Month: December 2024

Alan Wake 2 will release on October 17. The date was revealed in a new trailer shown during today’s PlayStation Showcase (above), which also introduced a new protagonist to share the stage with Alan: FBI agent Saga Anderson. 

According to Remedy, it’s no big deal if you haven’t played the first Alan Wake: you should be able to “easily dive into the sequel” and figure out what’s going on. That’s probably true. As big as the Remedyverse is getting, and as weird as its stories can be, the Finnish studio likes to work within known genre archetypes with direct, monologue-heavy storytelling. 

But Alan Wake 2’s storytelling doesn’t sound totally straightforward, because we get to choose which protagonist we play as first.

“After certain events have transpired, fans can play Wake and Anderson’s respective stories in any order they choose,” writes Remedy communications director Thomas Puha on the PlayStation Blog. “Their journeys echo and foreshadow each other, in this intense atmospheric story, taking players on two separate dark and disturbing paths. We are excited to allow players to decide how to experience the story of Alan Wake 2.”

The ‘real world’…

We Windows users are sometimes the butt of the joke when it comes to cybersecurity issues. Or at least, we often used to be. Still, if I receive one more lecture on why Linux or Mac systems are more secure, I’ll at least have this article to point to. Not always, I shall say. Not always.

Oligo Security’s research team has discovered a “0.0.0.0 Day” vulnerability that affects Google Chrome/Chromium, Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari browsers, enabling websites to communicate with software running on MacOS and Linux systems (via The Hacker News).

The vulnerability means public websites using .com domains are able to communicate with services running on the local network by using the IP address 0.0.0.0 instead of localhost/127.0.0.1.

The good news, if you’re a Windows user at least, is that Microsoft’s OS blocks 0.0.0.0 at a system level. Hooray for the sometimes-rarer-than-we’d-like Microsoft security win. The bad news for the rest of you is that this loophole is said to have been exploitable since 2006, which means it has been an active cybersecurity vulnerability for an astonishing 18 years.

It’s said that the percentage of websites …

Russian media agency Interfax (via The Moscow Times) reports that Steam has complied with a request from Roskomnadzor—Russia’s media regulator—to remove “all materials forbidden in the Russian Federation.”

Steam has, says The Moscow Times, around 9.5 million users in Russia (and all of them have gotten angry at me in Counter-Strike). No doubt the Russian state’s rapidly growing interest in clamping down on western tech and developing its own national “digital sovereignty” has led it to pay close attention to the US-headquartered service.

“Steam has complied with the law’s demands regarding the removal of prohibited information,” Roskomnadzor told Russian media. “Links to 11 internet pages, included earlier on the Registry[of prohibited information] will be excluded from it” over last week. In total, says the regulator, Steam has removed “over 260 materials containing illegal content” in Russia.

The question is, of course, what materials were those? Both Roskomnadzor and Valve have kept schtum about it, the former only referring to them as generic “forbidden materials” and Valve saying, well, nothing at all. I’ve reached out to both Valve and Rosko…