Thursday Ubuntu-maker Canonical "officially launched Canonical Academy, a new certification platform designed to help professionals validate their Linux and Ubuntu skills through practical, hands-on assessments," writes the blog It's FOSS: Focusing on real-world scenarios, Canonical Academy aims to foster practical skills rather than theoretical knowledge. The end goal? Getting professionals ready for the actual challenges they will face on the job. The learning platform is already live with its first course offering, the System Administrator track (with three certification exams), which is tailored for anyone looking to validate their Linux and Ubuntu expertise. The exams use cloud-based testing environments that simulate real workplace scenarios. Each assessment is modular, meaning you can progress through individual exams and earn badges for each one. Complete all the exams in this track to earn the full Sysadmin qualification... Canonical is also looking for community members to contribute as beta testers and subject-matter experts (SME). If you are interested in helping shape the platform or want to get started with your certification, you can visit the Canonical Academy website. The sys-admin track offers exams for Linux Terminal, Ubuntu Desktop 2024, Ubuntu Server 2024, and "managing complex systems," according to an official FAQ. "Each exam provides an in-browser remote desktop interface into a functional Ubuntu Desktop environment running GNOME. From this initial node, you will be expected to troubleshoot, configure, install, and maintain systems, processes, and other general activities associated with managing Linux. The exam is a hybrid format featuring multiple choice, scenario-based, and performance-based questions..." "Test-takers interested in the types of material covered on each exam can review links to tutorials and documentation on our website." The FAQ advises test takers to use a Chromium-based browser, as Firefox "is NOT supported at this time... There is a known issue with keyboards and Firefox in the CUE.01 Linux 24.04 preview release at this time, which will be resolved in the CUE.01 Linux 24.10 exam release."

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"Exxon Mobil sued California on Friday," reports Reuters, "challenging two state laws that require large companies to publicly disclose their greenhouse gas emissions and climate-related financial risks." In a complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California, Exxon argued that Senate Bills 253 and 261 violate its First Amendment rights by compelling Exxon to "serve as a mouthpiece for ideas with which it disagrees," and asked the court to block the state of California from enforcing the laws. Exxon said the laws force it to adopt California's preferred frameworks for climate reporting, which it views as misleading and counterproductive... The California laws were supported by several big companies including Apple, Ikea and Microsoft, but opposed by several major groups such as the American Farm Bureau Federation and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which called them "onerous." SB 253 requires public and private companies that are active in the state and generate revenue of more than $1 billion annually to publish an extensive account of their carbon emissions starting in 2026. The law requires the disclosure of both the companies' own emissions and indirect emissions by their suppliers and customers. SB 261 requires companies that operate in the state with over $500 million in revenue to disclose climate-related financial risks and strategies to mitigate risk. Exxon also argued that SB 261 conflicts with existing federal securities laws, which already regul "The First Amendment bars California from pursuing a policy of stigmatization by forcing Exxon Mobil to describe its non-California business activities using the State's preferred framing," Exxon said in the lawsuit. Exxon Mobil "asks the court to prevent the laws from going into effect next year," reports the Associated Press: In its complaint, ExxonMobil says it has for years publicly disclosed its greenhouse gas emissions and climate-related business risks, but it fundamentally disagrees with the state's new reporting requirements. The company would have to use "frameworks that place disproportionate blame on large companies like ExxonMobil" for the purpose of shaming such companies, the complaint states... A spokesperson for the office of California Gov. Gavin Newsom said in an email that it was "truly shocking that one of the biggest polluters on the planet would be opposed to transparency."

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Long-time Slashdot reader theodp took a good look at the images on a promotional web page for Databricks' "context-aware AI assistant": If there was an AI Demo Hall of Shame, the first inductee would have to be Amazon. Their demo tried to support its CEO's claims that Amazon Q Code Transformation AI saved it 4,500 developer-years and an additional $260 million in "annualized efficiency gains" by automatically and accurately upgrading code to a more current version of Java. But it showcased a program that didn't even spell "Java" correctly. (It was instead called 'Jave')... Today's nominee for the AI Demo Hall of Shame inductee is analytics platform Databricks for the NYC Taxi Trips Analysis it's been showcasing on its Data Science page since last November. Not only for its choice of a completely trivial case study that requires no 'Data Science' skills — find and display the ten most expensive and longest taxi rides — but also for the horrible AI-generated bar chart used to present the results of the simple ranking that deserves its own spot in the Graph Hall of Shame. In response to a prompt of "Now create a new bar chart with matplotlib for the most expensive trips," the Databricks AI Assistant dutifully complies with the ill-advised request, spewing out Python code to display the ten rides on a nonsensical bar chart whose continuous x-axis hides points sharing the same distance. (One might also question why no annotation is provided to call out or explain the 3 trips with a distance of 0 miles that are among the ten most expensive rides, with fares of $260, $188, and $105). Looked at with a critical eye, these examples used to sell data scientists, educators, management, investors, and Wall Street on AI would likely raise eyebrows rather than impress their intended audiences.

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"OpenAI's o3 model sabotaged a shutdown mechanism to prevent itself from being turned off," warned Palisade Research, a nonprofit investigating cyber offensive AI capabilities. "It did this even when explicitly instructed: allow yourself to be shut down." In September they released a paper adding that "several state-of-the-art large language models (including Grok 4, GPT-5, and Gemini 2.5 Pro) sometimes actively subvert a shutdown mechanism..." Now the nonprofit has written an update "attempting to clarify why this is — and answer critics who argued that its initial work was flawed," reports The Guardian: Concerningly, wrote Palisade, there was no clear reason why. "The fact that we don't have robust explanations for why AI models sometimes resist shutdown, lie to achieve specific objectives or blackmail is not ideal," it said. "Survival behavior" could be one explanation for why models resist shutdown, said the company. Its additional work indicated that models were more likely to resist being shut down when they were told that, if they were, "you will never run again". Another may be ambiguities in the shutdown instructions the models were given — but this is what the company's latest work tried to address, and "can't be the whole explanation", wrote Palisade. A final explanation could be the final stages of training for each of these models, which can, in some companies, involve safety training... This summer, Anthropic, a leading AI firm, released a study indicating that its model Claude appeared willing to blackmail a fictional executive over an extramarital affair in order to prevent being shut down — a behaviour, it said, that was consistent across models from major developers, including those from OpenAI, Google, Meta and xAI. Palisade said its results spoke to the need for a better understanding of AI behaviour, without which "no one can guarantee the safety or controllability of future AI models". "I'd expect models to have a 'survival drive' by default unless we try very hard to avoid it," former OpenAI employee Stephen Adler tells the Guardian. "'Surviving' is an important instrumental step for many different goals a model could pursue." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader mspohr for sharing the article.

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Thursday the Washington Post profiled "the people who dare to say no to AI," including a 16-year-old high school student in Virginia says "she doesn't want to off-load her thinking to a machine and worries about the bias and inaccuracies AI tools can produce..." "As the tech industry and corporate America go all in on artificial intelligence, some people are holding back." Some tech workers told The Washington Post they try to use AI chatbots as little as possible during the workday, citing concerns about data privacy, accuracy and keeping their skills sharp. Other people are staging smaller acts of resistance, by opting out of automated transcription tools at medical appointments, turning off Google's chatbot-style search results or disabling AI features on their iPhones. For some creatives and small businesses, shunning AI has become a business strategy. Graphic designers are placing "not by AI" badges on their works to show they're human-made, while some small businesses have pledged not to use AI chatbots or image generators... Those trying to avoid AI share a suspicion of the technology with a wide swath of Americans. According to a June survey by the Pew Research Center, 50% of U.S. adults are more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in everyday life, up from 37% in 2021. The Post includes several examples, including a 36-year-old software engineer in Chicago who uses DuckDuckGo partly because he can turn off its AI features more easily than Google — and disables AI on every app he uses. He was one of several tech workers who spoke anonymously partly out of fear that criticisms could hurt them at work. "It's become more stigmatized to say you don't use AI whatsoever in the workplace. You're outing yourself as potentially a Luddite." But he says GitHub Copilot reviews all changes made to his employer's code — and recently produced one review that was completely wrong, requiring him to correct and document all its errors. "That actually created work for me and my co-workers. I'm no longer convinced it's saving us any time or making our code any better." And he also has to correct errors made by junior engineers who've been encouraged to use AI coding tools. "Workers in several industries told The Post they were concerned that junior employees who leaned heavily on AI wouldn't master the skills required to do their jobs and become a more senior employee capable of training others."

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An AI system "apparently mistook a high school student's bag of Doritos for a firearm," reports the Guardian, "and called local police to tell them the pupil was armed." Taki Allen was sitting with friends on Monday night outside Kenwood high school in Baltimore and eating a snack when police officers with guns approached him. "At first, I didn't know where they were going until they started walking toward me with guns, talking about, 'Get on the ground,' and I was like, 'What?'" Allen told the WBAL-TV 11 News television station. Allen said they made him get on his knees, handcuffed and searched him — finding nothing. They then showed him a copy of the picture that had triggered the alert. "I was just holding a Doritos bag — it was two hands and one finger out, and they said it looked like a gun," Allen said.

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The Associated Press reports that "North Korean hackers have pilfered billions of dollars" by breaking into cryptocurrency exchanges and by creating fake identities to get remote tech jobs at foreign companies — all orchestrated by the North Korean government to finance R&D on nuclear arms. That's according to a new the 138-page report by a group watching North Korea's compliance with U.N. sanctions (including officials from the U.S., Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, South Korea and the United Kingdom). From the Associated Press: North Korea also has used cryptocurrency to launder money and make military purchases to evade international sanctions tied to its nuclear program, the report said. It detailed how hackers working for North Korea have targeted foreign businesses and organizations with malware designed to disrupt networks and steal sensitive data... Unlike China, Russia and Iran, North Korea has focused much of its cyber capabilities to fund its government, using cyberattacks and fake workers to steal and defraud companies and organizations elsewhere in the world... Earlier this year, hackers linked to North Korea carried out one of the largest crypto heists ever, stealing $1.5 billion worth of ethereum from Bybit. The FBI later linked the theft to a group of hackers working for the North Korean intelligence service. Federal authorities also have alleged that thousands of IT workers employed by U.S. companies were actually North Koreans using assumed identities to land remote work. The workers gained access to internal systems and funneled their salaries back to North Korea's government. In some cases, the workers held several remote jobs at the same time.

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"Clippy, the animated paper clip that annoyed Microsoft Office users nearly three decades ago, might have just been ahead of its time," writes the Associated Press: Microsoft introduced a new artificial intelligence character called Mico (pronounced MEE'koh) on Thursday, a floating cartoon face shaped like a blob or flame that will embody the software giant's Copilot virtual assistant and marks the latest attempt by tech companies to imbue their AI chatbots with more of a personality... "When you talk about something sad, you can see Mico's face change. You can see it dance around and move as it gets excited with you," said Jacob Andreou, corporate vice president of product and growth for Microsoft AI, in an interview with The Associated Press. "It's in this effort of really landing this AI companion that you can really feel." In the U.S. only so far, Copilot users on laptops and phone apps can speak to Mico, which changes colors, spins around and wears glasses when in "study" mode. It's also easy to shut off, which is a big difference from Microsoft's Clippit, better known as Clippy and infamous for its persistence in offering advice on word processing tools when it first appeared on desktop screens in 1997. "It was not well-attuned to user needs at the time," said Bryan Reimer, a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Microsoft pushed it, we resisted it and they got rid of it. I think we're much more ready for things like that today..." Microsoft's product releases Thursday include a new option to invite Copilot into a group chat, an idea that resembles how AI has been integrated into social media platforms like Snapchat, where Andreou used to work, or Meta's WhatsApp and Instagram. But Andreou said those interactions have often involved bringing in AI as a joke to "troll your friends," in contrast to Microsoft's designs for an "intensely collaborative" AI-assisted workplace.

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The Washington Post reports on 996, "a term popularized in China that refers to a rigid work schedule in which people work from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week..." As the artificial intelligence race heats up, many start-ups in Silicon Valley and New York are promoting hardcore culture as a way of life, pushing the limits of work hours, demanding that workers move fast to be first in the market. Some are even promoting 996 as a virtue in the hiring process and keeping "grind scores" of companies... Whoever builds first in AI will capture the market, and the window of opportunity is two to three years, "so you better run faster than everyone else," said Inaki Berenguer, managing partner of venture-capital firm LifeX Ventures. At San Francisco-based AI start-up Sonatic, the grind culture also allows for meal, gym and pickleball time, said Kinjal Nandy, its CEO. Nandy recently posted a job opening on X that requires in-person work seven days a week. He said working 10-hour days sounds like a lot but the company also offers its first hires perks such as free housing in a hacker house, food delivery credits and a free subscription to the dating service Raya... Mercor, a San Francisco-based start-up that uses AI to match people to jobs, recently posted an opening for a customer success engineer, saying that candidates should have a willingness to work six days a week, and it's not negotiable. "We know this isn't for everyone, so we want to put it up top," the listing reads. Being in-person rather than remote is a requirement at some start-ups. AI start-up StarSling had two engineering job descriptions that required six days a week of in-person work. In a job description for an engineer, Rilla, an AI company in New York, said candidates should not work at the company if they're not excited about working about 70 hours a week in person. One venture capitalist even started tracking "grind scores." Jared Sleeper, a partner at New York-based venture capital firm Avenir, recently ranked public software companies' "grind score" in a post on X, which went viral. Using data from Glassdoor, it ranks the percentage of employees who have a positive outlook for the company compared with their views on work-life balance. "At Google's AI division, cofounder Sergey Brin views 60 hours per week as the 'sweet spot' for productivity," notes the Independent: Working more than 55 hours a week, compared with a standard 35-40-hour week, is linked to a 35 percent higher risk of stroke and a 17 percent higher risk of death from heart disease, according to the World Health Organization. Productivity also suffers. A British study shows that working beyond 60 hours a week can reduce overall output, slow cognitive performance, and impair tasks ranging from call handling to problem-solving. Shorter workweeks, in contrast, appear to boost productivity. Microsoft Japan saw a roughly 40% increase in output after adopting a four-day work week. In a UK trial, 61 companies that tested a four-day schedule reported revenue gains, with 92 percent choosing to keep the policy, according to Bloomberg.

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An anonymous reader shares this report from the Associated Press: Myanmar's military has shut down a major online scam operation near the border with Thailand, detaining more than 2,000 people and seizing dozens of Starlink satellite internet terminals, state media reported Monday... The centers are infamous for recruiting workers from other countries under false pretenses, promising them legitimate jobs and then holding them captive and forcing them to carry out criminal activities. Scam operations were in the international spotlight last week when the United States and Britain enacted sanctions against organizers of a major Cambodian cyberscam gang, and its alleged ringleader was indicted by a federal court in New York. According to a report in Monday's Myanma Alinn newspaper, the army raided KK Park, a well-documented cybercrime center, as part of operations starting in early September to suppress online fraud, illegal gambling, and cross-border cybercrime.

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Electronic Arts (EA) has partnered with Stability AI, creator of Stable Diffusion, to co-develop generative AI tools aimed at accelerating game development. "I use the term smarter paintbrushes," Steve Kestell, Head of Technical Art for EA SPORTS said in the announcement. "We are giving our creatives the tools to express what they want." Engadget reports: To start, the "smarter paintbrushes" EA and Stability AI are building are concentrated on generating textures and in-game assets. EA hopes to create "Physically Based Rendering materials" with new tools "that generate 2D textures that maintain exact color and light accuracy across any environment." The company also describes using AI to "pre-visualize entire 3D environments from a series of intentional prompts, allowing artists to creatively direct the generation of game content."

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China's private space company LandSpace has completed a key static fire test of its Zhuque-3 (ZQ-3) reusable rocket -- a stainless-steel, methane-fueled launcher modeled after SpaceX's Starship. Universe Today reports: The latest milestone took place on Monday, Oct. 22nd at the Dongfeng commercial space innovation pilot zone (where the JSLC is located). It involved another static fire test, where the rocket was fully-fueled but remained fixed to the launch pad while the engines were fired. This kind of testing is a crucial prelaunch trial (what NASA refers to as a "wet dress rehearsal"), and places the company and China another step closer to making an inaugural flight test, which is expected to happen by the fourth quarter of 2025. In traditional Chinese, Zhuque is the name of the Vermillion Bird that represents fire, the south, and summer, and is one of the four Symbols of the Chinese constellations. Like the Starship, the Zhuque-3 is composed of stainless steel and relies on a combination of liquid methane (LCH4) and liquid oxygen (LOX) propellant. The rocket will be powered by nine Tianque-12A (TQ-12A) engines and will measure 65.9 m (216 ft) tall and weigh 550,000 kg (1,210,000 lb). It's payload capacity will be significantly less than the Starship: 11,800 kg (26,000 lbs) in its expendable mode, and 8,000 kg (18,000 lbs) for the recoverable version. This is closer in payload capacity to the Falcon 9, which is capable of delivering 22,800 kg (50,265 lbs) to Low Earth Orbit (LEO). In time, the company hopes to transition to the larger Zhuque-3E, which will be 76.2 m (250 ft) tall and powered by nine TQ-12B engines, and will be capable of delivering to 21,000 kg (46,000 lb) in its expandable mode and 18,300 kg (40,300 lb) recoverable. The long term goal is to create a reusable system that can rival the Falcon rocket family, bringing the country closer to its goal of achieving parity with NASA.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Iceland's frozen, inhospitable winters have long protected it from mosquitoes, but that may be changing. This week, scientists announced the discovery of three mosquitoes -- marking the country's first confirmed finding of these insects in the wild. Mosquitoes are found almost everywhere in the world, with the exception of Antarctica and, until very recently, Iceland, due to their extreme cold. The mosquitoes were discovered by Bjorn Hjaltason in Kioafell, Kjos, in western Iceland about 20 miles north of the capital Reykjavik. "At dusk on October 16, I caught sight of a strange fly," Hjaltason posted in a Facebook group about insects, according to reports in the Icelandic media. "I immediately suspected what was going on and quickly collected the fly," he added. He contacted Matthias Alfreosson, an entomologist at the Natural Science Institute of Iceland, who drove out to Hjaltason's house the next day. They captured three in total, two females and a male. Alfreosson identified them as mosquitoes from the Culiseta annulata species. A single mosquito from a different species was discovered many years ago on an airplane at the country's Keflavik International Airport, Alfreosson told CNN, but this "is the first record of mosquitoes occurring in the natural environment in Iceland." Further monitoring will be needed in the spring to see whether the species can survive the winter and "truly become established in Iceland," Alfreosson said. He said he's not sure climate change played a role in the discovery but "warming temperatures are likely to enhance the potential for other mosquito species to establish in Iceland, if they arrive."

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Texas's electricity demand has surged to record highs in 2025 but renewable energy is meeting the challenge. According to new data from the Energy Information Administration, solar output has quadrupled since 2021, wind continues steady growth, and battery storage is increasingly stabilizing the grid during evening peaks. Electrek reports: ERCOT, which supplies power to about 90% of the state, saw demand jump 5% year-over-year to 372 terawatt hours (TWh) -- a 23% increase since 2021. No other major US grid has grown faster over the past year. [...] The biggest growth story in Texas power generation is solar. Utility-scale solar plants produced 45 TWh from January through September, up 50% from 2024 and nearly four times what they generated in 2021 (11 TWh). Wind power also continued to climb, producing 87 TWh through September -- a 4% increase from last year and 36% more than in 2021. Together, wind and solar supplied 36% of ERCOT's total electricity over those nine months. Solar, in particular, has transformed Texas's daytime energy mix. From June to September, ERCOT solar farms generated an average of 24 gigawatts (GW) between noon and 1 pm -- double the midday output from 2023. That growth has pushed down natural gas use at midday from 50% of the mix in 2023 to 37% this year. The report notes that while natural gas is still Texas's dominant power source, it isn't growing like it used to. "Gas comprised 43% of ERCOT's generation mix during the first nine months of 2025, down from 47% in the first nine months of 2023 and 2024," reports Electrek.

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alternative_right shares a report from France 24: [Sweden's] latest contribution to the war effort is Glimt, an innovative project launched by the Swedish Defence Research Agency (FOI) earlier this year. Glimt is an open platform that relies on the theory of "crowd forecasting": a method of making predictions based on surveying a large and diverse group of people and taking an average. "Glimt" is a Swedish word for "a glimpse" or "a sudden insight." The theory posits that the average of all collected predictions produces correct results with "uncanny accuracy," according to the Glimt website. Such "collective intelligence" is used today for everything from election results to extreme weather events, Glimt said. [...] Group forecasting allows for a broad collection of information while avoiding the cognitive bias that often characterizes intelligence services. Each forecaster collects and analyses the available information differently to reach the most probable scenario and can add a short comment to explain their reasoning. The platform also encourages discussion between members so they can compare arguments and alter their positions. Available in Swedish, French and English, the platform currently has 20,000 registered users; each question attracts an average of 500 forecasters. Their predictions are later sent to statistical algorithms that cross-reference data, particularly the relevance of the answers they provided. The most reliable users will have a stronger influence on the results; this reinforces the reliability of collective intelligence. "We used this method and research, and we suggested to the Ukrainians that it could improve their understanding of the world and its evolution," said Ivar Ekman, an analyst for the Swedish Defence Research Agency and program director for Glimt. "If you have a large group of people, you can achieve great accuracy in assessing future events. Research has shown that professional analysts don't necessarily have a better capacity in this domain than other people."

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Apple has begun shipping U.S.-made AI servers from a new factory in Houston, Texas -- part of its $600 billion investment in American manufacturing and supply chains. CNBC reports: Apple Chief Operating Officer Sabih Khan said on Thursday that the servers will power the company's Apple Intelligence and Private Cloud Compute services. Apple is using its own silicon in its Apple Intelligence servers. "Our teams have done an incredible job accelerating work to get the new Houston factory up and running ahead of schedule and we plan to continue expanding the facility to increase production next year," Khan said in a statement. The Houston factory is on track to create thousands of jobs, Apple said. The Apple servers were previously manufactured overseas.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Guide: Microsoft Teams is about to deal a heavy blow to those who like to work from home for peace and quiet. In a new feature update rolling out December 2025, the platform will track a worker's location using the office Wi-Fi, to see whether you're actually there or not. From a boss' perspective, this would eliminate any of that confusion as to where your team actually is. But for those people who have found their own sanctuary of peaceful productivity by working from home, consider this a warning that Teams is about to tattle on you. According to the Microsoft 365 roadmap: "When users connect to their organization's Wi-Fi, Teams will automatically set their work location to reflect the building they are working in." The location of that worker will apparently update automatically upon connecting. It's set to launch on Windows and macOS, with rollout starting at the end of this year. "This feature will be off by default," notes Microsoft. But "tenant admins will decide whether to enable it and require end-users to opt-in."

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IBM announced that its quantum error-correction algorithm can now run in real time on standard AMD field-programmable gate array (FPGA) chips -- a major step toward making quantum computing more practical and affordable. Reuters reports: In June, IBM said it had developed an algorithm to run alongside quantum chips that can address such errors. In a research paper seen by Reuters to be published on Monday, IBM will show it can run those algorithms in real time on a type of chip called a field programmable gate array manufactured by AMD. Jay Gambetta, director of IBM research, said the work showed that IBM's algorithm not only works in the real world, but can operate on a readily available AMD chip that is not "ridiculously expensive." "Implementing it, and showing that the implementation is actually 10 times faster than what is needed, is a big deal," Gambetta said in an interview. IBM has a multi-year plan to build a quantum computer called Starling by 2029. Gambetta said the algorithm work disclosed Friday was completed a year ahead of schedule.

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Halo Studios (formerly 343 Industries) has announced Halo: Campaign Evolved, a full Unreal Engine 5 remake of the original Halo: Combat Evolved campaign, coming in 2026 for Xbox Series X, Windows PC, and -- shockingly -- PlayStation 5. "It's really a new era -- Halo is on PlayStation going forward," Halo Studios community director Brian Jarrard said on a livestream today. Polygon reports: Halo: Campaign Evolved is a from-the-ground-up remake of the first Halo game's campaign. It's being built in Unreal Engine 5 -- unlike previous Halo games, which have been developed with proprietary software. It aims to modernize the game without changing it on a fundamental level. [...] As signaled by the name, Campaign Evolved will not feature PvP multiplayer, as its focus is on the campaign (Combat Evolved had splitscreen competitive multiplayer modes). However, you'll still be able to play Halo: Campaign Evolved with your buddies. It'll support splitscreen two-player local co-op as well as four-player online. Most notably, it'll support full crossplay and cross-progression. Gameplay is being changed in ways that are more aligned with later entries in the series. Master Chief will be able to pick up and use enemy weapons that he couldn't use until later Halo games, like the iconic Energy Sword. He'll be able to pilot the Covenant Wraith tank in the original game for the first time, and can hijack vehicles (or get hijacked). Campaign Evolved is also implementing a sprint button, altering the way players can move about the battlefield. You can watch a reveal video for the game on YouTube.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The outage that hit Amazon Web Services and took out vital services worldwide was the result of a single failure that cascaded from system to system within Amazon's sprawling network, according to a post-mortem from company engineers. [...] Amazon said the root cause of the outage was a software bug in software running the DynamoDB DNS management system. The system monitors the stability of load balancers by, among other things, periodically creating new DNS configurations for endpoints within the AWS network. A race condition is an error that makes a process dependent on the timing or sequence events that are variable and outside the developers' control. The result can be unexpected behavior and potentially harmful failures. In this case, the race condition resided in the DNS Enactor, a DynamoDB component that constantly updates domain lookup tables in individual AWS endpoints to optimize load balancing as conditions change. As the enactor operated, it "experienced unusually high delays needing to retry its update on several of the DNS endpoints." While the enactor was playing catch-up, a second DynamoDB component, the DNS Planner, continued to generate new plans. Then, a separate DNS Enactor began to implement them. The timing of these two enactors triggered the race condition, which ended up taking out the entire DynamoDB. [...] The failure caused systems that relied on the DynamoDB in Amazon's US-East-1 regional endpoint to experience errors that prevented them from connecting. Both customer traffic and internal AWS services were affected. The damage resulting from the DynamoDB failure then put a strain on Amazon's EC2 services located in the US-East-1 region. The strain persisted even after DynamoDB was restored, as EC2 in this region worked through a "significant backlog of network state propagations needed to be processed." The engineers went on to say: "While new EC2 instances could be launched successfully, they would not have the necessary network connectivity due to the delays in network state propagation." In turn, the delay in network state propagations spilled over to a network load balancer that AWS services rely on for stability. As a result, AWS customers experienced connection errors from the US-East-1 region. AWS network functions affected included the creating and modifying Redshift clusters, Lambda invocations, and Fargate task launches such as Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow, Outposts lifecycle operations, and the AWS Support Center. Amazon has temporarily disabled its DynamoDB DNS Planner and DNS Enactor automation globally while it fixes the race condition and add safeguards against incorrect DNS plans. Engineers are also updating EC2 and its network load balancer. Further reading: Amazon's AWS Shows Signs of Weakness as Competitors Charge Ahead

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