Month: July 2024

Among the many highlights of last weekend's San Diego Comic-Con was the official full trailer for the second season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. Sauron has returned and is plotting his takeover of Middle-earth. Will donning the titular rings make the wearers his adversaries—or his collaborators?

(Spoilers for S1 below.)

As previously reported, Prime Video made a major investment in The Rings of Power when it acquired the rights to the source material from the Tolkien estate, even committing to multiple seasons upfront. Pretty much everyone guessed long before the S1 finale's reveal that Halbrand (Charlie Vickers), king of the Southlands, was Sauron in disguise. Fans even dubbed him "Hot Sauron." He took advantage of the fact that the elvish light of Valar was fading, putting the race of elves in danger of extinction unless they returned to Valinor to preserve their immortality. The discovery of the precious ore mithril gave the elves another option championed by Elrond (Robert Aramayo), Galadriel (Morfydd Clark), and the elven smith Celebrimbor (Charles Edwards).

The merging of Warner Bros. and Discovery effectively put an end to one DC Extended Universe era while placing the fate of several planned projects in limbo. Chief among those was a sequel to 2022's The Batman and an associated spinoff series, The Penguin. Both projects have survived the merger, and DC Studio unveiled the first full trailer for The Penguin—starring Colin Farrell reprising his The Batman role of Oswald Cobblepot—during its panel at San Diego Comic-Con last weekend.

The panel also included a first look and a screening of the first episode of Prime Video's new animated series Batman: Caped Crusader, with Minnie Driver voicing a gender-swapped version of the Penguin named Oswalda Cobblepot. The official trailer dropped last month.

(Spoilers for 2022's The Batman below.)

Enlarge / Wikipedia's decades of content can be a light to you in dark places, and now you can choose the dark for yourself. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images | Wikipedia)

Dark mode, night mode, light-on-dark design, or whatever you want to call the version of computer content that doesn't feel blindingly bright at night, had something of a peak moment around 2019–2020. That's when Android and iOS designed a system-wide way to implement a darker theme, and signal to compatible apps to do the same. Many, many systems, apps, websites, and other digital tools soon followed.

Except, most notably, Wikipedia. Despite being one of the sites most sympathetic to late-night mind wandering, Wikipedia had no official way to switch its iconic white pages into something more sleep and eyeball-friendly. Now, after great effort from its community, a dark mode (technically a dark "Color" setting) is available to most Wikipedia visitors on both desktop and mobile.

On desktop, look for a sidebar on the right-hand side that has buttons for setting text size and width, and then "Color (beta)." If you don't see a sidebar, look for an eyeglasses-like icon in the upper-right corner near the search and account tools. On mobile, look for the three horizontal bars (aka hamburger button) in the upper-left corner of a page, choose Settings, then pick your Color. There is the standard Light you know, Dark, and Automatic, which takes its color cues from your system.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Microsoft is urging users of VMware’s ESXi hypervisor to take immediate action to ward off ongoing attacks by ransomware groups that give them full administrative control of the servers the product runs on.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-37085, allows attackers who have already gained limited system rights on a targeted server to gain full administrative control of the ESXi hypervisor. Attackers affiliated with multiple ransomware syndicates—including Storm-0506, Storm-1175, Octo Tempest, and Manatee Tempest—have been exploiting the flaw for months in numerous post-compromise attacks, meaning after the limited access has already been gained through other means.

Admin rights assigned by default

Full administrative control of the hypervisor gives attackers various capabilities, including encrypting the file system and taking down the servers they host. The hypervisor control can also allow attackers to access hosted virtual machines to either exfiltrate data or expand their foothold inside a network. Microsoft discovered the vulnerability under exploit in the normal course of investigating the attacks and reported it to VMware. VMware parent company Broadcom patched the vulnerability on Thursday.

Star Trek: Lower Decks is a particular favorite among Ars staffers; it's arguably the best of the recent crop of Star Trek shows, along with Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. So we were disappointed when we learned that the animated series would be ending with its fifth season. Paramount+ debuted the first teaser for S5 during the Star Trek panel at San Diego Comic-Con over the weekend, along with a teaser for Star Trek: Section 31—a spinoff film from Star Trek: Discovery featuring Michelle Yeoh's Philippa Georgiou—a clip from Strange New Worlds S3, and the latest news about Star Trek: Starfleet Academy.

The Lower Decks teaser opens with a suitably nostalgic recap of some of the highlights of the adventures of the plucky crew of the USS Cerritos, inviting viewers to join them for one last adventure. Cue Boimler (Jack Quaid) and Mariner (Tawny Newsome) in voiceover objecting to that description ("Yeah, right, we're not done voyaging—we've hardly even cracked one quadrant yet"). Their S5 mission involves a "quantum fissure" that is causing "space potholes" to pop up all over the Alpha Quadrant ("boo interdimensional portals!"), and the Cerritos crew must close them—while navigating angry Klingons, an Orion war, and who knows what other crazy developments?

The final season of Lower Decks premieres on Paramount+ on October 24, 2024, and will run through December 19.