Earlier this morning, Bandai Namco and From Software announced that all the servers for Dark Souls Remastered, 2, and 3 were temporarily shut down because of an “issue with online services.” While the publisher didn’t share more details, it’s believed the “issue” is a recently publicized PC exploit that would allow a…
Source: Kotaku – Dark Souls Servers Down Due To Exploit That Could Give Someone Control Of Your PC
Have you ever wanted to star in a TV commercial, and one that airs during the Super Bowl no less? As it turns out, State Farm is giving folks the chance to show off your TikTok chops for an opportunity to do just that.
TikTok is a social media platform that allows users to post short video clips of their creative abilities. Some people
Source: Hot Hardware – State Farm Goes All In On TikTok For Super Bowl Ads And You Could Co-Star With Jake
WhatsApp may soon release two highly-requested features. The first is one iPhone users have been waiting for since the company made it possible for Samsung Galaxy owners and later those with Pixel phones to migrate their chat history from an iOS device. Per a post spotted by The Verge, WABetaInfo found evidence in the latest WhatsApp iOS beta release of a feature that lets you migrate your chat history from Android to iOS. The discovery builds on an earlier one the outlet made in September.
Screenshots shared by WABetaInfo suggest the app will ask for your permission before it starts migrating your chat history. We also know from the earlier leak you’ll need to use Apple’s Move to iOS app as part of the transfer process. On Android, that same process can be convoluted, as you need a Lightning to USB-C cable and phone that’s either brand new or has been recently factory reset.
In a separate articleWABetaInfo published over the weekend, the website found that WhatsApp is also working on a two-step verification feature for its desktop and web clients. Should the company move forward with a release, the tool will allow you to add a personal pin to your account. In that way, anytime you want to access WhatsApp either through your computer or online, you’ll need to input that passcode, as well as the six-digit pin WhatsApp sends to your phone, to do so. That’s something that will help protect you from SIM swap attacks.
It’s unclear when the company plans to release either feature. A month before the migration one launched on Samsung devices, WhatsApp head Will Cathcart said it would arrive on iOS phones “soon.”
Source: Engadget – WhatsApp is nearly ready to migrate Android chats to iPhone
“Qt, the framework that powers the KDE desktop, is announcing support for ads in client-side applications,” reports Neowin:
This means that application developers will now be able to serve ads in traditional desktop applications…. Windows users have been dealing with this in Metro UI apps since Windows 8 and it’s something that’s never gone over well on the desktop.
While it’s doubtful you’ll see ads in KDE’s core applications, it would be possible for distributions that wish to further monetize their work to fork these applications, placing ads in them…. According to the documentation, the advertising plugin supports a variety of platforms. They are as follows:
– Windows 10
– Ubuntu 20.04
– Raspbian Buster
– macOS
– Android 7.0
— iOS
“Our offering aims to disrupt the IoT industry,” explains Qt’s press release, “enabling new business models and business cases that before were not possible.”
Reactions have been mixed. Comments on Phoronix ranged from calling it “a great way for boost development on KDE” to “Not sure if I like this.”
Thanks to Slashdot reader segaboy81 for sharing the story
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – KDE-Powering Qt’s New Framework Lets Developers Bring Ads Into Their Apps
This morning marked the release of Linux 5.17-rc1 that officially ends the merge window for this next stable kernel series. Linux 5.17 won’t see its stable debut until around the end of March but there is a lot to get excited about for this open-source kernel in 2022.
Source: Phoronix – Linux 5.17 Features From New AMD P-State To Xilinx Drivers, Lots Of New Hardware
This post contains spoilers for the sixth season of ‘Billions.’
Peloton can’t quite escape the publicity headaches from TV shows featuring its products. According to The New York Times and The Verge, the premiere episode of Billions season six includes a scene that, like the Sex and the City follow-up And Just Like That, paints Peloton’s Bike in a less-than-flattering light — if not quite as dire as before.
The scene depicts Mike “Wags” Wagner (played by David Costabile) having a heart attack while riding his Peloton spin bike. Unlike the And Just Like That scene, however, Wagner survives — he even references the AJLT scene, telling staff that he’s “not going out” like that character. Billions‘ executive producers told The Times the moment was filmed in spring 2021, months before AJLT‘s debut, and that the team overdubbed the reference to the other show in postproduction to reflect “what Wags would say.”
Peloton stressed in a statement that it hadn’t provided the Bike or otherwise greenlit the use of its brand for Billions. It even celebrated parts of the episode, noting that the show highlighted the “strong benefits” of a cardio workout. When the AJLT scene caused a panic, Peloton faulted the character’s lifestyle and suggested the bike at least delayed the inevitable. It went on to create a promo to defend its products in response, although it pulled that ad soon after when the focus of the promo, actor Chris Noth, faced accusations of sexual assault.
The Billions scene isn’t the biggest PR crisis Peloton has faced lately. The company’s stock price plunged after a (since-denied) claim it halted production due to slowing sales. However, it does illustrate Peloton’s odd position. While its fitness gear is still considered iconic, the company is no longer quite so revered by shoppers or the entertainment business.
Source: Engadget – ‘Billions’ is the latest TV show to create a PR problem for Peloton
Not only can cold, dry winter air be problematic for your skin, it can cause some unwanted changes to your hair and scalp as well. This means that we may have to shift our haircare routines in order to protect it more throughout the season. And part of that is avoiding certain treatments and styling techniques that…
Source: LifeHacker – Everything You Shouldn’t Do to Your Hair During the Winter
In the tutorial, you will learn how to install and configure Apache (HTTPD) on Fedora 35 Workstation or Server with a free TLS/SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt.
Source: LXer – How to Install Apache (HTTPD) on Fedora 35
Having announced plans recently to form the first labor union within a North American AAA game developer, workers at Raven Software are ending their weeks-long strike action against publisher Activision Blizzard. “Pending the recognition of our union, the Raven QA strike has ended,” Activision Blizzard worker advocacy group ABetterABK said on Saturday in a tweet spotted by Eurogamer. “Unused strike funds are being stored for future organizing [and] strike efforts.”
Pending the recognition of our union, the Raven QA strike has ended. Unused strike funds are being stored for future organizing/strike efforts.
We’ll post or retweet any GWU updates here. Appreciate all the community support throughout the strike!
— ABetterABK 💙 ABK Workers Alliance (@ABetterABK) January 23, 2022
The strike began in December when 60 employees and contractors with Raven Software’s quality assurance department walked off the job to protest the studio’s decision to lay off 12 of their co-workers. Raven is one of the developers that supports Activision’s Call of Duty franchise, and its QA team is specifically responsible for bugs and other technical issues in Warzone. When the action began, it had no planned end date, a first for the walkouts at Activision Blizzard. The publisher had reportedly declined to meet with the striking workers, despite mounting pressure from Warzone’s community over the game’s current state.
On Friday, the 34 workers who said they plan to unionize with the Communication Workers of America (CWA) asked Activision Blizzard to recognize their group, the Game Workers Alliance, voluntarily. The company has until January 25th to respond to the workers. “Activision Blizzard is carefully reviewing the request for voluntary recognition from the CWA, which seeks to organize around three dozen of the company’s nearly 10,000 employees,” the company said on Friday.
If the company fails to respond to the group, it will file for a union election through the National Relations Broad. Since the collective has a supermajority of votes, with 78 percent of the 34-person unit supporting the action, they can form a union without voluntary recognition from Activision Blizzard.
News of the union drive at Raven comes in the same week that Microsoft announced its intent to buy Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion. Pending regulatory approval, the company expects the deal, which could have far-reaching ramifications for the gaming industry, to close in June 2023.
Source: Engadget – Workers at Activision Blizzard’s Raven Software end strike action following union push
We’re still expected to receive the third Jurassic World film this summer, though it may not seem like it since actual footage for the movie has been fairly scarce since it faced a pandemic-induced delay. The most that the general public has seen of it has been its prologue back in November (or June, if you saw F9 in…
Source: Gizmodo – Jurassic World: Dominion Disrupts the Winter Olympics in New TV Promo
Hello! It’s time for Kotaku’s Sunday Comics, your weekly roundup of the best webcomics. The images enlarge if you click on the magnifying glass icon.
Source: Kotaku – Sunday Comics: There!
In 1992 John Conway raised a question about the patterns in his famous mathematical Game of Life: “Is there a Godlike still-life, one that can only have existed for all time (apart from things that don’t interfere with it)?”
Conway closed his note by adding “Well, I’m going out to get a hot dog now…” And then, nearly 30 years later, a mathematical blog reports:
Ilkka Törmä and Ville Salo, a pair of researchers at the University of Turku in Finland, have found a finite configuration in Conway’s Game of Life such that, if it occurs within a universe at time T, it must have existed in that same position at time T-1 (and therefore, by induction, at time 0)…
The configuration was discovered by experimenting with finite patches of repeating ‘agar’ and using a SAT solver to check whether any of them possess this property.
The blogger also shares some other Game of Life-related news:
David Raucci discovered the first oscillator of period 38. The remaining unsolved periods are 19, 34, and 41.Darren Li has connected Charity Engine to Catagolue, providing approximately 2000 CPU cores of continuous effort and searching slightly more than 10^12 random initial configurations per day.Nathaniel Johnston and Dave Greene have published a book on Conway’s Game of Life, featuring both the theoretical aspects and engineering that’s been accomplished in the half-century since its conception. Unfortunately it was released slightly too early to include the Törmä-Salo result or Raucci’s period-38 oscillator.
Thanks to Slashdot reader joshuark for sharing the story.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – A Conway ‘Game of Life’ Conjecture Settled After 29 years
You might not want to play a Dark Souls game online for a while — not that you necessarily can. As Dexerto and The Verge report, attackers have discovered a security exploit in Dark Souls 3 (and potentially Elden Ring) for Windows that lets attackers remotely execute control and effectively hijack your PC. Streamers like The_Grim_Sleeper have learned about the potential damage first-hand — in his case, the intruder launched Microsoft PowerShell and ran a text-to-speech script blasting him for his gameplay.
The exploiter might not have malicious intent. A post on the SpeedSouls Discord claimed the hacker was trying to warn developer FromSoftware about the Dark Souls 3 vulnerability, but turned to compromising streamers to highlight the problem. Few people beyond the perpetrator are aware of how to use it, but there’s already a patch for the unofficial Blue Sentinel anti-cheat tool.
FromSoftware and its publisher Bandai Namco have since responded to the exploit. They’ve temporarily shut down the player-versus-player servers for Dark Souls 3 and its predecessors while the security team investigates the flaws. It’s not certain when the servers will go back online, but From and Bandai clearly won’t restore service until they’re reasonably confident players are safe. More sinister attackers could use the flaw to steal sensitive information, ruin gamers’ systems and otherwise do serious damage.
PvP servers for Dark Souls 3, Dark Souls 2, and Dark Souls: Remastered have been temporarily deactivated to allow the team to investigate recent reports of an issue with online services.
Servers for Dark Souls: PtDE will join them shortly.We apologize for this inconvenience.
— Dark Souls (@DarkSoulsGame) January 23, 2022
Researchers have disclosed details of two critical security vulnerabilities in Control Web Panel that could be abused as part of an exploit chain to achieve pre-authenticated remote code execution on affected servers.
Source: LXer – Critical Bugs in Control Web Panel Expose Linux Servers to RCE Attacks
Each year, carbon monoxide poisoning brings more than 20,000 Americans to the emergency room—around 4,000 of whom are hospitalized, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports. Additionally, more than 400 Americans die from unintentional carbon monoxide poisoning (not linked to fires).
Source: LifeHacker – How to Prevent Carbon Monoxide Poisoning in Your Home During the Winter
If ever there was a moment to brush up on your knowledge of the immune system, this is that moment. (Okay, March-April 2020 may have been preferable, but you can still catch up.) And Immune is the perfect vehicle to help you do that. This book is phenomenal. It is engaging, it is informative, it is extremely clear and well-organized, it is helpful and illuminating and relevant and eye-opening and incredibly timely. And it is beautiful. Go get it and read it.
Philipp Dettmer is not an immunologist. He is a self-described “immune system enthusiast.” But his is no dilettantish, idle intellectual curiosity. He comes by his enthusiasm honestly, as he has had more intimate run-ins with his own immune system than anyone would like. He developed a food allergy as an adult that sent him to the hospital with shock, and he had cancer at age 32 and had to undergo chemotherapy.
What he is, is an information designer. He founded Kurzgesagt-In a Nutshell, one of the largest science channels on YouTube, which exists to explain complex ideas in an accessible, holistic manner. But the immune system is incredibly, ridiculously, notoriously complex. So much so that even Dettmer, who has dedicated his career to making obtuse scientific information accessible, decided that the best way to introduce immunity was in book form rather than through his online videos. For, an introduction is all the book is, as he tells you repeatedly; it’s just a cursory overview of the whole intensely complicated affair. There are sporadic disclaimers like this one:
Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Source: Ars Technica – It’s a good time to learn the immune system—and this is the book for it
“The traditional idea of going to the office five days a week or working 9 to 5 may be dying,” reports the Washington Post:
Zoom, which many workplaces and workers relied on during the pandemic, is starting to allow its more than 6,000 workers to choose whether to work in the office, work remotely, or go hybrid, as in working remotely a certain number of days per week or month at their choosing. Bolt, a San Francisco-based e-commerce start-up boldly introduced a permanent four-day workweek for its nearly 600 employees. Workplace communications platform Slack is reimagining its office primarily as a gathering place for meetings and projects. And tech giants Amazon and Salesforce are allowing their employees to decide as a team when and where they should work, based on the projects at hand.
These approaches come as companies rethink workplace policies amid the fast spread of the omicron variant and the “Great Resignation,” during which employers are finding it more difficult to retain talent. U.S. office occupancy dipped to about 28 percent during the third week of January, compared to 40 percent in November before the massive spread of the omicron variant, according to building security company Kastle Systems. Still, some employers see this as an opportunity to rethink the way employees have traditionally worked, opting for even more flexible and creative arrangements that are more likely to lure and retain workers….
Jennifer Christie [Bolt’s chief people officer] said after piloting the policy last year, 91 percent of managers and 94 percent of employees wanted to continue. They also reported increased productivity and better work-life balance. Meanwhile, the start-up has been inundated with resumes and emails from people interested in working for the company, Christie said. “People want to be empowered and have autonomy to do work in a way that fits them,” Christie said. “That’s going to be where talent is attracted….”
The one thing the Kickstarter union workers agree on is the desire for the four-day workweek. “I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t listened to some recruiters from places that already implemented a four-day workweek,” said Dannel Jurado [a member of Kickstarter United, which is part of the Office and Professional Employees International Union].
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Is the Five-Day Work Week Dying?
The Linux command line is known for being a productivity powerhouse. It’s also a place to have some fun, too!
Source: LXer – Our favorite Linux commands to use just for fun
(credit: Felix König)
On the last day of 2021, as final preparations were being made for the New Year’s Eve firework display in central Berlin, outside the German capital another era was drawing to a close. It was the beginning of the end of Germany’s decades-long dalliance with nuclear power.
On December 31, Germany shut down three of its six remaining nuclear plants. By the end of 2022, the other three will be shut as well. Two decades after an agreement to eliminate nuclear power became law, the country’s phaseout has been dramatic. In 2002, Germany relied on nuclear power for nearly 30 percent of its electricity. Within a year, that percentage will be zero.
Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Source: Ars Technica – Europe is in the middle of a messy nuclear showdown
For those interested in compilers, Mold as the “Modern Linker” is one of the interesting projects to watch in 2022…
Source: Phoronix – Mold 1.0.2 Released For This High Performance Linker
