This week, we raved about the new action-RPG The First Berserker: Khazan, voiced our critiques of the new Pokémon TCG set Journey Together, and shared some thoughts on the uselessness of game genres and the discourse around Daredevil: Born Again. Read on for these takes and more.
The Washington Post reports that after months of polar darkness, the extent of sea ice blanketing the Arctic this winter “fell to the lowest level on record, researchers announced this week… the smallest maximum extent in the 47-year satellite record, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
“Since then, the ice has already begun to melt again.”
“Sea ice is acting like the old canary in the coal mine,” Dartmouth University geophysicist Don Perovich said. “It’s saying loud and clear that warming is occurring….”
In the summer, when the sun’s radiation shines down on the Arctic for 24 hours a day, the ice acts as a shield, reflecting more than half of the light that hits it back into space…. With so little sea ice in the Arctic this year, more sunlight will be able to reach the open ocean, which absorbs more than 90 percent of the radiation that hits it. This will further warm the region, accelerating ice melt and exposing even more water to the light. This feedback loop helps explain the rapid warming of the Arctic, and it is expected to lead to a complete lack of summer sea ice in the region within decades, [said explained Melinda Webster, a sea ice scientist at the University of Washington]. The consequences would be dire for seals, polar bears and other wildlife, which depend on a stable sea ice platform to birth their young and hunt for food. It would also expose miles of coastline to pounding ocean waves, accelerating the erosion that threatens to tip some communities into the sea.
But the effects will also be felt in places far from the poles, Perovich said. Studies suggest that a complete loss of Arctic sea ice would raise global temperatures as much as adding a trillion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Changes in the Arctic could also affect the jet stream, the river of winds that flows through the upper atmosphere, contributing to more extreme weather around the globe.
“What happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic,” Perovich said.
Earlier this year sea ice also fell 30% below the amount typical in the Antarctic prior to 2010, the researchers report. The total amount of sea ice on earth has now reached an all-time low, declining by more than a million square miles (2.5 million square kilometers) below the pre-2010 average.
“Altogether, Earth is missing an area of sea ice large enough to cover the entire continental United States east of the Mississippi.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
With the first quarter quickly drawing to a close, here’s a look back at the most popular Intel Linux news of the quarter. There’s been excitement with the Battlemage discrete graphics cards with their open-source driver, early work on Xe3 graphics, AVX10.2 dropping the optional 512-bit features to make it mandatory now (thankfully!), and a lot of exciting upstream Linux kernel improvements…
Back in 2022, Sony hired Garrett Fredley to join its then newly formed Preservation team, which has been working to find and save documentation of PlayStation’s 30-year history since then. Now, Fredley spoke at Game Developers Conference to give an update about his team’s efforts. In his Game File newsletter, Stephen Totilo has shared the details about Fredley’s talk. Apparently, the team formed what it’s calling the PlayStation Studios Vault to store everything it could find about Sony’s game-making history.
The Vault now houses game builds, source code and source art, but it has all kinds of other files, as well. Fredley explained that it was created to preserve “everything that is ever related to a project you can possibly find: from documentation to audio assets, to prototype information, anything under the sun, even cultural artifacts.” If it’s adjacent to a PlayStation studio game, the team will store it in the Vault — even photos of developer teams that made the game. Currently, the oldest item in the team’s collection has a 1994 timestamp and was from the tactical RPG Arc the Lad. The latest files include every customer-facing PS5 build of every PlayStation Studios game, as well as every debug, testing, alpha, beta and milestone releases. It has over 1,000 builds saved.
At the moment, the Vault has two main servers located in Las Vegas, Nevada and Liverpool, England, which store 650 terabytes of data, or around 200 million files. That’s almost double the 350 terabytes of data Fredley said the team gathered during another one of his talks last year. He expects to quickly go over the 1 petabyte of cloud server storage data the team’s current setup can handle, especially since more and more games are being developed.
The preservation team uses tools to help its work, including a robot called Vaultron that can read thousands of discs to find files. But it still hasn’t been easy, since most studios don’t exactly store their files in a way that makes them understandable and accessible decades from now. Going forward, Fredley and his team will have to solve a few problems that they’re expecting to pop up. They’ll need to have good indexing tools, for instance, and figure out a way to maintain the ability to use the files they collect.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/playstation/sony-has-been-backing-up-its-ps5-game-builds-as-part-of-a-preservation-effort-150025423.html?src=rss
An anonymous reader shared this report from BleepingComputer:
Three security bypasses have been discovered in Ubuntu Linux’s unprivileged user namespace restrictions, which could be enable a local attacker to exploit vulnerabilities in kernel components. The issues allow local unprivileged users to create user namespaces with full administrative capabilities and impact Ubuntu versions 23.10, where unprivileged user namespaces restrictions are enabled, and 24.04 which has them active by default…
Ubuntu added AppArmor-based restrictions in version 23.10 and enabled them by default in 24.04 to limit the risk of namespace misuse. Researchers at cloud security and compliance company Qualys found that these restrictions can be bypassed in three different ways… The researchers note that these bypasses are dangerous when combined with kernel-related vulnerabilities, and they are not enough to obtain complete control of the system… Qualys notified the Ubuntu security team of their findings on January 15 and agreed to a coordinated release. However, the busybox bypass was discovered independently by vulnerability researcher Roddux, who published the details on March 21.
Canonical, the organization behind Ubuntu Linux, has acknowledged Qualys’ findings and confirmed to BleepingComputer that they are developing improvements to the AppArmor protections. A spokesperson told us that they are not treating these findings as vulnerabilities per se but as limitations of a defense-in-depth mechanism. Hence, protections will be released according to standard release schedules and not as urgent security fixes.
Canonical shared hardening steps that administrators should consider in a bulletin published on their official “Ubuntu Discourse” discussion forum.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is starting to put together a team to migrate the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) computer systems entirely off one of its oldest programming languages in a matter of months, potentially putting the integrity of the system—and the benefits on which tens of millions of Americans rely—at risk.
The project is being organized by Elon Musk lieutenant Steve Davis, multiple sources who were not given permission to talk to the media tell WIRED, and aims to migrate all SSA systems off COBOL, one of the first common business-oriented programming languages, and onto a more modern replacement like Java within a scheduled tight timeframe of a few months.
Under any circumstances, a migration of this size and scale would be a massive undertaking, experts tell WIRED, but the expedited deadline runs the risk of obstructing payments to the more than 65 million people in the US currently receiving Social Security benefits.
The reviews train rolls on at Engadget. We’ve had another busy couple of weeks, and more new devices are arriving for testing every day. For now, catch up on our in-depth analysis of the new base-model iPad, Nothing Phone 3a duo, some incredible sounding headphones and more.
Apple has been busy updating several devices over the past few weeks, including the “regular” iPad. The company’s entry-level tablet now has an A16 chip that offers plenty of power for most people. The iPad Air is still a better option if you can afford to spend more, according to buying advice senior reporter Jeff Dunn. “But for $250 less than the latest Air, the iPad (A16) does well to meet most iPad users where they live,” he writes. “It’s not the most delightful iPad, but it’s good enough for the masses.”
The Nothing Phone 3a is much more than an update to the 2a when you consider the company opted to debut a new Pro model alongside it. There are concerns about a limited warranty in the US, but the 3a is a great budget device and the Pro has better-than-midrange cameras. “It’s really hard to criticize Nothing for any of the component choices, and if you’re willing to take a risk on the company’s limited US warranty and want something unique, these are the phones to buy,” senior reporter Igor Bonifacic explains.
$649 is a lot to pay for a pair of wireless headphones. But if you’re searching for the absolute best available sound quality, perhaps money is no object. Noble Audio’s FoKus Apollo has a unique driver setup that offers a more expansive and detailed soundstage than the competition and long battery life, but that’s about it. “For me, to pay $649 I expect more in terms of features,” I argue. “The first item would be better ANC performance, but I don’t feel like spatial audio support and wear detection are too much to ask.”
Contributing reporter Kris Holt spent some time with the new Assassin’s Creed title and came away with some mixed feelings on the game. “Assassin’s Creed Shadows has impressive technical work, great performances and an expansive, well-drawn story but it’s unfortunately weighed down by some frustrating decisions and antiquated gameplay systems,” he writes. “Still, I’m eager to keep exploring.”
In addition to reviewing the latest iPad, Jeff also pit the Amazon Fire HD 8 against Walmart Onn 8 in a battle of the sub-$100 tablets. After a few weeks with the matchup, his biggest takeaway is you should probably just try to spend a little more on a new tablet. “Get an iPad, buy an older refurbished one if you have to, pay even a little bit extra for a more powerful tablet from Samsung, Lenovo or another name brand — it shouldn’t really matter,” he says. “It’ll run better, both today and into the future.”
The busy reviews season continues for the team at Engadget. Coming up next, we’ve got the Pixel 9a, ASUS ROG Flow Z13 and AMD Ryzen 9950X3D. I’ll also be taking a look at the Weber Smoque smart grill and Audio-Technica’s ATH-CKS50TW2 earbuds. Spring is also the time we typically see a lot of the devices that were announced at CES go on sale, especially home theater gear, so look for some of those items to appear soon as well.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/engadget-review-recap-ipad-nothing-phone-3a-assassins-creed-shadows-and-more-130057384.html?src=rss
Our latest XR News Round-Up is live, bringing you a few more stories that caught our attention this week.
Between GDC 2025 and other commitments, it’s been a few weeks since our last weekend round-up, and there’s been no end of stories. The VR Games Showcase hosted notable reveals like Forefront, Titan Isles and Reave, Behemoth added a New Game+ mode, No Man’s Sky released the RELICS update, and Onward 2.0 launched. We also checked out Pinball FX VR, Boxed Out, Mythic Realms, Hitman on PS VR2, Final Fury, Pixel Dungeon, and Roboquest VR.
With hardware, things have been equally busy. Bigscreen Beyond 2 was officially revealed and sold more headsets in one day than the original did in six months. A new Apple Vision Pro clone emerged with Vivo Vision, a PTC build emerged for Quest v76, LG ceased XR product efforts, and we learned more about the Valve Deckard proof of concept. Apple also confirmed WWDC25 takes place on June 9.
For regular updates, we recommend subscribing to our weekly newsletter or checking out our latest articles. Here’s what else we’ve seen these last few weeks.
The latest monthly Gran Turismo 7 content drop is now live on PlayStation VR2. Update 1.57 features the expected range of changes, most notable being three new cars: Aston Martin Vintage ‘18, Mazda CX-30 X Smart Edition ‘21, and the Renault Kangoo 1.4 ‘01. There’s also a new Café menu, three new events with World Circuits, a new Scape, and the GT Sophy AI’s 2.1 update.
After GGWP became an official safety partner for Unity’s Vivox Voice Chat, Another Axiom implemented its proactive voice moderation tools for the popular VR multiplayer hit Gorilla Tag. The developer previously confirmed this while outlining the game’s 2025 roadmap in January, stating it would also introduce a new team of paid moderators.
While it’s heading to the original PSVR headset and PlayStation VR2 next month, The Obsessive Shadow recently entered full release on Quest and Steam. Developed by Asi Games Technologies, this new horror game sees you play as a 9-year-old boy left alone in his home, navigating this unsettling labyrinth with just a flashlight.
Trigger Happy Interactive confirmed its upcoming survival horror game, Total Chaos, will receive VR support on Steam. Set across “a decaying terrormare where reality crumbles” called Fort Oasis, you’re tasked with surviving the island’s mysteries and monstrosities. A flatscreen demo is currently available, and VR support will be included with the full release as an additional mode.
Following last year’s debut presentation, Ruff Talk VR is back with its second annual showcase. The upcoming showcase promises “brand-new games, major updates” and additional surprises with original trailers being revealed for the first time, such as new DLC for rhythm game Ragnarock. That airs on April 4 at 1pm ET on YouTube.
For more stories, here’s everything else we’ve seen this week.
If you’d like to inform us about a VR game we should know about for this article or future updates, you can use our contact page or email tips@uploadvr.com with details.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: The first clinical trial of a therapy bot that uses generative AI suggests it was as effective as human therapy for participants with depression, anxiety, or risk for developing eating disorders. Even so, it doesn’t give a go-ahead to the dozens of companies hyping such technologies while operating in a regulatory gray area. A team led by psychiatric researchers and psychologists at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College built the tool, called Therabot, and the results were published on March 27 in the New England Journal of Medicine. Many tech companies are building AI therapy bots to address the mental health care gap, offering more frequent and affordable access than traditional therapy. However, challenges persist: poorly worded bot responses can cause harm, and forming meaningful therapeutic relationships is hard to replicate in software. While many bots rely on general internet data, researchers at Dartmouth developed “Therabot” using custom, evidence-based datasets. Here’s what they found: To test the bot, the researchers ran an eight-week clinical trial with 210 participants who had symptoms of depression or generalized anxiety disorder or were at high risk for eating disorders. About half had access to Therabot, and a control group did not. Participants responded to prompts from the AI and initiated conversations, averaging about 10 messages per day. Participants with depression experienced a 51% reduction in symptoms, the best result in the study. Those with anxiety experienced a 31% reduction, and those at risk for eating disorders saw a 19% reduction in concerns about body image and weight. These measurements are based on self-reporting through surveys, a method that’s not perfect but remains one of the best tools researchers have.
These results … are about what one finds in randomized control trials of psychotherapy with 16 hours of human-provided treatment, but the Therabot trial accomplished it in about half the time. “I’ve been working in digital therapeutics for a long time, and I’ve never seen levels of engagement that are prolonged and sustained at this level,” says [Michael Heinz, a research psychiatrist at Dartmouth College and Dartmouth Health and first author of the study].
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The big event of the week was Thursday’s Nintendo Direct, the last one focused on the original Switch before the curtain gets pulled back on its successor next Tuesday. However, we also have details on some great games that are a steal right now on PSN during Sony’s spring sale, the lowdown on a big structural shakeup…
Thanks to Collabora’s work on Zink and NVK… and indirectly to GPU-maker’s FOSS release, too. Not one but two new drivers for some Nvidia GPUs is a promising, if indirect, offshoot of the GPU maker’s open-saucy moves.…
Earlier this month brought the Theora 1.2 beta release coming 16 years after Theora’s libtheora 1.0 release for this video codec designed by Xiph.Org for use with Ogg audio. Theora is derived from the now rather ancient VP3 video codec, but for those continuing to enjoy content in Theora format, today brings the version 1.2 library…
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
Leaders at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ordered staff this week not to release their experts’ assessment that found the risk of catching measles is high in areas near outbreaks where vaccination rates are lagging, according to internal records reviewed by ProPublica.
In an aborted plan to roll out the news, the agency would have emphasized the importance of vaccinating people against the highly contagious and potentially deadly disease that has spread to 19 states, the records show.
A CDC spokesperson told ProPublica in a written statement that the agency decided against releasing the assessment “because it does not say anything that the public doesn’t already know.” She added that the CDC continues to recommend vaccines as “the best way to protect against measles.”
But what the nation’s top public health agency said next shows a shift in its long-standing messaging about vaccines, a sign that it may be falling in line under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime critic of vaccines:
“The decision to vaccinate is a personal one,” the statement said, echoing a line from a column Kennedy wrote for the Fox News website. “People should consult with their healthcare provider to understand their options to get a vaccine and should be informed about the potential risks and benefits associated with vaccines.”
ProPublica shared the new CDC statement about personal choice and risk with Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health. To her, the shift in messaging, and the squelching of this routine announcement, is alarming.
“I’m a bit stunned by that language,” Nuzzo said. “No vaccine is without risk, but that makes it sound like it’s a very active coin toss of a decision. We’ve already had more cases of measles in 2025 than we had in 2024, and it’s spread to multiple states. It is not a coin toss at this point.”
For many years, the CDC hasn’t minced words on vaccines. It promoted them with confidence. One campaign was called “Get My Flu Shot.” The agency’s website told medical providers they play a critical role in helping parents choose vaccines for their children: “Instead of saying ‘What do you want to do about shots?,’ say ‘Your child needs three shots today.’”
Nuzzo wishes the CDC’s forecasters would put out more details of their data and evidence on the spread of measles, not less. “The growing scale and severity of this measles outbreak and the urgent need for more data to guide the response underscores why we need a fully staffed and functional CDC and more resources for state and local health departments,” she said.
Kennedy’s agency oversees the CDC and on Thursday announced it was poised to eliminate 2,400 jobs there.
When asked what role, if any, Kennedy played in the decision to not release the risk assessment, HHS’s communications director said the aborted announcement “was part of an ongoing process to improve communication processes—nothing more, nothing less.” The CDC, he reiterated, continues to recommend vaccination “as the best way to protect against measles.”
“Secretary Kennedy believes that the decision to vaccinate is a personal one and that people should consult with their healthcare provider to understand their options to get a vaccine,” Andrew G. Nixon said. “It is important that the American people have radical transparency and be informed to make personal healthcare decisions.”
Responding to questions about criticism of the decision among some CDC staff, Nixon wrote, “Some individuals at the CDC seem more interested in protecting their own status or agenda rather than aligning with this Administration and the true mission of public health.”
The CDC’s risk assessment was carried out by its Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics, which relied, in part, on new disease data from the outbreak in Texas. The CDC created the center to address a major shortcoming laid bare during the COVID-19 pandemic. It functions like a National Weather Service for infectious diseases, harnessing data and expertise to predict the course of outbreaks like a meteorologist warns of storms.
Other risk assessments by the center have been posted by the CDC even though their conclusions might seem obvious.
In late February, for example, forecasters analyzing the spread of H5N1 bird flu said people who come “in contact with potentially infected animals or contaminated surfaces or fluids” faced a moderate to high risk of contracting the disease. The risk to the general US population, they said, was low.
In the case of the measles assessment, modelers at the center determined the risk of the disease for the general public in the US is low, but they found the risk is high in communities with low vaccination rates that are near outbreaks or share close social ties to those areas with outbreaks. The CDC had moderate confidence in the assessment, according to an internal Q&A that explained the findings. The agency, it said, lacks detailed data about the onset of the illness for all patients in West Texas and is still learning about the vaccination rates in affected communities as well as travel and social contact among those infected. (The H5N1 assessment was also made with moderate confidence.)
The internal plan to roll out the news of the forecast called for the expert physician who’s leading the CDC’s response to measles to be the chief spokesperson answering questions. “It is important to note that at local levels, vaccine coverage rates may vary considerably, and pockets of unvaccinated people can exist even in areas with high vaccination coverage overall,” the plan said. “The best way to protect against measles is to get the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine.”
This week, though, as the number of confirmed cases rose to 483, more than 30 agency staff were told in an email that after a discussion in the CDC director’s office, “leadership does not want to pursue putting this on the website.”
The cancellation was “not normal at all,” said a CDC staff member who spoke anonymously for fear of reprisal with layoffs looming. “I’ve never seen a rollout plan that was canceled at that far along in the process.”
Anxiety among CDC staff has been building over whether the agency will bend its public health messages to match those of Kennedy, a lawyer who founded an anti-vaccine group and referred clients to a law firm suing a vaccine manufacturer.
During Kennedy’s first week on the job, HHS halted the CDC campaign that encouraged people to get flu shots during a ferocious flu season. On the night that the Trump administration began firing probationary employees across the federal government, some key CDC flu webpages were taken down. Remnants of some of the campaign webpages were restored after NPR reported this.
But some at the agency felt like the new leadership had sent a message loud and clear: When next to nobody was paying attention, long-standing public health messages could be silenced.
On the day in February that the world learned that an unvaccinated child had died of measles in Texas, the first such death in the U.S. since 2015, the HHS secretary downplayed the seriousness of the outbreak. “We have measles outbreaks every year,” he said at a cabinet meeting with President Donald Trump.
In an interview on Fox News this month, Kennedy championed doctors in Texas who he said were treating measles with a steroid, an antibiotic and cod liver oil, a supplement that is high in vitamin A. “They’re seeing what they describe as almost miraculous and instantaneous recovery from that,” Kennedy said.
As parents near the outbreak in Texas stocked up on vitamin A supplements, doctors there raced to assure parents that only vaccination, not the vitamin, can prevent measles.
Still, the CDC added an entry on Vitamin A to its measles website for clinicians.
On Wednesday, CNN reported that several hospitalized children in Lubbock, Texas, had abnormal liver function, a likely sign of toxicity from too much vitamin A.
Texas health officials also said that the Trump administration’s decision to rescind $11 billion in pandemic-related grants across the country will hinder their ability to respond to the growing outbreak, according to The Texas Tribune.
Measles is among the most contagious diseases and can be dangerous. About 20 percent of unvaccinated people who get measles wind up in the hospital. And nearly 1 to 3 of every 1,000 children with measles will die from respiratory and neurologic complications. The virus can linger in the air for two hours after an infected person has left an area, and patients can spread measles before they even know they have it.
This week Amtrak said it was notifying customers that they may have been exposed to the disease this month when a passenger with measles rode one of its trains from New York City to Washington, DC.
Within This Week in Plasma, KDE developer Nate Graham notes the great excitement in KDE bug fixing this week/ KDE developers have lowered their HI/VHI priority bug counts down to “their lowest numbers ever numbers” in addition to working on new Plasma 6.4 features over the past few days…
The Debian release team announced that the Debian 13 “Trixie” transition and toolchain freeze began on-schedule this month…
Here at Mozilla, we are the first to admit the internet isn’t perfect, but we know the internet is pretty darn magical. The internet opens up doors and opportunities, allows for human connection, and lets everyone find where they belong — their corners of the internet. We all have an internet story worth sharing. In […]
Despite recent test failures, NASA has added SpaceX’s Starship to its Launch Services Program contract, allowing it to compete for future science missions once it achieves a successful orbital flight. Florida Today reports: NASA announced the addition Friday to its current launch provider contract with SpaceX, which covers the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. This opens the possibility of Starship flying future NASA science missions — that is once Starship reaches a successful orbital flight.
“NASA has awarded SpaceX of Starbase, Texas, a modification under the NASA Launch Services (NLS) II contract to add Starship to their existing Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launch service offerings,” NASA’s statement reads. Th announcement is simply an onboarding of Starship as an option, as the contract runs through 2032. However, SpaceX is under pressure to get Starship operational by next year as the company plans not only to send an uncrewed Starship to Mars by late 2026, but the NASA Artemis III moon landing is fast approaching. Should it remain the plan with the current administration, Starship will act as a human lander for NASA’s Artemis III crew.
“The NLS II contracts are multiple award, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity, with an ordering period through June 2030 and an overall period of performance through December 2032. The contracts include an on-ramp provision that provides an opportunity annually for new launch service providers to add their launch service on an NLS II contract and compete for future missions and allows existing contractors to introduce launch services not currently on their NLS II contracts,” NASA’s statement reads.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Surprise in the Meta Quest Charts: the brutal VR action RPG Hellsplit: Arena enters at number 10 and divides the community.
The post Meta Quest Charts: Medieval horror RPG makes surprise Top 10 debut appeared first on MIXED Reality News.