Protocol reports that a series of patents was recently granted to Meta that may give us an idea of how the company could one day monetize the metaverse. Some of the technology does sound enticing and has the potential to make the metaverse more immersive: a magnetic sensor system for wearing around the torso to track movements and a photo analyzer that can recreate skin textures to create a virtual avatar identical to your physical form—if that’s what you’d want....

When Meta begins allowing the broad sale of digital assets in its Horizon Worlds VR experience, it will take a whopping 47.5 percent cut from content creator revenue. This factors in both the Meta Quest Store’s 30 percent cut and a separate 17.5 percent cut from Horizon World itself. That’s almost a 50 percent slice of the pie for Meta, which is absolutely massive and far beyond what most other content distribution platforms usually charge for their services....

What will the world look like after the bombs fall? Can God exist in a place without hope? When man’s desire to survive overrides his morality, is the empire he constructs worth saving? Those are some of the questions raised by Metro: Last Light. The (cheery!) first-person shooter is Russian studio 4A Games’ follow-up to their flawed 2010 gem, Metro 2033. The Metro games are based on the works of author Dmitry Glukhovsky; the first game was based on his novel of the same name, and while the sequel isn’t based on a specific work, it directly carries on the first game’s storyline....

Xbox Game Pass Friends & Family lets members share their subscription with up to four friends and family members, and each account receives the usual benefits of Game Pass Ultimate such as access to over 100 games, EA Play membership, and console multiplayer. Group members will also have their own achievements and cloud saves, as each person uses their own account and Xbox profile. As the plan can be shared across five accounts, it amounts to less than €5 per user, which is certainly reasonable when compared to the €12....

AV-Comparatives, a leading organization in security software testing, recently released its latest Malware Protection Test for consumer antivirus software. The test compared major antivirus products with a defined set of malware samples, collecting logs and results about the software capabilities to detect and protect users against infection. The list of tested products in the Malware Protection Test for September 2022 included well known names in the security business like Avira, AVG, Avast (which are now all part of the Norton LifeLock product family), Bitdefender, Kaspersky and many more....

The Surface 3 is powered by an Intel Atom x7-Z8700, which is one of Intel’s new 14nm Cherry Trail SoCs built on the company’s 14nm manufacturing process. The chips are a decent upgrade on the Bay Trail products we’ve seen in the market since 2013, bringing faster CPU cores, better power management and faster graphics along with full 64-bit support. The Atom x7-Z8700 features four Airmont CPU cores clocked at 1....

Microsoft has not divulged Xbox sales since 2016, but a probe out of Brazil prompted the colossal tech firm to put forward a general stat. The Administrative Council for Economic Defense (CADE) is questioning Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard to determine whether the deal gives the tech titan an unfair advantage in the gaming sector. According to the machine-translated document, Microsoft claims that during the last-generation console wars, PlayStation 4 outsold Xbox One by a factor of two....

Our custom WinRAR compression test strongly favored the Intel platforms with the Core i3 taking 130 seconds to complete the 700MB compression test. That’s 42% faster than the quickest A75 solution in our test, which finished in 225 seconds. When testing with Adobe Photoshop CS5, the Z68M-ITX/HT and i3-2120 was only 11% faster than the A75M-ITX and A8-3850.

The Motorola Droid Bionic has had a storied past, despite just being released a couple of days ago. It was originally announced way back at the CES trade show in January, though it was a very different looking smartphone back then. Motorola went back to the drawing board and redesigned the Bionic to what we have today: a 4G LTE phone that could be a doppelganger for the already-released Droid X2....

As the software included with the Style is vanilla, you’re not getting a whole ton of new features baked into the operating system. However, Motorola does provide a useful app with the device called Moto that includes some functionality that’s worth setting up and exploring. One of the most useful features included is called Moto Display, which shows snippets of notifications and the time on the display as soon as you pick up your phone, wave your hand over the display, or remove it from your pocket....

Since the GS40 was released, MSI has tweaked their display profile to more accurately conform to the sRGB spectrum. This display is still limited to 88% sRGB coverage, but the white point has been improved to near-accurate levels, with much better greyscale and gamma performance. The trade-off here is a slight reduction in maximum brightness, which now sits at 288 nits, with a contrast ratio of 1:970. Color accuracy is reasonable, but limited as the display cannot produce the entire sRGB spectrum....

All kidding aside, the GS63VR 6RF Stealth Pro is the latest in MSI’s thin and light 15-inch gaming laptop series. Like essentially all gaming laptops on the market today, the GS63VR uses current-generation GeForce 10 graphics and Intel Core i7 processors, along with modern technology like Thunderbolt 3 and PCIe storage. The hardware in this laptop is, first and foremost, geared towards performance. Unlike other laptops from MSI and its competitors, though, the GS63VR tries to cram this powerful hardware in a portable chassis....

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has successfully completed the seventh and final stage of telescope alignment and is ready to move to the science instrument commissioning phase. In announcing the milestone, the space agency said it has confirmed that Webb is capable of capturing crisp, well-focused images with each of its four onboard science instruments: the near-infrared camera (NIRCam), the near-infrared spectrograph (NIRSpec) and the fine guidance sensor / near infrared imager, the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) and the slitless spectrograph (FGS/NIRISS)....

Researchers have just revealed a new zero-day vulnerability in Microsoft Office, which the infosec community has dubbed Follina. It allows attackers to execute Powershell commands via Microsoft Diagnostic Tool (MSDT) once a malicious Word document is opened. What makes this vulnerability especially dangerous is that it completely bypasses Windows Defender detection, works without elevated privileges and doesn’t require Office macros to be enabled. So far, it’s been confirmed to be present in Office 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, and a few versions included with a Microsoft 365 license on both Windows 10 and 11....

Folio Photonics announced a new method for optical disc storage this week that could make hard drives bigger and cheaper than ever. Using new materials and manufacturing techniques, the company says it can offer storage at $5 per terabyte, and eventually $1 per terabyte. The best hard drives are currently five times more expensive at around $25 per terabyte. The new optical discs feature dynamic multi-layer write/read capabilities, which previously hadn’t been cost-effective at the enterprise scale....

According to notifications placed on the German and Austrian versions of the PlayStation website, Sony is removing hundreds of titles from its servers, so even those that have bought the movies and shows will no longer have access to them. On August 31, Austrian customers are losing 137 titles, and Germany is losing a whopping 317, including Apocalypse Now, John Wick, Robocop, and the entire Saw series. Sony said it has to remove the content “due to [its] evolving licensing agreements with content providers....

Unlike some low-end handsets with imposibly long battery life, the Nokia X will need a charge every night so you don’t run out of juice the following day. Most days I ended with ~20-30% of the battery’s charge remaining. Obviously using the camera for longer periods, or making lengthy phone calls, will reduce this estimate. When gaming, you’ll be lucky to get three hours out of the Nokia X, as the 45nm SoC chews through 5....

A source familiar with the company’s plans told TechCrunch that Pei met with several key industry executives at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week and showed off a prototype version of the upcoming handset. The publication said it even viewed a photo of Pei meeting with Qualcomm’s CEO. Not a whole lot is known about Nothing’s debut phone at this stage, although the source did say it would share a similar design language with the company’s first product, a set of semi-transparent earbuds....

The GeForce GTX 480 SLI cards delivered 85% more performance compared to the 70% increase we received with the second Radeon HD 5870 board.

It was only a matter of time until Nvidia added a mainstream performance graphics card to its GTX 500 series, and today we have that product. Known as the GeForce GTX 560 Ti, this new graphics card will retail for $250, placing it in direct competition with the Radeon HD 6870. Earlier this month some users discovered the GeForce GTX 560 Ti when sifting through the leaked 266.44 GeForce driver....