Latest News - Page 1366

A new Call of Duty: Warzone tournament has been announced, and its one for the history books as its the first Warzone tournament that pays out winners in cryptocurrency.

The tournament is being organized by a company called Military Finance ($MIL), which has dedicated its business model to providing financial and emotional support to military veterans. According to the Military Finance website, the tournament will be month-to-month for 13 months with $50,000 up for grabs each month. It's also stated on the website that winners of the semifinals will automatically be in the final tournament that has a prize of $400,000. Anyone can enter if they pay $25 in $MIL coin.

Looking at Military Finances White Paper, the company states, "Once $MIL reaches 5,000 holders, the coins in the donation wallet will be transferred according to these specifications: 75% transferred to veteran charities, 15% for operation expenses, and 10% marketing to grow the value of the coin. In the event the donation wallet exceeds 5% of the liquidity pool the remaining tokens will be burned. This insures the market stays healthy and makes the token deflationary."

For years DICE L.A. has been a support studio for the Battlefield franchise. Now they've rebranded into their own studio and are working on a new game.

Today is a big deal for EA's Los Angeles-based team. DICE L.A. is now called Ripple Effect Studios, and has been officially recognized as its own studio. Respawn's Vince Zampella will co-lead the studio alongside GM Christian Grass. "We're currently working on a player-inspired experience for Battlefield 2042 and starting work on a yet-to-be announced project," the studio said.

The news comes over a year after EA confirmed DICE L.A. would eventually turn into an original team. Ripple Effect's current project, Battlefield 2042's third mysterious mode that's rumored to be a hub for classic maps and gametypes, will be revealed on July 22. The studio is also working on a new original game set in an unannounced IP.

The Witcher 3 looks great on its own but it really stands out on its own with some mods placed on top of it, but with a bunch of mods and running at 8K -- 7680 x 4320 -- it looks out of this world. Check it out:

Digital Dreams has shared a new video running The Witcher 3 loaded with mods including the ray tracing reshade mod, Vanilla Lighting 2.0, and at 8K. You'll need the most powerful hardware you can buy, so I wouldn't be trying this without NVIDIA's flagship GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card.

The PC running The Witcher 3 with the ray tracing reshade + Vanilla Lighting 2.0 and all at 8K is the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X processor, 32GB of DDR4, and an ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card.

Fallout 76's new legendary crafting system is now live, but it hasn't changed all that much from the unpopular PTS build.

Fallout 76 players can now craft the perfect legendary item, but the odds of that happening are extremely small. The new legendary crafting system lets players re-roll powerful weapons and armor for the chance of unlocking the best of the best gear. There's just one issue: The odds are very much against you.

Gamers have a few issues with the system. It requires a hefty investment in materials gathering with no guaranteed payoff. The argument is that it shouldn't be easy to get perfect gear, but players still want more control in the items they do get.

Apple has only just entered the world of Mini-LED technology on its new 12.9-inch iPad Pro but the Cupertino-based company is already shifting into OLED.

The new 12.9-inch iPad Pro only just launched with its new Mini-LED display, and while we've been hearing rumors of an OLED iPad already, the latest word is coming from the Display Supply Chain Consultants (DSCC). DSCC said in its new quarterly OLED Shipment Report that Apple will release a 10.9-inch AMOLED iPad, possibly an iPad Air with an OLED panel in 2023.

Apple has been using OLED displays in their latest iPhones, the new Apple Watch, the MacBook Pro Touch Bar (hey, it still counts) as well as OLED displays for the Mac and iPad. DSCC says the first iPad with an OLED display will drop in 2023, but other rumors have said that Apple would have a 10.8-inch iPad with an OLED display in 2022... I guess we'll have to wait and see.

There are over 170 apps available on Android that are crypto mining scams, with 26 of the cloud mining apps available publicly on the Google Play Store.

Security firm Lookout found the apps, saying that they "advertise themselves as providing cloud cryptocurrency mining services for a fee". The team did a detailed analysis of the apps and found that there was in fact no cloud crypto mining going on -- shock, horror -- no, really.

Google has since removed the 26 apps that weren't actrually cloud crypto mining from the Play Store, with over 86,000 people scammed by the crypto mining apps. At least $350,000+ was lost, either through the purchase of the app itself, or through fake upgrades and other services in-app.

In what feels like it's ripped right out of an episode of Black Mirror, Tencent has announced that it will be using facial recognition technology to stop minors in China from playing games into the night -- and past China's strict curfews.

China passed a law in 2019 that stopped minors "from indulging in video games" making it seem like gaming is like heroin or some other super addictive narcotic, with the Chinese Communist Party stamping down a ban on minors gaming between the hours of 10PM and 8AM -- and that's on top of limiting their gaming time to just 90 minutes per day.

The restrictions don't end there: minors are only able to spend between $28 and $57 per month on microtransactions, and no matter your age -- if you're gaming in China then you'll need to use your real identity to register for games, and gamers in China are restricted from playing games with "sexual explicitness, goriness, violence, and gambling"... sorry GTA, and like most popular games.

Rockstar Games is about to unleash some performance-enhancing goodness in its new Blood Money update, with NVIDIA's kick ass DLSS technology entering Red Dead Redemption 2.

The Blood Money trailer above gives you an idea of what to expect with the big Red Dead Redemption 2 update, with GeForce RTX gamers tapping some performance upgrades with DLSS. If you're gaming at higher resolutions and want some free performance, DLSS will drop on July 13 and give you better performance and image quality.

Rockstar notes right at the bottom like it's some last-minute addition that "as part of the July 13th update" that both Red Dead Redemption 2 and Read Dead Online on PC will have NVIDIA DLSS support for "all Windows users with eligible NVIDIA GeForce RTX graphics cards". Rockstar teases that DLSS will boost FPS and "generates beautiful sharp images".

Fallout 76's new Steel Reign update makes big changes to the game's economy and fans are pretty happy.

Bethesda just released a hefty new update for Fallout 76 that increases resource caps across the board. Players can now hold 40,000 caps (up from 30,000), gold bullion caps have been doubled to 10,000 units, daily scrip earnouts have doubled to 300 scrip, and the max scrip a player can hold has been boosted by 500% to a whopping 5,000. The developers at Bethesda Game Studios Austin are clearly listening to feedback.

The most important resource boost is the scrip limits. Like all Fallout games, Fallout 76's mid-to-endgame loop is driven by the hunt for legendary items. Seasoned players want to collect perfect legendary gear for themselves and their groups, and are prepared to do some serious grinding to get them. Fallout 76's randomized system can deliver lots of junk legendaries across 1-, 2-, or 3-star variants. Gamers scrap the items they don't want to get scrip, which is then spent on randomized legendary lootboxes from Purveyor Murmrgh. These boxes have the chance to drop some serious high-powered gear, but if they don't, players scrap them for even more scrip.

Assassin's Creed Origins, Odyssey Valhalla...these games were all experiments leading up to an infinite Assassin's Creed platform.

Ubisoft's new Assassin's Creed Infinity isn't a game. It's a platform. Ubisoft has a bold vision for a cross-platform hub that will serve up future Assassin's Creed games and content. The idea is to create an online platform that offers expanding content with different historical settings, not unlike a subscription service.

Think of Infinity as a kind of Halo Waypoint for Assassin's Creed that sells games, content, and microtransactions. Infinity is basically it's own digital distribution platform/storefront in a games wrapper, and kind of like an MMO launcher with sequels as well as expansions.

President Trump was pretty much memory holed and removed from social media earlier this year, but he's not sitting on his hands at all -- far from that in fact.

President Trump has announced that he is suing Facebook, Google, and Twitter -- and their respective CEOs in Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, and Jack Dorsey. Trump said at a news conference in Bedminster, New Jersey: "We're demanding an end to the shadow banning, a stop to the silencing, a stop to the blacklisting, vanishing and canceling". He added that "we are asking the court to impose punitive damages".

The major argument that President Trump is pushing is that being suspended from his various social media accounts is an infringement on the First Amendment, that free speech wouldn't be stomped on by the government. President Trump added: "The Founding Fathers inscribed this right in the very first amendment to our Constitution because they knew that free speech is essential to the prevention of, look ... the prevention of horror".

Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO) have gained recently popularity lately after videos of UFOs, or as the military call them Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP), were released by the US Navy.

Since then many videos/photos have surfaced online of people claiming to have spotted a UFO, and with most of these videos there is an insinuation that the object that is being observed is otherworldly. Unfortunately, majority of the video proof is also captured with a camera that lacks quality, which can lead to viewers believing that the object is otherworldly, and that what they are witnessing cannot be explained by something much simpler.

One UFO sighting that recently went viral came from Matthew Evans, a student living in Devon. Evans lives in a block of units on the top level and looked out his kitchen window to see what was described as object that had four bright lights that were orientated in a triangular formation. Matthew Blythe, a local photographer took an image of the same view as Evans, but Blythe's image was taken with a much better and showed that the object was just the Moon.

The United States was the victim of a malicious ransomware attack on July 4 that has now been called the largest ransomware attack in history.

The attack was carried out on July 4, and since then, a Russia-linked hacking group called REvil has claimed responsibility. REvil has now posted onto its dark web site the choice of purchasing a decryptor software key that would allow for companies to access their data. However, the price of that decryptor software key is $70 million in the form of cryptocurrency.

REvil has affected thousands of users and managed to gain control through firms that manage IT infrastructure for companies remotely. President Biden has previously said to Russia's President, Vladamir Putin, "we will respond" if Russia is found responsible for an attack. Deputy National Security Advisor Anne Neuberger has stated that Biden has "directed the full resources of the government to investigate this incident" and is asking anyone who has been affected by this attack to contact the FBI.

After 20 years of delays, the International Space Station (ISS) will finally get its long-awaited "walking" robotic arm.

On July 15, the European Robotic Arm (ERA) will launch from Earth towards the ISS on board a Russian Proton rocket that will also be carrying the Russian Multipurpose Laboratory Module. The European Space Agency has explained that the robotic arm measures in at 36 feet and will be smart enough to anchor itself to locations outside of the Russian segment of the ISS as well as move between certain points.

The purpose of the arm is to assist astronauts that are out on spacewalks by carrying payloads, transporting crew members, using its cameras to inspect areas out of the station. Essentially, the arm will free up time for astronauts that can now concentrate on other matters. Astronauts have the ability to control the robot from inside the Space Station or from the outside. Additionally, the robot can be programmed to carry out a set of instructions or can be used free-hand.

Astronomers have located four planets near the center of the Milky Way galaxy that are close to the mass of Earth.

The new study has been published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, and presents evidence of four planets that are "rogue" or "free-floating", meaning they aren't bound to the gravitation pull of a star. The team of researchers used data from a 2016 mission conducted by NASA's Kepler Space Telescope that observed a field of millions of stars near the center of the Milky Way.

Interestingly, Kepler isn't designed to find new planets, which means that the researchers needed to create new data extracting techniques to extrapolate the evidence from Kepler's dataset. Co-author Eamonn Kerins of the University of Manchester said, "Kepler has achieved what it was never designed to do, in providing further tentative evidence for the existence of a population of Earth-mass, free-floating planets. Now it passes the baton on to other missions that will be designed to find such signals, signals so elusive that Einstein himself thought that they were unlikely ever to be observed."

There is a really bad bug that has been found with Apple's iPhones, and if you have accidentally experienced it and want to fix it or just want to avoid it in general, this is what you will need to know.

Over the weekend, a security researcher named Carl Schou joined a Wi-Fi network named "%p%s%s%s%s%n" and noticed that the Wi-Fi on his phone stopped working and was unable to be turned back on. Additionally, Schou noticed that other network-based features such as AirDrop also weren't working. Schou said anyone could "disable any iOS device's WiFI by hosting a public Wi-Fi named %secretclub%power."

Another thing to note is that the Wi-Fi name doesn't need to have a "%" character in it for it to disable your Wi-Fi connection. Amichai Shulman, CTO of wireless security specialist AirEye said to Forbes, "Our research team was able to construct the network name in a way that does not expose the user to the weird characters, making it look like a legitimate, existing network name."

Back at the end of May, iOS 14.6 was released to the public, and since then, reports are surfacing about how the newest update is causing iPhone batteries to drain faster than usual.

A new report from CNET states that several users have been saying that their iPhone's battery is draining a lot faster than it usually does since they updated their phone to iOS 14.6 and that this was most noticeable when using when the Podcast app. iOS 14.6 ushered in new features for iPhone users, some of which are a new way to find lost AirTag trackers, Apple Card Family, and more Apple Music support.

CNET recommends that if you have noticed a drop in your iPhone's battery life, you should go to Settings > Battery to find any apps that are using excessive battery power. Once you have located these apps, it's up to you whether or not you want to close/remove them to fix the problem. For more information on this story, check out this link here.

iPhone users have a massive problem on their hands, and millions of iPhone users have now been recommended to do their best to avoid it.

The problem revealed itself to the world over the weekend when Carl Shou discovered that joining a Wi-Fi network that had specific symbols (%in the name (SSID) would break his iPhone's Wi-Fi connection until the phone's network settings were reset. You are probably thinking, "well, I just won't join a network that has out-of-place symbols in it's name".

You would have been right until Amichai Shulman, CTO of wireless security specialist AirEye spoke to Forbes regarding the issue and said, "Our research team was able to construct the network name in a way that does not expose the user to the weird characters, making it look like a legitimate, existing network name." Now, Shulman is warning users that hackers could create Wi-Fi hotspot networks that use the name of popular public Wi-Fi hotspots such as Starbucks to bait people into joining.

Hubble is at it again with another breathtaking image that shows off a great comparison between two different light waves of a spiral galaxy.

As NASA explains, the Hubble Space Telescope has captured two extremely different images of the spiral galaxy M51 called the Whirlpool Galaxy. The image located on the left is an image captured in visible light, or the light that humans would see it in if they were floating around in space looking at the galaxy. The visible-light image shows off the galaxy's long arms and the pink star-forming regions littered with blue strands of star clusters.

The image on the right is shot in infrared light, light that humans are unable to see. The infrared image has stripped all of the starlight away from the image and leaves viewers with what NASA describes as "Whirlpool's skeletal dust structure". If you are interested in reading more about this story, check out this link here. If you would like to check out more images released by Hubble, visit this link here.

Chimpanzees are our closest known relatives, and a distinct difference between us is that chimpanzees are unable to talk.

But what if they could talk? What would they sound like? Back in 2016, researchers posed that very question to themselves and decided to create a simulation of a monkey talking. The researchers did this by using x-ray videos to map out vocal tracts in living macaques and found that macaques were able to produce an "adequate range of speech sounds to support spoken language". So, why is this important?

The study outlines that for forty years, researchers have believed that the monkeys being unable to speak stems from "limitations in their vocal tract anatomy". This study has disproved that, and has instead found that the limitation doesn't lay in the vocal anatomy but instead with the brain as it's unable to control the vocal tract. If you have never heard what a monkey would sound like if it spoke, the 1-second video can be watched above. The stimulated monkey says, "will you marry me?" - in a not-so-romantic voice.