Latest News - Page 2799

The recent report from Palo Alto Networks that disclosed the WireLurker malware targeting Apple iOS and Mac OS X was a sudden wakeup call to users. Even though it was isolated to China, and Apple has blocked the malware, cyberattackers are finding new ways to compromise iPhones and Mac OS systems. The company has done a great job to keep its software ecosystem secure, especially if devices aren't jailbroken, but cybercriminals are becoming more sophisticated in their research strategies.

Here is what Ryan Olson, Palo Alto Networks intelligence director, recently told eWeek: "We will continue to see new malware for both Mac OS X and iOS, and they will incrementally get better and better. I would be most worried about high-value targets," with a focus on government officials and political rivals.

Cyberattacks targeting Google Android and Microsoft Windows will remain more prevalent, but Apple users - many of them used to being relatively secure - could also be caught off guard when major security issues are released in the wild.

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare has been available since last week, and Sledgehammer Games is preparing a patch that will resolve bug problems and fine-tune other issues, based on input from the gaming community. Since launching on November 3, the game was met with mainly positive reviews from game sites and gamers, and Sledgehammer Games wants to continue appeasing customers with fast changes.

The update will address: in-game chat notification location, prestige reset problems, optimize connections, resolve leaderboard stat problems, fix round-based game modes that affect Win/Loss ratios, and other

"Our team has been working hard on improvements to the game," said Michael Condrey, studio head and Sledgehammer Games co-founder. "We've also had our ears to the ground, listening to your feedback. Our commitment to continuing to support the game and community is as strong as ever, and we have the whole team focused on making the experience the best it can be."

The current console market is fully consumed by the Sony PlayStation 4 and Microsoft Xbox One devices, though many often overlook Nintendo's Wii U. It's true that there are similarities in the game catalogs for both the PS4 and Xbox One, but that's because game developers want their titles on the two more popular consoles.

Here is what Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime said: "If you look at the other two competitive platforms, fundamentally, what's the difference? They have a lot of shared content. Look at it from the standpoint of, what don't they have? They don't have our games. They don't have Mario and Zelda. I'd much rather be where Nintendo is, with a differentiated platform, differentiated set-up experiences that we can provide uniquely to the consumer."

It's true that the PS4 and Xbox One don't have Mario or Zelda - but a counter to that argument is that many game studios would rather develop games for Sony and Microsoft. Nintendo relies heavily on a small handful of game franchises, while the PS4 and Xbox One can provide a diversified product offering.

The Mars One project is an ambitious program, where Mars One wants to see human beings on the red planet by 2025. Not only that, but Mars One CEO and co-founder Bas Lansdorp has said that he wants to leave the astronauts on Mars, and establish a self-sufficient settlement.

During the Engadget Expand show, there was a Life on Mars event where Lansdorp took the stage to talk about all-things Mars. He said that human settlement on the planet isn't just challenging, but it's almost close to achievable. He explained that the technology required for the Mars One project to succeed already exists, so that side of the problem isn't that bad. Then we have the issue of blasting a rocket in the right direction for the trip to succeed, with the first Mars One probe to touch down in 2018, and another to hit the red planet in 2020.

In 2022, life support systems and other essential equipment will be sent to Mars ahead of the first manned missions to the red planet, something that will launch in 2024 if all things go to plan. Why bother going to Mars? Lansdorp has said that it's simple, it's just "progress". He said that's why the human race is such a successful species, is that we're always pushing the boundaries. He said that the Mars One project is an excuse to expand on our exploration of the cosmos, where he hopes that the adventure to Mars will bring together the world in "one common goal". He added that by televising the journey of the first off-world settlers, we can live with them. He teased that "it's literally the next giant leap for mankind".

We've been waiting for a much closer look at Google's super-interesting Project Ara modular smartphone technology, and thanks to Engadget Expand in NYC over the weekend, we're now getting a much closer look at the modular smartphone.

Project Ara was running an older version of Android during the event, something that will be fully updated to the latest version of Android before it reaches consumers' hands. Google's Advanced Technology Projects, and Project Lead on Project Ara, Paul Eremenko, showed off the ease of switching around the modules on the modular handset, something he called hot-swapping, which we should all be familiar with. He also teased how the Endoskeleton's bus will handle all of the hot-swapping of its components.

Eremenko also talked about an app that allowed the modules to be "ejected", which will turn off the electro-permanent magnet, allowing the module to be removed. There will also be another module on offer, something that will sport an LED that will allow you to read your pulse.

Amazon has just unveiled somewhat of a surprise to the world, in the form of an always-listening, waiting-for-your-command portable speaker: Echo. Amazon's Echo has a built-in virtual assistant, with Siri and Google Now-like abilities, which can help you out wherever your Echo is sitting.

Inside of the slick-looking black tube, we have a 360-degree-firing speaker, with a 2.5-inch subwoofer and 2-inch tweeter, capable of playing your music from a smartphone or tablet through Bluetooth. Echo is also able to play music online through your Amazon Music Library, Prime Music, TuneIn and iHeartRadio.

Echo has seven microphones that feature far-field technology, so it can hear you from virtually anywhere in your room. It can use voice commands to do a variety of tasks, such as playing your music (the most obvious one), get the news for you, answer your questions, create to-do lists, set timers and alarms, tell jokes and much more. You can access Echo from anywhere, thanks to its companion app, too. In order to wake it up, you just use a "wake word" that you've set it up with: for example, "OK, Jarvis" would work nicely.

Brittany Levasseur's husband has had seven brain surgeries over the last 12 months, where she took to Reddit to post about how their doctor recommended playing Destiny as a form of mental therapy. She wrote: "It's been a joy to watch him. It's been a little over a week, and the game's effect on him has been so strong. Weak for months, he is flourishing in more than just the game world. He has been going out more, doing chores, making jokes. The effect of playing the game on his mood has been almost staggering".

It was shortly after Levasseur's post on Reddit that Bungie's Community Manager got in contact with her, offering her husband a package at the Tower: a one-of-a-kind rifle for Destiny. The Fate Of All Fools isn't in the game yet, unavailable to normal Destiny gamers. This means that this gamer is the only non-Bungie employee in the world to have this gun.

How does Levasseur feel about the gun? His wife said in an email to Kotaku: "He adores the gun. It's his first exotic, and he has been actively enjoying it all day. It seems like my entire night has been on repeat - it's been nothing but 'BANG! God I love this gun. BANG! This is awesome. BANG! Did you see that shot!?'".

Blizzard may have cancelled Titan, but it has just announced Overwatch, a team-based, first-person shooter that is the company's first new IP in quite a few years. Blizzard unveiled the game during BlizzCon 2014, with a pre-rendered video showing off Pixar-like animation, teasing its upcoming shooter.

If you thought Overwatch would be years away, think again, as Blizzard's Chris Metzen has said that Overwatch is coming "sooner than you think". CEO and co-founder of Blizzard Entertainment, Mike Morhaime said: "Our goal with Overwatch is to create an awesome FPS experience that's more accessible to a much wider audience while delivering the action and depth that shooter fans love". The game world itself is set many years in the future where an "international task force" known as the Overwatch, has brought peace to the world, but this has since finished, with new heroes needing to rise up to the job.

Overwatch is a team-based multiplayer shooter, which is "a game and genre" that Blizzard has wanted to play with for a while. It features cartoon style visuals, similar to other team-based shooters like Team Fortress 2, and RPG-like FPS games like Borderlands. We have some weird and wonderful characters to play with, including Hanzo, a bow-wielding ranger; Winston, the gorilla; Torbjorn, a dwarf engineer; Widowmaker, the sniper; and Bastion, the robot/turret.

Just a couple days after Palo Alto Networks spilled the beans on the WireLurker malware targeting Apple iOS and Mac OS devices, Apple has blocked infected apps so they will be unable to run on devices. The company didn't provide specifics into how the malware is being blocked, but did recommend users run anti-malware security software - and only download apps from the official Apple App Store.

The company confirmed it is "aware of malicious software available from a download site aimed at users in China, and we've blocked the identified apps to prevent them from launching."

WireLurker is the first known malware that spread to a large number of users that didn't jailbreak their devices - and shows cybercriminals are just as anxious to compromise Apple products as Google Android and Microsoft Windows.

The phrase Internet of Things (IoT) has been around for more than 15 years, and while it remains a buzzword, the industry is rapidly growing. There will be 30 billion connected "things" in 2020, with the industry valued at $3.04 trillion in 2020, according to the IDC research group - and that figure is only going to keep climbing, especially as adoption reaches outside of developed markets.

"The opportunities presented by IoT are driving widespread attention among both traditional and non-traditional ICT vendors looking to take advantage of emerging revenue opportunities," said Vernon Turner, IDC SVP of Enterprise Infrastructure, Consumer, Network, Telecom and IoT Research. "We're still in the early stages of maturation and IoT represents unparalleled opportunity in government, consumer, and enterprise environments."

Network security will remain a significant concern - and despite increased security protocols - social engineering and attacks designed to deceive users will pose problems.

Children under six years of age should not watch 3D content, and access for adolescents up to 13 years old should be limited, according to the French-based Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health and Safety (ANSES) group said.

"In children, and particularly before the age of six, the health effects of this vergence-accommodation conflict could be much more severe given the active development of the visual system at this time," the group said in a statement.

When Nintendo released the 3DS in 2010, there were safety warnings that children under six could have their eyesight damaged from using the device. However, as 3D technology becomes more common, health experts are again becoming concerned of potential long-term vision damage among users.

Texting while driving is a dangerous activity that can lead to traffic tickets and auto accidents, but 98 percent of drivers who own mobile phone and regularly text while driving say they are aware of the risks. Two-thirds of survey respondents say they read text messages when stopped at a stop sign or red light, with a quarter of survey respondents admitting they send and read texts while driving.

The survey also revealed motivations behind reading and sending texts while driving: 28 percent are worried they could miss out on something important, with a quarter also saying they don't believe their driving habits - and ability to pay attention to the road - are impacted.

Despite many states now having laws that make it illegal to read and send texts while driving, actual enforcement of these laws tends to be sporadic.

The Galaxy Note 4 is barely here, and here we are: talking about the Galaxy Note 5. Well, PhoneArena is reporting that the next Galaxy Note smartphone will sport a 5.9-inch 4K Super AMOLED display, which will be pushing 700PPI, with manufacturing to begin in August of 2015.

This puts it right into the time frame of the next Galaxy Note announcement, which is around September of every year. Samsung has confirmed the new 3840x2160 AMOLED panel for mobiles itself, during its Analyst Days presentations last year, as well as it telling the world at the Semiconductor and Display Technology Roadmap workshop back in January of this year.

What makes this interesting, is that a 5.9-inch 4K panel would be absolutely perfect for the Oculus Rift, and considering Samsung has a strong partnership with Oculus VR, this could be the display Oculus has been waiting for.

OnePlus has had quite the year, with its Smash the Past promotion, something it promoted right after unveiling the One itself, which had people around the world smashing their current smartphone for the sheer opportunity of getting the OnePlus One smartphone.

Second, was the referral program that had people inviting others to have the opportunity to buy a One smartphone, but now we're hearing the company has sold over 500,000 devices, with the aim now shifted to 1 million units. The company opened up its pre-order window for a single hour last month, which had their servers overloaded with requests. Now the company will be holding a similar event on November 17, where it hopes its servers will handle the load a little more.

During an interview with Forbes, co-founder and director of OnePlus, Carl Pei, said that they've sold 500,000 handsets, and hope to reach one million units before the end of the year. With OnePlus spending just $300 on marketing so far, I'd call that a success.

September 2014 has come and gone, with Google securing more of that coveted mobile OS market share pie. Android continues to lead, according to ComScore's latest data, with 52.1% of the mobile OS market, leaving iOS with 41.7% and Windows Phone with 3.6%.

When it comes to the OEM market share, Apple actually lead the pack with 41.7%, while Android is the leading platform spread across multiple partners in Samsung, LG, Motorola and HTC. Not only that, but ComScore is looking at what users are running on their phones, with Google and Facebook owning most of the top-used applications.

Facebook and its own app leads the pack, with YouTube coming in second, Google Play in third, and Google Play in fourth place. Pandora takes fifth place, Facebook returns for sixth place with Messenger, and then Google makes a return for seventh and eighth place with Maps and Gmail, respectively.

NVIDIA has just posted its Q3 fiscal year 2015 results, which ended on October 26, with some impressive results. The chipmaker has posted a Q3 revenue of $1.23 billion, which is up 16% year-over-year, while revenues are at $3.43 billion, up 15% year-over-year.

The company launched their second-generation Maxwell GPUs in the quarter, with the GeForce GTX 900 series performing, and selling well. NVIDIA's GeForce division also did well, which shouldn't be surprising, with their GPUs being the biggest revenue generator for the company. GPU sales were up 13% year-over-year, and quarter-over-quarter, with GeForce-branded GPU revenue up 36%. Gaming notebook sales are also up, more than double what they were last year. Tesla GPUs and GRID sales were also high, but no exact numbers were released.

NVIDIA's Tegra processor sold well over the three-month period, with a 51% increase year-over-year, with Tegra in vehicles being big business for NVIDIA. The company noted that over six million vehicles on the road right now have Tegra-powered infotainment systems. When it comes to mobiles, NVIDIA had quite a few products on the market with their chips: Shield, Google's Nexus 9 and some Chromebooks are powered by the company's Tegra K1 chip.

Massive Entertainment, the developer behind The Division, recently sat down with Open World Games, talking about its open-world tactical shooter. Martin Hultberg, Head of Communications at Massive, said that the developer will be optimizing The Division for all three platforms: Xbox One, PS4 and PC, instead of optimizing for a single platform.

He added that the game will not be "downgraded" from consoles to the PC, with each version receiving its own attention, utilizing each platform's strengths. With a capable PC, it means that the best version of the game will again be on the PC. Hulberg said: "Downgrading is a weird term to use. Obviously, we want to make a game that looks the best it can on its respective format, so Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC. So I think the term downgrade is a bit confusing and weird because we're trying to get the most out of every machine we use. So Xbox gets its attention, PlayStation gets its attention, and PC of course will be able to cram it up a bit more depending on the hardware you have".

Hulberg continued: "We address every console, every platform, as its own version, so we try to stay away from the thing where you go for the least common denominator, and everybody suffers for it". Hulberg added that each version of The Division will be handled individually, with resolutions and frame rates decided on a platform-to-platform basis, instead of pushing one standard across multiple platforms to hit uniformity. He added: "We want to make a good experience on all respective formats". Remember, the last time we heard about The Division was that it was locked at 30FPS, so this is a 180-degree change in direction for Massive and Ubisoft, but it's not confirmation that we should expect over 30FPS, which is what we need to hear most of all.

DICE has been working on something behind the scenes, porting its Frostbite engine over to iOS, the engine that powers its Battlefield games. Kristoffer Benjaminsson, Product Owner for Mobile at Frostbite has talked about the ways of getting Frostbite on iOS on the Frostbite blog.

Parts of Frostbite are already working on iOS, with DICE and its Battlefield 4 Commander app, but the company also showed off Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare on an iPad Air earlier this year at Apple's WWDC event, which is powered by its Frostbite engine. After that, the company wanted to see Battlefield 4 running in iOS, which has been quite the task.

With the Frostbite engine handling dynamic features like destruction or moving light sources in real-time, rendering all of this on a mobile device is extremely hard. But, DICE says that this "puts extra demand on performance to be able to deliver large, highly detailed world's with superb visual quality. We were making great progress feature-wise, but hardware and software limitations forced us to either scale down the number of objects and their complexity to retain visual fidelity, or accept lower visual fidelity to cope with a larger number of objects".

Far Cry 4, The Crew and Assassin's Creed: Unity are some of Ubisoft's biggest games coming out this year, and early 2015 have all but disappeared from Valve's digital distribution service, Steam.

A representative for Ubisoft UK told PCGamesN: "We've been in discussions with Valve about Assassin's Creed Unity but for the time being the game is not available via Steam in the UK". I've just checked Steam here in Australia, and all of those games do not show up, but I did see them just two days ago. This could be because Valve takes a cut of the sales, while Ubisoft has games big enough they'll still sell through their own distribution software: uPlay.

With everything going on surrounding Ubisoft pissing PC gamers off, you'd think the company would be trying all attempts to make up for it, and not dig the hole deeper. This move feels like the company has hired machinery to help dig its hole quicker from a construction company called 30FPS Construction, which would probably have a slogan like: "Digging At 24FPS Is More Cinematic".

The tablet market in North America is extremely competitive, but the Apple iPad is completely dominating Web traffic, collecting 79.9 percent, according to Chitika.

The statistics don't include the iPad Air 2 and iPad Mini 3 tablets, as Chitika studied mobile advertising impressions in September, so it's possible Apple's lead could have extended. In the No. 2 position was the Amazon Kindle with 6.7 percent, and Samsung took the No. 3 spot with 6 percent.

"With Amazon, Apple, Google, Sony, and other brands all overhauling one or more of their tablet offerings in advance of the 2014 holiday shopping season, the North American market remains tremendously competitive," the Chitika report says. The group also says "early January may yield the most accurate picture of the post-holiday North American tablet ecosystem."