Think Back. 8.1.2019 pic.twitter.com/StlbA42Cwj

— Fortnite (@FortniteGame) July 28, 2019

Look Forward. 8.1.2019 pic.twitter.com/NSKq5diQrN

— Fortnite (@FortniteGame) July 29, 2019

The Nintendo Switch Lite has been officially revealed and all is well, but remember the months leading up to its announcement when nearly every other day brought fresh rumours and “leaks” with varying levels of believability? It was a tough time to run a Nintendo site, we can tell you.

Well, as it turns out, one of these “leaks” actually turned out to be real, but no one seemed to believe it at the time. Reddit user Thraxmo has shared the following tweet from @PiranhaCapital, which dates back to 17th April and appeared to show a case for the console. The original replies are full of people doubting the image’s validity, as you’d expect.

As you can see, the case bears a striking resemblance to the upcoming console and even features the exact same shade of blue featured on one of the launch models. The tweet notes how the case is the same length as the original Switch with one Joy-Con attached, which also turned out to be correct.

We always advise against fully believing in rumours and leaks, and we would have done exactly the same seeing this image back in April, but it’s funny how – every now and then, at least – someone on the internet does actually stumble across a legitimate piece of information ahead of time.

If you’re thinking of picking up a Switch Lite, this handy guide should come in useful.

This game cropped up on the eShop last week, but covering it is a little tough – you see, we’re really not supposed to talk about it. However, if you agree to keep shtum we’ll disregard the first two rules of the club and clue you lovely people in on it.

Coming from Italian developer Corvo Studio, Animal Fight Club has you building an army from the finest members of the animal kingdom before heading out to take on all comers in single or multiplayer modes. It appears to have simple hack and slash (or ‘gnaw-and-claw’, if you will) gameplay where you chip away at opposing armies to find out who rules the roost.

Each animal has strengths and weaknesses against other types as you might expect. The game launched back in April on PC (the above trailer is for that version) and looking at the info on the game’s Nintendo website listing, we can see that it also includes a Mission editor enabling you to ‘”create new missions with custom armies, waves, maps and music!”

It has to be said that the battle environments look a little drab, and the animation is functional rather than fantastic, but the opportunity to combine disparate animals and create strange creatures like a veterinarian Victor Frankenstein sure sounds tempting – we’ve always wondered how a sharkaroo would do in a fight against a flamingoat.

The game is currently available for a mere $2.59 down from its standard $3.99 (UK folks will have to fork out the full £3.99, though), so if fusing animals like Jeff Goldblum with his machine from The Fly sounds like your sort of fun, you might want to head over to the eShop.

Sure looks goaty to us! Have you played game on PC? What are the weirdest animal concoctions you can come up with? Let us know with a maniacal little comment below.

As organizations pursue digital transformation by connecting vital equipment or creating new connected products, IoT deployments will get bigger and more common. In fact, IDC forecasts that IoT will continue to grow at double digit rates until IoT spending surpasses $1 trillion in 2022. As these IoT deployments come online, newly connected devices will expand the attack surface available to attackers, creating opportunities to target the valuable data generated by IoT.

Organizations understand the risks and are rightly worried about IoT. Bain’s research shows that security concerns are the top reason organizations have slowed or paused IoT rollouts*. Because IoT requires integrating many different technologies (heterogenous devices must be linked to IoT cloud services that connect to analytics services and business applications), organizations face the challenge of securing both the pieces of their IoT solution and the connections between those pieces. Attackers target weak spots; even one weak device configuration, cloud service, or admin account can provide a way into your solution. Your organization must monitor for threats and misconfigurations across all parts of your IoT solution: devices, cloud services, the supporting infrastructure, and the admin accounts who access them.

To give your organization IoT threat protection and security posture management across your entire IoT solution, we’re announcing the general availability of Azure Security Center for IoT. Azure Security Center allows you to protect your end-to-end IoT deployment by identifying and responding to emerging threats, as well as finding issues in your configurations before attackers can use them to compromise your deployment. As organizations use Azure Security Center for IoT to manage their security roadblocks, they remove the barriers keeping them from business transformation:

“With Azure Security Center for IoT, we can both address very real IoT threat models with the velocity of Azure and gain management control over the fastest scaling part of our business, which allows me to focus on delivering outcomes rather than hot fixing devices.” – Alex Kreilein, CISO RapidDeploy

Building secure IoT solutions with Azure Security Center

Securing IoT is challenging for many reasons: IoT deployments are complicated, creating opportunity for integration errors that attackers can exploit; IoT devices are heterogenous and often lack proper security measures; organizations may not have the skillsets or SecOps headcount to take on a new IoT security workload; and IoT deployments are difficult to monitor using traditional IT security tools. When organizations choose Microsoft for their IoT deployments, however, they get secure-by-design devices and services such as Azure Sphere and IoT Hub, end-to-end integration and monitoring from device to cloud, and the expertise from Microsoft and our partners to build a secure solution that meets their exact use case.

Azure Security Center for IoT builds on Microsoft’s secure-by-design IoT services with threat protection and security posture management designed for securing entire IoT deployments, including Microsoft and 3rd party devices. Azure Security Center is the first IoT security service from a major cloud provider that enables organizations to prevent, detect, and help remediate potential attacks on all the different components that make up an IoT deployment: from small sensors, to edge computing devices and gateways, to Azure IoT Hub, and on to the compute, storage, databases, and AI/ML workloads that organizations connect to their IoT deployments. This end-to-end protection is vital to secure IoT deployments. Although devices may be a common target for attackers, the services that store your data and the admins who manage your IoT solution are also valuable targets.

As IoT threats evolve due to creative attackers analyzing the new devices, use cases, and applications the industry creates, Microsoft’s unique threat intelligence, sourced from the more than 6 trillion signals that Microsoft collects every day, keeps your organization ahead of attackers. Azure Security Center creates a list of potential threats, ranked by importance, so security pros and IoT admins can remediate problems across devices, IoT services, connected Azure services, and the admins who use them.

Azure Security Center also creates ranked lists of possible misconfigurations and insecure settings, allowing IoT admins and security pros to fix the most important issues in their IoT security posture first. To create these security posture suggestions, Azure Security Center draws from Microsoft’s unique threat intelligence, as well as the industry standards. Customers can also port their data into SIEMs such as Azure Sentinel, allowing security pros to combine IoT security data with data from across the organization for artificial intelligence or advanced analysis.

Organizations can monitor their entire IoT solution, stay ahead of evolving threats, and fix configuration issues before they become threats. When combined with Microsoft’s secure-by-design devices, services, and the expertise we share with you and your partners, Azure Security Center for IoT provides an important way to reduce the risk of IoT while achieving your business goals.

Next steps

*Used with permission from Bain & Company

By AppleInsider Staff
Monday, July 29, 2019, 07:12 pm PT (10:12 pm ET)

Apple this week posted a pair of images to its regional website in Japan teasing what appears to be plans to open two new brick-and-mortar stores in the country later this year.

The company recently updated its retail webpage with cycling banner graphics publicizing renovations at Apple Omotesando and two stylized Apple logos potentially representing plans to open new locations sometime in 2019.

Apple has in the past used artistic renderings of its trademark logo to promote retail operations in Asia, including store renovations and grand openings in Japan and China. In Japan, the general motif sees the Apple logo precede Japanese kanji characters that denote the store’s location.

In early 2018, for example, the company teased a then-upcoming shop in Shinjuku with logo art reminiscent of neon lights, a nod to the bustling Tokyo ward’s rich nightlife. Later that year, Apple advertised the impending opening of its Kyoto location with a stylized logo set off against a traditional patchwork pattern.

Not much is known about the forthcoming outlets beyond the two teaser images on Apple’s website. One version shows off the logo in a series of four lines with gradated colors that borrow from Apple’s classic rainbow branding, while the other hints at an orange sun reflecting off an arrangement of progressively thin slats. Beneath both logos sits text that translates to “planned for 2019.”

It can be speculated that one of the new designs relates to a rumored store thought to be under construction at the base of the Mitsubishi building next to Tokyo Station in the capital’s Marunouchi district. Apple’s line drawing might pay homage to the multiple train and subway stops lines that converge in the area, each of which bears a different color on official city maps.

Apple is quickly building out its physical presence in Japan. Last year, former retail chief Angela Ahrendts announced a five-year plan to reinvest in the market with new brick-and-mortar locations and a series of renovations. The company currently operates eight locations across the country.

Amazon have just released beta 1.20 of their Lumberyard game engine.  The release contains over 200 improvements, fixes and features with the biggest features being every day quality of life changes.  The lead two features are improved Asset Processor performance as well as performance improvements to the Event Bus system.

Highlight features from the release notes:

Asset Processor

Event Bus (EBus) System

EBus performance improvements have reduced the overhead of invoking functions through the EBus API by at least 20% in most cases. Using EBuses to send events between different game systems and components now performs closer to that of calling the event as a raw function call, thus reducing update time.

Audio

Audio has the following new features:

• Wwise External Sources – You can now use the Wwise external audio source feature to specify a loose collection of audio files to be played back dynamically.

  Note

  The Wwise External Sources feature isn’t supported in Wwise LTX.

• Audio System Component – You can now perform audio operations at a global scope (as opposed to entity scope).

• Input Streaming Support – You can now stream data from a variety of input sources for playback by the audio system. For example, you can play back the audio stream from a video file.

• Sound Duration – You can now obtain the duration of a sound at runtime by registering with the AudioTriggerNotificationBus function and overriding the ReportDurationInfo function.

• Setting the Panning Mode – You can now use the Wwise SetPanningMode method to shift panning between speaker mode (60 degrees) and headphone mode (180 degrees).

Animation Editor

The Animation Editor has the following new feature:

• Interrupting Transitions – You can now interrupt a transition that is in progress with another transition and smoothly blend into the new state. With this feature, you can quickly blend towards a new state without waiting for a transition to complete. A purple line shows the transition being interrupted. A green line shows the new transition in progress. The ability to interrupt a transition is useful when you want to rapidly interrupt a character attack with another attack, or interrupt a jump with a run forward motion.

Mobile

Mobile has the following new feature:

PhysX

The PhysX system has the following new features:

• PhysX Force Region Component – You can use the PhysX Force Region component to specify a region to apply physical force to entities. The component applies force at each frame to any entity that is in the bounds of the region. For example, if an entity moves into the force region of a sphere, force is applied to the entity.

  For more information, see the PhysX Force Region component in the Amazon Lumberyard User Guide.

• In Script Canvas, you can obtain the value of the net force exerted on an entity by using the On Calculate Net Force method of the PhysX Force Region Generation Notifications node. This callback is invoked when the force region calculates the net force exerted on an object.

In somewhat belated news, Amazon also released Project N.E.M.O, a complete demo game showcasing how to use slices and script canvas.  This is the source of the game data in the video below.

GameDev News CryEngine

Click Here!

Ah, GoldenEye 007. If you owned a copy of this N64 classic during your youth, you probably also have an ample supply of nostalgic memories to go alongside it, as well as a few angry ones aimed at your friends who chose to play as Oddjob.

What you probably don’t have, though, is the ability to say that you’ve completed the game firing just one bullet. We wouldn’t have thought the feat possible in all honesty, but Ryan White, better known in the speedrunning community as ‘Goose’, has done exactly that.

Ryan’s detailed how it all comes together in this video below. For the most part, it turns out you’re able to use speedrunning techniques to simply charge your way through each level and bypass the guards in your way, or at the very least lure them into dropping mines. Certain levels are much more tricky than others – especially when extra goals such as collecting key cards are involved – but using the trusty ‘Slappers Only’ playstyle of whacking everything that moves with a quick hand chop is usually super effective.

So what about that one bullet? Well, as you can see above, the one essential shot in the game’s campaign actually comes in the very first level. In the Dam level, you’ll come up against a padlock on a gate towards the very end; Ryan says that there’s simply no other way of breaking that lock, even if you make the guards shoot at it.

If you’re up for something a little different, why not fire up your copy and see if you can pull this off? Or maybe you could try beating the game’s first level using just a piano?