Comment on The best gadget gifts for 2017

One of the largest residential solar installers in the nation has abruptly shut its doors and filed for bankruptcy in the latest blow to a troubled industry. Titan Solar, which installed thousands of systems across the U. S., informed its employees June 13 that it was “closing its doors,” having failed to secure a buyer for the company, according to an email obtained by TIME.

It has now been almost exactly seven years since Nintendo first announced Metroid Prime 4 and over five years since the company said it was restarting work on the game with series mainstay Retro Studios. Now, Nintendo has finally shared the first glimpse of gameplay for the renamed Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, which is now planned for a 2025 release. "After a very long time, we are finally able to share more information about this title," Nintendo executive Shinya Takahashi said during today's livestreamed Nintendo Direct presentation, showing a remarkable talent for understatement.

Enlarge (credit: Bandai) Elden Ring was my first leap into FromSoftware titles (and Dark-Souls-like games generally), and I fell in deep. Over more than 200 hours, I ate up the cryptic lore, learned lots of timings, and came to appreciate the feeling of achievement through perseverance. Months ago, in preparation for Elden Ring's expansion, Shadow of the Erdtree (also on PlayStation and Xbox, arriving June 21), I ditched the save file with which I had beaten the game and started over.

Enlarge (credit: Ric Tapia via Getty) Hackers who stole terabytes of data from Ticketmaster and other customers of the cloud storage firm Snowflake claim they obtained access to some of the Snowflake accounts by first breaching a Belarusian-founded contractor that works with those customers. About 165 customer accounts were potentially affected in the recent hacking campaign targeting Snowflake’s customers, but only a few of these have been identified so far.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson) As the Intel Mac era has wound down over the last couple of years, we've been painstakingly tracking the amount of software support that each outgoing model is getting. We did this to establish, with over 20 years' worth of hard data, whether Intel Mac owners were getting short shrift as Apple shifted its focus to Apple Silicon hardware and to software that leveraged Apple Silicon-exclusive capabilities. So far, we've found that owners of Intel Macs made in the mid-to-late 2010s are definitely getting fewer major macOS updates and fewer years' worth of security updates than owners of Intel Macs made in the late 2000s and early 2010s but that these systems are still getting more generous support than old PowerPC Macs did after Apple switched to Intel's processors. The good news with the macOS 15 Sequoia release is that Apple is dropping very few Intel Mac models this year, a much-needed pause that slows the steady acceleration of support-dropping we've seen over the last few macOS releases.

For the past three months, a small encrypted group chat of Latin American officials who investigate online child-exploitation cases has been lighting up with reports of raids, arrests, and rescued minors in half a dozen countries. The successes are the result of a recent trial of a facial-recognition tool given to a group of Latin American law-enforcement officials, investigators, and prosecutors by the American company Clearview AI.