Month: April 2016

SoCal Gas and the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) are at odds over how quickly the Aliso Canyon natural gas storage facility will be reopened after a devastating leak that released tens of thousands of tons of methane into the atmosphere this past winter.

SoCal Gas, which operates the 115-well Aliso Canyon field, says the field can be up and running again, minus the broken well that had leaked for months, by late summer. But in a Friday meeting of energy officials and residents of the impacted Porter Ranch community, CPUC President Michael Picker said, "I assume we won't have Aliso Canyon back on-line this year,” according to local public radio station KPCC.

Ars contacted CPUC for clarification, but we have not yet received a response.

As Microsoft continues to court businesses and encourage them to upgrade to Windows 10, the company has taken the novel step of publishing a roadmap of Windows 10 features. This roadmap describes business-oriented features that are coming to Windows 10. Some, such as biometric authentication in the Edge browser, have already been announced as part of the forthcoming Anniversary Update and are currently available in the Insider Preview.

But others are not. While some are so vague as to tell us nothing—the Passport API used for biometric authentication is being "enhanced" to improve enterprise functionality—other features are rather more concrete. Microsoft plans to add device-based PC unlocking, wherein Windows and Android phones can be used to store authentication credentials, and the feature can be used to both unlock the PC and authenticate apps and services that use Windows Hello and the Passport API.

The same is also being enabled for what Microsoft calls "Companion devices" that integrate with a new API called the "Companion Device Framework." The Microsoft Band 2 fitness device will plug into this framework, and third-party devices will also be able to join in.

Enlarge (credit: Bleeping Computer)

A nasty piece of ransomware that took crypto-extortion to new heights contains a fatal weakness that allows victims to decrypt their data without paying the hefty ransom.

When it came to light two weeks ago, Petya was notable because it targeted a victim's entire startup drive by rendering its master boot record inoperable. It accomplished this by encrypting the master boot file and displaying a ransom note. As a result, without the decryption password, the infected computer wouldn't boot up, and all files on the startup disk were inaccessible. A master boot record is a special type of boot sector at the very beginning of partitioned hard drive, while a master boot file is a file on NTFS volumes that contains the name, size and location of all other files.

Do not mess with anyone whose knuckles are literally made of metal. (credit: Hardcore Henry)

If you need an antidote for the overblown blah of Batman v Superman, your medicine has arrived in the form of Hardcore Henry, a surprisingly great sci-fi shoot-em-up that moves at the pace of a first-person shooter on speed—and crack, and some LSD for good measure. It’s the comic-violent tale of deadly cyborgs, dope-smoking clones, and a telekinetic gangster-corporate oligarch in Russia. And it has a great soundtrack, too.

Shot entirely from the perspective of Henry with head-mounted GoPro cameras, the movie begins with a familiar cyborg premise. We watch through Henry’s eyes as he boots up, looks down in confusion at the newly installed power ports in his chest, then watches as an engineer screws on his new bionic arm and leg. The engineer tells Henry that she’s his wife, and she hopes one day he’ll remember how much they loved each other. But there’s no time for lovey-dovey, nor to install Henry’s voice box, because the lab is immediately attacked by bad guys. As they run for their lives, Henry discovers that the lab is actually in a zeppelin, and he and the engineer barely have time to launch themselves in the sole remaining escape pod.

In the middle of all this, we realize that the engineer—who jokes that Henry “never liked” her work—has done kind of a half-assed job covering Henry’s bionic arm with skin. She’s left his knuckles bare, so that four gleaming metal joints show through. Of course, these perma-brass knuckles will come in handy, because Henry is going to spend this entire movie wordlessly pounding the crap out of people using every weapon on his body and in his arsenal.

Lucas Pope

Welcome to the Obra Dinn.

7 more images in gallery

If you've just come here to play one of the cooler story-mystery games in recent history, head to game developer Lucas Pope's website as soon as you possibly can to download the first public demo of his new game, Return of the Obra Dinn, for free on Windows and OS X.

We've been eagerly awaiting a chance to try the game again after enjoying its 15-minute demo at last month's Game Developers Conference. Pope's game-making reputation precedes him, thanks to his one-two punch of the touchscreen masterwork Helsing's Fire and Ars' choice for 2013 game of the year Papers, Please. Still, we had no idea what to expect—especially from a new game so graphically rudimentary, it makes the lo-fi Papers, Please look like a piece of classic art in comparison.

"A lot of the work in making this game has been so that when a player sits down, they don't think immediately, 'why is this game in one-bit?'" Pope said to Ars during a GDC interview. "'I can't fucking see anything. Just give me more colors so I can tell what's going on. I don't care about the stupid art style.'"