Hackers sympathetic to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) took over the United States Central Command’s Twitter (NYSE: TWTR) and YouTube accounts for about an hour on Monday and posted a number of inflammatory comments, photos, and videos before the Pentagon was able to disable its accounts.

Using the alias “CyberCaliphate,” the hackers tweeted repeated threats that ISIS would be coming for American soldiers and their families. The group also released several documents on Pastebin.com, including a list of work phone numbers of current Army officers as well as the email and mailing addresses of dozens of retired generals.

Most of the files appear to have already been publically available online. Noting that the pro-ISIS hackers did not compromise CENTCOM’s operational military networks and have had no operational impact, the U.S. Department of Defense said it was treating the incident “purely as a case of cybervandalism.”

While the Department of Defense’s effort to downplay the cyberattack is unsurprising, its failure to use common security measures to protect its social media accounts is troubling. According to the Wall Street Journal, the DoD manages the Twitter accounts of the nine U.S. combatant commands but the CENTCOM account allegedly did not even have two-factor verification enabled.

With Central Command responsible for overseeing the American air strikes against ISIS, the cyberattack amounts to a propaganda victory for the militants. Most embarrassing for the administration, CyberCaliphate carried out the security breach while President Barack Obama was busy giving a speech to the Federal Trade Commission on cybersecurity and identity theft.

The post ISIS Ally Hacks US Military’s Central Command Social Media Accounts appeared first on VR World.

When K-Pop star PSY released his single ‘Gangam Style’ in 2012 the hit song quickly went on to break records for view count, but now it looks as if PSY can add another record to his roster: breaking YouTube itself.

The Korean superstar didn’t take down YouTube. His song now has so many views on the video-sharing site, that it broke the site’s counter.

“We never thought a video would be watched in numbers greater than a 32-bit integer (=2,147,483,647 views), but that was before we met PSY,” YouTube posted on its Google Plus page.  “‘Gangnam Style’” has been viewed so many times we have to upgrade!”

PSY’s video holds the record as being the first to pass 2 billion views. However, his follow-up songs did not meet the same acclaim: “Gentleman” has only hit 762.2 million views while the Snoop Dog collaboration “Hangover” only has 162.3 million.

YouTube has said that it’s working on a fix to the 32-bit problem, but has not announced when this will be rolled out.

The post PSY’s ‘Gangam Style’ Breaks YouTube’s View Counter appeared first on VR World.

In a video titled, The Art of the Sizzle w/ David Bruce, HTC (TPE: 2498) satirically mocks the entire concept of the sizzle video that is designed to make you excited and intrigued by a simple video of a smartphone. There’s no doubt that HTC has participated in some of these sizzle videos, but the reality is that their competitors, namely Samsung, Nokia (now Microsoft), and Apple have really gotten the smartphone sizzle video down.

In fact, if you watch most smartphone introductions nowadays, you are almost guaranteed to watch some sort of a sizzle video in advance. Some companies like to focus on abstract angles and unique system features, while others simply try to make the phone look exciting by doing interesting motions and graphics alongside. A good example of this is Apple’s own iPhone 6 sizzle video. If that doesn’t give you a good idea of what’s in a smartphone sizzle video, then you can watch Samsung’s own Galaxy S5 introduction video.

The truth is that its actually quite hard to get a bunch of press and operators excited about a phone, especially since most phones nowadays are essentially the same phone with incremental upgrades and very little real innovation from one model to another. After all, it isn’t very profitable to be making major technological improvements from generation to generation. So, you need to focus on the exciting parts of the phone and accentuate them with the sizzle reel that gets people excited about your phone and gets their attention in preparation for the actual launch or actual unveiling in person or when people see them in stores.

Apple are the masters of these videos and I suspect that HTC is mostly mocking them with this video, however Samsung likes to do a lot of the same things that Apple does so it isn’t much of a stretch to consider Samsung part of this fad.

The post HTC Brilliantly Mocks the Smartphone Sizzle Video appeared first on VR World.

Didn’t get a chance to watch Oculus’ Oculus Connect conference? Well, now you can watch the most important parts of the conference online thanks to Oculus’ own YouTube channel. There are hours and hours of Oculus Connect content below, so be prepared to watch a lot of Oculus Connect, however, a lot of people anticipated John Carmack’s keynote which is over an hour and a half long. There are also keynotes from Oculus’ CEO Brendan Iribe as well as their Oculus Chief Scientist, Michael Abrash.

This is all possible thanks to Oculus selling 100,000 developer headsets to over 130 countries and enabling the VR industry. Oculus really believes that the future of VR is still going to be built around games and gaming thanks to 3D game engines. Oculus Connect’s goal is to enable both PC and mobile VR developers to get the best possible content and realism in VR. Part of this was also enabled by the newest version of the Oculus VR Rift Headset codenamed Crescent Bay. They also enabled such a broad developer base by doing things like open sourcing their original developer kit, the DK1 on Github.

The Oculus Connect videos provided below, compliments of Oculus’ YouTube Channel will appropriately fill you in on the state of VR right now from Oculus’ perspective and where they are going.

The post Inaugural Oculus Connect Videos Now on YouTube appeared first on VR World.

Update: In a new blog post, Twitch CEO Emmett Shear revealed that Amazon has indeed acquired the game-streaming service.

“Today, I’m pleased to announce we’ve been acquired by Amazon. We chose Amazon because they believe in our community, they share our values and long-term vision, and they want to help us get there faster.

“We’re keeping most everything the same: our office, our employees, our brand, and most importantly our independence. But with Amazon’s support we’ll have the resources to bring you an even better Twitch.”

A month ago Google was ready to buy up Twitch TV for the tune of $1 billion. Now it appears that Amazon, not Google, plans to snag the game-centric streaming service in an effort to pull the rug underneath the tech giant.

The Information reports that the deal is in “late stage talks” according to “two people close to the matter”, and that we could hear a formal announcement soon enough.

Nothing has been confirmed at the time of writing, and Google could very well still be planning on snagging Twitch.

Now that Google owns YouTube, adding Twitch to its roster could very well ignite a monopoly on streaming services. Google further received major flak from YouTube users after its poorly-managed Google+ integration into the service, and it stands to reason they may muddle up Twitch with the same attempts to cross social platforms with video streaming.

Amazon stands to make substantial gains if the deal is indeed true, as Twitch is quite influential in the gaming sector. It’s also quite lucrative, and the online-retailer-turned-hardware-maker could boost profits as well as have an impact in the gaming industry.

It will be interesting to see what happens, but Twitch users –and streamers — are no-doubt looking at this acquisition with trepidation, as big companies are wont to move things around (think of YouTube’s now-mandatory Google+ logins) and let the dust settle where it may.

The post Report: Amazon Buying Out Twitch TV (Update) appeared first on VR World.

The once popular social networking site Orkut just got the axe from Google. This website was incredibly popular with people BRIC countries, especially in Brazil and India. Because of those countries’ growth on the internet and the network’s popularity in those countries, it saw amazing growth over the past few years. Orkut itself was actually managed and run by Google Brazil and will continue to until the company shuts down all operations in September.

Google says that Orkut users will be able to save their data using Google Takeout if they wish to and will have until September to do so. Additionally, Google will not be accepting any new users for the social network starting today. They will also allow users to get a chance to switch over to Google+ but they’re not forcing any migrations like they did with YouTube and the commenting system. Speaking of YouTube, the reasons that Google cited for Orkut’s demise have to do with the fast growth and popularity of Blogger, Google+ and YouTube as social platforms. Which, while true, doesn’t make sense why Google would need to KILL Orkut.

Sure, Orkut is now 10 years old, and it seems as though Google has decided to kill Orkut on its 10th anniversary rather than give it a face lift. Google clearly believes that they are better off with Google+, YouTube and Blogger than they are with Orkut doing its own thing. I suspect that there are going to be a lot of pretty angry Brazilians when you consider that nearly 50% of the site’s traffic comes from Brazil alone. Sure, that’s a fairly scary statistic for a website that used to primarily serve people from the US, but it doesn’t change the fact that it was still getting traffic. Perhaps this is the perfect time to do so, make an unpopular decision while all of the Brazilians are distracted by their team playing in the World Cup and watching all of the games.

The post Google is Killing Orkut appeared first on VR World.

Google has finally released their findings of their ‘Google Video Quality Report‘ that we had talked about earlier this year which is really their YouTube Video Quality Report. Essentially, what Google went around and did was monitor which ISPs were delivering the best quality video service to their customers and how many of them were streaming in High Definition 720P (HD), Standard Definition 480P (SD) and Lower Definition sub-480P (LD). Google’s test takes a look at people’s video usage and how much of the overall video usage is HD video and then determines which ISP is capable of delivering HD video at a consistent level throughout the course of the month and the day. A simple explanation can be seen from the video Google has provided below.

Now that you’ve seen this polite and bubbly video that basically blames certain ISPs for causing video quality issues, you can also take a look at our own screenshots of Google’s YouTube Video Quality Report. Since we’re in San Diego, this report will mostly be Time Warner, Cox and AT&T Uverse since those are the three primary ISPs available in the entire county of San Diego. Additionally, we do have Webpass as a smaller ISP but they haven’t quite broken out into a major local ISP just yet. Even so, Webpass is clearly the fastest ISP in San Diego, which is why they share the YouTube HD Verified title along with Time Warner Cable and Verizon. The reason why Verizon is even on this list is because Verizon (unclassified) is actually Verizon’s business line service which tends to be fiber and is not offered in residential areas in San Diego. Not to mention, most of San Diego is served by Time Warner Cable and Cox with U-Verse coming in as a last option. Webpass is available, but they are slowly deploying their 100 Mbps service across the city but only to targeted areas where they can get a lot of customers with a single installation.

YouTube Shaming

As you can see, both AT&T’s Other (likely business) and U-Verse services are only deliver SD quality YouTube streaming bandwidth, along with CenturyLink (formerly Qwest) and Cox Communications. CenturyLink and Windstream are both delivering bandwidth to commercial customers, so naturally there isn’t going to be much traffic in the evening like you would see from Time Warner Cable, Webpass, AT&T or Cox. It is very easy to tell which ISPs are commercial and which ones are residential purely by the peak hours of usage.  Below, we’ve included all of the HD and SD charts because results will vary depending on where you live and some of you won’t be able to replicate this unless you manually change your location to San Diego and that isn’t linkable.

YouTube Comparison

The post Google Names and Shames in YouTube Video Quality Report appeared first on VR World.

Futuremark has today announced their new 3DMark DX11 benchmark called Sky Diver. Futuremark’s announcement of the new Sky Diver DX11 benchmark is clearly a pre-announcement ahead of Computex Taipei next week, which we’ll be covering for you from Taipei.  This makes Sky Diver the fourth benchmark as part of the 3DMark suite of benchmarks slotting in as the 2nd most strenuous test that 3DMark will offer cross-platform to PC and Mobile users ranging from smartphones all the way up to gaming desktops. Sure, it means that there’s yet another test to run, however this is a high-end test specifically designed to be able to run on gaming laptops and mid-range desktops and maybe even the ultra-highend tablet.

With the introduction of 3DMark Sky Diver, here’s how Futuremark’s 3DMark tests break down for different classes of hardware top to bottom (DX11 feature level 11 all the way down to DX11 feature level 9).

3DMark Tests:

Fire Strike, for high performance gaming PCs (DirectX 11, feature level 11)

Sky Diver, for gaming laptops and mid-range PCs (DirectX 11, feature level 11)
Cloud Gate, for notebooks and typical home PCs (DirectX 11 feature level 10)

Ice Storm, for tablets and entry level PCs (DirectX 11 feature level 9)

Futuremark will also be showing Sky Diver at Computex at multiple companies’ booths including ASUS, MSI, GIGABYTE, Galaxy, Inno3D, and G-Skill from  June 3 through June 7th. This will likely become the standard GPU benchmark for laptops where Firestrike is too strenuous and Cloudgate isn’t stressful enough. Anyone that has ever run both benchmarks would know that there is a huge gap between the two different benchmarks in terms of stress on the GPU and system as a whole, so it makes total sense that they would come out with it. We will be sure to include this test in our future benchmarks and to add it into our GPU benchmarks for middle to low end GPUs where Firestrike is may not be very useful.

The post Futuremark Releases, Beautiful, Sky Diver DX11 3DMark Benchmark appeared first on VR World.

Some places are calling this new acquisition rumor of Twitch.tv to be one that has YouTube as a suitor and others are calling it a Google acquisition. Ultimately, Google is the parent company even though it would directly associate with YouTube in terms of media delivery and sharing. Whether you say YouTube is acquiring Twitch or Google, the end result is that Twitch is getting acquired for $1 billion in cash according to Variety, an interesting source of M&A news. While I would certainly allow this rumor to mature and ferment a bit in the rumormill, this may actually be the most reasonable acquisition (and acquisition price) in quite some time.

Also, keep in mind that this rumor is likely a little bit off in terms of accuracy since Twitch.tv is actually a subsidiary of Justin.tv which is a much older site and serves all types of video traffic. In fact, it is a direct competitor with YouTube since it delivers live stream video feeds much like YouTube does now (YouTube didn’t offer this before). In fact, the Variety article mentions the fact that that Twitch.tv was born out of Justin.tv but they don’t acknowledge its direct ownership by Justin.tv (which is now incorporated as Twitch Interactive, Inc.). In fact, Twitch.tv is a higher ranked website globally than Justin.tv with Twitch.tv ranking 279th and Justin.tv 2742nd. But the real problem here is that I have a VERY strong feeling that there is a lot of cross-use of proprietary IP between Justin.tv and Twitch.tv and we’re likely looking at a full acquisition of Justin.tv and Twitch.tv as a whole by YouTube (or Google).

The reason why Google’s acquisition of Twitch.tv makes so much sense, even for $1 billion is the absolutely insane growth of game streaming and eSports. We just reported on Friday the fact that Dota 2’s International competition Prize pool had reached $5 million. Well, at the time of publication, it has already reached $5.7 million and likely has much further to go. And with games like Dota 2 reaching such crazy levels of prize pools there are sure to be more people watching these games get live streamed on services like Twitch.tv. Not just that, but with Google and YouTube’s infrastructure we could see a vast improvement in Twitch.tv’s functionality as well as upload capability which would allow a lot of streamers to upload their streams more easily to YouTube and simplify their income from online gaming/streaming.

While Twitch.tv’s earnings and profitability remain secret, I do believe that $1 billion is a fair price for the website and their audience of 43 million users. Sure, they’re no WhatsApp or Viber but they do have a very loyal and strong base and they are growing at a pace that is more than encouraging. Not to mention, there is already quite a significant amount of revenue streaming through Twitch.tv which a lot of apps like WhatsApp and Instagram simply didn’t have when they were acquired.

The post Google to Buy Twitch.tv for $1 billion in Cash? appeared first on VR World.

Ipsos OTX, a research and social strategy company, says sitting in front of the TV is still the preferred viewing experience. Eighty six percent of adults out of 15,551 in 20 countries are traditional couch potatoes.

According to their statistics, several respondents admitted to accessing video in multiple ways. The company quotes 27 percent as streaming/downloading TV/video via computer, 16 percent streaming Internet video to TV, 16 percent are using DVR/recording devices to view video entertainment, and only 1710 in 15.5 thousand watching on mobile.

Depending on the method of watching entertainment, the results resemble a roller coaster, up and down depending on the modality.

As expected, viewing methods vary according to age group. Seniors between 50 and 91 years old rarely watch on any unit other than live TV. Middle aged folks between 35-49 are ranked at 88 percent while the younger, under-35 crowd, prefer more technological methods of viewing.

In contrast, and as expected, the last group has the highest use of newer modes of watching via computer/laptops. Seniors drop to 17 percent in this category. Streaming from the Internet follows a similar pattern with under 35’s at 20 percent and the next two groups dropping below that. Those 50-64 are minimal users registering only 5 percent.

The least used mode of viewing video is the DVR or similar recording device, but here seniors are at the top of the list. Obviously they are having to save those late, late shows that run after they are all nestled snug in their beds for viewing at a more convenient time.

Since this is a worldwide set of statistics it is difficult to quantity what is really going on in any given circumstance or group. However, statistics are always interesting … aren’t they?

The post Live TV Viewing Out Weighs Streaming Video appeared first on VR World.

G4Saurus is enjoying a big can of Whoopas ;)

Pun is definitely intended, and personally, the world would be a better place if the author didn’t mention some of the things which ATI copied badly (anyone remembers the historical SNAFU patchwork called Crossfire pass-through cable… ah, right. Never existed), but the video is a laugh. Over the past several years, it looks like we haven’t seen anything but bashing of the red team, and now the time has come to hit the beach and enjoy the sweet taste of success. And of course, payback is a beach.
You can view the video here.
P.S. Please don’t send any e-mails about the word “beach” in the title. You all know what I meant

The post ATI vs. Nvidia: Payback is a beach appeared first on VR World.