In his new book, historian Michael Livingston explores the real-world myths and legends the author used to construct his epic fantasy series. The post Here’s How Robert Jordan Built ‘The Wheel of Time’ appeared first on WIRED.

India currently doesn’t plan to put restrictions on how much time individuals, including youngsters, spend playing games online, taking a different approach from the neighboring nation China that rocked the local gaming market after enforcing strict new measures last year. From a report: Rajeev Chandrasekhar, India’s minister of state for electronics and information technology, told the lower house of the country’s parliament in a written response that no such proposal is currently under the consideration of the Indian government. New Delhi is aware of the possible risks and challenges surrounding online games, including addiction, violence and financial loss, Chandrasekhar said, but asserted that country’s IT rules already impose obligation on intermediaries to perform due diligence such as ensuring they don’t “host, display, publish, transmit or share any information that is harmful to child.”

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After taking control of the Tomb Raider franchise earlier this year, today Crystal Dynamics announced Amazon Games will publish the next game in the series. From a report: The new Tomb Raider is currently untitled, but Amazon confirmed it will be a multiplatform release and a “single-player, narrative-driven adventure.” We should expect gameplay familiar to the franchise (exploration, puzzles, creative enemy encounters), which Tomb Raider fans will be happy to hear.

Back in April, Crystal Dynamics formed part of the launch of Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 5, and took the opportunity to announce it was just starting development on a new Tomb Raider game. That game will of course use Unreal Engine 5, which should offer some spectacular, super-realistic visuals on PS5, Xbox Series X, and PCs running the latest graphics cards.

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Tesla has launched Steam integration inside its Model S and Model X electric cars with thousands of games now playable. Electrek reports: Today, Tesla launched Steam Beta for Model S and Model X as part of its “holiday update.” We reported all the details of Tesla’s holiday update earlier today for most Tesla vehicles, but the Steam integration is only for the refreshed Model S and Model X produced over the last two years. That’s because Tesla’s two flagship vehicles are equipped with a more powerful entertainment computer designed for video games.

With the unveiling of the new Model S and Model X, Tesla announced the new gaming computer: “Up to 10 teraflops of processing power enables in-car gaming on-par with today’s newest consoles via Tesla Arcade. Wireless controller compatibility allows gaming from any seat.” A known chip leaker, Patrick Schur, posted a diagram of Tesla’s new gaming computer powered by the AMD Navi 23 GPU. The system is integrated and connects directly to two touchscreens inside the Model S and Model X to play games, watch entertainment, and perform other functions. Musk also revealed that the new computer has more storage space to be able to handle more games on the platform at the same time, which is going to be useful to handle your Steam library. The holiday update also brings support for Apple Music, an update to Dog Mode, improvements to Tesla’s “Light Show” feature, and a bunch of smaller features/updates.

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A new patent granted to Apple suggests the company could use satellite communications for more than just getting help in an emergency. 9to5Mac reports: Emergency SOS via Satellite was one of the headline features of September’s Apple event — so much so that the Far Out event name referenced it. The service launched in the US and Canada last month, and was yesterday extended to the UK, France, Germany, and Ireland. More countries will follow. A patent granted on the same day the service expanded to more countries suggests that Apple satellite plans may extend beyond text, and beyond emergency use.

Patently Apple spotted it: “Satellite communications data conveyed by transceivers #28 and antenna radiators #30 may include media data (e.g., streaming video, television data, satellite radio data, etc.), voice data (e.g., telephone voice data), internet data, and/or any other desired data.” Apple has currently committed $450M to support the satellite communications feature, a reasonably sizeable amount of money even by Apple standards for a service that will be of use to a tiny fraction of iPhone owners. But if it’s the start of something more, then the investment could look rather modest.

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The US seized dozens of internet domains and charged six people in a sting intended to bring down a network of cyberattack-for-hire services, the Department of Justice announced on Wednesday. Bloomberg reports: In all, the US obtained a court order to seize 48 websites, and six people were criminally charged in relation to the takedowns, according to federal prosecutors. The FBI was in the process of seizing the websites, officials said Wednesday. The websites were used to launch, or attempt to launch, millions of so-called DDoS attacks around the world, the DOJ said in a statement. Short for distributed-denial-of- service, DDoS attacks direct huge amounts of junk internet traffic at a website or computer network to knock it offline.

DDoS-for-hire services often refer to themselves as “stresser” or “booter” tools that purport to offer a way for individuals to test the resilience of websites and services they operate, according to cybersecurity experts. In reality, the services are often used for harassment, extortion and criminal mischief, they say. The sites seized by the FBI include royalstresser, securityteam and dragonstresser, among others.

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U.S. prosecutors on Wednesday said they have charged eight individuals in a securities fraud scheme, alleging they reaped about $114 million from by using Twitter and Discord to manipulate stocks. Reuters reports: The eight men allegedly purported to be successful traders on the social media platforms and then engaged in a so-called “pump and dump” scheme by hyping particular stocks to their followers with the intent to dump them once prices had risen, according to prosecutors in the Southern District of Texas.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said it has filed related civil charges against the defendants in the scheme, claiming that seven of the defendants used Twitter and Discord to boost stocks. It said the eighth was charged with aiding and abetting the scheme with his podcast. The individuals charged were Texas residents Edward Constantinescu, Perry Matlock, John Rybarczyk and Dan Knight, along with California residents Gary Deel and Tom Cooperman, Stefan Hrvatin of Miami and Mitchell Hennessey of Hoboken, New Jersey.

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“Linus has released the 6.1 kernel,” reports LWN.net — and it’s the one with initial support for kernel development in Rust.
Elsewhere LWN explains the specifics of this milestone:
No system with a production 6.1 kernel will be running any Rust code, but this change does give kernel developers a chance to play with the language in the kernel context and get a sense for how Rust development feels….

There are other initiatives underway, including the writing of an Apple graphics driver in the Rust language. For the initial merge into the mainline kernel, though, Linus Torvalds made it clear that as little functionality as possible should be included. So those drivers and their support code were trimmed out and must wait for a future kernel release. What is there is the support needed to build a module that can be loaded into the kernel, along with a small sample module…. Torvalds asked for something that could do “hello world” and that is what we got. It is something that can be played with, but it cannot be used for any sort of real kernel programming at this point.
That situation will, hopefully, change in the near future.

Meanwhile, Linux 6.1 also includes “support for destructive BPF programs, some significant io_uring performance improvements, better user-space control over transparent huge-page creation, improved memory-tiering support.”

The Register adds:
Other interesting additions include more support for the made-in-China LoongArch CPU architecture, introductory work to support Wi-Fi 7 and security fixes for some flaky Wi-Fi routines in previous versions of the kernel. There’s also plenty of effort to improve the performance of Linux on laptops, and enhanced power efficiency for AMD’s PC-centric RYZEN silicon.

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“Java is no longer among the top three most popular programming languages in the TIOBE Index,” reports the Register, “one of several not particularly definitive yardsticks by which such things are measured.”

According to Paul Jansen, CEO of Netherlands-based TIOBE Software, the rising popularity of C++ has pushed Java down a notch. The index’s rankings are now:
– Python in first place
– C second
– C++ third, and
– Java fourth.

C++ stepped up to third, and Java fell to fourth. “C++ surpassed Java for the first time in the history of the TIOBE Index, which means that Java is at position 4 now,” said Jansen in the December update for the TIOBE Index. “This is the first time that Java is not part of the top 3 since the beginning of the TIOBE Index in 2001.”

The surge in C++, perhaps in part helped by the stable release of C++ 20 in December 2020, is particularly ironic in light of the language’s recent dismissal by Microsoft CTO Mark Russinovich, which coincides with industry evangelism for Rust and its capacity for memory safety.
The article points out that other rankings still show a slighty higher popularity for Java.

And ZDNet notes the other languages rising quickly in popularity over the last 12 months:
In a year-on-year comparison in Tiobe’s index, the languages now in the top 20 that made significant gains over the period are: Rust (up from 27 to 20), Objective-C (up from 29 to 19), science-specialized MATLAB (20 to 14), and Google’s Go language (up from 19 to 12).

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Apple is preparing to allow alternative app stores on its iPhones and iPads, part of a sweeping overhaul aimed at complying with strict European Union requirements coming in 2024. From a report: Software engineering and services employees are engaged in a major push to open up key elements of Apple’s platforms, according to people familiar with the efforts. As part of the changes, customers could ultimately download third-party software to their iPhones and iPads without using the company’s App Store, sidestepping Apple’s restrictions and the up-to-30% commission it imposes on payments. The moves — a reversal of long-held policies — are a response to EU laws aimed at leveling the playing field for third-party developers and improving the digital lives of consumers. For years, regulators and software makers have complained that Apple and Google, which run the two biggest mobile app stores, wield too much power as gatekeepers.

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