Sunday papers [2017-07-29]

It was a rather uneventful personal weekend, with most time spent at work or doing work things (I'll repeat it again, but you've got to keep reading and experimenting to stay on top of the curve in software development). Uneventful, except for one thing: I relapsed!

I've been following Kotaku and Rock Paper Shotgun - as usual - since, in addition to video games reviews, they have longer pieces about the crazy world of game development. In fact, for those who don't know my Sunday Papers are borrowed from RPS's eponymous recap of the week, albeit only in the world of video games.
I read a review of the latest patch of No Man's Sky on Kotaku and it basically said it was miles better than when it came out. It tempted me to dust it off, which consisted in wasting 30 minutes of my life at trying to make it run... I gave up and reinstalled the whole thing, it worked. I've yet to spend more time with it but it feels better.

One of today's articles is about the development of this game and its very troubled release, with death threats, and all...

So here it goes for this week's motley collection:

- ⌨️ -

How they did it (and will likely try again): GRU hackers vs. US elections / Ars Technica

Sean Gallagher wrote an excellent detailed piece about how the Russian hackers managed to penetrate the internal network of the Democratic Party, and ultimately, get access to the emails. The article is based on the indictment returned by the Grand Jury assembled by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. It is all based on extensive data collected through various means.

It's just only slightly technical at times and makes for an excellent 15 minutes read or so. What's fascinating in this piece though is how methodical and well organized the attack. It also shows, again, that the most vulnerable point is still the human, as the entry point was obtained using various spear-phishing attacks.

I like those pieces from Ars Technica, I think they are very good at vulgarizing such content.

- 🎤 -

Poland's democracy is being boiled to death while the world watches / Euronews

This is Euronews interviewing Professor Laurent Pech about the current situation in Poland. I realize given what's occurring in the world at, well, basically any time, what's going on there might have not hit world wide's news. It's a very interesting, but chilling, interview you can read in about 15 minutes too.

So what's going on, you may ask? The whole country's judicial system is being overhauled in an attempt to replace independent judges with people more akin to help the ruling party... I think the most relevant sentence in there, and the one that hits the nail on the head, trough the wall and the house (emphasis mine):

Majority rule should also not be confused with tyranny of the majority especially when the “majority” view is in fact expressed not to say manufactured by the ruling party without the citizens having any say in practice

- 🎮 -

No Man’s Sky developer Sean Murray: ‘It was as bad as things can get’ / The Guardian

_{No Man's Sky Next, picture found on imgur, but I guess it's copyrighted to Hello Games.}

Keza MacDonald interviews Sean Murray, the man heading Hello Games, behind the No Man's Sky videogame. Even if you are not interested in video games, it's a good one. It recounts the chaotic release of the game as the game was not what was expected for a lot of gamers. Some of them even made death threats... all of this for just a video game.

I myself was a bit disappointed at the time, but I think that I got a good share of gaming (+5o hours) before letting go, because I was not interested anymore. The story part was way too light for me, but I still think that landing on a new randomly generated planet/moon and discovering the fauna and flora is the best part of the game.
Anyway, personal attacks? Death threats? I think there are just way much worse people on the planet than passionate game developers...

Now, instead of just letting go, the developers of Hello Games continued to improve the game with smaller and then much larger patches since the release. The latest one, called Next, has just came out, and I'm giving it a try at the moment.