DJI has filed a lawsuit against the US Department of Defense over its addition to the Pentagon list that designates it as a “Chinese military company.” In its filing, shared by The Verge, the company said it’s challenging the designation because it’s “neither owned nor controlled by the Chinese military.” It described itself as the “largest privately owned seller of consumer and commercial drones,” mostly used by first responders, fire and police departments, businesses and hobbyists.

The company claimed that because the Pentagon has officially proclaimed it as a national security threat, it has suffered “ongoing financial and reputational harm.” It also said that it has lost business from both US and internal customers, which terminated contracts and refused to enter new ones, and it has been banned from signing contracts with multiple federal government agencies.

DJI explained that it tried to engage with the Department of Defense for over 16 months and submitted a “comprehensive delisting petition” on July 27, 2023 to get the agency to remove its designation. However, the agency allegedly refused to engage in a meaningful way and to explain its reasoning behind adding the company to the list. On January 31, 2024, the DoD redesignated the company without notice, DJI wrote in its complaint. DJI alleged that the DoD only shared its full rationale for its designation after it informed the agency that it was going to “seek judicial relief.”

The company claimed that the DoD’s reasoning wasn’t adequate to support its designation, that the agency confused people with common Chinese names and that it relied on “stale alleged facts and attenuated connections.” DJI is now asking the court to declare the DoD’s actions as unconstitutional, describing the Pentagon’s designation and failure to remove it from the “Chinese military company” list a violation of the law and of its due-process rights.

DJI has long been at the crosshairs of various US government agencies. The Department of Commerce added it to its entity list in 2020, which prevented US companies from supplying it with parts without a license. A year later, it was added to the Treasury department’s “Chinese military-industrial complex companies” list for its alleged involvement in the surveillance of Uyghur Muslim people in China. And just a few days ago, DJI confirmed that its latest consumer drones are being held at the border by US customs, which cited the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. The drone-maker denied that it has manufacturing facilities in Xinjiang, the region associated with forced Uyghur labor.

Mobile gaming fans around the world are ready for battle as Age of Empires Mobile has launched worldwide on the Apple App Store and Google Play.

Co-developed by TiMi Studio Group (Call of Duty: Mobile, Pokémon Unite) and World’s Edge, an Xbox Games Studio, Age of Empires Mobile is a fresh and innovative experience for the beloved series, bringing familiar elements from the iconic Age of Empires games with brand-new and mobile-specific gameplay to mobile players. We’ll see how mobile players take to it. Reviews are mixed, but fans are going to get their chance to weigh in with their opinions in a big way now.

It’s been hard to translate PC and console games to mobile, but TiMi Studio Group in Shenzhen (and multiple other cities) has had enormous success in hardcore mobile games over the years. Started in 2008, the studio is a part of Tencent and its Level Infinite brand. TiMi’s hit games include Honor of Kings, Speed Drifters, and Arena of Valor. TiMi has also created Call of Duty: Mobile and the first strategic Pokémon team battle game Pokémon Unite.

In the game, you can take your own strategic approach through your civilizations, heroes and troops with hundreds of combinations to pick your most effective plan of attack. You can participate in massively multiplayer online player alliances and Siege, an alliance-versus-alliance game mode, where large-scale castle sieges unfold with authentic weapons and complex defenses, with hundreds of players controlling thousands of units in one on-screen battle.

Honestly, I don’t know how they pull of this tech on mobile, but it’s a sign that they’re now able to put what used to be supercomputers inside the brains of mobile devices. I got my first demo from Marta Hu, marketing lead for Age of Empires Mobile at TiMi Studio Group, and Emma Bridle, director of player engagement at World’s Edge, at Gamescom.

You can play multiple single-player modes built on the Age of Empires lineage and featuring iconic elements from the original series. You can build your empire in a vibrant medieval world, with big civilizations, imperial cities and legendary historical figures and test your mettle to becoming the strongest governor.

And the game promises you can experience original gameplay on immersive battlefields, adapt your strategy to dynamic, interactive terrain and changing weather conditions and manage multiple troops with real-time control.

“We wanted to bring fresh experiences to the Age of Empires franchise, giving newcomers a taste of what makes this series so important to its fan base,” Robin Xin, producer from TiMi Studio Group, said in a statement. “Age of Empires Mobile is delivering a lot of strategic depth to players, with a resonant, intricate art style that respects history and mythology.”

Expanding on the series’ lineage, Age of Empires Mobile offers players the opportunity to select from some of the world’s most legendary historic figures to lead their armies. Players choose from dozens of these leaders, such as Barbarossa, Darius the Great, Hammurabi, Joan of Arc and Leonidas I, each featuring unique individual talents and synergies with each other to unleash on their foes.

There are eight civilizations at launch – play as the British, Byzantines, Chinese, Egyptians, French, Japanese, Koreans or Romans.

“Age of Empires Mobile introduces a brand-new entry point to the franchise for mobile gamers, with its alliance gameplay and siege battles featuring hundreds of players at war,” Earnest Yuen, senior director of production from World’s Edge, in a statement. “And your empire feels so dynamic, you can hear the world come alive, with water lapping the shore and wind blowing in the trees as your empire grows.”

Back in August at Gamescom, I was briefed by TiMi on the work in progress, when there were 200,000 players testing the game on servers. They called it a 4X mobile strategy game and showed me the details of the title.

They were most proud of the massively multiplayer siege gameplay, because this requires dozens, if not hundreds or thousands of players. It enables teammates — an entire alliance — to go to war against another alliance in an attempt to take the enemy’s fortress.

This is where the strategy, the collaboration, really comes into play. For your alliances, everybody goes on the attack and tries to take out the city center in the end. Players have to coordinate, not only with troops but with ships coming in from a river or with massive siege weapons to take down walls.

The single-player modes include “battlefield survivor.” It’s a bullet heaven mode, fighting in a compact moment. You can do a military exercise where you can test your heroes and builds and tactics as you take a hill or something like it. You can also engage in “island tactics,” which is akin to an autochess experience, as well as “lost borderland.”

“If you press luck and go one step too far, you may lose everything,” TiMi devs said, in our briefing.

There are collections of heroes where you can play as famous figures from history who have influenced the ages. You can engage in fishing if you like, as a kind of mini game, as you go about gathering resources. You can also train your troops and level them up to get more power. A given land can have thousands of different lords, which each lord being a human player. Getting thousands of human players into one game, such as a Siege, is a pretty amazing achievement.

Each civilization and city will have distinct architecture. And every faction will have its own advantages and disadvantages in battle or resource production. You can see things like the wind blowing things around. It’s like triple-A graphics on mobile.

You can use trebuchets, which are giant rock throwers like catapults on steroids. An alliance can be huge numbers of players, or as small as 16. You can zoom in on the action and see some amazing details. It’s a new frontier for Age of Empires.

The PC port will include the base game and all of its subsequent DLC, like New Game Plus mode and extra spider suits, along with PC-specific features like “keyboard and mouse controls, ultra widescreen support, and numerous graphical options,” according to Mike Fitzgerald, Core Technology Director at developer Insomniac. That will include “enhanced ray-tracing options.”

As part of the announcement, Sony also revealed that “we have no additional story content planned for Marvel’s Spider-Man 2” on either platform.

Spider-Man 2 is just the latest in a big PC push from Sony, which also includes a PC overlay that launched in June alongside Ghost of Tsushima’s PC port. Spider-Man 2 is also the fastest a major PS5 game has been ported so far, with the PC version coming less than two years after its original launch.

The Maxfree K3 is a compact 82-key mechanical keyboard (83 keys for the UK version) with a intriguing twist – it has a integrated 13-inch touch screen attached.

The IPS display offers a 1920x720P resolution, 60Hz refresh rate, up to 300 nits brightness, and 60% NTSC color gamut, plus it has 10-point touch capability.

Among the many mysteries of the world, few are more profound or significant than the question of why a particular movie or TV show is at the top of the Netflix chart on any given day. Some of the movies that get to that spot make sense, but others can be head-scratchers, at least at first blush.

Unhinged is one such title that has been dominant on the Netflix charts recently, and while it may seem like a pretty random movie, there are some important reasons for its appeal. The movie tells the simple story of a woman who honks at another car in rush hour traffic, only to discover that the man behind the wheel of the other car is now tailing her, and has hatched a plan for revenge. Here are three reasons you should check it out.

We also have guides to the best movies on Netflix, the best movies on Hulu, the best movies on Amazon Prime Video, the best movies on Max, and the best movies on Disney+.

It gives Russell Crowe a chance to go full villain mode

For most of his career, Russell Crowe has played some variation of the leading man. As lead actors age, though, they often slip into other kinds of roles, and those roles often give them a chance to show off skills that they didn’t get to display during their leading-man days.

That’s exactly the case for Crowe here as he plays a villain who lives up to the name of the movie he’s in. Crowe displays some true menace here that isn’t part of his normal body of work, and by the end of the movie, it’s easy to forget that we rooted for this guy in Gladiator.

It’s delightfully pulpy

It’s indebted to an early Spielberg masterwork

Unhinged has a lot of obvious similarities with Duel, one of Steven Spielberg’s very first movies. The film tells the story of a man who inadvertently makes a truck driver very angry, and then is pursued across the country by that very same truck. The difference with Duel is that we never see the other driver.

While Unhinged lacks some of the technical wizardry that a young Spielberg was able to bring to the project, both movies are worth watching, if only to remember how the legacy of older films gets passed down to newer titles.

Unhinged is streaming on Netflix.