Latest News - Page 3001

Now that the Chrome Beta channel app has opened its doors for business in the Google Play Store, we're finally getting some constant updates. The latest update includes a new icon that has a black and white "BETA" tag on it.

This may not sound like world changing news for most, but usually the BETA tag has a grey and white color scheme. The new update brings some small fixes:

As with most Beta releases, there are still some bugs hanging around - such as the yahoo.com page links not working as well as some graphical glitches on some devices. You can get the Chrome Beta right here.

I knew Sony were in trouble, but is this a sign of serious problems for the Japanese electronics giant? Sony have now announced they're selling their New York headquarters to a consortium led by The Chetrit Group.

After Sony settle their debts on the building, the $1.1 billion sale will see Sony cash in around $685 million in operating income. This will help their Q3 earnings, but it won't help the company in the long run. Rumor has it that Sony are looking to repeat the sell off in Japan, which will see another $1.14 billion enter their accounts.

Do you see this as a sign of confidence for Sony? Or as a sign of things to come? I personally think that if the PlayStation 4 isn't super successful, and by that I mean a total homerun, it'll be lights out for Sony. Maybe not right away, but in the coming 1-2 years, that's my prediction. They need something big and they need it now.

Diablo III's Game Director, Jay Wilson, has announced through the Blizzard forums that he is leaving his post. Wilson has been in this position for seven years now, and is looking to move on as he has "reached a point creatively where I'm looking forward to working on something new".

Wilson will now move from the Diablo III project and onto something else within the company, so this definitely isn't hit resignation from the company. Wilson cites that he wasn't the only person working on the project and there are still many committed employees of Blizzard tweaking and working on Diablo III to continue to impress fans.

Wilson finishes his post by telling the world that patch version 1.0.7 is on its way, and that there are "many other great things brewing for Diablo in 2013". He finishes his post with something personal, and witty:

Google would be popping the Moet right now, as Fortune have released their annual list of the top 100 companies to work for, with Google taking out the top dog, number one position on the list.

This is not the first time the Mountain View-based company has taken the top spot, but their fourth time riding high on the Fortune 100 list. The explanation as to why Google is the best company to work for, is:

AMD's first major driver release for 2013 is here in the form of the just-released AMD Catalyst 13.1 WHQL drivers. These drivers are similar to the company's 12.11 "Never Settle" driver, with the new 13.1 WHQL drivers delivering performance enhancements for a huge amount of games.

They mainly aim for the Radeon HD 7000 series GPUs, and AMD have also included some new 3D settings and profile management user interface within the Catalyst Control Center (CCC). This is on top of the performance enhancements and various fixes. From the changelog, we can expect:

There is a huge list of resolved problems within Windows 8 and Windows 7, which includes:

Google's Project Glass is quite an interesting project. With every new project, new challenges arise. For instance, developers will have to cope with figuring out how to enter data into the glasses without a keyboard. This is where a new patent by Google could come in handy. Pardon the pun.

Google's patent uses a laser to project a keyboard onto the user's hand, which can then be articulated by gestures. Patent 20130016070, "Methods and Systems for a Virtual Input Device," is the patent in question. Of course, as we warn with all patents, just because they have applied for it, it doesn't mean it will make its way into a product.

The hand can either be used as a touchscreen or the camera can recognize hand gestures, allowing input by two different methods. It would help solve the problem of input into a device that doesn't feature a physical keyboard. It would also be pretty sweet since it uses laser. We still have a good amount of time before Glass releases to the public, so it's definitely possible it will show up in the final product.

Been holding out for a white PlayStation 3? Well, if you have, Sony has provided you with just that. Starting January 27, Sony will be selling a white version of the iconic PlayStation 3, likely as a way to boost sales just a few months before the rumored release of the PlayStation 4.

The console will come with a matching "Classic White" controller, a 500GB hard drive, and a year-long subscription to PlayStation Plus. PlayStation Plus comes with a collection of downloadable PlayStation 3 and Vita games. The current list of games includes LittleBigPlanet 2, BioShock 2, Super Street Fighter IV Arcade Edition, Borderlands, Gotham City Impostors, and 7 others.

The console will only set you back $300, which is quite a deal when you add in all of the free games and such. But, will it be enough to boost sales when the PlayStation 4 is rumored to be so close around the corner? We'll have to wait and see.

Larry Page, during a recent interview with Wired, brought up Steve Job's comment about waging thermonuclear war on Android. His response was a simple, yet effective one: "How well is that working?" If you use stock price to judge how well its working, then the answer is also simple: not well.

The interview then transitioned towards self-driving cars and Google X, known for projects such as the Google Self-Driving car and Project Glass:

Kim Dotcom, the infamous creator of Megaupload, has announced via Twitter in a series of tweets that Mega, the encrypted file sharing service, will feature 50GB of free cloud storage upon launch. It also has plans to bring back Megaupload user's data.

50GB of storage is quite a bit with other cloud based services offering less than 10GB, but we all know that Kim Dotcom loves to do things in grand style. Dotcom also revealed that the service will be hosted on the New Zealand based domain Mega.co.nz.

Dotcom also tweeted that Mega was partnering with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in court to give Megaupload users access to their files. The team of lawyers "will seek court permission" to make the transfer. Mega is set to launch in just two days. Do you plan on signing up on launch day? Let us know in the comments below.

Google's Nexus 7 has topped the sales charts in Japan over the recent holiday season, effectively knocking the iPad out of the number one spot.

Nikkei market research firm BCN in reporting from a survey of 2,400 stores in Japan that Google's 7-inch tablet accounted for 44.4% of all tablet sales in the country. Sales of Apple tablets, including the iPad Mini, only made up 40.1% of tablet sales over the same time period. It is however, unclear if Apple stores were included in the survey.

Google's plan of offering a smaller, yet still very capable tablet is working better than expected. In Japan the Nexus 7 costs around 19,000 yen ($212 USD, while the iPad and iPad mini cost 42,000 yen ($470) and 28,800 yen ($322 USD) respectively. Market research firm IDC estimates a total of 3.6 million tablets were sold in Japan during 2012.

The Federal Aviation Administration have announced that all Boeing 787s in the US are to be grounded after yet another lithium-ion battery failure has caused a fire in Boston following one in Japan.

Just hours previous, a 787 had to make an emergency landing in Japan after a fire broke out on the aircraft and had smoke filtering into the cabin. The FAA will now run an investigation into the 787s to ensure that the batteries are indeed safe for the planes to be operational again.

On January 7, a fire broke out in a 787 at Boston's Logan Airport, preventing the plane from taking off. Today's announcement comes just days after the FAA launching an investigation into the Dreamliner's design, manufacture, and assembly. The investigation is set to look over the various issues the 787 has faced over the last year since it first took into the skies.

Java seems to be one of the most exploited pieces of software running on a computer. Unfortunately, most computers are running Java for websites and other interactive features online. Just earlier this week, Oracle had to rush out a patch for Java that secured up a critical bug that allowed hackers to run code on a victim's machine.

An administrator for an exclusive cybercrime forum posted up Monday an offering for a new zero-day exploit that has yet to be patched by Oracle. It also has yet to be rolled into one of the exploit kits, some of which rent for upwards of $10,000 a month. The starting price for the exploit? $5,000.

AT&T has been slowly reducing restrictions on Apple's FaceTime. The latest reduction in regulation comes in the form of AT&T allowing iPhone 4S users on a tiered data to use FaceTime over their cellular data. Previously, AT&T would not let non-LTE devices use FaceTime over the network. This change also means that other smartphone devices that don't feature LTE will be able to video chat over cellular data, again, provided that they are on a tiered data plan.

AT&T Mobility VP Mark Collins:

The Empire State Building wants you to be the one to choose the official standard of colors for its new LED tower lights. The lighting system designed by Phillips Color Kinetics, allows customized lighting schemes from a pallet of over 16 million colors.

Starting tonight through Jan 20th the building will be shining a different shade of the same color on each of its four faces. The colors red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple and pink will be used giving you a total of 28 choices. Those interested in helping choose the colors can head over to the buildings official Facebook page to cast your vote.

The Empire State Building often uses its lighting to celebrate or highlight certain events. In case you're wondering, @esb_lights is an unofficial Twitter account that explains the meaning of ESB's lighting on any given day. The final seven colors will be announced the week of Jan. 21, 2013.

A developer working at an anonymous "critical infrastructure company" has been terminated because he was caught outsourcing his entire job to China. The trickery was highlighted in a recent study in which Verizon was asked to complete about some suspicious network traffic.

The employee who is called "Bob" in the study, was caught when someone noticed suspicious activity on the company's VPN log. "We received a request from a US-based company asking for our help in understanding some anomalous activity that they were witnessing in their VPN logs. Plainly stated, the VPN logs showed [Bob] logged in from China, yet the employee is right there, sitting at his desk, staring into his monitor", the study reported.

Bob had hired Chinese developers to complete all of his task, while he sat back and browsed Facebook, Reddit and LinkedIn for most of the day. If you did not think that this story could get any better, Bob was actually running this same ruse with several other full-time employers which was earning him a combined salary of several hundred thousand dollars a year.

For those super early (and lucky) developers who were able to get their hands on early access to a Google Glass unit - for a cool $1500 - are now invited to two hackathon events which are dedicated to the wearable augmented reality unit.

The events will take place on January 28 and 29, which will be held at Google's San Francisco office, but on February 1 and 2 the Glass Foundry in New York will house the second, and last hackathon. Registration opens on January 18 and I'm sure those seats will be snapped up quite quickly. Developers will learn about the Google Glass Mirror API, but Google engineers will also be there to help out and answer questions.

The full letter is below:

It warms my heart to see that there are still developers out there who state they're looking after PC gamers, and then actually follow through with it. Crytek are notorious with Crysis 2 for slapping PC gamers in the face, but BioShock Infinite developer, Irrational Games, has PC gamers' backs with their latest first-person shooter.

Irrational Games' Technical Director, Christopher Kline, admitted that the precious BioShock titles didn't have great PC-specific features, which he cites is due to the studio not being able to spare the resources required to amp up the PC version, and not because they didn't want to please PC enthusiasts.

BioShock Infinite turns things around, and Kline says that the studio has a special team which is responsible for identifying and implementing features that are important for PC gamers, as this time around, they had the resources spare to apply them. DirectX 11 will be included, as will HD Ambient Occlusion and Diffusion Depth of Field, EyeFinity and Surround Vision support, as well as huge amounts of graphical options and support for Steam Cloud and Big Picture.

We had a rumor less than a couple of days ago regarding pricing on the next-generation of consoles, which would be just $400 at launch. Now we're hearing from Sony's Vice President of Home Entertainment that we could see the PlayStation 4 unveiled sooner, rather than later.

Hiroshi Sakamoto recently talked to Chilean website Emol that Sony are working hard on the next-generation PlayStation, and that they are focused on showing it off at E3 in June, or even earlier. If Sony did jump first, they would beat Microsoft to the punch with their next-generation console which is expected to be unveiled at E3 in June.

The PlayStation 4 being announced ahead of the next-gen Xbox won't do much, but it will certainly have press sites going crazy, and thus, readers wanting to know more. Sony unveiling the PlayStation 4 would work for them, but against them at the same time - as it would give Microsoft E3 all to themselves and their next-gen consoles.

Wireless is a funny thing, it pretty much controls most people's everyday lives, and because it is mostly invisible, there's never an afterthought. If it 'just works', then that's fine. Well, a new wireless standard is on its way as the IEEE have adopted a new standards known as 802.11ad.

802.11ad will boast some incredible speeds of 7Gbps over 60GHz frequencies and should be baked into consumer devices as soon as 2014. The consumer-friendly marketing name that will find its way plastered all over 802.11ag is going to be WiGig. WiGig won't be replacing your wireless network, it will be complimenting it.

The hopes of the new technology will be that it'll provide an insanely fast, direct link between devices. The reason behind this is because of the 60GHz frequency it finds itself surfing along. As higher radio frequencies are used, they aren't so good at penetrating solid objects like walls, fridges, desks and more. High frequencies are really only good at shorter ranges, so WiGig will have its place in the market, but not where you'd like it to be.

Interested Americans, historians, or really anybody who owns a smartphone will be able to live stream the Presidential Inauguration straight to their device, thanks to a new app released for iOS and Android. Released Monday morning, the official Inaugural 2013 app features photos, videos, and a livestream that will go live January 21 and stream footage of the ceremony.

It features numerous other features, such as a map if you will be in DC for the inauguration, and information about volunteering opportunities for the Inaugural Committee's National Day of Service on January 19.

The app was produced by AT&T and is a free download for both iOS and Android devices.