We Windows users are sometimes the butt of the joke when it comes to cybersecurity issues. Or at least, we often used to be. Still, if I receive one more lecture on why Linux or Mac systems are more secure, I’ll at least have this article to point to. Not always, I shall say. Not always.
Oligo Security’s research team has discovered a “0.0.0.0 Day” vulnerability that affects Google Chrome/Chromium, Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari browsers, enabling websites to communicate with software running on MacOS and Linux systems (via The Hacker News).
The vulnerability means public websites using .com domains are able to communicate with services running on the local network by using the IP address 0.0.0.0 instead of localhost/127.0.0.1.
The good news, if you’re a Windows user at least, is that Microsoft’s OS blocks 0.0.0.0 at a system level. Hooray for the sometimes-rarer-than-we’d-like Microsoft security win. The bad news for the rest of you is that …
If there’s anyone that can speak authoritatively about the extraction shooter as a genre, it’s Petter Mannerfelt. He’s currently creative director on Sharkmob’s high-stakes PvPvE shooter Exoborne, but not too long ago he was a game director at Ubisoft Massive, where he worked on The Division and (most notably) its Dark Zone mode.
Before Escape From Tarkov codified the term ‘extraction shooter’, players were backstabbing each other for high-tier loot and extracting from The Division’s Dark Zone, a quarantined high-risk arena embedded in the RPG’s New York map. The concept is now one of the most chased-after trends since Battle Royale.
Battle Royale is actually where Sharkmob started. The studio’s first game—Vampire: The Masquerade – Blood Hunt—was a casual, high-mobility battle royale that couldn’t maintain an audience despite its quality. Petter attributes some of the game’s struggles to being late to the party, long after Fortni…
Is Nvidia’s new RTX 4060 Ti an actual disaster or just a bit disappointing? That’s debatable. But one thing is for sure. At $400, it’s still whole console money for a pretty low end GPU. What is a gamer on a tight budget to do?
Buy an Intel Arc A750 graphics card, that’s what. Yes, really. Because it’s now available for just $200. That’s half the price of the 4060 Ti, but it’s a lot more than half of the graphics card.
It’s also way cheaper than the new $300 AMD RX 7600. And get this. Sometimes it’s actually faster than the RX 7600. On average, for standard raster games with no ray tracing enabled, the RX 7600 is about 10% faster than the A750 at 1440p. But if you enable ray-tracing the A750 is actually faster.
It’s very hard to see what the extra $100 is buying you with the AMD board. How about the Nvidia comparison? For standard raster performance at 1440p, the RTX 4060 Ti is in the region of 60% faster. That sounds like a lot. And it is. But the RTX 406…
OpenAI is a company built on the work of others. Techbros may hail CEO Sam Altman as some sort of digital messiah but, with apologies to Monty Python, really he’s just a very naughty boy, who understands that if OpenAI hoovers up as much content as it can to train its models, then all we can do is close the stable door long after the horse is bolted. OpenAI trains ChatGPT on copyrighted content by design, and dares society to try and stop it (on which note, good luck to the New York Times with its lawsuit).
One of the advantages of all that lovely venture capital flowing in is that OpenAI can afford all the lawyers it wants to fight these battles. But maybe there was something of a lull recently, because OpenAI has issued a “copyright complaint” against the r/ChatGPT subreddit for the use of the OpenAI logo.
The news came in a post to the subreddit (first spotted by 404Media), which included a screenshot of this message received from Reddit:
Bethesda has quietly removed Russian language support from its upcoming sci-fi RPG Starfield, and nobody seems to know why.
The change came to light by way of a nondescript entry in the Steam store page’s changelog on SteamDB, which indicates that Russian and Russian subtitles were both removed from the game’s listed supported languages on April 11. The Internet Archive confirms that Russian language support was listed on the Starfield Steam page as recently as March 29.
March 29:
April 11:
There’s been no official word from Bethesda about why Russian language support was dropped, which has of course led to speculation on Reddit. A few optimistic souls believe it’s a principled stance against a militaristic, authoritarian regime, but the far more common theory is that it’s simply a cost-cutting move: There’s no point in supporting Russian (and paying for the requisite translations) because the game won’t be sold in Russia anyway because of international sanct…
I know we’ve had a downright deluge of roguelike deckbuilders over the past few years, but by golly I can’t seem to get enough of them—I just like gathering my funny little cards, and the process of rinse & repeat is soothing to me, as my recent Hades obsession can confirm. Toads of the Bayou certainly looks like the next darling to scratch that itch.
As revealed in this year’s PC Gaming Show, Toads of the Bayou is a deckbuilder-slash-roguelike game that blends cards with good ol’ fashioned turn-based tactics. Baron Samedi, a nasty spirit, has trapped you and your fellow hoppers in a cursed bayou to wallow and suffer.
Unfortunately for Samedi, he didn’t realise toads have invented firearms. Classic blunder, could happen to anyone.
What’s interesting, to me, is how Toads of the Bayou has both combat and movement cards on offer—generally-speaking, deck builders are turn-based affairs where your only real consideration is finding synergi…