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NASA's remotely-piloted Ikhana aircraft flew in public airspace for the first time without a chase aircraft. Typically, one follows the large drone when it flies in parts of the sky zoned for use by commercial and private pilots, but the FAA granted the space agency a waiver to test out several key technologies they've been developing for years detect and avoid other aircraft. They wanted to know if this baby bird could fly on its own among piloted planes, and it passed the test. The Ikhana took off from Edwards Air Force Base in California and transitioned through several air traffic control jurisdictions and spent time in multiple altitude zones (up to 20,000 feet for commercial aviation, down to 10,000 feet for general aviation) to make sure its remote pilot could navigate and coordinate with ground operations just like he was in the drone's cockpit...

Cyberpunk 2077 looks fantastic. It's a joy to be able write those words, and it's a relief that they ring so true. CD Projekt Red, the studio behind the Witcher series, has been remarkably silent since revealing Cyberpunk in 2012 -- developers released one teaser trailer in 2013 and then went underground, leaving sci-fi and RPG fans in the dark for five long years. At E3 2018, they finally turned on the light. And, my oh my , what a sight it is. The light happens to be neon, shining bright blue, green, pink, red, purple and yellow across the sprawling, metallic future of Night City. Cyberpunk offers a fresh kind of sci-fi dystopia, ditching the heavy, dreary backgrounds of Blade Runner or Deus Ex for a brighter, yet still corrupt and dangerous, metropolis. This art direction alone infuses the game with life -- it feels more connected to reali...

If publishers think Facebook would give them an exemption from its new political ad disclosure policy , they have another thing coming. The social network's Campbell Brown has rejected calls for publisher exemptions to th e "paid for" label in a blog post, arguing that equal treatment is necessary to ensure the policy works. It would "go against our transparency efforts," Brown said, and would be ripe for abuse. A "bad actor" could hide its identity by claiming to be a publisher, and news outlets can take definite political stances. Brown also denied allegations that this was a "criticism or judgment" of publishers. It's just meant to encourage "more informed consumption," he said. This isn't likely to satisfy publishers who've seen their ads and promoted posts vanish and have sometimes turned...

Two point-and-click titles from Tim Schafer's studio Double Fine Productions will be coming to the Nintendo Switch. The first, Grim Fandango Remastered , is a revised version of the classic title for modern platforms that came out in 2015, while the two - part Broken Age marked Schafer's triumphant return to adventure games. Double Fine didn't announce when either would come to the Switch. We are excited to say that we're working on bringing Grim Fandango Remastered and Broken Age to Nintendo Switch! #e32018 pic.twitter.com/R26Whl58bh — Double Fine (@DoubleFine) June 13, 2018 The announcement came alongside a night of performances commemorating Grim Fandango 's 20th anniversary. The original voice cast assembled for a live reading of a slice of the game's script backed by music from the title's soundtrack composer Peter McCon...

Mozilla may be working on a voice-controlled platform of its own. A listing for an all-hands internal meeting appeared about what seems like a new project: Scout. "With the Scout app, we start to explore browsing and consuming content with voice," it read. It's very unclear what the platform may or may not end up doing, as the meeting is focused on technical requirements for a "voice browser" that would, as a stated example, be able to read users an article about polar bears. Whatever it is, Scout is likely at a very early stage. "This talk will discuss the architecture and key components needed for a voice platform, the required capabilities of those components and the challenges of working with the limitations and confines of existing platforms," the listing read. It's unclear when (or if) we'll hear more about it. When r...

China and the US are the world's leading sources of distributed denial-of-service botnet attacks. via Dark Reading: https://ift.tt/2LOTpF4 If New feed item from http://www.darkreading.com/rss/all.xml , then send

Antarctica is losing ice at an increasingly rapid rate, according to a new study published today in Nature . More than 80 researchers from 42 international organizations presented findings that show between 2012 and 2017, Antarctica's ice sheet lost 219 billion tons of ice per year -- triple the rate prior to 2012. Between 1992 and 2017, ice losses in the region contributed to a global sea level rise of 7.6 millimeters, with forty percent of that rise occurring in the last five years alone. The global research team analyzed 24 satellite-based estimates of Antarctic ice sheet mass to calculate these rates. "We took all the estimates across all the different techniques, and we got this consensus," Isabella Velicogna, a professor at the University of California, Irvine and an author of the study, told the Washington Post . "According to our analysis, t...

If you're going to be playing Fornite for hours at a time, you need a headset that not only sounds good, but is also super comfy. Alienware revealed its Wireless Gaming Headset last week ahead of E3, but today I got to briefly test its merits. I'll admit when I first saw it last week, I wasn't blown away with the overall design. But as I would find out on the show floor, the company built a solid and capable gaming accessory here. Like a lot of gaming headsets, Alienware's latest looks big and bulky. Despite that overall appearance, the Wireless Gaming Headset is actually quite lightweight. Indeed, there isn't a lot of extra heft to it, a quality that will go a long way in keeping you comfortable during longer sessions. The soft cushy earpads are also wrapped in a moisture-wicking sports mesh material. The company combined all of that wit...

We here at The Verge have tried to warn everyone about smart locks, particularly smart locks that rely on fingerprints for authentication . The TappLock is one such lock that was crowdfunded on Indiegogo and is now available to buy. And unsurprisingly, it's incredibly easy to physically and virtually hack. YouTuber JerryRigEverything proved that he could pull the lock apart using just a sticky GoPro mount, while cybersecurity company PenTest Partners found that the actual code and digital authentication methods for the lock were basically nonexistent. All someone would need to unlock the lock is its Bluetooth Low Energy MAC address, which the lock itself broadcasts. Essentially, the lock doesn't encrypt any of its data, leaving anyone... Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts https://ift.tt/2JAGWZ1 ...