Apple has accused a company of stealing its trade secrets. In a complaint filed Friday, the tech giant claims Rivos, a “stealth-mode” startup based out of Mountain View, California, led a recent “coordinated campaign” to poach employees from Apple's chip design division.

According to Reuters, the first publication to report on the lawsuit, Apple alleges at least two former employees took gigabytes of confidential data with them to Rivos. Among the information those individuals allegedly stole are presentations that detail unreleased chip designs, reports Bloomberg.

“Apple has reason to believe that Rivos instructed at least some Apple employees to download and install apps for encrypted communications (e.g., the Signal app) before communicating with them further,” the company says in the complaint. We’ve reached out to Apple for comment.

Should the case move forward, it’s likely to draw a significant amount of attention, much like Waymo's suit against Uber for stealing confidential information about its self-driving technology did in 2017. After years of litigation, that case ended with Uber agreeing to settle for $245 million, and with a court sentencing Anthony Levandowski, the engineer at the center of the dispute, to 18 months in prison before former President Donald Trump issued a pardon.

Google’s recent Pixel software updates haven’t always landed flawlessly. At the end of last year, for instance, the company was forced to pause the release of an OTA after reports that the software caused the Pixel 6 and 6 Pro to drop calls. More recently, the March update introduced an issue that left the company’s latest phones producing much weaker notifications when you got a notification. Many Pixel 6 and 6 Pro owners complained after Google released the update, noting that no matter what they set their phone’s haptic feedback to, they would miss calls and emails because they couldn’t feel their device vibrating.

On Monday, Google began rolling out the May Pixel software update. It includes a fix for the vibration issue. “Improvements for haptic feedback under certain conditions and uses cases,” the company writes on its community website. The update resolves two other issues that affect all recent Pixels devices. The first involves a bug that had caused those phones to wake their displays without any input. The second solves a problem that could crash the Pixel launcher after you restarted your device. The update also includes the latest Android security patch from Google.

According to Google, it will roll out the May 2022 update to all eligible Pixel devices in the coming weeks. If you’re feeling adventurous, you can attempt to install the software on your phone by manually sideloading it. Just note that flashing a device always comes with a degree of risk.

Scientists have made considerable progress with soft robots used for assistive wearables, rehabilitative technologies and more. Powered by compressed air, they offer advantages over regular robots like sensing capabilities, soft touch, and high power-to-input ratios. 

Designing and building them has been a challenge, however, due to the need for a manual design and fabrication pipeline that requires a lot of trial and error. Now, scientists from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have come up with a new pipeline called "PneuAct" that uses computers and a special knitting process to design and digitally fabricate the soft pneumatic actuators. Their work could eventually lead to new assistive and rehabilitative devices. 

"PneuAct uses a machine knitting process — not dissimilar to your grandma's plastic needle knitting — but this machine operates autonomously," according to CSAIL researchers. The designer simply needs to specify the stitch and sensor design patterns in software to program actuator movements, which can be simulated before printing. The textile piece is then fabricated by the knitting machine, which is fixed to a rubber silicone tube to complete the actuator. 

The actuators use conductive yarn for sensing so they can essentially "feel" or respond to what they grab. As proof of concept, the team developed several prototypes including an assistive glove, soft hand, interactive robot and a pneumatic walking quadruped, as shown in the video above. 

The new devices are considerably improved over older designs, incorporating programmed bending when inflated and the ability to incorporate feedback. "For example, the team used the actuators to build a robot that sensed when it was touched specifically by human hands, and reacted to that touch," the team wrote. The glove could be worn to supplement finger muscle movement, adding extra force for grasping to help people with finger or hand injuries. 

The team plans to explore actuators with different shapes, and incorporate task-driven designs with target poses and optimal stitch patterns. "Our software tool is fast, easy to use, and it accurately previews users' designs, allowing them to quickly iterate virtually while only needing to fabricate once," said Harvard University's Andrew Spielberg, an author on the paper. 

Apple is moving forward with a second season of its critically-acclaimed adaption of Min Jin Lee’s best-selling novel Pachinko. The company announced the renewal shortly before the show’s season one finale premiered this past Friday on Apple TV+.

Published in 2017, Lee’s multi-generational tale won accolades for its portrayal of a Korean family that immigrates to Japan before the outbreak of the Second World War. What’s striking about both the novel and Apple’s drama series is how they effortlessly weave history and the deeply personal stories of their characters together. From Japanese colonialism in Korea to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and later Japan’s economic boom in the 1980s, history has a profound effect on Pachinko’s characters and yet the story always feels intimate.

Friday’s season one finale pulled from a scene that occurs about a third through Lee’s approximately 500-page novel, so there’s plenty of story left for Apple’s TV+ series to adapt. The company didn’t say when season two will begin filming or when it plans to stream the new episodes. All of that just means you have time to catch up on Pachinko if you’ve been sleeping on it.

Apple recently sent notices to some indie developers, warning them that their app will be pulled from the App Store if it's not updated within 30 days. The tech giant has had a policy in place against outdated and abandoned applications since 2016, but the move suggests that it's now more rigorously enforcing that rule. Some of the letters' recipients criticized the policy for being a barrier to indie developers, what with how tough it is to keep up with platform changes and how much work it takes to roll out even a minor update. Now, Apple has published a post clarifying why some old apps are in danger of being removed, along with the announcement that it's giving developers more time to update their applications. 

In the post, the company said that it will only send removal notices to developers whose apps haven't been updated in three years, as well as to devs whose apps have not "been downloaded at all or extremely few times during a rolling 12 month period." Apple said that dropping outdated apps makes newer ones more discoverable and also ensures users can enjoy games and tools that have been optimized for its latest OS and devices. 

As a lot of people know, there are older apps don't work as well on the latest generation of phones, tablets and laptops anymore, delivering a subpar user experience. Still, 30 days might not be nowhere near enough time for smaller developers to conjure up an update. The good news is that Apple has extended its grace period and is now giving them up to 90 days to update their applications. Users will get to keep apps that are already installed on their devices even if they end up getting deleted, and developers can continue earning from them through microtransactions. 

Apple announced back in February that it's introducing changes that would make AirTags easier to find after several stories of bad actors using the tracker to stalk people came out. One of the upcoming changes it promised is adjusting the sound AirTags emit to be as loud as possible to make them "more easily findable." Now, as MacRumors reports, the tech giant has started rolling out that capability with the device's latest firmware update.

While Apple has published release notes to reveal what the update adds to the tracker, it didn't mention that the company is gradually making the feature available on a staggered basis. According to the publication, only one percent of users received the update when it went out on Tuesday, but it will be delivered to 10 percent of users by May 3rd and to 25 percent by May 9th. Apple expects to complete the rollout by May 13th.

Earlier this April, Motherboard had obtained police data that included 50 cases of women receiving notifications or hearing alert sounds revealing that someone was tracking them with an AirTag. While that's not a particularly large number, it suggests a growing number of cases wherein the trackers are being used for stalking purposes. In an effort to prevent the device from a creepy character's tool of choice, Apple promised a handful of anti-stalking features that include showing people a warning that it's a crime to use the device to track people. The company will also update newer iPhones' precision finding technology to make them capable of displaying the direction and distance to an unknown AirTag.

At the start of the year, Google announced the Privacy Sandbox on Android project, a new system designed to eventually replace today's existing third-party cookie schemes and reinvent a more privacy-centered method for serving advertisements. After an initial round of alpha testing and feedback, Google announced on Thursday that the first developer's preview of the sandbox is now available as part of Android 13 beta 1.

The Privacy Sandbox is a multi-year development effort that will "limit sharing of user data with third parties and operate without cross-app identifiers, including advertising ID," Google wrote in a February announcement. "We’re also exploring technologies that reduce the potential for covert data collection, including safer ways for apps to integrate with advertising SDKs." 

This preview provides developers with early looks at the sandbox's SDK Runtime and Topics API so that they can better understand how they'll fit into their apps and processes once it is officially released. We first saw Topics API back in January. It pulls data from the Chrome browser to identify the user's top five interests for the week, based on their search and browsing history. Those topics are then compared against a database of topics from the Interactive Advertising Bureau and Google's own data. Partner publishers can then ping the Topics API, see what the user is currently into, and then serve the most appropriate ads without having to know every nitty-gritty detail about their potential customer.

Developers will also have access to an early version of the Fledge API. This allows sites to run "remarket" to existing users — ie, serving users ads to remind them that they left items in their shopping cart and should just check out already. The Sandbox comes with everything that developers will need to test it, including the Android SDK and 64-bit Android Emulator. The company intends to further refine the toolset over the coming months and welcomes feedback and questions from the developer community 

Activision Blizzard's shareholders have overwhelmingly voted in favor of a proposed $68.7 billion takeover by Microsoft. More than 98 percent of the shares that voted at a special meeting held on Thursday approved of the merger.

Though the company called the vote non-binding and advisory, the deal could not have moved forward without the majority of shareholders giving it the green light. The board of directors unanimously agreed it was in the best interest of Activision Blizzard and its shareholders, and recommended they vote in favor.

The planned merger is not finalized and it could still collapse. The Federal Trade Commission is reviewing the deal and is expected to closely scrutinize the details. Under chair Lina Khan, the FTC has put the kibosh on NVIDIA's attempt to buy ARM and revived an antitrust case against Meta over its purchases of Instagram and WhatsApp.

Microsoft and Activision Blizzard will also need regulatory approval from the UK, the European Union, China and some other jurisdictions, according to an SEC filing. The companies expect the deal to close by June 2023.

There are other considerations that may impact the planned Activision Blizzard-Microsoft merger beyond antitrust concerns. The embattled game publisher has been the subject of lawsuits and accusations alleging workplace harassment and discrimination. Meanwhile, some quality assurance workers at Activision studio Raven Software are holding a union election over the next few weeks.

You can grab the newly launched 2022 Apple iPad Air for just $559 right now. While the device dropped to as low as $550 on Amazon for a grand total of eight hours last week, this latest deal shaves $40 off its retail price of $599. That's a decent discount for a device that only became available in March. The catch is that only the purple version is on sale for $559, though you can still get the other colors for $20 less than retail at $570. 

The 2022 iPad Air gets a huge performance boost over its predecessor from its M1 chip, which also powers the tech giant's Mac computers and the considerably more expensive iPad Pro. We gave it a score of 90 in our review, mostly thanks to how significantly faster it is at both single- and multi-core tasks than the previous versions of the tablet when we ran Geekbench 5 on it. 

We also praised the device for having an excellent battery life despite the chip upgrade — it even lasted close to 12 hours during our test instead of just 10 like the company's claim. Apple also upgraded its front cam and gave it a 12-megapixel ultra wide angle camera that enables Center Stage. That's the tech giant's feature designed to follow you around and keep you in the frame during video calls. 

The version that's currently on sale for $559 is the WiFi-only variant, but you also have the chance to grab its 5G-capable counterpart at a discount. Its purple version has been available for $700 at Amazon over the past week: That's $49 less its retail price and the lowest we've seen for the 2022 cellular Apple iPad Air so far.

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

It took several months, but Apple's Self Service Repair program is now available in the US. If you have an iPhone 12, iPhone 13 or third-generation iPhone SE, you can buy key parts (such as batteries, cameras and displays) from a dedicated store and consult official repair manuals as you fix a device yourself. You can even spend $49 to rent a toolkit for a week if you'd rather not buy tools you're unlikely to use often.

The program will expand to other countries later this year, starting with Europe. You'll also have to wait until later to obtain parts, manuals and tools for Macs. Those kits will be limited to Macs with Apple silicon, so you'll be out of luck if you need to repair an Intel-based computer. 

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