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US tech companies don't want Obama to interfere with encryption

Michael Hatamoto | Hacking, Security & Privacy | Jun 10, 2015 12:00 PM CDT

President Barack Obama has received a letter from the Information Industry Association and Information Technology Industry Council not to mess with encryption. The US government wants backdoors created so law enforcement can access information when needed, but Silicon Valley companies warned that would also create opportunities for cybercriminals.

"We are opposed to any policy actions or measures that would undermine encryption as an available and effective tool," said the letter. The Information Industry Association represents companies such as Microsoft, Facebook, Google and Apple - with executives from each company previously speaking out against various government interference in security.

The FBI and other agencies support the Obama administration's efforts to help bypass encryption, but in a manner that wouldn't allow hackers and cybercriminals to exploit the encryption backdoor.

Continue reading: US tech companies don't want Obama to interfere with encryption (full post)

EU: Users pushed to piracy due to complicated copyright legislation

Michael Hatamoto | Internet & Websites | Jun 10, 2015 10:30 AM CDT

The fight against Internet piracy apparently isn't going well for copyright holders, and "legislation is pushing people to steal," said Andrus Ansip, Vice President for the Digital Single Market for the European Commission. Speaking during Midem, Ansip believes providing content across the EU - and educating users about legal options - are two critical steps that must be addressed.

The EU's recently adopted Digital Single Market strategy will hopefully end geo-blocking among EU nations, while consumers can legally purchase more content. The removal of geo-blocking will make it legal for 100 million Europeans to access content they own in other countries - a major development, with Europeans taking more than 270 million cross-border trips that last at least one night.

"Today, we don't have a Digital Single Market in the European Union," Ansip said.

Continue reading: EU: Users pushed to piracy due to complicated copyright legislation (full post)

AMD continues to push its huge PC Gaming Show at E3 next week

Anthony Garreffa | Graphics Cards | Jun 10, 2015 7:08 AM CDT

A trailer for the PC Gaming Show being held at E3 2015 has been unleashed, showing off a bunch of the oldeer, but huge fan favorite games from the last two decades.

The YouTube teaser also shows off some AMD hardware being installed, with some Radeon video cards and AMD CPUs being installed into a PC. AMD is sponsoring the show alongside PC Gamer, with special guests including Twitch, Digital Storm, Cliff "CliffyB" Bleszinski, Cloud Imperium Games (the developer behind Star Citizen), Tripwire Interactive, and many more.

The PC Gaming Show kicks off on June 16, 2015 with a livestream being made available on AMD's Twitch channel on the day.

Continue reading: AMD continues to push its huge PC Gaming Show at E3 next week (full post)

Amazon Game Studios is hiring top talent to make its first PC game

Anthony Garreffa | Gaming | Jun 10, 2015 3:37 AM CDT

Amazon is building a development team to work on a very ambitious PC game using the latest technology available under its Amazon Game Studios gaming division, securing some of the top talent in the industry.

Amazon Game Studios is hiring staff that have worked on gigantic games like BioShock, Portal, World of Warcraft, Half Life 2, Dota 2, Left 4 Dead, Halo, Infamous, Shadows of Mordor and The Last of Us. Considering the company reportedly signed a licensing deal worth up to $70 million with Crytek, we could see Amazon's game powered by Crytek's latest graphics engine.

The developer is hiring 26 new people, where it needs to fill positions like Senior Game Development Engineer, Tools Engineer, Senior Gameplay Engineer, Lead Visual Effects Artist, Platform Engineer and Senior Graphics Engineer... just to name a few positions.

Continue reading: Amazon Game Studios is hiring top talent to make its first PC game (full post)

SAPPHIRE Radeon R9 390X Tri-X OC 8GB teased, with 6 other models

Anthony Garreffa | Graphics Cards | Jun 10, 2015 12:45 AM CDT

The leaks of AMD's upcoming GPUs continues, with a full line up of SAPPHIRE products leaked. VideoCardz.com has picked it up, where SAPPHIRE is expected to have many cards to offer consumers.

Starting with the Hawaii XT-based Radeon R9 390X Tri-X OC 8GB, followed by the Hawaii PRO-based Radeon R9 390 Nitro 8GB. The R9 390X is expected to feature a new Tri-X cooler, with a factory overclock that is sure to impress. The R9 390 Nitro is a new brand for SAPPHIRE, which will also feature 8GB of VRAM and the Tri-X cooler, but the Hawaii PRO core.

Under these two flagship cards we have the Radeon R9 380 Nitro, Radeon R9 380 ITX, Radeon R7 Nitro, Radeon R7 370 and Radeon R7 360. SAPPHIRE will use a mix of its Dual-X and stock cooling on these cards. We should expect to see SAPPHIRE unveil these cards in the coming weeks.

Continue reading: SAPPHIRE Radeon R9 390X Tri-X OC 8GB teased, with 6 other models (full post)

EA announces Mirror's Edge Catalyst, more details coming at E3

Anthony Garreffa | Gaming | Jun 9, 2015 11:34 PM CDT

E3 kicks off next week, but we're seeing a boat load of game announcements and teases before the show, such as EA officially announcing Mirror's Edge Catalyst.

Mirror's Edge Catalyst's Senior Producer, Sara Jansson, said in a letter to fans: "Two years ago we revealed that we were making a new Mirror's Edge. Last year, we gave you a behind the scenes look into some of the early progress we had made. And though we haven't said much else in all that time, we have been listening. Thank you for your incredible passion and your patience. I'm excited to tell you that it's paid off - by this time next week, you will have finally seen more of the game at E3".

She continued: "Mirror's Edge has always had a special place in the hearts of all of us at DICE. The first game had a lot of promise. It was unlike anything else in terms of the gameplay and style - it had a unique soul. But as much as we loved that game, we knew it could be more. So that's what we have set out to do as we introduce Mirror's Edge to a new generation".

Continue reading: EA announces Mirror's Edge Catalyst, more details coming at E3 (full post)

AMD Radeon Fury X rumored to be around 50% faster than Radeon R9 290X

Anthony Garreffa | Graphics Cards | Jun 9, 2015 10:37 PM CDT

We are getting closer and closer to the launch of the next generation video cards from AMD with each passing day, where today some leaked specifications on the Radeon Fury X, of which we had a world exclusive on last week. It was only hours ago that we posted some OpenCL benchmarks of the Fury X, where it managed to keep up with and beat the Titan X.

The Radeon Fury X will reportedly feature 4096 stream processors, 64 GCN Compute Units, 128 ROPs, 256 TMUs, 4GB of HBM on a 4096-bit memory bus, a GPU clock speed of 1050MHz or more, and an effective memory bus of 1GHz, providing around 512GB/sec of memory bandwidth. All of these specs of the purported Fury X have it being around 54% faster than the Hawaii XT-based Radeon R9 290X, and around 48% more power efficient.

Speaking of power efficiency, the Fury X has a TDP of 300W with around 28.7 GFLOPS/watt of performance versus the 19.4 GFLOPS/watt that the Radeon R9 290X has on its 290W TDP. Overall performance has the Fury X capable of over 8.6 TFLOPS of performance, blasting out the 5.6 TFLOPS that the Radeon R9 290X managed.

Continue reading: AMD Radeon Fury X rumored to be around 50% faster than Radeon R9 290X (full post)

HGST, a division of Western Digital, unveils world's first 10TB HDD

Anthony Garreffa | Storage | Jun 9, 2015 9:49 PM CDT

HGST has just unveiled the world's first 10TB HDD, with the Western Digital-owned company developing the HDD for active archive applications, so it's not the fastest HDD on the planet by any means.

HGST, a division of Western Digital, unveils world's first 10TB HDD

The new HGST Ultrastar Archive Ha10 arrives in the 3.5-inch form factor, on the SATA 6Gbps or SAS 6Gbps standard. We have seven shingled magnetic recording (SMR) platters that are filled with helium. The company has said that the 10TB HDD has sustained read transfer speeds of around 157MB/sec, while sustained writes are much slower at 68MB/sec.

Brendan Collins, Vice President of Product Marketing of HGST said: "HGST's helium-filled drives boasts industry-leading storage density, low power consumption and proven reliability with 2.5M hours MTBF. By layering SMR on top of helium, we are enabling massively-scalable, TCO-driven storage solutions with the performance and durability necessary for the long term retention of archived data. Making SMR design investments today minimizes incremental efforts for future SMR solutions, and gives our customers a time-to-market advantage for all current and future high capacity HDDs in the market".

Continue reading: HGST, a division of Western Digital, unveils world's first 10TB HDD (full post)

The studio behind The Order: 1886 hires Blizzard's ex-COO Paul Sams

Anthony Garreffa | Gaming | Jun 9, 2015 9:01 PM CDT

With The Order: 1886 doing quite well as an exclusive to the PlayStation 4, developer Ready At Dawn, has some money to spend. The Irvine, California-based studio has just announced it has hired Blizzard's Chief Operating Officer, Paul Sams, as well as the expansion of its operations found in Austin, Texas.

Ready At Dawn has also said that it's in the process of finding a partner that will inject funds into the studio so that it can continue to create projects "of the transmedia IPs that we create" adds the developer. The company wrote on its official website of the news, with Ready At Dawn's co-founder and CEO Ru Weerasuriya saying: "It is never easy finding someone to take over the reins of a company after this many years, but I cannot think of anyone better suited to guide the team as we look to the future. He is one of the most accomplished, respected and experienced leaders in our industry".

Sams enjoyed a very successful run over at Blizzard, where he "played a key role in guiding the company from less than 50 employees to over 4,000 and to grow company value well in excess of $5 billion", writes Ready At Dawn. Sams was responsible for many of Blizzard's biggest games and services, such as World of Warcraft, Diablo, Warcraft, StarCraft, Battle.net, Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm and Overwatch. Sams himself added: "Ready at Dawn is one of the best pure game developers in the industry. After 12 years, they remain an independent developer true to their craft of creating gameplay in unique and immersive worlds filled with engaging characters and experiences".

Continue reading: The studio behind The Order: 1886 hires Blizzard's ex-COO Paul Sams (full post)

AMD rumored to be bundling Star Wars: Battlefront with each Fury card

Anthony Garreffa | Graphics Cards | Jun 9, 2015 11:17 AM CDT

With Star Wars: Battlefront shaping up to be one of the biggest releases of the year, it shouldn't come as too much of a surprise to hear the rumor that AMD will be bundling the game with its Fury branded video cards.

AMD will reportedly be releasing the HBM-powered Radeon Fury X and Radeon Fury cards at E3 2015 next week, but what better way of selling their flagship cards than by bundling one of the biggest games coming out this year. As for the Radeon 300 series, which are rebrands of the Radeon 200 series, they will reportedly include a copy of the new Dirt game coming out later this year.

Continue reading: AMD rumored to be bundling Star Wars: Battlefront with each Fury card (full post)

Oculus VR changes its logo, begins counting down to its June 11 event

Anthony Garreffa | Extended Reality (XR) | Jun 9, 2015 11:01 AM CDT

Update: It looks like the Oculus Rift CV1 has been leaked in full, with a detailed look at every angle of the VR headset. We seem to have nearly confirmed a touch-based gamepad, built-in headphones, a passthrough camera and the final design of the Rift CV1 itself.

Oculus VR changes its logo, begins counting down to its June 11 event

Oculus VR has just very quietly updated its website, showing off a new logo for the company, something you can see below. The company is also now counting down to its 'Step into the Rift' event on June 11, where we should see the CV1 of the Rift unveiled.

The Consumer Version 1 release of the Rift will be the first VR headset the company has released as a consumer-orientated product, with the release of the Developer Kit 1 (DK1) and DK2 being sold to developers, but open to the general public to buy, too. Oculus will be livestreaming the event, which is set to start on June 11.

Continue reading: Oculus VR changes its logo, begins counting down to its June 11 event (full post)

Purported shots of the Oculus Rift CV1 see a controller teased

Anthony Garreffa | Extended Reality (XR) | Jun 9, 2015 10:50 AM CDT

Update: We are now looking at some very real-looking images on the NeoGAF forums, which show the Oculus Rift CV1 off in great detail. This includes the confirmation of the touch-based gamepad, and its SID tracker (Simple Input Device).

According to a post on the /r/oculus subreddit, we're seeing some rendered images of the Oculus Rift CV1, the first consumer bound version of the Oculus Rift.

In the leaked images, we can see a large stand for the tracking module, and a good look at the strap and headphones that will arrive with the Rift. To the right, we can see the tease of a touch-based controller, something we reported on last week. From the image we can't tell if it's a controller for one hand, or a dual touchpad controller. I would be putting my money on the latter.

Continue reading: Purported shots of the Oculus Rift CV1 see a controller teased (full post)

AMD Radeon Fury X beats Titan X in leaked CompuBench OpenCL benchmark

Anthony Garreffa | Graphics Cards | Jun 9, 2015 10:37 AM CDT

With the leaked benchmarks from quite a while ago most likely out of date now, and with our world exclusive reveal on the Fury X branding from AMD, we're seeing some leaked OpenGL performance numbers from CompuBench.

The leak shows that the Fiji XT-based, HBM-powered Radeon Fury X beats NVIDIA's GM200-based, Maxwell-powered GeForce GTX Titan X from NVIDIA by a decent amount. But then, the R9 280X seems to not be that far behind the Titan X.

The Fury X loses quite horribly to the Titan X in the 'face detection' test on CompuBench, while it beats the Titan X once again in the 'TV-L1 Optical Flow' test.

Continue reading: AMD Radeon Fury X beats Titan X in leaked CompuBench OpenCL benchmark (full post)

OPM knew its computer system was at risk from hacker attacks

Michael Hatamoto | Hacking, Security & Privacy | Jun 9, 2015 6:20 AM CDT

The Office of Personnel Management knew that its computer security system could be exploited by outside act, but the issue still wasn't spotted in time. The OPM is expected to roll out two-step authentication to better protect its networks.

It was still too late - tens of thousands of files were already stolen before the inspector general's report last November. After a breach was detected last summer, cybercriminals were able to launch a broader attack that likely began in December. So far, more than 4 million people have been exposed by the breach, and it's likely that number will rise.

Cybercriminals tend to be very patient while browsing compromised networks, especially organized cyber hackers. It's possible the OPM hack was carried out by those responsible for breaching Anthem, as personal information is lucrative.

Continue reading: OPM knew its computer system was at risk from hacker attacks (full post)

Apple announces iOS 9 at WWDC allowing an easy transition from Android

Anthony Garreffa | Software & Apps | Jun 9, 2015 1:14 AM CDT

Apple has unveiled iOS 9 at its developer conference in San Francisco, but the Cupertino-based giant has also unveiled WatchOS 2 for the Apple Watch, and OS X El Capitan for Macs.

First up, iOS 9 is set to deliver some big improvements to features found in iOS like Siri and Spotlight, as well as the usual performance improvements, and revamping the experience of iOS for iPad users. Apple has completely revamped Spotlight Search, with some Google Now-like features. A new screen will show users relevant information based on external factors such as your location or the time of your day, just how Google Now works.

One of the areas that iOS users should be happy with improvements is Apple Maps, where maps of transit routes and public transportation maps now available on a city-by-city basis. This will expand as time goes on. Apple Maps in iOS 9 is lso capable of showing you information on nearby stores, where you can then search by category, as well as look at detailed information on businesses like their phone number, opening hours, and whether or not they support Apple Pay.

Continue reading: Apple announces iOS 9 at WWDC allowing an easy transition from Android (full post)

Fallout 4 'will never work' on the Xbox 360 or PS3

Anthony Garreffa | Gaming | Jun 8, 2015 11:48 PM CDT

Bethesda unveiled Fallout 4 last week, with some beautiful graphics and a world that will beat the size of Skyrim considerably. But it's the news that it 'will never work' on the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 that should have gamers happy.

Bethesda says that Fallout 4 "looks amazing" visually, and this is thanks to the studio coding the game for the current generation Xbox One and PS4 consoles, as well as PC. This obviously means they had to leave behind the previous generation Xbox 360 and PS3, but this is for a good reason - to allow the game to look as good as it does.

Continue reading: Fallout 4 'will never work' on the Xbox 360 or PS3 (full post)

AMD rumored to have $389 MSRP on Radeon R9 390X

Anthony Garreffa | Graphics Cards | Jun 8, 2015 10:15 PM CDT

With the new Radeon video cards launching in the next couple of weeks, most have been wondering what pricing AMD would stick to. Well, it looks like the MSRP on the Radeon R9 390X could be just $389.

There are two enthusiast cards in the Radeon R9 390X and Radeon R9 390, with the 'enhanced Hawaii XT' in the R9 390X with an MSRP of $389 and the 'enhanced Hawaii PRO' under the Radeon R9 390 with a price of $329. This should compete directly with the GeForce GTX 980 from NVIDIA which dropped to $499 thanks to the release of the GTX 980 Ti at $649. These two cards will better compete with the GTX 900 series, while the Fury range of cards will compete with the GTX 980 Ti and Titan X.

Will you be buying the Radeon R9 390X, or will you be waiting for the higher-end, HBM-based Fury cards?

Continue reading: AMD rumored to have $389 MSRP on Radeon R9 390X (full post)

XFX Radeon R9 390X Double Dissipation 8GB spotted in the wild

Anthony Garreffa | Graphics Cards | Jun 8, 2015 8:35 PM CDT

We've had to pull our ASUS Radeon R9 390X post, as well as our PowerColor Radeon R9 390X post, so here's hoping that news and images on the XFX Radeon R9 390X Double Dissipation 8GB doesn't need to be pulled.

The XFX branded card is the latest in a slew of Radeon R9 390X video cards that has popped up, a rebranded R9 290X with 8GB of VRAM. It sports a slick looking cooler with unlocked voltage, and a diamond-shaped texture which looks great. There's 7 extended heat pipes which should keep the XFX Radeon R9 390X Double Dissipation 8GB nice and cool.

The XFX Radeon R9 390X Double Dissipation 8GB output configuration is as follows: DVI-I, DVI-D, HDMI and DisplayPort.

Continue reading: XFX Radeon R9 390X Double Dissipation 8GB spotted in the wild (full post)

AMD will release a tiny little video card as 'Fury Nano'

Anthony Garreffa | Graphics Cards | Jun 8, 2015 7:12 PM CDT

After our world exclusive news that AMD would be releasing its Fury X as the watercooled, HBM-based flagship GPU, we began hearing about Fury Nano. We didn't want to post the news and possibly have it backfire on our source, so we waited on someone else to hear about it - and here we are.

We can now reveal that there will be three different Fury cards released, the Fury X as the flagship, Fury, which will be joined by Fury Nano. Fury Nano will be a tiny video card, which could arrive as the flagship. Right now it's all up in the air, but we do know there will be three different Fury cards, followed by a rebrand that will arrive as the Radeon R9 300 series.

Continue reading: AMD will release a tiny little video card as 'Fury Nano' (full post)

'Terminator' creator James Cameron backs 'Genisys'

Ben Gourlay | Celebrities & Entertainment | Jun 8, 2015 7:03 PM CDT

Legendary Writer Director James Cameron concieved and launched the 'Terminator' franchise with the 1984 original, before returning with 'Terminator 2: Judgment Day' in 1991 but had nothing to do with 'Terminator 3' or 'Terminator: Salvation', the latter of which even Schwarzenegger says "sucked". But in a new promotional video for the latest film in the franchise "Terminator: Genisys", Cameron himself sits down to publicly back the film even describing it as the real "Terminator 3".

Describing the film as "I feel like the franchise has been reinvigorated... this is a renaissance", Cameron goes further to sell a film he has no stake in by saying "If you love the Terminator movies, you're gonna love this movie". High praise indeed.

'Terminator Genisys' kicks off a new trilogy of films and hits screens worldwide on July 1st and for the first time in 3D, helmed by 'Thor: The Dark World' director Alan Taylor.

Continue reading: 'Terminator' creator James Cameron backs 'Genisys' (full post)

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