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I briefly played with Logitech’s new G Cloud Gaming Handheld

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I briefly played with Logitech’s new G Cloud Gaming Handheld

Yesterday, Logitech introduced its $349.99 G Cloud Gaming Handheld, which is popping out within the US on October seventeenth (till then, it’s $50 off to preorder). Right now, I received to briefly try it out. It was only a 10-minute demo, but it surely was lengthy sufficient for me to snap just a few pictures, launch some apps, and see the way it felt in my fingers. We’ll have a full overview within the coming weeks.

As I arrived on the testing station, Deathloop (freshly accessible on Xbox Sport Go) was streaming through Wi-Fi to the hand-held’s Xbox Cloud Gaming app. Sadly, it was the action-less intro sequence, however I nonetheless received to dash and soar round. Although it wasn’t a enjoyable killer, like all of my experiences with cloud sport streaming, there was only a whiff of enter lag that, not less than for me, is tough to disregard. On the plus facet, the G Cloud’s buttons, triggers, and analog stick structure really feel good. As for visible constancy, it’s robust to understand how a lot will be blamed on a congested Wi-Fi community, however the sport’s darkish environments regarded somewhat fuzzy on its seven-inch 1080p IPS panel.

The cloud model of Fortnite felt fairly good to play on the hand-held, even with a touch of enter latency.
Picture by Cameron Faulkner / The Verge

That wasn’t the case after I switched to Fortnite through the Nvidia GeForce Now app. Exiting Xbox Sport Go and booting into a brand new app was satisfactorily speedy. My preliminary impression is that in case your baseline expectations for velocity in a handheld encompass simply the Nintendo Swap, I believe you’ll most likely be impressed with how responsive the efficiency and interface navigation really feel — maybe not a lot should you’re coming from a Steam Deck. At its greatest, Fortnite on the G Cloud Gaming Handheld appears higher and runs smoother than it does on the Swap (not a really excessive bar, I do know), although that relies upon solely on the capabilities of your Wi-Fi community. After all, since that is an Android-based handheld, it’s most likely attainable to get precise Fortnite loaded onto this factor and never fear about the entire cloud side. Although, I’m undecided how properly it’d run with its Snapdragon 720G and 4GB of RAM.

The remainder of my time with the G Cloud Gaming Handheld was spent getting misplaced in its Android launcher that Tencent apparently assisted with in improvement, which feels ripped out of the Android Honeycomb days (although the unit that I examined was operating Android 11). It’s straightforward sufficient to search out your entire apps, other than the gaming-focused ones that it places entrance and middle. While you’re taking a look at your full app library, you’ll be able to click on a face button that serves as a portal to the Google Play Retailer, the place you’ll be able to obtain virtually something, I’d think about. Aesthetically, the consumer interface is attempting for a gamer-y vibe that didn’t completely click on with me.

A top view of the Logitech G Cloud Gaming Headset that shows its shoulder buttons, which are covered in a textured plastic.

The shoulder buttons and grips are lined in textured plastic to offer extra, properly, grip.
Picture by Cameron Faulkner / The Verge

The G Cloud Handheld is comfy to carry. The built-in grips supply a great quantity of palm help, and the textured plastic round its again and on the triggers is a pleasant contact. By way of ergonomics alone, I’d positively want to lose just a few hours enjoying video games on this than on the Swap. On the underside, there’s a headphone jack subsequent to a USB-C port that’s used primarily for charging. It could possibly’t help pushing video out to exterior displays — I requested — although it’ll work with USB-C audio transmitters for headsets that supply that sort of factor. On the highest left of the hand-held’s rail, there’s a quantity rocker subsequent to a sleep swap (you’ll be able to energy it down via the software program, as properly). And eventually, there’s a microSD card slot over on the fitting facet, subsequent to the fitting shoulder buttons.

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This image showcases the volume and power buttons located on the Logitech G Cloud Gaming Handheld

There’s an influence slider subsequent to a quantity rocker alongside the highest rail of the hand-held.
Picture by Cameron Faulkner / The Verge

This handheld feels and appears properly designed, and it took no time in any respect for me to really feel like it is a gadget that I would like to spend so much extra time testing. Although, like most Logitech merchandise, polished because it feels, spending time with it didn’t change that I’m not a fan of its $349.99 retail value. It’s a must to be completely purchased in, not simply to this handheld however to the companies that you just need to play video games on. So, the associated fee solely goes up from there.

This image shows the charging port and 3.5mm headphone jack located on the bottom of the Logitech G Cloud Gaming handheld.

The hand-held doesn’t help video out through USB-C, however you’ll be able to plug in USB-C audio transmitters for wi-fi headsets, along with charging.
Picture by Cameron Faulkner / The Verge

Wanting outdoors of this handheld, it’s actually tough to underplay how a lot worth a few of the different well-liked handheld consoles supply proper now, together with the $199 Swap Lite or the extra succesful $299 Swap that may connect with a TV. To not point out, the Steam Deck’s $399 beginning value is a tempting various if you wish to play PC video games on the go. Even so, Android tablets common into handhelds which are available for buy are simply unusual sufficient that the G Cloud Gaming Handheld might be a success. We’ll must see.

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Google DeepMind co-founder joins Microsoft as CEO of its new AI division

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Google DeepMind co-founder joins Microsoft as CEO of its new AI division

Microsoft has hired Google DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman. In a post on X, Suleyman announced that he’s joining Microsoft as the CEO of a new team that handles the company’s consumer-facing AI products, including Copilot, Bing, and Edge.

Suleyman will also serve as executive vice president of Microsoft AI and join the company’s senior leadership team that reports directly to CEO Satya Nadella. Suleyman co-founded the AI lab DeepMind in 2010, which was later acquired by Google in 2014.

DeepMind has remained a pioneering AI force within Google. However, Suleyman hasn’t been part of the division in many years. He was placed on leave in 2019 over controversy surrounding some of the projects he led, according to a report from Bloomberg. The Wall Street Journal later reported Google and DeepMind opened an investigation into Suleyman over complaints he bullied staff.

After getting placed on leave at DeepMind, Google announced it had hired Suleyman as vice president of AI product management and AI policy. Suleyman left Google in 2022 to co-found the startup Inflection AI.

In addition to hiring Suleyman, Microsoft is also bringing on some of Inflection AI’s employees, including co-founder Karén Simonyan, who will serve as the chief scientist of the consumer AI group. Kevin Scott will remain as Microsoft’s chief technology officer and executive vice president of AI.

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“I’ve known Mustafa for several years and have greatly admired him as a founder of both DeepMind and Inflection, and as a visionary, product maker, and builder of pioneering teams that go after bold missions,” Nadella says in a memo to employees published by Microsoft. “We have a real shot to build technology that was once thought impossible and that lives up to our mission to ensure the benefits of AI reach every person and organization on the planet, safely and responsibly.”

Microsoft has poured billions into its partnership with OpenAI and recently struck a deal with AI startup Mistral. The formation of a new AI team doesn’t mean Microsoft has forgotten about these partnerships. Microsoft says it “will continue to build AI infrastructure inclusive of custom systems and silicon work in support of OpenAI’s foundation model roadmap,” as well as “build products on top of their foundation models.”

Update March 19th, 1:38PM ET: Added context about Suleyman’s time at DeepMind.

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England's first convicted 'cyber-flasher' sentenced to 5 years

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England's first convicted 'cyber-flasher' sentenced to 5 years

England’s first convicted cyber-flasher was sentenced Tuesday to 5 1/2 years in prison.

Nicholas Hawkes, 39, a convicted sex offender who sent unsolicited photos of his genitals to a girl and a woman, was the first person in England and Wales convicted of violating the Online Safety Act.

Hawkes admitted at an earlier hearing that in February he sent a photograph or film of genitals with intent to cause alarm, distress, or humiliation.

SCAMMERS ARE USING FAKE NEWS, MALICIOUS LINKS TO TARGET YOU IN AN EMOTIONAL FACEBOOK PHISHING TRAP

The woman who received the photos in February took screenshots and reported him to police.

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Convicted sex offender Nicholas Hawkes was the first person in England and Wales convicted of violating the Online Safety Act. (Sergei Supinsky/AFP via Getty Images)

Hawkes was on the sex offenders register after being convicted last year of exposure and sexual activity with a child under 16. He pleaded guilty Tuesday to breaching both a community order and suspended sentence he had received for the earlier offense.

The cyber-flashing law that went into effect Jan. 31 makes it an offense to send unsolicited sexual images by social media, dating apps, or technologies such as Bluetooth or Airdrop.

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Nuclear weapons in space are bad news for the entire planet

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Nuclear weapons in space are bad news for the entire planet

Last month, several news outlets reported that Russia could be planning to deploy a space-based nuclear weapon, alarming, well, pretty much everyone.

US policy hawks, space environmentalists, and anyone with a lingering memory of Cold War-era fears over nuclear annihilation were all sounding the alarm about the threat posed by a Russian nuke in space. 

As scary as the prospects sound, the US government has assured people that the weapon doesn’t necessarily pose a threat to people on the ground. Instead, it would target other objects in space, like the satellites used by the US military for communications and other operations.

But that struck some as cold comfort, especially given Russian President Vladimir Putin’s unpredictability. And Putin has indicated that putting a nuclear power unit in space is a priority for the country.

In the long term, defense experts warn that having a nuclear weapon positioned in space could pose a threat to life on Earth by eroding international relations and space law. From clouds of space debris that could cut off access to space to the development of weapons that could launch from space to hit targets on the ground, space-based nukes have the potential to impact everything — and everyone. 

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Anti-satellite weapons already exist — but not nuclear ones

No country has ever used an anti-satellite weapon against another country, but several countries have destroyed their own satellites in demonstrations of their military capabilities — including the US, Russia, China, and India. 

These tests are not without controversy: a 2021 Russian test of an anti-satellite weapon, for example, drew condemnation from NASA for creating debris that threatened astronauts on the International Space Station (including Russian cosmonauts). Since then, a UN panel has called for a ban on the testing of such weapons and several European Union nations and the US have pledged not to perform destructive tests. 

A nuclear weapon in space would cause much more destruction than previous anti-satellite weapons tests, explained Andrew Reddie of the Berkeley Risk and Security Lab, as existing space-based weapons typically destroy just one satellite at a time. In the age of huge satellite constellations such as Starlink, knocking out a single satellite is more of an annoyance than a major threat.

To destroy satellites at scale, you need a different weapon, such as a directed energy weapon based on the ground. Or, you could use a nuclear weapon in space, which creates not only shock effects but also heat, radiation, and an electromagnetic pulse — giving it the ability to take out or impair entire networks. 

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A nuclear weapon in space would cause much more destruction than previous anti-satellite weapons tests

International laws protecting space

The best response the international community has had to date in restricting the stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons is international law. When it comes to space, the key piece of legislation is the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, of which Article IV prohibits placing nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in orbit.

Detonating a weapon in space would be unprecedented and could run afoul of international rules barring the use of indiscriminate weapons on civilians or civilian objects.

“It seems to be that any kind of destruction of something in space is an indiscriminate weapon, and indiscriminate weapons are prohibited, and the use of indiscriminate weapons are a war crime,” said Christopher Johnson, professor of law at Georgetown University.

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However, this assumes that satellites are being destroyed by a kinetic impact. It might be possible to disable or jam satellites in another way, such as using an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP. Some reports have suggested that Russia is developing an EMP anti-satellite weapon rather than a nuclear one. If that could be done in a way that doesn’t create a debris field, that may not contravene the international law because it would no longer be a weapon of mass destruction or indiscriminate in its effects.

With the current situation, “We don’t know what is being threatened,” Johnson said and pointed out that the details matter a lot here and that Russia is capable of a very close reading of the relevant laws to stay within them. 

Detonating a weapon in space would be unprecedented and could run afoul of international rules

The cascading debris problem

The reason that the use of weapons in space could be considered indiscriminate is because of the debris field they create. Destruction of objects in space creates large pieces of debris, which are hazardous but relatively easy to track. Where it gets dangerous is the increasing number of medium and small pieces of debris, which are too small to be trackable but are still traveling at high enough speeds to do tremendous damage to other objects or even people in space.

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“A fleck of paint the size of your thumbnail can go through most spacecraft. Traveling at a very high velocity — 18,000 mph — it’ll go right through it,” said space debris expert Vishnu Reddy of the University of Arizona. 

A serious collision in orbit could create a field of small debris pieces that would quickly collide with other satellites, creating a cascade. At a critical mass, each collision creates more debris, which creates more collisions, which creates more debris, until an entire orbit becomes difficult or impossible to access. 

This scenario, known as the Kessler syndrome, could cut off access to space for generations: from making rocket launches more difficult, dangerous, and expensive to, at worst, making any kind of space travel completely impossible for decades and shutting humanity off from the stars.

This concept of the syndrome was first proposed in the late 1970s, when there were optimistic predictions that the Space Shuttle might fly as often as once per week. That never came to fruition, so in the intervening decades, there was less concern about the possibility of a cascading debris event.

But now, with the pace of both government and private launches ramping up to the highest levels ever, space debris is once again on everyone’s radar, Reddy said: “The old fear has come back.”

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“A fleck of paint the size of your thumbnail can go through most spacecraft.”

Vulnerable orbits

The most useful orbits around the planet are getting increasingly crowded, and even if humanity stopped launching things into space tomorrow, the debris already in orbit would continue to collide and make the problem worse. 

Over the long term, if this problem isn’t addressed, it could spiral into a Kessler syndrome, as the situation can go from bad to catastrophic quickly. “The timeline for the cascading collisional scenario is very short,” Reddy said. “We’re talking anywhere from hours to days to weeks, not months to years to decades.”

The use of a nuclear weapon in orbit, depending on its size and in which orbit it is detonated, could kick off such a cascading scenario. But this isn’t exclusive to nuclear weapons. It’s possible that a bad actor destroying a single, carefully chosen satellite could create a cascade, Reddy said, if they picked a vulnerable target. 

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In geostationary orbit, for example, there are only so many slots available for satellites in the ring around the Earth’s equator. That makes the slots in high demand, as they are a limited resource. And this scarcity is compounded by the fact that it’s very difficult to remove debris from an orbit so distant, at over 20,000 miles from the Earth’s surface. If these slots are blocked by debris, it could cut off functionality for systems like communications satellites, weather satellites, and navigation satellites. 

“That would be really, really bad,” Reddy said. “One satellite explosion big enough would be enough to destroy a lot of assets in geostationary orbit.”

Fears for the future

Although it’s unlikely that any actor would launch a nuclear weapon in space with the specific intention of kicking off a cascading debris effect, it might happen as a consequence of trying to destroy a particular military system. But the debris isn’t the only thing that has experts worried.

Security risk expert Andrew Reddie questioned what it would take to convert the technology for a nuclear anti-satellite weapon into a platform that could deploy nuclear weapons from space to targets on the ground. This would require a reentry vehicle, for example, which doesn’t exist yet but could theoretically be constructed based on existing technology. Nukes launched from space would give less warning time than those launched from the surface, threatening thousands or even millions of people.

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It’s not that the deployment of nukes in space is necessarily likely, with no current indication that Russia is developing such a weapon. But it does show how nuclear weapons in space could shift the geopolitical landscape dramatically and why reports of potential space-based nuclear weapons have drawn such condemnation.

“The old fear has come back.”

A matter of global governance

Russian President Vladimir Putin has denied any plans to develop a nuclear anti-satellite weapon and has said that Russia is against the deployment of nuclear weapons in space. And experts agree that Russia takes pride both in its space program and in its role in international governance as a permanent member of the United Nations, though the invasion of Ukraine has shaken the country’s international status and resulted in the suspension of joint space missions with other space agencies. 

For the Russians to develop or deploy such an anti-satellite weapon “would undermine their diplomatic efforts,” Johnson said. Russia has a global leadership role in space governance and was a key negotiator in the Outer Space Treaty, and going against that would be self-undermining. “They take their role seriously,” Johnson said.

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There is also international pressure from beyond the US and Europe. Even China, which has a space program that is notably separate from other nation’s space programs and does not participate in international projects like the International Space Station, has emphasized that it is against the proliferation of weapons in space. US government representatives are trying to recruit China and India in discouraging Russia from pursuing nuclear anti-satellite technology. 

Deploying a weapon in space would be against Russia’s own self-interest, experts argue. Spreading a debris field across an entire orbit limits the ability of everyone to access space, including those who fired the weapon.

However, those effects are not necessarily symmetrical. “The Americans rely on space far more than both Russia and China, so in most domains, if you were to degrade it for everybody, that would be a problem,” Reddie said. “But if you’re degrading space, it’s going to asymmetrically affect the Americans. And the Russians know that.”

This raises the question of what the global consequences might be if — or when — any nation chooses to use a space-based weapon and whether the existing international legal structure could respond to that.

Space debris expert Reddy compared firing such a weapon to flipping a chess board when you’re losing a game: “It’s no longer about winning. It’s ‘I’m losing, so nobody wins.’”

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