Month: March 2020

Enlarge / Plans for a public E3 2020 event in Los Angeles have been canceled. (credit: Getty Images / Aurich Lawson)

Update (3/11/2020, 12:18pm ET): In a message sent Wednesday morning, the ESA cited "growing concerns over [the] COVID-19 virus" in officially canceling this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo. The organization says it is "exploring options with our members to coordinate an online experience to showcase industry announcements and news in June 2020," but nothing concrete has been announced on that score.

"After careful consultation with our member companies regarding the health and safety of everyone in our industry—our fans, our employees, our exhibitors, and our longtime E3 partners—we have made the difficult decision to cancel E3 2020, scheduled for June 9-11 in Los Angeles," the ESA statement reads. "Following increased and overwhelming concerns about the COVID-19 virus, we felt this was the best way to proceed during such an unprecedented global situation. We are very disappointed that we are unable to hold this event for our fans and supporters.  But we know it's the right decision based on the information we have today. Our team will be reaching out directly to exhibitors and attendees with information about providing full refunds."

Shortly after the ESA's statement, Microsoft's Phil Spencer offered an assurance on Twitter that fans should expect an "Xbox digital event" in the wake of E3's cancellation, with "details on timing and more in the coming weeks." We expect other major studios that had planned to attend E3 2020 to follow with announcements of their own.]

Enlarge / It's official. (credit: Getty Images / Aurich Lawson)

E3 2020 as we know it is over.

Multiple sources familiar with the Entertainment Software Association (ESA)'s plans have confirmed to Ars Technica that the organization, which is responsible for the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), will soon cancel the three-day expo. Like in prior years, E3 2020 was scheduled to play out in early June as a three-day event at the Los Angeles Convention Center. Shortly after we received the tip, indie game publisher Devolver Digital posted a brief, ominous message on Twitter: "Cancel your E3 flights and hotels, y'all." The ESA had not made any announcements about E3 2020 at that time.

Representatives for the ESA did not immediately respond to Ars Technica's questions about the state of E3 going forward, or whether the event's seismic shift may instead mean a delay, a move to a completely different venue, or a wholly virtualized, live-streamed event.

Enlarge (credit: Intel)

For the past 26 months, Intel and other CPU makers have been assailed by Spectre, Meltdown, and a steady flow of follow-on vulnerabilities that make it possible for attackers to pluck passwords, encryption keys, and other sensitive data out of computer memory. On Tuesday, researchers disclosed a new flaw that steals information from Intel’s SGX, short for Software Guard eXtensions, which acts as a digital vault for securing users most sensitive secrets.

On the surface, Line Value Injection, as researchers have named their proof-of-concept attacks, works in ways similar to the previous vulnerabilities and accomplishes the same thing. All of these so-called transient-execution flaws stem from speculative execution, an optimization in which CPUs attempt to guess future instructions before they're called. Meltdown and Spectre were the first transient execution exploits to become public. Attacks named ZombieLoad, RIDL, Fallout, and Foreshadow soon followed. Foreshadow also worked against Intel’s SGX.

Breaking the vault

By getting a vulnerable system to run either JavaScript stored on a malicious site or code buried in a malicious app, attackers can exploit a side channel that ultimately discloses cache contents belonging to other apps and should normally be off limits. This latest vulnerability, which like other transient-execution flaws can only be mitigated and not patched, gives way to exploits that completely upend a core confidentiality guarantee of SGX.

Enlarge / Tesla's 1 millionth car. (credit: Elon Musk)

Tesla has made 1 million electric cars, CEO Elon Musk announced on Twitter on Monday evening. Musk shared an image of the vehicle, a red Model Y—Tesla's forthcoming lower-cost crossover.

It's a remarkable milestone. The carmaking business is notoriously competitive and capital-intensive. Before Tesla, it had been decades since anyone had built a substantial American carmaker.

But Tesla is clearly here to stay. Wall Street now values the company at almost $120 billion—more than GM and Ford put together. The company has big expansion plans, with a recently launched factory in China and another planned for Germany. If all goes according to plan, Tesla will make its 2 millionth car in just a couple of years—far faster than the decade-plus it took to make the first million.

Enlarge / SpaceX CEO Elon Musk at the Satellite 2020 Conference in Washington, DC, on Monday, March 9, 2020. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

SpaceX's Starlink satellite broadband will have latency low enough to support competitive online gaming and will generally be fast enough that customers won't have to think about Internet speed, Elon Musk said at a conference yesterday. Despite that, the SpaceX CEO argued that Starlink won't be a major threat to telcos because the satellite service won't be good enough for high-population areas and will mostly be used by rural customers without access to fast broadband.

"It will be a pretty good experience because it'll be very low latency," Musk said in a Q&A session at the Satellite 2020 conference (see video). "We're targeting latency below 20 milliseconds, so somebody could play a fast-response video game at a competitive level, like that's the threshold for the latency."

Latency of less than 20ms would make Starlink comparable to wired broadband service. When SpaceX first began talking about its satellite plans in late 2016, it said latency would be 25ms to 35ms. But Musk has been predicting sub-20ms latency since at least May 2019, with the potential for sub-10ms latency sometime in the future.

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Today's Dealmaster is all about everyone's favorite mustachioed plumber and princess-saver: Mario. As has been the case for the past few years, Nintendo has declared this March 10 as "Mario Day" to celebrate its most popular mascot. (March 10 = MAR10 = Mario, get it?) For the most part, that celebration involves the company discounting a variety of games and knickknacks featuring the little guy and saying you should buy them. This is a made-up holiday, after all. But if those deals get you some good Switch games for cheap, it's hard to get too upset.

This year's discounts aren't quite as appealing as the offers we saw last year, but the selection is still solid. The main highlights include Super Mario Maker 2 and Super Mario Party down to $40, which in both cases is a $10 discount off the typical street price. These Mario titles are more niche than a traditional adventure game like Super Mario Odyssey, but the former still does well to let you create and explore custom Mario levels, while the latter remains a fun digital board game for parties (it will likely fracture a few friendships, but still).

Beyond that, Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle, a surprisingly engaging XCOM-style strategy game, is down to $15 at Best Buy, while various retailers have the kid-friendly side-scroller Yoshi's Crafted World—which doesn't feature Mario, oddly— down to $40. Best Buy has a handful of deals on Mario games for the Nintendo 3DS, too, and GameStop has several offers on related plushies and other toys. Additional Mario-themed controllers are also on sale.