Despite Valve's longstanding push to increase the profile of Linux gaming (and the Linux-based SteamOS that is still hanging out in beta), the growing list of Linux games on Steam remains dominated by smaller, independent titles and a few ports of big-name classics. So it's worth paying attention to the fact that 2K Games has announced that Borderlands: The Pre-sequel will have full Linux/SteamOS support on the same day it launches on Windows machines and consoles, October 14. The announcement comes alongside news that 2K has also released a port of Borderlands 2 for SteamOS, and it's offering the older game at a 75 percent discount to celebrate.

Getting major publishers to launch such heavily promoted, AAA games on Linux concurrently with Windows is going to be key to convincing PC gamers to make the switch to one of many Linux-based Steam Machines if and when they finally launch next year. So far, though, big-name publishers have yet to make Linux versions of their biggest titles a priority, despite Steam's work on tools to make such Linux ports less difficult. Aside from Borderlands, the biggest upcoming release Linux gamers can really point to is Firaxis' Civilization: Beyond Earth, which will be coming to Linux "at a later date" than the Windows release.

This isn't exactly how the Linux community saw things going when Steam for Linux was officially launched back in February of 2013. As Ubuntu developer Canonical's director of consumer applications David Pitkin said at the time, "we expect a growing number of game developers to include Ubuntu among their target platforms. We're looking forward to seeing AAA games developed with Ubuntu in mind as part of a multi-platform day and date release on Steam."

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This post originally appeared on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's website. The author, Dave Maass, is a media relations coordinator and investigative researcher for EFF.

For years, local law enforcement agencies around the country have told parents that installing ComputerCOP software is the “first step” in protecting their children online.

Police chiefs, sheriffs, and district attorneys have handed out hundreds of thousands of copies of the disc to parents for free at schools, libraries, and community events, usually as a part of an “Internet Safety” outreach initiative. (You can see the long list of ComputerCOP outlets here.) The packaging typically features the agency’s official seal and the chief’s portrait, with a signed message warning of the “dark and dangerous off-ramps” of the Internet.

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The Xen Project has published a security advisory that could affect millions of virtualized servers running in Amazon’s cloud and other public hosting services. A flaw in the Xen hypervisor could allow a malicious fully virtualized server to read data about other virtualized systems running on the same physical hardware or the hypervisor hosting the virtual machine. The malicious system could also potentially crash the server hosting the virtual machines. A patch, which was privately disclosed last week under embargo, has been issued to correct the issue.

Xen is used by a number of public and private cloud providers to support infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings such as Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, Rackspace, and some configurations of the OpenStack cloud provisioning environment. The flaw, discovered by Jan Beulich at SUSE, affects servers configured to support hardware-assisted virtualization (HVM) mode virtualization. HVM lets operating systems use hardware extensions that give them faster access to the physical server’s hardware, and it uses software emulation of other Intel platform hardware to allow those operating systems to run without modification. Windows virtual machines running on Xen require HVM support.

The bug, introduced in versions of Xen after version 4.1, is in HVM code that emulates Intel’s x2APIC interrupt controller. While the emulator restricts the ability of a virtual machine to write to memory reserved specifically for its own emulated controller, a program running within a virtual machine could use the x2APIC interface to read information stored outside of that space. If someone were to provision an inadvertently buggy or intentionally malicious virtual machine on a server using HVM, Beulich found that VM could use the interface to look at the physical memory on the physical machine hosting the VM reserved for other virtual machines or for the virtualization server software itself. In other words, an "evil" virtual machine could essentially read over the shoulder of other virtual machines running on the same server, bypassing security.

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Super Smash Bros. for 3DS brings Nintendo's long-running fighter franchise to a portable system for the first time. Screenshots in this review have been upscaled from the 3DS' native 400×240 resolution to show detail. Andrew Cunningham

To say Super Smash Bros. is a big franchise for Nintendo is an understatement. Since its launch on the Nintendo 64, the games have regularly ranked at or near the top of all-time sales lists for their respective consoles. Like Mario Kart, they often serve as important system-sellers that prompt additional sales bumps for the back catalogue.

This time around, Nintendo is extending the franchise to a portable system for the first time. Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS (a title that could surely be made shorter and better, but this isn't a review of the name) needs to take a fast, four-player fighter that has always had a whole TV to spread out on and squeeze it down to fit the 3DS' twin screens.

I didn't really care for the 3DS version of the game at E3, which was shown off alongside the upcoming Wii U version. Playing it on the small screen for a week has slowly changed my opinion, though. This one won't be a favorite of the hardcore set that keeps the Gamecube controller alive, but it's a surprisingly competent port and a good way to give Smash a reach that it just isn't going to have on the chronically sales-challenged Wii U.

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A web registration bug that affected more than 60,000 organ donation registrations certainly couldn't have helped these Ontario percentage numbers.

Yesterday, the government of Ontario put out a giant, public call to correct a web registration error that resulted in over 60,000 inaccurate organ donation applications.

According to a letter sent to affected province citizens by ServiceOntario, the error went unnoticed for nearly 18 months, and it centered around wrongly recorded "exclusions," meaning organs that someone would rather not allow to be harvested after death. In particular, the letter stated that web users who'd opted into all organ donations were still registered as "excluding" their pancreas.

The letter assured users that their personal information had not been compromised in any way, but it did not further clarify how other wrongful exclusion requests might have been registered by the beadonor.ca site between March 23, 2013 and September 19, 2014. In a report by the Toronto Star, Ronnie Gavsie, the president of the affected web site's operator, insisted that “no donation opportunities were lost” during that span of time, nor were any organs incorrectly donated. Upon discovering the error earlier this month, the government of Ontario shut beadonor.ca down to investigate, waiting until Tuesday to inform the public of its findings.

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In an indictment unsealed today, the Justice Department revealed that it had charged four men with stealing information from the US Army, Microsoft, and a host of other game developers. Two of the charged men pleaded guilty on Tuesday.

The unsealed indictment—which was returned by a federal grand jury in April—alleges that starting in 2011, the four men targeted Microsoft and stole “Log-In Credentials, Trade Secrets, and Intellectual Property pertaining to its Xbox gaming system,” specifically the still-in-development Xbox One.

The four men also allegedly turned to Epic Games and used SQL injection attacks “and other incidents of unauthorized access” like stolen passwords to pilfer “unreleased software, source code, and middleware” from the upcoming Gears of War 3 title.

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"Revenge porn" is a term that has developed over the last few years to refer to the posting of nude images without the consent of those in the pictures. After a spate of publicity surrounding some of the bad actors in this business, several states have passed laws outlawing "revenge porn" and applying penalties.

Now, a coalition of businesses and the American Civil Liberties Union have filed a lawsuit (PDF) challenging the anti-revenge-porn laws. They've picked Arizona as their battleground. One of the lead lawyers on the case, Michael Bamberger, told the National Law Journal that Arizona's law is "probably the most egregious," because it has no requirement that the images even be malicious, and an exemption for images taken in a "commercial or public setting" is vague.

"This is a supposed revenge-porn statute that does not require revenge," said Bamberger.

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One of the things shown off in the Continuum video: A modified Start screen, that incorporates elements of the Start menu.

The most important thing that Microsoft showed at its Windows 10 unveiling in San Francisco today won't actually be in the Technical Preview that's shipping tomorrow.

Joe Belfiore, corporate vice president of the operating systems group, showed a video of what he called a "design motion study" of a feature he called Continuum.

The Continuum design study.

With Windows 8 and 8.1, a wealth of hybrid machines that in one way or another act like tablets and laptops—machines such as the Lenovo Yoga and Surface Pro—hit the market, and Microsoft says that they've been very popular among their buyers. However, those buyers somewhat fell between the cracks.

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The Start menu is back where it used to be, but now includes traditional desktop elements alongside the live tiles designed for tablets.

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As announced earlier today, the next version of Windows is Windows 10. Skipping right over Windows 9, Microsoft is trying to blend the best bits of the desktop-centric Windows 7 with the best parts of the tablet-centric Windows 8. Microsoft isn't quite going up to eleven yet, but it's close.

Instead of the full-screen Start screen of Windows 8, there's a Start menu that will look familiar to Windows 7 users while adding the live tiles created for Windows 8. Windows 10 features new options for re-sizing windows, multiple desktops, and a convenient "task view" to switch between them. The Windows command prompt is also being dragged into the 21st century.

Microsoft focused a lot today on how it's improving the desktop, but that doesn't mean Windows isn't for tablets anymore. A touch-screen device that docks with a keyboard, for example, will switch from desktop mode to tablet mode depending on whether it's attached to the keyboard or disconnected.

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The Dallas Morning News is reporting that we've now seen the first case of Ebola infection diagnosed within the US. Although patients were previously brought back to the US for treatment following infection in West Africa, this is the first case we know of where the infected individual traveled back on their own, possibly unaware that they were infected.

According to the article, the patient is currently being kept in isolation at the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital of Dallas after doctors found that he had symptoms consistent with Ebola and had recently been to West Africa. Blood samples were shipped to the CDC for testing yesterday, which led to today's results.

Details are scarce at the moment, but it's safe to assume that health officials are trying to track back to the individuals that were in contact with the patient since his return from overseas. This will allow them to be monitored and treated quickly if symptoms should emerge. Depending on the exact details of when the patient traveled, it could be possible to keep the virus from spreading to other patients within the US.

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In late September, advertisements appearing on a host of popular news and entertainment sites began serving up malicious code, infecting some visitors' computers with a backdoor program designed to gather information on their systems and install additional malicious code.

The attack affected visitors to The Jerusalem Post, The Times of Israel, The Hindustan Times, Internet music service Last.fm, and India-focused movie portal Bollywood Hungama, among other popular sites. At the center of the malware campaign: the compromise of San Francisco-based Internet advertising network Zedo, an advertising provider for the sites, whose network was then used to distribute malicious ads.

For ten days, the company investigated multiple malware reports, retracing the attacker's digital footsteps to identify the malicious files and shut the backdoor to its systems.

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Flickr user: Michael Vroegop

The music-sharing service Grooveshark was sued by major record labels in 2011, and yesterday the hammer blow finally came down. A New York federal judge has ruled in favor of the music companies on just about every issue that came up in the lawsuit. Damages, and the scope of an injunction, are yet to be determined.

The 57-page opinion (PDF) penned by US District Judge Thomas Griesa certainly seems like the beginning of the end for Grooveshark. It isn't hard to rattle off names of the unauthorized music-sharing services—like Napster, Grokster, Kazaa, and Limewire—that have been dealt a death-blow by federal court rulings.

The case doesn't look like a close call. Grooveshark was hoping to be protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which protects online services from copyright lawsuits as long as they meet certain requirements, including responding to the takedown notices sent by copyright holders.

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Arduino

Arduino, maker of the open source hardware platform of the same name, is teaming up with a startup called Sharebot to sell a 3D printer for about $1,000.

Announced today, Materia 101 will be demonstrated at the Maker Faire in Rome this weekend. An on-sale date has not been revealed.

"The printer will be available only on the Arduino Store both as a kit and pre-assembled," the announcement said. "Official pricing of the device will be disclosed at a later date but the kit will sell for less than 600 EUR/800 USD, while the pre-assembled version will be available for less than 700 EUR/1000 USD."

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We're going to need more road again soon. Infrastructure sometimes has to chase California's vanishing water supply. USGS

In the public's mind, it's impossible to separate the climate from the weather. Each significant weather event seems to be accompanied by discussions of its implications for climate change; is it an example of what to expect, or clear indications that climate change isn't happening?

Often lost in the public discussion is that determining the role of climate change in a specific weather event is a challenging but interesting scientific problem. It's also one with immense practical implications. As regions rebuild after a damaging event, it's important that these efforts be informed by what we should expect in the future.

This month's edition of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society tackles this problem, termed "attribution," in a big way: 22 different studies of weather events rolled into a single report entitled "Explaining Extreme Events of 2013."

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Greetings, Arsians! Our partners from LogicBuy are back with a ton of deals for this week. The featured item is an Alienware 17 gaming laptop for $1,923 with free shipping. You save $375 off the regular price and get a $50 gift card! This beast of a laptop has a Core i7, 16GB of RAM, a 1080p screen, and a AMD Radeon R9 M290X with 4GB of video memory. It's perfect for school!

(OK, it's probably a little much for school, but it would be way more fun to bring this to class and frag things than pay attention to the lecture.)

Featured deal

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Microsoft talked briefly about the new features in its upcoming Windows 10 operating system, but it glossed over one thing that will surely be of great interest to sysadmins and developers alike: the further refinement of the Windows command line into a truly useful development and administration environment. Fortunately, engineer and blogger Rafael Rivera has spent some hands-on time with a technical preview, and he’s got a great post up explaining some of the new features—at least, as they stand right now.

The new Windows 10 command prompt options, from the current technical preview. Rafael Rivera

Rivera has a whole raft of additional screenshots demonstrating the additional command line features, but one of the simplest—and most anticipated—is proper text selection within command prompt windows. And we’re not just talking about Powershell, either—this is for every console window, including windows featuring good ol’ cmd.exe.

Previously, as anyone who’s dealt with a Windows command shell knows, selecting text at the prompt required a number of steps beyond simply clicking and dragging. You had to invoke a context menu, select "Mark" to tell Windows you wanted to mark text to select, and then lasso a selection box around what you wanted to pick. Text that spanned multiple lines was treated as not a single string, but rather multiple lines of text, with extraneous spacing and line breaks intact. This made for an annoying process—for more than basic selection, it was often easier to redirect whatever you were doing into a text file and do selection with a text editor.

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Kārlis Dambrāns

On Tuesday, eBay announced that in 2015 it would be splitting off its PayPal unit into a separate, publicly traded company. Investors lauded the move, sending eBay's stock price up nearly eight percent on the day, as of this writing.

PayPal has been an enormous player in the online payments and mobile payments sectors, but for years eBay's CEO John Donahoe resisted the clamor from investors to split PayPal into its own company. But after conferring with the company's board of directors, eBay has now changed its tune.

eBay acquired PayPal back in 2002, and it has been the company's fastest-growing segment, the Associated Press reported.

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OS X Yosemite as of the Public Beta. Andrew Cunningham

Not content to let some other company hog all the tens, MacRumors reports that Apple has just released the OS X Yosemite GM Candidate to developers using the new operating system. OS X 10.10 has been available to developers since it was unveiled at WWDC in June, and the release of a proposed "Golden Master" build suggests that Yosemite's fall release date will come sooner rather than later.

Note that a "GM Candidate" doesn't necessarily mean that this is the build Apple will release to the public later in the fall. It does indicate, however, that Apple has squashed the show-stopping bugs and that any future builds will contain minor patches rather than major changes. Apple has always released beta builds of work-in-progress operating systems to its registered developers, but Yosemite also brought with it the first public OS X beta program in about 14 years. Expanding its feedback pool beyond the developer community should hopefully mean that Yosemite is more stable and less buggy on day one than past OS X (and iOS) releases have sometimes been.

There's no word on when the GM build will be released to users of the OS X Yosemite Public Beta as an update, but we'd guess that Apple won't send it out before the official release date. Apple also sent out a Public Beta 4 build to users alongside the GM Candidate for developers—though it carries essentially the same build number as the developer build (14A379b, compared to 14A379a), Apple isn't labeling it as a "Golden Master" just yet.

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SAN FRANCISCO—At its Windows 10 event, Microsoft announced that the company will start a new beta program to give IT and enthusiasts early access to the next version of Windows. Beginning tomorrow, the Windows Ten Technical Preview for desktops and laptops will be available through the Windows Insider Program, with a Technical Preview of Windows 10 for servers following at a later date.

The company reinforced that this is not a version of Windows that everyone should run to download; it's an early release, not production quality, and should only be used by the technically able.

The company says that the initial version is oriented toward enterprise testers and users. Consumer-oriented features, such as the new Internet Explorer 12 interface, will emerge in early 2015, with the company planning a final release for around mid-2015.

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Don McCullough

Pennsylvania authorities suspect that two men accused of stealing mobile phones were monitoring law enforcement. Local media reported Tuesday that when they were arrested last month, one of the two suspects was carrying a camera-equipped drone that police saw flying over the Upper Saucon Township's police headquarters the day before the arrests.

The accused are Duane Holmes, 44, of North Bergen, and Chaviv Dykes, 20, of Newark. Police said they had $50,000 in mobile phones allegedly stolen from a Verizon Wireless store and other outlets that NJ.com said were lifted "during a string of smash-and-grab burglaries."

Police said footage from the drone they were reviewing did not contain images of the township's police station. However, the footage included still shots of I-495 in Union City heading toward the Lincoln Tunnel, and West 38th Street in Manhattan, CBS reported. Other footage from the drone was of shopping areas, leading CBS to suggest that the suspects were also using the drones to surveil their targets.

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