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New Kanye West album 'pirated 500,000 times' in short timeframe

Chris Smith | Celebrities & Entertainment | Feb 17, 2016 11:35 AM CST

Kanye West has been on another Twitter tirade. He's recently asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for a $1 billion investment and an Australian airline's account was even hacked and used to abuse him. With all of this action surrounding his 'Life of Pablo' album release, many are upset that West's new tracks are destined to be avaialble to Tidal users only.

This exclusive offering hasn't sat well with most, with Torrent Freak now estimating that his album has already been illegally downloaded over 500,000 times. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has been hot on the case of hosts, reportedly issuing 20 takedown requests to Google over this matter, especially seeing as many paying Tidal users are still unable to access this new content themselves.

"I haven't seen numbers this high before for a music release - not with Adele either" claimed Ernesto from Torrent Freak to the BBC, likely directly due to the botched release and exclusivity deals.

Continue reading: New Kanye West album 'pirated 500,000 times' in short timeframe (full post)

NVIDIA's flagship Pascal performance leaked in academic slides

Jeff Williams | Video Cards & GPUs | Feb 17, 2016 11:02 AM CST

NVIDIA's Pascal is quite the elusive GPU, not even actually physically shown at CES this year despite silicon rumored to be in testing and quite ready. Performance can only be speculated, however a new academic paper seems to have information regarding the actual theoretical compute performance of the Pascal Flagship.

The paper itself is a treatise on the benefits of new memory technologies and their impact on the compute landscape. In one of the slides the author, Manuel Ujaldon, compares Micron's Hybrid Memory Cube (HBM), GDDR5, DDR3 and HBM technologies. Surprisingly, one of the slides seems to have the theoretical double and single precision performance numbers for the flagship Pascal GPU compared to other compute devices, Kepler, Fermi, Xeon Phi and even a Bulldozer based Opteron. The DP performance is even slightly more than the SP numbers for GK110, and only 2000 GFLOPS less than the Titan X's SP performance. On the single precision front, it's simply off the charts.

Looking at the sources confirms that this particular fellow of CUDA indeed talked with NVIDIA, so his numbers aren't necessarily completely made up, and are likely based off of low estimates gained from internal testing. Of course, these are theoretical numbers and don't always translate into how a particular GPU actually performs in real-world tasks, but that's a lot of compute power. Even more than AMD's Radeon R9 Fury X

Continue reading: NVIDIA's flagship Pascal performance leaked in academic slides (full post)

Call to Arms reaches Beta status with 73% positive user reviews

Chris Smith | Gaming | Feb 17, 2016 10:34 AM CST

Announced recently, Call to Arms has now ascended into beta status, available through Steam's Early Access program.

Digitalmindsoft has given players the opportunity to complete the first half of its singleplayer campaign with this new update, further allowing for new multiplayer game modes, new menus, engine improvements and other various feature additions. Currently listed with 910 user reviews and 73% of those positive, many users have toted this game as somewhat of an 'arcade RTS' platform, rather than a strategy FPS as it is often claimed to be.

If you're interested in this title, expect to pay around $24.99 for the standard edition or $34.99 for the deluxe edition from Steam here.

Continue reading: Call to Arms reaches Beta status with 73% positive user reviews (full post)

SEGA Classic Bundle is completely free on Steam right now

Jeff Williams | Gaming | Feb 17, 2016 10:02 AM CST

A rather fantastic bundle of classic SEGA games is waiting on Steam for you, and it's completely free to download. No restrictions and no catches. Just click, download and enjoy some of the best games from SEGA's heyday.

What a nice surprise to wake-up to on a usually drab Wednesday morning. SEGA's historical catalog of games is full of some very interesting and unique games from back when they were competing in the console wars with the likes of Nintendo and even Sony. The games and ideas they had can sometimes be considered the pre-cursors to a lot of the

You can enjoy several of those classic games for free. In the bundle you'll find Golden Axe, Jet Set Radio and the Hell Yeah! series of games. Not a tremendous amount, nor does it include anything from the pervasive Sonic franchise, but the selection is a preview of the kind of mastery that SEGA was capable of when they put their collective corporate minds to making curious and compelling games. Retro they may be, but incredibly fun they certainly are. And free. Free is the best price ever.

Continue reading: SEGA Classic Bundle is completely free on Steam right now (full post)

Martin Shkreli has $15m of Bitcoin scammed over Kanye album promise

Chris Smith | Hacking, Security & Privacy | Feb 17, 2016 9:33 AM CST

A scammer has stolen $15 million worth of Bitcoins from one of the internet's most 'un-loved' celebrities, pharmaceutical man Martin Shkreli. Contacting Shkreli and pretending to be part of Kanye West's entourage, a scammer promised an early release of West's new album 'Life of Pablo' to Shkreli personally, setting the price at a hefty 37,000 Bitcoin.

Taking to Twitter in order to voice his frustrations over getting scammed, Shkreli claims to now have "quit rap," stating that "This is the worst day of my life. My mom said don't deal with these kinds of people. Nothing good comes from rap music."

Seemingly having some friends in high places, Shkreli told all of his followers that they are 'idiots' and he has "gotten in touch with Sitoshi (Bitcoin's creator) and he's agreed to help me get my money back. I always win." He ended his Tweet tirade by announcing that "And second of all I can make the money back faster than anyone so the joke is on YOU if you think I even care."

Continue reading: Martin Shkreli has $15m of Bitcoin scammed over Kanye album promise (full post)

Pre-register and reserve your new Nintendo account name for Miitomo

Jeff Williams | Gaming | Feb 17, 2016 8:50 AM CST

Nintendo has opened up the preregistration for their new My Nintendo Account service so you can start reserving your names on the new system. This new account system is a way for them to unify their entire ecosystem, including their upcoming foray into other mobile platforms.

The first game to fully make use of this cross-platform integration is their first upcoming mobile game, Miitomo, a social experience centered around the creation and care of your Mii avatar.

Nintendo is intent on changing the social experience through technology. The site describes Miitomo as a way to learn more about yourself and to potentially open up more freely, and in a vastly different way than you might well be used to. Preregistering also lets you earn Nintendo Platinum Points, the new currency for their redesigned rewards program. The catch is that those earned with preregistration expire six months after the official launch of My Nintendo.

Continue reading: Pre-register and reserve your new Nintendo account name for Miitomo (full post)

Anonymous claims hacker released 17.8GB of files from Turkey police

Chris Smith | Hacking, Security & Privacy | Feb 17, 2016 8:32 AM CST

Believed to be 'ROR[RG]', this hacker has been named by Anonymous as a person to successfully infiltrate Turkish national police servers, stealing private information that includes a multitude of database files.

The files have been explained as related to MySQL by International Business Times, known to be so as they are mostly presented in .myd, .myi and .frm file extensions. Available as a 2GB torrent file online, once extracted the data becomes a large 17.8GB cache of illegally-gathered information.

This breach was announced by 'TheCthulhu', further using its official Twitter account to announce "Hey #Turkey, I have something to show you tomorrow. See, if you fight your citizens, they will bite back. #standby." This isn't ROR[RG]'s first operation, being known as the hacker to infiltrate Adult Friend Finder back in 2015, releasing personal information regarding four million members.

Continue reading: Anonymous claims hacker released 17.8GB of files from Turkey police (full post)

Next PS4 software update is getting a beta test first, wanna sign up?

Jeff Williams | Gaming | Feb 17, 2016 8:00 AM CST

Sony is implementing their own preview program for software updates, letting the public sign-up to participate in future updates.

It seems that Sony was able to learn a lot from the huge response they received when they asked for gamers to lend a hand with the drastically new update that was released last September. Being able to test in large variety of situations and get data they otherwise wouldn't have been able to, to make sure the software update was as stable as possible, was a huge help.

So they're doing it again. But this time it's a proper beta test program that they're implementing that's open to a wider variety of people than the Xbox One Preview Program. All you have to do is sign-up at this link and join the forums. Just remember that they're looking for people to give actual feedback in addition to monitoring the vitals of your system when things go wrong.

Continue reading: Next PS4 software update is getting a beta test first, wanna sign up? (full post)

Australian airline Twitter account hacked, used to hurl Kanye abuse

Chris Smith | Internet & Websites | Feb 17, 2016 7:31 AM CST

While Kanye West has been on a rampant Twitter tirade surrounding his 'Life of Pablo' album release, even social media accounts from The Land Down Under have gotten in on the action.

Virgin Australia's official Twitter account told Kanye West to "EAD" recently, further labelling him as a "douche" and embodying the common insult of many Aussie Generation X or Y youths.

While this tweet did come from the official and verified Virgin Australia account, it was soon after deleted with the company releasing a statement that "A recent tweet on our account was not published by a Virgin Australia employee and we are investigating the matter."

Continue reading: Australian airline Twitter account hacked, used to hurl Kanye abuse (full post)

Epic Gear announces THUNDEROUZ headset, TweakTown review to come

Chris Smith | Audio | Feb 17, 2016 6:29 AM CST

New to the world but not to us, Epic Gear has just announced its new THUNDEROUZ headset to the world - something that I've been pre-release testing with a review to follow soon.

This headset features Epic Gear's own EG-Amp technology, working as an amplifier for the headset when plugged in through USB, supporting the provided 3.5m AUX connection. Another unique feature on offer here includes the touch sensor on the side of the earcup, allowing users to seamlessly change through different lighting modes and effects, great for those after something a little more fancy.

Sporting 50mm neodymium drivers, plush leatherette earcups and a stereo 2.0 sound configuration, this headset will be available mid-March for around $79.99.

Continue reading: Epic Gear announces THUNDEROUZ headset, TweakTown review to come (full post)

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