Month: September 2024

Even the smartest of boffins can trip up sometimes, and that’s exactly what happened after a member of Microsoft’s AI research team accidentally exposed 38TB of sensitive internal data after misconfiguring a link.

Wiz, a cloud security company that routinely looks for vulnerabilities or exposures of cloud-hosted data detailed the exposure on its blog (via ITWire). It found a GitHub repository belonging to Microsoft’s AI research division, hosting open-source code and AI models for image recognition. But that’s not all Wiz found.

A configuration error allowed anyone access the entire storage account, and this data included two complete PC backups belonging to Microsoft employees. According to Wiz, the data included “sensitive personal data, including passwords to Micros…

Have today’s Connections game sorted out in an instant with our help. There’s a hint for every colour waiting below if you’d like a guided nudge towards the answers, as well as the full solution for the September 19 (#100) game laid bare if you need it.

For some strange reason I struggled with the easiest set today, which is especially embarrassing when, well, you’ll see. Blues? Purples? No problem. Those yellows though? May as well have been invisible until the very end. Hopefully I’ll spot them a little earlier tomorrow.

NYT Connections hint today: Tuesday, September 19 

Need a hand with today’s Connections? You’ve got it. 

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Yellow: These words will be familiar no matter how you choose to br…

After seven years in the works, solo-developed roguelike Patch Quest has released its final version, a massive roguelike where your explorer uses their powerful lasso to capture and tame any of the many monsters that inhabit a huge labyrinth. It’s pretty much what would happen if you combined Pokemon with The Binding of Isaac, a simply to play yet wildly diverse set of attacks and movement mechanics ranging from gliding, leaping, and surfing to tunneling and spider-man-esque webslinging.

It definitely retains that Isaac DNA, however, becoming ever more of a bullet hell about dodging enemy attacks as you get deeper into the game. The roguelike quilted terrain of Patchlantis also rearranges itself every night, so if you’re defeated and sent back to base camp you’ll have to explore a…

I have three monitors on my desk. It’s ridiculous. It’s also extremely useful, which is why I put up with it, but sometimes I think, what if I could corral all these wires and mounts and buttons into one? And then I see that Newegg has Samsung’s excellent 34″ Odyssey G5 curved gaming monitor on for less than $300 at Newegg for Black Friday, and I think, that might just be the way to go.

Yes, it’s only one penny under $300, but “technically correct” is my favorite kind of correct, and even if you want to round it up to a flat $300, that’s still a really good deal—we were impressed when it dipped under $400 back in March.

So what do you get for the money? Size is obviously the big hook: At 34 inches, the Odyssey G5 offers a lot of real estate to play with, at 3440 x 1440…

Helldivers 2 is getting a new Warbond tomorrow: Cutting Edge, a ‘battle pass’ filled with high-tech zappers, stylish armours, and a few new fancy capes. 

If you’re used to the live-service grind and haven’t been keeping up-to-date with the game, that news might fill you with dread, prompting you to rummage around for medals and super credits. Well, I’ve got an order from Super Earth high command, and it says you need to take a deep breath and relax. 

As mentioned by the devs before launch, Warbonds aren’t designed to be FOMO machines—not only can you earn them through elbow grease (as I personally did after around 30 hours of shooting bugs and bots), they don’t vanish when a new one appears. To reiterate: When Cutting Edge comes out, Steeled Veterans will rem…

Warhammer 40,000: Battlesector, the turn-based strategy game whose singleplayer campaign casts you as 40K’s ultimate goth space marines, is adding another DLC faction. Joining the previously added Sisters of Battle, Necrons, Orks, and Daemons of Khorne will be the technogoth universe’s resident mech-piloting alien weebs, the T’au.

Battlesector’s T’au army includes a variety of battlesuits you can tell Shinji to get in, including the camouflaged XV95 Ghostkeel, the heavily shielded XV104 Riptide, and the weakness-detecting XV88 Broadside. On the more elite side, there’s the XV8 Crisis Battlesuit Team and the sneaky XV25 Stealth Battlesuits.

The T’au command unit, the Ethereal, can also pilot a battlesuit, whether the heavy-armor Enforcer or the more agile Coldstar. Ethereals …

Giant statues broadcasting a mysterious code, monks telling me to open my throat chakra, an ominous symbol added to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and now: a laptop displaying ancient Slavic text dropped into a middle of a landfill and a Johnny Silverhand-themed Wolfenstein 3D clone that unlocks a secret server farm. This is a side of Cyberpunk 2077 I never knew existed, FF:06:B5.

The FF:06:B5 subreddit and Kotaku both have in-depth breakdowns of this saga, but the basic facts from before Cyberpunk’s big 2.0 update are as follows: there’s a handful of large, stylized statues scattered across Cyberpunk 2077’s world map, some of whom have a readout with the code FF:06:B5 on their base. Monks near one of the statues warn that players’ “throat chakra is blocked,” and that they should “acti…

Good news: Palworld players have found yet another way to get one over on the system by violating the laws of god and man alike. Not content with killing the game’s bosses using physics-defying staircases, they’ve got a new trick: butchering their pals without killing them thanks to a well-timed mounting.

Obviously, that sentence is completely self-explanatory and you need no further information, but since we’re both here I might as well write some more about how it works. Over on Reddit, enterprising Palworldians have figured out that, if you just hop on a pal’s back immediately after you’re done carving them up for parts, they mysteriously fail to die, returning to your inventory and ready to be butchered again ad nauseum.

If you Mount your pal…

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Valve has made a bold decision with its latest update to Counter-Strike 2, and one that is something of an about-turn on previous attitudes. A client update has announced certain forms of scripting popular in Counter-Strike will now be detected and banned, essentially putting an end to automated inputs that some players use for actions such as jump-throws of grenades and counter-strafing. Yes sir, the tears are delicious.

A good chunk of Counter-Strikers probably don’t even realise such tactics existed, but keyboard macros of various types have been around in the game forever. In fact Valve’s previous stance was to allow them. But contemporary hardware has increasingly leaned-in to allowing what’s called Simultaneous Opposite Cardinal Direction (SOCD) inputs, a name so catchy that…

Valve has made some big changes to the online conduct rules and rules and guidelines for Steam, which now break down in much greater detail what people are and are not allowed to do while using the service.

“Beginning today, you’ll see we’ve made some updates to Steam’s Rules and Guidelines and Steam’s Online Conduct Rules,” Valve said in the announcement of the rule changes. “These updates are intended to add context and specificity to how we already apply these in practice to all behaviors and content across Steam.”

Unfortunately, Valve did not say anything in the announcement about what had changed, so for that we need to rely on the eternally useful Internet Archive. The rules and guidelines page as it existed in March 2023 was very general, perhaps reflectin…