Preorders are now open for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 through the Microsoft Store. The next installment of the franchise will launch on Xbox and PC on November 19th with updates that include new aircraft like hot air balloons and a more realistic looking simulated Earth. But the most welcome upgrade could be a much smaller installation size.

The current version of Microsoft Flight Simulator needs over 130GB of storage, but that’s just for the base version of the game. Players can enhance their experience by downloading additional aircraft, or installing world updates that bring more details to local scenery and airports, but that can gobble up even more storage. Those playing on the Xbox Series S, which only offers players 364GB of...

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A few months ago, I was driving my 2023 Volkswagen ID.4 when, seemingly out of nowhere, my driver-side door made several unusual clicking noises and then popped open.

“That’s not good,” I thought, as I quickly shut the door while also attempting to keep my hands on the wheel. And apparently, I wasn’t the only one experiencing this problem. Hundreds of other VW owners were also struggling to keep their doors closed while driving.

The issue culminated this week with VW halting production of the all-electric ID.4 at its factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee, as it scrambles to find a fix for the faulty electronic door mechanism. According to the recall, water was seeping into the door and shorting out the electronics, causing the circuitry...

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We still don’t know much about the seventh season of Black Mirror, but at least the show’s return will have a stacked cast. Netflix announced a big list of actors who will appear in the next installment of the anthology when it premieres in 2025, and it includes Doctor Who alum Peter Capaldi, Barbie star Issa Rae, Sunny’s Rashida Jones, and the always delightful Paul Giamatti.

Here’s the full list:

• Awkwafina
• Milanka Brooks
• Peter Capaldi
• Emma Corrin
• Patsy Ferran
• Paul Giamatti
• Lewis Gribben
• Osy Ikhile
• Rashida Jones
• Siena Kelly
• Billy Magnussen
• Rosy McEwen
• Cristin Milioti
• Chris O’Dowd
• Issa Rae
• Paul G. Raymond
• Tracee Ellis Ross
• Jimmi Simpson
• Harriet Walter

Of course, how these actors will figure into the new season remains unclear. Netflix...

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PlayStation has deftly come up with a way to get more people on board with the PS5 Pro. The company has announced a special 30th anniversary collection for the suite of PS5 consoles and accessories that is unfortunately sick as hell.

“To celebrate this 30th anniversary milestone, we had to create something that honored the history and joy that PlayStation has brought us all,” said PlayStation platform business CEO Hideaki Nishino. All the consoles and accessories are cast in classic PlayStation gray and feature the old-school multicolored PlayStation logo creating a look designed to target every gaming 30-something’s nostalgia organ with surgical precision.

The 30th anniversary collection features a PS5 Pro bundle that includes the...

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Pocketpair has responded to the lawsuit filed against it by Nintendo and The Pokémon Company. The studio that developed Palworld, the game at the heart of the suit, issued a statement early this morning saying it doesn’t know what patents it violated. “At this moment, we are unaware of the specific patents we are accused of infringing upon, and we have not been notified of such details,” the statement read.

According to Nintendo’s press release, the reason for the lawsuit has to do with Pocketpair allegedly infringing on multiple as yet undisclosed patents. The details of the lawsuit have not yet been made public, so we do not yet know which patents, and according to Pocketpair’s statement, it doesn’t know, either.

The news broke last...

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Today on Decoder, we’re talking about the big Google antitrust trial that’s currently taking place in a federal courthouse. No, not the one you’re thinking of — it’s the second Google antitrust case in just as many months. The company lost a landmark case in August in which a court ruled that it had an illegal monopoly in search.

This time around, the Department of Justice is claiming Google has another illegal monopoly in the online advertising market.

Unlike the search case, the ads case is both extremely complicated and somewhat harder to see. We all use search all day, and we’re surrounded by online ads all day, but while it’s easy to talk about search, no one really wants to think about how the ads get there or how much they really...

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Time really does fly, doesn’t it? It seems like only yesterday we were looking at Amazon’s July sales event, and now we are once again heading for the company’s fall Prime Day roundup of deals. Amazon has announced that its two-day sales event for Prime subscribers will take place starting at 12:01AM PT / 3:01AM ET on Tuesday, October 8th, and run through Wednesday, October 9th,

If you’re interested in the goodies being offered but haven’t signed up for Amazon Prime, don’t worry — Amazon makes it very easy.

Besides giving access to Prime Day bargains, Amazon includes a bunch of features to entice people to sign up for its Prime...

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Google employees liberally labeled their emails as “privileged and confidential” and spoke “off the record” over chat messages, even after being told to preserve their communications for investigators, lawyers for the Justice Department have told a Virginia court over the past couple of weeks.

That strategy could backfire if the judge in Google’s second antitrust trial believes the company intentionally destroyed evidence that would have looked bad for it. The judge could go as far as giving an adverse inference about Google’s missing documents, which would mean assuming they would have been bad for Google’s case.

Documents shown in court regularly display the words “privileged and confidential” as business executives discuss their...

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When Pokémon TCG Pocket was first teased a few months back, it looked like yet another mobile app meant to capitalize on the physical card game’s recent wave of unexpected popularity. With Pokémon TCG Live already on the market, it was hard to suss out how The Pokémon Company envisioned Pocket fitting into the larger franchise. And while titles like Marvel Snap and Hearthstone have proven to be big hits, it wasn’t clear that Pocket would be able to appeal to newcomers and hardcore Pokémon fans alike.

We’re still a few weeks out from Pokémon TCG Pocket’s general release. But during the hands-on time I recently spent testing the game out, it felt like a promising — if slightly daunting — attempt at reinventing the classic card collecting...

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DJI’s response to GoPro’s new Hero 13 lineup is the Osmo Action 5 Pro. It justifies that professional moniker with a new image sensor that promises to improve image quality and low-light performance. It also features a built-in pressure sensor, the ability to capture super slow motion at an unbelievable 1080p/960fps, and a new power-sipping 4nm chip that enables up to four hours of continuous recording off a single charge.

The camera is fitted with DJI’s next-gen 1/1.3-inch sensor that can capture 40-megapixel stills and an industry-first 13.5-stop dynamic range to capture high-dynamic, low-light video at 4K/60fps. And while 960fps slow-mo is impressive, DJI gets there by capturing 240fps and then making an intelligent guess as to how to...

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Anduril Industries, the military tech company started by Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey, is teaming up with Microsoft to improve the mixed-reality headsets used by the United States Army. The project announced by Anduril will embed the company’s Lattice software into the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS), allowing the HoloLens-based goggles to update soldiers with live information pulled from drones, ground vehicles, and aerial defense systems.

The partnership marks a return to the VR headset space for Luckey, having sold Oculus to Meta for $2 billion in 2014. Luckey started Anduril in 2017 with support from venture capitalist Peter Thiel.

The Lattice integration with IVAS could alert wearers to incoming threats picked up by...

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BMW of North America struck a deal to recycle lithium-ion batteries from all of its electrified vehicles with Redwood Materials, the companies announced today.

The German automaker said it would instruct its dealers to send old batteries from all of its electrified models, including battery-electric, hybrid, mild hybrid, and plug-in hybrid vehicles from brands like BMW, Mini, and Rolls-Royce, to Redwood for recycling.

Redwood, which was founded by Tesla cofounder and ex-chief technology officer JB Straubel, will handle the end-of-life batteries at its two facilities. One facility is in Reno, Nevada, and the other, which is still under construction, will be in Charleston, South Carolina — somewhat near BMW’s Spartanburg and Woodruff...

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It makes no sense to upgrade based on color alone. Or does it?

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Google is adding a new daily calendar overview in newly opened Chrome tabs for Workspace users with easy access to schedules and video calls. That way, when you’re signed in with your organization’s account, the first thing you’ll see is your appointments and meetings, in addition to files stored in Google Drive.

The new feature comes alongside several other Google Workspace updates, including new enterprise-managed site shortcuts, which let IT set up quick links to frequently used sites on the URL dropdown.

Regular Chrome users could already set up site shortcuts for themselves — for instance, you could program it to bring up a site search for Reddit just by typing “red.” Now, a group policy can be applied to departments and...

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From the unbeatable Switch Pro and comfy Joy-Con alternatives to a dongle that lets you use your Xbox or PlayStation controllers with your Switch, these are the best Switch controllers you can get.

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The House Committee on Energy and Commerce has advanced two high-profile child safety bills that could remake large parts of the internet: the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA 2.0). The proposed laws passed on a voice vote despite discontent over last-minute changes to KOSA, in particular, that were aimed at quelling persistent criticism.

KOSA and COPPA 2.0 would give government agencies more regulatory power over tech companies with users under 18 years of age. The former imposes a “duty of care” on major social media companies, making them potentially liable for harm to underage users. The latter raises the age of enforcement for the 1998 COPPA law and adds new rules around...

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A day after exploding pagers targeting Hezbollah members killed 12 people, including two children, and injured nearly 3,000 people in Lebanon and Syria, the attacks started again. The New York Times reports 14 people have died, along with hundreds injured in the second wave of explosions. Lebanese state media agency NNA reports they resulted from wireless devices like walkie-talkies and fingerprint analysis devices that also damaged cars and motorcycles and started fires, including one at a lithium battery store.

At least one of the exploding devices on Wednesday went off in the middle of a funeral procession for several of the people killed in the previous attack, causing additional panic as people ran for safety and were asked to...

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Soundcore has launched another ultralight wireless speaker called the Select 4 Go. It’s priced at $24.99, making it the most affordable option in Soundcore’s current lineup of Bluetooth speakers and much cheaper than similarly sized options such as Ultimate Ears’ recently launched $79.99 Miniroll.

The Select 4 Go pairs a 1.75-inch 5W full-range speaker driver with a passive radiator to help bolster the intensity of lower frequencies. That’s only a slightly smaller speaker than you’ll find inside the pricier Miniroll, which has a claimed 12 hours of battery life. Soundcore says the Select 4...

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It’s been nearly six years since we warned you that ads were coming for your pause button and 18 months since Google revealed that YouTube would serve them up, too.

Now, YouTube confirms advertisers can broadly target your paused screentime: “As we’ve seen both strong advertiser and strong viewer response, we’ve since widely rolled out Pause ads to all advertisers,” YouTube comms manager Oluwa Falodun confirms to The Verge.

Technically, YouTube started piloting pause ads in 2023 with a limited selection of advertisers, but Google chief business officer Philipp Schindler revealed this April that they were unsurprisingly a big hit with ad firms and lucrative for Google.

Last week, Redditors started posting that the pause ads seemed to be...

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