Month: September 2018

Enlarge (credit: Getty / Aurich / Revived Games)

Back in June, Valve issued expansive Steam guidelines that said games would only be removed from the platform for illegal or "outright trolling" content. At the time, we noted that the unclear definition of "trolling" left a lot of wiggle room for Valve to still define what is and isn't acceptable content in a game.

Yesterday, Valve took a stab at clarifying what defines "a troll game" in its estimation. These clarifications are welcome, but they raise some questions about how agnostic Valve's purported value-neutral moderation really is.

The many types of trolls

Some of Valve's definitions of trolling seem relatively clear-cut. Most everyone would agree that Steam should remove developers that are "trying to scam folks out of their Steam inventory items" or those "looking for a way to generate a small amount of money off Steam through a series of schemes that revolve around how we let developers use Steam keys," for instance.

Enlarge / Licensing is not really the easiest topic to illustrate. (credit: Peter Bright)

In its continued efforts to encourage corporate customers to make the switch to Windows 10, Microsoft is shaking up its support and lifecycle plans again. Support for some Windows 10 releases is being extended, and the company is offering new services to help detect and address compatibility issues should they arise.

The new policy builds on and extends the commitments made in February this year. Microsoft has settled on two annual feature updates (the "Semi-Annual Channel," SAC) to Windows 10; one finalized in March (and delivered in April), the other finalized in September (and delivered in October). Initially, the company promised 18 months of support for each feature update, a policy that would allow customers to defer deployment of feature updates or even skip some updates entirely. Going forward, the September releases are going to see even longer support periods: for Windows 10 Enterprise and Windows 10 Education, each September release will receive 30 months of servicing. In principle, an organization that stuck to the September releases could go two years between feature updates.

Customers of Windows 10 Home, Pro, and Pro for Workstations will continue to receive only 18 months of updates, for both March and September releases.

Enlarge / The horse is sad that you shouted at it. (credit: Eric LaMontagne)

Horses. To some people, a horse is a beautiful thing, and they love them. I am in the camp that regards them as random bone breakers, possessing four iron-shod clubs designed to deal damage at the whim of the maddened equine brain. This is because my only experience of horses involves leaving them at high speed to be greeted by an unyielding turf.

But, as one of our few domesticated species, horses have evolved to live with us. While I might not understand them, is it possible they understand me? A small study performed by a group of British researchers suggests that they can respond to emotion in voices.

Cows vs. goats

Allow me to interject some ignorant ramblings at this point. I am not in the “animals are all instinct" camp. I spent a lot of time driving small herds of cows and flocks of sheep without the aid of a fast bike or farm dogs. When you are alone like that, you really rely on the animal—somehow—understanding what you want it to do. Small herds of cows, for instance, when offered a choice between going through a gate (and into the unknown) and charging off down the fence line to apparent freedom, will often go in the direction that you point. This happens even when they are clearly nervous about going through the gate. When the cows don’t go through, you know it’s going to be a long day.

Actor Randall Park playing Kim Jong-Un in the Sony Pictures movie The Interview—a movie hackers didn't leak. (credit: Sony Pictures Entertainment)

In a presentation planned for noon Eastern time today, the Justice Department will announce the indictment of North Korean agents for both the theft of data and "wiper" attack on Sony Pictures in 2014 and the worldwide "WannaCry" malware attack of May, 2017. The indictments, reported by ABC News and the Washington Post, are the first direct charges against individuals associated with the North Korean government.

One of the individuals, identified by the Post as Pak Jin Hyok, conducted the Sony Pictures attack under orders from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea's clandestine military intelligence agency, the Reconnaissance General Bureau, the indictment alleges. The RGB is the agency that oversees Bureau 121, North Korea's cyber warfare agency.

Pak is alleged to be linked to the Lazarus Group—the malware and hacking group that has been previously connected by US intelligence and private sector security researchers to the Sony attack, the attempted theft of $1 billion from Bangladesh Bank through the SWIFT system, and the WannaCry malware. The group is also deemed to be behind denial-of-service attacks against the government, banks, and media companies in South Korea.

Enlarge (credit: Gage Skidmore)

For the many months preceding the appointment of Kevin Droegemeir to finally fulfill the role of White House Science Advisor, there was a bit of a “will they/won’t they” storyline with retired Princeton physicist William Happer. Happer—who also served at the Department of Energy during the George H.W. Bush administration—is better known these days as a climate contrarian willing to publicly claim that CO₂ emissions are a boon rather than an existential threat.

In the end, Happer was not tapped as Science Advisor by the Trump administration, but E&E News reported Tuesday that he is now a member of the National Security Council.

Happer was previously listed as the director of a group called the “CO₂ Coalition,” which has a website that claims that CO₂ released from fossil fuels stimulates global plant growth while having no real effect on Earth’s climate. (Both claims are false.) He has also taken to referring to the field of climate science as a “cult movement.”