Posted by from MMO Champion
Mythic+ Dungeon Adjustments - April 26, 2024
Originally Posted by Blizzard
(
Blue Tracker /
Official Forums)
With hotfixes that are now live, we’ve made the following adjustments to Mythic+ dungeons:
Uldaman: Legacy of Tyr
Timer increased by 1 minute.
Neltharus
Chargath, Bane of Scales
Fiery Focus’s Fire damage reduced by 25%.
Posted by BeauHD from Slashdot
From the would-you-look-at-that department: The free tax filing pilot from the IRS that rolled out in 12 states last month saved filers an estimated $5.6 million in tax preparation fees for federal returns, said IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel. CNBC reports: This season, more than 140,000 taxpayers successfully filed returns using IRS Direct File, a free tax filing pilot from the IRS, according to the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the IRS. Direct File surveyed more than 15,000 users, around 90% of whom rated their experience as "excellent," the agencies reported.
"We have not made a decision about the future of Direct File," Werfel said, noting the agency still needs to analyze data and get feedback from a "wide variety of stakeholders." The IRS plans to release a more detailed report about the Direct File pilot "in the coming days," he added. If Direct File were expanded for the next season, the program could add additional states and tax situations, according to a senior IRS official. The agency expects to decide the future of Direct File later this spring, Werfel said.
Posted by BeauHD from Slashdot
From the moving-away-from-Microsoft department: Tobias Mann reports via The Register: Canadian systems builder 45 Drives is perhaps best known for the dense multi-drive storage systems employed by the likes of Backblaze and others, but over the last year the biz has expanded its line-up to virtualization kit, and now low-power clients and workstations aimed at enterprises and home enthusiasts alike. 45 Drives' Home Client marks a departure from the relatively large rack-mount chassis it normally builds. Founder Doug Milburn told The Register the mini PC is something of a passion project that was born out of a desire to build a better home theater PC.
Housed within a custom passively cooled chassis built in-house by 45 Drive's parent company Protocase, is a quad-core, non-hyperthreaded Intel Alder Lake-generation N97 processor capable of boosting to 3.6GHz, your choice of either 8GB or 16GB of memory, and 250GB of flash storage. The decision to go with a 12-gen N-series was motivated in part by 45 Drives' internal workloads, Milburn explains, adding that to run PowerPoint or Salesforce just doesn't require that much horsepower. However, 45 Drives doesn't just see this as a low-power PC. Despite its name, the box will be sold under both its enterprise and home brands. In home lab environments, these small form factor x86 and Arm PCs have become incredibly popular for everything from lightweight virtualization and container hosts to firewalls and routers. [...]
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Posted by BeauHD from Slashdot
From the take-private-deals department: An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Darktrace is set to go private in a deal that values the U.K.-based cybersecurity giant at around $5 billion. A newly formed entity called Luke Bidco Ltd., formed by private equity giant Thoma Bravo, has tabled an all-cash bid of $7.75 per share, which represents a 44% premium on its average price for the three-month period ending April 25. However, this premium drops to just 20% when juxtaposed against Darktrace's closing price Thursday, as the company's shares had risen 20% to 5.18 pounds in the past month.
Founded out of Cambridge, U.K., in 2013, Darktrace is best known for AI-enabled threat detection smarts, using machine learning to identify abnormal network activity and attempts at ransomware attacks, insider attacks, data breaches and more. The company claims big-name customers including Allianz, Airbus and the city of Las Vegas. After raising some $230 million in VC funding and hitting a private valuation of $1.65 billion, Darktrace went public on the London Stock Exchange in April 2021, with an opening-day valuation of $2.4 billion. Its shares hit an all-time high later that year of 9.45 pounds and plummeted to an all-time low of 2.29 pounds last February. But they had been steadily rising since the turn of the year and hadn't fallen below 4 pounds since the beginning of March.
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Posted by msmash from Slashdot
From the ticket-closed department: A judge has dismissed a lawsuit brought by superconductivity physicist Ranga Dias against his employer, the University of Rochester in New York. From a report: In February, a university investigation found that he had committed scientific misconduct by, among other things, fabricating data to claim the discovery of superconductors -- materials with zero electrical resistance -- at room temperature. Dias filed the lawsuit against the university for allegedly violating his academic freedom and conducting a biased investigation into his work.
On 19 April, Monroe County Supreme Court justice Joseph Waldorf denied Dias's petitions and dismissed the lawsuit as premature. The matter "is not ripe for judicial review," Waldorf wrote, because, although Rochester commissioned an independent review that found Dias had committed misconduct, it has not yet finished taking administrative action. The university provost has recommended that Dias be fired, but a final decision is still forthcoming. A spokesperson for the university said Rochester was "pleased" with the justice's ruling, and reiterated that its investigation was "carried out in a fair manner" and reached a conclusion that it thinks is correct.
Nature's news team reported on Rochester's investigation previously: three scientists external to the university conducted a 10-month probe into 16 allegations against Dias and determined that the physicist had committed plagiarism, and data fabrication and falsification related to four scientific papers, including two published in Nature. Normally, the details of the investigation would probably have remained confidential. But in response to Dias's lawsuit, the university submitted the entire report as a court exhibit, making it public.
Posted by msmash from Slashdot
From the growing-trend department: The head of Britain's domestic intelligence agency warned the country's leading research universities on Thursday that foreign states are targeting their institutions and imperilling national security. The Record: "We know that our universities are being actively targeted by hostile actors and need to guard against the threat posed to frontier research in the most sensitive sectors," said the deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden, who also attended the briefing. The threat requires "further measures," said the deputy PM, who announced that the government was launching a consultation with the sector so it could "do more to support our universities and put the right security in place to protect their cutting-edge research."
The briefing was delivered by Ken McCallum, the director general of MI5, alongside Dowden and the National Cyber Security Centre's interim chief executive, Felicity Oswald. It was made to the vice-chancellors of the Russell Group, a collective of the country's 24 leading universities. Among the range of measures being considered is having MI5, the domestic security agency, carry out security vetting on key researchers involved in a "small proportion of academic work, with a particular focus on research with potential dual uses in civilian and military life."
Posted by msmash from Slashdot
From the growing-concern department: Noise pollution from traffic stunts growth in baby birds, even while inside the egg, research has found. From a report: Unhatched birds and hatchlings that are exposed to noise from city traffic experience long-term negative effects on their health, growth and reproduction, the study found. "Sound has a much stronger and more direct impact on bird development than we knew before," said Dr Mylene Mariette, a bird communication expert at Deakin University in Australia and a co-author of the study, published in the journal Science. "It would be wise to work more to reduce noise pollution."
A growing body of research has suggested that noise pollution causes stress to birds and makes communication harder for them. But whether birds are already distressed at a young age because they are affected by noise, or by how noise disrupts their environment and parental care, was still unclear. Mariette's team routinely exposed zebra finch eggs for five days to either silence, soothing playbacks of zebra finch songs, or recordings of city traffic noises such as revving motors and cars driving past. They did the same with newborn chicks for about four hours a night for up to 13 nights, without exposing the birds' parents to the sounds.
Posted by from MMO Champion
This Week in WoW - April 26, 2024
Originally Posted by Blizzard
(
Blue Tracker /
Official Forums)
Catch up on all the latest World of Warcraft news from the last week—mark your calendars for the next content update for
Dragonflight—Dark Heart, take a dive into Dragonflight Season 4, learn more about the
Cataclysm Classic Pre-Expansion, and more!
Dark Heart and WoW Remix: Mists of Pandaria Ahead
Mark your calendars for the release of the next content update for Dragonflight—Dark Heart—on May 7 and for the World of Warcraft Remix: Mists of Pandaria event on May 16 at 10:00 a.m. PDT globally!
Dragonflight: Dark Heart
The Dark Heart content update launches, May 7 and ushers in the final chapter of the Dragonflight expansion setting the stage for the story in the upcoming expansion, The War Within™.
Draenei and Troll characters can also embark on new questlines to lay claim to their new heritage armors, Kul Tiran Humans can select from six new hair colors, maximum-level characters will gain access to all Dragonflight quests regardless of Renown—and more.
World of Warcraft Remix: Mists of Pandaria
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Posted by msmash from Slashdot
From the blast-from-the-past department: A now-abandoned USB worm that backdoors connected devices has continued to self-replicate for years since its creators lost control of it and remains active on thousands, possibly millions, of machines, researchers said Thursday. ArsTechnica: The worm -- which first came to light in a 2023 post published by security firm Sophos -- became active in 2019 when a variant of malware known as PlugX added functionality that allowed it to infect USB drives automatically. In turn, those drives would infect any new machine they connected to, a capability that allowed the malware to spread without requiring any end-user interaction. Researchers who have tracked PlugX since at least 2008 have said that the malware has origins in China and has been used by various groups tied to the country's Ministry of State Security.
For reasons that aren't clear, the worm creator abandoned the one and only IP address that was designated as its command-and-control channel. With no one controlling the infected machines anymore, the PlugX worm was effectively dead, or at least one might have presumed so. The worm, it turns out, has continued to live on in an undetermined number of machines that possibly reaches into the millions, researchers from security firm Sekoia reported. The researchers purchased the IP address and connected their own server infrastructure to "sinkhole" traffic connecting to it, meaning intercepting the traffic to prevent it from being used maliciously. Since then, their server continues to receive PlugX traffic from 90,000 to 100,000 unique IP addresses every day.
Posted by msmash from Slashdot
From the very-annoying department: Captchas that aim to distinguish humans from nefarious bots are demanding more brain power. WSJ: The companies and cybersecurity experts who design Captchas have been doing all they can to stay one step ahead of the bad actors figuring out how to crack them. A cottage industry of third-party Captcha-solving firms -- essentially, humans hired to solve the puzzles all day -- has emerged. More alarmingly, so has technology that can automatically solve the more rudimentary tests, such as identifying photos of motorcycles and reading distorted text. "Software has gotten really good at labeling photos," said Kevin Gosschalk, the founder and CEO of Arkose Labs, which designs what it calls "fraud and abuse prevention solutions," including Captchas. "So now enters a new era of Captcha -- logic based."
That shift explains why Captchas have started to both annoy and perplex. Users no longer have to simply identify things. They need to identify things and do something with that information -- move a puzzle piece, rotate an object, find the specter of a number hidden in a roomscape. Compounding this bewilderment is the addition to the mix of generative AI images, which creates new objects difficult for robots to identify but baffles humans who just want to log in. "Things are going to get even stranger, to be honest, because now you have to do something that's nonsensical," Gosschalk said. "Otherwise, large multimodal models will be able to understand."
As its name suggests, Manor Lords is a city builder about managing a medieval village. You help it grow, fight off bandits, and eventually take part in larger military campaigns. But none of it amounts to a hill of beans if you can’t get families to move in and help your society grow, and some players seem to be… 
Another Crab’s Treasure is finally out, and if you’re as much of a sucker for soulslikes as I am, you’re likely picking it up. Good news: it’s pretty great and packed to the brim with charming nods to the Souls games, tight combat and skills, and funny-as-hell jokes. One of its running gags could potentially bite you… 
In the days after the April 19 release of The Tortured Poets Department, the latest album from Taylor Swift, I came across a presentation explaining the artist’s relationship with 1975 frontman Matty Healy. It is over one hundred pages long, and it’s not the only presentation, video, or article of its kind. Fans are… 
A Lego YouTuber has recreated the housebuilding scene from Rockstar Games’ open-world western, Red Dead Redemption II, complete with the catchy tune, a curious bird, and a pesky cougar. 
Arrowhead Game Studios has enjoyed handing down some tough and consequential major orders for the Helldivers 2 community to beat, but its latest might be one of its thorniest yet. You see, major orders tend to focus the entirety of the player base on a single objective or set of goals, such as killing billions of… 
Last week, journalist co-op 404 Media reported on Spy Pet, a site that was mining billions of Discord messages from nearly 620 million users and selling access to that data for as little as $5. After investigating the matter, Discord has announced that the accounts connected to that repository have been banned and the… 
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