Month: October 2023

Enlarge (credit: Intel)

Intel's new desktop processor generations haven't always come with significant generational improvements in recent years, as the company has struggled with new manufacturing tech that enables big leaps in performance and power efficiency. For every major jump—the 12th-generation CPUs, codenamed Alder Lake, come to mind—you usually get several faster but less-than-thrilling iterations.

Intel is officially launching its 14th-generation desktop processors today, and they're firmly in that iterative, non-thrilling group, even compared to last year's 13th-generation chips. The good news for price-conscious PC builders is that they'll continue to work in all current 600- and 700-series motherboards after a BIOS update, and Intel isn't launching a series of new motherboards to accompany them—there aren't many compelling reasons to upgrade from a 12th-gen setup to a 14th-gen one, but it's an available option.

Even the branding Intel is using here signifies that the processors are a throwback—next-gen Meteor Lake chips for laptops and all of Intel's other chips are losing the generational and i3/i5/i7/i9 branding in favor of "Core" and "Core Ultra." By Intel's admission, the last gasp of the 14th-generation branding here is a nod to how similar they are to the 13th-generation chips that preceded them (and, for that matter, the 12th-gen ones before that).

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There’s yet another company looking to get into the increasingly-crowded handheld gaming PC space. And, at least on paper, the upcoming NanoPlay handheld seems to hit a right of the right points. What remains to be seen is whether it will be competitive with bigger names in this space like Valve, Asus and Lenovo when […]

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During the summer of 2017, French law enforcement booked a massive success with the shutdown of T411, a popular semi-private torrent tracker with over five million registered members.

The site, which catered to a French-speaking audience, had been on the radar of rightsholders for some time. After avoiding the long arm of justice on several occasions, the curtain eventually fell.

Following news of the site’s downfall, it appeared that not all people working on the site were French. The main suspect was located in Canada and the system administrator was from Ukraine. Several French suspects were identified too, but these were mainly seen as moderators.

Today, more than six years after T411 was shut down, L’Informe reports that a Criminal Court in Rennes has handed the two main suspects custodial sentences and an unprecedented damages order of almost a quarter billion euros.

Three Years Prison and Massive Damages Award

In a landmark ruling, the court ordered the Canadian creator of the torrent site, Mr. Jolicoeur, to serve a three-year prison sentence and pay a €150,000 ($158,000) fine. The defendant wasn’t present in court and a warrant for his arrest was issued, which Canadian authorities have to follow up.

In addition, the court awarded an unprecedented €489 million ($516m) in damages to rightsholders. This is the largest damages award against pirate site operators we have ever seen. For comparison, The Pirate Bay founders had to pay damages that totaled less than seven million euros.

The amount in this case appears to be based on the total number of downloads that could be traced back to the site. The prosecution counted over 190,000 torrents, which generated more than 270 million downloads across various categories.

Films and TV series were by far the most popular, which explains why the bulk of the damages, €471 million, goes to movie industry companies including Warner, Pathé, Gaumont, UGC and Film24. The remaining €18 million is awarded to French music group SACEM.

18 Months for Ukrainian Sysop

In addition to the main suspect, the court also sentenced T411 sysop Mr. R.V., who previously shared his version of events with TorrentFreak.

R.V., who now lives in Sweden, was present at the hearings and sentenced to 18 months in prison, of which 13 are conditional. The sysop already served this time in pre-trial detention so remains free.

The court also held the sysop responsible for 30% of the damages award, more than €146 million in total. That’s pretty much a monetary life sentence, which comes as a huge disappointment.

Speaking with TorrentFreak, R.V. says that he will appeal the judgment. He describes the damages amount as abnormal and half-jokingly adds that he might as well quit his job if it’s upheld.

“I’m not going to pay it, but even if I am forced to do so, I will quit the job and live on social benefits for jobless people instead. Otherwise, I need to work 3,500 years to pay such a fine,” R.V. says.

R.V. also notes that the defense had no opportunity to challenge the calculation of the damages amount, which is something that will likely come up during the appeal.

Modest Sentences for Moderators

In addition to the site’s founder and sysop, the court also sentenced several French moderators of T411. The five defendants must pay 250 euros each to all of the listed rightsholders.

L’Informe reports that the authorities began investigating the site in 2015. They were ultimately able to identify the suspects by cross-referencing their PayPal accounts, IP-addresses, and bank details.

For rightsholders and French law enforcement, the convictions amount to a major victory, but their work is not over yet. Shortly after T411 was shut down YggTorrent took its place and, despite multiple attempts to take it offline, the site remains online today.

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

Enlarge / Moments like this are practically worth the price of admission. (credit: Insomniac / Sony)

When making a sequel to a successful game franchise, developers have to walk a tightrope between continuity and upgrades. Change too much, and you risk ruining the careful balance of elements that made the original game work so well. Change too little, and you risk players getting tired of a new title that feels like more of the same.

As much as we liked 2020’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, the game provided only minor tweaks to the successful formula established by Insomniac’s original 2018 take on everyone’s favorite wall-crawler. Spider-Man 2 is a slightly meatier sequel, with a bigger version of New York City to explore and a few welcome improvements in presentation and gameplay. Even so, the game still fits quite comfortably into the “more of the same” side of the sequel equation.

But we can’t say we’re too upset about this state of affairs. The basic open-world superheroics of Insomniac’s Spider-Man are so strong that this sequel can get by quite capably with a bit of tinkering at the margins. After three full games, it turns out we’re still not tired of defending Insomniac’s take on New York City.

A strained team-up

Pretty much every piece of pre-release hype for Spider-Man 2 focused on how the pairing of two separate Spider-Men–Peter Parker and Miles Morales–would implicitly lead to twice as much fun. It’s unfortunate, then, that the long-promised team-up feels more than a little forced here.

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Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Wear chips have been some of the most popular solutions for smartwatches running Google’s Wear OS software. And now Qualcomm and Google have announced they’re bringing something new to the ecosystem: RISC-V chips. Up until now all of Qualcomm’s smartwatch chips have been based on ARM architecture, but now the company says it’s […]

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Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

For such a car-centric nation, it's a little depressing that the US lags behind the European Union and China when it comes to electric vehicle adoption. Without a large investment to redesign our towns and cities to make them walkable and accessible via public transport, switching en masse to electric cars is the main remaining avenue left to decarbonize our transport, after all. So it is rather encouraging to see signs that more US car buyers are opting to go electric, as sales have climbed 50 percent, year on year, as uptake reaches almost 8 percent.

According to Kelly Blue Book, US car buyers bought 313,086 battery EVs between the months of July and September 2023, compared to just 209,030 BEVs for the same three months of last year. Add in the 882 Toyota Mirai hydrogen fuel cell EVs and 68 Hyundai Nexo FCEVs that found homes in Q3 2023 and that's a 50.1 percent increase, year on year.

The cumulative totals for all of 2023 so far are also looking healthy. KBB estimates that 873,082 BEVs have been bought this year, versus 586,965 for the first nine months of 2022. Add in about 2,800 FCEVs compared to around 1,000 last year, and clean vehicle sales grew 49 percent, year on year.

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