Microsoft's legal counsel has responded to Sony's claims about the Activision-Blizzard deal, and has over-dramatized a common business practice among platform holders.

Microsoft representation had interesting things to say about Sony in its response letter to Brazil's CADE agency, which functions similar to the FTC in the United States. CADE is currently asking games companies about Microsoft's huge Activision-Blizzard deal and how it could affect the industry. Sony counsel implied that Call of Duty being kept off of PlayStation could cause anti-competitive harm, and said that subscription services can lower a game's overall quality. It's important to remember that attorneys and lawyers representing Microsoft and Sony have made these comments.

Now Microsoft's counsel has issued a document arguing against Sony's claims namely exclusivity. One of the more interesting sections has dramatized how exclusivity works in regards to subscription services. Legal reps allege that Sony pays video game developers and publishers for "blocking rights" to "prevent" a game from coming to Game Pass. This nomenclature can be simplified in a term that all gamers will recognize: Exclusivity.

When Disney+ released in 2019 for just $6.99 it seemed too good to be true. Everyone knew price hikes were coming, and of course they happened. Disney+ jumped to $7.99, and now the service is getting its second price hike.

Today Disney announced it's increasing Disney+ subscription prices by $3. Subscribers will have two options on what plans to buy: an ad plan for $7.99 that will run interstitial advertisements periodically through shows or movies, or an ad-free plan for $10.99. The new ad plan will cost as much as the current ad-free plan.

This price hike represents a 38% increase as Disney continues spending big to produce new content. Disney has spent $3.55 billion on Disney+ programming and production costs throughout this fiscal year, with a record $1.435 billion spent during Q3'22 alone. Domestic Disney+ subscribers have reached 44.5 million in Q3 and a whopping 152 million worldwide including Hotstar in India.

Former U.S. presidential candidate and consumer protection advocate Ralph Nader has come out against Tesla vehicles' Full Self-Driving (FSD) capabilities.

Nader referred to the Tesla feature as "one of the most dangerous and irresponsible actions by a car company in decades," and appealed to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to issue a recall of every Tesla vehicle with the technology to have it removed. The NHTSA is already investigating 16 crashes involving Tesla Autopilot in some capacity, resulting in 15 injuries and one fatality.

"I am calling on federal regulators to act immediately to prevent the growing deaths and injuries from Tesla manslaughtering crashes with this technology," Nader said in a statement released by the Center for Auto Safety.

Google went down earlier this week for a brief period, with Google claiming it was due to a software update.

Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Images were all affected when Google's search engine went down, with thousands of people across over 40 countries reporting outages. According to a Google spokesperson, "a software update issue" led to the "briefly affected availability of Google search and Maps," but they "worked to quickly address the issue and our services are now back online."

Notably, an accident had occurred only hours prior at a Google data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa, in which an "electrical incident" seriously injured three electricians working onsite. They were all transported to a local hospital with burns but are now in stable condition. According to Google, the incident is unrelated to its outage later that day and into the next.

A study on the forever chemicals titled "Exposure to Perfluoroalkyl Substances and Risk of Hepatocellular Carcinoma in the Multiethnic Cohort: A Proof-of-Concept Analysis" has been published in the journal JHEP Reports.

Researchers from the University of Southern California (USC) have established a link between the wide-reaching synthetic chemical perfluooctane sulfate (PFOS) and non-viral hepatocellular carcinoma, the most common form of liver cancer. PFOS falls under the umbrella of polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, which are found in many consumer and industrial products, and are known as "forever chemicals" due to the extremely long time they take to break down.

As such, these chemicals can accumulate and persist in the environment and human tissues, including the liver. Though some manufacturers have phased them out, the long-lasting PFAS are still found in drinking water, numerous food products, and the blood of over 98% of adults in the United States.

NASA's Perseverance Mars rover has caught some debris inside its drill chuck.

An image of the drill chuck was captured by the rover's SHERLOC WATSON camera, located on the turret at end of its robotic arm, on August 4th, 2022, 517 days into its mission on Mars. The images were taken after Perseverance successfully collected and stored the 12th Martian sample of its mission, and show two pieces of debris. A small object was spotted on the coring bit that the rover uses to drill out core samples.

The second was a "small hairline object" spotted on the drill chuck, where different drilling implements are inserted into. The team behind the rover is now working to determine the origin of the debris; whether it originated from the rover itself or external debris from the entry, descent, and landing (EDL) system that the rover used to reach the planet's surface at the start of its mission before it was jettisoned.

A study on the continents titled "Giant impacts and the origin and evolution of continents" has been published in the journal Nature.

Researchers from Curtin University have shown that giant meteorite impacts during the first billion years of Earth's 4.5 billion year lifetime are the likely cause of the planet's continents. Evidence to support the theory was previously thin, but scientists have found strong evidence now by studying the Pilbara Craton in Western Australia, one of the two pristine Earth crusts from the Archaean period 3.6 to 2.7 billion years ago.

"By examining tiny crystals of the mineral zircon in rocks from the Pilbara Craton in Western Australia, which represents Earth's best-preserved remnant of ancient crust, we found evidence of these giant meteorite impacts. Studying the composition of oxygen isotopes in these zircon crystals revealed a 'top-down' process starting with the melting of rocks near the surface and progressing deeper, consistent with the geological effect of giant meteorite impacts," said Dr. Tim Johnson, from Curtin's School of Earth and Planetary Sciences.

Unity has announced it is partnering up with Mercedes-Benz to power their future vehicles with a next-gen infotainment system powered by the MB.OS operating system.

Mercedes will be using the Unity Industrial Collection to make the UI for the in-car cockpits of Mercedes-Benz vehicles that will roll out in 2024, with Unity's technology powering things like the 3D navigation software, and virtual avatars, in-car augmented reality experiences, and more. We should expect to see Unity-powered local weather and traffic data, streaming services, and more.

Gordon Wagener, Mercedes' chief design officer explained to GamesBeat: "At Mercedes, we believe that infotainment systems should be able to understand and learn the driver's needs and habits in order to become a personal assistant. Maximum comfort and minimal distraction is the goal. Interaction between humans and vehicles is increasingly based on voice assistants, touchscreens, and smart surfaces".

AMD's next-gen Ryzen 7000 series "Zen 4" platform is nearly here, with Team Red entering the DDR5 memory battle... and now we have some more details on DDR5 memory + Zen 4.

GIGABYTE's leaked BIOS for their upcoming X670-based motherboards has been checked over, with overclockers and enthusiasts discovering data hidden in the firmware. The BIOS leak confirms that AMD EXPO technology (EXtended Profiles for Overclocking) is real, something previously rumored, but also confirms AMD's upcoming EXPO technology will have two main profiles: one for bandwidth, and another for low latency.

You'll be able to tweak the active memory timings for the 4 x DDR5 memory channels, while the maximum frequcny of AMD's Infinity Fabric is 3000MHz in the BIOS.

Intel is back again with another video detailing its Intel Arc A750 graphics card, which has been benchmarked in close to 50 games with both DX12 and Vulkan API-based games.

In a new video from Intel, we have Ryan Shrout and Tom Peterson benchmarking their lives away with the Arc A750 Limited Edition graphics card in 49 games at both 1080p and 1440p resolutions. Intel versed its own Arc A750 graphics card against NVIDIA's mid-range GeForce RTX 3060, where it beat the RTX 3060 by 3-5% on average.

Ryan explains on the official Intel website: "For games with dedicated benchmarks like Dirt 5 and Hitman 3, we used their benchmark modes. Other games without built-in benchmarks were run using repeatable scenarios, though other testers might come up with different results. And you'll see in our results disclosure that we had two different Intel labs with slightly different configurations contribute to this collection of data, but all measurements for both Intel Arc and competitive products on a per game basis were performed by the same labs. We're confident that the combined data tells the story of the type of performance you can expect when playing some of your favorite modern games".