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Netskope, a security service edge provider, just published their new Cloud and Threat Report, which examines the past 12 months of malware downloads from the cloud and web. Research shows that there’s been a 450 percent yearly increase in malicious PDF phishing downloads, with attackers using search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to improve the ranking of malicious PDF files on search engines such as Google and Bing. These files often take the form of fake file sharing requests, fake invoices, or even fake Captchas that redirect users to phishing, spam, scam, and malware websites....

Musk charged into Twitter HQ late last week with a sink under his arm and his sights set on removing execs, including CEO Parag Agrawal. He’s now looking at changes to the service, starting with the verification process. “The whole verification process is being revamped right now,” Musk tweeted yesterday. According to The Verge and Platformer, this will involve making Twitter Blue—the optional $4.99 per month subscription that gives users extra features—more expensive, but it will also verify subs....

Twitter has been chaotic since Musk took over just over 50 days ago: firing executives and half the staff, the verified account/Twitter Blue shambles, lawsuits, an EU warning about helping Vladimir Putin, advertisers leaving, fighting with Apple, and banning accounts, including those of journalists. Around 14 hours ago, Musk tweeted another poll that would influence decisions at one of his companies; he sold a tenth of his Tesla shares based on the outcome of a 2021 poll and reinstated Twitter accounts, including Donald Trump’s, last month after more people voted Yes....

The second largest cryptocurrency by market cap has lost nearly a quarter of its value over the past week. Ethereum reached a seven-day high of $3,879 on January 4 before shedding several hundred dollars in value the following day. By Monday morning, Ethereum had dipped to around $2,939 before recovering slightly to $3,044.13 where it sits as of this writing. The high on Wednesday to the low earlier today translates to a 24....

Videogameschronicle reports that a group of community developers called Harbour Masters has been working on the Zelda port, which is now 90% complete and could arrive as soon as mid-February. The port builds on the work of the Zelda Reverse Engineering Team whose two-year project saw it decompile the Ocarina of Time’s code. A similar method was used to create the Super Mario 64 PC port from 2020. “We’ve been hoping to be complete by the middle of February and use a month or so until April 1st to refine the game before release,” said Harbour Masters developer ‘Kenix,’ adding that work on the PC port started almost as soon as Ocarina of Time was completely reverse engineered....

Right now, with the latest drivers, it seems that Nvidia has a slight edge over AMD, and this was particularly evident when looking at the ultra quality results with 4xMSAA enabled. This is surprising given that Far Cry 3 is part of AMD’s Gaming Evolved program and is featured in their latest Never Settle gaming bundle. Considering that, it seems reasonable to assume AMD’s drivers would already be quite mature, and the company has previously boasted that Far Cry 3 is optimized for Radeon graphics cards....

Despite being the series flagship, the GTX 980 is arguably the less interesting product. While it offers 23% more cores for a ~20% performance boost, the GTX 980 costs 70% more than the GTX 970. Along with providing a better value, the GTX 970 also outcompetes the Radeon R9 290X by offering better power consumption. Those factors have made the GTX 970 an obvious pick for many, but at $330 it’s still somewhat expensive when most gamers spend $200 or less on a GPU....

The Gaming Box is simple to set up, with plug-and-play functionality making it fast to switch between a docked setup for gaming, and a traditional ultraportable for work on the go. Power delivery, extra USB ports, and a very compact design are great complementary features as well, though its RGB lighting is a bit laughable. The best aspect to the Gaming Box, though, is its price. At $600 with the included GTX 1070 it’s a lot cheaper than the Razer Core, which sits at $500 without a graphics card....

Compared to the GTX 680, the GTX Titan averaged 42% faster in our frames per second testing and 29% faster in our frame time testing. At its worst, the Titan was only 10% faster than the GTX 680 in Crysis 3, but in games such as Far Cry 3, Sleeping Dogs and Hitman: Absolution, it was more than 50% quicker. It also dispatched the HD 7970 GHz Edition with an average of 30% more frames per second and 25% better frame latency....

The standard GTX 780 Ti delivered 77.2fps at 2560x1600 in Battlefield 3, 19% faster than the GTX 780, 14% faster than the R9 290X and 17% faster than the R9 290. Expanding on that, Gigabyte’s GTX 780 Ti OC averaged 83.6fps for a 23% lead over the R9 290X and 26% on the non-X version as well as 15% over the GTX 780 GHz Edition, which was still 12% faster than the normal GTX 780 and 7-10% faster than the 290s....

During the Google for Games Developer Summit keynote, Hartrell said the Steam alpha just launched for Chrome OS, making the longtime PC game store available on select Chromebooks. The executive, who serves as product director for games on Play/Android, said users could learn more about it on the Chromebook community forum. The issue is that Hartrell misspoke, and the Steam alpha hadn’t actually launched. In a follow-up post on the Chromebook forum, a Google representative said the Steam alpha for Chrome OS would be available to a small set of Chromebooks “soon....

Users will be able to examine this option before July 1 - the last deadline before G Suite users either start paying for Google Workspace or lose much of their data. Google has also directed those users to a survey which asks how they use G Suite. This could be an indication it’s still evaluating how it should design this new no-cost option. Google might not have known that many free users aren’t actually using G Suite’s features for business....

Intel Core i7-5960X (3.0GHz) x4 4GB Kingston Predator DDR4-2400 (CAS 12-13-13-24) Asrock X99 Extreme6 (Intel X99) Silverstone Strider Series (700w) Crucial MX200 1TB (SATA 6Gb/s) Nvidia GeForce Titan X (12288MB) Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti (6144MB) Gainward GeForce GTX 980 (4096MB) Gainward GeForce GTX 970 (4096MB) Palit GeForce GTX 780 Ti (3072MB) Palit GeForce GTX 780 (3072MB) HIS Radeon R9 390X (8192MB) HIS Radeon R9 390 (8192MB) AMD Radeon R9 295X2 (2x 4096MB) Gigabyte Radeon R9 290X (4096MB) Gigabyte Radeon R9 290 (4096MB) HIS Radeon R9 280X (3072MB) Microsoft Windows 8....

Meanwhile, the HIS Radeon HD 6850 IceQ X Turbo averaged 40fps, 8% faster than the GTX 460 and a standard HD 6850. The HIS Radeon HD 6870 IceQ X Turbo X Crossfire configuration gave us 52fps at 2560x1600, clocking in 2% behind the GTX 590 and 15% behind the HD 6990, while leading the HD 6970 by 18% and GTX 580 by 4%. Interestingly, in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat the HIS Radeon HD 6850 IceQ X Turbo Crossfire cards were only able to match the performance of the Radeon HD 6970 with an average of 44fps, making them 12% slower than the GTX 580....

The Hitachi SimpleTough was also slightly faster than the A-DATA SH93 in SiSoftware Sandra 2009. The margins were small but still a contrast to the results we saw earlier on. Overall performance was in line with what you’d expect from any USB 2.0 hard drive, though A-DATA’s SH93 came on top more often than not.

From your phone Android’s stock phone app should be the first thing to try. Go to your Contacts – we tried this on LG and Samsung phones, but depending on your phone’s brand it can be a little different – on the app, tap the Menu button > Manage Contacts > then select Merge. A screen with all repeated contacts will show up, so you can confirm which you want to merge one by one....

Information technology company HP announced plans to buy Poly for $3.3 billion, including the latter’s debt. The deal’s terms offer to pay $40 per share for Poly’s entire IP portfolio of hybrid work solutions, including its latest webcams, video conferencing monitors, and services. The deal is based on the increasing popularity of hybrid work environments worldwide. According to HP, 75 percent of office workers invest in their home setups to fulfill their needs....

Consumer group Euroconsumers recently reached a settlement with HP in which the printer manufacturer will pay up to $1.35 million to customers in four European countries over its enforcement of ink cartridge DRM in 2016. HP already agreed to similar pay-outs to customers on other continents. The trouble started when a firmware update for some of HP’s printers caused them to refuse ink cartridges from companies other than HP, identified by the lack of HP’s DRM chips....

We received an HP Victus equipped with an Intel Core i5-11400H CPU, RTX 3050 Ti laptop GPU (4 GB), 8 GB DDR4 (2 X 4 GB), 256 GB NVMe M.2 SSD and 70 Watt-Hour battery. This configuration will set you back around $930 depending on sale prices. All Victus laptops currently share the same 16-inch chassis and they mostly differ in internal configuration. The display is a 16.1" IPS FHD panel that comes in a 60Hz or 144Hz options (a mere $20 upgrade for the faster refresh rate)....

The design wasn’t the only impressive aspect of the HTC One. BoomSound brought powerful front-facing speakers to the handset, plus the Zoe-powered, UltraPixel-laden camera had a strong feature set that largely made up for merely average image quality. BlinkFeed was another major feature touted by HTC, integrating news and social media sources into an interesting, yet largely overlooked homescreen panel. In 2014, HTC is releasing the HTC One. Not the same HTC One from 2013, but the all new HTC One....