The uncertain future of the Xbox One

Two years later, many of these initial failings have been fixed. But rumors that Microsoft would like out of the Xbox business continue to swirl, prompted partly by stealthy executive departures and ongoing legal issues surrounding the Xbox 360’s disc-scratching problems.It’s difficult to know what to make of the Xbox One. When Microsoft first debuted the console nearly two years ago, its vision of the future of gaming slammed face first into therock wall of consumer expectations. Microsoft offered a second-generation motion tracker with voice commands and an “always on” capability — but consumers didn’t want it. The company declared that online and retail disc purchases would be treated the same, only to find that customers valued the ability to trade in games at a local store. It promised a future in which families and friends could share games out of a common library — but at the cost of offline play.

Report claims DirectX 12 will enable AMD and Nvidia GPUs to work side-by-side

With the Games Developer Conference right around the corner we’ve started to see more gaming and technology announcements cropping up, but a new report on DirectX 12 is certain to raise the eyebrows of any PC gamer. It’s been reported that DirectX 12 — Microsoft’s upcoming, low-latency, close(r)-to-metal API that replaces DirectX 11 — will be capable of running across AMD and Nvidia GPUs at the same time.

A “source with knowledge of the matter” told Tom’s Hardware that DirectX 12 will support asynchronous workloads across multiple GPUs, and that one extension of this support is that a task could theoretically be split between two different video cards from different manufacturers.

Lenovo PCs ship with adware that destroys system security, breaks HTTPS

Lenovo is selling PCs equipped with a pre-installed adware package that destroys the security of HTTPS and creates a perfect man-in-the-middle (MTM) scenario against the host PC. The software in question is called Superfish Visual Discovery, and its basic function — it injects advertising into browser sessions — is bad enough. Superfish’s five-alarm functionality is that it installs its own signed root certificates to a user’s operating system. What this means, in essence, is that Superfish substitutes its own signed certificate for the certificate that’s supposed to be provided by the actual website.