Month: June 2022

Enlarge / A box of Paxlovid, the Pfizer antiviral drug. (credit: Getty | Europa Press News)

Pfizer's antiviral pill Paxlovid is among the most treasured tools for hammering COVID-19; it can knock back the relative risk of hospitalization and death by 89 percent in unvaccinated patients at high risk of severe disease. But, as use of the convenient drug has grown in the US, so have troubling reports of rebound cases—people who took the pill early in their infection, began feeling better, and even tested negative but then slid back into symptoms and tested positive again days later.

It's still unclear just how common the phenomenon is, but it certainly happens in some proportion of Paxlovid-treated patients. In May, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention even issued a health alert over the rebound reports.

But, amid the rising awareness, it has also become clear that patients who have not been treated with Paxlovid can also rebound. In fact, in Pfizer's clinical trials of Paxlovid, researchers noted that about 1 percent to 2 percent of both treatment and placebo groups had rebounds.

Enlarge / A promised patch should soon allow KOTOR II players to beat the game on Switch.

Last week, publisher Aspyr officially acknowledged the existence of a game-breaking glitch in the recent Switch port of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II. That glitch, which crashes the game after the "Basilisk Crash" cutscene on the planet Onderon, has the inconvenient side effect of making the Switch version completely unbeatable.

While Aspyr promised this game-breaking glitch would be fixed in the game's next downloadable patch, plenty of game developers in the past haven't had that option. KOTOR II on the Switch is the latest in a long line of games that were literally impossible to complete (or to get a full, 100 percent completion rate) when they launched.

Here, we're not talking about games like The Sims or Tetris that are designed not to have a win condition and/or always end in failure for the player (though some games that seem like they fall in that category are surprisingly beatable). We're also not talking about games where the player is forced to reset after accidentally stumbling into an in-game predicament where they can no longer make progress (TV Tropes has a massive list of games that fit this description).

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In the decade since larger-than-life character Kim Dotcom founded Mega, the cloud storage service has amassed 250 million registered users and stores a whopping 120 billion files that take up more than 1,000 petabytes of storage. A key selling point that has helped fuel the growth is an extraordinary promise that no top-tier Mega competitors make: Not even Mega can decrypt the data it stores.

On the company's homepage, for instance, Mega displays an image that compares its offerings to Dropbox and Google Drive. In addition to noting Mega's lower prices, the comparison emphasizes that Mega offers end-to-end encryption, whereas the other two do not.

Over the years, the company has repeatedly reminded the world of this supposed distinction, which is perhaps best summarized in this blog post. In it, the company claims, "As long as you ensure that your password is sufficiently strong and unique, no one will ever be able to access your data on MEGA. Even in the exceptionally improbable event MEGA's entire infrastructure is seized!" (emphasis added).