doesn't have the incentive of catching rare monsters like Pokémon Go does. 

In Pikmin Bloom, you'll find seedlings when you walk that you can pick up and grow into plant-like creatures that'll follow you around. The more you walk, the more Pikmin you can pluck and the more Pikmin will follow you around. Onscreen, you're depicted as a Mii avatar, with a bunch of creatures walking behind you and making more flowers bloom along your path. You'll also be able to collect items on your walks, including clothes Pikmin can wear and fruit you can feed your creatures to make flowers bloom on their heads.

Niantic CEO John Hanke said in the game's video announcement that the flowers the Pikmin make can be viewed by other players, so you can create shared gardens with your neighbors. Pikmin Bloom is now live for Android and iOS in Singapore and Australia, and it will be arriving in more countries and regions "shortly."

Home Depot and Best Buy have pulled the products of Chinese tech surveillance makers linked to human rights abuses from their shelves, according to TechCrunch. Both US retail giants have stopped selling products from Lorex and Ezviz, while Lowe's no longer carries products by the former. Lorex is a subsidiary of Dahua Technology, whereas Ezviz is a surveillance tech brand owned by Hikvision. As TechCrunch explains, the US government added Dahua and Hikvision to its economic blacklist in 2019 for their role in the mass surveillance of Uighur Muslims in the province of Xinjiang.   

Earlier this year, Los Angeles Times published a report detailing how the facial recognition software developed by Lorex owner Dahua was being shopped to law enforcement as a way to identify Uighurs. A user guide for the service apparently touts its capability to identify people passing in front of its cameras by race. Meanwhile, Hikvision's cameras have been installed at mosques and detention camps in Xinjiang, according to a 2019 New York Times report. Maya Wang, a China researcher for Human Rights Watch, told the publication back then: "These systems are designed for a very explicit purpose — to target Muslims."

In a report on the human rights practices in China, the US Department of State said that the Chinese government "conducted mass arbitrary detention of Uyghurs, ethnic Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and members of other Muslim and ethnic minority groups in Xinjiang. China Human Rights Defenders alleged these detentions amounted to enforced disappearance, since families were often not provided information about the length or location of the detention." Human rights groups believe over a million Uighurs are being detained in internment camps, but China continues to deny the allegations. 

It's unclear why the retail giants have decided to pull Lorex and Ezviz products now, but consumers have freely been able to buy their security cameras over the past couple of years after their parent companies were placed in the US economic blacklist. Home Depot told TechCrunch that it's "committed to upholding the highest standards of ethical sourcing and [it] immediately stopped selling products from Lorex when this was brought to [the company's] attention." Best Buy simply told the publication that it was “discontinuing its relationship" with both Lorex and Ezviz.

More and more tech companies are issuing COVID-19 vaccine mandates to comply with the government's directives. Adobe is one of the latest to require all employees in the US to be inoculated against the virus. According to CNBC, the company has told employees in an email that they have to be vaccinated by December 8th if they don't want to be placed on unpaid leave. 

In the letter seen by the publication, the company explained that it's giving its personnel until December 8th to comply with the Biden administration's executive order. The president previously gave all federal contractors a December 8th deadline to require all their employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19. Adobe does a lot of business with the US government. Earlier this year, it teamed up with government agencies in all 50 states to help them modernize their services with Adobe Experience Cloud and Adobe Document Cloud. It even launched the Government Rapid Response Program during the pandemic to help ensure people can smoothly access government services, such as vaccine scheduling websites. 

Adobe Chief People Officer Gloria Chen wrote in the email that 93.5 percent of the US employees who responded to an internal survey was already fully vaccinated or in the process of getting both shots. Despite the mandate, the company will consider religious and medical exemptions. The company's move echoes many others in the industry. Google started requiring all employees to be vaccinated against the virus way back in July. Meanwhile, Apple has yet to issue to mandate, but it will start requiring unvaccinated employees to undergo daily rapid testing on November 1st.

Hayden Christensen isn't done playing Darth Vader. According to The Hollywood Reporter, he's reprising his role as the Sith Lord in the upcoming Disney+ series Ahsoka. Rosario Dawson will star as Ahsoka Tano, whom she also played in the second season of The Mandalorian. That's the first time Ahsoka's character appeared in a live-action Star Wars show — prior to that, Ahsoka was only seen in the franchise's animated entries.

Disney and Lucasfilm have yet to reveal the story for the live-action series. The Hollywood Reporter says, though, that it's set five years after the events in Return of the Jedi, similar to The Mandalorian. That Vader will be featured in a show about Ahsoka doesn't entirely come as a surprise, seeing she was Anakin Skywalker's padawan. But since Vader died in Return of the Jedi, it's unclear how his character will fit into Ahsoka's story, and whether he'll be shown in flashbacks or as a Force ghost.

Dave Filoni, who was involved in several previous Star Wars projects, will write the story and also serve as executive producer with Jon Favreau. The series will start production in 2022, though fans will get the chance to see Christensen play Vader before that in Ewan McGregor's Obi-Wan Kenobi that's set to debut early next year.

It took only a few hours for pranksters to find and deface a test version of former President Trump's yet-to-launch social media platform called TRUTH Social. According to The Washington Post, someone signed up for an account on the test website, took the username "donaldjtrump" and posted a photo of a defecating pig. 

Trump and his team recently announced that they're launching TRUTH Social in early 2022 and that beta tests will begin in November. In its announcement, the team said that the platform is part of its efforts to fight against "the Big Tech companies of Silicon Valley, which have used their unilateral power to silence opposing voices in America."

The test website has already been pulled down, but not before one of the publication's reporters was able to sign up under the name "mikepence" without encountering any safeguards that would prevent them from doing so. Based on the mock photos on its App Store listing, TRUTH Social looks like a Twitter clone, where users can post "Truths"similar to tweets and repost "Re-Truths," which are basically retweets. It has a news feed called the Truth Feed and a notification system, as well.

The website's code shows that it runs on a mostly unmodified version of open source software Mastodon, The Post says. Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko told Vice that the platform might be violating its licensing rules, since it requires developers to share any modification with the public and to give credit by linking to the original source code. The test website didn't just reveal TRUTH Social's code, though, but also its terms of service. A sub-section in the ToS shows that the website hopes to be protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

Part of the ToS reads: "[W]e are not responsible for any Third-Party Websites accessed through the Site or any Third-Party Content posted on, available through, or installed from the Site, including the content, accuracy, offensiveness, opinions, reliability, privacy practices, or other policies of or contained in the Third-Party Websites or the Third-Party Content."

Trump has been a very vocal critic of Section 230. In 2020, he signed an executive order meant to limit its scope shortly after Twitter fact-checked a false tweet he made. The order was never meaningfully imposed, but President Biden revoked it completely back in May.