Month: February 2020

Enlarge / Surviving these dark caves is about to get a whole lot easier, if you want it to be.

The Capy Games' survival-focused dungeon-crawler Below has earned a well-deserved reputation for punishing difficulty—Rock Paper Shotgun used it as a prototypical example of the necessary industry niche for "ultra-hard games." But the coming console release of the game will be introducing a new "Explore" mode that completely does away with this game-defining difficulty.

While the original game will still be available as "Survival" mode, the new Explore mode is "tuned to be accessible for players who seek more of an action-adventure style of play," as Capy put it in an announcement. In-game mechanics like survival, death, and damage will be toned down to be more forgiving, so players can "lose themselves on The Isle without suffering the exquisite pain of Below's original design."

"EXPLORE mode is our way of answering everyone who played BELOW at launch and found the challenge a bit too steep," Capy's Kris Piotrowski said in a statement. "It was clear that many players were intrigued by the game's haunting underworld and rich atmosphere, but its difficulty made the game inaccessible to some. We hope to see new players to get into Below, and for seasoned players to revisit The Isle and enjoy the game in a whole new way."

Enlarge / A note left behind by the RobbinHood malware. (credit: Sophos)

Attackers behind one of the world’s more destructive pieces of ransomware have found a new way to defeat defenses that might otherwise prevent it from encrypting data: install a buggy driver first and then hack it to burrow deeper into the targeted computer.

The ransomware in this case is RobbinHood, known for taking down the city of Baltimore city networks and systems in Greenville, North Carolina. When networks aren’t protected by robust end-point defenses, RobbinHood can easily encrypt sensitive files once a vulnerability has allowed the malware to gain a toehold. For networks that are better fortified, the ransomware has a harder time.

Now, RobbinHood has found a way to defeat those defenses. In two recent attacks, researchers from security firm Sophos said, the ransomware has used its access to a targeted machine to install a driver, from Taiwan-based motherboard manufacturer Gigabyte, that has a known vulnerability in it. Despite the vulnerability led to the driver being deprecated, it retains the cryptographic signature required to run in the highly sensitive Windows region known as the Kernel.

Enlarge / The Viacom and CBS merger brought Star Trek films (Viacom) and TV series (CBS) under one umbrella. Both would likely appear on this new service. (credit: Paramount)

According to a report from CNBC, ViacomCBS is planning the launch of a new streaming service that would expand upon the already successful CBS All Access with films from Paramount Studios and Miramax, plus TV programs from networks like MTV and Comedy Central.

The news follows a high-profile merger between Viacom and CBS. CBS had already launched its CBS All Access service before serious movement on the merger began, and Showtime (also owned by ViacomCBS) has offered streaming options for a while now. Previously, Viacom offered some streaming services of its own while also licensing its content to bigger players like Amazon Prime Video. Both CBS All Access and Viacom's existing streaming services would continue to exist alongside this new service in the company's current plans.

The future TV landscape is looking increasingly clear: an à la carte selection of major media companies' individual libraries, with a streaming service for each company. Disney recently launched its own service called Disney+ to early success, and WarnerMedia has begun pulling its properties like the popular sitcom Friends from other streaming services as it prepares to launch its own offering.

Enlarge (credit: CDC)

The phrase "warm summer evenings" sounds like an offer of a lazy, peaceful, relaxing respite. Any peace, however, will almost certainly be temporary, interrupted by an annoying buzz that signals it's time to start swatting away and, if that doesn't work, spend the rest of the night scratching some itchy welts.

By the time you hear its buzz, the mosquito has already engaged in a multisensory program that started by picking up your scent and the increased levels of carbon dioxide coming from your breath. By the time it's close enough for you to hear it, it's picking a place to land on you based on the fact that your skin temperature is even warmer than the summer air.

Interfering with this multisensory program holds the potential to not only improve your enjoyment of summer evenings; it could play a major role in limiting a variety of insect borne diseases that collectively kill millions of people each year and exact a staggering toll beyond that. But to interfere with the system, we have to understand it. And a key step toward that has now been provided by the identification of the protein that lets the mosquito sense that we're warmer than the environment. Unfortunately, that knowledge has enabled us to confirm that wiping out the heat-sensing part of the system is unlikely to protect us.

You can check out any time you'd like, but you can never... well, you know the song. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Customers of a small cable company in Vermont are protesting the company's pending sale to Comcast.

The sale of Southern Vermont Cable Co. (SVCC), which has about 2,450 subscribers and operates 123 miles of cable, is being reviewed by the Vermont Public Utility Commission. The commission has received 25 public comments, all of them either opposing the sale or expressing concerns that it will be bad for customers without appropriate consumer-protection measures.

Southern Vermont Cable owner and president Ernest Scialabba founded SVCC in 1988. He is selling the company and plans to retire after spending more than 40 years in the cable industry. Comcast already provides service in neighboring areas.

• 

  It actually feels intimidating standing next to a vehicle like this GMC Yukon Denali when the hood is level with your shoulder. [credit: Jonathan Gitlin ]

After essentially flat sales in 2019, (most of) the auto industry came to Chicago this week for the first big auto show of the year. In terms of making headlines, the 2020 Chicago show is yet more proof that the days of the big trade show are almost at an end as OEMs increasingly opt for standalone events to premiere new products. Two laps of the McCormick Place convention center was more than sufficient to take it all in, and while there was little new, a clear trend was evident. Efficiency, electrification, or advanced safety systems mostly took a back seat to size, with monster-faced SUVs and trucks everywhere I cared to look. As a harbinger of things to come, I dare say there was even a sense of menace lurking in the shadows.

Arguably the biggest product news of the week—albeit one of little interest to most of this audience—was the launch of Cadillac's newest Escalade. But that took place in California earlier in the week, and the biggest, brashest, body-on-frame behemoth didn't show its bluff nose (or anything else) in the Windy City. The closely related Suburban, Denali, and their fullsize pickup cousins were out in force, and I'm not being dramatic when I say some of them felt physically threatening to stand next to even when they were stationary. At 5' 7" (1.7m) tall, some of the hoods are now level with my shoulders, which is a recipe for vast, child-swallowing blindspots in front of their drivers. At a time when pedestrian safety is headed in the wrong direction, one has to wonder how we can get this particular pendulum to swing the other way.

Chicago's press preview coincided with a string of financial results, and as ever there are winners and losers. Lots of OEMs are changing the way they share their results, ending monthly sales. General Motors saw profits decline by nearly 20 percent in 2019, but it still ended the year $6.7 billion in the black. GM might have made a Super Bowl splash with a teaser for an electric Hummer, but the best its combined booths could boast if you were looking for evidence of its $2.2 billion electrification investment were a couple of Chevy Bolts.

What do you call the people who wear the new Space Force space camouflage? That's what the service is asking its members. (credit: US Space Force )

The United States Space Force, the newest branch of the US military hewed out of the Department of Defense's space-focused units under instructions from President Donald Trump, has a lot to do in order to establish itself. Among other things, the service's leadership needs to decide what to call its members and each of its ranks (which, unlike "airman" and "seaman," needs to be gender neutral).

In a Space Force email posted to an Air Force enlisted group on Facebook, Chief Master Sergeant Amber Mitchell—a senior enlisted leader on the staff of the United States Space Force—reached out to enlisted members of the nascent service for the purpose of "crowdsourcing your best ideas" on a number of topics essential to establishing the force's identity. Among those key questions:

- What should the enlisted E1-E9 ranks in the Space Force be called? Must be gender neutral.

- What should the collective group of members serving in the Space Force be called? Some names floating around already are Guardians, Sentinels, and Vanguards. Feel free to create a brand new word for those who are linguistically inclined.

CMSgt Mitchell also asked for input on enlisted rank insignia, uniforms ("all black with white nametapes," one forum member responded), and other key elements of a "Space Force culture."