Nintendo launched the Wii in 2006, and with it came the virtual console. Part of the Wii Shop Channel, the virtual console offered a way to enjoy the games of yesteryear, but that era is coming to a close. Nintendo will begin the next phase of shutting down the Wii virtual console today. You can no longer buy content from the store, and any unspent Wii Points are now useless. That means some of Nintendo’s classic games are now , and this comes as the company intensifies its crackdown on ROM sites. After more than 12 years, it’s understandable that would want to sunset the Wii Shop Channel.
It’s Wednesday, so that must mean Facebook is in hot water yet again after taking a laissez-faire attitude toward privacy. This time, Facebook was caught running a shady “research” program that paid teenagers and adults to install a VPN monitor on their phones, piping all their browsing data back to Facebook for analysis. The program wasn’t just sketchy — it also blatantly violated Apple’s developer guidelines. In response, Apple has . The Facebook Research program came to light yesterday, but it was something of an open secret. Since 2016, Facebook had used marketing firms like uTest and Applause to recruit people aged 13-35 to install its Facebook Research app.
Quantum computing just plain sounds cool. We’ve all read about the massive investment in making it a reality, and its promise of breakthroughs in many industries. But all that press is usually short on what it is and how it works. That’s for a reason: Quantum computing is quite different from traditional digital computing and requires thinking about things in a non-intuitive way. Oh, and there is math. Lots of it. This article won’t make you an expert, but it should help you understand what quantum computing is, why it’s important, and why it’s so exciting. If you already have a background in quantum mechanics and grad school math, you probably don’t need to read this article.
Storage in mobile devices has always come at a premium. But that could change, at least in high-end devices, courtesy of Samsung’s new eUFS 2.1-compatible 1TB storage IC. As Samsung notes, this advance comes just four years after it broke records by introducing an industry-leading 128GB chip. The 1TB eUFS is “expected to play a critical role” in bringing a more laptop-like user experience to the next generation of phones and tablets, said Cheol Choi, executive vice president of memory sales at Samsung. The new chip combines 16 layers of 512Gb NAND with a newly developed proprietary controller. Samsung claims that the new chip will store 260 10-minute 4K videos, where a standard 64GB eUFS storage device would only be capable of holding 13.
Stephen Hawking was perhaps the most famous user of “vocoder” speech synthesis hardware, but he was not alone. People all over the world are unable to speak on their own, but science may be approaching a point where they can turn their inner thoughts into speech without tedious typing or clicking. A team from the Neural Acoustic Processing Lab at Columbia University has devised an AI model that can . The research combines several advances in machine learning to interpret the patterns of activity in the brain to find out what someone wants to say even if they’re physically unable to make noise.
Looking for a better way to stream? Jump into this week’s Humble Caffeine Bundle to get access to the pre-release of a new streaming app called Caffeine. Even better, you can grab some awesome games to play for your fans. • For any price, you’ll get a copy of Caffeine and a collection of three games. Folks in the UK will also get some discounts with the Caffeine Gamer Pack, but that offer isn’t available everywhere. Pay what you wantHeadlanderGoNNER Blueberry EditionTreadnautsCaffeineCaffeine Gamer Pack (Not available in all regions)BONUS: Headlander Soundtrack ($1 or more)Go above the average bundle purchase price, and you’ll get Steam copies of This War of Mine, The Pillars of the Earth, and Dear Esther.
There’ve been a lot of nervous eyes on TSMC of late. Apple’s iPhone sales shortfall bit the company hard earlier this month after it announced an expected 14 percent drop in Q1 2019 revenue relative to the same period in 2018 and that it expected demand to remain weak in the first half of 2019. Following on the heels of reports that TSMC’s 7nm node is running under capacity, the potential for a general slowdown has had investors nervously eyeing the company’s sales projections. At its Q1 conference call this week, TSMC announced some mixed news on that front, but it signaled confidence in its 5nm technology development roadmap.
Most that pops up online targets Windows, but Apple’s platform is not immune. There’s a particularly sneaky new piece of malicious code floating around the web that hides in plain sight to attack macOS. The so-called VeryMal payload makes its way into computers by way of ad image files impregnated with a steganography-based payload. For the unaware, steganography is the process of integrating text or data into an image file. Running the operation in reverse, it’s possible to extract that data from the image. That data could be anything — there’s nothing inherently harmful about steganographic images or image files in general.
Intel’s stock lost a significant amount of value after its Q4 2018 earnings announcement on Thursday, though the company rallied a bit on Friday, taking some of the bite out of the hit. Investors were evidently concerned about the chip manufacturer’s guidance for 2019, despite the extremely strong showing for Intel during full year 2018. Before we dive into Intel’s numbers, it’s worth noting that this kind of response to quarterly news has become a trend in the past few months. 2018 was a strong year for many tech companies — Intel, Nvidia, and AMD all had a very good run and we don’t expect to see Q4 results that shake this much.
