Latest News - Page 2782

It launched under a week ago and unsurprisingly became the talk of the world, as 'Star Wars' fans across the globe synced their watches to be amongst the first to see brand new images from next year's feature.

Now, a study by YouTube marketing blog Zefr has reported that the trailer has reached over 60 million views (including shares and re-uploads) and generated over 90 million pieces of related content (including reaction and discussion videos). Now, the trailer is headed to be the most watched trailer of all time. Not bad for roughly 40 seconds of actual footage - move over Kardashian, 'Star Wars' really broke the internet.

'Star Wars: The Force Awakens' opens worldwide on December 18th, 2015.

Lyft's co-founder John Zimmer has appeared in an interview with Bloomberg TV today, covering issues based around privacy questions on user data, their main competitor 'Uber' and plans for expansion throughout the new year.

As we see ride-share applications begin to hit the mainstream market, there have been reports on the downturn in the traditional Taxi business alongside some reasoning for people making the change to this new-age format.Ride-share services currently have the general reputation for being more timely and neat, this is coupled with reported issues in the past of Taxi drivers being unsafe and potentially harmful toward their customers - sparking of public outrage here in Australia and throughout other parts of the Western world.

Zimmer defended Lyft's privacy options today, stating that "We (Lyft) do not share, currently share information like this with any third party. So that's definitely something that we can talk about." He went on to mention that Lyft's user-base has skyrocketed, seeing their year-over-year rides rise by 6 times, alongside their year-to-days rides reaching a 5 times increase - which is mirrored by their revenue increase.

Target Australia had only just announced they are pulling all copies of Rockstar games' GTA V off their shelves, now another Aussie retailer has joined the pledge. K-Mart has vowed to also remove all support for this controversial title, disclosing this information to Kotaku today over the phone.

As online activists gathered a 41,000 signature petition together, Australian retail giants have started to quiver. K-marts official statement on this matter was: "Following a significant review of all content in Grand Theft Auto Games Kmart has taken the decision to remove this product immediately, Kmart apologises for not being closer to the content of this game."

Reports have brought to light that both Target and K-Mart are owned by the same corporate group, Wesfarmers, so for those in the know - this shouldn't be a huge shock as we're sure the executives are covering their behinds against some kind of apparent public uproar. Who's going to fall next? In other news, this is great for online retailers as customers will now likely take their business to the internet in search for this massively popular title.

The Target breach was a nasty wakeup call for retailers, cybersecurity experts and consumers, as criminals were able to compromise millions of American shoppers. Since the incident, there has been a reported eight percent increase in IT security spending, but that still hasn't been able to slow down a tidal wave of follow up breaches.

"The reality is that companies that have taken these steps are treating the symptoms but not the underlying problems," said Dr. Barbara Rembiesa, CEO of the International Association of Information Technology Asset Managers (IAITAM). "By focusing only on narrowly focused and superficial IT security 'solutions,' companies are putting the cart before the horse and they're going nowhere."

In fact, security issues will continue to plague retailers in 2015, with companies too focused on trying to fix IT security gaps while not looking at the big picture. Dr. Rembiesa recommends companies to be fully aware of their PC systems and networks, as they cannot defend against a breach if they didn't know which systems are working on their networks.

Just yesterday we wrote about a Change.org petition to remove Rockstar's controversial next-gen release, GTA V, off popular retail chain 'Target' shelves. The petition claimed that the game was sexist, containing misogynist values and promoted violence towards and rape of women.

Target has just pushed a media release, claiming that due to public outcry the game has now been pulled from all shelves.

Their statement claims that "Target Australia will stop selling the R-rated video game Grand Theft Auto 5 (GTA5) following feedback

Americans are embracing online video, enjoying more freedom in choosing the content they watch, which has hurt TV viewership, according to a new report from Nielsen. The shift to online video is going to pressure cable and satellite TV providers - despite many consumers not necessarily cutting the cord, less viewership will hurt advertising and pressure providers to find ways to evolve.

More consumers have broadband Internet access and can choose from Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, YouTube and other services - as more broadcasters and content providers test online video services - with 45 percent of Americans streaming television shows at least once per month, eMarketer said.

"Content is still king, but consumers are shaping their own content-discovery experience, and the evolving media landscape has not lessened consumer demand for quality, professionally produced content," said Dounia Turrill, Nielsen SVP of insights, in a statement. "What has changed is the number and reliability of new media available to viewers."

The Sony Pictures hack has had an immediate impact in the form of several soon-to-be-released movies popping up on torrents, and Sony's employee personal records and passwords have also been leaked. Sony has been placed into a lockdown of sorts, and employees are not being allowed to login to their computers. The long-term effects may be even more devastating, as the FBI is warning that the malware used to execute the Sony attack is on the loose. The FBI's five-page flash warning was issued to major US corporations on Monday. The malware was specifically created to attack Sony, but other hackers often modify existing malware for their own purposes. There is an increasing threat of hackers creating a large number of mutations now that the exceptionally virulent bug is on the loose.

The nefarious bug not only steals data, but it also eventually overwrites all information on the storage device. This is particularly devastating. Once overwritten, the data is almost surely unrecoverable. The malware even overwrites the Windows master boot record (MBR), which makes any hope of salvaging data even harder. The warning from the FBI is targeted at businesses, but as with any malware, it will soon trickle out to the wider world at large. Nation-state developed malware is on the rise as shadowy global cyber-warfare campaigns continue unabated. Nations have many more resources at their disposal to create these electronic arms of mass destruction, but completely ignore the fact that these sophisticated hacks eventually spread to the public.

Components of the insidious malware have been tracked back to North Korea, which was very upset over a pending Sony movie that outlines an assassination attempt of the oft-ridiculed Kim Jong-un. Surprisingly, North Korea has a sophisticated cyber-warfare unit that has been linked to other large scale attacks in the past. A North Korean spokesperson offered a weak denial in the attack, but added in the comment that "I kindly advise you to just wait and see" if they were behind the attack.

NVM Express, or NVMe, is an optimized interface designed specifically for non-volatile memories, such as flash. As detailed in our Defining NVMe article, NVMe offers unparalleled performance over the PCIe bus. The NVMe specification lays the groundwork for the base technology, but complementary technologies are entering development to further enhance its capabilities. One particularly promising specification is the NVMe Over Fiber standard. This allows for end-to-end NVMe over Infiniband, Ethernet with RDMA, and Intel's Omni Scale Fabric.

Flash has long been confined inside the server in DAS (Direct Attached Storage) configurations. This keeps the SSD as close to the processor as possible, and eliminates network latency. NVMe Over Fibre offers refined performance by removing the SCSI translation layer, which adds latency when communicating over the network. According to recent surveys, network congestion is the most pressing issue for IT professionals. The NVMe Over Fibre standard will refine communication between clusters, and SSDs can be addressed from remote servers as if the PCIe SSD were plugged directly into the server. Qlogic is one of the leading suppliers of server networking products, and their entrance into the NVM Express consortium will likely speed development and adoption of NVMe Over Fibre as well.

SAN and NAS deployments are falling out of favor in the datacenter, and there is a move to VSAN and other server-SAN implementations. Much of this migration to DAS configurations is prompted by latency-inducing network protocols. Unadulterated NVMe SSD performance over the network will surely have administrators salivating as it moves closer to market, and could yet again alter high-performance storage deployments in the datacenter.

Patriot Memory was one of the early pioneers in the consumer SSD market and had several successful product lines. Patriot backed away from the SSD market as competition became stiff and the market consolidated. They never really gave a reason, but the SSD market is brutally competitive and margins are shrinking. They still have three models listed on their site, but these are older models with SandForce processors. New controller manufacturers, such as Phison and SMI, have begun to experience success. These controllers allow smaller SSD players without NAND fabrication capability to compete with leading SSDs from the fab-enabled behemoths.

A new unannounced Patriot SSD recently popped up on Amazon. The Patriot Torch is available in capacities of 120 and 240GB, and features a Phison controller. The Torch is outfitted with 16nm Synchronous NAND and features 555/535 MB/s sequential speeds. There is precious little information available on the new SSD, such as random performance and endurance. We do know the SSD features a three-year warranty and sports a 6Gb/s SATA controller. The SSDs are competitively priced, but the relatively small capacity points may be leading the way for high capacity versions.

There is no word on accessories or any toolbox-type applications available for the SSD. Patriot may be testing the waters with this new SSD, and hopefully they can expand it out into larger versions as well.

Toshiba has been aggressively pushing further in to the datacenter SSD market. Toshiba is surfing the wave of flash pouring into the datacenter, and they recently posted a 70.5% quarter over quarter jump in Q2 2014. There are other sharks swimming in the same pool, and competition for slots has been tough as Intel, Micron, and Samsung also have very competitive products. Toshiba has a long history with flash, they actually invented it, but they also have an often-overlooked advantage of being the only fab-enabled SSD manufacturer with HDD manufacturing as well. This provides them a complete portfolio in the two backbones of enterprise storage.

NVMe and PCIe are hot topics as of late, but SATA SSDs are also one of the fastest growing segments in the datacenter. Toshiba has announced two new SSDs to address this market. The HK3E2 is a value-endurance 6Gb/s SATA SSD that offers 3 DWPD (Drive Writes Per Day) of endurance, tailoring it well for mainstream enterprise applications such as exchange mail servers, web servers, database servers, indexing servers and data center storage workloads. Power loss protection is included and the HK3E2 sports speeds of 75,000/30,000 random read/write IOPS. The HK3E2 also features sequential read/write speeds of 500/400 MiB/s.

Toshiba is also providing the HK3R2 series to address read-centric workloads. The HK3R2 features 1 DWPD of endurance and speeds up to 75,000/12,000 random read/write IOPS. It also offers a beefy 500/400 MiB/s sequential write speed, and is designed for read intensive applications and workloads such as read caching, video streaming and data center storage. Both SSDs feature power loss protection and Toshiba's proprietary QSBC (Quadruple Swing-By Code) error control algorithms, which provide enhanced resilience to data failures.

Social justice has been steadily creeping its way more and more into gaming culture, seeing many people fight back on social media and news outlets posting opinion articles damning certain games, developers and personalities who express views that are alleged as misogynist, promoting senseless violence and/or rape culture.

In recent news, since the next-gen and PC release of Rockstar Studio's latest hit, Grand Theft Auto 5, there has been a major public outcry globally against the game. This passionate dislike for the game and it's morals has seeing peoples social media feeds explode with petitions to take the game off the shelves, alongside many negative opinions of the game they have worked so hard to produce.

The latest group targeting this game is a group of former sex workers, who are spearheading a Change.org petition to remove this title from the popular Australian department store, named Target. Their allegations include the statement that it "encourages players to commit sexual violence and kill women".

Reports have just come to light of an error code reading "160-0103" in-game which has been causing some users' Wii U systems to brick themselves or wipe their data fully off the console.

Gamnesia originally broke this news to the public, stating that the error is only applicable to one of the consoles latest releases and further issues appear when the user tries to enter their settings to figure out the source of the problem:

"It seems that this error only shows up with Super Smash Bros., and all other games and functions work fine until you play Smash Bros. or try to enter the Data Management page on the Wii U. When trying to enter the Data Management page, people have been receiving the error code 160-1710."

343 Industries is promising a patch for Halo: The Master Chief Collection, something that should fix the matchmaking issues that the reworked series of first-person shooters has been experiencing since it launched on the Xbox One a couple of weeks ago now.

The developer has said that "the next of which will specifically make improvements to the matchmaking system and flow". Not only that, but some gamers are peeved at Microsoft over one of their promotions, with the company teasing a deal that offered 15,000 credit bonus to any Xbox Live Rewards member who purchases Halo: The Master Chief Collection before December 31.

This means that $15 of credit is up for grabs within the Xbox Live Marketplace, with early adopters arguing that this is pretty much just a discount on the game itself. Considering the issues that the game has had since launch, this isn't too good at all for both Microsoft and 343 Industries.

Valve has launched Steam Broadcasting, which if you didn't guess is the company's own version of livestreaming, ala Twitch. You can watch gamers play games through the Steam Community, and stream games yourself, if you want to.

Steam Broadcasting also offers streaming games privately, as well as to the world, so if you want to have a private broadcast between friends, the option is still there. Gamers can set Steam Broadcasting to automatically stream games to your friends list on Steam if they want to watch it, or friends can alternatively send you a request to view your stream.

This is where Valve is making it different to Twitch, which requires software to get it up and running. Steam doing it natively, and very easily, is definitely the way to go. Valve obviously has the game library to back it up, as well as a few exclusives of their own like DOTA2 and CS:GO.

Riot Games has announced that over 27 million tuned into the League of Legends finals, and even with that astonishing number of people checking in, it is still down from the 32 million the developer saw tuning in last year.

The drop is a 15% dip in viewership, but for those who did tune into the finals, they stayed around longer. Riot noted that fans averaged around 67 minutes, while last year the average was just 42 minutes. The developer also saw a larger peak, with 11.2 million people watching at a single time during the showdown between Samsung White and Royal Club, compared to the peak of 8.7 million in 2013.

Over the entire Season Three World Championship, over 70 million hours were watched online, which spanned stages from Taipei to Seoul. Riot streamed over 100 hours of live content across 15 days, in 19 languages through 40 broadcast partners.

We've been hearing about this Tizen operating system for what feels like years now, but according to the latest rumors, the reality could soon be right around the corner. Samsung is rumored to unveil the Z1 smartphone, a Tizen-based handset, on December 10.

Samsung's Z1 handset would compete directly against Google's Android One initiative, which has the Mountain View-based search giant to get Android into the developing markets through cheaper handsets. VR World is reporting that Samsung could launch its Z1 handset with a 4-inch display with a resolution of 800x480, a 1.2GHz dual-core processor manufactured by Spreadtrum, which is a company Intel works with (and Intel being involved with the Tizen OS, too by the way).

Rounding up the specifications of the Z1, we have 512MB of RAM, 4GB of internal flash storage, a 3.2-megapixel rear-facing camera, dual-SIM capabilities, and more. We should expect Samsung to unveil the Z1 on December 10, so keep your eyes peeled to TweakTown.

It doesn't look like Ubisoft has learned anything from the recent release of Assassin's Creed: Unity and all of its issues, as rumors are now arriving about the next game in the series, Assassin's Creed: Victory.

The story came from Kotaku reporting that the new game would be set in 19th century London during the Victorian era, according to "a person familiar with the game" reported Kotaku, a game that would arrive in fall 2015 for the Xbox One, PS4 and PC. Ubisoft Quebec is the studio working on the game, unlike Ubisoft Montreal which worked on the currently still a work-in-progress Assassin's Creed: Unity.

There was also seven minutes of "target gameplay footage" which was shown, which was being rendered in real-time by the Assassin's Creed engine, and not pre-rendered. Personally, I think Ubisoft needs to be very, very cautious with this release. I think we should see a demo of the game released, so that the faith can be restored into the series, as I think over half the audience of the series would be very unsure of trusting Ubisoft again with another Assassin's Creed game following the recent train wreck that was the AC:U launch.

A relatively new player to the monitor market, Sceptre has announced the features and availability of their E275W-1920 Full HD 1080P monitor. Thanks to a press release delivered to us by Max Borges Agency, we've got the full information to you.

Although claiming them as rather new, Sceptre has actually been around since 1984 - providing the market with LCD and LED monitors. However, they've been recently seen pushing themselves harder into the market.

This new monitor comes with the ability to tilt 15 degrees backward and 5 forward, alongside built-in speakers, a 5ms response time, a net weight of 12.61 lbs and an Energy Star V6.0 rating.

Just yesterday we published an article outlining PAX Australia's 2015 ticket sales going live, seeing their event announced for the 30th of October 2015.

We covered that even though PAX Australia has a stellar reputation in the local market, with a total PAX culture being born only two years into its existence. Many fans are purchasing tickets even though no companies, titles, personalities or attractions have been announced to the public - with them claiming confidence in the fact that PAX will likely put on a great show no matter what.

We were able to get into contact with Guy "Yug" Blomberg, PAX Australia's Content & community manager, regarding a personal statement about the purpose for these early ticket sales. Guy provides some understandable and seemingly correct thoughts on the matter, with his full statement reading:

Iranian hackers continue to develop their cyberattack capabilities, and have breached some of the leading energy infrastructure and transport companies, potentially leading to physical damage, the Cylance cybersecurity firm warned.

As part of the widespread campaign, companies in the United States, China, Israel, Germany, France, India and Saudi Arabia have been hit - with industries ranging from aerospace research companies, universities, energy firms, telecommunications operators and hospitals being compromised.

"We believe that if the operation is left to continue unabated, it is only a matter of time before the team impacts the world's physical safety," the Cylance report claimed.