Month: June 2016

(credit: Antoine Thibaud)

In the immediate wake of a weather disaster, people like to wonder whether climate change is partly to blame for the disaster's severity. The problem is that any meaningful, serious answer to that question takes time—so much time that public attention has moved on before we get an answer.

For one group of climate scientists, that unfortunate problem sounded more like a challenge. With a good plan and the right setup, the team figured it could quickly run the necessary climate model simulations and spit out some basic results. By comparing a virtual world where humans didn’t drive up concentrations of greenhouse gases to the one we live in, the models can be used to see whether there's any change in the weather patterns associated with the latest disaster.

At the end of May, the team got a chance to take its system for a test drive. Weather linked to a lingering low pressure system dumped rain on France and Germany. Three days of steadily heavy rain, following a wet spring, caused flooding on the Seine and Loing rivers upstream of Paris. In Paris, the water level in the Seine rose more than 6 meters (over 20 feet), prompting the evacuation of art from basement levels of the Louvre. In other areas, thousands of human beings were evacuated as well.

We can only imagine the Steam Summer Sale's header image will be loaded with more characters and activity by the time the sale closes on July 4. (credit: Steam)

Ladies and gentlemen, start your game-buying wallets: The annual Steam Summer Sale has arrived.

The online game shop's bandwidth is currently being slammed thanks to the popularity of this sale, but should you be able to load its launch page, you'll see an advertised discount on a whopping 5,199 games until the sale ends on July 4. Thanks to the launch of VR headsets such as the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, that makes this the first Steam Summer Sale to reduce prices on virtual reality games.

Not every major SteamVR game is getting a discount during this sale, but if you're considering throwing down hundreds of dollars on compatible hardware, you may appreciate saving a few bucks on such solid VR fare as the music-punching gem Audioshield, the stellar VR deathmatch game Hover Junkers, the must-own arcade shooter Space Pirate Trainer, the sword-and-shield quest game Vanishing Realms, the plane-management challenge of Final Approach, and the two-player puzzle fun of Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes. (That last one works fine without VR, as well, and we heartily recommend it.)

Part of an e-mail thread discussing workarounds to keep Hillary Clinton's private e-mail server from being blocked by security filters at the State Department.

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Documents recently obtained by the conservative advocacy group Judicial Watch show that in December 2010, then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her staff were having difficulty communicating with State Department officials by e-mail because spam filters were blocking their messages. To fix the problem, State Department IT turned the filters off—potentially exposing State's employees to phishing attacks and other malicious e-mails.

The mail problems prompted Clinton Chief of Staff Huma Abedin to suggest to Clinton, "We should talk about putting you on State e-mail or releasing your e-mail address to the department so you are not going to spam." Clinton replied, "Let's get [a] separate address or device but I don't want any risk of the personal [e-mail] being accessible."

The mail filter system—Trend Micro's ScanMail for Exchange 8—was apparently causing some messages from Clinton's private server (Clintonemail.com) to not be delivered. Some were "bounced;" others were accepted by the server but were quarantined and never delivered to the recipient. According to the e-mail thread published yesterday by Judicial Watch, State's IT team turned off both spam and antivirus filters on two "bridgehead" mail relay servers while waiting for a fix from Trend Micro.

(credit: Opera)

Earlier this week, Microsoft made some bold claims about the battery life of its Edge browser, saying that laptops running Edge lasted much longer during video playback and used less energy during normal browsing operations than Chrome and Opera.

Opera, however, disagrees. The company has run its own tests and has written up the results: with power saving mode, Opera offered 22 percent more battery life than Edge and 35 percent more than Chrome. Unlike Microsoft, Opera has provided a lot more information about what its test did and how someone might replicate it. The test loaded a number of pages into different tabs and simulated button presses to scroll up and down.

While Microsoft hasn't yet formally responded, Edge Program Manager Kyle Pflug tweeted to point out that Opera's testing enabled not just power saving mode but also its built-in ad blocker, which is off by default. The test also compares Opera's latest developer build to Edge's current stable build. The latest Edge developer build supports ad blocking (through its extension mechanism) and makes a number of optimizations to further reduce battery drain.