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A new event is now underway in Pokemon Go. Niantic has brought the Water Festival back for a limited time, giving players around the world a chance to encounter more Water-types and even catch a couple of new Shiny Pokemon.

The Water Festival runs from August 23-30. During that time, Water Pokemon like Magikarp, Wooper, and Wailmer will appear in the wild more often than normal. If you happen to be near a body of water, you’ll also have a greater chance of encountering the Pokemon listed below.

Increased Water Pokemon Spawns

• Wartortle
• Poliwhirl
• Seaking
• Lapras
• Qwilfish
• Mantine
• Lotad
• Feebas
• Piplup
• Buizel
• Finneon

On top of that, Water Pokemon will be more likely to hatch from eggs during the Water Festival. Some Water-types such as Blastoise, Vaporeon, and Lapras will also appear as Raid Bosses, and if you’re lucky, you’ll have your first chance of finding Shiny versions of Carvanha and Barboach in the wild.

Returning Legendaries

That isn’t all that’s happening during the Water Festival; on August 28, the Legendary lake trio–Azelf, Mesprit, and Uxie–will be back in Gyms in their respective regions for a special Raid hour. You’ll also earn twice the usual amount of Candy for hatching Pokemon throughout the week, and the distance it takes to earn Buddy Candy will be cut in half if your Buddy Pokemon is a Water-type. You can read more details about the Water Festival on the official Pokemon Go website.

Other Pokemon Go Events

It’s going to be a busy few weeks for Pokemon Go players. Niantic recently revealed the game’s Ultra Bonuses, which includes a new Thousand-Year Slumber Special Research quest that leads to the Mythical Pokemon Jirachi. Additionally, the first Gen 5 Pokemon are set to debut starting September 16. There’s also the game’s next Community Day, which takes place on September 15 and features the Gen 4 starter Turtwig.

In the wake of negotiations that may end Disney and Sony’s partnership–and take Spider-Man out of the Marvel Cinematic Universe altogether–at least one Marvel executive producer remains optimistic. Jon Favreau, who directed and produced the original Iron Man and has remained an executive producer through Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame, says he’s still holding out hope.

“After all that time, it took 10 years for him to get to a good relationship!” Favreau told ET. “It’s still early days. As a fan, [I’m] cautiously hopeful that something will come together, because I think all the fans wanna see those characters together. … Things don’t always–what you read isn’t always indicative of where things are now, so hopefully I’ll find out more while I’m here. Holding out hope that this isn’t the final chapter of that story.”

Favreau is certainly more plugged in to the workings of the MCU than the average fan, but he made sure to qualify his statements as hopeful and not insider knowledge. Another consequence of the deal falling apart, according to reports, is MCU head Kevin Feige will no longer serve as producer due to a dispute over financing and profits.

Sony and Disney had reached a deal to allow Spider-Man into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, while Sony still retained rights to the characters. Sony itself responded to the reports of the dispute, saying that the conflict had been “mischaracterized.”

Favreau is another notable Marvel name to come out publicly hoping for a resolution. Actor Jeremy Renner, who plays Hawkeye, also sent a note asking Sony to bring back Spider-Man. Favreau himself is very active in the Disney corporation as a whole, having directed the recent Lion King live-action remake and currently heading up the Disney+ series The Mandalorian. He has also played Tony Stark’s confidant Happy Hogan from the beginning, and appeared in the most recent Spider-Man film, Far From Home.

As is the case each week, Friday has brought Xur to Destiny 2. His randomized slate of Exotic items has changed, but each class–Warlock, Hunter, and Titan–can find one piece of Exotic armor for sale. Even if you already own all three pieces, they’re worth taking a close look at, as armor pieces feature randomized rolls, so you might find something superior to what you already own. Alongside that, you’ll find an Exotic weapon to add to your collection if you don’t already own it. You can check out what the mysterious merchant is selling in the video above, or check out our full Destiny 2 Xur guide for August 23-27.

Microsoft contractors have listened to audio recordings of Xbox users speaking in their homes, a report by Motherboard has revealed. Audio from Xbox One users was sometimes triggered and recorded by mistake when contractors were working to improve the console’s voice command functions.

The practise began at the beginning of the Xbox One’s life cycle but was only meant to capture audio following voice commands like “Xbox” or “Hey Cortana.” It’s the latest example of contractors working on behalf of Microsoft to listen to audio captured by several of the company’s products. An earlier Motherboard report revealed that human contractors were listening to some Skype calls and audio recorded by Microsoft’s virtual assistant, Cortana.

“Xbox commands came up first as a bit of an outlier and then became about half of what we did before becoming most of what we did,” one former contractor told Motherboard. “Most of the Xbox related stuff I can recall doing was obviously unintentional activations with people telling Cortana ‘No’ as they were obviously in the middle of a game and doing normal game chat,” a current contractor said. Each contractor signed an NDA so Motherboard has kept them anonymous to protect their identities.

The Xbox One launched in 2013 with the capability to be controlled via voice commands using Kinect. At the time, many were concerned with the idea of Kinect listening to Xbox users, but Microsoft released a statement addressing privacy concerns saying that “Kinect for Xbox 360 was designed and built with strong privacy protections in place and the new Kinect will continue this commitment.”

“The Xbox stuff was actually a bit of a welcome respite, honestly,” the former contractor added. “It was frequently the same games. Same DLCs. Same types of commands, ‘Xbox give me all the games for free’ or ‘Xbox download [newest Minecraft skins pack]’ or whatever. Occasionally I heard ‘Xbox, tell Solas to heal,’ or something similar, which would be a command for Dragon Age: Inquisition.”

The former contractor said that most of the voices they heard were of children, and that listening continued as the Xbox One moved from using Kinect for voice commands over to Cortana in 2016. A current contractor provided Motherboard with a document, describing how workers should work with different types of Cortana audio, including Xbox voice commands.

“A domain for controlling gaming features, such as finding friends lists, creating a ‘party,’ inviting players to a party. Most Xbox controlling will belong to this domain,” the document reads. A “domain” is a topic that transcribed Cortana audio should be sorted into to improve the system.

Microsoft has now owned up to these issues, and the service did gradually improve. “As time went on, we got less apparently accidental stuff as the feature improved,” the former contractor said. Microsoft removed Cortana from Xbox One back in July, but the virtual assistant can still be used to control the console via the Cortana Android and iOS apps.

A Microsoft spokesperson responded to Motherboard’s report, saying that the company recently stopped listening to audio to improve its products. “We stopped reviewing any voice content taken through Xbox for product improvement purposes a number of months ago, as we no longer felt it was necessary, and we have no plans to re-start those reviews,” the spokesperson said. “We occasionally review a low volume of voice recordings sent from one Xbox user to another when there are reports that a recording violated our terms of service and we need to investigate. This is done to keep the Xbox community safe and is clearly stated in our Xbox terms of service.”

“We’ve recently updated our privacy statement to add greater clarity that people sometimes review this data as part of the product improvement process,” the company added. “We always get customer permission before collecting voice data, we take steps to de-identify voice snippets being reviewed to protect people’s privacy, and we require that handling of this data be held to the highest privacy standards in the law. At the same time, we’re actively working on additional steps we can take to give customers more transparency and more control over how their data is used to improve products.”

Microsoft offers a dedicated page for users to delete any audio captured by the company’s products.

Bungie has announced a new upcoming Destiny 2 event, known as a Community Challenge, that will have the entire playerbase working together toward a set of goals. Guardians that decide to take them on will be heading to Mars, where the war against the Hive continues. According to a Bungie blog post, September’s challenges are a good opportunity to prepare for Shadowkeep, where players will return to the Moon to fight the Hive.

On Mars, Guardians will need to join forces to complete a Community Objective, which will be available starting September 3 at 10 AM PDT / 1 PM EDT / 6 PM BST / 3 AM AEST on September 4. Bungie will also release a quality-of-life update on September 3 that will impact the Mars content, but the studio didn’t go into detail about what this will entail. You can find more details on the Community Objectives below.

Destiny 2 September 3 Community Objectives

• Defeat 175 thousand Wave 7 Escalation Protocol bosses
• Defeat 300 million Hive on Mars
• Mars Nightfalls
  • Defeat Nokris 150 thousand times
  • Defeat Xol 100 thousand times
• Use 300 thousand Override Frequencies

If all the objectives are completed during this event, any player that has completed at least one Nightfall during the period will be given a unique emblem (pictured below). This, Bungie says, will mark you as a Guardian that “rose to the Mars challenge.” Emperor Calus will also unlock additional rewards for successful Menagerie completions. Starting from when the goals are met, players are guaranteed to get two rewards when slotting their runes and opening a chest. Each Friday for the rest of the season, an additional reward will be added.

The emblem reward for September’s Destiny 2 Community Challenge

It’s been an exciting week for Destiny 2 players as Bungie launched cross-save on August 22. This allows players to continue developing their Guardians regardless of what platform they’re playing on. Of course, the details of how to do this and full-extent of which characters you can shift around are a little more complicated, but we’ve got a detailed breakdown on how Destiny 2’s cross-saves work.

Somewhat expectedly, Destiny 2’s cross-save rollout had some teething problems, but you should stick with it because it’s a fantastic addition to the game.