Slow your Meta-roll — “But here we are, Mark Zuckerberg has decided that now is the time…” Kyle Orland – Oct 29, 2021 7:59 pm UTC John Carmack, seen here wearing an early prototype Oculus Rift headset. Oculus consulting CTO John Carmack has been bullish on the idea of “the metaverse” for a long time,…
Q4 Earnings — Supply shortages led Apple to miss investors’ and analysts’ expectations. Samuel Axon – Oct 28, 2021 10:56 pm UTC Enlarge / Apple CEO Tim Cook. In its quarterly call with investors today, Apple revealed that its revenue grew in all of its businesses and product categories, but the numbers weren’t enough to…
In brief: Last week, a researcher discovered a vulnerability in older trial versions of the WinRAR file compression software. It allows for remote code execution—essentially allowing an attacker to intercept and change requests sent to WinRAR users. Web security researcher Igor Sak-Sakovskiy published an article on October 20 detailing the WinRAR vulnerability with the assigned…
What just happened? This week, Activision CEO Bobby Kotick announced to investors that he has asked for his salary to be cut to the lowest legal amount for California this year. It is one of the commitments he’s promised to address the controversy surrounding Activision Blizzard’s multiple investigations over discrimination and sexual harassment. In a…
Bottom line: This week, the US Copyright Office adopted a new rule acknowledging the Right to Repair (R2R) movement. The regulation creates an exemption in the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) that allows consumers to repair devices they own. However, it severely limits what users can fix on video game consoles. The US Copyright Office…
Ups and downs — iPhone maker cedes top spot to its tech rival after weak earnings. Nicholas Megaw and Joe Rennison, Financial Times – Oct 29, 2021 8:55 pm UTC Microsoft regained its crown as the most valuable publicly listed company in the world on Friday from Apple, whose shares slumped following a weak quarterly…
MLB A pirate-website operator named Joshua Streit was charged with hacking into Major League Baseball (MLB) computer systems and trying to extort $150,000 from the league by threatening to publicize security vulnerabilities, the US Department of Justice announced yesterday. Streit also “is alleged to have illegally streamed sports content online from MLB, the NHL, the…
Forward-looking: With the Alder Lake release right around the corner, Pat Gelsinger is already busy charting Intel’s next course. The Intel CEO has made several statements regarding the company’s direction following the 12th generation processor’s launch. According to Gelsinger, Intel will embark on a journey to outpace one of the most popular technological observations of…
Through the looking glass: The Boston Dynamics four-legged robot known as Spot is a machine with many talents. Seriously. It can do a lot of stuff now. I remember being amazed and somewhat disturbed when it learned how to open doors. Now it can operate a rickshaw, clean house, weed the garden, jump rope, pee…
In brief: Intel’s Arc Alchemist GPUs aren’t here yet, but that didn’t stop the company from dropping some teasers around that as well as its XeSS supersampling technology during the Innovation 2021 event. XeSS looks like a promising alternative to AMD’s FSR and Nvidia’s DLSS, and developers can already start adding support for it into…