Latest News - Page 3050

We all know that zombies are all the rage these days, where first-person shooter games seem to feature the brain-eating, vicious creatures in droves. The latest to bring zombies to the genre is Valve with Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.

CS:GO launches next week, and in collaboration with a mod team over at Plaguefest.com, Valve have released a zombie modification for CS:GO that will be made available alongside the FPS' launch, specifically for PC, on August 21. A blog post over on the official Counter-Strike site has said:

Saudi Aramco, who has the title of the world's largest oil company, has been struck by a cyber attack. The company has reported that nearly all of their workstations have been hit by malware, and the breach is said to be similar to the attack on Iranian systems back in Apri, but oil-production industrial equipment was not affected.

Saudi Aramco have said they've disconnected their entire network from the Internet as a precautionary measure, and expect a full recovery of their systems before the end of the week. The oil company hasn't said who is involved, but have insisted that the production of oil has not been altered as a result of the breach. The company said in a statement:

Crysis 3's graphics may look good, but we all know how Crysis 2 turned out, even after Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli said just how important PC was to Crytek, and now we're hearing the same things, yet again. Yerli has revealed during an EA livestream that Crysis 3 will push PC gamers' rigs like the first one did.

We all know the next line, "will it run Crysis", was the first comment on most threads, reviews, and websites when a new GPU was launched, it looks like Crysis 3 could do this yet again. Yerli even comments, saying "that joke will be resurrected again with Crysis 3, I'm quite sure about that. There are brutal expectations around the PC version of Crysis 3. So this time we promise to melt down PCs."

I'm disappointed, because I feel like we've heard it all before. Crysis tells us how PC will be looked after, then releases Crysis 2 in DX9-only, with a DX11 patch afterwards. Even then, it didn't look all that great, considering how Crysis launched and virtually blew every other game engine out of the water. The original Crysis also launched in DX10, which was strange that its sequel years later, launched in DX9. This is because Crytek switched from developing for PC only, to multi-platform to cater for those juicy console sales.

Another Apple-related RumorTT post, but this time it's not about their next-gen iPhone, sales, iPad, or their TV. This post is about the Cupertino-based company's vision of a set-top box, as reported by the Wall Street Journal. Apple look to want to feature a cloud-based DVR functionality, and an iPad-like interface. The features are said to be summed up into four basic details:

An iPad-like interface doesn't sound too strange, it's something I would actually totally expect. I personally think they should have an option when you buy the set-top box (or TV), if you're an owner of an iPhone, iPad or iPod (or any iOS-based device) then you should be able to download an application that would act as a remote, iRemote? Alternatively, or additionally, there should be an iOS-based touchscreen controller you should be able to purchase.

Cloud DVR? This sounds like iTunes on steroids, but would be great for customers who want a super-easy way of catching up on TV, or movies. Social features, well, considering iOS sports Twitter and Facebook deeply in iOS and OSX in the near future, with the former deeply integrated now, this should be another day-one feature of the STB. Apple still have a lot of work on the business side of things before something like this could take off.

Avengers fans rejoice! Disney has confirmed that the sequel to the massively successful movie, The Avengers, will indeed hit theaters on May 1, 2015. About two weeks ago, a rumor hit the scene that pegged this as the day that the sequel would hit theaters, but most doubted it as the person claiming this, MTV, didn't name sources.

This morning, Disney unleashed the following press release:

The United States government just can't seem to catch a break when it comes to the MegaUpload/Kim Dotcom lawsuit. First, the warrant used to raid his house has been overturned by New Zealand. Then, his extradition hearing was pushed all the way back to March, 2013. Now, a New Zealand court has ruled that the FBI must release all evidence against him for his extradition hearing.

This strikes a major blow to the United States as the FBI has been doing their best to keep their evidence secret. The New Zealand court has made a logical argument in which they state that "severely restrict[ing] the ability of [one party] to file relevant evidence would not easily be characterised as 'fair.'"

The New Zealand court asserts that there is no reason that the evidence cannot be presented in New Zealand and subsequently presented in the United States. Furthermore, the court cites the Bill of Rights Act and it's requirements for a fair hearing. Some interesting sections of the ruling follow:

Malware is bad. It's created by people who want to cause you trouble or steal your information. It's a fact of life that Windows will always be a target of malware, but how about Android? It seems as more hackers and scammers are now targeting the mobile operating system with varying degrees of success.

In the second quarter of 2012, Kaspersky Labs found that the number of malware out there targeting Android has tripled. Likely this is the result of an increased number of Android phones giving malicious programmers a wider base to attack. This is the same reason so many different malwares are written for Windows.

During the three months that make up the second quarter, the number of new malware increased to nearly 15,000. 49 percent of the malware were multi-functional Trojans designed to steal data such as contact names, phone numbers, and e-mails. 25 percent were SMS Trojans which send texts to premium numbers to gain money for the programmer.

When I hear military-grade, I immediately hear "expensive," however, that's not the case with Fujitsu's new military-grade tablet. At $549, it's $50 less than a storage-comparable Apple iPad 3--and the device even weighs less than it does. It manages all of this while being tested to meet or exceed military durability standard MIL-STD-810G.

So just what do you get with the Fujitsu M532? Well, it features a quad-core Tegra 3 processor and 1 GB of RAM stuffed behind a 10.1-inch IPS display running at WXGA (1280 x 800) resolution. Camera-wise, it features an 8-megapixel rear-facing camera and a two-megapixel front-facing camera.

It weighs in at just 1.23 pounds which, as I said, is less than the iPad 3's 1.44 pounds. Furthermore, the battery is said to last for 8.4 hours of video playback, which should get you through at least 3 movies and will get you most of the way to Europe from the United States. You also get a one-year license for device tracking through Absolute Computrace.

The Motion Pictures Expert Group (MPEG) has released a new draft which should see the release of a new video codec, H.265. The proposed High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) looks to save on space by up to 50% of the current MPEG-4 H.264 standard, with its aim of reducing the amount of bandwidth used by online video applications, making room for more.

A group of 450 people met in Stockholm during July in order to approve the new codec, which if adopted, would see double the amount of TV channels broadcast, all in the same amount of spectrum. Per Fröjdh, chairman of the Swedish MPEG delegation and manager for Visual Technology at Ericsson Research has said it will "have an enormous impact on the industry", and rightly so. He also notes that it is currently predicted that video could account for "90 percent of all network traffic" by 2015.

Fröjdh also believes that the new HEVC format could see a launch in the commercial product space as soon as next year. Apple would hopefully be an early adopter in H.265, as they were in H.264. Nokia and Microsoft also recommend H.264 as an alternative to plugins for video in the HTML5 specification. We should hear more about H.265 over the coming months.

Developer Uber Entertainment wants to get out from behind games such as Super Monday Night Combat and create a real-time strategy title called Planetary Annihilation. Uber Entertainment has taken to Kickstarter to finance the $900,000 cost of the game, but they're also taking donations through the game's website, too.

What the best bit of this news is, is that Planetary Annihilation is described as "Total Annihilation-inspired gameplay on a planetary scale". Now, when I was in high school, I would've spent hundreds upon hundreds of hours on Total Annihilation, I had a non-cached version of the Celeron 300, and if I reset my computer 20-30 times, it would somehow clock in at 333MHz instead of 300MHz. I would get a decent frame rate boost when there were tonnes of units on screen. I upgraded so many times for this game it wasn't funny. Nostalgia, check.

Planetary Annihilation will give players the chance to create their own maps, and in the case of this planetary game, their own planets and systems, where players will be able to publish and share out to the community. Multiplayer skirmishes are said to have anywhere between two and 40 players, and in order to handle the amount of load on the server, Planetary Annihilation will employ a client-server model to handle the majority of the work on running multiplayer matches, meaning that real-time multiplayer won't be slowed down by slower systems.

AMD have just released a tasty version of their Catalyst drivers, version 12.8. The biggest gem in this driver is most likely going to be the Windows 8 support, which includes AMD's first logo certified and unified driver for Windows 8 production. This includes:

Major technologies / features also supported under Windows 8:

There's also some performance improvements with Catalyst 12.8 when versed against Catalyst 12.6:

The Apple vs. Samsung trial is coming to an end, but before we get there, Samsung started their day in court on Monday with some very interesting things to say. Apple have been playing dirty in court from day one, stating that Samsung knowingly stole its technology and designs by very meticulously examining each key element of the iPhone's UI and mimicking it on their own products.

Samsung, rather than deny doing anything wrong, decided to play hard ball - prove that Apple's technology patents aren't valid because they stole them to begin with. Samsung started off by talking about Apple's pinch-to-zoom patent, which Apple claim Samsung infringes upon by using the feature in most of Samsung's smartphones and tablets.

BGR goes into a technology called "Diamond Touch" which was shown to the court by Samsung's legal team on a massive touchscreen table built by Mitsubishi, where they showed the jury that Apple's patent on pinch-to-zoom technology shouldn't be valid because the technology had existed for years before the first iPhone hit the market. Samsung took a stab after, suggesting Apple knowingly stole the technology when its witness, Mitsubishi engineer Adam Bogue, testified that he showed the Cupertino-based company's engineers the Diamond Touch tech back in 2003.

We know that Amazon aren't just sitting on their hands over at Amazon HQ, and we've been teased that they were working on a larger Kindle Fire, but it looks like it cleared the FCC yesterday. The Digital Reader has a scoop from a friend of his, who tipped him to a bunch of FCC documents that were posted yesterday.

It doesn't show much, but the site reports "Like Amazon's past FCC submissions, this paperwork belongs to a new front company. This time around the company is Harpers LLC." Every time Amazon has thrown a new device through the FCC, they've used a new front company and then used a magic wand to make the paperwork disappear. Amazon have done this for every e-reader and tablet since the second iteration of the Kindle.

The Digital Reader has donned their detective hat and looked into Harpers LLC, looking at the address that leads back to a storefront rented by CSC Entity Services, with the man named on the paperwork as the President of Harpers, also works for CSC. Stephen Facciolo appears on LinkedIn as a service leader for CSC, which has led Nate (the reporter on The Digital Reader) to conclude that CSC is the legitimate front company that Amazon has hired to run a second front company so that the FCC paperwork trail doesn't lead back to them.

In a scary ruling, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that law enforcement can use GPS data from a cell phone without a warrant. The ruling came down in a 2-1 verdict and liked the GPS data of a cellphone to the scent given off, and subsequently caught by a dog. Furthermore, the fact he obtained it voluntarily seemed to be a deciding factor for the court.

"There is no Fourth Amendment violation because Skinner did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the data given off by his voluntarily procured pay-as-you-go cell phone," wrote Judge John Rogers. "If a tool used to transport contraband gives off a signal that can be tracked for location, certainly the police can track the signal."

The ruling is contrary to the Jones v. United States case decided by the Supreme Court in January, 2012. In that case, agents put a physical tracking device on the suspect's vehicle. Since no physical intrusion occurred in this case, that ruling had no effect on the court in making their decision for this case.

A lot of cool announcements are coming out of Gamescon and EA has just joined the party with their announcement that Command & Conquer would become an online, free-to-play game. Taking the best of a popular game and putting online for free, with some restrictions, seems to be the way of the future as more and more companies are doing it.

Command & Conquer will receive regular free updates to keep the content fresh and fun to play. It's not clear if everything will be unlockable through gameplay, or if certain troops and maps will have to be purchased separately. The latter is likely the case in order to provide more income for EA.

Command & Conquer Generals 2, a game previously announced, is going to make up a majority of the new game. The new free-to-play game is based upon the Frostbite 2 engine and features detailed units, fully destructible environments, dynamic physics and high-quality visual effects.

As if we didn't have enough choice when it comes to gaming keyboards, Razer has introduced a new model that features it's Switchblade user interface. The Switchblade UI is the same that is currently used the on Razer Blade gaming laptop and has an LCD trackpad and LED keypad combo which can be turned into "a customizable control panel with 10 dynamic, adaptive tactile keys."

The thing looks pretty sweet, but looks don't matter with a gaming keyboard. Instead, it's all about how it works. Without actually using the keyboard, I'm unable to comment on that aspect of the new product. It has some unique aspects which are relayed in a humorous pres release, including this gem: "The Razer DeathStalker Ultimate features an anti-ghosting infrastructure of up to 10 keys in game mode. Users may actuate as many keys as they have fingers, and have them all register accurately and swiftly in-game."

"With the Switchblade UI on the Razer DeathStalker Ultimate, we wanted to offer gamers an enriching and intuitive gaming experience built for total game control," said Robert "RazerGuy" Krakoff, president of Razer USA. "We continue to work closely with independent software vendors to integrate the API of their games on the Switchblade UI, so that you can see more of the game as you play. I'm excited that we are making such cutting-edge technology available to gamers everywhere, and look forward to bringing more game-specific apps."

Pinterest has released an Android app and iPad app after "very vocal" Android users persistently requested one. An iPhone app has existed for a while now, but also saw an update on Tuesday. The idea behind the apps is to allow pinning to be faster and more efficient so that you can "go offline and do things that you love."

Apparently, every product release by Pinterest was followed by the question "what about an Android app?" So that's what they did: "our custom-designed Android app makes it simple and fast to pin, so that the time you spend on Pinterest is as productive as possible. We also made sure the app works well on Android phones and tablets, regardless of your device's cost, speed or screen size."

Pinterest believes that their iPad app is the best way to experience Pinterest. "iPad owners may have the best Pinterest experience yet." iPhone users also received a redesigned app. The new version features a two-column layout so that users can see more pins, just like they have been requesting.

Today, Corsair has announced that they have acquired certain assets of Raptor Gaming in order to get a better hold in retail sales. Raptor Gaming has a strong retail presence in Germany, the largest market for video gaming in Europe, and this is what Corsair hopes to be able to do with this acquisition.

Corsair has acquired from Raptor Gaming its full product portfolio of keyboards, mice, headsets, and accessories. These new products will be used in a new line alongside of Corsair's currently existing Vengeance gaming products. Raptor Gaming executives CEO Dirk Schunk and COO Heinz-Dieter Ludwig will work with Corsair to ensure a smooth transition.

"Corsair and Raptor share the same goal, bringing best-in-class PC hardware to gamers around the world," said Andy Paul, President and CEO of Corsair. "Raptor Gaming's strong retail presence will allow us to offer a wider range of PC hardware to gamers across Germany."

Contrary to rumors flying around the internet, Sapphire has not cancelled the 6GB 7970 Toxic graphics card they produce. It seems that because one major reseller put "discontinued" instead of "out-of-stock", or something similar, enthusiasts freaked out that they wouldn't be able to get the super fast card.

At Gamescon, however, Sapphire has a large booth and sitting right in the middle as the pride and joy of the booth was the 6GB 7970 Toxic card. KitGuru asked Bill Donnelly for a little more information regarding the rumor flying around the web. The short answer? It's not discontinued, just facing production constraints.

Times are changing, and the way American teens digest digital content, more specifically, music, is changing in strides. According to a new study from Nielsen Music 360, American teenagers are using Google's YouTube to listen to music compared to radio, iTunes or CDs.

Radio still remains the biggest music discovery option, but when it comes to listening, YouTube is out in front. The study reveals that nearly 50% of teens have radio apps on their smartphones and that digital music has passed physical CDs in terms of perception of value.

This study from Nielsen is based on results from 3,000 online consumer surveys conducted in the US. This would be why YouTube drives so much traffic, and I personally have young nieces and nephews who use YouTube to stream music all the time. They're finally getting onto the bandwagon with me and Spotify, though. I think the 'fads' these days will change quicker, as music discovery applications such as Spotify become more well-known.