(Photo: Markus Winkler/Unsplash)Following a steep increase in Quick Response (QR) code usage nationwide, the FBI is asking people to exercise caution when scanning QR codes. These boxy little codes have exploded in popularity in recent years, both as marketing tools and as savvy ways to avoid physical contact in public environments. Restaurants began asking customers to access virtual menus via QR codes at the start of the pandemic, in lieu of sanitizing physical menus or paying to print disposable paper ones. Entrepreneurs are known to carry business cards with QR codes in the corners, linking to their websites or social media; guerilla artists slap QR codes onto public poles to generate interest in their latest exhibition.
If you’re a PC gamer, you better be babying your video card. While there have been some signs that GPU prices , it’s still nigh impossible to get your hands on a new video card. There was some hope that the AMD website’s anti-bot measures would help, but shows that not to be the case. If the screenshot is to be believed, one bot managed to purchase the majority of GPUs offered in AMD’s latest European drop. We’re not going to bother going into great detail on the nature of the GPU shortage. We all know what’s been going on after the last few years — high demand, low silicon supply, cryptocurrency mining, and so on.
OnePlus announced its new flagship phone a few weeks ago, but you might not have heard about it. The OnePlus 10 Pro is currently only available in the company’s home market of China, but YouTube phone torture channel JerryRigEverything has one in hand — the remains of one, that is. The durability test revealed significant structural problems with the OnePlus 10 Pro. The modern smartphone is a sandwich of glass and aluminum, which is usually more durable than you’d expect. Glass has meager tensile strength, so it cracks and shatters if dropped or struck. However, it has incredibly high compressive strength — orders of magnitude higher than the tensile strength.
Ever since the Playstation 5’s launch in 2020, people have been wondering when Sony would release a next-gen virtual reality (VR) platform that could take advantage of the horsepower provided by its beefy new gaming console. The company broke its silence at CES 2022, finally confirming that a successor to Playstation VR was in the works, and revealing the hardware’s specifications, but it didn’t provide any images to accompany that info. Today the company has finally pulled the wraps off its upcoming hardware, giving gamers a glimpse of what the system looks like. Sony still isn’t saying when the PSVR2 will be available or what it will cost.
(Photo: Nastya Dulhiier/Unsplash)Picture this: you’ve just signed the lease on an apartment, and one of your top to-do items is to sign up for internet services to enjoy in your new place. Even though there are two or three internet service providers in your area, your landlord-to-be tells you you’re required to go with “option” B, thanks to an agreement between the building owner and the ISP itself. Option B is expensive and no one in your social circle likes it, but you reluctantly sign up for a year-long contract anyway, because it’s either that or you restart your housing search.
AMD’s Ryzen Mobile 6000 family of CPUs has launched and reviews of the new CPU have popped up across the net. Reviewers are pleased with the platform overall, but the Ryzen 9 6900HS doesn’t quite match the performance of CPUs like the Intel Core i9-12900HK. It also doesn’t burn nearly as much power. Our sister site, PCMag, in an Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 laptop. Competitor systems included top-end chips from Intel’s 10th, 11th, and 12th Generation families (Comet Lake, Tiger Lake, and Alder Lake respectively). An AMD Ryzen 9 5900HS and Apple’s M1 Max rounded out the comparison list.
At this week’s 2022 Intel Investor Meeting the company laid out its vision for the future, detailing the roadmap for all of its business divisions and its plans to capitalize on the unprecedented demand for semiconductors. Although the presentation didn’t reveal a lot of new information and was largely a retread of previously discussed technologies, the company did divulge some new information about its upcoming Arc GPUs, a new cloud gaming service, and new information on its future server products. Xeon Roadmap Update Intel has committed to shipping Sapphire Rapids in Q1 2022, but we don’t expect it to ship in significant volume until Q2.
Despite a lot of bellyaching about the Metaverse, both here and elsewhere online, it appears that interest in this elusive future reality is beginning to drive a lot of growth in the Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) industries. A new report from research firm Trendforce paints a rosy picture of the AR and VR market this year, predicting that shipments of headsets will increase substantially, and that the lion’s share of the spoils will land directly in Meta’s coffers, thanks to its Quest 2 VR headset. The majority of the AR business will land in Microsoft ‘s court with its Hololens 2 device, which is aimed at enterprise customers.
Facial recognition technology is nothing new — there are probably apps on your phone right now with the ability to recognize faces, but you have some modicum of control over that. Clearview AI, on the other hand, aims to build a facial recognition database that includes you. Yes, you. But not only you. Clearview wants its database to include every human being on Earth, and it thinks it can get there by siphoning up 100 billion photos from the internet. And all it wants is a few million more dollars in venture capital. Clearview was founded in 2017 but operated in stealth mode until the end of 2019.
