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Welcome to the 2020 showcase! This year brought with it more challenges than any of us could have expected, and our graduating classes rose to meet those challenges at every turn. Our community, scattered by a global pandemic, came together from all over the world to produce a collection of innovative and exciting games at a time when play is paramount. These games are a mark of the resilience, passion, and creativity of our designers. While we know you can only watch this year, we encourage you to seek out and play these phenomenal games for yourself. We have so many different games in store, from hot pots to post-apocalyptic gardening, from magical capes to subway laundromats, there’s so much to offer in this year’s showcase, and we can’t wait to share it with you. Join us on Twitch on May 21, 2020 starting at 2pm.

The NYU Game Center is streaming various games from their 2020 showcase from graduates tomorrow starting at 2PM EST (1400) on their Twitch channel. These students are the future so tune in to support their work!

Microsoft is promising to dramatically improve its Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) with GUI app support and GPU hardware acceleration. The software giant is adding a full Linux kernel to Windows 10 with WSL version 2 later this month, and it’s now planning to support Linux GUI apps that will run alongside regular Windows apps.

This will be enabled without Windows users having to use X11 forwarding, and it’s mainly designed for developers to run Linux integrated development environments (IDE) alongside regular Windows apps.

Very encouraging signs that they're embracing Linux after just a decade or so ago, Steve Ballmer declared Linux "the enemy".

I slept 4 hours a night for 14 days and didn’t find any effects on cognition (assessed via Psychomotor Vigilance Task, a custom first-person shooter scenario, and SAT). I’m a 22-year-old male and normally I sleep 7-8 hours.

I was fully alert (very roughly) 85% of the time I was awake, moderately sleepy 10% of the time I was awake, and was outright falling asleep 5% of the time. I was able to go from “falling asleep” to “fully alert” at all times by playing video games for 15-20 minutes. I ended up playing video games for approximately 30-90 minutes a day and was able to be fully productive for more than 16 hours a day for the duration of the experiment.

@matigo This is quite a experiment…

Another month, another wrongful removal from the Play Store. Google booted Podcast Addict off the Play Store because it references the novel coronavirus outbreak — or rather, it offers you to listen to podcasts that do, just like any other podcast player out there. For some reason, Podcast Addict has been singled out by Google, with the company asking the developer to prove that his product is endorsed by some government, or remove any references to COVID-19.

Google references section 8.3 of its developer distribution agreement, which it recently updated to make it harder for malicious apps to take advantage of people searching for information on the pandemic. That's a good thing, but taking down an app that merely offers third-party COVID-19 content seems to overshoot that goal — Google would have to remove its own apps like YouTube, Google News, and even feed readers or other news aggregation services shouldn't be allowed on the Play Store if they're not government-sanctioned. Thus, it's safe to say that some automated algorithms probably stumbled upon mentions of the coronavirus in the app and issued a false positive, and as always, no actual person at Google is available to the developer to resolve the problem.

This would be a huge blow to indie podcast developers on the Play Store if this is become a precedent. Hope it can be fixed ASAP.

The U.S. Space Force unveiled its service flag on Friday, when top Pentagon officials presented President Donald Trump with the sixth military branch's officials colors during a private Oval Office ceremony marking Armed Forces Day.

In photos tweeted out by a Reuters photographer, Trump is seen smiling as the Space Force’s senior enlisted leader, Chief Master Sgt. Roger Towberman, holds up the new flag representing the military service charged with carrying out the Pentagon’s space-based operations. The new service was officially stood up in December when the president — who championed the force’s cause even as some Pentagon leaders initially pushed back on it necessity — signed a law mandating its creation.

And the US Space Force unveiled their flag…by ripping off the Federation's shield logo!!!

Before I say anything else, I will tell you that this tool is SLOOOOOW. I'm not a super clever PHP developer, so I don't know how to multi-thread this process, so it's going to take a while to get your report, so get a cup of coffee while it's running.

With that out of the way, I’ve created a simple page for downloading all of your App.net messages in a nice simple CSV.

If you're interested in seeing your old ADN post, a former user created a tool to see them. The CSV is currently disabled but it should be back up soon.

While the country is facing a daily Covid-19 death toll in the thousands and the coronavirus outbreak snakes its way inside the executive branch, Congress is currently considering a vast expansion of the Justice Department’s power over online platforms and the people who use them. Should these measures pass, Americans’ web searching and browsing histories could be collected by the FBI without a warrant. But that’s just the preeminent concern. Should Congress grant the DOJ all the power it is seeking, users may also lose access to apps that use end-to-end encryption (like Signal and Facebook Messenger), and the kinds of content they can currently post online may find themselves subject to additional moderation and monitoring.

“Together, EARN It and Mitch McConnell’s Patriot Act amendments would give the most corrupt attorney general of our lifetime unprecedented ability to pry into everything Americans do and say online,” Wyden told The New Republic in a statement. “It would be an unconscionable mistake for Democrats to hand Donald Trump and Attorney General Barr these sprawling powers, especially during the Covid-19 crisis, when Americans are spending more and more time on our devices.”

A potential huge double blow to our freedoms while no one is paying attention.

UPDATE: The Senate has voted to allow the FBI to snoop on Americans' browsing history

At 22, Marcus Hutchins put a stop to the worst cyberattack the world had ever seen. Then he was arrested by the FBI. This is his untold story.

This is a must-read story that everyone needs to have the time to listen to Marcus' incredible journey. I have been a supporter of his for a long time now and this is great detail.

On Sunday, Eindhoven University of Technology researcher Björn Ruytenberg revealed the details of a new attack method he's calling Thunderspy. On Thunderbolt-enabled Windows or Linux PCs manufactured before 2019, his technique can bypass the login screen of a sleeping or locked computer—and even its hard disk encryption—to gain full access to the computer's data. And while his attack in many cases requires opening a target laptop's case with a screwdriver, it leaves no trace of intrusion and can be pulled off in just a few minutes. That opens a new avenue to what the security industry calls an "evil maid attack," the threat of any hacker who can get alone time with a computer in, say, a hotel room. Ruytenberg says there's no easy software fix, only disabling the Thunderbolt port altogether.

Ruytenberg points out that the flaws he found extend to Intel's hardware and can't be fixed with a mere software update. "Basically they will have to do a silicon redesign," he says. Nor can users change the security settings of their Thunderbolt port in their operating system to prevent the attack, given that Ruytenberg discovered how to turn those settings off. Instead, he says that paranoid users may want to disable their Thunderbolt port altogether in their computer's BIOS, though the process of doing so will be different for every affected PC. On top of disabling Thunderbolt in BIOS, users will also need to enable hard disk encryption and turn their computers off entirely when they leave them unattended, in order to be fully protected.

Yikes, this looks bad. Can check to see if you have this flaw here

The plan is to have no plan, to let daily deaths between one and three thousand become a normal thing, and then to create massive confusion about who is responsible— by telling the governors they’re in charge without doing what only the federal government can do, by fighting with the press when it shows up to be briefed, by fixing blame for the virus on China or some other foreign element, and by “flooding the zone with shit,” Steve Bannon’s phrase for overwhelming the system with disinformation, distraction, and denial, which boosts what economists call “search costs” for reliable intelligence.

Stated another way, the plan is to default on public problem solving, and then prevent the public from understanding the consequences of that default. To succeed this will require one of the biggest propaganda and freedom of information fights in U.S. history, the execution of which will, I think, consume the president’s re-election campaign.

Jay Rosen truly gets it people.