Kevin Mitnick, one of the most famous computer hackers in the world and the subject of an over two-year manhunt in the 1990s, died of complications from pancreatic cancer last Sunday, aged 59. His death has been confirmed to the New York Times.

Mitnick is a legendary figure, one of those people whose life story reads like an elaborate work of fiction. After getting his start with a punch card machine that let him get free bus rides at age 12, he graduated to phone phreaking and hacking as he got older, breaking into networks owned by corporations like the Digital Equipment Corporation. The police weren’t too keen on that, and he was sentenced to a year in prison and three years of supervised release in 1988.

He almost made it through, but right toward the end of his supervis…

My biggest gripe with current PCs is excessive power consumption. Second to that is the heat generated by NVMe SSDs. A motherboard with an acre of metal covering half the board, or SSDs cooled by tower heatsinks with tiny fans is just not what I want to see. It’s not like Gen 5 x4 SSDs deliver tangible performance improvements anyway.

That’s why the news (via Tom’s Hardware) of Intel’s efforts to create a bandwidth controller driver to address these issues is concerning. This driver has been developed for Linux users with the aim of controlling thermal issues inherent to high bandwidth PCIe devices by reducing PCIe link speed when necessary.

Phoronix reports the driver should incorporate a mechanism to reduce the link width of PCIe Gen 6 devices. So, a Gen 6 x4 drive could r…

Get out of the way silicon, you’re not our top transistor anymore. We’ve had enough of your inability to maintain electrical properties at tiny scales. That’s right, we’re leaving you. Moving onwards and upwards onto better things that can truly grow with us. To put it simply: it’s not us, it’s you. We’re probably going to have to rename that valley, too.

We’ve had a really good run with silicon, but companies like TSMC have been seeking alternatives for a while, largely as a way of trying top keep up with Moore’s law. Moore’s law observed that the number of transistors able to be manufactured on silicon doubled approximately every two years, while the cost of computers fell. 

This remained true for a long time, but is petering out. Some companies like Nvidia consider i…

If you think your folder of Sims 4 custom content is stuffed, its upcoming competition Life By You wants to attract even more mods to clog your downloads folder. Life By You envisions itself as a highly customizable modder’s paradise, and unlike the tension that can exist between The Sims 4 and Patreon-funded modders, Life By You says “monetize all you want—you don’t owe us a dime.”

In a recent interview with PC Gamer, Life by You creative director Rod Humble, who was previously head of The Sims and Second Life, took a totally permissive view of modding in general. “Player creativity is good for us,” Humble said. “It’s good for us [even if] we don’t make a dime because it was made using our game.

“If you make a YouTube series made using Life By You, I want you to know:…

Well, we finally got a big, long look at Starfield. It’s great to get a better sense of what the game really is, but it’s frustrating to see Bethesda retreading a load of the same old flaws its games have been suffering from for decades now. Nowhere is that more evident than the companion system.

As soon as Bethesda’s presentation moved to NPC friends, I got the heebie-jeebies. Though the studio boasts of improved animations, Starfield’s glassy-eyed characters still sit firmly in the uncanny valley, miles behind their contemporaries in other big budget games. That’s fine when all they’re doing is offering me quests or delivering exposition, but for the love of God don’t ask me to form relationships with them.

Companions are the characters that’ll actually follow you around, …

Sleek, powerful and decisively good looking—these are just a few words I’d use to describe myself and the ROG Zephyrus G14 2024. I recently reviewed the RTX 4070 model of this excellent gaming laptop, and not a few months later its cheaper sibling is enjoying a hefty discount.

The ROG Zephyrus G14 with an RTX 4060 is on sale for $1,350 over at Best Buy, a discount of $250.

That’s an important discount, as it’s possible to find much more affordable RTX 4060 gaming laptops if you’re looking hard enough (or save yourself the hassle and read our cheap gaming laptop deals page). The Zephyrus G14 promises more luxury, and that’s why it’s usually more money.

The new G14 for 2024 is an entirely different beast to last year’s model. It’s been redesigned from the …

As someone with an occasionally dodgy internet connection, videogames that require an internet connection even for solo play is a regular source of frustration. So I was very happy to hear that BioWare’s upcoming Dragon Age: The Veilguard will not require an internet connection to play, nor will it offer any sort of microtransactions.

The previous Dragon Age game, Inquisition, used a website called Dragon Age Keep for players to configure the world state they wanted—essentially a way to carry over the decisions you made in the previous Dragon Age games (and their consequences) without uploading old saves. In a recent interview with IGN, game director Corinne Busche said The Veilguard will not make use of Dragon Age Keep, but will instead have a built-in system that provides …