Month: December 2021

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A newly discovered vulnerability affecting Java versions of Minecraft makes it possible for miscreants to execute malicious code on servers and end-user devices running the wildly popular game, several websites said on Thursday.

And as if a vulnerability of this magnitude in the world’s best-selling game wasn’t serious enough, the breadth and immediacy of the bug may be worse still. Exploit code has become available for the underlying vulnerability, which resides in Log4j, a logging utility that’s built into some of the Internet’s most widely used development frameworks, all but ensuring that Minecraft isn’t the only major application to be affected.

There already are reports servers performing Internet-wide scans in attempts to locate vulnerable servers.

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  Virtual Keanu Reeves, rendered in real time on a consumer-grade Xbox Series X in the latest Unreal Engine 5 demo. [credit: Epic Games ]

2021 is the 25th anniversary of a gaming-related milestone: the Super Mario 64 face. This fascinating tech demo (whose creator opines about it in a May 2021 interview) is the first thing you see upon booting the N64's signature game, and it was a declaration of the N64's potential 3D prowess, well ahead of the likes of Sony's first PlayStation.

Modern games rarely come with this sort of useless, whimsical tech demo, and similar tech muscle-flexes on consoles have been rare in the years since the N64's '90s heyday. Tonight, another unbelievable demo joins its ranks: The Matrix Awakens.

This brand-new Unreal Engine 5 showcase, now downloadable on Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5, is rendered almost entirely in real time on current-gen consoles. What's more, every image in this article was not only captured on my own home Series X but is also, according to Epic Games, rendered in real time. Only a few choice snippets of the demo, now downloadable via Xbox Live and PlayStation Network, consist of premade video footage, which I skipped in favor of the impressive faces, action sequences, and cityscapes that UE5 is apparently equipped to render on the latest home consoles.