Latest News - Page 2809

Computer security companies have had their hands full keeping PCs and other devices secure from cyberattackers, and while mobile malware is still overlooked, the threats are continuing to grow. There is serious concern that hackers will infect smartphones and tablets using malicious programs that are able to act like legitimate apps - giving them access to a large amount of information on mobile devices.

"We think the threat is real; we think it's a growing threat," said Gary Davis, McAfee chief consumer security evangelist. "We think there's a laissez-faire attitude with consumers not giving it the same kind of attention they give other threats."

Despite the lack of mobile attacks, where Google Android devices receive 98 percent of total mobile threats found in the wild, other operating systems need to be aware of security problems. Furthermore, mobile malware still has a lot of room to grow, even with thousands of Android-based malicious threats already spotted by security researchers.

Google may become the first trillion dollar company, but its dominant position as the world's most commonly used search engine has intense rivalry from Amazon.

Surprisingly, Google's competition isn't other engine engine companies. Google's CEO Eric Schmidt said, "Many people think our main competition is Bing or Yahoo. But, really, our biggest search competitor is Amazon". He continued, "People don't think of Amazon as search, but if you are looking for something to buy, you are more often than not looking for it on Amazon."

Google also feels that its position is also threatened by startups and innovators who are probably working from a garage right now. It's understandable, considering that Google's humble beginnings were from a garage. On the matter, Mr. Schmidt said, "Someone, somewhere in a garage is gunning for us. I know, because not long ago we were in that garage. Change comes from where you least expect it. The next Google won't do what Google does, just as Google didn't do what AOL did." Despite its dominant position, Google is one of many search engines that is available today.

Life for the older gaming consoles can be tough, but not in the sense they'll be used as containers to smuggle drugs. Older consoles were used as containers for smuggling cocaine, with four men arrested for allegedly smuggling thousands of grams of cocaine since Microsoft's first gaming console.

According to the investigation report, a pack of 1100 grams of cocaine worth over $100,000 was stashed inside an Xbox 360, and sent to a house in Reading, Pennsylvania. As investigations progressed, the police followed a vehicle where the suspects arrived in their home at Hancock Boulevard, with police raiding both houses after getting a search warrant, where they found a large amount of cocaine and even Xbox consoles, accessories and other parts.

The items are as follows:

It appears an Australian retailer has published details of the Microsoft Xbox One Assassin's Creed Unity bundle, which could be announced in the near future. Retailing for around $650 for the Australian market, the bundle includes a black 500GB Xbox One unit, Kinect, Assassin's Creed Unity and Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag. The bundle without a Kinect will cost around $521 but include the same console and games.

Microsoft hopes its gaming bundles will help draw interest from gamers ahead of the 2014 Christmas holiday shopping season - an important time for the company desperate to try to catch up to the Sony PlayStation 4. The company recently announced its Halo: The Master Chief bundle, but it won't be available to U.S. gamers, however.

Apple is cracking a whip to set an example over smaller companies and suppliers who received (or will receive) contracts from the company to make components for its devices. The company slapped a sapphire display maker with a $50 million fine for leaking the information about its devices' specification and other information that they were obligated to be silent about.

According to the report, the information came out because GT Advanced Technologies filed for bankruptcy once they have decided to sell off their sapphire crystal manufacturing factories. The company was responsible for leaking information about the presence of sapphire display for iPhone 6 before its release. But at the time when it was found that iPhone 6 will be using 'ion-strengthened glass', the share prices took a nose dive. Furthermore, the company owes about $600 million for the displays that are not used.

According to the bankruptcy report, the company said that its deal with Apple for iPhone screens was oppressive and burdensome where they had to terminate the agreement to deal with the situation. As a result, the company's facilities in Arizona and Massachusetts will close down, affecting up to 890 people's jobs. 13 employees would be getting bonuses adding up to $64,700.

Technological advances have allowed researchers to create prosthetic limbs that are able to better mimic the natural movement of human limbs, with medical patients able to regain their sense of touch. In one study, researchers in the United States manufactured a prosthetic hand that uses electric signals sent into a medical patient's harm and brain, providing a sense of "feel."

"The sense of touch is one of the ways we interact with objects around us," said Dustin Tyler, Case Western Reserve associate professor of biomedical engineering and the study's author. "The work reactivates areas of the brain that produce the sense of touch. When the hand is lost, the inputs that switched on these areas were lost."

A group of Swedish scientists created a mind-controlled prosthetic arm that connects to the medical patient's arm, nerves and muscles. This type of research has great potential for those injured in serious incidents, and will continue to be a topic of focus for researchers.

A video of Firefly Online was spotted in YouTube which was showing off its 3D environment engine. The game is designed by Spark Plug Games, and the sneak peak shows a one-minute video of the derelict ship's environment.

The video doesn't show much, except a lot of running around an abandoned ship, but it does give a good look of the game, and the progress the designs have made so far. Firefly is an MMO where the series' cast will be present in the game. According to Andy Fore, the CEO of Quantum Mechanix Interactive who is the publisher for Firefly Online, this will not be a traditional MMO since Firefly wasn't a typical sci-fi show.

When you're a captain of a ship in the game, you will need to get crew members. The crew members are NPCs, but unlike typical NPCs, they have an independent control of their life, and have the ability to transfer to ships belonging to other captains, retaining memories, personality traits and even grudges. The relationship between the character and the NPC is based on loyalty. There isn't much information about the game's release, as the developer is being quiet, unlike other publishers. While it's too early to say if this game will be good, I am sure this will satisfy a lot of Firefly fans.

In this government-spies-on-everyone age, anonymity is hard to come by. But, a group of privacy-focused developers have taken to Kickstarter, asking for funding from the world for something they call, Anonabox. With a goal of $7500, they've blown past that with a huge $146,755 (at the time of writing), with another 28 days still to go.

Anonabox is an open-source router that automatically directs all of your data, with it connecting to your router through Wi-Fi or ethernet, through the Tor network. This hides users' IP addresses, and skips over censorship. Better yet, Anonabox is tiny - small enough that it could easily fit inside of your pocket, or be easily placed anywhere near your router.

Thanks to its tiny size, users can take it with them, plugging it into any router, making their work and Internet use completely anonymous. For people who travel, they could use it in their hotel rooms, or for people in China at an Internet cafe, they can skip over the Great Firewall of China. August Germar, who has spent four years working on Anonabox, explains: "Now all your programs, no matter what you do on your computer, are routed over the Tor network". Germar says that the idea behind Anonabox making the use of Tor easier, but for those who reside in Internet-repressive regimes. He added: "It was important to us that it be portable and small-something you can easily conceal or even throw away if you have to get rid of it".

Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor has an insane Ultra HD texture pack, with a requirement of 6GB of VRAM from your GPU. But, by the looks of a comparison between the Ultra HD texture pack, and High settings, there isn't much of a change in visuals.

The Ultra HD texture pack is a separate 3.7GB download, but when enabled, apart from requiring 6GB of VRAM, it doesn't seem to look much better. There are some comparison screenshots above, and below, which compare both the Ultra HD texture settings, and the normal High setting within the game, that doesn't require 6GB of VRAM.

In the screenshots, the top half is the High settings screenshot, while the bottom shot is from the Ultra HD texture pack enabled version of the game.

ASUS has unveiled its new Republic of Gamers G751 series gaming laptop, which can be configured up to be a serious gaming powerhouse. This includes the option of an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 900M series GPU, the second-generation Maxwell chip that is doing wonders for gamers, as well as the exclusive ASUS TurboMaster GPU overclocking technology from ASUS.

First up, the G751 has a "stealthy F-22 Raptor-inspired" design, which definitely looks like a mean gaming machine. On top of that, we have a 17.3-inch Full HD display, with touch support being included on the G751JM model. The configurable specs start with multiple options of Intel's Core range of processors. We have the i7-4860HQ and i7-4710HQ for the G751JT model, the i7-4710HQ for the G751JT, and finally, the Core i7-4710HQ or i5-4200H for the G751JM.

The ASUS ROG G751 can house up to 32GB of DDR3L 1600MHz RAM, a slew of storage options with up to a 512GB NGFF PCIe-based SSD, but when it comes to GPUs, this is where it gets fun. The new gaming notebook from ASUS can be configured with up to the new Maxwell-based, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M with 4GB of GDDR5 RAM, on the G751JY at least. The G751JT features the GeForce GTX 970M with 3GB of RAM, while the G751JM includes the GTX 860M with 2GB of RAM.

Online cloud storage has always been plagued with one issue or another, which eventually affects its users whose data is either compromised, stolen or even deleted. Earlier, iOS cloud storage had a massive leak of celebrity nude photographs which alone raised questions about such cloud storage. Before that, it was Megaupload where its customer's data could have been wiped out.

Dropbox is now the latest name in a string of cloud storage problems, where a bug was found which deletes files of some of its users. The company said that the bug is present in its older version of the desktop app which deletes its user's data from the cloud, which happens when Selective Sync is enabled. This function allows users to use their local storage to download data from selected folders in the cloud automatically. But if the system shuts down while the Selective Sync is running, it will delete the files.

Dropbox also confirmed that its working to restore these deleted files and released a new desktop app fix that should prevent this issue from happening again. For the troubles, Dropbox is offering its affected users a year's service of Dropbox Pro. This may not be a compensation for some people whose irreplaceable data is probably worth a lot more than Dropbox Pro account. But if the cloud storage company is able to successfully retrieve all the lost data, then there should be no harm done. However, irrespective of the end result, this will raise serious doubts about the long-term reliability of cloud storage.

Some blame the recession and the weak economy for many businesses failing: small, medium and large. But Finland's Prime Minister Alexander Stubb suggested that Apple is the company that killed two of its important export industries. The first one is paper, the second one in Finnish-based, once-dominant and well-known maker of phones, Nokia.

During an interview with CNBC, Finnish PM said, "I guess one could say that the iPhone killed Nokia and the iPad killed the Finnish paper industry,". He added, "The iPhone killed Nokia and the iPad killed the paper industry, but we'll make a comeback". Recently, ratings agency Standard & Poor's downgraded the country's rating from AAA to AA+. Finland's GDP has been taking a nose dive for three years in a row, and started to reflect a negative perspective about the country's economy.

Though blaming Apple (or anyone) is simply wrong. Nokia's dominance collapsed not only it stuck with Symbian OS to a point that switching to other OS was too late. Android and iOS picked up the pace and dominated, not to mention Samsung's various smartphones and feature phone spree in almost every price range. Paper on the other hand gets replaced with other electronic devices, especially e-readers and tablets. Even airline pilots have slowly started replacing manuals and maps for a tablet where required information is easily available. At one point, even Apple had trouble and was in the brink of collapse, which was the turning point when the company brought back Steve Jobs in the '90s.

Alienware has a very powerful gaming laptop in its new Alienware 18, but now news is coming out that the gaming laptop can be configured with its Core i7-4940MX processor overclocked to an incredible 4.4GHz. While this clock speed might not be all that impressive on the desktop, for a notebook with limited cooling abilities, and a very limited space to dissipate heat, this is damn impressive.

The smaller, and cheaper Alienware 17 can be configured with an overclocked Core i7 processor, with its i7-4910MQ capable of being configured to hit 4.1GHz. Intel's latest Core i7-4940MX has a stock clock speed of 3.1GHz, and boost clock of 4.1GHz. Alienware's laptop system designers decided to crank it up a bit with some factory overclocking, with Intel writing through its 'Chip Shot' blog that the overclocked i7-4940MX to "enable some of the highest-performance laptop PCs on the market". The company is aware of the thermal issues with an overclocked processor in a gaming notebook, where it added "Alienware engineers really got creative and developed a new thermal solution to ensure reliable and cool operation in such a small system".

The Alienware 18 gaming notebook is quite a beast, with an 18.4-inch 1920x1080 display, configurable with up to two, yes two NVIDIA GeForce GTX 880Ms in SLI, or two AMD Radeon R9 M290X GPUs in Crossfire. Up to 32GB of dual-channel DDR3 1600MHz RAM, a slew of storage and ODD options, as well as an 8-cell 86wHr battery. The Alienware 18 starts at $2099, but if you build it up as serious as those aforementioned specs, you're looking at closer to $5000.

Oh, Ubisoft. The latest in a massive string of frame rate-related news, the Creative Director of Far Cry 4 has stepped forward to talk about Far Cry 4's frame rate on consoles. The upcoming adventure-based first-person shooter will be rendered at 1080p on the PS4, which is great and all, but it is locked at 30FPS, making it yet another Ubisoft title to be locked at the potato-powered frame rate. I'm sure that Ubisoft locked it at 30FPS, because we know that they think 60FPS "looks weird".

Alex Hutchinson, the Creative Director behind the game, replied to someone on Twitter who was asking "why not 1080p 60 fps", to which Hutchinson replied: "We'd have to simplify the art, have less people or events on screen or make other sacrifices". Someone else asked about the Xbox One version of the game, where Hutchinson said "We will announce all PC and console specs in crazy detail very soon: no point restricting it to Twitter. XBone looks great".

When it comes to the Xbox One version of Far Cry 4, versus the PlayStation 4 version, Hutchinson said he couldn't really tell a difference between the two. He said: "I would say identical but then some asshat would say a tree had one more leaf on xbone. So let's say I don't see a difference". It should be interesting to see what resolution Far Cry 4 is running at on the Xbox One, but judging from previous games on the PS4 running at 1080p, we should see Far Cry 4 on the Xbox One running at 900p, or possibly 1080p with some things dialed down to maintain that massive 30FPS frame rate.

Probably the strangest addition to a long-time team-player based first person shooter with a massive fan base, Valve has added a music-kit feature to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, where it replaces the in-game music with the listed music.

Once the music is equipped in-game for any scenario, you can share it with anyone and play in that particular selected action when it takes place. It also includes a feature where a special MVP anthem plays whenever you become the in-game MVP (Most Valuable Player). Scenarios include starting the round, planting bombs, diffusing bombs, shot dead and few more.

As of now, there are nine kits available via Steam market. One of these artists also made background music for games like Ghost Recon, Transformers: Age of Extinction, etc. Valve implemented this so that players can 'establish your identity', but I am sure a lot of people would like to see this feature let them choose the music that they want to play. In any case, some players seem to like this new addition. There have been few artists of these kits who have interacted with gamers as well in Reddit, and gamers can pitch in ideas or suggestions if they want to.

The next-generation of lithium-ion batteries is really going to ensure that users get all-day, and even more battery life out of their devices. A team of researchers in Singapore have developed this improved lithium-ion battery tech, which is capable of recharging a battery to 70% in just two minutes, yes: 120 seconds.

The clinch, is that this isn't a new battery technology, but it improves on the existing technology that is used. The improvements are coming from a form of nanostructures, where instead of traditional graphite used to create the lithium-ion battery's anode, this new technology uses a cheap titanium dioxide gel, which is a similar material to that used in sunscreen, that absorbs UV rays.

The scientists have discovered a way to turn these compounds into nanostructures that super-speed the charging process, with this change making lithium-ion batteries capable of charging 20x faster, and lasting up to 20x longer. Associate Professor Chen Xiaodong of Nanyang Technological University said in a release "With our nanotechnology, electric cars would be able to increase their range dramatically with just five minutes of charging, which is on par with the time needed to pump petrol for current cars". The researchers hope to have this technology on the market within two years, which should be perfect timing for our next, next-gen smartphones and electric cars.

Some exciting news for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with Robert Downey Jr. reportedly "on the verge" of signing up for Captain America 3. Downey Jr. will reprise his role as the infamous Tony Stark, or Iron Man, for Marvel's upcoming movie, which will go head-to-head with Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice, which screens a few months earlier - moving its debut two months away from Captain America 3.

Downey Jr. teased the news during his interview with Howard Stern, a move that could really change into a new phase of movies from Marvel. JoBlo also reports that this could "bring on the "Civil War" storyline from the Marvel Cinematic Universe". Continuing: "The plot has Stark ging against Captain America's alter-ego Steve Rogers, played by Chris Evans, as they feud over the Superhero Registration Act, which forces anyone with superhuman abilities to reveal their identities to the U.S. government and agree to act as a police force for the authorities. Stark supports the program, but Rogers does not, saying it threatens civil liberties, causing sides to be taken and Rogers, among others, to go on the run to avoid arrest. The moral question and battle with his Avengers teammate essentially makes Stark a villain of sorts in "Captain America 3," providing Downey with a meaty role he could play out into future Marvel films, including a fourth 'Avengers.'".

Captain America 3 reaches screens on May 6, 2016.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella admits the company dropped the ball with Windows 8, but has listened to complaints and hopes to win over trust with the Windows 10 operating system. The company took both consumer UI and IT components into consideration with Windows 10 development, and Nadella said he currently feels "very good" about progress.

Here is what Nadella recently said: "Let's face it, we got some things wrong in Windows 8. Windows 10 is a very important step for us. It's the first step in a whole new generation of Windows... computing is much more ubiquitous. It will run not just on tablets and PCs but 200+ billion sensors. So we want to make sure that we architect Windows 10 at its core, so it can run across a lot of things."

This is a drastic turnaround from Microsoft's stance on promoting Windows 8, with users unfamiliar with the format - and having different branding and UI for smartphones, tablets, and desktop versions of the OS.

It was only April of 2014 where most, ourselves included, thought Apple were well on its way to be valued at over $1 trillion. But, it looks like Google will beat Apple to this milestone, but it would have to more than double Apple's stock performance before 2020.

While Apple makes consumer electronics and online services, like the iPhone, iTunes, and more, Google steps right out of those boundaries. It has a massively used search engine, mobile OS and hardware, partnerships with virtually every player in the technology and manufacturing industry, artificial intelligence, robotics, health technology, the list truly goes on.

Colin Gillis, an analyst with BGC Capital, wrote in a research note to clients on Friday: "If you look at the range of [projects] Google is attacking, it represents opportunities on a much more massive scale than Apple is addressing". He added: "What are we going to get from Apple - a thinner iPad?". Right now, Apple is the most valuable US company, with a market capitalization of $599 billion, compared to Google's $372 billion.

Google has been known to hire cars, boats, hikers, mountain climbers and scuba divers, but this is the first time they mount its street view camera over a camel.

The search giant hired a camel named 'Raffia' to collect images of the desert around the Liwa oasis area in Abu Dhabi. With a help of the guide, the camel took pictures of the desert region called 'the trekker' which is usually strapped on a person for taking street view images. Najeeb Jarrar, Google's product marketing manager for the Middle East and North Africa said, "We hope this collection gives you a glimpse of what it may be like to travel the desert as caravan merchants have for the past 3,000 years."

The Liwa desert is a popular tourism spot in Abu Dhabi. Company spokeswoman Joyce Baz also said that undertaking such projects helps to boost tourism in the region. She said, "In the case of Liwa we fashioned it in a way so that it goes on a camel so that it can capture imagery in the best, most authentic and least damaging way."