In a nutshell, ASUS’ new powerful gaming phone is all about bigger specs and faster performance. It has a 165Hz 6.78-inch display, with 720Hz touch sampling rate, up to 18GB of RAM and a bigger 6,000mAh battery.
The most notable change is the revamped clip-on cooler that’s arriving alongside the ROG Phone 6. You can toggle between four cooling settings in the updated Armoury Crate app’s console, with a “Frozen” mode that pushes its Peltier chip to the max. This is only available when there’s external power plugged into the device but ASUS claims the AeroActive Cooler 6 can lower the ROG Phone 6’s surface temperature by up to a staggering 25 degrees Celsius (that’s 77 Fahrenheit), which sounds more like a portable air cooler than a smartphone accessory. As far as availability goes, ASUS says the ROG Phone 6 series will start from €999 (around $1,000) in Europe. US availability remains TBC.
-Mat Smith
The biggest stories you might have missed
NASA’s CAPSTONE satellite has gone dark
This wasn’t part of the plan.
Well, that’s taken a turn. Just yesterday we reported on NASA’s latest steps towards getting a human back on the Moon, but the agency has lost contact with CAPSTONE, a tiny satellite that left Earth’s orbit on July 4th. The small satellite stopped communicating with engineers shortly after deploying from an Electron rocket bus and exiting Earth’s orbit. Handlers are attempting to re-establish contact with the cubesat.
European Union passes landmark laws to rein in big tech
The Digital Markets and Services Acts are designed to level the playing field.
The European Union has passed a pair of landmark bills designed to rein in Big Tech’s power. The Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act are intended to promote fairer competition, improve privacy protection, as well as banning many forms of targeted advertising. The EU has given both bills plenty of teeth, and can dole out a maximum penalty of 10 percent of its total worldwide turnover from the previous year, should regulators find non-compliance. This figure will, however, jump to 20 percent of worldwide turnover if officials find “repeated non-compliance.”
Meta sues a site cloner who allegedly scraped over 350,000 Instagram profiles
The company also filed a complaint against a scraping-for-hire firm.
On Tuesday, Meta filed separate federal lawsuits against a company called Octopus and an individual named Ekrem Ateş. According to Meta, the former is the US subsidiary of a Chinese multinational tech firm that offers data scraping-for-hire services to individuals and companies.
Octopus also sells software that allows people to carry out their own data collection campaigns. According to Meta, this program first compromises the Facebook and Instagram accounts of the user by providing their authentication information to Octopus before proceeding to scrape all the data accessible to that individual’s accounts.
Ubisoft will drop details on Assassin’s Creed and more games on September 10th
‘Beyond Good and Evil 2’, please?
Back in June, Ubisoft confirmed it would share information about the future of Assassin’s Creed during a special event in September, and this appears to be that. The company is currently working on two Assassin’s Creed projects: one is a live multiplayer experience spanning multiple time periods code-named Infinity, and the other is a standalone series installment code-named Rift.