Month: August 2020

Enlarge / This cutaway shows how Lucid has packaged the battery modules in the Air.

When Lucid Motors revealed the range of its forthcoming electric sedan, plenty of eyebrows were raised. Independent testing confirmed that a Lucid Air, which enters production later this year, traveled 517 miles (832km) on a single charge. At the time, however, we didn't know the battery capacity of that test vehicle, since Lucid has previously stated that the Air would be available with packs varying from 60kWh to 120kWh. On Wednesday morning, we got our answer: 113kWh.

That might come as a little disappointment to those who were hoping that the entry-level model (which is expected to start at approximately $60,000) would have such long legs. But 517 miles from 113kWh is 4.57 miles/kWh (13.6kWh/100km), which is still extremely efficient by EV standards and would equate to up to 274 miles (440km) of range for an Air with a 60kWh pack.

Previously Lucid has said it's planning 60kWh, 100kWh, and 120kWh packs for the Air. If those numbers are total kWh as opposed to useable kWh (which is always a lower number to prevent the battery from completely discharging) and the total capacity of the extended range pack is 120kWh (for a usable capacity of 113kWh) then a 60kWh Air would probably have a usable 56.5kWh, which should equate to 258 miles/415km).

Enlarge / You might not like it, but this—along with a giant sack of burritos just off-camera to the left—is what peak cRPG gaming looks like. (credit: Jim Salter)

When I got the chance to play a pre-release copy of inXile's post-apocalyptic RPG Wasteland 3, I jumped at it. As a huge fan of RPGs in general and a backer of Wasteland 2, getting to play the next game in the series for my job was an obvious no-brainer. For those who aren't already familiar with the series, it's a darkly humorous tactical battler, set in an alternate-universe post-apocalyptic America divided into widely separated fiefdoms and sprawling chaos.

If you're thinking "like Fallout, but turn-based?" you're not too far off—there are a lot of similarities between Wasteland's and Fallout's versions of post-WWIII America, including some hilariously retrofuturistic touches. But where Fallout's world seems to have sprung from the late '50s, Wasteland's setting branches out from somewhere in the '80s. The HUD includes an Alpine-style cassette deck with obnoxious graphic equalizer, the clubs have Discobots, the CPUs are "overclocked to 66MHz," and so on.

Wasteland tries to take itself a little more seriously than Fallout does, too—its humor is a little less over the top, its ethical choices are harder, and it tries more frequently to get you to feel the gravity of the plights its characters find themselves in, up to and including brutal murder and cannibalism. It's a fine line to walk, but the tongue-in-cheek cultural references and silly jokes keep the player from slipping into despair at the awful situations faced by the game's characters.

Enlarge (credit: Bid.in2corporate.com)

Organizations that have yet to install the latest version of the Pulse Secure VPN have a good reason to stop dithering—a code-execution vulnerability that allows attackers to take control of networks that use the product.

Tracked as CVE-2020-8218, the vulnerability requires an attacker to have administrative rights on the machine running the VPN. Researchers from GoSecure, the firm that discovered the flaw, found an easy way to clear that hurdle: trick an administrator into clicking on a malicious link embedded in an email or other type of message.

Phishing season has now officially started

“While it does require to be authenticated,” GoSecure researcher Jean-Frédéric Gauron wrote in a post, referring to the exploit, “the fact that it can be triggered by a simple phishing attack on the right victim should be evidence enough that this vulnerability is not to be ignored.”