Month: January 2020

Enlarge / The Doomsday Clock reads 100 seconds to midnight, a decision made by The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, during an announcement at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, on January 23, 2020. (credit: EVA HAMBACH/AFP via Getty Images)

Today, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists released a statement that the group's Science and Security Board had moved the hands on the symbolic Doomsday Clock forward by 20 seconds to 100 seconds before midnight. Since the advent of the Doomsday Clock—even in the peak years of the Cold War—the clock's minute hand has never before been advanced past the 11:58 mark.

In a statement on the change, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists President and CEO Rachel Bronson said:

As far as the Bulletin and the Doomsday Clock are concerned, the world has entered into the realm of the two-minute warning, a period when danger is high and the margin for error low. The moment demands attention and new, creative responses. If decision makers continue to fail to act—pretending that being inside two minutes is no more urgent than the preceding period—citizens around the world should rightfully echo the words of climate activist Greta Thunberg and ask: "How dare you?"

Before 2017, the clock had not been at that mark since 1953—the year in which the United States and the Soviet Union both conducted atmospheric tests of their first thermonuclear bombs. Even during the Reagan years—during which the world came the closest it had ever come to a nuclear war—the clock was advanced only as far as three minutes before midnight. And in the fictional world of the original Watchmen comic books, the clock never advanced past five minutes to midnight.

Enlarge / A CenturyLink repair truck in Estes Park, Colorado, in 2018. (credit: Tony Webster / Flickr)

CenturyLink and Frontier Communications have apparently failed to meet broadband-deployment requirements in numerous states where they are receiving government funding to expand their networks in rural areas.

CenturyLink notified the Federal Communications Commission that it "may not have reached the deployment milestone" in 23 states and that it hit the latest deadline in only 10 states.

Frontier similarly notified the FCC that it "may not have met" the requirements in 13 states. Frontier met or exceeded the requirement in 16 other states.

Enlarge / Traffic moves through an interchange along Interstate 580 on July 25, 2019, in Oakland, California. (credit: Justin Sullivan | Getty Images)

The Trump administration has for several years been working to weaken federal vehicle fuel-efficiency standards. To justify these changes, regulatory agencies argued that more stringent standards would both cost consumers more and reduce road safety. A draft version of the new final rule, however, seems to directly contradict those lines of reasoning.

The draft of the Safer Affordable Fuel-Efficient (SAFE) Vehicles rule has not been released publicly, but Sen. Thomas Carper (D-Del.) has seen it. In a letter (PDF) to the White House, Carper says not only is the rule "replete with numerous questionable legal, procedural, and technical assertions," as well as "apparent typographical and other errors," but it also completely fails to provide the safety or economic benefits initially claimed.

Why SAFE?

The SAFE rule is part of a back-and-forth that hasn't literally been going on since the dawn of time, but it kind of feels that way. The kerfuffle all began in 2012 when the Obama administration adopted a fuel-economy standard that would gradually increase the average miles-per-gallon rating for most cars to 54.5mpg by 2025 (about 40mpg under real-world conditions). The Environmental Protection Agency finalized that standard in December 2016.

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  Stop trying to make Bing happen, Microsoft. It's never going to happen. [credit: Paramount Pictures ]

Microsoft announced today that, beginning in February 2020, Office365 Pro Plus installs and updates will include a Chrome extension that forcibly changes the default search engine to Microsoft's own search engine, Bing.

The change takes place beginning with Version 2002 of Office 365 Pro Plus, and it will affect both new installations and existing installations as they're automatically updated. If your default search engine is already Bing, Office365 will not install the extension. Users who don't enjoy the arbitrary unrequested change to their defaults can opt out by finding and changing a toggle which the extension also adds to the browser, or the extension itself can be removed, either manually or programmatically.

This new policy only takes places in specific geographic areas, as determined by a user's IP address. If you aren't in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, the UK, or the United States, you should be safe—for now, at least, and assuming you don't take your laptop on holiday or work-related travel to one of those countries during a time an Office update rolls out. Microsoft says it may add new locations over time but will notify administrators through the Microsoft 365 admin center if and when it does.

Enlarge (credit: Epic Games)

For anyone who clings to Linux or MacOS as a preferred gaming platform, Epic Games and Psyonix offered a rare kind of bad news on Thursday. The companies confirmed that their mega-hit game Rocket League would no longer receive updates for either platform following a "final" patch for all non-Windows versions on PC coming in "early March."

This "end-of-life" version of Rocket League on Linux and MacOS will still function in a wholly offline state, and affected players will be able to access whatever cosmetics and add-ons they'd previously earned through the game's economy system (but no more new ones). Additionally, those platforms will be able to use Steam Workshop content, but only if it's downloaded and applied to the game before the March patch goes live.

Otherwise, if any function in the game connects even in the slightest to the Internet—from item shops to matchmaking to private matches to friends lists—it will stop working once the March patch goes live, and any future modes, maps, or other game-changing content won't come to their platforms, either.

Enlarge / Safari is the default browser on all of Apple's devices. (credit: NurPhoto/Getty Images)

Release notes for the latest version of the Safari Technology Preview, essentially the beta version of the macOS Web browser, explicitly state that the update ends support for Adobe Flash. This marks the end of the line for that Web technology on Macs.

The change happened in Safari Technology Preview 99 and is likely to hit the public release sometime in the near future.

Apple already disabled Flash by default in a previous Safari version, and the practice of including Flash on each Mac from initial installation ended a decade ago. But if users wanted to download Flash to their Macs and manually activate it, doing so was still possible. Soon, it won't be—at least, not in the system's default browser.

Enlarge / A pharmacy technician grabs a bottle of drugs off a shelf at the central pharmacy of Intermountain Heathcare on September 10, 2018 in Midvale, Utah. IHC along with other hospitals and philanthropies are launching a nonprofit generic drug company called "Civica Rx" to help reduce cost and shortages of generic drugs. (credit: Getty | George Frey)

Fed up with the exorbitant price tags on old, off-patent medications, 18 Blue Cross and Blue Shield companies are partnering with a nonprofit dedicated to manufacturing and selling affordably priced generic drugs.

The BCBS companies are providing $55 million in their new partnership with nonprofit Civica Rx, the two organizations announced.

Like the new venture, Civica was born out of frustration with the pharmaceutical industry’s steep price increases as well as perilous shortages of essential drugs. In 2018, numerous health care organizations banded together with three philanthropies to manufacture their own brand of generic drugs, forming Civica and thwarting the generic industry. Their aim was to provide hospitals with injectable generic medications in steady supplies at affordable prices.

A young couple stumbles into the wrong neighborhood while house-hunting and finds themselves prisoners in the forever home from hell in Vivarium, a surreal science fiction film directed by Lorcan Finnegan. The film premiered last year at the Cannes Film Festival and made its way around the festival circuit before being picked up for distribution by Saban Films. And it's been garnering quite a bit of positive word of mouth along the way.

There's only the vaguest official premise: "A young couple looking for the perfect home find themselves trapped in a mysterious labyrinth-like neighborhood of identical houses." But Wikipedia offers this telling definition of the film's title: "A vivarium is an area, usually enclosed, for keeping and raising animals or plants for observation or research." It translates into "place of life," and it can be a small terrarium, for example, or something much larger, like Biosphere 2. It's pretty obvious that the film's suburban paradise is meant to be just such a place.

Imogen Poots plays Gemma, who is married to Tom (Jesse Eisenberg). They decide to check out the home options in a wholesome development called Yonder ("It has all you'd need and all you'd want"), and a very creepy real estate agent named Martin (Jonathan Aris) shows them around #9. Yonder is basically a large grid of identical streets filled with identical cookie-cutter houses, with the same cookie-cutter backyards. It calls to mind the classic folk song, "Little Boxes," popularized by Pete Seeger in the 1960s, about cheap, tiny surburban houses "made of ticky-tacky" that "all look just the same."

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  There are a bunch more enemy types, and they will overwhelm you. [credit: Bethesda ]

The portals open, the metal music starts, and the chainsaw revs up. There's something about that moment that, repeated as many times as it was throughout Doom (2016), never got old for me. But Doom Eternal is coming from the point of view that this setup did, in fact, get old, and the way to keep it fresh is to add a lot of new stuff. So much new stuff.

Publisher Bethesda Softworks hosted a 3-hour preview of Doom Eternal for press in Los Angeles this week. I came into the event right off my first playthrough of its immediate predecessor on Nightmare difficulty (I did better than I feared, though I still died a lot!) and amped up by watching an entertaining live speedrun at Awesome Games Done Quick earlier this month. I was ultra-eager to get a taste of the sequel to one of my favorite shooters in years.

I was pleased to find that the frenetic, in-your-face, always-moving combat of the 2016 reboot was still here in full force, as was the tendency of the music to amp up as enemy portals appear in your immediate surroundings. I was surprised, though, to find that much of the pacing and narrative of Doom (2016) have been dropped in the name of pure, video game-y carnage.