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One UI 4 is based on Android 12. Samsung says it introduces a number of improved customization and privacy capabilities. The beta program will be available in China, India, Germany, Poland, South Korea, UK, and the US. The release date of the software can vary by each market. However, users in the aforementioned locations can now check the Samsung Members app to sign-up for the beta.

After a few teaser announcements, the wait for the One UI 4.0 beta program finally came to an end today. Galaxy S21 users in Korea can now participate in the Android 12-based One UI 4.0 beta program and experience new features and a refreshed design. And of course, beta participants are highly encouraged to provide feedback to Samsung’s software engineers and help build the best One UI version possible.

The signup and feedback submission processes can be carried through the Samsung Members app on the Galaxy S21, Galaxy S21+, or Galaxy S21 Ultra. So far, the 2021 flagship series is the only one to have been accepted in the One UI 4.0 beta program, but additional models could join before the end of the year.

Get ready for early access to a refreshed user interface

As to what One UI 4.0 is about, well, in Samsung’s eyes at least, it’s about giving users “the power to tailor their own, optimized mobile experience” in a mobile world where “everyone has unique needs and preferences.”

In addition, Samsung claims that the new version of One UI based on Android 12 was created with input from developers so that it delivers the tools and innovations necessary for creating quality apps and experiences.

Stay tuned as we’ll be taking a closer look at One UI 4.0 and all its features in the coming days and weeks. And if you are a Galaxy S21 user, feel free to let us know if you’ll participate in the beta program. A word of warning, though: beta builds are often unstable, so it’s advised to join the beta program if you have a backup phone just in case things go wrong with the beta software on the Galaxy S21.

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Krstić said Apple rapidly addressed the issue with a software fix and that the vulnerability is “not a threat to the overwhelming majority of our users.”

Still, security experts encouraged users to update their mobile devices for protection.

In a statement, NSO Group did not address the allegations, only saying, “NSO Group will continue to provide intelligence and law enforcement agencies around the world with life saving technologies to fight terror and crime.”

The firm has previously said its software is only sold to vetted customers for counterterrorism and law enforcement purposes.

Researchers, however, say they have found multiple cases in which the spyware was deployed on dissidents or journalists. In 2019, Citizen Lab analysts alleged that Pegasus was used on the mobile phone of the wife of a slain Mexican journalist.

One of Magic: The Gathering’s most popular cards — Golos, Tireless Pilgrim — has been banned from play in the widely played Commander format, according to an update from the Commander Rules Committee, an independent group that both created the format and oversees the official rules for play.

Rules Committee founding member Sheldon Menery announced the Golos ban in an update posted Monday. Menery acknowledged that Golos is “both popular to play with and unpopular to play against,” and that the card’s “presence crushes the kind of diversity in commander choice which we want to promote.” In the same announcement, the rules committee unbanned another Commander, Worldfire. The committee’s banned list is here.

Image: Wizards of the Coast

“We understand that many players love Golos, so we don’t take this action lightly,” Menery said. “In the end, the health of the format is our primary concern and we find Golos unhealthy. While Kenrith, the Returned King is a similarly flexible and popular commander for good stuff five color decks, we see it as a clear step down from Golos.”

Menery added that the committee doesn’t expect Magic: The Gathering publisher Wizards of the Coast to print cards similarly powerful to Golos, Tireless Pilgrim in the near future, “so a surgical strike now makes sense.”

Golos, Tireless Pilgrim was introduced in Magic’s Core Set 2020, released last year. It allows players to search their library for a land card and place it into play tapped. Alternately, for the cost of two plus one of each mana color, players can exile three cards from the top of their library and cast them — without paying their mana cost. It’s a powerful move that’s hard to make in most formats but made easier and more desirable in Commander format.

Commander format is quite a bit different from vanilla Magic: The Gathering. The multiplayer mode of play supports two to six players, sometimes more. Each player gets 40 life points, and any player can attack any other player on their turn. Decks consist of 100 cards, and each of these cards — save for lands — must be unique. What sets the format apart is that one of those 100 cards must be a Legendary Creature, a type of creature first introduced to the game in 1994. That Legendary Creature is designated as the leader of your army, your deck’s eponymous Commander. The player with the last Commander standing wins.

Many Magic players see creating a Commander deck as the ultimate expression of a player’s skill, and of their ability to use their personal collection of cards to its fullest. The Commander format embodies the game’s reputation for competition, but also for storytelling. It’s the only format maintained by an outside entity, meaning an entity not controlled by publisher Wizards of the Coast.

You’re on Instagram looking for your best friend’s daily dog update, but you have to scroll endlessly through a sea of posts you care little about, and probably forget what you’re looking for in the first place. After a few extra annoyed scrolls, you close the app in frustration.

It seems Instagram is well aware of your plight, because it is quietly testing out a solution for your messy feed called “Favorites.”

According to Alessandro Paluzzi, a mobile developer who first posted about the new feature on Twitter, Favorites lets you categorize your most important Instagram accounts (friends and creators) as your priorities, so that their posts will land “higher” in your feed.

If this feature sounds familiar, it’s because Instagram was testing a different Favorites feature back in 2017, which you let you limit the exact audience for each post. For example, you could share your wedding photo with just your designated favorites, rather than with your entire following.

The 2021 iteration of Favorites, however, is about giving you more control over your feed — by telling Instagram which accounts are most important to you. After all, you may follow a bunch of different brands and creators on your account, but you don’t necessarily prioritize their content on the same level as your closest friends and families.

Currently, Instagram ranks the order of your feed by the most recent and shared posts from the people you follow, plus other “signals” like how likely you’ll engage with a post, according to the company’s June 2021 blog post about its algorithm. While you may “like” many posts you see, those may not be the content you’re actually looking for, but might be sending Instagram all the wrong signals on what you actually want to see in your feed.

It’s not clear whether this Favorites feature will become an official feature at all or if it will change before it’s rolled out more broadly. For now, Instagram says it “is an internal prototype that’s still in development, and not testing externally.” Perhaps in the future, you just might see this feature in your account menu, just below “Close Friends” — a feature that lets you control who you share your Stories.

Update, September 13th, 10:42AM ET: Article updated with comment from Instagram.

Google is forcing Discord music bots offline, issuing a cease and desist notice to the makers of a second high-profile program in less than three weeks.

According to The Verge, YouTube has sent a notice to the owners of Rythm, which allows Discord users to play the audio from YouTube videos within voice channels. The programmers were given seven days to comply, and as a result, the program will shut down on September 15.

Fortnite‘s Season 7 ending event, Operation: Sky Fire, had players go through a wild space ride with an exciting cliffhanger. To add to the tension, publisher Epic Games has shut down the game until the start of season 8 on Monday. 

Operation: Sky Fire put players in the role of infiltrators sent to an alien mothership to take it down with bombs strapped to their backs. While the ship did come down, so did a lot of other strange objects that players won’t understand until the start of Fortnite season 8. 

Here’s everything you need to know to prepare for Operation: Sky Fire.

Why can’t I play Fortnite?

Following Operation: Sky Fire, Epic shut down Fortnite for the next 13 hours. Players will have to wait until Monday, 2 a.m. PT (5 a.m. ET) to play the game again. 

When did Fortnite’s Operation: Sky Fire event start?

Operation: Sky Fire started at 1 p.m. Pacific Time / 4 p.m. Eastern Time on Sunday, Sept. 12. It lasted for approximately 12 minutes.

What is Operation: Sky Fire?

According to Epic, players “join a strike team and sneak aboard the Mothership to deliver IO’s final message to the invading aliens,” wrapping up the story threads that’ve been running through the entire season. 

When the event started, players were teleported to the mothership wearing special backpacks. Inside, they found parts of the island were being sucked into the ship. As players were locked into the ship, out from the floor game the giant pink cube referred to as “Kevin” by the Fortnite community. The mystery cube was a plot point for multiple seasons in the first chapter of Fortnite. 

Energy began firing out of “Kevin” killing other players, but it seemingly ran out of juice and laid dormant. This is when players realized they were merely pawns as their backpacks turned into bombs. However, one by one they began rebooting “Kevin” turning it blue. Before the bomb exploded, players then saw other cubes had been rebooted as well. After a flash, the mothership was a floating wreck and multiple “Kevins” began falling to the island. One piece of wreckage slams into the player and up comes the “To Be Continued…” screen.

When does season 8 start?

Fortnite season 8 will start Monday, 2 p.m. PT (5 p.m. ET). What will change after the this event is still a mystery. 

Fortnite players have spent the entirety of the game’s seventh season dealing with a growing alien threat. Now it’s time for the aliens to deal with the threat of us as we storm the alien mothership and liberate dangerous-looking glowing cubes in the explosive season finale event.

Though this was my first time attending a Fortnite finale event, having only recently gotten into the game, I am well aware of the saga of the massive, unknowable, purple cube that fans affectionately call Kevin. From its first appearance back in 2018, birthed out of a mysterious rift, to its explosion, which briefly transported players to another dimension, the saga of Kevin has been one of the more interesting things to come out of Epic’s battle royale game since it sprung to life and began devouring gamers back in 2017. Players love the cube. They want to know where the cube is, what it is thinking, and if it’s thinking of them.

In today’s special Season 7 finale event we found Kevin. And Kevin has friends.

Lots of friends.

In the final moments of Fortnite Season 7, players (including myself) were beamed aboard the alien mothership that’s been floating over the island for one final assault. The enigmatic Dr. Sloan laced a portion of the island’s landmass with explosives, and we players were needed to arm the explosives. Following a dramatic race through the mothership’s innards, we found ourselves in a large, empty room. As Dr. Sloan began to arm the explosives, a large, cubelike object rose from the center of the room.

Harnessing the power of our backpacks, Dr. Sloan managed to drain poor Kevin of power, leaving us standing in the room with his creepy gray cube corpse. The the good doctor arms the explosive charges and delivers some bad news. Rather than teleport us home and risk the cube escaping, she was leaving us in the ship to die. Bummer.

After a bit of running about the room in a blind panic, we players discovered our backpacks had the ability to recharge Kevin. Banding together we revived the cube, now glowing blue instead of purple, and the room we were trapped in began rising into the air. Then an explosion. Then falling. And finally … to be continued in Fortnite Season 8. Watch the entire explosive event below.

Fortnite Season 8 begins tomorrow at 5 AM Eastern time. If those final moments were any indication, it’s going to be glowing cube city up in there.

Epic Games has filed an appeal to a Friday’s ruling in its lawsuit against Apple, calling on a higher court to reexamine the case and overturn the judge’s ruling.

“Notice is hereby given that Epic Games, Inc…. appeals to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit from the final Judgment entered on September 10, 2021,” the document reads. Few details are given about the legal basis for Epic’s appeal, but it is likely to continue to press on the federal antitrust allegations dismissed by the court.

At trial, Epic argued Apple had a monopoly because of how it requires developers to use its payments system for in-game purchases. But Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruled Friday that Epic should pay damages to Apple for violating rules around its in-app purchasing system, while undoing Apple’s most restrictive rules on steering customers to alternate payment systems.

Most notably, the judge found that Epic failed to make the case for Apple as a monopoly in the mobile gaming marketplace, which she ultimately found was the relevant market for the company’s claims. “The evidence does suggest that Apple is near the precipice of substantial market power, or monopoly power, with its considerable market share,” Judge Rogers wrote — but said the antitrust claims failed in part “because [Epic] did not focus on this topic.”

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