Tech News Feed

FuboTV, Hulu Plus Live TV, ESPN Plus, DirecTV Stream and other streaming services claim to cater to live sports fans, but only a few truly deliver one-stop shopping for diehard sports fanatics.

Broadband connectivity has become more and more integral to our daily lives. In which company should you put your household's trust?

Spruce up your space with interior designs put together with the help of a professional designer for $98.

You can become a student of their storytelling secrets.

The Windows 11 22H2 update is working its way through Microsoft's Windows Insider testing channels, and we'd expect it to begin rolling out to Windows 11 PCs at some point in the next few weeks or months. But Microsoft has had almost nothing to say about the next major update to Windows 10 beyond the fact that the operating system will keep getting yearly updates for the foreseeable future. From a report: And the Windows 10 22H2 update is actually already out there for those who know how to install it. Neowin has published a list of commands that can be typed into the Command Prompt or Windows Terminal to turn a fully updated Windows 10 21H2 install into a 22H2 install. The commands use Microsoft's Deployment Image Servicing and Management (DISM) tool to make tweaks to your Windows install and require the optional KB5014666 update for Windows 10 to be installed first. The catch is that enabling Windows 10 22H2 doesn't actually seem to do much beyond incrementing the version number on the "About Windows" screen.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sony has revealed the three games that all PlayStation Plus subscribers can snap up in July. They are Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time, Man of Medan and Arcadegeddon — a notable leaker once again got all three games spot on.

Crash Bandicoot 4 arrived in 2020 and was the first new mainline Crash game in 12 years. It was pegged as a direct sequel to the original PlayStation 1 trilogy — meaning that it ignored all the PS2 games. Both the PlayStation 4 and PS5 versions will be available, with the latter supporting features like the DualSense controller's adaptive triggers and haptic feedback.

Man of Medan is the first title in Supermassive's Dark Pictures Anthology series. It's an interactive horror game in which your choices determine whether characters live or die. However, we felt it didn't hold up as strongly as the studio's previous game, Until Dawn. Man of Medan is hitting PS Plus just after the arrival of Supermassive's latest game, The Quarry.

Arcadegeddon, meanwhile, is a multiplayer shooter from Illfonic that has both co-operative and player vs. player modes. You'll search for loot and unlock abilities as you take on the evil Fun Fun Co. megacorp, which is using an arcade for real-world weapons testing.

This is the first time Sony has refreshed the games on the lowest tier of the new-look PS Plus since it revamped the service. The company said it will continue to offer Essential tier users a couple of games a month that they'll have access to as long as they remain subscribers. Sony will also update the Extra and Premium lineups in the middle of each month.

Crash 4, Man of Medan and Arcadegeddon will be available to claim on July 5th. Until then, you can still add the current batch of PS Plus Essential titles — God of War (2018), Naruto to Boruto: Shinobi Striker and Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl — to your library.

Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle was a pleasant surprise. A charming game that married Nintendo’s Mushroom Kingdom with the chaos of Ubisoft’s Rabbid mascots and crammed it into a game that was, well, pretty much a cartoon interpretation of the tactical strategy series XCOM.

It was an unlikely early hit on the Switch. Ubisoft was able to offer a different kind of game than Nintendo was offering in its first-party titles. Apparently, that was the seed that led Ubisoft Milan Creative Director Davide Soliani to Mario + Rabbids. Talking to Engadget, he said, “[We] should create something that makes sense from Ubisoft’s point of view, something not happening in Nintendo’s catalog.”

Ubisoft fulfilled that brief with Kingdom Battle. Soliani added: “We can match the aesthetics [of Super Mario], using and misusing the elements…. The contrast is the drive.” That’s the context for this sequel, too. 

In Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope, Mario et al. (and their Rabbid equivalents) face a shared threat, called Cursa. The blended worlds of Mario and Rabbids are being contorted by darkness, but this time it’s a little more galactic. Expect to see varied worlds, à la Mario Galaxy, with the Lumas of that game being transformed into Sparks, elemental sprites that work like summonable magic attacks in the many, many battles.

That may sound new to anyone that played Kingdom Battle, but there are far bigger changes afoot. We’re yet to play the game, but judging from the new teaser and Davide Soliani’s explanation, it’s going to feel different – less of an XCOM tribute and something between tactical strategy conventions and the manic dashing and leaping of typical Mario games.

Ubisoft

Your party of three heroes can now move around in real-time, no more grids. You’ll be able to see how far a character can move within their environment thanks to a white outline, but you’ll be able to figure out cover and optimal attacks on the fly. Each hero will get their turn before the baddies get to, well, return the favor. Soliani says this should help the game to feel more “natural”.

Crucial elements will include where you move your hero (as long as you don’t shoot), utilizing items to extend movement and even using some enemies against other enemies – like hurling a Bob-omb towards some unsuspecting enemies on the other side of an area. Like Kingdom Battle, the synergy with other heroes will be crucial in tackling the biggest enemies.

Alongside companion elemental Sparks, which will grow in abilities as your characters do, each hero will have their own unique weapon this time, running the gamut from melee weapons like swords through to dual pistols and even bows. (You can’t have a game in the 2020s without including a bow.)

You’ll be joined by some new characters, including a Rabbid with a sword called Edge. (Dumb, I love it.) and age-old rival Bowser, who’s apparently a heavy-hitter equipped with what appears to be a bazooka.

More freedom in battles is mirrored in the game too. The worlds you’ll explore should feel more open-ended than the areas of its predecessor. Explore planets, take on fetch quests (this is a Ubisoft game after all), solve the major darkness problems of this specific planet – or just do the bare minimum and move on to the next part of the game.

Ubisoft

This should all help Sparks of Hope feel a little more contemporary – aided by a pretty incredible array of musical talent. Kingdom Battle composer Grant Kirkhope, who also contributed to Rare’s epic run of Nintendo 64 games, returns, joined by Gareth Croker (Ori and the Will of the Wisps, Halo Infinite) and Yoko Shimomura (Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy XV). Those are some gaming music heavyweights which should help ensure all these different worlds sound as different as they’ll look.

Judging from the teaser and Soliani’s comments, Ubisoft is evolving Mario + Rabbids at a swift clip, modernizing the battle system and adding further strategic wrinkles and customization to fights. Sparks of Hope could feel like a different sort of tactical battle game, and if they nail the synergy like the first game, it could be just as entertaining.

With Atari turning 50 this year, the brand’s current owner plans to celebrate with a collection that brings together five decades of games. Announced today, the aptly named Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration will include more than 90 titles spanning the Atari 2600, 5200, 7800, ST, Jaguar and Lynx. What’s more, Atari hired Digital Eclipse, a studio that’s best known for its work on The Disney Afternoon Collection and the Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection, to oversee the project.

"When it comes to emulation or bringing classics back or doing really any sort of remastering or reimagining, I don't know if there's anybody who does it better than Digital Eclipse, so they were always our first choice," Atari CEO Wade Rosen told Game Informer.

Atari has yet to share a complete list of the games that will appear on the compilation, but in addition to many classics, the collection will include six new retro-inspired games. One of those is a sequel to 1981’s Haunted House for the Atari 2600. Haunted Houses will feature modern 3D voxel-based graphics and new levels for players to explore. Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration will cost $40 when it arrives later this year on Xbox, PlayStation, Switch, PC and Atari VCS.

AnandTech: We tend to discuss leading-edge nodes and the most advanced chips made using them, but there are thousands of chip designs developed years ago that are made using what are now mature process technologies that are still widely employed by the industry. On the execution side of matters, those chips still do their jobs as perfectly as the day the first chip was fabbed which is why product manufacturers keep building more and more using them. But on the manufacturing side of matters there's a hard bottleneck to further growth: all of the capacity for old nodes that will ever be built has been built -- and they won't be building any more. As a result, TSMC has recently begun strongly encouraging its customers on its oldest (and least dense) nodes to migrate some of their mature designs to its 28 nm-class process technologies. Nowadays TSMC earns around 25% of its revenue by making hundreds of millions of chips using 40 nm and larger nodes. For other foundries, the share of revenue earned on mature process technologies is higher: UMC gets 80% of its revenue on 40 nm higher nodes, whereas 81.4% of SMIC's revenue come from outdated processes. Mature nodes are cheap, have high yields, and offer sufficient performance for simplistic devices like power management ICs (PMICs). But the cheap wafer prices for these nodes comes from the fact that they were once, long ago, leading-edge nodes themselves, and that their construction costs were paid off by the high prices that a cutting-edge process can fetch. Which is to say that there isn't the profitability (or even the equipment) to build new capacity for such old nodes.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Right now, Prime members can get free access to over 200,000 audio books and podcasts, exclusive discounts and more.

The Avengers: Endgame directors will helm Netflix sci-fi movie The Electric State.

The device won't come with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 after all.

It's a busy spell for Blizzard, with Diablo Immortal, Overwatch 2 and mobile game Warcraft Arclight Rumble all arriving this year. The studio has another major release lined up in the form of World of Warcraft expansion Dragonflight, which is expected to arrive by the end of 2022. To help get WoW expansions out on time and ensure they meet the bar in terms of quality, Blizzard bought Spellbreak studio Proletariat to bolster its ranks of developers, as GamesBeat reports.

The news comes one day after Proletariat announced it will shut down Spellbreak early next year. The free-to-play game is an intriguing take on the battle royale genre, with players using magical powers instead of guns. The game never took off, though. It had an average player count of 166 on Steam over the last month. Apex Legends, on the other hand, has more than a thousand times as many players at any given time on Steam alone.

More than 100 developers from Proletariat will now be focused on World of Warcraft, though the studio has been working with Blizzard since last month. The Boston-based studio also plans to expand its team.

WoW general manager John Hight has spoken of the difficulties his team has had in hiring to deliver content updates to players more quickly (the publicturmoil at the studio over the last year might have played a role in that). Bringing Proletariat on board should help.

“A big part of caring for our teams is making sure we have the resources to produce experiences our communities will love while giving our teams space to explore even more creative opportunities within their projects,' Blizzard Entertainment president Mike Ybarra said. "Proletariat is a perfect fit for supporting Blizzard’s mission in bringing high-quality content to our players more often.”

Activision Blizzard is itself in the process of being bought by Microsoft for $68.7 billion. Given the ongoing labor and workplace culture issues at the company, there's a bit of irony in Blizzard snapping up a studio called Proletariat.

With exclusive early access to the Wish, we explore the AquaMouse ride, immersive dining, the kids club and how Disney is personalizing your experience.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In February 2019, a large container ship sailing for New York identified a cyber intrusion on board that startled the US Coast Guard. Though the malware attack never controlled the vessel's movement, authorities concluded that weak defenses exposed critical functions to "significant vulnerabilities." A maritime disaster didn't happen that day, but a warning flare rose over an emerging threat to global trade: cyber piracy able to penetrate on-board technology that's replacing old ways of steering, propulsion, navigation and other key operations. Such leaps in hacking capabilities could do enormous economic damage, particularly now, when supply chains are already stressed from the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, experts including a top Coast Guard official said. "We've been lucky so far," said Rick Tiene, vice president with Mission Secure, a cybersecurity firm in Charlottesville, Virginia. "More and more incidents are happening, and the hackers are getting a better understanding what they can do once they've taken over an operational technology system. In the case of maritime -- whether it be the ports or the vessels themselves -- there is a tremendous amount that could be done to harm both the network and physical operations." Rear Admiral Wayne Arguin, the Coast Guard's assistant commandant for prevention policy, said shipping faces cyber risks similar to those in other industries -- it's just that the stakes are so much higher given that almost 80% of global trade moves on the sea. While Arguin declined to put a number on the frequency of attempted break-ins, he said "I feel very confident that every day networks are being tested, which really reinforces the need to have a plan." "That universe includes not just ship operators but port terminals and the thousands of logistics links in global supply chains that are increasingly interconnected," the story adds.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The popular app continues to face scrutiny over privacy and security concerns.

This back to school sale has supplies for every age.

This half-phone, half-tablet foldable features two screens for better productivity, streaming, gaming and more.

The employees were in charge of labeling data for training neural networks, Bloomberg reports.

Signify introduces a host of new lighting products, including a rechargeable indoor/outdoor lamp.