Latest News - Page 2832

Britain is wholeheartedly rejecting its government approved 'porn filters' as customers signing up to internet providers for the first time opt out in droves, according to an official regulator.

Ofcom, the independent body that monitors the activities of telecoms providers, notes that under one in seven homes are actually making use of the content filters, introduced by the British Prime Minister David Cameron (pictured) and earning him the nickname Kim Jong Cameron. Top operators BT and Sky introduced the measures in late 2013. The announcement was deeply unpopular and led to calls of censorship, although the agreement between government and internet providers is technically voluntary. At the time it was represented as a measure designed to protect children.

Of the top companies running the scheme, TalkTalk has the most users making most of it at 36 percent. However, a paltry four percent of Virgin Media customers are switching off the porn, followed by five percent of BT customers and eight percent of Sky customers. "Ofcom's report clearly highlighted where Virgin Media has fallen short in meeting our original commitments," Tom Mockridge, ISP Virgin Media's chief exec said, according to Digital Spy. "We take our responsibility to help families stay safe online very seriously and have taken immediate action to improve how we meet our commitments to government."

There are many mobile wallet apps out there that allow you to do things like store credit cards and debit cards. There are also different wallet apps that allow you to send money digitally to other users. Amazon has launched a new wallet app called Amazon Wallet that is designed to be used at the point of sale in stores.

Amazon Wallet lacks some of the features you might expect with an inability to store credit cards or debit cards and no ability to send payments. That may not be a big deal to some security conscious users out there. What Amazon Wallet can do is store your gift cards and loyalty cards.

Using the app, you can scan or type in gift card and loyalty card numbers. The goal is to help you reduce clutter in your wallet. Perhaps future updates will let you add in credit and debit cards for use at the point of sale. The Amazon Wallet app is available on the Amazon Appstore and Google Play.

Google is offering a new prize for anyone who can build a better power Inverter. The price is a cool $1 million and it is being offered as part of the little box challenge. To win designers need to build a better small-scale power inverter than is available today.

What Google and the other firms backing the prize are looking for is a kW-scale power inverter with a density of at least 50W per cubic inch. Some believe that a power inverter of this type will allow the unlocking of billions of dollars of commercial value from the electric grid.

Flir is a company that has been making thermal imaging cameras for commercial and military use for a number of years. The company has been under pressure to branch out into the broader consumer market and has an interesting new product to help. The new product is called the Flir One and it is an accessory for the iPhone 5 or 5S smartphones.

The accessory camera will sell for $349 making it much cheaper than the $1000 price the next cheapest thermal camera sells for. A version of the Flir one for Android users will roll out next year.

Flir thinks that consumers will see the benefit in a thermal imaging camera that sells for $350. Using the camera people can do things like check for cold or hot air leaking into or out of a home allowing them to better insulate and save money on heating and cooling. Developers are working with Flir now on making apps to take advantage of the camera.

EA has delayed a second game today, with the first being Battlefield: Hardline pushed back into sometime next year, but Dragon Age: Inquisition is also getting a little more time in the oven. Bioware's upcoming fantasy RPG has a new release date of November 18, 2014 - an extra month of waiting.

Executive Producer on the game, Mark Darrah, explains: "I'm writing to let you know that Dragon Age: Inquisition has a new release date of November 18, 2014 in North America (November 21st in EU). We appreciate the enormous support we've received from all of you to get to this point, and while this extra few weeks may not seem like a lot, I know the game you'll play will be all the better for it".

Darrah continued: "Since we began working on Dragon Age: Inquisition almost four years ago, our goal was to create the best Dragon Age experience ever. It was that goal that motivated many of our decisions: moving to Frostbite, bringing race choice and customisation back, improving tactical camera, building a team of characters whose relationships evolve based on your actions, and most importantly, crafting an epic, nation-spanning story that both draws upon past games and takes you to many new places in the realm of Thedas".

The lure of easy pickings in online cybercrime has drawn many criminals to the Internet, where they look to compromise users, steal debit and credit card information along with other personal data. The use of social engineering to manipulate victims remains popular, but many Internet users provide information to criminals too easily.

The basic tips apply: don't provide personal information when you don't have to, such Social Security numbers; always monitor bank accounts; avoid clicking links in unsolicited emails, or other suspicious messages; and choosing a secure password are important.

"Con artists are going online to steal your hard-earned money," said Bob Gallo, AARP Illinois State Director, in a press statement. "Common sense should tell us that if it sounds too good to be true, chances are it is. But AARP's nationwide Fraud Watch Network can also help you beat con artists at their own game and get critical information to fight back and protect your money."

During the Commonwealth Games that take place between 24th July and the 3rd of August, BBC Research and Development will be conducting a few trials and public demonstrations. These experiments will see a number of industry partners working together to help create the future of BBC R&D's vision of the future of TV. These broadcasting milestones include:

The biggest part here is that we're going to be seeing the first live VR broadcast done, which will use a combination of 360-degree video with 3D audio. The BBC R&D team will be getting a hand from UCL, where they will create "the most immersive live virtual reality broadcast to date". The demonstration will involve "a panoramic, 360 degree video camera, and a 3D audio microphone will be placed into the SSE Hydro Stadium in Glasgow, streaming the live feeds to an Oculus Rift virtual reality headset in the Glasgow Science Centre". They continue, by teasing that "This provides the viewer with the sensation of being transported inside the stadium and being part of the crowd. This work forms part of ongoing projects to explore the creative and editorial potential of new consumer audio-visual technology".

I think this is going to be a very important step forward for VR, and more specifically the Oculus Rift which is being used in this massive trial. The future of VR is well and truly bright, and I can't wait to see what we have come out of this new research in the future of entertainment, sports and media.

Starting next year, the British government will decriminalize online video game, music and movie piracy, as well as totally removing harsher punishment plans after it has considered them unworkable. In 2015, file sharers will be sent four warning letters telling them of their activity being illegal, but after the fourth letter, no more correspondence will take place.

The British government has called this new scheme the Voluntary Copyright Alert Programme (VCAP), and has arrived after many years of discussions between ISPs, British politicians, and the movie and music industries. This has involved the UK's biggest providers - BT, TalkTalk, Virgin and Sky - with each of them signing up for VCAP, leading the way for the smaller providers to soon join them.

The newly installed scheme will replace anti-piracy measures that are already in place across the country, which included cutting users' Internet connections, as well as creating an ever-growing database of known file sharers. Chief Executive of the BPI, Geoff Taylor talked about VCAP, where he said that: "persuading the persuadable, such as parents who do not know what is going on with their net connection". He added: "VCAP is not about denying access to the internet. It's about changing attitudes and raising awareness so people can make the right choice".

Samsung has released a behemoth of a new TV, measuring in at a truly gigantic 105 inches. The new TV is 4K-capable, and retails for for a price that puts it into the 1% category: $120,000.

For $120,000 you're getting yourself a 105-inch curved Ultra HD TV that features a higher-than-4K resolution of 5120x2160. This provides the new 105-inch TV with an aspect ratio of 2.39:1. The usual Ultra HD resolution of 3840x2160 provides the standard 16:9 ratio, but this new Smart UN105S9 TV from Samsung features an even wider aspect ratio than the 'true 4K' resolution of 4096x2160 (1.9:1).

The expensive, but luxurious TV is capable of delivering your content in 3D, too. But with next to no 4K-capable 3D content available, right now this feature is a little useless. We have four HDMI 2.0 ports that are capable of 4K support at 60FPS and a bundled 1TB HDD from Samsung that includes some 4K content.

Electronic Arts has announced that it has delayed the release of the Visceral Games-developed Battlefield: Hardline until next year, citing that the development teams want more time to polish the game before it gets released to gamers across the world.

DICE's Vice President and Group GM, Karl Magnus Troedsson, explains: "Back at E3, we launched a beta for Hardline - we wanted to not only show you the game, but to let you play it for yourselves. Millions of you jumped in and had a great time. As a result, the Visceral Games team learned a lot from players about what they wanted in the game. We've been pouring over the data and feedback, and have already been putting a lot of it right into the game and sharing it directly with you".

He continued: "This feedback also spurred us to start thinking about other possibilities and ways we could push Hardline innovation further and make the game even better. The more we thought about these ideas, the more we knew we had to get them into the game you will all be playing. However, there was only one problem. We would need more time. Time that we didn't have if we decided to move forward with launching in just a couple of months". Troedsson said that the teams at DICE and Visceral Games wanted to spend more time on developing better innovation on the multiplayer side of things, as well as bake in "ideas direct from the community that will evolve the cops and criminals fantasy into a truly unique Battlefield Multiplayer experience".

Microsoft hasn't hit the same popularity it did with Windows 7 with its latest two operating systems: Windows 8 and Windows 8.1, but will it strike the iron again with Windows 9? We are now being treated to an early look thanks to some leaked screenshots of the next version of Windows' Start Menu.

The new build of Windows is still codenamed "Threshold" which is another major desktop revamp, with one of those bits being the much-talked about Start Menu. We can see that the new screenshots show off an impressive looking Start Menu that features some "Metro-style" apps that are pinned to the Start Menu itself, as well as the usual applications to the left.

The Verge is reporting that these images are genuine, and are from the current development versions of "Windows 9". The second screenshot shows that Microsoft is hoping to have Metro-style apps run in the desktop as either fullscreen or windowed. This is a large part of Microsoft's plans for the upcoming version of its OS, something that will make mouse and keyboard users have a better experience on the desktop.

That infamous hawker of hype and high-price handsets, Apple Corporation, has just posted its quarterly profits - of 7.75 billion dollars, up a very respectable 12 percent compared to the same time last year.

It claimed the runaway success of its latest iPhone models is to thank for the strong growth, as well as a swelling of its business in China, where revenue was boosted 28 percent to reach 5.9 billion dollars. The company brought in over 10.3 billion in operational cash flow, it said. "Our record June quarter revenue was fueled by strong sales of iPhone and Mac and the continued growth of revenue from the Apple ecosystem, driving our highest EPS growth rate in seven quarters," Tim Cook, Apple's CEO, said in a statement. "We are incredibly excited about the upcoming releases of iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite, as well as other new products and services that we can't wait to introduce."

For now it looks like the hype train is showing no signs of stopping, as the entire blogosphere speculates on what's next for the iconic iPhone. What's a little less on everyone's lips, though, is the iPad - sales of which happened to plummet for a second quarter in a row, down by a pretty substantial nine percent to 13.3 million.

The continued political unrest in Iraq has led to armed conflict, but has led to a rise in something a bit more surprising: a cyberwar that has used social media and coordinated malware and other cyberattacks against rival political factions.

The use of the "Njrat" malware, to compromise PCs and create a rudimentary botnet, has drawn interest among cybersecurity experts - and other similar tactics are being deployed. The criminals are interested in stealing data and using hijacked microphones and cameras to see what is happening in select regions.

"The key parties are local groups within Iraq using malware for targeted intelligence on each other," said Andrew Komarov, Intel Crawler chief of security, in a statement. "It is very hard to confirm who is the author, as some of the malware is used from public sources, but it is very visible that it is used within Iraq, and not outside against foreign countries, which may explain the beginning of internal local cyberwar."

We've all been there at birthdays or during the holiday season, someone gives you a gift card to a place you don't like and you silently think that gift card will sit in your sock drawer forever. GameStop has announced a new gift card exchange program that is powered by Cardpool that will let you trade those unwanted gift cards for credit for stuff you do want- games and accessories.

The new gift card exchange program allows users to exchange physical plastic gift cards and e-cards to get a digital GameStop gift card that can be spent online or in GameStop retail stores. The trade process is very easy with three steps to swapping unwanted cards for GameStop cards.

The page for the trade in program lets you check gift card balance, fill out your information to get a trade quote, and then get the GameStop card via email. It's unclear if this is a dollar for dollar exchange program; presumably, Cardpool is going to take a cut of the money in the trade.

For something that we've been teasing for a little while now, NVIDIA has just taken the official wrap off of its Shield Tablet. We now have confirmed specs, with the new device being an 8-inch tablet featuring the slightly higher than Full HD resolution of 1920x1200.

The new Shield Tablet is powered by the company's more than impressive Tegra K1 processor, is compatible with the new Shield wireless controller, something that will let you get your game-streaming fun on. This will allow you to run your games remotely from your PC at home. With its mini-HDMI connection, you can throw up 1080p content to the Full HD TV near you.

Because it's an Android-based device, you get the best of both world's - the Android games, as well as PC games. This is something most other devices don't even begin to offer, especially at $299. NVIDIA is doubling down with the Shield Tablet, by turning the Shield brand into a product family. The new NVIDIA Shield Tablet is also the first global launch that the company has taken on. The new Shield Tablet starts off with the Wi-Fi-only 16GB version priced at $299. The 32GB model with LTE capabilities is priced at $100 more, at $399.

In this fast-paced world, we simply can't keep up with everything that is going on, and that's without considering Facebook. But for people who breath the social network in everyday (guilty!), then the social network has something in store for you with its new Save function.

The new Save feature will allow you to use a bookmark-like system that lets you save content such as movies, places, TV, music or links so that you can view them at a later date. This is perfect in the example scenario of sitting on the bus or train, or even a doctors office, going through content, you can 'save' it, and view it later when you're not about to jump off the bus, or go into your appointment.

Facebook has said that the saved items will only be seen by you, unless you choose to share them with friends. The saved items can be viewed at anytime, anywhere, by simply tapping the "More" tab on your mobile, or clicking the left side of Facebook when you're using it in a web browser. If you haven't viewed your saved items after a short period of time, Facebook will remind you that you have saved these items by displaying them in your News Feed. This new function should roll out to everyone on iOS, Android and the web over the coming days.

One of the biggest issues Ubisoft had this year was gimping the PC version of Watch Dogs, something that a modder fixed in his spare time. Federico Rojas (or TheWorse) released a mod called 'TheWorse' that reverted the graphics on the PC version to what Ubisoft showed off at E3 2012, something that looked far better than the game did when it was officially released 2014.

Rojas explains in the release of TheWorse Mod version 1.0: "This is the last release of my modification. I did my best to improve graphics and performance as much as I could without degrading the quality". This release is split in two, the first includes the high resolution texture pack from another modded by the name of MaLDo, and the other does not include this high-res pack.

You can download version 1.0 of TheWorse mod for Watch Dogs right here.

According to the latest rumors, NVIDIA could unveil its next-gen GeForce GTX 800 series sometime in the next couple of months. SweClockers is the site behind the tease, stating that NVIDIA will unveil its new GTX 870 and GTX 880 GPUs in October or November.

We already know that the upcoming GTX 800 series will be a powerhouse series of video cards, with the two GPUs being positioned for the high-end market. The GTX 870 and GTX 880 will replace the current GTX 780 and GTX 780 Ti video cards, with the new GM204-based hardware. The last time we heard about the GTX 880, we heard that it sported 8GB of RAM and a 375W TDP.

The GeForce GTX 800 series should arrive on the 28nm process, and not the 20nm process like some thought it would. The biggest tease is that NVIDIA is rumored to launch its GeForce GTX 990 early next year, something that would truly break some speed records as it will be based on the 16nm process, skipping the 20nm process entirely.

When Facebook announced it was acquiring Oculus VR back in March, it had the entire world up in arms - myself included. Time has passed, and those worries have all but died down, with the news that the acquisition is now final, with an update issued by both of the companies.

Facebook and Oculus VR said in a joint statement: "We're looking forward to an exciting future together, building the next computing platform and reimagining the way people communicate". Back in March, Facebook said it was going to acquire Oculus VR for $2 billion, in a deal that would include $400 million in cash, and 23.1 million shares in Facebook valued at $1.6 billion.

At the time, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook said: "Mobile is the platform of today, and now we're also getting ready for the platforms of tomorrow. Oculus has the chance to create the most social platform ever, and change the way we work, play and communicate". In April, the Federal Trade Commission approved the deal. Right now, people are waiting for their Development Kit 2 (DK2) units to arrive, sporting a 1080p low-persistence screen, and much more.

According to sources of The Wall Street Journal, Apple has ordered a huge number of next generation iPhones. The Journal's sources have said that the company has ordered a huge 70 to 80 million units, with this order being split between the two screen sizes.

Remember that we should have both a 4.7-inch and 5.5-inch iPhone 6 arriving, with the 4.7-inch being teased the most so far. If we put these figures up against the order that Apple placed for the iPhone 5S and 5C, Apple ordered between 50-60 million. The iPhone 5S was met with big demand, which saw Apple experiencing shortages for consumers.

Things have changed in the past year for Apple, with the company signing a rather large deal with China Mobile, which has over 790 million subscribers on its network. We should expect Apple to bake in considerable changes into the iPhone 6, in both the software and hardware departments.