Joseph James O'Connor has pleaded guilty to playing a role in various cybercrime activities, including the July 2020 hack that took over hundreds of high-profile Twitter accounts. O'Connor, who's known by the name PlugwalkJoe online, was originally from Liverpool, but he was extradited from Spain to the US in April. If you'll recall, the perpetrators of the 2020 Twitter hack hijacked accounts owned by popular personalities, including Bill Gates, Barack Obama and Elon Musk, and promoted crypto scams under their names. In 2021, Graham Ivan Clark, the supposed teenage mastermind behind the breach, pleaded guilty in return for a three-year prison sentence. 

According to the Justice Department, O'Connor communicated with his co-conspirators in that Twitter breach regarding purchasing unauthorized access to Twitter accounts. He allegedly purchased access to at least one Twitter account himself for $10,000. In addition, he was also apparently involved in the hack of a TikTok account with millions of followers, as well as a Snapchat account, via SIM swapping. In both cases, O'Connor and his co-conspirators stole sensitive personal information from the victims and then threatened to release them to the public. While the DOJ didn't identify victims in those cases, The Guardian says they were named in press reports as TikTok star Addison Rae and actor Bella Thorne.

From March 2019 until May 2019, O'Connor was also allegedly involved in the infiltration of a Manhattan-based crypto company to steal $794,000 worth of cryptocurrency. They used SIM swapping to target three of the company's executives and successfully pulled it off with one of them. Using the compromised executive's credentials, they were able to gain unauthorized access to the company's accounts and computer systems. They then laundered the stolen cryptocurrency by transferring them multiple times and using crypto exchanges. 

O'Connor has pleaded guilty to a lengthy list of charges, including conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering, both of which carry a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison. He is now scheduled for sentencing on June 23rd. 

Uber has started offering domestic and international flight bookings in the UK and will continue rolling it out across the whole region over the coming weeks, according to the Financial Times. The company's general manager for the UK, Andrew Brem, told the publication that this is "the latest and most ambitious step" it has taken to achieve its goal to become a wider travel booking platform. 

Uber first revealed its plans to add train, bus and flight bookings to its UK app in April last year and launched the first two options a few months later. Brem said train bookings have been "incredibly popular" so far and have grown 40 percent every month since they became available, though he didn't give the Times concrete ticket sales numbers. 

For its flights, the company has teamed up with travel booking agency Hopper. The Times says Uber will take a small commission from each sale and could add a booking fee on top of its offerings in the future. It's unclear how much the company's cut actually is, but it charges its partner drivers 25 percent on all fares. As the Times notes, offering flight bookings could also help grow Uber's main ride-hailing business even further, since users are likely to book rides to and from the airport through the service, as well. 

Although flight bookings are only available in the UK at the moment, the region — one of its biggest markets outside North America — only serves as a testing ground for Uber's plans. Brem told the publication that the company is hoping to expand flight offerings to more countries in the future, but it has no solid plans yet. Uber did offer $200 chopper rides in the US back in 2019, but that service was discontinued in the midst of pandemic-related lockdowns. 

MediaTek has a simple answer to Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 you see in many gaming phones: deliver an uprated version of last year's high-end hardware. The brand has unveiled a Dimensity 9200+ system-on-chip with improvements that will be particularly noticeable with games. You'll find higher clock speeds for the main Cortex-X3 core (up from 3.05GHz to 3.35GHz), three Cortex-A715 cores (from 2.85GHz to 3GHz) and four Cortex-A510 efficiency cores (1.8GHz to 2GHz). More importantly, the company says it has "boosted" the Immortalis-G715 graphics by 17 percent — games that were borderline playable before should be smoother.

The Dimensity 9200+ is built using TSMC's newest 4-nanometer process, potentially extending battery life and allowing for cooler, slimmer phones. The WiFi 7 support, AI processing unit and image signal processor are unchanged, although there's not much room to complain. WiFi 7 still isn't a finished standard, for example, and routers that support it are still extremely rare.

You won't have to wait long to see the first phones based on this chip. MediaTek expects the first Dimensity 9200+ phones to launch later this month, although it hasn't named customers as of this writing. The question is whether or not this refresh is enough. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 has only a slight edge over the regular 9200, so a higher-clocked 9200+ might emerge victorious. However, Qualcomm doesn't usually sit still — it likes to ship mid-cycle upgrades of its own.

Nonetheless, this may be an important release if you're a mobile gamer. This gives Qualcomm fresh competition in the Android gaming world. That, in turn, could lead to both more variety in phones as well as more aggressive pricing.

Google and WhatsApp have confirmed they are aware of a bug that makes it appear as if WhatsApp is accessing phones’ microphones unnecessarily on some Android devices. The issue first cropped up a month ago, but gained new attention after a Twitter engineer tweeted about it in a post that was boosted by Elon Musk.

An image shared by Twitter engineer Foad Dabiri appeared to show that the microphone had been repeatedly running in the background while he wasn’t using the app. He tweeted a screenshot from Android’s Privacy Dashboard, which tracks how often apps access a device’s microphone and camera.

Musk retweeted Dabiri’s post, saying “WhatsApp cannot be trusted.” Incidentally, Musk is known to be a fan of Signal, and has said encrypted direct messages on Twitter could roll out as soon as this month. The company didn’t respond to a request for comment.

In a statement shared on Twitter, WhatsApp suggested it was an Android-related issue, and not a result of inappropriate microphone access by the messaging app “We believe this is a bug on Android that mis-attributes information in their Privacy Dashboard and have asked Google to investigate and remediate,” the company said.

Dabiri is not the first to notice the issue. WhatsApp blogwabetainfohighlighted the bug a month ago, describing it at the time as “a false positive” affecting owners of some Pixel and Samsung devices. They added that restarting the phone may be a possible fix. Meanwhile, Google has said little about what could be causing the discrepancy, but confirmed it’s looking into the matter. "We are aware of the issue and are working closely with WhatsApp to investigate,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement.

It has been more than five years since Beats last refreshed its top-end Studio headphones, but a new model could be on the way. According to 9to5Mac, Apple is “about” to launch a set of Beats Studio Pro headphones. The new model reportedly features a custom Beats chip that promises improved active noise cancellation and transparency mode performance. For the first time, the Studio line may also feature personalized spatial audio. Additionally, 9to5Mac speculates the new model will come with a USB-C port for fast charging.

Visually, the headphones look similar to the current Studio3 model, though it appears Apple has done away with the “Studio” branding found on the side of those headphones. Based on codenames found by 9to5Mac in the internal files for iOS 16.5’s release candidate, Apple collaborated with fashion designer Samuel Ross, best known for starting the clothing label A-Cold-Wall, on the design of the Beats Studio Pro. Images the outlet found in those same files suggest Apple will offer the headphones in four colorways: blue, black, brown and white.

It’s unclear if Apple intends for the Beats Studio Pro to replace the $349 Studio3 headphones, or if the company plans to market them as a more premium offering. According to 9to5, Apple is also working on a set of Studio Buds+. They will reportedly support audio sharing, automatic device switching and Hey Siri integration. The outlet suggests both products will arrive in stores soon.

Japanese developer Game Freak is best known for a little franchise called Pokémon, but throughout the years it has dabbled in other genres, like the strategy title Little Town Hero and the rhythm-based platformer HarmoKnight. Now, the company is betting big on a brand-new action adventure IP codenamed Project Bloom.

Game Freak is teaming up with a Take-Two Interactive publishing label called Private Division. You may not recognize the company by name, but it’s been behind a slew of well-regarded titles throughout the years, like Outer Worlds, Kerbal Space Program, Rollerdrome and OlliOlli World, among others. As for Game Freak, last year’s Pokémon Legends: Arceus proved it could handle open worlds and action-heavy gameplay. The company says Project Bloom is a “bold and tonally different” IP from its prior work.

Not much is known about the game, other than some concept art and a short video announcing the partnership between the two developers. Also, we won’t be playing this anytime soon, as the “sweeping new action-adventure game” isn’t slated for release until Take-Two's 2026 financial year, which runs from April 1, 2025, to March 31, 2026.

It might be surprising to hear that Take-Two Interactive is publishing the game, and not Nintendo, which has been Game Freak's partner on Pokémon for over 25 years. While Pokémon is co-owned by Nintendo, Game Freak is an independent developer. To that end, no gaming console has been mentioned as a home for the forthcoming title. As the game won't be released for three years, the home console landscape is likely to look different than it does now. At the very least, the long-rumored followup to the Switch should be out by then.

Years before everyone was being impressed with the human-like text output of ChatGPT and other generative AI systems, IBM's Watson was blowing our minds on Jeopardy. IBM's cognitive computing project famously dominated its human opponents, but the company had much larger long-term goals, such as using Watson's ability to simulate a human thought process to help doctors diagnose patients and recommend treatments. That didn't work out. Now, IBM is pivoting its supercomputer platform into Watsonx, an AI development studio packed with foundation and open-source models companies can use to train their own AI platforms.

If that sounds familiar, it may be because NVIDIA recently announced a similar service with its AI Foundations program. Both platforms are designed to give enterprises a way to build, train, scale and deploy an AI platform. IBM says Watsonx will provide AI builders with a robust series of training models with an auditable data lineage — ranging from datasets focused on automatically generating code for developers or for handling industry-specific databases to climate datasets designed to help organizations plan for natural disasters.

IBM has already built an example of what the platform can do with that latter dataset in collaboration with NASA, using the geospatial foundation model to convert satellite images into maps that track changes from natural disasters and climate change.

Reimagining Watson as an AI development studio might lack the pizazz of a headline-grabbing supercomputer that can beat humans on a TV quiz show — but the original vision of Watson was out of reach for the average person. Depending on how companies use IBM's new AI training program, you may find yourself interacting with a part of Watson yourself sometime in the near future.

Watsonx is expected to be available in stages, starting with the Watsonx.ai studio in July, and expanding with new features debuting later this year.

A Pokémon-inspired art collection is visiting Los Angeles this summer. The Pokémon × Kogei craftwork exhibition is a collaboration between The Pokémon Company and LA’s Japan House, a space dedicated to spotlighting Japanese culture. The collection includes more than 70 pieces of art crafted by 20 artists, each piece filled to the brim with pocket monsters.

The exhibition focuses on crafts over drawings and paintings, as the art spans multiple mediums like lacquer, ceramics, textiles, metalwork and more. The artists involved with the collection include metalworks legend Morihito Katsura and sculptor Taiichiro Yoshida, among others. The collection is arranged into three sections.

The “Stories” section emphasizes franchise mascot Pikachu. A much-anticipated piece here is called “Pikachu Forest,” which is made from more than 900 strands of lace suspended from the ceiling to create, well, a forest populated by electrified yellow rodents. The “Appearance” section includes many pieces featuring Eevee and its various evolutions, like Jolteon, Vaporeon and Flareon. The final section, called “Life”, seems to be a hodge-podge affair with many different Pokémon.

The exhibition starts on July 25th and runs for five full months, all the way until January. Admission is free and the gallery is open seven days a week. Japan House also says they'll be hosting events related to the exhibition but has not announced any details. In any case, this seems like a great place to meet friends for some Pokémon Go action.

Meta is open-sourcing an AI tool called ImageBind that predicts connections between data similar to how humans perceive or imagine an environment. While image generators like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and DALL-E 2 pair words with images, allowing you to generate visual scenes based only on a text description, ImageBind casts a broader net. It can link text, images / videos, audio, 3D measurements (depth), temperature data (thermal), and motion data (from inertial measurement units) — and it does this without having to first train on every possibility. It’s an early stage of a framework that could eventually generate complex environments from an input as simple as a text prompt, image or audio recording (or some combination of the three).

You could view ImageBind as moving machine learning closer to human learning. For example, if you’re standing in a stimulating environment like a busy city street, your brain (largely unconsciously) absorbs the sights, sounds and other sensory experiences to infer information about passing cars and pedestrians, tall buildings, weather and much more. Humans and other animals evolved to process this data for our genetic advantage: survival and passing on our DNA. (The more aware you are of your surroundings, the more you can avoid danger and adapt to your environment for better survival and prosperity.) As computers get closer to mimicking animals’ multi-sensory connections, they can use those links to generate fully realized scenes based only on limited chunks of data.

So, while you can use Midjourney to prompt “a basset hound wearing a Gandalf outfit while balancing on a beach ball” and get a relatively realistic photo of this bizarre scene, a multimodal AI tool like ImageBind may eventually create a video of the dog with corresponding sounds, including a detailed suburban living room, the room’s temperature and the precise locations of the dog and anyone else in the scene. “This creates distinctive opportunities to create animations out of static images by combining them with audio prompts,” Meta researchers said today in a developer-focused blog post. “For example, a creator could couple an image with an alarm clock and a rooster crowing, and use a crowing audio prompt to segment the rooster or the sound of an alarm to segment the clock and animate both into a video sequence.”

Meta

As for what else one could do with this new toy, it points clearly to one of Meta’s core ambitions: VR, mixed reality and the metaverse. For example, imagine a future headset that can construct fully realized 3D scenes (with sound, movement, etc.) on the fly. Or, virtual game developers could perhaps eventually use it to take much of the legwork out of their design process. Similarly, content creators could make immersive videos with realistic soundscapes and movement based on only text, image or audio input. It’s also easy to imagine a tool like ImageBind opening new doors in the accessibility space, generating real-time multimedia descriptions to help people with vision or hearing disabilities better perceive their immediate environments.

“In typical AI systems, there is a specific embedding (that is, vectors of numbers that can represent data and their relationships in machine learning) for each respective modality,” said Meta. “ImageBind shows that it’s possible to create a joint embedding space across multiple modalities without needing to train on data with every different combination of modalities. This is important because it’s not feasible for researchers to create datasets with samples that contain, for example, audio data and thermal data from a busy city street, or depth data and a text description of a seaside cliff.”

Meta views the tech as eventually expanding beyond its current six “senses,” so to speak. “While we explored six modalities in our current research, we believe that introducing new modalities that link as many senses as possible — like touch, speech, smell, and brain fMRI signals — will enable richer human-centric AI models.” Developers interested in exploring this new sandbox can start by diving into Meta’s open-source code.

With an instantly recognizable hook and effervescent melody, Vanessa Carlton’s debut single A Thousand Miles hit the 2002 Billboard Charts like a neutron bomb, earning nominations for the Grammy Award for Song of the Year and the Billboard Music Award for Top 40 Track of the Year. Featured prominently in 2004’s White Chicks, Terry Crews credits the undeniable smash with helping launch his acting career. 

The accompanying music video saw Carlton and her piano rolling through Newbury Park, California, and portions of downtown Los Angeles. Twenty-one years later, a team of hobbyist roboticists have brought Carlton’s music back to the public ear — this time, to the streets of San Francisco with an animatronic performer and remotely deployable disco ball.

The robot, which currently doesn’t have much of a moniker from the team beyond “The Robot,” is the brainchild of San Francisco-based aerospace engineer Ben Howard, electrical engineer Noah Klugman, lawyer Lane Powell (with additional assistance from local puppeteer, Adam Kreutinger). “This is just a thing that we've done together, the three of us, to try to create some joy,” Klugman told Engadget during a recent video call.

The trio first collaborated during the pandemic. “Kids couldn't really trick or treat properly,” Howard explained. “So we put together a kind of spooky Halloween candy dispensing robot that could drive around the streets and any kids who were brave enough could walk up, have a conversation with it and get some candy.” That project inspired them to look into developing a robot with year-round appeal. A “piano playing Muppet seemed like a good thing to do,” he continued, and from that the Thousand-Mile Machine was born.

The team started with an outdated food delivery drone model, obtained from “a friend of a friend,” as the mobile platform on which to build out the rest of the construct. “When companies get rid of these things, if they're cool pieces of hardware, there are plenty of engineers around the city who like to modify them and turn them into fun projects,” Howard explained. “There's a big community of people who are sharing cool hardware around.”

“I came to acquire [the wheeled base] and we wanted to do this music playing robot.” he added. “Then, when you think about piano player that roams around the city, immediately that [Vanessa Carlton] video comes to mind. It's so iconic.”

The nearly 400-pound robot measures roughly five feet long on a side and about four feet tall, narrow enough to fit on a sidewalk and into the TEU container workshop in which it was built at San Francisco’s Box Shop. The wheeled base is controlled remotely and manually, while the puppet’s performance — from the hand and head movements to the big disco ball reveal — are all part of a prerecorded act, akin to Chuck E Cheese’s animatronic Pizza Players band. A single button press is all that’s needed to start the performance.

Vanessa Carlton herself reportedly met the robot during a recent event in Petaluma, “it seemed like she enjoyed it,” Klugman noted. “Everyone we've met in San Francisco has seemed to really love it. I think the response has been overwhelmingly positive.”

“That was very much [the case with] everyone we encountered when we were out filming,” Lane added. “Just really happy to watch it and excited to talk to us about it and just 100 percent positive from all ages and all walks of life all over the city. It was a really cool experience.”