Month: December 2017

Enlarge / There isn't much obvious rhyme or reason to the game's puzzles, which turn a 10-minute level into an hour-long affair.

Hello Neighbor won’t be the very last game I review this year. I can only pray that it will be the worst. As of now, the first-person stealth puzzler is the worst game I can remember covering in a long time.

That’s a shame, because the premise is promising enough. It’s like a suburban take on Rear Window set in the world of Psychonauts’ Milkman Conspiracy. Empty, twisted cookie-cutter houses embody a cartoonish paranoia. The player character, a young boy presumably native to the breezy street where the game takes place, sees something he shouldn’t. His titular neighbor has shoved a shrieking somebody (or something) into his basement. It’s your job to learn who or what.

All of this is implied through imagery. It has to be, since there isn’t really any dialogue in Hello Neighbor. There’s also no tutorial or anything like a basic breakdown of the controls, either. That quickly becomes a problem as you realize nothing works as it should, from avoiding your pursuer to stacking crates to sneak in through windows.

Enlarge / Elon Musk in front of a Tesla in China in 2015. (Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty Images) (credit: Getty Images)

On Tuesday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk took to Twitter to respond to queries from the company’s fans and followers. In his series of replies, Musk promised new software-based functionality and repeated a vague promise that he made back in April: that after a Model Y SUV, Tesla would introduce a pickup truck to compete with Ford’s F series.

The pickup truck promise was made earlier this year at the same time that Musk announced a semi from his electric vehicle company. Specifically, the CEO said that the semi announcement would happen in September 2017, and he promised a pickup truck announcement some time between October 2018 and April 2019. But the whole timeline was thrown off by the Model 3 passenger car, which was supposed to hit mass production in July 2017. It struggled to get off the ground due to manufacturing bottlenecks, and the semi announcement was delayed to November 2017.

Musk didn’t give a revised date for when Tesla would officially announce a pickup in his Tuesday tweet, but he said that the truck would start rolling off Tesla production lines some time after the Model Y.

Science is rarely kind to "crypto-zoology," which posits the existence of "hidden" creatures such as yeti, chupacabra, and Korean unicorns. It used to be that you could return from the weekend in the woods to regale your Sasquatch-hunting friends with tales of mysterious nocturnal sounds, a chase in the darkness, and—dramatically pulling a bag from your pocket—a tuft of the unseen creature's hair that had caught on a tree branch! Maybe your friends believed; maybe they did not. But, in the end, who could say exactly what you might have found?

And then scientists came along, science-ing these kinds of wonderful stories into scientific oblivion using science-y mitochondrial and nuclear DNA testing of purported Sasquatch bits. Such results have never been kind to crypto-zoology, often turning up possum and human DNA rather than anything Sasquatch-y.

But, if I'm remembering my Alexander Pope correctly, humans love to keep looking for mysteries:

Enlarge (credit: Michael Nagle / Bloomberg / Getty Images News)

Yesterday, the US Library of Congress announced a change to its social media archiving policy. In 2010, the LOC had been given a complete archive of every tweet sent to that point; it has been grabbing every single new one since. But starting on the first of January, the archiving will become selective; only tweets that are deemed newsworthy will be kept.

The LOC describes the decision in a very short white paper. Part of the reasoning is the sheer volume of data; the number of tweets is up, and their possible length has been doubled recently. But it's also a matter of being able to actually preserve content. Tweets now embed pictures, videos, and previews of the content of any links they contain. The LOC has been preserving only text and, therefore, is missing out on an increasingly important portion of the information content of any tweet.

In addition, the Library's normal role is as a curator, preserving information that's thought to be most significant or valuable. In this sense, the change will bring its Twitter policy more in line with its general approach to collecting.

Enlarge (credit: Mozilla)

If you're using Thunderbird for your email needs, make sure you're on version 52.5.2. Mozilla recently released the new version, which has patches that squash a handful of bugs.

The bug, rated critical by the Mozilla Foundation, is CVE-2017-7845, which is a buffer overflow vulnerability affecting only Windows users. "A buffer overflow occurs when drawing and validating elements using Direct 3D 9 with the ANGLE graphics library, used for WebGL content," Mozilla said in its security advisory. "This is due to an incorrect value being passed within the library during checks and results in a potentially exploitable crash."

Two of the bugs are rated "high" in severity. CVE-2017-7846 is a JavaScript exploit affecting Thunderbird's RSS reader capabilities. The second, CVE-2017-7847, is a CSS bug that could potentially allow an attacker to discover user data, like a user name.