China successfully launches first ever mission to Mars
The secretive space mission is called Tianwen-1 and is scheduled to land on Mars in seven months time. China has officially entered the Mars space race with the successful launch of Tianwen-1, an unmanned rover that will land sometime in February if all goes well. It would make China the...
Current in News
Metacritic combats game ‘review bombing’ with 36-hour delays to user scores
Metacritic, widely renowned as the ultimate review aggregator, is introducing 36-hour delays to user scores on new games in an effort to combat ‘review bombing.’ Metacritic is tightening its defence against premature user scores by implementing 36-hour delays to all new games on its platform. With a view to maintaining...
Twitter suffers massive bitcoin security breach
Accounts of huge companies and celebrities including Barack Obama and Apple have been compromised in the biggest Twitter hack ever. Over 300,000 verified Twitter accounts have been temporarily blocked from posting any content due to a huge, widespread cyber-attack by a bitcoin scammer. These users include huge international companies such...
The first human trial of potential coronavirus vaccine shows promise
Oxford University has partnered with pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca to produce a global coronavirus vaccine and hopefully begin delivering doses by the end of the year. After preliminary trial results revealed that Oxford University’s Covid-19 vaccine – called AZD1222 – appears to be safe, AstraZeneca has stated that it hopes to...
Is TikTok really an elaborate façade for Chinese spyware?
Cyber-experts are claiming that 2020’s number one app is a shady front for Chinese spyware and mass censorship. Suggestions that ByteDance’s ‘innocuous’ short-bite video app TikTok has all the makings of a totalitarian plot hatched by the Chinese government are looking more plausible by the day. Suffice to say, people are freaked. Months of bad...
Clown protests take Read Dead Online by storm
It’s been close to a year since Rockstar meaningfully expanded Red Dead Redemption 2, and players have started populating entire servers with clowns in protest. All is not well in the digital wild west. It’s been seven months since Red Dead Online’s ‘Moonshiners’ expansion dropped, and players are growing frustrated...
Chinese face-tracking tech bans foreigners from live streaming
A global inquest into TikTok has done little to deter China from pushing stricter censorship on its own soil. Official documents from TikTok’s parent company ByteDance have confirmed rumours that the viral video app is constantly running facial recognition technology to monitor and censor content on Douyin – China’s version of the platform. Douyin may appear innocuous on the surface, but Chinese streamers are subject to an intrusive regime of automated...
Russian hacking group attack vaccine researchers
According to British authorities, Russia is sponsoring hacking group APT29 who’re attacking British, US, and Canadian medical organisations. The UK’s National Cyber Security has publicly stated that drug companies and research groups focusing on a Covid-19 vaccine have been targeted by a hacker group called APT29. Known in hacking circles as the Duke or Cozy Bears, APT29 are sponsored by the Russian state and are considered a particularly troublesome collective...
Publishers to raise gaming prices for next gen
2K announced last week that NBA 2K21 will cost $70 USD on next-gen, setting a precedent for other publishers to increase prices - but it should come with a reduction in microtransactions. The regular pricing for video games could be seeing an increase as we move into the next generation of consoles, as 2K has announced it will be raising the price of NBA 2K21 by 10$ USD for...
Reddit must persist with alt-right purge despite ‘free speech’ concerns
Media efforts to combat hate is pressuring user-based platforms like Reddit and MeWe to follow suit, and rightly so. Since the 18th century we have used boycotting as a political weapon for good. In 1791 some 300,000 people abstained from buying any goods produced by slaves in the West Indies, demonstrating for the first time the undeniable influence of consumer action in bringing about tangible change. Today, with social media being...
