Movie and video games rental service confirms the acquisition of the digital distribution service.

GameFly officially confirmed that it has acquired Direct2Drive, but did not offer up any financial details of the deal with IGN. News Corporation (IGN owner) will maintain a minority stake in GameFly and will have a representative on the company board.

However, News Corp (or IGN) will not play any direct part in the future running of GameFly or Direct2Drive. Currently, Direct2Drive offers 3,000 games for PC and Mac users.

"We're very excited to bring the D2D team on board at GameFly and expand our ability to deliver games to consumers," said GameFly CEO David Hodess.

"Only GameFly can offer a complete library of physical and digital games for the PC, Mac and consoles in one place."

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New Internet traffic report shows that Netflix is now the application responsible for the highest levels of traffic in the U.S.

The movie streaming service accounts for 24.71 percent of peak time aggregate traffic in America, ahead of BitTorrent which stands at 17.23 percent. In comparison, in Europe, BitTorrent accounts for 28.4 percent of peak-time traffic, just ahead of all http traffic.

BitTorrent remains #1 in the United States for peak upstream traffic, with 52.01 percent, but Netflix again tops the Downstream chart with 29.70 percent (Downstream traffic is great than upstream by about 4:1).

In regions where there are very few legal services, P2P services dominate the charts. In Latin America, for instance, the Ares Galaxy file sharing network accounts for 15.48 percent of peak-time traffic just behind HTTP.

Netflix is helped by the nature of its relatively inexpensive bundles, and a broad number of platforms on which subscribers can view content streamed directly from Netflix.

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Skype founder Niklas Zennstrom predicts that Microsoft will capitalize on its $8.5 billion acquisition of the service.

"Skype's full potential hasn't been realized yet," he said in an interview at the e-G8 forum underway in Paris. He suggests that Microsoft could push Skype into higher places if they expand it more into the mobile territory and if they make dramatic improvements to the quality of video calling on the Internet.

"I think that Microsoft has a huge opportunity to integrate it into a lot of their different services," Zennstrom said. "Of course they have so many different assets. If they do a good job integrating Skype, the company can grow even more."

Zennstrom will sell all of his shares in Skype once the Microsoft deal closes, and will no longer retain a management role at the company which he founded with Janus Friis in 2003. Skype has grown a lot since then, and touts 145 million users per month. eBay also owned Skype from 2005 until a consortium (of which Zennstrom was a part) bought it back in in 2009.

Microsoft can combine Skype services with many of its own existing products and services. One possibility is integrating it to the popular Outlook application so to provide video conferencing for business users. It will likely use Skype to boost its position in the mobile space however, after making several moves in the territory recently, such as partnering with Nokia.

"We still all travel a lot for meetings because you can't match the intimate experience of seeing someone in person, even with Skype video calling," he said. "There is a lot more work to do on the core technology to improve quality of video calls."

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Twitter will alert users that they are being pursued if they are forced to hand over user information to authorities.

Tony Wang, who heads up Twitter's European operations, commented when asked about an online privacy dispute that is beginning to boil over in the UK. "Platforms should have responsibility not to defend the user, but to protect that user's right to defend him or herself," said Wang.

On several occasions, information has shown up on Twitter that could be found to violate the law in the UK. This often includes personal information about people in the public eye, such as celebrities and athletes.

The case that has brought the questionable legality of some tweets to the front pages started with a so called superinjunction granted to a Premier League footballer when it became clear that the mainstream media was throwing around a story alleging he had an affair.

When a superinjunction of this nature is issued, the mainstream media (newspapers and their websites, television news stations etc.) generally honor it. However, it becomes blurry when you consider that a UK citizen can use Twitter to publish that information quite easily, and it can quickly spread across the site.

Manchester United footballer Ryan Giggs was outed as the Premier League star who had been granted the injunction several weeks ago, which at the time was honored by the media. However, it was no secret on Twitter very quickly.

News then made the rounds that Giggs' lawyers have filed a lawsuit to identify the sources of the tweets that helped spread the rumor wide and far. The case also got blown into the mainstream media, despite the injunction, when a member of parliament in the UK used his immunity to identify Giggs as the footballer behind the injunction.

Since then there has been a lot of mixed feelings. In some corners, the whole idea of a superinjunction is being challenging in a free society, while others stress the need to also protect people's personal and private matters from being all over the front pages.

Some Manchester United fans also questioned the timing of the media's mass intervention into the case, which came pretty much on the day that the club won a record 19th Premier League title (Giggs' 12th), and just a week ahead of the UEFA Champions League final on Saturday where Manchester United will face Barcelona in the biggest football game of the season.

Manchester police even confirmed that cars belonging to journalists and paparazzi outside Giggs home were attacked by masked men in an incident earlier this week.

U.S.-based Twitter is likely to hand over user information related to the case, but the website will alert the user first to prepare them to fight their corner.

"If we're legally required to turn over user information, to the extent that we can, we want to notify the user involved, let them know and let them exercise their rights under their own jurisdiction," Wang said. "That's not to say that they will ultimately prevail, that's not to say that law enforcement doesn't get the information they need, but what it does do is take that process into the court of law and let it play out there."

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YouTube has just turned six years old, and has more milestones to report to the world on its relentless growth.

Founded in 2005, YouTube's ease of use and potential has attracted hundreds of millions of people to the service. The idea that a video in almost any format could be uploaded by the user, and then converted and provided on its own YouTube page (and could be embedded anywhere else) attracted drones of people to the service.

That growth only seems to accelerate for YouTube, which is now reporting that over 48 hours of video is uploaded to the site every single minute. So in just one minute, two whole days of video content has been added to YouTube's incredibly vast digital vaults.

To compare that to last year, it represents a 100% increase in the amount of content being uploaded at any given time.

All of that content needs viewers to have any purpose on the video sharing giant, and YouTube is now reporting that it delivers 3 billion video views every single day.



Now YouTube is challenging its users to keep up the momentum , so that it can one day in the near future reach 72 hours of video footage per minute, and 4 billion daily views. To help this, the service is constantly making improvements to aid content creators and to provide its service on as many platforms as possible.

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According to Eurogamer, Microsoft is set to announce full stereoscopic 3D features for the Xbox 360 games console very soon.

The report says that the support works exactly like the PlayStation 3's 3D effects, providing HDMI stereoscopic 3D in the 1280x1470 twin 720p framebuffer configuration, giving a 720p image per eye.

"They'd be mad not to do it, is all I can say," said Eurogamer's source, who is said to be close to continued Xbox 360 development. "The machine is not only very capable, it's more capable than the PlayStation 3 of doing stereo, assuming you don't have one of the old crappy ones with the composite leads... assuming you have a HDMI Xbox."

The source went on to hint that the announcement will be made at E3 this year. "Microsoft is going to have to go on stage to say something, aren't they?"

The PS3 officially got stereoscopic 3D functionality last June bia a firmware update, and is still the only console to offer it as a feature. Some titles for the Xbox 360 do tout the effect, but render using 3D techniques based on the principle of two distinct images crammed into one 720p framebuffer.

Microsoft's Aaron Greenberg commented last year that the Xbox 360 is fully capable of providing for stereoscopic 3D titles, but the question is whether consumers are interested in it.

The support is expected to be added to the Xbox 360 via a Dashboard update in the near future.

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The widely reported mass suing of sharers of the Oscar-winning Hurt Locker movie has bloated to include 24,583 file sharers.

This new number puts it on top of the list for the most number of potential defendants in a file sharing case, just ahead of the lawsuit against sharers of the "Expendables" movie, which initially took aim at 23,322 sharers. Both lawsuits are being managed by Washington, DC-based law firm Dunlap, Grubb and Weaver.

Filed last year, the Hurt Locker lawsuit originally targeted about 5,000 file sharers, but has jumped to almost 25,000 since. Of the 24,583 people, 10,532 subscribe to Comcast services, 5,239 to Verizon, 2,699 to Charter and 1,750 to Time Warner.

This mammoth mass-lawsuit won't be carried out quickly however, as both Charter and Verizon have only agreed to provide between 100 and 150 subscriber identities per months, whereas Comcast hasn't agreed to hand over any details at all yet.

TorrentFreak is hosting documents that list all targeted IP addresses in the Hurt Locker case.

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According to reports, Nvidia's Project Denver CPU will feature x86 hardware emulation.

Just like China's Loongson processors, the emulation will be achieved by use of an extra hardware layer, though it will come with a speed penalty of between 15% and 20% (still better than the Loongson's 30 percent penalty). Nvidia is expected to launch the CPU around 2013-2014.

Adding the x86 emulation to the package will help the graphics chip maker to better compete with Intel Corporation and Advanced Micro Devices.

Project Denver is expected to launch around the same time as Nvidia's Maxwell GPU architecture, both of which could be interlinked to provide a very high-performance computing platform to drive the next generation of computers.

Its design allows it to be used for products that range from Desktop PCs right up to high-resource supercomputers.

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To celebrate the annual Towel Day we here at AfterDawn decided to give away a bunch of AfterDawn towels. How clever!

In order to enter the drawing, just comment on this article, like it on Facebook or Tweet about it. If you include an appropriately towel-themed picture of yourself, your chances to win will increase fortytwofold!



Towelday.org

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Apple has decided to acknowledge the Mac Defender malware variants and says it will help fight the FakeAV software through an update.

Recently, Mac users started reporting problems with several fake security products. The Mac Defender family of malware products works the same as countless FakeAV/scareware products that target Windows users. It will alert the user of the system to fake malware results and then try to scam a credit card number to clean the system.

At first, Apple seemed to completely ignore the malware to the disapproval of many users. The company even reportedly told its AppleCare and retail staff not to acknowledge it to customers and strangely, not to remove it from users' computers.

Now Apple seems to have had a change of heart, posting an online support document with removal instructions and promising an update for Macs that will attempt to prevent future infection.

"A recent phishing scam has targeted Mac users by redirecting them from legitimate websites to fake websites which tell them that their computer is infected with a virus," Apple wrote in its support document. "In the coming days, Apple will deliver a Mac OS X software update that will automatically find and remove Mac Defender malware and its known variants. The update will also help protect users by providing an explicit warning if they download this malware."

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A security researcher has blasted Siemens for comments made by the company downplaying security vulnerabilities in its industrial control systems.

Dillon Beresford wrote that the German company was downplaying the threat of findings he made while testing a Siemens programmable logic controller (PLC). "The vulnerabilities are far reaching and affect every industrialized nation across the globe," he wrote in an e-mail posted to a public security list.

"This is a very serious issue. As an independent security researcher and professional security analyst, my obligation is not to Siemens but to their consumers."

Siemens PLC equipment is used in all sectors of industry, being found at oil refineries, manufacturing plants and waste treatment facilities. Their security has been called into question following the Stuxnet discovery and analysis, which apparently targeted Siemens equipment used as part of Iran's nuclear program.

Beresford discovered several security bugs with a Siemens PLC he got through his employer, NSS Labs. He took issue with comments of Siemens representatives made to the media, which claimed the bugs were discovered "under special lab conditions with unlimited access to protocols and controllers," and that the vulnerabilities would be difficult for hackers to exploit.

"There were no 'special laboratory conditions' with 'unlimited access to the protocols,'" Beresford wrote. "My personal apartment on the wrong side of town where I can hear gunshots at night hardly defines a special laboratory."

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