Latest News - Page 2657

Republican House representative Michael McCaul, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, believes it's time for the United States to begin striking back against the Islamic State's cyber commanders.

"What they are saying is 'attack military installations and attack police officers,'" said McCaul, while speaking on "This Week with George Stephanopoulos. "The chatter is so loud and the volume so high that it's a problem that's very hard to stop and disrupt in this country."

"We need to take the fight over there a little stronger. And we need to hit these guys, these cyber commanders, that are sending these Internet directives out to attack, attack, attack in the United States." However, trying to figure out how to "take the fight" to Islamic State in the online world will be rather challenging - there are at least 100,000 Tweets per day from 50,000 suspected Islamic State-influenced Twitter accounts.

Will "killer robots" end up causing harm to humans, especially with militaries interested in developing robots that would be able to engage human forces?

Telsa and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, physicist Stephen Hawking, and more than 1,000 scientists and engineers have signed an open letter to prevent a future open arms race focused on killer artificial intelligence. The idea of robot regulation was mentioned earlier in the year, and there appears to be growing momentum to make sure things are kept within human control.

"AI technology has reached a point where the deployment of [autonomous weapons] is - practically if not legally - feasible within years, not decades, and the stakes are high: autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms," according to the letter.

Bethesda may have waited until June to announce Fallout 4, but the studio had a great interest in having the game take place in Boston for years now. In fact, the location was decided before Skyrim was released in 2011, and developers started thinking about Bean Town in 2008.

"Long ago... Pre-Skyrim. The ideas for Fallout 4 started right after Fallout 3 and have gotten worked on and been percolated since 2008," said Pete Hines, VP of Marketing at Bethesda, in a statement to GameSpot. "We're talking about its infancy, we're talking about jotting some stuff down, we're talking about, 'I want to do it in Massachusetts, and have it be about this, this, and this."

Fallout 4 game development started after Skyrim had been supported "for several years," and the studio was comfortable moving on to the next project.

Bungie has a long-term plan for Destiny, and gamers will be able to support their current Guardian for quite some time. It turns out, with Bungie's current 10-year support plan, gamers may not need to make a new character - or switch - anytime soon.

"We certainly take it seriously that Destiny is a ten-year thing," said Luke Timmins, engineering lead for the Destiny video game, in a statement to GamesRadar. "It's a long-term thing and with these adventures that we're adding my contract to you - and any player - is that your Guardian will always be there. We're going to keep adding new stuff for you to do and I'd hope you'll look at The Taken King and be like, 'I'm looking forward to logging on again and hooking friends online.'"

Destiny: The Taken King is scheduled for launch on September 15, and it looks like Bungie plans to support your characters for a while. The expansion will be available for $40. In addition, it looks like Bungie is already working on a new "upcoming title," so Destiny fans will be quite busy.

Said to provide "the combination of the internet of things and a powerful router," ASRock has shown off its new Gaming G10 router in a recently issued press release.

Able to learn the infrared signals of a TV remote and assign them to your smartphone through its soon-to-be added Google Play and Apple app store ASRock Router Application, this product will enable you to control your television through your smartphone via Wi-Fi, 3G or 4G to the router which provides an infrared connection to your TV.

Not limited only to TV's, any device which relies on an infrared remote can be controlled, allowing for many different applications through a single device.

We sometimes feel a little like Goldilocks when we go in search of a great external battery. Some are too bulky. Some aren't powerful enough. So when we find one that's just right, we're obviously going to share the great news with you. Even better news? We're making the A8 Pro 25600mAh external battery available for just $69.95 at TweakTown Deals, a savings of 53%.

Here's why you'll love it:

Get the A8 Pro 25600mAh external battery for $69.95 at TweakTown Deals. Add it to your cart now!

Ouya CEO Julie Urhman today confirmed that PC hardware maker Razer has bought out the company. Urhman inadvertently broke the news by tweeting a cavalcade of thank you messages signalling something big had happened.

The ex-CEO further tweeted the following message to Razer, confirming the buyout speculations: "Can't wait to see what you do. Take care of my incredible team and community...I know you will."

Razer has since issued a lengthy announcement post. "Today we're pleased to welcome OUYA to the Razer family," reads the announcement. "With them in the Razer fold, we plan to further embrace hardcore gaming in the living room and take Android gaming to the next level."

Hori's new Tactical Assault Commander 4 is a keyboard and mouse duo aimed at emulating PC quality FPS control on Sony's PlayStation 4 console. Armed with the new controller, gamers can now hone their headshot skills to a heightened degree with the kind of precision that a steady mouse can offer.

The mouse and keyboard are both wired via USB and feature programmable macro buttons for customized play. Like previous models, the peripheral sports must-have modes like snipe and walk buttons, and the traditional WASD scheme shouldered by Triangle (Q) and Circle (E) for easy maneuvering. It also has keys to match a DualShock 4 including a Share button for screenshots and video.

The keyboard is decidedly created with right-handed gamers in mind--lefties are out of luck with this model. Hori affirms that the Tactical Assault Commander 4 is cross-platform compatible and is fully functional on the PlayStation 3, so you can fire up yesteryear classics like Blops 2 for practice.

2014 has proven to be quite the lucrative year for Valve as reports indicate that the company's digital PC gaming storefront Steam raked in an estimated total of $1.5bn in total sales last year.

Valve's in-house mega blockbusters DOTA 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Team Fortress 2 were responsible for a considerable bulk of the figures, pulling in more than $450m profit across all three games.

Industry research company SuperData affirms that Valve also amassed $330m in royalties from third-party titles sold on Steam. As per company policy, Valve takes a 30% cut of each sale. Considering Steam has a library consisting of over 781 million games, and that the service hit a peak of 9.2 million users, it's no wonder Valve can pull in that kind of revenue.

id Software understands the importance of eSports in 2015, but said Doom isn't being designed specifically to become the next big eSports platform.

Just creating the multiplayer mode is a priority, and id Software will go back and analyze eSports potential after Doom has been released. Of course, id is familiar with multiplayer success, especially with Quake 3 and Quake 4, which were popular among professional gamers and players at LAN parties.

"We're not developing [Doom] specifically with how we address eSports. There's tons of moments, even just watching the [multiplayer matches] at Quakecon, where there's very eSports moments in it," said Marty Stratton, developer at id Software, in a statement to GameSpot. "It really just illustrates how eSports can be born out of that. But we're really [working on] how we entertain millions of people on their couches everyday. So that's really been our focus."

It looks like Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro still want to work on a gaming project, even though Silent Hills was scrapped. Details regarding the project haven't been disclosed, but could give gamers something to look forward to one day.

"I love working with Kojima-san. We are still in touch," del Toro recently told IGN. "We are still friends and working into doing something together, but that's not going to be [Silent Hills]."

It's a shame that Silent Hills was scrapped, as both del Toro and Kojima were excited about the progress being made:

The virtual reality market seems to be surging, but there is still quite a bit of confusion regarding what vertical will help drive interest. Initial signs point towards the gaming market, but a VR pioneer said there are much more important and practical uses for VR technology.

"I don't believe that video games are an appropriate market for this. Especially when you get into the highly violent games - do you really want to feel that blood splatter on you?" said Jeremy Bailenson, founder of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab, in a statement to the San Jose Mercury News. "I don't think it's the right use case."

"I don't believe VR should be used for hours a day. I think VR's great for really particular and specific moments that you try to learn about yourself and learn about others. Maybe I'm in a minority, but when these games come out, I don't think people are going to want to play them for eight hours."

If you're a little short on cash or just crazy about overclocking, MSI is offering up some beastly prizes including its new GODLIKE motherboards alongside Intel CPUs and PCIe NVMe drives, HyperX RAM and HyperX SSDs to winners of this newly-announced event.

These high-end prizes will be distributed to top placing competitors in the wide variety of competitions on offer including 2D battle and 3D battles expanding to categories such as ambient and extreme cooling, with limitations on overclocking specifics and CPU frequencies.

If you're interested in learning more about the competition or entering for yourself, you can head to the official event page or check out the press release.

Microsoft is bringing some new major changes to the Xbox Onewith the Fall update, including voice-assisted support from Cortana and a new dashboard layout--but speed is their top priority.

"Brand new Xbox One User Interface experience that will be going out this fall and is really focused around speed and getting to things faster," Xbox's Richard Irving told GamingBolt at E3 2015. "Our design point of the new Xbox experience is speed and making all of the things you do on Xbox Live, both in and out of the game much faster."

As an Xbox One owner myself I can attest that the console's menus can be sluggish. Firing up an app or starting up Snap Mode can take a bit, meaning you'll sometimes miss that perfect moment you wanted to record.

Edward Snowden may have support from a lot of American citizens, but don't count New Jersey Governor Chris Christie as a fan of the former NSA worker.

Recently, Christie described Snowden as a "piece of garbage," and said he "wouldn't send the SEALs in to pick up that piece of garbage," when asked he would send in the special ops unit to retrieve the American.

Just a few months ago, Christie described Snowden's whistleblowing behavior as "treasonous" and that he "should be forced to come home... and face prosecution."

The Raspberry Pi has proven to be the fruit of choice for clever tecchies and inventors everywhere, leading to a fascinating array of technical creations that amuse, mystify and outright dazzle.

The Pi Boy Portable is a prime example. Build using the Raspberry Pi, customized 3D-printed shell parts and a small screen, Thingiverse user Jooxoe3i has created a tiny portable Super Nintendo console built for retro gaming on the go.

The Pi Boy Portable build is inspired by a combination of custom eye-boggling inventions including adafruit's DIY Raspberry Pi Gameboy and Carasibana's Super Game PiSP, a PSP-shaped SNES retro handheld.

Nintendo has ambitious plans to make the new Zelda Wii U game the "best Zelda experience" yet--but to beat all the other entries in the series the Japanese gaming titan will need to really push the bar.

"We confirmed that a Zelda game, a new Zelda experience is in development for the Wii U and we have our team hard at work on that," Nintendo exec Scott Moffitt told iDigitalTimes in an E3 2015 interview. "We want that to be the best Zelda experience. Fans have been waiting for and deserve a game when it's ready, when it's fully featured and when it can live up to what we would like to deliver."

Originally slated for a release this year on the flagging Wii U console, Nintendo delayed Zelda Wii U for TBA 2016 leaving the possibility open for a cross-platform launch on Nintendo's mysterious new NX platform.

Doom is one of the most iconic video game series, with three games released since the first one launched in 1993 - but id Software is aware of the changing times. Gamers, many of whom have a rather shot attention-span, have focused on a number of other game titles.

"id hasn't made a game in the current pantheon of first-person shooters," said Pete Hines, VP of Marketing at Bethesda, in a statement to GameSpot. "It's not a part of that conversation. You can go to any sixteen-year-old at Quakecon and ask them what their favorite shooter is and they're going to say Call of Duty and Battlefield and Halo, but not Doom, because why would they?"

The studio previously discussed how it scrapped the "Doom 4" game title, saying it felt too much like Call of Duty - and not enough like Doom. It's reassuring to hear developers were willing to go back to the drawing board when it came to Doom, and I'm very much looking forward to it.

The Islamic State is heavily restricting Internet access in its so-called capital of Raqqa, Syria, according to recent reports.

The group recently began circulating leaflets that demand Internet cafes to remove all Wi-Fi boosters, private wireless adapters, and other hardware that helps provide Internet connectivity.

"You won't find computers in 95 percent of them," said Abu Ibrahim al-Raqqawi, c-founder of the Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently organization, in a statement to The Daily Beast. "It's more like a small shop where not even two or three people can sit down. You go there, bring your own cell or laptop. You tell them, 'I want an account with you.' The Internet café owner will give you a password and account username."

The closed alpha of Hitman is a huge resource hog, where even NVIDIA's GeForce GTX Titan X can't run the game at a stable 60FPS at 1080p on 'Ultra' settings. Now we are noting here many times: this is just an alpha, and not indicative of the final version of the game.

But, with the alpha build of Hitman already chewing up a serious video card like the Titan X and not even being able to spit out 60FPS at 1080p, is worrying. YouTuber 'polaric90' has posted a video using a Titan X, with an average frame rate of around 40FPS. With the performance on one of the best cards on the market not even hitting 60FPS at only 1080p, what will happen at 1440p? 4K?

The biggest thing to worry about here is the console versions of the game, which are much slower than a Titan X. It looks like the developer has quite a bit of work to do on optimization between now and December 8, when Hitman reaches the Xbox One, PS4 and PC.