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2026-04-18 06:19:25

The James Bond franchise has a long history of getting pop stars to record its theme songs (perhaps most memorably with Live and Let Die), and it looks like that tradition will now extend to video game adaptations about the fictional spy. IO Interactive has announced that Lana Del Rey co-wrote and performed the theme for 007 First Light, the developer's playable James Bond origin story.

"First Light" is written and performed by Lana Del Rey and composer David Arnold, and like the moody and abstract opening credits released alongside the song, could vaguely gesture at the themes of the game. IO Interactive has previously said that its game focuses on a young, inexperienced and more reckless Bond, before he developed his trademark cool. The developer is also integrating the stealth mechanics it perfected in Hitman into the upcoming game.

Del Rey's personal gaming experience may begin and end with her hit "Video Games," which was apparently written about a former boyfriend's love of World of Warcraft, but the artist does know how to write a song with Bond in mind. Lana Del Rey shared in 2024 that her song "24" from the album Honeymoon was originally written for 2017's Spectre, one of several songs that were cast aside in favor of Sam Smith's "Writing's on the Wall."

007 First Light is coming to Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5 and PC on May 27, 2026. A Nintendo Switch 2 version of the game is now coming out this summer.

2026-04-18 05:03:47

The crew of NASA's Artemis II mission have safely returned to Earth, but if your Moon fever has yet to break, or you're curious to get a big picture view of how the second of a planned five Moon missions was pulled off, PBS has a new documentary you'll want to watch. The hour-long Return to the Moon was produced for PBS' NOVA and aired on TV on April 15, but you can view the episode in its entirety on YouTube right now.

Return to the Moon covers the history of NASA's Artemis program, and specifically the planning and preparation that went into Artemis II. Per the documentary's official description:

Follow the four members of the Artemis II crew as they embark on a perilous 10-day journey to orbit the Moon, venturing beyond Earth orbit for the first time since Apollo and farther into the Solar System than any humans have gone before. And get an inside look at the preparations needed to overcome the extreme engineering challenges of human-crewed spaceflight, all the way from launch to splashdown.

The last Apollo mission was in 1972, so Artemis II getting a group of four astronauts anywhere near the Moon has naturally generated a lot of excitement. The crew flew further away from Earth than anyone has gone so far, captured some stunning photos of both the Moon and our home planet and managed to make everyone feel better about their dislike of Microsoft Outlook. Few Moon missions have been as well-documented or relatable.

2026-04-18 04:02:37

The specter of price hikes caused by the current AI-driven demand for memory and storage appears to have convinced a fair share of people to buy a new computer. According to data analyzed by Counterpoint Research, global PC shipments grew around 3.2 percent year-over-year in Q1 2026, "driven by pre-emptive buying before memory-led price increases hit the retail level" and Microsoft forcing some customers to upgrade by ending support for Windows 10 last year.

Sales hit 63.3 million units during the first quarter, Counterpoint says, and were particularly concentrated in five high-end PC makers: Lenovo, ASUS, Apple, HP and Dell. Of the five, Lenovo commands the most PC market share at 26 percent, but sales increased for almost all of the companies, save for HP, whose year-over-year sales technically declined by 5 percent. Of particular note, Apple's PC sales grew by 11 percent, likely on the strength of the M5 updates it made to the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air, and the introduction of the affordable $600 MacBook Neo. Counterpoint suggests the updates could drive even further sales growth next quarter. 

Even with positive sales, the PC industry as a whole is by no means out of the woods. "The aggressive expansion in AI infrastructure investment is driving up overall component costs, which will likely impact the pricing of CPUs and other key components in [PCs]," Counterpoint Senior Analyst Minsoo Kang says. "Ultimately, the sustained upward pressure on costs and the resulting hike in retail prices are expected to have a significant negative impact on the PC market’s growth in 2026."

A general sense that the worst is yet to come is consistent with what other analysts have warned about the current shortages of RAM and storage. In December 2025, IDC predicted that PC shipments could drop as much as 8.9 percent in 2026 in response to the price of RAM, and later revised its prediction to 11.6 percent this past March. Even if consumers aren't feeling the worst of these price hikes just yet, new announcements of price increases seem to arrive like clockwork every few weeks — for example, this week, Meta raised the price of its Quest headsets — which means if they aren't feeling them now, they will soon.

2026-04-18 01:15:00

Sam Altman's cryptocurrency turned identity verification startup Tools for Humanity is offering a new set of perks to people who scan their eyes at one of the company's orbs. Among them, is a new tool called Concert Kit that could help bands and artists fight back against ticket scalping bots. 

The new feature relies on the revamped World ID, the orb-based verification system that scans users eyeballs and faces to create a "proof of human" signature that lives on users' mobile devices. "It's basically like a little human passport for the internet that lets you prove on apps and websites that you are a real and unique human without revealing anything about yourself," Tools for Humanity Chief Product Officer Tiago Sada tells Engadget. 

Now, as more apps and services are starting to support World ID, that "human passport" can unlock some new abilities. Coupled with Concert Kit, it allows artists to designate a specific pool of tickets for "verified" humans only. The concept is a bit like how pre-sales currently work, with artists (or their teams) setting aside a specific number of tickets for people who have set up a World ID. Those folks can then use their World ID to get ticket codes for Ticketmaster, Eventbrite, AXS or other major ticketing platforms. 

Because World ID is limited to actual, "verified," humans the system won't be susceptible to the same tactics that have enabled bots to ruin the ticket-buying process for so many, Tools for Humanity says. Artists are also in control of what level of verification they want to require from their fans. (The new World ID app will also allow people to set up an account with a selfie check if they don't have ready access to an orb.) 

Just how much of a dent Concert Kit will be able to make in the massive scalping bot problem that plagues the concert industry is less clear. So far, Bruno Mars is slated to use the solution on his upcoming world tour — no word on just how many of his tickets will be reserved for World ID-verified humans, though — and Concert Kit is available to other artists starting today.

Concert Kit is one of several new integrations and updates to World ID that Tools for Humanity announced at an event in San Francisco Friday. Tinder, which earlier this year started testing World ID as an age verification solution in Japan, will be rolling out support worldwide. In the US, Tinder's integration won't be for age verification, though. Instead, it will indicate whether there is an actual "verified" human behind a given profile.

Tools for Humanity

On the enterprise side, Zoom and DocuSign are also adding support for World ID to help businesses verify that there is an actual person (and not a deepfake or bot) joining their video calls or signing important documents. Tools for Humanity is also introducing a standalone app for World ID that separates its identity verification tools from its existing crypto wallet app.

The updates are Tools for Humanity's latest attempt to make their orb-based verification system, which has been widely mocked, more mainstream and perhaps a little less dystopian. (Elsewhere, orbs have begun appearing in some new places like a San Francisco Gap.) 

On their part, Tools for Humanity seems aware that a lot of people aren't ready to scan their faces at a bunch of orbs controlled by Altman just to "prove" they are humans. I asked Sada, Tools for Humanity's Chief Product Officer, what he would say to people who think that the company is solving for the wrong problem: that really it should be up to ticketing platforms and dating apps and other services to strengthen their security and bot-fighting tools, rather than rely on their users to "prove" their humanness. 

He said it was a "completely understandable question" and compared it to some people's initial discomfort with things like Apple's TouchID or FaceID. "Not everyone has to do it upfront, and that's important," he said. "It's optional. If you want to have a World ID, you get access to that enhanced experience."

2026-04-18 00:47:12

Bluesky is once again having a wobble. The platform said some of its systems are down and that it’s “investigating an incident with service in one of our reginos” (that’s Bluesky’s typo, not mine). The issue appears to have started at 1:42AM ET and was still persisting as of 11AM when this story was originally published. Since then, the site has been experiencing intermitent interuptions, including at times to its status page where users should be able to monitor outages.

At 7:47PM ET, the platform explained that it’s been attempting to mitigate “a sophisticated Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack, which intensified throughout the day.” It said the attack had caused interruptions to users’ feeds, notifications, threads and search, all of which the Engadget team experienced first-hand at various points through the day. While DDoS attacks are frequently used as virtual smokescreens for hacks, Bluesky says it has “not seen any evidence of unauthorized access to private user data.” The social media service had another brief outage earlier this month.

In a later update on April 17, Bluesky noted that the DDoS attacks are “ongoing” but that the service has been stable since about 9PM PT last night. The company also reaffirmed that it hasn’t seen any evidence of access to user data. The next update is set to arrive by end of day Friday.

Update, April 17, 12:47PM ET: This story was updated with Bluesky’s latest outage update.

Update, April 16, 8PM ET: This story was updated after publish with an of the outage from Bluesky.

2026-04-18 00:15:25

NASA has confirmed the pending launch of the European Space Agency's (ESA) Rosalind Franklin rover, which is being sent to Mars. The current plan is to launch via a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center. The timing is still being worked out, but the space agency says this won't happen until at least 2028.

This is a partnership between NASA and the ESA, with the European agency providing the rover, the spacecraft and the lander. The US will provide braking engines for the lander, heater units for the rover's internal systems and, of course, assistance with the actual launch.

The rover will be outfitted with scientific instruments to look for signs of ancient life on the red planet. These include a state-of-the-art mass spectrometer and an organic molecule analyzer, which will come in handy as the vehicle collects samples at the Oxia Planum landing site.

This is a mission that has suffered years of delays for all kinds of wild reasons. It was actually first conceived all the way back in 2001. The rover mission was originally scheduled for 2009, after NASA came on board. Budget constraints forced NASA to drop out in 2012, so Russia signed on as the ESA's launch partner.

During this period, the mission experienced technical malfunctions which forced additional delays. The ESA suspended its partnership with Russia in 2022 after the country invaded Ukraine. This left the mission in doubt until 2024, when NASA came back into the fold.

However, the setbacks didn't even end there. The Trump administration has repeatedly tried to end NASA's involvement with the project, and many others, via stark budget cuts. The current proposal was made while the Artemis II crew was on their mission around the Moon, according to a report by The Register. Here's hoping the launch actually happens in 2028.