California resident Markara Man has been charged with threatening to kill FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s children because he was “angry” about the repeal of net neutrality regulations. He thought that the address STUBBLEMANLINESS@GMAIL.COM would hide his identity, but the FBI didn’t have a problem tracing the emails to his home.



One of the emails, sent Dec. 20, to Pai’s government and personal accounts had the subject line “Cheers.” The body of the email listed the names and addresses of three preschools in and around Arlington, Va., where Pai lives, followed by, “I will find your children and I will kill them,” according to the affidavit against Man.

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Source: [H]ardOCP – Man Charged with Threatening to Kill Ajit Pai’s Family

Why did Mass Effect Andromeda perform so poorly? Developer Mark Darrah suggests that part of its failure could be attributed to “a really really busy window” in March 2017, which included the release of numerous RPGs, such as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Darrah claims that Andromeda “did not get a fair shake” because reviewers were too harsh, despite the game being deeply flawed.



Word of mouth and many technical issues with Mass Effect Andromeda caused a ripple effect. In fact, the situation got so bad even properly implemented systems were overly scrutinized by the media, he believes. It was a busy release window with Zero Dawn, Nioh, Wildlands and others releasing with better RPG elements.

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Source: [H]ardOCP – EA Blames Zelda for Mass Effect Andromeda’s Failure

The co-founder and CEO of iFixit has published an article describing how the latest MacBook keyboards fail and why they are so “magnificently prone to failure.” According to his testing, a single grain of sand wedged underneath the butterfly lever is all it takes to make a key unusable. With the keyboard being a permanent part of the upper case, repairs are both impractical and costly.



The keyboard itself can’t simply be swapped out. You can’t even swap out the upper case containing the keyboard on its own. You also have to replace the glued-in battery, trackpad, and speakers at the same time. For Apple’s service team, the entire upper half of the laptop is a single component. That’s why Apple has been charging through the nose and taking forever on these repairs.

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Source: [H]ardOCP – MacBook Keys Wrecked by Single Grain of Sand

The Wi-Fi Alliance has officially announced the successor to Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) 2, which debuted over a decade ago. Like its predecessors, WPA3 will feature both Personal and Enterprise security modes, but with a new algorithm that makes offline dictionary attacks impossible.



WPA3 is currently optional for all newly produced devices, but it will become the de-facto Wi-Fi authentication standard for all Wi-Fi capable devices in the coming years. A date has not been set yet, but the new WPA3 will retain interoperability with older WPA2 devices to ensure as less friction as possible during the transition to WPA3.

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Source: [H]ardOCP – New WPA3 Wi-Fi Standard Released

According to analysts with investment banking company PiperJaffray, “video games will be approximately 100% digital in the coming years,” with 2022 being a “realistic expectation.” They also predicted that developers would transition toward streaming games from the cloud.



“Our expectation is that major publishers will increasingly test and commercially develop streaming game offerings over the next 3-5 years, […]Streaming games from the cloud, without need for dedicated hardware or massive downloads, would materially grow the total addressable market for high end console-style titles.”

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Source: [H]ardOCP – Video Games Will Be “100% Digital” by 2022