Month: June 2021

Enlarge / Chris Doyon, in full "Anonymous mythology" mode, when I met him in Canada. (credit: Nate Anderson)

A decade after Chris "Commander X" Doyon skipped out on a federal hacking charge and fled the country, the long arm of US law enforcement this week plucked him from Mexico City, where he had claimed political asylum. Doyon now faces all of the original charges for coordinating a 2010 High Orbit Ion Cannon (HOIC) DDoS attack on servers belonging to Santa Cruz, California, plus a serious new charge for jumping bail.

This has been a surprising turn of events for the homeless hacktivist, who spent his years first in Canada and then in Mexico issuing press releases, hanging out on Twitter, writing a self-published memoir, appearing in documentaries, and meeting up with journalists like me—all without apparent response from the US government.

All that changed on June 11, when Doyon was arrested by Mexican police. This was confirmed by a press release from the US Attorney for the Northern District of California, where Santa Cruz is located, though no details were provided.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

Everything we've feared about the Facebookening of Oculus and its virtual reality ecosystem is starting to come true.

A Wednesday blog post has confirmed that Oculus, the VR-specific arm of Facebook, is now displaying advertisements in select VR games and apps to their players. As Facebook has since emphasized in emails sent directly to the press, these ads will leverage "first-party info from Facebook to target these ads"—and FB has yet to announce any limitations for what Facebook account data may be leveraged. (Ars Technica was not briefed about this news ahead of the announcement, and we did not get the opportunity to request the comments that other members of the media received.)

FB's additional clarifying statements about biometric and use data inside of VR are carefully worded to clarify that the company does examine specific use data as it sees fit, and for now, that data won't apply to its new advertising platform. Facebook says it processes and keeps track of the following data, uploaded by users while connected to any Oculus services:

We aren't getting a second season of Picard until next year due to the pandemic delaying production, but Paramount+ has been dribbling out images and short teasers in the meantime. The latest teaser gives us our first look at the return of fan-favorite Q (John de Lancie), an extradimensional being with power over time, space, the laws of physics, and reality itself.

(Spoilers for S1 below.)

As I wrote in my review last year, the series is set 20 years after the events of Star Trek: Nemesis. The first season opened with Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) having retired to the family vineyard. His bucolic existence was interrupted by the arrival of a mysterious woman named Dahj (Isa Briones) who pleaded for his help. Alas, Picard failed to save her. She was killed in front of him by Romulan assassins belonging to a radical sect known as the Zhat Vash, who is dedicated to eradicating all artificial life forms. Picard discovered that Dahj was actually a synthetic, technically Data's "daughter," and she had a twin sister, Soji, who was also in danger.

Enlarge / Five-star review. (credit: Getty Images | Khwanchai Phanthong | EyeEm)

Amazon today said it can't stop fake product reviews without help from social media companies, and it blamed those companies for not doing more to prevent solicitation of fake reviews.

In a blog post, Amazon said its own "continued improvements in detection of fake reviews and connections between bad-actor buying and selling accounts" has led to "an increasing trend of bad actors attempting to solicit fake reviews outside Amazon, particularly via social media services."

Amazon continued:

Enlarge / The Emergent BioSolutions plant, a manufacturing partner for Johnson & Johnson's COVID-19 vaccine, in Baltimore, Maryland, on April 9, 2021. (credit: Getty | Saul Loeb)

The US Food and Drug Administration is making progress in its efforts to sort out the fiasco at Emergent BioSolutions’ Baltimore facility, which, at this point, has ruined more than 75 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines stemming from what the regulator identified as significant quality control failures.

In March, news leaked that Emergent ruined 15 million doses of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine as well as millions more doses of AstraZeneca’s vaccine. The spoilage happened when Emergent cross-contaminated batches of the two vaccines with ingredients from the other.

Last week, the FDA told Emergent to trash about 60 million more doses of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine due to similar contamination concerns, The New York Times reported.

Enlarge / In another year, these weird games wouldn't necessarily rise to the top of our "best of E3" list. But when the biggest gaming companies focus almost exclusively on non-playable trailers, our picks have to go to the games we can personally test. (credit: Chris Klimowski / Gamious / rose-engine)

As the dust begins to settle from another hype-filled series of gaming announcements, timed for what used to be known as "E3," one thing stands out: folks in the press, like myself, have fewer ways to go hands-on with the biggest publishers' wares and tell you what stands out. Carefully staging bluster is easy; getting Ars Technica staffers to agree that the games in question are fun or interesting to play is not.

While a post-pandemic landscape has led more gamemakers to begin to offer remote game demos, none of the industry's current "triple-A" titans offered me a way to play their most-hyped titles, the ones typically slated to launch a few months after a big June showcase. Sorry, Metroid Dread and Age of Empires 4.

Even so, plenty of other gamemakers were happy to offer me 30-minute slices of their cherished games-to-be, whether via direct downloads or cloud-streamed demos on services like Parsec. No, these are not blockbusters by any stretch, but guess what, games companies? You had your chance. And the indies took it.