Technologies

Call of Duty Black Ops 6 Season 4 Reloaded Release Date Revealed

We now know when the Eclipse night club and the Fringe distillery will make their multiplayer debut.

If you enjoy smaller, quicker Black Ops 6 multiplayer experiences, the Season 4 Reloaded update has you covered with a pulse-pounding new Gunfight map.

The next big midseason update adds multiplayer maps, zombies events and gameplay features for Warzone’s battle royale mode. Whether you’re looking to earn time-limited rewards, try out your Season 4 weapons in some new places or you just want to enjoy zany map reskins, Season 4 Reloaded has something for everyone.

Here’s everything you need to know about the arrival of Black Ops 6 Season 4 Reloaded, including the release date and time, and what new content you can expect to see once the update arrives for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and PC.

When does Call of Duty Black Ops 6 Season 4 Reloaded come out?

The new Black Ops 6 midseason update will launch on July 2, including a substantial content package for multiplayer and zombies mode players. Here’s when the Season 4 Reloaded patch will come out in your time zone:

Eastern Time: July 2, 2025 at 12 p.m.
Central Time July 2, 2025 at 11 a.m.
Mountain Time: July 2, 2025 at 10 a.m.
Pacific Time: July 2, 2025 at 9 a.m.

Two new multiplayer maps coming to Black Ops 6

One of developer Treyarch’s best three-lane multiplayer maps from Black Ops 3 is making a return in Black Ops 6 Season 4 Reloaded.

Fringe is a war-torn version of a small town, where heated sniper battles take place down an open street and flankers scuttle through crowded buildings that fill up the sides of the map.

The new version of the map takes place on the grand opening of a rustic-looking distillery — too bad you won’t have time to grab a drink with all the gunfire breaking out around you. Fringe is a medium-sized map for 6v6 core playlists.

Eclipse is a much smaller map, but it has a really groovy vibe. This Avalon nightclub is streaked through with purple strobing lights, which could be disorienting in the middle of battle. Your battles here will be up close and personal: Eclipse is a small-sized map designed for 2v2 playlists, but some 6v6 playlists will also add this map to the lineup.

CODtoons: Cel-shaded map variants arrive alongside Beavis and Butt-Head event

Fan-favorite multiplayer maps are getting a cartoon glow up (or glow down?) during the CODtoons event. Cel-shaded versions of Nuketown, Babylon, Skyline, Stakeout and Grind will be added to the game in a special moshpit playlist — which means it’s fairly safe to assume you’ll be playing on cel-shaded Nuketown and Stakeout for a majority of the event.

The Beavis and Butt-Head event includes a free and premium reward track, wherein players can earn the Olympia shotgun from the original Black Ops, a Pickaxe melee weapon, an SVD full auto mod and a CQB auto conversion kit for the TR2 marksman rifle.

If you pay for the premium track, you’ll have a chance to earn cel-shaded Beavis and Butt-Head operator skins in their most famous cartoon attire. If you want to deck them out in tactical gear for the true Call of Duty experience, you’ll have to shell out even more money for the Tracer Pack: Beavis and Butt-Head.

Zombies starting room challenge is a new limited-time mode

Treyarch has acknowledged the long-standing challenge in the zombies community with an official game mode. Don’t worry about neglecting to buy the door — you physically can’t leave the starting area in this limited-time offering.

This limited-time mode is available on all of the current Black Ops 6 zombies maps, including Liberty Falls, Terminus, Citadelle des Morts, The Tomb and Shattered Veil. The space you have to work with, wall buy weapons and mystery box, perk machine and GobbleGum machine availability varies by map.

Each map will have a special high-round challenge associated with it. If you’re able to reach that round without getting downed by the zombie horde, you’ll earn 15,000 account XP points, a high-value GobbleGum and a GobbleGum pack.

Everything else coming in Call of Duty Black Ops 6 Season 4 Reloaded

We’ve covered the biggest parts of Season 4 Reloaded — but that’s not all that this update will change in Black Ops 6. Here are the other changes you’ll see with the launch of the midseason patch.

Multiplayer

The Party Ops limited-time mode is a new free-for-all playlist where players compete in different minigames. These include controlling moving zones (which force you to dance), a version of red light, green light and more. The three top performing players will each count as victors.

Zombies

The Abomination Challenge limited-time mode brings players back to a fully cel-shaded version of Liberty Falls. Here, opening the church door unleashes Mo, a special boss Abomination zombie that’s always in its enraged form. Mo is a real threat — this guy will gain immunity to weapons frequently fired at him, refuse to eat your tossed grenades and he can knock perk bottles out of you with his charge attack. If you can brave this challenge and defeat the boss, you’ll unlock a special calling card.
New leaderboard events will let you test your undead-slaying prowess against other Black Ops 6 players and earn special rewards for doing so. Everyone gets something, but the top players will unlock exclusive items for stacking up zombie eliminations.
The Grief mode is getting tweaked. Now, you can inflict more punishing effects on enemy players. Revive-based GobbleGums are outright banned, and zombies spawn faster after a zone is captured on the map. Completing Grief matches also guarantees you’ll earn a Whimsical-tier GobbleGum, which is a fun little quality-of-life update.

Warzone

A cel-shaded variant of Rebirth Island will be available to play alongside the multiplayer maps during the CODtoons event.
Resurgence Casual and Havoc Amped are new game modes you’ll be able to queue for. Havoc Amped lets you drop in with their full loadout in quick 15-minute long matches that ramp up as you unlock special powers when the circle closes.
Players will now be able to call in a care package outside of the Clash game mode to earn new gameplay items, the Hand Cannon and Door Barricade.
The Loot Master perk is the next way you can augment your Warzone loadout. It’s a simple perk, letting you spawn more loot from supply caches.
The Search and Destroy contract is a new way to get discounts at buy stations — if you can hold off against enemy squads for long enough to set off a bomb.

Black Ops 6 Season 4 Reloaded will be released for free on July 2 for PlayStation, Xbox and PC. If you want to keep an eye on when we’ll get a double XP weekend in Season 4 Reloaded, keep up with our coverage here.

Technologies

Cloudflare Says Winter Olympics Cybersecurity Is at Risk in Spat With Italian Regulators

But Cloudflare’s global head of policy tells CNET the company is open to an agreement with Italy.

The CEO of the networking company Cloudflare is lashing out at Italy in response to regulatory anti-piracy fines, threatening to withdraw from the country and potentially the 2026 Winter Olympics.

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Italy announced on Jan. 8 that it had issued a fine of 14.2 million euros (approximately $16.5 million) against Cloudflare for failing to block access to pirated content. Soon after that, Cloudflare’s CEO Matthew Prince took to X to call out the fines, describing Cloudflare’s decision not to comply as a fight over censorship. Prince said that complying with Italy’s demands under its Piracy Shield policies would affect content globally.

Italy’s Piracy Shield is a program implemented by the country’s telecommunications regulator, AGCOM. In order to cut down on piracy in the country, such as hosting illegal streams of sporting events, the program allows IP holders to report content violations to a rapid-response automated system. However, some have complained that the 30-minute window given is not enough time for ISPs to properly vet complains, and is resulting in legitimate, non-pirated content being blocked as well.

«In other words, Italy insists a shadowy, European media cabal should be able to dictate what is and is not allowed online,» Prince said.

Yesterday a quasi-judicial body in Italy fined @Cloudflare $17 million for failing to go along with their scheme to censor the Internet. The scheme, which even the EU has called concerning, required us within a mere 30 minutes of notification to fully censor from the Internet any… pic.twitter.com/qZf9UKEAY5

— Matthew Prince 🌥 (@eastdakota) January 9, 2026

In his posts, Prince specifically mentioned the 30-minute timeframe that Italy requires for Cloudflare to disable access to suspected piracy traffic.

«We block pirate streams every time we find one,» he wrote. «We hate them.» But, he said, «we can’t put in place a system where a shadowy cabal can require us to remove GLOBALLY anything they don’t like on the internet within 30 minutes. That’s insane.»

Some of the proponents of Italy’s piracy rules are soccer teams that want to prevent the illegal streaming of their matches.

Prince went on to list steps his company might take, including pulling its cybersecurity service from the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympics, removing Cloudflare servers from Italian cities and holding off on any plans to invest in the country. Prince also suggested he would get US government leaders involved, tagging Vice President JD Vance in his post. Prince also reposted a message addressed to the Italian prime minister, along with an article about Italy’s actions.

The Winter Olympics, scheduled to take place between Feb. 6 and Feb. 22 at sites across Lombardy and Northeast Italy, are a sensitive subject when it comes to cybersecurity, considering the potential that many may use VPN technology to view broadcasts of the event.

Door is open to an agreement, Cloudflare says

In an interview with CNET, a Cloudflare representative said that while the fine from Italy represents more than the company’s total revenue from the country, Cloudflare is still open to an agreement to avoid saying arrivederci to the country.

«We’re still evaluating, and we’re still open to working something out,» said Alyssa Starzak, Cloudflare’s deputy chief legal officer and global head of policy. «That would be a better solution. The hope is we can have some discussions for a more reasonable result.»

Starzak said the company has posted information and conducted outreach to Italian stakeholders about the ways Cloudflare is working to combat unauthorized streaming. But Italy’s law, she said, leaves no room for negotiation or nuance.

«It’s been very much a ‘You must do what we say’ » situation, she said.

Technologies

Transport Your Dungeons & Dragons Hero Off the Page With This Tabletop Gadget

At CES 2026, I found a couple ways that players and dungeon masters can use tech to upgrade their gameplaying experience.

As I walked around CES 2026, my eyes drifted over a poster awash with fantasy heroes, dastardly monsters and rolling dice — and I failed my saving throw to look away. If you’re a fellow tabletop gaming nerd, you might want to follow this pair of gadgets due out later this year.

Tabletop gaming continues to appeal to players with its deliberately analog gameplay, using miniatures, maps, dice and other physical trinkets to keep the focus on real-world play. The niche has grown in popularity over the decades, and a supporting industry has risen around it, offering third-party materials and accessories to enhance the experience. Digital gadgets and software have been added to this mix in recent years, and a new company, Arcalink, has its own supporting products for the avid Dungeons & Dragons player.

The first of Arcalink’s upcoming tabletop augmentations is a gadget that’s small but mighty. About the size of a film canister, the Arcalink One is a rectangular display around 2 to 3 inches long that’s covered in fantasy decorations. These can be swapped out, with one looking like a doorway in stone ruins and another appearing like a blue wizard’s portal (a third, not present but described to me, would look like a Mimic, the classic D&D monster that appears as a treasure chest to trick adventurers).

The Arcalink One’s screen shows a player’s avatar, and since it was built with the fantasy roleplaying game D&D in mind, animations for popular spells that can be triggered by voice commands. Tabletop RPGs encourage the theater of the mind, with players envisioning their characters through vocal descriptions, but the Arcalink One seems like a neat way for them to accessorize with a digital version of their hero (uploaded in JPG or MP4 file formats) that’s neither essential to play nor large enough to be obtrusive — a totemic treat to take from one game to another, swapping out character portraits by using the paired app.

The basilisk in the room is the price tag: the Arcalink One is expected to cost between $100 and $150, Arcalink founder Lizheng Liu told me. While the company hasn’t hashed out the final numbers, that first number is the device itself, and the high end of the range will bundle more of those clip-on decorations along with it.

Over $100 for an optional device is prohibitive for most tabletop players, but I imagine this would appeal to adventurers with deeper pockets who want a neat little plug-and-play gadget to bring more flair to the game table. Also, let’s not pretend tabletop fans aren’t already spending a good amount of money on accessories, dice and miniatures (looking at you, wargamers).

The company plans to let a select group of supporters start backing the Arcalink One in March or April, with a full Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign launching around June.

The second product, Arca Studio, is entirely digital: AI-powered software to help dungeon masters, the thankless gameplay managers who tell the story and give voice to their world’s denizens for their characters to experience. No, it’s not using generative AI to spit out campaign ideas — this AI software records your game sessions and will make it easy to go back and search for characters and plot events while planning ahead of your next game day.

Yes, this is a sort of gaming version of the AI summaries that productivity apps offer when, say, you’ve finished a video chat, but there are a few unique features tailored to tabletop gaming. One makes a word cloud grouping together recurring names and concepts in your campaign recordings to visualize the themes and frequent elements — great for dungeon masters to see which plot lines and adventure types they might be overusing to switch them up.

Arca Studio will launch around May or June and will be a subscription service, though Arcalink hasn’t decided on an expected monthly cost yet. It’s worth pointing out that anything could change in pricing or product features before these two products reach the market — and just like a good tabletop campaign, there might be some last-minute twists that change everything.

Technologies

Today’s NYT Mini Crossword Answers for Tuesday, Jan. 13

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for Jan. 13.

Looking for the most recent Mini Crossword answer? Click here for today’s Mini Crossword hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Wordle, Strands, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Need some help with today’s Mini Crossword? It features one of those annoying elements, where the puzzlemakers tie two clues together. In this case, you can’t really solve 4-Across and 7-Across separately, so you need to fill in the other answers to see these answers develop. Read on for all the answers. And if you could use some hints and guidance for daily solving, check out our Mini Crossword tips.

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: Tips and Tricks for Solving The New York Times Mini Crossword

Let’s get to those Mini Crossword clues and answers.