Month: August 2018

Enlarge (credit: John Lund/Sam Diephuis)

Booze is a leading cause of death and disease worldwide, and no amount is devoid of risks, according to a massive meta-analysis on global alcohol use.

The study, published late last week in The Lancet, appears to contradict some health advice that suggests low-to-moderate drinking is fine and may even provide health benefits. But it’s important to keep in mind that the study is focused on risk at the population level—individual, absolute risks can still be quite small, even nearly negligible, depending on how much you drink.

For the study, hundreds of researchers collaborated to lump together 3,992 estimates for relative risks of alcohol drinking. That is to say, they combined estimates of how drinking increases a person’s risk of a particular potential harm—such as being injured in a drunken accident or developing throat cancer—relative to someone who does not drink or drinks less. Those estimates were distilled from 592 different studies. The researchers also amassed data on alcohol exposure from 694 different sources, extracting 121,029 data points. This helped the researchers estimate how much men and women in 195 countries might actually be drinking, broken out by age.

Enlarge (credit: John Lund/Sam Diephuis)

Booze is a leading cause of death and disease worldwide, and no amount is devoid of risks, according to a massive meta-analysis on global alcohol use.

The study, published late last week in The Lancet, appears to contradict some health advice that suggests low-to-moderate drinking is fine and may even provide health benefits. But it’s important to keep in mind that the study is focused on risk at the population level—individual, absolute risks can still be quite small, even nearly negligible, depending on how much you drink.

For the study, hundreds of researchers collaborated to lump together 3,992 estimates for relative risks of alcohol drinking. That is to say, they combined estimates of how drinking increases a person’s risk of a particular potential harm—such as being injured in a drunken accident or developing throat cancer—relative to someone who does not drink or drinks less. Those estimates were distilled from 592 different studies. The researchers also amassed data on alcohol exposure from 694 different sources, extracting 121,029 data points. This helped the researchers estimate how much men and women in 195 countries might actually be drinking, broken out by age.

The upcoming video game Cyberpunk 2077 took this summer's E3 by storm with a behind-closed-doors reveal that set tongues wagging. Now, two months later, the game's developers at CD Projekt RED have deemed this hour-long gameplay slice worthy of public consumption.

We've reviewed the footage, which the developer posted on Monday on its own Twitch feed and then encouraged other users to re-stream, and we can confirm both its similarities and differences to what we saw back in June. In short: differences in combat, movement, and tempo appear to indicate this is a real-time-rendered demo—albeit one that adheres to a strict path.

Tech on TV: Better Call Saul. Click here for transcript. (video link)

On the surface, nothing about Better Call Saul appears particularly innovative. Crime and legal dramas stand as one of TV's oldest formats, and this one happens to be set in the near-past. The show can't even draw on the latest headlines where the bleeding edge of tech runs into law. On top of that, of course, Saul spun-off from the wildly successfully Breaking Bad, meaning a lot of this world's largest narrative arcs have been spelled out already (to say nothing of the critical shadow Breaking Bad casts). 

And yet through three seasons, Better Call Saul has surprised viewers from every angle—its subtle tech-savvy included. If the show's writing and visual language don't give it away, Saul happens to boast one of television's most experienced and creative staff and crew. Even if Jimmy McGill doesn't have hacker friends or carry a futuristic laser pistol, the show hides plenty of clever VFX work in relatively plain sight.

Enlarge (credit: Epic Games)

Epic Games' popular shooter Fortnite has been out on Android for just a few weeks, and already there are concrete examples of some of the security fears brought about by the game's unique distribution method. Google disclosed a vulnerability in the Fortnite Installer that could trick the installer into installing something other than Fortnite.

Fortnite is one of the rare Android apps that isn't distributed on the Google Play Store. Epic, in an effort to avoid Google's 30-percent cut of in-app purchases, is distributing the game itself on Android. Users who want Fortnite must go to Epic's website and download an app called the "Fortnite Installer," which will then download and install the Fortnite game and keep it up to date. This distribution method opens up users to a number of potential security risks. Getting the installer means users must allow "unknown sources" installation through the browser, and they have to make sure they're actually downloading Fortnite from Epic Games and not just a website claiming to be Epic Games.

The Fortnite Installer was vulnerable to a "Man-in-the-disk" (MITD) attack. The installer, after downloading the game, could have the Android APK file swapped out with a malicious copy by a third-party app just before it was installed. The vulnerability only worked on Samsung devices—the "exclusive" launch OEM for Fortnite on Android. According to Google's bug report, on Samsung phones, the Fortnite Installer used a "private Galaxy Apps API." Samsung's API stores the downloaded file in Android's "external" storage, which is world readable, leading to the security problems. Google's bug report even mentions that "Using a private internal storage directory rather than external storage would help avoid this vulnerability."

Enlarge / Ben Chalker, who is in charge of manufacturing at Defense Distributed, shows a part of the blueprint on a computer at the Austin, Texas factory on August 1, 2018. (credit: KELLY WEST/AFP/Getty Images)

A federal judge in Seattle has ruled against Defense Distributed, imposing a preliminary injunction requiring the company to keep its 3D-printed gun files offline for now.

US District Judge Robert Lasnik found in his Monday ruling that the plaintiffs were likely to succeed based on their argument that the Department of State, in allowing for a modification of federal export law, had unwittingly run afoul of a different law, the Administrative Procedure Act.

In essence, the judge found that because the Department of State did not formally notify Congress when it modified the United States Munitions List, the previous legal settlement that Defense Distributed struck with the Department of State—which allowed publication of the files—is invalid.

Enlarge / Come on, you've always wanted to do this during gridlock. Admit it.

When you think about it, it's kind of incredible that more games haven't tried to ape the general premise of 2004's Katamari Damacy. There's a unique sense of almost zen calm in gathering up literally everything you see into a big sticky ball, yet there are few games that capture that same feeling, sticky-ball or not.

Fourteen years later, here comes Donut County, another game about cleaning up disorder that invites obvious Katamari comparisons. This time, instead of a sticky ball, you control a hole in the ground that can swallow up anything it can slide under. There's a wacky plotline focusing on a racoon with a donut-delivery app that kind of ties the concept together, but really all you need to know is that you are an insatiable hole.

Every item that falls into the pit increases the hole's diameter, until you're able to swallow up every single simplistic, cel-shaded 3D object you can see and leave a soothing expanse of nothingness.