The following article contains major spoilers for Season Four, Episode Nine

Star Trek: Lower Decks takes its name and premise from a late episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. “Lower Decks” pivots away from the show’s usual format to focus on four junior crew members and is told mostly from their perspective. One of them is Sito Jaxa (Shannon Fill) who had appeared two years earlier as a cadet in “The First Duty.” That episode focused on Wesley Crusher’s involvement in a conspiracy to cover up an accident that killed a fellow cadet. It also gave us our first look at Nicholas Locarno (Robert Duncan McNeill), the episode’s ostensible villain. Locarno was, at some point, intended to be the helm officer in Voyager and was named as such in an early draft of the series' bible. But, during pre-production, Locarno’s name was dropped and McNeill instead played Tom Paris, with the same backstory. Producers have, in various interviews, said the issue hinged on Locarno’s redeemability after his actions in “The First Duty.” But it’s equally plausible that the character was changed to avoid paying royalties to the character’s creators. But, even if you knew none of the above information, I don’t think you’d get any less out of this week’s episode of Lower Decks. Because while this series was conceived at the get-go to play to the crowd and bury itself in references, it rarely does so at the expense of telling a good story.

Mariner is once again throwing herself into harm’s way to save her friends without regard to her own safety. Her cavalier attitude to life, death, and her own career have threaded through much of this season to the point that now, even Captain Freeman is worried. She pulls the rest of Beta shift into a plan that’ll keep her daughter out of harm’s way on the next mission. Starfleet thinks the rogue ship destroying everything in its path might be targeting former officers. The list of at-risk individuals includes high-profile figures like Dr. Crusher but, this being Lower Decks, the Cerritos is sent off to find Nicholas Locarno. And while that’s going on, Freeman sends Mariner, Boimler, Tendi and T’Lyn on what she hopes will be a zero-stakes assignment to fix a weather buoy in orbit around Sherbal V. Except, of course, the crew’s shuttle is attacked by a Klingon Bird of Prey and the crew have to beam down to the hostile planet below.

Meanwhile, Freeman, Shaxs and Rutherford head to what can only be described as a Star Wars planet where Locarno is meant to be plying his trade. Despite its reputation as a wretched hive of scum and villainy, it’s got a muscular bureaucracy that the inhabitants use to frustrate Starfleet officers. The episode makes full use of that disconnect between the stuffed-shirt crew and the rougher corners of the universe. It was rare that we’d see the Next Generation crew really get their elbows dirty – the best I can call to mind is the awkward moments in “Gambit.” There’s just something inherently funny about the primary-colored space communist scouts encountering hairy-assed people who live in the “real world.” That’s before you get to Captain Freeman trying to beat up a Balok puppet that turns out to be a real alien. Of course, it’s a double bluff – at each turn, the villains put bureaucratic obstacles in Starfleet’s way but wave through a sinister bounty hunter type out of spite. Except the bounty hunter in question is Billups wearing a silly helmet, who got the necessary data to track down Locarno.

On the planet, the rest of Beta Shift is left fending for their lives as chaotic weather makes survival even harder. It doesn’t help that the victims of other attacks, explorers from several other alien races, are all fighting to the death for supremacy. Mariner, frustrated at the gang’s wise refusal to fight their way to safety, opts to go it alone and bumps into a Klingon. But their own fight to the death is interrupted by a rainstorm of glass shards and, while they shelter, Mariner finally reveals the source of her angst. She’s been sabotaging her career because she’s deeply resentful about Starfleet, and her role within it. When she signed up, she’d bought into the idea of exploring strange new worlds, but instead the Federation has been embroiled in an endless parade of galaxy-threatening wars. Her best friend was Sito Jaxa, from “Lower Decks,” who in that episode was sent to her death on a covert mission. Starfleet quite literally chewed up and spat out one of her friends, but as much as Mariner may hate what Starfleet is, she can’t quite just walk away because of what the Starfleet ideal represents. And you don’t need to be fluent with the events of a TV series from 31 years ago — Good God, I feel old — or the para-narrative around Voyager’s pre-production, to appreciate that dilemma. Of course, her Klingon opponent counters, saying that Mariner's angst dishonors Sito's sacrifice, and that she needs to get on with the job at hand. And, much as she agrees, she adds (just before hugging her former opponent) that she's still duty-bound to call out when Starfleet "can do better." 

Despite its love of self-referentiality, Star Trek has often struggled with any degree of on-screen self-interrogation. There are moments, best exemplified by the Root Beer scene in “The Way of the Warrior,” where the show touches on the values it espouses. The show’s numerous creative teams have often pushed the idea that Starfleet, and the Federation, aren’t as noble a force as the myth suggests. With Beyond, Simon Pegg wanted to focus on the nature of the Federation as a colonizing force, even if that concept is almost entirely erased from the finished film. I’ll leave it to better writers than I to explore this in depth, but it’s rare we get moments where Starfleet officers wonder, out loud or in private, if they aren’t the universally good force they’ve been led to believe they are. This thread is also paid off in the B-story as Freeman and Co. are told, more or less, that nobody in the real world likes having them around. Sure, it’s a gag in a sitcom, and our sympathies are almost universally with the Starfleet crew, but the fact it’s here at all isn’t to be sniffed at.

By the time we’ve reached the cliffhanger, Beta shift is trying to cajole the warring parties to work together. And, if we’re honest, the idea of disparate groups coming together to solve a problem as a whole is, surely, an idea worth upholding. But before we can see if they are able to be rescued, Mariner is beamed away to an ultra-minimalist starship. After forcing the door, she comes face-to-face with her rescuer / captor, and it’s… Nicholas Locarno.

After Disney releases a new film in English, the company will go back and localize it in as many as 46 global languages to make the movie accesible to as wide an audience as possible. This is a massive undertaking, one for which Disney has an entire division — Disney Character Voices International Inc — to handle the task. And it's not like you're getting Chris Pratt back in the recording booth to dub his GotG III lines in Icelandic and Swahili — each version sounds a little different given the local voice actors. But with a new "AI dubbing" system from ElevenLabs, we could soon get a close recreation of Pratt's voice, regardless of the language spoken on-screen.   

ElevenLabs is an AI startup that offers a voice cloning service, allowing subscribers to generate nearly identical vocalizations with AI based on a few minutes worth of audio sample uploads. Not wholly unsurprising, as soon as the feature was released in beta, it was immediately exploited to impersonate celebrities, sometimes even without their prior knowledge and consent. 

The new AI dubbing feature does essentially the same thing — in more than 20 different languages including Hindi, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, Ukrainian, Polish and Arabic — but legitimately, and with permission. This tool is designed for use by media companies, educators and internet influencers who don't have Disney Money™ to fund their global adaptation efforts.

ElevenLabs asserts that the system will be able to not only translate "spoken content to another language in minutes" but also generate new spoken dialog in the target language using the actor's own voice. Or, at least, a AI generated recreation. The system is even reportedly capable of maintaining the "emotion and intonation" of the existing dialog and transferring that over to the generated translation.

 "It will help audiences enjoy any content they want, regardless of the language they speak," ElevenLabs CEO Mati Staniszewski said in a press statement. "And it will mean content creators can easily and authentically access a far bigger audience across the world."

Game Pass subscribers will have to wait a bit more before they're able to play Diablo IV and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III on the service. Activision Blizzard has announced on X, formerly Twitter, that it doesn't have plans to add those games — among other upcoming and recent releases — to the service anytime this year. Based on its explanation, it's waiting for Microsoft's acquisition of the company to be finalized, which is expected to happen within this month. 

"As we continue to work toward regulatory approval of the Microsoft deal, we've been getting some questions whether our upcoming and recently launched games will be available via Game Pass," the gaming giant wrote. It added that it expects to start working with Xbox and add its titles to the Game Pass service once the deal closes, and that the process would begin "sometime in the course of next year."

Microsoft first announced that it was buying Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion in early 2022 and that it was hoping to close the deal by June 2023. However, several regulators moved to block the purchase over concerns that it would harm competition and stifle innovation. The European Commission rubberstamped the acquisition in May with the condition that Microsoft offers its games on other cloud gaming services. Meanwhile, the UK's Competition and Markets Authority blocked the deal until the companies promised to sell "cloud streaming rights for all current and new Activision Blizzard PC and console games released over the next 15 years to Ubisoft Entertainment... in perpetuity." In the US, courts denied the Federal Trade Commission's (FTC) request to issue an injunction on the purchase. However, the FTC announced in September that it plans to restart its in-house trial against the acquisition. 

Just when Microsoft's buyout of Activision seemed to finally be near complete, the Federal Trade Commission said it will revive its attempt to block the $69 billion deal in an adjudicative process. The FTC plans to restart its in-house trial against Microsoft’s multibillion-dollar acquisition of the Call of Duty maker.

This effort by the FTC is unlikely to be anything more than a nuisance for Microsoft. It already received EU approval over the summer when the European Commission endorsed the deal as long as the tech giant could ensure “full compliance with commitments.” And more recently, the UK's Competition and Markets Authority issued a preliminary approval of the merger. Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick called it “a significant milestone for the merger” in a statement and said he remains optimistic that the deal will complete soon. The CMA's consultation on Microsoft's proposed changes is expected to be complete by October 6, just days ahead of the October 18 deadline for the CMA’s review process.

Normally, the FTC typically drops its challenges to deals when efforts are lost in federal court and despite the agency’s effort, this move will not delay the deal from going through. The likely worst-case scenario for Microsoft would be divestiture. Being forced to sell Activision or parts of it after the fact would not be ideal, but at least short term there seems to be little chance of the FTC derailing things.

The agency’s failed attempt to block the acquisition over the summer in the US should have put an end to the bargaining when the FTC’s injunction request to block the deal got rejected and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals denied the agency’s last-ditch effort. Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley said in her ruling that the FTC did not prove the deal would harm consumers.

Microsoft told Bloomberg that it's not overly concerned about the move preventing its purchase. Regardless of what impact it could have, the FTC’s in-house hearing will only start after the Ninth Circuit issues an opinion on the appeal, according to the filing.

Lulu Cheng Meservey, the CCO of Activision, said the company is focused on closing the deal with Microsoft. In a jab on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, she questioned the FTC for how it “uses limited taxpayer resources.”

Meta’s big product showcase for 2023 focused on its new headset, the Quest 3, which Mark Zuckerberg claims is “the first mainstream mixed reality headset,” hurting the feelings of the Quest 2, which preceded it.

The Meta Quest 3 has full color passthrough on its external cameras, able to blend augmented reality elements into your surroundings. It’s also the first consumer device that runs on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 chip, and Meta claims it delivers double the performance of the Quest 2. Expect higher resolution and a larger depth of field, thanks to upgrades to the screen and lenses. Meta has also revamped the Quest controllers, ditching the weird tracking rings and letting new sensors handle tracking instead.

Meta teased a handful of new games and experiences — mostly underwhelming — with an extra push towards fitness apps and upgrades. (You know Zuckerberg is hench now, right?) That said, Xbox Cloud gaming is coming to the Quest 3 in December, unlocking a bigger range of (admittedly non-VR) games with no need for a TV or monitor.

The event also revealed next-gen Ray-Ban smart glasses, AI updates and more – read on for those.

— Mat Smith

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Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses hands-on

New frames and major upgrades to the hardware.

The Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses might actually do what you want smart glasses to do. They’re less clunky than the original Ray-Ban Stories, and now pack a 12-megapixel camera capable of recording 1080p 60 fps video — the bare minimum in 2023 — although they are restricted to 60 seconds. For longer things, you can now livestream footage while tethered to your phone, although Meta will calibrate video quality based on your connection speed.

Another major change is the addition of a second frame called the Headliner, alongside Wayfarers. As well as the shiny and matte black frames, there are three new semi-transparent colors: jeans, caramel and a smoky Rebel Black. There’s also the option to add polarized lenses or even prescription glass.

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Former Microsoft exec Panos Panay is the new head of Amazon hardware

Surprise!

Former Microsoft executive Panos Panay will take over as the head of Amazon’s Devices and Services division, the company confirmed. He’ll start his new role at the end of October, CEO Andy Jassy said. It emerged last week that Panay was leaving Microsoft after a 19-year run, most recently as the chief product officer, where he oversaw Surface devices and Windows 11 development. Rumors quickly suggested Panay would move to Amazon to lead the Alexa and Echo teams.

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Logitech’s new racing cockpit is a $299 foldable chair

You can fold the Playseat Challenge X up and stow it away.

Logitech

Logitech has introduced a $299 cockpit chair for racing sims. It worked with Playseat to release the Playseat Challenge X, a fold-up chair with room for pedals and even a gearshift mount. While the chair doesn’t include the actual accessories to play racing sims, it is compatible with Logitech’s G wheels and driving force shifters. I am also fully aware it looks like a baby seat.

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Disney+ cracks down on password sharing, starting in Canada

New password sharing restrictions will take effect this fall.

Disney+ will restrict its Canadian users from sharing accounts with people outside their households unless they’re willing to pay more, starting November 1. The company sent out an email to subscribers notifying them of the change, which Disney CEO Bob Iger foreshadowed in an earnings call back in August. Disney specifies a household includes only “the collection of devices associated with your primary personal residence,” used by the people who live there.

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Microsoft's $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard looked close to being dead not long ago, but it just took a big step toward clearing its last major obstacle. The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has announced that Microsoft's revised agreement "substantially addresses previous concerns and opens the door to the deal being cleared." The agreement is still in consultation, but final approval now looks highly likely. 

"The CMA considers that the restructured deal makes important changes that substantially address the concerns it set out in relation to the original transaction earlier this year," the regulator wrote. "In particular, the sale of Activision’s cloud streaming rights to Ubisoft will prevent this important content — including games such as Call of Duty, Overwatch, and World of Warcraft — from coming under the control of Microsoft in relation to cloud gaming."

The UK regulator initially blocked the merger over fears it would hand Microsoft a 60 to 70 percent share of the cloud gaming market, making it a monopoly player. That in turn would give it "incentive to withhold games from competitors and substantially weaken competition in this important growing market." 

In response, Microsoft announced last month that it would sell Activision Blizzard streaming rights to Ubisoft in an attempt to win UK approval. It said that if the merger goes through, it would transfer "cloud streaming rights for all current and new Activision Blizzard PC and console games released over the next 15 years to Ubisoft Entertainment... in perpetuity." Ubisoft said in a separate release that the titles would be available across a range of services. 

The revised deal "substantially addresses most concerns," the CMA wrote, but it still wants to ensure that provisions in the sale of Activision's cloud streaming rights to Ubisoft can't be "circumvented, terminated or not enforced." It added that Microsoft has offered remedies to ensure that those rights are enforceable, and those should resolve any residual concerns. 

Microsoft managed to turn the deal around after taking a lot of blows from regulators. Late last year, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sued to block the merger, but was later rebuffed by a federal court. The UK's CMA rejected the deal a few months later, but Microsoft appealed the decision and was later given more time to submit an amended deal. It made a major concession with the sale of streaming rights to Ubisoft — and that seems like it may have done the trick. We should know soon, as the CMA's consultation on Microsoft's proposed remedies closes on October 6. 

Apple TV+ has some intriguing TV series on hand to keep you occupied this fall. Along with the return of The Morning Show and the debut of a show that features Godzilla, the captivating For All Mankind is about to set sail on its fourth season. New episodes of the drama, which offers an alternate perspective on the space race, will start streaming on November 10.

Apple also released a teaser for the 10-episode season, which jumps forward eight years from the events of season three to 2003. Much of the action will take place on Mars, where astronauts stay busy by mining for resources. The teaser is in the form of a recruitment ad narrated by Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman) that encourages people to sign up to work on the Red Planet.

As it happens, Apple just announced new iPhones that will soon be available to pre-order. If you snap up one of those — or another new iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Mac or iPod touch — you'll get three months of Apple TV+ access at no extra cost.

Google Keep, the company's note-taking app, is getting a long-overdue feature that unfortunately doesn't seem fully baked. Google is adding a version history function, which could save you from having to manually retype a lot of text that you mistakenly deleted.

The tool allows you to download a text file with previous versions of your notes and lists, according to a support page. The help document states that Google is gradually rolling out the feature to everyone, so it may not be live for you yet. When it is, you can access it on the Keep web app, by clicking on the three-dot menu at the bottom of a note.

As Android Police points out, Keep's version history is only available on the web for now — you won't be able to see previous versions of your notes on the Android or iOS apps just yet. What's more, it doesn't cover images, so if you deleted a photo from a note, you won't be able to recover it using this option.

This is a fairly basic feature and it's somewhat baffling that Google hasn't offered it in Keep until now. After all, the company has long offered similar functions in Google Drive apps. The implementation is odd too. Rather than seeing the version history in the app and being able to revert to a previous incarnation of a note with a tap (like you can do in apps like Docs), having to download a file and copy text back in manually seems like a strange choice. That said, this is a step in the right direction for Keep.

Newly unsealed court filings reveal how much data Xwitter has handed over to the January 6 investigation. This includes all tweets sent, drafted, liked and retweeted – even if they were subsequently deleted – by Donald Trump’s official account. This cache also included DMs sent, received or stored in draft form, as well as linked accounts used on the same device. Even more interesting is the company handed over records of all searches made by the account, too.

We already knew Xwitter had fought the order tooth-and-nail, leading to a court battle and a hefty fine. But the list of what was available should also serve as a warning to everyone else that the platform stores a lot more data on its users than you might expect. The fact it could serve up location history, deleted DMs and a list of searches might make you wonder what else it has on you.

– Dan Cooper

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Scientists recreate an iconic Pink Floyd song by scanning listeners' brains

It could eventually help people with speech challenges.

Researchers claim to have found a way to extract a song from a person’s brain by analyzing their neural activity. A group of test subjects with drug-resistant epilepsy, who already have implants in their brains, were played Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1. Using the implants, the team monitored how the brains responded to the stimulus and used AI to recreate what they heard. The result is a bit like listening to a Pink Floyd cover band playing down the street while you’re swimming, but it’s recognizable enough. It’s hoped the discovery could be used as a jumping-off point to develop tech to help people with atrophied speech communicate.

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Intel walks away from its $5.4 billion takeover of Tower Semiconductor

Rumors suggest Chinese regulators were slow to agree to the deal.

Intel Corporation

Intel has withdrawn its $5.4 billion offer to buy Israeli chip fabricator Tower Semiconductor after failing to get regulatory approval. Tower is not a bleeding-edge manufacturer; it makes chips for industrial and automotive applications using older processes. Intel wanted it as part of its plan not to just make its own chips but to manufacture third-party designs in its facilities. It’s thought the major roadblock was China, which refused to give its blessing in a “timely manner.” It’s not clear if China’s inaction was part of the current geopolitical brouhaha over the future of chip making, but it probably hasn’t helped.

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GM’s latest investment could speed development of cheaper EV batteries

It is putting $60 million into a US-based battery company.

Karl Nielsen for General Motors

GM has a vested interest in making batteries both cheaper and more efficient, which is why it just dropped $60 million into Mitra Chem’s pocket. Mitra Chem is working on a US-made battery using cheaper, more common metals than are presently employed. It’s also looking to speed up research into new battery technologies using software that could eliminate much of the early gruntwork.

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Google is working to improve Bard's soulless life advice

But not everyone on the project thinks it’s a good idea.

A Google contractor developing Bard, the search giant’s AI chatbot, has enlisted a score of experts to improve the system’s ability to dole out life advice. It’s in response to users asking the platform for help with intimate issues, like how to back out of a destination wedding. The work has caused alarm in some parts of the company, where workers feel people shouldn’t be asking an AI those sorts of questions.

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Snapchat's My AI chatbot glitched so hard it started posting Stories

It shouldn’t be able to do that.

Snapchat’s in-app digital assistant experienced a malfunction so great it started posting its own stories. My AI is a chatbot you can access if you subscribe to Snapchat Plus for $3.99 a month, but it shouldn’t have access to your stories at all. In a statement, the company explained the system had a “temporary outage” and there’s nothing to worry about. For now, at least.

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My AI, the in-app digital assistant that rides herd on your Snapchat Plus experience, has suffered numerous breakdowns and technical malfunctions since its debut in February. Tuesday was more of the same as the chatbot took it upon itself to post single-second-long Stories to users' feeds and then go unresponsive for extended periods of time. Thing is, My AI doesn't have the capacity to post to Stories. And now it's got a bunch of people on Twitter wondering if we're at the dawning of the Singularity.

As first reported by TechCrunch, the My AI chatbot posted a two-tone image in Stories, which one user mistook for a shot of their ceiling. What's more, upon being asked about the mysterious post, the bot would either go dark or respond that it was suffering a technical issue. This explanation proved insufficient for many users, causing minor panic and jokes about the AI system's imminent awakening. In the end however, it really was a technical issue.

“My AI experienced a temporary outage that’s now resolved,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch, adding that "At this time, My AI does not have Stories feature."

The My AI bot is bundled as part of the company's $3.99/month Snapchat Plus package and offers users a variety of features. These include AR filter recommendations and suggestions for restaurant and activities based on currently popular places on the Snap Map. It also offers AI functionality in group chat, photo and video snaps, and text messages, as well as an AI persona. A text-to-image genAI is also reportedly in the works, though the ads have already arrived.