Enlarge/ A shot from the introductory cut scene to Tom Clancy's Elite Squad showing a Black Lives Matter raised fist symbol used to represent the game's terrorist antagonists. (credit: Ubisoft)
Ubisoft apologized over the weekend for a cut scene in Tom Clancy's Elite Squad, a mobile game released last week, which used a raised fist symbol associated with the Black Lives Matter movement to represent an in-game terrorist organization masquerading as a populist front.
The cut scene in question shows a world descending into chaos and introduces UMBRA as a "faceless organization that wants to build a new world order" and "a new threat [emerging] to take advantage of escalating civil unrest." The group "claims to promote an egalitarian utopia to gain popular support, while behind the scenes... organiz[ing] deadly terrorist attacks to generate even more chaos and weaken governments at the cost of many innocent lives."
While the intro's entire over-the-top (and perhaps overly topical) concept was roundly mocked on social media over the weekend, the specific use of the raised fist symbol in UMBRA imagery drew condemnation from many.
Google and Facebook have withdrawn plans to build an undersea cable between the United States and Hong Kong after the Trump administration raised national security concerns about the proposal. On Thursday, the companies submitted a revised plan that bypasses Hong Kong but includes links to Taiwan and the Philippines that were part of the original proposal.
One of the original project's partners, Hong Kong company Pacific Light Data Communication, has been dropped.
Federal law requires a license from the Federal Communications Commission to build an undersea cable connecting the United States with a foreign country. When Google and Facebook submitted their application for an undersea cable connecting the US to Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Philippines, a committee of federal agencies led by the Justice Department recommended against approving the connection to Hong Kong, citing the "current national security environment."
Enlarge/ Were you hoping to play classic PlayStation discs on the newest PlayStation 5 console later this year? If so, we have bad news. (credit: Aurich Lawson)
On Monday, an Ubisoft FAQ page went live to walk the company's fans through games coming out on a bunch of consoles this holiday season. In doing so, the FAQ seems to have finally confirmed something Sony hadn't yet announced about its PlayStation 5 console: its backward-compatibility limitations.
PlayStation 4 players will be able to join multiplayer games with PlayStation 5 players. Backwards compatibility will be available for supported PlayStation 4 titles, but will not be possible for PlayStation 3, PlayStation 2, or PlayStation games.
[Update: Shortly before this article's publication, the quoted text was removed from the Ubisoft page in question, though it remained live for hours while PlayStation fans began sharing it far and wide.]
Those little pocket TVs were quite the cool gadget back in the ’80s and ’90s, but today they’re pretty much useless at least for their intended purpose of watching analog television. (If someone is out there making tiny digital-to-analog converter boxes for these things, please let us know.)
Our favorite part of this project is the way that [technichenews] leveraged what is arguably the most useless part of the TV — the antenna — into the star. Their plan is to use the camera to peer into small engines, so by mounting it on the end of the antenna, it will become a telescoping, ball-jointed, all-seeing eye. You can inspect the build video after the break.
Tesla has released a new version of its Autopilot software that adds the ability to read speed limit signs, improving the accuracy of the speed limits displayed on the dashboard. The new version of the software also recognizes when a stoplight turns green. The car will notify the driver but won't start moving on its own.
Tesla first added the ability to spot stoplights and stop signs back in April. The initial version of the stoplight feature would slow down for a stoplight whether it was red or green. The driver had to signal the car to proceed through the intersection if the light was green—otherwise, the car would stop.
The first version of Autopilot, which was based on technology from Mobileye, included the ability to recognize speed limit signs. But Tesla split with Mobileye in 2016 and began building more of its Autopilot technology in-house. As a result, prior to the latest software update, newer Tesla vehicles displayed speed limits based on a GPS-based database of roadway speed limits.
Telecoms and data-center operators take note: attackers are actively trying to exploit a high-severity zeroday vulnerability in Cisco networking devices, the company warned over the weekend.
The security flaw resides in Cisco’s iOS XR Software, an operating system for carrier-grade routers and other networking devices used by telecommunications and data-center providers. In an advisory published on Saturday, the networking-gear manufacturer said that a patch is not yet available and provided no timeline for when one would be released.
Memory exhaustion
CVE-2020-3566, as the vulnerability is tracked, allows attackers to “cause memory exhaustion, resulting in instability of other processes” including but not limited to interior and exterior routing protocols. Exploits work by sending maliciously crafted Internet Group Management Protocol traffic. Normally, IGMP communications are used by one-to-many networking applications to conserve resources when streaming video and related content. A flaw in the way iOS XR Software queues IGMP packets makes it possible to consume memory resources.
PC- and gadget-maker Lenovo has announced a suite of consumer products for the holiday season this year, including three new Yoga-brand Windows laptops.
The company had already announced other laptops in this line—including the Yoga Slim 7i, the Yoga Slim 7i Pro, the Yoga Slim 7 pro, the Yoga 6, and the 2-in-1 Yoga 7i—earlier this month. Today brings details about the Yoga Slim 9i (14 inches) and the convertible Yoga 9i (available in 14- and 15-inch versions).
The new models include new-generation Intel Core CPUs and Intel Xe graphics. The 9i's 15-inch model offers CPU configurations maxing out with an Intel Core i9 HK, can be configured with discrete graphics cards as speedy as Nvidia's GTX 1650 Ti, and offers up to 16GB of DDR4 RAM and 2TB of SSD storage. The 9i can also include a 4K touchscreen with a maximum brightness of 500 nits—just enough to qualify for the bare minimum HDR specification. The 14-inch variant of the 9i includes two Thunderbolt 4 ports, while the 15-inch version (and the 9i Slim) offer three.
[Erik Knutsson] is stuck inside with a bunch of robot parts, and we know what lies down that path. His Open Personal Assistant Robotic Platform aims to help out around the house with things like filling pet food bowls, but for now, he is taking one step at a time and working out the bugs before adding new features. Wise.
The build started with a narrow base, an underpowered RasPi, and a quiet speaker, but those were upgraded in turn. Right now, it is a personal assistant on wheels. Alexa was the first contender, but Mycroft is in the spotlight because it has more versatility. At first, the mobility was a humble web server with a D-pad, but now it leverages a distance sensor and vision, and can even follow you with a voice command.
The screen up top gives it a personable look, but it is slated to become a display for everything you’d want to see on your robot assistant, like weather, recipes, or a video chat that can walk around with you. [Erik] would like to make something that assists the elderly who might need help with chores and help connect people who are stuck inside like him.
China has announced new export restrictions for artificial intelligence technology that could complicate ByteDance's plans to sell off the US operations of its wildly popular TikTok app. The Trump administration has ordered ByteDance to spin off its US operations or shut them down by November.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the Chinese government announced new restrictions on Friday that "cover such computing and data-processing technologies as text analysis, content recommendation, speech modeling and voice-recognition." A key part of TikTok's success has been its sophisticated algorithms for making personalized video recommendations. So a ban on transferring such technology could make it more difficult to transfer the app to a Western buyer or prevent a sale altogether.
ByteDance is reportedly close to announcing its decision. CNBC reports that the leading bidders are Microsoft (in partnership with Walmart) and Oracle. An announcement could come as early as Tuesday, with an expected sale price between $20 billion and $30 billion, according to CNBC.
We’ve had something of an anniversary of late, and it’s one that will no doubt elicit a variety of reactions from our community. It’s now 25 years ago that Windows 95 was launched, the operating system that gave the majority of 1990s PC users their first taste of a desktop-based GUI and a 32-bit operating system.
To the strains of the Rolling Stones’ Start me up, Microsoft execs including Bill Gates himself jubilantly danced on stage at the launch of what was probably to become the company’s defining product, perhaps oblivious to the line “You make a grown man cry” which maybe unwittingly strayed close to the user experience when faced with some of the software’s shortcomings.
Its security may seem laughable by the standards of today and the uneasy marriage of 16-bit DOS underpinning a 32-bit Windows operating system was clunky even in its heyday, but perhaps now is the best time to evaluate it unclouded by technical prejudice. What can we see of Windows 95 in the operating systems we use today, and thus from that can we ask the question: What did Windows 95 get right?
For Most People, This Was Where It All Started
A test of the legacy of Windows 95’s desktop comes in how intuitive it still is for users of a 2020-era GUI OS.
Windows 95 was by no means the first operating system to use a desktop based GUI. While earlier Windows GUIs had been more akin to graphical launchers there had been a succession of other GUI-based computers since their Xerox PARC ancestor, so Macintosh and Amiga owners among others could have been forgiven for wondering why it took Redmond so long to catch up. But for all the clamour from the 68k-based fans, the indulgent smiles from X window users on UNIX workstations in industry and universities, and the as yet unfulfilled desktop fantasies of 1995’s hardy band of GNU/Linux users, the fact remains that for the majority of the world’s desktop computer users back then it would be the Microsoft Sound that heralded their first experience of a modern GUI operating system.
We’re lucky here in 2020, to have such computing power at our fingertips that we can run in-browser simulations or even outright emulations running real code of most of the 1990s desktops. WIndows 95 can be directly compared with its predecessor, and then with its contemporaries such as Macintosh System 7 and Amiga Workbench 3.1. Few people would have had the necessary four machines side-by-side to do this back then, so paging between tabs their differences and relative shortcomings become rapidly obvious. In particular the menu and windowing systems of the Mac and Amiga desktops which seemed so advanced when we had them in front of us start to feel cumbersome and long-winded in a way the Windows 95 interface for all its mid-90s Microsoft aesthetic, just doesn’t.
Using Amiga Workbench again after 25 years provides an instant reminder that an essential add-on to the Workbench disk back in the day was a little utility that gave window focus to mouse position, brought right-click menus up at the mouse pointer position, and brought focused windows to the front. Good GUIs don’t need to have their shortcomings fixed with a utility to stop them being annoying, they — to borrow a phrase from Apple themselves — just work. Right-click context menus at the mouse pointer position, the Start menu bringing access to everything into one place, and the taskbar providing an easy overview of multitasking, they were none of them earth-shattering, but together they set the Windows GUI as the one that became a natural environment for users.
Finding the Very Long Shadow of ’95 today
If you miss ’95, ReactOS is probably the closest you can get here in 2020.
Returning to the present and Windows 10, the spiritual if not codebase descendant of Windows 95, has a Start menu and a task bar that will be visibly familiar to a user from 25 years before. They were so popular with users that when Windows 8 attempted to remove them there was something of a revolt, and Microsoft returned them to later versions. The same features appear in plenty of desktop environments in other operating systems including GNU/Linux distributions, indeed it can be found on my laptop running an up-to-date Linux Mint. Arguments will probably proceed at length whether it or the dock-style interface found on NeXT, MacOS, and plenty of other GNU/Linux distros are better, but this legacy of Windows 95 has proved popular enough that it is likely to remain with us for the forseeable future.
It’s odd, sitting down for this article at a Windows 95 desktop for the first time in over two decades. It’s so familiar that despite my having not possessed a Windows desktop for around a decade I could dive straight into it without the missteps that I had when revisting Amiga Workbench. It’s almost a shock then to realise that it’s now a retrocumputing platform, and there’s little in my day-to-day work that I could still do on a Windows 95 machine. Perhaps it’s best to put it down before I’m reminded about Blue Screens Of Death, about driver incompatibilities, or Plug and Pray, and instead look at its echoes in my modern desktop. Maybe it did get one or two things right after all.
The F-35 Lightning II fighter has generated a lot of hype and a lot of hate over the past decade. But the next three years will see major changes to the aircraft that will, with any luck, at least mute some of the hate—or otherwise, just add billions more to the cost of the aircraft.
The Tech Refresh 3 program for the F-35 includes an upgrade of the aircraft's core processor and memory and the replacement of the aircraft's Panoramic Cockpit Display—the big-screen display that is the user interface for many of the aircraft's sensors and systems. There are also radar upgrades and some weapons-handling hardware changes in store, but a vast proportion of the upcoming changes will be in software.
The personal car has been sold to society as an engineered expression of freedom, as told through stories as varied as the dust bowl migration of The Grapes of Wrath to the irresponsible road racers of The Cannonball Run. And decades of dependence on fast-flowing liquid hydrocarbons for fuel have left little tolerance for spending many minutes more plugged in and stationary, waiting for lithium-ion cells to recharge. So when it comes to bench-racing electric vehicles, the only statistic most people care about is how far it can go before you need to plug it in again.
The situation isn't exactly helped by the tests used by regulators. In Europe, the WLTP test cycle averages 29mph (47km/h) and generates range estimates that should be considered mere fantasies on North American roads. The US Environmental Protection Agency's test averages almost twice that, but then gets subjected to a fudge factor that heavily penalizes some while flattering others. Which is why it's interesting to see the results of an independent range test of several EVs that involved charging them up then driving them at a steady 70mph (112km/h) until they ground to a halt.
The study was commissioned by Polestar, which wanted to rank its new Polestar 2 EV against three competitors: the Tesla Model 3 Performance, Jaguar I-Pace, and Audi e-tron. The test procedure, conducted on July 28 on a three-mile (4.8km) oval at Fowlerville Proving Ground in Michigan, was quite straightforward.
