This week, Big Tech wants to know who you see, Libra is trying to stay alive, and Bad Robot is coming back to television.
Scott is a developer who has worked on projects of varying sizes, including all of the PLUGHITZ Corporation properties. He is also known in the gaming world for his time supporting the rhythm game community, through DDRLover and hosting tournaments throughout the Tampa Bay Area. Currently, when he is not working on software projects or hosting F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Scott can often be found returning to his high school days working with the Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), mentoring teams and helping with ROBOTICON Tampa Bay. He has also helped found a student software learning group, the ASCII Warriors, currently housed at AMRoC Fab Lab.
Avram's been in love with PCs since he played original Castle Wolfenstein on an Apple II+. Before joining Tom's Hardware, for 10 years, he served as Online Editorial Director for sister sites Tom's Guide and Laptop Mag, where he programmed the CMS and many of the benchmarks. When he's not editing, writing or stumbling around trade show halls, you'll find him building Arduino robots with his son and watching every single superhero show on the CW.
One of the biggest stories to come out of the COVID-19 outbreak has been the announced partnership between Apple and Google. The two companies, which represent the vast majority of the mobile phone market, have come to whether to develop an app intended to help track the spread of the virus. This is accomplished through mobile Bluetooth beacon technology, which was originally intended for advertising. But, with a little change to the concept, it is going to used to determine whether you have come in contact with someone who has been exposed to the virus.
For many years, the unofficial test of a gaming PC's power was its ability to play the game Crysis. For a while, it was simply whether the game could be run on the system at all, but over time it became a test of what settings the game could be run on, and what framerate the game would then play at. That statistic quickly became a badge of honor among the gaming community. All of this was because of the incredible graphics - something that was far ahead of its time. It was almost as if the game was a time traveler, showing what the future of gaming might look like.
It's been almost a year since Facebook first announced its intentions to release a cryptocurrency called Libra. Almost immediately, the plan was met with concern from nearly everyone. Governments around the world saw the stable coin as a threat to their own control over the value of currencies. This was caused by the intent of the project - to tie the value of the stable coin to a bucket of investments, such as the US dollar, the Euro, as well as treasuries and securities. The move could reduce some of the control that central banks exert over their population through the controlled value of money, which might have been part of the plan.
Last September, WarnerMedia inked a deal with JJ Abrams and his production company Bad Robot to produce a wide variety of content, including TV, movies, and videogames through 2024. The full details of the deal were not revealed, but the beginning of the company's plans have been revealed this week, with three original programs being announced. The shows will be produced by Bad Robot, with Abrams acting as Executive Producer. The three new shows will all be distributed by Warner Bros. International Television Distribution and released under the HBO Max streaming service, which recently announced a partnership with Charter. The three announced shows are DC Justice League Dark, Overlook, and Duster.