EA's Formula 1 sim F1 22 will be released worldwide on July 1st, 2022 with the FIA's all-new hybrid cars and updated rules unveiled this season, EA and Codemaster announced. The game will supposedly be more "competitive and unpredictable" thanks to the major overhaul of F1 cars that happened in the real-world, and includes new features like PC VR support.

New Broadcast and Immersive modes will let players choose between more realistic or cinematic modes for formation laps, safety car periods and pit stops. Multiplayer racing will use either two-player splitscreen and online modes, or you can drive in VR on Oculus Rift and HTC Vive headsets.  

Meanwhile, a new feature called F1 Life lets players "step into the glamorous world of Formula 1" via a customizable hub to show off supercars, clothing and accessories earned during gameplay or purchased at the in-game store. The other new feature is an Adaptive AI mode that lets less experienced player compete with AI racers matched in skill.

Career Mode was a popular update last year and it's back again with "fresh new features," though EA didn't say which. The "My Team" feature also returns, letting players choose a starting budget based on Newcomer, Challenger and Front Runner entry points. It also includes track updates to reflect the real-world updates in Australia, Spain and Abu Dabhi. As mentioned, F1 2022 will go on sale around the world on July 1st. 

Google is introducing a new Play Store policy that will effectively block third-party call recording apps from the Play Store by May 11th, according to a Reddit post seen by 9to5Google. Such apps currently use the Accessibility API (designed for people with disabilities) to gain access to the audio functions on Android devices. 

"Apps with a core functionality intended to directly support people with disabilities are eligible to use the IsAccessibilityTool," the policy states. "Apps not eligible for IsAccessibilityTool may not use the flag and must meet prominent disclosure and consent requirements. The Accessibility API is not designed and cannot be requested for remote call audio recording. " 

Google has gradually been trying to eliminate call recording on Android, mainly due to privacy concerns. It was largely blocked on Android 6, and the use of the microphone for call recording was eliminated in Android 10. The last resort for call recording apps was to use the Accessibility API. 

Google addressed the issue in a webinar video, saying that "remote in this context refers to call audio recording where the person on the other end is unaware of the recording is taking place." It added that dialer apps like Google Phone and Mi Dialer with native call recording functionality will be unaffected by the change.

 "If the app is the default dialer on the phone and also pre-loaded, accessibility capability is not required to get access to the incoming audio stream," said Google content global operations lead Moun Choi. "Hence would not be in violation. Since this is a clarification to an existing policy, the new language will apply to all apps starting on May 11th." It's not clear if the new policy means existing call recorder apps will be pulled from the Play Store.

HBO Max and HBO picked up 3 million subscribers in the same quarter that Netflix lost 200,000 of them for the first time in years, Variety reported. The streaming/cable service reported earnings under former parent AT&T for the last time, as it's set to become part of the new Warner Bros. Discovery media conglomerate.

The lion's share of new HBO/HBO Max subs were in the US (1.8 mllion), and the services now count 48.6 million subscribers domestically and 76.8 million worldwide. That's up 12.8 million over last year, showing solid growth. (HBO Max costs $15 per month ad-free or $10 with ads, and HBO on cable is $15 per month.)

However, it was still a drag on parent AT&T (for the last time). WarnerMedia revenue was down 32.7 percent over last year to $1.3 billion due to investments in HBO Max and the failed launch of CNN+.

That's essentially why AT&T decided to divest WarnerMedia and focus strictly on its core telecom business. To wit, the company announced its largest gain in post-paid phone net additions in more than a decade. Excluding WarnerMedia and other divested businesses, AT&T revenue was $29.7 billion, up 2.5 percent over the same quarter last year.

With WarnerMedia and Discovery divested, AT&T plans to invest any free cash in 5G and fiber deployments (it still has $169 billion in debt, despite the $43 billion dollar deal to sell WarnerMedia.) "AT&T has entered a new era," said CEO John Stankey in a prepared statement during the company's earnings call.

Elon Musk's The Boring Company (TBC) is now worth up to $5.7 billion after a funding round that saw it raise $675 million, TechCrunch reported. The company plans to use the funds to "significantly increase hiring across engineering, operations and production to build and scale Loop projects," it wrote in a press release. 

TBC believes it could mine 600 miles of tunnels per year in the near term using its current Prufrock-2 machines that can dig up to a mile of tunnels per week. That would increase significantly with Prufrock-3, a next-gen machine that will supposedly be able to handle 7 miles per day. "As a point of reference, less than 20 miles of underground subway tunnel has been constructed in the United States in the last 20 years," the company noted.

The Boring Company

It will also use the money to "build and scale Loop projects, including Vegas Loop and others," though it didn't list any other projects by name. The company is targeting "throughput of up to 57,000 passengers per hour" on the 29-mile, 51 station Vegas Loop, calling it the "largest subsurface transportation project in the United States."

That's still far in the future, though, and TBC has a list of announced projects that never went anywhere. In 2017, Elon Musk tweeted that the company had a permit in Washington DC, but officials said no such thing had been issued. A preliminary digging permit was issued later, but the Boring Company no longer lists the project on its website. Others in Chicago and Los Angeles were quietly cancelled or also removed from TBC's website. 

US Congress was evacuated yesterday after Capitol Police said it was "tracking an aircraft that poses a possible threat to the Capitol Complex," CBS News reported. Everyone stood down a short time later when it turned out to be a parachute demonstration, but the incident caused a lot of ire. "The Federal Aviation Administration’s apparent failure to notify Capitol Police of the pre-planned flyover [at] Nationals Stadium is outrageous and inexcusable," wrote House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. 

The plane belonged to the Army Golden Knights parachuting team, dropping parachutists into the stadium for Military Appreciation Day. The pilot reportedly avoided flying over the restricted airspace over the Capitol Building and was coordinating with the control tower, but may not have had proper clearance, according to The Associated Press. 

FlightRadar24

The FAA acknowledged the incident and promised an "expeditious" review. "We know our actions affect others, especially in our nation's capital region, and we must communicate early and often with our law enforcement partners," it said in a statement. The plane's entire voyage was tracked by FlightRadar24 (above).

The incident demonstrates the level of coordination needed between FAA, law enforcement and other interested parties, particularly near restricted areas. As such, it may be an example of why the agency has been so careful in permitting passenger or delivery drones to operate in populated or sensitive areas. Such incidents are rare nowadays, but things could get chaotic with thousands of new drones plying the skies if the government doesn't have a comprehensive plan.

Amazon has unveiled "Buy with Prime," a service that let's other online retailers use its vast delivery network to fulfill orders on their own websites. At the same time, it will be another Prime subscriber perk for goods they might not be able to find directly on Amazon.

Merchants using it will be able to put the Prime badge on their own websites beside eligible items available for free next-day or two-day delivery. Then, Prime members can purchase the product using the payment and shipping details already stored on their Amazon accounts. 

Sellers will pay for the service with fees depending on the card processor, fulfillment and more. To start with, it's launching by invitation to Amazon sellers already using Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), but will eventually expand to other merchants, even if they're not on Amazon. 

FBA retailers currently pay to store inventory in Amazon's warehouses and use its shipping services, and in return, get the valued Prime logo on Amazon-listed products. Amazon recently announced that it would charge them an additional 5 percent fuel and inflation surcharge on top of the FBA fees they're already paying. It also has a program called Multi-Channel Fulfillment that allows retailers to store and ship goods using its logistics chain.

Using FBA may have been akin to a deal with the devil for some sellers, however. Amazon has been accused in the past of using seller data to create its own private label products like car trunk organizers and Peak Design bags, The Wall Street Journal reported back in 2020. Amazon denied this, but the SEC recently launched an investigation into the practice. 

Buy with Prime also means Amazon will be competing directly with shipping services like FedEx and UPS. The company recently said that it was about to become the largest delivery service in the US, according to CNBC. It also recently reported that its third-part seller services, including shipping, fulfillment and others, brought in $30.3 billion in the last quarter alone. 

With self-driving vehicles possibly arriving on UK roads later this year, the government is starting to put rules in place to accommodate them, the BBC has reported. As part of that, it will allow drivers in autonomous vehicles to watch TV from an infotainment screen in self-driving mode, as long as they're ready to take back control. That's a modification of a law that has been on the books since 1986 that prohibits drivers from viewing a "television-receiving apparatus" when behind the wheel.

It will still not allow the use of mobile phones, which were officially banned in the UK last year. That's because automakers can implement technology to stop a car's built-in screen from displaying content when the driver needs to take back control, but can't do the same on a smartphone. The government also decided that insurance companies and not people will be liable for accident claims in a number of circumstances. The changes will be an "interim measure" until an all-new set of rules can be put in place by 2025.

Self-driving cars are not yet legal in the UK, but the Department for Transport (DfT) said they may be ready later in 2022. A year ago, the government announced that basic self-driving cars with automated lane-keeping systems could arrive on British roads by the end of last year. 

The UK government predicted that self-driving tech could "improve road safety across Britain by reducing human error, which is a contributory factor in 88 percent of all recorded road collisions." In the meantime, though, self-driving tech has gone nowhere over the last few years, apart from a few exceptions like GM's Cruise offering public driverless taxi rides in San Francisco. 

Following a breach of its systems in January, Okta has released a forensic report finding that the threat group Lapsus$ accessed just two active customers via a third-party company. Lapsus$ "actively controlled" a workstation belong to an engineer at support firm Sitel for 25 minutes on January 21st, the company said. 

"The threat actor actively controlled a single workstation, used by a Sitel support engineer, with access to Okta resources," wrote Okta chief security officer David Bradbury. "During that limited window of time, the threat actor accessed two active customer tenants within the SuperUser application and viewed limited additional information in certain other applications like Slack and Jira that cannot be used to perform actions in Okta customer tenants."

While just two customers were accessed, many more users might have been affected, as Otka has 15,000 customers but over 100 million individual users. Despite the access, though, Lapsus$ was not able to do any MFA or password resets, configuration changes or customer support impersonation, Okta said. "The threat actor was unable to authenticate directly to any Okta accounts." 

It took Okta two months to notify customers of the Lapsus$ breach, and eventually released a statement saying it "made a mistake" in how it handled things. In a blog post last month, it revealed that 2.5 percent of its customers may have had their data viewed or acted upon during a five day window.

It now looks like the breach was far more limited in scope, but Okta said it took lessons from the situation. It terminated its relationship with the contractor in question and promised to strengthen audit procedures for others. It's also going to directly manage the devices of third parties with access to customer support tools so it can respond more "effectively" to incidents. Finally, it's adopting new systems to "help us communicate more rapidly with customers" on security issues. 

Brave is putting Google's Accelerate Mobile Pages (AMP) on blast with a new feature called De-AMP, The Verge reported. It's designed to bypass any pages rendered with AMP and take users directly to the original website. "Where possible, De-AMP will rewrite links and URLs to prevent users from visiting AMP pages altogether,” the company wrote in a blog post.

If that's not possible, then "Brave will watch as pages are being fetched and redirect users away from AMP pages before the page is even rendered, preventing AMP/Google code from being loaded and executed," it added. 

The new feature was implemented in the name of privacy, security and internet experience, according to Brave. "In practice, AMP is harmful to users and to the Web at large," the article states. "Just as bad, AMP helps Google further monopolize and control the direction of the web." It adds that the next iteration of AMP "will be even worse." 

Google originally promoted AMP as a way to improve the mobile web experience by loading pages faster. However, it has recently been a target of critics who see it as a way for Google to increase its hegemony in the internet ad market by hosting content on its own servers. A group of publishers recently announced it was moving away from AMP, and a lawsuit filed by several US states accuses Google of running a monopoly that harmed ad-industry competitors and publishers.

Brave promises "the best privacy online" with its browser, so of course attacking Google is part of its business strategy. Despite its efforts, though, it lags well behind most other browsers in mobile market share, sitting in the "other" category behind Internet Explorer on Statcounter. De-AMP is now available in beta and "will be enabled by default in the upcoming 1.38 Desktop and Android versions, and will be released on iOS soon after," Brave said.

Samsung has unveiled the Pokémon Edition of its Galaxy Z Flip 3 foldable smartphone that's bound to be irresistible to collectors. It comes in a special box with a number of Pokémon-themed accessories, including a Pikachu picture case (with a Pokémon Custom Pack), a Pikachu Clear Cover Set, a Pokémon Pouch with a lanyard strap, a Pikachu keychain and a Poké Ball stand. It'll also have some Pokémon-edition ringtones, themes and wallpapers. 

The model is coming along at a good time, as a Pokémon Bread craze has apparently taken South Korea by storm, according to Maekyung.com. Collectors are mostly buying them for the Pokémon stickers contained inside, which are reportedly selling for 10 times the price of the $1.20 bread. 

Samsung has released custom versions of its foldable phones before, including the Thom Browne Edition of the Galaxy Flip 3 and and Fold 3. Judging by the reaction of some of my Engadget colleagues, though, Samsung has nailed the Pokémon Edition's design and accessories. It has yet to release the price and other details, but it's likely to be sold only in Korea — we'll learn all when it drops on April 25th.