Security alert

• Microsoft Security is tracking a massive campaign that installs remote access tools on your computer using malicious Excel macros, embedded in a spreadsheet purporting to show COVID-19 stats
  • The emails in question pretend to be from Johns Hopkins Center about the “WHO COVID-19 SITUATION REPORT”
  • Steps to avoid:
    • Don’t open random emails
    • Don’t open unexpected attachments
    • And most importantly, definitely don’t run Excel macros on anything you don’t know the full provenance of

Free Games

• PS4

  • Star Wars Battlefront II

    • 2017
    • Third and first person action shooter that, as you can tell from its name, is the fourth major release in the series and seventh overall, it caught a lot of flack early on for its predatory microtransactions to the point that EA completely revamped the system to avoid gameplay advantages
    • Content based on the Star Wars movies up to and including The Rise of Skywalker

  • Call of Duty: WWII

    • 2017
    • First-person shooter following a squad in the 1st infantry division and their battles during the events of the Battle of Normandy

• Xbox One

  • Destroy all Humans!

    • 2005
    • Action adventure game set in the 1959 United States that has you playing an alien harvesting DNA from humans to continue the cloning process of his species
    • A remake is due for release in July

  • Shantae and the Pirate’s Curse

    • 2016
    • Metroidvania-style adventure platformer that has you playing the half-genie Shantae out to save Sequin Land from the Pirate Master

  • Sine Mora

    • 2012
    • 2.5D bullet hell shoot ’em up in a diesel punk inspired world filled with anthropomorphic characters

  • Coffee Talk

    • 2020
    • Visual novel that follows a barista working in a coffee shop in a fantasy version of Seattle, as they listen to the concerns of the shop’s patrons and prepare drinks

• Epic Games

  • Borderlands: The Handsome Collection

    • 2015
    • Improved versions of Borderlands 2 and the Pre-Sequel, the popular action RPG sci-fi loot shooters with a good sense of humor, with all their DLC, enhanced local multiplayer, and the ability to transfer save data from the PS3/Xbox 360 versions

• Twitch

  • The Last Tinker: City of Colors

    • 2014
    • Indie developer Mimimi’s take on action adventure like Jack and Daxter or Banjo-Kazooie, minus the jump button

  • Pulstar

    • 1995
    • Horizontal-scrolling shooter, similar to R-Type, that has you defeating a hostile race of aliens threatening mankind

  • Blazing Star

    • 1998
    • Shoot ’em up sequel to Pulstar with improved graphics and less challenging difficulty

  • Fighting games

    • Samurai Shodown II

      • 1994
      • One of the first games to incorporate parrying, where you can block at the last second to deflect the attack and leave your opponent vulnerable

    • The King of Fighters 2000

      • 2000
      • 7th entry in the KoF series for the NeoGeo and the last one produced by SNK before their bankruptcy

    • The King of Fighters 2002

      • 2002
      • Ninth game in the KoF series that discarded the previous titles’ 4-on-4 striker match format and returned to the 3-on-3 battles that KoF used until ’98

    • Fatal Fury Special

      • 1993
      • An updated version of Fatal Fury 2 with tweaks to the gameplay system and an expanded roster

    • Art of Fighting 2

      • 1994
      • Set as a prequel to the Fatal Fury series, it was the first fighting series to allow players to perform a “super attack”

Trump is up in arms after Twitter decided to flag some of his misinformation as false, though the rest of his bull is still coming through strong

• With the current COVID-19 situation, Twitter has decided to make some improvements to their platform so that incorrect information gets flagged
  • So when Trump tweeted about mail-in voting, claiming that there’s no way that they’ll be anything less than substantially fraudulent, Twitter threw a link at the bottom so that readers could “Get the facts about mail-in ballots”, and directs them to articles about his unsubstantiated claim
  • Trump’s response was to claim that they’re interfering in the 2020 election, and that Twitter is now stifling free speech. Even though that really only applies to the government, and companies are not required to give you a platform to say whatever you want
  • Then the Trump administration took to Fox News to single out Twitter’s head of site integrity, Yoel Roth, after digging up some tweets he had posted that were critical of the current US government
    • Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway called on listeners to go after him, causing a flood of abuse, harassment, and death threats online
  • So this is the government of a world power having a tantrum against a social media website because the president posted verifiably false information online
• Unfortunately it doesn’t look like Twitter is enforcing these policies strongly enough
  • Another of Trump’s tweets has invented a conspiracy theory accusing MSNBC host Joe Scarborough of murder
    • Trump basically said that the former congressman killed a staff member in 2001 even though he was 800 miles away at the time and her death was ruled an accident (she suffered a heart condition that caused her to fall and hit her head on a desk)
    • Trump then doubled down on the accusation even after her widower pleaded unsuccessfully with Twitter to take down the posts about his late wife in an open letter, saying that they’re causing her family a lot of emotional pain
      • He went on to say that the president is perverting the memory of his dead wife for perceived political gain, and if an ordinary user was throwing around these kinds of lies they would get banned from Twitter altogether
    • Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s usual insistence that they’re sticking to the letter of their terms of use, commonly gamed by internet trolls and the president of the US, can’t even be used as armour in this case because they’re so solidly in the wrong- even by their own terms of use these posts should be removed and the account should be flagged if not banned altogether
  • This isn’t even new behaviour, after Trump used deluded conspiracy theories in 2016 against Ted Cruz, saying his father was involved in the JFK assassination, when going for the republican nomination in the presidential election

According to US courts, just turning on your phone’s lock screen may count as a search by law enforcement and require a warrant

• While police can run a search without a warrant under special circumstances, if the phone is currently in police custody the device cannot be turned on even to take a screenshot of the lock screen. As soon as a physical intrusion is made, even just to press a button to wake up the screen, even though the lock screen is something somewhat publicly accessible, it counts as a intruding on a constitutionally protected area

Fans rejoice, you’re finally getting the Snyder Cut of Justice League

• Joss Whedon was brought in to finish the film after Zack Snyder left the film’s production due to family tragedy, but he drastically changed the tone of Snyder’s unfinished version
• Synder’s personal cut of the Justice League will be a long-form series coming to HBO Max in 2021, and is expected to cost over $30M in development and reshoots

More than half of Apple Stores worldwide have reopened now, and their precautions are pretty solid

• Multiple staff are stationed around the store’s entrance to direct people to different lineups either for shopping, walk-in repair work, or genius bar appointments
• They also have guards doing screening, temperature checks, handing out masks, and directing the use of hand sanitizer
• In store they’re keeping physical distancing in effect by helping people across tables and continually cleaning things with sanitizing wipes
• All in it was quite a good experience, and I felt like the store was really taking the pandemic seriously while still taking care of my laptop repair
  • If you have a MacBook with USB-C ports that just aren’t holding on to cords like it used to, you should definitely get it checked out. Just make sure they put the screws back in
  • Anecdotally, keep in mind that the Apple Store isn’t a free mask dispensary. I saw one argument while in line with a couple maintaining that, because they bought an iPad yesterday, they should get a free mask from Apple even though they weren’t entering the store at all

Fallout 76 Tips and Tricks from Foam Forge Cosplay

• Some lessons I’ve learned about FO76 in the past 2 weeks for anyone looking to optimize their end game.
• Start building early.
  • Pick what weapon kit out you want and start engineering yourself towards it.
  • An endgame respec right now can cost up to 50 levels of points. (ask me how I know.)
• Auto Rifles are still viable but you need a good back pack.
  • You won’t be using power armor.
  • Charisma is a dump stat.
  • Get ready to abandon it down to 3 points once you hit 50.
  • It’s only useful for dialogue checks.
  • Grape mentats help with that.
  • The perk Glow Sight is a must have.
    • At max rank it gives +60% damage to glowing enemies.
• A good 1  Legendary > Decent 3  Anything with armor piercing is a god send.
  • Enemies in FO4 and FO76 don’t get more health.
  • They stack “armor”.
  • This is Bethesda’s way of dealing with game balancing.
    • IE: it’s broken too.
• • VATS kills fusion cores so build your Power armor build to avoid Vats.
  • Getting a targeting hud makes enemies glow in the dark
    • Much easier to kill them when you can see them without having to “ping” them with VATS
    • Physical Damage Resistance > Any Other Kind.
• Best end game armor is T-51B or the much coveted Ultracite armor for base game.
  • The Strangler Heart is better than both but you gotta run Vault 94 for that.
  • The total difference is almost negligible so if you want (Like me) the X-01 is still a solid set of armor to run around in.
• Staggering opponents makes them useless and unable to fight you.
  • If you hit hard enough and frequently enough they sort of just stun lock.
  • Heavy guns and shotguns are great for that.
  • Best end game guns come from Wastelanders.
• Farm lots of rep for both factions to get you one of the new Gauss weapon types.
  • Shotgun or Minigun. They melt enemies.
  • If you’re heavy weapon specced Becket just gives you a fantastic .50 CAL at the end of his quest chain.
  • No spoilers for his quests though. Enjoy them.

Tidbits

• It looks like Apple has been re-issuing many app updates this week, with some users reporting 100+ apps flagged for updates over the course of a couple days
  • There’s no solid info on why, but this may have been the fix to a problem causing some apps to stop opening properly, showing an error saying “This app is no longer shared with you”
• macOS 10.15.5 is out now, including new battery health management features to extend the overall lifespan of a Mac’s battery, especially when you keep a laptop plugged in all the time
  • It also brings options to turn off Facetime video resizing to show the active speaker, issues with Finder freezing during large file transfers and a bunch of other bugs
• With the iOS 13.5 release last week Alberta’s ABTraceTogether contact tracing app is apparently getting an update to support the secure Apple/Google exposure notification API, but there’s still no solid word on when that’s happening
  • Unfortunately many can’t even use it in its current state, with some devices purchased brand-new even three years ago unable to run the version of Android it requires
    • The app requires Android 8 or newer, leaving about 2/5 of Android phones unable to download it
    • To contrast, more than 95% of all active iPhones support the minimum iOS 11 required
• The new Unc0ver jailbreak for iPhones is now available, and can hack anything from iOS 11 to the latest 13.5 that was just released
  • Apparently this is the first time a jailbreak has worked on all devices on launch day since iOS 10, according to the security researcher who discovered the vulnerability
• Facebook is reportedly planning to allow its staff to work from home on a permanent basis even after the current crisis is over
  • Zuckerberg is expecting about half of his workforce to take advantage of the new program, though salaries will be adjusted according to living costs in their location
  • Apparently they’ll be verifying employee home addresses by monitoring their access to company systems
• Due to pandemic concerns, Blizzcon 2020 has officially been cancelled
  • The convention’s executive producer, Saralyn Smith, released a statement saying that they still want to connect with fans online but, because this is new-ish territory with a lot of factors involved like their esports competitions, rather than having anything this fall it will likely be sometime early next year

Alan finished Network Effect, the first full-length Murderbot Diaries novel, this week, and it was damn good

• Martha Wells does a fantastic job of showing a future that is equal parts exciting, promising, and bleak, with a very realistic balance of utopian and dystopian worlds
• For not being interested in being at all human, Murderbot is such a good example of our foibles and fallacies while also being basically super-human at times
• If you liked the novellas you’ll love this book, and if you’re interested in solid sci-fi you’ll be in for a good time