Time is running out to download Epic Games’ The Matrix Awakens. The free open-world interactive demo made with Unreal Engine 5 will be removed from the PlayStation and Xbox stores on July 9th. Luckily, players can still access the game an unlimited amount of times once it’s downloaded. The tie-in experience to The Matrix Resurrections debuted last year, and was one of the first examples of what Epic’s next generation game engine can do. UE5 has since been released to the wider developer community.

While The Matrix Awakens isn’t a full game, it’s still a memorable introduction to UE5’s immersive visuals and natural lighting. Players are essentially given free rein to roam through the titular Matrix and soak in the visual effects. The game was written by Lana Wachowski, the co-writer and director of The Matrix trilogy films, and features performances by both Carrie-Anne Moss and Keanu Reeves.

If you’ve already dipped your toe into the world of The Matrix Awakens and are interested in experiencing more games using UE5, a number of new titles have been announced, including a new Tomb Raider game, ARK 2, the upcoming Witcher game and Black Myth: Wukong. You can check out gameplay footage from The Matrix Awakens (available on PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X/S console) below.

The otherworldly dust has settled on season four of Stranger Things, which just wrapped up with a blockbuster pair of episodes. While The Duffer Brothers, who created the show, have one more season of the Netflix megahit to make, they're looking ahead to future projects.

Matt and Ross Duffer have set up a new production company as part of their partnership with Netflix. Fittingly enough, it's called Upside Down Pictures. The studio, which will be run by Ozark and Orphan Black producer Hilary Leavitt, will “aim to create the kind of stories that inspired the Duffers growing up — stories that take place at that beautiful crossroads where the ordinary meets the extraordinary, where big spectacle co-exists with intimate character work, where heart wins out over cynicism,” Netflix said.

The company and the Duffers also revealed some of the projects they have in the pipeline. For one thing, they're working on a stage play set in the world of Stranger Things. Emmy- and Tony-award winner Stephen Daldry, known for his work on The Crown and Billy Elliot, will direct the play. A live-action Stranger Things spin-off series is also in the works.

Intriguingly, Netflix is taking another stab at adapting the classic manga and anime series Death Note with the help of the Duffers. Unlike the poorly received 2017 movie, this will be a live-action show.

Also in the works under the wing of Upside Down Pictures are a series from Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance creators Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews and an adaption of Stephen King and Peter Straub‘s The Talisman. The production company and Netflix have teamed up with Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment and Paramount Television for the latter series.

Stranger Things is easily one of Netflix's biggest successes. Fans have already collectively viewed more than a billion hours of Stranger Things 4 alone. After Squid Game, it's only the second season of a Netflix show to hit that milestone within 28 days of release.

As such, it's not too much of a surprise that Netflix wants to expand the Duffers' remit to (hopefully) work their magic on more shows and movies. The company is having a rough year and is in desperate need of more big hits to draw in new subscribers and keep existing ones on board.

For the second time this year, Square Enix is delaying Forspoken. Following a delay that pushed the title from its original May 24th release date, the upcoming action RPG from Final Fantasy XV studio Luminous Productions was scheduled to hit PlayStation 5 and PC on October 11th, 2022. It will now instead come out on January 24th, 2023, the publisher announced on Wednesday.

“As a result of ongoing discussions with key partners, we have made the strategic decision to move the launch date of Forspoken to January 24, 2023,” Square Enix said on Twitter. “All game elements are now complete, and development is in its final polishing phase.”

The delay comes on the same day Sony announced the release date for God of War: Ragnarok. The latest project from the company’s Santa Monica studio will arrive on PS5 and PS4 on November 9th. With Forspoken pushed back to 2023, Sony’s fall release schedule now only includes Ragnarok and The Last of Us Part I – the latter is due on September 2nd. The last time we got an extended look at Forspoken was during a hands-off preview Square Enix held at the end of last year. The publisher promised to show off more of the fantasy game later this summer.

Apple has announced Lockdown Mode, an "extreme" level of security designed for a "very small number of users who face grave, targeted threats." It will be available this fall when the company rolls out iOS 16, iPadOS 16 and macOS Ventura.

The company says it created Lockdown Mode to help protect high-profile people who, because of their status or job, might be personally targeted by malware developed by the likes of NSO Group, which is behind Pegasus, or other state-backed groups. Switching on Lockdown Mode will severely restrict the functions of an iPhone, iPad or Mac to limit possible entry points for spyware.

In Messages, for instance, most attachments other than images will be blocked. The same goes for link previews. Lockdown Mode will prohibit incoming FaceTime calls and other invites, unless it's from a person you've previously called or shared an invite with. Wired iPhone connections with computers and accessories will be disabled when the device is locked.

Apple will also block some web technologies, such as just-in-time JavaScript compilation, unless you manually approve a site. It will also not be possible to install a configuration profile or add a device to mobile device management when Lockdown Mode is enabled. A screenshot notes that "some experiences" will be unavailable entirely.

Apple

The company says all these protections will be available when Lockdown Mode launches. It plans to add more over time. Apple will also expand its Security Bounty program. Researchers who find weaknesses in Lockdown Mode and help Apple make it more secure will be eligible for rewards of up to $2 million.

“Apple makes the most secure mobile devices on the market. Lockdown Mode is a groundbreaking capability that reflects our unwavering commitment to protecting users from even the rarest, most sophisticated attacks,” Ivan Krstić, Apple’s head of security engineering and architecture, said. “While the vast majority of users will never be the victims of highly targeted cyberattacks, we will work tirelessly to protect the small number of users who are. That includes continuing to design defenses specifically for these users, as well as supporting researchers and organizations around the world doing critically important work in exposing mercenary companies that create these digital attacks.”

Apple sued NSO Group last year to "hold it accountable" for states that target and spy on its users. The company says it's donating $10 million, as well as any damages it receives as a result of the suit, to organizations that "investigate, expose, and prevent highly targeted cyberattacks." Grants will be made through the Ford Foundation's Dignity and Justice Fund.

Insulting someone online could land an individual in Japan a one-year prison term under an amendment to the country’s penal code enacted on Thursday morning. Following the apparent suicide of Hana Kimura and a paltry ¥9,000 (around $81) fine for one of the men accused of bullying the Terrace House star in 2020, government officials began a review of Japan’s cyberbullying laws. Under the previous version of the country’s penal code, the punishment for posting online insults was a fine of ¥10,000 or less and fewer than 30 days in prison. Now, the law allows for financial penalties of up to ¥300,000 or about $2,200.

Despite pressure from the public on the government to tackle cyberbullying, the bill that introduced the amendment was controversial. CNNreports it only passed after Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party added a provision that calls on the government to review the law in three years to examine its impact on freedom of expression. As The Verge points out, there are also concerns the law isn’t specific enough about what counts as an insult.

The country’s penal code defines insults as an effort to demean someone without referencing specific facts about them – defamation, by contrast, includes reference to specific traits. "There needs to be a guideline that makes a distinction on what qualifies as an insult," Seiho Cho, a criminal lawyer in Japan, told CNN. “At the moment, even if someone calls the leader of Japan an idiot, then maybe under the revised law that could be classed as an insult.”

Nintendo occasionallyreleases special-edition Switch models for its big games and Splatoon 3 will be no different. A very colorful version of the Switch OLED will be available on August 26th, a couple of weeks before the game arrives on September 9th. This version of the console costs $360 — $10 more than the regular OLED. Pre-orders are open now.

The main body has gray artwork from the game on the rear, but it's the Joy-Cons that really make this special version shine. The left one has a blue and purple scheme and the right Joy-Con has a yellow and green gradient. Both Joy-Cons have squid-style artwork and a white design on the rear. Here's hoping they'll be available separately at some point. The console also comes with a white Splatoon 3-centric dock, with a similar art style and a splash of yellow ink.

Unfortunately, Nintendo isn't tossing in a copy of the game as a bonus — you'll need to buy Splatoon 3 separately. The company will also release a $75 Splatoon 3 Nintendo Switch Pro Controller (with similar art and blue and yellow grips) on the day the game comes out, as well as a themed $25 carrying case.

Nintendo released the Switch OLED last year and there haven't been many variants of it to date. This one could be ideal for Splatoon fans who prefer to play in handheld mode and haven't snagged a Switch OLED yet. It's not clear how many units of the special edition Nintendo plans to make, though, so it might not be easy to snap up.

Nintendo

After it spun out from Huawei, Honor wanted to make a splash with its first flagship, the Magic3 Pro. One of the biggest features the company boasted about was the camera, saying it was good enough to shoot a proper movie with. Armed with one, we’d all be turned into miniature Tom Cruises, shooting TikToks as if they were destined for the multiplex. Unfortunately, the phone never left its native China, but Honor is using the same pitch for its successor, the Magic4 Pro, which has arrived in Europe.

Certainly, Honor distinguished itself with the spec list, which reads like the company threw the kitchen sink, then the kitchen, then the dining room at the handset. The Pro model has a 50-megapixel primary camera paired with a second 50-megapixel ultra-wide camera with a 122 degree field of view. On top of that, there’s a 64-megapixel telephoto with 100x digital zoom and an 8x8 Direct Time of Flight sensor, giving it whip-fast focusing.

The “IMAX-enhanced” phone’s cinematic credentials go further: Honor enlisted the help of a professional colorist to devise specific hue palettes for video. Bryan McMahan created a series of Look Up Tables (LUTs) for the phone which act like an Instagram filter for your video. These range from a Sunny mode that makes your footage look like it was shot at the height of summer, and a Gloomy mode which makes everything look like it’s been through a bleach-pass. One of my favorites was Focus, which dials down all the colors except for skin tone, at least for my caucasian limbs, making everything look like an ‘80s music video.

But the phone’s real point of interest is its claimed ability to shoot in Log, which is the standard that most Hollywood movies are shot in. Now, technically, it’s a custom format – MagicLog – which Honor designed to work with mobile devices, but the point remains the same. Log is short for Logarithmic, and it’s a way of filming something that preserves as much of the dynamic range and tone as possible. It’ll preserve scenes in high contrast, as well as shadows, highlights and whites that a conventional digital camera might try to smooth out or just straight-up fail to capture properly.

Unfortunately, it has not been plain sailing by any stretch of the imagination – some of the takes I shot for my piece to camera were plagued by strobing. Which was odd, since my LED bulbs shouldn’t be strobing, and the camera only seems to pick up on it every now and again. The sound, too, leaves a lot to be desired and I had to record all of my audio on an external microphone. (Yes, this is common for most professional cameras, but the point here is that people are going to be using this as the camera for their vacation videos, right?)

Being able to shoot Log means you could also hand over your footage to a colorist and get perfect footage. In theory. The first test shots I took were very flat, and it was hard to pull out a lot of the detail and dynamic range that should be there. Now, I’m not a professional colorist but my colleague, Engadget’s Steve Dent is, so I sent him the phone, and all of my footage, for him to run his trained eye all over.

He said that there was a significant amount of clipping, which means that there’s a lot of detail in the footage that can’t be accessed. This is likely a consequence of compression since MagicLog is designed to be mobile-friendly, after all. But it means that my clips couldn’t, after treatment, get the good pops of color that we were hoping to tease out. Not to mention that Honor doesn’t appear to offer a standalone LUT for editing software, which meant that Steve couldn’t simply run it through the standard model (which is table stakes for other pro cameras).

Shooting with the Magic4 Pro is also, in Steve’s words, difficult for a couple of other fairly big reasons. First, because it clips highlights, you have to expose for them and not the shadows, which means that there’s some guesswork involved. Then there’s no easy way to tell if you’re shooting safe footage as there’s no built-in Display LUT to give you an idea of what’s coming. There’s also no video level display, so shooting in MagicLog involves a lot of hitting and hoping.

Now, that’s not to say that the Magic4 Pro is terrible, awful and a general waste of your money – because it isn’t. Shooting in the standard mode is easy enough and the results were good enough for me to use as a pro-quality video for Engadget. But fundamentally it feels like until Honor really finishes building out the Log offering, with a display LUT, video level display and making it easier for non-pros to color-correct afterward, this isn’t something novices should be playing with and expecting good results.

Microsoft will have to satisfy more than just the Federal Trade Commission to complete its $68.7 billion deal to buy Activision Blizzard. On Wednesday, the United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority announced it would investigate the proposed merger. The watchdog says it seeks to determine whether the agreement would create a “substantial lessening of competition” within the UK. The CMA could announce a decision on whether it will move forward with a probe as early as September 1st. With today’s announcement, the public has until July 20th to submit comment.

Microsoft was most likely ready for the deal to be intensely scrutinized, and in recent months it has made moves seemingly designed to placate regulators. In June, for instance, the company announced a labor neutrality agreement with the Communications Workers of America, the organization that seeks to represent the quality assurance workers who recently voted to unionize at Activision’s Raven Software studio. Just how effective such gestures will be is hard to say. At the start of the year, NVIDIA abandoned its proposed $40 billion deal to buy chip designer ARM after the FTC sued to block the purchase. At the time, the agency called the outcome “signifcant” because it represented “the first abandonment of a litigated vertical merger in many years."

It's been a wild 48 hours for NASA's Capstone mission. Following the lunar satellite's successful launch on Monday, ground control lost contact with the spacecraft shortly after escaping Earth's gravity well and separating from its Electron rocket carrier. After nearly a full day in the dark, NASA announced on Wednesday that its engineers have managed to reopen a line to the 55-pound satellite.

Dubbed, the Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE), this spacecraft will continue to orbit the planet for nearly another week, building up enough momentum to sling it on a trans lunar injection (TLI) route over to the moon. Once the Capstone reaches the moon, it will match the planned path of the Lunar Gateway to verify its highly-eliptical orbit.

Developing...

Marriott confirmed it was the target of yet another data breach after attackers recently breached the company's systems. The company said hackers used social engineering techniques to gain access to an employee's computer. After obtaining around 20GB of data, the person or group behind the attack tried to extort Marriott, but the company refused to pay up. 

The hackers had access to Marriott's network for less than a day. The company told CyberScoop it was already investigating the breach before it received the extortion attempt. The incident is said to have taken place around a month ago, but it only just came to light. Marriott has informed law enforcement and it will notify between 300 and 400 unspecified individuals and regulators as required.

According to DataBreaches, which first reported on the attack, the hackers gained access to a server at BWI Airport Marriott in Maryland. They provided the publication with screenshots that appear to show reservation documents for flight crews, along with ]corporate credit card numbers for an airline or travel agency.

Marriott said most of the information was “non-sensitive internal business files regarding the operation of the property.” It's unclear what kinds of other customer and employee data was included. Engadget has contacted Marriott for comment.

This is at least the seventh data security incident involving Marriott since 2010, according to DataBreaches. One of the more notable cases emerged in November 2018. The company said hackers gained access to the reservation database of its Starwood subsidiary and obtained personal details of as many as 383 million guests (though some of those were believed to be duplicate records). The data included 5.3 million unencrypted passport numbers. The UK's Information Commissioner's Office fined Marriott £18.4 million (around $21.9 million at today's rates) over the incident.