August 2022 – Page 35 – news.buyenne.com

Pentiment preview: Obsidian’s historical, religiously charged murder mystery

Lead dev on Obsidian’s first game since Microsoft acquisition: “We can do this now.”

There are only so many hours in a Bavarian murder investigation set in the early 1500s.

Since its reveal earlier this year, new video game Pentiment has been shrouded in secrecy and confusion. We knew it was being developed by Obsidian Entertainment, yet we also thought it might be a wild divergence from that beloved studio's biggest hits (Fallout New Vegas, The Outer Worlds).

That suspicion was firmed up last week in a pre-Gamescom conference hosted by its gameplay director and art director, who comprise one-sixth of its full development staff. You read that correctly: Obsidian's first video game since being acquired by the deep pockets of Microsoft will launch in November with a team of only 13 people on the credits.

Pentiment gameplay reveal, June 2022.

Game director Josh Sawyer doesn't mince words about this peculiar game's budget and scope—nor about its corporate handlers finding the right place to put it.

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Denuvo Promises to Kill Nintendo Switch Emulator Piracy With New Protection

Anti-piracy company Denuvo has announced a new product that aims to prevent pirated copies of Nintendo Switch games from being played on PC-based emulators. Denuvo says that ‘Nintendo Switch Emulator Protection’ will have no impact on the gaming experience and will ensure that anyone wishing to play a game will have to buy a legitimate copy.

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

Most video gamers will be familiar with the concept of an end-of-level or end-of-game ‘boss’. They take many forms but tend to present as an escalated challenge designed to prevent gamers from progressing any further.

Anti-piracy company Denuvo embraces the ‘boss’ concept and drops it on its head. Anyone wanting to play a Denuvo-protected videogame without paying for it will have to defeat Denuvo’s protection right at the very beginning, before the game even starts.

Worst still, only a handful of people in the whole world are up to the Denuvo boss challenge, so until they emerge victorious, nobody gets to play the game, unless they’re prepared to pay for it. This makes Denuvo very unpopular in video game piracy circles but very popular with its clients, some of whom have a new product to consider.

Nintendo Switch Emulator Protection

Providing there’s no obvious reuse of copyrighted code or trademark abuse, emulation software is mostly immune to legal attack. Emulators that mimic gaming hardware are mostly legal to develop, legal to distribute, legal to own, and even legal to use.

In reality, most emulator gamers like to gloss over that last bit. In the time it takes the minority to shout “HOMEBREW”, the rest will have downloaded several hundred MAME ROMs, a few Nintendo Switch games, and will be playing them on a PC.

Nintendo is concerned about all piracy, but emulator piracy is special in that gamers don’t need to buy games, and they don’t need to buy a console either. Denuvo announced today that it has a new product to bring this to an end.

It’s called Nintendo Switch Emulator Protection and Denuvo wants game developers to start using it right away.

Emulation Good / Piracy Bad

Reinhard Blaukovitsch is the founder and Managing Director of Denuvo, a business owned by cybersecurity giant Irdeto. In an announcement on Irdeto’s blog today, Blaukovitsch acknowledges that PC emulators can bring old games back to life with a wave of nostalgia but warns of the piracy risks.

The claim that hundreds of free emulators can play Switch games sounds a bit enthusiastic, but that’s not really important. Yuzu and Ryujinx are the most popular and between them cover Windows, Linux and macOS users. All three can be used with entirely legal software but Denuvo would like them to be less useful to pirates moving forward.

Games Need Protection From Emulation

“Your Nintendo Switch games need a protective solution. Emulating games may be harmless in some cases, but at the end of the day, it is still a major means of piracy,” Denuvo’s message to Nintendo developers reads.

“Our brand new Denuvo Nintendo Switch Protection helps prevent emulation from the get-go and stops pirates from getting hold of your game via the PC.”

Denuvo says its solution integrates “seamlessly and automatically” and works by detecting differences in the way a game behaves compared to what it was designed for.

“In this way, our software can tell that your game has been tampered with – and will make it unplayable.”

Denuvo says its solution will stop Switch games from being pirated and help to secure income for developers. As for gamers, they will “simply have to pay” if they want in on the action.

The Switch hacking/piracy scene is likely to perceive that as a challenge.

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

DeskPi Super6C is a $200 mini ITX board powered by up to 6 Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 devices

You know what’s more powerful than a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4? Six Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 devices hooked up in a cluster that allows them to work together. And the new DeskPi Super6C is a mini ITX mainboard designed to make it easy t…

The post DeskPi Super6C is a $200 mini ITX board powered by up to 6 Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 devices appeared first on Liliputing.

Samsung announces 990 PRO SSDs for PCIe 4.0 with big speed bump

Samsung claims 55 percent gain in random read/write performance over the 980 PRO.

Samsung's newly announced 990 PRO with Heatsink SSD.

Samsung's 990 PRO, its latest NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD, aims to give gamers, 3D-renderers, and 4K/8K video editors a decent ratio of price to performance if this top-of-the-line drive can get close to its promised specs in real-world testing.

The 990 PRO is touted as offering "nearly the highest speed currently available from the new PCIe 4.0 interface" and a 55 percent increase in random performance over its 980 Pro. Samsung touts sequential read and write speeds of 7,450 megabytes per second (MB/s) and 6,900MB/s, respectively. Random read/write speeds are listed at 1,400K and 1,550K IOPS, respectively, based on IOmeter 1.1.0 performance. DRAM for the 990 PRO drives is 1GB per terabyte of storage, up to 4GB for the 4TB model.

Samsung suggests the performance bump comes from its own V-NAND and proprietary controller advancements. Power efficiency is improved up to 50 percent over the 980 PRO, the company claims, while a nickel coating and heat-spreading label dissipate heat. The heatsink model gives you more temperature assurance while, of course, adding RGB lights.

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990 Pro: Samsungs SSD reizt PCIe Gen4 aus

Mit der 990 Pro bringt Samsung noch einmal ein PCIe-Gen4-Topmodell: Die SSD soll bei der Random-Performance gleich 55 Prozent zulegen. (Solid State Drive, Speichermedien)

Sense 2: Fitbit bringt Temperatursensor auf Sportuhr

Die nächste Apple Watch soll es können, Google-Tochter Fitbit kündigt jetzt für die Sense 2 einen Hauttemperatursensor an – und weitere Wearables. (Fitbit, Google)

Die nächste Apple Watch soll es können, Google-Tochter Fitbit kündigt jetzt für die Sense 2 einen Hauttemperatursensor an - und weitere Wearables. (Fitbit, Google)

Data privacy bill would give you more control over info collected about you

It would also force businesses to change how the handle data.

Data privacy in the U.S. is, in many ways, a legal void. While there are limited protections for health and financial data, the cradle of the world’s largest tech companies, like Apple, Amazon, Google, and Meta (Facebook), lacks any comprehensive federal data privacy law. This leaves U.S. citizens with minimal data privacy protections compared with citizens of other nations. But that may be about to change.

With rare bipartisan support, the American Data and Privacy Protection Act moved out of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce by a vote of 53-2 on July 20, 2022. The bill still needs to pass the full House and the Senate, and negotiations are ongoing. Given the Biden administration’s responsible data practices strategy, White House support is likely if a version of the bill passes.

As a legal scholar and attorney who studies and practices technology and data privacy law, I’ve been closely following the act, known as ADPPA. If passed, it will fundamentally alter U.S. data privacy law.

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