A software update Hewlett-Packard released earlier this month for its OfficeJet printers is causing some of those devices to become unusable. Since about the second week of May, the HP support forums have been rife with complaints of OfficeJet printers bricking after they automatically installed the company’s most recent firmware update.

After downloading the faulty software, the built-in touchscreen on an affected printer will display a blue screen with the error code 83C0000B. Unfortunately, there appears to be no way for someone to fix a printer broken in this way on their own, partly because factory resetting an HP OfficeJet requires interacting with the printer’s touchscreen display. For the moment, HP customers report the only solution to the problem is to send a broken printer back to the company for service.

Among the affected printers are OfficeJet 902x models, including the Pro 9022e, Pro 9025e, Pro 9020e All-in-One and Pro 9025e All-in-One variants. If you own an OfficeJet printer, for the time being, your best bet is to disconnect your printer from the internet so that it doesn’t automatically download the buggy update.

On Saturday, HP acknowledged the issue and told Bleeping Computer it was working on a fix. “Our teams are working diligently to address the blue screen error affecting a limited number of HP OfficeJet Pro 9020e printers,” the company said. “We are recommending customers experiencing the error to contact our customer support team for assistance: https://support.hp.com.”

This isn’t the first time one of HP’s recent software updates has created a headache for its customers. In March, the company appeared to double down on its unpopular ”dynamic security” policy and began rolling out a security update that saw more of its printers not work with third-party ink cartridges.

At the end of last year, Apple announced iMessage Contact Key Verification, a tool the company said would allow those who face “extraordinary digital threats” to safeguard their conversations from malicious actors. At the time, the company promised the safety feature would arrive sometime in 2023. Now, a little more than two weeks before the start of WWDC 2023, it looks like iMessage Contact Key Verification could arrive with the release of iOS 16.6.

As first reported by MacRumors, Apple began rolling out the first iOS 16.6 beta on Friday, and among the features the release appears to add is iMessage Contact Key Verification. A new option within the Settings app indicates Apple is working on the tool, but, for the time being, enabling Contact Key Verification doesn’t appear to activate the feature. MacRumors speculates that could be because the company has yet to fully implement iMessage Contact Key Verification.

Once it arrives, iMessage Contact Key Verification will, provided everyone in an iMessage conversation has the feature enabled, send an automatic alert when Apple detects someone has added a rogue device to an account. The company envisions the feature protecting activists, government officials and journalists from state-sponsored hackers. It’s one of the last features Apple is expected to add to iOS 16 before the company shifts its full attention to iOS 17.

Every third Thursday of May, the world commemorates Global Accessibility Awareness Day or GAAD. And as has become customary in the last few years, major tech companies are taking this week as a chance to share their latest accessibility-minded products. From Apple and Google to Webex and Adobe, the industry’s biggest players have launched new features to make their products easier to use. Here’s a quick roundup of this week’s GAAD news.

Apple's launches and updates

First up: Apple. The company actually had a huge set of updates to share, which makes sense since it typically releases most of its accessibility-centric news at this time each year. For 2023, Apple is introducing Assistive Access, which is an accessibility setting that, when turned on, changes the home screen for iPhone and iPad to a layout with fewer distractions and icons. You can choose from a row-based or grid-based layout, and the latter would result in a 2x3 arrangement of large icons. You can decide what these are, and most of Apple’s first-party apps can be used here.

The icons themselves are larger than usual, featuring high contrast labels making them more readable. When you tap into an app, a back button appears at the bottom for easier navigation. Assistive Access also includes a new Calls app that combines Phone and FaceTime features into one customized experience. Messages, Camera, Photos and Music have also been tweaked for the simpler interface and they all feature high contrast buttons, large text labels and tools that, according to Apple, "help trusted supporters tailor the experience for the individual they're supporting." The goal is to offer a less-distracting or confusing system to those who may find the typical iOS interface overwhelming.

Apple also launched Live Speech this week, which works on iPhone, iPad and Mac. It will allow users to type what they want to say and have the device read it aloud. It not only works for in-person conversations, but for Phone and FaceTime calls as well. You'll also be able to create shortcuts for phrases you frequently use, like "Hi, can I get a tall vanilla latte?" or "Excuse me, where is the bathroom?" The company also introduced Personal Voice, which lets you create a digital voice that sounds like yours. This could be helpful for those at risk of losing their ability to speak due to conditions that could impact their voice. The setup process includes "reading alongside randomized text prompts for about 15 minutes on iPhone or iPad."

For those with visual impairments, Apple is adding a new Point and Speak feature to the detection mode in Magnifier. This will use an iPhone or iPad's camera, LiDAR scanner and on-device machine learning to understand where a person has positioned their finger and scan the target area for words, before reading them out for the user. For instance, if you hold up your phone and point at different parts on a microwave or washing machine's controls, the system will say what the labels are — like "Add 30 seconds," "Defrost" or "Start."

The company made a slew of other smaller announcements this week, including updates that allow Macs to pair directly with Made-for-iPhone hearing devices, as well as phonetic suggestions for text editing in voice typing.

Google's new accessibility tools

Meanwhile, Google is introducing a new Visual Question and Answer (or VQA) tool in the Lookout app, which uses AI to answer follow-up questions about images. The company's accessibility lead and senior director of Products For All Eve Andersson told Engadget in an interview that VQA is the result of a collaboration between the inclusion and DeepMind teams. 

Google

To use VQA, you'll open Lookout and start the Images mode to scan a picture. After the app tells you what's in the scene, you can ask follow-ups to glean more detail. For example, if Lookout said the image depicts a family having a picnic, you can ask what time of day it is or whether there are trees around them. This lets the user determine how much information they want from a picture, instead of being constrained to an initial description. 

Often, it is tricky to figure out how much detail to include in an image description, since you want to provide enough to be helpful but not so much that you overwhelm the user. For example, "What’s the right amount of detail to give to our users in Lookout?" Andersson said. "You never actually know what they want." Andersson added that AI can help determine the context of why someone is asking for a description or more information and deliver the appropriate info. 

When it launches in the fall, VQA can present a way for the user to decide when to ask for more and when they've learned enough. Of course, since it's powered by AI, the generated data might not be accurate, so there's no guarantee this tool works perfectly, but it's an interesting approach that puts power in users' hands. 

Google is also expanding Live Captions to work in French, Italian and German later this year, as well as bringing the wheelchair-friendly labels for places in Maps to more people around the world. 

Microsoft, Samsung, Adobe and more

Plenty more companies had news to share this week, including Adobe, which is rolling out a feature that uses AI to automate the process of generating tags for PDFs that would make them friendlier for screen readers. This uses Adobe's Sensei AI, and will also indicate the correct reading order. Since this could really speed up the process of tagging PDFs, people and organizations could potentially use the tool to go through stockpiles of old documents to make them more accessible. Adobe is also launching a PDF Accessibility Checker to "enable large organizations to quickly and efficiently evaluate the accessibility of existing PDFs at scale." 

Microsoft also had some small updates to share, specifically around Xbox. It's added new accessibility settings to the Xbox app on PC, including options to disable background images and disable animations, so users can reduce potentially disruptive, confusing or triggering components. The company also expanded its support pages and added accessibility filters to its web store to make it easier to find optimized games.

Meanwhile, Samsung announced this week that it's adding two new levels of ambient sound settings to the Galaxy Buds 2 Pro, which brings the total number of options to five. This would let those who use the earbuds to listen to their environment get greater control over how loud they want the sounds to be. They'll also be able to select different settings for individual ears, as well as choose the levels of clarity and create customized profiles for their hearing.

We also learned that Cisco, the company behind the Webex video conferencing software, is teaming up with speech recognition company VoiceITT to add transcriptions that better support people with non-standard speech. This builds on Webex's existing live translation feature, and uses VoiceITT's AI to familiarize itself with a person's speech patterns to better understand what they want to communicate. Then, it'll establish and transcribe what is said, and the captions will appear in a chat bar during calls. 

Finally, we also saw Mozilla announce that Firefox 113 would be more accessible by enhancing the screen reader experience, while Netflix revealed a sizzle reel showcasing some of its latest assistive features and developments over the past year. In its announcement, Netflix said that while it has "made strides in accessibility, [it knows] there is always more work to be done."

That sentiment is true not just for Netflix, nor the tech industry alone, but also for the entire world. While it's nice to see so many companies take the opportunity this week to release and highlight accessibility-minded features, it's important to remember that inclusive design should not and cannot be a once-a-year effort. I was also glad to see that despite the current fervor around generative AI, most companies did not appear to stuff the buzzword into every assistive feature or announcement this week for no good reason. For example, Andersson said "we're typically thinking about user needs" and adopting a problem-first approach as opposed to focusing on determining where a type of technology can be applied to a solution.

While it's probably at least partially true that announcements around GAAD are a bit of a PR and marketing game, ultimately some of the tools launched today can actually improve the lives of people with disabilities or different needs. I call that a net win.

Google recently announced that it will start deleting accounts that have been inactive for two years starting in December this year. The move was supposed to cover all its products, including Gmail, Drive, Docs, YouTube, Google Photos, Meet and Calendar. But now the tech giant has updated its blog post (as noticed by TechCrunch) announcing the purge to say that it does "not have plans to delete accounts with YouTube videos at this time."

The tech giant positioned security as its main reason for deleting inactive accounts. It said internal analysis showed that old, abandoned accounts are around 10 times less likely to have two-factor enabled. That makes them vulnerable to bad actors who could use them for identity theft and other nefarious purposes. One could also come to the conclusion, however, that deleting old accounts would free up space in Google's servers. 

After the announcement went out, critics raised concerns that the move could wipe out some important pieces of internet history. Old YouTube videos, including the very first one, would disappear, along with videos uploaded by deceased users. Google didn't say why it ultimately changed its mind, but YouTube videos are safe. For now.

As for the rest of its products, the company intends to send out warning emails to accounts in danger of being deleted and to their recovery emails by the end of 2023. Those accounts will be deactivated within 60 days if their owners don't log in after receiving the warning email, though users will have 60 more days (for a total of four months) to recover their accounts before they're permanently gone. 

Apple is famous for being protective of its projects and for expecting secrecy from its workers. Now, according to The Wall Street Journal, the tech giant is concerned about the possibility of its employees inadvertently leaking proprietary data while using ChatGPT. To prevent that scenario from happening, Apple has reportedly restricted the use of ChatGPT and other AI tools, such as GitHub's Copilot that can autocomplete code. The Journal also says that Apple is working on large language models of its own. 

In early April, The Economist Koreareported that three Samsung employees shared confidential information with ChatGPT. Apparently, one employee asked the chatbot to check database source code for errors, while another asked it to optimize code. The third employee reportedly uploaded a recorded meeting onto the chatbot and asked it to write minutes. It's unclear how Apple is restricting use of generative AI tools and if it's prohibiting their use completely. But in Samsung's case, the company restricted the length of employees' ChatGPT prompts to a kilobyte or 1024 characters of text. 

Large language models like OpenAI's become better the more people use them, because users' interactions are sent back to developers for further training. ChatGPT's terms and conditions, for instance, state that conversations "may be reviewed by [its] AI trainers to improve [its] systems." For a secretive company like Apple, limiting their use doesn't come as a surprise. That said, OpenAI introduced a new privacy control setting in April that enables users to switch off their chat histories so that their conversations can't be used for training. The company made it available after it had to pull ChatGPT for a few hours due to a bug that showed users other people's chat histories. 

Not much is known about Apple's LLM projects at the moment, if there truly are any, but all its AI efforts are under the supervision of John Giannandrea, who used to lead Google's search and AI teams. The tech giant has also snapped up a number of AI startups over the past few years. When asked about AI in an interview recently, Apple chief Tim Cook hinted that the tech giant is taking a cautious approach by saying: "I do think it's very important to be deliberate and thoughtful in how you approach these things."

Horror collection Layers of Fearalready had a concrete release date of June 15th for many platforms, but now the day one launch also includes Apple Mac computers. This is only for recently-released models with Apple-manufactured silicon chips, but it’s certainly a feather in the company’s cap, as Apple has been busy trying to further its gaming ambitions.

The collection includes full remakes of the original Layers of Fear and Layers of Fear 2, including DLC for both titles and an original chapter made just for this release. These remakes aren’t simple upscales, as each title was recreated in Unreal Engine 5 and include all manner of modern graphical touches, though it’s still unknown if the Mac version will handle advanced techniques like ray-tracing. Developer Bloober Team has stated that it made full use of Apple’s proprietary Metal 3 upscaling tech.

“Apple silicon has transformed gaming on Mac — delivering incredible graphics performance, new capabilities, along with extraordinary battery life,” said Bloober Team CEO Piotr Babieno.

In addition to the Mac platform, Layers of Fear is launching on PC via Steam, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. In other words, it’ll be playable on just about everything but a Switch. Bloober Team is also porting former Xbox-exclusive The Medium to Apple Macs later this summer. The number of available modern titles on Apple computers is still paltry compared to other platforms, but silicon Macs have gotten some recent high-profile releases like Resident Evil Village. Some games, like Grid Legends and No Man’s Sky, have been announced for the platform but have yet to materialize.

Apple has one more batch of major OS updates in store ahead of WWDC. The company has released iOS 16.5, iPadOS 16.5 and macOS 13.4 updates that all have an Apple News section dedicated to sports. You can keep up with rankings, scores and stories without having to wade through other articles. There are likewise score and schedule cards in News that jump directly to pages for particular games.

Apple TV 4K users, meanwhile, get a Multiview feature that shows up to four sports streams at once in the TV app. That includes Friday Night Baseball games as well as MLS Season Pass matches, but we wouldn't count on third-party service support.

Other improvements aren't quite so dramatic. Both iOS 16.5 and watchOS 9.5 respectively add Pride wallpaper and watch face options (shown above). You can also expect the usual round of bug fixes, including issues with CarPlay and Spotlight on iOS as well as Screen Time syncing on multiple platforms.

This probably won't be the last substantial update before iOS 17. MacRumorsunderstands that Apple is privately testing iOS 16.6, and might offer a public beta in the near future. Whatever happens, it's evident Apple is winding down work on its current software as it prepares to deliver major updates this fall.

Apple makes some of the best earbuds around for iOS users and now you can pick up a pair of AirPods for less than they'd usually set you back. The second-generation AirPods Pro have dropped back down to their lowest price to date. You can currently snap up a pair for $200, which is $50 off the usual price.

We found that the latest AirPods Pro, which Apple released last year, boast better audio quality than the original model. Thanks to the more powerful H2 chip, they have an excellent transparency mode and good active noise cancellation (ANC). Being able to move between Apple devices seamlessly is a plus point as well. On the downside, we found that the new touch controls took a bit of getting used to, while the so-so battery life didn't blow us away. Overall, we gave the second-gen AirPods Pro a score of 88 in our review.

Meanwhile, you can pick up standard AirPods for less cash than usual. The second-gen AirPods are $99 ($30 off), while the third-gen model is $159 ($10 off). We feel that the third-gen AirPods are better than the previous model in almost every respect thanks to features such as improved fit and audio quality, as well as a longer battery life. Water resistance is definitely welcome too. As a result, we gave the third-gen AirPods a score of 88.

Although they're four years old, the second-gen earbuds shouldn't be dismissed entirely, especially if you're budget conscious. These AirPods can still pair with your iPhone in a snap and switch to other Apple devices with ease when you need them to. As with the third-gen AirPods, there's support for hands-free Siri.

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

Earlier this year, Microsoft signed deals with a number of game streaming services to bring Xbox-exclusive titles to its rivals. Today we see the first fruits from the relationship ‘twixt Microsoft and NVIDIA as Gears 5 makes its bow on GeForce Now. The PC version of the title is available to play right now, with NVIDIA reminding users that it’s offering discounted signups between now and May 21st. And that higher-paying GeForce Now users can play the title in 1080p at 60fps, or in 4K 120fps if they’ve signed up to Ultimate. NVIDIA added that we should expect to see Deathloop, Grounded and Pentiment — three more Microsoft-owned titles — added to the service on May 25th.

All of this is part of Microsoft’s work to convince regulators to approve its mega-bucks purchase of Activision Blizzard. In order to convince officials that the vast trove of titles it’ll control should it be permitted to control the Call of Duty maker, it’s signed 10-year deals with rival platforms. That includes Nware, Boosteroid and NVIDIA, as well as a pledge to put Call of Duty on Nintendo’s consoles for a decade with a guarantee of full feature and content parity. That’s satisfied some bodies, like the EU, but not the UK, which feels that Microsoft’s potential control of the cloud gaming market could kill it before it flourishes.

If you have a Google account you haven’t used in a while but want to hang onto, you may want to log back in. The company announced today that it will begin deleting accounts that have been inactive for at least two years. Google frames it as a privacy-enhancing move, but it’s easy to also see it as a cost-cutting measure to free up storage on Google’s servers.

Starting later this year, anyone with an account that’s been inactive for two years will receive an email warning them that it will be deactivated if they don’t log in within 60 days. After deactivation, you’ll have another 60 days to sign in before the company permanently deletes it. So, in total, that’s about four months’ worth of notice to recover your account, which sounds reasonable enough. Google says the earliest it will begin deleting accounts is December 2023.

The company will send warning emails to both the account in danger of being deleted and any recovery emails you added. The deactivation and deletion will apply to everything you use that account for, including Gmail, Drive, Docs, YouTube, Google Photos, Meet and Calendar. It only applies to personal accounts, so work or school emails will be spared the culling.

Although the company’s stated privacy motive may be a convenient way to avoid saying, “We want to save money,” there is some substance to that framing. In addition to not having up-to-date passwords, abandoned accounts are ten times less likely to have two-factor authentication set up, making them more vulnerable to hijacking.

Google has a web tool to simplify avoiding account deletion. The company’s Inactive Account Manager can warn you more frequently about dormant accounts while letting you decide what happens to your data. There, you can choose trusted contacts to alert or even download your account data if it’s in danger of deactivation. And in case it ever does get axed, you can plan ahead by using Google’s age-old Takeout feature that lets you view and export all your data.