Enlarge / This is arguably not the best promotional image to leave on your Diablo II: Resurrected site these days, Blizzard. (credit: Blizzard)

On Wednesday, Blizzard confirmed reports about three major staffers on its game-design teams no longer working for the company. This is yet another example of the tumult that has recently overtaken the lawsuit-plagued game publisher and creator.

In a statement provided by Blizzard to Ars Technica, the studio confirmed that the following staffers are no longer working for the company: Luis Barriga, who’d served as director of the upcoming sequel Diablo IV; Jesse McCree, a Diablo IV designer who is also the namesake of an Overwatch character; and Jonathan LeCraft, a designer on the World of Warcraft team. Blizzard’s exact statement says that the three men in question are “no longer with the company,” without clarifying the nature of the change in employment (layoff, termination, resignation, etc.) or whether all three staffers parted ways at the same time.

McCree and LeCraft entered the limelight in the wake of last month’s widespread lawsuit filed against Activision Blizzard by a California state agency. Their faces appeared prominently in a series of photos, originally revealed and reported on by Kotaku, about the contentious “Cosby Suite,” a makeshift shrine to Bill Cosby that appeared in the July lawsuit. The lawsuit suggested that the “Suite,” adorned with a painting of Bill Cosby, was part of extracurricular parties connected to Blizzard’s 2013 BlizzCon fan expo. The suite’s name is arguably a reference to Cosby’s notorious public reputation at the time.

Enlarge / A pharmacist holding a vial of the undiluted Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for COVID-19. (credit: Getty | JEAN-FRANCOIS MONIER)

The plans were first reported by NBC News and confirmed by CNN and Politico.

The FDA is expected to give a green light for a third dose of both the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech mRNA vaccines. The authorization for the third shots would come by way of updates to the vaccines’ emergency use authorizations.

Enlarge / Sensitive BIOS passwords leaked by QAnon figure Ron Watkins have been linked to a Colorado County office run by a clerk who promotes “Stop the Steal” messaging. (credit: JJ Gouin / Getty Images)

Last week, Ron Watkins—conspiracy theorist, QAnon enthusiast, and former 8chan site admin—released photocopies of an installation manual for Dominion voting machines. The copied pages gave basic instructions for configuring BIOS passwords (necessary to change some system settings) and iDRAC, a standard network remote control tool (which the manual explicitly requires the administrator to disable).

On the next day, Watkins released a video purporting to be from a “whistleblower” exposing Dominion’s “most egregious lie”—that, supposedly, Dominion can remotely administer the machines. He also released several screenshots of Election Management Systems hardware his “whistleblower” had access to.

Although none of Watkins’ screenshots—which will be immediately familiar to anyone who’s ever administered enterprise-grade hardware—are as damning to the voting machines themselves as Watkins would clearly like, they did end up causing problems for one of Watkins’ fellow travelers—county clerk Tina Peters of Mesa County, Colorado, whose office manages the machines in question.

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  Nicholas Cage is an imprisoned bank robber named Hero. [credit:
  YouTube/RLJE Films
  ]

Nicholas Cage’s unusual artistic choices over the years have been frequently remarked upon by critics, and no doubt he’s been in some pretty bad films over his long and storied career (*cough* The Wicker Man *cough*). But he’s also chosen some truly original, visionary independent projects, most recently 2019’s Lovecraft adaptation Color Out of Space and the bloody horror comedy Willy’s Wonderland earlier this year. He’s currently earning critical raves for his portrayal of a chef turned truffle hunter in search of his stolen truffle pig in Pig. And now we have the official trailer for Cage’s latest film, Prisoners of the Ghostland, a post-apocalyptic thriller that looks like Max Max transported into a surreal samurai Western.

Prisoners is helmed by idiosyncratic auteur Sion Sono. While Sono isn’t a household name in the US, he has enjoyed a fair amount of fame in his native Japan and on the film festival circuit. The Hollywood Reporter once called him “the most subversive director working in Japanese cinema today, with nearly 50 films of various genres—rite-of-passage stories fueled with social transgressions, all-out sex-and-gore thrillers, hip-hop musicals, and warm human drama.” He’s perhaps best known for 2008’s Love Exposure, a four-hour (!) art-house comedy drama inspired by Sono’s own youthful experience with a cult.

Prisoners of the Ghostland is Sono’s English-language debut, and it looks like a good fit for Cage’s colorfully flamboyant, mega-acting style. (Cage himself has called his method “Nouveau Shamanic” or “Western kabuki.”) The film premiered in January at the Sundance Film Festival to decidedly mixed reviews, although both Cage’s performance and Sono’s striking visuals received praise.

Enlarge / Mike Richards (right) will be the new regular host of Jeopardy! when it returns for its 38th season. The Big Bang Theory star Mayim Bialik will host “primetime and spinoff series.” (credit: Sony Pictures Entertainment)

Sony Pictures Entertainment announced today that Mike Richards and Mayim Bialik would share hosting duties on Jeopardy! when the show returns for its 38th season later this year, with Richards hosting the regular version of the show and Bialik hosting “primetime and spinoff series, including the upcoming all-new Jeopardy! National College Championship.”

The former co-host of Beauty and the Geek and the 2012 reboot of The $100,000 Pyramid, Richards has served as an executive producer of Jeopardy! since 2020 and will continue in those duties while hosting the show. Bialik is best known for her roles on The Big Bang Theory and Blossom, and she also has a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA.

Richards and Bialik will take over for longtime host Alex Trebek, who passed away in late 2020 following a pancreatic cancer diagnosis; his last episodes aired in January 2021. Throughout the rest of its 37th season, the show used a long list of guest hosts to fill in for Trebek at the podium, including Richards and Bialik but also former Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings, newscasters Katie Couric and Anderson Cooper, and book enthusiast LeVar Burton.

Enlarge (credit: RobertAx | Getty Images)

Poly Network, which links some of the world’s most widely used digital ledgers, said on Tuesday that attackers had exploited a vulnerability in its system and taken thousands of crypto tokens. The attack would be one of the largest to date on a crypto venture, on a par with breaches of exchanges Coincheck and Mt. Gox.

The alleged hack was a blow to supporters of decentralized finance, or DeFi, which has been one of the fastest-expanding areas of the booming cryptocurrency market. It also highlighted the lack of consumer and investor protections in a market with only light oversight from financial regulators.

Enlarge / American actor Charlton Heston as stranded astronaut George Taylor in the 1968 film Planet of the Apes. (credit: Getty | Silver Screen Collection)

Facebook described the campaign’s methods as “sloppy” and “crude and spammy” in a report published Tuesday. The social media giant noted that “the vast majority of this campaign fell flat,” with most of the networks’ posts receiving little to no attention.

The campaign had two distinct waves, which were linked to regulatory evaluations of vaccines in the targeted areas. The first wave in November and December of 2020 aimed to spread lies about AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine. The thrust of the campaign was to scare people into thinking that the vaccine could turn people into chimpanzees. Spoiler: It does not.

Enlarge / The Galaxy Watch 4 (credit: Samsung)

Samsung just wrapped its 2021 Unpacked event, and in addition to releasing a few high-end foldable phones, the company announced new Galaxy Watches. The watches’ designs have been updated moderately, as have their innards, and they will be the first smartwatches running Google and Samsung’s new Wear OS.

For the first time—and perhaps as a result of the Google/Samsung collaboration—the newest Galaxy Watches will not be able to pair with iOS devices. Samsung told us that it currently has no plans to stop legacy support for previous Galaxy Watches that were compatible with iOS devices.

Google’s revamped Wear OS platform was first announced at Google I/O earlier this year as a collaboration between Samsung and Google. The new Galaxy Watches give us our first glimpse at the software since the announcement. For now, it seems that slightly wider app compatibility is the main feature on the software front. Hardware may be the biggest advantage, though, as Samsung’s chips, like the new Exynos W920 in the Galaxy Watch 4, will be available to all future Google wearables, which desperately need hardware upgrades.

Enlarge / Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos announces the company’s partnership with Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Draper to develop a Human Landing System in 2019. (credit: Blue Origin)

On Wednesday, the US Government Accountability Office released its full-but-redacted decision that ruled in favor of NASA’s selection of a Human Landing System contractor. The document (see PDF) makes clear that SpaceX offered NASA the most technically ready, well-managed, lowest-cost option.

Furthermore, the decision document says NASA was entirely justified in selecting a single winner for the lunar lander bid because Congress appropriated only about one-quarter of the funds sought by the space agency. NASA, the document states, “expressly put all offerors on notice that the number of awards was subject to available funding, and the agency could make multiple contract awards, a single award, or no award at all.”

As it has already done several times since NASA’s original decision to select SpaceX in April, Blue Origin greeted the GAO’s full decision with a testy response. “We stand by our assessment that SpaceX received preferential treatment,” the statement says, in part.

Enlarge / An AT&T technician working on a fiber project. (credit: AT&T)

“Up through the second quarter, we hadn’t really experienced any impact from the supply-chain disruptions that are happening across the industry. But since the start of the third quarter, we are seeing dislocation across the board including in fiber supply,” AT&T Senior Executive VP and CFO Pascal Desroches said yesterday at a virtual conference hosted by Oppenheimer.

AT&T previously told investors to expect “3 million homes passed [with fiber] this year,” Desroches said. “We’re probably going to come in a little bit light, probably around 2.5 [million].”

Enlarge (credit: Picture Alliance / Getty Images)

The world seems to be simultaneously on fire and flooding, and the latest expert report indicates that we’ve just about run out of time to avoid even more severe climate change. All of that should leave us in a place where we are looking for ways to cut carbon emissions as quickly and economically as possible.

Some good news in that regard came via the recent release of a paper that looks at how much each individual power plant contributes to global emissions. The study finds that many countries have a significant number of power plants that emit carbon dioxide at rates well above either the national or global average. Shutting down the worst 5 percent of this list would immediately wipe out about 75 percent of the carbon emissions produced by electricity generation.

CARMA revisited

It’s easy to think of power generation in simple terms, like “renewables good, coal bad.” To an extent, that’s accurate. But it also compresses all power generation, from “somewhat bad” to “truly atrocious,” into a single category. And it’s clear from a variety of research that this isn’t entirely accurate. Depending on their vintage, many plants convert fossil fuels to power at different degrees of efficiency. And some of the least efficient plants are only brought online during periods of very high demand; the rest of the time, they’re idle and produce no emissions at all.

Enlarge / Coming soon in full 4K. (credit: Criterion)

The Criterion Collection, one of the most renowned distributors of home films on various formats, has long been dogged for not releasing movies on the latest high-resolution disc format, 4K UHD Blu-ray. That situation finally changes this week with the announcement of Criterion films coming to 4K discs later this year.

As it turns out, Criterion waited to secure the rights to a megaton film before making its 4K bow: Citizen Kane. This film choice, coming to 4K Blu-ray in “November 2021,” is remarkable for a few reasons. But, beyond its inclusion in typical best-films-ever lists, Criterion hasn’t been able to release a version of Citizen Kane since the company’s very first laserdisc release of a film in 1984.

That same month, five other films from Criterion will join Citizen Kane in 4K UHD Blu-ray format:

Today is Samsung Unpacked, which has turned out to be a big foldables show. The company has made the widely leaked Galaxy Z Fold 3 and Galaxy Z Flip 3 official.

First up is the Z Fold 3, Samsung’s flagship foldable. The Z Fold 3 is a phone that opens up into a tablet, featuring a 7.6-inch, 2208×1768 flexible OLED display on the inside and a 6.2-inch, 2260×832 OLED display on the outside. The Fold is getting a few big changes this year. First, both screens are 120 Hz. The Fold 2 was 120 Hz on the inside and 60 Hz outside, so the update provides a nice bit of consistency.

The device sports Samsung’s foldable “Ultra-thin glass” as a display cover, and there’s a layer of protective plastic over top of that. On previous models, the top plastic display surface was subject to scratches and wasn’t as friction-free as a real glass smartphone, but the internal layer of ultra-thin glass provides some much-needed rigidity to the plastic display surface. Samsung says it has improved the plastic display cover, which is “80% more durable” than previous plastic covers.

Enlarge / Activision’s Los Angeles offices. (credit: Getty Images)

That message comes from the SOC investment group, which works with union-sponsored pension funds representing millions of union members to speak out against “irresponsible and unethical corporate behavior and excessive executive pay.” The group sent a letter to Activision Blizzard Lead Independent Director Robert Morgado last week (before publishing it Tuesday) asking the company “to push beyond the inadequate response from management and take the steps necessary to protect our investment from the financial, operational, and reputational risks that have come to the fore over the past week.”

The letter takes particular issue with the naming of Wilmer Hale as the law firm that will handle ongoing employee complaints and investigate harassment at the company. SOC says Wilmer Hale and its named lead investigator Stephanie Avakian are “defender[s] of the wealthy and connected” and do not have an established track record in this kind of wrongdoing investigation.