Geek News

MoviePass' approach to gathering viewer data might raise eyebrows. According to Media Play News , CEO Mitch Lowe told those at a business forum that the movie subscription service's app not only tracks your location, but follows you to and from the theater. "We watch how you drive from home to the movies," he said, adding that "we watch where you go afterwards." Not surprisingly, the company is hoping to understand customer habits and "build a night at the movies." If people tend to have dinner before the movie or to have a drink afterwards, for example, MoviePass could steer customers to restaurants and bars and take a cut of the revenue. It's no secret that MoviePass would want to collect at least some data. It can use that to help movie studios gauge how well their shows are really doing, which is particularly important now that MoviePass has a stake in some productions . However, the company doesn't tell you that it's actively t...

It's been clear for a while that the fixes for the Meltdown and Spectre memory vulnerabilities would slow down PCs, but just how bad is the hit, really? Microsoft has run some benchmarks , and it's unfortunately bad news if your system is less than fresh. While the patches for Meltdown and one variant of Spectre will have a "minimal performance impact," fixing a second Spectre variant through low-level microcode imposes a tangible speed penalty -- and it's particularly bad on systems released around 2015 or earlier. If you have a PC with a 6th-generation Intel Core processor or later, you should only see a hit in the "single-digit" percentage range. That's small enough that you might not notice a thing. If you're using a 4th-generation Core or older CPU, however, you'll see "more significant slowdowns," some of which could be noticeable. And that's if you're using Windows 10. Most Windows 7 or 8 users on similar hardware...