Month: April 2018

Islands of Nyne originally launched in a limited, closed-alpha state. Over the weekend, it officially launched via Steam Early Access, so we are updating our April report with impressions of what you can expect from the $24.99 game on Windows 10.

Call it a trend, if not an outright phenomenon. Battle royale games have officially catapulted into the industry's pole position, largely fueled by the neck-and-neck popularity contest between PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG) and Fortnite: Battle Royale. And over the past few months, we have learned that even more of these games will likely show up by year's end, with announcements attached to major series like Call of Duty and Battlefield.

The news follows plenty of latecomers to the battle royale genre, which all have a few things in common. Roughly 100 players parachute onto an island with the goal of being the last shooter standing, and that contest is made all the more tense by random-item pickups and a constantly shrinking battlefield.

(credit: AMD)

The second-generation Ryzen chips announced last week are now out, and reviews have hit the 'net. Unlike the situation last week, we're now free to talk about what's changed in the second-generation chips and where their improvements lie.

AMD is calling the new parts "Zen+." This isn't a new architecture; rather, it's a tweaked version of the first-generation Zen architecture. The basic layout of the chips remains the same: each contains two core complexes (CCXes), which are blocks of four cores, eight threads, and 8MB level 3 cache, joined with AMD's Infinity Fabric.

Architecturally, the biggest improvements seem to have been made to memory and cache latencies. AMD says that the cache latency for level 1, level 2, and level 3 caches and main memory have all improved, reduced by up to 13 percent, 34 percent, 16 percent, and 11 percent, respectively. Tech Report's benchmarks show improved main-memory latency, and PC Perspective found improved communications latency between CCXes.

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have another round of deals to share. Today's list includes a decent price on Dell's Inspiron 15 5000 notebook, which can be had with a 7th-gen Core i7, 16GB of RAM, and a 4GB AMD Radeon R7 graphics card for $700.

It probably goes without saying this isn't the most luxurious notebook in the world—you have to deal with a 1TB HDD instead of a faster SSD, there's no USB-C, and, again, the processor is a generation old—but that's still a good amount of horsepower for a laptop with a midrange price. Just note that it uses a TN panel, not an IPS one, so its contrast isn't the best—though it does at least have a 1080p resolution and is touch-enabled. There's also a DVD drive and HDMI port, if you're still hanging onto those. Heads up, though: Dell says stock is limited for this one.

If you don't need a new laptop on the cheap, we also have deals on Google's Daydream View headset, 4K TVs, Logitech mice, the Essential Phone, Bluetooth speakers, and more. Check them all out for yourself below.

Enlarge / Airport security line. (credit: TSA)

Congressional Republicans want to impose "net neutrality" rules that allow Internet service providers to charge online services and websites for priority access to consumers. Making the case for paid prioritization Tuesday, US Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) said that paying for priority access would be similar to enrolling in TSA Precheck.

"In real life, all sorts of interactions are prioritized every day," Blackburn said in her opening statement at a subcommittee hearing on paid prioritization. Blackburn continued:

Many of you sitting in this room right now paid a line-sitter to get priority access to this hearing. In fact, it is commonplace for the government itself to offer priority access to services. If you have ever used Priority Mail, you know this to be the case. And what about TSA Precheck? It just might have saved you time as you traveled here today. If you define paid prioritization as simply the act of paying to get your own content in front of the consumer faster, prioritized ads or sponsored content are the basis of many business models online, as many of our members pointed out at the Facebook hearing last week.

Dividing up online services into those that have paid for TSA Precheck-like priority access and those that haven't wouldn't necessarily be appealing to consumers. While TSA Precheck lets travelers zoom through security, everyone else is stuck in a long, slow-moving line and met with frequent obstacles. Comparing paid prioritization to TSA Precheck lends credence to the pro-net neutrality argument that allowing paid fast lanes would necessarily push all other online services into "slow lanes."

Enlarge / They were big, but we showed up, and they're now gone. (credit: Mauricio Anton)

When the first modern humans ventured beyond Africa during the late Pleistocene, roughly 120,000 years ago, they stepped into a world filled with giants: the 6-ton giant ground sloth in South America, the 2- to 3-ton wooly rhino in Europe and northern Asia, the 350- to 620-pound sabertooth cat in North America, and the 6-ton wooly mammoth in Eurasia and North America. It's hard to imagine a world filled with animals that large: the giants of the Pleistocene quickly vanished, and the animals that survived were, in general, two or three times smaller than those that went extinct. A new study indicates that the late Pleistocene decrease in mammal size coincided with the geographical spread of humans around the world—and the authors say that's not just happenstance.

Human involvement in the disappearance of the Pleistocene megafauna is still the subject of intense debate, but this is hardly the first time we've been implicated. To provide a different perspective on these extinctions, a team of biologists led by Felisa Smith of the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, decided to look for changes in the pattern of extinctions since the beginning of the Cenozoic period 65 million years ago—the end of the dinosaurs and the beginning of the rise of mammals. Species go extinct all the time at a steady background rate of about one to five species per year. If that rate or the kinds of animals dying off changed after humans started colonizing the world beyond Africa, that could imply that we had something to do with it.

The biologists examined two large datasets. One listed the global distribution and body size of animal species in the late Pleistocene and Holocene, starting 125,000 years ago. The other listed similar information for species spanning the whole Cenozoic. Starting at around 125,000 years ago, the datasets traced a decrease in both the mean and the maximum body size of mammals on every continent, coinciding with the spread of humans into each region. Wherever humans went, mammals got smaller, and big ones tended to die off.

Enlarge / No, no you can't. (credit: Nathan Mattise)

Google's App Engine may not have been designed to provide a way for developers to evade censors, but for the past few years it has offered one, via a technique known as domain fronting. By wrapping communications to a service with a request to an otherwise innocuous domain or IP address range such as Google's, application developers can conceal requests to domains otherwise blocked by state or corporate censors. It's a method that has been used both for good and ill—adopted by Signal, the anti-Chinese censorship service GreatFire.org, plugins for the Tor anonymizing network, some virtual private network providers, and by an alleged Russian state-funded malware campaign to obfuscate Tor-based data theft.

But on April 13, members of the Tor Project noticed that domain fronting had become broken. The reason, according to a report by The Verge's Russell Brandom, is that Google made changes to the company's network architecture that had been in the works for some time. A Google representative told Brandom that domain fronting had never been officially supported by Google, and it only worked until last week "because of a quirk of our software stack… as part of a planned software update, domain fronting no longer works. We don’t have any plans to offer it as a feature.”

Ars attempted to contact Google, but we've received no response as of press time.