When Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess debuted during Capcom’s digital summer showcase last year, I didn’t pay much attention. It looked like a high-concept action RPG based in Japanese mythology that took some of its artistic cues from another one of Capcom’s highly stylized games, Okami. And while I have nothing but love for action RPGs and Japanese folklore, nothing in that initial trailer, nor the ones that followed, showed me enough of what the game was about to be interesting.
Technology
CARMEN the robot companion can help boost your memory and cognition
Have you ever walked into a room and forgotten why you’re there? Or misplaced your keys for the umpteenth time this week? If you’ve been noticing these little memory hiccups more often, you’re not alone.
As we age, our cognitive functions can start to slow down, and for some, it might be a sign of mild cognitive impairment.
But don’t worry. Help is on the way in an unexpected form. Say hello to CARMEN, a new robot designed to give your brain the workout it needs.
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Carmen AI robot (University of California San Diego)
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What’s CARMEN, you ask?
CARMEN stands for Cognitively Assistive Robot for Motivation and Neurorehabilitation. Fancy name, right? But don’t worry, CARMEN’s job is simple — to help people with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) sharpen their mental skills from the comfort of their own homes. This small, tabletop robot was developed by researchers at the University of California San Diego.
Think of CARMEN as a personal trainer for your brain, ready to guide you through exercises that can boost your memory, enhance your attention and improve your problem-solving skills. What makes CARMEN special is that it’s the only robot out there that focuses on teaching compensatory cognitive strategies. In other words, it helps you find clever workarounds for cognitive challenges.
Carmen AI robot (University of California San Diego)
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Why CARMEN is a game-changer
Here’s the deal. About 20% of folks over 65 have MCI, which is like a middle ground between normal aging and dementia. It’s not just a minor inconvenience. Up to 15% of people with MCI transition to dementia each year. While there aren’t any miracle pills to stop MCI from progressing, behavioral treatments can make a real difference. That’s where CARMEN comes in.
As Laurel Riek, a professor at UC San Diego and the project’s senior author, puts it, “We wanted to make sure we were providing meaningful and practical inventions.”
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Carmen AI robot (University of California San Diego)
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What can CARMEN do for you?
Imagine having a personal trainer for your brain right on your tabletop. CARMEN leads you through fun, interactive games and activities designed to boost your memory, attention and problem-solving skills. If you need help remembering where you put your keys, CARMEN can teach you to create routine places for important objects.
If you’re struggling to keep track of appointments, CARMEN’s got note-taking strategies for that. These aren’t just random exercises. They’re part of a well-validated compensatory cognitive training (CCT) intervention, which CARMEN delivers autonomously.
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Carmen AI robot (University of California San Diego)
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The brains behind CARMEN
CARMEN wasn’t born in a vacuum. The clever folks at the University of California San Diego teamed up with doctors, people with MCI and their caregivers to create this little robot. They wanted to make sure CARMEN would be truly helpful in real-life situations.
The team designed CARMEN with some key features in mind. It’s plug-and-play, with few moving parts, so you can use it without supervision. It works even with limited internet access. It communicates clearly and shows empathy. It gives you breaks after tough tasks to keep you engaged.
Carmen AI robot (University of California San Diego)
CARMEN in action: What do users think?
After spending a week with CARMEN, users reported trying out new strategies they thought were impossible before. Most found CARMEN easy to use and understand, though one user did find it a bit challenging. The best part? Everyone wanted more time with their new robotic pal.
“We found that CARMEN gave participants confidence to use cognitive strategies in their everyday life, and participants saw opportunities for CARMEN to exhibit greater levels of autonomy or be used for other applications,”the researchers reported.
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Carmen AI robot (University of California San Diego))
The tech behind CARMEN
CARMEN is built on the FLEXI robot platform from the University of Washington. However, the UC San Diego team made significant hardware modifications and wrote all the software from scratch. They’re using ROS (Robot Operating System) to run CARMEN’s brain.
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Carmen AI robot (University of California San Diego)
What’s next for CARMEN?
The team is planning to test CARMEN in more homes. It also wants to teach CARMEN how to have conversations while keeping your privacy safe. This is both an accessibility issue and a response to people’s expectations of being able to talk with home systems. The researchers are also exploring how CARMEN might help people with other conditions, like ADHD.
But they’re being careful too. As Riek notes, “We want to be mindful that the user still needs to do the bulk of the work, so the robot can only assist and not give too many hints.”
While we don’t know the eventual cost or exact release date yet, CARMEN’s development shows promise for accessible, at-home cognitive support in the future.
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Similar technologies in brain training
While CARMEN represents an exciting development in cognitive assistance for those with mild cognitive impairment, it’s worth noting that it’s not the only player in the field of brain training technology. We’ve previously covered another innovative system called Sens.ai, which offers a different approach to cognitive enhancement.
Sens.ai is a 5-in-1 brain training system that uses a comfortable headset and a gamified app to help users achieve various cognitive goals. Unlike CARMEN, which is specifically designed for those with mild cognitive impairment, Sens.ai caters to a broader audience looking to improve sleep, cognition, well-being or meditation skills.
The Sens.ai system employs a range of advanced technologies, including brainwave sensors, heart rate monitors, transcranial photobiomodulation, and objective functional brain testing. These tools work together to measure and enhance brain performance across different areas of cognitive function.
While CARMEN is still in the research phase, Sens.ai is already available to consumers, offering a free trial of its membership program. It’s backed by scientific research and has garnered positive testimonials from users.
The existence of technologies like Sens.ai alongside research projects like CARMEN demonstrates the growing interest and investment in cognitive enhancement tools. As this field continues to evolve, we may see a variety of options become available to support brain health and cognitive function for different user needs and preferences.
Kurt’s key takeaways
CARMEN represents an exciting step forward in how we approach cognitive health. By bringing clinically validated exercises into people’s homes through a friendly, interactive robot, we’re making brain health more accessible and engaging. While CARMEN is still in the research phase, it’s not hard to imagine a future where these kinds of AI assistants become common household helpers, especially for our aging population. They could be a game-changer in extending independence and quality of life for many people.
So, what do you think? Would you welcome a little robot like CARMEN into your home to help keep your mind sharp? Let us know by writing us at Cyberguy.com/Contact
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/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25539323/Gamma_PS1.png "The Gamma PS1 emulator for iOS now supports 4-player games")
The Gamma PS1 emulator has gained a number of significant updates since it launched as one of the first console emulators for iPhones in May. Recent updates added a new “Enhance Audio” feature and better multiplayer support, joining other key updates over the last few weeks.
Developer Benjamin Stark (aka ZodTTD) told The Verge in an email that the Enhance Audio feature in his most recent update improves audio “using reverb and interpolation effects.” He also “added Multitap emulation” for games that used Sony’s adapter that expanded the PS1’s controller port count from two to four. (That was used for games like Crash Team Racing, NBA Jam: Tournament Edition, and more.)
In other recent updates, Stark added analog stick support for games that used the Sony Dual Shock controller and the ability to switch discs without going back to the main menu for multidisc games like Metal Gear Solid. He also introduced a new “Pro” upgrade for $4.99 that turns ads off entirely.
Technology
Capcom’s Kunitsu-Gami combines tower defense strategy with the heart of community organizing
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25538593/Kunitsu_Gami_Gameplay_Screenshot___5_.png "Capcom’s Kunitsu-Gami combines tower defense strategy with the heart of community organizing")
It was only after trying the game’s demo at this year’s Summer Game Fest, and later getting my hands on a copy, that I finally got it. And damn is this game worth getting into.
In Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess, you play as Soh, the guardian of the priestess Yoshiro who you must protect and guide through the land helping her purge it of evil demons. In an email to The Verge, art and game director Shuichi Kawata wrote that it wasn’t intentional that the marketing surrounding Kunitsu-Gami made it unclear what kind of game it was.
“This title is a mix of several genres,” Kawata wrote. “And we imagined the possibility that there would be a range of impressions people would have.”
I defy you to guess what kind of game this is based on this launch trailer.
Kawata described Kunitsu-Gami as a “maiden” defense game. Gameplay is divided into three parts: day, night, and a base-building cycle. During the day, Soh goes about mountain villages blighted by demonic corruption. He cleanses the corruption and rescues villagers who will help him in the night cycle to come. At night, demons attack, hoping to make their way to Yoshiro to kill her. To stop them, Soh assigns villagers different jobs, each with their own abilities, strengths, and weaknesses, and positions them throughout the village to prevent the demons from reaching Yoshiro. Once Yoshiro gets to the end of a village, it is permanently cleansed, making it a new base Soh and the villagers must repair before moving on to the next location.
I love how Kunitsu-Gami cleverly iterates on tower defense games. You assign roles to villagers with crystals, a resource gained through defeating demons at night and cleansing a village in the day. Not every villager can perform every role, and some roles aren’t combat viable, though they have other benefits. During a day cycle, I might assign a couple of my people to the thief role, sending them out to dig up more crystals or rations that act as health potions for Soh and the villagers. But thieves are useless at night, requiring me to burn up precious time and crystals to reassign and redeploy them. Sometimes, I might not have enough crystals, having used them all to buy the expensive sumo wrestler role — who draws demons’ attention to themselves and away from Yoshiro — or the acetic who uses their power to freeze demons in their place, making them easy pickings for the archer’s bow or the woodcutter’s axe.
Kunitsu-Gami offered the kind of challenge that makes my puzzle and strategy-obsessed brain sizzle with excitement
In addition to simply completing a stage, each village battle also comes with a set of special parameters that, if met, will get you extra goodies. One parameter required that I use no more than 1,900 crystals. While that initially seemed trivial, that goal got a lot harder to meet because that stage also required that I give 1,500 crystals to Yoshiro to complete it. I was then left with only 400 crystals for my villagers — an extremely tight budget when the basic roles like the archer and the woodcutter are 50 crystals a pop, while the more powerful roles cost between 150 to 300.
1/3
I really enjoyed that tension between strategic assignment and deployment. Do I spend the crystals to get the powerful roles, leaving me with fewer defenders? Or do I risk my larger but weaker army getting overrun? Kunitsu-Gami is also special in that it never fell into the trap of being too trivial. In other tower defense games, it’s possible to set your defenses so well that you can sit back and watch the game play itself. That never happened for me. No matter if I had a glut of resources and well-placed villagers, I always had to stay on high alert, often coming to Yoshiro’s rescue with one of Soh’s ultimate attacks. At every level, Kunitsu-Gami offered the kind of challenge that makes my puzzle and strategy-obsessed brain sizzle with excitement.
While it’s not a prominent feature, there’s also an interesting bit of narrative to the game. Each villager you rescue has a name and a bio, and I enjoyed reading their stories and how they all intertwined. These people became more than nameless units to throw at a demonic horde, but members of a living, breathing community made up of married couples, family, and friends. It made for a beautiful message that reminded me of the aphorism “we all we got.”
In Kunitsu-Gami, Soh is the only one with martial training while everyone else is farmers, fishermen, and housewives. Instead of waiting for outside help or succumbing to the relentless demons, those ordinary people took up what little arms they had to defend their homes and families. In a political climate that seems determined to roll back protections for women, queer people, and people of color, it’s nice to see that message. Help isn’t coming — we are the help. It’s a sentiment supported by what Kawata shared as Kunitsu-Gami’s main theme.
“Challenge is the driving ethos for this game,” he wrote. “We face various conditions seriously and push forward without fear.”
Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess is out now on PlayStation, PC, Xbox, and Xbox Game Pass.
TikTok is having a tough time, and hackers are working hard to add to its misery. A malicious code took over accounts on TikTok and compromised the official presence of celebrities and brands, including Paris Hilton and CNN.
The hackers behind this sent malware via direct messages (DMs) on the platform.
Users didn’t have to click any links or download any files to get hacked. Just opening the message was enough for a device to be infected.
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A person on TikTok (Kurt “CyberGuy” Knutsson)
What you need to know about TikTok DMs exploit
Hackers are apparently targeting high-profile TikTok accounts. So far, accounts from CNN, Sony and Paris Hilton have been targeted. CNN was the first account that got hacked, and it was reportedly down for several days after the incident.
The attack reportedly happens without the account owner needing to click on or open anything, known as a zero-click attack. All they need to do is open a DM, and the account can be taken over, leaving the rightful owner locked out. The vulnerability might lie in how content is processed when a DM is opened. Similar weaknesses have been identified before, such as vulnerabilities in the Chromium browser triggered by fabricated images.
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We reached out to TikTok, and a spokesperson told CyberGuy, “Our security team is aware of a potential exploit targeting a number of high-profile accounts. We have taken measures to stop this attack and prevent it from happening in the future. We’re working directly with affected account owners to restore access, if needed.”
The hack appears to be a “zero-day” attack, which means the bad actors discovered the vulnerability in TikTok’s code before the developers did. TikTok had zero days to prevent it.
TikTok logo on a smartphone (Kurt “CyberGuy” Knutsson)
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TikTok has a history of getting hacked
This is not TikTok’s first hacking incident. In 2023, over 700,000 accounts in Turkey were hacked because TikTok’s two-factor authentication system wasn’t secure enough. This all happened right before an important presidential election in Turkey, which made things even messier.
In 2022, security experts at Microsoft found a major flaw in the TikTok app. All it took was clicking a bad link and hackers could hijack your account.
Concerns about TikTok’s data security and its connection to ByteDance, its Chinese parent company, have also captured the attention of lawmakers. The U.S. government fears China uses the app to spy on Americans or to influence the messages they see. President Biden has even signed a bill forcing ByteDance to either sell its U.S. TikTok operations or face a ban in the country.
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A TikTok account on a laptop (Kurt “CyberGuy” Knutsson)
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6 ways to protect yourself from TikTok DM danger
To make sure your TikTok account doesn’t get hacked by malicious DMs, follow these steps.
1. Use strong antivirus software to protect against phishing attempts: Stay vigilant when it comes to emails, phone calls or messages from unknown sources asking for personal information. Avoid clicking on suspicious links or providing sensitive details unless you can verify the legitimacy of the request.
The best way to protect yourself from clicking malicious links that install malware that may get access to your private information is to have antivirus protection installed on all your devices. This can also alert you of any phishing emails or ransomware scams. Get my picks for the best 2024 antivirus protection winners for your Windows, Mac, Android & iOS devices.
2. Use strong and unique passwords: Create strong passwords for your accounts and devices and avoid using the same password for multiple online accounts. Consider using a password manager to securely store and generate complex passwords. It will help you to create unique and difficult-to-crack passwords that a hacker could never guess. Second, it also keeps track of all your passwords in one place and fills passwords in for you when you’re logging into an account so that you never have to remember them yourself. The fewer passwords you remember, the less likely you will be to reuse them for your accounts. Get more details about my best expert-reviewed password managers of 2024 here.
3. Enable two-factor authentication: Enable two-factor authentication whenever possible. This adds an extra layer of security by requiring a second form of verification, such as a code sent to your phone, in addition to your password.
4. Keep your TikTok app up to date. Regularly update your TikTok app to avoid getting hacked. While you’re at it, update your antivirus software, web browsers and other applications to ensure you have the latest security patches and protections.
5. Review and adjust privacy settings: Ensure that your TikTok privacy settings are appropriately configured. Limit who can send you direct messages, comment on your videos and view your profile. This reduces the risk of unwanted interactions with potential hackers.
6. Monitor account activity: Regularly check your account activity for any unusual behavior or unauthorized access. TikTok provides a log of devices that have accessed your account. If you notice any unfamiliar devices, immediately change your password and log out of all devices. Also, to report suspicious activity on your account, TikTok provides channels to report a problem in its app.
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Kurt’s key takeaways
TikTok needs to strengthen its system to ensure hackers don’t access users’ accounts. While the latest incident seems to be affecting celebrities and high-profile accounts, bad actors may also start targeting common users. Given these security concerns, it should come as no surprise that I advise against using TikTok, or at the very least, to use it with extreme caution. Meanwhile, be cautious. If someone messages you asking you to click on something or send them something, don’t just do it. Scammers love pressuring people to act fast. So, take a breath and think twice before you click.
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Do you think government intervention is necessary to improve the security of social media platforms? Let us know by writing us at Cyberguy.com/Contact
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