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We've spent hundreds of hours researching and testing all kinds of gadgets and gear under $50. Here are the ones we'll be giving as gifts this holiday season.

Wireless carrier T-Mobile says the personal information of a small number of individuals was exposed in a recent data breach.

The post T-Mobile Says Personal Information Stolen in New Data Breach appeared first on SecurityWeek.

DF Version 50.08 has been released.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: When you think of digital entertainment, your mind might turn first to online video-streaming services, such as Sling TV or YouTube TV, and video-on-demand services, including Netflix or Acorn TV. However, consultant Deloitte's 17th annual "Digital Media Trends" survey suggests traditional television shows and movies are no longer the only forms of entertainment. Younger generations, often called Gen Zs and Millennials, are increasingly turning to user-generated content (UGC) -- which relies on unpaid contributors rather than traditional media professionals -- and video games to find personal fulfillment, value, and meaning. These younger users are creating a vibrant, immersive, and social tapestry of experiences with UGC, video games, music, and social media all playing significant roles. And that move towards UGC and gaming could have big implications for everyone. Deloitte's survey found that about a third (32%) of consumers view online experiences as meaningful substitutes for in-person interactions, with that proportion increasing to 50% among Gen Zs and Millennials. Almost half (48%) of these younger generations engage more with others on social media than in the physical world, and 40% of them socialize more in video games than offline. Of course, it's not only younger people who view online experiences as meaningful substitutes for in-person interactions. [...] Yet those born after 1981, the usual dividing line between Generation X and Millennials, are much more inclined to live their lives online.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The telecom industry has always been a tantalizing target for cybercriminals. The combination of interconnected networks, customer data, and sensitive information allows cybercriminals to inflict maximum damage through minimal effort. It’s the breaches in telecom companies that tend to have a seismic impact and far-reaching implications — in addition to reputational damage, which can be

When I first encountered the Unix vi editor many years ago, I recoiled in horror. It was nothing like the editors I was used to—Borland IDEs, DOS 5.0/6.x EDIT, or OS/2 and Windows editors. But over the years, I learned to use vi.

It turns out that on many exotic *nix systems, vi is the only game in town. Sure, there might be some way to install pico or nano or whatever, but even if that is possible, it might be very difficult to get there without editing a couple of files… with vi. And when the system in question is some ancient XENIX or PC/IX or Microport UNIX or whatever, the effort of installing some other editor vastly outweighs the effort of learning vi—and that’s if the system in question even comes with a compiler.

Some time later I started using the vi editor that comes with the (Open) Watcom compilers. It’s a decent vi clone, not great but workable. It has the nice property that there are console versions for DOS, OS/2 (both 32-bit and 16-bit), and NT available (and *nix, too). The DOS version that ships with the compiler is a 32-bit DOS-extended version, but it’s also possible to build a 16-bit version. Which will run on a 286 or even an 8086, and that’s occasionally useful.

I’ve been using the 16-bit DOS version of Open Watcom vi for some time, and it works well… except sometimes it hangs the system. But only sometimes and not very consistently. When it does hang, it usually happens when quitting the editor, but rarely also when starting it up.

I’ve never been able to track down the problem because it doesn’t happen frequently enough and when it does, all I can see that the system ends up in a corrupted state. Until yesterday.

Somehow I ended up in a situation where running vi immediately after starting a certain DOS VM would trigger the hang, maybe 80% of the time. I decided to pounce. Once again, I couldn’t tell much from the hung state. So I decided to roll out the big gun. I ran the VirtualBox VM in a debug build with software instruction emulation and partial instruction logging—that is, logging every instruction, partially decoded, without logging the register state. This is a compromise that is already slow and produces huge log files, but not as horribly slow verbose as full register state logging. Since the problem was runaway code, I hoped the log would tell me something.

The log looks about like this:

IEMExecLots: cs:rip=c9d8:000016bf ss:rsp=8e66:0000054a EFL=027246
decode - c9d8:00000000000016bf mov rAX,Ov [#2761123]
IEMExecLots: cs:rip=c9d8:000016c2 ss:rsp=8e66:0000054a EFL=027246
decode - c9d8:00000000000016c2 add rAX,Iz [#2761124]
IEMExecLots: cs:rip=c9d8:000016c5 ss:rsp=8e66:0000054a EFL=027206
decode - c9d8:00000000000016c5 cmp Gv,Ev [#2761125]
IEMExecLots: cs:rip=c9d8:000016c8 ss:rsp=8e66:0000054a EFL=027246
decode - c9d8:00000000000016c8 jnc/jnb Jb [#2761126]
IEMExecLots: cs:rip=c9d8:000016bf ss:rsp=8e66:0000054a EFL=027246
decode - c9d8:00000000000016bf mov rAX,Ov [#2761127]
IEMExecLots: cs:rip=c9d8:000016c2 ss:rsp=8e66:0000054a EFL=027246
decode - c9d8:00000000000016c2 add rAX,Iz [#2761128]

The first thing I noticed was that when things were going wrong, the VM was executing single-stepping breakpoints. That was certainly unexpected, but quickly explained by a POPF instruction popping junk off the stack.

Now I knew where things had definitely gone off the rails. The challenge was finding where it started. Not entirely trivial in a log file about 1.5 GB in size with hundreds of thousands of lines.

There were multiple red herrings. Executing code with CS=FFFFh turned out to be normal, just DOS in HMA. Similarly a stack with SS=00F5h looked suspicious but was just DOS doing its thing.

After more poking around, I narrowed down the region where things probably started going wrong. Searching through the log I noticed a curious thing: There was a code location which executed a RETN instruction a couple of times, but then that RETN suddenly turned into a JMP and things started going wrong.

In other words, there was a routine which finished with a RETN instruction, but somehow that instruction changed into a JMP and then nothing much made sense anymore. Self-modifying code was a possibility, but the jump did look like it ended up in an implausible location.

I knew that I couldn’t find from the log file where the RETN instruction was overwritten. But I could just put a write breakpoint on that memory location and re-run the testcase. That’s the beauty of deterministic environments that don’t use ASLR—things are in the same place every time. The breakpoint was quickly hit, and things started looking more promising. Interestingly, the instruction doing the overwriting was using a SS: segment override; that was significant.

The reason for hope was that the code segment of the overwriting instruction made me (as it turned out, correctly) suspect that it was code in the vi editor itself doing the nasty work. The next challenge was to find what the code was. With a map file in hand, I was able to narrow down the location to two or three object files. Running those through the wdis disassembler quickly allowed me to determine that the code doing the overwriting was in a module called int.obj. Then it was easy to look at the corresponding source code.

The code installs a timer interrupt handler (called via INT 1Ch from the BIOS timer tick hardware interrupt routine) which is supposed to update the data for a clock displayed in the upper right corner of the editor. I could immediately see the problem: One of the routines was assuming that SS==DS and using SS: segment overrides to access the data segment (DGROUP).

That is a big no-no in hardware interrupt handlers. And of course it explained the observed behavior. Almost all the time, when the timer interrupt was handled, vi was running on its own stack with SS==DS. But sometimes it wasn’t, and then things went wrong, and some innocent memory got corrupted. But the corruption might not affect vi itself and only became apparent after quitting the program. Or it might not become apparent at all.

The problem was easily solved by making sure the int.obj module gets compiled with the -zu flag. That tells the compiler that SS!=DS and the compiler will know it can’t use SS: segment overrides to access DGROUP. And the saddest part? The -zu flag used to be there, but then someone completely reorganized the vi project makefiles, and the flag got lost. The perils of open source development.

This bug was very much in the nasty category. It was only triggered relatively rarely. And even when it was triggered, it corrupted some not entirely predictable memory location which might never be used. Even when it was used, it might be used long, long after the actual corruption occurred. In such cases, an element of luck is often involved—coming up with a reproduction scenario which makes the bug more or less reliably occur.

Even then it’s not smooth sailing, because when the detective arrives at the murder scene, the culprit had long left the room. It requires careful analysis and tracking the footprints of the bug to its origin. That can also be quite difficult and may require various tools to accomplish. In this case, I was able to do that and the fix turned to be trivial. Which is also not unusual—in many cases, finding the bug is orders of magnitude more difficult than fixing the bug.

In yet another instance of how threat actors are abusing Google Ads to serve malware, a threat actor has been observed leveraging the technique to deliver a new Windows-based financial trojan and information stealer called LOBSHOT. "LOBSHOT continues to collect victims while staying under the radar," Elastic Security Labs researcher Daniel Stepanic said in an analysis published last week. "One

Born without a butthole

I really thought this was going to be worse. Hearing about 2004's Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel in the years since Fallout 3 introduced console players to the franchise, I thought it was going to be an abomination. If Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel (don’t get them confused) is the series’ black sheep, then surely Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel was the sibling that died early because it was born without a butthole.

I was led to believe it was a barely related cash-in made by people who paid no care to the license it was based on. It has advertising for Bawls in it; that caffeinated energy drink with the cheeky name. Bawls. There was no way it could possibly be good.

It’s not, but it definitely has a butthole.

[caption id="attachment_376588" align="alignnone" width="640"] Image via Fallout.wiki[/caption]

Lowered Expectations

I guess there’s a lot to be said about lowered expectations.

To be fair, Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel was being developed around the same time as the planned Fallout 3 was at Black Isle Studio. Black Isle was having its own issues. A lot of the team responsible for the original Fallout left because of a disagreement with Interplay. In 2001, Interplay was bought up by Titus, which is a name I can’t say without my body trying to reject my vocal cords. The remaining team at Black Isle continued working on Fallout 3, only to have it cancelled and the studio shuttered in 2003.

Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel continued development in-house at Interplay. It’s not the development team’s fault that Black Isle got the shaft, as they so often did, but you can see why fans weren’t exactly receptive to its existence. It probably would have been more welcomed if it was a console title that was arriving alongside another whole-fat title in the series, but that wasn’t the case anymore.

Conceived as a console-focused spin-off of Fallout, Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel builds on the same engine as Balder’s Gate: Dark Alliance. Rather than a full RPG like the main series, it’s more of a dungeon crawler not too far removed from Diablo. There are still a number of RPG systems running beneath the action, but it’s a much more linear experience. You won’t be getting a car, driving out to Reno, and becoming a porn star.

And that’s a bit of a shame.

[caption id="attachment_376589" align="alignnone" width="640"] Image via Fallout.wiki[/caption]

Nuclear F-bomb

That said, when taken as a spin-off, Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel is… fine. It’s amusing to look back at the reviews that came out about it at the time, since they’re very quaint by today’s standards. The complaint I saw repeated frequently was the game’s use of “four-letter words,” and crude humor. Fuck, I’m glad we’re past the days when dropping an f-bomb was considered shocking and obnoxious. This was 2004, just shy of the 2006 release of Scarface: The World is Yours, which set a new standard for fuck’s sake.

It’s honestly not that bad. It wasn’t so intrusive that I even really noticed that Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel had an affection for the word until I checked the opinions of others. The humor is a little, er, ‘aughties. I don’t personally see how it’s so intrusive, but it has aged poorly. But, I mean, in Fallout 2, you could lose an arm wrestle with a super mutant, then wake up with a ball gag in your inventory. The implications aren’t so subtle. I’m just saying, the bar wasn’t set particularly high when it comes to the sophistication of the humor.

A lot of other complaints were more on the mark. The combat, for example, is boring. This isn’t really too out of the ordinary for dungeon crawlers, I just don’t particularly dig it. You have a lock-on system, but you can only move while firing if you’re playing as one of the female characters. There's a dodge button, but since this isn’t Dark Alliance and enemies are using firearms, it’s not all that useful. You can really just turn your brain off for much of the fighting, which will probably be a positive from some perspectives, but I don’t love it.

[caption id="attachment_376591" align="alignnone" width="640"] Image via Fallout.wiki[/caption]

A varied wasteland

The level design holds up a bit better. I generally have a distaste for dungeon design, regardless of whether it’s Zelda or Fallout. However, through the game’s three chapters, there’s a lot of variation in location. Even when you get to areas where you’d expect things to become samey, there manages to be distinct visual differences.

There’s maybe a bit too much love for instant death here. Fortunately. save points are extremely frequent, and you can always find one at the beginning of each section.

But while there’s a lot of variety in the locations of Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel, there isn’t so much when it comes to equipment. New weapons and armor are very gradually drip-fed, and a lot of them are largely interchangeable. Ammunition is really the bigger concern, as firearms tend to eat up a lot of it in an effort to deal damage. For much of the game, I simply went with melee weapons, which themselves are very interchangeable. It just meant that I didn’t have to deal with ammunition, and it made the combat feel slightly less mindless.

[caption id="attachment_376592" align="alignnone" width="640"] Image via Fallout.wiki[/caption]

War never changes

Altogether, you’re looking at 10-12 hours to get through Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel. There is some replay value, as playing through it will unlock additional characters. Still, it feels like too much game for what it is. While the levels get more interesting as you progress, the gameplay feels too monotonous and worn thin by that point.

I’m sure this isn’t going to surprise you, but it also doesn’t adhere very strictly to continuity. The developers were obviously familiar with the world of Fallout, so it’s not as though this spin-off is completely unrelated, but they seem to have been more focused on making a title for console gamers rather than make their mark on the series. Considering Fallout 3 didn’t do the best job of sticking to the established narrative, it’s maybe more forgivable today.

I’m mostly bringing this up as a warning. I don’t have much reverence for the continuity of the series, but some people do, so there it is.

[caption id="attachment_376595" align="alignnone" width="640"] Image via Mobygames[/caption]

Fox on the box

I’m going to be honest; I kind of enjoyed the experience. This may be to do with the fact that my expectations were dredging the ocean floor. I was kind of expecting Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel to be painful to play, and it’s definitely not that bad.

However, it’s easy to see where the rather loud complaints came from. Interplay was a pretty horrible parent to the Fallout series to begin with, and that only seemed to get worse when Titus took over. Maybe the game itself isn’t that bad, but the company politics going on around that time certainly were.

The developers definitely didn’t just phone it in. While Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel isn’t a great game, it’s not just a quick write-off. You can tell the team behind it at least cared to some extent about the quality of the final product. I guess what I’m saying is; we can all blame Interplay and, by extension, Titus for why Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel receives so little love. We all rely on reputation, to some extent, to decide on what games we play, so it’s a bit of a bummer when the real reason for a game's derision has to do with the company behind it and not the game itself.

On the other hand, I now want to try the Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance games. The older ones, I mean. If Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel was Dark Alliance, but not very good, then Dark Alliance must at least be better than not very good.

For previous Weekly Kusoge, check this link!

The post Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel doesn’t glow, but it isn’t radioactive appeared first on Destructoid.

At this point in history, one would assume we have already explored the map of the world of pizza to its edges (which are probably stuffed with cheese). You can grill it, shave truffles on it, use cauliflower instead of dough, and jam the crust full of all kinds of weird crap. But a recent discovery revealed to me…

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The modding team behind RBDOOM-3-BFG has released a new version of it that replaces OpenGL with DirectX 12 and Vulkan. According to the team, and in some really demanding scenes, DX12 can almost double the game’s performance. As the team stated: “This is actually one of the most demananding scenes in Doom 3 with many … Continue reading RBDOOM-3-BFG 1.5.0 replaces OpenGL with DX12, almost doubling performance →

The post RBDOOM-3-BFG 1.5.0 replaces OpenGL with DX12, almost doubling performance appeared first on DSOGaming.

CISA has opened proposed guidance for secure software development to public review and comment.

The post CISA Asks for Public Opinion on Secure Software Attestation appeared first on SecurityWeek.

For half a century, Geoffrey Hinton nurtured the technology at the heart of chatbots like ChatGPT. Now he worries it will cause serious harm. From a report: Geoffrey Hinton was an artificial intelligence pioneer. In 2012, Dr. Hinton and two of his graduate students at the University of Toronto created technology that became the intellectual foundation for the A.I. systems that the tech industry's biggest companies believe is a key to their future. On Monday, however, he officially joined a growing chorus of critics who say those companies are racing toward danger with their aggressive campaign to create products based on generative artificial intelligence, the technology that powers popular chatbots like ChatGPT. Dr. Hinton said he has quit his job at Google, where he has worked for more than decade and became one of the most respected voices in the field, so he can freely speak out about the risks of A.I. A part of him, he said, now regrets his life's work. "I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn't done it, somebody else would have," Dr. Hinton said during a lengthy interview last week in the dining room of his home in Toronto, a short walk from where he and his students made their breakthrough. Dr. Hinton's journey from A.I. groundbreaker to doomsayer marks a remarkable moment for the technology industry at perhaps its most important inflection point in decades. Industry leaders believe the new A.I. systems could be as important as the introduction of the web browser in the early 1990s and could lead to breakthroughs in areas ranging from drug research to education. But gnawing at many industry insiders is a fear that they are releasing something dangerous into the wild. Generative A.I. can already be a tool for misinformation. Soon, it could be a risk to jobs. Somewhere down the line, tech's biggest worriers say, it could be a risk to humanity. "It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things," Dr. Hinton said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As announced at Star Wars Celebration, Lucasfilm is not yet done with characters from the Skywalker saga. A new feature, set 15 years after "The Rise of Skywalker," will see Daisy Ridley return as Rey Skywalker, now a Jedi Master. Other Jedi, whose identities remain as yet unknown, will be in disarray. Chances are, they won't call it "Episode X," just to keep the sanctity of the Skywalker saga at George Lucas' planned nine episodes, yet it's definitely a continuation of the universe we know and (mostly) love.

Here's where we all hope they learn from the sequel trilogy's mistakes. Love or hate any of those films individually, most agree that any problems they have arose from Lucasfilm not developing a coherent plan, thereby allowing directors J.J. Abrams and Rian Johnson to seemingly contradict each other, with some awkward reconciliation at the end. "The Rise of Skywalker" couldn't possibly fill all the plot holes that ensued, but the Rey movie might need to take over on that score.

Here's a look at what the movie at least needs to address before blazing a brand-new trail. Some of these items have been touched on in expanded media, but deserve a fuller fleshing out for all fans.

Seriously, What's The Deal With Rey's Parents?

Rey's parents, whom she barely remembers, played a key role in the sequel trilogy by being a mystery that nobody, not even the directors, knew the real answer to. "The Force Awakens" implied she had a significant heritage. "The Last Jedi" proclaimed her parents were absolute nobodies with drinking and gambling issues. Then "The Rise of Skywalker" revealed she's Emperor Palpatine's granddaughter, which made fans do a double take, as they did not want to envision Palpatine ever having sex.

Of course, he probably would have. Rich, wrinkly old men frequently use their money and power to get some action on the side. Still, nobody wants to think about it, which is probably why Disney, via the "Shadow of the Sith" novel, revealed Rey's father to be an inferior clone attempt, or strandcast, without a strong Force connection. Though officially canon (in the same way all the tie-in novels are supposed to be now), that story, heavy with Sith mysticism, is entirely subject to revision by subsequent filmmakers. It also depicts events that, seemingly, the adult Rey does not know or remember yet.

Rey would surely want to know more about her parents than merely that one of them was Palpatine's "son," if we can really call a strandcast that. How much will she learn? How can she let it all go? How did the midichlorians apparently skip a generation almost completely? She needs to know, as do we.

Lando's Daughter

Despite strong hints at the end of "The Rise of Skywalker" that Jannah (Naomie Ackie) was Lando Calrissian's daughter, Lucasfilm has yet to fully confirm it. What we do know, according to the novels, is that Lando had a daughter named Kadara, who was kidnapped by the First Order at the age of 2. Jannah, conveniently, was also kidnapped by the First Order as a child and raised to be a stormtrooper. Is it just an incredible coincidence? Fifteen years along in the timeline, somebody has to know for sure. The movie novelization arguably implies Jannah is not Lando's daughter, as it doesn't play up a familial connection between the two. It suggests Jannah merely reminded Lando of his daughter, but it's ambiguous enough that Lucasfilm could decide to retcon it if they wanted.

A lot presumably depends on what the filmmakers have in mind, and whether Naomie Ackie returns. If she doesn't, Kadara can turn out to be someone different. One way or another, though, the only surviving child of the original trilogy heroes -- Wicket's junior Ewok aside -- needs to factor in. Lando basically got screwed by the sequel trilogy, almost as badly as he screwed Han over back in the day. Don't let his legacy go to waste. 

Din Grogu, Doing Good?

Two things about everyone's favorite baby Yoda-ish hero are true. One: his species lives up to 900 years. Two: there's no way Disney is insane enough to kill off such a merchandising cash cow. That being said, he'll probably still be around in the timeline, but what will he be doing? And more importantly, where was he when the First Order rose? The real answer, obviously, is that he hadn't been invented yet. Now that he has, and his story has intersected with major players, it seems kind of important that an apprentice of Luke Skywalker (however briefly), who was also pals with Boba Fett for one hot minute, didn't make any kind of appearance when the entire galaxy was freaking out about Luke's disappearance.

Now that Luke's Force ghost has his head back in the game, it makes sense that he and Din Grogu might talk. Given the latter's lifespan, he could easily be in his surly adolescent phase by then, though he'd also have taken the creed of the Watch. (Since he's beginning to almost talk on "The Mandalorian" now, it makes sense he'd be fully able 15 years post-First Order). How might he react to a bunch of new Jedi running around? With space dad Din Djarin likely quite old or deceased, would the youngster decide to re-up his Force training?

Which Way Did The Mandalorians Go?

Assuming "The Mandalorian" doesn't end with Mandalore getting the Death Star treatment, there's a whole population of Mandalorians out there who also sat out the First Order-Resistance conflict. Granted, it didn't last remotely as long as the Empire's reign, but we're still talking about an entire race with a grudge against the dominant evil power. It's not impossible that Mandalore could elect a villainous leader, as they've done before, but even the biggest jerk with a jetpack might balk at allying with the forces of Palpatine, which previously bombed their homeworld to (perceived) death.

So what have they been doing? We know they're very good at hiding, so they might have all gone underground. If Din Grogu emerges (and he probably will because Disney likes money), he'll be the key, as he's more Mandalorian than Jedi at this point. As the first Mandalorian that we know of to not be a standard-sized humanoid species, maybe he can even open the Creed up to more aliens. How about we have a Mandalorian academy this time, rather than a Jedi one?

Wheresa Jar Jar Binks?

Many fans hate Jar Jar. A significant portion these days do not. Regardless of one's individual feelings, however, there's no dispute that he's a significant character in the history of the galaxy far, far away. Through sheer Buster Keaton levels of convenient clumsiness, he helped defeat the Trade Federation in battle; then, through misguided Senate voting, basically gave Palpatine martial law without considering the downside. He's also not confirmed dead. J.J. Abrams made a joke about putting a familiar Gungan skull on Jakku but never went through with it. Jar Jar's final fate was revealed as an interlude in the novel "Empire's End: Aftermath," in which he's living as a street performer on Naboo and offers to teach a child how to be a professional clown. It's a tragic turn of events for Jar Jar, who is ostracized from society after being blamed for helping create the Empire. It's unknown if the Gungan lived through the First Order-Resistance conflict depicted in the sequel trilogy, but if he did, the new movie could be a place to give the character a more proper sendoff. While there's nobody left in the Resistance that he'd be particularly attached to, Jar Jar's role as a historical figure could surely prove useful to new students. Actor Ahmed Best, however, would probably much rather play Kelleran Beq.

Rey's Master Said The Jedi Should Die. What Now?

Luke Skywalker was pretty adamant that the Jedi needed to end. Even when he sort of backtracked, it was to tell Rey to finish her fight, not start a new one. So why would she have started the Jedi Order again?

Kathleen Kennedy has indicated we probably shouldn't expect a lot of Force ghosts hanging around, so we don't (and shouldn't) need ghost Luke to pop up and say, "Hey, I've changed my mind again!" However Rey leads the Jedi moving forward, what we do need is a new coherent philosophy; one that addresses their institutional flaws in the prequel era, the ease with which they were duped in the Clone Wars, and the way Jedi Masters deal with students who are in the process of being seduced by dark side wielders. "Not trying to kill them in their sleep" should be Jedi 101 -- it's dishonorable, even if your foe is someone as obviously evil-looking as a Darth Maul type.

Could we see the long-rumored "Grey Jedi," offering a balanced approach? Or, perhaps, a more nuanced understanding and distribution of the Force.

Finn's Force, Awakened

As of this writing, the odds of John Boyega returning seem about 50-50. After "The Force Awakens" established a potential romantic chemistry between Finn and Rey, subsequent installments dropped the ball tremendously, pairing Finn with different female partners in each subsequent installment. Author Alan Dean Foster, who wrote the official "Force Awakens" novelization, saw the Finn-Rey pairing as romantic but was asked to remove any hints regarding a potential relationship from the book. As the sequel trilogy went along, the filmmakers gave us the vaguest hint of a Finn-Rose romance before swerving again and teaming him with Jannah.It was in that last pairing that J.J. Abrams finally got around to explaining the title of "The Force Awakens" -- it involved Finn and similar stormtroopers in other locations suddenly sensing they were on the wrong side. Even though he and Jannah aren't Jedi in the making, at least so far, they felt the Force telling them to leave the First Order. That set many of the events of the sequel trilogy into motion. What, though, does it signify for the Force's future? If it can be felt and put to use by not just Jedi and Sith, it's going to shake things up. There is always a balance, and if the light side can awaken the good in normies, surely the dark side has a similar trick.

Where Do Secondary Characters Go When You Can't Kill Them?

If "The Rise of Skywalker" clarified anything, it's that Lucasfilm will not kill off any popular supporting legacy characters it doesn't have to, which is to say aliens and droids that don't age. The movie tried to shock us with Chewbacca's death and C-3PO's memory wipe, only to backtrack on both almost before they'd even sunk in. So what to do with them? Likewise, there are human supporting characters who've been spotlighted but sidelined, like Rose Tico and Beaumont Kin. They don't need to be brought front and center, but they all deserve better than Cara Dune's Poochie-style offscreen sendoff. Indeed, it's clear that for the most part, neither Abrams nor Johnson really knew what to do with Chewie and Threepio, save knowing they had to do something. Threepio somehow getting his red arm replaced off-camera during a major battle was a bizarre choice indeed.

Rose and Beaumont might be better served by a TV series on the side, although Rose might work in a Mon Mothma-esque leadership role. Chewbacca and Threepio deserve a happy ending. The neurotic protocol droid should go back to protocol, possibly on Jack Black and Lizzo's planet. As for our favorite Wookiee, he should have a real family in canon at last, so we can finally replace the images in our brains from the Holiday Special that have been unpleasantly seared.

Maz Kanata Has Much Explaining To Do

In "The Force Awakens," Maz Kanata promised that the story of how she got Luke Skywalker's lightsaber was for "another time." That time was nowhere in the course of the sequel trilogy, as it turned out. The comics have fleshed some of this development out, but it's not the only secret she's keeping. Why does she manage labor disputes at gunpoint, for example? What's the story with the real master hacker that Finn and Rose never got to actually meet? Maz's motives seem pure, as she's with the Resistance at their base in "The Rise of Skywalker" and she's with Leia when she dies. Could she have planned the Canto Bight trip as a set-up, though? And if not, couldn't she at least have told them where to park?

Maz was initially described as a pirate and seems much more morally ambiguous on paper than in Lupita Nyong'o's affable performance. Considering her establishment catered to both heroes and villains, she has to have a darker side than we've seen. Even if the character's too old to live much longer, some of her mysteries need to be revealed.

What Do You Do About Canto Bight?

"The Last Jedi" established that within the "Star Wars" universe, there's a planet catering to high rollers who bankroll both sides in major conflicts, and, oh yeah, their casino is built on child slavery. Surely the prequels can be our guide to the fact that leaving intact criminal systems built on slavery isn't a good idea. Not just because slavery is bad in general, and child slavery worse, but because if even one kid gets free and becomes a Jedi, he might come back and commit genocide. Do you want Broom Boy to become the next Darth Vader?

A whole lot of fans hate Canto Bight, with its arbitrary parking rules and insufferably Disney Channel-ready enslaved moppets. Regardless of that, it needs to be dealt with. Rehabilitation, as seen in "The Mandalorian," can be iffy, but killing them all is not the Jedi way, except when the enemies are sentient battle droids who say "Roger" a lot.

Look, with all the political differences and bigotry in the world today, even most Earth-based humans agree that slavery is bad and ought to be illegal everywhere. The "Star Wars" universe, which frequently presents as more enlightened, should take a stand that's at least as good as ours, if not more so. They've already had a couple of civil wars, so now's the perfect time for a galactic Emancipation Proclamation.

Read this next: Every Star Wars Project Currently In Development

The post 10 plot threads the new Star Wars Rey movie needs to resolve appeared first on /Film.

A third-party power management tool known as NVIDIA GPU Power Management enables lots of fine-tuning for GeForce GPUs in applications.

A new unofficial power management tool for NVIDIA GPUs  appears, allowing users to alter settings per application

Modern games such as Cyberpunk 2077 require a lot of graphical prowess to run and can make cards such as the RTX 4090 sip over 450W when path tracing is enabled. However, there are also older games that don't require the extra power and all the extra performance is going to waste if the same cards are sipping over 400W power while producing frames beyond the monitor's refresh rates.

Some of the most common applications to limit power or locking framerate include MSI's Afterburner application (one of the top GPU applications available) or NVIDIA System Management Interface command lines (NVIDIA-SMI). The latter must be altered manually, but a new application allows users to control the power with an easy user interface called NVIDIA GPU Power Management.

This new tool is not a product of NVIDIA. It utilizes the NVIDIA GPU driver application and allows users to individually change each application's power management and memory settings so that all titles can be tailored for the user without needing to be in the game or application. This new graphical user interface (GUI) tool does the work of what would usually only be available through command lines.

The NVIDIA GPU Power Management application, created by developer Simon Macer, is available via Sourceforge. Macer has also created an AMD Radeon Setup Tool Project specifying the components and other options before installation.

The NVIDIA GPU Power Management tool offers users the ability to:

• Automatically apply Power Limit after booting the system: Automatically apply GPU Power Limit after booting OS.
• Power Limit Profile Management (NVPL Profile): You can define power limits for your application on NVIDIA Power Management. The range of power limit depends on your graphics card. Usually, GeForce RTX 4090 has more power max/min range.
• Adaptive VRAM Clock Control: Adaptive VRAM Clock. App whitelist automatically adjusts the minimum VRAM Clock to prevent GPU from deep power saving.
• NVIDIA GPU Performance State Monitor

Since this is not an official NVIDIA application or tool, there are risks to downloading anything that alters the user's system. It is always a good option to measure any risks or issues with installing new software and do a system backup before installing software such as the NVIDIA GPU Power Management tool. The tool appears to be safe through virus detection software, but that does not mean the risk is eliminated. Always be cautious before installing software from 3rd party sources.

With the latest entry in the "John Wick" franchise, director Chad Stahelski pushed himself and his team beyond anything they'd done before. "John Wick: Chapter 4" is three hours long and packed with more elaborate action than any of the previous three entries in the saga -- which is saying something.

This latest entry seemingly lurched from one set-piece to another, providing ever more inventive ways to punish its protagonist and showcase some stylish combat in the process. There was the infamous back-breaking staircase scene in Paris, which saw John Wick battle his way to the top of a staircase leading to the Sacré-Cœr, only to fall all the way back down and have to start over. That followed another memorable set-piece that involved John Wick fighting waves of attackers amidst speeding traffic at the Arc de Triomphe -- an outlandish scene that even prompted Keanu Reeves to wonder if they went too far with the car stunts.

But going too far is the name of the game. People come to John Wick for its bombastic, over-the-top action, and this latest installment certainly provides it. In fact, in its efforts to push action choreography beyond where it's previously gone, you might say the franchise has taken action as an art form to deadly serious levels. But if you ask Stahelski himself, it's also all a bit of a joke.

'The Whole Gag Is Excess'

Speaking to RogerEbert.com, Stahelski elaborated on his conversations with Lionsgate about the film's epic runtime, explaining that he didn't have to fight "about the runtime" but rather justify, "why the runtime." As the director sees it, making such a long movie is only justifiable if you're able to keep an audience engaged throughout, and depending on who you ask, he and his team may or may not have achieved that with their latest effort. In fact, /Film's own Witney Seibold argues that "John Wick: Chapter 4" is proof that action movies can have too much action.

But Stahelski saved his most interesting comments for last. The filmmaker said:

"The whole gag of the movie is to have longer than long fight scenes—we're making fun of ourselves. We're making fun of the genre. We don't want to take them too seriously, we're trying to make this fun. The whole gag is excess. That's the whole moral of the story, the theme of this John Wick mythology."

Sure, there's always been a slight tongue-in-cheek aspect to the "John Wick" movies. They are, as Stahelski says, an exercise in excess. But there's something odd about Stahelski's comments here, in that it's never seemed as though the "John Wick" films are explicitly making fun of the action genre. Quite the opposite, in fact.

The John Wick Films Are Serious About Action

Chad Stahelski, Keanu Reeves, and his stunt coordinators have taken the action in their films seriously enough to spend time crafting their own gun-fu combat style, drawing from legends of the genre such as director John Woo and treating action itself with reverence and respect. Their style has influenced almost every other action movie released in recent years, and feels less like the result of a group of people "making fun of the genre" and more like the result of people taking it seriously enough to forgo character development and story in favor of putting action front and center.

If anything, the John Wick franchise stands as an argument for non-stop action being enough to carry a film. Stahelski, himself a former stunt performer and choreographer who doubled for Reeves in the "Matrix" movies, basically crafted a four-movie love letter to action itself. That's why I don't entirely buy that the whole thing was just an exercise in making fun of the action genre.

That said, there is an obvious absurdity to the whole franchise. After shooting wrapped on "John Wick: Chapter 4," Keanu Reeves gifted the stuntmen t-shirts tallying how many times they had each individually been dispatched by John Wick. And over the course of four films, Wick has racked up 439 kills, which is an insane body count when you consider these movies are supposed to take place over the course of just six months. In that sense, it feels more like Stahelski and co. are at times having fun with the genre rather than making fun of it.

Read this next: 12 Awesome Action Movies That Never Got Sequels

The post John Wick's Long Fight Scenes Are Actually Intended to Make Fun of the Action Genre appeared first on /Film.

The Information reports: Late last year, a trio of engineers who had just helped Apple modernize its search technology began working on the type of technology underlying ChatGPT... For Apple, there was only one problem: The engineers no longer worked there. They'd left Apple last fall because "they believed Google was a better place to work on LLMs...according to two people familiar with their thinking... They're now working on Google's efforts to reduce the cost of training and improving the accuracy of LLMs and the products based on these models, according to one of those people." MacRumors summarizes the article this way. "Siri and Apple's use of AI has been severely held back by caution and organizational dysfunction, according to over three dozen former Apple employees who spoke to The Information's Wayne Ma." The extensive paywalled report explains why former Apple employees who worked in the company's AI and machine learning groups believe that a lack of ambition and organizational dysfunction have hindered âOESiriâOE and the company's AI technologies. Apple's virtual assistant is apparently "widely derided" inside the company for its lack of functionality and minimal improvement over time. By 2018, the team working on âOESiriâOE had apparently "devolved into a mess, driven by petty turf battles between senior leaders and heated arguments over the direction of the assistant." SiriâOE's leadership did not want to invest in building tools to analyse âOESiriâOE's usage and engineers lacked the ability to obtain basic details such as how many people were using the virtual assistant and how often they were doing so. The data that was obtained about âOESiriâOE coming from the data science and engineering team was simply not being used, with some former employees calling it "a waste of time and money..." Apple executives are said to have dismissed proposals to give âOESiriâOE the ability to conduct extended back-and-forth conversations, claiming that the feature would be difficult to control and gimmicky. Apple's uncompromising stance on privacy has also created challenges for enhancing âOESiriâOE, with the company pushing for more of the virtual assistant's functions to be performed on-device. Cook and other senior executives requested changes to âOESiriâOE to prevent embarassing responses and the company prefers âOESiriâOE's responses to be pre-written by a team of around 20 writers, rather than AI-generated. There were also specific decisions to exclude information such as iPhone prices from âOESiriâOE to push users directly to Apple's website instead. âOESiriâOE engineers working on the feature that uses material from the web to answer questions clashed with the design team over how accurate the responses had to be in 2019. The design team demanded a near-perfect accuracy rate before the feature could be released. Engineers claim to have spent months persuading âOESiriâOE designers that not every one of its answers needed human verification, a limitation that made it impossible to scale up âOESiriâOE to answer the huge number of questions asked by users. Similarly, Apple's design team repeatedly rejected the feature that enabled users to report a concern or issue with the content of a âOESiriâOE answer, preventing machine-learning engineers from understanding mistakes, because it wanted âOESiriâOE to appear "all-knowing."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The IBM PCjr. had many faults, one of which were the compromises IBM imposed on the machine to limit its PC compatibility.  By the time the PCjr. was released and in people's homes and offices, there was over two years of software developed with only the IBM PC and IBM PC/XT in mind.  For a too-brief period of time, PCjr. compatibility was an important focus, especially as some companies updated their software to become PCjr. compatibile.  Then once the PCjr. was discontinued, PCjr. compatibility pretty much fell by the waist-side not too long afterward.  In this article we will identify the issues which held the PCjr. back and what needs to be done to show that a piece of software is truly PCjr. compatible.

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De-aging tech has received its share of criticism, and rightly so. In our nostalgia-mad monoculture, being able to digitally rewind the physical effects of time seems like a neat trick that can, and kind of has, only been used as a gimmick. In recent years we've seen de-aging tech creep further into movie-making and so far it's yet to really prove its worth. There was the time Corridor Crew did a better job than Lucasfilm of deep-faking young Luke Skywalker. Then Martin Scorsese tried de-aging Al Pacino, Robert DeNiro, and Joe Pesci for "The Irishman" — a fascinating project that ultimately ended up feeling a bit uncanny, especially when DeNiro performed a fight scene as a 30-something version of himself who moved with all the aggression and vigor of a semi-conscious toddler waking up from a nap.

Other attempts at using de-aging tech as a storytelling device have come from Marvel, whose VFX department seemingly added one of those selfie beauty filters to Robert Downey Jr. for a brief flashback in "Captain America: Civil War." But for every ungodly android-esque nightmare vision, there are examples of the tech working quite well. That's especially true when it's used sparingly, like in the final act of "Blade Runner 2049" when Sean Young's Rachael is briefly resurrected as a clone.

And it seems, even though it's mostly set in 1969, the upcoming "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny" is using young Indy flashbacks that, if the trailers are anything to go by, make similarly effective use of de-aging technology. This must have been a surreal experience for Harrison Ford, who evidently feels himself to still be the lovable young rogue that first won our hearts back in 1981's "Raiders of the Lost Ark."

Ford Is Young At Heart

We've seen impressive de-aging shots in "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny" thanks to the film's trailers, which showcase the 1944 flashbacks and the film's approximation of a young Indiana Jones. Harrison Ford, 80, is playing a 70-year-old version of Indy in the film's main 1969 setting. But it seems Lucasfilm has improved its de-aging tech drastically, which might have something to do with the fact they hired that YouTuber that did a better job than them of deepfaking back in 2021. The de-aged shots in "Dial of Destiny" are essentially advanced deepfakes, with Lucasfilm using their extensive archive of Ford's image to recreate his younger likeness.

Ford has spoken about how the de-aging shots in "Dial of Destiny" are different, in that they're all based on these historical images of his face which are superimposed onto his actual performance. Now, in a Total Film interview, the actor revealed that he finds the de-aging tech to be, "an intriguing, useful, and extremely sophisticated story device." That might have to do with the fact that, according to Ford, he still sees himself as a younger man. Asked whether he recognizes his older self in the de-aged shots, he said, "Yeah. In fact, when I look in the mirror, I still see that guy with brown hair."

Considering Harrison Ford hasn't shied away from doing his own stunts in "Dial of Destiny," while also throwing himself into some intense horse-riding action as part of his "1923" TV series, it's not all that surprising the 80-year-old still sees himself as a younger man. De-aging technology might have a surreal aspect to it, but it seems Ford found some kind of affirmation in seeing his performance as an octogenarian rendered in a younger-looking body.

Could Dial Of Destiny Be A Turning Point?

In the Total Film article, "Dial of Destiny" director James Mangold commented on Harrison Ford being an "incredibly gifted and agile" leading man. This bodes well, as while the de-aging certainly looks impressive thus far, its success will come down to whether Ford managed to sell his body movements enough to maintain the illusion while filming the scenes in question.

According to Mangold, those scenes comprise a, "25-minute opening extravaganza," designed to, "give the audience a full-bodied taste of what they missed so much" — that being young Indiana Jones. Until the film actually arrives we'll have to wait to see whether these VFX-assisted scenes actually do serve the story or whether they are, like so many other de-aging attempts, gimmicky nostalgia plays.

In general, de-aging tech is exciting in that it could allow older actors to demonstrate more of their abilities by playing younger versions of themselves and designing complex performances to meet that challenge. Think Matthew McConaughey in "True Detective" season 1. The Oscar winner played detective Rustin Cohle across a 17-year span, developing a detailed performance that made subtle changes to his character's body movements and vocal cadence depending on which version of Cohle he was portraying. Season 3 saw Mahershala Ali achieve a similar feat, but these were both younger actors playing older parts. If de-aging tech can reach a point where it's convincing enough to not disturb us all with nightmarish visions of half-human grotesques, then we could, theoretically be able to witness more of these types of singular performances from older actors. And perhaps "Dial of Destiny" will be the turning point.

"Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny" is due in theaters on June 30, 2023.

Read this next: The 18 Best Action Movie Actors Ranked

The post Harrison Ford Still Sees 'That Guy With Brown Hair' When He Looks In The Mirror appeared first on /Film.

For Red Hat's 30th anniversary, North Carolina's News & Observer newspaper ran a special four-part series of articles. In the first article Red Hat co-founder Bob Young remembers Red Hat's first big breakthrough: winning InfoWorld's "OS of the Year" award in 1998 — at a time when Microsoft's Windows controlled 85% of the market. "How is that possible," Young said, "that one of the world's biggest technology companies, on this strategically critical product, loses the product of the year to a company with 50 employees in the tobacco fields of North Carolina?" The answer, he would tell the many reporters who suddenly wanted to learn about his upstart company, strikes at "the beauty" of open-source software. "Our engineering team is an order of magnitude bigger than Microsoft's engineering team on Windows, and I don't really care how many people they have," Young would say. "Like they may have thousands of the smartest operating system engineers that they could scour the planet for, and we had 10,000 engineers by comparison...." Young was a 40-year-old Canadian computer equipment salesperson with a software catalog when he noticed what Marc Ewing was doing. [Ewing was a recent college graduate bored with his two-month job at IBM, selling customized Linux as a side hustle.] It's pretty primitive, but it's going in the right direction, Young thought. He began reselling Ewing's Red Hat product. Eventually, he called Ewing, and the two met at a tech conference in New York City. "I needed a product, and Marc needed some marketing help," said Young, who was living in Connecticut at the time. "So we put our two little businesses together." Red Hat incorporated in March 1993, with the earliest employees operating the nascent business out of Ewing's Durham apartment. Eventually, the landlord discovered what they were doing and kicked them out. The four articles capture the highlights. ("A visual effects group used its Linux 4.1 to design parts of the 1997 film Titanic.") And it doesn't leave out Red Hat's skirmishes with Microsoft. ("Microsoft was owned by the richest person in the world. Red Hat engineers were still linking servers together with extension cords. ") "We were changing the industry and a lot of companies were mad at us," says Michael Ferris, Red Hat's VP of corporate development/strategy. Soon there were corporate partnerships with Netscape, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Compaq, Dell, and IBM — and when Red Hat finally goes public in 1999, its stock sees the eighth-largest first-day gain in Wall Street history, rising in value in days to over $7 billion and "making overnight millionaires of its earliest employees." But there's also inspiring details like the quote painted on the wall of Red Hat's headquarters in Durham: "Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind; and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era..." It's fun to see the story told by a local newspaper, with subheadings like "It started with a student from Finland" and "Red Hat takes on the Microsoft Goliath." Something I'd never thought of. 2001's 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center "destroyed the principal data centers of many Wall Street investment banks, which were housed in the twin towers. With their computers wiped out, financial institutions had to choose whether to rebuild with standard proprietary software or the emergent open source. Many picked the latter." And by the mid-2000s, "Red Hat was the world's largest provider of Linux...' according to part two of the series. "Soon, Red Hat was servicing more than 90% of Fortune 500 companies." By then, even the most vehement former critics were amenable to Red Hat's kind of software. Microsoft had begun to integrate open source into its core operations. "Microsoft was on the wrong side of history when open source exploded at the beginning of the century, and I can say that about me personally," Microsoft President Brad Smith later said. In the 2010s, "open source has won" became a popular tagline among programmers. After years of fighting for legitimacy, former Red Hat executives said victory felt good. "There was never gloating," Tiemann said. "But there was always pride." In 2017 Red Hat's CEO answered questions from Slashdot's readers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's a story we see all the time. A quiet and quaint lakeside town. A family from that town maintaining appearances in public but breaking down in private. A series of vicious crimes that even the town's seasoned detectives have a hard time wrapping their heads around. Ultimately, a darkness emerges from the picture-perfect facade and swallows it whole.

So it goes in Adam Randall's 2019 film "I See You." It is something of a mystery movie, a thriller that draws anxiety and suspense from the question of what is lurking beneath the surface of what you're seeing. Even though the small town with hidden crimes setup is familiar, the story goes in wild directions that keep the viewer from ever feeling truly grounded.

What makes the movie different from that setup is the vast array of plot reversals; the way moments take on new meaning when viewed from a different perspective; the haunting cost of an individual's crimes. It may not be hitting the highs of the best unconventional small-town crime tale "Twin Peaks," but it marches to its own beat, handling moments of betrayal and violence with a detached, widescreen visual sensibility. And there are a lot of questions raised throughout.

The dizzying twists come into clarity in the final moments, but the movie takes many gambles getting there, including a meandering opening act and a major perspective shift about halfway through. Who is the "I" of the title? Who is the "you?" When a young boy (Riley Caya) is flung from his bike during a routine ride through the woods, the camera adopts an all-seeing, omniscient perspective, zooming into the boy's route from high above. He disappears.

Missing Children

The big trick of the movie is that the boy's fate is not really the driving narrative engine of the movie. Even though Detectives Greg Harper (Jon Tenney) and Spitzky (Gregory Alan Williams) are on the case, the movie is just as concerned with what's going on in Harper's home. If "I See You" isn't one of the best detective movies, that's because its focus is just as much on familial strife than the case at hand. Director Adam Randall's misdirection here is potent.

Harper's family life has been complicated, possibly torn beyond repair from his wife Jackie (Helen Hunt) having had an affair. Now, Jackie suffers the insults of her teen son Connor (Judah Lewis) and Greg sleeps on the couch, returning to work every morning to solve the case of the kid's abduction, making progress when we do see him work. A green pocket knife found on the ground by the child's last location suggests an old case: a convicted pedophile and child abductor named Cole Gordon, locked up 15 years ago.

We're given just enough clues regarding the nature of the crime to stay curious and invested, but the movie stays around the Harper homestead, giving us extensive shots laying out the geography and the pristine interior design. If some of the repetitiveness around the house seems to drag on, it's necessary too. The undercurrent of the family being watched, emphasized by a long string of voyeuristic wide shots that slowly zoom in, doesn't seem to be developed. At one point, Greg steps out on the roof to see what looks like his son's joints in a mug. The slowly creeping shots suggest that he's about to get thrown off and the threat in the house feels supernatural.

Perfect, All-American Family

Like a lot of movies dealing with the horrors underneath the polite veneer of small-town life, "I See You" uses the dissolution of the family unit at the movie's center as a mirror. The threat inside the house wouldn't be as effective if the family hadn't already destroyed themselves, but there they are, in a beautiful home, totally unwilling to trust each other or even communicate beyond the surface level.

Greg gets locked in a closet mysteriously. When a repairman tells Jackie her "daughter" let him in, she doesn't even question it. Bringing it up with Connor just starts another fight about her affair.

Her lover Todd (Sam Trammell) returns to the house too. One of director Adam Randall's great plays here is refusing to underline the nature of Todd and Jackie's relationship, or making explicit what she saw in him or what led to the distance between her and Greg. In giving the viewer just a brief glimpse of Todd -- the polar opposite of Jackie's moody, obsessive husband -- we know enough. As the two talk outside, Todd gets hit by the same mug Greg spotted on the roof earlier, meaning it was probably Connor's doing. She leaves Todd in the basement to drop Connor off at school.

By the time she's able to check back in on Todd in the evening, he's been killed and she assumes it was Connor's doing. Together, she and Greg discard the body with the ease of any of the great criminal cinematic couples. And Connor, still oblivious, is on his computer, reeling when he gets a message: "Do you know what phrogging is?" Behind him, a masked figure approaches.

His parents return from their body-burying to find him tied up in the bathtub, with a green pocket knife.

Phroggers

"Phrogging," as the movie helpfully explains, refers to the act of secretly living in a house, without the residents' being aware. It's a bit like squatting, but with an actual presumed victim -- the people in the house.

Rather than the supernatural threat teased throughout the movie's first half, we learn that the people responsible for the home invasion are a man and a woman maybe a few years older than Connor. Their names are Mindy and Alec (Libe Barer and Owen Teague), as they explain to the camera via their video diary. For them it's like tourism, a chance to vicariously experience the lives of these people. And in the case of the Harper household, they've been given especially chaotic lives to observe, and to destroy. Mindy notes that Alec picked this house out and it's his first time phrogging. They're both anxious, but excited, setting up shop in the family's attic.

It's a big twist, one worthy of Rian Johnson's "Glass Onion." Effectively, it puts the unsettling and meandering quality of the movie's first half through a new perspective, as everything falls into place. We relive the first half of the movie with these new characters, and see how every creepy bit of psychological pain unleashed on the family has come from them. The "daughter" the repairman saw? Mindy. The joints in the rooftop mug? Alec's. Greg mysteriously getting locked in a closet? Also Alec.

As time goes on, their actions become darker. Alec becomes drawn to a different aspect of the crime -- the ability to "mess with" people -- and his psychopathic designs quickly overtake the initial experiment.

Who Killed Jackie's Lover?

Because of all this, any perceptive audience member begins to suspect Mindy and Alec were responsible for Todd's death. The thrill of the phrogging has given way to both of them being paranoid and nervous, knowing they can't get away with it much longer. But Alec hangs on, as if he's on a mission to ruin these peoples' lives.

In fact, the two have nothing to do with Todd's death. Mindy ends up seeing the man in the family's basement. She then sees Greg violently kill him before planning with Jackie to dispose of the body, in one of the most disturbing moments of the movie. When she goes upstairs to warn Alec, we realize he was the man in the mask, now tying up Connor in the bathtub and a few moments away from shoving Mindy down the stairs. He puts her unconscious body in Greg's car and plots his next move. When Jackie finds her son tied up, she takes him to the hospital, and Greg drives off to parts unknown.

In Greg's car, Mindy wakes up to discover many green pocket knives, realizing she's in the car of the child abductor, who we now realize is Greg. The movie has made a point of setting up clues as to Greg's secret identity: the troubled marriage, the late nights, the sleeping on the couch, and more explicitly the killing of Todd. He brings Mindy back to the house to kill her after she stumbles on the hidden location of the missing boys. She's already called the cops, but we know Greg is capable of handling a body.

After killing her, he is attacked by Alec and knocks him out.

Alec's Revenge

While many of the movie's questions are resolved by the time you get to the climax, one major mystery remains. Why was Alec so focused on ruining this particular family? Many houses could have been picked by the phroggers, so what led to them picking this one? Again, the movie's hidden the explanation in plain sight, making it so obvious it doesn't register until you get to the final moments. So many twists have been deployed at that point that the clearest answer is foggy.

The last time the town saw child abductions with the green pocket knives was some 15 years ago. Spitzky, Greg's partner, has always taken credit for putting away Cole Gordon, the man presumed responsible. Naturally, the case's resurgence led to the cops looking into the victims, and where they are now. One is clearly mentally unwell, hardly able to communicate with the police. The other is a mystery.

At his home, Greg is eventually shot by Alec in the garage, just before the arrival of the police. Spitzky emerges from his vehicle to shoot Alec in the shoulder and then he takes another look, clearly recognizing the young man. It's been 15 years since they've seen each other.

As the movie edges into its haunting conclusion, flashbacks show Alec as a boy, crosscut with his being wheeled into an ambulance truck as an adult. We realize we're seeing the abduction and the perpetrator is not Cole Gordon but someone we recognize -- Greg. The twists throughout the movie shift our perspective and understanding of the characters. At first, Alec and Mindy's phrogging turns them into villains destroying a family's life. But in the movie's final moments, it becomes clear that for Alec it was an act worthy of the best revenge movies.

Read this next: Horror Movies That Make Us Root For The Villain

The post I See You Ending Explained: Small Town Secrets appeared first on /Film.

This update is huge and replaces OpenGL with DX12 and Vulkan using Nvidia's NVRHI API and adds support for glTF 2 models and animations. So over 600 commits later and probably over 1200 hours provided by 4 programmers RBDOOM-3-BFG 1.5.0 is final after one year of development. You can just extract the files over the 1.3.0 release.

Whether you’re into classic, well-manicured American suburban landscape design, or favor a more natural look featuring native shrubs, you probably have some type of foundation plant around the perimeter of your house (or at least the parts visible from the street).

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Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian" is a modern American epic, a mythic tale that unflinchingly captures the brutal and violent spirit of the West, devoid of any of the heroism and starry-eyed optimism that's usually part of the genre. Shockingly, however, despite the novel's immense influence and grand cinematic scope, "Blood Meridian" has never been adapted for the big screen. Finally, after numerous attempts from a long line of filmmakers eager to bring McCarthy's seminal work to life, John Hillcoat will be directing a proper adaptation, according to Deadline.

There's an argument to be made that "Blood Meridian" is quite possibly the most savage, cynical, and terrifyingly bleak Western ever written. There are no beacons of justice in McCarthy's Wild West; instead, there's only the scalp-hunting Glanton gang and the carnage that his crew perpetuates. A deconstruction of Western tropes that serve to highlight the racist, imperialist, and sadistic attitude of the United States' expansion out West into Mexican and Native territories, "Blood Meridian" has inspired many a revisionist Western since its original publication in 1985. Unfortunately, a string of failed plans to adapt the prestigious work has made it seem as if the novel is cursed with the "unfilmable" label, though that will soon come to an end with Hillcoat's project.

The Long Road To Hell

Hillcoat has already directed a Cormac McCarthy adaptation with "The Road" in 2009 (seen above), while McCarthy himself is signed on as an executive producer alongside his son John Francis McCarthy. The film will be a New Regency and Keith Redmon production, who also financed the similarly brutal Western "The Revenant." 

Screenwriter Steve Tesich first penned a script adaptation of "Blood Meridian" in 1995, which actor Tommy Lee Jones rewrote with the intention of directing. However, plans fell through, apparently because the material was too violent, and the next attempt went to Ridley Scott and William Monahan, fresh off their director-writer collaboration on the historical epic "Kingdom of Heaven," released in 2004. Once again, the violence proved to be an issue. Scott himself said that a proper adaptation would constitute an "X-certificate," but that there's no point in making the film if "you can't apologize for the violence..."

"Tar" director Todd Field was briefly attached at one point and expressed that "a bleak and bloody story has nothing to do with whether or not you can put it on the screen." It's not the violence, but rather the challenge of translating such grandiosity to the screen, which "would require someone with a bountiful imagination and a lot of balls," as Field puts it. 

The closest the novel has come to a film adaptation was when James Franco shot 25 minutes of test footage featuring Mark Pellegrino, Dave Franco, Scott Glenn, and Luke Perry. The actor/director even managed to secure a cast for a full-length feature starring Russell Crowe, Tye Sheridan and Vincent D'Onofrio, but he couldn't properly secure the rights. Although there is no news of a cast or a script yet, it seems as if the new project will finally move forward with McCarthy's blessing.

Read this next: The 20 Best Westerns Of All Time

The post After Years of Development Hell, Blood Meridian is Finally Happening With John Hillcoat Directing appeared first on /Film.

In an age where remakes and remasters dominate much of the game release schedule throughout the year, one of the most seminal games of all time, System Shock, is finally about to come back to the market as a whole new product.

Despite the May 30th launch date on PC, there's not much fanfare around it, perhaps due to the project's known problems and delays (it was first announced in 2015). In a 45-minute-long conversation over Zoom, I recently had the opportunity to go through the whole behind-the-scenes process of remaking System Shock from its very inception with Stephen Kick, Game Director and co-founder of Nightdive Studios, and Larry Kuperman, Director of Business Development.

It was a long and interesting chat, during which we also touched upon the current schedule for the console ports, some possible post-launch additions like New Game+, what's next after this remake, the impact of the recent acquisition by Atari, and even a brief update on the live action TV adaptation. Strap in.

Let's begin by addressing the elephant in the room. People have been waiting to play this System Shock remake for a very long time due to multiple delays. What happened?

Stephen Kick: System Shock has been in development not for seven years but closer to 11 years. Back in 2012, I was still working at Sony as a character artist and my girlfriend at the time, who was also a character artist, decided that she was pretty much done with the video game industry after a pretty short stint and convinced me to pack up everything we owned into a Honda Civic and drive across the border in Mexico.

It was cool. It was really scary. We spent the next ten months going through the entirety of Mexico and Central America. One night, when I was in Guatemala, I decided to play some classic video games. They were what originally inspired me to become part of the industry and are still a big love of mine. I tried to boot up System Shock 2 and I couldn't get it to run, so I went, like any normal person would do, to GOG.com. I figured it's one of the best games ever made; it's got to be available for purchase.

I discovered that it was the most requested title in GOG's catalog. So, I decided to do some digging and found that the rights had been transferred to the Meadowbrook Insurance Group. I reached out to their general counsel and discovered that they had not only the rights but had recently acquired the trademark and were looking for some way to commercialize the game so they could hold on to those rights.

At first, they asked me if I wanted to do a System Shock game. But, being miles into a jungle with $5,000 to my name, it was out of the question. I recommended that we just re-release the games on digital storefronts like GOG and Steam. There was a very quick back and forth with the contract. I had to convince friends and family to lend me enough money to pay for the license and the game went on sale on Valentine's Day 2013.

It was a smash hit, and it opened up the possibility of going out and spending my time doing the same for other games you can no longer commercially purchase or run on modern machines.

Larry Kuperman: That starts off Nightdive Studios. A year later, right after GDC 2014, I joined the company. My first task was to acquire the remaining System Shock rights so we could do more with the games. That took well over a year of working with that insurance company's attorneys.

I will tell you that for a long time, I have had weekly phone calls every Friday. I kept calling the attorney, saying, are we ready to do business? Finally, we acquired the remaining rights.

The next question is, what do we do with it? That takes us up to the point where we announced that we would do a remake of the original System Shock game. In order to do that, we needed to do a Kickstarter.

That was quite successful, right?

Larry Kuperman: Yes, and one of the reasons it was so successful was we had a clear vision. We put together a team and we created a demo running in Unity. The fact that we were showing what people were backing and what we hoped the finished version would look like led to the success of Kickstarter's success. We reached and exceeded our goal on that and then began the work of actually creating the game.

People from that original team were called to other things, so we had to put together a new team to fulfill that vision. The first thing that we did not anticipate happening was we had really come up against the wall for what Unity could do at the time. We always knew that we wanted the game to be on PC, but also on Xbox and PlayStation consoles. We wanted to have a consistent frame rate across all devices. At that time, I know it's improved since then, but at that time, that really was pushing Unity beyond the limits of what it could do.

That was the first change. We transitioned over from working in Unity to working in Unreal, which would be able to help us realize that vision. That also was a setback and there was some delay, but we eventually had a team in place again after hiring some new people. Throughout all of that time, we were posting updates to the System Shock community via the Kickstarter page.

As the team was working on the game, there was a temptation that I think is universal when you work on remakes of classic IPs, which is to put your own signature and imprint on the game to make things work according to your vision.

That's when it began to drift off from what we had shown originally and what we had promised to people. The feedback that we began to get was that this isn't what people wanted, that it was something different from what we had shown and promised. That led to a number of heated discussions with the team.

We were also quickly burning through the money we had raised on Kickstarter, so there was a financial concern about it. At any rate, at that point, we knew that things were not working the way we wanted them.

I guess that was in early 2018 when you announced System Shock would go on hiatus.

Larry Kuperman: Correct. It's funny, I thought everyone knew that that hiatus meant a pause, not an ending. But the news came out that we were abandoning the game, that we were terrible people and had squandered everybody's money. None of that was accurate.

The team had gone off in a direction that we did not want them to. We took responsibility for it and ultimately, we probably should have been more hands-on than we were at the time. We learned a lesson from that. Very quickly, we put together a new team and by GDC of that year, we actually showed off a demo running in Unreal that was much closer to and very true to the System Shock vision of what we had originally shown.

Time goes on; we're continuing to work on the game. It was not only Nightdive, certainly, it was worldwide and industrywide, but of course, then came COVID. There was social unrest, there was a pandemic, there were acquisitions, and people were being hired away by other companies who had allowed them to work on our project as well. Then that company was bought by somebody else. There was a lot of that during the COVID period. That said, our team continued to be productive and it continued to work forward on the game, but by that time, it was taking longer than our fans wanted.

It's natural for gaming fans that they want every game to be done today if not yesterday, right? The other thing that people perhaps were not aware of is where was the money coming from that was paying this development team.

Nightdive was funding all of the development by that point. Fortunately, we have a successful business, and we were doing other things. We have multiple teams, and so we were producing the games that are perhaps best associated with Nightdive, like Turok 1 and 2, we had Strife, we had multiple other titles and the revenues from that were funding the continued development of System Shock. That brings us up pretty close to where we are today.

Along the way, we began working with a publisher, Plaion. That has been a very positive relationship for us. The game is now in the final stages of being polished. Much of the work that is going on behind the scenes now has to do with localization.

This is a big stretch for us. Typically, we have only supported the European languages, EFIGS as people say, English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish. We are supporting System Shock with something like 14 languages. We're planning on having worldwide distribution and we want as many fans regardless of where they live regardless of their language, to be able to play and enjoy the game.

Once the PC version is finished, we've already had prototypes of the console versions, those are already in testing. But we want to make sure that the game is as close to perfect as we can make it for all versions so that people can play it on PC, Xbox, and PlayStation.

Just a quick follow-up on that. Are you still planning to release System Shock on last-generation consoles or will it be just PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series S|X?

Larry Kuperman: It's going to be on both generations, particularly with our audience which is retro gaming enthusiasts. That's our core audience. Although of course, this game will certainly expand Nightdive's audience,  many of them have not upgraded and we want people to be able to play it regardless of how they want to play it.

What are the odds of a Nintendo Switch port?

Larry Kuperman: It's probably a bit early to talk about that, but it's certainly something that has been discussed. The only thing that I can say at this point is to stay tuned.

Fair enough. It was a long development phase, for sure. Can you discuss what kind of changes you have made compared to the original game and maybe also which ones were inspired by the community's feedback through the Steam demos you have released over the years?

Stephen Kick: We implemented a number of changes from the original just to make the game more user-friendly. One thing that kind of inspired this whole project was the addition of mouse look in the original. It didn't have that when it initially came out in 1994. Instead, you had to drag the mouse to the edge of the screen to look around.

We worked with a modder in the System Shock community to inject the ability to have mouse look. We immediately found out that the game had been changed so dramatically that it became accessible to just about everybody at that point. We had new players come in and really enjoy themselves immensely. That kind of sparked the initial idea of, wow, that's all that it took to make this game more playable and more accessible and just more fun.

Well, what if we did this, what if we did that? The next iteration was getting the source code of the game and porting it to our test engine and adding even more features to make it more accessible. High-resolution support, widescreen support, stuff that would normally be pretty standard in any remaster. Then from there, our discussions went well, this game is really underrepresented. It inspired so much that we owe it to the legacy of not only System Shock but of Origin and Looking Glass and Irrational to bring this game back for people to truly appreciate it. That's when we brought on, like Larry said, the initial Unity team and we did the prototype. That's when we knew that we had something very special.

Aside from just adding mouse look, one of the other major things that we changed was the overall user interface and the user experience. In the original, it was very obtuse and made it hard to understand what was going on.

If you weren't savvy or you weren't aware, you wouldn't notice that certain panels that had vital information would kind of switch around on you and just be all over the place. That was by design, but again, that was something that we wanted to standardize. We took the lessons that were learned between System Shock 1 and 2, which came out in 1999, 5 years later, and we brought that back to the original game.

Now we've got more or less a hybrid of the two inventory systems. We feel like we've struck a really great balance between a modern game and something old-school that's reminiscent of those old games. What we have now is essentially something more like the Resident Evil remake where you've got a grid-based inventory and everything is clearly visible and you can move things around.

Long answer to your short question, but the user interface, the inventory system, all those have changed.

I think you also introduced the dismemberment system, correct?

Stephen Kick: Yeah. There wasn't any dismemberment or anything like that in the original, but there were graphics, let's just say to suggest that some really gory, nasty things had happened to the people on Citadel Station.

We wanted to pay homage to that by implementing a dismemberment system so that corpses and enemies reacted accordingly when subjected to explosives.

Can you talk about how you've modified Cyberspace?

Stephen Kick: This goes back to your initial question too about things that we changed. Cyberspace was definitely the subject of a lot of upgrades and changes from the original, which while a very novel and very fun mini-game, was just hard to control and hard to understand where you were going and what the objective was.

Again, we looked to games that came out well after the original System Shock that did it differently and, you know, better. We brought that back to the original. Now you've got something more akin to Descent where you're controlling like a ship and you have six degrees of freedom to move around in the space, to navigate it. The objectives are clear, the directions and where you can go are clear and it's proven to be much more than just a mini-game. It's a major part of the critical path for the remake.

We've touched on things that we've changed. There's a lot we didn't change on purpose, as old-school games did a lot less hand-holding than many modern games. You're gonna be challenged, you're going to have to figure things out.

The only I'll give is listen to those audios. One of the things that I've enjoyed is that people miss things or they go past something, they don't know what to do, they'll die in the game but then they immediately restart to go back. That's what we want; the game has to be challenging. It has to have that right level of frustration that makes you want to try another time to overcome obstacles.

Do you think the length will be the same as the original System Shock?

Stephen Kick: It's definitely a lot longer. One of the things we had to change was the placement of the audio logs because in the original the movement speed and just the pacing are much slower due to how cumbersome the movement was. We had to adjust the spacing of all the audio logs because in this modern game, you're moving at a quicker pace and you're able to explore a lot more easily, so you're picking up a lot more logs all at once and the player is just sitting there listening to something instead of playing the game.

We had to spread that out quite a bit, but a new player can expect somewhere between 16 to 20 hours of gameplay if they want to explore and do everything. There's even difficulty modes that we've implemented where if you want a real challenge, there's a timer that has a real-time effect in the game where you'll lose the game if you don't beat it within like eight hours.

There's some variables that we've introduced that are going to either elongate your playtime experience or make it artificially shorter to add to the challenge.

Will there be something like a New Game+ mode?

Stephen Kick: There may be a New Game+ that we introduce after launch. As it is right now, just like the original, there's a difficulty mode that you can alter.

You've got variables for the four parts of the game. There's combat, hacking, puzzles, and cyberspace. Each of those has three levels of difficulty that you can change at the beginning of the game, depending on the kind of experience you want.

Larry Kuperman: We're concerned that the users can customize it to how they wish to play. I think that that also adds a whole new level of replayability.

Speaking of replayability, what about PC modding? Is it something you will support, or just leave it to the community?

Stephen Kick: It's something that we would like to support in the future. System Shock is not gonna be moddable out of the box due to using the Unreal Engine, but I'm sure some individuals will find a way to modify the game not long after launch.

Larry Kuperman: Let me give you a slightly different answer to that. We're not going to be doing that at launch, but if some of our fans would choose to implement that that is not something that we would in any way stop or impede.

Fair enough. I've read some feedback from the forums, Reddit, et cetera. A few people weren't too happy about the pixelated look. Is there any chance you'd make it optional in the settings?

Larry Kuperman: The art style was a very deliberate choice on our part. We brought back Rob Waters, who was the original artist. In terms of the pixelated look, Nightdive is all about the preservation of classic games and the way they looked and felt. It was a very deliberate choice.

We want players to recognize that at the core, this is a homage to the great games that have influenced so much of today's gaming environment.

We listen very closely to our backers, particularly our Kickstarter backers and people on all the forums. We've seen that on Reddit as well. We understand if you're purely a modern gamer, if you're somebody who has never played any of the classic games, the art style is going to appear unusual to you.

On the other hand, if you are somebody who has come up through those games or has familiarity with the way classic games looked and felt, you're going to look at the art style on it and go, I get it. It's a recognition that this is a remake of a title that originally came out in 1994, and we don't want people to forget that.

On that note. Do you believe remaking this story about Shodan in this age where AI is really close to entering every aspect of our lives is a particularly good time to introduce the classic IP to the newer generations?

Larry Kuperman: I think that's very accurate. It would be great if I said that the timing of this game, which is about a rogue AI, coming out at a time when half the universe is concerned about the development of a rogue AI, was intentional on our part. It wasn't, but this is certainly the right game for this time.

Will you support NVIDIA DLSS and/or AMD FSR and Intel XeSS?

Stephen Kick: We are gonna support DLSS 2, that's already available in the demo out there now. We are evaluating DLSS 3. As for ray tracing, that is something that we're gonna have to look at a little more closely, Due to the art style that we've got, ray tracing is not gonna have any noticeable improvement over the lighting that we've got.

You're also making System Shock 2 Enhanced Edition, right? Some people would like to know if you will add the controller support from this remake to that game as well.

Stephen Kick: That's the plan. The idea is that System Shock 2 Enhanced Edition will be cross-platform, so you'll be able to play it on Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo Switch like all of the other remasters we do on that team.

Is the controller support going to be available on PC as well?

Larry Kuperman: Yes, absolutely.

Going back to the System Shock remake console ports, will they be out this year?

Larry Kuperman: That's something that we've been working very closely with our publisher to achieve. We expect them to be on the shelves for the holiday season.

I'm hoping you can discuss the news of Nightdive's $10 million buyout from Atari. How does this affect System Shock and your future as a studio?

Larry Kuperman: We've had a long relationship with some of the key people at Atari. People should be aware that Chairman and CEO Wade Rosen, for example, has been involved with Nightdive Studios for years, in a very hands-off capacity, for the reason that he's a big supporter of what we do.

There was a lot of thought that went into this partnership. One of the motivations on our part was we've now partnered with a company that wants us to keep on with what we have been doing only to do more of it, to put that on a bigger stage.

Does this acquisition take off a bit of pressure on the success of System Shock?

Larry Kuperman: It both takes off some pressure and since this will be the first title that will be coming out under the new banner, so to speak, it adds another layer of pressure as well.

Let's say that the System Shock remake launches as you hope, as a success. What's next? A lot of people are already doing wishlists for a System Shock 2 remake. Have been thinking about it?

Larry Kuperman: We have. I'm not ready to make that commitment. Our team is really heads down focused on the System Shock game that we have to get out.

But of course, the question about what will be the next game has come up a couple of times. We currently have three other titles in production from our other team. We're gonna have a very busy 2023.

We have our calendar set for 2024. That said, the success of this game will in many ways dictate what the future is for other titles in the franchise or other titles outside of that franchise.

One last question - is there any news on that System Shock live-action TV adaptation announced a couple of years ago?

Larry Kuperman: It did not pan out as intended. We are currently working with a team, but nothing is final as of yet.

Thank you for your time.

Electric vehicles are known to require less routine maintenance compared to internal combustion vehicles. With EVs, you can say goodbye to regular engine oil changes, but what about differential oil? Do electric vehicles even have differentials, and do they require oil changes?

Before SaaS, employees had to rely on IT and other teams to procure software, which gave the organization a direct way of controlling such purchases and deployments. Now, employees can sign up for SaaS applications without involving anyone in the company. All it takes is a few clicks and (sometimes) a credit card for people to start using such products. In moments, SaaS apps can start processing sensitive business data with no consideration for security, governance, oversight, and other requirements that are at the top of the minds of CISOs and CIOs.

The lack of internal bottlenecks empowers people to quickly get the tools they need to get work done. However, Finance, IT, Legal, and other teams lack the visibility to ensure that SaaS apps are provisioned and managed responsibly and securely. No longer the gatekeepers, these teams must revisit the approaches to guiding and overseeing the company’s use of SaaS.

What can we do to support the use of SaaS within the enterprise, but do so in a responsible way?

Security, IT, and SaaS "Ownership"

There are several reasons why SaaS ownership is challenging for IT and security teams.

Employees can start using SaaS applications without any involvement from IT and security teams. As a result, these teams are often unaware that the applications are being used and don’t know about the associated risks. For example, we might not realize that a SaaS provider now processes sensitive data and cannot configure the appropriate security measures with the app. On their own, end-users often lack the expertise to configure the apps in a way consistent with the organization’s policies. 

Another challenge is the lack of a clear understanding of the roles and responsibilities of “owning” a SaaS application:

• Who is responsible for adding new users to it and assigning them the appropriate permissions?
• Who will revoke access when the need arises?
• Who will handle renewal and other licensing discussions?

End-users who initially purchase a SaaS product might expect IT or other teams to handle all or some of these responsibilities, but these teams might not share this understanding.

In addition, modern SaaS applications rarely function as data siloes. They often integrate with other software. The individuals who bring SaaS into the organizations often do not consider such interdependencies and dataflows. Late-stage discovery of such externalities can put unexpected burdens on IT and security teams and prevent the SaaS application from achieving its full potential.

Clarifying SaaS Expectations

IT and security teams should document the roles and responsibilities of deploying and maintaining a SaaS application. Explain what aspects of the IT team will own, such as the app’s configuration and security oversight. We should clarify what responsibilities might reside with the end-users. For example, depending on how the app integrates with the company’s identity management system, IT can automatically provision users with the proper privileges into the SaaS app; in other cases, designated people outside IT might need to do this.

Also, we should clarify the company’s expectations of SaaS applications:

• What security requirements does the organization impose on its SaaS providers?
• How might these requirements differ based on the sensitivity of the data they process?
• What are the service-level expectations, Single Sign-On (SSO) requirements, etc.?
• What other internal teams, such as Legal and Finance, might need to be involved and when?

We should document these expectations so that people looking at SaaS know what they need to do or communicate to SaaS providers.

In addition, we should recognize that unsanctioned SaaS products will find their way into the organization. Consider what approaches and tools we might use to discover their existence, so IT and security teams can bring the necessary oversight to their usage to protect the organization and support end-users. (Axonius, where I lead the security program, offers a solution for this.)

Collaborating with SaaS Stakeholders

One way to start the discussion of SaaS ownership is to identify common interests. Most likely, all stakeholders want to have a SaaS application that is correctly deployed and properly licensed. It should be available to the right people with the expected functionality. The stakeholders will probably agree that the app should be responsibly secured and not expose the organization to unexpected or undesirable risks.

Next, we can outline what one-time and ongoing tasks should happen for the organization to meet the identified objectives. With these responsibilities at hand, we can discuss who is best positioned to handle them, how, and when. We can also assign responsibilities according to the RACI model, which calls for agreeing on who should be responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed about the tasks.

When screenwriter and filmmaker Dan O'Bannon wrote the original "Alien," he couldn't have imagined that his own personal experience dealing with Crohn's disease -- which helped inspire the chest-burster Xenomorph -- would go on to spawn six of the most thought-provoking sci-fi horror movies in cinema history. O'Bannon's own fears eventually transferred over to the character of Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), who became terrified of suffering the same horrible fate as Kane (John Hurt) aboard the Nostromo.

Over the course of Ridley Scott's "Alien," James Cameron's "Aliens," and David Fincher's "Alien 3," Ripley's worst fear was finally realized when she dove into a fiery pit, just as a chest-burster struggled to get free from her grasp. Returning as a clone in Jean-Pierre Jeunet's "Alien: Resurrection," Ripley's humanity was then stripped away in favor of a disconnected superhero version of the character that took away everything fans loved about her in the first place. Even after that ambitious but failed attempt to continue Ripley's storyline, Weaver has always been the face of the franchise. And now, it appears as though any chance of ever seeing her in the role that made her famous is growing more and more unlikely.

Weaver hasn't officially been a part of the series since Scott took the films in an entirely different direction with "Prometheus" and "Alien: Covenant" -- the prequels that were supposedly going to lead up to the events of the original "Alien." Bigger ideas about the origin of life and Scott's continuing fascination with artificial intelligence made his prequel films more philosophical in nature, although that also made it harder to imagine how a character like Ripley might fit into the bigger "Alien" picture going forward. Weaver seems acutely aware of this fact, which is why she plans to formally retire as Ripley for good.

'That Ship Has Sailed'

In an interview with Total Film magazine, Sigourney Weaver was asked the unavoidable question that she's basically been asked every time she promotes something new nowadays: Will she return as Ripley in a future "Alien" film? Her answer was decidedly final on the matter. It seems as if Weaver is ready to let the next generation take up the controls:

"There are all kinds of younger actors taking this kind of role. And there was an 'Alien' [film] that I really wanted to do with Neill Blomkamp and we didn't get to do that, but, you know, that ship has sailed."

Please don't remind us of the "Alien 5" idea that wound up never happening! If you recall, Blomkamp ("District 9") wanted to essentially reboot the franchise, ignoring the beginning of David Fincher's "Alien 3" -- wherein Hicks and Newt are already dead on arrival when Ripley crash-lands on the prison planet Fiorina 161. A few years back, some concept art began trickling out, giving fans a sense of what could have been if Hicks and Ripley had been re-united onscreen. Weaver seemed genuinely excited about the chance to do another direct sequel to "Aliens" but the project was eventually put on the back-burner while Ridley Scott proceeded with his own prequels. The project remains one of the most fascinating "What if?" scenarios in "Alien" history, but time has unfortunately moved on.

In any case, Weaver appears perfectly content to keep Ripley in the rearview at this stage: "I'm very happy doing what I'm doing. I put in my time in space!" She certainly has.

'I Was Very Lucky'

Honestly, after the bizarre experience Sigourney Weaver probably had to endure during the production of "Alien: Resurrection," she definitely needed a nice long break from the character. The underwhelming response to Jean-Pierre Jeunet's experimental take on the material didn't exactly reignite the franchise, and the same can be said for Ridley Scott's last entry, "Covenant" (itself more of a mashup between the grand design put forth with "Prometheus" and the remixed action beats of the first "Alien").

With Fede Alvarez now working on an "Alien" film reportedly featuring all-new characters, Weaver acknowledged how fortunate she was that Scott, and by extension Dan O'Bannon, created such a memorable female archetype that still has so much cultural impact to this day. "They made Ripley a woman, without making her this helpless creature," she told Total Film. "Because I think I was very lucky. These were men who were creating this woman character, but they liked and respected strong women."

The world of "Alien" will always be Scott's baby and Weaver will forever be associated with her Oscar-nominated role. Still, it will be fascinating to see if Noah Hawley (of "Fargo" and "Legion" fame) can bring the property back to its horror roots in his upcoming, long-awaited TV series that's still expected to arrive in 2024. Perhaps Weaver will make a cameo or even direct an episode? The show should absolutely include some female directors , and it would make so much sense to see Weaver be involved in some way creatively -- although seeing Ripley again is highly unlikely, considering the series reportedly takes place years before she was alive. Scott is also involved as a producer, although he's already said "It'll never be as good as the first one." And you know what? He's probably right.

Read this next: 20 Movies About Aliens That You Definitely Need To Watch

The post Why Sigourney Weaver is Done Playing Ellen Ripley in the Alien Franchise appeared first on /Film.

"One Ring to rule them all ..."

Fans aren't likely to forget the haunting words narrated by Cate Blanchett's elf queen Galadriel which open 2001's "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring," adapted from author J.R.R. Tolkien's original text. In short order, director Peter Jackson had summed up much of the backstory that newcomers would need to hit the ground running and understand the plight of Middle-earth under the threat of the Dark Lord Sauron's return. But as much as the trilogy relied upon the fate of the One Ring, it mostly left all those other Rings of Power strictly on the sidelines.

That's where Prime Video's "The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power" series came in, filling in the gaps from thousands of years earlier in the canon to tell the sprawling tale of how the heroes of Middle-earth dealt with Sauron the last time he appeared. As of the season 1 finale, the series will also deal with the creation of the first of those Rings.

Although liberties were taken regarding plot specifics, like a younger Galadriel (played by Morfyyd Clark) obsessively following the trail of Sauron or the existence of Charlie Vickers' duplicitous Halbrand, the broad strokes remain in line with the accounts laid down by Tolkien in the appendices found at the end of "The Return of the King." As implied by the title, the debut season carefully documented the series of events that would eventually motivate Galadriel, her loyal friend Elrond (Robert Aramayo), and the great elven craftsman Celebrimbor (Charles Edwards) to combine their various powers into crafting three particular rings.

But what is their significance? How many more are there still to be made? How do they tie into Sauron's grand plan? Let's dive in and find out.

'Three Rings For The Elven-Kings Under The Sky ...'

In Tolkien's various stories and notes, the forging of the three rings for the elves comes about slightly differently than depicted in "The Rings of Power" -- though plenty of parallels remain. At this point in history, Sauron has disguised himself under the "fair" and unassuming visage of Annatar, an elvish name meaning "Lord of Gifts," which explains the cheeky emphasis of that word in the season finale. Although that alias hasn't yet been spoken aloud in the Prime Video series, it's clear that this is meant to be the show's interpretation of the same events.

According to Tolkien, Sauron emerges from centuries of hiding in the wake of Morgoth's defeat during the First Age (for context, "The Rings of Power" is set during the Second Age) and befriends the great elven smiths of Eregion -- including the greatest of them all, Celebrimbor. Despite the concerns of certain elves like Galadriel and Elrond, Annatar passes on his expert knowledge of ring-making and the ability to imbue their wearers with the power to transform Middle-earth with healing, preservation, and protection. However, as with the series, it's important that Sauron isn't directly involved in the crafting of the three major elvish rings. Whereas Tolkien describes Celebrimbor as crafting the three only after Annatar departs the region, "The Rings of Power" ties Galadriel's realization of Halbrand's true identity as Sauron into his hasty departure before the rings could be finished. Upon completion, Galadriel, Elrond, and Celebrimbor should now be able to stave off the diminishing power of their people.

Their unique origin in "The Rings of Power" also extends to the order of their creation. In the books, the elvish rings are created last of all the rings of power. Here, they're crafted first.

'Seven For The Dwarf-Lords In Their Halls Of Stone ...'

That brings us to the mighty dwarves, whom we've seen throughout "The Rings of Power" season 1 through the eyes of Elrond's old friend, Prince Durin (Owain Arthur). In the series, they've yet to receive their own batch of seven rings gifted by Annatar to seven different great lords. Unlike the elven rings, however, these are crafted under Sauron's supervision and explicitly meant to corrupt whoever wears them. But Annatar underestimates the hardiness of dwarves, who seem impervious -- on the surface, at least -- to their power. Yet that doesn't mean they wield no influence whatsoever, as they exacerbate their lust for gold and riches (this, shall we say, isn't one of Tolkien's finer moments in terms of reinforcing questionable stereotypes) and even contain the power to exponentially increase the precious ore they mine.

While Sauron's grand plan involves collecting all the rings under his power, he finds this particularly difficult with the dwarves. By the time "The Lord of the Rings" begins, most of the dwarven rings have either been consumed by dragons or simply lost in the intervening ages. Only two ultimately make it back into his clutches, one of which belonged to the father of Thorin Oakenshield (portrayed by Richard Armitage in Jackson's "The Hobbit").

It's hard to know exactly how season 2 will depict Sauron's treachery with the dwarves, especially since the secret is now out, and none ought to trust Halbrand again. Will Sauron find another disguise, leading to yet another season-long guessing game as to who he might be this time around? Or, famously stubborn as they are, will Durin's father and people simply ignore Galadriel's warnings and trust Halbrand anyway, accepting his favor and dooming themselves to centuries of trouble?

'Nine For Mortal Men Doomed To Die ...'

And now we come to some of the most famous rings of them all (excepting the One Ring, of course). Tolkien, Jackson's "The Lord of the Rings," and "The Rings of Power" have all taken pains to portray the race of men as the most susceptible to evil of all the peoples of Middle-earth. This is proven most emphatically through what's believed to be the Númenórean lords who were most easily seduced by Annatar. Similar to the dwarven rings, these helped their bearers achieve great wealth and power ... but like the One Ring itself, they also unnaturally extended their lifespans until they eventually withered away into invisibility and fell under Sauron's sway entirely. Known henceforth as Ringwraiths, they would eventually plague our fellowship of heroes on their quest to destroy the One Ring thousands of years later, but that's getting ahead of ourselves.

Excitingly, it's possible that we'll soon be introduced to the flawed figureheads whom Sauron will bestow his gifts upon in future seasons of "The Rings of Power." Having already established the island kingdom of Númenor, the series should have no trouble at all introducing these more sinister individuals in stark juxtaposition to other supporting characters, such as the noble Elendil (Lloyd Owen). The table-setting has already begun, evidenced by the impending fall of Númenór due to their leaders' profound fear of death. What better way to exploit this weakness than by offering some rings of power that can prolong life indefinitely?

Although all of these events take place over the course of hundreds of years in Tolkien's writings, "The Rings of Power" will have to continue to drastically condense its timeline for adaptation purposes. Either way, expect some major events in season 2.

'One For The Dark Lord On His Dark Throne ...'

And, of course, we can't forget the One Ring to rule them all. By far the biggest development in season 1 of "The Rings of Power" has to be the Halbrand/Sauron reveal dovetailing with the transformation of the Southlands into the land of Mordor, where the shadows lie. While fans can consider the eruption of Mount Doom and its subsequent terraforming of the surrounding area as a sort of Easter egg further connecting the series to the events of "The Lord of the Rings," it actually serves an incredibly important practical purpose, as well.

As part of Sauron's devious scheme, all the 19 total rings of power (known as the "lesser rings") are meant to come under the control of his secret One Ring, created with the express purpose of turning all of Middle-earth's most powerful people into his puppets. But in order to craft the most powerful object the world has ever seen (at least since the Silmarils, that is), Sauron would need a forge to match. No dark magic in all the land could compete with Mount Doom itself, the beating black heart of the evil land, and the location where the One Ring was forged.

You might remember a little trilogy of movies called "The Lord of the Rings" that depicted why this ring was so important in the first place. But long before, Sauron's scheme paid off as the rings allowed him to wage open war on all of Middle-earth. "The Rings of Power" has some time to go before plunging into this conflict to come, but the seeds have been planted and now we await the forging of the other rings of power.

"The Rings of Power" season 2 comes to Prime Video sometime in 2024.

Read this next: 13 Fantasy Shows Like The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power You Should Check Out

The post Breaking Down All The Rings of Power from Amazon's Lord of the Rings Series appeared first on /Film.

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As tick populations grow (thanks, climate change) and tick-borne diseases like Lyme become more widespread, tick checks have become routine for many of us. But do you really know what it means to “check yourself for ticks”? Chances are, you’re missing some important parts of the process.

You only need a tick check when you've been in the woods

Are you conscientious about tick checks when you're camping, but only when you're camping? Ticks live in more places than just the woods, and most parts of the U.S. are home to at least one tick species. Check these tick maps from the CDC to get a sense of whether they’re in your area and which tick species to look out for. Dog ticks are found just about everywhere. Some tick species are only found in the eastern half of the country, while Rocky Mountain ticks and western blacklegged ticks are generally found out west.

Ticks live in grassy, brushy, and wooded areas, the CDC notes. Growing up in Pennsylvania, I always thought of the woods and farm fields as the places you pick up ticks. But years later, I now know there are ticks in my own backyard, as well as parks and other areas that don’t fit the stereotype I had in my head. I’ll do a tick check whenever I’ve spent time near tall grass, leaf litter, woods, or brush—which includes pretty much anywhere I go in the summer. Don’t forget to check your kids for ticks, too.

Skipping the shower

If you think of a "tick check" as an isolated chore, it's easy to forget. But if you make sure to take a shower after you've been outdoors, it gives you an opportunity for a thorough check as you're undressing, and will possibly wash off ticks even if your check wasn't so thorough (or if you forgot to do it entirely). The CDC points out that taking a shower within two hours of getting home from an outdoor outing has been shown to reduce your chances of getting Lyme disease, and probably also reduces your chances of other tickborne diseases as well.

Ticks crawl around for a few hours before they find a place to attach, so there’s a good chance that unattached ticks will wash off during the shower, whether you see them or not. As a bonus, you also have several hours to wash off the oils from poison ivy before it triggers a rash. A shower is always on my to-do list after coming home from a trail run. The other benefit of taking a shower after you get home is that it gives you a chance to get naked—and that’s when the real tick check begins.

Missing critical areas of your body

The first place I always check is my lower legs. Ticks need to stay close to the ground while they’re waiting for a person to walk by, so you won’t find them climbing trees and dropping down from above—that’s a myth. They chill on the ground, then climb a stalk of grass. If they haven’t found a victim, they will return to the ground to rehydrate for a bit. That means they’ll usually contact your lower legs first, so if you just got back from your hike, check your ankles, shins, and knees right away.

Over the course of the next few hours, they’ll climb upward. It’s not uncommon to find ticks on your upper body, or even in your hair, if they've had enough time to climb. So check these harder-to-see spots, which I’ll list from bottom to top:

• The backs of your knees

• Between your legs (use a mirror...sorry!)

• Inside your belly button

• In your armpits

• Behind your ears

• In your hair

A mirror or a partner can help you to see those out-of-the-way places. If you have kids, check them over while you help them get ready for a shower, or when you change their diaper.

Not knowing what you're looking for

Look up the species of ticks that live in your area, and make sure you know how big they are and what they look like. Ticks grow as they go through their life cycle, with the smallest being about the size of a poppyseed. Adult ticks can be anywhere from the size of a sesame seed to the size of a corn kernel, depending on the species and whether they have fed.

Before ticks attach, they crawl around, and you might mistake them for other kinds of bugs (and vice versa). There are lots of little bugs you can pick up from outside that aren’t ticks. If you want to take an educated guess at whether the little guy you found is a tick, check the number of legs. Ticks are arachnids, so they have eight legs.

You may find an attached tick during your check—or, if you’re unlucky, sometime the next day after you should have done your check. An attached tick doesn’t usually hurt. You might just notice a little scab or mole where there wasn’t one before, and when you take a closer look at it, you discover it’s got legs. Ew. Go get the tweezers or your handy-dandy tick removal device. (I’m partial to the TickKey.)

Once a tick is done feeding, it will drop off. If you have a pet dog and don’t keep up with their flea and tick medication, you may occasionally find what looks like a gray or green corn kernel in the dog bed. That’s what this is. A tick that is not attached to you isn’t usually a health risk if you find it in your house; chances are, it will dry out and die. But just to be safe, you can launder any clothes or bedding in hot water and/or put them in the dryer on high. Next time, keep your pet up to date on tick control medication, and do those tick checks on everyone when you get home.

Not having a plan for what to do when you find a tick

If you find a tick crawling on you, that's easy—wash it off, brush it off (if you're outside), or squish it and throw it in the trash. But what if you find one that's already attached? That's when you have to know the right way to remove a tick.

Forget the blown-out matches, soap, or alcohol—you don't want to do anything that makes the tick release itself, since they'll vomit their stomach contents into your bloodstream, which worsens the risk of catching a tick-borne disease. Instead, pull the tick off your skin with fine-tipped tweezers, or with a specialized device like a TickKey or Tick Twister. I keep a TickKey in my bathroom at home, and bring another with me when I travel. You slip the little keyhole slot over the tick, and pull—something even most squeamish folks can probably handle.

The Legend of Zelda logo is a pretty good one

Nintendo has been adding various icons as bonuses for My Nintendo users, which range all across their suite of first party games (and beyond). Whenever a big game drops you can bet Nintendo will peddle some icons for it: and in case you missed the last Zelda: Breath of the Wild round, there's another one on the way.

Announced by Nintendo, a "second chance" run of Zelda: Breath of the Wild icons are available now. The first wave is scheduled to go away (back into the vault) on May 3, 2023, and the second wave will kick off on that same day through May 10. Out of all these, the Guardian one is fairly unique, and the general "Zelda" logo will slot in nicely for a lot of folks for years to come: even if Breath of the Wild fades into memory.

As a reminder, if you want physical rewards, you can find our full Platinum Point guide here, which has been updated with details on weekly missions: bookmark it for when you need quick points for a reward. A handful of points is incredibly easy to get, as that’s basically just 15 minutes with Super Mario Run, or a quick sign-on to the 3DS or Wii U 3Shop. Also remember that any shipments are bundled together, so you can pay a flat rate for multiple items instead of paying it each time. Just know that items go out of stock on My Nintendo frequently, and some are never restocked.

[caption id="attachment_375774" align="alignnone" width="640"] Image via Nintendo[/caption]

Second chance Zelda: Breath of the Wild icons Wave 1 (April 26-May 3, 2023):

• Zelda
• Link (attacking pose)
• Link (looking pose)
• Guardian

Second chance Zelda: Breath of the Wild icons Wave 2 (May 3-May 10, 2023):

• Zelda
• Link (bow)
• Zelda logo
• Link (with horse)

The post Zelda: Breath of the Wild Switch icons are back for a few weeks appeared first on Destructoid.