Latest News - Page 1304

Facebook has gone dark and with it taken its services including Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp -- across desktop, web, and mobile apps. But it seems TikTok is joining the outages, too.

TikTok is down for what seems like most people, with DownDetector showing that TikTok is experiencing issues right now and plenty of people on Twitter are tweeting that TikTok is down right now. I can access it here from Australia on the desktop but mobile is having issues for me right now.

I guess this isn't the end of whatever is happening right now, but Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp are just lights off right now. TikTok seems very unstable, but there are lots of people who seem to not be having any issues right now. This is all happening in real-time, so let us know in the comments... if you're able to, if TikTok is down for you.

Facebook is down right now across the planet, as well as Facebook-owned services including Instagram and WhatsApp... but hours before, at the start of the day, Facebook stock started plunging.

The price of Facebook stock started dropping because over the Facebook whistleblower in an interview with 60 Minutes that the social media giant puts "profits over people". Frances Haugen, who was the former product manager at Facebook revealed herself as the whistleblower behind the leak to The Wall Street Journal.

Haugen said that Facebook knew it was creating a dark online environment for teenage girls and said that Facebook used different rules for VIP accounts and that the social media giant also had a hand in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol building. Haugen said: "There were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook. Facebook over and over again chose to optimize for its own interests like making more money".

Like Dark Souls, Sekiro, and Bloodborne, FromSoftware says Elden Ring will be "very difficult" and gamers will have "high sense of accomplishment" when they beat bosses and progress throughout the open-ended Lands Between.

Elden Ring is FromSoft's most ambitious game yet, featuring horseback riding, a huge fantasy realm full of monsters, loot, and seamless dungeons, and a wider class-based system with four-player co-op. There's one thing that remains consistent, though: Grueling and punishing gameplay. In a recent interview with Famitsu at the Tokyo Game Show, FromSoft's marketing guru Yasuhiro Kitao warns players to expect pain.

"It will be very difficult," Kitao said. "We want players to feel a sense of accomplishment, and one of the ways to achieve this is to set a high difficulty level."

I'm sitting here at 2:30AM here in South Australia and then I noticed that Facebook wasn't working on the desktop for me, and thinking I had networking issues tried to do a few things before I realized it wasn't just me.

Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are all down worldwide right now, with Facebook owning Instagram and WhatsApp. All of these services are completely dead right now, with the desktop Facebook website not working, while the app remains wobbly at best.

The outage is suspicious AF with Frances Haugen revealed her identity as the Facebook whistleblower, showing documents that the Mark Zuckerberg-led social networking giant prioritized "growth over safety" and then bam, Facebook is down worldwide.

Thanks to Kraken's compression tech, Alan Wake Remastered is half as big on PS5 as it is on PS4.

Some cross-gen games are smaller on PS5 than they are on PS4--Avengers, Hitman 3, Control Ultimate Edition--and Remedy's new Alan Wake Remastered is no exception. The game's install size is roughly 28GB on PS5 versus 57GB on PS4, which is a reduction of nearly 50%. The PS5 version includes 4K textures and all the hardware-based optimizations intact.

The significant shrink is all thanks to the PS5's utilization of RAD Game Tools' powerful Oodle Kraken compression technology, which is also now owned by Epic Games--the same billion-dollar company who's publishing Alan Wake Remastered on PS5 and PC.

Netherrealm boss Ed Boon will attend this year's DC Fandome event on October 16, and based on recent leaks, he could tease a new Injustice sequel.

Warner Bros. just revealed a star-studded schedule for DC Fandome 2021, including big names like Jason Mamoa, Kaley Cuoco, JJ Abrams, and The Rock. Among these names was Ed Boon, who leads the studio responsible for mega-hits like Mortal Kombat and Injustice.

While it's entirely possible Boon's appearance doesn't mean a new game reveal--last year he was part of a panel discussing how the Injustice games were made--there's more credence the possibility now more than ever. A recent GeForce Now database leak listed Injustice 3: Gods Will Fall as part of its catalog. Netherealm has also been hiring for multiple projects that should include a new Mortal Kombat and Injustice game. We believe that Mortal Kombat 12 will come first but we could get some sort of indication, confirmation, or teaser trailer for the next Injustice at the event.

A study that used nearly 20 years of data indicates that Earth is becoming dimmer, and climate change is the likely culprit.

Earth reflects around 30% of the sunlight that hits the planet, and according to the researchers who published the paper in the peer-reviewed journal Geophysical Research Letters, Earth's albedo, or reflectance, has reduced. Researchers used data from 1998 to 2017 to measure the amount of Earthshine that causes the Moon to be illuminated and found that it has reduced by half a watt less light per square meter, or 0.5% when compared to data recorded in 1998.

According to theoretical physicist Philip Goode from the New Jersey Institute of Technology, "The albedo drop was such a surprise to us when we analyzed the last three years of data after 17 years of nearly flat albedo." The study found that the likely culprit of the reduction in reflectance is not due to a reduction in sunlight coming from Earth, but a reduction in the number of reflective clouds that appear over the eastern Pacific Ocean. The researchers link the reduction in these clouds to climate change.

The massive cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has confirmed that thousands of accounts have been breached.

Coinbase has sent out a notification letter to at least 6,000 Coinbase customers who have had funds removed from their accounts. According to the letter, which can be found in full below, "these third parties first needed prior knowledge of the email address, password, and phone number associated with your Coinbase account, as well as access to your personal email inbox" to gain access to the Coinbase accounts.

Additionally, Coinbase states that it has found no evidence that the aforementioned information was acquired from Coinbase itself. On top of that, Coinbase says that even if the third-parties that stole the cryptocurrency had all of the aforementioned information, they would still need proceed through additional authentication measures to access a Coinbase account.

The volcanic eruption that has happened on Spain's La Palma island doesn't seem to be stopping anytime soon, and some new images from space reveal its destruction.

Locals in the area have reported earthquakes in the region as the La Palma volcano continues to spew lava out into the surrounding area. The images from space come from Russian cosmonauts Oleg Novitsky and Pyotr Dubrov, who are aboard the International Space Station (ISS). The cosmonauts snapped images of the volcanic eruption as the ISS passed overhead at night, which made for a beautifully horrific image of a river of lava passing through a surrounding town.

Reports indicate that more than 1,000 buildings have been buried in lava since the volcano first began erupting back on September 19. In total, 1.4 square miles of land have been swallowed by the lava, and due to new earthquakes that occurred on October 1, the flow of lava isn't stopping. As for people, more than 6,000 residents in the local area have been evacuated. If you are interested in reading more about this story, check out this link here.

A new paper that has appeared on the pre-print server arXiv has detailed the arrival time for what could be the largest comet humans have ever discovered.

The comet is Bernardinelli-Bernstein and researchers estimate that it is at least 62 miles in diameter, which is around 1,000 times larger than a typical comet. Researchers previously incorrectly estimated that Bernardinelli-Bernstein was a dwarf planet due to its size but later found out that it was a comet. Further analysis of the celestial object found that it's making its way towards the Sun.

At the moment, Bernardinelli-Bernstein is located in the Oort cloud, 29 astronomical units away from Earth. An astronomical unit is the distance between Earth and the Sun, which is about 93 million miles. Researchers detail in their paper that Bernardinelli-Bernstein will make its closest approach to Earth within 10.97 astronomical units, which will put it just outside of Saturn's orbit. The researchers estimate that Bernardinelli-Bernstein will make its closest approach with Earth 10 years from now.

The Hubble Space Telescope is at it again with another jaw-dropping image. This time the space telescope has snapped a photo of a celestial "eye".

The image is of a spiral galaxy dubbed NGC 5728 that's located around 130 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Libra. NGC 5728 is a Seyfert galaxy, which means it has an active nucleus at its center. According to Space.com, at the center of this galaxy, there is a black hole that has lots of gas and dust surrounding it, causing it to be bright.

The image was released by the European Space Agency, which co-operates the Hubble Space Telescope with NASA. According to European Space Agency, "As this image shows, NGC 5728 is clearly observable, and at optical and infrared wavelengths it looks quite normal. It is fascinating to know that the galaxy's centre is emitting vast amounts of light in parts of the electromagnetic spectrum that WFC3 [Wide Field Camera 3] just isn't sensitive to!"

A mystery that has spanned almost half a century has just been answered, according to a team of researchers.

The mystery involved the above image, which is a trace fossil. A trace fossil shows the activity of an animal rather than the animal themselves, and these types of fossils provide really valuable information to researchers looking to understand the evolution of complex life on Earth. The quartzite rock was discovered in Mount Barren in southwestern Australia, and the tracks embedded in it appear to have been made by crustaceans that burrow into the sand.

The only problem is, "quartzite is as hard as concrete and impossible for burrowing animals to penetrate. The traces would therefore have had to be made while the sand was still loose. But the sand was deposited 1.7 billion years ago - a billion years prior to the appearance of the first animals in the fossil record, and its transformation to quartzite occurred more than 1.2 billion years ago, much earlier than the oldest animal fossils, which are less than 0.6 billion years old," said paleontologist Bruce Runnegar from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

In a bombshell report from CBS Mornings, current and former Blue Origin employees have signed an essay that accuses Blue Origin of prioritizing speed over safety.

The report occurred on October 1st, and according to Alexandra Abrams, a former head of employee communications at Blue Origin, the company pushes employees to sign brutal nondisclosure agreements that infringe on rights, doesn't listen to any feedback, and disregards safety warnings provided by employees. On top of that, the essay, which was published on the website Lioness, details that the workplace environment at Blue Origin was "toxic" and an uncomfortable sexist climate for women.

Now, NASA has fired back at Blue Origin, saying that the company is threatening to destroy the "once-in-a-generation momentum" because it gambled on its original proposal for a new lunar lander and lost. NASA's lawyers stated in legal documents obtained by The Verge through the Freedom of Information Act that "Blue Origin made a bet, and it lost." Due to the legal battle between NASA and Blue Origin the construction of a new lunar lander has been put on hold which throws the 2024 date of the next Moon landing into jeopardy.

Yellowstone National Park, located mostly in Wyoming, is a 3,500 square-mile volcanic hotspot that is home to the world's largest active geyser.

The geyser named Steamboat Geyser has been observed for a number of years, along with the rest of the park, as researchers fear that one day the supervolcano located underneath the surface will erupt. Monitoring the geysers and the overall park will give researchers the data they need to be able to predict if an eruption is likely, which in turn will help save lives if an evacuation is needed.

As for Steamboat, onlookers of this active geyser will see water being shot out of the northern vent at heights of 300 feet to 400 feet. As with all geysers, Steamboat's eruptions go through cycles, and depending on what stage of the cycle the geyser is in will determine how active it is. In the past three years, there have been over 110 eruptions, leading some researchers to believe that Steamboat is slightly more active than what it usually is.

Konami has enlisted Virtuos to lead development of a Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater remake, sources tell Video Game Chronicle.

Virtuos, a Singapore-based game developer mostly known for excellent ports of games like The Outer Worlds and Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD, is currently making a MGS3 remake. Contrary to popular belief, Sony's newly-acquired Bluepoint apparently isn't working on Metal Gear.

The project is in early phases of development and underlines Konami's reinvigorated focus on premium AAA releases, which is something the company outlined in 2019:

Some of gaming's top companies will discuss the industry's next evolution--the mysterious metaverse.

The metaverse is hailed as the future of video games. It's a somewhat-confusing concept centered around a kind of total immersion where all of gaming's current facets combine into one multi-dimensional experience: social interactions, online multiplayer, digital avatars, advertising, etc. So far no one can aptly describe or really explain the metaverse (outside of essayists like Matthew Ball) because it hasn't necessarily been established by any games-makers yet. The closest thing we have right now are titles like Fortnite, which has become a huge interactive advertising billboard and melting pot for media's biggest properties, and Roblox, which has a distinct meta-realm focus by hosting a platform of player-created experiences.

This could change as more game developers start talking openly about the metaverse. NVIDIA's GTC 2021 showcase will be a stage where one such talk will take place. The GTC '21 program schedule confirms big players like Epic Games and Roblox will attend a panel discussing the metaverse.

Capcom reiterates its strong emphasis on PC games, promises to continue simultaneously launching games on consoles and PC.

In a recent interview with Nikkei, Capcom's Chief Operating Officer Haruhiro Tsujimoto underlines how important PC gaming is for the company by saying it wants PC and console gaming to eventually hit a 50:50 even split. Tsujimoto reaffirms Capcom's commitment to both simultaneous and staggered PC releases of hit games, and strongly hints that pretty much all games moving forward will release on PC at some point (the most recent example is Monster Hunter Rise, which is scheduled to launch in January 2022).

Capcom has been investing heavily into PC gaming for a while now. There's a big reason for this: PC gaming is basically all-digital, and Capcom wants to reduce its spending while maximizing revenues. Digital gaming is the best way to do this. There's also the added bonus of instant distribution via downloads. The plan is paying off big: Capcom has had multiple years of record operating revenues because of its focus on digital gaming. For emphasis, Capcom sold 20.5 million digital games in 2020; in 2021 it hopes to push that number to a record-breaking 23.5 million.

Final Fantasy 16's development is going according to plan, game director Naoki Yoshida says.

Tons of games are getting delayed but Final Fantasy 16 may not be one of them. In a recent Tokyo Game Show stream, Final Fantasy 16 director Yoshi-P confirms the main storyline (what Square Enix refers to as the "main scenario") has been completed and finished. Right now the team is finalizing character models using motion-captured animations, which is one of the most time-consuming parts of any game. Yoshida-san reassures fans that FF16's dev team is currently polishing the core experience but there's still no release date just yet.

Yoshi-P also hints that Final Fantasy 16 has been in the works for some time. The RPG has a medieval-style scope that sees the franchise returning to its roots, complete with modernized hack-and-slash action combat reminiscent of Final Fantasy 15's energetic fighting sequences.

Intel's new Alder Lake CPU platform is about as close as it can be to me smelling that fresh silicon, with BIOSTAR now officially teasing its next-gen Z690-based motherboards.

BIOSTAR is preparing at least two Z690 motherboards with new Racing and Valkyrie Z690 motherboards, which will take Intel's new LGA1700-based 12th Gen "Alder Lake" CPUs. We don't know if these new BIOSTAR motherboards are DDR5 or DDR4, since Alder Lake can accept both -- but I'd say at least one, if not both of these new motherboards, are ready for next-gen DDR5 memory.

Here's the official tweet in question from BIOSTAR which is teasing its next-gen motherboards, of course without spoiling that they're based on the new 600-series chipset from Intel and ready for the next-gen Alder Lake family of CPUs.

If you know how to access the black market in China, then you can get yourself Intel's unreleased, next-gen flagship Core i9-12900K "Alder Lake" CPU.

The new Core i9-12900K can be purchased on the black market in China for around $700, with the chips being sold on the Taobao second-hand market. The processors in question are ES2 or second-generation engineering samples. These processors aren't meant to be sold and are sent out for qualification testing months ahead of launch.

Intel's Core i9-12900K ES2 processor isn't a final chip and any performance numbers you see from them should be taken with a grain of salt. There can be hardware-level bugs, lowered performance numbers, and more. The new 600-series chipset is also required, with a new motherboard also required -- oh and a new cooler.