Month: June 2017

Enlarge / Hurricane Matthew is seen in 2016, closing in on Florida. (credit: NOAA)

It's a lousy time to be a US weather forecaster. Even as the Atlantic Ocean heats up, wind shear falls, and the potential for an active hurricane season looms, vacancies have been mounting at the National Hurricane Center in Miami and at National Weather Service offices around the country. According to a new US Government Accountability Office report, morale has sunk among forecasters, and increasing vacancies have led to an inability to provide timely severe weather information to state and local emergency managers.

Instead of addressing this problem, the proposed budget released by the Trump administration late last month would exacerbate the tempest. Overall, the President's budget for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration sought $1.06 billion for the National Weather Service, down six percent from 2017. But the devil is in the details, and some of these details are indeed devilish.

Perhaps most questionable is a "request" to limit the ability of forecasters to predict hurricanes and other severe weather with computer modeling. "NOAA requests a reduction of $5,000,000 to slow the transition of advanced modeling research into operations for improved warnings and forecasts," the budget blue book states.

Enlarge (credit: Valve Software)

Valve announced today that anyone will be able to publish games on Steam through its previously announced Steam Direct program for "a $100 recoupable publishing fee per game."

In announcing the direct publishing fee, Valve says it "wanted it to be as small as possible to ensure it wasn't a barrier to beginning game developers, while also not being so small as to invite easy abuse by people looking to exploit our systems." The company's "initial thinking" hovered around a $500 fee, the post notes, but eventually that number came down as "the community conversation really challenged us to justify why the fee wasn't as low as possible, and to think about what we could do to make a low fee work."

Valve's announcement doesn't go into details on how exactly developers will "recoup" the $100 fee Valve is asking for, outside of the usual 70 percent cut of Steam sales they already receive. The fee may end up being used as a sort of advance payment on Valve's usual 30 percent cut of revenues, but it's unclear how that would work for completely free titles listed on Steam.

(credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft's Windows Insider program suffered an awkward setback last night as the company released two different builds—one for desktop users, another for mobile—without apparently meaning to.

In both cases, systems configured to use the fast ring could find themselves downloading and installing Windows releases that weren't supposed to ship to the general public. For desktop users, the problem is merely an annoyance; the build, taken from a development branch named "RS_EDGE_CASE," appears to work, broadly speaking, but "may include issues that impact usability of your PC." Such issues aren't entirely uncommon on the fast ring, though this time Microsoft warns that such problems may be more numerous than usual. Anyone who installed the build can either roll back to the previous release or wait until Microsoft publishes a new fast ring build. That will happen next week at the earliest, as the company has said it won't be publishing any new builds this week.

The mobile situation is a little more grave. Again, a build was released from a different development branch—this one named "RS_IoT," denoting that it's not even a mobile build at all but rather an Internet-of-Things variant. Unlike the errant desktop build, this build isn't usable; phones that install it will get stuck in a boot loop, and the only way to restore them is to use the Windows Device Recovery Tool. This will wipe the entire phone and flash it with a working firmware.

Enlarge / Was Denuvo's DRM slowing down this darling fox?

Whatever your thoughts on the use of digital rights management to protect games against piracy, you probably don't want any DRM solution to actually have a negative impact on the performance of the game or your computer (SecuROM, anyone?). Now, though, crackers are alleging that Denuvo's DRM protection is causing performance issues in Rime, accusations the DRM maker and game maker both deny.

In a readme file accompanying the crack for the game, a cracker going by the handle Baldman says the Denuvo protection "now calls about 10-30 triggers every second during actual gameplay, slowing game down. In previous games like [Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3], Nier, Prey there were only about 1-2 'triggers' called every several minutes during gameplay, so do the math."

Speaking to Kotaku, a Denuvo spokesperson flatly denied that the DRM was having a negative impact on the game's performance. "Prior to release, we performed benchmark testing on the protected vs. unprotected versions of Rime. There was no performance impact on the version that is protected with Denuvo anti-tamper vs. the unprotected version."

Enlarge / HOPKINS, MN - APRIL, 27: Abdullahi Mohamud, 5, awaits returning to school after two of his siblings contracted the measles during the current outbreak. He received one dose of the vaccine in January and did not get sick. (credit: Getty | Courtney Perry)

After years of being the target of anti-vaccine groups, a vulnerable Somali immigrant community in Minnesota is now fighting a raging measles outbreak. It’s the worst outbreak in the state in nearly 30 years, and this year’s totals now exceed the total number of measles cases reported in the entire country in 2016.

Nevertheless, anti-vaccine groups have stepped up their effort to spread frightening falsehoods and dangerous misinformation about vaccines and measles, the Washington Post reports. In a recent forum, an anti-vaccine advocate handed out fliers that falsely alleged that safe and life-saving vaccines cause permanent brain damage and death.

Health professionals and religious leaders are uniting to fight back, promoting life-saving vaccinations and accurate health information during this holy month of Ramadan. They fear that with the religious festivities and gatherings, the outbreak will continue to boom. Health experts already estimate that 8,250 people have been exposed in daycares, hospitals, and schools.

Enlarge (credit: Valentina Palladino)

The ad exodus from YouTube has died down since its peak in March, but YouTube continues to update its guidelines to reassure advertisers and, in some ways, its creators. In a blog post, YouTube outlined more specific definitions of hate speech and what kinds of incendiary content wouldn't be eligible for monetization.

Three categories are classified as hate speech, with the broadest one being "hateful content." YouTube is defining this as anything that "promotes discrimination or disparages or humiliates an individual or group of people on the basis of the individual’s or group’s race, ethnicity, or ethnic origin, nationality, religion, disability, age, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity, or other characteristic associated with systematic discrimination or marginalization."

The second category is "inappropriate use of family entertainment characters," which means content showing kid-friendly characters in "violent, sexual, vile, or otherwise inappropriate behavior," no matter if the content is satirical or a parody. The final category is somewhat broad: "incendiary and demeaning content" means that anything "gratuitously" demeaning or shameful toward an individual or group is prohibited.