Logitech has refreshed its iconic gaming mouse, the G502, with lighter materials and new features while mostly keeping its design. The new lineup is called the G502 X, and it comes in a wired version, a base wireless form and another wired option with RGB lighting. Logitech used thin-wall exoskeleton and a lighter scroll wheel to reduce the wired mouse's weight to 89 grams. It also used an updated version of its proprietary Lightspeed wireless protocol to ensure that its wireless versions have a 68 percent faster response rate than the previous generation's.

All three versions use Lightforce hybrid optical-mechanical switch technology, which (as Logitech explains) combines the crisp tactile clicks of mechanical switches with the ultra low-latency/speedy performance of optical switches. They also use Logitech's Hero 25K gaming sensor — the company's most advanced mouse sensor — for max speed and accuracy. Plus, they come with a removable DPI shift button that lets you program the mouse to go faster or slower. You can either reverse the button's orientation to bring it closer to your thumb or replace it completely with the included blank cover if you don't think you need it.

The Plus wireless variant of the G502 X has all the features the other models offer, but it also comes equipped with a flowing 8-LED lighting strip that you can customize with effects and personalizations through the G Hub software. While it will likely use more battery than its less showy wireless sibling, it does have a play detection feature that switches the lighting off while your hand is covering it to conserve power.

The new G502 X models in black and white options are now available for pre-order from the Logitech G website and will also be sold via retailers like Amazon starting this month. You can get the wired G502 X mouse (Amazon) for $80, the G502 X Lightspeed wireless mouse for $140 and the G502 X Plus wireless mouse (Amazon) with RGB lighting for $160.

Sony has started to sell a new PlayStation 5 model that may not necessarily improve performance, but will be lighter and possibly easier to produce, Press Start has reported. The CFI-1200A/B digital/disc models have started to appear in Australia with a significant loss in weight. 

According to packaging information, the digital version is 200 grams lighter and the disc version weighs 300 grams less than last year's models, so the latter is roughly the same weight as the digital model was at launch. Whether that loss is coming from changes in the case design or internal components is not yet known, though — we'll have to wait for a teardown to confirm that. However, last year's CFI-1102 mode was lighter mostly due to a smaller heatsink.

The weight reduction could allow Sony to reduce production costs and possibly build consoles more quickly. Last week, Sony announced that it was raising PlayStation 5 pricing around the world but not in the US (€50 more than the original launch prices in Europe), due to "challenging economic conditions." It said last year that it's no longer selling the PS5 at a loss and was actually making money on the disc-based version. 

Earlier this month, Logitech announced that it was working on a handheld gaming device with Tencent that would "support multiple cloud gaming services" including NVIDIA's GeForce Now and Xbox Cloud Gaming. Now, it looks like we're getting our first look at the device thanks to prolific leaker Evan Blass. We also know that it should be called the G Gaming Handheld as Logitech has listed that name on a recently published landing page. 

It looks just like many other gaming handhelds, with left and right joysticks, a direction pad, ABXY buttons, a home button and shoulder pads, along with a custom "G" button. Another image also shows what looks like the home screen, with icons for Google's Play Store, Xbox, GeForce Now, Steam, Chrome and YouTube. We also see icons for user profile, messages, settings and power.  

You could compare the G Gaming Handheld to a Steam Deck or even Nintendo's Switch Lite in terms of the basic design. The cloud gaming aspect means it's likely to have similar capabilities to a smartphone, albeit with a more convenient form factor and gaming-centric UI. As such, it'll compete not just with other handhelds but numerous controllers designed for smartphones like Razer's Kishi V2, the 8bitDo Pro 2 and SteelSeries Stratus+ — so it's level of success will depend strongly on the price. 

There's no word yet on when it'll arrive, but as mentioned, Logitech now has a landing page in place, so you can submit your email address to get more details. 

AMD has officially announced the Ryzen 7000 processor models, which the company had accidentally revealed back in July. It will release four models on September 27th, to be specific, the most affordable of which is the 6-core Ryzen 5 7600X that will set you back $299, followed by the 8-core Ryzen 7700X that costs $100 more at $399. The 12-core Ryzen 9 7900X CPU will be sold for $549, while the 16-core Ryzen 9 7950X will cost $699. As Ars Technica notes, the 7600X and the 7900X models have the same launch prices as their direct predecessors from the Ryzen 5000 lineup, whereas the 7950X is $100 cheaper. The 7700X costs $100 more than the 5700X, but that model launched over a year after the first Ryzen 5000 processors came out.

The Ryzen 7000 models are based on AMD's Zen 4 architecture, which promises to deliver max boost speed above 5GHz, AI acceleration and a doubled L2 cache. They use AM5 platform, the chipmaker's new socket generation, and will require DDR5 RAM. They're also the first desktop CPUs based on the 5nm manufacturing process, according to Gizmodo, and that means they have more transistors than the 5000 chips. That usually translates to less heat and more power for users. 

AMD claims that the Ryzen 7000 processors are around 29 percent faster than the Ryzen 5000 models for single-threaded tasks, including games. Chief Technology Officer Mark Papermaster told CNET, though, that when the company measured for tasks that span the processor's 16 processing cores, the speed boost was as much as 49 percent.

If you're looking for Zen 4 CPUs cheaper than these four, you'll have to wait until next year when the more affordable options and models for laptops are slated to arrive. The company intends to continue selling processors based on older Zen architectures that work with the AM4 platform, though,so you still have options if you're looking to build a PC on a budget.

Cybercriminals are increasingly exploiting security flaws in smart contracts to steal cryptocurrency, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In an advisory it published on Monday (via Bleeping Computer), the agency warned investors of a significant uptick in attacks targeting decentralized finance platforms.

Between January and March of this year, hackers stole $1.3 billion worth of cryptocurrencies, with almost 97 percent of that money coming from DeFi platforms, the FBI said citing data from Chainalysis. That’s an increase from both 2021 and 2020 when DeFi-related thefts represented 72 percent and 30 percent the source of all stolen crypto. The agency has seen criminals employ a variety of methods to fleece DeFi platforms. In one case, hackers employed a so-called flash loan attack to steal approximately $3 million worth of cryptocurrencies. In a separate attack targetting a signature verification vulnerability in a platform’s token bridge, cybercriminals made off with $320 million.

Chainanalysis

Many of the most prolific hacks in recent months fall into those categories of attacks. For instance, the largest crypto heist ever saw the Lazarus Group, a North Korean state-sponsored hacking collective, target Axie Infinity. The group reportedly exploited a backdoor in a Remote Procedure Call node from Axie creator Sky Mavis to forge fake withdrawals using compromised private keys. More recently, a hacking “free-fo-all” saw Nomad bridge users lose $200 million worth of crypto due to a misconfiguration.

The FBI recommends investors take a handful of precautions before risking their money with a DeFi platform. You should research the platform you want to invest in, as well as the details of the smart contract they employ. Additionally, only put money down on a firm or company that has paid for independent code audits. You also want to avoid investment pools with extremely limited timeframes to join.

"Cyber criminals seek to take advantage of investors' increased interest in cryptocurrencies, as well as the complexity of cross-chain functionality and open source nature of DeFi platforms," the FBI said. "Investors should make their own investment decisions based on their financial objectives and financial resources and, if in any doubt, should seek advice from a licensed financial adviser."

Meta has followed through on its threat promise to bring NFT (non-fungible token) support to Facebook. Users can now post digital collectibles that they have in their digital wallets across Facebook and Instagram. After they connect digital wallets to one app, they'll be able to access NFTs from both of them.

The company is making the move a few weeks after it expanded access to Instagram's NFT functions in dozens more countries. It started testing NFTs on Facebook earlier this summer. Meta is moving deeper into NFT territory even though the market for the digital tokens has nosedived in recent months. There are indications that Meta is working on a marketplace where people can buy and sell NFTs, but whether people will actually use it remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, here's Snoop Dogg and Eminem's MTV Video Music Awards performance, which featured animated versions of their NFTs. In terms of bleak visions of the near future, The Last of Us has nothing on this.

A new Mafia game is on the way. Series publisher 2K Games and Hanger 13, the studio that worked on Mafia III and Mafia: Definitive Edition, announced the news in a blog post celebrating the franchise’s 20th anniversary. 

“I'm happy to confirm we've started work on an all-new Mafia project,” said Roman Hladík, Hanger 13 general manager. “While it's a few years away and we can't share anything more right now, we're really excited to keep working on this beloved franchise and to entertain our players with new stories.”

The studio did not share any other details on the project. Its most recent release was 2020’s Mafia: Definitive Edition, a remake of the franchise’s original 2002 entry. According to a Kotaku report published earlier this year, Hanger 13 has gone through multiple rounds of layoffs since the studio completed work on Mafia III in 2016. The most recent occurred in May after 2K reportedly canceled a game that Hanger 13 had been working on for a while and that the publisher had funded to the tune of $50 million. That same month, Kotaku published a separate report revealing that the studio was also working on a Mafia prequel set in Italy and built on top of Unreal Engine 5. It’s unclear if that project is the game 2K and Hanger 13 announced today.

If you want to revisit the series or play it for the first time, 2K also announced today it would give the original game away on Steam between September 1st and 5th. You can also buy Definitive Editionon sale until September 8th.

The Federal Trade Commission has sued a data broker called Kochava, alleging the company sold geolocation information that could be used to reveal visits to sensitive locations. The agency says the data could show movements to and from reproductive health clinics, places of worship and addiction recovery centers, as well as homeless and domestic violence shelters.

"By selling data tracking people, Kochava is enabling others to identify individuals and exposing them to threats of stigma, stalking, discrimination, job loss and even physical violence," the agency said. It wants Kochava to stop selling such data and to delete sensitive geolocation information it has collected. Samuel Levine, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said the move is an attempt to protect people's privacy.

The FTC says the data includes timestamped latitude and longitude locations that are matched with unique mobile device identification numbers. It alleged that Kochava's custom data feeds allow its customers "to identify and track specific mobile device users." The agency claims that someone who buys the data could compare the location of a phone (especially if it's in the same place overnight) against property records to identify someone and follow their movements. In fact, using a data sample, the FTC says it was able to track a device from a reproductive health clinic to a single-family residence, as well as other locations.

In June, the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, which had conferred a nationwide right to safe abortion access since the early '70s. After that decision, Google started deleting abortion clinic visits from users' location history. The FTC is going a step further by trying to halt the sale of device-level geolocation data that could be used to identify someone who visits or even works at a reproductive health clinic.

France is preparing to launch a new electric vehicle subsidy program that would give people the ability to lease an EV for €100 ($100) per month. Budget Minister Gabriel Attal announced the plan over the weekend on the country’s LCI news channel, reports Bloomberg. “We know that for many French [EVs] remain very expensive,” he said, adding that the government was working to figure out how quickly it could implement the measure.

Under a subsidy scheme that’s similar to the one introduced by the US Inflation Reduction Act, French car buyers can currently receive as much as €6,000 off electric vehicles that cost less than €47,000. Consumers can also take advantage of a federal trade-in program to get money for their old combustion-engine cars. Despite those incentives, EVs only accounted for 12 percent of new vehicle sales in France during the first seven months of 2022.

For context, France is significantly behind on that front compared to countries like Norway. Last year, battery-electric and hybrid vehicles made up nearly two-thirds of all new car sales within the Nordic country. Much of what’s driving adoption there is a subsidy scheme that allows car buyers to avoid taxes that are found on internal combustion engine cars.

Attal’s announcement follows months of extremely hot weather across France as Europe and the world feel the brunt of worsening climate change. After enduring multiple heatwaves throughout June and July, parts of Paris saw temperatures rise to 36 degrees Celsius (nearly 100 Fahrenheit) earlier this month.

Amid Elon Musk's legal battle with Twitter, his attorneys have now subpoenaed the company's former security chief, Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, to appear for a deposition on September 9th. Zatko last week submitted a lengthy whistleblower complaint against Twitter to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission. He accused the company of (among other things) having "egregious" security issues. Zatko suggested the problems may pose a national security risk.

In the subpoena, which was filed on Monday and obtained by The Verge, Musk's attorneys request materials related to how Zatko’s tenure at Twitter ended and what stock, if any, he owns in the company. There are also demands for documents that might indicate any illegal activity by Twitter or foreign intelligence agents it employs. Perhaps most pertinently to Musk's attempt to back out of his agreement to buy Twitter, the subpoena asks for information connected to the monetizable daily active users (mDAUs) metric Twitter uses, as well as documents Zatko has on Twitter's alleged spam problem.

Zatko claimed in the complaint that Twitter lied to Musk about the prevalence of bots and spam accounts, as The Washington Post notes. Musk has accused Twitter of fraudulently masking the true number of bots. In his bid to abandon the acquisition, Musk said Twitter made “false and misleading representations” about how many phony accounts are on the platform.

In July, Twitter sued Musk over his attempt to wash his hands of the deal. Musk filed a countersuit later that month. His team has also subpoenaed former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. The case will go to trial in October. 

Meanwhile, Senate and Congressional committee leaders are investigating Zatko's claims. The whistleblower is set to appear at a Judiciary Committee hearing five days after he's scheduled to be deposed in Musk's case against Twitter. Zatko's assertions have been disputed by Twitter and its CEO Parag Agrawal.