from the silent-treatment dept

Over a decade ago, Microsoft was getting set to release its new Xbox One console. In the lead-up to launch day, a bunch of rumors began swirling about some of the online requirements the console would come with. Details weren’t to be found, so the public was left to speculate what these requirements would entail. Would the console always need to be online when launching games? Would it need to check in online on a certain cadence for games to work, such as every day? Every 30 days?

Microsoft did very little to calm the waters in all this speculation. Very little came out from the Xbox team prior to launch, and what did come out was often confusing. What became very obvious, however, was that the lack of clear and direct messaging from Microsoft made a bad situation much worse. The backlash to the requirement rumors was severe and Xbox largely ended up scrapping them.

Fast forward to the present and the internet has exploded the past few days with claims that an update pushed to PlayStation consoles has introduced a 30 day online check in requirement for newly purchased games.

Some PlayStation users have noticed a new online DRM policy for digital games purchased on the PlayStation Store: newly purchased digital games now display a “Valid Period” tag showing a start date, an end date, and a countdown timer. If the console does not connect to the internet within 30 days, the game’s license reportedly expires, and the title becomes unplayable until an online connection is restored.

The story broke over the weekend through Lance McDonald, the well-known modder who managed to patch Bloodborne to run at 60 frames per second. He posted on X: “Hugely terrible DRM has now been rolled out to all PS4 and PS5 digital games. Every digital game you buy now requires an online check-in every 30 days. If you buy a digital game and don’t connect your console to the internet for 30 days, your license will be removed.

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We thought about reporting this story as soon as McDonald surfaced it. However, several users also swore they saw nothing of the sort in their libraries, so we waited. Thus far, Sony has not made any official public statement, but a few hours ago, a PlayStation Support assistant confirmed to a user that the 30-day timer is not a bug at all.

That support assistant being referenced is a bot, however, not a human being behind a keyboard. You can see the response it gave in the screenshot below.

That is, at the time of this writing, the most that Sony has said about whatever the hell is going on here. As a result, all kinds of people, big and small within the gaming community, are losing their shit over this new “online DRM requirement” for existing consoles that previously didn’t have it. Oh, and it’s a requirement that Sony mocked Microsoft for trying to require way back in 2013 before the backlash.

The silence is, as they say, deafening. Is this fully intentional? Not all the reporting suggests that at all. Other reports indicate that this is just a bug in the update and this was not intended to be rolled out at all.

Shortly after the issue surfaced, video game preservation site Does it play? weighed in on the matter. It reported hearing from an anonymous insider that the timer was actually just a bug. “From what we gathered, Sony accidentally broke something while fixing an exploit. They’ve known about the confusing UI for a while, but didn’t see it as urgent,” their X post read.

However, many noted that an accidental deployment still implies Sony was testing the concept, since the interface had already been built. Throughout the confusion, Sony has yet to provide an official comment regarding the issue.

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That last sentence is the most important one. Hey, Sony: what the actual hell is going on here?

The fact that all of this rumor, speculation, and angst has gone on for at least a couple of days now without a single word being uttered directly from Sony is remarkably stupid. The waters need to be calmed and that’s only going to happen by the company speaking up. Was it a bug? Cool, say so and let’s move on. Is the online requirement DRM now a thing? Much less cool, but at least we’ll know where the company stands (though, then we can start talking about Sony changing its policies on consoles after they are sold).

What can’t happen is this vacuum of information because Sony wants to give the public the silent treatment. That’s just bad business.

Filed Under: 30 day timer, drm, playstation, playstation online assistant

Companies: sony

• Incidents rose 18% and theft value rose 36% in 2025
• FBI warns of “cyber-enabled strategic cargo thefts”
• Basic security hygiene already goes some way to preventing attacks

The FBI has warned cybercriminals are increasingly targeting cargo shipments with hacking and impersonation tactics – and making a hefty profit doing so.

With incidents rising 18% in 2025 and the average value per theft up around 36% (to $273,990) due to criminals targeting high-value goods, losses in the US and Canada alone hit around $725 million over the year, a significant 60% year-over-year increase.

from the weak-men-afraid-of-words dept

Brendan Carr’s FCC claims to be moving forward their their plan to “review ABC’s broadcast licenses” because Jimmy Kimmel made a joke about the president’s wife. And it’s every bit as dumb and legally baseless as you might expect.

Carr has sent a letter to ABC/Disney saying he’s accelerating the review of their existing broadcast licenses. It’s very clearly because the Trump administration wants to annoy, harass, and pressure ABC into firing Kimmel. But since that’s a direct assault on the First Amendment, they’re trying to do an end around and pretend that the review is because ABC is “violating DEI requirements.”

Carr’s underlying legal argument is genuinely and profoundly stupid. He’s claiming that ABC’s ordinary, modest, and inconsistent corporate diversity practices are racist against white men, and therefore violate the already fairly thin anti-discrimination components of the Communications Act.

It’s absolute fucking gibberish. But you’ll notice that most outlets, including this piece from CNBC, try to make the effort sound like sensible policy being conducted by reasonable adults:

“The letter orders the company to file for early renewal for ABC-owned television stations and notes the action is related to an investigation into Disney’s DEI efforts, which began last year.

Disney confirmed on Tuesday that it received the FCC’s order initiating an accelerated review of its licenses. The FCC said in the letter that Disney now has 30 days — or until May 28 — to file for the renewals.”

As we noted previously, ABC only actually owns about eight licenses to begin with. Most ABC broadcast licenses (230 or so) are actually owned by right-wing friendly local broadcasters already loyal to the president. We’ve noted how these stations routinely air right wing agitprop, and have been rewarded by Trump and Carr with a series of merger approvals that violate existing media consolidation limits.

The actual process of yanking a broadcast license is also a complicated, difficult, and extremely time consuming affair. Were Carr to actually do this (beyond sending Disney a stern letter to put on a show for the press), you’re talking about potentially years of legal wrangling. A fight Carr would very likely lose, because, again, his entire underpinning argument is baseless and stupid.

Carr doesn’t actually want a legal showdown with deep-pocketed Disney over this turd of a case. They’re just hoping to make life so costly and annoying for ABC/Disney that the company not only fires Kimmel, but thinks twice about supporting any journalist, satirist, or comedian who dares challenge the administration. It’s also a message to other networks that host voices critical of the unpopular president.

This is, if the pathetic U.S. press coverage of this FCC inquiry is any indication, already having an effect. A good chunk of the news reports on this inquiry (see: this Semafor piece) can’t be bothered to be honest about the pathetic, baseless nature of this censorship effort. Many outlets seem dedicated to helping Trump and Carr pretend this is any sort of above-board review. They’re enablers.

Anna Gomez, the FCC’s lone Democratic official (because Republicans refuse to fill the other seat), correctly notes that this whole dumb First Amendment violating gambit will fail:

“This is the most egregious action this FCC has taken in violation of the First
Amendment to date. As part of its ongoing campaign of censorship and control, the
White House called publicly for the silencing of a vocal critic, and this FCC has now
answered that call. This is an unprecedented and politically motivated attempt to
interfere with how broadcasters operate, and this unlawful overreach will fail.”

You know it’s bad when even Ted Cruz is blasting your baseless censorship campaign as stupid:

“It is not government’s job to censor speech, and I do not believe the FCC should operate as the speech police.”

You might recall that the last time Disney capitulated to these dim fascists (temporarily suspending Kimmel because he made some jokes about the deceased right wing social media propagandist Charlie Kirk), it resulted in the company losing millions of streaming video customers and amusement park attendees. Hopefully Disney execs learned their lesson from that experience.

The problem for Trump is that as his health, influence, popularity, and political power wane, he and Carr’s threats will carry less and less weight, even among feckless corporations. They’re just weak men afraid of words, ideas, and comedy, desperately trying to pretend that they have power to permanently stifle jokes. It’s foundationally pathetic and embarrassing, something press coverage should make very clear.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, brendan carr, broadcast, broadcast licenses, censorship, comedy, dei, fcc, free speech, jimmy kimmel, licenses

Companies: abc, disney

Norwegian-American robotics firm 1X Technologies has offered a glimpse into what scaled humanoid robot production looks like, and it’s surprisingly circular. In a newly released demo, its Neo robot is shown assisting humans on the factory floor, helping build more Neo units as the company moves toward full-scale manufacturing.

Robots helping build more robots

At the center of the demo is 1X’s Neo humanoid robot, a bipedal machine designed primarily for domestic environments that is now stepping into early manufacturing workflows. The footage shows Neo performing repetitive, assistive tasks alongside human workers, effectively becoming part of the assembly process.

The setup shows how 1X is approaching production at its Neo Factory, where robots are involved in close collaboration with humans. The company has also emphasized a vertically integrated model that involves designing and manufacturing core components in-house, including motors, batteries, sensors, and structural parts.

This end-to-end control allows 1X to iterate quickly on both hardware and manufacturing processes, while scaling output as demand grows. The factory has already begun full-scale production, with plans to deliver thousands of units following strong early interest and pre-orders.

Scaling a still-evolving product

Despite the polished demo, Neo remains a work in progress. The robot is designed to operate autonomously, but it’s not quite there yet. So 1X is relying on guided assistance from human operators to supervise and help the robot complete unfamiliar tasks, which also enables it to learn over time.

This learning loop is central to how Neo improves, combining real-world deployment with continuous training. Early versions are expected to expand their capabilities gradually as they gain more experience in both factory and home environments.

With production now underway, 1X is effectively turning Neo into both the product and part of the process. If this model is successful, future iterations may not just assist humans in daily life but also play a direct role in building the next generation of 1X robots.

Apple’s iPhone sales and Services revenue were the stars of the show in the tech giant’s most recent quarter, but the Mac quietly outperformed — helped by growing demand for AI workloads.

Wall Street investors had expected to see Mac revenue in the low $8 billion range, but Apple reported $8.4 billion in the second quarter ended March 28 — a notable beat for a non-core segment of the tech giant’s business. In addition, investors ahead of earnings believed that Mac sales would be essentially flat year-over-year. Instead, Mac sales were up 6% on an annual basis, the company told investors. The company’s total revenue was $111.2 billion, a 17% increase from the same period last year.

Apple chalked up some of the Mac growth to recent product launches, including the well-received MacBook Neo. However, those fun, colorful computers were only on sale for a few weeks after the March 4 preorders began. Realistically, most units shipped mid- to late March, and some demand may have been pushed into April as certain models sold out.

Apple CEO Tim Cook told analysts on the company’s Q2 earnings call on Thursday that customer demand for the Neo was “off the charts” and higher than Apple had expected. He also noted that Apple set a record in the quarter for customers new to the Mac, partly due to the Neo.

Cook attributed the Mac sales growth to the use of the platform for running local AI models, like OpenClaw — something that took Apple somewhat by surprise as Mac mini and Mac Studio devices sold out in recent weeks.

“Both of these are amazing platforms for AI and agentic tools, and the customer recognition of that is happening faster than what we had predicted, and so we saw higher than expected demand,” Cook said of these Mac sales. He also noted that the Mac mini was the top-selling desktop in China — a market that’s been in an OpenClaw frenzy as of late.

Still, Mac revenue was flat on a quarter-over-quarter basis, suggesting this new demand has yet to scale. Cook said it may take Apple “several months” to reach supply-demand balance on the Mac mini and Studio models.

“We’re not at the point where we’re saying this [constraint] is going to end anytime soon. And it’s not because of a problem, per se, other than we just under-called the demand,” Cook explained.

Enterprise demand for the Mac was also at play. Apple pointed to a couple of larger companies, including Perplexity, that had turned to Mac as their preferred platform for building enterprise-grade AI assistants.

He also said Apple was “supply constrained on the MacBook Neo,” and has even seen school systems, like Kansas City Public Schools, dropping Chromebooks for the Neo.

AI has plenty of messy use cases, but emergency medicine may be one place where it can do some real good. A Harvard study comparing AI performance against doctors using patient data from emergency-room cases revealed that OpenAI’s o1 reasoning model outperformed human doctors in emergency triage diagnosis, especially in cases where decisions had to be made quickly with limited information.

What did the test reveal?

A part of the Harvard trial included 76 patients who arrived at the emergency room of a Boston hospital. The AI model and two human doctors were given the same electronic health record, including basic details like vital signs, demographic information, and a short nurse-written note explaining why the patient had come in.

The AI managed to identify the exact or near-exact diagnosis 67% of cases. Meanwhile, the human doctors scored between 50% and 55%. In the second test, more detailed information was provided, which caused the AI’s accuracy to rise to 82%. On the other hand, the humans scored between 70% and 79%. It is worth noting that this gap was not statistically significant.

Why doctors aren’t being replaced yet

The premise of this study revolves around text-based medical reasoning, and not the full reality of emergency care. Researchers note that AI did not assess a patient’s distress, appearance, tone, body language, or other real-world signals doctors use in the actual ER.

Dr Adam Rodman, another lead author and a doctor at Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, said AI could become part of a “triadic care model” involving the doctor, patient, and AI system.

While the results are impressive, the technology isn’t ready to be dropped into emergency rooms just yet. Experts raised concerns over accountability, patient safety, AI errors, and whether doctors may start deferring too quickly to AI recommendations. As of right now, it can only be good enough to offer second opinion when doctors need one fast.

After being harried by complaints that its search function needed improving, Reddit has in the last few years invested in its search engine, and has even added AI features to help its users find what they’re looking for. It appears that investment is finally paying off: The company has seen a 30% year-on-year jump in the number of people using search every week, CEO Steve Huffman said on Thursday.

Huffman noted that search has been one of the major drivers of user acquisition and retention for the platform.

“On search, we have seen great performance. Search DAUs, WAUs, and queries are up meaningfully year-over-year. It’s a great driver of retention and DAUs. The search team is, quite frankly, I think doing a great job. If you use Reddit Answers, you can see it is better integrated into the product,” he said on the company’s first quarter post-results conference call.

Earlier in February, the platform started testing product placement through AI search results in the U.S.

Huffman said that around 40% of conversations on Reddit are commercial in nature, and 84% shoppers feel more confident in their buying decisions after researching on Reddit.

The social platform ended the quarter with more than 493 million weekly active unique users (WAUq), up 23% from the same period last year, and about 126 million daily active unique users (DAUq), a 17% improvement from a year earlier.

Reddit reported a 7% improvement in U.S. visitors, reaching 53.5 million DAUqs, and 73.3 million DAUqs internationally, a 26% increase. The company said it plans to reach a billion daily users worldwide and 100 million daily users in the U.S.

Besides search, the company said its machine translation feature, which now supports over 30 languages, has driven significant user growth in the past few quarters.

Reddit reported revenue of $663 million in Q1 2026, beating Wall Street’s expectations of $609.8 million. The company also said it only spent $1 million in capital expenditures in the quarter.

MOM just released its latest advanced quarterly labour report & employers are showing signs of caution

Singapore’s labour market continued to expand in Q1 2026, but employers are showing early signs of caution as they tighten hiring plans, according to the Ministry of Manpower (MOM)’s latest advance quarterly labour market report released today (Apr 30).

The report, based on preliminary data, found that the city-state added 5,000 jobs in the first quarter of 2026, extending an 18-quarter growth streak.

While this was higher than the 2,300 jobs added in Q1 2025, it marked a sharp slowdown from the 17,700 jobs recorded in Q4 2025.

MOM attributed the softer pace largely to seasonal factors and a high base in the previous quarter, rather than a broad-based weakening in labour demand. It noted, for instance, that construction activity typically slows during the Chinese New Year period.

At the same time, the share of firms planning to hire in the next three months fell from 54.6% in Feb to 44.6% in Mar. The proportion of firms expecting to raise salaries in the next three months also dropped from 39.3% to 25.4% over the same period.

Earlier this month, the Monetary Authority of Singapore warned that the business outlook had softened and employment growth would likely ease from 2025’s gains because of the Middle East conflict.

MOM noted that hiring sentiment has yet to recover to Feb levels before the conflict began, despite early signs of stabilisation in April.

“This suggests a more measured pace of hiring and emerging caution among firms, with potential softening if external conditions weaken,” said MOM.

Employment growth among Singaporeans and permanent residents for Q1 2026 was concentrated in sectors such as transportation and storage, and administrative and support services, while non-resident employment growth continued to be driven by the construction sector.

Meanwhile, unemployment rates remained low and broadly stable. The overall rate edged up to 2.1% in Ma, from 2% in Dec 2025. Among citizens, the rate rose to 3.1% from 3% in the previous quarter.

Some 3,700 workers were retrenched in Q1 2026, up from 3,590 a year ago, and 3,690 in the last quarter of 2025. For every 1,000 employees, 1.5 people were retrenched in the Jan to Mar period, the same as the last quarter.

“Retrenchments were stable or declined across most sectors, with a majority occurring due to business reorganisation or restructuring,” said MOM.

The full labour market report for Q1 2026 will be released by MOM in mid-Jun.

Job market forecast

Looking ahead to Q2 2026, the labour market is expected to remain tight and continue to expand, said MOM.

However, geopolitical tensions and increased economic uncertainty are also expected to make businesses cautious about hiring and wages.

Commenting on MOM’s report, Callam Pickering, senior economist at Indeed, said: “An uncertain business environment, both in Singapore and globally, will make it more difficult for Singapore businesses to plan ahead and understand their staffing needs.”

Pickering also noted that labour demand also shows signs of deterioration, with job postings on Indeed down 2.8% in Mar, compared to the end of last year, continuing a three-year downward trend in hiring demand.

Nonetheless, he pointed out that the job market “continues to be healthy,” with unemployment and retrenchment figures still low. “We expect the job market to weaken this year, but strong fundamentals will help Singapore weather the storm,” Pickering reflected.

• Read more articles we’ve written on Singapore’s job trends here.