Earlier this week, many gamers were shocked to turn on their PlayStation 5 consoles, only to be confronted with a dramatic change to their dashboards: Usually, each game’s icon on the dashboard has a piece of art from that game as a background. Instead, they saw full-screen promotional news posts and advertisements for the game (or sometimes sales in which that game featured) as backgrounds instead. The ads were often outdated or irrelevant to the user — especially given they usually owned the games in question.

PlayStation quickly rolled out a fix and assured users this was a bug introduced in a major update, not a change in its advertising strategy. However, mistake or no, it also offers a glimpse into how players would respond if PlayStation actually rolled out a change such as this. Needless to say, they weren’t happy. The biggest complaint on sites like X and Reddit was that there was no apparent way to disable this despite the PS5 having a setting to turn off ads. Some users went so far as to say these full-page promotional images put them off of using their PS5s entirely.

The second biggest was that the ads and news shown in the new display weren’t relevant and often months out-of-date. Users pointed out that this would prove especially bothersome when playing older games, as these promotional posts might include spoilers or just be comically old. But for the most part, users who noticed this change were clear: They didn’t want intrusive ads on their dashboards. Despite this being a bug, it could prove to be valuable as a case study if PlayStation ever did consider rolling out fullscreen dash ads.

In personal news, I’ll likely still be catching up on September’s games before the October releases — such as Silent Hill 2 Remake, Metaphor: ReFantazio and Dragon Age: The Veilguard — start to show up. That being said, since it is the spooky season officially, I might try my hand at Zoochosis, an atmospheric indie horror title that cropped up online.

What to play this week

What’s new:

• Until Dawn Remastered
• Throne and Liberty
• NHL 25
• Starfield: Shattered Space
• Master Detective Archives: Rain Code Plus
• Metal: Hellsinger VR
• Zoochosis
• Mobile Suit Gundam: Silver Phantom
• Sword Art Online: Fractured Daydream
• Kill Knight
• SpongeBob Squarepants: The Patrick Star Game

New on subscription services:

• MLB The Show 24 (Xbox Game Pass)
• Open Roads (Xbox Game Pass)
• Sifu (Xbox Game Pass)
• WWE 2K24 (PlayStation Plus Essential)
• Dead Space (PlayStation Plus Essential)
• Doki Doki Literature Club Plus! (PlayStation Plus Essential)
• Alien Isolation (Amazon Luna Prime)
• Mortal Shell (Amazon Luna Prime)
• Dusk (Amazon Luna Prime)
• Perish (Amazon Luna Prime)
• Tormented Souls (Amazon Luna Prime)
• Amid Evil (Amazon Luna Prime)
• Valfaris (Amazon Luna Prime)
• Doomblade (Amazon Luna Prime)
• Monster Harvest (Amazon Luna Prime)
• Bear and Breakfast (GeForce Now)
• Monster Jam Showdown (GeForce Now)
• TerraTech Worlds (GeForce Now)
• NBA 2K25 Arcade Edition (Apple Arcade)

Over the past several weeks, WordPress cofounder Matt Mullenweg has made one thing exceedingly clear: he’s in charge of WordPress’ future.

Mullenweg heads up WordPress.com and its parent company, Automattic. He owns the WordPress.org project, and he even leads the nonprofit foundation that controls the WordPress trademark. To the outside observer, these might appear to be independent organizations, all separately designed around the WordPress open-source project. But as he wages a battle against WP Engine, a third-party WordPress hosting service, Mullenweg has muddied the boundaries between three essential entities that lead a sprawling ecosystem powering almost half of the web.

Meta has shared another contestant in the AI video race that’s seemingly taken over much of the industry in recent months. The tech giant released a new model called Movie Gen, which, as the name indicates, generates movies. It’s notably more comprehensive in its feature list than many others in its initial rollout, comparable to OpenAI‘s Sora model, which garnered so much attention upon its initial unveiling. That said, Movie Gen also shares with Sora a limitation on access to specific filmmakers partnering with Meta rather than a public rollout.

Movie Gen is impressive based on the demonstrations of its ability to produce movies from text prompts, as seen above. The model can make 16-second videos and upscale them to 1080p resolution. The caveat is that the video comes out at 16 frames per second, a speed slower than any filming standard. For a more normal 24 fps, the film clip can’t be more than 10 seconds long. 

Movie Gen Action

The deadliest hurricane to strike the US mainland since Hurricane Katrina has also drawn attention for its potential disruptions to the tech industry. Destruction from Hurricane Helene is threatening one of the industry’s major supply chains – a North Carolina mining town that supplies high-purity quartz crucial for manufacturing the chips found in smartphones and data centres worldwide.

The mining town of Spruce Pine is among the many US communities impacted by Hurricane Helene, which killed more than 200 people in multiple states, displaced thousands and left more than a million homes and businesses without power. The storm pushed 900 kilometres inland from the Florida coast and inflicted deadly floods across a wide region, even reaching deep within the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina, where the Spruce Pine quartz mines are located.

Here is what you need to know about how Helene’s ripple effects could impact the tech industry.

Why is high-purity quartz so important?

High-purity quartz is used to make fused-quartz crucibles, cylindrical containers that are key to the chip-manufacturing process because they can endure the high temperatures required to melt silicon. The melting-point temperature for semiconductor-grade polysilicon is around 1425°C (2597°F), and quartz crucibles can typically withstand temperatures of up to 1650°C (3000°F).

In the chip manufacturing process, the fused-quartz crucibles are filled with molten silicon. A silicon seed crystal is dipped into the melted silicon within the spinning crucible so that it can grow into a significantly larger silicon ingot before being gradually drawn out. A fully grown ingot can weigh over 500 kilograms.

Those silicon ingots are then cut into silicon wafers, which in turn can be imprinted with the transistor patterns that form the foundation of modern computer chips.

Where does high-purity quartz come from?

The natural deposits of quartz found in Spruce Pine originated when North America and Africa collided to form the supercontinent Pangaea about 300 million years ago. That process created the Appalachian mountains and also forced part of Earth’s oceanic crust to sink beneath North America, where the intense heat and pressure near the planet’s mantle melted ocean sediment and rock.

The resulting lava slowly cooled over time to form pegmatite rock deposits containing large mineral crystals – including high-purity quartz. These pegmatite formations eventually became more accessible near the surface because of more geological upheaval and weathering.

How did Hurricane Helene impact quartz mining operations?

The Spruce Pine mining district currently has quartz mining and refining operations owned by Belgium-based Sibelco and Norway-based The Quartz Corp. Both companies shut down operations on 26 September and have not yet said when they might restart.

The companies say they have confirmed the safety of their employees and contractors in the area – and they described relatively minimal direct damage to their facilities.

“The initial assessment indicates that our operating facilities in the Spruce Pine region have only sustained minor damage,” said Sibelco in a 3 October statement. “Our dedicated teams are on-site, conducting cleanup and repair activities to restart operations as soon as we can.”

“We have been able to conduct the first visual inspections of our plants and it would appear that damage is mostly concentrated around ancillary units,” said The Quartz Corp in a statement on 2 October. But the company also cautioned that resumption of mining operations “will also depend on the rebuilding of local infrastructure” – many of the roads in the area were closed and damaged in the immediate wake of the storm.

Similarly, Sibelco referenced power outages from the storm as one challenge. “Restoring power remains crucial to resuming our operations,” said the company in its statement. “The repair of power lines leading to our plants has progressed significantly.”

The Quartz Corp also described having stockpiles of quartz in Norway that could be used in ongoing purification processing operations, along with additional “safety stocks of finished products” that could avoid any critical shortages for customers – including semiconductor manufacturers – in the short or medium term.

Will Helene disrupt the supply of semiconductors?

Major semiconductor manufacturers have said that they currently do not expect disruptions to their operations in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.

TSMC, a Taiwanese company that is the world’s leading chip maker, described having “diverse global suppliers” to draw upon. “Through an effective risk management system and close partnerships with suppliers, we currently do not anticipate any significant impact on the company’s operations,” says a TSMC spokesperson. “We will keep monitoring the situation closely.”

Samsung Electronics, which ranks as the second largest chip maker and is headquartered in South Korea, told New Scientist that the company’s operations were not affected.

GlobalFoundries, the largest semiconductor manufacturer based in the US, described itself as having the “flexibility to leverage alternative sources for key supplies” with chip-making facilities on three continents. “We are in contact with our global suppliers and do not expect any disruption to our supply of quartz due to Hurricane Helene,” says a GlobalFoundries spokesperson.

Companies that produce raw silicon wafers currently have wafer stockpiles sufficient to last anywhere from three to eight months, said Dylan Patel at SemiAnalysis, an independent research firm, in a social media post.

Are there alternative sources of quartz for the global semiconductor industry?

Spruce Pine “has a near unique combination of purity, availability and price,” wrote Ed Conway, a journalist at Sky News and author of Material World, in a Substack post. But he also pointed to other high-purity quartz mines in China, Russia and Brazil.

Natural high-purity quartz deposits are “scarce”, but companies can use purification methods if needed or even synthetically produce pure quartz, said Patel. He also pointed to the company Ferroglobe, which acquired a high-purity quartz mine in South Carolina in October 2023. A company press release projected that mining operations could begin in the second half of 2024.