Zak Killian
Recent posts
Two Replicator "virtual twin" environments.
Long before Facebook rebranded itself as Meta, and even before its CEO introduced the idea of the "metaverse" to the masses, it's been an attractive concept to creators. After all, one perfect...
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This weekend, cyber-security firm Palo Alto Networks released a detailed analysis of an ongoing hacking campaign targeting technology, defense, healthcare, energy, and education industries. The attack targets Zoho's ManageEngine...
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It's easy to think of hackers in the colloquial sense as being the enemies of society. People who break into computer systems and sabotage electronics to gain control of them or steal data; how could someone like that be of benefit to...
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When your device has a problem, what do you do? You take it apart—whether that means digging into layers of software or painstakingly troubleshooting the hardware—and you fix it. For some folks, that's true whether we're talking about a...
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Ever since their introduction in the PC market during the mid-1990s, heat pipes have been a central fixture in the cooling of hot computer processors. Whether in the form of actual 'pipes' or as a planar heat spreader—more commonly known...
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It's always fun to cheer for your team, isn't it? Sometimes it seems like folks love nothing more than to divide into opposing groups over the most arbitrary of boundaries and then battle to the figurative (or literal!) death over the...
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Do you ever forget to type the TLD (like, ".com") for websites that you visit, then click the top result when the inevitable search comes up? We might recommend you to stop doing that in the future. At least on Google and Bing, the first...
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AAA video games have really ballooned in size over the last ten years, and chief among the offenders are your big open-world extravaganzas. Red Dead Redemption 2 comes in at nearly 120GB on PC, ARK: Survival Evolved is 115GB, and Ubisoft's...
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Even though they are fundamentally similar devices, we use smartphones and PCs in completely different ways. It's not uncommon to have dozens or even hundreds of processes running in the background on a PC, and that's fine, because you are...
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When you think of "video game piracy," you probably think immediately of PC games. That's not really a fair association, though; console game piracy has been going on as long as there have been video game consoles, and it's a bigger market...
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Remember the old days of code pages and customized OSes for specific languages, like DOS/V? Unicode has more or less solved the biggest issue with displaying non-ASCII glyphs on computers, although it's still up to the operating system to...
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When consumer virtual reality made a resurgence with the launch of the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, many people dismissed it as a short-lived gimmick, with widespread comparisons to the brief hype period surrounding 3D TVs. Those people have...
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With any type of creative or engineering project, you have to be aware of your target, whether that's the audience for a joke, the landscape for a building, or the use-case for a piece of hardware or software. All practical attempts to...
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Once upon a time, a video game getting a post-launch patch was arguably a bad thing, as it meant that there was a flaw so serious in the original release that it warranted a significant update. In the age of "games as a service" and...
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The messaging app landscape is kind of a wasteland of apps with similar feature sets, with a few standouts. Facebook's Messenger is popular, of course, as are services like Discord, WhatsApp and Telegram. Secure messaging app Signal is...
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One of the main reasons that the malware epidemic in the Windows XP days was so severe was because almost all those machines were configured with only a single user account that had administrative privileges by default. That meant that any...
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It's October 28th, and Halloween is nigh. Among other mischieviously-festive events, the Steam Halloween sale is on, with tons of games discounted in celebration of All Hallows' Eve.
Bubbling to the top of the pool of discounted titles...
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Like Microsoft and Sony, Nintendo gates its online-capable video games behind a subscription service. In the case of the Nintendo Switch, it's the simply-named Nintendo Switch Online. The subscription costs $19.99 USD per year, and besides...
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Super Mario Odyssey, downscaled from 4K.
To legally play console games in an emulator on a PC, you have to own both the game and the required hardware, which might leave some folks scratching their heads as to why you would even bother...
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Do you use BQE Software's BillQuick? If you do, go update it—immediately. Huntress ThreatOps identified nine zero-day vulnerabilities in BillQuick Web Suite, a time and billing software that the publisher claims is in use by over 400,000...
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Exploits in online games don't have to be security-related to be serious. Online games are commercial products; even if they're "free to play", someone's paying for the experience, and an in-game exploit that grants one player or group of...
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Remember just this past Wednesday when Microsoft made the Windows Subsystem for Android (WSA) available to Windows 11 Insiders? If not, go read that story first—the context is important. One of the myriad frustrations of WSA is that users...
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