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Enlarge / You might not like it, but this—along with a giant sack of burritos just off-camera to the left—is what peak cRPG gaming looks like. (credit: Jim Salter)

When I got the chance to play a pre-release copy of inXile's post-apocalyptic RPG Wasteland 3, I jumped at it. As a huge fan of RPGs in general and a backer of Wasteland 2, getting to play the next game in the series for my job was an obvious no-brainer. For those who aren't already familiar with the series, it's a darkly humorous tactical battler, set in an alternate-universe post-apocalyptic America divided into widely separated fiefdoms and sprawling chaos.

If you're thinking "like Fallout, but turn-based?" you're not too far off—there are a lot of similarities between Wasteland's and Fallout's versions of post-WWIII America, including some hilariously retrofuturistic touches. But where Fallout's world seems to have sprung from the late '50s, Wasteland's setting branches out from somewhere in the '80s. The HUD includes an Alpine-style cassette deck with obnoxious graphic equalizer, the clubs have Discobots, the CPUs are "overclocked to 66MHz," and so on.

Wasteland tries to take itself a little more seriously than Fallout does, too—its humor is a little less over the top, its ethical choices are harder, and it tries more frequently to get you to feel the gravity of the plights its characters find themselves in, up to and including brutal murder and cannibalism. It's a fine line to walk, but the tongue-in-cheek cultural references and silly jokes keep the player from slipping into despair at the awful situations faced by the game's characters.

Enlarge (credit: Bid.in2corporate.com)

Organizations that have yet to install the latest version of the Pulse Secure VPN have a good reason to stop dithering—a code-execution vulnerability that allows attackers to take control of networks that use the product.

Tracked as CVE-2020-8218, the vulnerability requires an attacker to have administrative rights on the machine running the VPN. Researchers from GoSecure, the firm that discovered the flaw, found an easy way to clear that hurdle: trick an administrator into clicking on a malicious link embedded in an email or other type of message.

Phishing season has now officially started

“While it does require to be authenticated,” GoSecure researcher Jean-Frédéric Gauron wrote in a post, referring to the exploit, “the fact that it can be triggered by a simple phishing attack on the right victim should be evidence enough that this vulnerability is not to be ignored.”

Enlarge / COVID-19 has really shifted the academic world in 2020 (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty)

For parents and teachers in the US, August usually means getting ready for the school year to start—finalizing lesson plans, making sure all the school supplies are on hand, and possibly buying a rapidly growing kid a new wardrobe. In the face of a global pandemic, however, getting ready for school means something entirely different. It starts today with buying face masks and checking whether the school buildings have been reworked to enable socially distanced learning.

That's assuming the schools reopen at all, of course. Under the best of circumstances, that would be a difficult decision, involving weighing the availability of extra staff, funding for facilities changes, and competing interests in child development and physical health. But the whole question has now become a partisan political issue, driven by an ill-informed president making a big push to reopen schools.

With all that noise, it's undoubtedly difficult for parents to even figure out what factors they should consider when making decisions for their children. To try to help, we've looked over guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control, National Academies of Science, the World Health Organization, and other expert groups, and we've found there's a general consistency in their advice. What follows is an attempt to summarize both the considerations that motivate this advice, as well as the factors these experts suggest people keep in mind when making decisions about in-person learning this fall.