The Fallout Of A Hack. Celebgate, Double Standards And iCIoud Weaknesses

A nightmare for those involved and a mixed blessing for the mainstream press. John Moore looks at the two-sided tale of the recent iCIoud hack...

The massive release of stolen celebrity pictures that began at the imageboard AnonIB, an affair that's since been dubbed Celebgate (or The Fappening, if you really want to be crude), must have caused some fevered meeting among newspaper and website staff on Sunday 3rd September. They had a fine line to walk when working out exactly how much salacious content they could get away with, without crossing the line. Seriously, if infamously amoral celeb blogger Perez Hilton - who has a long track record of publish-and-be-damned insouciance - is pulling photos from his site and sites like Gawker are wringing their hands about this breach of privacy, others needed to tread carefully, because the legal rottweilers must be on the loose. Or was this change in attitude more than just the result of legal approaches?

How much RAM do you really need?

More is usually better, but is there a limit to high you should go with your memory setup?

Memory upgrades are a great way to improve a computer. RAM is affordably cheap, easy to install and virtually guarantees a performance increase at any level, so resource-hungry is the software we use.

But how much RAM is enough? The average desktop contains around 2GB, but it’s not unusual to upgrade your system so that it contains 4GB, 8GB or even more than that. Since there are only four memory banks on a montherboard, there's a physical limit to how much you can install. But should you be aiming to hit that limit, or is the practical limit much lower than that?

How Do You Solve A Problem Like GamerGate?

How did a piece of parochial tittle-tattle turn into a row that has exposed a divisive rift in the gaming community, and what will be the long-term fallout? John Moore takes a look.

No story that begins with a blog post from a disgruntled ex-boyfriend claiming infidelity by his former girlfriend is likely to end well, but no one really had a clue quite how deep the GamerGate rabbit hole was going to be. For the past month, it's been a war of words that's sectioned off its own increasingly bitter and murky corner of social media and progressively leaked into the mainstream gaming media. If you have no idea what we're talking about, here's a quick synopsis.

Intel Core i5 4690K

There is a common trend in pretty much all corners of the PC market, whether processors, graphics cards or motherboards. There’s a series with a super high-end component - seriously powerful, but probably very expensive. That’s the aspirational part. Then there’s the real low-end stuff, the components that share the same DNA but have been technologically hobbled to justify a far lower price. And then you have the middle siblings: they’ll generally have a good percentage of the power of the high-end, but with a generous drop in price.

These are the parts of interest to gainers, and the latest К-series i5 is a perfect example. It’s a powerful processor, with many of the qualities of the top-end Haswell Core i7 CPU, but with a few strategic omissions from its specs list. However, what has been removed to ensure a lower price doesn’t stop it from being the finest, best value gaming processor available.

Sunset Overdrive

We’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: Sunset Overdrive feels like a return to the sunny, arcade inspired skies of Sega’s Dreamcast. Its chunky, colourful visuals, cheery abandonment of realism and narrative logic, and its breathless rhythm all conspire to create a reassuring sense of nostalgia. But more importantly, Sunset Overdrive feels like a proper Insomniac game, a return to form after the studio's first foray away from PlayStation hardware, Fuse, which struggled to find an identity within its generic looks and lacklustre implementation.

The one thing Sunset Overdrive does have in common with Fuse is a focus on co-op. Find one of the photo booths dotted around the city and up to seven other players can join you in a mode called Chaos Squad. This plays out across the same city as the singleplayer campaign, and you get to keep your character, too, but the group votes on which o: the proffered co-op-specific missions to attempt. Each new voting opportunity presents players with two choices: one mission will increase the Chaos level - which equates to higher difficulty and greater rewards - in your world, while the other will provide the team with buffs, ammo or health, but only slightly increase the Chaos level, if it does at all.