Month: September 2018

Microsoft

After six years spanning three previous installments across two consoles, it's fair to say the Forza Horizon franchise is well established. This concept should sound familiar by now: an open-world driving game you can play solo or online, with a traveling music festival in the background. It's the work of Playground Games, built on the bones of the Forza game engine developed by Turn 10 for the even longer-running Forza Motorsport series. So far, the Horizon festival has visited Colorado, the Mediterranean, and Australia. And in Forza Horizon 4, it's Britain's turn.

If the developers at Playground were lazy, they could have just dusted off the last game and built a new map for it, replacing down under with the land soon to be known as Brexitopia. But the past two years have involved more than just building a new map. There's new online functionality with up to 72 players in a session. In addition to dynamic weather and days that turn into nights, now there are seasonal transitions, each of which brings new challenges for you to complete. There is a complete and welcome absence of loot boxes or microtransactions—something that will no doubt come as welcome news. And we even get a guest appearance from at least one other blockbuster game franchise.

Enlarge / Sean tries his best to take care of Daniel by himself.

The first Life Is Strange was a complicated piece of work. The episodic adventure game played brilliantly with its own format, weaving a moving and potentially tragic story about two young women finding their place, both in the world and with each other. But it was also marred by some awkward writing, stiff performances, and occasionally serious misfires when it came to dealing with serious subject matter.

For the second season of Life Is Strange, developer Dontnod Entertainment faced the simple and daunting challenge of sanding off the series' rough edges while keeping its warm heart intact. After playing the first episode, it seems they’re well on their way to doing just that.

On the run

Dontnod's development challenge is complicated by the series’ shift into an entirely new setting, with a whole new set of characters and a modified play style to go along with it.

Meet Sean, a high school senior in Seattle with simple desires: a girl to spend time with; a good party; a small, warm family he loves dearly in that detached teenage-boy way. But what begins as a lush, domestic story on par with the first game quickly goes off the rails when a chance encounter with a bully and a police officer leaves Sean and his young brother Daniel with a startling new status quo. Their dad is dead, as is a police officer, and Daniel seems to have wild and uncontrollable psychic powers.

Enlarge / Facebook reset login tokens for 90 million accounts as it patched bugs that allowed 50 million accounts to be compromised. (credit: Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Facebook reset logins for millions of customers last night as it dealt with a data breach that may have exposed nearly 50 million accounts. The breach was caused by an exploit of three bugs in Facebook's code that were introduced with the addition of a new video uploader in July of 2017. Facebook patched the vulnerabilities on Thursday, and it revoked access tokens for a total of 90 million users

In a call with press today, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the attack targeted the "view as" feature, "code that allowed people to see what other people were seeing when they viewed their profile," Zuckerberg said. The attackers were able to use this feature, combined with the video uploader feature, to harvest access tokens.

"The attackers did try to query our APIs—but we do not yet know if any private information was exposed," Zuckerberg said. The attackers used the profile retrieval API, which provides access to the information presented in a user's profile page, but there's no evidence yet that Facebook messages or other private data was viewed. No credit card data or other information was exposed, according to Facebook.

Enlarge / Scroby Sands offshore wind farm, Caister, Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, England. (credit: Photo by: Geography Photos/UIG via Getty Images)

This week, the executive director of the International Energy Agency (IEA) told the Global Wind Summit that wind energy was likely to become Europe's dominant energy source by 2027 and that it would grow from there.

Today, roughly 25 percent of the European Union's power currently comes from nuclear sources, with coal and gas each delivering a little above 20 percent. Wind constitutes 10 percent of the European Union's energy mix.

But by 2027, IEA's forecasts (PDF) put wind just beating all other electricity sources with a 23-percent share of the energy mix. "Other Renewables" like biomass plants contribute a little over 20 percent, gas adds 20 percent, nuclear contributes just a little below 20 percent, and coal declines to just over 10 percent. Solar energy contributes about six or seven percent in the IEA's 2027 scenario.

Enlarge / Skype 8.0. (credit: Microsoft)

In July, Microsoft announced plans to end support for the "classic" Skype client in September. But those plans were put on hold after the Skype community complained that the new, modern client was missing some beloved features from the classic client.

With plans now in place to reinstate those missing features, Microsoft has resurrected plans to deprecate the old Skype client. Skype version 7, the classic client, will no longer be supported after November 1 on desktop devices and November 15 on mobile devices.

The deprecation comes as Microsoft is consolidating its Skype development on a single client that's used across Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android, and even the Web. The new client, version 8, has been under development since 2016 and is where Microsoft is performing all new development work, including the recent call recording and end-to-end encryption features.

Enlarge / The Boeing/Saab T-X has won the Air Force's advanced jet trainer contract. (credit: Boeing)

The end-of-the-year contract rush for the US Defense Department has been good to Boeing. As the clock ticks down on the fiscal year, Boeing grabbed its third DOD contract in a month: this time, it's the Air Force's T-X next-generation advanced jet trainer contract. Boeing's joint bid with Swedish aerospace company Saab came in more than 50 percent below the Air Force's initial cost estimate, shutting out Lockheed and the US subsidiary of Leonardo (formerly Finmeccanica). Both of those entities bid trainers based on existing aircraft.

The award comes less than a week after the Air Force awarded a Boeing-Leonardo bid the win for the Air Force's replacement of its UH-1 nuclear security helicopters. And on August 30, Boeing won the Navy's MQ-25 unmanned carrier-launched tanker contract.

The T-X is designed to bring pilot training into the 21st century, providing an aircraft to train pilots in the pipeline to fly the F-35 Lightning II. The new jets—at least 351 of them—will replace the Air Force's aging fleet of Northrop T-38 trainers. Those T-38s, based on the Northrop F-5 fighter, have been in service since the 1960s. The new contract also includes 46 training simulators and ground equipment. It could be expanded to 475 aircraft eventually and may also result in international sales to other countries who have committed to buying the F-35.