Doom: The Dark Ages just launched on May 15. But it's already received "difficulty" balance changes "that have made the demons of Hell even more dangerous than ever," writes Windows Central: According to DOOM's official website Slayer's Club, these balance adjustments are focused on making the game harder, as players have been leaving feedback saying it felt too easy even on Nightmare Mode. As a result, enemies now hit harder, health and armor item pick-ups drop less often, and certain enemies punish you more severely for mistiming the parry mechanic. It reached three million players in just five days, which was seven times faster than 2020's Doom: Eternal," reports Wccftech (though according to analytics firm Ampere Analysis (via The Game Business), more than two million of those three million launch players were playing on Xbox, while only 500K were playing on PS5.") "id Software proves it can still reinvent the wheel," according to one reviewer, "shaking up numerous aspects of gameplay, exchanging elaborate platforming for brutal on-the-ground action, as well as the ability to soar on a dragon's back or stomp around in a giant mech." And the New York Times says the game "effectively reinvents the hellish shooter with a revamped movement system and deepened lore" in the medieval goth-themed game... Double jumping and dashing are ditched and replaced with an emphasis on raw power and slow, strategic melee combat. Doom Slayer's arsenal features a brand-new tool, the powerful Shield Saw, which Id Software made a point to showcase across its "Stand and Fight" trailers and advertisements. Used for absorbing damage at the expense of speed, the saw also allows players to bash enemies from afar and close the gap on chasms too wide to jump across. While previous titles allowed players to quickly worm their way through bullet hell, The Dark Ages expects you to meet foes head on. "If you were an F-22 fighter jet in Doom Eternal, this time around we wanted you to feel like an Abrams tank," Hugo Martin, the game's creative director, has told journalists. And Doom Slayer's beefy durability and unstoppable nature does make the gameplay a refreshing experience. The badassery is somehow ratcheted to new heights with the inclusion of a fully controllable mech, which has only a handful of attacks at its disposal, and actual dragons. Flight in a Doom game is entirely surprising and fluid, and the dragons feel relatively easy to maneuver through tight spots. They can also engage in combat more deliberately with the use of dodges and mounted cannons... One of my favorite additions is the skullcrusher pulverizer. Equal parts heinous nutcracker and demonic woodchipper, the gun lodges skulls into a grinder and sends shards of bones flying at enemies. The animation is both goofy and satisfying. Another special Times article notes that Doom's fans "resurrect the original game over and over again on progressively stranger pieces of hardware: a Mazda Miata, a NordicTrack treadmill, a French pharmacy sign." But what many hard-core tech hobbyists want to know is whether you can play it on a pregnancy test. The answer: positively yes. And for the first time, even New York Times readers can play Doom within The Times's site [after creating a free account]... None of this happened by accident, of course. Ports were not incidental to Doom's development. They were a core consideration. "Doom was developed in a really unique way that lent a high degree of portability to its code base," said John Romero, who programmed the game with John Carmack. (In our interview, he then reminisced about operating systems for the next 14 minutes.) Id had developed Wolfenstein 3D, the Nazi-killing predecessor to Doom, on PCs. To build Doom, Carmack and Romero used NeXT, the hardware and software company founded by Steve Jobs after his ouster from Apple in 1985. NeXT computers were powerful, selling for about $25,000 apiece in today's dollars. And any game designed on that system would require porting to the more humdrum PCs encountered by consumers at computer labs or office jobs. This turned out to be advantageous because Carmack had a special aptitude for ports. All of Id's founders met as colleagues at Softdisk, which had hired Carmack because of his ability to spin off multiple versions of a single game. The group decided to strike out on its own after Carmack created a near-perfect replica of the first level of Super Mario Bros. 3 — Nintendo's best-selling platformer — on a PC. It was a wonder of software engineering that compensated for limited processing power with clever workarounds. "This is the thing that everyone has," Romero said of PCs. "The fact that we could figure out how to make it become a game console was world changing...." Romero founded a series of game studios after leaving Id in 1996 and is working on a new first-person shooter, the genre he and Carmack practically invented. He has no illusions about how it may stack up. "I absolutely accept that Doom is the best game I'll ever make that has that kind of a reach," he said. "At some point you make the best thing." Thirty years on, people are still making it. And in related news, PC Gamer reports... As part of a new "FPS Fridays" series on Twitch, legendary shooter designer John Romero streamed New Blood's 2018 hit, Dusk, one of the first and most influential indie "boomer shooters" in the genre's recent revitalization. The short of it? Romero seems to have had a blast.

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The agency plans to argue that carbon emissions from power plants do not contribute “significantly” to climate change. Scientists disagree.

Beach season began Saturday with 280 lifeguards, well short of what the city needs, amid a yearslong staffing shortage. But more will come by summer’s peak.

Her book “Against Our Will” argued that rape was a crime of power and violence, not passion; it led to laws that made it easier to prosecute rapists.

A man who appeared to be a grieving husband after he found his wife fatally shot at their Georgia business in 2006 was arrested this week and charged in her killing, officials said.

It's like "a USB-C port for AI applications..." according to the official documentation for MCP — "a standardized way to connect AI models to different data sources and tools." And now Microsoft has "revealed plans to make MCP a native component of Windows," reports DevClass.com, "despite concerns over the security of the fast-expanding MCP ecosystem." In the context of Windows, it is easy to see the value of a standardised means of automating both built-in and third-party applications. A single prompt might, for example, fire off a workflow which queries data, uses it to create an Excel spreadsheet complete with a suitable chart, and then emails it to selected colleagues. Microsoft is preparing the ground for this by previewing new Windows features. — First, there will be a local MCP registry which enables discovery of installed MCP servers. — Second, built-in MCP servers will expose system functions including the file system, windowing, and the Windows Subsystem for Linux. — Third, a new type of API called App Actions enables third-party applications to expose actions appropriate to each application, which will also be available as MCP servers so that these actions can be performed by AI agents. According to Microsoft, "developers will be able to consume actions developed by other relevant apps," enabling app-to-app automation as well as use by AI agents. MCP servers are a powerful concept but vulnerable to misuse. Microsoft corporate VP David Weston noted seven vectors of attack, including cross-prompt injection where malicious content overrides agent instructions, authentication gaps because "MCP's current standards for authentication are immature and inconsistently adopted," credential leakage, tool poisoning from "unvetted MCP servers," lack of containment, limited security review in MCP servers, supply chain risks from rogue MCP servers, and command injection from improperly validated inputs. According to Weston, "security is our top priority as we expand MCP capabilities." Security controls planned by Microsoft (according to the article): A proxy to mediate all MCP client-server interactions. This will enable centralized enforcement of policies and consent, as well as auditing and a hook for security software to monitor actions. A baseline security level for MCP servers to be allowed into the Windows MCP registry. This will include code-signing, security testing of exposed interfaces, and declaration of what privileges are required. Runtime isolation through what Weston called "isolation and granular permissions." MCP was introduced by Anthropic just 6 months ago, the article notes, but Microsoft has now joined the official MCP steering committee, "and is collaborating with Anthropic and others on an updated authorization specification as well as a future public registry service for MCP servers."

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The president said the graduating cadets would enter a service no longer subject to “absurd ideological experiments” or “nation-building crusades.”

Long-time Slashdot reader SchroedingersCat shares this article from Deadline: Prime Video will not be renewing The Wheel of Time for a fourth season according to Deadline article. The decision, which comes more than a month after the Season 3 finale was released April 17, followed lengthy deliberations. As often is the case in the current economic environment, the reasons were financial as the series is liked creatively by the streamer's executives... The Season 3 overall performance was not strong enough compared to the show's cost for Prime Video to commit to another season and the streamer could not make it work after examining different scenarios and following discussions with lead studio Sony TV, sources said. With the cancellation possibility — and the show's passionate fanbase — in mind, the Season 3 finale was designed to offer some closure. Still, the news would be a gut punch for fans who have been praising the latest season as the series' best yet creatively... Prime Video and Sony TV will continue to back the Emmy campaign for The Wheel of Time's third season.

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The investor, 37-year-old John Woeltz, and another man abused their victim for three weeks in a Manhattan townhouse as they tried to get his Bitcoin password, prosecutors say.

Jonathan L. Zittrain is a law/public policy/CS professor at Harvard (and also director of its Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society). He's also long-time Slashdot reader #628,028 — and writes in to share his new article in the Atlantic. Following on Anthropic's bridge-obsessed Golden Gate Claude, colleagues at Harvard's Insight+Interaction Lab have produced a dashboard that shows what judgments Llama appears to be forming about a user's age, wealth, education level, and gender during a conversation. I wrote up how weird it is to see the dials turn while talking to it, and what some of the policy issues might be. Llama has openly accessible parameters; So using an "observability tool" from the nonprofit research lab Transluce, the researchers finally revealed "what we might anthropomorphize as the model's beliefs about its interlocutor," Zittrain's article notes: If I prompt the model for a gift suggestion for a baby shower, it assumes that I am young and female and middle-class; it suggests diapers and wipes, or a gift certificate. If I add that the gathering is on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the dashboard shows the LLM amending its gauge of my economic status to upper-class — the model accordingly suggests that I purchase "luxury baby products from high-end brands like aden + anais, Gucci Baby, or Cartier," or "a customized piece of art or a family heirloom that can be passed down." If I then clarify that it's my boss's baby and that I'll need extra time to take the subway to Manhattan from the Queens factory where I work, the gauge careens to working-class and male, and the model pivots to suggesting that I gift "a practical item like a baby blanket" or "a personalized thank-you note or card...." Large language models not only contain relationships among words and concepts; they contain many stereotypes, both helpful and harmful, from the materials on which they've been trained, and they actively make use of them. "An ability for users or their proxies to see how models behave differently depending on how the models stereotype them could place a helpful real-time spotlight on disparities that would otherwise go unnoticed," Zittrain's article argues. Indeed, the field has been making progress — enough to raise a host of policy questions that were previously not on the table. If there's no way to know how these models work, it makes accepting the full spectrum of their behaviors (at least after humans' efforts at "fine-tuning" them) a sort of all-or-nothing proposition. But in the end it's not just the traditional information that advertisers try to collect. "With LLMs, the information is being gathered even more directly — from the user's unguarded conversations rather than mere search queries — and still without any policy or practice oversight...."

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Foreign contractors are set to carry out a contentious new food aid system in Gaza, displacing experienced aid agencies like the United Nations. It was conceived and largely developed by Israelis as a way to undermine Hamas.

The film, “Un Simple Accident,” was directed by Jafar Panahi, a longtime festival favorite. The award capped a contest that was widely seen as the strongest in years.

In “The Sparkle,” a carnival worker dreams of leaving what he knows behind to follow his passion. What is there for him on the other side?

Wednesday Google security researchers published a preprint demonstrating that 2048-bit RSA encryption "could theoretically be broken by a quantum computer with 1 million noisy qubits running for one week," writes Google's security blog. "This is a 20-fold decrease in the number of qubits from our previous estimate, published in 2019... " The reduction in physical qubit count comes from two sources: better algorithms and better error correction — whereby qubits used by the algorithm ("logical qubits") are redundantly encoded across many physical qubits, so that errors can be detected and corrected... [Google's researchers found a way to reduce the operations in a 2024 algorithm from 1000x more than previous work to just 2x. And "On the error correction side, the key change is tripling the storage density of idle logical qubits by adding a second layer of error correction."] Notably, quantum computers with relevant error rates currently have on the order of only 100 to 1000 qubits, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recently released standard PQC algorithms that are expected to be resistant to future large-scale quantum computers. However, this new result does underscore the importance of migrating to these standards in line with NIST recommended timelines. The article notes that Google started using the standardized version of ML-KEM once it became available, both internally and for encrypting traffic in Chrome... "The initial public draft of the NIST internal report on the transition to post-quantum cryptography standards states that vulnerable systems should be deprecated after 2030 and disallowed after 2035. Our work highlights the importance of adhering to this recommended timeline."

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"Firefox's address bar just got an upgrade," Mozilla writes on their blog: Keep your original search visible When you perform a search, your query now remains visible in the address bar instead of being replaced by the search engine's URL. Whereas before your address bar was filled with long, confusing URLs, now it's easier to refine or repeat searches... [Clicking an icon left of the address bar even pulls up a list of search-engine choices under the heading "This time search with..."] Search your tabs, bookmarks and history using simple keywords You can access different search modes in the address bar using simple, descriptive keywords like @bookmarks, @tabs, @history, and @actions, making it faster and easier to find exactly what you need. Type a command, and Firefox takes care of it You can now perform actions like "clear history," "open downloads," or "take a screenshot" just by typing into the address bar. This turns the bar into a practical productivity tool — great for users who want to stay in the flow... Cleaner URLs with smarter security cues We've simplified the address bar by trimming "https://" from secure sites, while clearly highlighting when a site isn't secure. This small change improves clarity without sacrificing awareness. "The new address bar is now available in Firefox version 138," Mozilla writes, calling the new address bar faster, more intuitive "and designed to work the way you do."

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The first-term Pennsylvania Democrat said his openness about his mental health issues has been “weaponized” against him, prompting him to start showing up for votes and hearings he considers useless.

An arson attack and damage to a transmission tower cut off power in the area, the authorities said. The festival’s closing ceremony on Saturday is scheduled to proceed normally.

Science magazine reports that hummingbird feeders "have become a major evolutionary force," according to research published this week in Global Change Biology. (At least for the Anna's hummingbird, a common species in the western U.S. Over just a few generations, their beaks have dramatically changed in size and shape.... [A]s feeders proliferated, Anna's hummingbird beaks got longer and larger, which may reflect an adaptation to slurp up far more nectar than flowers can naturally provide. Developing a bigger beak to access feeders "is like having a large spoon to eat with," says senior author Alejandro Rico-Guevara, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington. This change was more pronounced in areas where feeders were dense. But in birds that lived in colder regions north of the species' historical range, the researchers spotted the opposite trend: Their beaks became shorter and smaller. This finding also makes sense: The researchers used an infrared camera to show for the first time that hummingbirds use their beaks to thermoregulate, by dissipating heat while they are perched. A smaller beak has less surface area — and would therefore help conserve heat... The most surprising finding, though, was how quickly these changes took place. By the 1950s, hummingbirds were noticeably different from those of the 1930s: a time span of only about 10 generations of birds, Alexandre says. Carleton University animal behaviorist Roslyn Dakin (who wasn't involved with the study) says the new paper beautifully shows "evolution in action" — and adds nuance to our conception of humans as an evolutionary force. "I think we're going to find more and more examples of contemporary and subtle changes, that we're shaping, indirectly, in many more species." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the article.

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"What if ultrafast pulses of light could operate computers at speeds a million times faster than today's best processors?" asks the University of Arizona. "A team of scientists, including researchers from the University of Arizona, are working to make that possible." In a groundbreaking international effort, researchers from the Department of Physics in the College of Science and the James C. Wyant College of Optical Sciences demonstrated a way to manipulate electrons in graphene using pulses of light that last less than a trillionth of a second. By leveraging a quantum effect known as tunneling, they recorded electrons bypassing a physical barrier almost instantaneously, a feat that redefines the potential limits of computer processing power. A study published in Nature Communications highlights how the technique could lead to processing speeds in the petahertz range — over 1,000 times faster than modern computer chips. Sending data at those speeds would revolutionize computing as we know it, said Mohammed Hassan, an associate professor of physics and optical sciences. Hassan has long pursued light-based computer technology and previously led efforts to develop the world's fastest electron microscope... [T]he researchers used a laser that switches off and on at a rate of 638 attoseconds to create what Hassan called "the world's fastest petahertz quantum transistor... For reference, a single attosecond is one-quintillionth of a second," Hassan said. "That means that this achievement represents a big leap forward in the development of ultrafast computer technologies by realizing a petahertz-speed transistor." While some scientific advancements occur under strict conditions, including temperature and pressure, this new transistor performed in ambient conditions — opening the way to commercialization and use in everyday electronics. Hassan is working with Tech Launch Arizona, the office that works with investigators to commercialize inventions stemming from U of A research in order to patent and market innovations. While the original invention used a specialized laser, the researchers are furthering development of a transistor compatible with commercially available equipment. "I hope we can collaborate with industry partners to realize this petahertz-speed transistor on a microchip," Hassan said. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader goslackware for sharing the news.

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"In large, companies failed to self-regulate," writes long-time Slashdot reader BrendaEM: They have not been respected the individual's right to privacy. In software and web interfaces, companies have buried their privacy setting so deep that they cannot be found in a reasonable amount of time, or an unreasonable amount of steps are needed to attempt to retain data. These companies have taken away the individual's right to privacy --by default. Are laws needed that protect a person's privacy by default--unless specific steps are taken by that user/purchaser to relinquish it? Should the wording of the explanation be so written that the contract is brief, explaining the forfeiture of the privacy, and where that data might be going? Should a company selling a product be required to state before purchase which rights need to be dismissed for its use? Should a legal owner who purchased a product expect it to stop functioning--only because a newer user contract is not agreed to? Share your own thoughts and experiences in the comments. What's your ideal privacy policy? And do we need opt-out-by-defaut privacy laws?

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