Ronald.phillips

He probably thinks he's a real cowboy...

If you remember that a new Saints Row game came out in the summer of last year, then you might be pleased to hear that the open-world adventure's first DLC expansion will finally arrive next week, nine months on from the game's initial release on PlayStation, PC, and Xbox platforms.

The Heist and The Hazardous — which hits all platforms on May 9 — will see our uber-trendy gangsters on a mission of vengeance, tracking down the double-crossing Hollywood star Chris Hardy following a botched assignment. The expansion will feature new in-game events, story missions, and a wardrobe full of new clothing, weapons, and other related chicanery. The Heist and The Hazardous is the first of three paid DLC expansions planned for the title in 2023.

https://twitter.com/SaintsRow/status/1653399037180010500?s=20

Saints Row, which launched last August after being delayed from its initial spring release date, saw the tongue-in-cheek crime franchise rebooted with an oddly elite fashion aesthetic and a cast of younger, entrepreneurial stars. While the game itself was serviceable, with high-octane action and an appetite for destruction, many critics and fans were non-plussed at the reboot's general vibe, complaining about a dated mission design, obnoxious and offputting dialogue, as well as a slew of technical issues.

Developer Volition has been releasing updates to correct the latter problems, which has led to this long delay between launch and DLC drops. Soon after release, it was announced that Volition was being transferred from Deep Silver to another Embracer Group publisher, Gearbox Entertainment.

Saints Row is available now on PlayStation, PC, and Xbox. But not Stadia. Not anymore.

The post Saints Row DLC, The Heist and The Hazardous, finally arrives next week appeared first on Destructoid.

In Michael Mann's 2001 biopic "Ali," Jamie Foxx played Drew Bundini Brown, Muhammad Ali's assistant trainer. Brown was, as the film depicted him, a little crass, openly lascivious (he confesses his particular fetishes in public), and not always up to living the way Ali would have liked him to. In one notable scene, Ali (Will Smith) bursts into Brown's dingy apartment and finds him hungover. Ali screams at the man to respect himself.

Mann is a filmmaker fond of shaky, handheld camera moves, was an early proponent of digital photography, and seeks a certain kind of steely, assertive realism in his work. This was an exhilarating approach for a high-profile Hollywood biography like "Ali," a film that was nominated for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor at the Academy Awards.

It's worth noting that Mann and his three credited "Ali" co-screenwriters, Eric Roth ("Forrest Gump") and writing duo Stephen J. Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson ("Nixon"), are all white men. They may have been able to capture the historical details correctly, and they may have accurately depicted Muhammad Ali's unique character, largely thanks to the legendary boxer's many outspoken press conferences and interviews, but what they lacked was the perspective of the Black community. It was here that Jamie Foxx stepped in. 

In a 2018 interview with Yahoo! Life, Foxx recalled an afternoon he spent with Mann during the production of "Ali," and how a chance encounter with one of Foxx's fans gave the actor a chance to tell his director what needed to happen in a key "Ali" scene.

'Black People Don't Do It Like That'

The scene in question was when Brown was to meet Muhammad Ali for the first time. Because Ali was already a celebrity when Brown met him, Mann felt Brown needed to be quiet and nervous in the champ's presence. Jamie Foxx immediately pointed out to Mann that this would not be an accurate response between two Black men. He said: 

"I had never worked with Michael Mann, so I wasn't aware of the presence, and I had to learn some things. But he learned some things as well. Like, when it came to me walking in as Bundini talking to Ali the first time, he said you should be scared of him. I asked why. He said, 'Because he's the champ.' And I said, 'So?' He said, 'Why are you saying, "So?"' I said it was because Black people don't do it like that." 

Foxx patiently explained to Mann that Brown would not have been intimidated by Ali. Indeed, he would have approached with friendliness and confidence, showing his gregariousness and willingness to pal around with a celebrity. Foxx initially followed Mann's initial direction, but felt his instincts as an actor were still the correct way to play the scene. Foxx said: 

"[I said to Mann] 'If I see someone who's a star, and I say hello to them, I feel like I'm a part of them.' So we shot it the nervous way, and I didn't think it was the right thing, but I had to respect the director."

Foxx was able to prove his point to Mann a few days later when a random fan approached the actor while he was filming an outdoor scene in Miami. The fan possessed the same confidence Foxx said Brown ought to have.

'Holler At Me Foxx, What We Doing Tonight?'

Foxx couldn't have communicated his intentions better than if he staged the following incident himself. Foxx doesn't say the name of the fans who approached him, but one person provided a real-world example of exactly what Foxx had tried to communicate to Mann:

"[A] few days later, I was standing on the street, and we're shooting something in Miami, and this little white couple comes up and quietly says, 'Mr. Foxx, is it okay if I get a picture?' and I said, 'Sure,' and we took the picture. As soon we get through with the picture, I hear a brother across the street — 'FOXX! What about it, baby? What's up?' He comes across the street, got a little bag of something he's eating, 'What's good, baby? Holler at me Foxx, what we doing tonight?'"

This person was not a friend of Foxx's. He was merely a confident human being. Foxx pointed out that this fan was more emblematic of the way Black men communicate. Indeed, Foxx pointed out that the confidence of a fan is a subtle test of the celebrity's character. Foxx said: 

"Mann says, 'Do you know him?' I say, 'Never met him in my life. That's just the way we are. If I'd have shined on him, and told him I couldn't holler at him, he would have told everybody Jamie Foxx is an a**hole.'"

After this encounter, Mann and Foxx went back to the scene in question and reshot it in the manner Foxx preferred. Not only did the actor like the finished product better, but he felt it informed Bundini's optimistic character for the rest of the movie. 

Michael Mann, Foxx admitted, is a brilliant director. But even the most seasoned pros can learn from their cast.

Read this next: The 14 Best Film Acting Debuts Of All Time

The post Jamie Foxx Brought a Key Cultural Perspective to a Scene in Ali appeared first on /Film.

Almost half of MSP clients fell victim to a cyberattack within the last 12 months. In the SMB world, the danger is especially acute as only 50% of SMBs have a dedicated internal IT person to take care of cybersecurity. No wonder cybercriminals are targeting SMBs so heavily. No wonder SMBs are increasingly willing to pay a subscription or retainer to gain access to expert C-level cyber-assistance

“Put some potato chips in there” is a sandwich hack so timeworn, I’m hesitant to characterize it as anything more than generally accepted wisdom. What sandwich wouldn’t benefit from extra salt and texture? Who actually prefers a peanut butter and jelly sandwich without a hidden layer of fried potato (preferably the…

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As we continue to drive toward making the world safer and more productive for all, it is vital we empower our customers to secure every aspect of their organization. Each day we are seeing more advanced security threats as bad actors develop new tactics that aim to take advantage of businesses as they digitally transform and adopt a multicloud infrastructure. At Microsoft, we understand cloud security is a problem you manage, not a problem you solve, so we are constantly working to use data, intelligence, AI, and automation to provide a comprehensive solution that helps us all respond faster and even stay one step ahead of bad actors and events.

Core to this approach is our ability to help customers do more with the security of Microsoft Azure that’s built-in, embedded, and out of the box, and extending that protection to multicloud infrastructures. We are honored to be recognized as a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Infrastructure-as-a-Service Platform Native Security (IPNS), Q2 2023 report. The IPNS category compares public clouds and highlights the native security provided to customers on public cloud platforms. This includes capabilities for storage and data security, identity and access management (IAM), network security, and hardware and hypervisor security. In the report, it is great to see Forrester recognize the continued progress we have made, noting “Microsoft provides strong CSPM and CIEM [cloud security posture management and cloud infrastructure entitlement management] capabilities. It has made significant investments in CSPM and CWP [cloud workload protection]. The vendor sports a strong vision for IPNS offerings, and its execution roadmap and market approach are ahead of the competition.”

Additionally, Microsoft received a top score from Forrester in the current IPNS offering category and had the highest possible score in the data centers, security certifications, roadmap, market approach, innovation, and seven other criteria. The report states, “Microsoft offers strong admin IAM management, above-par CSPM and CIEM capabilities, and broad coverage guest OS [operating system] security. Network security capabilities and multicloud support are ahead of others evaluated as well.”

Microsoft is committed to continual innovation and investment in cloud security. In Azure, our security approach focuses on defense in depth, with layers of protection built throughout all phases of design, development, and deployment of our platforms and technologies.

In a constantly changing world, we work hard to release features that help our customers strengthen their security posture, accelerate protection against modern threats, and reduce risk throughout the cloud application lifecycle. Microsoft Defender for Cloud is a critical component of that strategy. Natively available in Azure, it helps protect multicloud and hybrid environments end-to-end, from development to runtime as a comprehensive cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP). Our multicloud approach means customers get the protection they expect from Microsoft—not only in Azure—but also by centralizing and unifying their security needs on other public clouds as well.

Customers like VECOZO choose integrated security from Microsoft across Defender for Cloud, network security, and identity to combine their various security layers and functionalities into an easy-to-deploy, easy-to-manage, highly secure environment. Igor van Haren, Lead Architect, VECOZO, said “There’s always security work to be done, but with Azure, we’ve gained improved visibility, removed some of the most tedious work from our administrators’ agendas, and adopted a number of solutions that aid our Zero Trust security approach.” Read more about VECOZO’s experience in their customer story.

Over the last several months we have also announced new feature releases across Defender for Cloud, network security, and other services that continue to build on our vision for a comprehensive, intelligent cloud platform. These include:

Microsoft Defender Cloud Security Posture Management is now generally available to help organizations get an end-to-end view of risks and prioritize remediation across their multicloud environments with contextual cloud security. And now, new integrated data-aware security posture capabilities allow teams to automatically discover their data estate, assess threats to their most critical assets and sensitive data, and proactively prevent breaches along potential attack paths.

Microsoft Defender for Storage now offers sensitive data discovery and malware scanning to address threats to critical storage resources in the cloud. New scanning capabilities prevent infiltration attempts with near real-time detection of metamorphic and polymorphic malware across cloud data.

Microsoft Defender for APIs is in preview. A new offering as part of Defender for Cloud, Defender for APIs helps organizations gain visibility into business-critical Azure APIs, understand their security posture, prioritize vulnerability fixes, and detect and respond to active runtime threats within minutes. For more information on future Defender for Cloud releases, our roadmap showcases a comprehensive list of information about new features.

Microsoft Azure Firewall Basic, a new SKU of Azure Firewall, delivers an enterprise-grade network firewall to small and medium businesses (SMBs) at an affordable price point. You get essential network firewall capabilities, like filtering of east-west and north-south traffic with built-in threat intelligence to block malicious traffic. As a cloud-native service, Azure Firewall is easy to set up, configure, and manage, and requires zero maintenance.

Microsoft Azure DDoS IP Protection, a new SKU of Azure DDoS Protection, is designed with SMBs in mind and delivers enterprise-grade, cost-effective DDoS protection. You can defend against the most sophisticated DDoS attacks with always-on monitoring and adaptive threat intelligence that is tuned to your normal traffic volume. Customers have the flexibility to apply protection on individual public IP resources.

These innovations highlight how Microsoft is committed to solving some of the toughest security challenges we all face today. By continually improving the platform, tools, and intelligence our customers need, we can help drive meaningful change in how we protect the world around us.

 We invite you to read the full Forrester report here.

To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us on LinkedIn (Microsoft Security) and Twitter (@MSFTSecurity) for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

The post Forrester names Microsoft a Leader in 2023 Infrastructure-as-a-Service Platform Native Security report appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

The architecture of our teams

Having a broad complement of full-time software developers and product managers is critical to leading an organization that operates as a product team. At the same time, we recognize that federal tech resources are in scarce supply in the market, and the technical landscape changes more quickly than the traditional government employee pipeline can accommodate. While we seek to increase the number of full-time technical staff in OIT, our efforts cannot match our demand for tech talent. Our scope spans over two thousand locations, a thousand systems, and over a half million users. As a result, we will continue to depend heavily on contractors to deliver on our mission, and we embrace them as members of one team. To do this effectively, we conduct project reviews and planning jointly. We are clear on who is responsible for what, and we work together to continuously improve our technical rigor as a single Product Group at VA.

Contractors as a critical component of the IT Product Group

The government often gets into a mindset of shielding contractors from meetings, decision-making, and performance review; this is a mistake. When you think about the structure of most product and development teams within the commercial space, they act as a single team. We also must do this in the federal environment, even though a lot of our work is outsourced.

Operating as a single team still means we must hold our contractor partners accountable for their portion of the end result and how they do the work. By doing so, we get better incrementally and bring forward the issues they face. We expect them to develop ideas on making process improvements, thereby getting into a rhythm of continuously improving. As a measure, if we don’t know the names of the contractors, then we aren’t getting a balanced view because we don’t hear those voices. If we aren’t hearing from their leadership on what is going well and what isn’t, then there’s an important voice missing from the conversation. So, again, we must act as one virtual team, with all members performing their job.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that we mistake purposeful inclusion for blanket participation. It’s not always appropriate or ethical for contractors to participate in decisions and planning that would give them an unfair advantage during competition for a contract requirement that flows from privileged conversations around planning and decision making. Careful coordination with the Contracting Officer and Office of General Counsel during both the contract planning and post-award stages is critical to mitigating these risks.

At the same time, we must recognize that they are contractors. Just like our full-time employees, the government must take action if the contractor is not performing well. It’s a delicate balance of acting as a team and holding contractors responsible for their work. We in the development teams and in Strategic Sourcing do this by having candid conversations with their leadership and by documenting contractor performance, reflecting on how well the contractor performed on past work and whether we would want to work with them again in the future. Every time VA conducts a Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA) review, it serves as a gate as we consider how well the contractor has performed before continuing our partnership.

My past experience working on the team that recovered from the early failed effort of Healthcare.gov illustrates the importance of operating collectively as one product group and ensuring performance-based accountability at both the government and contractor levels. Originally, everything was farmed out to multiple contractors who were each responsible for delivering individual pieces of the larger system. Each one believed that their individual pieces would “magically work,” despite the immense complexity and scope of the system. This led to a lack of accountability and a reluctance to work together to solve the problem when those individual pieces resulted in a dysfunctional product. During the recovery, we forced the teams to act as one composite team, problem solving together as one.

This project also illustrates why a great full-time system architect is so critical. If you’re contracting several pieces out, you need an architect with deep systems development experience who can ensure that you have a solid system design to begin with, assess the technical roadmaps chosen by the teams, identify the problems before they explode, and ensure the teams are working together in harmony towards the same goal.

Don’t use contractors as a crutch

In most cases, I believe it’s a mistake to contract out top-level strategy work.  It can be supported by contractors with specific knowledge and insight, but in the end, the internal teams are the ones that know the environment best and will be on the hook to deliver results for stakeholders, policymakers, and taxpayers in the future. They are going to be the ones who lead the organization through implementing the strategy, and they need to have been intimately involved in its creation and the development of the implementation roadmap. They must be passionate about that role, understand it well, connect it to the strategy, evangelize it, and communicate to stakeholders. That just can’t be outsourced.

The value of contractors is, instead, to leverage them to dig in and do independent assessments in areas that we don’t have the full-time capacity or the independent perspective to do. But if we use them in this way, we need to be sure that the questions we’re asking them to answer are ones that we truly can’t live without the answers to – e.g., don’t ask them to do a complete industry assessment when we know that we really only have two feasible options. In fact, don’t use them at all until you believe you have the problem well framed and the critical questions identified.

Innovate on your contract vehicles

The government relies heavily on contractors to accomplish the mission. This necessitates rigorous evaluation not only in ensuring that we’re using the most appropriate contract vehicles to satisfy the business need, but that we’re making contract selections in the right way—both areas that are ripe for innovation.

This demand for contract labor has created a vast, lucrative marketplace for vendors.  Amid all this choice, it can be difficult for the government to align the right contractor solution to the government’s requirement. Cutting through the marketing pitches of contract proposals in order to evaluate the feasibility of their approach can be difficult, and that’s why you sometimes see proposals that make sense on paper but reflect a different reality when it comes to execution. At VA we utilize a “show me, don’t tell me” evaluation approach. Instead of long written “book reports” or other static proposals that do not directly reflect how a vendor delivers, we review real work products and processes demonstrated by vendors in response to a fictional problem. Alternatively, we’ll competitively award a small project to a promising contractor to see how well they deliver. Both approaches provide us confidence that the vendor is capable of delivering high quality solutions in support of our Veterans in a way that aligns with OIT’s working principles of engineering excellence and with a focus on the customer and user experience.

We review the past expertise and experience of the vendor. This includes the review of case studies, project artifacts, and live products, delivered by the vendor during previous projects, allowing us to separate the “fakers” from vendors who truly specialize in digital transformation and agile delivery.

We also ensure that we contract for systems “in increments.” If a contractor is not delivering, there is always an “Optional Task” or “Option Period” milestone coming up where we can reconsider whether to continue the relationship. This is particularly important in major modernization projects. We’re increasingly defining contracts with a series of incremental deliverables that avoid “big bang modernization,” where the entire system is bought as a single, fully deployed system. Instead, we’re focusing more and more on delivering the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) first, validating it meets the goals, and scaling with success.

Veterans can only receive the benefits and services that they deserve when VA has a strong partnership between government and contractors delivering modern software products.  This doesn’t happen by accident. In response to tough labor markets, tight government resources, and the ever-changing nature of the IT problems that  we’re trying to solve, we lean heavily on a growing contractor workforce to modernize our software products. As we continue to innovate around these acquisitions to ensure the government is maximizing value from taxpayer dollars, we must also not slip into the old way of thinking—that you can purchase a little help from here and from there and then put it all together for a working product. The complexity of our systems and software requires a mindset where the government and the contractor workforce operate as one team, and both are held accountable for the product’s success.

Coping with loneliness can be difficult, with older adults more likely to be affected. Here's how you can try and find a community.

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.

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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.

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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.

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