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The teenager behind last year's disastrous Grand Theft Auto 6 leaks has been sentenced to life in a secure hospital, the BBC reports.

18-year-old hacker Arion Kurtaj has been sentenced to a life term in a mental hospital for his role in Lapsus$ cybertheft activity. In 2022, Kurtaj took part in a major database infiltration on Rockstar Games, successfully acquiring 90 clips of the then-unannounced Grand Theft Auto 6. Kurtaj actually hacked Rockstar and released the GTA 6 videos while he was out on bail for previous hacks on NVIDIA and BT/EE.

As a result of his actions and apparent motivation to keep carrying out cybercrimes, UK Judge Patricia Lees has sentenced Kurtaj to an indefinite stay in a mental hospital. Kurtaj suffers from acute autism and was found by psychiatrists as unable to stand trial, so the courts took a more direct approach and simply asked Kurtaj if he did the acts, Reuters reports.

Xbox gaming CEO Phil Spencer outlines the new pecking order at Microsoft's games business.

Xbox is adjusting its ranks as it integrates its $68.7 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard King into its ecosystem. Activision CEO Bobby Kotick will resign at the end of this month, and the current ABK management will stay in charge.

The biggest update is regarding Matt Booty's recent promotion to president of Game Content and Studios, a new position that was opened up shortly after the ABK merger was closed. In this position, Matt will oversee the existing stable of developers under the Xbox Game Studios label, as well as Activision Blizzard King and ZeniMax, who will sit horizontally in the structure instead of vertically under the Xbox Game Studios banner.

When Apple released iOS 17.2.1 to the public earlier this week it brought with it a number of bug fixes, but that was all that Apple had to say when people dug into the update's release notes. Now, it seems that those release notes were slightly different depending on which country you happened to live in.

As has been reported online, including by MacRumors, users who downloaded iOS 17.2.1 in Japan and China noted that their release notes mentioned an update that would help fix a battery drain issue which saw battery life fall more quickly than would normally be expected.

Apple hasn't provided any specific details about what that original bug was that caused the battery drain, but it does seem fairly confident that the problem has been fixed. MacRumors says that it reached out to Apple for clarification on the situation but has as yet not received a response.

If you're planning on buying a new car in 2024 and want to be able to make use of the latest and greatest CarPlay technology, you might want to consider heading to your local Porsche or Aston Martin dealer, it seems. Apple announced its revamped CarPlay interface alongside iOS 16 back in June of 2022, but we've been waiting to hear more about it ever since. Now, it's been reported that vehicles from those two companies are coming on board.

Car and Driver reports that while Porsche hasn't been specific about which vehicles will offer the updated CarPlay look and feel, Aston Martin's 2024 DB12 and DB12 Volante vehicles will be good to go.

For those who might have forgotten what all the fuss is about considering how long ago it was announced, what makes this updated CarPlay so important is its ability to work with multiple displays. Currently, CarPlay can only work with the car's main infotainment display, but the arrival of the updated version in these new cars will change that. Here, CarPlay will also take over the car's instrument display as well, hooking into in-car information like speed, mileage, and more. Apple says that none of that information is stored on the connected iPhone, and the overall experience could be a huge upgrade.

Apple's iPhone 15 Pro Max is undoubtedly the best iPhone the company has ever made for a few reasons, and not just because it has the fast A17 Pro chip or the biggest and best display yet offered in an Apple-branded phone. Another reason beyond those is the addition of Apple's first tetraprism camera lens, a lens that allows Apple to fold light and create a new telephoto lens that can manage a 5x optical zoom. That beats out the 3x zoom of previous models, and the telephoto lens still used on the iPhone 15 Pro. But now it seems increasingly likely that Apple will bring that same lens to the iPhone 16 Pro.

It was said that the tetraprism lens didn't get an iPhone 15 Pro release due to the smaller size of the phone impacting Apple's ability to physically fit it inside. However, it now appears that Apple has been able to fix that problem and the 5x zoom lens is now coming to the iPhone 16 Pro.

That's according to a report by MacRumors which matches similar reports by The Elec and analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, claiming that both the iPhone 16 Pro and IPhone 16 Pro Max models will sport improved zoom offerings when they go on sale in or around September 2024.

When Apple announced the Vision Pro headset back in June of 2023, the company confirmed very few release details. While Apple was quick to share details about what the headset would be capable of, it didn't say when it would go on sale beyond a simple timeframe of early 2024. We also learned that the Vision Pro would cost a whopping $3499 once it did go on sale, but it was never confirmed when that would be. But now, we might finally know when Vision Pro will hit store shelves.

That's after a new Bloomberg report, penned by the well-connected Mark Gurman, shared that Apple is now aiming for a February release window for what is sure to be its biggest release since the Apple Watch debuted in 2014. The Vision Pro enters a whole new category for Apple, as the original Apple Watch did a decade ago, and it's as-yet unclear whether it will be a success.

Gurman says that production of the new headset has been running at its maximum speed for several weeks now, with facilities in China working on getting the headset ready for prime time. The aim is to have headsets ready by the end of January, with sales then beginning the following month - although it isn't yet clear how far through February that launch will come.

Baldur's Gate 3 has released another hotfix - the fifteenth for the game in fact - and it makes what you might call an interesting tweak.

As PC Gamer reports, those who have run into one particular bug probably haven't forgotten it, because the glitch causes character noses and cheeks to get stretched during cinematics, to the point where they can "lose their eyeballs, turning the sockets into pits of flesh," apparently. Yikes...

Developer Larian tells us: "Have you found some characters' faces turning into stretched eldritch horrors with pits of flesh in place of eyes? That should not be a problem anymore!"

Steam users who are buying games they'd rather not let anyone else know about can now hide such purchases.

Valve has introduced a new capability in beta whereby Steam users can choose a new option at checkout - 'For my account: private.'

As the name suggests, when this choice is made, the game is purchased, but not shown publicly.

It's Thursday, and as usual we've just received our weekly update from NVIDIA about the new games it has introduced to GeForce Now.

There are 11 games for this week, in fact, headed up by Monster Hunter: World, the latest instalment in the popular franchise to hit GeForce Now (following the debut of Monster Hunter Rise, which came out back near the start of 2023).

Monster Hunter: World is well-liked on Steam, and the action RPG is actually on sale right now (but only for the next couple of hours, at the time of writing), with a pretty hefty 67% off. So that's something to consider if you can move quickly on a purchase.

Konami has announced it will be rolling out a new patch for Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 1, adding a bunch of new settings for gamers to tweak their in-game experience.

The new update is version 1.4.0, and it's already live for owners of Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 1 on Steam. The new patch will add a bunch of new settings, such as smoothing options, game screen settings (standard, pixel perfect, 16:9), screen filters, additional audio settings, and controller response speed customization.

The new patch also comes with a bunch of bug fixes, and Konami has demonstrated the changes in detail within the patch notes that can be found here. While Steam players are already enjoying these changes, Konami has announced that PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch players will get the update "early" in January 2024.

The Megalodon is a prehistoric great white shark and one of the most fearsome predators to have ever been discovered by researchers.

Megalodons roamed the deep seas between 4 and 20 million years ago, and these fearsome 20-meter-long creatures wielded some 40,000 individual razor-sharp teeth throughout their lives. These teeth are about as long as your palm to the end of your middle finger, and while these massive predators swam through the ocean, they shed their teeth, approximately 40,000 over their life.

These teeth float down to the ocean floor, and now researchers, for the first time, have found one embedded in the seafloor 1.9 miles below the surface of the Pacific Ocean. The tooth was recovered and inspected back on the dry land, with the researchers reporting it had a broken tip but still had its serrated edges intact. The newly discovered tooth isn't the first Megalodon tooth to be discovered, nor the biggest (2.5-2.6 inches), but its condition is believed to be pristine and will be added to the historical records of the once monstrous predators that haunted the deep blue.

Microsoft Copilot, the AI assistant available for Windows and Edge users, just got a fun update in time for the holiday season: the ability to generate a song from your input. The ability arrives thanks to a new partnership with Suno.ai, and accessing the feature is as simple as enabling the Suno plug-in and then describing the type of song you want to hear.

Microsoft describes the ability to turn ideas into songs as something for everyone, regardless of musical background. Suno.ai is a leader in artificial intelligence-based music creation, and they have their own standalone AI-powered web app you can use to generate songs. So, if you're looking for a hip-hop song about your loved one for the holidays, be sure to give this a go.

Simplicity is the key, as Suno.ai can generate a song from a single sentence, like this little song called Pickles and Strings, a folksong about a man who loves pickles. What's cool is that you can specify the genre, tempo, the types of instruments you want to hear, and more.

The US Space Force is tracking six unknown objects that were released into Earth's orbit by a mysterious space plane.

The Chinese-operated space plane launched from the Gobi Desert on December 14 and has been closely monitored by satellite trackers and amateur astronomers since its departure from Earth's surface. The only information that is publicly available on China's mysterious space plane is that its primary objective is to verify spaceplane technologies and carry out scientific experiments. Now, amateur astronomer and satellite tracker Scott Tilley, who's been tracking the spaceplane, claims it released six unknown objects upon reaching orbit.

Reports indicate the US Space Force is tracking all six objects, and the US Department of Defense has named all six OBJECT A through to F. "OBJECT A's or nearby emission is reminiscent of earlier Chinese space plane 'wingman' emissions in the sense the signal is modulated with a limited amount of data," Tilley told Space.com. As for OBJECT B, Tilley writes it is likely the spaceplane itself, with OBJECT D and E both emitting "placeholder" signals.

NVIDIA's next-gen GeForce RTX 50 series "Blackwell" GPUs will be ready to rock and roll by this time next year, according to the very latest leaks.

In a new video from Moore's Law is Dead, Tom's sources have said that NVIDIA's next-gen GeForce RTX 50 series "Blackwell" GPUs will be "ready for launch" in Q4 2024... if NVIDIA wants to. Why is that? It will depend on how the GeForce RTX 40 "Ada Lovelace" GPUs are selling at that point and how AMD's next-gen RDNA 4 GPU architecture is shaping up.

NVIDIA will reportedly be making a "big deal" about the GeForce RTX 50 series GPUs and their efficiency, rocking along on TSMC's updated 3nm process node. We should expect some big power savings, higher clock speeds, and a huge performance upgrade over the current-gen RTX 40 series GPUs.

A group of three graduate students at Stanford built an AI model that is capable of identifying the location of photographs by simply looking at the picture.

The developers of the AI claim the model, which has been trained on Google Street View data, is capable of correctly predicting the location of where a photograph was taken with 95% accuracy and within 25 miles of the real location. The team noted that this new AI model has real-world applications rather than just being used to track the location of people, as the new model could be used to promptly identify roads with downed power lines or biological surveys of regions.

The trio of engineers got the idea for the new AI model by being fans of the online game GeoGuessr, which places a player somewhere around the globe using Google Street View. The player is then required to guess their location by dropping a pin on the map, and the closer the players get to their actual location, the higher the score they get. To create the new AI model officially called "Predicting Image Geolocations" (PIGEON), the team of engineers used OpenAI's CLIP neural network, which learns about images through text.

A group of scientists taught an artificial intelligence-powered algorithm to detect autism with photos of children's eyes.

A new study published in the JAMA Network Open earlier on December 15 details a team of researchers training an AI algorithm with photos of children's eyes to detect childhood autism. The paper explained that the AI model was trained on 1,890 retina images captured from 958 participants with an average age of 7.8 years.

Notably, half of the participants in the study were already diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), and once the model finished analyzing each of the retina images, it was asked if it could spot ASD within the images. According to the study, the AI was able to identify which study participants had autism and those that didn't with "100% accuracy". The team behind the study notes that it limited the participants to ages between 4 and 18, but they believe the algorithm could work on even younger children.

The holiday season is here, and just in time for Christmas, instruments used to observe the vastness of the cosmos have honed in on a certain astronomical in celebration for the time of year.

The specific astronomical object is officially called NGC 2264, which is also known as the Christmas Tree Cluster. This cluster contains a group of stars that astronomers estimate to be anywhere between one and five million years old, which is considered to be extremely young for a star. Notably, the sizes of these stars within the Christmas Tree Cluster vary drastically, with some stars being much larger than our Sun and others being far smaller.

The above image was captured using NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory, along with optical data from the Nation Science Foundation's WIYN 0.9-meter telescope. The image showcases gas in the color green, which NASA writes "corresponds" to the "pine needles of the tree," while infrared data from the Two Micron Sky Survey shows foreground and background stars in white.

NASA's iconic Hubble Space Telescope has snapped a new picture of a distant astronomical object that's giving off "forbidden" light.

The object is officially called MCG-01-24-014, and it's a spiral galaxy that's located 275 million light years from Earth within the constellation Hydra. The European Space Agency (ESA) explains on its website that MCG-01-24-014 has what scientists call an AGN, or an active galactic nucleus, leading to MCG-01-24-014's specific classification of a Type-2 Seyfert galaxy, which is known to emit a "so-called 'forbidden' emission". So, why is it forbidden?

Firstly, Type-1 and 2 Seyfert galaxies are differentiated by their spectra, or the observable light that is emitted from a galaxy in different wavelengths.

The Tesla Cybertruck is making its way into the hands of the public, and now owners are reporting that Tesla's new electric vehicle ships with a feature called "Wade Mode".

The new feature is a first for Tesla as no other EV from the company comes with this feature, which makes sense when you consider how it changes the Cybertruck. Nic Cruz Patane took to X to share an image of the feature, writing the Cybertruck has a "toggle" for Wade Mode within the "Off-Road" settings. Notably, Wade Mode is intended to be used when driving through water, and when toggled on, it raises the ride height of the Cybertruck while also pressurizing the battery.

Tesla's head of design, Franz von Holzhausen, explained to car enthusiast Jay Leno that the Cybertruck uses a technology Tesla calls the "scuba pack". This technology uses Cybertruck's air suspension system to pressurize the battery by forcing air into the battery pack, creating positive pressure that, with the seal around the pack, keeps water out.

GEEKOM has just teased some new Mini-PC systems that will include AMD's new Hawk Point APUs and Intel's new Meteor Lake CPUs, which it will be detailing at CES 2024 in early January 2024.

The company will be releasing three new models at CES 2024: the GEEKOM IT14 Pro, A8 Max, and APro8 Max Mini-PC systems. Firstly, the new GEEKOM IT17 Pro features a tiny NUC-style 0.7-liter chassis powered by Intel's new Core Ultra 7 155H "Meteor Lake" processor with 16 cores and 22 threads of Meteor Lake CPU power behind it.

This system uses the integrated Intel Arc GPU with 8 Xe cores enabled -- or 128 EUs -- with an NPU inside for AI goodness heading into 2024. We don't know about RAM, storage, networking configuration, or anything else just yet; that's what CES 2024 is for.