This week, Asus brings down the internet, Nvidia is bringing in Microsoft Game Studios, domains will cause problems, and YouTube videos are safe, for now.
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.
It's always a rough day for users when an internet-connected device unexpectedly goes offline. We remember just a few months ago when Insteon devices went dark without any warning or communication. Customers had no idea what was going on or if there was a way to recover any of the devices they had built their smart homes upon. What rises above this in terms of internet issues is having your router go offline with seemingly no issue or recognition of the problem. This is exactly what Asus router owners experienced this week.
Microsoft has announced another new partnership for its Microsoft Studios games, both current and future: Nvidia. This new partnership will bring Xbox Studios games to another Microsoft competitor, GeForce Now. The partnership will bolster the cloud gaming platform whose business model was forced to change after launch, while also giving Microsoft another outlet for sales of games. Plus, it will look good across the globe - especially in the UK.
A group petitions the ICANN every few years to introduce new Top Level Domains (TLD). These are the last part of a website we're familiar with and use daily. The most common, and the longest-lasting, are .com, .net, and .org. Recently, a new petition to add 8 new TLDs was submitted by Google. 6 of these TLDs are mostly innocuous, but 2 of them will make it easier for scammers to ruin your day (or more likely your parents).
This week, Google announced a new policy surrounding inactive Google accounts. The plan, according to a blog post is to purge accounts that have not been active for at least 2 years. The company has its reasons for the purge, but one concern remained: what would happen to YouTube videos for inactive accounts? Google has clarified and it did not go the way we expected.