Blizzard announced today that it is introducing the Warlock as a playable character to Diablo II: Resurrected. It brings the first new class in 25 years to this remaster of the original RPG. It’s part of the Reign of the Warlock DLC, which is available today and will run you $25. It also includes some other updates to the base game, including new items and a new pinnacle boss encounter against the Colossal Ancients. For those players who don’t already own the base game, you can also pick up the Infernal Edition of D2R for $40, which includes the new content.

When D2R launched in 2021, it was an impressively faithful recreation of the game that so many Blizzard fans continued to adore over the years. Bringing in a whole new player class is a big win for those players who have stuck with the game in its contemporary era.

If D2R isn’t your jam, though, Warlock is also being added to both Diablo 4 in its upcoming Lord of Hatred expansion this April and to Diablo Immortal. So aside from Diablo 3 not getting much love, just about all fans of the franchise will have a chance to get into the demon-summoning groove. Blizzard’s 30th anniversary showcase video has all the details about what the other Diablo titles have in store during this year.

Blizzard has been keeping the news and updates rolling over the past few weeks in honor of the company’s 35th anniversary. One of the more notable updates came for team hero shooter Overwatch, which lost the 2 in its name, but gained five more heroes in its big update yesterday.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/diablo-ii-resurrected-is-adding-warlock-as-a-brand-new-player-class-000130003.html?src=rss

On Tuesday night, the Federal Aviation Administration closed airspace up to 18,000 feet above the El Paso International Airport in Texas, saying the restrictions would be in place for 10 days. Then, less than 10 hours later, the federal agency reopened the airspace, allowing planes to land and take off at the busy airport.

About an hour after lifting the restrictions, US Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy, whose responsibilities include overseeing the FAA, explained the unexpected closure by saying, “The FAA and DOW acted swiftly to address a cartel drone incursion.” (The Trump Administration refers to the Department of Defense as the Department of War, or DOW, although its legal name remains the former.)

Not everyone agrees with Duffy’s account.

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BrianFagioli writes: The Linux Mint developers say they are considering adopting a longer development cycle, arguing that the project’s current six month cadence plus LMDE releases leaves too little room for deeper work. In a recent update, the team reflected on its incremental philosophy, independence from upstream decisions like Snap, and heavy investment in Cinnamon and XApp. While the release process “works very well” and delivers steady improvements, they admit it consumes significant time in testing, fixing, and shipping, potentially capping ambition.

Mint’s next release will be based on a new Ubuntu LTS, and the team says it is seriously interested in stretching the development window. The stated goal is to free up resources for more substantial development rather than constant release management. Whether this signals bigger technical changes or simply acknowledges bandwidth limits for a small team remains unclear, but it marks a notable rethink of one of desktop Linux’s most consistent release rhythms.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last May, law enforcement authorities around the world scored a key win when they hobbled the infrastructure of Lumma, an infostealer that infected nearly 395,000 Windows computers over just a two-month span leading up to the international operation. Researchers said Wednesday that Lumma is once again “back at scale” in hard-to-detect attacks that pilfer credentials and sensitive files.

Lumma, also known as Lumma Stealer, first appeared in Russian-speaking cybercrime forums in 2022. Its cloud-based malware-as-a-service model provided a sprawling infrastructure of domains for hosting lure sites offering free cracked software, games, and pirated movies, as well as command-and-control channels and everything else a threat actor needed to run their infostealing enterprise. Within a year, Lumma was selling for as much as $2,500 for premium versions. By the spring of 2024, the FBI counted more than 21,000 listings on crime forums. Last year, Microsoft said Lumma had become the “go-to tool” for multiple crime groups, including Scattered Spider, one of the most prolific groups.

Takedowns are hard

The FBI and an international coalition of its counterparts took action early last year. In May, they said they seized 2,300 domains, command-and-control infrastructure, and crime marketplaces that had enabled the infostealer to thrive. Recently, however, the malware has made a comeback, allowing it to infect a significant number of machines again.

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If your chat app of choice is Telegram, you have some changes to look forward to. The company announced a number of updates this week, chief among them a new look for its Android and iOS apps—the former is getting a total overhaul, but iPhone users will still note some new UI elements when chatting with friends on Telegram. There are also some new features, including one I find a little odd.

There’s a new look for Telegram on mobile

Credit: Telegram

Per the announcement, the biggest changes come via UI updates, particularly on Android. Telegram says that its Android app has a “fully redesigned interface” intended to make navigating the app quicker and more intuitive—Telegram notes the interface code itself was entirely rebuilt to meet these goals. Changes include a new iOS-like bottom bar that lets you switch between your chats, settings, and profile, among other functionality. If you find the new interface effects to be too much, or too big a draw on your battery, Telegram says you can adjust them from Settings > Power Saving.

The company also updated its iOS app, though not quite in the same way. Telegram says it added “even more Liquid Glass” to its iOS app, Apple’s new design language for iOS 26, including a redesigned media viewer, sticker and emoji pack preview panels, and new context menus in profiles when choosing messages.

You can now transfer a Telegram group chat to a new admin

Credit: Telegram

As of this latest update, if the owner of a Telegram group chat leaves that conversation, the ownership of the group will transfer automatically to one of the group’s admins after a week. However, the departing group owner can also choose their own admin if they want to, as Telegram now presets an option to appoint another admin when leaving the group. The company adds that admins can transfer ownership at any time, even if they don’t leave.

Telegram bots are now more colorful

Credit: Telegram

A small change, but if you develop bots for Telegram, you now have the option to add colors and emojis to those buttons. It’s far from a radical update, but it could make it a bit easier to tell options apart at a glance.

There’s a new send message shortcut on the Telegram iPad app

A small but noteworthy feature for any Telegram users on iPad: Now, you can send a message using the shortcut “Command + Enter.”

You can now “craft” gifts in Telegram

And here’s that weird new feature: I don’t usually expect my chat app to offer collectible gifts, but apparently Telegram does. It previously introduced the ability to send gifts to other people, and even upgrade those gifts to collectibles that can be auctioned on NFT marketplaces (which requires real money).

Now, Telegram is reportedly expanding this gift system in the latest update with the ability to combine existing gifts in a new “crafting” system to create “Uncommon, Rare, Epic or Legendary” versions. You can combine up to four gifts at once, and adding multiple gifts with the same “attributes” raises the chance the crafted gift will have that attribute as well. Again, this is the last thing I’d expect or want from a chat app, but, as it’s part of this update, so I’m telling you about it.

On February 1, Robert Tinney, the illustrator whose airbrushed cover paintings defined the look and feel of pioneering computer magazine Byte for over a decade, died at age 78 in Baker, Louisiana, according to a memorial posted on his official website.

As the primary cover artist for Byte from 1975 to the late 1980s, Tinney became one of the first illustrators to give the abstract world of personal computing a coherent visual language, translating topics like artificial intelligence, networking, and programming into vivid, surrealist-influenced paintings that a generation of computer enthusiasts grew up with.

Tinney went on to paint more than 80 covers for Byte, working almost entirely in airbrushed Designers Gouache, a medium he chose for its opaque, intense colors and smooth finish. He said the process of creating each cover typically took about a week of painting once a design was approved, following phone conversations with editors about each issue’s theme. He cited René Magritte and M.C. Escher as two of his favorite artists, and fans often noticed their influence in his work.

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A little more than two months ago, a Rocket Lab employee called the Stennis Space Center Fire Department from the nearby A3 test stand. There was a grass fire where Archimedes engines undergo testing. Could they please send personnel over?

According to the fire station’s Nov. 30 dispatcher log, the employee said, “The fire started during a test when an anomaly caused an electrical box to catch fire.”

Satellite imagery from before and after the anomaly appear to show that the roof had been blown off the left test cell, one of two at the test stand at the historic NASA facility in southern Mississippi. One person with knowledge of the anomaly said, “The characterization of this as an electrical fire doesn’t reflect what actually occurred. This was a catastrophic engine explosion that resulted in significant infrastructure damage.”

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The pre-Inca Chincha Kingdom (circa 1000-1400 CE), along Peru’s southern coast, was one of the most wealthy and influential of its time before falling to the Inca and Spanish empires. Scientists have long puzzled over the foundation for that prosperity, and it seems one critical factor was bird poop, according to a new paper published in the journal PLoS ONE.

“Seabird guano may seem trivial, yet our study suggests this potent resource could have significantly contributed to sociopolitical and economic change in the Peruvian Andes,” said co-author Jacob Bongers, a digital archaeologist at the University of Sydney. “Guano dramatically boosted the production of maize (corn), and this agricultural surplus crucially helped fuel the Chincha Kingdom’s economy, driving their trade, wealth, population growth and regional influence, and shaped their strategic alliance with the Inca Empire. In ancient Andean cultures, fertiliser was power.”

Last November, Bongers co-authored a paper detailing evidence supporting the hypothesis that the mysterious “Band of Holes” on Mount Sierpe in the Andes might have been an ancient marketplace. Aerial photographs from the 1930s first revealed that long row of around 5,200 precisely aligned holes, seemingly organized into blocked sections, most likely constructed by the Chincha Kingdom. Scholars had suggested various hypotheses for what the site’s purpose may have been: defense, storage, or accounting, perhaps, or maybe to collect water and capture fog for local gardens. But nobody had any strong evidence for those suggestions.

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On Wednesday, former OpenAI researcher Zoë Hitzig published a guest essay in The New York Times announcing that she resigned from the company on Monday, the same day OpenAI began testing advertisements inside ChatGPT. Hitzig, an economist and published poet who holds a junior fellowship at the Harvard Society of Fellows, spent two years at OpenAI helping shape how its AI models were built and priced. She wrote that OpenAI’s advertising strategy risks repeating the same mistakes that Facebook made a decade ago.

“I once believed I could help the people building A.I. get ahead of the problems it would create,” Hitzig wrote. “This week confirmed my slow realization that OpenAI seems to have stopped asking the questions I’d joined to help answer.”

Hitzig did not call advertising itself immoral. Instead, she argued that the nature of the data at stake makes ChatGPT ads especially risky. Users have shared medical fears, relationship problems, and religious beliefs with the chatbot, she wrote, often “because people believed they were talking to something that had no ulterior agenda.” She called this accumulated record of personal disclosures “an archive of human candor that has no precedent.”

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