Console gaming is at a crossroads, finding itself in the center of that transitory phase between console generations. Many games are landing on both last-gen and next-gen hardware. And given that getting your hands on a PlayStation 5 or an Xbox Series whatever remains damn near impossible, this is a boon all around.
Source: Kotaku – Here’s Every Major Cross-Gen Game
Every parent has been there (and if you haven’t yet, give it time): Your focus shifts for just a moment. You’re at the store, trying to pick out the right birthday card for your sister. Or you’re digging money out of your wallet to pay for the corn dog at the fair. Your back is only turned for literal seconds, but…
Source: LifeHacker – Do This If You Lose Your Child in Public
While most Linux users likely don’t get excited when hearing of a new Glibc release, version 2.33 of the GNU C Library is due to be released next week and it’s pretty darn interesting for having the new HWCAPS functionality in opening up for more optimized out-of-the-box Linux performance moving forward…
Source: Phoronix – GNU C Library 2.33 Should Be Out Soon – And It’s Very Exciting Due To “HWCAPS”
If you enjoy watching an episode or two of a show before you drift off, Netflix’s latest feature might be useful. It’s testing a sleep timer function on Android devices. A select number of users will see a clock icon when they watch something. If you…
Source: Engadget – Netflix is testing a sleep timer on Android
The Securities and Exchange Commission broke its silence Friday morning on the populist investor uprising that has sent the stock price of beleaguered retailer GameStop “to the moon,” warning everyone involved that they are watching… and, for the time being, not doing a whole lot else, it seems.
Source: Gizmodo – SEC Issues Vague Threats Against Everyone Involved in the GameStop Stock Saga
The end of the week has brought along a flurry of encouraging news on the second wave of covid-19 vaccines being tested in trials around the world.
Source: Gizmodo – The Second Wave of Covid-19 Vaccines Are Looking Really Promising
Every year, tens of millions of Americans collectively lose billions of dollars to scam callers. Where does the other end of the line lead? From a report: I flew to India at the end of 2019 hoping to visit some of the call centers that L. had identified as homes for scams. Although he had detected many tech-support scams originating from Delhi, Hyderabad and other Indian cities, L. was convinced that Kolkata — based on the volume of activity he was noticing there — had emerged as a capital of such frauds. I knew the city well, having covered the crime beat there for an English-language daily in the mid-1990s, and so I figured that my chances of tracking down scammers would be better there than most other places in India. I took with me, in my notebook, a couple of addresses that L. identified in the days just before my trip as possible origins for some scam calls. Because the geolocation of I.P. addresses — ascertaining the geographical coordinates associated with an internet connection — isn’t an exact science, I wasn’t certain that they would yield any scammers.
But I did have the identity of a person linked to one of these spots, a young man whose first name is Shahbaz. L. identified him by matching webcam images and several government-issued IDs found on his computer. The home address on his ID matched what L. determined, from the I.P. address, to be the site of the call center where he operated, which suggested that the call center was located where he lived or close by. That made me optimistic I would find him there. In a recording of a call Shahbaz made in November, weeks before my Kolkata visit, I heard him trying to hustle a woman in Ottawa and successfully intimidating and then fleecing an elderly man in the United States.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Who’s Making All Those Scam Calls?
Klipsch’s first foray into wireless earbuds, its T5 True Wireless, paired a set of decent-sounding buds with a stainless steel charging case inspired by Zippo lighters. It was a fun way to differentiate the brand, and for round two Klipsch has gotten even more creative. But the charging case for its new T5 II True…
Source: Gizmodo – Klipsch Paired Fantastic Wireless Earbuds with Another Weird Charging Case
You may know it as the Everything Store. But there’s one chunk of “everything” Amazon has failed to crack: video games. A new report from Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier and Priya Anand sheds light on why Amazon Game Studios, backed by one of the planet’s biggest companies, can’t seem to make a successful video game.
Source: Kotaku – Bloomberg Report Reveals Major Dysfunction At Amazon Game Studios
I have been getting a lot of emails lately. Most are about baking soda and ground beef, one was about Stuart Murdoch, and a fair number are about sweet potatoes, their skins, and how I am a doofus for not eating them (a thing I mentioned in this blog about roasting them):
Source: LifeHacker – How to Make Sweet Potato Skins Taste Delicious
As the WallStreetBets fiasco heated up yesterday, Robinhood and other companies were restricting free trade of GameStop and AMC stocks under the guise of “helping users.” Since then, people have been outraged, enough so to initiate class-action lawsuits against the stock-trading app. Individual users are also now taking to leaving poor reviews
Source: Hot Hardware – Google Defends Robinhood App From Angry GME Mob, Censors 100,000 Negative Reviews
Enlarge / A closed GameStop store in Frankfurt, Germany, on Friday, Jan. 29, 2021. (credit: Alex Kraus/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
You’ve probably seen stories about GameStop, the struggling video game retailer that has improbably seen its stock quintuple since the start of the week. The stock isn’t up because GameStop announced strong financial results or a new turnaround strategy. Instead, it was the focus of a coordinated buying campaign by members of the WallStreetBets subreddit.
The effort has been so effective in part because its architects have convinced people that it’s not just a pump and dump scheme. Instead, they’ve painted a seductive story in which retail investors found a loophole that allows them to make money at the expense of hedge funds and other wealthy investors who had shorted the stock.
In reality, most of the gains captured by early GameStop investors will come at the expense of later investors who will be left holding the bag when the stock falls.
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Source: Ars Technica – The GameStop bubble is going to hurt a lot of ordinary investors
After WandaVision’s first three episodes, the series was in the position to make a choice whether to keep on focusing specifically on Wanda and Vision’s suburban bubble reality, or finally shift focus to one of its other characters like Monica Rambeau, whose perspectives might provide some important information about…
Source: io9 – WandaVision’s Menacing Signal Is Finally Cutting Through the Noise
El Gato Cam Link 4K | $107 | Amazon
Source: LifeHacker – Connect a Nice Camera to Your Computer With an El Gato Cam Link for 7
Enlarge / This is an artist’s concept of Wind, a NASA spacecraft which spent twenty years gathering data on the solar wind (no relation). (credit: US Department of State)
When security firm Malwarebytes announced last week that it had been targeted by the same attacker that compromised SolarWinds’ Orion software, it noted that the attack did not use SolarWinds itself. According to Malwarebytes, the attacker had used “another intrusion vector” to gain access to a limited subset of company emails.
Brandon Wales, acting director of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA), said nearly a third of the organizations attacked had no direct connection to SolarWinds.
[The attackers] gained access to their targets in a variety of ways. This adversary has been creative… it is absolutely correct that this campaign should not be thought of as the SolarWinds campaign.
Many of the attacks gained initial footholds by password spraying to compromise individual email accounts at targeted organizations. Once the attackers had that initial foothold, they used a variety of complex privilege escalation and authentication attacks to exploit flaws in Microsoft’s cloud services. Another of the Advanced Persistent Threat (APT)’s targets, security firm CrowdStrike, said the attacker tried unsuccessfully to read its email by leveraging a compromised account of a Microsoft reseller the firm had worked with.
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Source: Ars Technica – 30% of “SolarWinds hack” victims didn’t actually use SolarWinds
Seems like every time you turn on the computer there’s a new hack for trying to peel a clove of garlic. I didn’t realize peeling garlic was such a hassle, but then again, I am not much of a cook. (My garlic comes in a powder or freeze-dried, so all I need to do is add water.) But this new TikTok hack was intriguing …
Source: LifeHacker – Is This Viral TikTok Hack the Best Way to Peel Garlic?
Enlarge / Ready, take aim, and let fly… (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)
As the price of heavily shorted stocks like GameStop has shot up in recent days, so, too, has interest in retail trading apps like Robinhood. That app, launched in 2013 with a promise to “democratize finance for all,” offers so-called retail investors simple, zero-fee trades as an easy way to gamble on quick movement of individual stocks.
But that smooth path to playing the market hit a bump Thursday morning, when Robinhood announced that it was suspending the ability to purchase 13 extremely volatile stocks, including GameStop.
In the hours following the announcement, GameStop’s stock price first shot up to a high of nearly $470, then cratered to a low of about $126 by 11:20am. The price then turned back upward and has currently stabilized around $310 as of this writing.
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Source: Ars Technica – Robinhood’s plan to “democratize finance” hit a GameStop-shaped speed bump
An airport for flying cars will thrust the English city of Coventry into the future later this year, with a project aimed at demonstrating how air taxis will work in urban centres. From a report: Urban-Air Port, a British-based start-up, has partnered with car giant Hyundai Motor to develop the infrastructure required for when flying cars take to the skies to ferry around people and goods. From November, visitors to Coventry will be able to see what a flying car airport looks like and see a passenger-carrying drone and an operational electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) vehicle on the landing pad. Urban-Air Port was selected by a government programme aimed at developing zero-emission flying and new air vehicles, winning a 1.2-million-pound ($1.65-million) grant to help fund the temporary installation of the airport in Coventry city centre.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Flying Cars Airport of the Future To Land in England
While Creative Labs has expanded its product offerings into other arenas, the company has never waivered from its core competency: PC and home audio. The Sound Blaster maker has almost always offered speaker systems to pump out the audio from our favorite PC and console games. Today, that tradition lives on with Creative marketing a wide variety…
Source: Hot Hardware – Creative SBS E2900 2.1 Speakers Review: Big Sound, Small Price
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