News
- The next State of Play broadcast airs tonight and is dedicated entirely to Ghost of Yōtei
- The livestream will begin at 2 PM PT / 5 PM ET / 11 PM CEST / 10 PM BST and will be 20 minutes long
- Sucker Punch studios has confirmed that it will cover the game's story as well as offer a gameplay deep dive
Sony's next State of Play airs tonight, and this special broadcast will be dedicated entirely to Ghost of Yōtei.
The Ghost of Yōtei State of Play is scheduled to begin on July 10 at 2 PM PT / 5 PM ET / 11 PM CEST / 10 PM BST, can be watched on PlayStation’s Twitch and YouTube channels, and is confirmed to be 20 minutes long.
Hosted by Sucker Punch’s creative directors, Jason Connell and Nate Fox, the livestream will offer a first look at the gameplay since the game's announcement.
"Beyond sharing more about Atsu’s quest for vengeance, we’re excited to show off her new weapons, new ways to personalize your journey at the edge of Japan, new special modes, and much more," Sucker Punch said in a PlayStation Blog post.
That's a lot to cover in 20 minutes, but I'm mainly hoping for a deeper look into the game's narrative. Earlier this year, Ubisoft launched Assassin's Creed Shadows, and since the first trailer for Ghost of Yōtei dropped, it's been difficult not to immediately compare the two games.
Admittedly, we don't know much about Ghost of Yōtei's story, only that the game follows protagonist Atsu as she hunts down a band of outlaws that murdered her family when she was younger.
It's very similar to Naoe's quest for revenge in Shadows, and if Sucker Punch studios wants to stand out among the best games of 2025, they'll need to deliver something that will subvert expectations.
Ghost of Yōtei launches on October 2 for PS5. Ghost of Yōtei pre-orders are now live.
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- Microsoft will donate $4 billion in cash over five years to upskill today's youth
- AI and cloud skills are lacking, and much of the global workforce needs to adapt
- Teachers are also getting support to help them integrate AI into the classroom
Microsoft has announced a pledge to donate $4 billion in cash over the course of five years to help K-12 schools, community and technical colleges, and nonprofits expand the use of, and training initiative to support, AI and cloud technology.
In a blog post, Microsoft outlined how it wants to support 20 million people by upskilling them with AI tools to support future working environments, starting at a young age.
"This represents our next chapter for corporate philanthropy and our non-commercial business model," President Brad Smith explained in the post.
Microsoft grant scheme to support future workersAs part of the scheme, Microsoft will be collaborating with governments to help launch its Elevate Academy to provide AI training right from foundation levels to more advanced skillsets.
The company will also work with OpenAI, Anthropic and the American Federation of Teachers to create the National Academy for AI Instruction, investing $23 million over five years to train 400,000 teachers in AI skills to help them integrate the tech into classrooms.
"We believe some of the most important work ahead isn’t just building smarter machines – it’s ensuring those machines help people thrive," Smith added.
The company cited WEF research stating that two-fifths (59%) of the global workforce will need new digital skills by the end of the decade. A separate study highlighted by Microsoft also revealed that three-quarters of the global youth lack the right skills for the AI economy.
Despite laying off thousands of workers in the post-pandemic years, driven largely by AI-induced productivity gains, Microsoft's President stressed the importance of human workers in the future.
"This is the work ahead – not just building the next generation of AI but building the next generation of opportunity," Smith concluded.
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One of the most innovative, if least understood updates in Samsung's new Galaxy Watch 8 is the new antioxidant index metric, which uses Samsung's latest BioActive sensor. Unlike sensors that look under the skin for, say, blood oxygenation or heartbeats, these new yellow, blue, and violet sensors focus on the surface and measure your level of antioxidants.
According to Samsung executives who walked us through Galaxy Watch 8's latest health capabilities shortly after unveiling the new wearables at Samsung Galaxy Unpacked on July 9, measuring antioxidant levels on the skin relates directly, though not immediately, to your eating and drinking habits. Certain foods, for instance, like fruits and vegetables, might raise the antioxidant levels in your skin. Having higher antioxidant levels might help stave off illness.
We were shown what looked like a direct correlation between, for instance, drinking alcohol during the holidays and how that might lower antioxidant levels. These levels, by the way, are represented in a chart you can read on your Samsung Health app.
Even if you put the Samsung Galaxy Watch 8 on when it's available on July 25, and have a healthy salad instead of a burger and fries, the watch may not immediately read any differences. Antioxidant readings appear somewhat cumulative on the skin and might take a week to show up.
There's also the matter of how you use the new Galaxy Watch 8 sensors.
Now, ironically, it seems, Samsung worked hard to reengineer the Galaxy Watch 8 and its band attachment system to bring the watch closer to your skin. My sense is that these watch backs sit on your wrists, so I'm not sure how much closer they can get, and the executives didn't entirely explain that.
Even so, for this newest sensor, it doesn't matter. The only way to read your antioxidant levels with the Samsung Galaxy Watch 8 is to take it off your wrist and press your thumb against the BioActive sensor on the back of it.
(Image credit: Lance Ulanoff / Future)We asked why the sensors couldn't read the antioxidant levels on the wrist, and it turned out to be a fairly obvious answer.
"We tried a lot with the measurement on the wrist, but there is – we really want to measure from skin, not the blood. Here [indicates wrist], there are many capillaries."
Essentially, a wrist measurement would be looking at (or confused by) the blood in those capillaries and not reading the skin. When you press with your thumb, you actually push away all the blood, so the sensors read the antioxidant levels in the skin more easily.
When I asked why the thumb and not other fingers, it turns out it could be done with your other fingers, but doing the reading with a thumb is just more comfortable.
While this makes perfect sense, this sensor might get used less than others because it's not a passive reading. Instead, it's more like ECG, in which you have to sit still and put a finger on the top button for 20 seconds or so. You actively choose to take this reading, plus you must take off the watch to do so.
Samsung acknowledged there's no notification telling you to occasionally take an antioxidant reading, which means this could end up being a little-used health metric.
Having those antioxidant readings could be useful for understanding your overall wellness as it relates to eating habits, but the other hurdle is remembering what you ingested and when, and few enjoy keeping a diary of their food intake.
I suggested that the upcoming Project Moohan Glasses (a joint XR project between Samsung and Google) might assist here, actively seeing and tracking everything you eat. The Samsung Exec said it's a good idea.
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- AMD finds four flaws, separately low in severity, but powerful when combined
- Together, they can be abused in information disclosure attacks
- The list of affected devices is rather extensive, so be on your guard
AMD has discovered several security vulnerabilities affecting many of its chips can be chained together to create a concerning hack which could result in information disclosure.
The four vulnerabilities are tracked as CVE-2024-36349 (3.8), CVE-2024-36348 (3.8), CVE-2024-36357 (5.6), and CVE-2024-36350 (5.6). Together, they can be used in a so-called Transient Scheduler Attack (TSA), a side-channel, or timing-based attack that likely exploits transient scheduling decisions made by the CPU scheduler to leak information.
Since this is a side-channel attack that results in information disclosure, it is similar to the infamous Meltdown and Spectre flaws which dominated the security scene for months.
Updating the systemsSeparately, the vulnerabilities were given relatively low severity scores, since the devices need to be compromised in advance, either by physical presence, or through malware, before they can be leveraged.
Furthermore, the TSA would need to be executed many times before any meaningful data could be extracted.
Here is how a theoretical attack would occur: A CPU expects load instructions to complete rather quickly. However, if there is a condition that prevents them from doing so, a “false completion” happens. Since the load didn’t complete, the data from the load is forwarded to dependent operations, affecting the timing of the instructions the CPU executes - something the attackers can observe.
The worst-case scenario is AMD chips leaking OS kernel information - but other applications or VMs could leak data as well.
A patch is already available, and AMD advised system admins to update to the latest Windows versions as soon as possible.
Those who are unable to install the patch quickly can implement a workaround involving a VERW instruction, but AMD has advised against it since it could reduce the performance of the system. In any case, the details about the mitigation can be found here.
The full list of all affected chips, including EPYC, Ryzen, Instinct, Ahtlon, and others, can be found in AMD’s advisory.
Via The Register
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