Latest News - Page 3069

How often have you seen someone cheating during online multiplayer action? Usually companies just ban the offending accounts, if they even do that. Rockstar is taking an interesting approach to punishing cheaters in the new Max Payne 3 game by forcing them to play with each other by placing them in a "Cheater's Pool."

It doesn't matter what the person did wrong. If they are a "confirmed miscreant," they will be added into the "Cheater's Pool." Rockstar is giving users one chance to get back out of the Cheater's Pool, but if they misbehave again, they will be left there permanently, doomed to play the game only with other cheaters.

Rockstar can't manage this all by themselves, however, so they are calling upon users in the game to report suspicious activity. Basically like a neighborhood watch, Rockstar asks users to e-mail maxpayne3.banhammer@rockstargames.com with the platform (PC, Xbox360, PS3), the cheater's screenname, a description of the activity, and, if possible, hard evidence like a screenshot or video.

Samsung is trying to get into the social networking game, if an article by The Korea Times is to be believed. The article, which cites a Samsung official, claims that Samsung will enter the social networking market early next year with a Facebook-like service which Samsung hopes will be able to compete with Facebook.

The new service is designed to be available on a wide variety of internet-connected devices such as TVs and cameras, as well as computers and tablets. Family Story, Samsung's current social network, provides a nice framework for Samsung's developers to build upon. The current Family Story has a focus on photo sharing and schedule reminders.

According to the official:

Earlier this morning, Microsoft announced that they are rolling out a new advertising product to Skype for Windows. The new ad product is designed to monetize the free users of Skype, but will need to hit the right people. As such, Microsoft needs to know a little bit more about its users so that the ads can hit the right people.

This is why the stats released by Microsoft today make sense. They aren't just showing off, but instead they are releasing relevant information that can be used for advertising purposes. The ads that Microsoft are adding are silent, non-expanding ads and will only be shown to users who don't have subscriptions or Skype Credits and are using Skype for Windows.

Now, onto the statistics:

The internet is about to get even more confusing for old people. ICANN has been working on offering generic top-level-domains for about six years now, and today sees another step in that direction. Top-level-domains (TLD) are the endings on domains such as ".com" or ".org" and generic TLDs will come in the form of brands, ".samsung," or topics, ".lol."

"It's a historic day for the Internet," said ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom. "The internet is about to change forever." Notice that he doesn't specify that it is changing for the better as no one truly knows the full impact that these domains will have. It has the possibility to create widespread confusion, or easy ways to find topic-specific sites.

Brands had to pay a whopping $185,000 just to apply for a TLD; some brands applied for multiple. Applicants also had to prove their ability to pay to run a registry by putting up additional money. The application period has ended and ICANN has finally released a listing of applicants and the TLDs that they applied for.

AMD has just announced the immediate availability of the FirePro W600. The FirePro W600 is the first professional-level graphics card to released by AMD that leverages the 28nm manufacturing process along with the Graphics Core Next GPU architecture. This card is designed to be used for large, dynamic screens that are easily updated with new content.

"Whether we are checking flight times at the airport or watching the latest ads on massive screens in city squares, digital signage has quickly become an important and ubiquitous part of our lives," said Matt Skynner, corporate vice president and general manager of AMD Graphics. "To enable these displays, the digital signage industry demands technology that can be regularly refreshed with new, feature-rich content. With the launch of the AMD FirePro™ W600 professional graphics card, AMD is helping advance the digital display wall industry by providing suppliers and developers with impressive display density, performance and exceptional value."

There are many new screens being built that are leveraging the latest in HD LED, LCD and plasma technologies. These screens, in turn, are being installed together to create giant video walls. The AMD W600 was designed to power these huge, multi-monitor displays which are often used for advertising and video conferencing.

It's been expected by many analysts and fanboys alike that AMD would eventually either produce their own ARM-type chip or license one of ARM's creations. Today, AMD has finally done one of those options by licensing the ARM Cortex-A5. The Cortex-A5 will find its way into AMD's APU line of CPUs.

It's not actually the processing functions of the Cortex-A5 that AMD is after, however. This is the unexpected part. Instead, AMD is looking to use the security features that ARM has been working on for some time. Dubbed TrustZone, ARM has produced hardware and software which make data transfers and transactions more secure.

The Cortex-A5 was chosen as it is the smallest of ARM's chips and will take up only a marginal amount of space on one of AMD's APUs. If produced on the 28nm process, it is expected the A5 will add about 10-15mm2 of die size. The A5 will take care of all of the security functions for securing online transactions.

Epic has released a YouTube video demoing the capabilities of their next generation graphics engine. Unreal Engine 4 is designed to run on next-gen consoles and push the limit for DirectX 11 games on PCs. Unreal Engine 4 has been under construction for some time now, and is finally nearing completion.

I can't wait to see this new engine unleashed and the games that come with it. Unreal-powered games have always been fun and graphically good, and this new engine appears to not disappoint. Check out the video above and let us know what you think in the comments.

Android user? iPhone user? Well, right now you are the two major competing phone operating systems. However, analysts are expecting that to change by 2016. Windows Phone is predicted to eclipse iPhone's market share by the year 2016 due to the recent release of the Nokia Lumia 900 to emerging markets.

The IDC predicts that iPhone's market share will drop by about 1.5%, ending at 19% by 2016. Windows Phone, on the other hand, will gain 14% and end near 19.2%, if predictions prove accurate. Android will give up the majority of the market share that Windows Phone will gain. Android is looking towards loosing about 8% market share.

Blackberry isn't going to lose much, about 0.1%. Android is going to remain the top mobile operating system, partly thanks to some of Samsung's new phone releases. "The smartphone parade won't be as lively this year as it has been in past," said Kevin Restivo, senior research analyst with IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker. "The mobile phone user transition from feature phones to smartphones will continue in a gradual but unabated fashion. Smartphone growth, however, will increasingly be driven by a triumvirate of smartphone operating systems, namely Android, iOS and Windows Phone 7."

LulzSec, a hacking group responsible for many hacks last year, has been fairly quiet this year after their leader allegedly worked with law enforcement to bring charges against its members. Now, however, LulzSec Reborn has taken over and started hacking, mainly compromising user accounts and leaking the details.

LulzSec Reborn has had two major hacks this year and otherwise has been quiet. The first was a leaking of 170,000 MilitarySingles accounts on Pastebin and now they are taking responsibility for the leaking of 10,000 Twitter accounts on Pastebin. The latter, today's leak, features much more information than a traditional password hack.

The leak comes in the form of an SQL dump which features usernames, passwords, real names, bios, locations, avatars, security tokens used by the service for authentication with Twitter and the user's most recent Tweet. The hack comes from compromising a third-party site that required the login information to work.

The world is becoming more and more connected and more and more devices are joining the internet. This fundamental idea is the driving force behind the need to change to IPv6. Now even smart meters are connected to some sort of network through which they transmit usage data back to the power company.

An EU watchdog is concerned about the privacy of the data that is being reported back. Due to the massive amounts of data being reported, it's easy to see when people are home or not by watching the power usage. Not only that, but the meter can even report back what medical devices are in use in the house.

It's of the utmost concern to Privacy International, a group claiming that proposed safeguards do not go far enough. The major fear appears to be regarding the ability to deduce if someone is home or not, but there are plenty more complaints about the sheer amount of data being collected.

Intel has decided that AES encryption feature of the 520 Series SSD (Cherryville) does not actually feature 256-bit encryption. It turns out that the SSD actually only supports 128-bit encryption, which should be plenty for most users. These details have come to light after Intel published an updated specification document for the series.

Intel is doing the right thing and offering a refund for users who feel 128-bit isn't enough:

A surprise from AMDs beta drivers has arrived today. No, not some incredible performance jump that causes it to smash the 680...or is it? The new beta drivers make reference to 16 previously unseen device IDs and their codenames. These new device IDs could (read: likely) belong to the upcoming HD 8000 series GPUs.

The codenames, 4x "Venus", 3x "Oland" and finally 9x "Mars", should flesh out the HD 8000 series nicely. The Venus will most likely be the top end card due to the LE, Pro, XT and XTX suffixes. Oland will probably end up being the 8800 series and Mars will most likely flesh out the lower end and mainstream market.

The cards will likely launch near the end of 2012 or very early 2013, if previous AMD launches are anything to go by. There have been zero rumors about performance, although with this new finding, I'm sure they will start flowing. In case you're curious, the device IDs are listed below:

iOS brings with it a new version of Siri. She has been studying for the past 8 months and can now do so much more like understand sports. There are also new features for finding restaurants and making reservations.

Siri also understands movies better as she has integrated with Rotten Tomatoes. Siri can search for movies featuring specific actors or directors.

Siri can also launch apps:

Sources around the web are indicating that Crytek, the studio behind the hit series Crysis, is moving towards producing free-to-play games with pay-to-play budgets. This means that Crysis 3 is likely the last retail title we will see from the Crytek team. Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli let the cat out of the bag to Videogamer.com.

These free-to-play games will be serious, online games that are near console quality. Budgets should be in the range of $10-30 million which will produce some great quality games. Crytek has already teamed up with Trion on one of these games to create a free, online FPS game called Warface. We reported on the game, which is live in Russia and in closed beta in China, from E3.

Intel recently released their Medfield Atom chip in smartphones and have had limited success. At first blush, it appears tests are proving the single core chip is the same as multicore ARM chips in both performance and power draw measurements. Usually, to increase performance, more cores are thrown at the problem.

However, this time Intel believes that won't help as they are saying that Android isn't properly prepared to utilize multiple cores efficiently. Moreover, Intel thinks that these optimizations for multiple cores could and should come from the System-on-a-chip providers such as Texas Instruments or Qualcomm.

Intel's Mobile and Communications Group General Manager, Mike Bell, had this to say:

Valve's Source engine arrived in 2004 and has powered some truly great games such as Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, Counter Strike: Source, and more. Now the game engine is stepping over into movies where it will be used in the upcoming movie 'Deep'.

Deep is a small-budget animated movie, utilising the Source engine as its a low-cost solution for real-time rendering and editing. Thanks to the partnership between the developer and film producer, Deep could be the first movie released on Steam. Deep is an animated film set in the post-apocalyptic landscape of World War III, where the remaining few members of mankind huddle together in abandoned ship hulls, struggling to survive.

Deep has a budget of a shave under $19 million. This could be a step in a very interesting direction for Valve, and Steam.

Remember the free-to-play mech game Hawken? Well, after seeing the MEK-FU controller you won't... the USB-based controller was unveiled at E3 last week and is designed by new accessory company RIPLEIGH. CEO of RIPLEIGH, Chen Yisheng has told Destructoid that his team did a lot of research in order to get to the MEK-FU, going as far as having a guy on the team that used to drive tanks in the military.

MEK-FU sports two joysticks, lots of buttons, flip switches, and is fully programmable. There's even a full keyboard on the thing! The MEK-FU is also capable of taking a mobile or tablet device that acts as a secondary display, or the main screen, that works with Hawken thanks to the Gaiki streaming partnership.

Hawken drops in December and the MEK-FU should hopefully arrive soon after. How much would you want to pay for this controller? I'm loving the idea of using a smart device such as a tablet as a secondary display, I've been waiting for a game developer to do this since the iPad was released.

It looks like the lads that co-founded Google are in hot water once again, where they'll have to appear before US antitrust regulators for questioning. Larry Page and Sergey Brin have reportedly retained counsel, and are expected to give depositions before the Federal Trade Commission sometime over the coming months.

What is it all over? Well, the issue boils down to whether or not Google have been unfairly using its position as the world's dominant search engine in a manner biased in favor of its own products, as well as whether Google has increased advertising rates for its competitors.

Google of course maintains that users are free to visit Google's competition, which the search giant says is "only a click away" thanks to the nature of the web.

I've been taking my time and thinking these awards over carefully. You can't just run around tossing out Best of Show awards everywhere or they start to mean nothing. With that said, I've put much consideration into these and will only be giving them out in a few key categories.

Best upcoming game of E3 has to be given to Crysis 3. I know I have awarded them other awards this E3 and that is because it is such an amazing game. Period. Feel free to argue, but I was there and saw with my own eyes the beauty and quality that Crysis 3 is already sporting, and it doesn't even release until February 2013.

Most innovative game of E3 needs to be awarded to an IndieCade game called Tickleplane. It may not have the best graphics or the most in-depth story line, in fact it has none, but the controls of the game are so different that it wins the award. They take a while to get used to, but once you do, the game is a great time waster.

Computex 2012 - A good friend of mine asked me to check out the Clevo stand, so we stopped by and they were surprisingly quiet, which was good for us to walk around and snap a bunch of pictures. Clevo's P270WM had some insane specs, sporting a third-generation Core i7 Extreme Edition, X79 chipset, NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 675M (in SLI!!) GPU, 16GB memory support, 17.3-inch Full HD display, 3 x HDD support, and more. No wonder this beast was so heavy.

Clevo's P370EM was specced nearly as good, same processor, but Intel's HM77 chipset, an option of AMD's Radeon HD 7970M GPU, or GTX 675M SLI, the same Full HD display, but just two HDD support, but ca be cranked up to support 32GB of RAM.

Something that caught my eye was Clevo's A110EU all-in-one PC, the A110EU was running Windows 8 and thanks to its multi-touch screen, I could test it out. The specs on it were Intel's quad-core i7, H61 chipset, HD Graphics 4000, a 21.5-inch Full HD display (multi-touch), 6 x USB 2.0 ports, HDMI output, 8GB RAM support.