Latest News - Page 1643

Have your credit card linked to your Nintendo Account? Remove it, or add two-factor authentication to protect yourself.

Hackers are breaking into Nintendo Accounts and stealing credit card info, leading to fraudulent charges and hijacking of sensitive data, Nintendo Japan reports. We're not sure if this is just isolated overseas in Japan or of it's more widespread, but the millions of people staying at home worldwide due to COVID-19 are prime targets for theft. Gamers are more eager to buy digital games from the eShop, and that means using credit and debit cards.

Nintendo obviously doesn't want you to remove your credit card from your Nintendo Account--then you'd be less likely to make impulse buys--but it does encourage two-factor authentication. It's a pretty simple process and involves installing Google Authenticator to generate a random code every time you want to access your account info or make a purchase.

It appears that gamers Down Under are getting hurt by the coronavirus restrictions, with 3 gamers in Victoria, Australia being fined $1652 AUD ($1018) for playing games in a lounge room.

Victoria Police have been doing spot checks throughout the state to make sure that Australians are following their (very strict) coironavirus lockdown rules, where 3 gamers who don't live together, were in a lounge room at one house and were fined for breaching the coronavirus lockdown rules.

Victoria, Australia is currently under stage 3 restrictions, meaning no more than two people (except for members of your immediate household) can gather together. These rules were introduced by the Victorian government on March 31.

You might remember Martin Shkreli from headlines a few years ago, someone who was quickly nicknamed "Pharma Bro" after his company Turing Pharmaceuticals acquired the manufacturing license for antiparastic drug Daraprim, and raised its price 56x from $13.50 to $750 per pill.

Well, Pharma Bro is back in the headlines after he has said he wants to get out of prison so he can research a treatment and cure for coronavirus. The news is coming directly from his defense attorney Ben Brafman, who has said he will be filing court papers requesting authorities to release Shkreli for 3 months so he can do the required laboratory work, but "under strict supervision".

Brafman said: "I have always said that if focused and left in a lab, Martin could help cure cancer. Maybe he can help the scientific community better understand this terrible virus".

Call of Duty players will be glad to know that Season 3 has just been dropped by Activision, and as expected, it comes with a bunch of new features to enjoy.

According to a new trailer dropped onto the official Call of Duty YouTube Channel, Season 3 will add the highly anticipated four-player squads mode to Warzone. We already knew that Activision was planning on increasing the squad size, as Infinity Ward co-head, Patrick Kelly teased back in early March that the developers were planning on adding larger squads and ultimately 200 player matches.

As for Season 3, Infinity Ward and Activision are pumping out some fresh content for both Warzone players and Modern Warfare players. Warzone players will be able to use some new weapons and skins, which include silenced and non-silenced versions of every weapon type. There will also be brand new guns and blueprints inside in supply boxes. As for Modern Warfare players, Infinity Ward is introducing three new 6v6 maps, some are remastered of old classic maps, and some are down-scaled maps from Ground War. Season 3 will begin on April 8th for every platform the games playable on.

Zoom is in serious doo-doo right now, with the videop conferencing provider now admitting that users' calls from around the world were routed through China.

Zoom CEO Eric Yuan admitted that his company "mistakenly" routed calls through China, he explained: "In our urgency to come to the aid of people around the world during this unprecedented pandemic, we added server capacity and deployed it quickly - starting in China, where the outbreak began".

Yuan continued: "In that process, we failed to fully implement our usual geo-fencing best practices. As a result, it is possible certain meetings were allowed to connect to systems in China, where they should not have been able to connect".

We know governments of the world are wanting to use as much power at their disposal to track, and hopefully stem the spread of COVID-19 coronavirus -- but how far is too far? We last heard the talks were happening to use mobile data to track users' location, but it seems this is now in full effect.

Google is now using Google Maps location data from people who have previously agreed to share their history, to see who is staying and working at home. In Google's new COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports, the search giant is using anonymized data from people in 131 countries, in order to see their movement trends.

Google adds that "No personally identifiable information will be made available at any point". Because we haven't heard that before.

It feels like we're in an altered reality right now, but this is real -- a World Health Organization (WHO) official has said that they may have to "enter homes and remove family members" because of the novel coronavirus. Watch it with your own eyes:

Carlson says: "In response to the spread of coronavirus, authorities may have to enter peoples' homes and remove family members -- presumably, by force". On March 30, Dr. Michael Ryan who is an Executive Director at the WHO Health Emergencies Programme, said something that I'm not seeing much coverage of.

The WHO official said: "in most parts of the world, due to lockdown, most of the transmission that's actually happening in many countries now is happening in the household, at family level. In some senses, transmission has been taken off the streets and pushed back into family units, now we need to go and look in families and find those people who may be sick and remove them, and isolate them, in a safe and dignified manner".

Sony just revealed the PlayStation 5's new DualSense controller, and it's so transformative that it's kicking off a new generation of controller design. But how does it compare to the PS4's DualShock 4?

Side-by-side comparisons show just how much the PlayStation 5's new DualSense controller has changed over the DualShock 4. The Dualsense is an upgrade on almost every level. It's shaped more like an Xbox controller with are more ergonomic fang-style grip, its buttons are thicker and more tactile--not to mention enhanced with new adaptive triggers--and it packs a boosted battery. There's also USB-C for improved and convenient charging.

Microsoft says it's being careful about the Xbox Series X's price this time around. It's not eager to re-live the infamous E3 2013 catastrophe.

In a consumer industry, cost is king. Microsoft and Sony understand that console sales rely on costs. So how much will the Xbox Series X be priced at? No one knows for sure, but Microsoft says it's willing to adjust and be flexible.

"We're going to make sure we stay agile on our pricing and that we have a good plan going into launch," Phil Spencer said in a recent IGN Unlocked interview.

Sony today officially announced the PlayStation 5's next-gen controller. It's called the DualSense.

The PS5's new DualSense controller is quite futuristic, and looks kind of like those weird old-school PS3 controllers merged with a PS4 system, and pretty much has all the features we've been reporting on for a while now. The DualSense has special rumble feedback and adaptive mechanisms in the triggers to simulate fine-tuned haptics; things like pulling a bow string will feel different than revving up a car, for instance. The DualSense has a built-in mic, USB-C charging, a bigger battery, a new Create button that could fold into the awesome create-your-own-game-demo feature we reported on, and a lot more:

"DualSense marks a radical departure from our previous controller offerings and captures just how strongly we feel about making a generational leap with PS5. The new controller, along with the many innovative features in PS5, will be transformative for games - continuing our mission at PlayStation to push the boundaries of play, now and in the future. To the PlayStation community, I truly want to thank you for sharing this exciting journey with us as we head toward PS5's launch in Holiday 2020. We look forward to sharing more information about PS5, including the console design, in the coming months," said Sony's Jim Ryan.

Project xCloud will let anyone anywhere instantly sample Xbox games before they buy, making it a tremendously potent tool for Microsoft's ecosystem.

Xbox Game Pass is one of the most powerful services in the industry right now. It's an all-you-can play subscription that gives you access to a pool of full games to download and play at any time. Because access isn't permanent and dependent upon a continual monthly fee, Game Pass has sparked full game sales as players buy the games they want to keep forever. But Game Pass is missing something big: Instant access.

That's where Project xCloud, Microsoft's new cloud game streaming service, comes in.

League of Legends dev Riot Games just made a new shooter called Valorant, and gamers are really curious if it's good or not.

Valorant aims to usurp the current FPS market. With 120Hz tick rate servers, ultra-accurate aiming, and Overwatch-like hero abilities in a 5v5 setting, Valorant is attracting major FPS enthusiasts and pros everywhere. The game isn't out yet, but Riot is holding a huge closed beta with some of the most popular streamers, and gamers are tuning in en masse.

At the time of writing, Valorant has over 1.7 million viewers across the globe. This is huge for any game, but it's well-timed on Riot's part now that everyone's home over COVID-19 quarantines.

It looks like Apex Legends will soon have console crossplay support, with developer Respawn saying it is "important" for the battle royale game.

In a recent interview with Game Informer, Respawn's chief operating officer and general manager for Apex Legends, Dusty Welch, said that crossplay for gamers on the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 is "important". He said: "I think on crossplay we see it's something that is kind of expected in the industry and is important to a game like ours".

Welch added: "Chad [Grenier, Apex Legends' director] and I are obviously big fans of playing our game at work and in our free time - and we go home on a Friday or weekend and want to play with each other and we're on different systems. On a personal level, yes, we'd love to do that and party up on the weekends. I think it's an important thing to get to".

It looks like Samsung's upcoming 3nm volume production has hit a snag, with the current COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak forcing Samsung to reportedly delay volume production into 2022.

According to DigiTimes, Samsung had projected volume production of the new 3nm process to begin in early 2021 -- but that has now slipped to 2022 because of the coronavirus pandemic. But to be clear, this has nothing to do with Samsung and its production facilities, but more so the world.

The logistics and transportation involved in getting new EUV equipment and other critical production equipment is a big issue for Samsung, and without it, it will not be able to meet its goal of 3nm volume production in early 2021. Samsung will be hit in multiple ways because of it, especially if its competitor in TSMC can come out of the coronavirus pandemic relatively unscathed.

Origin PC just unveiled a beast new gaming laptop in the new EON15-X, which packs an AMD Ryzen 9 3900 processor which packs 12 cores and 24 threads of Zen 2 goodness.

Yeah, a 12-core/24-thread CPU inside of a gaming laptop -- that's pretty insane, and it's matched with NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 2070 Max-Q graphics, so you're able to drive that 1080p 144Hz display at 144FPS without an issue in virtually all games on the market.

Origin PC has gone with a 15.6-inch 1920 x 1080 (1080p) 144Hz refresh display, up to an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 MaxQ graphics card, and up to 2 x 2TB of M.2 PCIe SSDs as well as a 2.5-inch drive for storage. You can configure Origin PC's new EON15-X gaming laptop with up to 32GB of DDR4-2666 RAM, too.

AMD and NVIDIA have just joined the HPC COVID-19 Consortium, with the White House supercomputing partnership that is joining US tech companies together for the effort.

The HPC COVID-19 Consortium is a push by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the US Department of Energy, and IBM teaming with the US government, tech industry, and academic leaders who are volunteering free compute time and resources to COVID-19 researchers.

Researchers wanting to tap untold amounts of supercomputing power can do so by applying to the HPC COVID-19 Consortium, and if approved, will receive access to resources to help super-speed their research. 4th Chief Technology Officer of the United States, Michael Kratsios, also said that there are over 402 Petaflops across 105,000 nodes, 3.5 million CPU cores, and 41,000 GPUs -- and these numbers are only increasing.

China is leading the way in pushing out new technologies amid the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic bringing the world to its knees, with a new robotic 5G car that scans faces, checks for a fever, and it even makes deliveries.

In a world where we're all pretty much forced to stay inside of our homes, the Beijing Institute of Technology has deployed a robotic 5G monitoring car that is roaming its campus. Remote operators then control the 5G-powered car from a facility, while remotely driving the car to make deliveries and check your temperature.

When it's in basic delivery mode, the robotic 5G car can carry packages from one location to another -- with 1 out of its 4 side-mounted locker doors opening up so people can collect their packages. But wait, because there's a top-mounted camera that will turn around and identify you through facial recognition, and thermally scanning you to see if you have a temperature.

Microsoft has confirmed that all of its events, both internal and external, will be "digital-first" until at least July 2021.

First it was rumor, but then Microsoft confirmed the news with ZDNet, where they explain: "In light of the challenges presented by Covid-19, Microsoft has been closely monitoring the developing global situation and re-assessing the overall company-wide in-person event strategy".

Microsoft continues: "As a company, Microsoft has made the decision to transition all external and internal events to a digital-first experience through July 2021. This will include future MVP & RD Summit which is currently scheduled for March 28-April 2, 2021. We will continue to evaluate the situation and look forward to connecting in person when the situation allows".

We all know the next-gen console wars later this year, and possibly in 2021 if the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X launches are postponed due to the havoc that coronavirus is having on the world, are going to be wild.

Well, now we have Crytek rendering engineer Ali Salehi being intervewed by Persian gaming website Vigiato, where he talked about the power differences between the next-gen consoles. Salehi said that developing for the PlayStation 5 was extremely simple, and that reaching the peak performance on the PS5 is much easier than on the Xbox Series X.

Salehi said: "The developers are saying PS5 is the easiest console they have ever coded on to reach its peak performance. Software-wise, coding for PS5 is extremely simple and has so many abilities that make the [developers] so free. In total, I can say PS5 is a better console".

UK prime minister Boris Johnson has been moved to intensive care, shortly after being admitted to hospital in London on Sunday night with "persistent symptoms" of coronavirus. These symptoms have now worsened.

The Queen herself is being updated on Johnson's health, with BBC political correspondent Chris Mason saying he had been given oxygen on late Monday afternoon before he was taken into intensive care. A No 10 statement explains: "The prime minister has been under the care of doctors at St Thomas' Hospital, in London, after being admitted with persistent symptoms of coronavirus".

The statement continues: "Over the course of [Monday] afternoon, the condition of the prime minister has worsened and, on the advice of his medical team, he has been moved to the intensive care unit at the hospital. The PM is receiving excellent care, and thanks all NHS staff for their hard work and dedication".