Author: Mark Walton

As you may have heard, this week a new Star Wars film is coming out. Chances are, it may even be good. Or, if you're as excited about The Force Awakens as I am, you know it will be good. The trouble is, between now and the time that most people see the film this Thursday, the Internet will be awash with chatter from the film's recent premiere in Los Angeles, and from early press screenings. There's a chance, however unlikely, that said chatter will say the film is bad.

Obviously, those people will be wrong. Fortunately, the Internet has come up with a way of blocking naysayers and negative nancys until the rest of us can watch the film and give it the positive reception it so clearly deserves. A new Chrome extension, Force Block: the Star Wars spoiler blocker, blocks pages containing what it thinks might be spoilers for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, replacing them with various Star Wars quotes. There's even a whitelist should any regular Star Wars content get blocked.

Having just tried out the extension on a Guardian article about the premiere, I can confirm it works as described. You can of course choose to ignore the spoiler warning and continue to view the content, but remember that for most part, these people will all wrong and in reality Star Wars: The Force Awakens is the best Star Wars since Star Wars. Definitely.

As insights into the cultural trends of 2015 go, YouTube's annual list of its most popular videos is perhaps the most interesting. After all, falling down the YouTube rabbit hole in a spiral of viral videos, epic lolz, and squandered afternoons is an occupational hazard for anyone that spends their days sat in front of a computer.

While last year's list (excluding music videos) was topped by the frankly terrifying "Mutant Giant Spider Dog," this year the slightly more palatable Heaven King dance crew performing choreography to Silento's "Watch Me" took the top spot for the biggest "trending" video of 2015. That's based a combination of views, shares, comments, and likes, rather than just straight up view counts. Those with children will no doubt have suffered this video and others on repeat ad nauseum throughout the year. And for those that don't, count yourself lucky you don't know what a "stanky leg" is.

Perhaps more surprising is what's at number two: the live-action Clash of Clans Revenge Super Bowl commercial featuring Liam Neeson. For those that don't know, Clash of Clans is a freemium mobile MMO strategy game developed and published by Supercell that's one of the most profitable and popular mobile games of all time. Liam Neeson is famous for speaking gruffly into a telephone and threatening to kill people. Combine the two and, well, you've got over 83 million views and pure YouTube gold. That also makes the Clash of Clans ad the most popular gaming video for year,too.

In an effort to enforce no-fly-zones across the city, Tokyo's Metropolitan Police Department is launching a drone squad. According to Japan Today (via Popular Science), the squad will patrol no-fly-zones and "will search for the operators and order them to ground the drones."

If an operator fails to comply, police will scramble large drones up to 10 feet long armed with cameras and nets to take down the unwanted machines. There's no word yet on whether said tactics will be accompanied by a perfectly-timed blast of The A-Team theme tune, though—we can but dream.

Despite the humorous name, the drone squad will take on some serious issues in Toyko. "Terrorist attacks using drones carrying explosives are a possibility," a senior member of the police department's security bureau told the Asahi Shimbun website. "We hope to defend the nation's functions with the worst-case scenario in mind."

Spotify may soon allow musicians to reserve their albums for paying subscribers only, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal. Currently, music must be made available to both paying subscribers and those using the free ad-supported service, something which has proved to be a sticking point for artists like Taylor Swift, who pulled her entire catalogue from the service last year.

According to Spotify's artist guidelines, the service pays between $0.006 and $0.0084 per stream to rights holders, but notes that "the effective average per-stream payout generated by our Premium subscribers is considerably higher." If artists are able to focus their efforts purely on Spotify's 20 million paying users, the amount they earn per-stream might be reasonable enough to encourage artists like Taylor Swift to re-join the service.

The report adds that Spotify will be implementing the change with one artist initially in order to investigate how the approach might affect usage and subscription sign-ups. Who that artist might be remains up for discussion, but Spotify is said to have been in talks with Coldplay and the album "Head Full of Dreams." The deal fell through because the group's management couldn’t guarantee that it could keep the album off other free sites such as YouTube, according to the WSJ's sources.

Night Dive Studios—the group behind the recent System Shock Enhanced Edition and new owner of the System Shock IP—recently teased that it was in talks about a possible sequel to the legendary System Shock 2. Thanks to some enterprising members of the public, that sequel has now been outed: System Shock 3 is in the works and being developed by Otherside Entertainment, the small studio currently developing Underworld Ascendant.

As discovered by a member of the RPG Codex forum, System Shock 3 was supposed to be the big reveal at the end of a countdown timer started on Otherside Entertainment's website yesterday. The countdown timer, which is still live, sits on a cryptic teaser page with a flickering letter "S" and a countdown clock with just over five days remaining. While it's possible that the countdown could be for another project, the discovered page, as well as the link to sign up to the System Shock 3 mailing list appear conclusive.

Notably, Otherside Entertainment was founded by Paul Neurath, who also co-founded original System Shock creator Looking Glass Studios. Other members of the team include developers who worked on System Shock 2, Thief, Dishonored, and Bioshock Infinite, the latter being the last game from System Shock 2's director Ken Levine.

Those fancy fairy lights you've lovingly draped over the Christmas tree might look pretty, but they could be causing slower Wi-Fi speeds, UK telecoms regulator Ofcom has warned.

The watchdog has added the festive lights to the likes of baby monitors and microwave ovens as troublesome electronics that may cause interference to 2.4GHz Wi-Fi signals. It estimates up to six million homes and offices could improve the quality and performance of their Internet connection by removing the offending electronics.

To help Wi-Fi users find out if their connection is suffering from interference, Ofcom has released the "Ofcom Wi-Fi Checker" app for Android and iOS. It performs two tests for data loss and data delay across your network, and tells you how well your Wi-Fi network is performing.

Certain third-party CPU coolers could damage Skylake CPUs and motherboards thanks to Skylake's thinner construction, according to a report by German tech website Games Hardware. In independent testing, the site found that the pressure exerted by some popular coolers caused the structurally weaker Skylake CPU to bend, thus damaging the motherboard's delicate pins and contacts.

The problems appear to stem from the substrate used in Skylake's construction, which is noticeably thinner than that of previous-generation chips. Noctua, EK Water Blocks, Scythe, Arctic, Thermaltake, and Thermalright, commenting to Games Hardware about the issue, suggested that damage from overly high mounting pressure is most likely to occur during shipping or relocation of a system. Some are recommending that the CPU cooler be removed altogether before a system is shipped.

So far, only Scythe has offered a solution to the problem. A post on its support page notes that it will be redesigning the mounting mechanism for Skylake CPUs by offering new screws to reduce the mounting pressure. The change only affects coolers that use its H.P.M.S mounting system, with the company saying that its coolers are "compatible with Skylake sockets in general." Scythe will send a set of upgraded screws for free to existing customers.

Last week, publisher Koei Tecmo made a surprisingly frank admission on Facebook that the upcoming Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 wouldn't be released in the EU or US because it was worried about how Western audiences would react to the way the game depicts women. Given that it features a sun-tanning system, "butt fights" between bikini-clad ladies, and a horrifyingly ambitious physics model, it's not all that surprising Koei Tecmo spoke up.

"Do you know many issues happening in video game industry with regard to how to treat female in video game industry?" read part of the the now-deleted Facebook post. "We do not want to talk those things here. But certainly we have gone through in last year or two to come to our decision."

The publisher has since taken to Twitter to distance itself from the Facebook post, claiming that the Koei Tecmo employee posting on Facebook was speaking out of line.

Usually it's just PC players that get stiffed when it comes to launch day bugs—the disastrous Arkham Knight port being a prime example—but Just Cause 3 is reportedly causing problems on PC and console. Reports are coming in from multiple media outlets and Reddit users that JC3 is suffering from random frame rate drops, crashes, and disappearing oceans, to name just a few problems.

An early analysis of the the Xbox One version from NX Gamer claims that playing the game for more than hour leads to loading times of over 15 minutes, with the frame rate dropping to as low as 17FPS. NX Gamer also experienced multiple crashes—which is a particularly big problem for a console game—and other problems which could only be resolved by a full system reboot.

"This just looks like memory leakages where it's clearing out RAM," NX Gamer's video analysis says. "Some of the AI goes mad, the physics can react really oddly, and unfortunately on top of all these problems, the performance with a game that's totally designed around blowing stuff up and having this chaotic world doesn't perform very well at all."