An administrative law judge has ordered Microsoft to comply with all Activision merger document requests made by the FTC's complaint counsel in a recent motion.

Recent filings indicate the Federal Trade Commission is having trouble getting specific documents from Microsoft and Activision. FTC complaint counsel (the lawyers representing the FTC that seek to block the merger) filed a motion to compel production of documents. Statements from the FTC say that Microsoft was largely uncooperative and "have refused to produce anything at all for 24 requests."

Microsoft and Activision-Blizzard counsel argued against the motion and said that the requests (known as RFPs in this context) are "duplicative and unduly burdensome" because they'd require the companies to "re-review millions of documents previously deemed least relevant." The respondents (Microsoft and Activision) argue that complaint counsel has received 17 million pages in a massive second request.

ChatGPT can be put to a lot of uses, as we've seen - such as its recent introduction to gaming chat platform Discord - and the latest one is the AI being recruited to help consumers build a PC over at major US retailer Newegg.

The AI-powered PC Builder tool is still in beta testing (Image Credit: Newegg)

In fact, Newegg is putting the AI's skills to use for a raft of things across the retailer's site, but primarily to beef up the PC Builder tool, which is now labeled as 'Build with AI' - and a clear caveat that this is still a beta experience.

As you might expect, if you want to put together a PC, ChatGPT will help provide recommendations for various components that will go together well, or fit a certain budget.

Last week, ChatGPT went down in what first appeared to be a global outage, but was in fact, due to OpenAI shutting the service (temporarily) after finding a bug that made user chat histories visible to the public - and more besides, we've now found out, worryingly.

The bug in an open source library has turned into a thornier problem than OpenAI first realized (Image Credit: Pixabay)

In what was later described as a "significant issue" pertaining to a bug present in an open source library, titles of chat histories, and possibly the initial messages, were in some cases seen by other users who were active at the same time as a person having a chat.

The bug is now fixed, but after fully investigating what happened here, OpenAI has admitted that some credit card details of a small subset of users were possibly exposed.

Microsoft has swiftly deployed emergency fixes for a security flaw in Windows 11 that affected the Snipping Tool (and the Snip & Sketch app in Windows 10, too).

This bug was rated as a 'low' severity affair by Microsoft, but some affected users may not agree with that assessment (Image Credit: Elisa Ventur / Unsplash)

Those screenshot-grabbing and editing utilities were blighted by an issue whereby cropped data in PNG image files wasn't being properly overwritten, playfully named the "acropalypse" bug.

In other words, when users crop a file, the part of the picture discarded could potentially be recovered and scrutinized by someone exploiting the flaw.

Earth was just smacked with a very powerful blast from the Sun that caused the spawning of auroras more south than they typically appear.

The event occurred on March 25 and was confirmed by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which issued a statement declaring a severe geomagnetic storm warning and an image showing where the impact would be focused. NOAA's map of Earth shows a large swath of North America being right in the impact zone, which coincides with the plethora of gorgeous aurora images that were posted online during and following the storm.

NOAA ranked the solar storm at G4 on the 5-grade scale that is used to define the intensity of a geomagnetic storm. Notably, the impact of the storm was so strong that there were reports of the Northern Lights appearing as far south as New Mexico in the U.S. So, how does this happen? Auroras such as the Northern and Southern Lights typically appear close to the Earth's poles as the planet's magnetic field deflects charged particles around the planet to its poles, where they reach the weakest points of Earth's magnetic field.

The Turtle Beach Stealth Pro is the latest premium gaming headset from the peripheral maker and audio company. It supports all gaming devices, Bluetooth, active noise-cancellation, and other notable features.

Turtle Beach Stealth Pro, image credit: Turtle Beach

Regarding active noise cancellation, Turtle Beach claims that it's "the most effective, competitively benchmarked noise-cancellation available in a gaming headset," with dedicated internal microphones that lead to a reduction of up to 25dB. This makes the new Turtle Beach Stealth Pro gaming headset something you could effectively take on the go or use while traveling.

This tech extends to the noise-canceling TruSpeak boom microphone, which is also detachable. With support for Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PS5, PS4, Windows PC, Mac, Nintendo Switch, and mobile/tablet devices (via Bluetooth), it's certainly versatile.

The Flux Keyboard is a fascinating new peripheral that has blasted through its Kickstarter goal of AUD 200,000, where it was funded in eight minutes and hit AUD 1 million in four hours. And it's not hard to see why, as this modular keyboard integrates a fully dynamic display with the feel of a mechanical keyboard.

Flux Keyboard, transparent keyboard with integrated display, image credit: Flux Group

The display allows any icon to be placed on any key, paving the way for multi-language support and application-specific layouts and styles. Created by the Australian-based Flux Group, the high-definition IPS display sits below a modular, transparent layer that can display any image or video and can even showcase reactive animations as part of a singular background.

How does this translate to the precision and tactile feel you get from a mechanical keyboard? On that front, the Flux Keyboard uses custom Maglev switches that rely on magnets to deliver a tactile or linear feel similar to what you get from the spring in a traditional mechanical key switch.

Intel is releasing new Game On Drivers for its Intel Arc range of graphics cards at a steady clip, with the latest release adding support for the Resident Evil 4 Remake on PC.

Resident Evil 4 performance with the Intel Arc A750, image credit: Intel.

With its low price point, the Intel Arc A750 is positioned as an affordable GeForce RTX 3060 competitor. With that, the new driver update Intel showcases the 1080p and 1440p performance in Resident Evil 4 with the Arc A750 using the game's "High" settings outperforming the RTX 3060.

Even though internal benchmarks should always be taken with a grain of salt, Intel adds that at 1440p, you're looking at an impressive 74% more performance per dollar with the Intel Arc A750, and it does so with a very solid 78 frames per second.

We've all lived through the GeForce RTX 30 Series generation, where the rise of cryptocurrencies and mining drove prices up and increased scarcity for GPUs. So this new interview with The Guardian is interesting in that it sees NVIDIA publicly distance itself from something that has negatively affected the PC gaming space.

Speaking with Michael Kagan, Chief Technology Officer at NVIDIA, he explicitly states that the whole crypto boom didn't "bring anything useful for society." Of course, this statement is also born from the current AI boom where NVIDIA hardware sits at the heart of AI technology like ChatGPT.

Even though crypto led to large volumes of sales for NVIDIA and increased scarcity and availability in most markets, the company attempted to minimize the impact on desktop sales by introducing LHR or "Lite Hash Rate" technologies in models like the GeForce RTX 3060.

When AMD announced its new flagship RDNA 3 GPUs last year, the Radeon 7900 XT and 7900 XTX, the company also briefly teased that it was developing FSR 3. Its next-generation FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 technology would, in effect, present an alternative to NVIDIA's DLSS 3 - specifically Frame Generation.

AMD FSR 3 presentation GDC 2023, image credit: AMD

With FSR 2 being an open DLSS Super Resolution alternative, FSR 3 will follow suit - with the technology appearing at GDC 2023. For the still-in-development FSR 3, AMD aims to achieve a 2x performance increase over FSR 2 by creating new frames.

AMD outlined a high probability that each interpolated or generated pixel in a frame will have a sample. With no feedback loop, each interpolated frame will only be shown once. And with that, AMD notes that the recommendation for FSR 3 is that the input should be at least 60 frames per second.