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The ban is one of several implemented by The Taliban since it returned to power in Afghanistan in August last year following the collapse of the US-backed government and the withdrawal of American troops. Music, movies, TV soap operas and channels, and over 23 million websites have all been banned for their “immoral content.” The decision to ban PUBG and TikTok because they were leading Afghanistan’s youth “astray” was announced in April....

Thief was another big title of 2014 and we had to wait till the GTX 980 Ti was released before it could be enjoyed at over 60fps at 2560x1600. The GTX 1080 takes things to the next level, with a 41% performance boost averaging 90fps, while we run into a system bottleneck at 1366x768. Watch Dogs is still a visually impressive title, though when using the GTX 1080 it does start to show its age as frame rates hovered above 100fps at 2560x1600....

The Armor A30 appears to have the most clever installation procedure. Although the process is still more complicated than a larger tower case, it is very efficient for a mini case. You have to remove the top of the case by undoing three thumbscrews. This is a quick and easy process. Once the top is off, you must remove six standard screws and five thumbscrews from the power supply cage to gain access to most of the case....

The Level 10 GT also excels in cable management and we found it extremely easy to keep things tidy with the holes in the motherboard tray. It’s worth noting that the right case door has a bulge for extra wide connectors and cables to be stored, and there are tabs on the motherboard tray for cable ties. To be perfectly honest, we found no problems with the layout of the Level 10 GT....

Apple patched a severe vulnerability in macOS Monterey last October, but older versions remain susceptible to a code injection method that can break a Mac wide open. There are no known cases of attackers using the exploit, but it could leak sensitive information or grant a hacker elevated privileges. The exploit can bypass two principal security measures Apple designed to stop malicious code from spreading through a system. The first, macOS Sandbox, is supposed to confine malicious code to the app that it has infected....

CPU-wise we’re looking at four 1.33 GHz ‘Silvermont’ cores, with a Turbo Boost of 1.86 GHz when higher single-thread performance is needed. There’s an Intel Gen 7 HD Graphics GPU clocked at 667 MHz, plus a dual-channel LPDDR3 controller that’s paired with 2 GB of 1067 MHz RAM. Bluetooth 4.0 and dual-band Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/g/n make up the tablet’s connectivity; there’s no LTE/HSPA+ model available, which some users will find disappointing....

iSkin Aura 2 Case iSkin describes their Aura 2 iPad case as a premium multi-function folio. The brushed metallic navy blue Aura 2 features the same auto-sleep technology used in Apple’s Smart Cover where the display turns off when the cover is closed but the real selling point of this case is the superb craftsmanship and the ability to transform into a typing stand or a viewing stand with ease....

The deep dive, which involves every top 10 list published since late June 2021, reveals that TV shows account for roughly 75 percent of viewing. That may be surprising, but it makes more sense when you consider TV shows are longer than movies and thus tend to stay in the top 10 list for longer. The publication further noted that due to Netflix’s penchant for binge releasing entire seasons at once, shows don’t stay in the top 10 for every long....

The long-running saga of Musk’s attempt to buy Twitter ended recently. The world’s richest man once again blamed the decision on Twitter’s alleged refusal to prove that the number of fake accounts on the platform constitutes less than 5% of its entire userbase. Musk claimed this represented a material breach of the deal, allowing him to walk away without paying the $1 billion termination fee. Twitter’s lawyers wrote in its Delaware-filed suit that Musk “refuses to honor his obligations to Twitter and its stockholders because the deal he signed no longer serves his personal interest,” adding that the company was suing him to fulfill his legal obligations....

In an interview with Axios, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot said some of Ubisoft’s games will cost the same price as the competition. “The big AAA games will come at $70,” he said. It was back in 2020 when 2K Sports set an unwelcome precedent by announcing NBA 2K21 would cost $70 for the standard edition on the now current-gen consoles. A couple of weeks later, Ubisoft confirmed that all of its games over the holiday period, including Watch Dogs: Legion and Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, would be priced at the usual $60....

As the story goes, Atari developed a sequel to Marble Madness and created a handful of prototypes for internal focus group testing in the early 90s. Feedback wasn’t all that hot, however, and Atari reportedly blamed it on the game’s trackball controls. Another prototype was made with an updated control scheme that replaced the trackball with a joystick and accelerator button but it didn’t fare much better. Rather than try a third time, Atari scrapped the game and moved on to another project....

On Monday, Seattle Judge John C. Coughenour rejected Valve’s bid to end an antitrust case over Steam. Coughenour said it is plausible that Valve is abusing Steam’s top position in the market to stop developers from lowering their prices elsewhere. The core of this case concerns why games tend to have the same price on Steam and other stores despite some of them, like the Epic Games Store, taking smaller cuts....

Testing with Just Cause 3 at 1080p using the maximum in-game quality settings shows no difference in performance when comparing the 2GB vs. 4GB cards, so obviously the same was found for the 4GB vs. 8GB comparison. Now at 2560x1600 we find that Just Cause 3 consumed 3.4GBs of VRAM when available and yet despite that the GTX 960 delivered much the same performance using either the 2GB or 4GB card....

AMD has overcome Intel in terms of performance before, but previous wins against the chip giant have been rare over the years. Furthermore, every time Intel looked inferior, it responded swiftly and effectively. The story last time Jump into a time machine and go back to 2005 if you want to witness the last time AMD thoroughly thumped Intel in terms of performance. It was the new dual-core Athlon 64 X2 that managed to impress reviewers back then, making the Intel Pentium 4 and related Pentium D processors look positively dated....

It was almost exactly one year ago when Boston Dynamics introduced Stretch. Unlike some of the company’s other machines, such as the quadrupedal Spot and humanoid-like Atlas, Stretch has a specific use case. Its robotic arm and smart vacuum gripper allow it to pick up, move, and put down warehouse boxes weighing up to 50 pounds, while the base lets it move in any direction and even tackle ramps. But no backflips or parkour....

When Warner Bros unveiled Gotham Knights in August 2020, it was supposed to come out on current and last-gen consoles alongside a PC version. It was set to launch at an unspecified date in 2021. In March 2021, the studio announced it was delaying the game until 2022 but said nothing about canceling last-gen versions. In March, WB finally announced a solid release date of October 25, 2022. Again, last-gen versions appeared to be on track — at least the developer didn’t indicate otherwise....

Prediction 1: Device Categories Start to Disappear One of the key metrics for the relative health of the tech industry has always been the measurement of unit shipments and/or revenues for various categories of hardware-based tech devices. From PCs, tablets and smartphones, through smartwatches, smart TVs and head-mounted displays, there’s been a decades-long obsession with counting the numbers and drawing conclusions from how the results end up. The problem is, the lines between these categories have been getting murkier and more difficult to distinguish for years, making what once seemed like well-defined groupings become increasingly arbitrary....

That isn’t to say they have poor cooling performance, it’s just that you’ll have to invest in a few extra fans to see it. Anyone putting mid-range to high-end hardware in these cases will want to account for the cost of at least two more 120mm fans. Those trying to build the cheapest rig possible without cutting corners on quality should check out the Carbide 100R. Although it’s Corsair’s most affordable case, it has many of the attributes that made the company’s pricier cases so popular....

It’s almost always better to purchase a last-generation high end phone over a current mid-range device in the $200 to $300 market. Here we see a mix of new mid-range devices competing against last generation flagships that are still sold new but at new reduced prices, and these usually win. Flagship phones from a year or two ago routinely pack better hardware, superior cameras, better performance, and more software features....

As we learned back in September, Intel effectively ripped out Hyper-Threading and dropped a memory channel with the Core i5. However, after completing extensive testing we found that in most situations the lack of HT technology is not an issue, while the dual-channel memory controller provides ample bandwidth. Furthermore, when comparing clock for clock performance between the Core i5 and Core i7 processors there was very little in it, which was surprising....