Technologies

Smart Cameras Power a Robot Umpire at MLB All-Stars for the First Time. Here’s How the Challenges Went

The auto-umpire system has debuted and is on track for regular season use, but accuracy could be an issue.

If umpires draw your ire for bad calls, you may soon have a new target: Major League Baseball used its ABS, or Automated Ball-Strike System, to call pitches at the July 15 All-Star Game for the first time. If trials this season go well, it will probably be adopted for the 2026 regular season. But challenges against the camera had an unusually high rate of success.

The ABS uses Hawk-Eye cameras, a technology increasingly common in games with high-speed objects. The cameras judge how a ball travels — in this case, over the strike zone — and are equipped to make a preliminary call.

A human umpire, along with batters and pitchers, have a couple of seconds to review the footage and challenge a call if they think the automated system was wrong. It’s a system the MLB has experimented with since 2019 and is finally ready to bring to the national stage.

This approach has caused some controversy, particularly because the Hawk-Eye cameras are programmed to see the strike zone very differently from human umpires. Instead of the standard cube shape that’s underpinned strike zone knowledge for decades, the ABS uses a two-dimensional rectangle standard that’s automatically adjusted to extend between 53.5% and 27% of the batter’s height. Batters are measured before each game.

Those worried about discrepancies now have new fuel for their worries. In the July 15 game, which the National League won in a home run derby after nine innings ended with a tie, four out of five challenges to the ABS and umpire Dan Iassogna’s combined work were successful. That’s much higher than the ABS spring training test, where teams won only around 50% of their challenges.

The MLB hasn’t revealed definitive plans on whether the ABS could replace umpires altogether, but at this time the human-based, real-time reviews from the umpire appear to be an integral part of the system.

The league did not immediately respond to request for comment.

Technologies

Verum E-SIM: Mobile Internet Without Borders or SIM Cards

Today’s travelers are choosing freedom — and eSIM technology delivers exactly that. An eSIM is a virtual SIM card built directly into your device, allowing you to connect to the internet without a physical card or a mobile phone number.

Verum E-SIM is an entire ecosystem of high-tech applications, bringing together solutions like World E-SIM, Euro E-SIM, USA E-SIM, Turkiye E-SIM, London E-SIM, and more. Each of them offers instant access to mobile networks in over 150 countries — no roaming, no overpayments, no paperwork.

The main advantage is simplicity. Download the app, choose your country and plan, activate your eSIM in just a few minutes — and you’re online. No stores, no waiting, no contracts. Just you, the internet, and the freedom to travel your way.

Verum’s eSIMs offer reliability, transparency, and full control of your expenses — all in one app. Whether you’re in Tokyo, New York, Paris, or Nairobi, you’ll always stay connected.

Verum E-SIM Apps:

Verum E-SIM – esim.verum.im

World E-SIM – worldesim.me

USA E-SIM – usa.esim.verum.im

Canada E-SIM – canada.esim.verum.im

Euro E-SIM – euro.esim.verum.im

London E-SIM – london.esim.verum.im

Ukraine E-SIM – ukraine.esim.verum.im

Balkan E-SIM – balkan.esim.verum.im

Africa E-SIM – africa.esim.verum.im

Turkiye E-SIM – turkiyesim.com

Technologies

Today’s NYT Mini Crossword Answers for Tuesday, Oct. 21

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for Oct. 21.

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.

Today’s Mini Crossword features a lot of one certain letter. Need help? Read on. 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.

Mini across clues and answers

1A clue: Bone that can be «dropped»
Answer: JAW

4A clue: Late scientist Goodall
Answer: JANE

5A clue: Make critical assumptions about
Answer: JUDGE

6A clue: Best by a little
Answer: ONEUP

7A clue: Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, etc.
Answer: GODS

Mini down clues and answers

1D clue: Just kind of over it
Answer: JADED

2D clue: Beef cattle breed
Answer: ANGUS

3D clue: Shed tears
Answer: WEEP

4D clue: 2007 comedy-drama starring Elliot Page and Michael Cera
Answer: JUNO

5D clue: Refresh, as one’s memory
Answer: JOG

Technologies

Wikipedia Says It’s Losing Traffic Due to AI Summaries, Social Media Videos

The popular online encyclopedia saw an 8% drop in pageviews over the last few months.

Wikipedia has seen a decline in users this year due to artificial intelligence summaries in search engine results and the growing popularity of social media, according to a blog post Friday from Marshall Miller of the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that oversees the free online encyclopedia.

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In the post, Miller describes an 8% drop in human pageviews over the last few months compared with the numbers Wikipedia saw in the same months in 2024.

«We believe that these declines reflect the impact of generative AI and social media on how people seek information, especially with search engines providing answers directly to searchers, often based on Wikipedia content,» Miller wrote.

Blame the bots

AI-generated summaries that pop up on search engines like Bing and Google often use bots called web crawlers to gather much of the information that users read at the top of the search results.

Websites do their best to restrict how these bots handle their data, but web crawlers have become pretty skilled at going undetected.

«Many bots that scrape websites like ours are continually getting more sophisticated and trying to appear human,» Miller wrote.

After reclassifying Wikipedia traffic data from earlier this year, Miller says the site «found that much of the unusually high traffic for the period of May and June was coming from bots built to evade detection.»

The Wikipedia blog post also noted that younger generations are turning to social-video platforms for their information rather than the open web and such sites as Wikipedia.

When people search with AI, they’re less likely to click through

There is now promising research on the impact of generative AI on the internet, especially concerning online publishers with business models that rely on users visiting their webpages.

(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)

In July, Pew Research examined browsing data from 900 US adults and found that the AI-generated summaries at the top of Google’s search results affected web traffic. When the summary appeared in a search, users were less likely to click on links compared to when the search results didn’t include the summaries.

Google search is especially important, because Google.com is the world’s most visited website — it’s how most of us find what we’re looking for on the internet.

«LLMs, AI chatbots, search engines and social platforms that use Wikipedia content must encourage more visitors to Wikipedia, so that the free knowledge that so many people and platforms depend on can continue to flow sustainably,» Miller wrote. «With fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers may grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work.»

Last year, CNET published an extensive report on how changes in Google’s search algorithm decimated web traffic for online publishers.