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Speaking at a news conference, US Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and Deputy U.S. Attorney General Lisa Monaco announced that the government secretly infiltrated the Hive ransomware gang’s networks in July 2022 before launching a six-month monitoring operation. During this infiltration, the government was able to steal more than 300 decryption keys from Hive and distribute them to victims who were under attack, preventing around $130 million in ransom payments, including $5 million from a Texas school district....

The FBI, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the Department of the Treasury issued the joint warning to provide information on the Maui ransomware that has been infecting Healthcare and Public Health (HPH) Sector organizations since at least May 2021. Like other ransomware, Maui encrypts an infected system’s files with AES 128-bit encryption. In this case, it’s the servers responsible for healthcare services that are targeted. Impacted areas include electronic health records, diagnostics, imaging, and intranet....

The New York Post reports that the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is split on whether to levy an antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft’s attempt to buy Activision. Rather than face a split vote, the FTC might approve the deal. Sources told the Post that one member of the four-person FTC panel already favored the acquisition, and another recently leaned towards Microsoft. A 2-2 vote would effectively kill a lawsuit. In June, the FTC said it would examine the deal’s potential impact on workers....

The first menu lets you save, import and export a profile. Additionally, you can program the mode key profiles as well. In the ‘Setting’ menu the polling rate can be set, the N-key Rollover feature can be tweaked, and repeat rate acceleration as well as the repeat delay can be tuned. Next we have the lighting menu and here you can choose from 24 different pre-defined colors. Lighting effects can also be enabled while individual keys can be configured using the ‘single’ keyboard lighting option....

The Chaser MK-1 stands on four massive feet that lift it 35mm off the ground and can rotate out at a 90-degree angle for greater stability. Also under the case is a large dust filter that protects the power supply, as well as a 120mm fan grill should you care to install one. The Chaser MK-1 has a solid internal design with excellent cable management and plenty of easy to use tool-less components....

As a side note, before testing we made sure to use the latest firmware (including betas) on Windows 8 64-bit, which helped iron out some of the floaty or laggy input on a few of the devices. It’s also worth noting that we think the debate between optical and laser sensors is pointless for most gamers. Of the top pricing tier, we have the Logitech G700s ($70), the Razer Taipan ($62) and the Razer Naga 2014 ($77)....

A month later, we saw the release of the GeForce GTX 650 Ti ($150). Thanks to the use of the GK106 architecture, it offered considerably better performance as the larger die allowed for a more aggressive core configuration, improving texture fill rates by 75%. The GTX 650 Ti became our favorite $100 - $150 graphics card last year, as it thrashed the Radeon HD 7770. Meanwhile, AMD held on to the $150 - $200 price range with the Radeon HD 7850....

When breaking down the GeForce GTX 580 in terms of cost and performance the card still made sense despite its high asking price of $500. Keeping in mind the performance margins we just mentioned it was easy to justify the 11% markup when compared to the GeForce GTX 480. On the other hand, the card was a significant 47% more expensive than the Radeon HD 5870, but then again the performance gain was of a similar figure....

The GeForce GTX 570 was 8% more efficient than the GTX 480 and while it consumed a similar amount of power to that of the GTX 470 it was considerably more power hungry than the Radeon HD 5870 using 15% more power. Although the GeForce GTX 570 uses slightly less power than the GTX 580 they both operate at the same idle and load temperatures when using the Nvidia reference coolers....

For those familiar with Nvidia’s line-up, the performance results here are exactly as expected: the GTX 970M slots right in between the 980M and the 960M, with performance usually falling somewhere between the two. With results like this, it’s clear the 970M isn’t suited to 4K gaming, though it should be perfectly capable of gaming at 1440p or 1080p on high or ultra settings, depending on the title. Of the games not included in our benchmark suite, I played a bit of Fallout 4 on the P34W v5, and had no trouble achieving upwards of 45 FPS on the game’s high preset at 1440p....

As we learned a few months ago in our Asrock Z68 Extreme4 motherboard review, there isn’t much of a performance difference between Intel’s P67 and Z68 chipsets. Intel’s latest Cougar Point chip is more about bridging the gap between the H67 and P67. As you’ve probably gathered by now, SRT has been the focal point of Gigabyte’s Z68XP-UD3-iSSD because it’s the first motherboard we’ve seen ship with an on-board cache drive right out of the box....

But what about when you’re in the market for a new graphics card and prices are still sky high? Just how much better is one of the latest GPUs compared to an architecture that first appeared over four years ago? Well, read on to find out how one person’s upgrade choice all panned out. What card to get? Choices and decisions Everybody has different uses for their graphics card – for some, it’ll be purely for entertainment (gaming, watching videos), whereas for others it will be entirely work-based (rendering, video editing, compute workloads)....

Requests for content delisting from Google Search results recently reached an unprecedented milestone, passing the six-billion mark and highlighting the company’s strong will to cooperate with rightsholders. Mountain View regularly receives takedown orders on alleged pirate links from its earch index. Google grants the requests after a careful review of their validity. Google’s policy on copyright infringement, as outlined on its Transparency Report page, is consistent with the infamous Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and “provides a simple and efficient mechanism for copyright owners from countries/regions around the world....

Google’s annual developer conference will return to the Shoreline Amphitheatre this May, Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai has revealed. Google I/O 2022 will run from May 11-12. It’ll be conducted in front of a limited live audience and like last year’s event, will stream online. The “limited live audience” will apparently consist of select Google employees and some business partners, we’re told. So in other words, it’s mostly just an online event....

Alphabet Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai told staff that the cuts, which will impact jobs across all divisions of the organization, come after a rigorous review of the business. The CEO said he takes “full responsibility for the decisions that led us here.” Severance packages for US employees include at least 16 weeks of salary, their 2022 bonus, paid vacations, and six months of health coverage. Pichai thanked staff for “working so hard” and their “invaluable” contributions....

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 is an octa-core SoC with two quad-core Kryo 280 CPU clusters: one efficient cluster operating at 1.9 GHz, paired with a high-performance cluster at 2.45 GHz. The GPU is an Adreno 540 clocked up to 710 MHz, and there’s an LPDDR4X memory controller providing 29.8 GB/s of bandwidth. For connectivity, the Pixel 2 XL supports up to Category 15 LTE speeds (800 Mbps down, 75 Mbps up) through 4x4 MIMO, 3xCA and 256QAM, though Gigabit LTE is not supported....

Insider, citing two senior Google employees, reports that Google managers were informed of the company’s hiring slowdown last month. They were instructed by leaders to give back a percentage of their headcount grants for the third quarter. CEO Sundar Pichai reportedly sent an email to employees confirming the hiring reductions. “Moving forward, we need to be more entrepreneurial, working with greater urgency, sharper focus, and more hunger than we’ve shown on sunnier days,” he wrote....

Increasing the resolution to 1920x1200 shows just how demanding Absolution really is, as even the HD 7970 dips below 60fps on average, which was still 16% faster than the GTX 680’s 50fps. The old GTX 480 rendered 40fps, making it just a single frame faster than the GTX 660 Ti and HD 7870. Those hoping to play Hitman at this resolution on high will want nothing less than a GTX 660 or HD 7850....

We’ll power through how 3D models are transformed and how light sources are accounted for. The differences between vertex and geometry shaders will be thoroughly explored, and you’ll get to see where tesselation fits in. To help with the explanations, we’ll use diagrams and code examples to demonstrate how the math and numbers are handled in a game. If you’re not ready for all of this, don’t worry – you can get started with our 3D Game Rendering 101....

Our machine featured the upgraded 14.5" HD+ HP Radiance LED display running at 1600 x 900. While I personally love the increased resolution and colors were very vibrant, I couldn’t help but notice that whites seemed a bit too warm. I was able to adjust this to a more acceptable level using Windows 7’s calibration tools, but I can still tell a difference between the whites on the HP display and those of other notebook or LCD monitors....