Microsoft’s next Xbox Series X game showcase coming July 23

First-party games, including Halo Infinite, expected to feature heavily.

Promotional image of video game.

Enlarge / Halo Infinite is still slated to launch close to Xbox Series X's "holiday 2020" launch window. (credit: Xbox)

Our next look at new games for the Xbox Series X will be coming on July 23. That's when Microsoft will be holding its next Xbox Games Showcase, the company announced today, streaming on multiple digital platforms starting at 9am Pacific Time.

Unlike Microsoft's May promotional event, which focused on third-party launch titles for the upcoming console, the July 23 event is expected to discuss first-party exclusives from Microsoft's own Xbox Game Studios. That likely includes new footage of Halo Infinite, which saw a new teaser trailer a few weeks ago.

"Xbox Series X is now in the hands of our 15 Xbox Game Studios teams and the biggest names from our network of game development and publishing studios worldwide, ensuring Xbox Series X will power a new generation of blockbuster games, like Halo Infinite," Microsoft said in a blog post last month.

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Exoplanet in the hot-Neptune desert is the first of its kind

Hello, planetary delivery service? I’ll take one gas giant, hold the gas.

Planets and moons orbiting a star.

Enlarge / Artist's conception of a gas giant planetary system. Unlike TOI-849b, this one still has its enormous gassy envelope. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

In 2018, scientists monitoring TESS—the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite—discovered a giant planet in close orbit around the star TOI-849, roughly 735 light years away. Nature recently published a paper from scientists at the Centre for Exoplanets and Habitability that describes this planet in detail.

TOI-849b is roughly 40 times the mass of Earth, which would normally indicate a gas giant, weighing in somewhere between Saturn and Neptune. Yet its radius is smaller than Neptune's, although it has more than double Neptune's mass. Since it's hard to see how that can happen in a gaseous world, the scientists suggest that the planet may once have been a gas giant, stripped now nearly to its solid core. The alternative is that it might have formed in a highly unusual way that allowed it to avoid accumulating much gas in the first place.

TOI-849b's host star is a late G-class yellow dwarf, a little cooler and approximately 2 billion years older than our Sun, with about nine-tenths its mass and radius. TOI-849b is very close to its host—its orbital period is a little over 18 hours. That means the farthest distance from its star is only 0.02 Astronomical Units (the typical distance between Earth and our Sun). For reference, our own Mercury orbits the Sun nearly 20 times more distantly, at almost 0.4 AU.

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Alldocube Expand X portable display + keyboard heading to Indiegogo for $199 and up

Chinese PC and tablet maker Alldocube plans to launch a crowdfunding campaign soon for a device that’s not really a standalone PC or tablet. The Alldocube Expand X is a portable display that can bring a second screen to your laptop, tablet, smar…

Chinese PC and tablet maker Alldocube plans to launch a crowdfunding campaign soon for a device that’s not really a standalone PC or tablet. The Alldocube Expand X is a portable display that can bring a second screen to your laptop, tablet, smartphone, or even a game console. It’s battery-powered, which means you can use it anywhere. […]

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F1 2020 reviewed—Codemasters takes another racing game win

Create your own team and race new tracks Zandvoort and Hanoi before real F1 drivers.

In the before times, pre-pandemic, the annual installment of the officially licensed Formula 1 game would arrive about midway through the championship. But we're not in the long-long ago anymore, and in our 2020, F1 started an abbreviated, socially distanced season at the Red Bull Ring in Austria. So when F1 2020 launches this week—tomorrow for the Deluxe Schumacher Edition, Friday for the standard edition—it takes players to an alternate universe where there was no COVID-19 and where F1 racing started as usual in Australia, in March.

The team at Codemasters probably didn't intend for a multiverse angle for F1 2020, but if this year has taught us anything, it's to make the best of the cards we're dealt. The upside to this digital release is it means you can race wheel-to-wheel at new tracks in Hanoi in Vietnam and Zandvoort in the Netherlands almost a year before they'll host their first F1 events in meatspace. But the addition of a couple of new circuits isn't the only way that Codies have kept things from getting stale—no mean feat for an official franchise for a sport that doesn't really change a huge amount year-to-year.

Whose team? My team

Probably the biggest new addition to F1 2020's gameplay is a new career mode. This one is called My Team, because instead of joining one of the existing 10 teams, it puts you in the role of a new team owner (as well as F1 racing driver). You get to pick the team name, design a livery and logo, find a title sponsor, and choose a second driver for the team. Then, in between races, you'll manage the team, which (hopefully) involves bringing in more money than you spend, all the while keeping each department happy.

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Daily Deals (7-06-2020)

Lenovo is selling an IdeaPad Flex 5 convertible notebook with a 14 inch display, a Ryzen 7 4700U processor, 8GB of RAM and 512GB of storage for just $640. But if you’re willing to settle for a version with half the storage and a slightly less po…

Lenovo is selling an IdeaPad Flex 5 convertible notebook with a 14 inch display, a Ryzen 7 4700U processor, 8GB of RAM and 512GB of storage for just $640. But if you’re willing to settle for a version with half the storage and a slightly less powerful Ryzen processor, Office Depot has a model priced […]

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Anti-Piracy Company & Record Labels Are “Running Pirate Sites”, Investigation Claims

An ongoing anti-piracy investigation being carried out by The Music Mission project has teased some interesting findings. According to the groups involved, the owner of one pirate site not only has its own watermarking company but also supplies an anti-virus solution. But the industry foxes inside the hen house don’t stop there.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

The Music MissionEarlier this year we reported on a brand new anti-piracy initiative with an aim to shut down 200 professionally-operated music piracy sites.

Headed up by anti-piracy company AudioLock, music distributor Label Worx, and supported by hundreds of distributors, labels, and other industry players, The Music Mission has a focus on sites that give the impression of being legitimate competition for digital portals such as Beatport, Juno, and Traxsource.

After many weeks of investigations the project has now begun to release some of its initial findings. They are extremely surprising and tend to suggest that parts of the music industry may have allowed the foxes into the hen house. But first, an idea of the scale of just one of these pay-piracy sites.

Almost Eight Years’ Worth of Music on Just One Site

According to information just released by The Music Mission, an analysis of a single ‘pirate’ store has revealed a database of 780,000 unique tracks available for download in MP3 format. All told, the offer totals 10,050 GBs of music or, as the project puts it, more music than anyone could get through in the next decade.

“If all are 320kbps mp3 files, [it] would amount to a shocking 69,791 hours of music or put another way, 7.96 years of music! If you listened to all that whilst walking then you would have got to the moon before having to listen to anything twice,” the coalition says.

Seemingly Legitimate Companies Running Pirate Sites

One surprising revelation is that a company supplying what would normally be viewed as an anti-piracy service is reportedly running a pay-piracy site. Somewhat ironically claiming that its “legal team will make sure that the leaks of your files will be eliminated from illegal sharing websites”, the company appears to be playing for the other side too.

“One particular pirate store owner conveniently have their own anti-virus software company as well as a music watermarking company. Both good partners to an anti-piracy company,” The Music Mission reveals.

The project, which has some heavyweight label supporters plus music licensing group PRS for Music, is currently withholding the name of this company for legal reasons, according to documentation made available to TorrentFreak. However, the allegations against other supposedly industry-supporting entities don’t stop there.

Record Labels and Pro DJs Implicated in Running Pirate Sites

“Several site owners also run/own record labels – at a glimpse, it appears that music from these labels does not appear to be available through the pirate stores, which will be a big help for their chart positions because the other releases in those charts will be losing a large proportion of sales when copies are purchased through the many pirate stores,” The Music Mission continues.

Again, the names of these labels haven’t yet been revealed but given the hundreds of well-known labels supporting this project, it seems unlikely that this conclusion has been pulled out of thin air. The Music Mission says its investigations are continuing so more detail is expected in due course.

On top of this specific threat, there also appears to be another interesting angle.

According to the project, it has identified a number of site owners that are “moonlighting as pro DJs” who have established sizeable fan bases across social media with “gig lists that include international festivals and world-famous nightclubs of which they have graced the decks.”

Somewhat disappointingly, no DJ names have been released, with legal reasons cited once again for the omission.

Pirates Were Aware They Were Being Monitored

One of the aims of The Music Mission is to have a delisting program aimed at reducing the visibility of the sites targeting by its campaign. This appears to have suffered some delays, partly because the true scale of the pirate operations wasn’t immediately apparent and partly because the pirates may have realized they were being watched.

According to the people behind the project, the pirates went to some lengths to prevent the investigation taking place, for both the delisting program and the collection of broader forensic evidence. These “hurdles” have reportedly been overcome now but what exactly has been found remains a question.

So Who Are the Foxes in the Hen House?

Despite asking this question, TorrentFreak was unable to gain any additional information on the players involved in this alleged behavior. That being said, the list of music watermarking companies who also have an anti-virus product can’t be particularly long so if the allegations stand up to scrutiny, they will now be on notice that their adversaries are homing in.

Labels themselves will be harder to identify due to their sheer numbers but the fact that The Music Mission is prepared for this information to be heard in public may affect how these entities behave in the weeks and months ahead.

The only other surprising thing is why The Music Mission hasn’t turned this into a criminal referral, given the alleged scale and organization.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Supreme Court strikes down 2015 law allowing robocalls by debt collectors

Collectors of US-backed debt no longer allowed to make robocalls to cell phones.

The words

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Olivier Le Moal)

The US Supreme Court today struck down a provision in US law that let debt collectors make robocalls to cell phones, ruling that the law violates the First Amendment by favoring debt-collection speech over other speech.

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) of 1991 prohibits "almost all robocalls to cell phones," but Congress in 2015 amended the law to add "a new government-debt exception that allows robocalls made solely to collect a debt owed to or guaranteed by the United States," the Supreme Court noted in today's ruling. The opinion was written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

"As the Government concedes, the robocall restriction with the government-debt exception cannot satisfy strict scrutiny," the ruling said. "The Government has not sufficiently justified the differentiation between government-debt collection speech and other important categories of robocall speech, such as political speech, issue advocacy, and the like." Government-backed loans affected by the ruling include student loans, home mortgages, veterans' loans, farm loans, and business loans.

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James McAvoy voices Morpheus in final teaser for The Sandman audio drama

Neil Gaiman narrates, Michael Sheen is Lucifer, and Taron Egerton is John Constantine.

Neil Gaiman narrates The Sandman audio drama, coming July 15 on Audible.

We're just a week or so away from the official release of The Sandman, a multi-part audio drama adaptation of Nail Gaiman's seminal graphic novel series, via Audible Original. And we also have a new teaser for the drama, directed by Dirk Maggs. Maggs also directed the audio drama adaptations of Good Omens and Gaiman's novel Anansi Boys.

For the uninitiated, the titular "sandman" is Dream, also called Morpheus, among other names. He is one of seven entities known as the Endless, and he is seeking to set right his past mistakes. The other Endless are Destiny, Destruction, Despair, Desire, Delirium, and Death, portrayed as a perky punk/goth young woman—they became almost as popular as Dream himself and were featured in several spinoff comics. 

The audio drama will cover the first three of the series' ten volumes: Preludes and Nocturnes, The Doll's House, and Dream Country. The series opens when Morpheus, the King of Dreams, escapes from a 70-year imprisonment by an occultist (who actually wanted to capture Dream's sibling Death but trapped the Sandman by mistake). From there, per the official synopsis:

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The Norman Conquest didn’t change ordinary people’s lives very much

A recent study suggests that after 1066, English food was as terrible but filling as before.

The Norman Conquest didn’t change ordinary people’s lives very much

(credit: By unknown seamsters, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17141779)

When William the Conqueror won the Battle of Hastings, he became King of England in 1066. This changed the political landscape of Europe and the course of world history. For the English aristocracy and religious leaders, the world turned upside down as William replaced them with his handpicked Normans. But what was it like for ordinary people in England? A recent study suggests that, for them, not much changed under the new regime.

We usually see the Norman Conquest from the lofty and often perilous view of nobility and clergy. The roughly 2 million (based on a 1086 census) ordinary people who lived through the upheaval left behind no written records to tell us how they felt or what they experienced. To understand what their lives were like during the Norman Conquest and the years of political, economic, and social upheaval in its wake, archaeologists have to turn to other kinds of evidence.

For the new study, Elizabeth Craig-Atkins (University of Sheffield), Richard Madgwick (Cardiff University), and their colleagues cobbled together part of the story from the bones and teeth of medieval Britons, as well as animal remains and microscopic residues left behind in cooking pottery. Together, those lines of evidence revealed what—and how well—people ate in the years on either side of the Norman Conquest. The results suggest that food supplies got a bit scarce during the conquest and the sporadic fighting that followed, but some aspects of life didn’t change much in its wake.

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