Enlarge / A woman watches white flags on the National Mall on September 18, 2021 in Washington, DC. Over 660,000 white flags were installed here to honor Americans who have lost their lives to COVID-19 epidemic. (credit: Getty | Chen Mengtong )

COVID-19 was the third leading cause of death in Americans between March 2020 and October 2021, accounting for one in every eight deaths.

In that time frame, COVID-19 ranked in the top five causes of death for every age group of people older than 15 years. Between January and October 2021, the pandemic disease was the leading cause of death among people 45 to 54 years old.

That's all according to a study of national death certificate data , published Tuesday in JAMA Internal Medicine by researchers at the National Institutes of Health.

Enlarge / YouTube thinks the dark and creepy "Local58TV" series is for kids. (credit: Local58TV )

Google's wonderful content moderation bots are at it again. After previously doing things like including suicide instructions in a children's video, and the whole Elsagate problem, YouTube is now flagging a horror video as "for kids." Worst of all, this is against the creator's wishes. The video was previously flagged as for ages 18 and up, and YouTube decided it was for kids and won't let the creator restore its content rating.

The video in question is from horror series Local58TV . The creator, Kirs Straub, checked his account over the weekend to find that his not-for-kids content has been spotted by YouTube's content moderation AI, and automatically marked for kids.

congrats @youtube on the decision to auto-designate @LOCAL58TV ’s “show for children” as FOR KIDS despite my having set it as inappropriate for kids. i also can’t change it voluntarily without an *appeal* pic.twitter.com/dnhmzL9hbi

— Kris Straub (@krisstraub) July 5, 2022

"For kids" in this context means Google has flagged the video for inclusion in the "YouTube Kids" app, which is a separate interface for YouTube that is supposed to only show a "safe" curated slice of YouTube. The "Kids" flag also means the video is forced to comply with US Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), so comments are turned off.

Enlarge / Tesla factory in Fremont, California as seen on April 20, 2022. (credit: Getty Images | Justin Sullivan )

Tesla is facing a new racial discrimination lawsuit filed by 15 factory employees who allege that Tesla's "standard operating procedures include blatant, open, and unmitigated race discrimination." Racial harassment and discrimination is "rampant" at Tesla and the company has "done little to nothing to reasonably prevent or stop this toxic behavior and work environment," the lawsuit says.

The plaintiffs include nine men and six women who work or worked at Tesla factories in California. About half of the plaintiffs were either fired or quit, while the rest still work at Tesla.

"Plaintiffs, who [are] African-American employees, have been subjected to offensive racist comments and offensive racist behavior and discipline by colleagues, leads, supervisors, managers, and/or Human Resources personnel on a daily basis," the complaint says. The complaint alleges that an April 2021 incident at Tesla CEO Elon Musk's home led to one of the plaintiffs being fired on the same day.

Enlarge / This... isn't supposed to happen in Ocarina of Time . Here's the story of how some fans made it happen anyway—all on a stock N64 with an unmodified Ocarina cartridge. (credit: Summer Games Done Quick)

Shortly after our guide to Summer Games Done Quick 2022 went live, the event hosted an astounding demonstration of a classic video game—one that has since crowded that Ars article's replies. If we want to split hairs, this run through the 1998 N64 classic Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is not a "speedrun," but it's another example of the " TASBot " concept transforming games in ways we would never have dreamed of 24 years ago.

The team of fans and programmers responsible for this week's "Triforce-percent" demonstration have since revealed how they achieved the feat with nothing more than a stock N64 and an original Ocarina retail cartridge—though the secret involves controller inputs so fast and precise that they cannot be performed by anything less than a computer.

Nothing stale about this run

The 53-minute demonstration (embedded at the end of this article) opens with an exploit previously unearthed in late 2019, which the community dubbed " Stale Reference Manipulation ." This exploit takes advantage of a vulnerability in the game's original 1.0 version, which allowed players to manipulate numerical values assigned to specific objects in the game's memory. The breeziest explanation for this complicated technique can be found in a YouTube video from early 2020 (embedded above), as it spells out the various numerical values assigned to each object in the game, such as their X-, Y-, and Z-axes and their rotation.

Enlarge / Tesla's new factories in Berlin and Texas are proving more costly to set up than its plant in Shanghai (pictured). (credit: Tesla)

After several quarters of impressive growth, Tesla is starting to feel the pinch. The US automaker announced on Saturday that, between April and June, it has produced only 258,580 electric vehicles and delivered only 254,695 cars.

By comparison, it was able to build 305,407 EVs and deliver 291,189 of them in the first three months of 2022. However, it claims that it produced more cars in June 2022 than any previous month in its history.

A detailed breakdown of this quarter's results is scheduled for July 20, which should shed light on CEO Elon Musk's claims that the company's new factories in Berlin and Texas are " gigantic money furnaces " costing Tesla billions.

Use cash to buy orbs.

Despite backlash from some players , Diablo Immortal 's free-to-play, microtransaction-laden game design seems to be working out just fine for Blizzard's bottom line. Using data from mobile analysis firm Appmagic , MobileGamer.biz estimates that the iOS and Android versions of the game brought in $49 million in earnings from just over 10 million mobile downloads in the versions' first 30 days of availability.

Those estimates, which are based on public charts provided by the mobile platforms , don't include the PC version of the game and, thus, may actually be underselling the scale of its financial success. With PC players included, Blizzard announced that Diablo Immortal hit 10 million installs after just over a week , well ahead of the mobile download pace estimated by Appmagic.

By way of comparison, Diablo III took nearly six months to sell 10 million copies after its troubled launch back in 2012. But that game sold for a $60 MSRP, making it hard to compare directly to a free-to-play game that has so far brought in an estimated average of less than $5 in earnings per download, according to Appmagic.

Enlarge (credit: the_burtons | Moment )

Imagine an online world where what users want matters, and interoperability reigns. Friends could choose whichever messaging app they like and seamlessly chat cross-app. Any pre-installed app could be deleted on any device. Businesses could finally access their Facebook data, and smaller tech companies could be better positioned to compete with giants. Big Tech could even face consequences for not preventing the theft of personal info.

As the US struggles to pass legislation to protect Internet consumers , in the EU, these ideals could become reality over the next few years. EU lawmakers today passed landmark rules to rein in the power of tech giants such as Alphabet unit Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook (Meta), and Microsoft, establishing a task force to regulate unfair business practices in Big Tech.

Amazon said that the company plans to evolve with Europe's "regulatory landscape" and review what the new legislation means for Amazon, its customers, and its partners. None of the other Big Tech companies mentioned immediately responded to a request for comment for this story.

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  The new Gmail. It's blue and has a big sidebar, but there are options for both of these big changes. [credit: Google ]

The new desktop Gmail design started rolling out this weekend. If you use the default theme, you'll know it has arrived when your entire Gmail interface turns blue. Gmail's new design first entered an opt-in preview in February , and after gathering feedback and fixing a few things, Google is pushing the design out to everyone. Everyone dislikes Gmail changes, so let's talk about what's different and how to turn it back.

A few things have changed between now and the February preview. The most striking change is the all-blue color scheme. Google's blog post says: "You’ll notice the new navigation now features Material You, our updated, fresh look and feel for your Google apps." "Material You" launched with Android 12 as a color-coordinated theming system that matched your OS color scheme with your wallpaper. There's no color-matching with Gmail's "Material You," though, just the blue color scheme.

Gmail still has a theme system, so you can change the color to whatever you want. Click on the settings gear in the top right and then under the "theme" section, click "view all." The background closest to the old Gmail is the solid "soft gray" background option. To truly match the Old Gmail background, you would want "white," but that's not an option. (You can also pick from your Google Photos collection via a "my photos" link at the bottom, and I tried uploading a solid-white background, but trying to apply it only brings up an error message). This "theme" screen is also where you can apply Gmail's weirdly hidden dark mode: Just pick the black background option, and everything will switch over to light text on a dark background.

Enlarge / The Oculus Quest 2.

A recent media release from market research firm IDC predicts that Meta (the parent company of Facebook) may not be able to compete in the mixed-reality business in the long run if its strategy remains unchanged.

The media release offers a bird's-eye view of the virtual reality hardware marketplace. In the release, IDC research manager Jitesh Ubrani said that, while "Meta continues to pour dollars into developing the metaverse, [the company's] strategy of promoting low-cost hardware at the expense of profitability isn't sustainable in the long run."

A similar concern was raised by tech industry analyst Ming-Chi Kuo late last month. Kuo predicted that Meta would make moves to scale down investment in virtual reality, creating an opening for Apple and other competitors. He also wrote that Meta's practice of selling VR headsets at a loss is unsustainable.