Month: February 2016

Microsoft has released a firmware update to the Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book that, at long last, fixes significant power management and sleep bugs that saw Microsoft's latest systems draining their batteries and getting extremely hot when they should have been in ultra low power mode. Power management and driver problems are an unfortunately common feature of Windows systems, but these newest Surface devices have been a little more troublesome than most. With Microsoft responsible for both the hardware and the software, this has been a disappointment to many.

The Surface Book was one of my favorite machines from 2015, with its sleek, elegant package, pleasing hinge and solid specs. The review unit had a very raw firmware and driver loadout; in fact, the Windows Hello facial recognition wasn't working in the review system. I also had some issues with detaching the screen. I assumed that all these issues would be ironed out by the time the hardware hit the market, and certainly shipping machines did have proper support for Hello, but niggling issues persisted.

I wasn't alone with this; the Surface Book and Surface Pro 4 have both suffered a range of problems with, among other things, Wi-Fi, sleep, and the display drivers. The sleep problem—which, oddly, didn't seem to affect me with the pre-release firmware—was probably the most serious and persistent issue. The systems are supposed to support Connected Standby, aka S0ix power saving modes, which lets the system sleep while still being able to do things like check for e-mails, fetch new tweets, or receive Skype calls. This mode should be a very low power mode, but Surface Pro 4 and Book owners were finding that their systems would drain their batteries within a few hours. When doing so in laptop bags, they'd get very hot, too.

Vice Admiral Mike Rogers told Yahoo News that crypto is "foundational to our future"--but it's also a royal pain in the neck.

In an interview with Yahoo News chief investigative correspondent Michael Isikoff published today, National Security Agency director Michael Rogers declared that the terrorists involved in last November's attacks in Paris used at least some encrypted communications to plan their actions, preventing NSA from being able to warn French officials in advance. Because of encrypted communications, he said, "we did not generate the insights ahead of time. Clearly, had we known, Paris would not have happened."

Rogers did not explicitly re-launch the campaign waged by FBI director James Comey to force technology companies to provide a "golden key" to encrypted communications. Rogers called encryption "foundational to our future" and added that arguing over encryption backdoors was "a waste of time." But he did say that encryption was making the job of the NSA and law enforcement more difficult.

The interview comes shortly after the FBI won an order requiring Apple to provide technical means to bypass the security measures preventing them from unlocking the iPhone 5C belonging to Syed Rizwan Farook. Farook, along with his wife, are responsible for the December mass shooting in San Bernardino, California.

Pilot flying the pope's plane was hit by a laser beam as the plane landed in Mexico City on Friday. (credit: ychamyuen)

Last Friday, a charter Alitalia plane carrying Pope Francis was struck by a laser beam as it came in to land at Mexico City International Airport. Although the pilot was able to land the Airbus A330-200 safely, he alerted air traffic control, which alerted local police, according to USA Today.

It's unclear whether the pope's flight was specifically targeted. ABC News noted that "several other pilots in the area also reported laser strikes.” It appears that no one was hurt.

Still, laser strikes have become more and more common over the last decade. In 2012, the FBI called laser strikes against airplanes an "epidemic," noting that reported strikes in the US went from 283 in 2005 to about 3,700 in 2012. According to USA Today the Federal Aviation Administration logged a record total of 7,153 laser strikes in the US in 2015 through December 11.

Warren Spector

With nearly 17 years having passed since the well-remembered launch of System Shock 2, we've been having some trouble believing that newly launched studio Otherside Entertainment could recall the series' former glories for the recently announced System Shock 3. Our skepticism is at least a little reduced today, though, with the news that original System Shock producer Warren Spector has joined the Otherside team as studio director.

Spector, who's also known for his work on the Deus Ex, Thief, and Epic Mickey series, was already serving as a creative advisor for Otherside along with his current academic role at the University of Texas Austin. As Spector told GamesIndustry.biz:

"I've loved working with students as Director of the Denius-Sams Gaming Academy in the University of Texas' Moody College of Communication," Spector said. "But when the opportunity to have a bigger role in bringing Underworld Ascendant to life, as well as playing in the System Shock universe once again, helping to bring these games to a 21st century audience, I just couldn't say no. Working on System Shock was one of the most fulfilling things I've done in my career and it's hard to describe how much I'm looking forward to sharing with players what SHODAN has been up to since the last game was released."

While there are still precious few details known about System Shock 3, the array of well-known names being lined up behind the game's development is certainly starting to impress. At Otherside, Spector joins studio founder Paul Neurath, whom he worked with on games like Thief and Ultima Underworld at Looking Glass.

Would you do it with a Neanderthal? I mean, maybe, if he looked like this and knew his way around a Linux box.

By now it's pretty obvious that Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis were hot for each other. The two groups of early humans were not separate species—they were kissing cousins, separated by just a few hundred thousand years of evolution. Now we know they started hooking up far earlier than scientists believed was possible.

The standard narrative about how modern humans met Neanderthals is pretty simple. A group of early humans, possibly Homo erectus, hiked out of Africa over 600,000 years ago and settled all over Europe and the Middle East. Over time, they evolved into Neanderthals, Denisovans, and probably several other groups. Meanwhile, back in Africa, the common ancestor of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens was busily evolving into—you guessed it—Homo sapiens sapiens. Around 70 thousand years ago, modern humans started streaming in huge numbers out of Africa, into Europe and the Middle East, possibly spurred on by chilly weather caused by the Toba eruption in Indonesia. There, they met up with their long-lost cousins and immediately started humping.

Genetic analysis has confirmed that said humping took place. Seems like that should be the end of the story, except that even during the Pleistocene, relationships were complicated.