Latest News - Page 2838

Foxconn should be one of the first companies to deploy robots to build consumer devices, with Apple reportedly being the first company to make use of these new "Foxbots" as they're referred to.

These new Foxbots will be capable of assembling an average of 30,000 devices, costing somewhere between $20,000 to $25,000 per robot to make. Foxconn CEO Terry Gou has already said that these robots are in their final testing phase, with the company ready to unleash 10,000 robots into its factories. With Foxconn being the biggest partner for Apple in assembling its iOS-based devices like the iPhone, iPad and iPod, this could be big news for the Foxconn.

We already knew that Foxconn laid out plans to replace some of its human workers with some 1 million robots, but the time frame of this may shift. Apple is even chipping in, investing a hefty $10.5 billion on the advanced supply chain technology, with some of this investment sliding over to advanced machinery, something that includes assembly robots. Foxconn has hired an additional 100,000 new workers to help assemble the upcoming iPhone 6 for Apple, with production expected to ramp up next month for a launch in September.

For something that Microsoft teased back in March, Kinect 2.0 is finally headed to the PC. The 3D camera will be made available for PC on July 15, without the Xbox logo being printed on it.

The PC-compatible 3D camera is priced at $100 more than its Xbox One counterpart, at $200. Considering Microsoft knocked $100 from the price of the Kinect-less Xbox One, one has to wonder what the 100% increase in price represents. It should be the same hardware inside, but I'm sure we'll find out what the PC-compatible Kinect 2.0 sensor is capable of in a just a few days time.

During Nintendo's annual investors Q&A, one investor admitted that he did not understand video games. Considering he owns shares in one of the most beloved video game companies in the world, it's quite strange to hear.

Here's what the investor said: "I do not understand video games and I even feel angry because, at Nintendo's shareholders' meetings, the shareholders always discuss things relating to video games or such childish topics as "what the future of video games should be," while I, for one, was flabbergasted that Mr. Iwata continues to hold his position although he had said that he would resign if the company's performance were bad".

"I hope that Nintendo's shareholders' meeting will become an opportunity where the shareholders discuss the company's business operations from the viewpoints of capital gain and dividends", the investor added. But don't worry, Nintendo executives were quick to fire back, with Genyo Takeda and Tatsumi Kimishima replying.

May spam email traffic averaged 69.8 percent, a 1.3 percent drop from April, but security experts continue to tell Internet users to be weary of sometimes rather clever spam. There was a large amount of mass mailings for schools and universities, along with "offers" for student loan repayment plans also popular phishing techniques.

Email search sites were the most popular targets (32.2 percent) ahead of social media websites (23.9 percent), and financial and payment organizations were in the No. 3 spot (12.8 percent). Spammers rely on unsuspecting and gullible Internet users to click compromising links that install malware - or otherwise steal credentials.

"Spammers are constantly thinking up new tricks or turning to old favorites to catch out their victims," said Tatyana Shcherbakova, Kaspersky Lab Senior Spam Analyst, in a statement. "It's not just about advertising: this month we came across a number of mass mailings imitating official notifications from various services and companies. The attachments in these emails contained malware from the Andromeda family. This family consist of backdoors that allow attackers to silently control infected computers, which often become part of a botnet."

CliffyB, of Epic Games fame, has just announced he has formed a new game studio, Boss Key Productions. CliffyB has teamed up with Arjan Brussee, a former EA employee and Guerrilla Games co-founder.

Boss Key Productions' CEO is CliffyB, while the Brussee sits in the position of COO. Before Brussee founded Guerrilla Games, he was helping Bleszinski on co-developing the infamous Jazz Jackrabbit series. At the moment, Brussee's LinkedIn says he's working as an Executive Producer at Visceral Games, the studio that is working on Battlefield: Hardline.

Just what will Boss Key Productions be offering gamers? Well, according to a document filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, Boss Key's goods and services will be "downloadable multi-player interactive computer game programs; computer and video game software; downloadable computer and video game software; downloadable electronic games via the Internet and wireless devices; downloadable computer application software in the field of games; interactive computer and video game programs".

In the middle of the Asetek Holdings Inc. Vs. CoolIT Systems legal battle over a patent infringement associated with closed-loop liquid cooling units, Corsair got stuck in the eye of the storm as it had few models made by CoolIT. Due to the issue at hand, the court eventually decided to keep a motion for partial summary judgement involving CoolIT OEM Corsair AIO units. What was not known until now is that the partial motion summary judgement has concluded in Corsair's favour.

In August 2012, Asetek signed up a licensing agreement with Corsair for AIO liquid cooling units. In the agreement, Asetek gave a non-transferable, non-assignable, non-exclusive license with no sub-license clause. CoolIT defended itself saying that Asetek cannot sue them for infringement of US patents no '362 and '762 because CoolIT was making the so-called 'infringing products' for Corsair on their request. Asetek argued, pointing out that Corsair actually purchased 'off-the-shelf' CoolIT liquid cooling hardware in its ready-made form. The questioned models from Corsair were the H60, H80i and the H100i.

The California court however was skeptical of Asetek's claims that these were off-the-shelf models. Though, initially CoolIT approached Corsair of a retail channel partnership collaboration, Corsair wanted to pick a particular combination of radiators and fans to have a different product. Many specifications were changed, such as lengths of the tubes, the thickness of the radiator and even the size of the fans bundled with these AIO coolers. For example, Corsair H60 changed about 35% of the components for H60, whereas H80i and H100i had 46% and 46% changes. CoolIT also said that the 3/8 rubber tubing, barbs and radiators were specifically made for Corsair, and was not used in its brand or with others.

The rise of hackers and cybercrime are problematic, but national governments maintaining security and political control on the Internet will remain the biggest threat. Specifically, there will be a rise in blocking, filtering, segmentation and balkanization of the Internet, according to a study published by the Pew Research group.

Thirty-five percent of those surveyed said they expected significant changes "for the worse" in regards to accessing and sharing online content by 20125 - a troubling concern as more people begin to access the Internet.

"Governments worldwide are looking for more power over the Net, especially within their own countries," said Dave Burstein, Fast Net News editor, in a statement. "Britain, for example, has just determined the ISPs block sites the government considers 'terrorist' or otherwise dangerous. There will usually be ways to circumvent the obstruction but most people won't bother."

In a new interview, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has revealed just how outright difficult Steve Jobs could be, even in the earliest days of Apple.

Some early Apple employees said they would never, ever work with Jobs again if they could help it - and Wozniak described these workers as some of the brightest and among his best friends in Apple. "Steve Jobs had a lot of these questionable things, like some of my very best friends in Apple, the most creative people who worked on the Macintosh, almost all of them said they would never, ever work for Steve Jobs again," Wozniak said, speaking with the Milwaukee Business Journal. "It was that bad. I'm shocked."

However, Woz went on to say that from the early days, Jobs really respected people who would stand up to his pushy attitude. "He would directly confront people and almost call them idiots," Wozniak said. "But ... when they confronted him back and told him why they were right in understandable forms, he was just testing and learning, and he would respect those people and give them high privileges in the company." In the interview, as BusinessInsider points out, Wozniak also revealed that in the early days, Jobs would be happy to rush products out before they were ready.

When Edward Snowden blew the lid on the NSA's spying last year, everything changed. The NSA has asid that even though it intercepts pretty much every single person's communications, it only "targets" a very small number of these people.

This smaller percentage of traffic is flagged as a pattern, or suspicious by the NSA, which then starts their data retention. These targets don't see their data flushed from NSA databases on a 48-hour or 30-day basis like the rest of the world, instead their data is kept forever. This news comes from German site Tagesschau, where Lena Kampf, Jacob Appelbaum and John Goetz reported the NSA's rules on what is deemed a "target" to the US spy agency.

They report that the NSA targets anyone who searches for online articles about Tails, or Tor. Anyone who even uses Tor becomes an instantly target for long-term surveillance and data rentention. Both Tor and Tails have been part of the mainstream discussion for online security, surveillance and privacy for quite sometime. For the NSA to just instantly put surveillance and retention on these people is yet another step of unbelievable, in an already unbelievable breach of users' privacy and rights.

QuakeCon 2014 is nearly here, but now we can start forming a plan of action thanks to Bethesda Softworks unveiling the schedule of events for the convention. The biggest part should be the reveal of Doom 4, id Software's next-gen Doom title.

The Doom 4 reveal will happen during the annual QuakeCon welcome ceremony, which kicks off at 6PM CT on Thursday, July 17, at the Ventrilo Main Stage. Bethesda has also said that this presentation will be exclusive to QuakeCon 2014 attendees, so we unfortunately won't see that footage. Other events that will take place during QuakeCon's first day include tournaments for The Elder Scrolls Online.

On Saturday, July 19, there is a "Designing the Perfect Game" panel that will see Obsidian Entertainment's CEO, Feargus Urquhart take the stage, former Minnesota Vikings punter Chris Kluwe, and others. This will be livestreamed over Twitch, running from 5-6PM. The full schedule can be found over on the Bethblog.

GIGABYTE is already breaking various records with its LN2-only motherboard, the Z97X-SOC Force LN2. Today, the company has announced that the new SOC Force LN2 motherboard has broken the DDR3 memory world record, not once, but twice.

Once at launch, hitting 4.5GHz, and then just three days later, the motherboard was used for another world record. The second time was at the Kingston HyperX OC Takeover World Finals, where a team of overclockers breached the massive 4.56GHz speed. If you thought this was the end, you were wrong. After a bunch of reports hitting the Internet of suspicious memory overclocks, GIGABYTE took it upon itself to pull out the big guns with its Z97X-SOC Force LN2 motherboard.

Using this motherboard, the GIGABYTE overclocking team smashed the DDR3 memory world record once again, reaching a gigantic 4.62GHz. This was achieved using Kingston's HyperX Predator DDR3 RAM. It looks like these days, posting a score with clear pictures of your work on HWBOT.org isn't enough for these super overclocks. To make sure nothing was left out, and that the public could see the overclocker's work, they uploaded everything onto YouTube.

It wasn't even a week ago that we reported that Crytek wasn't paying some of its staff on time, but now according to people familiar with the matter, Crytek's UK office has seen the majority of its employees stop coming into work.

Kotaku's Jason Schreier has "spoken with four people connected to Crytek's UK studio" and according to those people "Crytek's UK staff have still not been paid the full amounts they are owed, and this week, according to two sources, the staff at Crytek's UK office handed in formal grievance letters and went home".

One person familiar with the studio has said that an estimated 100 people have left the company, but we don't know if these people have left permanently or not. The new rumors are that Deep Silver, the studio behind Dead Island, the Metro series, Saints Row IV and Homefront: The Revolution (which the Crytek UK studio is currently working on) will buy Crytek. One source said: "They have invested a lot in Homefront and will want to protect their investment". We should see some movement on this story in the coming weeks.

Enough energy to power the entirety of the United Kingdom and Norway is wasted every single year as smart devices are left on standby mode, according to a report.

The International Energy Agency claims that wasted electricity from these devices makes up over 400 terawatt hours (TWh) every year - or about as much power produced yearly by over 100 coal plants. Crunching the numbers, the IEA points out that just last year over 14 billion devices were network enabled and it's set to shoot up to 50 billion by 2025 - and the required energy could make up a stonking 6 percent of global consumption.

"The proliferation of connected devices brings many benefits to the world, but right now the cost is far higher than it should be," the IEA's executive director, Maria van der Hoeven, said. "Consumers are losing money in the form of wasted energy, which is leading to more costly power stations and more distribution infrastructure being built than we would otherwise need, not to mention the extra greenhouse gases."

Chinese website GamerSky has posted up photos that they are calling a GeForce GTX 880 engineering sample, and boy do they paint quite the picture. The prototype that is in the photos below has some incredible specs behind it, with 8GB of RAM to start things off.

We should expect two variants to launch, with a GeForce GTX 880 with 4GB of RAM, and another with 8GB of RAM. From here, we have 3 PCIe power connectors, two 6-pin connectors and a single 8-pin connector for a total power draw of 375W. This is an insane number, but we are looking at a 28nm-based Maxwell GPU, and not the 20nm GPU that will pave the way for lower power draw and temperatures.

We should hopefully see the GeForce GTX 880 materialize before the end of the year, with a refreshed GTX 990 on the 20nm process expected for 2015 - this is me guessing here, but I think we'll see it happen.

When Europe ruled Google had to enforce the "right to be forgotten" it wasn't entirely clear what that meant, but the first indicators have started. The search giant has been bogged down with search removal requests, and now articles from respected international newspapers are being removed.

The Daily Mail, the BBC, and the Guardian have all received notice of removal emails from Google, which asserted that some articles would no longer be listed through search. In these cases, according to the Age, the rulings seem to be siding with a disgraced football referee, Dougie McDonald, and an investment banker, Stan O'Neal, who was involved in the global financial crisis. Guardian media columnist Roy Greenslade has also had some of his articles removed from the listings.

Britain's Daily Mail has published a scathing critique of Google's actions, comparing the moves as being similar to "burning books in a library". "These examples show what a nonsense the right to be forgotten is, it is the equivalent of going into libraries and burning books you don't like," MailOnline's publisher Martin Clarke said. "MailOnline intends to regularly publish lists of articles deleted from Google's European search results so people can keep track of what has been deleted. There is no suggestion any of these articles are inaccurate."

I was one of many who really enjoyed Zack Snyder's reboot of Superman, Man of Steel. Sure, it had plot holes (like nearly all of Christopher Nolan's movies), but it propelled Superman into today, a Superman of our generation. Well, instead of a direct sequel, we're going to see Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice released first, with the first photo of Henry Cavill as Superman shown off earlier today.

You can see in the above photo, what seems like Gotham City in the background, with Superman posing with a serious look on his face. There are some slight tweaks to his suit, compared to the one he wore in Man of Steel. Zack Snyder is back in the director's chair, with Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice leading into the Justice League movie, and then hopefully Man of Steel 2.

Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice will star Henry Cavill as the Superman, Ben Affleck as Batman, and will be released in May 2016.

Before Ubisoft has even released Assassin's Creed: Unity, the company is teasing that its Quebec-based office is the lead studio on "a future Assassin's Creed" game. This breaks the norm of Ubisoft Montreal being the lead developer on the game.

Ubisoft Quebec Managing Director Nicolas Rioux talked about the history of Assassin's Creed with his studio, where he said: "We were involved in Brotherhood. We were involved in Revelations. We were involved in Assassin's Creed 3. With AC 3 we were working on the biggest DLC for the franchise - The Tyranny of King Washington. After that we were also involved with Freedom Cry. We have the confidence of the brand team and also from Ubisoft to take leadership of an upcoming Assassin's Creed title. The team is ready for the next big step".

One of the driving reasons behind the "future Assassin's Creed" game being developed at Ubisoft Quebec could be that the company is using $4 million of a $28 million investment to create a new workspace. From this new workspace, three entire floors will be dedicated to AAA game development. The city of Quebec is chipping in $500,000 to the studio, too. Ubisoft Quebec hires 350 people right now, with a goal of hiring a total of 425 before the end of 2017.

If you're an Android user, you should begin to get excited for the next iteration of Android, simply known right now as the 'L' release. Rewinding back to when Jelly Bean was released, which featured Project Butter - an initiative that improved the overall speed and performance of the entire OS.

When Google unleashed KitKat, we saw Project Svelte tightening things up, optimizing the installation of Android to run on just 512MB. This allowed entry-level smartphones and tablets to rock the latest mobile OS from Google, without requiring the latest and greatest hardware. Moving onto the new L release, which should arrive as Android 5.0, and its new Project Volta.

Project Volta has the aim of battery life in its sights, with Ars Technica getting its hands-on Android L's Project Volta, and chucking into a battery life test. In their Wi-Fi browsing test, the Android L Developer Preview was able to beat out Android 4.4 KitKat by 36%, which is a huge difference. This provides an additional two-or-so hours of battery life, which is some what of a small, but gigantic victory for Google. The testing itself was performance on what Ars Technica explains as a "beat-up, daily driver phone" so we should expect even better numbers with Google's official release.

Back in March, Lucasfilm and TV's Cartoon Network entered a deal to not only broadcast the full series of 'Star Wars: The Clone Wars' to Netflix customers, but allow the streaming giant to bankroll the last leg of production on 'The Lost Missions'; aka the sixth season of 'The Clone Wars' following it's earlier cancellation.

With 4K streaming content growing in uptake, Netflix has been keen to provide further content in UHD, with a report suggesting that Lucasfilm is well down the track of re-rendering the entire series in 4K. resolution.

The stylistic CG produced by Lucasfilm Animation, which was created with Autodesk software with predominantly vector based Maya 3D assets would seem to lend itself quite efficiently to 4K up-rezzing, but to date, neither LucasFilm or Netflix have announced their future plans for the property.

Goldman Sachs accidentally sent out an e-mail recently, which contained "highly confidential" information, to the wrong person. The investment banking firm is now requesting that Google somehow unsend the e-mail.

Reuters is reporting that a Goldman Sachs contractor was testing changes to the company's internal systems, in order to meet the requirements set out by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. The contractor then mistakenly sent out a client's confidential brokerage account information to someone's Gmail account, instead of the correct gs.com account.

This all happened on June 23, which means that whoever received the e-mail, has probably read it. But, Goldman Sachs wants to see its power used, pushing a US judge to issue a court order demanding that Google delete the e-mail, in order to protect itself, and its customer from further damages. Before Goldman Sachs went to court, the firm reached out to the Gmail account owner, but received no response.