Latest News - Page 2467

One month after publicly supporting Apple in its fight for encryption, chat app company WhatsApp now features end-to-end encryption in its client. In essence, whether you're calling someone, sending a file, messaging, hosting a group chat, or anything else, you can be rest assured it's completely private from hackers, WhatsApp, and anyone else you might be paranoid about.

"We live in a world where more of our data is digitized than ever before," company CEO and founder Jan Koum says of the change. "Every day we see stories about sensitive records being improperly accessed or stolen. And if nothing is done, more of people's digital information and communication will be vulnerable to attack in the years to come. Fortunately, end-to-end encryption protects us from these vulnerabilities."

"Encryption is one of the most important tools governments, companies, and individuals have to promote safety and security in the new digital age," he continues. "Recently there has been a lot of discussion about encrypted services and the work of law enforcement. While we recognize the important work of law enforcement in keeping people safe, efforts to weaken encryption risk exposing people's information to abuse from cybercriminals, hackers, and rogue states."

Today isn't just about NVIDIA and their GTC event, AMD too has something new going on today as well. The 7th generation of the APU, based on the Excavator core and codenamed Bristol Ridge, are shipping far ahead of schedule. They're already shipping the new 28nm APU's in an updated HP Envy x360 2-in-1 laptop.

We were able to take a look at some Geekbench scores that inadvertently showed up yesterday in their online database and those seem to be just in time to announce the launch of their new processors that'll take the place of Kaveri based systems, and be along side of Carrizo based systems that also have the same Excavator cores.

Full specifications haven't quite been given yet, but we do know that the various 28nm processors will come in two and four core configurations with either Radeon R5 or R7 class GPU's with 8-10 compute units attached and support for DDR4. They're saying that compared to Kaveri, we should see a 50% increase in general performance. Gaming performance itself should definitely experience a nice boost. These processors are a stopgap until we see the Zen-based Summit Ridge APU's and CPU's later on. We're expecting more detailed information to come during Computex 2016, with the full break-down of clock speeds and all the other innovations that come along with it.

Back in 2011, HP hired marketing company Moving Brands to redesign its logo and "brand identity." The result -- a minimalist logo featuring just four 'slashes' -- was scrapped...until now. HP will be using the once-dead logo for its premium laptops only going forward, starting with the just-launched Spectre 13.

HP split into two companies in 2014: it would appear the PC and printer side (HP Inc.) is willing to take risks like this as a result, as opposed to the safer management side (Hewlett-Packard Enterprise) which last year decided on possibly one of the most boring logos of all-time.

We already knew that the Gears of War series is a very violent foray into the human (and alien) condition, and Gears of War 4 will be no exception. To that end, The Coalition is going to have a filter for excess gore and for explicit language, another mainstay of a successful deep look into humankind.

Rod Fergusson, the head developer that's working on Gears of War 4, spoke to Game informer about how the darker theme that we'll see from the story will contribute to a much more explicit experience. That is, it'll be more real in how it presents language and when things perish. Even with game ratings systems that tend to give guidance on what to censor in order to reach certain levels, it was difficult for The Coalition to determine what exactly they wanted to cut out, or if they wanted to simply cut them out or censor them.

"Gore is important for obvious reasons and swearing too." Rod continued, "I think the tricky part for us is, and it's been one of the funny things about the mature language flag, is that there's no standard, so we've had to set the bar," he explained." In essence he didn't want to detract from the character development, of which even explicit language is actually quite important. In the end, they've found a good balance between what's acceptable and what'll detract from the game. It wouldn't do to have a completely cus laden game that contradicts what you're trying to teach your own children, should you happen to have children around that you don't want to hear such things.

Starting April 15, Apple retail outlets will be moving away from their well-liked plastic drawstring bags to new paper bags made out of 80 percent recycled materials, according to a note sent to retail employees. The note also instructs employees to give out the old bags until they're all gone and to ask customers if they want a bag or not, in order to potentially further cut down on waste.

Apple VP of environment, policy, and social initiatives Lisa Jackson last month discussed environmental efforts at the company's press event, noting 93 percent of its operations around the globe are powered by renewable energy, and that its new robot 'Liam' can disassemble iPhones for recycling. As well, Jackson declared all of Apple's packaging would eventually be paper.

GTC 2016 - NVIDIA just unveiled its next-generation Pascal architecture at GTC 2016, showcasing its new Tesla P100 video card - with an insane amount of power. The Tesla P100 has 16GB of HBM2, with an insane amount of horsepower behind it.

Well, NVIDIA also announced its new DGX-1 - the world's first Deep Learning supercomputer. DGX-1 packs 8x Tesla P100 video cards, each with 16GB of HBM2. DGX-1 has 7TB of SSDs, 2 x Intel Xeon processors, 170 TFlops of performance, Quad IP 100Gbps and dual 10GbE connectivity. It uses just 3200W of power (3.2kW) which might sound like a lot to you and I, but this is a supercomputer... not a traditional rackmount PC.

NVIDIA's new Pascal-based DGX-1 is priced at $129,000.

GTC 2016 - NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference kicked off today, where the company talked about its work with AI and deep learning were a large focus, as well as VR being a large part of NVIDIA's opening keynote at GTC 2016. But the star of the show was the new Tesla P100.

We have the new Tesla P100, which is "the most advanced hyper scale datacenter GPU ever built". The Pascal chip itself is 600mm2 and built on the incredible 16nm FinFET process with the Tesla P100 packing a how-did-they-do-it 150 billion transistors (150,000,000,000), with the super-fast HBM2 memory included. The new Pascal-based Tesla P100 is in volume production right now, which is incredibly exciting news as it means HBM2 is ready right now - and NVIDIA has it.

Now, the 150 billion transistors sounds absolutely mind-blowing - as its 1775% more than the 8 billion that the GM200 includes (the GPU that powers the GTX 980 Ti and Titan X). We chatted with Rob and Fudo from Fudzilla, who say that the Tesla P100's 150 billion transistors, is made up from 17 billion on the GPU - with the rest of the transistors coming from the HBM2. This makes much more sense.

AMD has today released its Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.4.1 drivers.

With it comes up to 35% better performance in Quantum Break with the R9 Fury X, a fix for framerate capping issues in some DirectX 12 apps, and a fix for flickering in Hitman when using DirectX 11 mode and high shadow settings; support for HTC Vive and Oculus Rift is listed again for some reason (it was introduced last week in the 16.3.2 drivers).

If you're experiencing any other issues, AMD has some workarounds while they work on fixes:

VR is really taking off now that the two major players have finally released their headsets into the wild. There just remains one issue for those content creators that wish to make pretty things in VR for us to consume; the system to use for that creating. HP is helping to make that decision easier with their new Z series of workstations, make especially for creating highly demanding VR content, which might need a bit more horsepower than usual.

These new workstations are built around two of Intel's newest Broadwell-EP Xeon E5-2600 v4 processors so you can have up to 44 actual cores and 88 threads to process those difficult to render high-resolution scenes. On the graphics front they went with up to dual NVIDIA Quadro M6000's with 24GB of VRAM. That means you can basically keep all your assets in memory and not have to worry about slow load times in whatever engine or program you're working with. For system RAM, you can configure it to have up to 256GB of DDR4 or up to 1TB of LRDDR4 if need be. Storage can e equally as monstrous with a massive six STA ports, eight different SAS ports and up to two PCIe 3.0 NVMe capable m.2 ports.

This can be one monster machine if you want it to be to handle just about any rendering or creation task you want it to. Some might ask why one would want to buy anything premade, and the answer is the support that comes with it. That is, the technical and warranty support that might come in handy from running these systems hard for many hours on end. The new Z840 from Hp starts at $4366, a hefty price tag but for a system that packs a mighty punch. Keyboard and monitor are sold separately, as are the VR HMD's of choice.

The launch trailer for Enter the Gungeon is exactly what you'd think if you were following the game's development; full of violence, awesome music and lots more animated mayhem. It's cute, though. But that's not the usual pronoun assigned to such a thing as this. Check it out for yourself though, and be the judge.

It's a rogue-like dungeon crawling extravaganza with procedurally generated levels. Sure, there's been quite a few of them over the past few years, but that doesn't mean that they're all alike or cookie-cutter. This one takes itself seriously, but then throws that out the window in the most adorable way. It's also challenging and incredibly fun. Not the 'throw your controller or keyboard out the window' type of challenging, but the "I've gotta try that again!" type of challenging. It's an odd mix that pulls you in almost instantly, even if you don't initially like the look of it. It's... weird.

If you dare to challenge yourself thusly, you can find Enter the Gungeon on Steam for $13.99 right now. Other players, or 12 users that have reviewed it thus far, seem to really be enjoying it. That means you might too. I got sucked in and my capsule review is already late because of it.

Armored Warfare is continuing to update their game with new vehicles and more fun. Coming very soon you'll be able to take a ride in the Turkish Altay Main Battle Tank, which is planned to be avaliable sometime in 2017. The developer, Obsidian Entertainment, is working on the beginning stages of bringing it to the game.

The Altay is a brand new main battle tank that's entered into mass production just yesterday and so to will Armored Warfare bring it into their game to celebrate the first Turkish-developed tank since World War II. The tank will be modeled and rendered in all its glory, including the massive 120mm smoothbore gun. Just as in real life, you'll be able to reach speeds of up to 70km/h (if only you could take off the limiter...). More details about the tank and the specifications we'll see in the game will be announced at a later date.

This is all part of their plan to continually add real life-based vehicles into the game. That dedication will add quite a bit of variety not present in other vehicular combat games. Whenever new technologies and vehicles are announced in the real-world, they'll be worked on in the game. Of course making them as realistic as possible is not an easy process, but they're very willing to add in new stuff as much as possible.

Well, this certainly came out of left field: IKEA, the Swedish company responsible for furnishing millions of homes, has launched an interactive VR app that allows users to remodel virtual kitchens.

As HTC and Valve start to ship the first Vive VR headsets, the Steam VR storefront is filling up with games and virtual reality entertainment. The VIve isn't just about gaming, however; the Vive will support a host of different immersive activities including remodeling digital kitchens. The IKEA VR Experience represents a kind of proof-of-concept that highlights the swath of opportunities that VR offers, such as allowing everyday people simulate and map out home alterations and experience them in full 3D.

The app is only limited to a kitchen area for now, and users can make alterations like swapping out floor and surface materials, as well as interact with objects and see through a child's point of view. The kitchen is fully scaled to a real-world size and apparently there's a nifty teleport function. IKEA notes that the app is a "test pilot app", and that the company plans to support the software until August 2016, so we could eventually see all kinds of different rooms and furnishings added. It'll be like the 3D tours you take when you're thinking about buying a home, but this time it'll be much more realistic.

The next PlayStation 4 update is almost here, landing tomorrow, April 6th. System Software Update 3.5, codenamed Musashi, brings about some more social functions that should better allow you to play with your friends when they're online. The video below highlights some of the things you can look forward to in the newest update.

You'll now have the ability to actually appear offline even when you're perusing and doing other things, or just don't want to be bothered with play requests while going through a particularly tough part of Dark Souls III.

There's also a new notification system when friends are online, and you're able to quickly join a game with your friends when they're already in an online multiplayer session. One feature that they've added that's actually quite useful in its simplicity is being able to check on the status of the various PSN services. There's plenty more they added and you check out the whole list and descriptions of those features below. It's an incremental update, but if we're waiting on a PlayStation 4.5 that's 4K capable, then further updating will be in the works too.

GTC 2016 - World Exclusive - We've just had some breaking news delivered to us, on NVIDIA's next-generation video card. We don't have specifics to share with you right now, but we do know that it's going to be what we expected: a freakin' monster.

I expected NVIDIA's next-gen video card to be something quite special, thanks to it being based on the Holy Trinity of GPU upgrades - the shift from the 28nm to 16nm FinFET process, the new exciting Pascal architecture and the insanely fast HBM2 memory. Well, according to our exclusive source - NVIDIA's new video card was right on the expectations that I was able to summarise about in the last few months.

We should expect the unannounced video cards to be a beast, with an option between 8/16GB of VRAM or 16/32GB of VRAM. The performance numbers have not been unveiled, and neither has the new naming or branding for the card - but we do know it's going to be insanely powerful. I'm expecting it to be ~1.5x the power of the GeForce GTX Titan X, and the AMD Radeon R9 Fury X (which runs HBM1 @ 512GB/sec).

Amazon Payments is getting beefed up with a new global partner program designed to make the service into an e-commerce competitor to PayPal and Apple Pay; Amazon is using the term 'global' loosely, as the program is available to partners in the US, Germany, UK, and Japan only.

The refreshed service is different than the current 'Login and pay with Amazon' feature -- pictured here -- that some individual merchants already use: it's intended for e-commerce platforms that provide secure payment features to those merchants. Currently on board are Shopify, OpenCart, and PrestaShop, among many others.

For the public, this means you'll no longer have to create a new username and password for different shopping sites: just use your Amazon Payments account for everything, à la PayPal.

Ever thought to yourself, "gee I'd really love a copy of the studio's original master copy of Ghostbusters"? Sony Pictures have heard your cries, and will release 'Ghostbusters' and 'Ghostbusters II' on the new 4K UltraHD Blu-ray format - just in time for the rancid reboot.

Both films have been fully remastered in 4K resolution from the original 35mm negative, with new High Dynamic Range passes and immersively remixed Dolby Atmos audio. They'll also come packaged with a standard Blu-ray version filled with extra features, including cast and crew commentary, trailers, behind the scenes featurettes, deleted scenes and yes - that Ray Parker, Jr. music video.

Both films will be released on the 4K UltraHD Blu-ray format in the United States on June 7th, and will be available to purchase from Amazon shortly.

Final Fantasy 15 game director Hajime Tabata spills the beans on a ton of new game info, answering burning community questions around moogles (yes, they're in!), the flying car airship, combat, summons, and much, much more.

While Square Enix's Final Fantasy Uncovered event revealed quite a bit about Final Fantasy 15, there's still much more we don't know. Thankfully Tabata-san took some time to sit down with PlayStation Access and answer a bunch of questions. Check our list below for the major tidbits.

Final Fantasy 15 is slated to release on September 30 across PS4 and Xbox One, and Square Enix promises to evaluate a PC version in the future. Final Fantasy 15 will also have its own prequel CGI movie called Kingsglaive, as well as a free anime series called Brotherhood that shows the friendship between Noctis, Gladio, Ignis and Prompto.

When the leaked Nintendo NX controllers turned out to be fake, gamers learned to keep their saltshakers handy. Now we have a new batch of NX rumors that center around the console's technical details and these claims are actually quite believable.

According to claims made by Reddit user untypedhero, who has verified dev connections, Nintendo's new NX console will support the following features:

Given what we already know about the Nintendo NX, these rumors seem right on the money. The NX will support cross-compatibility with existing Nintendo hardware like the Wii U and 3DS/N3DS, as well as smartphones. It's only natural that Nintendo ties all of its hardware to its new My Nintendo ecosystem, and patents have already revealed certain My Nintendo features on the NX. As for the x86 architecture, it's been said that the NX will need zero modification to run ports of PS4 and Xbox One games.

AMD's next generation Zen is still quite a ways off from being a reality in desktops or mobile products, but it look like their more mainstream series of mobile products based off of their 28nm Excavator core, codenamed Bristol Ridge, has been spotted in Geekbenches database. The results seem to point towards a slight improvement in performance, given the reported CPU frequencies.

The sample is the AMD FX 9800P installed in a Lenovo device of some kind. This particular chip has been rumored to have 4 28nm Excavator based cores that run at a nominal 2.7GHz with 8 GCN 1.2 compute units attached. Here, though, it's recorded as running at 1.85GHz and has a multi-cor score of 5596, which is on-par with an Intel i5-6200U running at 2.4GHz. That's not too shabby if the reported clock frequencies are correct.

You can also find scores for the A10-9600P and the A12-9700P in what could possibly be upcoming Lenovo laptops or test systems on the Geekbench website. Bristol Ridge will be the mainstream Excavator based APU's available both on the new AM4 socket as well as on mobile through the FP4 interface. There's no real difference between this and Carrizo aside from naming scheme and the switch to allow DDR4 instead of strictly DDR3. Otherwise, the corresponding A[x]-8xxx Carrizo SoC is virtually the same. The power-savings from moving to 28nm should prove advantageous, however. This will be a sort of stop-gap between Zen, which is still due sometime this summer, or so we hope.

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