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This past weekend, Rockstar Games parent company Take-Two Interactive suffered a major security breach, which resulted in hours of GTA 6 gameplay leaking online. Rockstar confirmed shortly after that the content was indeed legitimate and belonged to an early development build of the game, making this one of the biggest gaming leaks since The Last of Us 2 was exposed in 2020. Around that same time, Uber also reported a security breach in which hackers accessed employee accounts....

As per The Register, Twitter users are being warned about direct messages informing them that their accounts have been reported for bad behavior. Meanwhile, Discord hackers are subjecting victims to an old scam in which they’re told of an explicit photo or video of them being uploaded to chat servers dedicated to shaming people. As with similar social media hacks, clicking a link within one of these direct messages, which often come from compromised verified accounts, sends victims to what looks like a login page for Twitter....

The Halo Infinite single player campaign was released just days ago on December 8, and with this 8th main entry in the Halo series supersoldier Master Chief is back at it. For testing we’re using a demanding section of the campaign, which we find suitable for GPU stress testing and it’s potentially far more consistent than using the multiplayer portion of the game. Halo Infinite’s multiplayer has been in open beta since November 15 and it’s a free to play affair, which is extremely cool and we wish more games did this....

In S.T.A.L.K.E.R Clear Sky the Radeon HD 5850 defeated Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 285 once again by a 19% margin at 2560x1600. The 5850 card was also 19% slower than the Radeon HD 5870 at the same resolution.

When running Absolution’s benchmark at 1680x1050 on high quality with 2xAA and 8xAF, the game is surprisingly demanding. Achieving an average of 60fps is no easy feat and you’ll definitely need a high-end graphics card to pull it off. Something else you may notice is that the AMD’s cards perform very well in this game, particularly the Radeon HD 7900 series. The HD 7970 averaged 68fps while the 7950 wasn’t much slower with 63fps....

This week, the PC system requirements for Hogwarts Legacy appeared on the game’s Steam page. Unlike some recent high-profile titles that provide multiple tiers of requirements for resolutions like 1440p and 4K, Hogwarts Legacy so far only lists “Minimum” and “Recommended” specs for 1080p gameplay. However, they are steep compared to other recent high-profile games at that resolution. The open-world fantasy prequel to the Harry Potter franchise from Avalanche Software and Warner Bros studios requires at least a GTX 1070 or an RX Vega 56 to play at 1080p and 60fps with low graphics settings....

We’ve seen some workarounds before but they require firing up the HEX editor to modify system files, and you are still limited to 256-color background images in a handful of specific sizes. That’s more work than most people are probably willing to bother with and as you can imagine the results are not quite optimal. Enter Decor8. Stardock’s latest Windows 8 customization app removes this limitation by giving users the ability to pick any picture they want, regardless of size or color range, as the Start screen background....

Where the Envy x360 succeeds is undoubtedly in its main hardware: most configuration options leave you with either a Ryzen 5 2500U or an 8th gen Core CPU paired with MX150 graphics. You’ll be getting plenty of CPU and GPU horsepower here, with the Intel/Nvidia configuration giving you the best bang for your buck considering the discrete GPU is more powerful than AMD’s integrated Vega 8. The design is also great from both a visual and construction standpoint, with nice bonuses such as a Windows Hello camera....

A teaser shared with the publication depicts a goggles-style headset with front and side-mounted cameras that doesn’t look too terribly different from the enterprise-focused Magic Leap 2. Ye said the self-contained headset will afford around two hours of battery life and support controllers with six degrees of freedom as well as hand tracking. The multi-purpose goggles will be ideal for gaming, entertainment, exercise, productivity and enterprise use, the executive added....

As I discussed in my review of the Huawei Mate 9, the Kirin 960 contains a fast GPU that can hold its own against some of today’s most powerful SoCs at times. It’s more than twice as fast than the GPU in the P9 in our benchmarks, and around 15 percent faster than the Snapdragon 821. It does fall behind the Snapdragon 835’s GPU by 25 percent, and it also falls behind the Exynos 8895 by 13 percent on average....

In a small experiment to find out just how much social networks impact our lives, I decided to disable my three main accounts for three weeks to see what, if any, effect it has on my day to day. While I’m not overly active on social networks and don’t post very often, I estimate still spend around 1.5 to 2 hours every day—a lot more than the 38-minute US average—on social media....

Should the estimate come to fruition, it would be nearly five times more ICs than were shipped in the year 2000 and almost 44x more than were shipped way back in 1980. Viewed through this lens, the data really illustrates just how many of today’s products rely on integrated circuits and how integral they are to modern society. IC Insights notes that 2019 was the last time there was a falloff in IC shipments and only the fifth time in the history of the market with a year-over-year decline....

The standalone display looks no different than an ordinary tablet but “slides” open to expand into a larger 17-inch display. Details of the display technology weren’t shared but it looks virtually identical to the rollable display tech we’ve seen in recent years, just with a tighter roll that enables the sliding illusion. It’s a lot like the canceled LG rollable phone we recently highlighted. Are laptops with sliding displays coming?...

The Core 2 Duo E7400 managed just 26fps, while the Phenom II X2 550 was only slightly faster with 28fps. The x264 HD Benchmark 3.0 is used to measure the performance of a 2-pass 1280x720 encoding, again displaying the results in a frame per second format. The Core i5 661 was able to match the quad-core Athlon II X4 620, which made it 9% faster than the old Core 2 Quad Q6600....

Our Core i5 661 GPU delivered comparable performance to that of the AMD 780G. The synthetic FurMark test at 1024x768 saw the 780G deliver a maximum frame rate of 11fps, while the Intel Graphics Media Accelerator HD produced a maximum of 10fps. The Intel platform got stomped in the Maya test, delivering significantly less performance. Finally, we tested with Unreal Tournament 3 using maximum image quality settings with AA/AF disabled at 1024x768....

Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege is another CPU demanding title and at 720p the new Core series pushed over 180fps at all times. The 8700K was almost 40% faster than the Ryzen 7 1800X when comparing the minimum frame rate, so that’s obviously a pretty massive margin. The 7700K was also 30% faster than the 1800X, so let’s move to 1080p. That 40% margin seen previously has been reduced to 30% in favor of the 8700K over the 1800X, meanwhile the 7700K is just 19% faster than the eight-core Ryzen 7 CPU....

This week, Intel revealed that it should have Wi-Fi 7-capable desktops and laptops ready by 2024 or 2025. The newest wireless connectivity standard also called 802.11be could offer connections twice as fast as Wi-Fi 6 and 6E. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) expects to finalize Wi-Fi 7’s specifications in 2024, however some manufacturers are currently working with draft specifications. In a press briefing, Intel wireless solutions VP Eric McLaughlin confirmed the company’s plans....

An important addition brought to mobile Ivy Bridge processors is the inclusion of a configurable TDP that allows them to switch between three different ratings: nominal, a lower configurable TDP and an upper configurable TDP. Ultra low voltage (ULV) parts will be rated at 17W, similar to existing ULV Sandy Bridge processors, but can go up to 25W – with a corresponding rise in performance – when running under mains power, or when it’s connected to a docking station that increases the amount of cooling to dissipate the additional heat....

The first wave of Intel’s 12th generation Alder Lake CPUs for mid-range and high-end laptops arrived with a splash. Our own Tim Schiesser found Team Blue’s latest H-series CPUs to be an impressive upgrade over previous generations. The Core i7-12700H, in particular, proved faster than AMD’s excellent Ryzen 7 5800H processor in a variety of tasks. Today, Intel launched the second wave of Alder Lake mobile processors designed for thin and light laptops....