Latest News - Page 1303

Battlefield 2042 is a little bit closer with the official Open Beta about to unleash, and now we have some early performance numbers that show that Battlefield 2042 Open Beta isn't very well optimized on the PC.

NVIDIA's previous-gen flagship Turing-based GeForce RTX 2080 Ti graphics card is only managing around 80-90FPS average at 1080p on Recommended settings in the Battlefield 2042 Open Beta, which isn't too good at all.

EA DICE recommends a GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card for its recommended PC specs, but a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti is much more powerful, and yet only runs 1080p 80-90FPS average. This means on something like the RTX 3060, RTX 3060 Ti, RTX 3070 will see around 1080p 60FPS in the Battlefield 2042 Open Beta.

Can you believe we're actually here? EA DICE has just unleashed the pre-loading floodgates to Battlefield 2042, with the Battlefield 2042 Open Beta pre-loading beginning across all platforms worldwide.

Battlefield 2042 Open Beta pre-load is now live on Steam, Origin, PS5/PS4 and Xbox Series SX/S consoles. But if you are a PC gamer on Steam for example, then going to Battlefield 2042 in your library does nothing. You'll need to do a few more steps in order to get the Battlefield 2042 Open Beta pre-load to begin downloading.

Battlefield leaker Tom Henderson has some great tips that he posted on Twitter, running everyone through how to pre-load the Battlefield 2042 Open Beta. It's not too hard, with just a few steps required for each platform to get started.

Sony's new PlayStation Now lineup is headlined by first-party exclusive The Last of Us Part II alongside a number of new titles.

Gamers can now try The Last of Us Part II via Sony's game-streaming PS Now servers without any downloads or wait times. Naughty Dog's controversial and widely-praised PS4 game will be available on the service until January 2022, and is joined by a few other heavy-hitters like Fallout 76 and Final Fantasy VIII Remastered.

These games are pretty time-consuming and Sony's aim is simple: Longer games typically mean longer playthroughs and a better chance in subscriber retention. Right now Sony's PS Now service is being pressured by Microsoft's Project xCloud initiative, which offers an expansive offering of high-profile games available for streaming free as part of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate.

The International Space Station (ISS) is a modular space station that is located in lower-Earth orbit. It serves as a place for research to be conducted in microgravity.

The images were taken by Russian cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy who was traveling on the Russian Soyuz capsule from the Earth-facing Rassvet module to the docking port on the Nauka module. Novitskiy was joined by Pyotr Dubrov, a fellow cosmonaut and NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei. According to Novitskiy, everything went according to plan.

Looking at the image, you can see at the bottom of the space station the Nauka module and SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule "Endeavour," which transported four astronauts to the space station in April at the top. In other news about the International Space Station, Russia will soon be launching a director, an actor, and a cosmonaut to the ISS to shoot the first movie in space, more on that story can be found here.

Actor William Shatner has announced that he will be going on a suborbital flight to space with Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin.

The announcement from Shatner comes after the heated news that Blue Origin employees found the work environment "toxic" and uncomfortable for women. Shatner is known for his role in Star Trek as Captain Kirk and will be joined by Audrey Powers, the vice president of missions and flight operations at Blue Origin. The launch is scheduled to occur at New Shepard's launch site in west Texas on October 12.

Shatner took to Twitter to announce the news, saying, "So now I can say something. Yes, it's true; I'm going to be a 'rocket man!'" Shatner added in a Blue Origin statement, "I've heard about space for a long time now. I'm taking the opportunity to see it for myself. What a miracle." Additionally, the announcement comes after anonymous former/current Blue Origin engineers warned that Blue Origin prioritized speed over safety.

The largest underwater eruption caused a massive volcano to rise up from the seafloor, leading researchers to investigate.

On May 10, 2018, researchers recorded a seismic event that caused a volcanic island to emerge from the seafloor between Madagascar and East Africa. Within a few days of the island emerging, researchers recorded a 5.8 earthquake that was traced back down to volcanic activity underwater. In February 2019, teams of researchers mapped 3,320 square miles of the seafloor with sonar in an effort to gain more knowledge of the event.

The researchers found that more than 17,000 seismic events occurred between February and May 2019 at a depth of 30 miles beneath the seafloor. The researchers dubbed the discovery of these seismic events as "highly unusual". From these observations, the researchers were able to construct a model of how the volcanic island came to be and found that the island started with magma below the molten mantle.

The team aboard the International Space Station will soon be welcoming three new crew members, a director, a cosmonaut, and an actor.

The three new crew members will be taking off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 4:55 a.m. EDT (0855 GMT or 6:55 p.m. local time) and will be venturing to the ISS to shoot the very first movie scenes in space. The three crew members are Russian cosmonaut and multi-spaceflight veteran Anton Shkaplerov, film director Klim Shipenko, and actor Yulia Peresild.

The crew of three is going to the ISS to shoot scenes for a character in the movie The Challenge. The movie follows a doctor that has to go to the ISS to assist a cosmonaut that is in need of medical attention. The New York Times reports that Russia is trying to secure first place for the first movie shot in space and has even moved its launch schedule around to fast-track the launch ahead of SpaceX and NASA's plans to support a Tom Cruise action movie being shot in space.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has taken to his personal Twitter account to share a crazy video of the rocket Starship caught in a lightning storm.

The video showcases SpaceX's Starship rocket that will be transportation humans take to get to Mars one day. The team at SpaceX is currently hard at work getting Starship ready for its first orbital flight that is scheduled to happen sometime before the end of the year. SpaceX's Starship is the company's largest rocket, and when paired with the Super Heavy booster, it's the tallest rocket ever constructed at 400 feet.

In the video that Musk shared, we can see Starship at SpaceX's Texas facility off to the left-hand side with lightning appearing all around it, causing a gorgeous silhouette of the massive rocket. Musk further clarified in a follow-up reply to the original post that what viewers were seeing was real, "this is real btw" as some people must not have believed the video was real. If you are interested in reading more about this story, check out this link here.

NASA previously announced it was looking for four individuals to participate in spending a month in the space agency's simulated Mars habitat.

The four individuals were required to have certain qualifications and would have to spend 45 days working and living in the Human Exploration Research Analog (HERA). The idea behind this project is so NASA scientists can observe how the first humans will react to living on Mars when we finally get there. While we are still decently far away before any colony starts on the Red Planet, the space agency wants to do as much preparation as it can before the missions go underway.

As for this particular HERA mission, NASA will be simulating a trip to Phobos, the innermost and larger of the two natural satellites of Mars. The mission will include cramped living spaces and delayed communications with the outside world. As previously stated, the duration of the mission will be 45 days, and throughout that time, NASA researchers will be monitoring the four individuals inside for changes in the human psyche, health, etc.

Eyewitnesses have reported seeing an extremely bright fireball pass overhead in the night sky. Officials have confirmed its existence.

The American Meteor Society has confirmed a meteor estimated to be the size of a house entering Earth's atmosphere above Colorado, United States. The fireball was captured on film by numerous cameras, some of which were porch cameras, and they show a bright fireball enter the sky, lighting it up a beautiful blue hue. According to Josh Ellis, located in Evergreen, Colorado, the fireball was so bright that it charged his solar lights.

Doug Robinson, who captured a video of the fireball over Boulder, Colorado, said, "Everything was pitch dark, and all of a sudden it lit up as if it was a brightly lit moon." Additionally, six people reported hearing a boom sound as they saw the fireball pass overhead. This "boom" was likely the fireball exploding as it broke up in the atmosphere.

Numerous reports have surfaced about a fireball appearing in the night sky and confirming the reports are videos published on the American Meteor Society (AMS) YouTube Channel.

A meteor is a space rock that has entered Earth's atmosphere and is plummeting towards the surface. Luckily, most meteors never make it to Earth's surface and burn up as they get lower and lower into our atmosphere. The American Meteor Society was created to track events such as these, and just recently, AMS received around a dozen reports that an extremely bright fireball streaked across the night sky above Colorado.

When a meteor enters Earth's atmosphere, it's introduced to our thick atmosphere that slows it down, and heats it up via friction. This friction causes the meteor to catch on fire, which results in the bright object we see up in the sky. As previously stated, most of these fireballs aren't large enough to make it to the surface, and as a result, they disintegrate or explode. As for this fireball, reports state that it was around the size of a house.

Amazon is continuing to kill innocent GPU silicon with its new game New World, with the open beta killing GeForce RTX 3090 graphics cards, and now the full game is here and it hasn't stopped.

Previously, New World was killing EVGA GeForce RTX 3090 FTW3 graphics cards, with EVGA explaining it was due to "bad soldering". But now, new reports from PowerGPU -- a custom PC builder -- tweeted that the company received multiple emails from customers saying their graphics cards died after playing New World.

It seems gamers need to make sure they cap their FPS, or things can get out of control on a really powerful graphics card as you enter the many hundreds of frames per second. A user on Reddit played the full game, with uncapped FPS, on his brand new PC with a GeForce RTX 3080 Ti inside. The post explains: "Just hours before live servers I decide to go back into the game due to anticipation and then my GPU fans go wild/loud and hangs the PC. I reset and the red VGA light appears on my motherboard......... sadge. I have since replaced my graphics card with my old 1070 which is now working fine (and set all settings to low)".

A drone light show in China has ended in absolute terror, with drones falling out of the sky and onto spectators watching below.

A bunch of videos were uploaded to various social media networks, with a video above on YouTube showing the disaster unfold. There were 200 drones flying in formation above a mall in the central city of Zhengzhou, China, when they started dropping out of the sky.

The drones hit buildings on the way down, and crashes into vehicles parked on the road. Spectators of the drone light show were yelling out "be careful" and "back off" as they were running away from the drones falling out of the sky. There were reportedly around 5000 people in the crowd that day, including many of them being children, with drones falling out of the sky and onto them is a horrible thing to imagine.

Aaaand it's official: ASUS and Noctua have officially announced the new ASUS GeForce RTX 3070 Noctua Edition graphics card. Check it out:

The new ASUS GeForce RTX 3070 Noctua Edition graphics card is the world's first graphics card to use Noctua cooling fans, and a custom heat sink co-engineered by Noctua. The card looks unique, but utterly beautiful, and will now be one of the quietest graphics cards of its class -- in the RTX 3070 arena.

There's a semi-passive fan control system on the card, where the fans will disable once the GPU temps are under 50C. This means that for everything you're doing with your PC, the GPU is only going to hit 50C when it's doing something: gaming, mining, rendering. It will be silent for all other operation. Even once the fans spin up, they're Noctua fans... so it would be interesting to see how the noise levels are, as they should be close to silent.

Can you imagine a world where Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey actually purchased the Facebook.com domain out from Facebook... well, Dorsey did question "how much?" would it cost in a teaser tweet.

Dorsey didn't expect the tweet to blow up so much, where at the time of writing there had been over 72,000+ likes on the tweet and close to 5,000 quote tweets and 18,500+ retweets. Dorsey posted the picture of the Facebook.com domain up for sale, which I reported about below, and simply tweeted "how much?"

Once the tweet from Dorsey blew up, the Twitter CEO linked to his SoundCloud with a track by Kanye West titled "Off The Grid". I don't know if that's a warning... off the grid meaning the supply of electricity is usually cut, and you're surviving off the grid -- no water, electricity, etc. Weird.

Signal is still up, and is currently welcoming everyone to their app in the dark times that Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are experiencing right now.

The company took to Twitter, tweeting: "Signups are way up on Signal (welcome everyone!) We also know what it's like to work through an outage, and wish the best for the engineers working on bringing back service on other platforms #mondays".

If you don't know about Signal, it's a cross-platform centralized encrypted messaging app, for the desktop, and mobile with iOS and Android apps. You can download Signal here. I'm sure Signal is going to be receiving a helluva lot of new users right now, with billions of people unable to use Messenger and WhatsApp right now.

You have probably heard by now that Facebook is down, and with it Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp. Well, it goes from bad to worse to epic bad with their domains now up for sale.

We don't know exactly what has caused Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp to go dark but the DNS A and AAA records for Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp have been "nuked". The actual Facebook.com domain was for sale, with a third-party that doesn't own Facebook.com listing the website on Uniregistry.com.

Don't worry, Facebook.com isn't being sold -- at least for now. The listing for Facebook.com is just another coincidence, and I guess a chuckle, at the mess Zuck and his crew are swimming through right now. The listing for Facebook.com has been removed, with a GoDaddy spokesperson confirming the domain was removed from sale not too long ago now.

I've been writing for the last few hours as it's been happening in real-time about Facebook going down, and bringing with it Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp. But at the same time, #DeleteFacebook was trending on Twitter alongside #FacebookDown.

As I went to take a screenshot for the article, #DeleteFacebook disappeared from Twitter's trending list for me, but you can easily search for the hashtag separately on Twitter and see thousands of people tweeting out about #DeleteFacebook.

It should come as no surprise if you consider Facebook is down just as a whistleblower exposes the company and some of its darker side, over 1.5 billion Facebook users' data up for sale on a hacker forum, and the fact that the entire service and its owned apps -- Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp -- are all down right now.

Update: A Telegram representative reached out to me, to clarify: "Only a handful of users are affected. These affected users are mostly seeing a slowdown and some notification issues. Our distributed service means that Telegram can remain stable globally even when there are issues in some regions".

Telegram is joining in on the party in the dark, hanging out with fellow outage members in Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp.

DownDetector tweeted out that there are many users experiencing issues with Telegram, with plenty of people tweeting in with issues using Telegram. I'm using it here on the desktop on Windows and it's fine, and my phone is fine for now, but I did have issues about an hour ago (at the time of writing).

Today couldn't get worse for Facebook, with the world's largest social media company down right now, and a Facebook whistleblower exposing some dark sides to the Mark Zuckerberg-led company.

Now, this is where things get worse: over 1.5 billion users have had their information up for sale on a hacker forum, with the personal data of over 1.5 billion Facebook users now up for grabs. You can buy it right now, either in a lump -- 1.5 billion users' information -- or maybe you just want 17 million users' information.

1 million accounts would cost you $5000 or so, which means 1.5 billion Facebook users' data is only going to cost you $7.5 million. Today, of all days, where Facebook has gone down, a whistleblower has exposed the social media giant, and their stock price is crashing... 1,500,000,000 users' data gets leaked and goes up for sale.