Maximum PC November 2018

it isn’t about early adopters anymore…

I WAS TEMPTED to dedicate this intro to thanking early adopters. The guys and gals who have helped shape today’s tech industry. The reason is because it feels like we need these early adopters to step up to the plate again in order to make Nvidia’s real-time ray-traced dreams a reality. And given the price tags hanging from its new GPUs, Nvidia certainly needs to woo anyone who values potential over any current performance metric. The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that the days of one or two (thousand) early adopters helping to define the market are behind us. Even at these new, far more eye-watering prices, it’s not enough to sell a few cards. The whole PC market has to adopt a new way of…

ray tracing goes hardware

THE LAUNCH of a major new range of graphics cards is always a notable event, but Nvidia’s new GeForce RTX range is something beyond that. These are the first of a whole new generation of cards based on the Turing GPU. Nvidia’s president, Jensen Huang, has claimed this is the company’s most important GPU since the Tesla, in 2006. It shows where cards are heading over the next few years, and it’s going to look sumptuous. There are three new cards initially: The RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 2080 are due first (and we’ve got one—see page 76). The Ti version is an eye-watering $999; the plain version is a still-substantial $699. The RTX 2070 is due to follow in a month, at around $499. There are Founders Editions, too, for…

top mac app is spyware

ADWARE DOCTOR, a top-ranked $5 app from the Apple Store, has been revealed as spyware. It has been sending users’ private data to servers in China. Security researcher Patrick Wardle was tipped off by user forum posts, and after investigation posted his finding on Malwarebytes, then passed the results to Apple. Disappointingly, Apple took months to kick the offender from the Store. To scan for malware, Adware Doctor requests universal access when first used, which circumvents much of the internal security between apps. It then raids your browser history, collects a list of software you’ve downloaded, your iTunes history, and a list of running processes. The data is collated into a password-protected zip folder, and sent to a third-party. To keep users happy, and oblivious, it also does the job it…

the end of the url

THE UNIFORM RESOURCE LOCATOR (URL) is messy, confusing, and can get long—making it difficult to remember, and easy to fake. Most people really don’t want or need to know the full path of a webpage. Google has been musing on this for years, and is getting ready to unveil an alternative system, which will remove the clutter, and leave a more natural English URL. “We want to move toward a place where web identity is understandable by everyone,” said Chrome’s engineering manager, Adriene Porter Felt. It’s not really in the hands of Google, of course. However much it would like to, Google doesn’t actually control the Internet, although it does have the world’s most popular browser. It was instrumental behind the move to HTTPS encryption, for example. Whether such a fundamental…

one in four dump facebook

ACCORDING TO NEW FINDINGS from the Pew Research Center, 26 percent of US Facebook users have uninstalled it in the last year; the figure rises to 44 percent for those aged 18–29. Over half claim to have adjusted their privacy settings, too. The poll was taken between May 29 and June 11, when concerns about data sharing peaked. Startling stuff, although tellingly, the number of reported active accounts from Facebook didn’t plunge over the same period; growth merely leveled off. Possibly, many of those dumping Facebook weren’t active users in the first place, or went back again. The headline figures may be open to interpretation, but it does indicate that people are adjusting their relationship with the company—when so many report changing usage, you know something is afoot. Facebook lives and…

tech triumphs and tragedies

TRIUMPHS ✔ HEADS UP BIKERS JDI has developed an experimental heads-up display fitted to a motorcycle helmet. ✔ FOLDING PHONES Samsung is set to launch its foldable-screen phones before the year’s end; a tablet when you want it to be. ✔ ULTIMATE GAMING CHAIR Acer’s new 495lb Predator Thronos chair has mounts for three 27-inch monitors, fancy lighting, it vibrates, and reclines. TRAGEDIES ✖ GLOFO DROPS 7NM Huge costs push AMD partner GlobalFoundries out of market, leaving three major fabricators capable of making 7nm chips. ✖ PRIUS FIRE RISK Toyota has recalled one million cars built since 2016, due to a potential overheating problem. ✖ TWITTER BANS INFOWARS The infamous Alex Jones has had his Twitter account pulled; the company cites infringements of its abusive behavior policy.…