Month: September 2021

Enlarge (credit: Hasbro)

Consider this a public service announcement big enough for Flint, Gung-Ho, and Alpine to host: G.I. Joe, one of the United States' longest-running comic and cartoon series, appears to finally be on the verge of returning to console video games in a major way.

Magic: The Gathering creators Wizards of the Coast are making a new game in the franchise with ex-WB Games developers—the first project for a new, as-yet-unnamed triple-A studio. As listed in multiple job posts on its career page, the company is looking to fill positions at the development house, currently called "New Raleigh-Durham Studio," for a multiplatform third-person action game set "in the G.I. Joe universe."

Wizards, a division of Hasbro (which also owns the G.I. Joee brand), states the developer is being headed by experienced ex-staffers from WB Games and other major studios, though the listings suggest it's still recruiting for some senior positions, including lead game designer and art director.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Ars Technica)

Twitch—the popular game-streaming site acquired by Amazon in 2014—has been inundated in recent months by "hate raids," which can dump vulgar and hateful speech into the site's prominent chat feeds. For some time, racist slurs and bigoted references have been winning this fight, but a leaked interface update suggests that Twitch might finally take legitimate steps to squash its toxic chat feeds.

On Sunday, streaming-industry reporter Zach Bussey shared a series of screenshots, including an interface as apparently captured from Twitch's German site, that point to a new type of user verification system coming to the chat-heavy service. As pictured and described, this system would allow Twitch users to opt into either verifying their email address or phone number. (A version of email verification already exists, but currently, Twitch users can use the same address to bulk-verify multiple accounts at the same time.)

The incentive for opting in to this process will come from individual Twitch channel moderators, who might only allow people to chat if they've verified either (or both) credentials.

Enlarge / We had trouble even finding HTTPS statistics earlier than 2016—but even in 2016, fewer than one in four websites were delivered via HTTPS. (credit: HTTP Archive)

Last week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation announced that it will deprecate its HTTPS Everywhere browser plugin in 2022. Engineering director Alexis Hancock summed it up in the announcement's own title: "HTTPS is actually everywhere."

The EFF originally launched HTTPS Everywhere—a plugin which automatically upgrades HTTP connections to HTTPS—in 2010 as a stopgap measure for a world that was still getting accustomed to the idea of encrypting all web-browser traffic.

When the plugin was new, the majority of the Internet was served up in plaintext—vulnerable to both snooping and manipulation by any entity which could place itself between a web-browsing user and the web servers they communicated with. Even banking websites frequently offered unencrypted connections! Thankfully, the web-encryption landscape has changed dramatically in the 11 years since then.

Enlarge / A rendering of the BlueOvalSK campus in Glendale, Kentucky. (credit: Ford)

On Monday, the Ford Motor Company announced a massive investment to build electric vehicles in Kentucky and Tennessee. Together with partner SK Innovation, it will invest $11.4 billion and create around 11,000 new jobs in the region building electric F-series pickup trucks and battery packs.

"This is our moment—our biggest investment ever—to help build a better future for America," said Jim Farley, Ford president and CEO. "We are moving now to deliver breakthrough electric vehicles for the many rather than the few. It's about creating good jobs that support American families, an ultra-efficient, carbon-neutral manufacturing system, and a growing business that delivers value for communities, dealers and shareholders."

Blue Oval City in Staunton, Tennessee, will be a $5.6 billion, 3,600-acre (14.6 km²) campus that includes a vehicle assembly plant for electric pickups, as well as a joint venture BlueOvalSK battery plant. The companies say this will create nearly 6,000 new jobs and that the plant is designed to be carbon neutral with no landfill waste once it's operational.