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The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has settled its first-ever enforcement action against a company that was selling unregistered Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs).

That company is Impact Theory, and according to a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company has been ordered to pay more than $6.1 million in penalties. Impact Theory, the Los Angeles-based media company, raised approximately $30 million from hundreds of investors for its NFT project "Founder's Key".

According to the SEC, Impact Theory wrongfully encouraged investors to purchase the NFTs as a way to invest in the business, and since the company offered investors digital assets through a form of "investment contracts", the NFTs are considered to be "securities". Additionally, the SEC order instructed the company to create a "Fair Fund", which is meant to be a way investors can recover their losses.

Digitec Galaxus AG is the largest Swiss online retailer covering all corners of the tech and electronics sector. Over the weekend, some new data (via @TechEpiphany) relating to failure rates for graphics cards (GPUs) and the RMA process measured in the time between a warranty claim being made and a working unit being back in the hands of a customer appeared online.

Like all PC hardware, GPUs can fail - regardless of brand, model, or price point. This makes a company's warranty and claim process, and the timely and helpful manner in dealing with customers and issues, something to consider before any purchase. The data coming from a single retailer in a single market is not representative of the entire global market. In addition, without sales figures for each brand listed, it's more of an indication of what to expect versus a tier list of the best GPU manufacturers in 2023.

That said, the data covers brands that have sold over 300 GPUs over the last two years - and based on the wide range of products on offer by Digitec Galaxus AG could also include workstation graphics cards in addition to those built for PC gaming in the desktop space.

The transition from PCIe Gen4 to PCIe Gen5 storage has led to an impressive leap in overall read and write speeds - where now sequential read speeds in the region of 10 to 12GB/s are not uncommon. But, with great power (or speed) comes great responsibility (or the need to keep overall temperatures down).

The arrival of high-speed PCIe Gen5 SSDs has also meant that storage devices are not noyl faster than they have ever been but running hotter. With several companies releasing SSD options with all-in-one cooling solutions involving large heatsinks and active fans, the new T-FORCE DARK AirFlow SSD Cooler from TEAMGROUP has been designed to keep PCIe Gen5 SSD temperatures cool during periods of high transfer speeds.

As a custom solution, the T-FORCE DARK AirFlow ensures that a PCIe Gen5 SSD maintains optimal operating temperatures even in high-speed transfer mode over a sustained period. With a graphene-patented dual-layer structure alongside two 5mm pure copper piped with multi-layered aluminum fins, a "high-pressure smart PWM fan" will adjust its speed according to requirements.

If you've ever gotten deep into a racing or flight simulator, you've undoubtedly considered putting together a dedicated rig to power your vehicular fantasies. That is a full chair with a steering wheel or physical flight controls attached to an ultrawide or multi-monitor display to deliver an immersive view of a race track or sky.

Cooler Master's new Dyn X combines a dynamic and customizable cockpit with an ergonomic and durable racing seat to accommodate 14 driving positions, according to the press release. And this extends to flight simulators like the visually stunning Microsoft Flight Simulator.

Racing sims on PC cover almost anything with four wheels, from major Formula 1, GT, and Rally car racing to driving various buses, trucks, and even tractors as part of a daily route or routine. Yep, driving a virtual truck to deliver cargo in faraway countries is more popular than you'd think - and Cooler Master's Dyn X will have you doing that in style.

Apple co-founder and former CEO Steve Jobs is still fondly remembered even more than a decade after his death from pancreatic cancer. So it perhaps shouldn't be all that surprising that a handwritten ad for an Apple-1, penned by the man himself, should sell for a big sum of money when put up for auction. But did anyone expect it to fetch quite this much?

Apparently not, because the lot that just sold for almost $176,000 was originally expected to sell for a fraction of that when RR Auction put it up for grabs. But the action ended with one buyer spending $175,759 on the handwritten ad copy as well as Polaroid photos that were taken at a local store - The Byte Shop in Mountain View, California to be exact. Jobs even added his own comment to one of the photos, saying that it was fuzzy because the camera "wiggled" when the image was being taken.

The auction was originally expected to bring in around $30,000 so it's fair to say that it exceeded expectations. It also comes with a letter from the items' former owner that explains where they came from which no doubt helped bump the price up a bit.

The gamer who leaked 45 minutes of Starfield footage has been arrested on felony theft charges and released on bail.

Days ago, 29 year-old Darin Harris was arrested in Shelby County, Tennessee on charges of Class D felony theft. According to police reports obtained by Polygon and the Memphis Commercial Appeal, Harris had allegedly stolen dozens of copies of the game and potentially intended to sell or distribute the stolen copies through FedEx shipments.

Shelby County police searched Harris' home, finding multiple copies of the unreleased game. The copies of Starfield in Harris' possession had been stolen from a Memphis-based Vantiva warehouse where the game discs are stored and distributed. Authorities also found copies of Starfield that were packaged in FedEx envelopes, presumably to be sold to users online.

Following reports that the iPhone 15 Pro Max might have to wait until October due to production issues, it sounds like we might have been worrying for nothing. That's after a new report by the well-connected analyst Ming-Chi Kuo.

There had been some concern that the iPhone 15 Pro Max's new periscope zoom camera could cause Apple and its suppliers to struggle to get the new iPhones into stores ready for the usual late-September release. However, Kuo's latest Medium post suggests that won't be the case with Apple already set to begin ramping up mass production of the best iPhone as soon as this week. Based on Kuo's report it's now more than possible that the iPhone 15 Pro Max should go on sale as normal.

Kuo's report says that he believes that analysts have been overly conservative when it comes to predicting how many new iPhones will be shipped as a result of the expected iPhone 15 Pro Max concerns. He also goes on to add that he believes that Apple's stock prices could experience a rebound once everyone gets a better handle on the stock situation.

Fans of the green iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 mini are in luck because it sounds like Apple is about to bring back a color from those 2020 handsets when the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus go on sale next month.

Apple is strongly expected to announce the new iPhone 15 series alongside the iPhone 15 Pro models within a few weeks and a new leak claims that green will be one of the colors that is offered. It's likely to be joined by colors that previously leaked including black, yellow, pink, and blue while a (PRODUCT) RED model is also likely to be offered up.

That red color is one that Apple offers across its lineups and helps give additional money to The Global Fund to help combat the spread of HIV/AIDS and other viruses in Africa. A portion of the money from sales of those items goes to help those efforts.

The iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro are expected to be announced next month and the expectations are already very high indeed. But those who like to get their hands on a new leather case to go with their new iPhone will find themselves left buying a third-party one instead of an official Apple one. That's after reports that Apple won't make one of its own, preferring instead to go for something that will be a faux leather alternative.

The removal of the leather iPhone case is something that makes sense given Apple's stance on the environment and the different programs it runs also speak to that. The result is that making its own leather cases isn't something that really fits with Apple's environmental chops and it now sounds like the company has decided to replace it with something that will not be based on animal skin at all. Leaks suggest that an imitation leather material will be used, based on what Weibo leaker UnclePlan calls a woven shell.

Now, X leaker Majin Bu has shared images of what appears to be a case made by a company other than Apple but is said to be similar to what the official cases will look like. The leaker also says that while the material will apparently be similar to leather, it will have a different texture than the real thing.

Diablo IV was one of the most hyped games of this year, and following its release, there has been a mixed bag of opinions by people who really enjoy the game, and people who really enjoy pointing out Blizzard's shortcomings.

One of the latter players decided to compile a list of all of Blizzard's grammatical errors found in-game, and there aren't just a few - there are quite a lot. This user goes by the name Aeretes and posted a slew of screenshots to Reddit in a post that has since gained a lot of traction within the Diablo subreddit. The screenshots revealed many basic grammatical errors as well as punctuation errors - some as simple as unnecessary apostrophes in the word "it's".

Other errors included blatant misspellings of characters and creature names. An example of this would be the two separate objective descriptions in the quest Bad Blood, which points players to a potion that is said to have the ability to turn people in Nangiri. Notably, there isn't a race of Nangiri within the Diablo universe, but there is a race of serpentine people called the Nagari. While these errors are small, and some gamers may not even care, others believe it represents sloppy development.

Apple is looking to usher in some major upgrades to its tablet line-up of devices, with Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reporting that next-generation tablets will feature Apple's new M3 chip and OLED displays.

Despite being the company's least amount of revenue, Apple is pushing forward with its iPad line-up, and according to Gurman, the company wants to make the handheld devices much more attractive. According to the Bloomberg reporter, that's notorious for Apple insider knowledge, Apple is planning on shifting to its next-generation M3 chips for the next iPad Pro models, which are codenamed J717, J718, J720, and J721.

Additionally, each of these iPad Pro models is expected to come with an OLED display, marking Apple's first jump into the OLED display for tablets. Apple began using OLED displays with the iPhone X in 2017, and for those who don't know, OLED is considered to be the best pixel technology as it produces extremely accurate colors and has finer details.

Elon Musk made a surprise appearance at a Valorant tournament, and when he was put on screen for all of about 4 seconds, the crowd began to boo.

Musk appeared at a Valorant champs tournament on Saturday, and the event showcased the owner of X for all of about 4 seconds. The moment was captured and posted on X, and it shows the crowd immediately beginning to boo Musk, sparking a response from one of the commentators that said, "Where is that from? That can't be from in here, surely". The camera controllers quickly pulled away from Musk, who appeared to be clapping for the in-game performance, which was followed by the crowd beginning to chant, "bring back Twitter".

Notably, Musk was attending the event that was located at the KIA Forum in Los Angeles with his son, as the X owner was posting pictures with his son prior to entering the arena. While Musk's appearance at the tournament was brief, it still gained a lot of traction online as many X users rushed to express their pleasure in Musk being booed by Valorant fans. The above video was posted on August 27 and has already gained nearly 10 million views.

SpaceX has ferried four astronauts to the International Space Station on the back of its Falcon 9 rocket that was recently launched from NASA's Kennedy Space Center.

The launch took place on August 26 and is officially called the Crew-7 mission, as it's SpaceX's 7th flight to the ISS featuring astronauts. The astronauts took the Dragon capsule Endurance to the ISS, which is a journey that took approximately 30 hours to complete. SpaceX took to its official X account to share incredible footage of the Dragon capsule docking with the ISS. After arriving, the four astronauts will begin a 6-month stint of science-focussed investigations that are combined with typical ISS maintenance tasks.

Crew-7 commander Jasmin Moghbeli of NASA radioed to SpaceX mission control following the successful docking with the floating laboratory, saying, "Thank you so much. I have to keep reminding myself that this is not a dream." Crew-7 pilot Andreas Mogensen from the European Space Agency (ESA) said to SpaceX that the first step of the journey has now been completed, and "the real mission begins now". Adding, "Aboard the International Space Station, we have a lot of work ahead of us that we look forward to."

Elon Musk, the owner of the social media platform formerly called Twitter, has said that the entire platform could fail under his command.

The owner of X has admitted what many users have suspected: the entire social media platform could fail under his command. This admission came after a glitch riddled the platform last weekend that resulted in images and links posted before December 2014 to magically disapear. The Verge reported that X was having trouble displaying any hyperlinks that were converted through Twitter's built-in URL shortener. The publication confirmed that this glitch didn't affect videos.

The problem was discussed by the X Support account, which wrote, "We fixed the bug, and the issue will be fully resolved in the coming days. The glitch claimed one of the most famous tweets ever, the selfie snapped by Ellen DeGeneres that features a slew of stars such as Bradley Cooper, Brad Pitt, Kevin Spacey, Jennifer Lawrence, and more. Musk took to his personal X account for the rare admission, saying there are no great "social networks' right now, and that there is a real possibility that X may fail like many social media platforms before it.

MSI has released a new BIOS update for its AM5 motherboards, ushering in a new "High Efficiency" mode that gives gamers a performance boost of 12%.

The new AGESA 1.0.0.7c BIOS update gives support for higher frequency DDR5 memory modules, while simulatenously fixing some issues that were discovered in older version of the firmware. According to a report by WCCFTech, MSI's newest BIOS update adds "High Efficiency" mode, which is a new feature that brings in optimizations through pre-configured memory profiles for popular modules.

These pre-configured memory profiles offer high bandwidth and lower latency through their optimizations, specifically through tweaks of the DDR5 DRAM timings and Memory Timing Presets. Users are able to select between each of the memory timing presets, which are; Tightest, Tighter, Balance, and Relax. If you are interested in seeing testing results for the new BIOS update, check out this link here.

Elon Musk has announced that all news links on X that redirect users to websites will be getting a facelift in the pursuit of making X a more aesthetically pleasing social media platform.

The social media platform formerly known as Twitter will soon be changing the way it displays news links on its timeline in an effort to make the social media platform's timeline more visibly attractive. According to a post that X owner Elon Musk replied to last Monday, X will be getting rid of the headline and just leaving the header image and link. According to Musk, this will "greatly improve the esthetics."

Before these changes, Twitter displayed a preview card of the post along with the headline and summary text. However, if Musk's change is rolled out, users will only show the image and the link. Moreover, if the publication or source of the post doesn't include any text with the link, users will only see the link and image for that article. So, why go through with this change? In short, Musk wants to reduce the height of a post in order to fit more posts on the screen.

At Gamescom, AMD announced two more GPUs to round out its RDNA 3 powered Radeon RX 7000 series, with the new Radeon RX 7700 XT and Radeon RX 7800 XT set to launch on September 6. These optimized for 1440p cards are set to go head-to-head against NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4060 Ti and GeForce RTX 4070 in the mid-range bracket, and with the launch around the corner, expect reviews to drop very soon.

On the Gamescom show floor, Scott Herkelman, senior vice president and general manager of the Graphics Business Unit at AMD, made a somewhat surprising statement confirming that with the arrival of the 7700 XT and 7800 XT, "we're done," regarding new GPUs for its RDNA 3 lineup, which makes the five models you see above potentially it for the Radeon RX 7000 generation.

Or six if you count the new Radeon RX 7900 GRE for system builders. Scott Herkelman didn't rule out the possibility of new products arriving based on the existing ASIC, and we could see something arriving to bridge between the USD 269 Radeon RX 7600 and the USD 449 Radeon RX 7700 XT, but his statement was pretty clear.

Samsung flew me out to try out the 55-inch Odyssey Ark gaming monitor, and throughout the approximately 15 to 20-minute gaming session, I gathered some thoughts on one of Samsung's highest-end displays.

The 55-inch Odyssey Ark is a curved UHD gaming display that's designed to match the human eye for increased realism with its 1000R curvature, and before we get into my personal experience with the display, we should discuss the Ark's specifications. Samsung has pulled out all of the stops with the Ark, equipping the display with Quantum Matrix Technology, a 3840 x 2160 resolution VA panel at a 165Hz refresh rate, a 1,000,000:1 (Static) contrast ratio, a 1ms GTG response time, Quantum HDR 32x, a typical brightness of 600cd/㎡, and a 95% color gamut (DCI coverage).

Full specifications for the Ark can be found below, but let's get into my experience with the gaming monitor. Samsung set up the Ark in two stations at its event. The first was in a driving simulator, where I was positioned below the monitor. I immediately noticed the severe curvature of the display, but after taking a seat in the cockpit, the curvature dissipated as I was looking directly at the Ark's center. This was impressive, and Samsung's choice of Gran Turismo 6 was fantastic, as the racing games really made the monitor shine.

Will Starfield feature NVIDIA DLSS support to boost performance on day one? The answer to that, at least officially, is no. Bethesda is partnering with AMD to optimize performance for PC and Xbox Series X|S consoles with CPU and GPU features. The upscaling method of choice will be AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution or FSR 2.

FSR 2 is a platform-agnostic upscaling technology that works on AMD Radeon, NVIDIA GeForce, and Intel Arc graphics cards. The controversy about Starfield and DLSS comes down to NVIDIA's AI-based upscaling delivering better overall results than AMD's FSR and word that AMD forces developers not to adopt competing technologies as part of its developer partnership program. FSR 2 in Starfield makes perfect sense as the technology is fully supported on Xbox Series X|S consoles.

In a new interview with The Verge, AMD gaming chief Fran Azor states (more or less) that no clauses like this exist and that if Bethesda wants to add DLSS as an option in Starfield on PC, "they have AMD's full support."

SPARKLE has finally confirmed that it has a SPARKLE Intel Arc A770 TITAN OC Edition on the way, with the 16GB flagship Intel Arc GPU's product page now live. With 16GB of VRAM and an out-of-the-box overclock, this could be the 16GB GPU to get - especially if the SPARKLE Intel Arc A750 TITAN OC Edition is anything to go by.

Per our review of that card, we called it "one of the best-looking and well-made GPUs available today," the only downside is the Intel Arc A750's overall performance is a mixed bag. It's mostly good (and things continue to improve for Intel's discrete GPUs), but there's still room for improvement. Plus, the triple-fan TITAN design from SPARKLE demands to be paired with a more powerful GPU as it features impressive cooling and thermal performance to match its style.

One cool little design touch we loved from our review of the Intel Arc A750 version was that the light strip on the side of the GPU changes according to the card's temperature - with fans that stop spinning once the temp gets within the 'white' range. With ample cooling and three-fans, SPARKLE is pushing the card's Graphics Boost Clock' to 2300 MHz from the 2100 MHz specified by Intel for the Arc A770.