Star Wars Outlaws launches, X braced for Brazil ban
The first-ever open world Star Wars video game, the highly-anticipated Star Wars Outlaws, launches today. The third-person role play game (RPG) focuses on a Han Solo-inspired scoundrel, Kay Vess, and is set between the events of the 1980 hit The Empire Strikes Back and 1983’s Return Of The Jedi. The game encourages fighting, stealing, and even gambling despite being set in a franchise widely perceived as being child-friendly. Disney will be anxious for a hit, following news last week that the House of Mouse had already cancelled its latest Star Wars live-action show, The Acolyte. Sky News
X, formerly known as Twitter, has said it expects to be blocked in Brazil after failing to meet a deadline to name a new legal representative for the company. The social media network closed its office in the country earlier this month, saying its representative had been threatened with arrest if she did not comply with orders it described as “censorship”. The months-long row began with Supreme Court Judge Alexandre de Moraes in April ordering the suspension of dozens of X accounts for allegedly spreading disinformation. BBC
Google recently started letting you use its Gemini AI chatbot to ask questions about your Gmail inbox on the web, and now, that feature is coming to mobile. The company says its Gmail Q&A feature is starting to roll out on Android and that the feature will be “coming soon” to iOS. Using Gmail Q&A, “you can ask Gemini questions about your inbox or to do things like find specific details in your emails, show you unread messages, view messages from a specific sender, or summarize emails about a topic in your inbox,” according to Google’s blog post. The Verge
Amazon’s revamped Alexa due for release in October will be powered primarily by Anthropic’s Claude artificial intelligence models, rather than its own AI, five people familiar with the matter have told Reuters. Amazon plans to charge $5 to $10 a month for its new “Remarkable” version of Alexa as it will use powerful generative AI to answer complex queries, while still offering the “Classic” voice assistant for free, Reuters reported in June. Indpendent
Donald Trump has warned that Mark Zuckerberg will “spend the rest of his life in prison” if Facebook illegally influences the outcome of the US presidential election. In a book to be published next week, Trump alleged that the billionaire tech chief “steered” Facebook against him during the 2020 campaign. Trump claimed in the book, titled Save America, that Mr Zuckerberg would visit the Oval Office and “bring his very nice wife to dinners, be as nice as anyone could be”, while engaging in a “plot against the president”. Telegraph
A few hours ago iFixit published its teardown video of the Google Pixel 9 Pro XL, and now the same phone has been subjected to a similar treatment by Zack at JerryRigEverything. The device is opened from the back using heat and isopropyl alcohol. From the get-go repairs seem slightly hindered by the use of less common screws in some parts. And there are also multiple sizes of screws, which can complicate the reassembly process even further.
The battery removal process is quite bad, as has also been evidenced in the other video. The pull tab basically breaks without doing its job, so you need to use alcohol to dissolve the very strong adhesive. GSM Arena
