Author: Ars Staff

STARKVILLE, Mississippi—“By the time it gets here, David, it’s no longer my poop,” says microbiologist Todd French with conviction. “I don’t want you to think there’s solid turds coming in over there. When we get it as sludge, it’s far removed from what it was when it left your body. That’s all bacteria that has grown and fed off this stuff.”

French is trying to reassure me. We’re gazing down into a concrete vat filled with a churning tide of gray and green water at the Ernest E. Jones Wastewater Treatment Plant in Starkville, Mississippi. A gust of wind kicks an odor off the frothy surface; a spittle-sized drop of foam has hit my lip. Students in French’s program must get hepatitis shots and boosters before helping French in his audacious quest to convert sludge like this into biodiesel; I furiously rub my finger over the spot, removing as many dermis layers as possible.

But French tells me he’s ingested “mouthfuls” of the water without ill effects. “You don’t have to worry about getting anything… too much,” he says.

Let's get the bottom line of the way up front: Far Cry Primal certainly isn't the best Ubisoft game — or even the best Far Cry game. It is, however, perhaps the most Ubisoft game I've yet played. That doesn’t say anything about the game’s breadth, depth, or quality of content. But in terms of how that content is presented, it’s pure, distilled Ubisoft all the way.

This is all despite the game's setting being as about as far removed from previous Far Cry entries as historically possible. The game begins by quite literally turning back the clock more than 12,000 years (though it’s still in Europe, of course). In 10,000 BCE, a prehistoric tribe is looking to eke out a living in the harsh, though still apparently desirable Oros valley.

The time period is just about the only thing that sets the plot apart from the previous pair of numbered Far Cry games. The apparently exceptional central character, Takkar, has the same habit of toppling warlords and leading tribal revolutions as the heroes of Far Cry 3 and 4 did. He simply does so with a club and spear, rather than a bevy of automatic weapons.

Another turn of the Earth

If you're wondering where things go from there; don't bother. Even more than most Ubisoft games, Primal isn't so much a sequence of events as a flat, open-ended plate of tasks to complete, and checkboxes to fill on a list. The lack of a linear sequence plays into the gameplay design, as the "story" missions can be completed in any order (with a few exceptions).

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Apple CEO Tim Cook on Tuesday evening said the US government's legal position on encryption backdoors was setting "a dangerous precedent.” That’s because, just a few hours prior, a federal judge agreed with the US Justice Department that a 1789 law compelled Apple to alter an iPhone's firmware that would allow the authorities to use a brute-force attack on an iPhone owned by one of the San Bernardino shooters.

Cook said Apple will fight the Riverside, California magistrate judge's orders, calling it an "unprecedented use of the All Writs Act of 1789 to justify an expansion of its authority." Depending on where you line up in the cryptowars debate, Cook's characterization of the government's stance may or may not be true. But what is undeniable is that the act has certainly been used to expand the government's surveillance reach. Whether it ultimately will in the iPhone case is an open question likely to be resolved by the Supreme Court.

While the All Writs Act is not used every day, the act has been successfully invoked by the government to compel telephone companies to install wiretaps, for phone companies to hand over call records, to obtain CCTV footage, handwriting exemplars, and DNA samples. It's even been cited to force a defendant to cough up his computer password.

A bizarre security flaw involving recycled phone numbers is allowing some users of the taxi-hailing app Lyft to access other riders’ accounts, exposing names, e-mail addresses, complete ride histories, and credit card information.

The bug was brought to Ars’ attention by a Lyft user named Felix, who says he signed up for the service for the first time earlier this month. He went through the normal registration process, entering his name, e-mail, credit card, and a new phone number, which was recently assigned to him by T-Mobile.

But Felix realized something was wrong when drivers kept addressing him by someone else’s name—a woman’s name he didn’t recognize. At first, he brushed it off. “I was like, uhh no, it’s Felix. But whatever, you’re here,” he told Ars, recalling some confused moments during his first week using the ridesharing service.

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains, we have a number of deals to extend your Presidents' Day shopping spree. Dell is offering its Venue 7000 tablet series (specifically the 8-inch and 10-inch models) for half price, making them $199 and $299, respectively. You can also save on a gaming console—get an Xbox One bundle with Gears of War and a $100 Dell gift card for just $349.

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Many of us are familiar with the first-person shooter (FPS) creation myth—that it materialized fully formed in the minds of id Software founders John Carmack and John Romero shortly before they developed Wolfenstein 3D. Afterward, it was pushed forward only by id until Valve's Half-Life came along.

But the reality behind FPS evolution is messier. Innovations came from multiple sources and often took years to catch on.Even Wolfenstein 3D had numerous predecessors within and without id. And like the genres we've previously explored—a list including city builders, graphic adventures, kart histories, and simulation games—there have been many high and low points throughout this long, violent, gory history.

Minus '90s cult favorite Descent's (because I personally consider it a flight combat shooter), these are the shooters that pushed the genre forward or held it back. Many of us encountered at least one that truly spoke to us, but together, these titles made it cool to shoot pixel-rendered dudes, dudettes, mutants, and weird alien creatures in the face.

At the end of October 2014, something very important came to an end. After 15 years of changing the way people communicated forever, Microsoft closed down its MSN Windows Live service.

Originally named MSN Messenger, its demise was not an overnight failure. Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype for £5.1 billion in 2012 meant it was only a matter of time before it was finally closed. China was the last territory to migrate the service to Skype; other countries did so 12 months earlier.

At its height, MSN Messenger had more than 330 million users after originally being launched to rival the emerging chat networks of AOL's AIM service and ICQ, followed by the entry of Yahoo Messenger. It was the social network of its day and as influential and dominant as Facebook is today.

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Unravel Creative Director Martin Sahlin described the game at its unveiling at last year’s E3 as a metaphor for what binds people together. Just minutes after starting the game, it’s obvious to see how that metaphor plays out, and it's fairly easy to guess where the game is headed. As for the reality within the game, however, not everything happens exactly as expected.

More than just colorful

A large part of the game's appeal is Yarny, the cloyingly named mascot that seems to have captured so many people’s imaginations. As his name and the game’s title imply, Yarny is composed entirely of yarn, and he trails a thin line of fabric behind him wherever he goes. While this apparently limits his powers of personal expression, it does offer a bevy of convenient platforming tricks.

Besides using his omnipresent lifeline to rappel up and down cliffs, Yarny can lasso, swing from, and anchor to specially marked locations and objects in each level. When Unravel is operating at its peak, these abilities tie together obviously and quickly. You swing from one branch to the next to reach a soiled tuna can, drag it back over a yarn bridge tied between two docks, then step over it to reach the next target of your trusty lasso. The majority of the game’s puzzles are in this simple mold, asking you to rely on your assortment of yarn-based traversal to get Yarny or other detritus from one location to another.