Since the release of the highly anticipated Cyberpunk 2077 video game on Dec. 10, thousands of gamers have created viral videos featuring a multitude of glitches and bugs -- many hilarious -- that mar the game and render it virtually unplayable for many users. So many gamers demanded refunds from distributors last week that they overwhelmed Sony's customer service representatives and even briefly took down one of its corporate sites. In response, Sony and Microsoft said they would offer full refunds to anyone who bought Cyberpunk 2077 through their online stores; Sony even removed the title, Mike Isaac and Kellen Browning report in The New York Times. Cyberpunk's rollout is one of the most visible disasters in the history of video games -- a high-profile flameout during the holiday shopping season by a studio widely considered an industry darling. It shows the pitfalls gaming studios can face when building so-called Triple-A games, titles backed by years of development and hundreds of millions of dollars.

The lockdown boom in video games has put the spotlight on the global success of British game makers, attracting the attention of deep-pocketed US giants looking to snap up valuable pandemic-proof businesses. Electronic Arts, the California-based global gaming giant, announced a surprise £945m bid for Codemasters, the maker of Formula One racing games. EA's offer, which has been recommended by the Codemasters board, is almost £200m more than that tabled last month by its rival Take-Two Interactive, the maker of games including Grand Theft Auto, which is expected to rejoin the bidding war with a sweeter deal. The gaming industry has proved to be a coronavirus winner, with tens of millions of consumers looking for relief from lockdown boredom and Britain's pedigree ensuring excited investors sent stocks soaring. Industry veterans are not surprised by the latest boom, pointing to Britain's history of creating world-class games The handful of UK game developers that are listed on the London stock market, including the Warwickshire-based Codemasters, have all experienced share price surges of more than 100% this year.

Branches of Co-op in the south of England have been using real-time facial recognition cameras to scan shoppers entering stores. This story originally appeared on WIRED UK. In total 18 shops from the Southern Co-op franchise have been using the technology in an effort to reduce shoplifting and abuse against staff. As a result of the trials, other regional Co-Op franchises are now believed to be trialing facial recognition systems. Use of facial recognition by police forces has been controversial, with the Court of Appeal ruling parts of its use to be unlawful earlier this year.

Fans of the Queen's Christmas Day broadcast will be able to listen without lifting a finger – and not just because the TV's been tuned to BBC One since The Gruffalo at 8.55am. Alexa users will be able to summon Her Majesty into their living rooms from 3pm GMT with the words "Alexa, play the Queen's Christmas Day message". The privilege isn't reserved just for Brits. Anyone with their Amazon Echo set to English – be that British, American, Australian, Canadian or Indian – will be able to listen to the speech, Amazon has announced. "After a challenging year, millions of people from across the Commonwealth will be eagerly awaiting Her Majesty the Queen's message on Christmas Day," said Eric King, the director of Alexa Europe.

On Wednesday, members of the company's prominent Ethical AI research team wrote a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai asking that ousted researcher Timnit Gebru be rehired. On Wednesday, members of the company's prominent Ethical AI research team wrote a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai asking that ousted researcher Timnit Gebru be rehired. Members of a prestigious research unit at Google have sent a letter to the company's chief executive demanding that ousted artificial intelligence researcher Timnit Gebru be reinstated. Gebru, who studies the ethics of AI and was one of the only Black research scientists at Google, says she was unexpectedly fired after a dispute over an academic paper and months of speaking out about the need for more women and people of color at the tech giant. In a letter sent on Wednesday by members of Google's Ethical AI team to CEO Sundar Pichai, Gebru's former colleagues ask that she be re-hired and promoted, among a host of other demands, according to a copy of the note obtained by NPR that was first reported by Bloomberg.

The report referenced an "interoperability test [in which] Huawei and Megvii jointly provided a face-recognition solution based on Huawei's video cloud solution. In the solution, Huawei provided servers, storage, network equipment, its FusionSphere cloud platform, cameras and other software and hardware, [while] Megvii provided its dynamic facial-recognition system software".

Or at least, they do in Google's latest machine learning experiment, the awe-inspiring Blob Opera, which will see a chorus of four adorable, colorful blobs serenade you with spine-tingling operatic music. Drag a blob up or down, and you'll change what pitch they sing in; drag them from side to side, and you'll change the vowel sound. Each blob will also harmonize with the others, in what can only be described as magical. The Blob Opera just sounds beautiful, with soaring harmonies ringing out from each blob. Four actual opera singers -- Christian Joel (tenor), Frederick Tong (bass), Joanna Gamble (mezzo‑soprano), and Olivia Doutney (soprano) -- recorded 16 hours of singing (Ingunn Gyda Hrafnkelsdottir and John Holland-Avery also contributed), but it's not their actual voices you're hearing when the blobs sing.

A new feature from Amazon Web Services will alert developers to potential bias in machine learning algorithms, part of a larger effort by the tech industry to keep automated predictions from discriminating against women, people of color and other underrepresented groups. The feature, SageMaker Clarify, was announced at the AWS re:Invent conference Tuesday as a new component of the AWS SageMaker machine learning platform. The technology analyzes the data used to train machine learning models for telltale signs of bias, including data sets that don't accurately reflect the larger population. It also analyzes the machine learning model itself to help ensure the accuracy of the resulting predictions. A 2018 MIT study found that the presence of a disproportionate number of white males in data sets used to train facial recognition algorithms led a larger number of errors in recognizing women and people of color.

When you are angry, do you scowl, cry or even laugh? To what extent do your facial movements depend on the situation you are in -- whether you are in a formal meeting, say, or at home with your family? And do other people around the world express anger in such situations in the same way? These questions are at the centre of a contentious scientific debate about the nature of emotion that has raged for more than a century. Writing in Nature, Cowen et al.1 enter the fray.

In addition to hoverboards, unicycles, mopeds, and dog-pulled skateboards – as well as an occasional car or bike – San Franciscans will soon be sharing the roads with driverless robocars, zipping through traffic without the added weight of human passengers. Last October Cruise LLC received a permit to test up to five vehicles at a time within City limits without a human in the driver's seat. Cruise is the fifth company allowed to conduct such field work in California. San Franciscans have seen plenty of self-driving cars, but always with human passengers. Usually identifiable by prominent logos and strangely protruding sensors, autonomous vehicles (AV) have been approved for testing on California's roadways since 2014.