Majority of employees use their work laptop for some personal tasks, with many engaging in risky activities.

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in a recent talk at Stanford that, while he isn't giving investment advice, Nvidia is the top beneficiary of the AI boom.

Warning: This article contains some light spoilers for Alien: Romulus.Alien: Romulus starts with something of a goofy premise. For 20 years after the events of the original Alien, apparently, the xenomorph-obsessed Weyland-Yutani Corporation has been searching for the Nostromo and the monster its crew brought aboard. When they finally find it, they discover the original alien that Ellen Ripley blew out an airlock at the end of that movie. Somehow, the creature survives, allowing the scientists to capture it and study it--with predictably lethal results.Alien: Romulus has to jump through a lot of hoops to create a situation in which some of the most frightening creatures ever committed to film can do their thing and scare new audiences. It's a little peek at what kind of mess the Alien franchise's overarching story has become. The knots Romulus twists itself in so it can stay true to the story of Alien, Aliens, Prometheus, and Alien: Covenant are a pretty good argument for why it's time for the Alien franchise to drop all its past stories and start fresh.Continue Reading at GameSpot

Ever since being in the mainstream, gaming and WW2 themes have been closely tied together. The most notable early example would be Wolfenstein 3D, which was released in 1992. From that point onward, and likely also thanks to the film Saving Private Ryan, there has been an abundance of WW2 games that have been released over the years.

Drone Attack: Pig Irruption has received some major updates to enhance your gaming experience.What's New v1.1.0, v1.1.1, v1.2.0:Added balls indicating multiple enemy killsIntroduced pig emotions for a more engaging experienceRedesigned interface buttonsAdded quick access to bombsAdded pulsating store buttonsDisabled automatic adsGeneral bug fixes, performance improvements

Its almost time to get your crew and queue up to play Concord*. Along with our launch, were also excited to share with you all the accessibility offerings that will be available. Making a game that has something for as many people as possible to enjoy was not only important to the team, but always on our mind throughout the development process. While we created many in-game offerings, like maps, modes, Freegunners, cosmetics, playstyles, lore, and more, it was also important to us that as many people as possible could enjoy these experiences. Which is why we made sure to include an array of offerings from text size to outline thickness.Here are the current accessibility offerings that will be available for everyone to use on PS5 and PC, both digital download and disc.Beyond the MenuPing SystemOur ping system will let you pinpoint areas of the map to alert your teammates. The ping will also create an icon in the world, play directional vibrations towards the location of the ping, and play character voice over.Playable Training experienceWeve created a training experience that teaches you the basics and core mechanics of Concord. Weve also made it repeatable, so it can be revisited and replayed so you can refresh on the basics any time.How to PlayWeve created an in-game menu that will give you robust details on all aspects of the game.Character optimizationWeve designed certain characters to have abilities and weapons that consider players who may experience motor barriers.Lark: Larks gameplay focuses on moving around the map and placing spores to create an extended area that buffs your teammates and debuffs your enemies, rather than engaging in direct combat.Also, Larks weapon does not rely on precision or require a direct line of sight to the enemy to be effective. It fires a projectile that hangs in the air, and then bursts into homing projectiles when a target comes close.Jabali: Jabalis weapon and both of his abilities have a strong homing component, which may reduce the amount of precision required to hit targets. His Life Pulse Orb also stays in the world after he throws it, so even if you miss, your allies can still retrieve it.Daw & Kyps: Both Freegunners have kits that can focus on placing supportive elements around the map, allowing you to support your team without engaging in direct combat. They also have burst weapons, which may reduce the amount of fine aiming needed while shooting.General Menu NavigationModified SettingsWhenever you change one of your settings, the change will be highlighted in each screen.Each tab can be filtered to show only modified settings.Each setting will include what the default value was and can be reset to default individually or by an entire tabControlsGeneralInvert vertical/horizontal axis: Enables inversion of the look stick.PC Only: Mouse invert.SensitivityDouble Pressing Sensitivity: Lets you adjust the timing needed between quick button presses needed for an action to count as a double press. For example, in Concord, the default action to perform a dodge uses the double press so you can adjust the timing needed in-between each press. This can also be set separately on PC for keyboard vs controller.Stick Sensitivity Settings: Lets you adjust the sensitivity of using the Look Stick on your controller. You can adjust vertical and horizontal sensitivity separately for Look and Look while Aiming Down SightsPC only: Mouse sensitivity can be adjusted separately for Look and Look while Aiming Down SightsInputController Binding Presets: Choose between several control schemes for both stick layout and button layout. This is only available when using a controller. Also includes a preset for motor accessibility that aims to minimize holds and includes default bindings for auto-move and recenter camera.Custom Full Input Binding: Allows you to rebind an inputs button and the action required (i.e. press, double press, toggle, hold). Available for both controller, as a custom preset, and for keyboardAccessibility-specific Binding optionsEnable/Disable Auto Move: Automatically moves the character forward (also works with sprint). Using the Move stick will automatically disengage.Recenter Camera: Sets your camera back to the center of the screen, facing forwards.GameplayGeneralCamera shake: Turns on or off the camera shake during gameplay.Weapon Bob Strength: Adjusts the amount of movement on the weapon when running or sprinting.Minimap Orientation: Lets you pick between rotating the map around the player, with the player icon always facing up, OR keeping the map static and moving the player icon.Player and object outline thickness: Changes how thick the team-color outlines are around players and objects.VibrationsAdaptive Trigger Resistance (DualSense Only): Enables or disables trigger resistance for the DualSense controller.Turn off ALL controller vibrations.Cinematic dialog to vibrations: Will represent all spoken dialog during cutscenes with controller vibrations (DualSense only).Ability to adjust the strength of groups of vibrationsVibration sub-groupsThe following vibration groups will be available:Weapons and AbilitiesWeapons: Firing, reloading, ready, stow, and melee actions.Additional Weapon Feedback: Additional weapon-related feedback, such as Haymars weapon charging, 1-0FFs Industrial Vacuum filling up, Bazz hitting an enemy with her knives, etc.Abilities: Vibrations related to activating character abilities, like throwing grenades, placing deployables, etc.Player StateIncoming Negative Effects: Damage, nearby detonations, and negative status effects (like Burning caused by Haymars Flame Wall.)Incoming Positive Effects: Healing, shields, and buffs, like Stealthed or Mobility Up.Health Alert: A continuous vibration that plays when you are not at full health.Sprint Footsteps: Vibrations for your characters footsteps while sprinting.General GameplayPickups: Vibrations that play when automatically picking up various objects in the game like Player Bounty Cards in Trophy Hunt, ability charges, and Blue Buddy.Interact Prompts: Vibrations for using in-game prompts: when you start interacting, ongoing interaction, stopping interaction, completed interaction.Spatial AwarenessIn-world ability locations: Vibrations for when you enter an area related to a game object like Daws dome or heal pad, or if an object was placed near you.Interacts nearby: Pulsing vibration that plays when a nearby interact prompt is available to use.Ping and callout haptics: Vibrations that play in the world where an ally pings.UI VibrationsMenu Navigation: Vibrations that play when you are selecting and confirming menu items.Character Select: Vibrations that alert you when its your turn to pick a character, or that you are running out of time to pick.Galactic Guide: Vibrations associated with the Galactic Guide.Match Status UpdatesZone States: Vibrations related to objective zones. Like when you enter or exit a zone, a zone has been flipped to the opposing teams control, etc.Global Mode States: Vibrations related to global states in the match, such as a zone becoming unlocked, overtime, etc.InterfaceSubtitles: Can toggle on or off. Subtitles also include speaker names.In-game Language selectionHUD Scale: Adjusts the scaling of the in-game heads up display (HUD). Does not affect the reticle.PC Only: UI Aspect Ratio sets the aspect ratio of the games UI.Use minimum font size and minimum text size value: forces text to be at least the minimum text size selected. This includes subtitles and speech-to-text. Text size range is from 18 to 40pt.High Contrast Text: Enabling this will add a contrasted color outline to all text.Use Alternate Font: Swaps in-game text between default and alternative fonts for preferred text clarity.Color Options: Choose your own colors to assign to various in-game visuals, includingEnemy, friendly, and neutral colorsPositive vs negative options (for example, full vs low health, valid position vs invalid position),Alerts are specific to your playerHUD elementsReticle colorElements that may create a white flash on screen by defaultThe blind status effect from Haymars abilityThe full screen hit effect that happens when you melee someoneAudio SettingsSeparate volume controls for all audio, including music volume, sound effects volume, and dialogue volume.Speech to Text for Voice Chat: Enables speech-to-text narration for in-game voice chat. This appears just below where subtitles appear on the screen.PC only: Audio output device which will let you choose the output device.PC only: Audio performance which will let you balance audio latency with resource use.GraphicsBrightness: Adjust your level of brightness to your liking.Motion Blur: Turns on or off motion blur in world and on movement.PC only: Resolution, VSync, and FPS Limiter, Field of View (FOV) Scale.Post-launch supportThis is just the starting point for our accessibility options for Concord. We are continuing to work on other settings to be announced at a future date and will be sure to provide updates to you as we can.While were glad we can have these offerings available on day one, were committed to continuously refining and improving accessibility in Concord post-launch.To make our accessibility considerations the best they can be, we need your feedback! So, as you and your crew head into the galaxy on your own adventure, please send us your feedback and suggestions to our Player Support team or drop them in our official Community Discord server. Well make sure we share that feedback with the rest of our team so that we can continue to iterate and improve the experience for all our Freegunners around the world.Well see you in Concord very soon!*Account for PlayStation Network and internet connection required. Paid for PlayStation Plus membership (sold separately) required on PS5.

Dragon Age: The Veilguards new trailer is chock-full of details that my Tumblr mutuals keep screenshotting and dissecting. But those uninitiated with the deeper lore of the franchise might be wondering why everyone is specifically going feral for the woman who shapeshifts from the form of a giant crow. I mean, besides the fact that she made such a badass entrance.Basically, the trailer confirmed that Morrigan, Witch of the Wilds is officially back (after her voice actor Claudia Black oh-so-demurely denied it), and oh my God, depending on what you did in the previous games, some big, big consequences might be ahead.Who is Morrigan in the grand scheme of Dragon Age?Short answer: Shes a shapeshifting Goth swamp witch who hates everyone at first, but might just become your best friend and/or lover.Longer answer: Shes one of the companions from the first Dragon Age game, Origins, whose weird swamp-witch mother, Flemeth, basically mandates that she goes along with your player character. Shes cold, intelligent, and a total badass mage. You can win her respect, and even her love, and shes just, like, so cool.So what happened in that first game?Over the course of Dragon Age: Origins, she eventually confides in you that Flemeth intends to use her body as a vessel so that she can stay young and beautiful forever, something shes done for centuries to her other daughters. You help her kill her mom. Later on in the end game, when youre faced with the fact that either you or one of your companions in the party will need to sacrifice yourselves to save the world, she offers you a solution: If youre a dude, you can impregnate her (if youre a lady, your companion will), and the baby will essentially save your soul from being consumed when you slay the Archdemon.After the final battle, no matter what path you choose, she takes off. Its revealed in the Witch Hunt DLC that she recognizes that her mom isnt perma-dead and goes off to hide in a secret network of elven mirrors that everyone thinks is defunct (more on that later). If she has a kid, she takes her son with her. If you romanced her, you can join her.In previous games, BioWares default world state (the one that players who havent played the previous games inherit) had a Morrigan who didnt complete that ritual, and thus did not have a son. So, its likely that the deal is the same in The Veilguard, and if youre going in without importing prior decisions, you probably wont have Morrigan who is a mom. Otherwise, she has a son named Kieran who will be 20 years old in this game and he might make an appearance too. And he just might have the soul of an old god dwelling within him.Morrigan doesnt make a direct appearance in Dragon Age II, but her mother does. As it turns out, Flemeth had a feeling that Morrigan was gonna kill her, so she safeguarded a piece of herself in a magic amulet that she tasks the player character with delivering in exchange for helping them escape demons. After a big ritual, Flemeth regenerates, says something cryptic to the player character, then takes off.And heres where things get spicyMorrigan reappears in 2014s Dragon Age: Inquisition, where she assists the player character in taking down Corypheus, the Big Bad of the game. Part of his big master plan is using that secret network of previously assumed defunct mirrors, so she teams up with you to stop him before he does.This leads you to finding a mysterious well in the temple of Mythal, an ancient elven goddess. Morrigan offers to drink from it, as it will give control over the mirror and thus prevent Corypheus from using it. As the player, you can decide which of you does so.Either way, its revealed that while the drinker does get some hidden ancient knowledge, they also become a lackey of the ancient elven goddess. And that ancient elven goddess? Well, it just so happens that Morrigans dearly departed mother is her current vessel.However, in the epilogue of the game, everyones favorite elven mage Solas (the bald guy in The Veilguard trailers, who is big angry because his master plan has been thwarted) seemingly kills FlemethWhat does this mean for the new game?Going into The Veilguard, you can have a Morrigan who is both a mother and at the whims of the goddess Mythal, who may or may not be her own toxic mother. Or, you can have a childless Morrigan and a player character dealing with the fallout of being Mythals lackey! Or some combination of that. Its unclear at this stage what the default option in The Veilguard will be, but theres probably going to be ramifications for whatever you decided for Morrigan way back whenOne very telling detail in the trailer: Morrigan (who now has a bit of a I am now 40 something so maybe I should tidy up a bit bob going on instead of a messy bun) is wearing the same headpiece that Flemeth wears. Does that mean shes become Mythals vessel? Now that the elven gods are walking among the world again, that could be especially disastrous for Morrigan.Dragon Age: The Veilguard is out Oct. 31.

Google's latest AI image generation model, Imagen 3, is now publicly available in the United States, and all you need to try it out is a free Google account. As spotted by VentureBeat, the company quietly opened up its model this week, publishing its research in a paper on Tuesday. It comes two months after the company first announced the new model at Google I/O back in May.In a post on Hugging Face, a machine learning platform, Google researchers said, "We introduce Imagen 3, a latent diffusion model that generates high quality images from text prompts. We describe our quality and responsibility evaluations. Imagen 3 is preferred over other state-of-the-art (SOTA) models at the time of evaluation. In addition, we discuss issues around safety and representation, as well as methods we used to minimize the potential harm of our models."From some initial amateurish tests on my end, the model seems pretty solid. When asking for photorealistic images, the results are relatively high quality, with some decent stabs at realism that could fool people on first glance. (I was particularly impressed with the quality of images when I prompted the model to create a 35mm film look.) Imagen 3 also highlights particular parts of the prompt that affected the output, so you can adjust those if you don't like the way the image came out. Credit: Jake Peterson/Google However, Imagen 3's offerings still display the telltale signs of AI-generated images. In some photos, hands have too many fingers, faces are distorted, and text doesn't make sense. (Although the model was able to reproduce the "Coca-Cola" and "Canon" logos with trademark-infringing accuracy.) Credit: Jake Peterson/Google Google isn't the only tech company to release a new image model this week. X recently pushed a new beta for Grok, the company's AI chatbot, and with it, an image generator built with seemingly very few restrictions. Users (specifically, Lifehacker's Michelle Ehrhardt) have used Grok to generate everything from Taylor Swift in a MAGA hat to Pikachu holding an AK-47. Imagen 3, on the other hand, displays obvious guardrails. When I attempt to prompt Google's image generator with anything controversial, it stops itself and politely directs me to Imagen 3's FAQ to understand why my prompt wasn't appropriate. It also refuses to generate copyrighted content, but can be tricked into producing it with the right prompts. As noted above, I was able to generate logos, and was even able to get it to spit out trademarked characters like Mario and Pikachu, even if I couldn't get them to engage in a gunfight. Credit: Jake Peterson/Google How to try Imagen 3Google's new AI image generator is free to try for any U.S. user with a Google Account. To do so, head to ImageFX in Google's AI Test Kitchen. Sign in with your Google Account, then get prompting.

OpenAI said on Friday that it thwarted an Iranian influence campaign that used ChatGPT to generate fake news stories and social posts aimed at Americans. The company said it identified and banned accounts generating content for five websites (in English and Spanish) pretending to be news outlets, spreading polarizing messages on issues like the US presidential campaign, LGBTQ+ rights and the war in Gaza.The operation was identified as Storm-2035, part of a series of influence campaigns Microsoft identified last week as connected with the Iranian government. In addition to the news posts, it included a dozen accounts on X and one on Instagram connected to the operation. OpenAI said the op didnt appear to have gained any meaningful traction. The majority of social media posts that we identified received few or no likes, shares, or comments, the company wrote.In addition, OpenAI said that on the Brookings Institutions Breakout Scale, which rates threats, the operation only charted a Category 2 rating (on a scale of one to six). That means it showed activity on multiple platforms, but no evidence that real people picked up or widely shared their content.OpenAI described the operation as creating content for faux conservative and progressive news outlets, targeting opposing viewpoints. Bloomberg said the content suggested Donald Trump was being censored on social media and was prepared to declare himself king of the US. Another framed Kamala Harris choice of Tim Walz as her running mate as a calculated choice for unity.OpenAI added that the operation also created content about Israels presence at the Olympics and (to a lesser degree) Venezuelan politics, the rights of Latin American communities and Scottish Independence. In addition, the campaign peppered the heavy stuff with comments about fashion and beauty, possibly to appear more authentic or in an attempt to build a following.The operation tried to play both sides but it didnt look like it got engagement from either, OpenAI Intelligence and Investigations investigator Ben Nimmo told Bloomberg.The busted dud of an influence op follows the disclosure earlier this week that Iranian hackers have targeted both Harris and Trumps campaigns. The FBI said informal Trump adviser Roger Stone fell victim to phishing emails. The Iranian hackers then took control of his account and sent messages with phishing links to others. The FBI found no evidence that anyone in the Harris campaign fell for the scheme.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cybersecurity/openai-shut-down-an-iranian-influence-op-that-used-chatgpt-to-generate-bogus-news-articles-202526662.html?src=rss