Month: February 2025

Laptops with Intel’s new Arrow Lake mobile processors are just starting to hit the starting to hit the streets, but details about next-gen Intel mobile chips based on Panther Lake and Wildcat Lake architecture are starting to arrive. According to a social media post from @jaykihn0, Intel’s Panther Lake chips could feature up to 16 CPU cores […]

The post Lilbits: Intel Core Ultra 300 chips leak, OpenWrt 24.10 released, and third-party auto-fill coming to Chrome for Android (later than expected) appeared first on Liliputing.

On Wednesday, a New York-based app developer named Isaac Gemal debuted a new site called WikiTok, where users can vertically swipe through an endless stream of Wikipedia article stubs in a manner similar to the interface for video-sharing app TikTok.

It's a neat way to stumble upon interesting information randomly, learn new things, and spend spare moments of boredom without reaching for an algorithmically addictive social media app. Although to be fair, WikiTok is addictive in its own way, but without an invasive algorithm tracking you and pushing you toward the lowest-common-denominator content. It's also thrilling because you never know what's going to pop up next.

WikiTok, which works through mobile and desktop browsers, feeds visitors a random list of Wikipedia articles—culled from the Wikipedia API—into a vertically scrolling interface. Despite the name that hearkens to TikTok, there are currently no videos involved. Each entry is accompanied by an image pulled from the corresponding article. If you see something you like, you can tap "Read More," and the full Wikipedia page on the topic will open in your browser.

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There are only two licensed professional sports games included in Wikipedia's "List of video games notable for negative reception." Do not be fooled, however: WWE 2K20 and eFootball 2022 are just the outliers, arriving so poorly crafted as to cause notable outcry and an actual change to development plans. Most licensed professional sports games come out yearly, whether fully baked, notably improved, or not, and fans who have few other options to play with their favorite intellectual property learn to make do with them.

Not so with fans of Football Manager, a series that can be traced back in some form to 1992 that has released a game almost every year, minus one ownership shift in the early 2000s. Sports Interactive, the company behind the franchise, released a statement on Thursday (in British time) that says that "following extensive internal discussions and careful consideration," Football Manager 25 is canceled. The game was "too far away from the standards you deserve," so they are focusing on the 2026 version.

Trying not to make “the same bloody game every year”

Credit: Sports Interactive

Football Manager 2025 was already delayed twice and is now quite late—as we are now midway into the European football (or what Americans call soccer) season. The game was intended to be a major overhaul.

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This week the Trump Administration imposed a 10 percent tariff on Chinese products shipped to the United States and removed an exemption that allowed goods from China valued at less than $800 to be shipped duty-free. The sudden move caught many retailers, shippers, and customers by surprise. Now the president has temporarily reinstated the exemption […]

The post Cheap stuff from China can be shipped to the US duty-free again… temporarily appeared first on Liliputing.

The Department of Education (DOE) was sued Friday by a California student association demanding an "immediate stop" to Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) "unlawfully" digging through student loan data to potentially dismantle DOE.

"The scale of the intrusion into individuals’ privacy is enormous and unprecedented," the lawsuit said.

According to the University of California Student Association (UCSA)—which has over 230,000 undergraduate students as members—more than 42 million people in the US have federal student loans and face privacy risks, if DOGE's access to their information isn't blocked. Additionally, parents and spouses of loan borrowers share private financial information with the DOE that could also be at risk, the lawsuit alleged.

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The United Kingdom issued a secret order requiring Apple to create a backdoor for government security officials to access encrypted data, The Washington Post reported today, citing people familiar with the matter.

UK security officials "demanded that Apple create a backdoor allowing them to retrieve all the content any Apple user worldwide has uploaded to the cloud," the report said. "The British government's undisclosed order, issued last month, requires blanket capability to view fully encrypted material, not merely assistance in cracking a specific account, and has no known precedent in major democracies."

Apple and many privacy advocates have repeatedly criticized government demands for backdoors to encrypted systems, saying they would harm security and privacy for all users. Backdoors developed for government use would inevitably be exploited by criminal hackers and other governments, security experts have said.

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Kein Reacher, kein Fallout und kein The Boys: Wegen eines Patentstreits könnte Nokia den Streamingdienst Amazon Prime Video abschalten lassen. (Prime Video, Server)

If you watched the 2007 documentary King of Kong or followed the controversy surrounding score-chaser Billy Mitchell, you know all about Donkey Kong's famous kill screen. For over four decades, no one was able to pass the game's 117th screen (aka level 22-1) due to a glitch in the game's bonus timer that kills Mario well before he can reach the top of the stage's girders.

That was true until last weekend, when Mario speedrunner Kosmic shared the news that he had passed the kill screen using a combination of frame-perfect emulator inputs, a well-known ladder movement glitch, and a bit of luck. And even though Kosmic's trick is functionally impossible to pull off with human reflexes on real hardware, the method shows how the game's seemingly insurmountable kill screen actually can be overcome without modifying the code on an official Donkey Kong arcade board.

Breaking the broken ladder

Donkey Kong's kill screen is a side effect of the limited 8-bit register the game uses when calculating the two largest digits of a level's Bonus Timer (which doubles as the overall timer for each screen). At level 22, this calculation makes the register overflow past 256 and back down to 4, giving Mario just a few seconds to complete the stage before instant death.

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Life isn't so easy for automotive manufacturers right now. Take Porsche, which just published preliminary financial numbers for last year and projections for 2025. While things aren't Tesla levels of bad, they're not exactly great. Sales were down 28 percent in China last year and 3 percent overall. Worse yet, profit margins are just over 10 percent, far below the 18 percent the company was targeting.

As a result, Porsche says it's taking "extensive measures" to improve profitability, including adding more internal combustion and plug-in hybrid vehicles to go with the slow-selling EVs. All told, the company expects to spend $830 million (800 million euros) on expanding its non-battery EV lineup in 2025.

There's a lot of that sort of thing going around. Last year, General Motors and Ford lamented missing where the market actually is with too many too-expensive EVs and not enough hybrids. And over at Porsche's sister brand Audi, a similar realization set in, to the point that the brand developed a new combustion engine vehicle architecture (called PPC) to go alongside the new EV-only PPE platform. That new platform will presumably be welcomed over at Porsche as well.

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Zum derzeit besten Vergleichspreis und kurioserweise mit 80 Euro Rabatt kann man bei Amazon den Ryzen 7 9800X3D kaufen. (Prozessor, Technik/Hardware)