Month: September 2017

Enlarge (credit: Reikon Games)

I wish I could go back in time and experience the opening levels of Ruiner for the first time with a controller. The top-down cyberpunk shooter from Reikon Games pretty much demands the fluidity of twin-stick control, even at the cost of mouse-and-keyboard precision. And by "demands," I mean the game kicked my head in six ways 'til Sunday before I realized the optimal way to play.

The harshness of the action is telegraphed by the harshness of Ruiner's tone. The game's world is as red as Carrie on prom night and puts about as much value on human life. An opening crawl of text warns you that this dystopian future is as much about malice as mega-corporate profit—that hacking into people's brains and messing up their lives "has never been more fun."

That form actually gets in the way of function, at times. Mostly red bullets are guided by red laser lights to produce red blood over red metal floors from enemies and weapons highlighted in red. Throw in the odd explosion or glitchy screen static as your character's brain gets hacked and the action can sometimes get impossible to read. Thankfully, that action is smooth enough to compensate for these occasional problems (so long as you're playing with a controller).

KILL BOSS... and then some

All that action isn't muddied with plot, either. Ruiner drops your nameless, faceless avatar into a densely guarded corporate hideout. Your objective to "KILL BOSS" crackles harshly over the screen and airwaves on repeat. Things escalate when a miniboss fight forces you to juggle a timer, which extends every time you kill an enemy, along with dodging shotgun and assault rifle fire.

Enlarge / Cow. (credit: Ian Barbour)

A serious vulnerability that remains unfixed in many Android devices is under active exploit, marking the first known time real-world attackers have used it to bypass key security protections built in to the mobile operating system.

Dirty Cow, as the vulnerability has been dubbed, came to light last October after lurking in the kernel of the Linux operating system for nine years. While it amounts to a mere privilege-escalation bug—as opposed to a more critical code-execution flaw—several characteristics make it particularly potent. For one, the vulnerability is located in a part of the Linux kernel that's almost universally available. And for another, reliable exploits are relatively easy to develop.

By the time it was disclosed, it was already under active exploit on Linux servers. Within days of its disclosure, researchers and hobbyists were using the vulnerability, indexed as CVE-2016-5195, to root Android phones.

Enlarge / President Donald Trump motions to his daughter Ivanka Trump as she delivers remarks alongside students and members of Congress and her father's administration, before President Trump signed a memorandum to expand access to STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education in the Oval Office at the White House on September 25, 2017 in Washington, DC. (credit: Kevin Dietsch-Pool/Getty Images)

Ivanka Trump spoke briefly at a Tuesday event in Detroit put on by a trade group known as the Internet Association. The event centered around a pledge from companies and the federal government to spend $500 million on coding and computer science education at the K-12 levels.

According to White House pool reports, Trump (who is one of the daughters of President Donald Trump) arrived around midday to speak with various executives as part of a brief "fireside chat."

"Computer science and coding are priorities for the administration as we think about pathways to jobs and alignment of education to in-demand jobs in the modern economy," Trump said, according to White House pool reports. "I've spent a lot of time on the growth of economy and job growth. Part of that is jobs unfilled today and jobs of the future and the skill sets necessary to enable the next gen to thrive."

Enlarge (credit: flickr user: Alexandre Dulaunoy)

In late 2014 and early 2015, escalating tensions in New York City led to the NYPD staging a slowdown in which the department performed only its most essential duties. That might be expected to lead to an increase in crime, but a new analysis of official statistics shows the opposite: a significant drop in major crime for the period of the slowdown. Researchers are now arguing about what this tells us.

The slowdown developed in response to a sequence of events following the death of Eric Garner in July 2014, who died when placed in a chokehold by the police officers who were arresting him. This led to extensive protests, which continued after the decision of a grand jury not to indict the officers involved in Garner’s death. Two weeks after that ruling, NYPD officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos were fatally shot by an anti-police extremist, and the NYPD responded by informally and collectively stepping back their policing to the bare minimum.

This included fewer tickets and a huge drop in arrests. The action was partly attributed to precautionary measures, but there were also political motivations: “The act was a symbolic show of strength to demonstrate the city’s dependence on the NYPD,” write criminologists Christopher M. Sullivan and Zachary P. O’Keeffe in a paper in Nature Human Behaviour this week.

Apple has released a small software update for iPhones and iPads today. iOS 11.0.1 "includes bug fixes and improvements for your iPhone and iPad," but the short note provided to iOS users when they update doesn't specify which fixes or improvements they can expect.

However, Apple has claimed in its support documentation that one of the most jarring problems with last week's iOS 11 release is addressed by this update: the Exchange e-mail server bug that prevented sending e-mails for many users relying on e-mail accounts hosted on Outlook.com, Office 365, or certain Exchange Server 2016 configurations. Users received an error message saying, "Cannot Send Mail. The message was rejected by the server."

The support documentation no longer says that a fix is coming; instead, it says you'll experience the issue "until you update to iOS 11.0.1." Given the popularity of Microsoft's servers, this was a serious issue that impacted a lot of people. Apple claims it is now resolved.

Enlarge / High Sierra is less about the visible changes and more about under-the-hood features (like external GPU support). (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

MacOS High Sierra just came out of beta and is available to the public, but some users may feel left out by the current limitations of Apple's new file system (APFS). The new system currently supports machines with all-flash built-in storage, so those with Fusion Drives can't use it. However, a report from MacRumors cites an e-mail to a reader from Apple's Craig Federighi that states APFS will support Fusion Drives with later software updates. Apple confirmed to Ars that this is the case: support for Fusion and HDD systems will come in future updates.

Those who tested the beta version of High Sierra were in a pickle before the official release of the update on September 25. Because APFS did not support Fusion Drive systems like older iMacs and Mac Minis at launch, those who had their file systems already converted to APFS needed to revert them back to the older HFS+ format. APFS support was included in early betas of High Sierra but was then removed in the most recent beta versions.

Apple provided a long list of instructions on how to change back to the HFS+ format before High Sierra became available. Only those who downloaded beta versions of High Sierra had to worry about converting back before the official version was released. Now, with High Sierra available to all, those with Fusion Drives simply will not be updated to APFS until support for the new file system is released in later updates.

(credit: Getty Images)

For as long as video game piracy has existed, gamers and the industry have argued about whether the practice really hurts sales of legitimate games. In 2010, the Business Software Alliance estimated that generalized software piracy costs the world $51 billion annually and half a million jobs. Even most people who doubt every pirated download is equivalent to a lost sale will admit that illegal downloads have some negative effect on overall game sales.

So it's more than a bit surprising that an exhaustive study of piracy's effects by the European Commission found that "illegal consumption [of games] leads to increased legal consumption." To be more precise, the study estimates that for every 100 games that are downloaded illegally, players actually legally obtain 24 more games (including free games) than they would in a world in which piracy didn't exist.

The 306-page "Estimating Displacement Rates of Copyrighted Content in the EU" report (PDF) points out a number of caveats for this headline number, not least of which is a 45-percent error margin that makes the results less than statistically significant (i.e. indistinguishable from noise). That said, the same study finds that piracy has the more-expected negative effects on sales of films and books (and a neutral effect on music), singling out games as one area where piracy really does seem to work differently.