A VPN is supposed to help preserve your privacy, but free VPNs are a very different animal. A free VPN from Facebook? That’s just asking for trouble. has decided to pull its Onavo VPN app and . In addition, it will end all unpaid market research programs while making some changes to its paid programs. Facebook has decided to make these changes as it struggles to deal with the controversy surrounding its Facebook Research app. A report several weeks ago revealed that about $20 per month to share all their device usage data. Apple pulled that app and scolded Facebook for misusing developer certificates to distribute the app.
Virgin Galactic is inching closer and closer to making its commercial spaceflight service a reality. The company just completed yet another test flight of its rocket-powered spaceplane, reaching the of 55.87 miles (89.8 kilometers). At this rate, founder Richard Branson has expressed optimism that he’ll be able to fly into space to mark the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing this summer. As with all flights, the process starts with a conventional airplane-style lift off from the Mojave Air & Space Port north of Los Angeles. Virgin’s SpaceShipTwo links up to the carrier jet, known as WhiteKnightTwo for this phase of the test.
Five months ago, Nvidia launched its new RTX Turing family, with new ray tracing and anti-aliasing capabilities and no improvement whatsoever in terms of performance per dollar. Nvidia may have felt it had little choice — the company appears to have systemically underestimated its exposure to the cryptocurrency market, which led to an enormous glut of cheap Pascal cards throughout the end of 2018 — but enthusiasts largely chose not to take the bait. The company has been forced to acknowledge that sales of its RTX 2080 and 2070 series failed to meet expectations. The GTX 1660 Ti is the GPU Nvidia hopes will change things.
One whole decade after launch, and Pathfinder is still going strong. In commemoration, Paizo has joined up with Humble Bundle to offer dozens of digital RPG books at a fraction of their list price. If you just want to dip your toe into Pathfinder, you can get a lot of content for just a buck. The Beginner Box, rulebook, character folio, and more will make your first game easy to start. Spend at least $1Bestiary 1Core RulebookGameMastery GuidePathfinder Player Character FolioPathfinder Roleplaying Game: Beginner BoxPathfinder Adventure Path: Shattered Star Player’s GuideWe B4 Goblins!We Be Goblins Free!We Be Goblins Too!We Be Goblins!Pathfinder Online Free TrialIf you’re already used to running Pathfinder games, the next level is probably what you want.
Modern smartphones have gotten a little boring after a decade of iterative improvements. The wacky smartphones of yesteryear have died off in favor of the flat glass slab. Samsung is currently the largest smartphone maker in the world, which gives it room to try something new. The previously teased Galaxy Fold is official, and it’s coming this April. You might want to start saving up now, though. The Galaxy Fold has two screens, only one of which folds. On the outside of the book-like device, you get a tiny 4.58-inch OLED screen. That might not sound particularly small, but it’s very tall and narrow with a resolution of 1960×840 — the home screen is only three icons wide.
Back in 2017, Razer released an Android gaming smartphone with an emphasis on gaming specs, including a high-end 120Hz LCD. In October 2018, the company launched a refreshed model with an updated SoC and some additional improvements. Now, however, it looks as if the company is done with phones. Over the weekend, Razer announced it was shutting down its gaming store. Then, Droid-Life a tip that the firm was actually shuttering its mobile division altogether. When that site reached out for confirmation on whether Razer was specifically done with mobile, the company responded: In our mobile division, there were some staff members who were let go, and others who were reassigned to other new projects.
A new whitepaper exploring innovative methods for building GPUs calls on manufacturers to revive a line of research that terminated in the 1980s: wafer-scale processing. As the name implies, a wafer-scale processor is a chip built over an entire silicon wafer, or at least most of one. According to the paper, a GPU constructed in this fashion would have vastly superior scaling to any alternative arrangement — and a surprising set of performance characteristics. The theoretical advantage of wafer-scale processing was the ability to implement an entire chip design on a single piece of silicon, including I/O and power circuitry.
Audi is revving up its slick Traffic Light Information (TLI) system. Now Audi TLI can tell you the best speed to drive in order to hit a string of green traffic lights, without having to suddenly speed up to make a light on yellow, or brake hard if you can’t speed up enough. For TLI to work, it requires a grid of traffic signals that report their status — green, yellow, red, and how many seconds ’til the next signal change — to cars with onboard telematics modems and the ability to read the signal information. TLI initially gave you enough information to know if you should slow down for the next light, and a countdown timer until the light turns green again.
MRAM and the associated grab-bag of alternative memory technologies have long seemed to occupy an unfortunate no man’s land between “Never going to happen,” and “Next Big Thing.” When Intel debuted its own 3D XPoint technology 3.5 years ago, it seemed as if the already narrow space for these alternative memory technologies might be squeezed further. But that hasn’t happened. Instead, Intel has moved ahead with its own research into MRAM and has designed a version of the technology compatible with its own process nodes. Image by EETimes At the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) this week, Intel presented a paper on its own spin-transfer torque MRAM (STT-MRAM).
