Microsoft could outline new plans for its Xbox games division next month, sources tell ZDNet.

Microsoft's online-only Build conference is set for May 25-27, and Xbox could show up in some form. Sources say that Microsoft will hold a "What's Next for Gaming" presentation in the coming weeks, presumably before, during, or after the main Build show.

The event may not have many substantial announcements, however. The small-scale event is expected to have investor-friendly presentations that highlight Microsoft's games business, complete with reinforcement on console and cloud gaming, as well as in-development projects. We may get a few snippets about Project xCloud updates, too.

eBay scalpers are once again taking advantage of Nintendo product scarcity with exorbitantly expensive listings.

Days ago, Nintendo officially discontinued sale of 3D Mario All-Stars on Nintendo Switch. It didn't take long for scalpers to close in and start opening up wildly fluctuating auctions for the game. Some eBay listings are moderately priced at $65-80, whereas others skyrocket into the thousands of dollars. There's even a listing that asks $25,000 for a copy.

Nintendo has been criticized for product scarcity in the past, and often, the supply of its games and hardware has been out of the company's control. With Mario 3D All-Stars, however, the company has in fact created artificial scarcity by de-listing the game from its own digital storefront--digital games don't have any supply issues. Sources close to Nintendo say the business decision was made to drive up FOMO sales (fear of missing out).

GameStop, the famously-volatile "meme stock" that rose to $347.51 in January, is about to issue up to 3.5 million shares to help raise money for its business.

Today GameStop announced that it will sell 3.5 million common stock in an at-the-market sale price. The current market rate for GME is $191.45, and the company warns of extreme volatility in the stock. Investors are to take caution as the shares could lead to "significant material loss."

In a recent SEC filing where the company outlines its prospectus, GameStop says it will use the funds broadly across its business, from debt repayments (the company owes $244 million in long- and short-term debt) to its new ambitious e-commerce plan.

YouTuber Michael Pick has created a massive Nintendo Switch that King Kong would absolutely love.

Modder and electrical whiz Michael Pick just made the world's largest Nintendo Switch, a behemoth that measures 70 inches x 30 inches, weighs 65lbs, and is 650% bigger than a normal handheld-console.

The monster-sized console comes with a full-sized 4K UHDTV display and two oversized JoyCon controllers that actually work, not unlike the DualSense included with the huge $70,000 PlayStation 5.

You may not know it, but the security passcode that you use for your phone, whether it be iPhone or an Android, could be a very simple combination for a hacker to guess.

In the entirety of this article, you will find a list of the most common guessable passcodes that have been published by security expert Tarah Wheeler. Wheeler noted back in 2019 that almost 30% of all iPhones that have been broken into are using one of these twenty different passcodes, which is why it's recommended to change your passcode to something else if you find it on the list.

If you are still worried about your phone passcode being guessed by someone, you can always enable Face ID/Touch ID or whatever is equivalent to your Android device. These forms of security make it much more difficult for someone to try and get into your phone as they cannot be randomly guessed. Digital security is important, and the more you adopt technology into your life, the more important it is to make sure it's secure becomes.

One of the White House health advisors has said that there is a "message" problem regarding what vaccinated people can now do.

That White House health advisor is Dr. Michael Osterholm, who recently stated that COVID-19 vaccines are not complete protection against the virus, thus the recommendation of fully vaccinated people avoiding air travel if it's "nonessential". Here's what Dr. Osterholm said, "It's not perfect, it's not 100 percent [protection from COVID-19]".

Dr. Osterholm also said that there is a problem with conveying this message to the public, stating, "We do have a problem right now from a public health standpoint nuancing that message." As for what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends, fully vaccinated people can safely travel but are still recommended to wear masks.

We've already had a decent look at the patent for AMD's upcoming GPU chiplet technology, but a new patent that was published on April 1 teases a few very interesting new things.

AMD's new GPU chiplet technology patent has an inter-chiplet bridge that has its own integrated cache, which is the main course here versus the previous tease of AMD's upcoming GPU chiplet tech. The active bridge would be a high-bandwidth die-to-die interconnect between the GPU chiplet dies, depending on how many there are.

The active bridge chiplet would handle inter-chiplet communications and route cross-chiplet synchronization signals, where the LLC here means L3 cache -- AKA the new Infinity Cache found inside of the new RDNA 2-based Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope is still in action capturing astonishing images of planets, galaxies, and other celestial sights.

Above we have an image of the Veil Nebula, and as BGR mentions, it looks like the image was created using special effects, but it's not. This is Mother Nature at her finest. On NASA's post, it details that the Veil Nebula is 2,100 light-years away from Earth and that the nebula was created as a result of a death of a star that is estimated to be 20 times the mass of our Sun.

What we are seeing in the image is ionized gas that has been left over after the star detonated around 10,000 years ago. While it may take some billions of years, eventually, all of this gas will clump together into tighter and tighter pieces. Dust and other materials in space will also clump together, which may form a brand new planetary system, and thus the cycle of stars and planets. For more information on this story, check out this link here.

The very latest version of Core Temp is here with version 1.17 being the first update of the software in close to 10 months, and the very first update of 2021.

Core Temp 1.17 has support for AMD's Zen 2 and Zen 3 APUs (Lucienne and Cezanne), and Intel's new Rocket Lake processors in the new 11th Gen Core range of processors. Core Temp not only supports Intel's just-released Rocket Lake family of CPUs but the upcoming Alder Lake and even Meteor Lake CPUs coming in the next couple of years from Intel.

There's also a bunch of fixes and a few tweaks here and there with the new version of Core Temp, which you can download here. The full changelog for Core Temp v1.17:

Google will unveil its next-gen Pixel 6 smartphones later this year, with 9to5Google reporting that the new Pixel 6 will be one of the first devices running on Google's own in-house "GA101" Whitechapel chip.

The new Whitechapel chip has been rumored since early 2020 and would see Google building and using its own in-house SoCs to power their Pixel smartphones and Chromebooks. This is similar to how Apple uses its own chips inside of the iPhone and Mac and Samsung splits its Galaxy smartphones with some of them running the in-house Exynos chip while the others use a Snapdragon chip from Qualcomm.

9to5Google reports that we could see the first Whitechapel-powered smartphone with the release of Google's next-gen Pixel 6 family of handsets, with "GS101" possibly standing for "Google Silicon". Another tip is Whitechapel is "used in connection" with the codename Slider that 9to5Google found in the Google Camera app.

Another day, another huge Facebook data leak with the personal data of 533 million users has leaked online and is available for free.

Business Insider reports that it has verified the leaks, explaining: "The exposed data includes personal information of over 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries, including over 32 million records on users in the US, 11 million on users in the UK, and 6 million on users in India. It includes their phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birthdates, BIOS, and - in some cases - email addresses".

Facebook explains that it had fixed a vulnerability in 2019 and that the data scraped was from back then, and not current data. But the information on the users is the same with the biggest point here being the phone numbers, as many more services now just require a phone number for registration and as the creator of Have I Been Pwned database, Troy Hunt, explains:

SpaceX is making some great strides with its satellite-based internet service Starlink, with one user in Sonoma County, California showing that he was rocking up to a pretty insane 200Mbps of bandwidth from his Starlink internet service.

You're not going to get 200Mbps out of the box and 24/7 with Starlink, but it is more of a case of what the service is capable of. The lowest of the 6 results the user shared with Wccftech has him pegged at 44Mbps, but this got a little higher as the tests continued.

SpaceX told the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) back in October 2020 that the average download speed for its Starlink internet service would be at around 80Mbps -- up from the 43Mbps average speed the company talked about in September. But there are other users around the US where in Montana someone hit 190Mbps while Starlink users in Seattle and New York were seeing 230-240Mbps. Not too damn bad at all.

Another GPU competitor has just entered the chat, with Chinese company Tianshu Zhixin announcing its new compute accelerator a couple of months ago -- and now we have some more firm details on the Big Island GPU.

Tianshu Zhixin's new Big Island GPU is made on TSMC's 7nm process, packs over 24 billion transistors, and 37 TFLOPs of single-precision compute power. The new compute accelerator is using the latest PCIe 4.0 standard, packs 32GB of super-fast HBM2 memory (unknown memory bandwidth at the moment) and uses 300W of power.

The new Big Island GPU will be offered by Tianshu Zhixin in both the normal dual-slot PCIe 4.0 x16 standard with passive cooling, as well as the normal mezzanine board form factor. The company hasn't shared the double-precision compute performance, but once we have those numbers we'll let you know how Tianshu Zhixin's new GPGPU performs in FP32.

MSI's new MEG Z590 ACE motherboard was revealed alongside Intel's new 11th Gen Core CPUs -- also known as Rocket Lake-S which are led by the flagship Core i9-11900K processor.

But now we're getting our first look at a new variant of the board with MSI's upcoming MEG Z590 ACE Gold Edition motherboard, which sees the company changing up the color scheme and introducing brushed aluminum and parts of gold throughout the board and its design.

It's the same motherboard as the original dark version, but MSI has dipped it in the new color scheme and it really does look great. With the right components -- G.SKILL's Trident Z Royal DDR4 RAM is an absolute MUST with this motherboard in my opinion -- this motherboard would look fantastic in a gaming PC.

It seems that Hong Kong customs are having a good day having seized some 300 of NVIDIA's new CMP (Crypto Mining Processors) mining cards.

According to MyDrivers, Hong Kong customs have seized the crypto mining GPUs in a smuggling attempt -- but that's not what you should be doing when in some regions China has bans on crypto mining farms. There were massive surges of electricity demand from crypto mining farms enjoying cheap electricity prices in many regions of China.

Around 65% of global mining power requirements are supplied by China according to estimates, and because of that the government has been clamping down on crypto mining farms pretty hard. The 300 new NVIDIA crypto mining GPUs were seized, with the entry-level CMP 30HX seized in large quantities.

Apex Legends season 9 will introduce a new legend, and a bunch of content that pleases Titanfall fans.

Respawn has ambitions plans to inject more Titanfall into its billion-dollar battle royale Apex Legends. The two games share the same universe, after all. In a recent dev panel, Apex Game Director Chad Grenier says Apex's new season (season 9) will have lots of throwbacks to the Titanfall games.

"Titanfall and Apex Legends are definitely in the same universe. We're not trying to separate them too much. We bring a lot of things from Titanfall into the game almost every season. Next season, season 9, you're actually going to see a ton of Titanfall coming back into the game one way or another,"Grenier said.

Cross-progression and private matches are still coming to Apex Legends, but Respawn doesn't have an official timeline.

Cross-play, one of the most important parts of any monetized live game, is now live in Apex Legends. The other missing link, cross-progression across consoles, PC, and Switch, is still being worked on, and it could take a while before it's ready. Respawn says that adding in cross-progression is more difficult than they anticipated.

"I'm really passionate about having cross-play into the game, which is why we added it. One another thing I'm passionate about is cross-progression, which we don't support yet, but we are working on it," Apex Legends Game Director Chad Grenier said in a recent BrownGirlGamerCode dev panel.

Creating new playable legend characters in Apex Legends is a long, long process that takes over one year, Respawn's Chad Grenier confirms.

Making games is tough, but live games are a whole different world of difficulty. The dev cycle for service games never stops, and the game requires consistent updates, tweaks, and content drops. This process means studios like Respawn are in perpetual motion at all times and production cycles overlap.

In a recent developer panel on Twitch, Apex Legends Game Director Chad Grenier gives transparency on how long the process can take. In this case, making a new playable legend to keep the roster fresh and create an engaging meta.

Chinese regulators just published a new controller patent from Tencent, and the design looks very familiar.

Tencent files a patent for the missing half of its games hardware R&D--a controller. A new patent shows what could be Tencent's idea for a gamepad. The peripheral is very derivative, and looks a combination of the Switch Pro, DualShock, and Xbox One controllers. Sadly, we couldn't find the actual patent on the Chinese patent office website, but the code is CN306433411S.

There's a touchpad right from a DualShock, a battery indicator similar to the Switch Pro, and the Xbox-style joystick design. There's even paddle buttons on the back. Specs aren't available, and it's worth mentioning this isn't a final product and may never actually be released. Like Sony, Tencent has filed a multitude of games patents that haven't become consumer products.

Gaming generated nearly $43 billion in North America in 2020, and companies like Nintendo were major contributors.

According to a new report from Research and Markets, consumers spent $42.83 billion on games in North America. Most of these billions were made from mobile games, the firm says, and the U.S. has more than 200 million mobile players.

To give the earnings some context, I dug around in company financials to see which of the industry's major players contributed the most to these earnings. Sadly, not every company reports geographic split for games earnings (Tencent does not report geo-split for gaming, for example, or else they'd be at the top; Sony doesn't either).