Autor: HCFG

Jennette McCurdy is featured in another promo for Mario Party: Island Tour. The video, which is the third of a series, sees the Nickelodeon personality outwit a vocal coach in the minigame Choicest Voice. Previous adverts for the new party game highlight McCurdy’s lassoing skills and her virtual ghost-hunting talent. Mario Party: Island Tour is out now for Nintendo 3DS.

Social video discovery site turned artist publishing platform Chill.com is closing its doors next month: Chill informed users of its site Friday that it will shut down on December 15. Customers who had previously bought a video through the site were advised in the email to download their purchases before that date.

Fo Chill, this is just the last chapter of a big bet that didn’t pay off: The Los Angeles-based startup had originally launched as a kind of Turntable.fm for video, but then switched course multiple times, and eventually settled on a Louis CK-like approach of premium video distribution, offering consumers DRM-free downloads of movies, short films and comedy specials.

However, in October, Chill was forced to lay off 40 percent of its staff because the premium content model turned out to be too hard of a nut to crack. Back then, Chill co-founder Brian Norgard told me:

“We…

John Carmack, legendary game programmer and co-founder of Doom and Quake developer id Software, will be leaving the studio he built to focus full-time on the Oculus Rift VR system, according to Polygon. Carmack had already been splitting his time between id and Oculus VR, where he is Chief Technical Officer.

Carmack’s departure is disarming, but not unexpected. The icon was tapped for the Oculus CTO position in August, after evangelizing the VR hardware headset even before it became a blockbuster Kickstarter success in 2012. Indeed, Carmack was the first developer to co-opt the Oculus Rift SDK into a working game, and also promised his much-anticipated (and often delayed) game Doom 4 would have a working port with the VR system. Carmack has also spent extensive time talking about the future of virtual reality, perhaps most effusively in his three-hour keynote speechat this year’s…

Given the rumors that Comcast (s cmcsa) is talking with regulators to see if it could find a way to buy Time Warner Cable (s twc) and that Liberty Media’s John Malone is eyeing some kind of Charter and Time Warner Cable tie up, this summer’s hand-wringing over cable consolidation is still in play.

As my colleague Om Malik explained in a post in July, Malone may have set this off, but it is an opportune time for the industry to consolidate given the demand for broadband generated by over-the-top services such as Netflix and Hulu. The cable guys don’t compete against each other in a given geographic footprint, but instead, against the telcos. And when it comes to broadband, the telcos are losing. As Om wrote back in July:

But the future isn’t about linear, old-styled video. Instead, it is about broadband and broadband-enabled video. The cable…

Mais de um terço dos usuários (34%) não se protege ao acessar redes Wi-Fi públicas, de acordo com a pesquisa global divulgada pela Kaspersky Lab. O estudo mostra que 14% dos entrevistados não viam problemas em usar bancos ou fazer compras online usando qualquer rede disponível. Apenas 13% se preocuparam em verificar o padrão de criptografia dos pontos de acesso.

No Brasil, 32% dos usuários pesquisados afirmaram não tomar nenhuma providência de proteção enquanto se conectam usando um ponto de acesso. Já 10% disseram que se sentem confiantes em fazer compras on-line ou usar o Internet Banking a partir de qualquer rede e apenas 9% dos brasileiros se preocuparam em verificar o padrão de criptografia dos pontos de acesso.

Faz sentido ter um cuidado extra ao usar um Wi-Fi público? A resposta é sim. Você nunca sabe o que “o cara com o laptop na mesa ao lado” pode estar fazendo. Talvez, como…

I remember, back when I was like fifteen, when getting to sit in a supercar was an unbelievable thrill. It was before I had a driver’s license, so driving them still seemed so far off in the distance, and sitting in a car at an event was sort of the pinnacle experience among my friends and I. We always used to talk to owners with the hopes of buttering them up before popping the big question, “So, can I sit in it?”

It seems like a simple request, but with many owners, you might as well be saying, “I really love your wife’s breasts, mind if I have myself a feel?” Such cars many people can hold that dearly to themselves. There were always the “cool” owners who obliged us, and a few complete jerks who wouldn’t. Some of my favorite reactions actually came from company representatives, who had forgotten…