Microsoft-owned game developer Activision has taken down the PC version of Call of Duty: WWII from the Microsoft Store. Last week, Activision took to the social media platform X (earlier Twitter) to announce that it was bringing the 2017 first-person shooter offline to investigate “reports of an issue,” without initially specifying the problem. This version of the game had recently launched and was also available through Microsoft’s gaming subscription service, Xbox Game Pass. According to a report by TechCrunch, this move came after hackers exploited a flaw that led to several players’ computers being compromised. The report cited a person (who remained anonymous) with knowledge of Activision’s response to claim that the company took the game offline due to ongoing hacks and is currently working on a fix.
How Call of Duty WWII players were affected by this hacking
Multiple players took to social media to report being hacked while playing the game. However, no direct connection between the incidents had been confirmed until now.In a post shared on X, a user wrote: “I JUST GOT HACKED PLAYING WW2! EVERYONE DO NOT PLAY WW2 ON GAMEPASS!”Meanwhile, a Reddit user wrote, “The game is not safe to play on PC right now, there’s an RCE exploit,” last week. The user referred to a type of security flaw known as remote code execution, which enables hackers to install malware that can effectively take control of the victim’s device.As per the report, two sources familiar with the matter has noted that the game’s publisher removed only the Microsoft Store and Game Pass versions of Call of Duty: WWII, as these editions were different from the Steam release and contained an outdated vulnerability that had already been patched in other versions of the game.Over the past two years, Activision has faced multiple hacking incidents, including a November 2024 exploit that misused the anti-cheat system to ban legitimate players, and earlier attacks involving infostealer malware. In 2023, a worm exploited an old unpatched bug in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. While some gaming companies have strengthened their cybersecurity and anti-cheat efforts, Activision has undergone several rounds of layoffs, impacting its cybersecurity teams.
What Is Artificial Intelligence? Explained Simply With Real-Life Examples
Please enable JavaScript if it is disabled in your browser or access the information through the links provided below.
July 09, 2025
Minutes of the Federal Open Market Committee, June 17–18, 2025
For release at 2:00 p.m. EDT
The Federal Reserve on Wednesday released the minutes of the Federal Open Market Committee meeting that was held on June 17–18, 2025.
The minutes for each regularly scheduled meeting of the Committee are generally published three weeks after the day of the policy decision. The descriptions of economic and financial conditions contained in these minutes are based solely on the information that was available to the Committee at the time of the meeting.
The minutes can be viewed on the Board’s website.
For media inquiries, e-mail [email protected] or call 202-452-2955.
A general view of the high voltage lines during a nationwide power outage in Rawalpindi. — AFP/File
ISLAMABAD: The National Electric Power Regulatory Authority (Nepra) has announced a nationwide reduction in electricity prices under the monthly fuel cost adjustment (FCA).
As per the latest decision announced on Wednesday, Karachi’s electricity consumers will see a reduction of Rs4.03 per unit, while the rest of the country will benefit from a 50-paisa per unit cut.
Nepra stated that the relief will reflect in July’s electricity bills for all eligible consumers.
According to the notification, the adjustment for K-Electric pertains to April 2025, while the rest of the country’s reduction applies to May 2025’s fuel cost adjustment.
It was also noted that K-Electric had requested a reduction of Rs4.69 per unit under the April adjustment.
— Reporter
The power regulatory authority stated in its notification that the refund was decided on account of variation in fuel charges for April 2025 in the approved tariff of the power company and to be passed on to the consumers in the billing month of July 2025.
As per Nepra’s directives, the notification shall apply to all the consumer categories except lifeline consumers, domestic protected consumers, electric vehicle charging stations (EVCS) and prepaid electricity consumers of all categories who opted for pre-paid tariff.
It also directed the KE to show the adjustment separately in the consumers’ bills on the basis of units billed to the users, in the respective month to which the adjustment pertains.
Last month, the federal government had abolished the provincial electricity duty on power bills effective July 1, and officially notified all chief ministers of the decision, which aimed at easing the burden on electricity consumers.
Federal Minister for Power Awais Leghari has written a letter to the chief ministers of all provinces, notifying them of the federal government’s decision to scrap electricity duty and explore “alternative mechanisms” for collecting provincial levies and duties.
In the letter — a copy of which is available with Geo News, the minister sought the support of all provincial chief executives in removing complexity arising from multiple charges, taxes, and duties being collected through consumer bills.
He expressed confidence that the move will not only make electricity bills more transparent and easier to comprehend but also ensure that “consumers are paying only for the cost of electricity, rather than a mix of other charges”.
The energy minister also sought the cooperation of all chief ministers in identifying and implementing alternative revenue collection methods will be instrumental in making this initiative a success.
Astronomers have discovered a mysterious and powerful blast of X-rays that are the cosmic equivalent of John McClane from the “Die Hard” franchise: a massive star that even a supernova explosion couldn’t kill.
This new research also indicates that the so-called fast X-ray transient (FXT) blast is a “failed” burst of even higher energy radiation, a gamma-ray burst (GRB).
The discovery could revolutionize our understanding of how stars much larger than the sun explode and leave behind exotic stellar remnants like black holes and neutron stars.
This sequence of images shows the fading light of the supernova SN 2025kg, which followed the fast X-ray transient EP 250108a, a powerful blast of X-rays that was detected by Einstein Probe (EP) in early 2025. (Image credit: International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURAAcknowledgment: PI: J. Rastinejad (Northwestern University)Image processing: J. Miller & M. Rodriguez (International Gemini Observatory/NSF NOIRLab), M. Zamani (NSF NOIRLab))
“This discovery heralds a broader understanding of the diversity in massive stars’ deaths and a need for deeper investigations into the whole landscape of stellar evolution,” team member and University of Leicester researcher Rob Eyles-Ferris said in a statement.
Tough star throws quite a party… but no gamma-rays
FXTs have long been a puzzle to astronomers. Occurring in galaxies located billions of light-years away and lasting anywhere from seconds to hours, these bursts of X-rays have proved elusive.
Scientists had hoped that the Einstein Probe, launched in January 2024 with the mission of studying X-ray transients, would shine a light on FXTs. A year after its launch in January 2025, the Einstein Probe discovered what was the closest FXT ever seen, known as EP 250108a, which emanated from a galaxy located 2.8 billion years away.
The relative proximity of this FXT provided astronomers with a unique opportunity to study the evolution of one of these X-ray blasts. Following up on its initial detection, astronomers investigated EP 250108a with an array of telescopes, including the Gemini North and South telescopes.
Breaking space news, the latest updates on rocket launches, skywatching events and more!
Tracing EP 250108a back to its origin, the team of astronomers discovered its link to the wreckage of a massive star destroyed in a supernova explosion, the optical signal of which is designated SN 2025kg.
An illustration of a planet orbiting Barnard’s star around 6 light-years from Earth. (Image credit: International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA Acknowledgment: PI: J. Rastinejad (Northwestern University) Image processing: J. Miller & M. Rodriguez (International Gemini Observatory/NSF NOIRLab), M. Zamani (NSF NOIRLab))
Observing the evolution of EP 250108a over 6 days, the team noticed it resembled a “failed GRB.”
GRBs are considered to be the most powerful explosions in the known universe, and they have been known to precede supernovas.
GRBs are thought to be launched from massive dying stars in the early stages of a supernova as its outer layers are ripped apart with escaping jets of high-energy particles. Belting through the cosmos at near light-speed, these particles emit gamma-rays that allow them to be detected.
The SN 1987A supernova remnant is like SN 2025kg but much closer to Earth. (Image credit: A. Angelich; NRAO/AUI/NSF)
EP 250108a resembles just such a jet-driven explosion, but the lack of gamma-rays implies that the material failed to erupt through the progenitor star’s outer layers.
These sealed jets interacted with the star’s outer layers, losing energy and emitting X-rays that were spotted by the Einstein Probe.
“This FXT supernova is nearly a twin of past supernovae that followed GRBs,” Eyles-Ferris said. “Our observations of the early stages of EP 250108a’s evolution show that the explosions of massive stars can produce both phenomena.”
‘Welcome to the party, pal!’ SOAR investigates FXT supernova too
To fully understand this strange FXT and the mechanisms that launched it, the team had to go further than the early stage of X-ray observations. As they observed EP 250108a after the initial 6 days, the X-ray emission faded, and the explosion began to be dominated by lower-energy optical light.
“The X-ray data alone cannot tell us what phenomena created the FXT,” team member and Northwestern University researcher Jillian Rastinejad said. “Our optical monitoring campaign of EP 250108a was key to identifying the aftermath of the FXT and assembling the clues to its origin.”
The rise in the optical brightness of EP 250108a lasted a few weeks, demonstrating characteristics that indicated its progenitor supernova was a specific type of cosmic explosion called a Type Ic broad-lined supernova.
The SOAR Telescope of Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) under the arc of the Milky Way. (Image credit: CTIO/NOIRLab/SOAR/NSF/AURA/C. Corco)
Type Ic supernovas are a distinct type of core collapse supernova, explosions that happen when massive stars run out of nuclear fuel and can no longer support themselves against their own gravity.
They differ from other core-collapse supernovas because they are thought to originate from stars that have lost their hydrogen and helium outer envelopes.
The team used the Southern Astrophysical Research (SOAR) Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile to further investigate EP 250108a. This led them to determine that the star that launched this FXT had a mass between 15 and 30 times that of the sun.
“Our analysis shows definitively that FXTs can originate from the explosive death of a massive star,” Rastinejad added. “It also supports a causal link between GRB-supernovas and FXT-supernovas, in which GRBs are produced by successful jets and FXTs are produced by trapped or weak jets.”
Since its launch, the Einstein Probe has detected several FXTs per month, while GRBs are only detected roughly once a year. This indicates that “failed jets” may be more common than “successful ones.”
Scientists hope that deeper mysteries surrounding stellar evolution like this could be solved when the Vera C. Rubin Observatory begins its decade-long survey, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST)
The team’s research is presented in two papers, which together provide the most detailed data about an FXT and its associated supernova.
Amazon Prime Day sale: You can find great deals on just about everything during Amazon’s Prime Day event, including the Chipolo One Point trackers. Right now on Amazon, they’re 15% off, making one tag $24, and a four-pack $75. You can find better deals directly from Chipolo’s website, but they’re currently showing as out of stock.
This is likely to be a limited-time deal, so we suggest ordering your new trackers now to ensure you get these prices.
We’re big fans of Apple’s AirTag item trackers — they’re handy for tracking everything from keys to cars. But if you’re an Android user, there’s no use spending your money on an incompatible AirTag. However, Apple is far from the only company that makes Bluetooth trackers, and Android users have some options that are just as good. I especially like the One Point, which Chipolo released in 2024.
The One Point is a Bluetooth tracker that uses Google’s own crowdsourced Find My Device network of over 1 billion Android devices. It works in a similar way to Apple’s Find My network to help you easily locate your keys, wallet, luggage, backpack, car or other items that are easy to misplace.
Hey, did you know? CNET Deals texts are free, easy and save you money.
Taking advantage of Google’s tracking network means besides using your own phone to locate the One Point tracker — with the Find My Device app — you can tap into all the other Android devices around you, from friends and strangers alike (completely privately), to better track your item, no matter where it is or how far from the item you are.
For more, here’s why you shouldn’t put an AirTag on a pet and five unexpected places to use a tracker.
How does the Chipolo One Point tracker work?
The tiny plastic tracker, which weighs relatively nothing, is about an inch and a half in diameter, roughly the size of those old Eisenhower dollar coins (I’m showing my age). Unlike the Apple AirTag, the One Point also has a built-in keyring hole, so you don’t need to buy an accessory to clip the tracker to your item. All you need is a key ring.
This is the Chipolo One Point tracker on my keychain.
Nelson Aguilar/CNET
Once your One Point is connected to your phone, you can check the location of your tracked item with Google’s Find My Device app. You can easily see where the tracker is on a map, and your distance from it. If you can’t find the tracker with your eyes, you can always force it to make a pretty loud sound (120db), so that you can easily hear where it is, even if it’s under a pile of clothing.
The battery life is about a year, but you can easily open the tracker (there’s a tiny hole on the side) to replace the CR2032 battery. You can buy a 10-pack of CR2032 batteries for $6, and Chipolo says that should last you a decade. If you’re placing your tracker on something shared, like a large piece of check-in luggage for you and your family, you can share the information with a loved one so that you can both keep an eye on the tracker from separate Android devices.
Top deals available today, according to CNET’s shopping experts
Curated discounts worth shopping while they last
Why this deal matters
Taking advantage of Google’s tracking network means that besides using your own phone to locate the One Point tracker — with the Find My Device app — you can tap into all the other Android devices around you, from friends and strangers alike (completely privately), to better track your item, no matter where it is or how far from the item you are. Doing all that while saving money is just an added bonus.
Why should you get the Chipolo One Point over the AirTag?
There’s really only one reason why you should get the Chipolo One Point tracker, and that’s if you own an Android device. The Chipolo One Point is made specifically for Android phones and tablets and works with Google’s Find My Device app. If you own an Android, you definitely don’t want an AirTag, mainly because there’s no way to connect an AirTag to an Android device.
If you’ve got a mix of Apple and Android devices, there are also a few other reasons to choose the Chipolo One over an AirTag:
The Chipolo One is cheaper than the AirTag. Only by a dollar, but still.
The Chipolo One has a built-in key ring hole. The AirTag doesn’t have a key ring hole, so you’ll need to buy an accessory, which ends up making the AirTag a more expensive purchase.
There is a card version of the Chipolo. The Card Point is a card tracker that’s specifically designed for your wallet. There is no AirTag card tracker at the moment.
If you’re on Android, you can’t use an AirTag anyway.
Nelson Aguilar/CNET
How to set up your Chipolo One Point tracker
Right out of the box, all you need to do is press in your Chipolo One Point (you’ll hear a pretty loud sound coming from the tiny device) and then place the tracker next to your phone. Your Android device will automatically detect the tracker, as long as you have the Find My Device app downloaded.
The pop-up on your screen will walk you through all the instructions for setup, which includes linking the device to your email account, agreeing to be part of Google’s Find My Device network and enabling recent locations for offline devices.
If you don’t have the Google Find My Device app, download it here.
Screenshots by Nelson Aguilar/CNET
All in all, the setup takes under a minute. And then you can keep track of your item from the comfort of your phone. Just don’t lose your phone.
Yoast SEO announced a new feature that enables SEO and readability analysis within Google Docs, allowing publishers and teams to integrate search marketing best practices at the moment content is created instead of as an editing activity that comes after the fact.
Two Functionalities Carry Over To Google Docs
Yoast SEO is providing SEO optimization and readability feedback within the Google Docs editing environment.
SEO feedback consists of the familiar traffic light system that offers visual confirmation that the content is search optimized according to Yoast SEO’s content metrics on keywords, structure and optimization.
The readability analysis offers feedback on paragraph structure, sentence length, and headings to help the writer create engaging content, which is increasingly important in today’s content-first search engines that prioritize high quality content.
According to Yoast SEO:
“The Google Docs add-on tool is available to all Yoast SEO Premium subscribers, offering them a range of advanced optimization tools. For those not yet subscribed to Yoast Premium, the add-on is also available as a single purchase, making it accessible to a broader audience.
For those managing multiple team members, additional Google accounts can be linked for just $5 a month per account or annually for a 10% discount ($54). This flexibility ensures that anyone who writes content and in-house marketing teams managing multiple projects can benefit from high-quality SEO guidance.”
This new offering is an interesting step for Yoast SEO. Previously known as the developer of the Yoast SEO WordPress plugin, it’s expanded to Shopify and now it’s breaking out of the CMS paradigm to encompass the optimization process that happens before the content gets into the CMS.
Read more at the Yoast SEO:
Optimize your content directly in Google Docs with Yoast SEO
The construction of thousands of dams since 1835 has caused Earth’s poles to wobble, new research suggests.
Scientists found that large dams hold so much water they redistribute mass around the globe, shifting the position of Earth’s crust relative to the mantle, the planet’s middle layer.
Earth’s mantle is gooey, and the crust forms a solid shell that can slide around on top of it. Weight on the crust that causes it to shift relative to the mantle also shifts the location of Earth’s poles, the researchers said.
“Any movement of mass within the Earth or on its surface changes the orientation of the rotation axis relative to the crust, a process termed true polar wander,” the researchers wrote in the study, published May 23 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
Scientists already knew human activities that displace enormous volumes of water can trigger polar wander. A study published in March showed that dramatic ice melt due to climate change may move the poles by 90 feet (27 meters) by the end of this century. And a 2023 study concluded that groundwater extraction between 1993 and 2010 caused a polar drift of 31 inches (80 centimeters).
For the new study, researchers examined the impact of 6,862 dams, built across the planet, on Earth’s poles between 1835 and 2011. The team used an already-published database of dams, which previously revealed that the volume of water held by these dams — a volume that could fill the Grand Canyon twice — had resulted in a 0.9-inch (23 millimeters) fall in global sea levels.
Related: Earth is going to spin much faster over the next few months — so fast that several days are going to get shorter
Get the world’s most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox.
Storing water behind dams caused Earth’s poles to move a total distance of 3.7 feet (1.1 m) over the study period, the authors of the new research found.
“As we trap water behind dams, not only does it remove water from the oceans, thus leading to a global sea level fall, it also redistributes mass in a different way around the world,” study lead author Natasha Valencic, a graduate student in geology, geophysics and planetary science at Harvard University, said in a statement.
The results, which were based on computer calculations and modeling, showed two distinct phases of polar wander within the study period. The first, from 1835 to 1954, reflects large-scale dam construction in North America and Europe. This caused the North Pole to migrate 8 inches (20 cm) closer to the 103rd meridian east — an imaginary line that runs north-south through Russia, Mongolia and China.
(Image credit: Valencic et al. (2025). Redistributed under the terms of Creative Commons.)
The second phase, from 1954 to 2011, reflects expansive dam construction in East Africa and Asia. These dams added mass onto the opposite sides of the globe to North America and Europe, leading to a 22-inch (57 cm) shift in the North Pole’s location toward the 117th meridian west, which runs through western North America and the South Pacific. Polar wander is not linear, instead forming a wobbly line, which is why the net shifts in each direction do not add up to 3.7 feet.
While the location of the poles has relatively little impact on Earth’s processes, the impact of dams on sea levels is meaningful, Valencic said. “We’re not going to drop into a new ice age, because the pole moved by about a meter in total, but it does have implications for sea level,” she said.
The results suggest that scientists should account for dams in their sea level rise projections, because dams block so much water from reaching the oceans. Global sea levels rose by 4.7 to 6.7 inches (12 to 17 cm) during the 20th century. About a quarter of that amount of water is behind dams, which means that depending on where you are in the world, dams will influence sea levels, Valencic said.
“That’s another thing we need to consider, because these changes can be pretty large, pretty significant,” she said.
South Korean video-game publisher Krafton Inc. is delaying the release of the highly anticipated survival game Subnautica 2, according to people familiar with the company’s plans, just months before it was due to pay a $250 million bonus to the development team.
Subnautica 2, the second-most-wished-for upcoming game on the PC platform Steam, was originally set to offer early access to players later this year. The schedule changed last week after Krafton pushed out the leadership of its Unknown Worlds Entertainment studio, said the people, who asked to not be identified because they weren’t authorized to talk to press. A representative for Krafton didn’t respond to a request for comment.
STONY BROOK, NY, July 9, 2025 – An analysis of two theropod dinosaur fossils showed they had a type of carpal bone (pisiform) in their wrists – a bone considered important to flight in birds. This discovery by a team of researchers led by James Napoli, PhD, of Stony Brook University, counters previous research that concluded theropods did not have a bird-like pisiform. Their finding, published in Nature, opens the possibility that the evolution of flight in dinosaurs was “all in the wrist.”
For years the identity of one of the carpal bones in the wrist of birds was a scientific mystery, until researchers proved it was the pisiform. This bone was originally a sesamoid bone like a kneecap and had moved from its original position in the wrist to replace the ulnare, another carpal bone. Its position in modern birds appears to establish linkages that allow birds to fold their wing automatically when the elbow flexes. The bone’s shape – with a large V-shaped notch – also allows the pisiform of birds to clasp their hand bones to stop them from dislocating during flight. Therefore, this bone is an important part of bird forelimb and critical to flight.
The two types of dinosaur fossils analyzed were a troodontid, a bird-like raptor related to the Velociraptor; and an oviraptorid, an odd birdlike omnivore with a long neck and a toothless beak.
The team’s identification of the pisiform bone in theropods was possible because of exceptional preservation of the dinosaurs, in combination with the use of high-resolution CT scanning that enabled them to digitally isolate the bones of the wrist. The dinosaur specimens in the analysis were available under a collaborative agreement with the American Museum of Natural History and the Mongolian Academy of Sciences.
The 3D visualizations make it clear that tiny, bead-like carpals are migrated pisiforms – the first ever identified in non-bird dinosaurs – captured in a transitional stage of their evolution.
“We believe this is the first time a migrated pisiform in a non-bird meat-eating dinosaur has been identified,” says Napoli, lead author, a vertebrate paleontologist and evolutionary biologist, and Research Instructor in the Department of Anatomical Sciences in the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University.
“While we currently do not know precisely how many times dinosaurs learned to fly, it is intriguing that experimentation with flight in these creatures appears only after the pisiform migrated into the wrist joint. Therefore, it is possible this established the automated mechanisms found in current living birds, though we would need to test this hypothesis with more research and analysis of dinosaur wrist bones,” he explains.
Putting their findings in evolutionary context, they determined that the pisiform moved into its bird-like position not within birds but by the origin of a group called Pennaraptora – a group of theropod dinosaurs that includes dromaeosaurids like the Velociraptor, troodontids, and oviraptorosaurs. Overall, this is the group of dinosaurs in which bird-like traits such as feathered wings began to appear, and in which flight evolved at least twice, and possibly up to five times.
Napoli and co-authors write that their results “make clear that the topological and functional replacement of the ulnare by the pisiform occurred much deeper in theropod history than has been previously understood and was a stepwise process…Over the past few decades, our knowledge of theropod dinosaur anatomy and evolution has increased exponentially, much of it revealing that classically ‘avian’ traits such as thin-walled bones, an enlarged brain, and feathers, all characterize more inclusive groups of theropod dinosaurs. Our results suggest that the construction of the avian wrist is no exception and follows topological patterns laid down by the origin of Pennaraptora.”
