Latest News - Page 1703

League of Legends is one of the biggest games ever created with a player base of over 100 million players. So how much carbon are those players generating?

In a new study, it has been estimated that League of Legends' 115 million players throughout 2019 resulted in around 3,139,385 tonnes of CO2 emissions, based on the average player game time. This amount of output of CO2 is estimated to be around the same as charging 400,372,745,210 smartphones or driving 7,790,037,221 miles.

Both gaming companies and consoles manufacturers are working towards minimizing their carbon footprint, and with study's such as these and others coming out estimating how much carbon they are producing, they are really putting them in a not-so-good spotlight. I don't know if a few studies will push big game companies such as Riot Games to implement a carbon reduction strategy, but it's a start, I suppose.

Avast Antivirus is one of the largest free Antivirus software's you can download on the internet, and now an investigation is being conducted into the company for reportedly selling user data.

According to Dark Reading, the Czech Office for Personal Data Protection is now investigating the actions of the Prague-based antivirus software company, Avast. The investigation is to find out whether or not Avast has been selling personal information from its user base to companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Home Depot.

The data that is suspected to have been sold off to these companies is browser history of users, online map searches, YouTube viewing habits, and more. Back in January, Motherboard and PCMag found evidence of Avast collecting data and selling it through its subsidiary company called "Jumpshot". Since this was discovered, Avast as closed down its Jumpshot division.

At the moment, SpaceX is gearing up for the first crewed flight to the International Space Station with their Dragon spacecraft.

According to recent reports, paperwork is the main problem before SpaceX is given the green light to take astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the International Space Station. While it hasn't been publically announced, Ars Technica says that NASA is currently working towards a May 7th launch of Crew Dragon, but that date is lucrative.

Above is a video SpaceX released onto their official Twitter account. The video is of the Dragon spacecraft, and according to the post, it's currently undergoing electromagnetic interference testing. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk originally said that Dragon should launch within the second quarter of 2020, and judging on recent reports, that estimation is quite accurate. Dragon will take to the skies sometime in April, May, June. May is most likely the month when a launch will happen.

The release of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate's 7.0.0 update, which added the new DLC character Byleth also added some fan-favorite skins for Mii Gunner - Cuphead.

In celebration of Cuphead making it over to Nintendo's representative fighter, a new spirit board event is being held in their honor. The new event will run for five days and add four new spirits from Cuphead to the spirit board. Players will be able to pick up these spirits starting on February 14th.

In other Super Smash Bros. Ultimate news, a recent rumor surfaced online in regards to Kingdom Hearts' main Sora, not making it as a DLC fighter. The rumor suggested that it was Disney's fault and not Nintendo's for not letting Sora be apart of the games Fighter Pass. More on that story can be found here.

It has been a staggering eight years since .com domain prices have moved either up or down, but that could all soon change as a new agreement is about to fall into place.

Since 2012, .com domain prices have been sitting at $7.85, but ICANN who is responsible for overseeing top-level internet domains is right in the middle of a new agreement with Verisign who has a contract to oversee .com domains. In this new agreement, Verisign will be allowed to increase the price of .com domains by up to 7% every year for the next 10 years. Excluding the years 2024 and 2025.

ICANN isn't the ones forcing the hand of Verisign, they come from a present agreement between Verisign and the Commerce Department which also has a finger in overseeing .com domains and their prices. According to a blog post by ICANN CEO, Goran Marby, ICCAN is "not a price regulator and defers to the U.S. Department of Commerce and the U.S. Department of Justice for the regulation of pricing for .COM registry services."

A new report has come out from The Wall Street Journal that claims Amazon CEO and founder; Jeff Bezos has bought the most expensive property in Los Angeles.

Amazon founder has reportedly bought the Warner Estate, the most prestigious property in all of Los Angeles from David Geffen for $165 million dollars. Bezos' net worth is currently sitting at around $131.9 billion, which means that if he did purchase the estate from Geffen for $165 million, that's only one-eight hundredth of his net worth.

The Warner Estate was built in the 1930s for Jack Warner, who was the former president and driving force behind the now-massive Warner Bros. Studios. The estate took around a decade to be built and features everything you could dream of; terraces, guest houses, golf courses, pools, tennis courts, and a lot more.

In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing, theaters around the United States will be showing the Hollywood film 'Apollo 13'.

If you haven't seen Apollo 13, now's your chance to see in the cinemas as on April 5th screenings for the movie which star Tom Hanks as Jim Lovell, Gary Sinise as Ken Mattingly and Bill Paxton as Fred Haise begin. Tickets for the movie will be available to purchase starting today, and the screenings will run on April 5th, 6th and finally 8th at cinema distributor Fathom Events.

Tom Lucas, Fathom Events vice president of studio relations said, "Apollo 13 may have been deemed a 'successful failure,' but the movie is a brilliant reminder that it was anything but. We are honored to commemorate the 50th anniversary of such an extraordinary human accomplishment - and the 25th anniversary of the movie - by bringing Apollo 13 back to movie theaters, where its vision and scope can be best appreciated."

The FBI has reported the highest amount of scammed losses in 2019 since it's Internet Crime Complaint Center was created.

According to the FBI.gov website, the internet safety arm of the FBI called 'Internet Crime Complaint Center' (IC3) issued out their 2019 report, which stated some worrying figures. The report says that during 2019 the IC3 received 467,361 complaints, which equated to an average of nearly 1,300 a day. It also recorded the highest amount of monetary losses since the center was established back in May, 2000.

The FBI says that more than $3.5 billion losses were recorded from individuals and businesses who fell victim to online scams. Scams such as phishing, non-payment/non-delivery scams, and extortion were the most common form of received complains. The complaints which ended up being the most financially costly were business email compromise (BEC), romance or confidence fraud, and mimicking the account of a person or business vendor.

WhatsApp is now home to a whopping 2 billion active users, with the Facebook-owned company taking to an official blog post for the announcement.

The company took the time in the blog post to underline its end-to-end encryption and privacy of eveyr message, with WhatsApp explaining: "Strong encryption acts like an unbreakable digital lock that keeps the information you send over WhatsApp secure, helping protect you from hackers and criminals. Messages are only kept on your phone, and no one in between can read your messages or listen to your calls, not even us. Your private conversations stay between you".

The company continues, saying that strong encryption is a "necessity in modern life. We will not compromise on security because that would make people less safe. For even more protection, we work with top security experts, employ industry leading technology to stop misuse as well as provide controls and ways to report issues - without sacrificing privacy".

Epic Games has a new president with Adam Sussman joining the ranks of the Fortnite developer and Unreal Engine creator, with Sussman having held VP positions with some of the largest companies in the industry.

Sussman confirmed the news on his personal LinkedIn account, with a large resume that incldues VP roles at EA, Disney, Take-Two, and Disney -- and was the former chief digital officer of Nike. Sussman wrote on his LinkedIn post: "After 5.5 great years at Nike, I have decided to move on to my next opportunity as President of Epic Games".

He continued: "Nike is an amazing brand, I got a chance to work with many great people and I am so proud of what we accomplished together. While it's bittersweet, I am so excited to join Epic and honored to be part of the remarkable team that has built one of the biggest games in the world. 2020 will be a big year for me and my wife, 3 kids and two dogs...A return to gaming, a move to North Carolina and an opportunity to help change the future of gaming".

Yeah, because we didn't see this happening -- Mobile World Congress organizers GSMA have officially canceled MWC over virtually all companies pulling out, but really it is over coronavirus fears.

GSMA explains: "With due regard to the safe and healthy environment in Barcelona and the host country today, the GSMA has canceled MWC Barcelona 2020 because the global concern regarding the coronavirus outbreak, travel concern and other circumstances, make it impossible for the GSMA to hold the event".

In the last week or so, most major companies that were attending had pulled out with a few of them radically scaling back anyway. The likes of Amazon, Facebook, Intel, LG, NVIDIA, and Samsung all pulled out of MWC 2020 -- but in the end the event was canceled anyway.

Now that Samsung's new Galaxy S20 family of smartphones is here, we're finding out what you do, and do not get in the box with your shiny new flagship smartphone.

Samsung will NOT be including the super-fast 45W charger in the box for its flagship Galaxy S20 Ultra smartphones -- something that one would think would be included in the box. Instead, you'll get the slightly slower 25W fast charger in the box with the 45W charger being an optional accessory that, yep -- you guessed it, you'll have to pay for.

This is no different to Samsung's other flagship Galaxy Note 10+ that supports 45W charging, but includes the 25W charger in the box and sees the 45W charger as another optional accessory. But after spending $1400 on a new Galaxy S20 Ultra, you'd hope that Samsung would be nice enough to give you all of the bells and whistles... I guess not.

Overwatch has passed the 50 million playher milestone across all platforms, something we learned during Activision's recent Q4 2019 earnings report.

Blizzard's hit first-person shooter has now passed 50 million players, joining massive games like Apex Legends, League of Legends, and others with tens of millions of players across the PC, Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo platforms.

Overwatch 2 was recently announced at BlizzCon 2019 but currently has no release date, it could be released later this year in 2020 or next year in 2021. Blizzard is currently building a cross-platform engine that will power future Blizzard games, a new engine that could power Overwatch 2 -- but nothing is sorted there.

Infinity Ward is rolling out a new system that'll let you custom install what content you actually want to save hard drive space.

Modern Warfare just got a huge 51GB patch on PS4, which skyrocketed up to 68GB on Xbox One. Needless to say gamers weren't happy to download an update the size of some full-length games. The massive patch included season 2 content, assets for the new Warzone battle royale mode, and an interesting new system that'll help save space in the long run.

According to Modern Warfare production director Paul Haile, season 2's patch came with a new delivery method baked in that will eventually streamline installation. As the game grows with tons of new content, Infinity Ward knows Modern Warfare will eventually swell and fill up storage real fast. So it and wants to give users options to help save space--the alternative is deleting MW to play something else.

A new Prince of Persia game is coming, but it's not something consumers can take home and play. Instead it's an interactive VR escape room game at VRcades across the globe.

Today Ubisoft announced Prince of Persia: The Dagger of Time, the next installment in Blue Byte's interactive group-friendly VR games.

The new Prince of Persia VR escape room game sees a team of up to four players using time manipulation powers and critical thinking skills to solve puzzles and overcome obstacles. This kind of thing is exactly what virtual reality was made for and actually sounds like a total blast. Blue Byte promises the VR game incorporates the legendary time mechanic found in the original trilogy, allowing gamers to freeze, slow, and rewind time.

Today EA announced it's handing the Need for Speed game series back to Criterion Games, and is making some big changes to the current NFS devs at Ghost Games.

Ghost Games, the team behind Need for Speed Rivals, the 2015 reboot, Payback, and NFS: Heat, is no longer the developer of EA's racing franchise. Criterion Games (NFS Burnout Paradise, Most Wanted) will now take over the series at its Guildford, UK branch.

EA is also shaking up Ghost Games as part of the new plan and up to 30 people could lose their jobs. Right now Ghost Games has three studios: one in Guildford, UK, one in Gothenburg, Sweden, and one in Bucharest, Romania. The studio's UK branch is being merged with Criterion (the two teams work in the same office, so there's no real impact). The Bucharest studio's fate remains unknown.

Geoff Keighley today announced he won't be hosting this year's E3 Coliseum event in June, a move that will radically change the content and quality of the event.

The annual E3 Coliseum events are pretty huge for gamers and for writers like me. It's a series of long interviews with game-makers that brings new perspectives and tons of new info about upcoming projects. As the host, Keighley has a natural knack for leading the conversation in a way that's extremely informative and interesting; he's always lightly pushing, prodding, and trying to extract key info right from the source. And a lot of the time it works.

Now this year Keighley says he won't be at the show. He's simply not comfortable with the ESA's new re-branded focus for E3, which sees the once-industry exclusive event opening up to mainstream gamers. And today's info leak didn't help things either.

UPDATE: The ESA confirmed Nintendo will be at E3 2020 in a recent press release.

Today the ESA accidentally left the backdoor to E3 2020's website open and revealed the current exhibitor's list, which is missing some important names.

As it stands right now, only 18 game publishers and studios have confirmed attendance at E3 2020. The list, which was accidentally leaked out this morning, doesn't include heavy-hitters like Microsoft or Nintendo. This has led many to believe that Nintendo is joining Sony in skipping this year's E3, but the exhibitor's list isn't yet finalized, so the Big N could still show up (Microsoft has confirmed it'll be at the show).

A PlayStation 5 icon reportedly popped up on the PS Japan website, showing the V-shaped devkit design. This is most likely a Photoshop fake.

Next-gen fever has set in, leading to rampant speculation, faked images, mock-ups, and reports. The latest is a supposed photo of Sony's Japanese PlayStation website that has a very interesting-looking PS5 icon at the top. The idea is Sony accidentally updated the website to include the PS5, then promptly took it down. At the time of writing there is no PS5 listing in the PS Japan product page section.

There's some big issues with this story. Only one image exists, which is pretty fishy in of itself. If Sony had actually uploaded a PS5 icon, more than one person would've spotted it and we'd see it everywhere. I also combed over archived versions of the PS Japan mainsite from yesterday and there's nothing to be found. If it is accurate, and with the very slim chance that no one else spotted it, Sony must've updated it today before anyone archived the page.

In a new press release, Exyn Technologies has announced its latest military surveillance drone that is designed to save human lives throughout reconnaissance.

Exyn Technologies has introduced us to their new drone called Scoutonomy. Scoutonomy has the capability of navigating within dynamic, complex, and dangerous environments without the assistance of human pre-loaded maps of areas. The new drone uses aerial robot systems to detect the environment it's flying in, adjust its course in real-time, and detect both objects and humans.

According to Nader Elm, CEO of Exyn Technologies, "Our aerial robots provide unique capabilities that the Government is seeking to develop and deploy. They are completely self-sufficient and a significantly valuable asset in providing superior situational awareness. We're most proud of our robots' ability to identify threats, reduce operational risks and save soldiers' and civilian lives in unknown and volatile situations. Now you can send a drone to perform highly sensitive missions that are far too dangerous for human soldiers, and acquire data that is unprecedented in its level of detail, accuracy and timeliness."