Square Enix wants to use AI neural networks and machine learning to help identify bugs and glitches and take some of the stress from QA testing.

While cruising Square Enix's job listings I found something rather interesting: The company's Advanced Technology Division, which is responsible for high-tech R&D, is hiring an AI-based QA automation researcher with the aim to "efficiently reduce the amount of manual labor on game QA."

Right now the listing is just for R&D, meaning we shouldn't expect it to translate to games any time soon. Given Square Enix's penchant for years-long development cycles and long-winded, expansive, and finely-articulated experiences, any effort to help QA will ship games faster. The sooner bugs are identified, the sooner devs can squash them and optimize the game, and the sooner it hits store shelves.

League of Legends is one of the biggest games ever created with a player base of over 100 million players. So how much carbon are those players generating?

In a new study, it has been estimated that League of Legends' 115 million players throughout 2019 resulted in around 3,139,385 tonnes of CO2 emissions, based on the average player game time. This amount of output of CO2 is estimated to be around the same as charging 400,372,745,210 smartphones or driving 7,790,037,221 miles.

Both gaming companies and consoles manufacturers are working towards minimizing their carbon footprint, and with study's such as these and others coming out estimating how much carbon they are producing, they are really putting them in a not-so-good spotlight. I don't know if a few studies will push big game companies such as Riot Games to implement a carbon reduction strategy, but it's a start, I suppose.

Avast Antivirus is one of the largest free Antivirus software's you can download on the internet, and now an investigation is being conducted into the company for reportedly selling user data.

According to Dark Reading, the Czech Office for Personal Data Protection is now investigating the actions of the Prague-based antivirus software company, Avast. The investigation is to find out whether or not Avast has been selling personal information from its user base to companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Home Depot.

The data that is suspected to have been sold off to these companies is browser history of users, online map searches, YouTube viewing habits, and more. Back in January, Motherboard and PCMag found evidence of Avast collecting data and selling it through its subsidiary company called "Jumpshot". Since this was discovered, Avast as closed down its Jumpshot division.

At the moment, SpaceX is gearing up for the first crewed flight to the International Space Station with their Dragon spacecraft.

According to recent reports, paperwork is the main problem before SpaceX is given the green light to take astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the International Space Station. While it hasn't been publically announced, Ars Technica says that NASA is currently working towards a May 7th launch of Crew Dragon, but that date is lucrative.

Above is a video SpaceX released onto their official Twitter account. The video is of the Dragon spacecraft, and according to the post, it's currently undergoing electromagnetic interference testing. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk originally said that Dragon should launch within the second quarter of 2020, and judging on recent reports, that estimation is quite accurate. Dragon will take to the skies sometime in April, May, June. May is most likely the month when a launch will happen.

The release of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate's 7.0.0 update, which added the new DLC character Byleth also added some fan-favorite skins for Mii Gunner - Cuphead.

In celebration of Cuphead making it over to Nintendo's representative fighter, a new spirit board event is being held in their honor. The new event will run for five days and add four new spirits from Cuphead to the spirit board. Players will be able to pick up these spirits starting on February 14th.

In other Super Smash Bros. Ultimate news, a recent rumor surfaced online in regards to Kingdom Hearts' main Sora, not making it as a DLC fighter. The rumor suggested that it was Disney's fault and not Nintendo's for not letting Sora be apart of the games Fighter Pass. More on that story can be found here.

It has been a staggering eight years since .com domain prices have moved either up or down, but that could all soon change as a new agreement is about to fall into place.

Since 2012, .com domain prices have been sitting at $7.85, but ICANN who is responsible for overseeing top-level internet domains is right in the middle of a new agreement with Verisign who has a contract to oversee .com domains. In this new agreement, Verisign will be allowed to increase the price of .com domains by up to 7% every year for the next 10 years. Excluding the years 2024 and 2025.

ICANN isn't the ones forcing the hand of Verisign, they come from a present agreement between Verisign and the Commerce Department which also has a finger in overseeing .com domains and their prices. According to a blog post by ICANN CEO, Goran Marby, ICCAN is "not a price regulator and defers to the U.S. Department of Commerce and the U.S. Department of Justice for the regulation of pricing for .COM registry services."

A new report has come out from The Wall Street Journal that claims Amazon CEO and founder; Jeff Bezos has bought the most expensive property in Los Angeles.

Amazon founder has reportedly bought the Warner Estate, the most prestigious property in all of Los Angeles from David Geffen for $165 million dollars. Bezos' net worth is currently sitting at around $131.9 billion, which means that if he did purchase the estate from Geffen for $165 million, that's only one-eight hundredth of his net worth.

The Warner Estate was built in the 1930s for Jack Warner, who was the former president and driving force behind the now-massive Warner Bros. Studios. The estate took around a decade to be built and features everything you could dream of; terraces, guest houses, golf courses, pools, tennis courts, and a lot more.

In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing, theaters around the United States will be showing the Hollywood film 'Apollo 13'.

If you haven't seen Apollo 13, now's your chance to see in the cinemas as on April 5th screenings for the movie which star Tom Hanks as Jim Lovell, Gary Sinise as Ken Mattingly and Bill Paxton as Fred Haise begin. Tickets for the movie will be available to purchase starting today, and the screenings will run on April 5th, 6th and finally 8th at cinema distributor Fathom Events.

Tom Lucas, Fathom Events vice president of studio relations said, "Apollo 13 may have been deemed a 'successful failure,' but the movie is a brilliant reminder that it was anything but. We are honored to commemorate the 50th anniversary of such an extraordinary human accomplishment - and the 25th anniversary of the movie - by bringing Apollo 13 back to movie theaters, where its vision and scope can be best appreciated."

The FBI has reported the highest amount of scammed losses in 2019 since it's Internet Crime Complaint Center was created.

According to the FBI.gov website, the internet safety arm of the FBI called 'Internet Crime Complaint Center' (IC3) issued out their 2019 report, which stated some worrying figures. The report says that during 2019 the IC3 received 467,361 complaints, which equated to an average of nearly 1,300 a day. It also recorded the highest amount of monetary losses since the center was established back in May, 2000.

The FBI says that more than $3.5 billion losses were recorded from individuals and businesses who fell victim to online scams. Scams such as phishing, non-payment/non-delivery scams, and extortion were the most common form of received complains. The complaints which ended up being the most financially costly were business email compromise (BEC), romance or confidence fraud, and mimicking the account of a person or business vendor.

WhatsApp is now home to a whopping 2 billion active users, with the Facebook-owned company taking to an official blog post for the announcement.

The company took the time in the blog post to underline its end-to-end encryption and privacy of eveyr message, with WhatsApp explaining: "Strong encryption acts like an unbreakable digital lock that keeps the information you send over WhatsApp secure, helping protect you from hackers and criminals. Messages are only kept on your phone, and no one in between can read your messages or listen to your calls, not even us. Your private conversations stay between you".

The company continues, saying that strong encryption is a "necessity in modern life. We will not compromise on security because that would make people less safe. For even more protection, we work with top security experts, employ industry leading technology to stop misuse as well as provide controls and ways to report issues - without sacrificing privacy".