Category: Uncategorised

SANTA MONICA, Calif.—Your history and experience with video games may very well be defined by the acronyms you hold near and dear. All-caps letter slams like WASD, LFG, GLHF, QTE, and HPB represent a lot for certain gaming genres or eras (and probably read like gobbledygook to outsiders), but in the console gaming space, one acronym may very well count as the longest-lasting of them all: ATB.

That stands for the Active-Time Battle system from Final Fantasy, which debuted in its fifth game and has remained a constant in a series that otherwise revels in full memory-slate wipes with its every sequel. Sure, the games share constants like Chocobos, mechanics named Cid, and elemental magic mixed with giant-monster summons, but the RPG series is probably best known for, and identified by, its meter-charging twist on turn-based combat.

The upcoming release of Final Fantasy XV is interesting in a lot of ways, from its enormity to its car-cruising "band of bros" premise. But after being given full room to roam in the game's entire first chapter, the largest takeaway by far is its battle-system shift. Forget the teases and dances with real-time active combat in games like FFXIII; Square Enix has finally, truly pushed its golden child into the real-time combat realm.

The Donald. (credit: Gage Skidmore)

A hack on the Democratic National Committee has given attackers access to a massive trove of data, including all opposition research into presidential candidate Donald Trump and almost a year's worth of private e-mail and chat messages, according to a published report.

In an article published Wednesday, The Washington Post reported that researchers with CrowdStrike, the security firm DNC officials hired to investigate and contain the breach, determined the intrusions were carried out by two separate hacker groups that both worked for the Russian government. One, dubbed Cozy Bear, gained access last summer and has been monitoring committee members' e-mail and chat communications. The other is known as Fancy Bear and is believed to have broken into the network in late April. It was the latter intrusion that obtained the entire database of Trump opposition and later tipped off IT team members the network may have been breached.

The DNC intrusion is just one of several targeting US political organizations, the WaPo said, with the networks of Trump, rival presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and some republican political action committees also being targeted by Russian spies. Details about those campaigns weren't available. The hackers who penetrated the DNC network were expelled last weekend. No financial and donor information appears to have been taken, leaving analysts to suspect the attack was a case of traditional espionage and not the work of criminal hackers. According to Wednesday's report:

That's not exactly what we mean when we say consoles are becoming more like mobile phones... (credit: Destructoid)

For decades now, the game console market has progressed in a reliable pattern. Roughly every six or seven years, console makers would introduce new hardware expected to completely replace the old. After a short transitional period, support for the older hardware would dry up on the part of both developers and the console makers themselves. Everyone would move on.

This year's E3 has provided an important inflection point for that model. Both Sony and Microsoft are announcing new hardware intended to complement, rather than replace, their current consoles. It's a move that will have far-reaching implications for what console gaming looks like going forward. Goodbye to the game console as we know it. Hello to the tiered console platform.

Sony technically started things off, confirming days before E3 that the codenamed PlayStation 4 Neo would "sit alongside and complement the standard PS4" throughout that system's lifecycle. Microsoft took it even further at its press presentation Monday, announcing the codenamed Xbox One Scorpio as a six-teraflop workhorse that will support "true 4K gaming" and high-end virtual reality by the end of 2017.

(credit: Canonical)

Ubuntu's "snappy" new way of packaging applications is no longer exclusive to Ubuntu. Canonical today is announcing that snapd, the tool that allows snap packages to be installed on Ubuntu, has been ported to other Linux distributions including Debian, Arch, Fedora, and Gentoo among others.

If you have no idea what the above paragraph means, here's a summary. Traditionally, applications for Ubuntu and similar distributions are packaged in the deb (short for Debian) format. These packages consist of the application a user wants to install, and they can also install other things that the package depends on in order to run (libraries, other applications, scripting, support files, and so on). Applications often require a lot of dependencies, making things more complicated, for example, when one application needs one version of another piece of software and a second application needs a different version of that other piece of software.

"Snap packages solve this problem by creating self-contained packages," we noted in our review of Ubuntu 16.04, which brought snaps to servers and desktops. "With snap packages, applications are installed in their own container, and all the third-party applications are installed with them so there are no version conflicts. Snap packages are also smart enough to not install a package more than once, meaning applications installed via Snappy don't take any more disk space than regular applications."

White House Photo by Pete Souza (November 10, 2010).

President Obama places a call from his secure BlackBerry 8900 from the presidential limo while in Indonesia in 2010. When he took office, Obama pushed to keep a mobile device for unclassified use.

3 more images in gallery

When President Barack Obama took office in 2009, he pushed to keep his BlackBerry. Instead, he was issued another BlackBerry device—a BlackBerry 8830 World Edition with extra crypto—for unclassified calls and e-mail. Until recently, Obama continued to carry a BlackBerry handset, but mobile device technology shifts have finally caught up with the White House. Sadly, the Obamaberry is no more.

In an appearance on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, Barack Obama noted that he now carries a secure "smartphone" that is so locked down that he compared it to an infant's toy phone. While Obama didn't mention the type of handset he now carries, there's only one mobile device supported by the Defense Information Systems Agency—the agency that provides the White House with communications services. That phone is a "hardened" Samsung Galaxy S4.

The S4 is currently the only device supported under DISA's DOD Mobility Classified Capability-Secret (DMCC-S) program. In 2014, a number of Samsung devices were the first to win approval from the National Security Agency under its National Information Assurance Partnership (NIAP) Commercial Solutions for Classified (CSfC) program—largely because of Samsung's KNOX security technology. And the S4, layered with services managed by DISA, is the first commercial phone to get approval to connect to the Secret classified DOD SIPRNet network.

Get hyped: the next Legend of Zelda game has finally received a trailer loaded with a significant amount of gameplay and feature previews. From the look of things, Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild seems like it will live up to some very lofty expectations.

The 2017 Nintendo game, set to launch on both Wii U and the still-unnamed Nintendo NX system, shows an apparent Link hero traversing a giant, colorful world in many ways, including horseback, parasailing, and Tomb Raider-esque cliffside scaling. Our hero gets up to a lot of new activities in a mere three-minute trailer runtime. Most notably, Link gets his first-ever Grand Theft Auto-styled maneuver: hijacking a rogue horse after stealthing up to it in some tall grass.

Link is also seen wielding new kinds of main weapons, including a few staves and a strangely styled sword that looks axe-like. He's even seen putting together various ingredients to cook dishes of food. Puzzle solving via environmental shoves and magical ice-block formations, not to mention a few giant baddies and a long look at the series' famous Master Sword, round out the trailer's most spine-tingling moments.