Today marks one year since Deep Rock Galactic, our co-op first, dwarven mining space shooter, launched as a console exclusive on Xbox Game Preview. Developing Deep Rock Galactic alongside our community has been, and continues to be a truly awesome experience  and we have to thank each and every miner who has joined the initiative this past year. I wanted to take this opportunity to look back at our first year on the platform, update you on today’s in-game festivities, and give an insight into our experience working on Deep Rock in open development.

To celebrate our first birthday, we’ve released an update that encourages all of our space mining dwarves to let loose and party on the Space Rig, the homebase for all personnel currently in the service of Deep Rock Galactic. We’ve decorated the Space Rig with festive dressing, introduced a time-limited one-year celebration hat to the Gear Shop and called for an all day long happy hour in the Abyss Bar, meaning all beverages are half price! Outside of our one-year celebrations, the update also introduces weekly assignments where miners can earn hefty bonuses in credits and minerals, and 13 new items of stylish headgear. Today’s festive update marks the 22nd update we’ve introduced into Deep Rock Galactic since alpha testing began.

We’ve been constantly introducing regular updates to Deep Rock Galactic that have brought new biomes, new monsters, new weapons and tech, new game modes and endless technical improvements to continue refining the game. From day one we’ve worked extremely closely and transparently with our community to deliver the game developments and content that they want to see. We’ve never wanted anyone on the team to feel like should hide anything from the community so we don’t have any kind of approval process for social posts etc. as we want our players to know they’re part of the production.

As well as being constantly engaged with the Deep Rock Galactic community, we also have more systematic ways of gathering player feedback that helps make sure we’re not missing anything. We have an in-game survey that players can fill out, and we’re also beginning to do on-site testing to monitor the experiences of new miners, and we monitor reddit and other social channels very closely. When we release a new build, we often join random games with a Dev-tag inside the game and talk to players directly, so keep an eye out for us!

Whilst open development has been an amazing system for us, it does present challenges. Being in constant communication with your community takes time, and whilst it’s absolutely worth it, we could have done with a dedicated Community Manager early on. We also need to ensure we have a constant stream of assets that we can release with immediacy as updates happen to keep the community engaged. It can also be tricky to do larger system/feature updates, we prefer to integrate smaller updates to be released every 3-6 weeks to maintain visibility and feedback.

Outside of constant feedback, our approach to open development has also meant we’ve built an amazing network of die-hard fans who act as spokesdwarves for Deep Rock Galactic. Our players know they’re being listened to and can have a direct impact on the development of the game which builds very high levels of trust. This has also come with some amazing opportunities, our QA is partly done by the community and we’ve also used community-driven localizations from fans passionate about making Deep Rock accessible to their region. Having our community play such an integral and continuous part of development is also a constant morale booster to the team through positive engagement on social media.

We’re so proud of what we’ve achieved this past year with Deep Rock Galactic, and open development has meant we’ve been able to work collaboratively and transparently with our community to keep improving the game. We still have a lot that we want to deliver, and we’re so excited to keep building Deep Rock Galactic together in the run-up to full release.

Hopefully see you for half price drinks at the Abyss Bar!

Alien Escape is set to launch on Nintendo Switch this “spring/summer” and an announcement trailer has been shared to show off its gameplay (check it out above).

The game tasks players with thinking in 360 degrees, solving challenges inside a dark tower. You play as a group of aliens who have been kidnapped and jailed; the puzzles are your means of escape, but you’ll have to do a whole lot more than just jumping and running to get out.

You’ll need to keep in mind each stage’s rotation, using gravity and various objects in each room to work your way around. “Gravity, fire, water and a lot more” are all present to throw you off course and, as the game’s press release states, “you have to think around the corner”.

We’ve got some screenshots for you to check out below:

Do you like the look of this one? Will you be keeping an eye out for it appearing on the eShop? Let us know in the comments below.

Outlaws of the Old West is Now Available on Steam Early Access and is 25% off!*

Outlaws of the Old West is a massively multiplayer survival MMO with a huge world, thousands of items and a modular building system. Survive the wild, build your own homestead, defeat villainous bandits and work with others to tame the Wild West.

*Offer ends March 19 at 10AM Pacific Time

We’re slowly entering the “bug fixing and polishing” phase of the 1.14 Village & Pillage update, but that didn’t stop us from sneaking in a few cool features like Leather Horse Armor (it’s dyeable!), making Invisiblity Potions actually useful in survival, and best of all… wait, oh dear, I’ve forgotten what that last thing was. Oh well, it’ll come to me later. 

A full summary of the content available in this snapshot can be found in the changelog on Minecraft.net.

• One Iron Golem now spawns in all villages upon generation
• Improvements to invisibility to allow it to correctly work in many cases where it didn’t but you’d expect it to
• Added Leather Horse Armor
• Textures for potion effects are now split into individual files
• Command parser now accepts ' as string quotes. Inside '-quoted string " is handled as normal character and requires no escaping (and vice-versa) – so now it’s easier to input text components in NBT.
• Stopped foxes, dolphins, and pandas from having armor equipped onto them via dispenser
• Changed bounding box and eye height of foxes (prevents them from drowning when swimming)
• Foxes that trusted you in the previous snapshot will unfortunately no longer be trusting

LEATHER HORSE ARMOR

• Added a new armor type for horses
• Dye it in lots, yes LOTS, of different colors

To get snapshots, open your launcher and go to the “launch options” tab. Check the box saying “Enable snapshots” and save. To switch between the snapshot and normal version, you can find a new dropdown menu next to the “Play” button. Back up your world first or run the game on in a different folder (In the “launch options” page).

Please report any and all bugs you find in Minecraft to bugs.mojang.com.

Snapshots can corrupt your world, please backup and/or run them in a different folder from your main worlds. 

Share your thoughts on how 1.14 is shaping up in the comments below!

Drifter scowled at a notch on his glaive as he buffed the blade with a heavy cloth. A large attaché case rested heavily at his feet.

He and Joxer were back aboard the Derelict. The Titan held his head in his hands. His glowing armor suffused the room with a blood-red warmth.

“Cheer up, brother,” Drifter said. “That didn’t go too bad.”

“Three Guardians are dead,” Joxer replied, looking up to stare straight at the rogue Lightbearer.

“That’s right,” Drifter quipped, continuing to clean his weapon. “In the dirt. Never comin’ back. Their Ghosts got sloppy. You give Taken the chance and they’ll snuff out your Light. The fact that you’re alive means your Ghost knows what he’s doin’.”

“You said this was a test run.”

“Where do you think you are? The Crucible? Gambit Prime is for keeps, test or no.”

“You son of a—”

“Leave the name-calling to me, hotshot. Let’s wrap up this debrief and get you paid.”

“You could’ve helped them.”

Drifter stood, slamming the butt of his freshly polished glaive on the attaché case at his feet. 

“You got yourself out,” he said, leaning on the weapon. “You didn’t need help.”

“You could’ve stopped those Taken. You could’ve saved them all.”

“I paid you to try on that armor. How’s it treating you?”

Joxer was silent. “It worked exactly like you said it would,” he finally responded. “I invaded the other side. The armor locked the Bank down, and I took their Motes right out of it, like they were mine.” He looked down at the deck. “We wiped them out.”

“Yes. Yes, you did,” Drifter said, nodding along fiercely with each detail.

“You’re giving everyone a set of these?”

“If they can build it themselves. I’ll gladly provide the engram prints.” He half-smiled. “Your fireteam—may they rest in peace—they help you out?”

Joxer took his helmet off, rubbed his eyes. “We didn’t use names, just like you told us. The… the Warlock watched our Bank.”

“Like a one-man private security company,” Drifter nodded.

“He always seemed to know where the other Invader was.”

“A Sentry worth their salt always does.”

“And the Hunter. She was a beast. Tore those Cabal up like they were made of paper.”

“Your team’s Reaper,” Drifter clarified. “She’s like you, a born killer. But specializing in the enemies of humanity. Your Collector’s best friend.”

“Yeah, the Collector, one squirrely Titan. Hid a lot, grabbed a bunch of Motes.”

Drifter snickered. “You thought he was useless, didn’t ya?”

Joxer sighed. “‘Til he dropped the meanest Taken I’ve ever seen on the enemy side.”

“Brother, if you manage to summon a giant blocker?” Drifter shook his head, grinning. “That thing’s gotta eat.”

“We had them. We gutted the opposing team. It’s just…” The Titan stopped speaking. He didn’t lift his head, still staring at the deck.

“The Primeval,” Drifter said, with a touch of… pride?

“That Primeval took us apart.”

Drifter shrugged. “You found one that matched your strength. Lesson learned. Make sure your Ghost stays on his toes.”

“They’re all dead,” Joxer said again.

“Yeah, in a town full of immortals,” Drifter said. “Who’da thought? Their cut goes to you. And a little extra to keep, you know, the details outta sight from the Vanguard.”

The rogue Lightbearer kicked the attaché case across the deck. Joxer picked it up without opening it.

“More where that came from, if you want the work,” Drifter said, leaning on his glaive again.

“You’re on your own.” Joxer stood and walked past the Drifter. He left the chamber, massive case in tow.

“You can keep the armor,” Drifter called after him, not bothering to turn around.

As the Titan’s footsteps echoed down the hall towards the Derelict’s hangar, a Ghost emerged from a dark alcove.

“How much data did you pick up?” Drifter asked.

The Ghost’s eye glowed a dark red as it projected patterns across the metal deck: scrolling streams of statistics and figures for each candidate in their roles. Three Ghost-feeds hung in the air, playing on loop. Each one restarted as the same massive Taken came into focus.

Drifter took it all in, his eyes reflecting the blood-red of his Ghost’s Light. His smile was all teeth.

The Linux Foundation has launched the Red Team Project, which incubates open source cybersecurity tools to support cyber range automation, containerized pentesting utilities, binary risk quantification, and standards validation and advancement.

The Red Team Project’s main goal is to make open source software safer to use. They use the same tools, techniques, and procedures used by malicious actors, but in a constructive way to provide feedback and help make open source projects more secure.

We talked with Jason Callaway, Customer Engineer at Google, to learn more about the Red Team project.

Linux Foundation: Can you briefly describe the Red Team project and its history with the Fedora Red Team SIG?

Jason Callaway: I founded the Fedora Red Team SIG with some fellow Red Hatters at Def Con 25. We had some exploit mapping tools that we wanted to build, and I was inspired by Mudge and Sarah Zatko’s Cyber-ITL project; I wanted to make an open source implementation of their methodologies. The Fedora Project graciously hosted us and were tremendous advocates. Now that I’m at Google, I’m fortunate to get to work on the Red Team as my 20% Project, where I hope to broaden its impact and build a more vendor neutral community. Fedora is collaborating with LF, supports our forking the projects, and will have a representative on our technical steering committee.

LF: What are some of the short- and long-term goals of the project?

Jason: Our most immediate goal is to get back up and running. That means migrating GitHub repos, setting up our web and social media presence, and most importantly, getting back to coding. We’re forming a technical steering committee that I think will be a real force multiplier in helping us to stay focused and impactful. We’re also starting a meetup in Washington DC that will alternate between featured speakers and hands-on exploit curation hackathons on a two-week cadence.

LF: Why is open source important to the project?

Jason: Open source is important to us in many ways, but primarily because it’s the right thing to do. Cybersecurity is a global problem that impacts individuals, businesses, governments, everybody. So we have to make open source software safer.

There are lots of folks working on that, and in classic open source fashion, we’re standing on the shoulders of giants. But the Red Team Project hopes to offer some distinctly offensive value to open source software security.

LF: How can the community learn more and get involved?

Jason: I used to have a manager who liked to say, “80% of the job is just showing up.” It was tongue-in-cheek for sure, but it definitely applies to open source projects. To learn more, you can attend our meetups either in person or via Google Hangout, subscribe to our mailing list, and check out our projects on GitHub or our website.

This article originally appeared at The Linux Foundation

By Roger Fingas
Wednesday, March 13, 2019, 12:57 pm PT (03:57 pm ET)

Apple on Wednesday confirmed its recent takeover of Laserlike, a Silicon Valley startup that applied machine learning to content discovery.

The firm was actually absorbed sometime last year, The Information said. It’s not clear what the terms of the deal were, or why exactly Apple would want the business.

Laserlike was active for four years and concentrated on an “interest search engine” that could fetch news, video, and general Web content relative to each user. A key assumption was that people may want to know about things that don’t necessarily pop up in their usual sources, such as a car recall or an upcoming music festival. The app for the engine is no longer available.

A possibility is that Apple will use Laserlike’s technology and/or staff to boost its own machine learning efforts. Siri, for instance, has been criticized as weaker than rival AI assistants from Amazon and Google, which have the advantage of being hooked into massive amounts of cloud data. Apple’s privacy stance has siloed Siri in many cases, and wherever possible it relies on on-device processing.

The technology could also be applied to services like Apple News. A paid subscription option, Apple News Magazines, should be announced at a March 25 press event alongside a video streaming service, which itself will need recommendations to spur viewing.

The Laserlike crew has reportedly joined Apple’s AI division, led by John Giannandrea, who was hired away from Google in 2018. His unit oversees the strategy for AI and Machine Learning across all Apple products, as well as the development of Core ML and Siri.

More recently Giannandrea kicked Bill Stasior out of Siri development, allegedly to steer work towards research and away from evolutionary upgrades. It’s unknown if Stasior has been replaced.

By Joe Robinson 13 Mar 2019