OnlyFans is back. Or at least, business will continue as usual for now. Best known for its adult videos and images from independent creators, the site decided to bring the ban hammer down on adult content last week, citing that big banking was to blame for the sudden shift in policy. Apparently, as of yesterday, OnlyFans has found a way forward. It says it’s “suspended” the ban on pornography for now, but has otherwise left creators and the rest of us in the dark as to the details. In an email to creators, OnlyFans said it’s got “banking partners’ assurances” that it can support the whole gamut of content hosted on the site.

The next challenge for the company are the issues highlighted in a recent BBC investigation of its activities. The report outlined how illegal content from some creators was able to make it onto the site, and how banning policy seemed to contort to fit its most popular creators.

— Mat Smith

Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 review

Still the best Android smartwatch.

David Imel for Engadget

Samsung features a new OS, body composition measurement and sleep-tracking features as well as upgraded sensors and processor in its Galaxy Watch 4. According to Reviews Editor Cherlynn Low, while those are helpful, it’s the core smartwatch experience (what used to be known as Tizen) that shines. Unfortunately, battery life suffers as a result of all those new features.

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The next Marvel game is a turn-based RPG from the creators of XCOM

Apparently, no perma-deaths.

Firaxis Games/2K

XCOM developer Firaxis has unveiled Marvel's Midnight Suns, a turn-based role-playing game based on the Midnight Sons team from 1990s crossover issues. The modern take has you play a new Marvel co-created superhero, The Hunter, with help from Midnight Sons members, like Blade, Ghost Rider and Wolverine, and Avengers including Captain America and Iron Man.

Midnight Suns comes to PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, Switch and Windows PCs in March 2022.

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A Discord music bot is going offline after YouTube crackdown

It's shutting down on August 30th.

If you're a Discord user, there's a good chance you've benefited from Groovy Bot, which lets people jam together with music from YouTube, Spotify and others. But it turns out Google didn't appreciate its ability to rip music out of YouTube. The company has sent a cease and desist letter to Groovy Bot's owners, and against the might of Google, they're not putting up a fight: Groovy Bot will go offline on August 30th.

A YouTube spokesperson noted that Groovy Bot violated its terms of service, particularly because it modified the way YouTube worked and charged for the privilege. If Groovy Bot were merely free, it may have been able to live on — the premium subscription might be what killed it.

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Kanye West's new album 'Donda' comes on a remix-it-yourself gadget

You’ll be able to split up the elements of each song.

Kanye West

West and electronics design firm Kano have introduced a Donda Stem Player that, as the name implies, lets you remix music from Kanye's upcoming album Donda (plus your own tunes) using song stems. The gadget can apparently isolate song parts and control aspects like bass, drums, samples and vocals, though it’s unlikely to be able to perfectly lift out separate elements. You can order the Stem Player now for $200. 

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'Halo Infinite' is launching on December 8th

It was confirmed at Gamescom.

After a year-long delay, Halo Infinite will arrive on December 8th. Developer 343 Industries confirmed the timing during Gamescom’s Opening Night Live event yesterday. However, this date was leaked just hours before the show started. To celebrate, however, we did get a new multiplayer gameplay trailer. 

Take a look here.

The best wireless headphones you can buy right now

Sony, Bose, Apple and even Razer have headphones worth considering.

In the last two years, true wireless earbuds have made quite the leap. There’s no doubt the popularity of Apple’s AirPods helped make these headphones a mainstay, but companies’ ability to offer reliable connectivity, great sound and active noise cancellation (ANC) in an increasingly smaller form factor has hastened widespread adoption. Here’s our updated guide to the best options out there.

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The big news you might have missed

Fitbit's Charge 5 packs an ECG and stress response sensor

How to clean and organize your Mac

Facebook is reportedly mulling a commission to advise on elections

Special-edition 'Halo Infinite' Xbox Series X and controller arrive on November 15th

President Biden is meeting with Apple, Google and Microsoft on cybersecurity

Lucid is offering two variants of its Air Dream Edition luxury EV

South Korea to end its controversial gaming curfew

Saints Row gets a gritty reboot set in the 'weird west'

Marvel's 'What If…?' turns grim in its third episode with mixed results

This article contains mild spoilers for season two, episode three of 'Star Trek: Lower Decks.'

This week’s episode of Lower Decks, “We’ll Always Have Tom Paris,” manages to squeeze two references into its title: a season one The Next Generation installment called “We’ll Always Have Paris,” and the name of a main cast member of Star Trek: Voyager, Lieutenant Tom Eugene Paris. But aside from that clever bit of wordplay, the title also carries a deeper meaning: That as much as we’d like to forget about the more embarrassing moments of the Star Trek franchise, they still happened and they weren’t all bad. Even, and especially, Voyager.

CBS

Viewer reactions to Voyager have been rather polarized over the course of the 26 years since it premiered. Back in the ‘90s, many fans were excited to have a “real” Star Trek show again, one that took place on a ship that was constantly exploring, unlike the comparatively stationary political drama of Deep Space Nine. But clunky writing soured many people’s opinion on Voyager, and toward the end of its run the show was known more for Seven of Nine’s skintight outfits and its slate of guest stars of the week, including Jason Alexander and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.

After the show went off the air, the franchise stopped moving forward in its timeline, choosing to explore Starfleet’s founding in Enterprise and rebooting the entire universe completely with the 2009 Star Trek movie. While fans were thrown a bone with a brief cameo by Admiral Kathryn Janeway in the last TNG-era film, Nemesis, Voyager would essentially disappear from the Star Trek canon until the appearance of Seven of Nine in episode four of Picard.

Trae Patton

For fans of The Next Generation, Picard had its upsides: We got to see Troi and Riker as a family, and Data got a better sendoff into the afterlife. But for fans of Voyager, it was anything but positive, with the death of a supporting character and a rather grim existence for fan-favorite Seven of Nine.

Star Trek: Lower Decks rolls back the clock a little bit, as it takes place a year after the events of Nemesis, making it our first real view of the Star Trek universe’s immediate future after TNG, DS9 and Voyager. The Dominion War is over, Romulus is under a new regime and the crew of the USS Voyager are basically celebrities after seven years spent in the Delta Quadrant; Picard takes place nearly twenty years later, when the luster would have been gone.

Matt Kennedy

Here everything is just shiny and new and worthy of commemorative plates — a bit of a weird thing to exist in a post-scarcity culture, but this is a comedy series, after all. And in this week’s B-plot, Brad Boimler is looking to get one of his plates signed by a special guest to the USS Cerritos: Tom Paris. Or, as Brad refers to the former Voyager crew member, “Creator of Fairhaven, Captain Proton himself” as well as the first human to break the transwarp barrier. Straight off, that’s a reference to three of the goofiest, oddball and some say worst episodes of Star Trek: Voyager. And just in case you forgot what was so bad about the last one, Mariner asks “is he still a salamander?,” because that is a thing that happened in the episode “Threshold.”

Undeterred (and perhaps even encouraged) by the weirdness, Boimler is all hyped to meet his hero. Even after the ship’s system doesn’t recognize him and won’t let him through any doors, he takes to the Jefferies tubes to make his way to the bridge to meet Lt. Paris.

In a way, it feels like a metaphor for how the fandom feels about Star Trek: Voyager now. While everyone admits it had a lot of dumb moments, those actually made it more endearing. The famous line “there’s coffee in that nebula” would inspire astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti to bring a replica uniform with her and wear it on a mission back in 2015:

And who can forget the infamous “Tuvix” episode, where crew members Tuvok and Neelix were merged into one being thanks to a transporter accident? Though the resulting individual was healthy and happy, the decision was made to force him to split back into his component persons, inspiring the recent internet rallying cry “Janeway murdered Tuvix.” Even Janeway actor Kate Mulgrew entered the debate, responding to a tweet from Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. When you’ve got politicians involved it’s not really a fandom in-joke anymore.

Maybe it’s time to give Voyager a bit more credit. It’s not as good as TNG or DS9, but it still has its fair share of fans. I remember a time when it seemed like it was constantly running on Spike TV (now the Paramount Network), as opposed to Deep Space Nine, which is seldom rerun due to its serialized nature. Last year I sat down and rewatched the entire Star Trek franchise, including Voyager, and saw quite a few episodes I had missed the first time. I found myself enjoying some of it, cringing just as often, and eventually remembering why I had stopped watching the show for a while back when it aired. In general, I feel like the show’s biggest problem was missed potential, like the way the conflict between the Starfleet and Maquis crew members was quickly smoothed over, how it underutilized many of its cast, and why on earth did Harry Kim never get promoted.

CBS

However, it’s not the job of Lower Decks to explain or redeem Voyager. Boimler and Tom Paris are only the B-plot here, with the main drive of the episode being Tendi and Mariner’s mission to pick up a package for Doctor T’Ana as well as Rutherford’s quest to find out how a certain dead officer is alive again. The episode just asks us to consider what it would be like to be a Starfleet officer and hear about all of Voyager’s adventures in the Delta Quadrant. Weird and goofy? Yes. But honestly, they’re also pretty cool.

Facebook is considering forming a commission to advise on thorny issues related to global elections, according to a report Wednesday from The New York Times. The company has begun to approach academics and policy experts, who The Times says could potentially weigh in on issues ranging from political ads to election misinformation. What's more, it is not just US elections where a commission could find itself weighing complicated election issues; the commission would also likely have a mandate to weigh in on closely watched elections in Hungary, Germany, Brazil and the Philippines.

Engadget has asked Facebook for comment.

On its face, the commission sounds a lot like Facebook's Oversight Board, an independent panel of journalists, academics and activists often described as a "Supreme Court" that's tasked with reviewing Facebook's policies. The Oversight Board is perhaps best known for upholding Facebook's decision to ban Donald Trump, though since its formation last year it has also agreed to weigh in on doxing; hate speech; how politicians at large should be treated; content moderation in coup-torn Myanmar; moderation by algorithms; and the appropriate treatment of satire content.

But though the makeup of the election commission sounds like the Oversight Board — and could similarly let Facebook side-step ownership of controversial decisions — there could be an important difference, according to The Times. Whereas the Oversight Board weighs in on decisions that Facebook has already made (much like the Supreme Court considers contested court rulings), the election commission would have the latitude to proactively offer advice, even on matters where Facebook had not yet taken a public stance.

If Facebook goes ahead with outsourcing election-related decisions to an advisory committee, it would be a departure from its previous attempts to counter election misinformation, which have been largely reactive, and almost always imperfect. Even after a temporary ban on political ads ahead of the 2020 US election, some ads were still showing as active in Facebook's ad library. Facebook last year also endeavored to label ads from politically connected publications, and earlier this year moved to show users less political content altogether.

Though Facebook reportedly hopes to launch the commission ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, The Times also describes the outreach as preliminary, with no guarantee that Facebook will move forward on this.

Instagram is working on making its search function more intuitive. The app is experimenting with changes that allow users to search for content based on topics rather than account names or hashtags.

Up until now, Instagram’s search has been fairly rudimentary. Typing “kittens” into the search bar would turn up results for specific accounts or hashtags, for example, but you’d have to jump around different pages to actually find kitten content. But with the update, searching for topical content on Instagram will be more like Pinterest, with a grid of photos and videos related to that topic.

“We've been experimenting with what we are internally calling interest search,” Instagram head Adam Mosseri said in a video posted to Twitter. He added that the new search results are available for “a range of topics and a range of languages” but that Instagram is still “working to expand” the feature. For now, users can browse the new results by looking for search terms that have a magnifying glass next to them.

Instagram has teased other major updates to its search features in recent months. The app is also working on a visual search feature that would allow users to find products using the in-app camera, though the company hasn’t shared additional details.

Jurassic World Evolution 2, the next installment in everyone's favorite dinosaur-based park-management franchise, is heading to Xbox Series X and S, PlayStation 4, PS5 and PC on November 9th. Pre-orders are open now, and buying the game early will net players three vehicle skins inspired by the 1997 film, The Lost World: Jurassic Park.

Jurassic World Evolution 2 allows players to build, manage and mess around in a world of Spielberg-inspired dinosaurs. There are four modes: campaign, chaos theory, challenge and sandbox. Campaign mode takes players through a narrative arc set after the events of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, the 2018 movie. Chaos theory presents classic moments from the film franchise, but with a twist, playing out "what if" scenarios. Challenge is the mode for folks who want to test their dino-rearing skills, while sandbox is the creative way to play.

Jurassic Wold Evolution 2 is made by Frontier Developments, the studio that handled the 2018 game Jurassic World Evolution.

We haven't heard much about Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga since TT Games delayed it indefinitely back in April. At Gamescom's Opening Night Live event, the studio and publisher Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment showed off a new trailer that embraces the series' trademark irreverent humor, in-jokes and sleek visuals. 

There are a bunch of nods to famous scenes from the Star Wars movies (the game adapts all nine entries in the Skywalker saga). Along with X-wing battles and lightsaber duels with the likes of Darth Vader and Darth Maul, you'll see moments like Rey flipping over Kylo Ren's TIE fighter. The game includes 20 unlockable planets you can travel between and more than 300 playable characters.

While there's no firm release date as yet, the game should arrive in spring 2022 on Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch and PC.

This is the first game in the Lego Star Wars series since 2016, when TT Games Legofied Star Wars: The Force Awakens. It marks the first time that the studio has adapted The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker. Warner Bros. initially planned to release Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga in 2020, and then in spring 2021, but TT Games needed "more time" to finish it.

This post contains major spoilers for episode three of What If…?

After two fun, zippy stories that focused on the idea of swapping one character for another, What If…? pivots to a darker outcome in its third installment. This time, the entire Avengers slate is wiped clean, with Nick Fury left to sort out the mess. It’s a nod to the animated series’ comic inspiration, plus a sign that the show isn’t willing to settle into a routine.

The original comic book, also called What If?, often see-sawed between silly and serious scenarios, like what would happen if Spider-Man had joined the Fantastic Four, Gwen Stacy had lived or if Dazzler became Galactus’ herald. With no need to follow continuity, the creative teams of each issue in the anthology were free to take the story wherever they wanted, often in dark turns that ultimately illustrated why the original timeline was the best.

Marvel Studios

However, the What If…?Disney+ series has taken the opposite tack, showcasing one scenario where things are largely the same level of good and bad (for Captain Carter) and another where events went decidedly better (unless you’re Peter Quill). It’s likely the creators didn’t want to immediately scare away casual viewers with anything too grim, keeping the stories as light and breezy as their cinematic inspirations.

The third episode doesn’t just change this course by featuring a more pessimistic scenario, however, it also steps away from telling us upfront why things are like this. The first two episodes had Uatu explicitly pointing out the moment of divergence. This time around, we know something is different — the prospective Avengers are being murdered — but exactly how and why is a mystery.

Marvel Studios

It actually makes for a more interesting show because rather than playing a half-hour game of “spot the difference,” we become engaged in speculation about why this is happening. We know things would be vastly altered if Tony Stark or Bruce Banner dies, but now we get to play detective, plumbing our knowledge of the Marvel Cinematic Universe for suspects and motives. Instead of a straight-up adventure tale, this episode was a murder mystery.

Whether it’s a successful mystery, I’m not entirely sure. Hank Pym is not someone I had considered as a suspect, even with his distaste for SHIELD and the Starks in the main timeline. The point of divergence turns out to be Hope Pym joining SHIELD and being killed on a mission, which leaves Hank alone and bitter. Why he chooses to kill five uninvolved strangers in an attempt to hurt Nick Fury is murky at best. I’d originally pegged the murder of the Avengers as a Hydra plot, which would have actually help shore up the retcon from Captain America and the Winter Soldier of SHIELD being taken over by Hydra — it’s rarely explored why Hydra let the Avengers get as far as they did in the main timeline, rather than strangling that potential opposition in its cradle.

Ultimately, the point of the episode is to set the viewer up for even darker stories to come — at least one future story is focused on zombies, a nod to the rather successful line of “Marvel Zombies” comics from over a decade ago. It also does some tidying up for the main continuity as well, reminding the viewers that three of the early MCU films took place in the same week, and that Loki is stilla jerk. It may not be essential viewing, but What If…? is certainly a useful footnote.

Kanye West is no stranger to dabbling with technology (he discussed a Teenage Engineering collaboration in 2019), but now there's a device you can buy for yourself. The rapper and electronics design firm Kano have introduced a Donda Stem Player that, as the name implies, lets you remix music from Kanye's upcoming album Donda (plus your own tunes) using song stems.

The puck-like gadget reportedly lets you isolate song parts and control aspects like bass, drums, samples and vocals. You can reportedly split "any" song into stems. We've asked Kano how this works, but it's unlikely that it will perfectly separate song elements — that's a difficult feat for a full-fledged PC, let alone something as portable as this.

The Stem Player also includes familiar tools including effects, four-channel audio mixing, live sampling and real-time loop and speed controls. You navigate much of the interface through four touch-sensitive "light sliders" with haptic feedback and customizable colors, and you can save and share your creations with othrs.

You can pipe audio through the built-in speaker, Bluetooth or a 3.5mm headphone jack through a variety of lossy and lossless formats (including AAC, AIFF, MP3 and WAV). You'll have just 8GB of storage to work with, though — minus the bundled Donda stems.

You can order the Stem Player now for $200. That's not a trivial outlay if you're eager to tinker with songs, but it's relatively affordable as far as electronic music-making devices go. Just be aware that it's really just one part of a larger creative toolset, not your ticket to stardom.

Gamescom officially gets underway today as an online-only event for the second year running. It kicks off with Geoff Keighley's Opening Night Live, a two-hour showcase filled with trailers, announcements and updates about a ton of upcoming games.

Keighley has already announced some of what to expect, including news on the likes of Call of Duty: Vanguard, Far Cry 6, Death Stranding: Director's Cut, Genshin Impact, Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, Splitgate, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge and much more. A new football game will be revealed, and we could get confirmation of the Halo Infinite release date, which is expected to be December 8th. Fingers crossed for another look at Elden Ring too.

Publishers involved include Amazon Games, Bandai Namco, Devolver Digital, Mediatonic, PlayStation, Sega, Warner Bros. Games, Ubisoft and Xbox Game Studios. 

Opening Night Live starts at 2PM ET. You can watch it via the YouTube embed below, or on Twitch, Twitter or Facebook. Engadget will cover the biggest news coming out of the event too.

Netflix has announced its first-ever global fan event, TUDUM (say it out loud, it's fun). It's named after the sound that plays alongside the Netflix logo whenever you start watching something on the service. The company says TUDUM will be a three-hour event full of news, trailers and exclusive clips from more than 70 series, movies and specials, with appearances from some of Netflix's biggest stars.

The goal of TUDUM is "to entertain and honor Netflix fans from across the globe" and surely create some buzz around many of these shows and movies. Among the projects that Netflix will showcase are Stranger Things, The Witcher, Cobra Kai, Money Heist, Bridgerton, The Crown, Ozark, The Umbrella Academy and Red Notice (a blockbuster heist film starring Dwayne Johnson, Gal Gadot and Ryan Reynolds). Cowboy Bebop is also on the docket, so perhaps Netflix will show the first trailer from the upcoming series during the event.

TUDUM starts at noon ET on September 25th. It will stream live on Netflix's various YouTube channels as well as on Twitch and Twitter. There are pre-shows before the main showcase as well, starting at 8am ET. Those will center around anime and a selection of shows and films from South Korea and India. Netflix says Facebook, Twitch and YouTube users can co-stream the event — in other words, rebroadcast TUDUM on their own channels in real-time and react to it live.