Month: December 2019

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  The Aston Martin DB5, one of the Bond franchise's most iconic cars, returns for No Time to Die with some modifications... [credit: MGM ]

Ahead of this year's deluge of December film releases, MGM showed up with a trailer for Daniel Craig's fifth go at the James Bond franchise: No Time to Die, slated to launch in April 2020. From what we can tell, this 2.5-minute clip sure looks like 007 material, with car chases, globe-trotting action, and hints that nobody is to be trusted.

As is to be expected from Bond films, this one sees everybody peeling around in Aston Martin automobiles. The iconic DB5 takes center stage in a chase scene that bookends both halves of the trailer, clearly reinforced to withstand a ridiculous amount of bullets. It also includes a very Bond-ian tweak: a mechanism in the headlamps that can cycle the light bulbs out and a pair of Gatling guns in. Couple that update with Bond's driving skills in a parking lot and you have quite the 360-degree turret. (Take that, Mandalorian.)

We also see new Bond series co-star Lashana Lynch roll into town in a DB11, which Ars car editor Jonathan Gitlin has personal experience with, along with a hard-to-discern Aston Martin model that Craig reveals by quickly yanking a cover. That model certainly has a 1980s vibe, and we look forward to said car driving very fast in the April 2020 film.

Fans of 2017 indie forest exploration title Firewatch (including us) have been excited for developer Campo Santo's next project, the Egyptian-influenced In the Valley of the Gods, since it was announced in late 2017. Those fans got even more excited when Valve acquired Campo Santo in 2018, suggesting big things were in the works from both companies ahead of the game's planned 2019 release.

But with 2019 drawing to a close, and with 19 months of radio silence regarding the game's progress, Campo Santo fans began to worry that In the Valley of the Gods had joined a long list of cancelled Valve game projects. Those worries heightened when a number of Campo Santo developers removed all mention of In the Valley of the Gods from their Twitter profiles following last month's announcement of Half-Life: Alyx.

This week, Campo Santo cofounder Jake Rodkin confirmed some of those fears to Polygon, saying that development of In the Valley of the Gods is officially "on hold," but it "certainly feels like a project people can and may return to." As he put it in a statement:

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  On Wednesday morning, the Falcon 9 rocket stands ready on the launch pad. [credit: Trevor Mahlmann for Ars ]

A twice-flown Dragon spacecraft is ready to be launched on Wednesday to the International Space Station. The mission, which will ferry nearly 2.6 tons of supplies to the orbiting laboratory for NASA, will remain in orbit for about a month before returning to Earth with more than 50 science experiments.

Liftoff is scheduled for 12:51pm ET (17:51 UTC) from Space Launch Complex-40 in Florida. Surface weather conditions are fine, but there are concerns about upper-level winds reaching as high as 120 knots later today. Before launch, meteorologists will release a weather balloon to determine whether upper atmospheric conditions are acceptable for the rocket to navigate through. A back-up launch opportunity is available at 12:29pm ET on Thursday.

New rocket

SpaceX has built a new Falcon 9 rocket for this mission—hence, no soot in the launch pad photos. However, it will be flying a different profile for this space station supply mission. Typically, the newest variant of the Falcon 9 rocket has enough lift capacity to loft the Dragon spacecraft into orbit before using its remaining fuel to steer it back to a landing site on the Florida coast.

Enlarge (credit: blogtrepreneur.com/tech)

As a leading vulnerability reporting platform, HackerOne has paid hackers more than $23 million on behalf of more than 100 customers, including Twitter, Slack, and the US Pentagon. The company’s position also gives it access to unimaginable amounts of sensitive data. Now, the company has paid a $20,000 bounty out of its own pocket after accidentally giving an outside hacker the ability to read and modify some customer bug reports.

The outsider—a HackerOne community member who had a proven track record of finding and privately reporting vulnerabilities through the platform—had been communicating late last month with one of the company’s security analysts. In one message, the HackerOne analyst sent the community member parts of a cURL command that mistakenly included a valid session cookie that gave anyone with possession of it the ability to read and partially modify data the analyst had access to.

“HackerOneStaff Access,” the community member haxta4ok00 wrote in broken English on November 24. “i can read all reports @security and more program.” In a follow-up message, haxta4ok00 wrote: “i found what is you can edit private program (for test) I have not changed anything and not used , all for the sake of hacking.” On the same day, the hacker followed up again, writing: “If you need Proof, I can write a message [redacted].”