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The 2019 Game Developers Conference (GDC), held last week in San Francisco, welcomed an estimated 20,000-plus developers, gamers, publishers and tech vendors from across the globe.

From the tech driving the future of gaming to the industry’s most prevalent conversations and trends, here are five takeaways and headlines from the 13th annual show.

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YouTube has never had the best layout. Despite going through numerous design changes over the years it’s always looked a bit of a muddle, and unearthing great content to watch has never been as easy as it should be.

What Google’s video site has needed for quite some time now is a fresh take to bring it more in line with its newer rivals, like Instagram and TikTok. Something like this.

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Kaspersky Lab reports that the software update system used by ASUS was hijacked by hackers and used to deliver a backdoor-laden piece of malware to users. The company estimates that around a million users may have been affected by what it describes as "one of the biggest supply-chain incidents ever".

Back in January, the security firm discovered that a threat actor interfered with the ASUS Live Update Utility, adding a backdoor to it. Signed with an official ASUS certificate and carefully crafted to be precisely the same size as the official tool, the malware -- dubbed ShadowHammer -- went unnoticed for some time.

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There are some gaming franchises that have some serious staying power, and Elder Scrolls is one with longevity. The series has been around for an incredible 25 years now, and gaming behemoth Bethesda has a treat for you to help celebrate.

To mark the quarter-century landmark, the company is giving away free copies of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind to anyone who fancies delving into the world of Tamriel. The special offer was only meant to be available yesterday, 25 March (to coincide with the anniversary of the birth of Elder Scrolls), but now Bethesda has extended the giveaway until the end of the month -- but you still need to act fast!

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Apple has done very well financially under Tim Cook, but the company's hardware is starting to lose its luster. iPhone sales are down, and the Mac line continues to be a confused mess -- "Flexgate" and an unreliable keyboard plague the once great MacBook Pro. We still don't have the promised new Mac Pro, and AirPower is missing in action too. While Apple Watch and AirPods are successful, I still hate them both -- the former has a terrible user interface, while the latter can hurt some users' ears (including mine). Quite frankly, I suspect most folks simply use Airpods and Watch as status symbols and for fashion -- their staying power may be limited.

So now, Apple is trying to pivot to services, and that's a very good idea. The problem? Its News+ service is lacking key news sources, such as The New York Times, for instance. Apple TV+ is a Netflix-like video service with exclusive Apple original content, which, let’s be honest, will probably be lame. Ultimately, I don't envision News+ or TV+ being successful. Thankfully, Tim Cook and company seemingly got one thing right today, Apple Arcade -- an upcoming video game subscription service for iOS, macOS, and Apple TV which will offer access to more than 100 premium games.

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Earlier today, at a special event hosted at its the Cupertino campus, Apple took the wraps of its paid news subscription service, but it was really the tech giant’s rumored TV service that everyone was waiting to hear about. And that wait is finally over.

Apple’s new TV and movie steaming service goes by the name Apple TV+ and it will be home to a wide selection of original Apple content.

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Content creation is huge these days, with everyone wanting to be the next big internet star. Not only are people doing podcasts, internet radio shows, and YouTube videos, but they are streaming themselves playing games too, on platforms like Twitch.

If you want to stand out from all of the other creators flooding the web, you should obviously create enjoyable content and offer a unique personality. Talent isn't everything, however, as the technical aspect is important too. For instance, people want clear video -- nothing dark or grainy. Arguably more important is audio -- no one wants to struggle to hear your voice. Today, HyperX launches a new product that should enhance your audio experience -- the premium QuadCast Microphone.

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At a special event at its Cupertino campus, Apple today lifted the wraps of its revamped Apple News app, which comes with a new premium subscription service called Apple News+. This offers readers access to over 300 magazines and newspapers for a flat rate of $9.99 a month.

Available in the US and Canada to begin with, publications offered by Apple News+ include Vogue, National Geographic, People, ELLE, The Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times.

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A new study reveals that 79 percent of IT leaders believe that employees have put company data at risk accidentally in the last 12 months, and 61 percent believe they have done so maliciously.

The research from data security company Egress also explores how employees and executives differ in their views of what constitutes a data breach and what is acceptable behavior when sharing data.

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Unplanned service interruptions which can include outages, operational overload, slowdowns in delivery, notification fatigue and other unanticipated events represent a major issue according to a new global survey of site reliability engineers (SREs).

The study by digital experience monitoring specialist Catchpoint reveals that 49 percent say they have worked on an incident in the last week, while the same percentage state they have worked on outages longer than a day in their career.

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Ever hear of Devon Island? Yeah, neither have I. Apparently, it is an island in Canada that is referred to as "Mars on Earth" by some, including Google. Why? Because of its similar terrain/environment to the "red planet."

You see, the search giant seems very excited about bringing its popular Google Street view to this location. Truth be told, at first, I thought Google actually had miraculously brought Street View to the actual planet of Mars (silly me), but upon further investigation, my excitement was quickly extinguished when I discovered it was just a place here on Earth. But OK, I guess it's still kind of cool.

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Apple had a pretty busy week last week, unveiling new iPads, new iMacs, and updated AirPods.

Today things get even busier for the tech giant as it’s holding a special keynote at its Cupertino campus where it is expected to unveil several new services, including one that aims to compete with Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.

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We have known for a little while that Microsoft is planning to release a Chromium-based version of its Edge browser, and a new leak gives us our first glimpse at it. With Chromium at its core, it is perhaps no surprise that this version of Edge bears more than a passing resemblance to Google Chrome.

The leak also confirms much of what we thought we already knew about the upcoming browser -- support for Chrome extensions, a dark mode, synchronization of favorites, and more

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If you see a 5G indicator in your phone's status bar, you know you've got a fast connection, right? Think again. The technology world may be eagerly anticipating the capabilities of 5G, but in the US AT&T has simply jumped on the hype bandwagon as a marketing tool.

A new study into the speed of the company's 5G E service found that it is actually slower than 4G offerings from its rivals. Despite the name suggesting a futuristic service with speeds to match, AT&T is actually delivering sub-par performance.

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Few people can claim to like the ads that have become part and parcel of smartphone usage, but for the most part they can be endured. But what about when a minor inconvenience that merely infringes on your time becomes even more of a nuisance and actually starts to kill your phone battery?

According to an investigation, this is precisely what has been happening. An ad fraud scheme has been uncovered that invisibly plays videos lucrative video ads on handsets, earning money for fraudsters and draining the batteries of Android handsets.

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