Month: March 2020

It came out much later in March than we expected, but yesterday Google launched the second developer preview for Android 11, the next big version of Android due out at the end of the year. Despite the coronavirus disrupting just about every part of normal life, Google posted the same schedule it did with Preview 1, indicating that the plan is still to have a preview release every month. (Elsewhere in Google, the Chrome team is taking a different approach and pausing releases for a while.)

Anyway, here are the important new things in this release.

Even more notification changes

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  The notification looks under construction, but right now it uses a lot more vertical space with these giant headers. [credit: Ron Amadeo ]

The notification panel is all kinds of different in Preview 2. Google went crazy with notification category titles. Precious space in the notification panel is now sucked up by giant titles labeled "Conversations," "Alerting Notifications," and "Silent Notifications." These are not only hard to read because they are text on a semi-transparent surface; they also don't make a ton of sense. "Alerting notifications" is used for everything that isn't silent or a conversation, but is a music player really an "alerting" notification? Is Google Maps?

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  DirectX ray tracing became available in early 2018. DX12 Ultimate brings new features that weren't available in DXR1.0. [credit: Nvidia ]

Today, Microsoft is announcing a new version of its gaming and multimedia API platform, DirectX. The new version, DirectX 12 Ultimate, largely unifies Windows PCs with the upcoming Xbox Series X platform, offering the platform's new precision rendering features to Windows gamers with supporting video cards.

Many of the new features have more to do with the software side of development than the hardware. The new DirectX 12 Ultimate API calls aren't just enabling access to new hardware features, they're offering deeper, lower-level, and potentially more efficient access to hardware features and resources that are already present.

For now, the new features are slated largely for Nvidia cards only, with "full support on GeForce RTX"—the presentation you're seeing slides from actually came from Nvidia itself, not Microsoft. Meanwhile, AMD has announced that its upcoming slate of RDNA 2 GPUs will have "full support" for the DirectX 12 Ultimate API—but not any prior generations of AMD cards. (AMD takes the opportunity to remind gamers that the same RDNA 2 architecture is powering both Microsoft's Xbox Series X and Sony's PlayStation 5 consoles.)

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Today's Dealmaster is headlined by a $10 pre-order discount on Doom Eternal, the long-anticipated first-person shooter game that (officially) launches tomorrow.

This offer has been available at Walmart and Amazon for a few weeks, but we expect the game to jump up to the standard $60 going rate for new releases once it hits shelves tomorrow. The retailers have discounted pre-orders for a number of big-name games over the past several months—the much-hyped Cyberpunk 2077, for instance, is $10 off as well—but we're comfortable spotlighting this deal since we reviewed Doom Eternal very favorably earlier this week.

You can read that write-up for more details, but in short, Ars Senior Gaming Editor Kyle Orland called the game "a thrilling return to form and a high-water mark for fast-paced twitch shooting." A couple of boss fights can be a drag, and some first-person platforming sections aren't great, but for the most part Doom Eternal's frenetic running-and-gunning is a rush. The whole thing is like the video game version of an '80s hair metal album cover.

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Update 3/23/2020 3:35 California time: A Netflix spokeswoman said that the dismissal of this bug report on the grounds it was out-of-scope was a mistake on the part of the company. The company has since confirmed the validity of the report and began rolling out a fix on Friday. The spokeswoman said that the researcher will receive a bounty, although she didn't say how much it will be. What follows is the Ars report as it ran on Thus

A Netflix security weakness that allows unauthorized access to user accounts over local networks is out of the scope of the company’s bug bounty program, the researcher who reported the threat said. Despite dismissing the report, the Bugcrowd vulnerability reporting service is trying to prevent public disclosure of the weakness.

The researcher's proof-of-concept exploit uses a classic man-in-the-middle attack to steal a Netflix session cookie. These browser cookies are the equivalent of a wristband that music venues use so paying customers aren’t charged an entrance fee a second time. Possession of a valid session cookie is all that’s required to access a target’s Netflix account.