Unnamed hackers claim they accessed spyware firm WebDetetive and deleted device information to protect victims from surveillance, TechCrunch reported on Saturday. Users of the spyware won't get any new data from their targets. "Because #fuckstalkerware,” the hackers wrote in a note obtained by TechCrunch.

Spyware software allows users unfettered access to a victim's device, whether that's a government using it to surveil citizens or an abuser using it to stalk a survivor. The spyware advertises the ability to monitor everything a victim types, listen to phone calls and track locations for "less than a cup of coffee" without being seen. It works by downloading an app on a person's phone, under an alias that goes undetected, to give full access to the device. The WebDetetive breach compromised more than 76,000 devices belonging to customers of the stalkerware, and more than 1.5 gigabytes of data freed from app's servers, according to the hackers.

While TechCrunch did not independently confirm the deletion of victim's data from the WebDetetive server, a cache of data shared by the hackers provided a look at what they were able to accomplish. TechCrunch also worked with a nonprofit that logs exposed datasets, DDoSecrets, to verify and analyze the information. Hackers obtained information on customers like IP addresses and devices that they targeted. 

If you've been looking to pick up a spare gamepad for your Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S or PC, it might be a good time to pull the trigger, as Microsoft's official Xbox Wireless Controller is on sale for $44 at Amazon and Walmart. Microsoft itself has the device for a dollar more. While this isn't an all-time low — we saw the controller go for $5 less over Black Friday, for instance — the Xbox pad has typically retailed in the $50 to $55 range in recent months. Note that this price applies to the white, black and red models; the pink, green and "electric volt" colorways, which usually cost $5 more, are each on sale for $49.

The Series X/S controller has the same broadly comfortable shape as older Xbox pads, with responsive face buttons and triggers, smooth joysticks and a pleasing sense of heft. Its d-pad is much more clicky than the one on Sony's DualSense PS5 controller, and it still uses an asymmetrical joystick layout, but whether those are negatives is largely a matter of preference. There's Bluetooth for pairing with a PC or mobile device, as well as a dedicated "Share" button for capturing screenshots and gameplay clips. While you don't get the advanced haptic feedback features of the DualSense, the whole thing is a bit less wide, and it's generally easier to use on a PC, especially if you use clients besides Steam. Alternatives like the 8BitDo Ultimate Bluetooth Controller and Microsoft's own Elite Series 2 pad (which is on sale for $140) offer a wider array of features, but if you just need the basics, the standard Xbox controller should do the job.

The main hang-up is that it still relies on AA batteries for power. That lets it last longer on a charge than the DualSense, but you'll have to buy a separate rechargeable battery pack if you don't want to swap out batteries on the regular. If you can live with that hassle, however, you can lessen the need to buy new batteries by grabbing a pair of rechargeable AAs like the Panasonic Eneloops. 

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Dr. Mario did not prepare us for this. In a pioneering effort, researchers from UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley, in partnership with Edinburgh-based Speech Graphics, have devised a groundbreaking communications system that allows a woman, paralyzed by stroke, to speak freely through a digital avatar she controls with a brain-computer interface.

Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) are devices that monitor the analog signals produced by your gray matter and convert them into the digital signals that computers understand — like a mixing soundboard’s DAC unit but what fits inside your skull. For this study, researchers led by Dr. Edward Chang, chair of neurological surgery at UCSF, first implanted a 253-pin electrode array into speech center of the patient’s brain. Those probes monitored and captured the electrical signals that would have otherwise driven the muscles in her jaw, lips and tongue, and instead, transmitted them through a cabled port in her skull to a bank of processors. That computing stack housed a machine learning AI which, over the course of a few week’s training, came to recognize the patient's electrical signal patterns for more than 1,000 words.

But that’s only the first half of the trick. Through that AI interface, the patient is now able to write out her responses, much in the same way Synchron’s system works for folks suffering from locked-in syndrome. But she can also speak, in a sense, using a synthesized voice trained on recordings of her natural voice from before she was paralyzed — same as we’re doing with our digitally undead celebrities.

What’s more, the researchers teamed up with Speech Graphics, the same company that developed the photorealistic facial animation technology from Halo Infinite and The Last of Us Part II, to create the patient’s avatar. SG’s tech “reverse engineers” the necessary musculoskeletal movements a face would make based on analysis of the audio input, then feeds that data in real-time to a game engine to be animated into a lagless avatar. And since the mental signals from the patient were mapped directly to the avatar, she could express emotion and communicate nonverbally as well.

“Creating a digital avatar that can speak, emote and articulate in real-time, connected directly to the subject’s brain, shows the potential for AI-driven faces well beyond video games,” Michael Berger, CTO and co-founder of Speech Graphics, said in a press statement Wednesday. “Restoring voice alone is impressive, but facial communication is so intrinsic to being human, and it restores a sense of embodiment and control to the patient who has lost that.“

BCI technology was pioneered in the early 1970s and has been slowly developing in the intervening decades. Exponential advancements with processing and computing systems have recently helped reinvigorate the field, with a handful of well-funded startups currently vying to be first through the FDA’s regulatory device approval process. Brooklyn-based Synchron made headlines last year when it was the first company to successfully implant a BCI in a human patient. Elon Musk’s Neuralink entered restricted FDA trials earlier this year after the company was found to have killed scores of porcine test subjects in earlier testing rounds.

Microsoft is acting on its promise to bring PC Game Pass to NVIDIA's GeForce Now service. The companies have announced that Game Pass and Microsoft Store titles will be available to stream on GeForce Now starting August 24th. Not every title will be playable right away, but this will give Game Pass subscribers access to releases like Deathloop and No Man's Sky through NVIDIA's platform.

The two companies have been forging a partnership for a while. Microsoft struck a deal with NVIDIA in February to bring Xbox games to GeForce Now for 10 years, and the first title (Gears 5) arrived in May. Bethesda's first games, including Doom Eternal and the Wolfenstein reboots, surfaced earlier this month. In that sense, PC Game Pass just expands the selection further.

The pact was announced as part of Microsoft's bid to get regulatory approval for its purchase of Activision Blizzard. In theory, this shows that Microsoft won't have unfair dominance over cloud gaming. The company also plans to sell Activision Blizzard game streaming rights to Ubisoft to address UK officials' concerns, and has been signing smaller cloud deals in recent months.

It may seem odd to access one streaming service's games through another, but there may be advantages. GeForce Now is aimed at enthusiasts who want maximum visual quality and reduced lag, with the Ultimate tier supporting 4K at 120 frames per second. If your PC and internet connection are up to the task, Game Pass might shine on GeForce Now where it would otherwise be limited.

Microsoft is significantly restructuring its Activision Blizzard merger proposal by selling cloud gaming rights for Activision Blizzard games to rival Ubisoft, it wrote in a blog post late yesterday. That would address a key concern of UK regulators, which blocked the deal in part become of Microsoft's potential dominance in cloud gaming — but nothing is likely to be approved until October 18th. 

"As a result of the agreement with Ubisoft, Microsoft believes its proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard presents a substantially different transaction under UK law than the transaction Microsoft submitted for the CMA’s consideration in 2022," Microsoft President Brad Smith wrote. 

If the merger goes through, Microsoft 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 SA, a leading global game publisher. The rights will be in perpetuity," Smith added. That means Microsoft wouldn't be able to make Activision Blizzard games exclusive for Xbox Cloud Gaming, nor have any say on how they're released on rival services. It will also allow Ubisoft to offer Activision Blizzard cloud gaming services on Apple and other non-Windows systems. 

As for the terms of the transaction, "Ubisoft will compensate Microsoft for the cloud streaming rights to Activision Blizzard’s games through a one-off payment and through a market-based wholesale pricing mechanism, including an option that supports pricing based on usage," Smith said. 

In its own blog post, Ubisoft indicated that Activision Blizzard titles will be available across a range of services if the deal goes through. "With a single subscription to Ubisoft+ Multi Access, players will soon be able to play their favorite Ubisoft and Activision Blizzard games across multiple platforms including PC, Xbox consoles and Amazon Luna, and on the PlayStation platform through Ubisoft+ Classics," wrote Ubisoft's Daniel O'Connor.

The UK's CMA (Competition and Markets Authority) blocked the proposed merger earlier this year citing cloud gaming monopoly concerns as the primary issue. However, after the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) lost its own appeal to block the merger, the CMA agreed to extend negotiations until August 29th. "Based upon the discussion to date, both sides — Microsoft and the CMA — have confidence that Microsoft notifying a restructured transaction is capable of addressing the concerns that the CMA has identified," the CMA said in July. 

The UK regulator will now examine the restructured deal and deliver a decision by October 18th, it said in an article published today. "This is not a green light. We will carefully and objectively assess the details of the restructured deal and its impact on competition, including in light of third-party comments," said CMS chief executive Sarah Cardell. "Our goal has not changed — any future decision on this new deal will ensure that the growing cloud gaming market continues to benefit from open and effective competition driving innovation and choice."

Dr. John Warnock, who co-founded the revolutionary company Adobe, has died aged 82, Adobe announced on Saturday. He is survived by his wife, Marva Warnock, and three children; no cause of death has been released. 

"It is with profound sadness that I share that our beloved co-founder Dr. John Warnock passed away at the age of 82," wrote Adobe Chair and CEO Shantanu Narayen. "John has been widely acknowledged as one of the greatest inventors in our generation with significant impact on how we communicate in words, images and videos."

Warnock created Adobe with the late Dr. Charles Geschke in 1982, and served as the company's CEO until 2000, remaining co-chairman with Geschke until 2017 (Geschke passed in 2021). The company's original logo was created by Marva Warnock, and Adobe released its debut product, the desktop publishing software Adobe Postscript, in 1984. 

Adobe went on to launch Photoshop in 1987. It subsequently developed the PDF file format, and released widely used applications like Illustrator, Lightroom, Premiere Pro and After Effects. To that end, the company helped launch the desktop publishing revolution in the '80s, and offers key tools used for the web, video/audio editing and visual effects used in film and television. 

Warnock was one of the rare CEOs with high-level technical skills. In his 1969 doctoral thesis, he invented the Warnock algorithm for hidden surface determination. He later worked with Geschke at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, but was unable to convince management to commercialize the InterPress graphics language. That led the pair to form Adobe, where they subsequently created PostScript and released it for Apple's LaserWriter in 1985. Warnock also invented Adobe Illustrator, a drawing program that uses vectors rather than pixels to describe images. 

"My interactions with John over the past 25 years have been the highlight of my professional career," wrote Narayen. "At breakfasts with John and Chuck, we would imagine the future, however, it was our varied conversations on rare books, art, world history and politics that gave me unique insight into John, who was truly a renaissance man."

Earlier this year, Pew Research reported that a majority of US Twitter users reported spending less time on the platform since Elon Musk’s takeover last year. Now, new data suggests another important group of users are also pulling back from the service now called X.

More than half of scientific researchers who use Twitter report they’ve reduced the amount of time they spend there or have left altogether, according to a survey of thousands of scientists conducted by Nature. And nearly half of those polled said they’ve turned to alternative social networks like Mastodon

Of the 9,200 researchers polled, more than 47 percent said they had decreased their usage of the site, while nearly 7 percent reported quitting the site altogether. Notably, almost the same number said they had started an account on at least one new platform over the last year.

Of these, Mastodon, which has seen significant growth since Musk’s takeover of Twitter was announced, was the most widely used. About 47 percent of researchers said they had started using the open-source platform in the past year. LinkedIn and Instagram were the next most popular, drawing 35 and 27 percent of researchers, respectively. Interestingly, Meta’s Twitter competitor, Threads, took the number four spot even though the app launched only days before Nature conducted the poll.

As with the earlier data from Pew, Nature’s findings suggest that Twitter usage is down among those who were once active on the platform. It also highlights how much the dynamics of Twitter have changed over the last year.

Twitter, as Nature points out, has historically been an important platform for researchers and scientists. It’s been used to publicize research and promote scientific debate. And Twitter’s researchers have served as an important source of authoritative information on a platform that's long struggled to combat misinformation. Twitter has also been a valuable source of data for countless researchers studying everything from public health to linguistics.

But much of that has now changed. Many users now feel that their voices are drowned out on a platform that prioritizes content from those with paid verification. And the company has made its API for researchers so expensive that most can no longer access it. So while not all the researchers that spoke to Nature were ready to give up on Twitter entirely, it does seem the company’s tactics have alienated large swaths of the scientific community.

X didn't respond to a request for comment. 

Measuring a mere 72 x 40.7 x 14.1 mm — just over half the length of the original NES controller — the 8BitDo Micro is a spiritual successor to the company’s Zero line of similarly minuscule gamepads. It also hurts my hands just to look at it.

The 8BitDo Micro pairs via Bluetooth with the Nintendo Switch, Android and Raspberry Pi. The wee little thing weighs 24.8 grams, includes a mode-switching button and supports button mapping via 8BitDo Ultimate Software. The company says it has a 180mAh battery that will last 10 hours of playtime and can fully recharge in one to two hours. However, it also works in wired mode (via USB-C) when you don’t mind being tethered to your gaming system.

8BitDo

The controller skips analog sticks in favor of a lone D-Pad. It includes four standard action buttons (A, B, X, Y), face buttons (plus, minus, star and checkered flag) and shoulder bumpers / triggers. (The latter is one way it differs from 8BitDo’s Zero 2.) It can work in keyboard mode, which opens up some compatibility with macOS, Windows and iOS — and you can assign shortcuts to use it as a remote control for tasks like photo or video editing. It's an impressive amount of IO to cram into a form factor that makes Joy-Cons look like the front face of an arcade cabinet.

The 8BitDo Micro launches today in blue and green. It costs $25 and is available to order from Amazon.

8Bitdo / Aspercreme / Avery Menegus / Engadget

Despite having trouble obtaining former President Donald Trump's records from Twitter (now X), the special counsel investigating the events of January 6th, 2020 was ultimately able to get his hands on vast amounts of information from the website. Based on the newly unsealed court filings (PDF) shared by Politico, though, it took a a lot of back and forth and a massive amount of effort before the counsel was able to secure the data requested from Twitter. 

Apparently the search warrant required Twitter to produce all the tweets the @realdonaldtrump created, drafted, liked or retweeted, including any post that he eventually deleted. The website also had to turn over DMs "sent from, received by, stored in draft form in, or otherwise associated with" @realdonaldtrump, as well as all other accounts related to it that the former president might have used on the same device. All devices used to log in to @realdonaldtrump had to be noted and given to the counsel, as well, along with the account's privacy settings and IP address history from October 2020 to January 2021. In addition, Twitter was required to hand over all records of searches done by @realdonaldtrump and the account's location information from the same time period.

Throughout the transcript of the proceedings, you'll see how the prosecutors insisted that Twitter had to adhere to a nondisclosure order that prohibits the company from telling Trump about the warrant. They explained that they had evidence that disclosing the warrant could jeopardize the probe, warning the court that "there would be actual harm and concern for the investigation, for the witnesses going forward." Meanwhile, Twitter's side argued that some of the information the investigators were requesting could be covered by executive privilege, which the prosecutors and judge questioned, since they didn't deem it likely that Trump discussed official government matter via DMs. 

As Politico reports, US District Judge Beryl Howell notably called attention to Twitter's efforts to give Trump advance notice about the search warrant. She had called the action "extraordinary" and something the company had never done for other users. The judge wondered whether Elon Musk was trying to "cozy up" to the former president and make him feel "particularly welcomed" on the platform. Trump's Twitter account had already been reinstated after Musk took over the website, but he has yet to start posting again. 

For several years, 8BitDo has offered a dongle that lets folks connect modern controllers to the NES Classic Edition, SNES Classic and Sega Genesis Mini. The latest version of the Retro Receiver brings support for the likes of the Switch Pro Controller, Xbox Elite Series 2 and the DualSense Edge to older hardware in the form of the PlayStation 1 and the PlayStation 2. The $25 dongle includes Windows 10 and 11 support as well.

The device supports lag-free gaming, 8BitDo claims, as well as controller vibration functions. You'll be able to link controllers to it using Bluetooth or a wired connection.

Along with Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo's peripherals, the Retro Receiver works with many of 8BitDo's own controllers. The supported gamepads are:

• DualShock 4, DualSense and DualSense Edge

• Xbox One, Series, Elite Series 2, Elite Series 2 - Core, and Adaptive Controller

• Wii U Pro and Switch Pro Controllers

• 8BitDo Ultimate Bluetooth, Pro 2, SN30 Pro+, SN30 Pro, SN30 Pro for Android, Lite 2, Lite SE, and Lite Controllers; Arcade Stick v3; PS1 Modkit and PS1 Classic Modkit

There is a way to connect such controllers to a PS3 using 8BitDo's previous Retro Receiver, but having a plug-and-play option for Sony's first two consoles is a welcome move. It's especially great to see 8BitDo including support for the Xbox Adaptive Controller, which could make it possible for some folks to play classic PS1 and PS2 games on original hardware for the first time.