Last week’s CrowdStrike outage plunged a noticeable portion of the world into a sea of blue death screens. The cybersecurity company tried to apologize with an Uber Eats gift card but its roll out had some troubles as well, according to a report from TechCrunch.
CrowdStrike apparently tried to send its "teammates and partners" a $10 Uber Eats gift card on Tuesday. The gift card was an attempt to apologize for the global shutdown that locked up computer systems for banks, hospitals, airlines and more and “the additional work that the July 19 incident has caused,” according to TechCrunch’s source who received the message.
When some tried to use the gift card on Uber Eats, they only saw a screen telling them that the offer had been rescinded by the issuing party. CrowdStrike told us that Uber flagged it as a fraud because of high usage rates.
CrowdStrike blamed the global system outage on a bug in an update that contained “problematic data.” The bug forced machines running on Windows into a boot loop that caused mass delays at airports, delayed scheduled surgeries and other operations at hospitals and disruptions at banks and even the London Stock Exchange.
Correction: July 24, 2024, 4:45PM ET: This story originally claimed that Crowdstrike tried to apologize for its recent outage by sending customers an Uber Eats gift card. The company gave us the following statement: "CrowdStrike did not send gift cards to customers or clients. We did send these to our teammates and partners who have been helping customers through this situation. Uber flagged it as fraud because of high usage rates."
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/crowdstrike-offers-a-10-uber-eats-card-to-say-sorry-before-pulling-the-offer-172605510.html?src=rss
Video games are supposed to provide us an escape from the grinding and anger produced on an average day. Now one of the real world’s most contentious aggravations has slithered its way into Fortnite AND Rocket League. The Cybertruck, Tesla’s electric vehicle that replaced the pink Hummer as the official car for total jerks, makes its digital debut in both games today.
The Cybertruck add-ons are part of a new “Summer Road Trip'' promotion bundle for Fortnite and Rocket League. Both bundles come with a vehicle that looks like a door stop and special body decals such as “Baja Off-Road,” “CyberCamo,” “MatteBlack,” “Stainless Steel” and “OMG Cybertruck,” which recreates the window that Elon Musk broke while trying to prove the strength of the Cybertruck’s windows. Did they also include the sticky accelerator?
Psyonix/Tesla
Presumably, the OMG stands for “Oh my God! (Can’t I go one day without seeing that ego on wheels we call the) Cybertruck?" The Baja Off-Road skin paired with the douchey Cybertruck in particular just screams, “I wear a lot of Ed Hardy!”
We have… some questions. Will the rain in Fortnite cause widespread rusting of the chassis? Will the Rocket League ball dent the “shatterproof” window like a metal ball famously did way back in 2019? Will players be able to finish a whole game if there’s another recall alert? If you really must, you can find out in both games now.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-cybertruck-is-coming-to-fortnite-and-rocket-league-because-were-being-punished-210309356.html?src=rss
Microsoft has been taking a lot of hits over its Xbox Game Pass price hike and the overall lackluster offering of games. So to make up for it, they are offering a Call of Duty game for the first time on its virtual buffet. Unfortunately, it’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, one of the lowest rated games in the series.
Calling the reviews for Modern Warfare III “mixed” would be generous.IGN’s Simon Cardy said its single-player campaign was “shallow,” “dull” and “the worst Call of Duty single-player campaign I’ve played.” Jump Dash Roll’s Derek Johnson wrote that its main campaign is “genuinely not worth playing” and its signature Zombies mode “isn’t quite as atrociously terrible as its single-player but that doesn’t mean it’s anything resembling something fun.”
Modern Warfare III won’t be the only Call of Dutygame available for Xbox Game Pass subscribers. Xbox Game Pass will provide day one access to Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 in October. Of course, we don’t know how good the game will be but one imagines it'll garner a bit more favor from critics compared to Modern Warfare III.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/a-call-of-duty-game-is-coming-to-xbox-game-pass-just-not-one-anyone-wants-175255224.html?src=rss
A teenage boy may be responsible for a ransomware attack that shut down MGM Resorts in Las Vegas last year. The West Midlands Police Department in England confirmed that they arrested an unidentified 17-year-old on Thursday from the town of Walsall who allegedly shut down the resort and casino on the Las Vegas strip last year.
The teenager was arrested on suspicion of blackmail and violating the UK’s Computer Misuse Act. He was released on bail, according to a statement from the police department.
Police officials tracked the teenage suspect as part of a joint investigation with the UK’s National Crime Agency and the FBI. The police department said they recovered evidence at the teenager’s address including “a number of digital devices which will undergo forensic examination.”
The statement also said the teenager was part of a “global cyber online crime group” but did not specify which group. The ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware group announced their responsibility for the MGM Resorts cyber outage. The attack happened on Sep. 12, 2023 allegedly with a simple 10 minute phone call to a Help desk employee using information obtained from LinkedIn. The group has also claimed responsibility for a similar ransomware attack on the beauty brand Esteé Lauder.
"All ALPHV ransomware group did to compromise MGM Resorts was hop on LinkedIn, find an employee, then call the Help Desk," the organization wrote in a post on X.
MGM Resorts’ system shutdown lasted for nine days and created a massive outage across all of its casinos on the Las Vegas Strip. News later surfaced that other casinos like Caesars were also targeted by a different group but chose to pay the hackers tens of millions of dollars to prevent private company data from being released.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/police-arrest-a-teenage-boy-in-connection-with-the-mgm-resorts-ransomware-attack-223906246.html?src=rss
Twitch has confirmed that former president and current Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s three-year ban on the gaming stream platform has been reversed. A statement from Twitch confirmed the news about the status of Trump’s ban from the platform.
“We reinstated former President Trump’s Twitch channel,” the statement read. “We believe there is value in hearing from Presidential nominees directly, when possible. Trump is now the official Republican nominee for US President.”
The Amazon-owned platform first issued a temporary suspension on President Trump's account in 2020 for violating its hateful conduct and harassment policies and restored it two weeks later. Twitch disabled the account following the Jan. 6 riot on the US Capitol in 2021 due to “the current extraordinary circumstances and the President’s incendiary rhetoric” before issuing an indefinite suspension two weeks later, according to a Twitch spokesperson.
Four people died and 174 police officers were injured during the attack. Three more police officers involved in the riot died in the days and weeks following Jan. 6, according to the New York Times.
Twitch is the latest Internet platform to lift a ban on one of Trump's accounts. Meta rolled back Trump's restrictions on Facebook and Instagram a week ago.
Trump first joined Twitch in 2019 during his presidential campaign against President Joe Biden. His campaign team used the platform to stream his rallies and other events starting with a stump speech in Minneapolis.
Since then, politics has carved out a notable corner of Twitch with live broadcasts of moments like the recent Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and even its own official category. Pundits and commentators on both sides of the political aisle also regularly broadcast live streams of political events and speeches and host debates on Twitch.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/twitch-restores-former-president-trumps-twitch-account-204327050.html?src=rss
A group of international researchers at the University of Cologne in Germany recently discovered one of the rarest types of black holes in the universe. The researchers were observing a cluster of stars in the vicinity of a supermassive black hole named Sagittarius A (Sgr A) at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. They then discovered signs of an intermediate-mass black hole, a type of black hole that’s sometimes referred to as the “missing link” of black holes, according to NASA.
Black holes range in size from supermassive to primordial and the intermediate sits above primordial in size. They are believed to have formed just after the Big Bang and act as “seeds” for creating supermassive black holes.
The star cluster believed to be the latest intermediate-mass black hole dubbed IRS 13 moved in an orderly pattern when they expected them to be randomly arranged. The researchers concluded that the star cluster had to be interacting with the supermassive black hole and “there must be something inside the cluster for it to be able to maintain its observed compact shape,” according to a statement from the University of Cologne.
Plans are underway to conduct further observations on the intermediate black hole. They will use the James Webb Space Telescope and the Extremely Large Telescope in Chile that’s currently under construction (and yes, that is its real name).
Scientists discovered the first intermediate-mass black hole in 2020 using the Hubble Space Telescope when they found the waves created by its formation. Until then, intermediate-mass black holes were considered to be a “missing link” between stellar-mass and supermassive black holes and could provide more insights on the formation of black holes and the universe.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/another-missing-link-black-hole-discovered-near-the-center-of-the-galaxy-175859313.html?src=rss
One of the founders of the movie ticketing service Fandango has died following an apparent suicide in New York City.
J. Michael Cline, the co-founder of the movie ticket website and service Fandango, died Tuesday after falling from the balcony of a Manhattan hotel in what the medical examiner’s office ruled as a suicide, according to The New York Times.
Cline co-founded Fandango in 2000 with former chief operating officer Art Levitt during the dot-com boom and became one of the biggest online retailers. Fandango launched with seven movie theater chains, according to Variety.
Fandango found success by completely changing the way people went to the movies. Moviegoers didn’t have to wait in long ticket lines only to find out that the 6 PM showing of Battlefield Earth was already sold out. They could purchase their tickets before they even left home and still have time to buy an overpriced box of Milk Duds and a watered down Shasta.
The company’s flashy orange “F” logo also made it one of the most recognizable online brands in the industry. Cline described his company's whimsical sounding name to Variety as “fast and fun” and a “perfect match to a service designed to make going to the movies easier and more enjoyable than ever before.”
Five years after its launch, online movie ticket sites like Fandango and its competitor Movietickets.com sold tickets worth over $30 million in one year. Comcast bought the Fandango brand in 2007 for an undisclosed sum. Fandango also bought some of the Internet’s hottest movie properties such as the aggregated movie review website Rotten Tomatoes in 2017. The movie ticket brand went through subsequent parent sales until it landed with its current owners NBCUniveral and Warner Bros., which expanded the Fandango brand to a streaming service called Fandango at Home as a replacement for Vudu.
Fandango continues to thrive as an online ticket retailer even at a time when movie theaters are seeing a huge slump in sales. During the Barbenheimer craze last summer, Fandango sold 3.5 million tickets alone just to the Oscar nominated and winning films Barbie and Oppenheimer.
Cline left Fandango in 2011 and went on to become the executive chairman of the tech investment firm Juxtapose that helped launch health and wellness companies like Care/of and Corduroy, according to the firm’s website.
Levitt described his former business partner to the New York Times as a formidable entrepreneur who was “a bit of an adventurer” and someone who “saw an opportunity in the market” with Fandango.
In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255 or you can simply dial 988. Crisis Text Line can be reached by texting HOME to 741741 (US), 686868 (Canada), or 85258 (UK). Wikipedia maintains a list of crisis lines for people outside of those countries.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/fandango-co-founder-j-michael-cline-dead-at-64-214725046.html?src=rss
The last couple of Alien movies have been good for the most part but it feels like they’ve been missing the raw, skin-shredding tension of the first few films. The latest trailer for Alien: Romulus looks like the series is headed back to its dark, claustrophobic roots.
Alien: Romulus features a whole new crew of doomed space-trekking souls who encounter the deadly Xenomorph on a derelict spacecraft. This time, it’s a crew of space colonizers who are scavenging for resources from abandoned ships and stations.
This Alienfilm was co-written and directed by Fede Alvarez, the filmmaker behind cult horror flicks such as the two Don’t Breathe movies and the Evil Dead remake. So, yes, Alien: Romulus is gonna be very tense and very, very bloody. Where the original Alien merely strapped a parasitoid xenomorph to a crew member's face, the trailer for Romulus is willing to show a facehugger penetrating some poor guy's head. Yikes.
Alien: Romulus hits theaters on Friday, Aug. 16.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-final-trailer-for-alien-romulus-looks-tense-bloody-and-awesome-191908758.html?src=rss
Serious concerns have been raised about the effect of social media on teenagers’ mental well-being. Meta is letting a group of researchers examine some of Instagram’s data to determine if social media is psychologically damaging younger users.
The Vergereported that the Center for Open Science (COS) is launching a new joint pilot program with Meta to produce independent studies about how social media affects teenagers’ mental health.
The Instagram Data Access Pilot for Well-Being Research program will conduct “independent academic” research using up to six months of Instagram data to determine the “potential positive or negative associations of Instagram use” among teens and young adults. The study will also examine the positive and negative differences of large populations across the world and the causes of “statistical relationships between Instagram and social or emotional health,” according to the program’s website.
The data researchers can access may include an Instagram user’s followers and the accounts they follow, account settings and the amount of time they spend on the photo sharing service. The researchers will not have access to users’ demographic information or the contents of their posts and comments. The data will come from accounts based in 24 countries including the US and UK, according to the request for proposal (RFP).
Other scientific studies conducted by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and New York University and Stanford have found parallel links between social media use and the state of a person’s mental health. The link earned greater awareness last year when Arturo Béjar, a former director of engineering for Protect and Care at Facebook, testified before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee that he alerted the company and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg by email of the dangers their product could have on young people.
Béjar testified that seven days before the hearing, 13 percent of users on Instagram between the ages of 13-15 receive unwanted sexual advances. He also testified that his own 16-year-old daughter exhibited signs of a momentary decline in mental health when a user commented that she should “get back to the kitchen” under one of her posts.
A month before the hearing, 41 states filed a lawsuit against Meta for allegedly misleading the public about the potentially addictive nature of its platforms like Facebook and Instagram among teenagers.
"My experience, after sending that email and seeing what happened afterwards, is that they knew there were things they could do about it, they chose not to do them and we cannot trust them with our children," Béjar said during the hearing. "It's time for Congress to act. The evidence, I believe, is overwhelming."
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/meta-gives-researchers-access-to-instagram-data-for-teen-mental-health-study-204322979.html?src=rss
No Man’s Sky has been sending players on interstellar explorations for more than eight years now, and explorers probably haven’t uncovered a tenth of this computer-generated universe. A huge new update called Worlds Part I expands this already sizable game with a ton of new gadgets, story driven missions and new worlds to discover and explore.
The Worlds Part I update is available now in No Man’s Sky across all consoles as well as PC and Mac. All told, there are over 40 new features, improvements or fixes and additions.
The game already has over 18 quintillion planets but there are a few new types added to this mix. One of the new world types now have “gravitational distortions” that have altered terrains to create floating islands that can be mined, altered or used as a platform to build a new homebase in the sky. No Man’s Sky has also transformed some of its words into “sub-zero” landscapes with new flora, mineral formations and terrains. Some worlds have even generated new forms of life such as plant-animal hybrids with features like “stamen-like whiskers” and “petal-like faces,” according to the official website.
The Worlds Part I update also comes with a bunch of new graphics improvements and features. Hello Games has given pretty much every part of its worlds a new look from the “new volumetric clouds” in the sky to the “high definition water” and “dynamic water” that’s more responsive to wind, depth and weather conditions.
Hello Games
Some planets have visually enhanced atmospheres that can produce familiar weather like rain and snow as well as unusual conditions such as falling ash and ember and storm crystals. The update also provides some engine enhancements to improve the game’s graphics and performance and render environments faster and clearer. There are even new sky and water colors across the universe’s many landscapes and horizons.
The new update isn’t just a cosmetic fix. There’s also some new toys in the game that help you alter planets’ terrains or blow giant holes in your enemies’ spacecraft. The coolest are the Liquidator combat mechs that look like giant Star Wars imperial walkers (if you cut off its head and attached a pair of arms to either side). You can also mount weapons on the arm such as the new Minotaur Flamethrower that can cause “extreme damage at close range.”
A flamethrower will come in handy when you’re engaged in combat in one of the new “walker battles” featuring new, deadly Sentinel units to fight or taking on one of the “vile insect queens” or a hostile beetle (or gentle but still roastable). Once you’ve defeated them, you can turn their carcasses into mounted trophies for your living space. There’s also new biological based accessories you can build including a “Chitin Flight Pack” and an insect based armor set if you want your explorer to look more GWAR-esque.
There’s even a new menu of “strange nutrients” to keep your explorer sated and healthy with ingredients like “nourishing slime,” “syrupy nectar” and “juicy grubs.” These components can create new dishes to consume like “Mucal Doughnuts,” “Seeping Pies” and “Juicy Thoraxes” that make Scottish cuisine sound like items from the French Laundry.
Hello Games
Now that you’ve got new items from your arsenal like bug-based armor and flamethrowers, you can take them out for a test-toast on new story-driven missions like the “Vile Brood Nexus Mission” to eradicate an invasive species. Once you get your Liquidator mech, you can go on a “Bug Hunt Expedition” to exterminate species of giant, dangerous insects and other biological horrors.
Phew, that’s one massive update. No Man’s Sky is known for its huge updates and patches that throw a ton of new stuff into the game’s virtual universe. The Orbital update released in March added new features like a ship editor and a new Guild system. The Echo package generated a new form of mechanical life called the Autophage, multi-tool salvaging and a graphics boost for PlayStationVR 2.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/no-mans-skys-newest-update-is-a-buried-tech-module-full-of-new-goodies-182151743.html?src=rss