A hacking group has claimed to have stolen an astonishing 500 million Ticketmaster customers' data, which includes a treasure trove of sensitive user data.

It was only last month Ticketmaster was slapped by the Department of Justice (DOJ), which filed an anti-trust lawsuit against Ticketmaster's parent company Live Nation Entertainment over its alleged monopoly on the entertainment industry. Now, Ticketmaster is reportedly suffering as a hacking group claimed to have stolen more than 500 million Ticketmaster customers' data in a recent attack, which the group is now turning around and attempting to sell for $500,000.

According to the hacker group the treasure trove of stolen data is approximately 1.3 terabytes and contains various sensitive user information such as full names of Ticketmaster customers, their addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, order history and ticket purchase details. It doesn't stop there. The group also claims to have scraped customers' payment data which includes names and the last four digits of their credit card numbers that were used at checkout of the ticketing service.

Google has confirmed the thousands of leaked documents that first emerged earlier this week are in fact internal company documents that reveal some aspects of the inner-workings of Google Search.

The leak of 2,500 documents is likely to cause a ripple effect across the SEO industry as many of the documents, while still being hard to decipher, reveal details about the way Google Search works, particularly the information and data Google collects to rank content on its search engine. Notably, The Verge reports the internal documents details run contrary to what Google representatives have said in the past about what contributes to webpage rankings on Search.

These thousands of documents contain a plethora of information about Search rankings, but none of the information is outlined in a way that makes it clear which data is more valuable than other data, making the entire leak very murky for interpretation. Additionally, there is a chance all of the information is completely out of date, or no longer considered valuable by Google as its data collection/ranking processes may have changed entirely.

One of the strangest and most beloved characters in J.R.R Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy is officially coming to Amazon's The Rings of Power season 2.

That character is none other than Tom Bombadil, who was famously cut from Peter Jackson's iconic trilogy of movies. For those that don't know who Tom Bombadil is, he is a merry fellow that lives in the valley of the Withywindle in the depths of the Old Forest, east of Buckland, and close to the dangerous Barrow-downs. While movie fans have never seen Tom, he is a big part of the start of The Fellowship of the Ring book where he rescues the hobbits from an old willow tree, and again from Wights in the Barrow-Downs.

The origin of Bombadil was purposely left in ambiguity, with very little canonical information to go by besides Tom being described as "Eldest" Tom, himself, said he remembers the "first raindrop and the first acorn... He knew the dark under the stars when it was fearless - before the Dark Lord came from Outside." Tom is one of, if not the most mysterious character in Tolkien's legendarium, with the majority of his intervention being in the Third Age of Middle-Earth, or in the age of Frodo, Bilbo and the One Ring.

Dataminers don't let anything scrape by unnoticed and that's exactly what happened in the latest Activision release for Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 and Warzone.

The Season 4 update was rolled out to the two aforementioned titles and dataminers dug through all of the files looking for clues about the upcoming and highly anticipated, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. The dataminers discovered some files that appear to reveal a major aspect regarding the launch of upcoming title, and that is Black Ops 6 supposedly releasing on multiple generations via a "cross-gen bundle".

It should be noted there isn't anything confirming if this bundle is real or not, but let's assume it is for a second. If there is a cross-gen bundle purchasable at launch it will mean Activision will be releasing Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 on the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. If true, it wouldn't make it the first time this has happened for the Call of Duty franchise, as Modern Warfare 3 also released with a cross-gen bundle. So, it's not completely out of the ordinary.

Robot dogs carrying guns is real, and there are videos posted of these new war machines being tested for upcoming combat missions.

What a time to be alive - quadruped robotic dogs with rifles strapped to their backs is actually something that is a real life thing. The first reports of such a creation come from Agence France-Presse, who covered a video published by state-owned broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV), which showed Chinese military testing a weaponized robotic dog in various scenarios. The rifle-equipped robotic pooch was shown hopping, diving, leading teams on reconnaissance objectives, and repeatedly firing its rifle attached to its back.

The robotic gun-wielding dogs were created with Unitree's $2,800 Go2 models, which are capable of being active on their own from anywhere between two and four hours depending on the task. The CCTV video shows a Chinese military soldier explaining the new robodogs "can serve as a new member in our urban combat operations" and are capable of "replacing our members to conduct reconnaissance and identify [the] enemy and strike the target."

The world's first biprocessor has been created using human brain tissue, according to Swiss startup FinalSpark that recently published their results.

The company has claimed the bioprocessor is connected to an online platform that enables remote access to 16 human brain organoids. The startup says its neuroplatform is a first-of-its-link and can deliver access to biological neurons in vitro.

Notably, the company claims its new bioprocessor requires 1 million times less power than a traditional processor, and if the startup's claims are proven to be true, these bioprocessors could revolutionize heavy usage processing situations where power is a problem. An example of this would be training large language models, the underpinning technology powering AI.

Sony has officially publicly apologized to Neil Druckmann, the studio head at Naughty Dog for misrepresenting his comments in a recent interview.

The interview with the boss of Naughty Dog, the studio behind extremely successful The Last of Us franchise, was published by Sony and it depicts Druckmann praising the explosion of AI tools as it will enable developers to push the boundaries of storytelling in games. Additionally, Sony's interview depicted Druckmann teasing the studio's next project, with the studio head reportedly saying it "could redefine mainstream perceptions of gaming."

However, not too long after the interview went live Druckmann took to his personal X account to clarify his statements, saying the comment about redefining perceptions of gaming was "not quite what I said." Druckmann didn't appear angry at the misrepresentation, writing, "In editing my rambling answers in my recent interview with Sony, some of my words, context, and intent were unfortunately lost." While Druckmann certainly took the diplomatic and admirable stance on his words being misconstrued, it appears he has downplayed Sony's violation.

Viggo Mortensen, the actor who played Aragorn in Peter Jackson's beloved Lord of the Rings trilogy has been asked if he will reprise his role of the Numenorian king in the upcoming The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum movie.

For those that missed the news, last year Warner Discovery announced it was creating three new Lord of the Rings movies. There was radio silence from the studio for quite some time until its recent earnings call this year where it announced the title and release year for next film. The Hunt for Gollum will star and be directed by Andy Serkis, and produced by Peter Jackson. More good news is that it will be written by Jackson's original trilogy writers Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens.

Canonically, The Hunt for Gollum takes place between the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings movies. Please read no further if you don't want any spoilers, as I'm about to explain the basic premise for the movie based on the events that take place in the books.

United States authorities announced they have arrested the administrator behind what is likely the world's largest botnet, which included more than 19 million compromised Windows machines across multiple countries.

The description of the world's largest botnet comes from FBI director Christopher Wray, who said the botnet was used to gather millions of dollars from people over the last 10 years. More specifically, the FBI director said to the Justice Department that a international cyber operation was conducted to identify the alleged administrator of the botnet known as "911 S5", who was found to be the individual Yunhe Wang. Wang was arrested and US authorities "seized infrastructure and assets, and levied sanctions against Wang and his co-conspirators," said Wray.

The infection of this botnet was truly global, with US officials writing the 911 S5 Botnet had infected PCs in nearly 200 countries and "facilitated a whole host of computer-enabled crimes, including financial frauds, identity theft, and child exploitation." Moreover, the US Treasury wrote in its announcement Wang didn't act alone in the venture, and named two more alleged perpetrators, Jingping Liu and Yanni Zheng. In total, the US authorities believe the botnet netted Wang and others involved $99 million.

Microsoft wants people to move off Windows 10 and move onto Windows 11, and one of the ways the company intends to attract customers to its latest operating system is AI-powered PCs - and the exclusive features that come with them.

Microsoft only recently announced a selection of AI PCs in the form of new Copilot+ laptops. These laptops are different from traditional versions as they feature a Neural Processing Unit (NPU), which is a piece of hardware dedicated to running AI tasks locally. Microsoft has locked many, if not all of its of Copilot+'s attractive features behind this hardware requirement in a bid to entice customers to go out and purchase a new Copilot+ PC.

One of the most talked about Copilot+ features is Windows Recall, which enables a user to ask the Copilot AI in natural language to show them what they were doing on the PC at specific times. For example, if a user at 4pm forgot what they were doing at 1pm they would be able to ask the AI and it would show them what was on their desktop at 1pm. Recall is able to create this timeline of a users desktop by taking screenshots of the desktop every few minutes, which are then stored locally.