Month: April 2018

HP

While the HP Pavilion line encompasses many types of all-purpose machines, the company is branching out with a new family of gaming PCs. Gone will be the Pavilion Power line, making room for the newly announced Pavilion Gaming family. HP says the line, consisting of laptops and desktops, is for gamers who value both gaming and entertainment but don't need the top-tier specs and customization that come with the company's Omen devices.

The 15-inch Pavilion Gaming laptop takes design notes from existing Omen laptops but implements them in a less ostentatious way. The all-black chassis has angled edges for style and venting. HP pushed the fans to the corners of this laptop, which allows more efficient air flow thanks to the vents at the angled corners. Geometric speaker grilles similar to those on other Pavilion laptops sit above the keys, and some models have an all-aluminum keyboard area. Lights underneath the keys and behind the HP logo on the lid offer accents in either white, green, or violet, depending on the model, and each display (it supports FHD at 144Hz, FHD at 60Hz, and 4K panels) is hugged by 9.8mm bezels on the left and right sides.

Enlarge / Robert Heinlein, L. Sprague de Camp, and Isaac Asimov, Philadelphia Navy Yard, 1944. (credit: Public Domain)

As part of its yet-to-launch TV streaming lineup, Apple will develop a series based on Isaac Asimov's highly influential Foundation series of sci-fi novels, both Deadline and Variety report.

The series will be helmed by screenwriters and producers David S. Goyer and Josh Friedman, who have individually and previously worked on numerous superhero films and TV series such as Batman Begins, as well as the Terminator franchise. It will be produced by Skydance Television, which is also responsible for the Netflix sci-fi series Altered Carbon.

Foundation takes place after humans have colonized the galaxy and is largely concerned with the efforts of a mathematician who develops a way to predict galactic-scale events through a method called psychohistory, and he consequently discovers that the prosperous galactic empire is doomed to fall. He creates a foundation that seeks to lay the groundwork for the civilization's reboot after its inevitable collapse.

(credit: Wired UK/Shuttershock)

Thousands of hacked websites have become unwitting participants in an advanced scheme that uses fake update notifications to install banking malware and remote access trojans on visitors' computers, a computer researcher said Tuesday.

The campaign, which has been running for at least four months, is able to compromise websites running a variety of content management systems, including WordPress, Joomla, and SquareSpace. That's according to a blog post by Jérôme Segura, lead malware intelligence analyst at Malwarebytes. The hackers, he wrote, cause the sites to display authentic-appearing messages to a narrowly targeted number of visitors that, depending on the browsers they're using, instruct them to install updates for Firefox, Chrome, or Flash.