Month: August 2019

Enlarge / Ewan McGregor made a surprise appearance at Disney's D23 Expo yesterday to announce he will star in an as-yet-untitled Obi-Wan Kenobi spin-off series. It will stream exclusively on Disney+, which launches November 12. (credit: Jesse Grant/Getty Images for Disney)

The rumors were true: there will indeed be a Star Wars spinoff series featuring Obi-Wan Kenobi, and none other than Ewan McGregor will be reprising his role as the iconic character. The actor (and Officer of the British Empire) made a surprise appearance last night at the tail-end of a showcase presentation at D23 Expo 2019, Disney's annual fan extravaganza. The series is still in the earliest stages of development, but will air on Disney+, the studio's new streaming service scheduled to launch in November. The showcase also featured several other notable projects Star Wars and Marvel fans in particular can expect to debut over the next two years.

Star Wars: The Mandalorian

The other major announcement during the Star Wars portion of the showcase was the premiere of the first official trailer for the spinoff series, The Mandalorian. Starring Pedro Pascal, the series takes place a few years "after the fall of the Empire and before the emergence of the First Order,'" according to the official synopsis. Pascal's bounty hunter is "a lone gunfighter in the outer reaches of the galaxy, far from the authority of the New Republic."

On display: costumes for The Mandalorian, for stars Pedro Pascal and Gina Carano. (credit: Jennifer Ouellette)

Disney+ is also developed a Star Wars spinoff ("Untitled Spy Series") featuring Rogue One's Cassian (Diego Luna) and his best droid buddy, K2 (Alan Tudyk). Both actors made a brief appearance during the announcement. Although there's no title yet, Tudyk quipped he though it could be called K2 Fast K2 Furious. Or possibly the Untold Cassian Untitled Story. In addition, there will be a return of the hugely popular animated series, The Clone Wars, in February 2020.

Fans went wild as Disney debuted the first trailer for its hotly anticipated original series, The Mandalorian, last night at D23, the annual fan extravaganza the studio has been organizing for the last several years. The series will be released in conjunction with the company's new streaming platform, Disney+, on November 12, 2019.

Starring Pedro Pascal (Oberyn Martell, aka the Red Viper, in Game of Thrones) as the Mandalorian, the series takes place a few years "after the fall of the Empire and before the emergence of the First Order,'" according to the official synopsis. Pascal's bounty hunter is "a lone gunfighter in the outer reaches of the galaxy, far from the authority of the New Republic." Pascal delighted the assembled fans with a surprise appearance at D23, along with co-stars Gina Carano, who plays Cara Dune, a former Rebel Shock Trooper; Carl Weathers as Greef Carga, leader of a bounty-hunter guild; Giancarlo Esposito; and Taika Waititi, who voices the droid IG-11. Ming-Na Wen (Agents of Shield) has also been cast in the series.

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  Stormtrooper skulls from a fallen Empire. [credit: YouTube/Star Wars/Disney ]

Showrunner and series creator Jon Favreau was also on stage for the event, and he explained that, after the defeat of the Empire in Return of the Jedi, there was a period of chaos and lawlessness as a new government struggled to emerge from the wreckage. The trailer plays up the space opera/spaghetti Western crossover vive. There's almost no dialogue, just scenes depicting a mysterious lone figure taking on an assignment from Carga to track something. Or someone. Could it be Han Solo trapped in carbonite?

When we publish galleries dedicated to gaming exhibitions, events, and landmarks, it's not a way to put off writing work. For one, we have to write all of the freaking captions (and also try to make some of them equal parts funny and informative). There's also the matter of a bunch of trained writers doubling as professional photographers while finding ourselves overstimulated by the coolest video games old and new. Hey. It's a living.

But while the work of shooting, editing, touching up, and publishing these collections is more involved than they might look, we love making them. There's something to be said about basking in the glow of an expertly crafted gaming-event gallery. I liken it to the digital equivalent of a freshly mowed yard. There's a certain, I dunno, majesty to it. At least, without the whole "sunlight" thing.

Thus, to conclude our dedicated Ars Gaming Week event, we invite you to bask in years of our digital yard work, all taken from our favorite gaming-related events.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto )

Social networks have struggled to figure out how to handle issues like threats of violence and the presence of hate groups on their platforms. But a new study suggests that attempts to limit the latter run up against a serious problem: the networks formed by hate group members are remarkably resilient, and they will migrate from network to network, keeping and sometimes expanding their connections in the process. The study does offer a few suggestions for how to limit the impact of these groups, but many of the suggestions will require the intervention of actual humans, rather than the algorithms most social networks favor.

Finding the "hate highways"

The work, done by researchers at George Washington and Miami Universities, focused on networks of racist groups, centered on the US' KKK. To do this, the researchers tracked the presence of racist groups on two major social networks: Facebook and a Russia-based network called VKontakte. The researchers crafted an automated system that could identify interest groups that shared links with each other. It would chart these connections iteratively, continuing until the process simply re-identified previously known groups. The system tracked links to other social sites like Instagram, but it doesn't iterate within those sites.

The authors confirmed this worked by performing a similar analysis manually. Satisfied, the team then tracked daily changes for an extended period of 2018. Through this, they identified more than 768 nodes formed by members of the white supremacy movement. Other nodes were identified, but these tended to be things like pornography or illicit materials, so they were ignored for this study.

Enlarge (credit: Audible)

Seven of the nation's top book publishers sued Amazon subsidiary Audible on Friday, asking federal courts to block the company from releasing a new feature called Audible Captions that's due out next month. The technology does exactly what it sounds like: display text captions on the screen of your phone or tablet as the corresponding words are read in the audio file.

The publishers argue that this is straight-up copyright infringement. In their view, the law gives them the right to control the distribution of their books in different formats. Audio is a different format from text, they reason, so Audible needs a separate license.

This would be a slam-dunk argument if Audible were generating PDFs of entire books and distributing them to customers alongside the audio files. But what Audible is actually doing is subtly different—in a way that could provide the company with firm legal ground to stand on.

Enlarge (credit: Thomas Trutschel/Getty Images)

The Internet is dark and full of terrible sources of information. Sometimes it seems like every day brings a new one to the list. There are the toxic conspiracy theories, deepfakes, and fake news mills. And then there are good old-fashioned Internet hoaxes. You know the ones—the sort of fear-mongering, copypasta-esquewarnings that came in the form of cryptically bolded email chains a decade ago, and today dot the social media feeds of your friends and relatives.

In comparison to the targeted disinformation campaigns that have dominated headlines in recent years, social media hoaxes seem almost quaint. Aw, we used to get duped by all-caps chain texts that claimed we would end up cursed if we didn’t forward it to five of our friends!

That is, at least, until you realize that they’re somehow still around.

(credit: xxdigipxx)

Hackers are actively unleashing attacks that attempt to steal encryption keys, passwords, and other sensitive data from servers that have failed to apply critical fixes for two widely used virtual private network (VPN) products, researchers said.

The vulnerabilities can be exploited by sending unpatched servers Web requests that contain a special sequence of characters, researchers at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas said earlier this month. The pre-authorization file-reading vulnerabilities resided in the Fortigate SSL VPN, installed on about 480,000 servers, and the competing Pulse Secure SSL VPN, installed on about 50,000 machines, researchers from Devcore Security Consulting reported.

The Devcore researchers discovered other critical vulnerabilities in both products. These make it possible for attackers to, among other things, remotely execute malicious code and change passwords. Patches for the Fortigate VPN became available in May and in April for Pulse Secure. But installing the patches can often cause service disruptions that prevent businesses from carrying out essential tasks.