Month: August 2017

Enlarge / Maybe Sonic and his friends are looking at an incoming, Denuvo-related crapstorm headed their way. (credit: Sega)

I had high hopes of returning to Sonic Mania and slapping an Ars Approved sticker on my early-August review once its PC version launched. I figured, by then, the console editions would have received patches to a few noticeable glitches and a tidy PC port would seal the deal on an easy game recommendation.

Then I tried loading the Windows version of Sonic Mania while my Steam account was offline. That's when Sonic Mania informed me, in no uncertain terms, that "Steam user must be logged in to play this game."

The error message shown when trying to boot Sonic Mania's PC version in offline mode on its launch day. In this case, Steam had previously booted, and thus authenticated, the game online.

Turns out, Sega has applied the much-maligned Denuvo copy-protection system to Sonic Mania's PC version—and this Denuvo implementation won't unlock the game for players so long as Steam is operating in "offline mode." Until the game receives an update, Sonic Mania fans hoping to play the PC version in an offline capacity are out of luck. (Your backup option, should you want to do something like board a plane, is to boot the game while connected to Wi-Fi, then disconnect from the Internet and leave the game running in the background until you're ready to play. It's not necessarily an ideal workaround.)

With Blade Runner 2049 hitting theaters October 6, you might be wondering what's been going on in the 30 years since the last film ended. The original Blade Runner ended ambiguously in 2017 when Deckard fled Los Angeles with the replicant Rachael. Now you can watch a short film called 2036: Nexus Dawn, directed by Luke Scott, who helmed the 2016 horror film Morgan. Nexus Dawn focuses on one, key meeting between biotech magnate Neander Wallace (Jared Leto) and some officials.

We're getting a feel for Wallace's fragility and hubris here. Though he's appeared as a builder of replicants in the 2049 trailers, it wasn't clear who he was or how he fit into the story. Now we know he holds patents to some kind of agriculture-related biotech that saved the world from starvation. Wallace is also kind of a classic mad scientist, obsessed with creating new life. He shows the people at this meeting the Nexus 9, a new kind of replicant that lives as long as his human owner desires and will never disobey orders or run away.

At Comic-Con last month, the filmmakers revealed what happened between the two films in a quick chart projected onscreen:

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Enlarge / Something was lost in translation. And something was gained. (credit: Sean Gallagher)

Google Translate—the Web and mobile tool that performs machine-learning-based translation of over 100 languages—has a small problem: to some degree, it depends on the kindness of strangers. And that dependence can be gamed for amusing (or enraging) result, as we discovered today while working on a story about North Korea's recent ballistic missile launches.

When using Google Translate's live feature—which performs machine-learning-driven translation of text viewed through a mobile device's camera—to translate an article in the North Korean periodical Tongil Sinbo, we discovered that the feature translated the Korean characters for "Supreme Leader" as "Mr. Squidward," as shown in the image above.

"Supreme Leader" is the title used for North Korea's leader, Kim Jung Un. "Mr. Squidward" is the formalized way to address a character from the cartoon Spongebob Squarepants.

The HoloLens headset. (credit: Microsoft)

Stop me if you think you've heard this one before: a Redmond-based software company is an early player in a brand-new market, then finds itself displaced and left behind after late-coming competitors bring to market similar products in a way that captures the mainstream audience.

We saw this with smartphones: Microsoft's various Windows Mobile offerings built a small but loyal following, but the company was too slow to acknowledge the widespread appeal of touch-first interfaces and didn't recognize the power of Android's zero-cost licensing. Microsoft eventually built a good product and was even carving out double-digit market share in Europe, but it subsequently floundered, and the company has now all but disappeared from the market.

The surprise reveal of Microsoft's HoloLens back in 2015 caught the world off guard. The product hadn't leaked, and it offered something genuinely new: a self-contained headset that mixed 3D computer graphics with the real world, offering the kind of augmented reality experience that had hitherto been the sole preserve of science fiction. Unlike virtual reality headsets, which completely occlude your view, HoloLens lets you see the whole world in all its glory, obscuring only those parts that were hidden behind virtual objects. It borrowed from work done with Kinect, containing complex systems for mapping and tracking the room and objects around you. The setup enabled full, untethered operation without needing any base stations or object markers. As a melding of the virtual and the real, the HoloLens was thoroughly convincing.

Enlarge / Pedestrians walk in front of a huge screen displaying a map of Japan (R) and the Korean Peninsula, in Tokyo on August 29, 2017, following a North Korean missile test that passed over Japan. (credit: AFP via Getty Images)

At 6 am local time on August 29, a ballistic missile was launched from near Pyongyang in North Korea. Flying 2,700 kilometers (about 1,700 miles), the missile arced over Japan's northern island of Hokkaido, prompting Japanese officials to issue a civil defense warning to citizens.

Alarm from JP Gov. "A missile was fired from North Korea. Please evacuate to a sturdy building or basement." #northkorea #Japan pic.twitter.com/38NNCteqY2

— Chiho komoriya (@Chihokomoriya) August 28, 2017

Tuesday's launch was the latest in a renewed barrage from North Korea, apparently in response to ongoing military exercises and US plans to station an anti-ballistic missile defense system in South Korea. While the missile passed over Japan, it's not clear that Japan or the US could have done anything to intercept it. And if they had tried, the attempt may have proven to be an embarrassment—potentially reducing confidence in the ability of the US and its allies to defend against an actual attack.

It is not yet clear whether the missile test was successful other than as a provocation. Reports indicate that the missile broke into three pieces and fell into the ocean 1,180 kilometers (about 730 miles) east of Hokkaido. As it passed over Japan, the missile reached an altitude of 550 kilometers (340 miles)—about the same altitude reached by another recently-tested, intermediate-range ballistic missile. That missile—the Pukguksong-2—had a much shorter flight of 500 kilometers (310 miles). But Tuesday's flight was much more shallow and shorter than the intercontinental ballistic missile North Korea tested in July.

Enlarge (credit: Yuri Samoilov)

A now-fired Philadelphia cop has been behind bars for almost two years for refusing to decrypt hard drives that authorities found at his residence as part of a federal child-porn investigation. On Thursday, his lawyers are set to ask a federal judge to release him while he appeals the reason for his confinement to the Supreme Court. If the justices take the case, it would be the first time they weighed the constitutionality of whether forcing somebody to decrypt hardware amounts to a Fifth Amendment violation.

Francis Rawls

The dispute concerns Francis Rawls, who has been serving an indefinite jail term after being held in contempt of court for refusing to unlock at least two FileVault-encrypted drives connected to an Apple Mac Pro. He has not been charged with any criminal offense even though the contempt order (PDF) was issued September 30, 2015.

Both a federal judge and the 3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals did not agree with Rawls' contention that forcing him to unlock the drives amounted to a violation of his Fifth Amendment right against being compelled to testify against oneself. The courts also concluded that it was a "foregone conclusion" that kid porn was on the drives because a forensic examination revealed that the "hash" values of the files have been linked by the authorities to known child pornography.