Month: October 2019

Enlarge / EA and Origin find themselves in the eye of the storm, so to speak. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

For the first time since 2012, Electronic Arts is once again publishing new games on Valve's Steam platform, the publisher announced today.

A preorder page for next month's Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is already up on the Steam store, and EA promises that "other major titles," like The Sims 4 and Unraveled Two, will be available on Steam in "the coming months." Multiplayer titles like Apex Legends, FIFA 20, and Battlefield V, meanwhile, will be available on Steam "next year," with cross-play between the Steam versions and those on EA's existing Origin service.

A long time coming

EA's return to Steam marks a sea change for the company's PC gaming plans, which for years have focused on Origin as its primary (and in most cases exclusive) sales channel. The company's Steam releases slowed to a trickle in 2012. By 2013, the only new EA content on Valve's service was DLC for various Sims games.

Enlarge / A Subaru Outback successfully stops for a "pedestrian" crossing the road in front of it. (credit: Insurance Institute for Highway Safety)

After reaching an all-time low in 2009, the number of pedestrian fatalities caused by cars has been on the rise in recent years. New technology has the potential to change that. A new report from the Insurance Institute for Highway Studies (IIHS) ranks 16 mid-sized cars on the performance of their pedestrian-detection systems.

Six of the cars earned "superior" ratings, indicating that they were able to stop—or slow down significantly—in each of the six scenarios tested by IIHS. These vehicles were the Audi A4, BMW 3 series, Subaru Outback, Mercedes-Benz C-Class, Nissan Maxima, and Volvo S60.

All of these vehicles except the Mercedes achieved superior performance with the standard equipment. The Mercedes C-Class achieved a superior rating for its optional "Active Brake Assist with Cross-Traffic Function" but only a "basic" rating with the standard package.

Enlarge / The Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant (KKNPP) was apparently targeted by a North Korean hacking campaign using the recently-identified Dtrack spy malware. (credit: indiawaterportal.org )

A former analyst for India's National Technical Research Organization (NTRO) has tied a malware report published by VirusTotal to a cyber attack on India's Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant. The malware, identified by researchers as North Korea's Dtrack, was reported by Pukhraj Singh to have gained "domain controller-level access" at Kudankulam. The attack has been reported to the government.

So, it's public now. Domain
controller-level access at Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant. The
government was notified way back. Extremely mission-critical targets
were hit. https://t.co/rFaTeOsZrw
pic.twitter.com/OMVvMwizSi

—
Pukhraj Singh (@RungRage) October
28, 2019

The attack likely did not affect reactor controls, but it may have targeted research and technical data. The attack apparently focused on collection of technical information, using a Windows SMB network drive share with credentials hard-coded into the malware to aggregate files to steal. Dtrack was tied to North Korea's Lazarus threat group by researchers based on code shared with DarkSeoul, a malware attack that wiped hard drives at South Korean media companies and banks in 2013.

Singh alluded to the attack in a September 7 tweet, in which he wrote, "I just witnessed a casus belli in the Indian cyberspace and it sucks at every level." He said that he did not discover the intrusion himself but learned of it from "a third party."Singh passed on the information to India's National Cyber Security Coordinator on September 4, and the third party shared the indicators of compromise "over the preceding days."Kaspersky later identified the malware involved as Dtrack, Singh said.

Disney's new streaming service, Disney+, launches next month, featuring the Mouse House's flagship eight-episode new series, The Mandalorian. It's a spinoff of the Star Wars franchise starring Pedro Pascal (Oberyn Martell, aka the Red Viper in Game of Thrones). And judging by the latest trailer, Disney is leaning hard into Space Western territory with this tale of a lone bounty hunter navigating the chaos in the wake of the Empire's collapse.

Details have been scant, but per the official synopsis: "After the stories of Jango and Boba Fett, another warrior emerges in the Star Wars universe. The Mandalorian is set after the fall of the Empire and before the emergence of the First Order. We follow the travails of a lone gunfighter in the outer reaches of the galaxy far from the authority of the New Republic." The premise is 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.

Pascal told Entertainment Weekly that his character is very much in the vein of Clint Eastwood, with advanced combat skills and "questionable moral character." Showrunner Jon Favreau confirmed as much, telling EW, "It's like after the Roman Empire falls, or when you don't have a centralized shogun in Japan—and, of course, the Old West, when there wasn't any government in the areas that had not yet been settled." So I guess it's like Unforgiven or Gladiator in space, which could bode well, since both those films are terrific.