Month: December 2020

Enlarge / A Pornhub logo at the company's booth during the 2018 AVN Adult Expo on January 25, 2018, in Las Vegas, Nevada. (credit: Getty Images | Gabe Ginsberg )

Pornhub last night purged millions of user-uploaded videos from its platform amid allegations that it was hosting content featuring child sexual exploitation, nonconsensual violence, rape, and other unlawful material.

"As part of our policy to ban unverified uploaders, we have now also suspended all previously uploaded content that was not created by content partners or members of the Model Program," Pornhub said in a company blog post, as first reported by Vice. The purge appears to have hit almost 9 million of the 13.5 million videos on Pornhub as of Sunday, or nearly two-thirds of all the content hosted on the site.

"This means every piece of Pornhub content is from verified uploaders, a requirement that platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat and Twitter have yet to institute," the company added. "In today’s world, all social media platforms share the responsibility to combat illegal material. Solutions must be driven by real facts and real experts. We hope we have demonstrated our dedication to leading by example."

Enlarge / A Cyberpunk NPC is shown talking before his textures have fully loaded on the console version of the game. (credit: CCPR / @MrDelabee Twitter)

Developer CD Projekt Red has issued an apology and offered a full refund to frustrated Cyberpunk 2077 players who are running into numerous issues with the console versions of the game. "We should have paid more attention to making it play better on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One," the company wrote in a statement posted to social media.

Ars Technica, like all other outlets receiving pre-release code, was only given access to a PC build of Cyberpunk 2077 before giving our opinion earlier this month. Those looking for impressions of the console versions had to wait until after the game launched publicly last Thursday.

At that point, those players would have encountered widespread player and critic complaints of game-breaking bugs, low-resolution graphics, and console crashes. While the PC version had its share of glitchiness, reports suggest the console versions are in much rougher shape. And while there aren't native versions of Cyberpunk 2077 on the PlayStation 5 of Xbox Series S/X yet, reports suggest the last-generation console versions of the game play somewhat better when running in backward-compatibility mode on those next-generation systems.

Enlarge / SpaceShipTwo Unity is seen shortly after landing in New Mexico on Saturday. (credit: Virgin Galactic)

On Saturday, nearly two full years after its last powered flight, Virgin Galactic attempted to send its sleek Space Ship Two space plane on just its third suborbital flight above 80km.

However, shortly after the space plane was released from its carrier aircraft, named White Knight Two, the ignition sequence to light the space plane's motor did not complete. As a result, the rocket motor failed to fire, and the two pilots on board safely glided the vehicle back to a runway in New Mexico rather than soaring above the atmosphere.

This flight came almost exactly two years after the company's first successful suborbital flight in Decembe r2018 and 22 months since its second suborbital flight in February 2019. Since then, Virgin Galactic has been moving its operations from California to New Mexico, modifying the interior of Space Ship Two's cabin for passenger flights, and promising stockholders it would soon begin commercial flights and increase its cadence of operations.