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According to a new report, LG is preparing to unveil a new TV with 8K resolution at the upcoming CES event in Las Vegas.

The 55-inch TV has a ridiculous 7,680 x 4,320 pixel resolution and 'over 20 display driver integrated circuits installed. The TV also has 500 nits brightness because "unlike conventional displays that use RGB sub-pixels, LG added a W sub-pixel to increase the brightness."

LG built a prototype last month and was so happy that it decided to airlift it to Vegas for CES, which begins on January 5th.

For any demos, LG will use "3D images generated by an unnamed high-quality Nvidia GPU" as there are currently no video sources with support for 8K. While the TV seems out of this world for the current environment, the sources believe LG will move to add an 8K model to their lineup in 2015. "With the know-how acquired from making the prototype, if LG finds good grounds to commercialize the display for mass production, it will do so. LG has already finished up approving the technological viability of the 55-inch, 8K display, and is now starting preparation to commercialize it to make it a product," reads the report.

Google has made their new Nexus 9 tablet available with LTE, just over a month after the tablet was released (sans cellular data).

Available at the Google Play Store for $599 with 32GB internal storage, the tablet is also available directly through T-Mobile for the same price or for $24.99 per month for two years with $0 down.

The HTC-built Nexus 9 has a 8.9-in. IPS LCD display with a 2048-x-1536 resolution (4:3 aspect ratio) which Google says is part of the company's "new focus on productivity." Under the hood is the crazy powerful Tegra K1 64-bit processor, and 2GB RAM. HTC has added dual front-facing stereo speakers for improved audio playback, and added their own BoomSound audio software enhancements. The 6700 mAh battery should give you 9.5 hours of active use.

Running on the new Android 5.0 Lollipop and all its features, Google has included a "tap to wake" option that was seen in the past on LG's tablets as 'Knock On." You have to tap the screen twice to turn on the display without needing to hit the power button.

Google has confirmed that while the Nexus 5 is on its last legs, it isn't totally dead yet.

The search giant says the year-old device will be available through Google Play and a few remaining retailers throughout the Q1 2015.

While Google is not saying goodnight to the device just yet, it is becoming increasingly hard to find one. The Google Play Store has removed all the additional colors that were available, with the exception of the standard black, which is still available in 16GB and 32GB models but supply goes in and out.

The Nexus 5 recently just received the Android 5.0 Lollipop update, which has been either a blessing or a curse depending on who you ask. Many have seen performance improved after the update, but many others have seen their devices freeze and reboot often and sluggish performance.

Sony Pictures has been forced to stop filming following the massive hack that has paralyzed the company in the past weeks.

Sources claim that glitches from the computer network that was taken down has led the studio to be unable to process payments. Most of the company's computers remain offline or unusable and the rest are experiencing significant technical glitches. Many at Sony Pictures have taken to using pen and paper while their systems are down.

Security experts have estimated the cyber attack will cost Sony nearly $100 million, but it is unclear if those experts took into account an extended freeze on shooting when creating their models.

Hackers got away with potentially 100 teraybytes of data in the breach, including pre-release movies, hundreds of thousands of emails, contracts for its stars and executives, and social security numbers and addresses for nearly 50,000 employees.

Besides the obvious monetary damages, the PR has been a nightmare for Sony. Many emails from executives have gone viral, showing that those with power at Sony Pictures often insulted, belittled or just generally disliked the actors, directors and producers their company was promoting.

Canadians who download and share musically illegally may end up getting notices from their Internet Service Providers due to a new law.

Up until now, Canadian ISPs had a choice of whether to notify a customer that had been identified by IP address for copyright infringement, but in January the system will change and become mandatory as the Copyright Modernization Act will take effect.

The ISP will not hand over personal details of the customer however, just act as an intermediary.

"So essentially a copyright holder will provide Sasktel with notification that an IP address has illegally downloaded some material...and then Sasktel is required to notify the customer with that IP address," said Michelle Englot, director of external communications at SaskTel.

Such communications are intended to deter users from continuing to infringe copyright and lead them to legal, licensed outlets instead.

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare may be the best selling game of 2014, but its sales are down compared to last year's retail sales of Call of Duty: Ghosts.

This represents a third straight year that Call of Duty sales have declined year-over-year in the United States. The data comes from Piper Jaffray analyst Michael Olson, citing research from the NPD Group.

"This is disappointing data following first week Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare sales showing a year-over-year increase," Olson said, reports GI.biz.

"NPD data does not include digital copies or international sales, which, if included, would lessen the year-over-year decline, but we believe this data suggests potential for Q4 revenue upside is now very low."

Activision's total sales have decreased by 22 percent year-over-year.

Comparing Advanced Warfare's first month to Modern Warfare 3, released in 2011, U.S. sales have declined by 49 percent during the first month of availability on the market.

The IsoHunt team has put the old Pirate Bay search and data back online in a working site for users while the original site remains down.

The Pirate Bay went down on Tuesday as a result of police action in Stockholm, and since then many proxies and mirrors have been mistaken for the official site. OldPirateBay.org is not a resurrection of the official site, but it will be something Pirate Bay users will be happy with.

It is the old Pirate Bay search and the archived data from the notorious BitTorrent site, and on top of that new torrents are appearing in "Recent Torrents" too. It is not intended as a replacement for the Pirate Bay however.

"As you probably know, the beloved Pirate Bay website is gone for now. It'll be missed. It'll be remembered as the pilgrim of freedom and possibilities on the web. It's a symbol of liberty for a generation of Internet users." a note reads on the site.

"It its honor we're making the oldpiratebay.org search. We, the IsoHunt team, copied the database of Pirate Bay in order to save it for generations of users. Nothing will be forgotten. Keep on believing, keep on sharing."

Nintendo has confirmed that its Amiibo line is a huge hit in the U.S.

Amiibo is a set of toys that use NFC to communicate with Nintendo 3DS and Wii U games, allowing characters and other data to be transferred across platforms.

Nintendo says that sales of the toys nearly matched Super Smash Bros. for Wii U, which puts the figure in the 700,000 range.

Additionally, Nintendo reported that their new Pokemon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire games also saw 1.5 million combined units sold, leading to one of the best months in quite some time for the Japanese game maker.

Source:
GI.biz

Ford has announced that its new in-car entertainment system, newly updated to version 3, has replaced Microsoft with BlackBerry for the underlying operating system.

Sync 3 uses a variant of BlackBerry's QNX operating system, after the first two versions ran on a variant of Windows.

While Microsoft has often boasted of its in-car system and its partnership with Ford, but QNX offers more modern features. A few examples are capacitive touchscreen support, pinch and zoom gestures, Wi-Fi OTA updates, and support for Siri.

A few of the launch apps that are supported are Spotify, iHeartRadio and NPR One.

Ford said that "hardware and software decisions were based on identifying the technology that would best meet the expectations for performance by our customers."

Twitter co-founder and board member Ev Williams had some choice words for rival social media platforms Facebook and Instagram.

Speaking during a recent interview, Williams said: "It's a question of breadth versus depth. Why is users the only thing we talk about? The crazy thing: Facebook has done an amazing job of establishing that as the metric for Wall Street. No one ever talks about, 'What is a [monthly active user]?' I believe it's the case that if you use Facebook Connect -- if you use an app that you logged into with Facebook Connect -- you're considered a Facebook user whether or not you ever launched the Facebook app or went to Facebook.com. So what does that mean? It's become so abstract to be meaningless. Something you did caused some data in their servers to be recorded for the month. So I think we're on the wrong path.

If you think about the impact Twitter has on the world versus Instagram, it's pretty significant. It's at least apples to oranges. Twitter is what we wanted it to be. It's this realtime information network where everything in the world that happens on Twitter -- important stuff breaks on Twitter and world leaders have conversations on Twitter. If that's happening, I frankly don't give a shit if Instagram has more people looking at pretty pictures."

Google has begun shutting down its operations in Russia, closing out its engineering office and relocating employees.

The search giant says the Russian government has become very restrictive, asking Google to remove over 250 links from its search results in the last six months. As with all tech companies in Russia, data about Russians must stay within the country's borders and it is unclear if Google has been complying.

Despite the shut down, some Google team members will stay around. "We are deeply committed to our Russian users and customers and we have a dedicated team in Russia working to support them," the company added.

With the move, Google has now pulled out of Russia and China and had their services restricted in Spain and other nations.

Seagate will start selling a hard disk drive (HDD) in January with a massive 8TB capacity and it is expected to cost $260 or below.

Designed for reliability rather than performance, the 3.5-inch Seagate 8TB Archive HDD has a reduced spindle speed of 5,900 RPM and the average read/write is only 150MB/s. That is significantly slower than modern HDDs and way slower than a decent solid state disk (SSD).

This drive is build simply for storage though so that doesn't matter all that much, and at $260 it would be a nice purchase for an NAS.

The hard drive will start selling mid-January.

The extra capacity and low cost are achieved with Seagate's SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) Technology. Here is a video explaining it.

Instagram has announced 300 million monthly active users, a huge jump year-over-year, and a number that surpasses Twitter.

The huge growth and the large active base will likely help the company to attract advertisers. The company recently began allowing for video ads and sponsored posts.

"As Instagram gets bigger, we're focused on helping you discover photos and videos from people who you care about, whether it's a friend or your favorite musician," says Instagram's CEO Kevin Systrom.

Additionally, users now share over 70 million photos/videos per day, a staggering figure.

In his blog post, Systrom also noted that celebrity and brand accounts will have new verification badges so you can ensure you are following the correct people. In addition, Instagram has been taking down thousands of spam and fake accounts in order to "do everything possible to keep Instagram free from the fake and spammy accounts that plague much of the web."

The information spilling onto the Internet as a result of the Sony Pictures hack keeps making headlines, and this time it has exposed a rift between Google and the MPAA.

The Motion Pictures Association of America (MPAA) is a trade group that represents movie studios in the United States. It speaks on behalf of those studios in copyright lobbying and in legal cases, and is essentially their face in the anti-piracy efforts targeted at the Internet.

In recent years it has been pressing more and more on Google to step up and fight piracy by removing links from its search index. Google responded by removing millions of links from its search index when it received DMCA requests, and lately went further to punish sites that are the target of a lot of DMCA complaints.

It had a significant impact too, with many torrent sites seeing a dip in traffic from Google, and the search giant was more than justified in feeling like it had done enough.

The MPAA disagreed however, and made a statement about Google that would turn their relationship sour very quickly.

"Everyone shares a responsibility to help curb unlawful conduct online, and we are glad to see Google acknowledging its role in facilitating access to stolen content via search," an MPAA press release opened with.

The malware that penetrated the cyber defenses of Sony and allegedly captured terabytes of data was a difficult one to deal with, says FBI official to the Congress.

Speaking to the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee assistant director of the FBI's cyber division Joseph Demarest said that nine out of ten corporate cyber defenses would have been helpless against the malware.

Malware that the security company Sony hired to investigate called "unprecedented" did not penetrate because of lack of preparation. According to Demarest the attack could have posed serious threat even to state government security systems.

Ars Technica notes that there has yet to be any clarification on behalf of Sony, the security company Mandidant or the FBI what made the malware unprecedented and so dangerous. And even if Sony is let off the hook on cyber defense, it is still under question if they could have prevented a leak of such magnitude.