Category Archives: News

Article note: Huh. I've been _deeply_ unimpressed by VR so far, but if anyone can make something compelling...

Enlarge / Yep, it's real—and here's what we know so far. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Valve)

For a certain class of video game fan, no news could be bigger than today's: Half-Life is back. In VR. As an entirely new game from the series' creators at Valve.

We're here to connect the dots between what has been announced, what has been rumored, and what we've heard from well-placed sources. Rise and shine, Half-Life fans. We have a lot for you today.

Months of rumors, then a TGA leak

We should probably begin with the game's name, as revealed in a leaked Game Awards 2019 presentation and confirmed hours later by an official post from Valve. Half-Life: Alyx is a brand-new game in the Half-Life universe designed exclusively for PC virtual reality systems (Valve Index, Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Windows Mixed Reality).

Article note: On one hand, this is an obviously absurd demand. On the other hand, I'm now worried that restaurants are going to contaminate their grills with coconut from the fake burgers, and I'm going to have a surprise allergic reaction.

Article note: Really Intel? You can't afford a dusty static ftp so your legacy drivers don't become a Honeypot for shady malware filled file hosts?

Article note: Getting a twofer today on "Intel processors get noticeably slower with each microcode update, as they are forced to disable sloppy bullshit that they shipped to win the numbers game." Latest microcode turns off all the TSX Hardware Lock Elision features in all processors, plus turns off a (probably exploitable) fast path for all JCC (Jump Conditionals) that happen to end on or across a 32-bit boundary (see: https://twitter.com/damageboy/status/1194751035136450560 ).

Article note: I got a little look at the A64FX stuff at SC this year, and chatted with a Cray rep in front of a sample board; a year ago I was curious about Fujitsu's Post-K ARM plan announcement, now it's a goddamn impressive chip that is already here. A bunch of ARM cores with SVE (nice SWAR extensions) and memory interfaces that beat the pants off anything you can get in or out of accelerators has both serious performance potential and should be drastically easier to program to squeeze that performance out of than most current contenders. It sounds like Cray has only very preliminary plans to put them on the fancier interconnects, but even still, after years of present but not really, this suddenly makes ARM HPC very credible.

Article note: Oh boy! Banking with google so you can get locked out of your inadequately regulated pseudo-bank because someone got butthurt about a internet shitpost! That seems like a GREAT idea. /s

Article note: Yeah! It's a little narrower and much, much later than I'd like to see, but the legal process is showing signs of functioning.

Enlarge / US Customs and Border Protection agents participate in a training exercise at a vehicle entry point along the border with Mexico on November 5, 2018, in Hidalgo, Texas. (credit: Getty Images | Andrew Cullen)

The United States government violated the Fourth Amendment with its suspicionless searches of international travelers' phones and laptops, a federal court ruled today.

The ruling came in a case filed "on behalf of 11 travelers whose smartphones and laptops were searched without individualized suspicion at US ports of entry," the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said today. The ACLU teamed up with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to fight the government on behalf of plaintiffs including 10 US citizens and one lawful permanent resident.

The order from a US District Court in Massachusetts limits what searches can be made by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Article note: In case that there was any remaining doubt that the academic prestige game is a meaningless Goodheart's law artifact; preemptively priming your children's E-Peen for competitive advantage.

Article note: Is google _trying_ to get regulated? Flaunt that they won't be? Just being creepy for the fuck of it?

Enlarge / Mountain View, Calif. - May 21, 2018: Exterior view of a Googleplex building, the corporate headquarters complex of Google and its parent company Alphabet Inc. (credit: Getty Images / zphotos)

Google quietly partnered last year with Ascension—the country's second-largest health system—and has since gained access to detailed medical records on tens of millions of Americans, according to a November 11 report by The Wall Street Journal.

The endeavor, code-named "Project Nightingale," has enabled at least 150 Google employees to see patient health information, which includes diagnoses, laboratory test results, hospitalization records, and other data, according to internal documents and the newspaper's sources. In all, the data amounts to complete medical records, WSJ notes, and contains patient names and birth dates.

The move is the latest by Google to get a grip on the sprawling health industry. At the start of the month, Google announced a deal to buy Fitbit, prompting concerns over what it will do with all the sensitive health data amassed from the popular wearables. Today's news will likely spur more concern over health privacy issues.

Article note: Unlike many of these projects, I can actually see applications for this one, and it is very neatly exectued. It needs a protective membrane under the keycaps and a few other minutia to be really suitable as a field computer, but damned if it isn't cool.