When the Bahamas Attorney General's office announced that it had arrested former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, it noted that the former FTX CEO was likely to be extradited at the request of the United States. Just over a week later, that prediction has come true: Bankman-Fried signed extradition papers on Tuesday afternoon.
According to an unsealed indictment, Bankman-Fried is facing 8 counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, commodities fraud, securities fraud, and more. Specifically, the SEC accuses the cryptocurrency founder of "orchestrating a massive, years-long fraud" for "his own personal benefit and to help grow his crypto empire." The Department of Justice has accused him of attempting commodities and securities fraud, conspiring to defraud investors and breaking federal election laws for donating more to political groups than is legally allowed.
Now, Bankman-Fried will be coming home to face those charges — which might actually be easier on him in the short term. When the former CEO was first arrested in the Bahamas, he was denied bail and deemed a flight risk. In the United States, it's possible he could be released on bail.
Bankman-Fried has previously said that he "didn't ever try to commit fraud," and doesn't believe he's criminally liable for the fall of FTX. The New York Times reports that a defense lawyer representing Bankman-Fried in the Bahamas says that he's returning to the US because he "wishes to put the customers right, and that is what has driven his decision."
According to a series of tweets outlining the new policy, sharing the live location of another person is now prohibited unless it is related to a "public engagement or event," like a concert or a political event. "When someone shares an individual's live location on Twitter, there is an increased risk of physical harm," the announcement reads. "Moving forward, we'll remove Tweets that share this information, and accounts dedicated to sharing someone else's live location will be suspended." The thread goes on to clarify that these rules only apply to the location of "someone else." You can still Tweet your own whereabouts.
Any account doxxing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended, as it is a physical safety violation. This includes posting links to sites with real-time location info.
Posting locations someone traveled to on a slightly delayed basis isn’t a safety problem, so is ok.
Historical location information is allowed, however, so long as "a reasonable time has elapsed, so that the individual is no longer at risk for physical harm." That part of the policy could leave room for an account like @Elonjet — and while the account was briefly restored this afternoon, at the time of this writing it is once again suspended, as are the personal accounts of Jack Sweeny, the college student who runs @Elonjet.
Valve's Steam Deck is a great way to get PC games out of your office and on to your couch, back patio, or anywhere. As we said in our review, it's worth having around even if you just play it a few times a month for a couple hours at a time. But I wound up using mine a little differently: I play the Steam Deck several times a day for just a few minutes per session.
And it's almost the only reason I play video games at all anymore.
I'm no less interested in games than I used to be, but since becoming a father, I've found I have a lot less time. For the first year of my daughter's life, setting aside an hour to play a game felt impossible. Then, Metroid Dread came out, and I found myself using the Nintendo Switch's sleep mode in short bursts. 5 minutes while the baby played with a new toy. 10 minutes as I waited for her to fall asleep.
Sean Buckley/Engadget
As I chipped away at Metroid Dread’s short 10-hour story, I found myself thinking about the Steam Deck. Not only was Valve’s gaming handheld a portable gaming system like the Switch, but it promised to give my Steam library something I had never experienced from PC gaming before: the ability to quickly suspend and resume a game. It’s a standard quality of life feature on home consoles, but trying to resume a game after putting a PC to sleep is hit or miss.
When my Steam Deck arrived four months later and the feature actually worked, it changed everything. I spent my first day with the handheld slowly playing through the Deck’s showcase demo: Valve’s Desk Job, casually picking the handheld up for just 5 minutes every few hours. When that worked, I got more ambitious — finishing Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order over the course of two weeks.
I started using the Steam Deck to play games in the margins of my day. Picking it up for a few random battles in Final Fantasy IV after the baby fell asleep on my chest, doing a deep space cargo run in Rebel Galaxy Outlaw as I watched her nap on the baby monitor, or sneaking in a few puzzles in Baba is You before turning in for the night. Suddenly I was finishing games I never thought I would have time for.
The suspend trick even works with non-Steam games and older titles: I spent hours experimenting in Lutris, an alternative Linux game launcher, getting the year 2000’s Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force to run smoothly on Steam Deck. A week or two later, I finally finished a game I abandoned when I was 16 years old.
Engadget
That isn't to say I haven't had longer play sessions on Steam Deck. Online-only games like Final Fantasy XIV or Knockout City tend to disconnect the player when thrown into suspend mode — but I often still prefer playing them on Valve's portable than on my big gaming desktop. Yes, an AMD Ryzen 7 3700X with 64GB of RAM and a GTX 980 GPU can soundly outperform the Deck’s custom AMD APU. It runs games at higher resolution with better graphic settings, but it’s wasted power.
I've grown to love having my library of PC games detached from the writing and video editing workstation that lives at my desk. You might say that’s what more powerful traditional game consoles are for, but the Deck’s Switch-like portability makes all the difference. Playing games on the couch, in bed, or while rocking the baby to sleep beats out having maxed out graphics settings every time. I’m not even sure if I’m going to upgrade that aging graphics card anymore. The Steam Deck may be less powerful, but at today’s GPU prices, it’s a far better value.
Not all of my games work smoothly on Steam Deck, but it turns out that's a plus for me as well. I love tinkering with gadgets and fiddling around with power user settings. So when I’m forced to drop into the Deck’s desktop mode to manually install a non-Steam game, which inevitably involves configuring alternative Wine compatibility layers, I enjoy the challenge almost as much as the game I’ll eventually play. And when I do get those games running, they almost always work with Steam OS' suspend and resume feature.
It feels a little silly to laud the Steam Deck for what’s an otherwise standard feature on most modern gaming devices, but I can’t help it. Sometimes one good feature can change everything. Before the Steam Deck, playing a game from my PC library was a chore that required sitting at a desk, booting up Windows, launching Steam and, finally, loading up a game. When you might only have minutes of free time during an entire day, that simply doesn’t work. Add in the possibility that a crying baby might call you away from that hard-earned game session at a moment’s notice, and you can start to see the appeal of a gaming device you can take anywhere, one that lets you instantly stop and start a high-end PC game with the touch of a single button.
Engadget
Suspend and resume had a rough start on the Xbox One and PS4, but eventually they became kind of an expected fare. Even so, it’s a killer feature that PC gamers have largely been missing out on. I never really appreciated how much of a game changer it could be until I really needed it. The Steam Deck brings that feature to the PC crowd in a natural, user-friendly package that we’ve never had before. And being a portable system is just the icing on the cake. The Steam Deck is certainly pricey, but being able to catch up on PC games with a baby in my arms is priceless.
Twitter verification is now just a $8 away away, but that doesn't mean the social network has democratized its long-standing status symbol entirely. The Twitter verification badge is now split between two different groups: accounts that were officially verified for being "notable in government, news, entertainment, or another designated category," and accounts that paid for the checkmark by being subscribed to Twitter Blue. But it can be difficult to tell the difference between the two types of verified accounts without clicking into their individual profiles, which is why one Twitter user created a tool to make it a lot easier.
Introducing Eight Dollars, a simple browser extension that swaps out Twitter's standard verification badge for two different labels that spell out if an account is "actually verified" or if it "paid for verification." Without the extension, you'd need to click on a user's profile, and then tap on the verification checkmark to determine if the user's check was approved by Twitter staff or purchased through Twitter Blue, but Eight Dollars makes that information available directly in your timeline.
If you're confused by the new Twitter Verification feature, I've been working with some friends on a Chrome Extension that helps you tell the differencehttps://t.co/zXkwzhXIc1pic.twitter.com/pHTBswBnnE
The extension was originally only available for Chrome, but New Zealand designer Walter Lim says it should work with Microsoft Edge as well as Firefox, and he's also added Safari to his to-do list. Installing any of them will take a little extra work: the add-on is currently only available on GitHub, and needs to be installed manually using the browser's developer mode. Even so, it could be worth the effort — unless you like being fooled by hackneyed scam accounts and impersonators.
If you subscribe to a YouTube Premium family plan, you may want to check your email: Google is notifying users that the monthly cost of the service will be going up by $5 a month.
Starting in November, most users will start paying $22.99 per month for YouTube Premium — though there seems to be some leeway. While the main announcement says that the price increase starts on the next billing cycle on or after November 21st, some legacy subscribers won't see their bill jump for several months. One Engadget staffer was informed that their price would not increase until April due to their status as a "long-standing and valued member."
With the new price structure, the family plan is less of a bargain for smaller groups. At $17.99, buying into the family plan for just two users offered a significant savings over individual accounts. Now, a two-user family will save only $1 a month. For now, however, single-user prices remain the same: $11.99 a month for individual accounts and $6.99 for students. The benefits haven't changed either, with Premium still offering users an ad-free YouTube experience, the ability to download videos for offline viewing, access to YouTube Music, and the ability to continue to play music and videos in the background or with your phone screen off.
Konami's Silent Hill 2 remake for PC and PlayStation 5 isn't the only reimagining of the classic 2001 game on the horizon: The company just announced that the story is also being adapted into a new major motion picture. Return to Silent Hill will apparently serve as a direct sequel to the original 2006 adaptation, and will be helmed by the very same director, Christophe Gans.
The project seems to still be in the development phase. There's no teaser trailer, just a handful storyboard images and pieces of conceptual artwork. Gans spent most of the announcement talking about the plot of the game itself. "We decided to go back to the best of these stories," he said during Konami's Silent Hill Transmission live stream. "The film tells the story of a young guy coming back to Silent Hill, where he has known a great love — and what he's going to find is a pure nightmare."
Victor Hadida, who also worked on the 2006 film, is also returning to produce, and says that while the project is planning to give the franchise a modern twist, staying true to the spirit of the original game is a key focus. Gans seems to agree, calling the original Silent Hill games "great artistic achievements."
Hearing Christophe Gans talk about the project is genuinely interesting, as the director ponders the unique challenge of translating the immersive narrative that only a video game can deliver into a shorter 90-to-100-minute experience. We won't see how well he manages it for quite some time, however. Return to Silent Hill does not yet have a release date.
It's been awhile since Sony teased us with the next installment in Kratos' story. Earlier this year, a first look at God of War: Ragnarok showed us a father and son on a search for Tyr, the God of War of the Norse mythology. In the new trailer revealed during the September State of Play event, they have apparently found him, as he questions their motives, their quest and what they even know of so-called Godhood.
It's a trailer that teases a complex story that seemingly has Kratos following his son's lead this time around. Together, they will determine if they are bound by fate and prophecy, or make their own destiny — all while marching through a parade of stunning visuals and fast-paced combat while wielding familiar weapons like the Blades of Chaos and Leviathan Axe.
Between the story hints and action, the trailer definitely teases what looks like a worthy successor to 2018's God of War — but if that's not enough to convince you to pick up the game when it launches on November 9th, Sony is hoping a special limited-edition controller might do the trick. The God of War Ragnarok DualSense wireless controller is a blue and white affair decorated with a wolf and bear. The two-toned design is so subtle, you probably wouldn't even recognize it as a God of War tie in at a glance. On the other hand, it's not obnoxiously ugly, either.
God of War: Ragnarok, and its limited-edition gamepad, are both available on November 9th. Pre-orders for the controller open on September 27.
Earlier this year, the Samsung Gaming Hub brought Xbox Game Pass, NVIDIA GeForce Now, Google Stadia and other gaming services to Samsung smart TVs and smart monitors, promising to add new services like Amazon Luna "soon." Soon, it turns out, is today: Amazon's cloud gaming service is now available on 2022 Samsung smart TVs.
Samsung says that with Luna, the gaming hub now has more than 1000 games available to play. Most of these games will require an extra subscription fee, though if you're an Amazon Prime subscriber, you already have access to a small library of games. Very small. Right now Prime users can play four games (Steel Assault, MYST, Control: Ultimate Edition and Garfield Kart: Furious Racing) included with their subscription.
The selection of free with Prime games changes every month, but users can subscribe to additional channels to expand their library. Luna Plus, for instance, includes games like Yakuza: Like a Dragon, Mega Man 11, Ghostrunner and Resident Evil VII. Luna's Retro Channel has a collection of classic games, from Centipede to Street Fighter II. Users can also subscribe to channels featuring Ubisoft and Jackbox game packs, all priced between $4.99 and $17.99 a month. If you do subscribe, your games won't be locked to your TV: Luna games are playable on PCs, Macs, tablets and smartphones.
How well all these games work, however, depends on your connection speed. Amazon Luna and Xbox Game Pass both recommended minimum internet speeds of 10Mbps to 20Mbps on a 5GHz WiFi connection — and of course, you'll also need the aforementioned 2022 Samsung Smart TV and a Bluetooth gamepad. If you have all that, Luna's Free with Prime games are a great way try game streaming on your TV.
Microsoft quietly announced the launch of Outlook Lite for Android, a streamlined version of the company's email service designed to use less battery and storage space than the default Outlook app without sacrificing features or performance.
Specifically, Microsoft says that Outlook Lite has all the main features of the Outlook experience neatly packed into a 5MB app that's optimized for speed, even on lower-end Android devices. The company says the app was designed to run fast on devices with as little as 1GB of RAM, use less battery impact than the full app and offer good performance on older 2G and 3G networks.
That lower data, storage and battery impact is, of course, the point. And Microsoft isn't alone: pared down, lightweight apps serve a huge market of users with budget devices on older networks. That's why Google offers Android Go, a pared down version of the mobile OS designed specifically for lower-end phones, and why Meta has put so much effort into building small, but feature-rich versions of its Instagram and Facebook apps. You can find lightweight apps for Twitter, Tiktok and even Tinder.
Like most lightweight apps, this one has its caveats. Microsoft's new mail app doesn't cut any major features to earn its 'lite' moniker, but it won't work with as many email providers as the primary Outlook app. At present, Outlook Lite is only compatible with Outlook.com, Hotmail, Live, MSN, Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Exchange Online accounts. Likewise, the app is also only available in select countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Columbia, Ecuador, India, Mexico, Peru, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey and Venezuela — though Microsoft says it may add support for more locations in the future.