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A Christmas release date for Halo: Infinite was among dozens of announcements at Microsoft’s E3 show.

It was scheduled for release last year alongside the new Xbox, but was delayed due to the pandemic and amid outcry from players over its graphics.

A new Forza racing game and the Xbox release of Flight Simulator were also among the 30 titles revealed.

It was the first E3 since Microsoft acquired Bethesda last year for $7.5bn (£5.3bn).

Unlike other developers’ conferences, the 90-minute Microsoft show was nearly entirely back-to-back game trailers and announcements, with few speeches in-between.

Bethesda boss Todd Howard started the event with news of a November 2022 release date for the firm’s first new series in 25 years, Starfield.

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The space-faring game was shown only with some in-game footage of a ship taking off from the surface of another world – revealing no new details about what its gameplay would be like.

Halo Christmas release
Halo: Infinite was officially delayed due to the pandemic.

But a preview released in July 2020 was widely criticised by fans of the game as looking unpolished, with enemy character models labelled as crude and reminiscent of older games, rather than a next-gen title. The developers pledged to work hard on improving them.

Sunday’s video showed off the series hero Master Chief meeting a new AI character, as the two discussed a mystery around the fate of Cortana, the game’s other long-running protagonist.

But it notably did not include the alien enemy models which caused so much controversy last year.

Microsoft did, however, show off the game’s multiplayer mode for the first time – the main attraction for many players.

Sticking to plans to make the multiplayer part of the game a free-to-play package, not requiring a purchase of the main product, Microsoft said it would release it alongside the game for the Christmas shopping season.

The company’s flagship racing title, Forza Horizon 5, set in Mexico, was also revealed for the first time with a 9 November release date.

Developers said parts of Mexico’s real landscape had been faithfully recreated using photogrammetry data – the same type of 3D technique used by Microsoft’s Flight Simulator to map realistic cities. But in Forza’s case, it was used for geographic features such as the caldera of a volcano.

A new game mode would allow players to create their own challenges – such as a “bowling alley” map where players drove through bowling pins and over ramps.

Flight Sim gets Top Gun
Another impending release was the arrival of Flight Simulator for Xbox consoles on 27 July.

The game was first released in August 2020 on PCs, and is notorious for pushing even high-end gaming computers to their limits.

A new expansion was also shown off, tied to the Top Gun film series – which will bring official support for fighter-jet style planes for the first time. Previously, such planes have only been available through player mods or paid add-ons.

Microsoft’s surprise pandemic hit, the pirate-themed Sea of Thieves, is also getting an expansion featuring Pirates of the Caribbean characters – including Captain Jack Sparrow.

Other titles announced included:

Stalker 2: Heart of Chernobyl, a next-gen sequel to the 2007 original
The first gameplay footage of Battlefield 2042, announced with a cinematic trailer a few days before
Psychonauts 2, a much-anticipated sequel to Double Fine’s beloved platformer, releasing 25 August
The Outer Worlds 2, a follow-up to the 2019 original
Redfall, a new shooter from Dishonored developer Arkane, featuring a vampire-hunting group of magically-enhanced gun-wielding characters
Of the 30 titles unveiled, 27 are included in Xbox’s subscription service, Game Pass.

‘Constant flow’
Piers Harding-Rolls, games analyst at Ampere, said that Microsoft’s strategy was to grow the service to tens of millions of users by accepting a broad range of new games from third party developers.

“It needs to have a constant flow of fresh and appealing content in the pipeline,” he said.

“Certain types of new games are particularly suited to Game Pass – generally those that benefit more from a ready-made audience compared to just competing with other premium releases in the store.”

Notably absent from Microsoft’s show was any mention from Bethesda of the Elder Scrolls 6, the sequel to Skyrim announced at E3 2018.

And in a nod to gamer jokes about the Xbox Series X’s boxy upright aesthetic, the firm closed the show with the reveal of an Xbox-shaped mini-fridge which it said it would sell near the end of the year.

Square Enix followed Microsoft, revealing its new Guardians of the Galaxy title which will be a single-player adventure game, and an expansion for The Avengers which will focus on the Black Panther character.

Monday’s conferences include Resident Evil maker Capcom.

But Microsoft’s lengthy showcase is arguably the biggest of the weekend – until Nintendo’s 40-minute presentation on Tuesday.

Facebook will let all employees who can work away from the office do so after the Covid pandemic is over.

The company has told employees “anyone whose role can be done remotely can request remote work”.

Rival big tech firms Apple and Google have recently reversed pandemic working conditions, telling staff to return to the office in the coming months.

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg told staff he plans to spend up to half of 2022 working remotely.

He had previously said that half of the company’s 60,000 employees could be working from home within a decade.

Facebook’s offices are expected to open to full capacity in October, but employees without permission to work remotely will have to come in at least half the time.

A Facebook executive, quoted by the Wall Street Journal, declined to say how many employees currently had permission to work from home, but said the company had approved about 90% of requests.

Contracted out
The company told the BBC that its new remote work policies apply to Facebook employees only, and not subcontractors, who are widely used to carry out content moderation and other tasks.

In November 2020, content moderators openly accused Facebook of forcing them back into the office.

At the time, the company said that the majority of its 15,000 global content reviewers had been working remotely, and would be able to do so for the duration of the pandemic.

Mr Zuckerberg set out his own experience of remote working in a separate memo to staff.

He said being out of the office had made him “happier and more productive at work”, adding it had given him “more space for long-term thinking” and enabled him to “spend more time with my family”.

Mr Zuckerberg spends some of his time on his private estate in Hawaii.

Home days
Other tech giants have also set out their future plans for the return to the office.

On Thursday, Amazon told employees they’re expected to work in-office at least three days per week, with the specific days to be decided on by leadership teams.

Employees in the UK, US and a handful of other countries are expected to begin their return to the office in early September.

In an all-staff memo last week Apple boss Tim Cook said he missed the “hum of activity” and workers should be in the office at least three days a week by September, specifying Wednesdays and Fridays as when employees may work remotely.

But that plan proved controversial among some employees, who circulated a letter that said Apple’s policy had “already forced some of our colleagues to quit”.

In a message to “Googlers” in May, chief executive Sundar Pichai wrote that the company would move to a hybrid work week, where most staff would “spend approximately three days in the office, and two days wherever they work best”.

The changes, he wrote, should eventually result in the majority of employees being in the office a few days a week, and about a fifth working remotely full-time.

Mr Pichai added: “The future of work is flexibility.”

A major internet blackout that hit many high-profile websites on Tuesday has been blamed on a software bug.

Fastly, the cloud-computing company responsible for the issues, said the bug had been triggered when one of its customers had changed their settings.

The outage has raised questions about relying on a handful of companies to run the vast infrastructure that underpins the internet.

Fastly apologised and said the problem should have been anticipated.

The outage, which lasted about an hour, hit some popular websites such as Amazon, Reddit, the Guardian and the New York Times.

Fastly senior engineering executive Nick Rockwell said: “This outage was broad and severe – and we’re truly sorry for the impact to our customers and everyone who relies on them.”

The company operates servers at strategic points around the world to help customers move and store content close to their end users.

But a customer quite legitimately changing their settings had exposed a bug in a software update issued to customers in mid-May, causing “85% of our network to return errors”, it said.

Engineers had worked out the cause of the problem about 40 minutes after websites had gone offline at about 11:00 BST, Fastly said.

“Within 49 minutes, 95% of our network was operating as normal,” it said.

The company has deployed a bug fix across its network and promised a “post mortem of the processes and practices we followed during this incident” and to “figure out why we didn’t detect the bug during our software quality assurance and testing processes”.

A photographer has launched legal action against gamemaker Capcom, accusing it of using dozens of her images without permission.

Judy Juracek claims Capcom used photographed patterns from a published book throughout its games – including Resident Evil and Devil My Cry.

In one example listed in court documents, she alleged the Resident Evil 4 logo uses the infringed assets.

She is seeking $12m (£8.5m) in damages from the Japanese games firm.

Capcom told gaming news site Polygon – which first reported on the legal case – that it was “aware of the lawsuit” but had no further comment.

‘Visual research’
Ms Juracek’s case claims that textures and images were taken from her 1996 book Surfaces, which is described as “visual research for artists, architects, and designers”.

The book included a CD-Rom with digital images of the textures.

But the CD-Rom, the case alleges, was for inspiration and research only – any use of the images would have needed another licence, and that was made clear in the CD’s copyright notice, her lawyers wrote. They say “many different parties” contacted Ms Juracek to obtain licences for commercial use.

Capcom did not – but used many images anyway, the filing claims.

In one example, an image of shattered glass photographed in Italy is compared to the logo used for Resident Evil 4.

Ms Juracek argues: “The probability of an object hitting the same thickness and configuration of glass identically at any other location is impossible or exceptionally remote.”

More than 100 pages of examples of further alleged infringements include stained glass windows used in a remaster of the original Resident Evil, wood, brick and carving reliefs used in Devil May Cry, and dozens more.

On top of the demand for financial compensation, Ms Juracek is demanding that Capcom “destroy each and every copy of all games” and other products using her images.

Hacked revelations
The court filing also reveals that the Capcom hack late last year was at least part of the reason Ms Juracek realised her content had allegedly been used without permission, despite some of the games being many years old.

The Capcom hack announced in November is believed to have compromised the personal information of up to 350,000 people, the company said at the time.

After the hacked materials were released publicly, they were found to include high-resolution artwork images, it is alleged.

The file names for “at least one” of the images from those hacked files are the same as those on Ms Juracek’s Surfaces CD-Rom, the case alleges.

In all, she and her legal team identified 80 photographs they say were used without permission.

Apple device users will now be able see when individual apps request to access features such as the microphone, camera and phone gallery, plus which third parties they have connected with in the last seven days.

The new “app privacy report” feature was unveiled at the firm’s annual developers’ conference, WWDC.

Apple has prioritised privacy lately, including a war on ad-tracking.

No new hardware was announced at the event, despite earlier speculation.

Privacy
The new privacy report goes further than Apple’s existing “nutrition labels” which show users what kinds of permissions apps ask for, before they are installed.

It will allow users to dive deep into when exactly an app used the permissions it has been given – and what third-party websites it contacted or sent data to.

“Apple continues to double down on privacy,” said Thomas Husson, analyst at Forrester.

“In this area, no doubt Apple is leading the pack and setting the tone for the rest of the industry.”

Other privacy-focused updates included:

audio processing moving to be on-device only – so voice commands to Apple’s smart assistant Siri will not be uploaded to central servers, unlike competitors such as the Amazon Echo
Apple Mail to hide the IP address of the device it is accessed on, meaning that senders of marketing emails, for example, cannot track where an email is sent and whether it is read
Apple’s own web browser Safari will prevent any third parties from accessing a user’s IP address to block tracking
iCloud subscribers will have the option to route Safari traffic through two internet relays, similar to a VPN, to hide your identity; and the “hide my email” feature, first unveiled in 2019, will be extended to hide email addresses when used to sign up to a number of online services
However a previous move by the tech giant to offer its customers a choice over whether to accept tracking for the purposes of advertising was criticised by a number of firms, including Facebook and other free-to-use services, for which ad tracking is a rich source of revenue.

Facetime
The firm also showed off a raft of updates to its Facetime video calling platform, some of which appear to compete with apps such as Zoom which exploded in popularity during the pandemic.

They include a gallery mode to view multiple speakers, a portrait mode with blurred backgrounds, and the ability to schedule Facetime calls and create web links.

This will also enable Android and Windows PC users to join calls, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering Craig Federighi said. Until now, the platform has only worked between Apple devices.

The new features form part of its latest operating system, iOS15.

“Allowing Apple owners to invite Android and PC users to FaceTime calls via a browser acknowledges the pandemic has sparked explosive growth in group video calling,” said Ben Wood, chief analyst at CCS Insight.

“Apple risked being left behind services such as Teams and Zoom – but browser-based calling won’t be enough to close the gap.”

Apple Wallet and digital records
Digital keys are coming to Apple Wallet, announced the firm’s Jennifer Bailey.

Car firm BMW and hotel chain Hyatt will be among the first to offer the keys – and it will also be available for homes.

The collaboration with BMW was initially announced at WWDC 2020 but has yet to actually launch.In some US states, iPhone users will also be able to store their State ID and driving licences, with the Transportation Security Administration lined up to be among the first to be able to use it, said Ms Bailey.

Apple also announced Live Text, which is able to scan a user’s library of photos for text that can be made searchable and copied and pasted between apps – for example, a phone number from a business card or menu.

Some note-taking apps have used optical character recognition (OCR) for similar reasons for years, but Apple’s solution is baked into the phone operating system itself.

Health app
The health app can now track walking steadiness and issue alerts if a user appears less steady, along with exercise suggestions as to how it might improve.

Apple also enabled health app data sharing with doctors, and between family members, but only with the health app user’s consent. The encrypted data is not visible to the tech giant, it stressed.

However, there may be a cultural barrier to overcome here, said Ben Wood.

“The ability to share health data with other family members looks an interesting idea on paper, but it is hard to see that many parents would want to share updates with their children,” he said.

There may, for example, be a number of reasons why a person’s heart rate increases which are not medical emergencies.

Others, like Carolina Milanesi from Creative Strategies, said she could see it being taken up by families who live far away.

“My biggest worry over the pandemic was my mom and asking how she was felt like nagging her,” she tweeted.

A social media account for popular Chinese e-commerce app Xiaohongshu has been blocked after it issued a post on the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown.

It had posted “Tell me loudly: what’s the date today?” on microblogging platform Weibo.

The post to its 14 million followers was swiftly deleted.

Its Weibo page has been replaced by a message saying it is being investigated for violations of laws and regulations.

Xiaohongshu has yet to comment publicly on the matter. As of Monday morning, its account on Weibo remained locked, but the app – which has an estimated 300 million users – was still working.

It is unclear whether the post was intended to reference the crackdown. One person familiar with the matter told the Wall Street Journal that the post had not been linked to the anniversary.

Xiaohongshu, backed by Chinese internet giants Alibaba and Tencent, has been described as China’s Instagram with e-commerce and is mostly used by young, urban Chinese women.

It shares the same name in Chinese – Little Red Book – as the famous book of quotations by Mao Zedong, the father of Communist China.

Xiaohongshu regularly poses questions in its social media posts and has made similar posts to mark the weekend.

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The anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown is highly sensitive in China, with the ruling party regularly suppressing efforts to mark the day when Chinese troops crushed pro-democracy protests in Beijing on 4 June 1989.

Estimates of the dead vary from a few hundred to several thousand.

On Friday, Hong Kong pro-democracy activist Chow Hang Tung was arrested for promoting unauthorised assembly. Ms Chow is vice chairwoman of the Hong Kong Alliance which organises annual vigils for victims of the crackdown.

The government is proceeding with the creation of a central store of data from GP records in England next month, despite the NHS suggesting a delay.

The data is moving to a central NHS Digital database, with the Department of Health saying it expects GPs to introduce the system from 1 July.

The NHS wanted a delay until September so patients had more time to learn about the system, the BBC has learned.

Critics worry the data could be misused by third parties.

Under a new system, called General Practice Data for Planning and Research, data from surgeries in England will be added to an NHS Digital database in “near real-time”.

The programme will also extract data from records created up to 10 years ago.

Patients have until 23 June to opt out.

There is widespread agreement that the data could be of great value to research, but doctors are concerned the public is not well enough informed about what is happening.

The British Medical Association and Royal College of General Practitioners have issued a rare joint letter to express their “concerns about the lack of communication with the public”.

The letter calls for NHS Digital to “take immediate action to run a public information campaign”.

Some GPs in east London have reportedly already refused to hand over patient data, citing the lack of an effective information campaign to tell the public about the changes.

Whether to delay, and in what form, has been the subject of intense discussions this week.

But on Thursday night, the Department of Health said in a statement that it expected the system to start on 1 July. It added that the plan would “provide benefits to patients across England” and that it was putting support in place.

“The new programme for collecting data has been developed in collaboration with doctors, patients and data, privacy and ethics experts to build on and improve systems for data collection,” the statement said.

Medical privacy campaign group MedConfidential criticised the decision to proceed as potentially “destroying public trust and harming research in the process”.

Informed consent
Campaigning law group Foxglove is supporting a coalition of organisations to challenge the scheme in court, and has sent a pre-action letter to the Department of Health and NHS Digital.

The letter warns that unless the government pauses the scheme and seeks “meaningful patient consent”, the group will seek an injunction to halt it.

This is not the first time the NHS has sought to extract data from GP records.

In 2016, a scheme called Care.data was abandoned and questions were raised about the adequacy of efforts to inform the public about it.

As part of Care.data, every household in England was sent a leaflet about the programme and the possibility of opting out, although a survey by the BBC suggested that less than a third recalled getting one.

Big data
NHS Digital says it will collect a range of information including data about “physical, mental and sexual health”, while details of gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation will also be included.

The NHS says the data will only be used for planning and research purposes, that each application to use it will need approval from advisory groups.

It may not be used “solely” for commercial purposes or for insurance, marketing, promoting or selling products or services, or market research.

However, some private sector organisations will be able to see it with permission, and critics are worried about the type of organisations that may gain access.

They point to the controversial involvement of firms like US data firm Palantir in the analysis of other NHS data.

Research reward
Last year there were more than 300 requests for GP data using “legacy systems”.

NHS Digital says GP data has benefited millions during the pandemic, helping the most vulnerable, rolling out the vaccination programme and identifying live-saving Covid treatments.

Prof Martin Landray, who jointly leads the “Recovery” trial which helped identify treatments for people hospitalised with Covid-19, told the BBC Tech Tent podcast there were many conditions where data needed for research was held only in GP records.

He said researchers could already request data from GPs, but the new system would bring consistency to how it is used and controlled.

“I can understand why at one level ‘all my data is going to be made available’ sounds scary,” he said.

“I don’t think that we should view it in that way.”

Twitter is launching its new subscription service, Twitter Blue, in Australia and Canada on Thursday.

The paid-for extra service will add features such as an “undo tweet” button, bookmarks, and a reader mode, Twitter said.

The limited launch is designed to “gain a deeper understanding” of what customers are looking for.

But the company also said the free-to-use version of the platform would also remain.

“We’ve heard from the people that use Twitter a lot, and we mean a lot, that we don’t always build power features that meet their needs,” the company said in a statement.

“We took this feedback to heart, and are developing and iterating upon a solution that will give the people who use Twitter the most what they are looking for: access to exclusive features and perks that will take their experience on Twitter to the next level.”

Twitter said the new subscription was not designed to undermine the free experience, but to offer “enhanced and complementary” features “for those who want it”.

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It will cost $3.49 in Canadian dollars and $4.49 in Australian dollars per month, Twitter said.

No date has been announced for other countries, but previous listings in mobile app stores have suggested it will eventually cost $2.99 in the US and £2.49 in the UK.

Blue perks
Twitter said subscribers will get “perks” – giving examples such as customisable app icons for phone home screens and what it calls “fun colour themes” for the app.

But they will also have access to a “dedicated” customer support, the company says.

The additional features that Twitter says were inspired by user requests include:

Bookmark folders, designed to help users organise saved tweets more easily
Undo tweet, which will let users set a timer of up to 30 seconds after posting before it appears publicly – to allow quick correction of obvious mistakes
Reader mode, which turns long threads of tweets into easier-to-read text

“We will be listening to feedback and building out even more features and perks for our subscribers over time,” it said.

It does not, however, include verification in the form of a “blue tick” on a user profile, which cannot be bought.

Twitter recently re-opened its verification applications for the fist time in years, but was forced to shutter the programme for a few days after just a week of accepting them, because it was inundated with requests.

Twitter made no secret of plans to charge its top users a small fee for some extra perks – but it’s only dipping its wing in the water for now.

The much-asked-for undo tweet button is undoubtedly top of the list, for all of us who’ve ever had a screamer of a typo, or – even worse – accidentally tweeted something we meant to search for.

But other features are squarely targeted at the Twitterati elite.

When Twitter bought web reader firm Scroll in May, it made a big deal about Twitter being for news and discussion. Bookmarks and the reader feature for long threads are firmly targeted there.

And for good reason.

Twitter’s growth in active users has slowed in recent years – a potential problem for any social network, where perceived value is often based on numbers. Twitter has never had the users that Facebook has – it boasts hundreds of millions, but not billions.

But many of its biggest users are media personalities, politicians, and business leaders – the type of people for whom a small monthly fee might not be too much to ask.

This is new territory. Unfounded rumours that Facebook might one day ask for a fee have led to digital panic in the past – so Twitter’s two-country opener is a test to see if the idea will fly.

A Russian cyber-criminal group was behind a ransomware attack that has targeted the world’s largest meat processing company, the FBI has said.

The FBI said it would was working to bring the REvil group to justice for the hack on JBS.

The cyber-breach over the weekend shut some JBS operations in the US, Canada and Australia.

REvil – also known as Sodinokibi – is one of the most prolific and profitable cyber-criminal cartels in the world.

“We have attributed the JBS attack to REvil and Sodinokibi and are working diligently to bring the threat actors to justice,” the FBI statement said.

“We continue to focus our efforts on imposing risk and consequences and holding the responsible cyber actors accountable.”

The White House said on Wednesday that US President Joe Biden would bring up the issue of cyber-attacks when he meets Russian President Vladimir Putin in two weeks.

“Responsible states do not harbour ransomware criminals,” said press secretary Jen Psaki.

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JBS said it was on schedule to resume meatpacking operations on Thursday in the US, where its five biggest beef plants are located.

The company, which identified the ransomware attack on Sunday, has not disclosed whether it paid the hackers.

Ransomware is one of the most prolific forms of cyber-attack. It typically involves hackers gaining access to a computer network and either encrypting files or locking users out of their systems until a ransom is paid.

JBS: From regional player to multinational
JBS is the world’s largest meat supplier with more than 150 plants in 15 countries
It was founded in Brazil in 1953 as a slaughtering business by rancher José Batista Sobrinho
The company now has more than 150,000 employees worldwide
Its customers include supermarkets and fast food outlet McDonald’s
In the US, JBS processes nearly one-quarter of the country’s beef and one-fifth of its pork
line
In 2019, REvil was linked to a co-ordinated attack on nearly two dozen local governments in Texas.

Last month, fuel delivery in the south-east of the US was crippled for several days after a ransomware attack targeted the Colonial Pipeline.

Investigators say that attack was linked to another group, DarkSide, with ties to Russia.

Colonial Pipeline has confirmed it paid a $4.4m (£3.1m) ransom to the cyber-criminal gang responsible.

The US government has recommended in the past that companies do not pay criminals over ransomware attacks, in case they invite further hacks in the future.

Just days after the attack on Colonial Pipeline, a different group of cyber-criminals infected the Irish national health system with ransomware.

An update of HarmonyOS, the operating system developed by Huawei, means it will now be installed in a wider range of products, including its smartphones.

It is due to roll out across Asia following a launch event on 2 June.

There is no date for a global launch yet.

A trade ban imposed by the US last year effectively prevented Huawei devices from working fully with Google’s Android platform because it blocked access to essential apps like Gmail.

However, Huawei said it did not consider Harmony to be a replacement for Android, which accounted for 85.4% of smartphones shipped in 2019.

Apple’s iOS had the remaining 14.6%, according to the research firm IDC.

Other operating systems such as Samsung’s Tizen and Amazon’s Fire have failed to disrupt the handset market.

HarmonyOS has so far only been available in some smart TVs.

The trade ban imposed by former US President Donald Trump did not stop Huawei handsets from using Android altogether but limited their functionality.

It was telling that there was expected to be a host of new products but no new Huawei smartphones unveiled at Tuesday’s launch, with the focus instead on Harmony’s use in other internet connected devices such as tablets, smart speakers and televisions.

“HarmonyOS is designed to provide the glue between a growing array of connected devices that Huawei is targeting,” commented Ben Wood, chief analyst at CCS Insight.

“Huawei will be hoping that it can follow Apple’s lead, by having a single software platform that extends in all directions, providing a seamless experience to customers that buy into its ecosystem of products.”

China’s official Xinhua News Agency reports that the Shenzhen-based tech giant is anticipating 300 million devices to be equipped with HarmonyOS by the end of the year.

There has been great excitement ahead of the launch inside China, said the BBC’s China media analyst Kerry Allen.

“Social media users have picked up on how the characters for ‘harmony’, ‘hong’ and ‘meng’, mean ‘ambition’, and ‘kindness'”, she said.

“Divisions of China’s youth movement, the Communist Youth League, and even fire rescue and official courthouse accounts, have been promoting the new system. In the last week, more than 17 million Weibo users have read posts that include the hashtag ‘TheHarmonySmartphoneSystemIsHere’.”