Apple Is Trying to Prevent Radioshack Selling Your Data
Apple has joined AT&T and other companies in order to attempt to stop Radioshack selling private customer information.
Electronics retailer Radioshack filed for bankruptcy earlier this year. Customer information was originally part of the first round of bankruptcy liquidation, but was withdrawn.
However, in April, Radioshack asked the court to authorise another round, including the data of up to 117 million customers.
Apple has said that Radioshack cannot include Apple customer data in the auction, and has joined in filing a motion to block the sale.
Pegg Says Original Star Trek 3 Script Was “Too Star Trek-y”
Simon Pegg has been talking about his work behind-the-scenes on the forthcoming Star Trek movie, explaining that his script-writing duty was to make the sequel “more inclusive.”
Pegg has co-written the movie with Doug Jung, but Roberto Orci, Patrick McKay and John D. Payne have all previously had stabs at the third film in the franchise.
“They had a script for Star Trek that wasn’t really working for them,” the actor told magazine Radio Times (via The Guardian). “I think the studio was worried that it might have been a little too Star Trek-y.
“Avengers Assemble, which is a pretty nerdy, comic-book, supposedly niche thing, made $1.5bn. Star Trek: Into Darkness made half a billion, which is still brilliant. But it means that, according to the studio, there’s still $1bn worth of box office that don’t go and see Star Trek. And they want to know why.”
Dragon Age and Metal Gear Lead Deals with Gold
Microsoft has announced the games discounted thanks to its Deals with Gold program from now until May 25.
On Xbox One, both Dragon Age: Inquisition and Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes are 50 percent off, while Unmechanical: Extended and Jet Car Stunts are 40 percent off. Finally, Dragon Ball: Xenoverse is 33 percent off.
On the Xbox 360 front there's a lot to choose from, but stand out offerings include the original Dragon Age games as well as earlier Metal Gear Solid titles.
The full list of games and their discounts is below.
Xbox One
- Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes - 50%
Valve’s Virtual Reality Kit Teams Up With Razer
Valve has become the latest company to team up with Razer's Open Source Virtual Reality standard drive.
Razer's latest announcement said that Valve's OpenVR, along with MonoGame, VorpX, and the Unigine engine will all be supported by OSVR, bringing the total number of partners so far up to 118.
Razer's virtual reality headsets will be going up against OculusVR over the coming year. The OSVR hardware development kit is expected to ship in July.
Valve joins Ubisoft as another big gaming name behind OSVR, after the Assassin's Creed developer said it was looking to bring its franchises into virtual reality.
This is What Doom 4 Could Have Looked Like
Footage from Doom 4 before it was rebooted back in 2013 has surfaced online, revealing a rather different title to the one we glimpsed yesterday.
The video, which you can see below, was picked up by Doomworld and shows a rather dull, brown world populated by pretty generic characters.
“It wasn’t one thing,” id Software’s studio director, Tim Willits told IGN when we asked why the reboot happened. “It wasn’t like the art was bad, or the programming was bad. Every game has a soul. Every game has a spirit. When you played Rage, you got the spirit. And
GTA 5 Has Sold-in Nearly 52m Copies to Retail
Grand Theft Auto V has now sold-in “nearly” 52 million copies across all five formats it’s available on, Take-Two Interactive has revealed via its latest financial report for the quarter ending March 31, 2015.
This is an increase of almost 7 million copies since the last reported figure; in early February Take-Two revealed via an investor call that over 45 million copies of GTA V had been sold-in to retailers.
GTA V is currently available on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, Xbox One, Xbox 360, and PC. Yesterday it was revealed that 5 million physical copies of Grand Theft Auto V have been sold in the UK alone.
L’Oreal Wants to Start 3D Printing Living, Breathing Skin
French cosmetics giant L’Oreal is partnering partnering with bioprinting startup Organovo to develop a way to 3D print living, breathing skin to test products on.
L’Oreal currently grows skin samples from tissues donated by plastic surgery patients that are then broken down into cells that are given a diet and “exposed to biological signals that mimic those of actual skin.” Guive Balooch, vice president of L'Oreal's Technology Incubator, told Bloomberg that they "create an environment that's as close as possible to being inside someone's body."
Here’s How Many Miles Frodo & Sam Walked to Get to Mt. Doom
How many miles did Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee walk to get from Bag End to Mount Doom? Quite a lot, actually.
Clever Imgur user mattsawizard (via io9.com) calculated that the pair walked 1350 miles, which equals 440 hours worth of walking.
For Americans, he worked out that's the same as walking from LA to Austin. For the British, it's like walking from London to Niš in Serbia. For Australians...I'm sorry, that info wasn't provided and I'm not smart enough. Check out the full breakdown here.
Pixar Boss Wants More Diversity Moving Forward
Pixar/Disney Animation Studios head John Lasseter is devoted to featuring a more diverse range of characters in the studios' films moving forward.
“It’s very important to us … to have female and ethnic characters,” said Lasseter, speaking at the press conference for Pixar's Inside Out. “It’s grown in importance over time. As you’ll see in future films, we’re really paying attention to that.”
Lasseter cited Disney's upcoming animated feature Moana, centered on a Polynesian princess, as an example.
“I guess most people think of fairy tales as European fairy tales. We’re trying to reach out and find origins of legends all over the world.”
Lasseter mentioned that much of this shift is already happening thanks to more diverse voices behind the camera in animation.
Fans Reason Why Friday the 13th Killed Found Footage
While it was previously reported that the next Friday the 13th installment might take the popular found footage route, producer Brad Fuller has laid those rumors to rest, and revealed that the fans played a large role in the decision.
"Listen, there was an outpouring of negative sentiment when it was revealed that Friday the 13th might have been a found footage movie," Fuller told Shock Til You Drop.
"That was very clear to us that there was not a groundswell of support for that. That had tremendous amount of impact on us and only substantiated our concern about doing it as a found footage movie. Ultimately, the fact that the movie’s been delayed for a long time might be a good thing, because now the movie’s not going to be found footage.”