Quality assurance workers at ZeniMax Studios today voted in favor of forming a union with Communications Workers of America — and ZeniMax's parent company, Microsoft, didn't stand in the way. Microsoft formally recognized ZeniMax Workers United/CWA alongside today's vote, making this the largest union in the video game industry and the first US union at Microsoft overall.

About 300 ZeniMax staff members were involved in the unionization effort, which was brewing for months before going public in early December. This was around the time QA testers at another major video game studio, Blizzard Albany, voted to unionize with CWA. The Blizzard Albany union is the second at parent company Activision Blizzard, after QA staff at Raven Software voted to organize in May 2022.

The employees behind ZeniMax Workers United/CWA argue that the union will help put an end to sudden periods of crunch, make pay more equitable, and improve communication with management, among other workplace benefits. ZeniMax Studios specializes in online experiences and is responsible for Elder Scrolls Online. The studio was absorbed by Microsoft in March 2021 as part of the broader ZeniMax Media acquisition, a $7.5 billion deal that brought Bethesda and other prominent development houses under the Xbox banner.

Microsoft is currently attempting to acquire — emphasis on attempting — Activision Blizzard, which would tie all of these unionization campaigns together. Activision Blizzard has actively tried to quell organization efforts, while Microsoft in June said it would respect all unionization efforts at Activision Blizzard. The ZeniMax vote was the first big test of Microsoft's neutrality when facing internal unionization.

If the RTX 4080’s $1,199 price point has stopped you from jumping on NVIDIA’s Ada Lovelace architecture, you can now access the power of one of the most powerful GPUs on the market through the company’s cloud gaming service. Alongside the RTX 4070 Ti (neé RTX 4080), NVIDIA is introducing a new GeForce Now tier. Set to replace the platform’s existing RTX 3080 plan, the new Ultimate tier grants access to servers with RTX 4080 GPUs.

You can expect a few upgrades thanks to the switch. To start, you can play games at up to 240 frames per second, with full support for hardware-based ray tracing and NVIDIA’s recently announced DLSS 3 frame generation technology. Provided you own a G Sync monitor and you’re playing a game that supports the company’s Reflex Low Latency Mode, you can also take advantage of GeForce Now’s new frame pacing technology. According to NVIDIA, the tech significantly reduces input lag over the cloud. We’ve reached out to NVIDIA to find out if those with G-Sync Compatible monitors can take advantage of the feature. NVIDIA is also adding support for ultrawide resolutions, and those with 4K displays can now play games at up to 120 frames per second.

If you’re already an RTX 3080 member, NVIDIA will automatically upgrade your account to the new tier at no additional cost. The company says RTX 4080 servers will start coming online later this month in North America and Europe, with availability in other regions to follow over the next few months. Pricing will remain at $20 per month or $100 for six months, as was the case with the past RTX 3080 plan. NVIDIA will also continue to offer $10 per month Priority memberships.

Normally, Dell’s Alienware division gets most of the attention when it comes to gaming notebooks. But with their revamped designs, the new G15 and G16 prove you don’t need to spend a ton of money to get an awesome-looking system.

Unlike Alienware laptops that appear as if they were beamed down from outer space, Dell’s latest G-series gaming notebooks seem to draw inspiration from gadgets in 80s sci-fi movies. You get simple lines with hard edges and bold two-tone paint jobs with neon/pastel accents. It’s the kind of style that makes me want to put on some synthwave and fire up F-Zero. And while the colors may change on final retail units, I appreciate that Dell is even taking the time to paint small details like the radiator fins inside each laptop’s vents.

Another nice touch is the way Dell arranged ports on the G-series. Connectors for stuff like power and HDMI 2.1 that you probably won’t need to adjust very often are in back, which helps keep clutter to a minimum. And then on the sides you have access to a 3.5mm audio jack, Ethernet and two USB 3.2 Type-A ports, so you can easily plug in peripherals like a headset, mouse or thumb drive. I just wish Dell has swapped the position of the side-mounted Ethernet jack and the lone USB-C port in back for even better usability.

As for specs, both systems are well equipped considering their prices. The G15 will start at $849 for a 13th-gen Intel Core i5-13450HX CPU, 8GB of DDR5 RAM, and a 120Hz FHD non-touch display. You also have a selection of RTX 40-series GPUs from Nvidia with additional options like a slightly faster 165Hz screen and up to 2TB of NVMe storage.

Sam Rutherford/Engadget

The larger G16 will start at $1,499 with the same Intel Core i5-13450HX chip, a higher-res 165Hz 2560 x 1600 screen, 8GB of DDR5 RAM, and 256GB of storage. And like its smaller sibling, you can upgrade components like the GPU, memory (up to 32GB) or the display (to a faster 240Hz panel). Both systems can even be configured with larger 86 WHr batteries in case the standard 56 WHr doesn’t cut it.

The two small cons I noticed are that weighing 5.84 and 6.01 pounds respectively, the G15 and G16 are a bit on the heavy side. I’m also slightly disappointed to see Dell go with 720p webcams on both models. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, all new laptops should have at least 1080p cameras, regardless of price.

Sam Rutherford/Engadget

Unfortunately, the models Dell demoed were non-functional pre-production units, so I didn’t have a chance to check out how smooth games ran or the single-zone RGB backlit keyboard. But for relatively affordable systems, I think Dell has created a really nice balance of style and performance.

Both the G15 and G16 are expected to go on sale sometime in Q1 2023, though there’s no word on pricing yet. Additionally, for people looking for non-Intel based configs, the company says there will be versions of both systems with AMD chips available slightly later in Q2.

Google has agreed to pay $9.5 million to settle a lawsuit brought by Washington DC Attorney General Karl Racine, who accused the company earlier this year of "deceiving users and invading their privacy." Google has also agreed to change some of its practices, primarily concerning how it informs users about collecting, storing and using their location data.

“Google leads consumers to believe that consumers are in control of whether Google collects and retains information about their location and how that information is used,” the complaint, which Racine filed in January, read. “In reality, consumers who use Google products cannot prevent Google from collecting, storing and profiting from their location.”

Racine's office also accused Google of employing "dark patterns," which are design choices intended to deceive users into carrying out actions that don't benefit them. Specifically, the AG's office claimed that Google repeatedly prompted users to switch in location tracking in certain apps and informed them that certain features wouldn't work properly if location tracking wasn't on. Racine and his team found that location data wasn't even needed for the app in question. They asserted that Google made it "impossible for users to opt out of having their location tracked."

The $9.5 million payment is a paltry one for Google. Last quarter, it took parent company Alphabet under 20 minutes to make that much in revenue. The changes that the company will make to its practices as part of the settlement may have a bigger impact.

Folks who currently have certain location settings on will receive notifications telling them how they can disable each setting, delete the associated data and limit how long Google can keep that information. Users who set up a new Google account will be informed which location-related account settings are on by default and offered the chance to opt out.

Google will need to maintain a webpage that details its location data practices and policies. This will include ways for users to access their location settings and details about how each setting impacts Google's collection, retention or use of location data.

Moreover, Google will be prevented from sharing a person's precise location data with a third-party advertiser without the user's explicit consent. The company will need to delete location data "that came from a device or from an IP address in web and app activity within 30 days" of obtaining the information

"Given the vast level of tracking and surveillance that technology companies can embed into their widely used products, it is only fair that consumers be informed of how important user data, including information about their every move, is gathered, tracked, and utilized by these companies," Racine said in a statement. "Significantly, this resolution also provides users with the ability and choice to opt of being tracked, as well as restrict the manner in which user information may be shared with third parties."

Engadget has contacted Google for comment.

You can get the latest MacBook Air on sale right now — even better, the discounted variant is the one with the bigger storage capacity. The silver 2022 MacBook Air with 512GB of internal storage and Apple's M2 processor is currently listed for $1,279 on Amazon, which is $220 off (or 15 percent less than) its retail price. That's a new low for the model. While the other colors are not quite as deeply discounted, you can still get the midnight and the starlight color options of the 512GB laptop for $1,300. 

We gave the 2022 MacBook Air a score of 96 in our review and found it far speedier than the previous model, which we already thought was "stunningly fast." The laptop mostly shines thanks to Apple's M2 chip that the tech giant had designed to have double the memory bandwidth of the M1 and to be able to support up to 24GB of RAM. 

The new MacBook Air is far thinner than its predecessor, and we even found it to be more portable than the 12.9-inch iPad Pro that weighs about 3 pounds when attached to a Smart Keyboard. Its 13.6-inch Liquid Retina screen also looks more expansive than the previous Air's due to Apple bumping up its brightness to 500 nits and making its bezel a bit thinner. To note, we found its display to be on par with the more expensive 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros, except without Apple's ProMotion 120Hz refresh rate technology. 

The Air also comes with the larger MacBook Pros' improved speaker technology that supports Spatial Audio and Dolby Atmos. In addition, it has the same keyboard and trackpad as the Pro laptops' and comes with two USB-C ports, as well as a MagSafe connector for power. During our tests, the Air lasted for 16 hours and 30 minutes on a single charge — enough time to get through a day's work. While the 512GB MacBook Air is still few hundred dollars more expensive than the 256GB version, which starts at $923 right now, it may be the perfect time to get one if you're looking for an ultraportable with a bigger storage capacity.

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On Tuesday, workers at Proletariat, the Boston-based studio Blizzard bought earlier this year to support World of Warcraft development, announced they recently filed for a union election with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Proletariat is the third Activision Blizzard studio to announce a union drive in 2022, but where past campaigns at Raven Software and Blizzard Albany involved the quality assurance workers at those studios, the effort at Proletariat includes all non-management workers. The 57 workers who want to form the Proletariat Workers Alliance include animators, game designers and software engineers. The group seeks representation from the Communications Workers of America (CWA), the union that helped QA staff at Raven Software and Blizzard Albany organize.

“Everyone in the video game industry knows Activision Blizzard’s reputation for creating a hostile work environment, so earlier this year, when we heard that Blizzard was planning to acquire Proletariat, we started to discuss how we could protect the great culture we have created here,” said Dustin Yost, a software engineer at Proletariat. “By forming a union and negotiating a contract, we can make sure that we are able to continue doing our best work and create innovative experiences at the frontier of game development.”

The Proletariat Workers Alliance asked Activision Blizzard to recognize their union voluntarily. According to the group, the company has yet to respond to the request. Activision Blizzard did not immediately respond to Engadget’s comment request.

The workers at Proletariat say they aim to preserve the studio’s “progressive, human-first” benefits, including its flexible paid time off policy and robust healthcare options. Additionally, they want to protect the studio from crunch, the practice of forcing compulsory overtime during the development of a game. They’re asking management to commit to a no-mandatory overtime policy and implement better pay and health protections for workers who agree to voluntary overtime. The Proletariat Workers Alliance says their colleagues also shouldn’t be penalized during performance reviews for not taking on extra work.

In June, Microsoft announced it would respect all unionization efforts at Activision Blizzard following the close of its $68.7 billion deal to buy the publisher. Earlier this month, the FTC sued the tech giant to block the merger.

Apple has stopped rolling out an optional Home app upgrade after users began reporting issues with the software. "We temporarily removed the option to upgrade to the new Home architecture," the company says on a support page spotted by MacRumors. "The option to upgrade will return soon. If you already upgraded, you are unaffected by this change."

Released as a part of iOS 16.2 and macOS Ventura 13.1 on December 13th, the recalled update was an upgrade to HomeKit's underlying architecture. Apple said the rewrite would make the platform "more reliable and efficient." However, some of those who installed the software quickly encountered issues, including select Siri terms not working correctly and their smart home devices not showing up within the Home app. MacRumors was one of the first publications to spot that Apple had removed the option to install the upgrade. The company later confirmed the move after The Verge contacted it.

"We are aware of an issue that may impact the ability for users to share the Home within the Home app. A fix will be available soon," an Apple spokesperson told the outlet. "In the meantime, we've temporarily removed the option to upgrade to the new Home architecture. Users who have already upgraded will not be impacted." If you've already installed the new architecture, you'll need to wait for Apple to release a fix for the software; there's no option to revert to the older framework.

The iPhone 14 Pro’s A16 Bionic chip uses a similar architecture to the A15 in the iPhone 13 Pro, but that was only Apple’s fallback plan, according to a report from The Information. The company wanted to add a next-generation GPU that supports ray tracing, but the silicon team discovered crucial design mistakes late in development. It allegedly had to scrap its plans and opt for the A16 we got.

The botched plans can reportedly be traced back to Apple’s silicon engineers being “too ambitious with adding new features.” The planned 2022 silicon would have supported ray tracing, the technique that makes light in video games behave as it does in real life. Software simulations had suggested it was feasible, and the company moved forward with prototyping. But test hardware drew more power than the engineers had expected, which would have hurt battery life and overheated the device.

Because Apple caught the mistakes late in development, it had to scrap the plans for this generation and opt instead for the A16 that shipped this fall. (In Apple’s September keynote, rather than puffing up the new chip’s monumental gains, as it typically does, it only briefly mentioned that the GPU had 50 percent more memory bandwidth.) The report’s sources described the screwup as “unprecedented in the group’s history.”

The Information's report connects this incident to bigger-picture struggles within the Apple Silicon team. It details the effective but highly demanding leadership under the senior vice president of Hardware Technologies, Johny Srouji. He runs the group “like a well-oiled machine,” but it’s also struggled with the limits of Moore’s law and a talent exodus to startups and rival chip makers. It allegedly lost the most talent to Nuvia, founded by former Apple chip designer Gerard Williams III — a well-liked leader among Apple’s silicon engineers. (Qualcomm bought Nuvia in 2021.) The designer who replaced Williams, Mike Filippo, then “clashed with engineers” before leaving to join Microsoft. Apple hasn’t yet replaced him. Additionally, the company reportedly tried to limit the talent exodus by showing presentations to engineers highlighting the riskiness of working for chip startups, warning that most fail.

Microsoft has filed a formal response to a Federal Trade Commission antitrust lawsuit that seeks to block it from buying Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion. It pushed back against the agency's claims that the takeover would harm competition in the gaming industry. The company argued that consumers would benefit. "The commission cannot meet its burden of showing that the transaction would leave consumers worse off, because the transaction will allow consumers to play Activision’s games on new platforms and access them in new and more affordable ways," Microsoft wrote.

The FTC asserted earlier this month that, should the deal close, it "would enable Microsoft to suppress competitors to its Xbox gaming consoles and its rapidly growing subscription content and cloud-gaming business." The agency pointed to Microsoft making some titles from Bethesda (whose parent company ZeniMax it bought last year) exclusive to its own platforms.

In the filing, Microsoft acknowledged that it planned to make three future Bethesda titles exclusive to Xbox and PC. The names of those games were redacted, but Starfield and Redfall will only be available on Xbox, PC and Xbox Cloud Gaming, while the FTC claimed in its complaint that Microsoft plans to make Elder Scrolls VI an exclusive as well.

One of the major sticking points about the deal is the future of Call of Duty. In an attempt to appease regulators, Microsoft has pledged to keep Call of Duty on competitors' platforms for at least 10 years if the acquisition closes, and to bring the blockbuster franchise to Nintendo consoles. Sony hasn't taken Microsoft up on that deal, however.

"The acquisition of a single game by the third-place console manufacturer cannot upend a highly competitive industry. That is particularly so when the manufacturer has made clear it will not withhold the game," Microsoft wrote. "The fact that Xbox’s dominant competitor has thus far refused to accept Xbox’s proposal does not justify blocking a transaction that will benefit consumers."

Microsoft and Activision Blizzard both claim that keeping Call of Duty away from other platforms wouldn't make sense. Activision said in its own filing that making the franchise exclusive "would be disastrous for Xbox," as it would lose billions in game sales and give up "a massive portion of the gamers that Activision has worked so hard to attract and retain." It added that "in a world with nearly unlimited gaming alternatives, making Call of Duty exclusive is not a plausible outcome."

Both companies took issue with the FTC, with Microsoft claiming that its procedures are unconstitutional. "The structure of these administrative proceedings, in which the commission both initiates and finally adjudicates the complaint against Microsoft, violates Microsoft's Fifth Amendment Due Process right to adjudication before a neutral arbiter," Microsoft said in reference to the agency's decision to file the complaint in its own administrative court, rather than in a federal one. The company also argued that hearing the case in the FTC's administrative court "violates Article III of the US Constitution and the separation of powers."

Activision asserted that by disregarding the supposed benefits to consumers and focusing "on supposed harms to Xbox's deep-pocketed competitors," the FTC was straying from the "underlying purpose" of antitrust laws to protect competition instead of competitors. It said the agency was "blinded by ideological skepticism of high-value technology deals and by complaints from competitors" and that it "lost sight of the realities of the intensely competitive gaming industry."

Nevertheless, Microsoft wants to agree on conditions with the FTC and other regulators that will lead to them rubberstamping the deal. “Even with confidence in our case, we remain committed to creative solutions with regulators that will protect competition, consumers and workers in the tech sector. As we’ve learned from our lawsuits in the past, the door never closes on the opportunity to find an agreement that can benefit everyone,” Microsoft president and vice chair Brad Smith said.

"There is no sensible, legitimate reason for our transaction to be prevented from closing. Our industry has enormous competition and few barriers to entry. We have seen more devices than ever before enabling players a wide range of choices to play games," Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick said in a statement to Engadget. "Engines and tools are freely available to developers large and small. The breadth of distribution options for games has never been more widespread. We believe we will prevail on the merits of the case.”

The deadline for the acquisition to close is in July. If it hasn't done so by then, Microsoft and Activision will need to renegotiate the deal or abandon it — Microsoft would then face a breakup fee of as much as $3 billion. As Axios notes, though, the FTC's antitrust case is set to go before its administrative court on August 2nd. In the meantime, the agency could still seek a preliminary injunction in federal court to stop the deal from closing.

The proposed acquisition is also facing scrutiny from regulators in the UK and the European Union. The jurisdictions' respective competition agencies are expected to issue rulings on the deal in the first half of 2023.

Google has announced that two of its latest privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs), including one that blurs objects in a video, will be provided to anyone for free via open source. The new tools are part of Google's Protected Computing initiative designed to transform "how, when and where data is processed to technically ensure its privacy and safety," the company said.

The first is an internal project called Magritte, now out on Github, which uses machine learning to detect objects and apply a blur as soon as they appear on screen. It can disguise arbitrary objects like license plates, tattoos and more. "This code is especially useful for video journalists who want to provide increased privacy assurances," Google wrote in the blog. "By using this open-source code, videographers can save time in blurring objects from a video, while knowing that the underlying ML algorithm can perform detection across a video with high-accuracy."

The other with the unwieldy name "Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) Transpiler, allows developers to perform computations on encrypted data without being able to access personally identifiable information. Google says it can help industries like financial services, healthcare and government, "where a robust security guarantee around the processing of sensitive data is of highest importance."

Google notes that PETs are starting to enter the mainstream after being mostly an academic exercise. The White House recently touted the technology, saying "it will allow researchers, physicians, and others permitted access to gain insights from sensitive data without ever having access to the data itself." Google noted that both the US and UK governments are held a contest this year to develop PET solutions around financial crime and public health emergencies.