News
- Star Wars: Galactic Racer lets players pilot vehicles as iconic characters from the movie series like Sebulba and Ben Quadinaros
- Lucasfilm Games executive producer Craig Derrick says "it's important to have some returning characters"
- Creative director Kieran Crimmins would "absolutely love" to see players try and emulate Sebulba's iconic podracing stance by playing with their feet
The upcoming arcade racing game Star Wars: Galactic Racer finally lets every Star Wars fan live out their ultimate fantasy: piloting a pod racer as legendary The Phantom Menace character Sebulba.
In just a few hours of hands-on at a recent preview event, I spotted the now grey-haired alien in both the game's Scenario mode and its intense online player-versus-player battles, where he appears alongside other movie favorites including the only marginally less iconic Ben Quadinaros. There are also plenty of newcomers, like the story mode protagonist Shade or their unapologetically Scouse-sounding companion Hibi.
"I think it's important to have some returning characters if they're important, if they're meaningful," explains Lucasfilm Games executive producer Craig Derrick. "I don't think we want to move to cameos for the sake of cameos; it feels cheap. But in the case of Sebulba and some of the other characters you may meet in this game, they actually have a real point and real presence in the story.
"It drives that story forward in a way that feels not only connected to the larger film franchise in the way that you've seen those characters before, but they actually have a real point. They have a real reason for being there, and so the fans get that instant flush of familiarity."
Although his presence in the game seems to follow his "mischievous" characterization in the film, Derrick teases that there might be some surprises in store for fans that play with their expectations.
"His mischievousness is [a huge part of his character]. It's an immediate read," he explains. "
"I hope our players come in and know the character before maybe the characters in our game do. Maybe some of his reputation precedes him a little bit in this, and then we get to play with that. We get to play with it both in terms of like 'how do we lean into what you already know?' and 'how do you subvert it?' Maybe the character changes his stripes a little bit... Or not."
Personality aside, one of the most memorable aspects of Sebulba is his unique pod racing position that involves piloting his craft with his feet. Asked whether players should try and emulate this for the most authentic experience, Kieran Crimmins, creative director at Galactic Racer developer Fuse Games, appears eager to see it tried.
"I think if they're not controlling it with their feet, then are they really playing the game properly?" he asks. "I would absolutely love to see someone try and do that. [...] Please send me the footage."
If you fancy getting your grippers out and giving it a go, Star Wars: Galactic Racer launches for Xbox Series X and Series S, PlayStation 5, and PC on October 6, 2026.
- Hacker “TheHatman” claims to have stolen millions of Azure/Entra employee records from major firms
- Data includes names, emails, job titles, privileged accounts; risks include impersonation and fraud
- Victims dispute scope, but researchers say infostealer‑based theft makes the leaks likely authentic
A cybercriminal is selling millions of user records on the dark web, which they claim to have stolen from large organizations such as McDonalds, Tata Consultancy Services, and Wyndham Hotels.
A hacker going by the alias “TheHatman” posted multiple threads on dark web forums, claiming to have stolen information from Azure and Entra environments.
TheHatman said they broke in using compromised login credentials, targeting almost a dozen organizations.
What was stolen and from whom?Among the victims and the number of records exposed, are:
McDonald’s Corporation: 1,700,000 records
TCS (Tata Consultancy Services): 800,000 records
Vodafone: 425,000 records
HCL Technologies: 250,000 records
InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG): 185,000 records
Kyndryl: 170,000 records
Gap Inc.: 80,000 records
Hexaware Technologies: 20,000 records
Wyndham Hotels: 9,000 records
They are now looking for a buyer: “I’m selling McDonald’s Corporation internal employee dump downloaded directly from Azure Tenant using compromised credentials,” TheHatman said in one of the posts.
In their writeup, security researchers from Cybernews said they analyzed one of the samples posted on the dark web and said the entries were “consistent with Azure directory exports”.
They contained employee names, emails, phone numbers, job titles, workplace addresses, IDs, the departments they work in, user group memberships, service accounts, and highly privileged account records.
What are the risks?Stealing information such as names, email addresses, and workplace details might not sound like a worrisome breach of privacy, but the implications are rather big. Cybercriminals can use it to impersonate a business partner or a major client, and try to trick their employees into installing ransomware, or making a fraudulent wire transaction. That way, they can escalate what seems like a relatively benign breach, into a full-blown cyberattack with material and legal consequences.
For example, a criminal might discover a Vodafone employee that regularly handles payments to a particular supplier. They might impersonate that supplier’s finance director, engage in conversation and, while requesting a new payment, warn that the company changed their bank account. This is not a purely theoretical scenario - it’s been documented time and time again.
What did the victims say?Most organizations are yet to give an official statement about these claims. Gap told BleepingComputer that it found no evidence of the breach and suggested that the attackers merely repackaged data from an older incident.
“Our preliminary investigation indicates that the data in question is limited in scope, non-sensitive and dated back to several years ago. Notably, there is no evidence to suggest that our corporate systems have been compromised,” Gap told the publication.
Tata Consultancy Services notified the Indian National Stock Exchange about the breach last week, also suggesting that this was a resurfacing of an older incident.
“The Company has investigated the matter and has not found any credible evidence of a breach of TCS systems or customer environments,” TCS said in the filing. “The information referenced appears to be more than four years old and limited to basic employee information. There is no indication that customer data, customer systems, or TCS operational systems have been impacted.”
TCS said the attackers broke in using credential stuffing, something that could have only been done years ago: “The attacker claims to have used password spray and Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) fatigue as the attack vector. The Company has had strong safeguards in place against such techniques for more than two years.”
Not everyone agrees with that assessment, though. Security researchers Hudson Rock believe the attackers stole login credentials with an infostealer, rather than through password spraying.
“Judging by the massive size of the organizations impacted, it appears highly likely that this campaign originates from targeted exploitation of Infostealer infections rather than a systemic zero-day vulnerability in Azure,” the researchers said in their report. “If this were a widespread vulnerability, we would likely see a much broader spectrum of organizations impacted, including smaller businesses, rather than just these massive Fortune 500-level enterprises.”
Hudson Rock also described the stolen data as “likely highly authentic”, hinting that just because it’s older, it doesn’t mean it’s not useful.
- Polaroid and Pokémon have jointly announced a range of Pokémon-themed instant cameras and accessories
- Cameras include a version of the Polaroid Now Gen 3 styled after a Poké Ball, and versions of the Go Gen 3 styled after Pikachu and Sylveon
- All the releases, including Pokémon-styled film and accessories, will be limited edition
I’m on the record as being a huge Polaroid fan — but this latest unexpected collab from the brand has me wishing I’d waited a little longer before buying my Polaroid Go Gen 3.
Polaroid has teamed up with Pokémon to help celebrate 30 years of the pocket-monster mega-franchise (the first Pokémon games were released for the Game Boy in 1996) and has produced a range of limited-edition Pokémon-themed cameras and accessories.
As you probably agree from the images above, the most eye-catching of the bunch is the Pikachu-styled version of the Polaroid Go Gen 3, colored in the character’s iconic shade of electric yellow, complete with a yellow hand-strap in the lightning-bolt shade of Pikachu’s tail and a drawing of the little guy on the camera body.
Yes, that is a Poké Ball-themed camera case. (Image credit: Pokémon / Nintendo / Creatures / GAME FREAK / Polaroid)There's also the Sylveon-styled version of the same camera, with a strap in the Fairy-type Pokémon’s colors of pink, white and blue. Alternatively, you could pick up a version of the larger Polaroid Now Gen 3, which takes full-size I-Type film, in the classic red, white and black colors of a Poké Ball. Although, in a small touch that I absolutely adore, all three cameras have Poké Ball-shaped shutter buttons.
(Image credit: Pokémon / Nintendo / Creatures / GAME FREAK / Polaroid)If you, like me, already own your Polaroid cameras, there are still ways you can get in on the Pokémon fun. The collab also includes Polaroid Go and I-Type film in Pokémon styling, with frames themed after iconic monsters like Charmander, Clefairy and Squirtle in addition to Pikachu and Sylveon, and a Pokémon-themed camera strap. And — I just love these — you can also get a camera case and photo album for your Polaroid Go in the shape and style of a Poké Ball!
The special-edition Go Gen 3 versions in Pikachu and Sylveon styles can be picked up for $99.99 / £89.99 (around AU$140), while the Poké Ball-themed version of the Now Gen 3 starts at $139.99 / £129.99 (around AU$198).
Special editions of I-Type film will be priced at $22.99 USD / £21.99 (around AU$32) while the Go film will be $24.99 / £21.99 (around AU$35). Basically, a couple of dollars over regular Polaroid film.
The three camera complete with stylized frames. (Image credit: Pokémon / Nintendo / Creatures / GAME FREAK / Polaroid)The whole lot will be available for pre-order from Polaroid and the Pokémon Center in the US, UK and Canada from August 25, and will go on general sale from October 6. And it’s all going to be in limited quantities — so if you’re a die-hard Pokémon fan who wants to get in on the instant-photography fun, you might not want to wait!
The demo that convinced me happened at an art exhibition I'd built myself.
We couldn't afford a team of docents, so I put together a side project to stand in for one. There was no prompt box and nothing to type. You pointed your phone at something and it told you what you were looking at. Then the show closed, and people kept using it anyway.
They pointed it at buildings, flowers, their kids' toys, posters on the street, none of which had anything to do with the exhibition.
Without anyone asking them to, they had decided a camera should be able to explain the world back to them.
That expectation is now the industry's to deliver on, and it arrives just as AI shifts from a training problem to an inference one, with more of the real work happening on-device while someone points a phone at an uncooperative real world.
A model needs different things from a frame than your eye does: edges to lock onto, and structure it can recover when the shot is full of glare or blur. The color and contrast that make a photo look good are, to the model, mostly in the way.
The sensor you'd want for a human viewer and the one you'd want for a model call for different designs.
The sensor has become a perception problem, and the people building real-time vision systems now care about it the way photographers once did.
Where the sensor came fromEric Fossum's CMOS active-pixel sensor, developed in the early 1990s, is why a capable camera now sits in nearly every pocket.
His later work heads somewhere else entirely: the Quanta Image Sensor, which counts individual photons. That arc previews what is happening to AI now: it runs from capturing a frame a person will like toward capturing the cleanest signal for a machine to reason over.
The sensor is turning into an instrument of perception, and photography is becoming only one of the things it is for.
Why inference changes the jobInference is what makes the problem urgent. Back when AI was mostly about training, the camera's role was indirect: it produced data to be labeled and learned from later, at leisure. Inference is not leisurely. It happens live, on a device short on power and already running warm.
When a system has to recognize something while you're still pointing at it and answer before the moment passes, the weakest link is whatever reaches the model, and it sets the ceiling on everything the product can do.
Part of the industry is still betting on the wrong thing. The assumption is that a big enough model will clean up whatever the camera hands it. I've watched this hold up product roadmaps for two years running, and I don't think it survives contact with physics.
No amount of model size recovers detail that motion blur or glare already destroyed, or that a beauty-first pipeline discarded before the model ever saw the frame. The bottleneck is moving upstream, toward the sensor and what sits between it and the model.
What the hardware is already doingSome sensors now do part of the processing on-chip, so the first computations happen before data leaves the pixel array. Event-based sensors, sometimes called neuromorphic, register only the parts of a scene that change, which suits real-time perception far better than streaming whole frames. Global shutters help too, by cutting the motion artifacts that wreck machine reading.
Even high dynamic range, long tuned to make skies dramatic, is being retuned around what a model can read cleanly in high contrast. Different as these are, they point the same way, toward a version of the world a model can work with.
From recognition to reasoningThe obvious thing to build is visual search: you point at something and get a label back. Point your phone at a menu, though, and what you want is help deciding what to eat; point it at a poster, and the useful move might be saving the event to your calendar. Recognizing the object is only the starting condition. The product lives in knowing what should happen next. That move is where the sensor becomes the first link in a longer chain of interpretation, beyond simple capture.
I never meant to build a camera product at all; it began as a cheap way to avoid hiring docents for one exhibition. But that small project taught me the instinct is already out there. The next camera race will run across the entire stack: the sensor, the image pipeline, the edge compute, the model orchestration, and what the system does with an answer.
Device makers have spent years perfecting image quality, and they will have to take inference quality just as seriously. And whoever writes the software can't treat capture as someone else's problem: how a signal is grabbed and routed shapes the result long before a user sees it. The old boundary between hardware and software matters less the further you push into real-time perception.
Startups still have room here. Their advantage is speed of definition: framing a problem before the larger players finish arguing about it. Generic model capability, on its own, is getting harder to defend. The open question is what happens once a single system can see, reason about what's in front of it, and act on the same event, and who gets there first with a product that holds together.
Human eyes vs machine mindsMy bet is that the next few years will sort companies into two camps: the ones optimizing for human eyes and the ones optimizing for what a machine has to read. Inside a flagship phone, those goals still overlap enough to ignore the difference.
As a strategy, they are already diverging. The more durable position belongs to whoever can turn the messy real world into the cleanest signal for a machine to reason over.
And that starts at the sensor.
We've reviewed, rated, and ranked the best camera phones.
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- Star Wars: Galactic Racer has call-backs that span the whole film series
- Iconic locations and recognizable characters will appear in the upcoming racing game
- The game's set to launch on October 6, 2026
Star Wars: Galactic Racer is shaping up to be the ultimate racing experience for Star Wars fans, letting you speed through a mix of new beloved locations (including the iconic Boonta Eve Classic course) as legendary characters like Sebulba and Ben Quadinaros.
It's not all based on The Phantom Menace, though, and in my recent couple of hours hands-on with the game, I spent plenty of time in the sandy starship-strewn desert of Jakku, seen in The Force Awakens, and other recognizable planets that haven't been revealed quite yet.
The game takes place in the Outer Rim, the perilous outskirts of the galaxy, in the New Republic Era right after the events of Return of the Jedi. According to Lucasfilm Games executive producer Craig Derrick, the setting was chosen because the game is "about telling a local story" rather than a grand intergalactic conflict.
"Sometimes putting a story in the Outer Rim helps distance it a little bit from all the bigger stakes that you see sometimes in our films," he says. "And it shows that these characters have a real life."
The team also says the decision was inspired by real-world history. "We wanted to tell a story of the beginning of this league and how it's put together," begins Kieran Crimmins, creative director at developer Fuse Games.
"And there was a kind of mirroring there of real life. The empire has just fallen, so a little bit like the end of World War Two. Here, there was a big rise in racing with all the ex-pilots, and ex-military people who were still very capable behind the wheel, becoming pilots."
This is best exemplified by Griff Halloran (who some might recognize from the Star Wars Resistance animated series), an ex-Tie fighter pilot who still wears his battered old armor in-game.
The chosen time period also gives the team plenty of license to draw on all the Star Wars movies in some way. "There's a great thing where you can pull from all the different time periods," adds Crimmins. "Particularly the kind of original trilogy and the prequel trilogy, and there is an absolute plethora of depth, not only in lore and character, but also the machines used and the design language used."
Star Wars: Galactic Racer launches for Xbox Series X and Series S, PlayStation 5, and PC on October 6, 2026.
- A new 'It Happens on PS5' ad features Grand Theft Auto 6 footage
- Fans are excited about a newly added trunk sound effect
- Fans are eagerly awaiting the 'Grand Theft Auto 6: An Extended Look'
Sony has released a new PlayStation 5 ad featuring Grand Theft Auto 6, and fans are getting excited over a new sound effect.
If you're out of the loop, the 'It Happens on PS5' physical ad campaign has just launched around the world, which highlights PlayStation's "biggest moments of play."
A new commercial also dropped and was swiftly brigaded by fans still angry with Sony's plan to end physical game disc production, and features games such as Marvel's Spider-Man 2 and 007 First Light, as well as upcoming titles like Marvel’s Wolverine and God of War Laufey.
GTA 6 is also featured, showing a live-action shot from Miami, clips from previous trailers, and a billboard in Poland. The thing is, the ad doesn't even feature new GTA 6 footage, but it's the shot of Lucia and Jason from inside a car trunk that has fans excited.
The same scene, which appears to be running at 60 frames per second (fps), first appeared in Trailer 2, but this version includes a sound effect of the car trunk closing. Yeah, that's it.
GTA 6 trunk closing sound effect heard in the new PS clip. pic.twitter.com/ZT88G8GOi9August 17, 2026
"GTA 6 appears in a new PlayStation commercial. Previously seen footage features new audio, including the sound of the trunk closing," a viral X post reads.
Rockstar Games plans to treat us to an extended look, premiering on Netflix on August 27, but it seems fans can't seem to hold out much longer.
"Rockstar Games is watching people get excited for the sound of trunk closing and probably thinking to themselves that maybe they overdid it with the silent treatment. Anyway, the sound of that trunk closing is extremely realistic I LOVE IT," one user replied.
"We’re so desperate for GTA 6 marketing that a trunk closing sound is exciting," a fan said, as another wrote, "Yup, that sounds like a trunk closing alright."
Someone also pointed out that the sound effect could have been edited on top of the footage by Sony for its ad, but either way, the upcoming extended look can't come soon enough.
GTA 6 launches on November 19 for PS5, Xbox Series X, and Series S.