Month: December 2018

Enlarge / The Epic Games Store logo. (credit: Epic)

PC gamers accustomed to the literally thousands of new games that flood Steam every year may be surprised that Epic is launching its recently announced Game Store tonight with just three third-party titles. A small handful more are listed as "coming soon."

As part of tonight's Game Awards presentation, Epic announced three new games that are currently available through the Epic Games Store interface:

• Ashen (A44 and Annapurna Interactive)
• Hades (Supergiant Games)
• Hello Neighbor: Hide and Seek (tinyBuild)

Three other games will be coming to the service before the end of the month, Epic said, including a couple that will be free on the service for a limited time (the store page itself says that it will offer a new free game to customers every two weeks):

On Thursday, Valve Software surprise-launched a comprehensive update to its five-year-old game Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) with two equally major changes: a new battle royale-inspired combat mode and a shift to the free-to-play economic model.

The battle royale mode in question, dubbed "Danger Zone," resembles popular fare like PUBG and Fortnite in that it revolves around a similar formula. Players drop onto an island with very little equipment, then search for weapons, ammo, and gear while trying to be the last person surviving. In order to speed combat up, a constantly shrinking "safe zone" forces players to run towards each other.

Enlarge / The Member for Sydney Tanya Plibersek speaks as the Labor party stay for the end of parliament in the House of Representatives at Parliament House on December 06, 2018, in Canberra, Australia. (credit: Tracey Nearmy/Getty Images)

On Thursday, the Australian parliament approved a measure that critics say will weaken encryption in favor of law enforcement and the demands of government.

The new law, which has been pushed for since at least 2017, requires that companies provide a way to get at encrypted communications and data via a warrant process. It also imposes fines of up to A$10 million for companies that do not comply and A$50,000 for individuals who do not comply. In short, the law thwarts (or at least tries to thwart) strong encryption.

Companies who receive one of these warrants have the option of either complying with the government or waiting for a court order. However, by default, the orders are secret, so companies would not be able to tell the public that they had received one.

Enlarge (credit: Le Quéré et al./ESSD)

For a young student, report-card season can be an exciting, stressful, or even depressing time of year. The annual tally of the world’s climate-changing greenhouse gas emissions is a little like that—but with a lot more on the line than a B in language arts. And unfortunately, 2018’s tally once again brings us short of a passing mark.

This annual project is the work of a large group of carbon-cycle scientists that updates the books to be as accurate a record as possible. The scientists also project the final tally for the current year based on all the available data at the time of publication.

Last year, for example, the projection for 2017 was a global CO₂-emissions increase of 2 percent, with error bars spanning 0.8–3.0 percent. This year’s update to the dataset puts the actual number at 1.6 percent. Interestingly, China’s emissions were projected to grow 3.5 percent (range 0.7–5.4 percent), but they appear to have ended up just 1.5 percent higher. Still, that brought an end to a brief stretch when China’s emissions had actually declined from a 2013 peak.