Apple's rumored Beats Studio Pro headphones may be more compelling than AirPods for some listeners. 9to5Macclaims to have leaked specs indicating the Studio Pro will be the first Beats earphones to support head-tracking spatial audio. Until now, only more recent AirPods (such as the AirPods Pro, AirPods Max and third-gen base model) offered the feature. If you like the thought of sounds seeming to have fixed positions, these new over-ears may be worth considering.

The Beats Studio Pro might also have an edge over the AirPods Max for some of the fundamentals. They'll reportedly last up to 24 hours with active noise cancellation enabled (40 without ANC) versus the 20 hours of the Max. You may also get both a 3.5mm jack and a USB-C port, and the 3.5mm cable could even be included in the box. On top of previously rumored personalized spatial audio, you'd get adaptive, environment-sensitive ANC and microphones that improve call quality versus the Studio 3 Wireless (pictured above).

The design is said to be similar to the Studio 3, but with improved ear cushions that promise better comfort and durability. Metal sliders may also deliver a more adjustable fit.

While the Studio Pro won't use Apple's self-branded chips, it will supposedly use a custom Beats chip that bolsters support for both Apple devices and Android. Both platforms will apparently support easy pairing, seamless device switching and lost-item tracking. Apple hardware may also support hands-free "hey Siri" voice commands.

Leaker Myke Hurley claims the Beats Studio Pro will arrive on July 19th, and 9to5 believes they'll match the $349 price of the Studio 3. If so, they could be a compelling option if you're looking for advanced Apple-made headphones but can't justify a $200 premium to get the design and sound characteristics of the AirPods Max.

Unless you count flip foldables, there aren't many options left when it comes to true compact smartphones these days, but somehow, ASUS has remained in this niche market. The freshly announced Zenfone 10 looks like a carbon copy of its predecessor, and even its 50-megapixel main camera has remained unchanged. Still, the company claims that this is now powered by a new version of 6-axis gimbal stabilization — a combination of hardware optical stabilization, upgraded electronic stabilization algorithm and fast auto-focus. This apparently lets you capture smoother videos and less blurry photos while on the move.

As you'd expect, the Zenfone 10 is powered by Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor, and now with faster LPDDR5X ROM of up to 16GB, along with faster UFS 4.0 storage option of up to 512GB — doubling that of the previous gen. While the battery remains at an impressive 4,300mAh, it is now supported by 15W wireless charging in addition to the original 30W wired charging. This does mean a gentle bump in thickness — from the old 9.1mm to 9.4mm, but the footprint remains at 146.5 x 68.1mm. The AMOLED display is again specced at 5.9 inches with a 2,400 x 1,080 resolution, though its top refresh rate has been boosted from 120Hz to 144Hz for slicker gaming.

ASUS

The ultra-wide camera has been swapped out with a 13-megapixel sensor, along with a bump in field of view — from 113 degrees to 120 degrees. The old 12-megapixel front punch-hole camera now uses a 32-megapixel RGBW sensor instead, and this apparently gives an 8-megapixel output with vastly improved low light selfies, thanks to the extra white sub-pixels on the sensor.

Like before, you still get stereo speakers and a 3.5mm headphone jack, along with dual microphones with support for Nokia's OZO Audio spatial capture and wind noise reduction. Other familiar goodies include the ZenTouch customizable unlock button (namely for toggling the camera or scrolling in a browser), NFC and IP68 ruggedness for resistance against dust and liquids.

ASUS has extended its "Connex" modular case system to the Zenfone 10, which lets you snap either a kickstand or a silicone cardholder into the grid of holes on the back of the case. You can even assign an app — YouTube, by default — to auto-launch whenever the kickstand is flipped out. If you'd rather go with thicker cases, ASUS has also partnered with Rhinoshield and DevilCase for some more rugged options.

ASUS

The Zenfone 10 will be available for pre-order in Europe from June 29, starting from €799 (about $870), with color options including "Aurora Green," "Midnight Black," "Comet White," "Eclipse Red" and "Starry Blue." As before, US availability to follow later, so stay tuned.

Meta's Oversight Board has called for a six month ban on Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen's Facebook and Instagram accounts for inciting violence, it wrote in a news release. It's the second time in the last week that the Board has reversed a high profile Meta review, after a Brazilian user posted a video asking followers to "besiege" government. However, it's the first time the Oversight Board has asked for a head of state to be banned, a decision that may have ramifications for future policy decisions. 

Hun Sen, who has led Cambodia since 1985, is facing an election this month. Earlier in the year, he posted a video of a speech telling political opponents he'd "gather CPP (Cambodia People's Party) people to protest and beat you up." Following several user reports and appeals, Meta policy and subject matter experts recommended leaving the post up based on newsworthiness, even though it violated the company's community standards for violence and incitement. 

"Given the severity of the violation, Hun Sen’s history of committing human rights violations and intimidating political opponents, as well as his strategic use of social media to amplify such threats, the Board calls on Meta to immediately suspend Hun Sen’s Facebook page and Instagram account for six months," it wrote. The suspension is non-binding, but Meta must take down the contested video within 60 days. 

In explaining the decision, the Board said that the "harm caused by allowing the content on the platform outweighs the post's public interest value," particularly given the prime minister's reach on social media. The original moderation decision, it added, "results in Meta's platforms contributing to these harms by amplifying the threats and resulting intimidation." 

Such behavior should not be rewarded. Meta should more heavily weigh press freedom when considering newsworthiness so that the allowance is not applied to government speech in situations where that government has made its own content more newsworthy by limiting free press.

On top of Hun Sen's ban, the Board advised Meta to make clear that its moderation policies are not restricted to single incidents of civil unrest or violence. It also recommended removing the newsworthiness allowance policy in cases involving incitement of violence, and prioritize reviews involving heads of state and senior members of government. Finally, it asked Meta to reveal the reasoning behind its decision for Hun Sen "and in all account-level actions against heads of state and senior members of government." 

The Board's review could set a bar for moderation of other authoritarian leaders in Asia, Human Rights Watch director Phil Robertson told The Post, while calling the takedown request of Hun Sen "long overdue." Facebook famously banned former US president Donald Trump from the platform (and restored his account earlier this year), but has caved to censorship demands in nations including Vietnam. Twitter owner Elon Musk recently justified censorship in Turkey ahead of an election, saying the company has "no actual choice" but to comply with such requests.

The Cambodian government hasn't responded yet to the board's decision, but previously said that the remarks were "only a confirmation of the legal process" in the nation. Hun Sen, who has 14 million Facebook followers, said today that he would halt any active posting on Facebook and use Telegram instead. 

Video games have been competitive for as long as people could land their three-character initials on a digital scoreboard. The fighting game genre got its start in the 1970s, but it was when Street Fighter 2 hit the arcades in the '90s that the genre would ascend to a whole new level. Since then, many groundbreaking series have graced the genre, such as Mortal Kombat, Tekken, Super Smash Bros. and much more. 

While fighting games may never have the same mass-market appeal they did in the '90s, 2023 is proving to be a mini-rennaisance for the genre. We've already had Street Fighter 6, Mortal Kombat 1 is arriving this fall, and there's Tekken 8 still to come. That's without mentioning the upcoming reboot of Dead or Alive or Riot Games' League of Legends spin-off Project L. It's a good time to be a fighting game fan — watch the video below for the full story.

With Google Glass, the company was the major player to push augmented reality wearables into the world. After shelving that early hardware, the company moved onto new internal projects, including Iris AR glasses. These were supposed to look like a pair of ordinary glasses, with early versions reportedly resembling a product called "Focals" by North, a Canadian startup that Google acquired in 2020. Google even demoed a newer version in a video showing a real-time AR translation feature.

The company has now reportedly shelved Iris following waves of layoffs and company reshuffles. Another event that factored into Google's decision was the departure of Clay Bavor, the company's former chief of augmented and virtual reality. Now, instead of building its own hardware, Google has apparently chosen to focus on creating an "Android for AR" ecosystem instead. Currently, that includes working on Android XR for Samsung's "extended reality" wearable device.

If we take Google’s approach to Android as a template, add another five years, and maybe we’ll see Pixel XR glasses?

– Mat Smith

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North America’s first hydrogen-powered train debuts in Canada

It’s a three-month loaner designed to encourage adoption across the continent.

Alstom

This summer, North America’s first hydrogen-powered train began traveling across the Canadian countryside. The French passenger train, the Coradia iLint, is a short-term demonstration, running through the end of September, that aims to spark adoption in Canada and the US. The Coradia iLint uses roughly “about 50 kilograms of hydrogen a day,” says Serge Harnois, CEO of Hanois Énergies, the train’s hydrogen fuel supplier. The same journey using a standard engine would burn around 500 liters of diesel fuel. It only emits water vapor along its journey as a byproduct of combining hydrogen with oxygen. Sounds good, right? Well, there are caveats. It requires a diesel-powered truck to transport the hydrogen to the train every time it refuels, and let’s not forget about the emissions made by the train’s trip from Europe to Canada for a mere three-month demo.

Continue reading.

'The Password Game' might break you

A game where you have to jump through hoops to make a new password.

Alstom

The goal of the game is to create a password no one hacker could possibly crack, and the experience starts out simple enough. “Your password must be at least 5 characters,” states rule one, while rule four asks that all the digits in your password add up to 25. Then, things start to become progressively more unhinged. Rule seven demands you include a Roman numeral, only for rule nine to demand that a handful of Roman numerals must multiply to make 35. If you want to test your mental resilience, you can try it out here.

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Microsoft is already offering a generative AI certification program

It includes free courses from LinkedIn.

Microsoft has announced a new program to train workers on generative AI. Microsoft’s AI Skills Initiative will include free courses created by (Microsoft-owned) LinkedIn, offering learners “the first Professional Certificate on Generative AI in the online learning market.” The company says the courses will cover introductory AI concepts and “responsible AI frameworks,” culminating in certification. Given that generative AI is so simple to use, it’ll be interesting to see what the courses entail. They could still provide tips for composing the most effective prompts – and we all know someone at work that struggles with even basic software functions.

Continue reading.

Unless you switch to chronological timeline on Facebook, the things you see on your timeline could seem pretty arbitrary at times. Now, Meta has given us pretty comprehensive look at how its AI systems decide on the posts that appear on our Facebook and Instagram feeds. The social networking giant has released 22 card systems for the platforms that explain how its AI systems rank content for its Feed, Stories and Reels. Each card explains how a certain aspect of Meta's platform works — for instance, the company explains that for Facebook Feeds, its AI system starts by gathering all potential posts by friends and Pages you follow. 

After that, the system considers various input signals, such as who created the post, how you interacted with them and how many of your friends have liked the post, if any. All those aspects will help the AI rank posts based on which you'll find the most relevant and valuable and then show them on your feed in order of the scores they get. The card systems also show how you can customize what you see on the platforms and link to instructions on, say, how to unfollow a person or a group and how to click "show more" or "show less" on a post to indicate if you like or dislike a particular subject. 

In a post announcing the cards' release, Nick Clegg, Meta's President of Global Affairs, listed the tools you can use to personalize your experience on the company's platforms. In addition to the two aforementioned tools, Facebook and Instagram have centralized menus with customization controls, called Feed Preferences and Suggested Content Control Center, respectively. Clegg also said that Meta is testing a new feature on Instagram allows you to indicate whether you're "Interested" in a recommended reel in the Reels tab, so the app can show you more similar content. At the moment, you can only indicate whether you're "Not Interested" in a specific reel. In addition, he said Meta is working on making the "show more" and "show less" feature more prominent. 

Meta has lifted the lid on how its algorithms work before the European Union starts enacting the Digital Markets Act in 2024. The new law will require online services like Facebook and Instagram to be more transparent on the technologies behind their recommendation algorithms. It will also require platforms to offer chronological feeds and will ban ads targeting you based on your religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity or political affiliation. Earlier this year, Meta also rolled out a new version of its "Why am I seeing this ad?" tool to provide more transparency on how your activities power its ad-matching software.

Researchers at the University of Maryland have turned eye reflections into (somewhat discernible) 3D scenes. The work builds on Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), an AI technology that can reconstruct environments from 2D photos. Although the eye-reflection approach has a long way to go before it spawns any practical applications, the study (first reported byTech Xplore) provides a fascinating glimpse into a technology that could eventually reveal an environment from a series of simple portrait photos.

The team used subtle reflections of light captured in human eyes (using consecutive images shot from a single sensor) to try to discern the person’s immediate environment. They began with several high-resolution images from a fixed camera position, capturing a moving individual looking toward the camera. They then zoomed in on the reflections, isolating them and calculating where the eyes were looking in the photos.

The results (here’s the entire set animated) show a decently discernible environmental reconstruction from human eyes in a controlled setting. A scene captured using a synthetic eye (below) produced a more impressive dreamlike scene. However, an attempt to model eye reflections from Miley Cyrus and Lady Gaga music videos only produced vague blobs that the researchers could only guess were an LED grid and a camera on a tripod — illustrating how far the tech is from real-world use.

University of Maryland

The team overcame significant obstacles to reconstruct even crude and fuzzy scenes. For example, the cornea introduces “inherent noise” that makes it difficult to separate the reflected light from humans’ complex iris textures. To address that, they introduced cornea pose optimization (estimating the position and orientation of the cornea) and iris texture decomposition (extracting features unique to an individual’s iris) during training. Finally, radial texture regularization loss (a machine-learning technique that simulates smoother textures than the source material) helped further isolate and enhance the reflected scenery.

Despite the progress and clever workarounds, significant barriers remain. “Our current real-world results are from a ‘laboratory setup,’ such as a zoom-in capture of a person’s face, area lights to illuminate the scene, and deliberate person’s movement,” the authors wrote. “We believe more unconstrained settings remain challenging (e.g., video conferencing with natural head movement) due to lower sensor resolution, dynamic range, and motion blur.” Additionally, the team notes that its universal assumptions about iris texture may be too simplistic to apply broadly, especially when eyes typically rotate more widely than in this kind of controlled setting. 

Still, the team sees their progress as a milestone that can spur future breakthroughs. “With this work, we hope to inspire future explorations that leverage unexpected, accidental visual signals to reveal information about the world around us, broadening the horizons of 3D scene reconstruction.” Although more mature versions of this work could spawn some creepy and unwanted privacy intrusions, at least you can rest easy knowing that today’s version can only vaguely make out a Kirby doll even under the most ideal of conditions.

Sports Interactive said back in 2021 that it would bring women's soccer to Football Manager, its long-running simulation franchise. Now, we have a clearer idea of when that will happen. In a blog post that looks at the franchise's future, SI says it will introduce women's teams in Football Manager 2025, which is next year's edition.

The studio initially said it would take a while to bring women's soccer into the fold as it wanted to offer the same level of depth that it does for the men's game. Football Manager has an enormous database of tens of thousands of players, each with individual stats, bios, injury history and so on. Not only that, SI had to account for changes to the attribute systems, gender considerations for translations and different league rules when it comes to women's football.

"The facts are that we’ve made really good progress in many areas, including research, the match engine and translation," SI studio manager Miles Jacobson wrote. "But there are other areas that haven’t made enough advancements, a lot of which are legal issues. The women's game deserves to be the best it possibly can be when it is released."

Alongside the addition of women's teams, Football Manager 2025 will herald a fundamental shift for the series as SI is moving to the Unity game engine. Jacobson says this will "give us a lot more power graphically, across all formats, alongside powerful user interface tools." There will be an entirely new UI and "a significantly better looking matchday experience," while animations are making "a big jump" forward. It'll take a little longer to transition to Unity on mobile, however.

A project to overhaul the underlying tech of Football Manager has been in the works for several years. The initial aim was to revamp the series with Football Manager 2022, but the COVID-19 pandemic forced SI to take a step back and focus on making sure it could release a new version each year.

Elsewhere, Jacobson acknowledged that while FM23 has reached more than 5 million players (by far the most in the series' history after SI introduced Apple Arcade and PS5 versions), some of its features weren't up to scratch. Some of those who play each year's edition may have also been disappointed by having "fewer new features than normal," the studio head noted.

However, SI has expanded its team and it's on track to fully implement FM24's new features faster than usual, leaving more time for polish and bug fixes. One of those updates is well overdue: the option to transfer your progress from FM23 and continue where you left off while benefiting from FM24's upgrades. Even though SI will move to a new game engine next year, the studio plans to let players take their FM24 saves into FM25 as well.

"This is especially good for those playing via Game Pass and Apple Arcade who, by subscribing to those platforms, would lose access to their career shortly after the new game is released," Jacobson wrote. "This has been unavoidable to date due to the expiry of our licenses which require us to remove titles from platforms upon conclusion. We’re still working out the finer details with the platform holders, but the idea is that you’ll be able to seamlessly move from FM23 to FM24 on those platforms and continue your save or start a new one."

Blizzard is bringing hardcore servers to World of Warcraft Classic. Inspired by the game’s popular “Death = Delete” community add-on, the mode limits any character you create to exactly one life. If your hero dies, running back to their body as a ghost won’t bring them back to life, nor can someone else resurrect your character with a class ability like the Shaman’s Ancestral Spirit spell. You also can’t use abilities like the Warlock’s Soulstone spell to bring your character back to life on their own. Oh, and Paladins won’t be able to bubble hearth out of sticky situations.

Your character won’t disappear after they die. Instead, they will remain as a ghost, so you can stay in touch with guildmates and any friends you met during your adventure. And if you want to continue playing your character after their untimely demise, Blizzard will offer free transfers to non-hardcore servers.

This being World of Warcraft we’re talking about, you have to imagine some people will try to trick other players into killing their own characters. To that point, Blizzard says Classic Hardcore will feature restrictions not found in other versions of the game. For instance, you won’t be able to kite a monster from one area to another in hopes of it terrorizing low-level characters. You also will need to deliberately flag yourself for PvP combat before you can attack another player. “We’ve added this failsafe to prevent situations in which a player could unintentionally take aggressive action against another player who is flagged for PvP, and unwittingly flag themselves,” notes Blizzard.

Speaking of PvP, Classic Hardcore will feature less of an emphasis on player-versus-player combat. You can’t queue for battlegrounds, for example, but Blizzard is introducing a new dueling mechanic that allows players to challenge one another to a fight to the death. Slaying an opposing player in such a duel will impart a permanent cosmetic buff called “String of Ears” on your character that tracks the number of players you’ve successfully taken down.

Hardcore servers will arrive in World of Warcraft Classic before the end of summer. Before then, a public test build of the new mode will go live on June 29th.

The Nintendo Switch Online library just got a bit beefier, thanks to the addition of four classic Sega Genesis titles. The subscription-based classic games platform is now host to Ghouls ‘n Ghosts, The Revenge of Shinobi, Landstalker and Crusader of Centy, joining around 30 pre-existing Genesis titles and many more NES, SNES and Game Boy releases. That’s right. Sonic and Mario are friends now.

For the uninitiated, Ghouls ‘n Ghosts is a tough-as-nails platformer that still gives nightmares to adults of a certain age. The Rise of Shinobi is a serviceable entry in the OG ninja-simulation franchise. Landstalker is a cult favorite action RPG with an isometric view and Crusader of Centy is a well-reviewed, yet relatively obscure, Zelda clone. Crusader of Centy is tough to find, with physical copies selling for thousands of dollars, so this is a boon for retro gaming enthusiasts. Here’s a video of all four games in action, so you can decide if you want to plunk down $50 for a yearly NSO Expansion Pack subscription.

As a note, these games are only available with a $50-yearly Expansion Pack subscription, though that also gets you access to N64 and Game Boy Advance titles. If you just want to play from a library of NES, SNES and Game Boy releases, go with the cheaper standard NSO subscription of $20 each year. Nintendo isn’t exactly speedy with these releases, with game drops around once a month, so check the full library before handing over your debit card information.