Roku is launching a trivia game called… Roklue?

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Who needs Half-Life 3 or Beyond Good & Evil 2? Roku, in an attempt to gamify content discovery on its platform, has cooked up a gaming announcement for the ages. Behold: Roklue. Yes, that's a real name that someone with a job title and (likely high) salary came up with.

Roklue (shudder) will quiz players on "the movies and TV shows that everyone is talking about," along with classic "beloved favorites." When it references a movie or show, it will provide a link for you to tune in on your device. The initial version is an Oscar season tie-in ("Roklue: Awards Season") that debuts on Saturday. This inaugural version is produced by B17 Entertainment, a Sony-owned company.

Roku says it will rotate thematic content throughout the year. Variety reports that those will center around music festivals, the Emmys and holidays.

Apart from that name, which should come with a gag-reflex warning, Roklue sounds harmless enough. You play a trivia game to find new stuff to stream; Roku grows its engagement. Win-win. But with corporate schemes like this, it's always worth wondering where further monetization might eventually come into play. Think something like linking to series on platforms you don't yet subscribe to. (Hello, kickback.)

On March 7, you'll find the free Roklue (ick) game on your Roku home screen, no download required.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/streaming/roku-is-launching-a-trivia-game-called-roklue-190000386.html?src=rss

Netflix just bought an AI startup founded by Ben Affleck

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Netflix has acquired an AI filmmaking startup called InterPositive, according to a report by Variety. This is a company that was founded by actor Ben Affleck back in 2022. Don't worry if you haven't heard of it. Affleck has been operating the company in stealth mode for the past few years, so this is pretty much it's big coming-out party.

The terms of the acquisition haven't been disclosed, but Affleck will remain on as a senior advisor to Netflix. Additionally, the entire staff will be absorbed into the streaming platform.

Affleck says he started the company after "observing the early rise of AI in production" and realizing how the "models came up short." The company makes tools that generate AI models based on an existing production's dailies. This lets filmmakers use the model in the post-production process to do stuff like mix and color, relight shots and add visual effects.

Affleck adds that this tech is "not about text-prompting or generating something from nothing." Netflix says the company will keep "filmmakers at the center of the process." The company recently used generative AI tools to whip up a VFX shot in a show called The Eternaut. It's also been using AI to make ads more intrusive. We'll have to wait and see if creators do indeed remain at the center of things. Netflix will offer access to InterPositive's tech to creative partners but has no plans to sell it commercially.

To Affleck's credit, he seems to have a nuanced understanding of modern AI tools. "We also need to preserve what makes storytelling human, which is judgment," he said. "The kind that takes decades to build, experience to hone and that only people can have. I knew I had a responsibility to my peers and our industry, to protect the power of human creativity and the people behind it." However, it's worth reiterating that the company is no longer in Affleck's hands, as he is now just an advisor.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/netflix-just-bought-an-ai-startup-founded-by-ben-affleck-184536640.html?src=rss

Meta hit with a class action lawsuit over smart glasses’ privacy claims

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Meta is facing a class action lawsuit for false advertising related to its AI glasses following reports about the company's use of human contractors to review footage captured from users' glasses. The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in federal court in San Francisco, alleges that Meta's claims about the devices' privacy features have misled users. 

The lawsuit comes after a Swedish newspaper reported that subcontractors in Kenya have raised concerns about viewing footage recorded via Ray-Ban Meta glasses. According to Svenska Dagbladet, workers have reported witnessing "intimate" material, including bathroom visits, sexual encounters and other private details as part of their job labeling objects in videos captured on users' smart glasses.

"This nationwide class action seeks to hold Meta responsible for its affirmatively false advertising and failure to disclose the true nature of surveillance and its connection to the company’s AI data collection pipeline," the lawsuit, filed by Clarkson Law Firm, states. The filing names two individuals who live in California and New Jersey who purchased Meta's smart glasses. It says that both "relied" on Meta's marketing claims about the glasses' privacy protecting features and that they would not have purchased them if they knew about the company's use of contractors. The lawsuit seeks monetary damages and injunctive relief.

A spokesperson for Meta confirmed to Engadget that data from its smart glasses can be shared with human contractors in some cases. The company declined to comment on the claims in the lawsuit.

"Ray-Ban Meta glasses help you use AI, hands free, to answer questions about the world around you," the spokesperson said. "Unless users choose to share media they've captured with Meta or others, that media stays on the user's device. When people share content with Meta AI, we sometimes use contractors to review this data for the purpose of improving people's experience, as many other companies do. We take steps to filter this data to protect people's privacy and to help prevent identifying information from being reviewed."

What the company doesn't explicitly say there is that there is no way to use the smart glasses' "multimodal" features without sharing the captures of your surroundings with the company. As I noted in my review of the second-generation Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses last year: "images of your surroundings processed for the glasses' multimodal features like Live AI can be used for training purposes (these images aren't saved to your device's camera roll)." 

So while Meta claims that users' own recordings are kept private, footage that is captured but not stored locally for users — like video when Live AI is in use — can be sent to contractors who help train the company's AI models. Meta's privacy policy doesn't specifically mention the use of human contractors, though it states that such data can be used for training purposes. 

"The undisclosed human review pipeline renders the Meta AI Glasses’ privacy features materially misleading, transforms the product from a personal device into a surveillance conduit, and exposes consumers to unreasonable risks of dignitary harm, emotional distress, stalking, extortion, identity theft, and reputational injury," the lawsuit says. "Indeed, Meta employees and contractors have described viewing credit card numbers, nudity, sexual activity, and identifiable faces in the footage they reviewed, and reported that Meta’s purported anonymization safeguards do not reliably function."

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/meta-hit-with-a-class-action-lawsuit-over-smart-glasses-privacy-claims-182846817.html?src=rss

IKEA Built A $4 Stick-On Light That Lasts 6 Months

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IKEA has always had a knack for making you feel clever. You walk into the store needing a bookshelf, and you leave with a bag full of small, inexpensive things you didn’t know existed but now can’t imagine living without. The ANKARLÄGG is exactly that kind of product. It’s a battery-operated LED nightlight shaped like a lightbulb, it sticks to any surface, and it costs about as much as a nice sandwich. On paper, it barely qualifies as news. In practice, it’s one of those quiet little design wins that remind you why IKEA remains so good at what it does.

Designed by Bruno Adrien Aguirre, the ANKARLÄGG is a motion-sensing nightlight that runs on two AAA batteries. No cords, no plugs, no electrician. You peel the backing off a double-sided adhesive pad, press the light against a wall, and you’re done. When someone walks within three meters of it in a dark room, it switches on. Thirty seconds later, with no further movement detected, it turns itself off. During the day, even if you’re dancing in front of it, it stays dark. The batteries last about six months under regular use, which IKEA defines as roughly ten activations per day.

Designer: IKEA

The shape is what gets me. The ANKARLÄGG looks like an outline of a classic lightbulb, almost like a cartoon sketch brought into three dimensions. It’s not trying to be invisible or blend into your wall. It’s a little wink, a product that acknowledges what it is by wearing the silhouette of the thing it’s replacing. The base is made from polycarbonate plastic, which gives it durability, while the frosted cover made from polypropylene helps diffuse the light into something soft and even. At 105 millimeters tall and 75 millimeters wide, it’s about the size of a pear. The whole unit weighs 80 grams, which is nothing.

I think the reason this kind of product resonates is that it solves a problem most of us have just learned to accept. We stumble down dark hallways at 2 a.m., we fumble around the inside of closets, we guide ourselves along stairways by muscle memory. We’ve been doing it forever, so we don’t really think of it as a problem. But then someone puts a tiny stick-on light in front of you that costs 39 Swedish kronor, and suddenly you realize how unnecessary all that fumbling was. Good design often works that way. It doesn’t announce itself with drama. It just quietly removes a friction you’d stopped noticing.

What I appreciate about the ANKARLÄGG is that it doesn’t try to be smart in the way tech companies define smart. It doesn’t connect to Wi-Fi. It doesn’t need an app. It doesn’t want to join your ecosystem. It uses a basic infrared sensor to detect motion and an ambient light sensor to know when it’s dark. That’s the entire feature set. In an era when even toothbrushes want to sync with your phone, the restraint here feels genuinely refreshing. It’s a product that knows exactly what it needs to do and does nothing more.

The installation simplicity is worth emphasizing too. IKEA products are famous for their assembly instructions, those wordless cartoon manuals that have spawned a thousand jokes. But the ANKARLÄGG barely needs instructions at all. Pop in two AAA batteries, stick it on a wall. That’s the whole process. You could explain it to a child. You could explain it to someone who has never installed anything in their life. This kind of radical simplicity is hard to achieve. It takes real discipline to resist adding features, modes, brightness settings, or app connectivity. Somebody had to say no to a lot of ideas to keep this product this clean.

The ANKARLÄGG is available now in selected IKEA stores and online. It’s a minor product in the grand scheme of the catalog, tucked somewhere between wall lamps and LED strips. But sometimes the minor products are the ones that tell you the most about a company’s design philosophy. IKEA still believes that useful, well-designed objects should be affordable and uncomplicated. The ANKARLÄGG is a small, glowing proof of that belief, shaped like the most universal symbol of a good idea.

The post IKEA Built A $4 Stick-On Light That Lasts 6 Months first appeared on Yanko Design.

The Playdate Catalog’s 3-year anniversary sale is here

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If your Playdate wishlist is anything like mine (endless), here's a good excuse to actually go ahead and free some of those games from limbo: Panic is running a two-week-long sale on the Playdate Catalog to celebrate its three-year anniversary. Sure, the majority of Playdate games are pretty cheap as is, but they can still add up when you're on a wild purchasing spree. Ask me how I know! The sale will be running from March 5 until March 19 at 1PM ET (10AM PT), so take advantage of the discounts while you can. 

There are 423 games available in the Catalog now, according to Panic, so if you're having trouble deciding on which you should go for, I've got you covered with a few recommendations right here. 

If $39 felt like too much to drop on Season Two when it came out last summer, now's the time to get it. Playdate's second season had only half the number of games as its first, but it still felt like a much stronger collection. Each of its 12 games is really solid, and there's plenty of variety in terms of genre and style, from puzzles and hours-long adventures to fast-paced action games that are great for bursts of intense play. And, it comes with Blippo+ — an oddball cable TV simulator that's unlike anything out there right now. 

All of these games are worth playing, but there were definitely some standouts from the bunch: The Whiteout, a post-apocalyptic adventure that'll surely hit even harder now considering the winter we've had; the puzzle platformer Taria & Como; the arcade action game Fulcrum Defender; the climbing adventure, Tiny Turnip. I also really enjoyed Dig! Dig! Dino! for something on the chiller side. 

I have not been able to shut up about this game since it came out. It's unique, it's creepy, it's completely engrossing and it really pushes the limits of what the Playdate can do. Outside Parties is a horror scavenger hunt, presenting you with one massive picture to scrutinize and find hidden scenes within, using the crank to adjust the brightness constantly so you can find anything that may be buried in shadow. As you find these targets, more and more of the game's story comes to light through eerie audio clips. It is such a cool experience and the atmosphere of it all is incredible. You'll get many hours of playtime out of this one too, with over 150 targets to find and lots of lore to uncover. 

A full-blown western for the Playdate! Crankstone is a gallery shooter with minigames mixed throughout, and between the aesthetic, the music and the activities, it's a lot of fun. You can choose the story mode to get right into the shooting and defending the town from outlaws, or head to the saloon to pick from the handful of mini games individually, including some fast-paced "spot the correct card" deck shuffling games and a few mimicry games involving the crank. It's like a wild west theme park crammed into the Playdate, which is to say, it's wonderful. 

This is one of my all-time favorite Playdate games. Echo: The Oracle's Scroll is a metroidvania without the usual combat, focusing entirely on exploration and puzzle-solving in a vast network of subterranean kingdoms. In this game, the Blight has forced civilization underground, and you play as a child who has been sent on a mission to deliver a scroll from the bottom-most territory, where the humans live, up to The Archives. 

There are all sorts of treacherous environments underground, including magma lakes and areas filled with hostile vegetation, making for what is at times a challenging platformer that requires lots of creativity to make your way through. The tone is a bit somber, but quirky characters — like a frog prince with a bouncy belly — keep things from getting too dark. 

This one's for lovers of classic card games. There are six games in this virtual card game parlor (which is run by a bird named Blanche): Cribbage, Gin Rummy, Spades, Cassino and Spite & Malice. It's great for if you already know what you're doing, but I found Carte Blanche to be a really good introduction to these games for absolute beginners too, thanks to the easy-to-follow tutorials. When you win games, you'll be rewarded with coins that you can spend at Blanche's slot machine, which is stocked with little trinkets she's collected.

These are just the games I've been enjoying lately, but there are tons of other Playdate games worth checking out during the sale, like these cheese games and Spilled Mushrooms. And if you need even more recommendations, take a look through our list of the best Playdate games, where you'll find gems like Summit and Bwirds. There are quite a few I'm planning to finally spring from my wishlist too, including The Shape That Waits, Xeno Escape and Loona Landa. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/the-playdate-catalogs-3-year-anniversary-sale-is-here-181500105.html?src=rss

I hope you like spreadsheets, because GPT-5.4 loves them

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OpenAI is releasing a new model today, and like GPT-5.2 before it, GPT-5.4 is all about professional work. OpenAI is calling GPT-5.4 its most capable frontier model for tasks like coding and data analysis. OpenAI claims the new model produced presentations with stronger, more varied aesthetics and made more effective use of its image generation tools.

It's also the first model from OpenAI built with native computer-use capabilities, making it better at carrying out tasks across several apps at the same time. When it comes to computer use, one noticeable improvement OpenAI has recorded is the way GPT-5.4 issues mouse and keyboard commands. It's significantly better at navigating a desktop environment than its predecessor.  

When users turn to GPT-5.4 in ChatGPT, where it will now be the default model for the chatbot's Thinking mode, the system will outline how it plans to tackle a request, giving people the opportunity to tell it to adjust course as it's generating a response. At the same time, the new model offers better web research capabilities, especially when it comes to "highly specific" queries, according to OpenAI. 

"Together, these improvements mean higher-quality answers that arrive faster and stay relevant to the task at hand," the company states. Separately, OpenAI claims GPT-5.4 is its most factual model yet, noting, relative to GPT-5.2, it's 18 percent less likely to generate a response with any errors. Here's hoping it knows not to turn to Grokipedia for information, something its predecessor was known to do.    

As mentioned, GPT-5.4 will be available in ChatGPT when users select the chatbot's Thinking mode, and as GPT-5.4 Pro from the model picker. As such, this isn't a release for Free and Go users — or even Plus subscribers, for that matter. It's more for enterprise customers, and developers who rely on the company's Codex app. On that note, for API customers, OpenAI claims GPT-5.4 is its most token efficient reasoning model to date, though those tokens will cost more than their GPT-5.2 counterparts. For instance, OpenAI is pricing one million input tokens at $2.50, up from $1.75 with GPT-5.2.   

The fact that OpenAI has increasingly shifted its strategy to focus on professionals shouldn't be surprising. When Microsoft announced last September it would add Anthropic's models to Copilot 365 (where previously it depended exclusively on OpenAI's systems), there were reports that suggested the company made the decision because it found Claude was better at tasks like generating spreadsheets and presentations. Reporting from The Information suggests OpenAI is generating about $25 billion in annualized revenue. However, the company is still far from being profitable, and with more than $1.4 trillion in data center commitments on the books, it's reliant on funding from investors to keep the lights on. Seen in that context, productivity represents a place where it might have a chance to build a sustainable business. 


This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/i-hope-you-like-spreadsheets-because-gpt-54-loves-them-180000444.html?src=rss

The National Videogame Museum has acquired the mythical Nintendo Playstation

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It might sound like the stuff of daydreams now, but once upon a time it was briefly the very real intention of Sony and Nintendo to collaborate on a console. Nicknamed the Nintendo PlayStation, the idea was that a new CD-ROM format backed by Sony would be added to the cartridge-based Super NES, resulting in a hybrid console that could play both.

The partnership didn’t last long, though, with Nintendo backing out before it ever really got off the ground, announcing that it would instead be working with Philips. Sony decided to make the PlayStation on its own instead, in an act of revenge that you have to say paid off in the long run, and we never did get to see Crash Bandicoot running around the Mushroom Kingdom. Still, the short-lived Nintendo PlayStation remains a fascinating what-if scenario in video game history, and the USA’s National Video Museum has acquired the original development kit.

Codenamed the MSF-1, the device now in the museum’s possession is the oldest known prototype of the console that never was, and according to the Texas-based NVM, likely the only one that still exists. Being a dev kit, it’s unsurprisingly not the most attractive thing to look at, and definitely not something you would guess is designed to play video games if you didn’t know any better. But it’s still a hell of an artifact for the museum to get its hands on.

Presumably very few people outside of Sony and Nintendo would have had access to the MSF-1, but just over a decade ago Engadget was able to test an ultra-rare prototype of what was going to be the consumer product. The same prototype was later sold for more than $300,000 at an auction.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/the-national-videogame-museum-has-acquired-the-mythical-nintendo-playstation-173529085.html?src=rss

Google begins calling out battery-killing Android apps

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Google is living up to its word and posting warning labels for battery-killing apps. 9to5Google spotted Google's rollout announcement, which the company previously said would arrive on March 1.

The label says, “This app may use more battery than expected due to high background activity.” If you don't yet see the warnings, they may not have reached you yet. Google says the banners will "roll out gradually to impacted apps" in the coming weeks.

Play Store battery warning
Play Store battery warning
Google

Warning labels aren’t the only stick in Google’s fight against infringing apps. They may also be excluded from discovery services like Play Store recommendations.

Google's definition of battery-draining apps centers around Android's "partial wake lock" mechanism. This service allows an app to keep the phone's processor running even while the screen is off. There are logical exceptions where apps do need this: audio playback, location access, etc. But the company apparently sees too many abusing that API for other reasons. And Google wouldn't want people to assume the problem is with the hardware and switch to an iPhone — because then we’re talking about money.

If you're a developer, Google's technical documentation offers much more detail. For everyone else, keep an eye out for those Play Store labels and consider steering clear of those apps until their devs clean things up.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/google-begins-calling-out-battery-killing-android-apps-170650936.html?src=rss

Google pledges roughly three hours of its annual profit to fight climate change

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Google has pledged "at least" $50 million through 2030 on "projects designed to eliminate superpollutants." The company will be joined by a handful of other companies including Amazon and Salesforce in the newly formed Superpollutant Action Initiative.

In total, these companies have committed $100 million to the project, hoping to "accelerate the reduction" of superpollutants like methane, black carbon and refrigerant gases. Google says these are responsible for close to half of all planetary warming.

"Superpollutants are a major part of the equation to limit atmospheric warming. Experts agree that eliminating them where we can is one of the most powerful levers we have to deliver near-term impact, playing a vital and complementary role to removing CO2," said Randy Spock, Google's carbon credits and removals lead. The gases break down faster than CO2 but can trap heat thousands of times more efficiently, and the coalition claims that aggressive action could prevent more than half a degree Celsius of warming by 2050.

Alphabet, Google’s parent company, reported $132 billion in net income in 2025. Google's five-year, $50 million pledge works out to about three hours of that. The company is also set to spend billions building massive data centers for AI that it claims are more resource conscious than others. So far, Google’s AI infrastructure buildout drove an 11 percent rise in the company's total emissions last year.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/google-pledges-roughly-three-hours-of-its-annual-profit-to-fight-climate-change-164808010.html?src=rss

Canadian government says OpenAI will take further steps to strengthen safety protocols

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The Canadian government says that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has agreed to take steps to immediately strengthen safety protocols, according to a report by Wall Street Journal. This follows a mass shooting incident at a high school in which OpenAI flagged the suspect and suspended his account, but did not alert authorities.

These changes look to primarily involve law enforcement, with commitments to notify police about potentially suspicious use of ChatGPT. We don't have any confirmation from the company at this time, but Canada's Artificial Intelligence Minister Evan Solomon says he "asked OpenAI to take several actions, which Altman has agreed to do."

Solomon attended a virtual meeting with Altman to discuss how the company "would include Canadian privacy, mental health and law enforcement experts into the process to identify and review high-risk cases involving Canadian users." He says OpenAI has pledged to provide a report to outline these new protocols.

He also asked Altman to make these changes retroactively and to review previous suspicious incidents on the platform, providing law enforcement with data when necessary. We don't know if OpenAI has consented to that part.

Engadget has reached out to OpenAI to ask about these changes and if they'll be exclusive to Canada. We'll update this post if we hear back.

This isn't the first step the company has made to make things right with Canada. Ann O’Leary, OpenAI's VP of global policy, recently suggested that the company would be tweaking its detection systems to better prevent banned users from returning to the platform. The company banned the alleged shooter's original account due to "potential warnings of committing real-world violence" but he was able to make another one.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/canadian-government-says-openai-will-take-further-steps-to-strengthen-safety-protocols-164151618.html?src=rss