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Bing Image Creator has been the subject of controversy recently, as it was upgraded (to Dall-E 3), but then misused to knock up pics that were tasteless and offensive - following which, Microsoft applied some strict censorship.

The move was far from surprising, given some of the controversial images posted - like the infamous 'Mickey Mouse' picture shared online - but the level of censorship imposed was an overreaction.

To the point where what seemed perfectly reasonable image generation requests have been denied in numerous cases, and with its random pic option, Bing AI is even censoring its own creations (a bizarre situation to say the least).

NVIDIA has revealed the games that'll be going live on its GeForce Now streaming service this week, and it includes some big-name releases.

We're talking about Forza Motorsport, the latest instalment in the racing franchise which is supported right now.

Then there's Lords of the Fallen, the Souls-like action RPG outing which has been generating a lot of interest, will be live on GeForce Now later today.

The Steam Deck has been out for quite some time, and has been undeniably popular - particularly at its launch - but we've now seen the first signs that sales for the handheld gaming PC are starting to fall off.

Valve's Steam Deck was launched early in 2022, and has been around for over a year and a half now, and in that time it has consistently been up there among the company's best-selling products.

As Gaming On Linux reports, the Steam Deck has been in the top 10 of Valve's own weekly top-selling products (globally) for 83 weeks (which is, of course, mostly games - this is all the firm's sales, hardware and software).

The TT Show is back for another big week of news and happenings in the tech, gaming, and science space, with Jak and Kosta diving into many topics on TweakTown's official podcast. This week's episode is also sponsored by be quiet!, the premium German brand of some of the most sought-after power supplies, PC cases, water and air cooling, and desktop PC fans.

With the launch of the SHADOW BASE 800 case, you've got exceptional airflow and maximum space. This week's episode also goes in-depth into the recent launch of the Intel Arc A580 GPU and Kosta's review of the SPARKLE Intel Arc A580 ORC OC Edition. Entry-level sub-$200 graphics cards are back!

The duo also digs into Diablo IV's new season and Steam launch, Cooler Master's Sneaker X and all of the cool tech on hand at PAX Australia 2023, the announcement and launch of Google's new Pixel 8, Pixel 8 Pro, Pixel Watch 2, and Pixel Buds Pro, and the latest X/Twitter drama.

UK antitrust regulators at the Competition and Markets Authority have approved Microsoft's new deal, and the companies are now free to combine and merge.

The last hurdle in the Microsoft-Activision transaction has been leapt as the CMA clears the deal, paving the way to the video games industry's largest-ever merger.

Microsoft won CMA approval thanks to a newly submitted deal which separated cloud gaming rights from the Activision merger. Instead, these rights would go to independent third-party publisher Ubisoft. Microsoft gave up the cloud streaming rights to Activision-Blizzard games to Ubisoft for a 15-year period as a concession to address the CMA's concerns over cloud. The maneuver worked and the CMA approved this new deal.

Intel has added a few new Arc Alchemist GPU PCI IDs inside of its recent Linux drivers, which means we could expect a family of refreshed Arc GPUs on the desktop... maybe.

We've only just had the launch of Intel's new Arc A580 graphics card, the last remaining member of the Arc Alchemist desktop graphics card family that was introduced over a year ago now. As it stands, these are the members of the Arc Alchemist GPU lineup: Arc A770, Arc A750, Arc A580, Arc A380, and finally, the Arc A310. Each of them is powered by the Alchemist GPU architecture -- either the ACM-G10 or ACM-G11 SKUs -- but now Intel has added 5 more Arc Alchemist GPU PCI IDs inside of its new Arc GPU drivers for Linux.

Phoronix found the mentions of Intel's new Arc Alchemist GPU PCI IDs inside of the Linux open-source i915 Direct Rendering Manager driver. Here's a list of those supported Arc Alchemist GPUs:

Elgato (owned by CORSAIR) is a name beloved by content creators and streamers worldwide, from its cameras to capture cards to the popular Stream Deck to make going live, playing games, or simply hanging out much easier. Today, we've got word that the company has launched the new Elgato Marketplace, which is set up to be a one-stop shop for plugins, graphics, voice effects, video transitions, and more.

With a focus on streaming and content creation, Elgato's popular Wave Link app and the third-party OBS Studio, and editing software and podcasting tools, the Elgato Marketplace is designed to be a one-stop shop. And one that will empower creators, with "Makers" being community sellers who can sell their digital products to a large audience.

The press release doesn't include info on the revenue split, but it's the right move to let the community create and share an avenue to make money. The Elgato Marketplace will be home to the popular Stream Deck plugins and controls for apps like Discord and Microsoft Teams, in addition to hosting a library of voice effects and sounds for podcasters, streamers, and content creators to draw from.

CORSAIR has launched its latest wireless mouse, the CORSAIR M75 AIR WIRELESS - an ultra-lightweight wireless mouse designed for gamers who love playing FPS titles. Weighing in at 60 grams, it's among the lightest and most agile offerings.

It comes equipped with the company's powerful CORSAIR MARKSMAN 26K DPI optical sensor, too, to ensure precise and accurate movement and tracking no matter if you're lining up a headshot or on the other end scrambling to run and strafe to find cover. This is backed up by pro-grade 650 IPS tracking and up to 50g acceleration.

Sporting a symmetrical shape, the 2023 wireless M75 AIR from CORSAIR features a meticulous redesign involving "every contour, outline, and button placement" being reworked and fine-tuned to reach the "optimal state." This is a bold claim, but based on the company's track record, it's enough to get super excited about going hands-on with the CORSAIR M75 AIR WIRELESS.

AMD currently has its codename "Phoenix" APUs in the form of Ryzen 7040 series mobile processors, but now we're expecting the upgraded codename "Strix Point" and "Strix Point Halo" APUs that will arrive in 2024 under the Ryzen 8050 series mobile processors.

Before that, we'll see AMD release its new Phoenix APU refresh APUs codenamed Hawk Point, which will be a refresh of the current Ryzen 7040 series APUs. They'll use the current Zen 4 architecture, topping out at 8 cores and 16 threads, compatible with FP7/r2 and FP8 platforms bringing support for DDR5 and LPDDR5X memory.

AMD's next-gen Strix Point APU will use the new Zen 5 CPU architecture based on the 4nm process node at TSMC, on a monolithic design. We'll see up to 12 cores in a hybrid configuration -- so, Zen 5 + Zen5C + with 32GB of shared L3 cache. Performance-wise, we're to expect a 35% performance uplift over the current Phoenix APU at 50W.

Best Buy will exit the physical media business and no longer sell DVDs and Blu-ray discs, sources tell The Digital Bits.

Retailer Best Buy plans to phase out its struggling physical media segment in a bid to reduce inventory costs and offset low sales. The company is expected to stop selling movies and TV shows across DVD, Blu-ray, and UHD 4K discs in early 2024 (corresponding to Best Buy's FY25 period), responding to a shift in consumer behavior. Physical video games are not expected to be included in Best Buy's decision.

The move comes at a time when consumers are buying less disc-based physical media, and any trip to a local Best Buy speaks volumes about the retailer's current focus. What comes as a surprise, however, is that Best Buy will no longer sell DVDs, Blu-rays, or UHD BDs on its online storefront either. The company apparently plans to remove all physical media from its inventory both in-store and online.

GIGABYTE has just accidentally, kinda confirmed the existence of the AMD Radeon RX 6750 GRE graphics card -- GRE standing for "Golden Rabbit Edition" -- in celebration of the Year of the Rabbit in China.

Unfortunately, you won't be able to buy the GIGABYTE Radeon RX 6750 GRE graphics card, because it won't be made available for the DIY market outside of China. You can, however, get your hands on the GPU through system integrators across the world, but it won't be as popular as other members of the Radeon RX 6000 and Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards.

Inside, we're expecting GIGABYTE's new Radeon RX 6750 GRE Falcon 12G graphics card available for purchase in China on October 18 at 9 AM. We should see the Radeon RX 6750 GRE graphics card based on the AMD RDNA 2 GPU architecture, but we don't know exactly how many Stream Processors will be used on the GPU itself.

ZTE has just unveiled its very first "flagship GPU server" for the Chinese market, powered by Intel Xeon Scalable processors and NVIDIA H800 AI GPUs. Check it out:

China hasn't stopped with its pursuits in artificial intelligence (AI) with multiple Chinese companies making their own "AI solutions" because of it. ZTE is known for its smartphones, networking, enterprise solutions, and more, but now the Chinese company has jumped into the AI industry with the introduction of the ZTE R6900 G5 flagship GPU server.

The new ZTE R6900 G5 flagship GPU server packs an undisclosed Intel Xeon Scalable processor (we don't know how many, or which models, clock speeds, etc) as well as 8 x NVIDIA H800 NVLink GPU modules or 8 x OCP OAM 8-GPU modules. Networking-wise, the new ZTE R6900 G5 server supports IB/RoCE networking between individual notes with up to 4.8TB/sec of non-blocking bandwidth.

Samsung has announced that it is preparing its next-gen HBM4 memory standard, where it is currently planned for a 2025 release.

The next-gen Samsung HBM4 memory will offer a performance boost in data transfer rates, higher capacities, and more improvements for the future of AI processors from the likes of NVIDIA and AMD. Samsung should have next-generation HBM4 memory stacks with a 2048-bit memory bus in 2025, doubling the 1024-bit memory bus that has been inside of HBM3 for a few years now.

Samsung's executive vice president of DRAM product & technology, Sang Joon Hwang, announced the South Korean giant would have sixth-generation HBM4 DRAM chips in 2025. Samsung has its mass-produced HBM2e and HBM3 memory, while in development the company has HBM3e on the way with 9.8Gbps of bandwidth.

If you've ever managed to misspell something in a post on the X social network and then cursed the fact that you can't edit the post, you're going to like what Mark Zuckerberg has just announced about Threads. That's the X competitor owned by Meta, the company Zuckerberg heads and it's just added an edit button to help people who just can't seem to get things right the first time.

Sure, you can edit posts on X if you're an X Premium subscriber, but few people seem to be willing to pay the money needed to get in on the act. And if all you want to do is edit typos the X Premium subscription seems a bit pointless. However, over on Threads, you'll be able to edit posts for free. No subscription required. Everyone can do it.

Are you watching, Elon Musk?

As you may be aware, the Steam accounts of a number of game developers have recently been used to spread malware, and Valve has now implemented measures to help stop this happening.

The game devs in question had their accounts broken into, with the perpetrators then sending out updates to their respective games which included malware. Nasty indeed, particularly when you consider many Steam users have their game library set to update titles automatically, which would have downloaded the malware straight away.

The better news with this security breach is that not many Steam users were affected, fewer than 100 as PC Gamer reported. And as you might expect, Valve has now made a move to tighten its defenses against this sort of attack.

Shadow, the French cloud gaming company that allows subscribers to run games via high-powered PCs over the internet, has emailed customers to warn them that it has suffered a security breach in which customer data was stolen. While Shadow hasn't confirmed how many people were affected, it's thought that around 530,000 users have had their information stolen.

In an email sent to customers and reported on by TechCrunch, Shadow said that it was the victim of a social engineering attack that targeted one of its employees at the end of September 2023. The attack apparently began on Discord and then resulted in the employee downloading a game on Steam at the suggestion of a third party. That third party was also a victim of the attack.

The data itself was collected after the attacker was able to gain access to an as-yet-unnamed software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider.

Samsung is very much expected to announce a trio of new smartphones in January of 2024, with the entire Galaxy S24 lineup starting to leak with increasing regularity. We already saw the Galaxy S24 Ultra's new Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip work its way through a Geekbench CPU test and pass with flying colors, and now the Exynos 2400 has made an appearance as well.

While the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip will be the only one used in Samsung's upcoming flagship, those buying a Galaxy S24 or Galaxy S24 Plus will have to hope that they live in the right part of the world if they want to get the Qualcomm chip - it'll only be used in phones destined for the United States and Canada. Everyone else will get Samsung's own Exynos silicon - and while the early benchmarks show that the Exynos 2400 is an improvement over other chips from Samsung, it still can't quite keep up with Qualcomm's finest.

This news comes after a Samsung Galaxy S24 Plus European variant carrying the model number SM-S926B popped up in new benchmark scores, managing to achieve 2067 points in the single-core benchmark and 6520 points in the multi-core run. To put that into comparison, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 scored 2234 points in the single-core test and 6807 in the multi-core test.

After months of rumors it's now official - OnePlus will announce the OnePlus Open foldable phone next Thursday, October 19. The phone has been teased a fair bit of late and is clearly seen in the OnePlus event announcement posted on social network X. Now we just need to wait for the full spec sheet to be announced, too.

The OnePlus Fold is a phone that we've heard a lot about over the last few months and it'll be good to see it finally made official. It promises to be a solid folding phone for people who prefer tablet-like foldables rather than flip phones, and it has some impressive specifications to go with that popular form factor, too. The phone itself will be announced on October 19 at 7:30 PM IST/4:00 PM CET/10:00 AM EDT at an event held in Mumbai, India.

While we haven't yet seen OnePlus confirm all of the new phone's specs, we do have some ideas about what we can expect based on previous leaks. Assuming that they turn out to be accurate we can expect the OnePlus Open to ship with a 7.8-inch foldable display and a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip paired with 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. The 4,800mAh battery will be charged by a 67W fast-charging USB-C port while Hasselblad-tuned cameras will include a 48-megapixel primary camera and a 48-megapixel ultrawide. The optical zoom camera will feature a 64-megapixel sensor.

Galax looks poised to possibly reveal a new RTX 4090 model to celebrate its 20th anniversary, and we've caught a glimpse of the graphics card.

VideoCardz grabbed the scoop here, as you can see in the above tweet, and although the tech site didn't get any firm details on the card, or confirmation that it's an RTX 4090 - it certainly looks that way.

As VideoCardz points out, judging from the image provided in the tweet, the size of the card and cooling system indicate this will be a Lovelace flagship model.

We might just see a new game in the Guitar Hero franchise, according to a heavy hint dropped by the CEO of Activision, Bobby Kotick.

Windows Central reports that this possibility came to light in a lengthy interview, where Kotick answers a whole load of queries from James Corden (of The Late Late Show and Gavin & Stacey fame).

Apparently the interview, which has been leaked, saw Kotick talking in some depth about how the Microsoft deal will boost what the games publisher can do (assuming it goes through, which it apparently will - and imminently).