Month: November 2017

Enlarge / Perhaps Star Wars: Battlefront II won't go down in flames after a major EA about-face.

Just hours before Star Wars Battlefront II's retail launch Friday, Electronic Arts and developer DICE announced that they are "turning off all in-game purchases... and all progression will be earned through gameplay." The surprise announcement promises the ability to purchase in-game crystals (used to purchase randomized loot boxes filled with in-game items) will return "at a later date," but "only after we've made changes to the game."

"As we approach the worldwide launch, it's clear that many of you feel there are still challenges in the design," DICE General Manager Oskar Gabrielson writes. "We've heard the concerns about potentially giving players unfair advantages. And we've heard that this is overshadowing an otherwise great game. This was never our intention. Sorry we didn't get this right."

Venturebeat cites "sources familiar with the situation" in reporting that the major change comes after Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson conducted a phone call with Disney CEO Bob Iger about the game. EA acquired the lucrative exclusive rights to publish Star Wars-based games in 2013, a year after Disney purchased Lucasfilm for $4 billion.

Enlarge / Perhaps Star Wars: Battlefront II won't go down in flames after a major EA about-face.

Just hours before Star Wars Battlefront II's retail launch Friday, Electronic Arts and developer DICE announced that they are "turning off all in-game purchases... and all progression will be earned through gameplay." The surprise announcement promises the ability to purchase in-game crystals (used to purchase randomized loot boxes filled with in-game items) will return "at a later date," but "only after we've made changes to the game."

"As we approach the worldwide launch, it's clear that many of you feel there are still challenges in the design," DICE General Manager Oskar Gabrielson writes. "We've heard the concerns about potentially giving players unfair advantages. And we've heard that this is overshadowing an otherwise great game. This was never our intention. Sorry we didn't get this right."

Venturebeat cites "sources familiar with the situation" in reporting that the major change comes after Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson conducted a phone call with Disney CEO Bob Iger about the game. EA acquired the lucrative exclusive rights to publish Star Wars-based games in 2013, a year after Disney purchased Lucasfilm for $4 billion.

Enlarge (credit: Samuel Axon)

Apple released iOS 11.1.2 for iPhones and iPads this afternoon. It's a minor, bug-fix update that benefits iPhone X users who encountered issues after acquiring the new phone just under two weeks ago.

iOS 11.1.2's patch notes are short and sweet. The update fixes just two problems. The first is "an issue where the iPhone X screen becomes temporarily unresponsive to touch after a rapid temperature drop." Last week, some iPhone X owners began reporting on Reddit and elsewhere that their touchscreens became temporarily unresponsive when going outside into the cold.

Apple shared the following statement with The Loop:

(credit: Comcast)

Comcast and Verizon have each, separately, approached 21st Century Fox about buying part of the company, according to several news reports.

Comcast already owns NBCUniversal and numerous regional sports networks. Adding part of 21st Century Fox would give Comcast even more programming to pair with the nation's largest cable broadband and TV network.

21st Century Fox owns Fox Broadcasting Company as well as various cable networks, broadcast stations, and film producers and distributors. 21st Century Fox also owns 39 percent of Sky, a European broadcaster.

(credit: Comcast)

Comcast and Verizon have each, separately, approached 21st Century Fox about buying part of the company, according to several news reports.

Comcast already owns NBCUniversal and numerous regional sports networks. Adding part of 21st Century Fox would give Comcast even more programming to pair with the nation's largest cable broadband and TV network.

21st Century Fox owns Fox Broadcasting Company as well as various cable networks, broadcast stations, and film producers and distributors. 21st Century Fox also owns 39 percent of Sky, a European broadcaster.

Enlarge (credit: Git)

One of the more surprising stories of the past year was Microsoft's announcement that it was going to use the Git version control system for Windows development. Microsoft had to modify Git to handle the demands of Windows development but said that it wanted to get these modifications accepted upstream and integrated into the standard Git client.

That plan appears to be going well. Yesterday, the company announced that GitHub was adopting its modifications and that the two would be working together to bring suitable clients to macOS and Linux.

Microsoft wanted to move to Git because of Git's features, like its easy branching and its popularity among developers. But the transition faced three problems. Git wasn't designed for such vast numbers of developers—more than 20,000 actively working on the codebase. Also, Git wasn't designed for a codebase that was so large, either in terms of the number of files and version history for each file, or in terms of sheer size, coming in at more than 300GB. When using standard Git, working with the source repository was unacceptably slow. Common operations (such as checking which files have been modified) would take multiple minutes.

Enlarge (credit: Git)

One of the more surprising stories of the past year was Microsoft's announcement that it was going to use the Git version control system for Windows development. Microsoft had to modify Git to handle the demands of Windows development but said that it wanted to get these modifications accepted upstream and integrated into the standard Git client.

That plan appears to be going well. Yesterday, the company announced that GitHub was adopting its modifications and that the two would be working together to bring suitable clients to macOS and Linux.

Microsoft wanted to move to Git because of Git's features, like its easy branching and its popularity among developers. But the transition faced three problems. Git wasn't designed for such vast numbers of developers—more than 20,000 actively working on the codebase. Also, Git wasn't designed for a codebase that was so large, either in terms of the number of files and version history for each file, or in terms of sheer size, coming in at more than 300GB. When using standard Git, working with the source repository was unacceptably slow. Common operations (such as checking which files have been modified) would take multiple minutes.

Enlarge / All you really have to do is set your DNS to 9.9.9.9. (credit: GCA/ Quad9)

The Global Cyber Alliance (GCA)—an organization founded by law enforcement and research organizations to help reduce cyber-crime—has partnered with IBM and Packet Clearing House to launch a free public Domain Name Service system. That system is intended to block domains associated with botnets, phishing attacks, and other malicious Internet hosts—primarily targeted at organizations that don't run their own DNS blacklisting and whitelisting services. Called Quad9 (after the 9.9.9.9 Internet Protocol address the service has obtained), the service works like any other public DNS server (such as Google's), except that it won't return name resolutions for sites that are identified via threat feeds the service aggregates daily.

"Anyone anywhere can use it," said Phil Rettinger, GCA's president and chief operating officer, in an interview with Ars. The service, he says, will be "privacy sensitive," with no logging of the addresses making DNS requests—"we will keep only [rough] geolocation data," he said, for the purposes of tracking the spread of requests associated with particular malicious domains. "We're anonymizing the data, sacrificing on the side of privacy."

Intelligence on malicious domains comes from 19 threat feeds—one of which is IBM's X-Force. Adnan Baykal, GCA's Chief Technical Advisor, told Ars that the service pulls in these threat feeds in whatever format they are published in, and it converts them into a database that is then de-duplicated. Quad9 also generates a whitelist of domains never to block; it uses a list of the top one million requested domains. During development, Quad9 used Alexa, but now that Alexa's top million sites list is no longer being maintained, Baykal said that GCA and its partners had to turn to an alternative source for the data—the Majestic Million daily top-million sites feed.