Author name: Kris Guyer

another-us-state-repeals-law-that-protected-isps-from-municipal-competition

Another US state repeals law that protected ISPs from municipal competition

Win for municipal broadband —

With Minnesota repeal, number of states restricting public broadband falls to 16.

Illustration of network data represented by curving lines flowing on a dark background.

Getty Images | Yuichiro Chino

Minnesota this week eliminated two laws that made it harder for cities and towns to build their own broadband networks. The state-imposed restrictions were repealed in an omnibus commerce policy bill signed on Tuesday by Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat.

Minnesota was previously one of about 20 states that imposed significant restrictions on municipal broadband. The number can differ depending on who’s counting because of disagreements over what counts as a significant restriction. But the list has gotten smaller in recent years because states including Arkansas, Colorado, and Washington repealed laws that hindered municipal broadband.

The Minnesota bill enacted this week struck down a requirement that municipal telecommunications networks be approved in an election with 65 percent of the vote. The law is over a century old, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s Community Broadband Network Initiative wrote yesterday.

“Though intended to regulate telephone service, the way the law had been interpreted after the invention of the Internet was to lump broadband in with telephone service thereby imposing that super-majority threshold to the building of broadband networks,” the broadband advocacy group said.

The Minnesota omnibus bill also changed a law that let municipalities build broadband networks, but only if no private providers offer service or will offer service “in the reasonably foreseeable future.” That restriction had been in effect since at least the year 2000.

The caveat that prevented municipalities from competing against private providers was eliminated from the law when this week’s omnibus bill was passed. As a result, the law now lets cities and towns “improve, construct, extend, and maintain facilities for Internet access and other communications purposes” even if private ISPs already offer service.

“States are dropping misguided barriers”

The omnibus bill also added language intended to keep government-operated and private networks on a level playing field. The new language says cities and towns may “not discriminate in favor of the municipality’s own communications facilities by granting the municipality more favorable or less burdensome terms and conditions than a nonmunicipal service provider” with respect to the use of public rights-of-way, publicly owned equipment, and permitting fees.

Additional new language requires “separation between the municipality’s role as a regulator… and the municipality’s role as a competitive provider of services,” and forbids the sharing of “inside information” between the local government’s regulatory and service-provider divisions.

With Minnesota having repealed its anti-municipal broadband laws, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance says that 16 states still restrict the building of municipal networks.

The Minnesota change “is a significant win for the people of Minnesota and highlights a positive trend—states are dropping misguided barriers to deploying public broadband as examples of successful community-owned networks proliferate across the country,” said Gigi Sohn, executive director of the American Association for Public Broadband (AAPB), which represents community-owned broadband networks and co-ops.

There are about 650 public broadband networks in the US, Sohn said. “While 16 states still restrict these networks in various ways, we’re confident this number will continue to decrease as more communities demand the freedom to choose the network that best serves their residents,” she said.

State laws restricting municipal broadband have been passed for the benefit of private ISPs. Although cities and towns generally only build networks when private ISPs haven’t fully met their communities’ needs, those attempts to build municipal networks often face opposition from private ISPs and “dark money” groups that don’t reveal their donors.

Another US state repeals law that protected ISPs from municipal competition Read More »

apple-clarifies-ios-17.5-bug-that-exposed-deleted-photos

Apple clarifies iOS 17.5 bug that exposed deleted photos

iOS 17.5 —

iOS 17.5.1 fixed the bug, but users still had questions.

iPadOS 17.5.1 ready to install on an iPad Pro.

Enlarge / iPadOS 17.5.1 ready to install on an iPad Pro.

Samuel Axon

On May 20, Apple released iOS 17.5.1 to fix a bug users had found a few days prior in iOS 17.5 that resurfaced old photos that had been previously deleted. So far, the update seems to have resolved the issue, but users were left wondering exactly what had happened. Now Apple has clarified the issue somewhat, describing the nature of the bug to 9to5Mac.

Apple told the publication that the photos were not regurgitated from iCloud Photos after being deleted on the local device; rather, they were local to the device. Apple says they were neither left in the cloud after deletion nor synced to it after, and the company did not have access to the deleted photos.

The photos were retained on the local device storage due to a database corruption issue, and the bug resurfaced photos that were flagged for deletion but were not actually fully deleted locally.

That simple explanation doesn’t fully cover all the widely reported edge cases some users had brought up in forums and on Reddit, but Apple offered additional answers for those, too.

The company claimed that when users reported the photos resurfacing on a device other than the one they were originally deleted on, it was always because they had restored from a backup other than iCloud Photos or performed a direct transfer from one device to another.

One user on Reddit claimed (the post has now been deleted) that they had wiped an iPad, sold it to a friend, and the friend then saw photos resurface. Apple told 9to5Mac that is impossible if the user followed the expected procedure for wiping the device, which is to go to “Settings,” “General,” “Transfer and Reset,” and “Erase All Content and Settings.”

The bug was particularly nasty in terms of optics and user trust for Apple, but it would have been far worse if it was iCloud-related and involved deleted photos staying on or being uploaded to Apple’s servers. If what the company told 9to5Mac is true, that was not the case.

Still, it’s a good reminder that in many cases, a deleted file isn’t necessarily deleted, either due to a bug like this, the nature of the storage tech, or in some other cases on other platforms, a deliberate choice.

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next-up-in-google’s-dramatic-overhaul-of-search:-ai-overview-ads

Next up in Google’s dramatic overhaul of search: AI Overview ads

Are any consumers enjoying this? —

Google turned search into an AI product, and now it’s time to make money.

  • Ads in AI Overview. They’re below the fold in this example.

    Google

  • Here’s the layout of Google’s example.

    Google / Ron Amadeo

Google’s AI Overview is a complete transformation of what Google Search is, changing from a product that searches the web to show relevant links, to a place that scrapes the web of information and shows it directly to users. Google is not done making changes, though, and next for AI Overview is ads! We’re all so excited.

The Google Ads & Commerce blog shows what this will look like, with ads landing at the bottom of the AI Overview box. The overview box was already a massive, screen-filling box, and ads make it even longer, pushing what’s left of the web results even further down the page. Google’s demo shows the ads at the bottom of the overview box, and you have to scroll down to see them.

Google’s ad placement will surely be changed and tweaked a million times in the future, and Google mentions that “in early testing, we’ve heard that people find the ads appearing above and below the AI-generated overview helpful.” Leaving aside the unique perspective that ads are “helpful,” there’s your confirmation of the usual above-the-fold ad placement.

For now, AI Overviews are rolling out to everyone in the US, and Google says ads will start appearing in the overview box “soon.” Existing Google ad customers don’t have to do anything to get ads in the Overview box; just keep spending, and Google will take care of it.

Listing image by Sean Gallup | Getty Images

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humane-ai-pin-is-a-disaster:-founders-already-want-to-sell-the-company

Humane AI Pin is a disaster: Founders already want to sell the company

The definition of Dead-on-Arrival —

One month after launch of its “smartphone replacement,” Humane already seems doomed.

Humane AI Pin

Enlarge / The Humane AI Pin. It has a magnetic back, so it sticks to your clothing like a name tag.

Humane

The wearable startup Humane, makers of the bizarre Humane AI Pin, is already looking for the exit. Bloomberg reports the company is seeking a sale after its first and only product launch was a big flop. Despite seemingly having nothing else in the pipeline and the AI Pin being dead on arrival, Bloomberg reports the company is “seeking a price of between $750 million and $1 billion in a sale.” Humane was founded by two ex-Apple employees, Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, in 2018 and has raised $230 million from some big-name investors like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

The Humane AI Pin immediately seemed like an idea that only made sense in a VC pitch room. The device is a wearable voice command box and camera that you magnetically clip onto a shirt, sort of like a Star Trek communicator. It wanted to replace your smartphone yet had no traditional display, and the company bragged in the launch video: “We don’t do apps.” That means you’re left with mostly voice commands for whatever the voice command system can process. You could press on the front and ask a question. The camera could also be involved in a “what’s this thing?” capacity.

While there was no onboard display, it did have a one-color 720p laser projection system that would project onto your hand. The UI looked just like a smartwatch, and you controlled it with the same hand you’re using as a projection screen. You could tilt your palm around to select something and tap your fingers together to confirm, all the while distorting and moving the “display” being projected onto your hand. The smartwatch-like UI raises the question: “Why not just wear a smartwatch instead?” Then you’d have real apps, a real display, a less-weird form factor, better input, and better voice commands, and it would probably cost less. Oh, yeah, about that price: The Humane AI Pin was $700 plus a $24-a-month subscription fee, while an Apple Watch Series 9 is $400.

Besides all those “on-paper” problems, the device was also universally panned once it landed in the hands of reviewers. The device comes in two halves, with a front processing unit and a back battery, and the side clipped together magnetically with your shirt in the middle. It turns out a shirt is not a great support substrate for the rather heavy device, and it drags down a lot of lighter clothes. Like all projector-based displays, the laser projector does not work well outside of a dark room. The voice response time is really slow, and the device is warm all the time, which is an odd sensation when it’s pressed against your chest. The battery life is between two and four hours. It can’t do a lot of basic things like set an alarm or timer. Review conclusions range from The Verge’s “not even close” to Marques Brownlee’s “the worst product I’ve ever reviewed.”

No one knows what sales were like for the company, but the AI Pin only started shipping in April. To already have the founders running for the exits a single month after launch sounds pretty dire. It’s hard to imagine a worse timeline of events and hard to imagine anyone paying $750 million for a company that seems to be swirling the drain. Don’t be surprised if history places Humane on the list of “biggest tech startup flops ever” alongside the likes of Juicero and Ouya.

Humane AI Pin is a disaster: Founders already want to sell the company Read More »

gordon-bell,-an-architect-of-our-digital-age,-dies-at-age-89

Gordon Bell, an architect of our digital age, dies at age 89

the great memory register in the sky —

Bell architected DEC’s VAX minicomputers, championed computer history, mentored at Microsoft.

A photo of Gordon Bell speaking at the annual PC Forum in Palm Springs, California, March 1989.

Enlarge / A photo of Gordon Bell speaking at the annual PC Forum in Palm Springs, California, March 1989.

Computer pioneer Gordon Bell, who as an early employee of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) played a key role in the development of several influential minicomputer systems and also co-founded the first major computer museum, passed away on Friday, according to Bell Labs veteran John Mashey. Mashey announced Bell’s passing in a social media post on Tuesday morning.

“I am very sad to report [the] death May 17 at age 89 of Gordon Bell, famous computer pioneer, a founder of Computer Museum in Boston, and a force behind the @ComputerHistory here in Silicon Valley, and good friend since the 1980s,” wrote Mashey in his announcement. “He succumbed to aspiration pneumonia in Coronado, CA.”

Bell was a pivotal figure in the history of computing and a notable champion of tech history, having founded Boston’s Computer Museum in 1979 that later became the heart of Computer History Museum in Mountain View, with his wife Gwen Bell. He was also the namesake of the ACM’s prestigious Gordon Bell Prize, created to spur innovations in parallel processing.

Born in 1934 in Kirksville, Missouri, Gordon Bell earned degrees in electrical engineering from MIT before being recruited in 1960 by DEC founders Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson. As the second computer engineer hired at DEC, Bell worked on various components for the PDP-1 system, including floating-point subroutines, tape controllers, and a drum controller.

Bell also invented the first UART (Universal Asynchronous Receiver-Transmitter) for serial communication during his time at DEC. He went on to architect several influential DEC systems, including the PDP-4 and PDP-6. In the 1970s, he played a key role in overseeing the aforementioned VAX minicomputer line as the engineering manager, with Bill Strecker serving as the primary architect for the VAX architecture.

After retiring from DEC in 1983, Bell remained active as an entrepreneur, policy adviser, and researcher. He co-founded Encore Computer and helped establish the NSF’s Computing and Information Science and Engineering Directorate.

In 1995, Bell joined Microsoft Research where he studied telepresence technologies and served as the subject of the MyLifeBits life-logging project. The initiative aimed to realize Vannevar Bush’s vision of a system that could store all the documents, photos, and audio a person experienced in their lifetime.

Bell was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, National Academy of Sciences, and American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received the National Medal of Technology from President George H.W. Bush in 1991 and the IEEE’s John von Neumann medal in 1992.

“He was immeasurably helpful”

As news of Bell’s passing spread on social media Tuesday, industry veterans began sharing their memories and condolences. Former Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie wrote, “I can’t adequately describe how much I loved Gordon and respected what he did for the industry. As a kid I first ran into him at Digital (I was then at DG) when he and Dave were working on VAX. So brilliant, so calm, so very upbeat and optimistic about what the future might hold.”

Ozzie also recalled Bell’s role as a helpful mentor. “The number of times Gordon and I met while at Microsoft – acting as a sounding board, helping me through challenges I was facing – is uncountable,” he wrote.

Former Windows VP Steven Sinofsky also paid tribute to Bell on X, writing, “He was immeasurably helpful at Microsoft where he was a founding advisor and later full time leader in Microsoft Research. He advised and supported countless researchers, projects, and product teams. He was always supportive and insightful beyond words. He never hesitated to provide insights and a few sparks at so many of the offsites that were so important to the evolution of Microsoft.”

“His memory is a blessing to so many,” wrote Sinofsky in his tweet memorializing Bell. “His impact on all of us in technology will be felt for generations. May he rest in peace.”

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microsoft-copilot-will-watch-you-play-minecraft,-tell-you-what-you’re-doing-wrong

Microsoft Copilot will watch you play Minecraft, tell you what you’re doing wrong

Parasocial gaming department —

Microsoft demo is like chatting with GameFAQs when you don’t have a friend to hang with.

In the recent past, you'd have to rely on your kid sibling to deliver <em>Minecraft</em> commentary like “Oh no, it’s a zombie. Run!”” src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/zombie-800×429.png”></img><figcaption>
<p><a data-height=Enlarge / In the recent past, you’d have to rely on your kid sibling to deliver Minecraft commentary like “Oh no, it’s a zombie. Run!”

Longtime gamers (and/or Game Grumps fans) likely know that even single-player games can be a lot more fun with a friend hanging out nearby to offer advice, shoot the breeze, or just offer earnest reactions to whatever’s happening on screen. Now, Microsoft is promising that its GhatGPT-4o-powered Copilot system will soon offer an imitation of that pro-social experience even for Minecraft players who don’t have any human friends available to watch them play.

In a pair of social media posts Monday, Microsoft highlighted how “real-time conversations with your AI companion copilot” can enhance an otherwise solitary Minecraft experience. In the first demo, the disembodied copilot voice tells the player how to craft a sword, walking him through the process of gathering some wood or stone to go with the sticks sitting in his inventory. In another, the AI identifies a zombie in front of the player and gives the (seemingly obvious) advice to run away from the threat and “make sure it can’t reach you” by digging underground or building a tower of blocks.

Real time conversations with your AI companion Copilot, powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4o. pic.twitter.com/Ug7EWv2sah

— Microsoft Copilot (@MSFTCopilot) May 20, 2024

These kinds of in-game pointers aren’t the most revolutionary use of conversational AI—even a basic in-game tutorial/reference system or online walkthrough could deliver the same basic information, after all. Still, the demonstration stands out for just how that information is delivered to the player through a natural language conversation that doesn’t require pausing the gameplay even briefly.

The key moment highlighting this difference is near the end of one of the video demos, when the Copilot AI offers a bit of encouragement to the player: “Whew, that was a close one. Great job finding shelter!” That’s the point when the system transitions from a fancy voice-controlled strategy guide to an ersatz version of the kind of spectator that might be sitting on your couch or watching your Twitch stream. It creates the real possibility of developing a parasocial relationship with the Copilot guide that is not really a risk when consulting a text file on GameFAQs, for instance (though I think the Copilot reactions will have to get a bit less inane to really feel like a valued partner-in-gaming).

Just hanging out with my AI buddy

It’s unclear from the video clips whether Copilot is reading data directly from the Minecraft instance or simply reacting to the same information the player is seeing. But the social media posts came the same day as Microsoft’s announcement of “Recall,” a coming feature that “take[s] images of your active screen every few seconds” to provide a persistent “memory” of everything you do on the computer. That feature will be exclusive to Copilot+ PCs, which use an integrated Neural Processing Unit for on-device processing of many common generative AI tasks.

Microsoft’s Minecraft copilot demo brings to mind some of the similar conversations that OpenAI showed off during last week’s live demo of ChatGPT-4o. But the artificial game-adjacent conversation here sounds significantly more robotic and direct than the lifelike, emotional responses in ChatGPT’s presentation. Then again, ChatGPT has come under fire from actress Scarlett Johansson for using a voice that sounds too much like her performance in a 2013 movie about a conversational AI. Microsoft might be on safer ground sticking with a voice that is more obviously artificial here.

The casual cursing is what really makes an AI gaming buddy feel real.

Speaking of Her, we can’t help but think of one particular scene in that movie where Joaquin Phoenix’s Theodore asks for gaming advice both from the titular AI and a hilariously potty-mouthed NPC. Maybe Microsoft can add a casual cursing module to its Copilot gaming companion to really capture the feeling of hanging out with a dorm room buddy over a late-night gaming session.

Microsoft Copilot will watch you play Minecraft, tell you what you’re doing wrong Read More »

this-is-volvo’s-production-ready-fully-autonomous-class-8-truck

This is Volvo’s production-ready fully autonomous Class 8 truck

still need a human to hook up the trailer —

Some believe autonomous trucks are the answer to a shortage of truck drivers.

A Volvo VNL truck covered in autonomous driving sensors

Enlarge / Aurora’s sensors festoon this Volvo VNL class 8 truck.

Volvo Trucks

Recently, we took a look at Volvo’s VNL new Class 8 heavy truck developed for the North American market. Last night at the ACT Expo trade show, the company debuted a new variant, called the VNL Autonomous. The name should give it away—this truck has been designed to drive itself using autonomous tech from the startup Aurora.

The VNL Autonomous has been designed for SAE level 4 autonomy and combines long-range lidar with radar, cameras, and other sensors. Input from these sensors is processed by a redundant pair of computers running Aurora’s AI software. Aurora has been a partner with Volvo Autonomous Solutions for some years now, working on hub-to-hub driverless freight systems for the North American market.

“Our platform engineering approach prioritizes safety by incorporating high-assurance redundancy systems designed to mitigate potential emergency situations,” said Volvo Autonomous Solutions’ chief product officer Shahkh Kazmi. “We built the Volvo VNL Autonomous from the ground up, integrating these redundancy systems to ensure that every safety-critical component is intentionally duplicated, thereby significantly enhancing both safety and reliability.”

This is the first production-ready system from this partnership, and the two companies say the truck has driven more than 1.5 million miles (2.4 million km) on public roads in testing and billions of miles in simulated environments.

“This truck combines Aurora’s industry-leading self-driving technology with Volvo’s best-in-class truck, designed specifically for autonomy, making it a must-have for any transport provider that wants to strengthen and grow their business,” said Sterling Anderson, cofounder and chief product officer at Aurora.

Autonomous trucking remains of interest to the freight industry due to ongoing shortages of commercial drivers. But the future of Class 8 heavy trucks carrying cargo with no human on board may still be some time off. The California Legislature is again trying to pass a law that would require a trained human to be present aboard any autonomous vehicle weighing more than 10,001 lbs (4,536 kg); a similar bill was vetoed in 2023 by California Governor Gavin Newsom.

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nova-explosion-visible-to-the-naked-eye-expected-any-day-now

Nova explosion visible to the naked eye expected any day now

Image of a blue sphere, surrounded by blue filaments, and enclosed in a partial sphere of pink specks.s

Enlarge / Aftermath of a nova at the star GK Persei.

When you look at the northern sky, you can follow the arm of the Big Dipper as it arcs around toward the bright star called Arcturus. Roughly in the middle of that arc, you’ll find the Northern Crown constellation, which looks a bit like a smiley face. Sometime between now and September, if you look to the left-hand side of the Northern Crown, what will look like a new star will shine for five days or so.

This star system is called T. Coronae Borealis, also known as the Blaze Star, and most of the time, it is way too dim to be visible to the naked eye. But once roughly every 80 years, a violent thermonuclear explosion makes it over 10,000 times brighter. The last time it happened was in 1946, so now it’s our turn to see it.

Neighborhood litterbug

“The T. Coronae Borealis is a binary system. It is actually two stars,” said Gerard Van Belle, the director of science at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. One of these stars is a white dwarf, an old star that has already been through its fusion-powered lifecycle. “It’s gone from being a main sequence star to being a giant star. And in the case of giant stars, what happens is their outer parts eventually get kind of pushed into outer space. What’s left behind is a leftover core of the star—that’s called a white dwarf,” Van Belle explained.

The white dwarf stage is normally a super peaceful retirement period for stars. The nuclear fusion reaction no longer takes place, which makes white dwarfs very dim. They are still pretty hot, though, and they’re super dense, with a mass comparable to our Sun squeezed into a volume resembling the Earth.

But the retirement of the white dwarf in T. Coronae Borealis is hardly peaceful, as it has a neighbor prone to littering. “Its companion star is in the red giant phase, where it is puffed up. Its outer parts are getting sloughed off and pushed into space. The material that is coming off the red giant is now falling onto the white dwarf,” Van Belle said.

Ticking time bomb

And it doesn’t take much littering to make the white dwarf explode. “The material from the red giant will accumulate on the white dwarf’s surface until it forms a layer that’s actually not that thick. Just a few meters—the depth of a deep swimming pool,” Van Belle explained. Most of the material coming off the red giant is hydrogen. And since the red dwarf is still hot, there will eventually be a spark that triggers a runaway nuclear fusion reaction. “That is what causes the explosion,” Van Belle said.

The explosion is a nova, which means it doesn’t kill either the white dwarf or the red giant as a supernova would. “Only about 5 percent of the hydrogen layer fuses into heavier elements like helium, and the rest just gets ejected into space. Then the process starts all over again because the explosion isn’t large enough to disrupt the red giant, the donor of all this hydrogen, so it just keeps doing its thing,” Van Belle told Ars. This is why we can predict this event with such precision.

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songs-of-conquest-is-the-heroes-of-might-&-magic-rebirth-we-all-deserve

Songs of Conquest is the Heroes of Might & Magic rebirth we all deserve

Just one more turn, with dozens of things in it —

Every choice in this game has a cost. Choosing to play it seems like a good bet.

Hexagonal battlefield covered in fire and magma.

Enlarge / Battles get a wee bit involved as you go on in Songs of Conquest.

Coffee Stain Publishing

There are games for which I have great admiration, pleasant memories, and an entirely dreadful set of skills and outcomes. Heroes of Might & Magic III (or HoMM 3) has long been one of those games.

I have played it on just about every PC I’ve owned, ever since it chipped away at my college GPA. I love being tasked with managing not only heroes, armies, resources, villages, and battlefield positioning but also time itself. If you run around the map clicking to discover every single power-up and resource pile, using up turn after turn, you will almost certainly let your enemy grow strong enough to conquer you. But I do this, without fail. I get halfway into a campaign and the (horse cart) wheels fall off, so I set the game aside until the click-to-move-the-horsey impulse comes back.

With the release of Songs of Conquest in 1.0 form on PC today (Steam, GOG, Epic), I feel freed from this loop of recurrent humbling. This title from Lavapotion and Coffee Stain Publishing very much hits the same pleasure points of discovery and choice as HoMM 3. But Songs of Conquest has much easier onboarding, modern resolutions, interfaces that aren’t too taxing (to the point of being Verified on Steam Deck), and granular difficulty customization. More importantly for most, it has its own stories and ideas. If you love fiddling with stuff turn by turn, it’s hard to imagine you won’t find something in Songs of Conquest to hook you.

Songs of Conquest launch trailer.

Songs of Conquest has you move your horse-riding Casters (the Heroes of its inspiration) and their armies around a world map, using each limited movement point to liberate a new resource, pick up some treasure, get a temporary power-up, or engage in battle. When it’s battle time, you switch to a hexagonal grid, where your troops trade blows and you choose spells so your Caster can help. Win the battle (either manually or with an automatic “quick” decision), unlock a new area, harvest new resources, recruit more troops, and repeat until the map is clear or some other condition is met. You’ll get multiple Casters, new kinds of troops, and tons of new spells and artifacts as you progress, and you’ll follow a very swords-and-dragons story.

  • Moving click by click through a dark world, choosing paths, stopping by fountains for temporary boosts—the overworld is heavy with Heroes of Might & Magic III memories.

    Coffee Stain Publishing

  • But not everything is the same. Building your central hub is more visually appealing, and likely more complex as you go on.

    Coffee Stain Publishing

  • Your caster can do a lot to affect battle outcomes. You’ll have complete control over which spells they can wield, branching off into different schools of magic.

    Coffee Stain Publishing

  • A map editor lets you torture your friends and random downloaders with constant which-way-to-go decisions.

    Coffee Stain Publishing

  • The game’s campaigns have short cinematics and evocative stills.

    Coffee Stain Publishing

The art is a mixture of intentionally granular (and pleasant) pixel art, throwback scroll-and-stone interface elements, and cutscenes and dramatic stills with a deliberate hand-painted look to them. Even if each element looks nice, I’m glad the game mixes it up, and you get a break from each. The properly medieval music seems well done, although it’s at a disadvantage, as my brain is making 45 decisions per minute and tends to block out brass, strings, and choirs.

There are four campaigns in the game, each with its own lands, enemy casters and units, spells, and lots of other new things to uncover and throw into your mental strategy RAM. It’s a good variety, especially combined with the difficulty and other campaign options you can set. Coming to this game from HoMM 3 memories, I’ve found the variety of map items, town/castle building, and Caster types new and engaging. My biggest quibble with the game is that managing the spells and upgrades of the Casters is too rich a field for me, somehow just one rich system over the line. Deciding which type of magic a Caster should specialize in and remembering the huge variety of spells available to put into their quickbar overwhelmed me.

As I noted up top, however, I’m not actually good at these games, I just enjoy the spell they put on me. Songs of Conquest is a rich new chapter for Heroes of Might & Magic fans, but it’s also a good jumping-in point if you’ve never been tempted before by the series with the unwieldy title and harsh difficulty ramp. Unlike your Casters, you can roam about its thousand little things at whatever pace you like.

Listing image by Coffee Stain Publishing

Songs of Conquest is the Heroes of Might & Magic rebirth we all deserve Read More »

slack-users-horrified-to-discover-messages-used-for-ai-training

Slack users horrified to discover messages used for AI training

Slack users horrified to discover messages used for AI training

After launching Slack AI in February, Slack appears to be digging its heels in, defending its vague policy that by default sucks up customers’ data—including messages, content, and files—to train Slack’s global AI models.

According to Slack engineer Aaron Maurer, Slack has explained in a blog that the Salesforce-owned chat service does not train its large language models (LLMs) on customer data. But Slack’s policy may need updating “to explain more carefully how these privacy principles play with Slack AI,” Maurer wrote on Threads, partly because the policy “was originally written about the search/recommendation work we’ve been doing for years prior to Slack AI.”

Maurer was responding to a Threads post from engineer and writer Gergely Orosz, who called for companies to opt out of data sharing until the policy is clarified, not by a blog, but in the actual policy language.

“An ML engineer at Slack says they don’t use messages to train LLM models,” Orosz wrote. “My response is that the current terms allow them to do so. I’ll believe this is the policy when it’s in the policy. A blog post is not the privacy policy: every serious company knows this.”

The tension for users becomes clearer if you compare Slack’s privacy principles with how the company touts Slack AI.

Slack’s privacy principles specifically say that “Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are useful tools that we use in limited ways to enhance our product mission. To develop AI/ML models, our systems analyze Customer Data (e.g. messages, content, and files) submitted to Slack as well as other information (including usage information) as defined in our privacy policy and in your customer agreement.”

Meanwhile, Slack AI’s page says, “Work without worry. Your data is your data. We don’t use it to train Slack AI.”

Because of this incongruity, users called on Slack to update the privacy principles to make it clear how data is used for Slack AI or any future AI updates. According to a Salesforce spokesperson, the company has agreed an update is needed.

“Yesterday, some Slack community members asked for more clarity regarding our privacy principles,” Salesforce’s spokesperson told Ars. “We’ll be updating those principles today to better explain the relationship between customer data and generative AI in Slack.”

The spokesperson told Ars that the policy updates will clarify that Slack does not “develop LLMs or other generative models using customer data,” “use customer data to train third-party LLMs” or “build or train these models in such a way that they could learn, memorize, or be able to reproduce customer data.” The update will also clarify that “Slack AI uses off-the-shelf LLMs where the models don’t retain customer data,” ensuring that “customer data never leaves Slack’s trust boundary, and the providers of the LLM never have any access to the customer data.”

These changes, however, do not seem to address a key concern for users who never explicitly consented to sharing chats and other Slack content for use in AI training.

Users opting out of sharing chats with Slack

This controversial policy is not new. Wired warned about it in April, and TechCrunch reported that the policy has been in place since at least September 2023.

But widespread backlash began swelling last night on Hacker News, where Slack users called out the chat service for seemingly failing to notify users about the policy change, instead quietly opting them in by default. To critics, it felt like there was no benefit to opting in for anyone but Slack.

From there, the backlash spread to social media, where SlackHQ hastened to clarify Slack’s terms with explanations that did not seem to address all the criticism.

“I’m sorry Slack, you’re doing fucking WHAT with user DMs, messages, files, etc?” Corey Quinn, the chief cloud economist for a cost management company called Duckbill Group, posted on X. “I’m positive I’m not reading this correctly.”

SlackHQ responded to Quinn after the economist declared, “I hate this so much,” and confirmed that he had opted out of data sharing in his paid workspace.

“To clarify, Slack has platform-level machine-learning models for things like channel and emoji recommendations and search results,” SlackHQ posted. “And yes, customers can exclude their data from helping train those (non-generative) ML models. Customer data belongs to the customer.”

Later in the thread, SlackHQ noted, “Slack AI—which is our generative AI experience natively built in Slack—[and] is a separately purchased add-on that uses Large Language Models (LLMs) but does not train those LLMs on customer data.”

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Sony backs down, won’t enforce PSN accounts for Helldivers 2 PC players on Steam

Purge the stain of this failure with the peroxide of victory —

What will Sony do next for an audience that likes its games but not its network?

Updated

Helldivers 2 player aiming a laser reticule into a massive explosion.

Enlarge / Aiming a single rifle sight into an earth-moving explosion feels like some kind of metaphor for the Helldivers 2 delayed PSN requirement saga.

PlayStation/Arrowhead

Helldivers 2 PC players can continue doing their part for Super Earth, sans Sony logins.

Sony’s plan for its surprise hit co-op squad shooter—now the most successful launch in Sony’s nascent PC catalog—Helldivers 2, was to make its players sign in with PlayStation Network (PSN) accounts before it launched in early February, even if they purchased the game through the Steam store.

Sony and developer Arrowhead didn’t enforce PSN logins during its frenetic launch and then announced late last week that PSN accounts would soon be mandatory. Many players did not like that at all, seeing in it a sudden desire by Sony to capitalize on its unexpected smash hit. Some were not eager to engage with a network that had a notable hack in its history, others were concerned about countries where PSN was not offered, and many didn’t take Sony at its word that this was about griefing, banning, and other moderation. Because of the uneven availability of Steam and PSN, Helldivers 2 was delisted in 177 countries on Steam over the weekend as Steam worked through refund requests.

The pushback made an impression, and now Sony has announced that account linking “will not be moving forward.” In a post on X (formerly Twitter) Sunday night addressed to Helldivers fans, the official PlayStation account wrote that the publisher had “heard your feedback” and was “still learning what is best for PC players and your feedback has been invaluable.”

“Feedback,” in this case, likely included a long weekend of both PlayStation and Arrowhead hearing from a Helldivers fanbase that had previously been relatively sanguine and cohesive, at least for an online multiplayer shooter. Steam reviews of Helldivers 2 took a sad but predictable plummet downward, the game’s subreddit pivoted from cosigned enthusiasm to protest, and lots of people tied to the game spent a lot of time over the weekend trying to address the surge of negative social media.

Johan Pilestedt, CEO of Arrowhead Games Studio, after facetiously asking if now was the moment “to tweet ‘What? You guys don’t have phones?'”, posted on X early Sunday that his firm was “talking solutions with PlayStation, especially for non-PSN countries.” Responding to a reply that asked why he or his firm were “acting all blameless,” Pilestedt was candid. “I do have a part to play. I am not blameless in all of this – it was my decision to disable account linking at launch so that players could play the game. I did not ensure players were aware of the requirement and we didn’t talk about it enough,” Pilestedt wrote.

He added, ‘We knew for about 6 months before launch that it would be mandatory for online PS titles.” Asked why, if known for 6 months, the game was sold to countries without PSN available, he responded, “We do not handle selling the game.”

It will certainly be interesting to see what Sony does next with its success beyond consoles. Helldivers 2 is by far its most successful PC launch to date, and its seventh highest-grossing game overall. There’s a market there for the right kinds of games, but how Sony cultivates that market, and whether they’ll welcome Sony as anything beyond a publisher on Steam, remains to be seen.

The developer of Ghost of Tsushima, arriving soon on PC, made sure to note Friday on X/Twitter that a PSN account was only required for the multiplayer mode of the game, not the single-player adventure.

This post was update at 10: 41 a.m. to note prior international delistings, and Sony’s clarification about PSN requirements for an upcoming game.

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Doctor Who’s sparkling new season feels like a fresh return to form

Now in its 61st year —

Russell T. Davies and stars Ncuti Gatwa and Millie Gibson weigh in on the new adventures.

black man and pretty blonde woman examining a strange contraption

Enlarge / Ncuti Gatwa is the Fifteenth Doctor, and Millie Gibson is his new companion, Ruby Sunday, in new season of Doctor Who.

Disney+

A new season of Doctor Who is almost upon us, featuring Ncuti Gatwa’s first full run as the 15th Doctor, with a shiny new companion. It’s also the first time Doctor Who will stream on Disney+, after the platform acquired the international broadcasting rights. That could translate into a whole new generation of fans for this beloved British sci-fi series.

(Spoilers for “The Power of the Doctor,” “The Giggle,” and “The Church on Ruby Road” below.)

Here’s a brief summation for the benefit of those who may not have kept up with the more recent seasons. Russell T. Davies—who revived the series in 2005 with Christopher Eccleston as the Ninth Doctor—has returned as showrunner. Davies lost no time introducing a few new twists. When it came time for Jodie Whittaker’s Thirteenth Doctor to regenerate, fans had expected Gatwa to be introduced. Instead, the new Fourteenth Doctor was played by former Tenth Doctor David Tennant, reuniting with former companion Donna Noble (Catherine Tate) for three specials.

The third special was called “The Giggle.” During the climactic battle, the Doctor was shot. But instead of the usual regeneration, the Fourteenth Doctor “bigenerated” instead, resulting in both a Fourteenth Doctor and Gatwa’s Fifteenth Doctor, a separate physical entity. Tennant’s incarnation settled into a comfy retirement with Donna and her family, while Gatwa’s newly regenerated Doctor headed off for a fresh set of adventures. In the Christmas special, “The Church on Ruby Road,” he picked up a new companion: Ruby Sunday, played by Millie Gibson. The eight-episode new season kicks off this weekend with the Davies-penned “Space Babies” and “The Devil’s Chord.” Davies wrote six out of the eight episodes, in fact, closing out with “The Legend of Ruby Sunday” and the finale, “Empire of Death.”

Doctor Who is now in its 61st year, and this is Davies’ second stint as showrunner. Yet the new season feels as fresh and energetic as ever in terms of its storytelling. Davies attributes this to the format. “Because it is an anthology show, every week it’s a different show, a different script,” Davies told Ars. “Often it’s a different writer. He lands at a different place, a different time, a different planet. And very often he lands in a different genre. That demand means I can’t sit back. The audience wants a new punch. You want that cold open where you’re surprised and shocked and taken aback and thrilled and delighted to be going to meet The Beatles, or to find yourself under an alien dome, or to be racing through the streets of London in a thriller. All I have to do is meet the ambition of the show and keep running with it. That’s my job.”

Davies:

Enlarge / Davies: “All I have to do is meet the ambition of the show and keep running with it.”

Disney+

Furthermore, the sheer scope of the show pretty much guarantees a vast wellspring of new ideas. “You literally have the whole of time and space and within that you can tell so many different stories,” said Davies. “World War II is often a very evocative setting for Doctor Who. The Victorian era is very evocative. Somehow, it matches that wooden TARDIS in ineffable ways, so it’s been to certain locations more than once. But that’s so rich. You can think of a thousand World War II stories. You can think of a thousand Dickensian stories. And equally, Doctor Who can be completely unafraid of reinventing its own history. It’s actually seen the destruction of Atlantis three times. So, the territory always remains fertile.”

Gatwa had some very big shoes to fill when he took on this iconic character, and he pulls it off with great charisma and style. He credits the writers and production staff, as well as Gibson, with helping him craft his unique take on the Doctor. Gatwa told Ars that his greatest challenge was portraying the character’s wisdom. “I’ve always had a baby face,” he said—so much so that he was often told at drama school that he just couldn’t portray more mature characters. He found the answer in the Doctor’s regenerations. “He’s reborn each time,” said Gatwa. “He’s seeing things with new eyes, like [picking up a bowl of berries], ‘This is the best bowl of berries I’ve ever had!’ That youthful energy ended up being really helpful in terms of accessing other traits, like his wisdom.”

The elements Gatwa brings to the role also drive much of the writing, per Davies. “His skill and talent, it makes me run faster because all you ever want in life is a limitless actor and also a fearless actor,” he said. “There is nothing he can’t do. Milly, too; she has a kind of bounce and energy. It’s not just the depth of their emotions, it’s their technical comic skills. It’s my job to showcase that.” Davies also tried to make sure he challenged Gatwa and Gibson in some way on a daily basis by having them do something they’d never done before, whether it be a new stunt, an exciting confrontation with a villain, or a heartbreaking personal scene.

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