Kazu Gomi, president and CEO of NTT Research, has a big view of the technology world from his perch in Silicon Valley.Read More

Assassin's Creed Shadows' success shows that the threat of negative campaigns is overblown | Opinion As solid sales numbers for the new Assassin’s Creed stack up, other companies should take note of how little the manufactured controversy around it mattered Image credit: Ubisoft Opinion by Rob Fahey Contributing Editor Published on April 18, 2025 It’s been a fairly grim few years for Ubisoft – buffeted by allegations of an abusive culture, plagued by dismal stock market performance, and seemingly unable to turn out the kind of hit titles that would silence its detractors, the company has seen its strategy and its future openly called into question. Late 2024 was a low point. Star Wars Outlaws underperformed commercially and the company's other great hope for that period, Assassin's Creed Shadows, was pushed back into 2025 after becoming the target of an online outrage campaign over its choice of protagonist characters. Consequently, there have probably been some heartfelt sighs of relief at the company as the sales figures for Shadows finally started to roll in over the past few weeks. We don't have precise numbers yet, but while Shadows doesn’t seem set to break any records, nor is it doing badly by any reasonable measure, and in the US at least, it's reportedly running in second place in the annual sales charts thus far. It's trailing only Capcom's immensely successful Monster Hunter Wilds. It's hard to overstate how important this is for Ubisoft. The Assassin's Creed franchise sometimes flies under the radar a little compared to other powerhouse franchises, because it isn’t a bankable annual event like Call of Duty or a complete sales juggernaut like Grand Theft Auto. Nonetheless, it's a franchise whose mainline entries have the kind of broad consumer appeal many other IP holders would sell their grandmothers to attain. The last major entry in the series, 2020's Assassin's Creed Valhalla, comfortably clocked up over a billion dollars in revenue, and the franchise overall has sold over 200 million games, putting it in roughly the same bracket as Final Fantasy or Resident Evil for lifetime franchise sales. It's not quite big enough to be the single tentpole IP that holds up all of Ubisoft, but it's the closest thing the company has to that. If the Assassin’s Creed franchise was actually to lose its mojo, it's honestly hard to imagine what Ubisoft's commercial path forwards would look like. One of the biggest problems is that such manufactured controversy is incredibly random in nature Assassin's Creed Shadows was therefore a make-or-break title – and before the delay and the manufactured controversy, it looked like a shoo-in. Fans had been clamouring for the heavily ninja-inspired series to do an instalment set in Japan for years; Assassin's Creed Shadows is, on paper at least, a perfect example of giving your fanbase precisely what they want most. We don’t yet know how Shadows has stacked up to Ubisoft's internal sales expectations, but the positive buzz around the sales data and the generally positive responses to the game from consumers suggest that it's done what it was supposed to do – namely, proved that the AC franchise still has gas in the tank at a crucial juncture for the company. The fact that we even need to have this conversation ("they set an Assassin's Creed game in Japan and it sold well" would have felt like the most staggeringly obvious thing only a few years ago) is largely down to the aforementioned controversy – a very intense "anti-woke" campaign against the game, which was sparked off when it was revealed that the playable protagonists would be a Black man and a woman. As is generally the case with these things, the initial racist and misogynistic backlash was quickly veiled in more broad-based concern trolling, alleging that Shadows was disrespectful or derogatory towards Japanese culture and religion in general. Things got very silly, very quickly. A historian who consulted on the game's depiction of its Black protagonist, Yasuke – a historically attested figure who has been featured uncontroversially in plenty of media over the years – was targeted by online harassment and it was falsely reported that he had been dismissed by his university. Twitter found itself home to a steady influx of accounts claiming to be outraged Japanese gamers who happened to post in fluent English and very obviously Google Translated Japanese. A few enterprising Japanese right-wing influencers did try to make hay from the controversy, albeit with limited success; one widely shared video in which a creator raged about the game allowing him to smash up a Shinto shrine was widely ridiculed by commenters, who pointed out rather reasonably that the creator himself was the one smashing the virtual shrine and getting mad about his own actions. Image credit: Ubisoft The campaign's high water mark came when a lawmaker in Japan's Diet asked the Prime Minister about defacing shrines in the game during an open question session. The questioner, Kada Hiroyuki, is a relatively unknown one-term Councillor whose marginal seat is at severe risk in the upcoming July election, so it was a fairly transparent grab for attention. PM Ishiba's answer entirely sidestepped any mention of the game to focus instead on some recent cases where real-life shrines were vandalised. Still, it was translated (or in some cases, wilfully mistranslated) as a triumph: get woke, go so broke that they'll ask time-wasting questions about you in the Japanese Diet, I guess. Storied game director and exceptional Twitter poster Kamiya Hideki, perhaps unsurprisingly, had the most level-headed take on the whole affair, pointing out in essence that when a fuss like this is being made by a relatively small group of extremely vocal people, it means little to a large majority of ordinary folk who will simply shrug their shoulders and quietly enjoy the game. The sales figures now trickling in suggest that he was essentially right. Incidentally, in the supposedly incensed and insulted Japanese market, physical sales of the game are sitting at around 25,000 – far from a smash hit, but reasonably solid for a PS5 launch in that territory. Back of the envelope calculations suggest that total sales in Japan are probably broadly in line with 2020's Valhalla, taking into account the massive switchover from physical to digital sales that's happened in that timeframe. For comparison, Monster Hunter Wilds sold less than half as many physical copies as 2018's MH World in its first week, but still sold significantly more copies overall once digital is factored in. These kinds of controversies around games and other kinds of media have become commonplace in recent years, and many companies struggle to figure out how much attention to pay to them, or how best to respond. One of the biggest problems is that such manufactured controversy is incredibly random in nature; companies trying to figure out how to avoid being the target of this kind of hate campaign are essentially setting out on an entirely fruitless quest, because there's little rhyme or reason to the special alignment of planets that turn a specific game or company into the right-wing punching bag of the week. Completely excluding whole swathes of ethnicities and identities from your game entirely is potentially far more commercially damaging than any online hate campaign might be – and even then, the stochastic finger of internet outrage may still end up pointing at some member of your team, some seemingly innocuous public statement, or even something entirely made up from whole cloth. Stick to your guns and release the best game you can – it's not just AC Shadows that shows this to be an effective approach The triggers for these outbursts only seem obvious in hindsight. I've seen people argue that Ubisoft was deliberately provoking a response by choosing Black and female protagonists, but when the company chose to use Yasuke as a protagonist, it was doing so off the back of well-received depictions of him in games like Nioh and Samurai Warriors, a highly rated Netflix anime series based on his life, and his role as inspiration for the hugely popular Afro Samurai anime series. None of those had caused so much as the barest whisper of controversy. Yasuke seemed like a safe bet, not to mention a perfect figure for the narrative, being that he was a total outsider who moved through some of the most interesting events of Japanese history. (As for the long history of popular, uncontroversial depictions of female ninjas, where to even start?) Wrong place, wrong time, wrong side of bed to get out of; these reactions are impossible to predict, and trying to design games "defensively" to avoid people on the Internet getting mad at you is likely to cause far more harm in the long run than the ravings of any number of sock puppet accounts could. Moreover, Ubisoft seems to have set out a reasonably decent playbook for how to deal with this sort of campaign when it does happen. The situation around Shadows was exacerbated by the delay to the game, which was interpreted as panic on Ubisoft's side and a sniff of blood in the water for its detractors. In reality, any panic was entirely down to Star Wars Outlaws' underperformance, not anything happening online. Shadows was delayed not to remove or change content that its detractors deemed objectionable, but rather to ensure the game was polished and high quality at launch, which is pretty much the best response there is to such bad-faith criticisms. Stick to your guns and release the best game you can – it's not just Assassin's Creed Shadows that shows this to be an effective approach. Aggressively anti-woke campaigns against games like Baldur's Gate 3 have even tried to turn on a dime and claim that the game is actually on their side of the argument when it became clear that it was immensely successful and popular. That may not fully happen to AC Shadows, which is unlikely to be quite the commercial juggernaut or the critical darling that BG3 was, but the lesson is clear – just as Kamiya suggested, a critical mass of ordinary people playing and enjoying a game will easily overpower the reach and volume of a small bad-faith negative campaign.

If you didn’t catch Mythic Quest’s series finale when it first debuted last month, there’s a chance you may never be able to see the episode as it originally was. Shortly after Mythic Quest’s fourth season and its Side Quest spinoff hit Apple TV Plus, the streamer announced that it was cancelling the series. The news came as a surprise given how “Heaven and Hell” — the open-ended finale — implied that Mythic Quest might return for a fifth season. And there were so many unresolved plotlines that the sudden cancellation meant that Mythic Quest would always feel incomplete.  Apple seemed to understand that last point when it announced its plan to debut an “updated” version of “Heaven and Hell” meant to tie up all of the series loose ends. The episode went live today, and it does deal with some of Mythic Quest’s big cliffhangers. But in addition to dropping the updated episode, Apple confirmed to The Verge today that it has also removed the original cut of “Heaven and Hell” from its platform entirely. You can kind of understand why Apple would want to direct viewers towards Mythic Quest’s proper ending. But the move smacks of revisionist history and streamersâ … Read the full story at The Verge.

The Challenge of Designing General-Purpose Vision Encoders As AI systems grow increasingly multimodal, the role of visual perception models becomes more complex. Vision encoders are expected not only to recognize objects and scenes, but also to support tasks like captioning, question answering, fine-grained recognition, document parsing, and spatial reasoning across both images and videos. Existing models typically rely on diverse pretraining objectives—contrastive learning for retrieval, captioning for language tasks, and self-supervised methods for spatial understanding. This fragmentation complicates scalability and model deployment, and introduces trade-offs in performance across tasks. What remains a key challenge is the design of a unified vision encoder that can match or exceed task-specific methods, operate robustly in open-world scenarios, and scale efficiently across modalities. Meta AI introduces Perception Encoder (PE), a vision model family trained using a single contrastive vision-language objective and refined with alignment techniques tailored for downstream tasks. PE departs from the traditional multi-objective pretraining paradigm. Instead, it demonstrates that with a carefully tuned training recipe and appropriate alignment methods, contrastive learning alone can yield highly generalizable visual representations. The Perception Encoder operates across three scales—PEcoreB, PEcoreL, and PEcoreG—with the largest (G-scale) model containing 2B parameters. These models are designed to function as general-purpose encoders for both image and video inputs, offering strong performance in classification, retrieval, and multimodal reasoning. Training Approach and Architecture The pretraining of PE follows a two-stage process. The first stage involves robust contrastive learning on a large-scale curated image-text dataset (5.4B pairs), where several architectural and training enhancements improve both accuracy and robustness. These include progressive resolution scaling, large batch sizes (up to 131K), use of the LAMB optimizer, 2D RoPE positional encoding, tuned augmentations, and masked regularization. The second stage introduces video understanding by leveraging a video data engine that synthesizes high-quality video-text pairs. This pipeline incorporates captions from the Perception Language Model (PLM), frame-level descriptions, and metadata, which are then summarized using Llama 3.3. These synthetic annotations allow the same image encoder to be fine-tuned for video tasks via frame averaging. Despite using a single contrastive objective, PE features general-purpose representations distributed across intermediate layers. To access these, Meta introduces two alignment strategies: Language alignment for tasks such as visual question answering and captioning. Spatial alignment for detection, tracking, and depth estimation, using self-distillation and spatial correspondence distillation via SAM2. Empirical Performance Across Modalities PE demonstrates strong zero-shot generalization across a wide range of vision benchmarks. On image classification, PEcoreG matches or exceeds proprietary models trained on large private datasets such as JFT-3B. It achieves: 86.6% on ImageNet-val, 92.6% on ImageNet-Adversarial, 88.2% on the full ObjectNet set, Competitive results on fine-grained datasets including iNaturalist, Food101, and Oxford Flowers. In video tasks, PE achieves state-of-the-art performance on zero-shot classification and retrieval benchmarks, outperforming InternVideo2 and SigLIP2-g-opt, while being trained on just 22M synthetic video-caption pairs. The use of simple average pooling across frames—rather than temporal attention—demonstrates that architectural simplicity, when paired with well-aligned training data, can still yield high-quality video representations. An ablation study shows that each component of the video data engine contributes meaningfully to performance. Improvements of +3.9% in classification and +11.1% in retrieval over image-only baselines highlight the utility of synthetic video data, even at modest scale. Conclusion Perception Encoder provides a technically compelling demonstration that a single contrastive objective, if implemented with care and paired with thoughtful alignment strategies, is sufficient to build general-purpose vision encoders. PE not only matches specialized models in their respective domains but does so with a unified and scalable approach. The release of PE, along with its codebase and the PE Video Dataset, offers the research community a reproducible and efficient foundation for building multimodal AI systems. As visual reasoning tasks grow in complexity and scope, PE provides a path forward toward more integrated and robust visual understanding. Check out the Paper, Model, Code and Dataset. Also, don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and join our Telegram Channel and LinkedIn Group. Don’t Forget to join our 90k+ ML SubReddit. Asif RazzaqWebsite |  + postsBioAsif Razzaq is the CEO of Marktechpost Media Inc.. As a visionary entrepreneur and engineer, Asif is committed to harnessing the potential of Artificial Intelligence for social good. His most recent endeavor is the launch of an Artificial Intelligence Media Platform, Marktechpost, which stands out for its in-depth coverage of machine learning and deep learning news that is both technically sound and easily understandable by a wide audience. The platform boasts of over 2 million monthly views, illustrating its popularity among audiences.Asif Razzaqhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/6flvq/IBM Releases Granite 3.3 8B: A New Speech-to-Text (STT) Model that Excels in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Automatic Speech Translation (AST)Asif Razzaqhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/6flvq/A Hands-On Tutorial: Build a Modular LLM Evaluation Pipeline with Google Generative AI and LangChainAsif Razzaqhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/6flvq/Researchers from AWS and Intuit Propose a Zero Trust Security Framework to Protect the Model Context Protocol (MCP) from Tool Poisoning and Unauthorized AccessAsif Razzaqhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/6flvq/Model Performance Begins with Data: Researchers from Ai2 Release DataDecide—A Benchmark Suite to Understand Pretraining Data Impact Across 30K LLM Checkpoints

Marvel is suiting up for another Swimsuit Special comic book release, and it looks like NetEase Games’ Marvel Rivals will join in on the summer fun with some of its own swimsuit skins.Details on what could eventually result in the arrival of long-awaited Marvel Rivals swimsuit cosmetics were shared in a recent post on the Marvel website. It promises that Marvel will return to the fan-favorite series come July 9 with Marvel Swimsuit Special: Friends, Foes, and Rivals #1. The story will give Earth’s Mightiest Heroes a much-needed break from the stresses of saving the world, but more importantly, the comic book giant teases that the run will include a sneak peek at designs for Marvel Rivals.Marvel Swimsuit Special art. Image courtesy of Marvel.“Roxxon Comics is at it again when they release their own UNAUTHORIZED SWIMSUIT SPECIAL,” a description for the Marvel Swimsuit Special says. “Wasp is on the case and seizes the opportunity for Marvel’s heroes to do their OWN swimwear fashion shoot all over the world! But fear not, True Believers, we know what you’re REALLY here for! This super-sized special features splash page after splash page of gorgeous art, but with a story so you can pretend you’re ‘reading it for the articles…’”Unfortunately, Marvel doesn’t share much about when these summer designs will launch or which characters will be included in the collection. It’s also important to note that today’s post doesn’t outright confirm that these skins will specifically be part of a swimsuit set, but considering the special’s subject matter, it would make sense to at least see some summer cosmetics included. We’ll learn more about the Marvel Swimsuit Special in the months ahead, so let’s hope future news comes with more information about how it ties into Marvel Rivals.Marvel Rivals launched in December and quickly became a popular distraction for multiplayer fans across PC and consoles. Its competitive nature and vast character pool have had players scheming up new ways to rise through the ranks, but while many focus on improving their performance, others are far more concerned with NetEase’s plans for post-launch support. One idea that has attracted the attention of armies of fans is the hope they may one day see a Marvel Rivals swimsuit collection come to the game, and now, we know that their prayers will likely soon be answered.     Regarding launch timing, there are a few clues we can look at when guessing when swimsuits may be included. We know that Marvel Rivals Season 2 brought Emma Frost and the Hellfire Gala to the hero shooter experience just last week. With the season set to end in about three months, we can guess that the new outfits should launch with Season 3 sometime around July or August. It’s a window that makes sense based on both NetEase’s previously promised schedule while letting fans soak up the sun just before summer comes to an end.Also launching alongside Season 3 is NetEase’s new post-launch plans. Instead of three-month seasons, Marvel Rivals fans can look forward to snappier seasons that last only about two months. That means at least one new playable hero will be included every month for the foreseeable future. For more on Marvel Rivals, you can read up on the April Fools' Day emote that let Venom twerk. You can also click here to learn more about how NetEase made an infamous Moon Knight meme canon. Michael Cripe is a freelance contributor with IGN. He's best known for his work at sites like The Pitch, The Escapist, and OnlySP. Be sure to give him a follow on Bluesky (@mikecripe.bsky.social) and Twitter (@MikeCripe).

This article contains spoilers for Daredevil: Born Again. The season finale of Daredevil: Born Again features that most time-honored of comic book tropes, in which two heroes disagree but ultimately team up. However, because the “heroes” are Matt Murdock a.k.a. Daredevil (Charlie Cox) and Frank Castle a.k.a. the Punisher (Jon Bernthal), even the team-up is pretty messy. The scene climaxes with Daredevil and Punisher cutting their argument short when a grenade lands in the room, sending them both flying from the building and atop a car on the street below. As the two get up and brush themselves off, Daredevil gets in one last shot. “You’re an asshole, Frank.” “Yeah, I know,” Frank responds. The collaboration is a fun, vibrant moment, and not just because of the visceral action that has become Daredevil‘s trademark. Cox and Bernthal have genuine chemistry, making their banter feel like something out of an ’80s buddy cop movie. However, the pleasure of their interactions undercuts the serious philosophical differences between them and their dangerous connection, something that’s been explored in much greater details in the pages of Marvel Comics. Frank Castle Goes to Hell “I kill only those who deserve to die, Jackal! And Spider-Man deserves to die!” Those words introduced the Punisher to the world, in the pages of 1973’s Amazing Spider-Man #129. Written by Gerry Conway and penciled by Ross Andru, the issue follows the Punisher as he hunts Spider-Man, duped by the evil scientist known as the Jackal. Although presented as an extremist in the style of revenge thrillers from the era, such as Dirty Harry and Death Wish, the issue also portrayed the Punisher as a sympathetic if misguided man. That inherent sympathy, along with an evocative costume designed by John Romita Sr., made the Punisher a breakout hit. So much a hit, in fact, that Punisher got his first solo stories just two years later, in the pages of the mature-readers magazines Marvel Preview and Marvel Super Action. While Punisher regularly crossed paths with Marvel heroes, he didn’t meet the Man Without Fear until 1982’s Daredevil #183. Part of Frank Miller‘s legendary run on the book, Daredevil #183 saw the two lock horns when Daredevil prevented Punisher from killing a drug addict. That first conflict contains the seeds for all of the heroes’ confrontations that follow. Frank dismisses Matt’s methods as too weak for the criminal element. Matt insists that heroes don’t need to be so brutal (while also hurling a baton at Punisher’s face). Miller pairs the confrontation with a timer in the form of the drug additct’s stopping heart, portrayed on the page as a heart rate monitor, driving Matt to swear that he won’t let the Punisher take another life. Matt’s actions result in Frank getting arrested, setting off a grudge that continues to this day. Join our mailing list Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox! The Devil’s Choice Easily the most striking conflict between Daredevil and Punisher occurs in 2000’s Punisher #3, written by Garth Ennis and penciled by Steve Dillon. After Matt successfully defends brutal gangster Dino Gnucci against a mishandled arrest, Frank waits on a rooftop ready to execute him. That’s when Matt arrives, in Daredevil gear, and begins his usual argument. “I know these speeches of yours by heart,” Frank sneers, starting a fight that end when he uses ultrasonics to knock Matt unconscious. When he awakes, Matt finds himself chained to a post, only able to move his finger, which rests on a pistol pointed at Frank. “One bullet. One shot,” explains Frank. “One chance to stop me killing Dino Gnucci.” The moment gets adapted for the third episode of the Netflix series, with some changes. Here, Matt uses the gun to shoot the chains holding him, getting a chance to save Frank’s victim. He’s not successful on that end, but Frank’s actions draw the attention of a nearby street gang. The episode ends with a highlight of the Netflix series, with a bloody Daredevil fighting through waves of baddies in a hallway, firmly establishing him as a hero. Because it’s written by Garth Ennis, the cynic behind The Boys and Preacher, no heroism appears in the comic book version. The sequence plays across four tightly composed pages, with Matt’s face almost melting in his desperation, which Dillon contrasts to Frank’s stoic expression. Finally convinced that his pleas will go unanswered, Matt whispers, “God forgive me,” and pulls the trigger. There’s a click followed by a bang. The former comes from Matt’s gun. The latter comes from Franks. “No firing pin,” explains Frank. “You can leave the killing up to me.” Some have read this sequence as a take down against Daredevil, which is fair — he looks pathetic at the end and Ennis makes no secret of his hatred of superheroes. However, it doesn’t make Frank look better either. “The thought of Dino Gnucci living one more minute is enough to drive me insane,” Frank explains in the middle of their debate, underscoring the theme of Ennis’s work on the Punisher: Frank Castle is a broken, deranged man, but Daredevil’s goodness is a useless sham. Hope in Hell The season finale of Daredevil: Born Again litigates the debate again, even after Frank accepts Karen Page’s pleas and rescues Matt from an onslaught of Fisk’s killer cops. When Daredevil shields one of the cops from Frank’s shot, insisting that the man isn’t worth the cost of the kill, Frank shoots another attacker and asks, “What about him? Is he worth it?” It’s a bleak and funny joke, but not to Matt. It isn’t just that Matt abhors Frank’s disregard for life. It’s also that Born Again has been presenting Matt’s backslide into vigilantism as something tragic. When he loses faith in the law and dons the Daredevil costume once again, Matt becomes like Frank, an idea that haunts him. It will be interesting to see how Born Again‘s second season and the upcoming The Punisher MCU series will develop the character’s differing philosophies. Until then, we have Marvel Comics to remind us the depth of Daredevil and Punisher’s differences… and their similarities. Daredevil: Born Again season one is now streaming on Disney+.

There’s a lot of excitement around iOS 19 due to the major redesign it will bring, but the update is also expected to introduce a new paid service that’s sure to be included in Apple One. Here’s what’s coming. Apple Health+ will feature AI coach, food logging, and more Tim Cook has claimed on multiple occasions that long-term, Apple’s biggest contribution to the world will be in health. Apple Watch has led to numerous lives being saved thanks to its health features, and its Activity rings motivate healthy habits. But perhaps more significant toward Cook’s belief is what’s coming next. Per Mark Gurman, there’s an upgraded Health app coming in iOS 19—likely with iOS 19.4 next spring. This app revamp is centered around a long-in-the-works new service that those inside the company are calling ‘Apple Health+.’ Here are some key details Gurman highlights: AI ‘doctor’: “The service would be powered by a new AI agent that would replicate — at least to some extent — a real doctor.” Personalized suggestions: “Health app will continue to collect data from your devices…and then the AI coach will use that information to offer tailor-made recommendations about ways to improve health.” Food logging: “Food tracking will be a particularly big part of the revamped app.” Educational videos: “Apple is also looking to bring in outside doctors, including experts in sleep, nutrition, physical therapy, mental health and cardiology, to create videos.” This video feature sounds like it could be a significant part of the service. Gurman writes in further detail: That content would serve as explainers to users about certain conditions and how to make lifestyle improvements. For instance, if the Health app receives data about poor heart-rate trends, a video explaining the risks of heart disease could appear. Apple is opening up a facility near Oakland, California, that will let the physicians shoot their video content for the app. It’s also seeking to find a major doctor personality to serve as a host of sorts for the new service Going big with new Apple One service in iOS 19 Apple has left the core services bundled in Apple One unchanged since 2019. But it sounds like it plans to take things in an exciting direction with Health+ in iOS 19. The current Health app is useful in various ways, but it’s always felt like Apple was leaving too much ground uncovered. Collecting data is useful, but Apple Health+ could actually help users benefit from that data in meaningful ways. If the execution is done well, Apple Health+ might very well end up being the most impactful paid service Apple offers. Are you interested in Apple Health+? Would it make an Apple One subscription more enticing to you? Let us know in the comments. Best iPhone accessories Add 9to5Mac to your Google News feed.  FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.You’re reading 9to5Mac — experts who break news about Apple and its surrounding ecosystem, day after day. Be sure to check out our homepage for all the latest news, and follow 9to5Mac on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to stay in the loop. Don’t know where to start? Check out our exclusive stories, reviews, how-tos, and subscribe to our YouTube channel

Musk's SpaceX facilities might be taking some flak from protestors lately, but it's nothing compared to the mass mobilization of demonstrations that have given his Tesla dealerships a black eye.That could change with his latest concept: a bid to build Donald Trump's "Golden Dome" missile defense system, for which the billionaire's SpaceX has emerged as a frontrunner, according to Reuters.Musk's company is leading a coalition of tech corporations in the bidding, including the surveillance platform Palantir and the drone builder Anduril. The current plan is to pitch the Pentagon on a "subscription-based" missile service, where the US pays for access to armaments owned by the tech companies instead of actually owning — and ultimately controlling — the system.Under Musk's vision, the three companies would pool their talents to launch between 400 to 1,000 satellites to circle the globe, likely surveilling foreign ballistic installationsReuters sources say a fleet of 200 attack satellites — themselves armed with either missiles or anti-missile lasers — would bring missiles down once detected.The Pentagon contracting out military operations is nothing new, though as Reuters notes, this deal would be a massive boost for Musk — a Silicon Valley company has never owned a Pentagon's armament of this size outright.It's a major departure for the Pentagon as well. One source suggested that Musk's commercial involvement is bought by his role in DOGE, noting that "there's an attitude that the national security and defense community has to be sensitive and deferential to Elon Musk because of his role in the government."Though we have the richest man in the world to thank for missiles-on-demand pitch, the bizarre push for missile spending is the brainchild of Trump.In an otherwise lackluster executive order from January 27, the president warned that enemy missile attacks are the "most catastrophic threat facing the United States," parroting an ancient talking point held by everyone from Ronald Reagan to the Heritage Foundation.Disregard the fact that an enemy missile has never been launched against US soil, and the US' own history of indiscriminate missile strikes on foreign lands. As of January, the US owns 1,419 strategic warheads — second only to Russia, which has 1,549.Meanwhile, remember that this is the same guy who brought us the Cybertruck, a luxury vehicle held together by glue. And his non-defense spacecraft have a nasty habit of falling out the sky."It remains to be seen whether SpaceX and these tech companies will be able to pull any of this off," as a source familiar with the discussion told Reuters.Hell, bombs away.More on military contractors: NASA Caught Purchasing Controversial AI Surveillance SoftwareShare This Article

Apr 18, 2025Ravie LakshmananFinancial Fraud / Cybercrime Cybersecurity researchers are warning of a "widespread and ongoing" SMS phishing campaign that's been targeting toll road users in the United States for financial theft since mid-October 2024. "The toll road smishing attacks are being carried out by multiple financially motivated threat actors using the smishing kit developed by 'Wang Duo Yu,'" Cisco Talos researchers Azim Khodjibaev, Chetan Raghuprasad, and Joey Chen assessed with moderate confidence. The phishing campaigns, per the company, impersonate U.S. electronic toll collection systems like E-ZPass, sending SMS messages and Apple iMessages to individuals across Washington, Florida, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Texas, Ohio, Illinois, and Kansas about an unpaid toll and clicking on a fake link sent in the chat. It's worth noting some aspects of the toll phishing campaign were previously highlighted by security journalist Brian Krebs in January 2025, with the activity traced back to a China-based SMS phishing service called Lighthouse that's advertised on Telegram. While Apple iMessage automatically disables links in messages received from unknown senders, the smishing texts urge recipients to respond with "Y" in order to activate the link – a tactic observed in phishing kits like Darcula and Xiū gǒu. Should the victim click on the link and visit the domain, they are prompted to solve a fake image-based CAPTCHA challenge, after which they are redirected to a fake E-ZPass page (e.g., "ezp-va[.lcom" or "e-zpass[.]com-etcjr[.]xin") where they are asked to enter their name and ZIP code to access the bill. Targets are then asked to proceed further to make the payment on another fraudulent page, at which point all the entered personal and financial information is siphoned to the threat actors. Talos noted that multiple threat actors are operating the toll road smishing campaigns by likely making use of a phishing kit developed by Wang Duo Yu, and that it has observed similar smishing kits being used by another Chinese organized cybercrime group known as the Smishing Triad. Interestingly, Wang Duo Yu is also alleged to be the creator of the phishing kits used by Smishing Triad, per security researcher Grant Smith. "The creator is a current computer science student in China who is using the skills he's learning to make a pretty penny on the side," Smith revealed in an extensive analysis in August 2024. Smishing Triad is known for conducting large-scale smishing attacks targeting postal services in at least 121 countries, using failed package delivery lures to coax message recipients into clicking on bogus links that request their personal and financial information under the guise of a supposed service fee for redelivery. Furthermore, threat actors using these kits have attempted to enroll victims' card details into a mobile wallet, allowing them to further cash out their funds at scale using a technique known as Ghost Tap. The phishing kits have also been found to be backdoored in that the captured credit/debit card information is also exfiltrated to the creators, a technique known as double theft. "Wang Duo Yu has crafted and designed specific smishing kits and has been selling access to these kits on their Telegram channels," Talos said. "The kits are available with different infrastructure options, priced at US $50 each for a full-feature development, $30 each for proxy development (when the customer has a personal domain and server), $20 each for version updates, and $20 for all other miscellaneous support." As of March 2025, the e-crime group is believed to have focused their efforts on a new Lighthouse phishing kit that's geared towards harvesting credentials from banks and financial organizations in Australia and the Asia-Pacific region, according to Silent Push. The threat actors also claim to have "300+ front desk staff worldwide" to support various aspects of the fraud and cash-out schemes associated with the phishing kit. "Smishing Triad is also selling its phishing kits to other maliciously aligned threat actors via Telegram and likely other channels," the company said. "These sales make it difficult to attribute the kits to any one subgroup, so the sites are currently all attributed here under the Smishing Triad umbrella." In a report published last month, PRODAFT revealed that Lighthouse shares tactical overlaps with phishing kits such as Lucid and Darcula, and that it operates independently of the XinXin group, the cybercrime group behind the Lucid kit. The Swiss cybersecurity company is tracking Wang Duo Yu (aka Lao Wang) as LARVA-241. "An analysis of attacks conducted using the Lucid and Darcula panels revealed that Lighthouse (Lao Wang / Wang Duo Yu) shares significant similarities with the XinXin group in terms of targeting, landing pages, and domain creation patterns," PRODAFT noted. Cybersecurity company Resecurity, which was the first to document Smishing Triad in 2023 and has also been tracking the scam toll campaigns, said the smishing syndicate has used over 60,000 domain names, making it challenging for Apple and Google to block the fraudulent activity in an effective manner. "Using underground bulk SMS services enables cybercriminals to scale their operations, targeting millions of users simultaneously," Resecurity said. "These services allow attackers to efficiently send thousands or millions of fraudulent IM messages, targeting users individually or groups of users based on specific demographics across various regions." 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Ben Affleck hated his “horrendous” Batsuit.The 52-year-old actor played Batman in 2016’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice as well as Justice League the following year and he reprised the role in 2023 film The Flash, and Affleck admits he loathed putting on the Caped Crusader's famous costume because it was “incredibly hot” and left him “pouring” with sweat.In a GQ video interview, Affleck explained: “I hated the Batsuits. The Batsuits are horrendous to wear. They’re incredibly hot, for one thing. They don’t breathe. They’re made to look the way they want ’em to look, and there’s no thought put into the human being.”He added: “You just start sweating. Now I’m already — I sweat, you know what I mean? I get hot. And so in that thing, you would just be pouring water because it’s got the cowl over it. Like, there’s one thing to wear the suit, but once you cover your head, I guess that’s where all your heat kind of escapes and you feel it.”He insisted even the stunt workers struggled when they put on the costume and they risked suffering heat stroke, saying: “Even the most highly-trained, much more fit stunt guys, the parkour guys, the action guys ... they could do that for about like 45, 50 minutes and then they’re like gonna get heat stroke. So you had to come out of it.”READ MORE: 20 Forgotten Movie SequelsAffleck went on to explain the costume made filming difficult because he felt constantly exhausted and the sweat kept causing problems.He said: “That was really the thing was that it just made it difficult to make the movie because it was so hot ... also [it] does not make you feel very heroic because you’re instantly exhausted and really sweaty and kinda trying to hide like, the sweat pouring down your face.”“Like, ‘No, we can go again, I’m fine, I’m good.’ And then there’ll be like - eye black is like, running.”Affleck concluded by suggesting other Batman actors, including Christian Bale and Robert Pattinson, were “just better at dealing with” with the sweaty suit, but he found the costume to be “the least fun part” of playing the superhero.It comes after the movie star admitted he won't be taking on any more superhero roles in the future because he's "lost interest".He told GQ magazine: "There are a number of reasons why that [playing Batman] was a really excruciating experience. And they don’t all have to do with the simple dynamic of, say, being in a superhero movie or whatever ... I am not interested in going down that particular genre again, not because of that bad experience, but just: I’ve lost interest in what was of interest about it to me.”Get our free mobile app25 Actors Who Turned Down Huge Movie RolesSome of the most famous actors in history turned down the chance to play cinema’s most iconic roles.Filed Under: Batman, Ben Affleck, DC Comics, Justice League, Zack SnyderCategories: Movie News, Superheroes