Hasta La Gadget!

We’re still expected to receive the third Jurassic World film this summer, though it may not seem like it since actual footage for the movie has been fairly scarce since it faced a pandemic-induced delay. The most that the general public has seen of it has been its prologue back in November (or June, if you saw F9 in…

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Having announced plans recently to form the first labor union within a North American AAA game developer, workers at Raven Software are ending their weeks-long strike action against publisher Activision Blizzard. “Pending the recognition of our union, the Raven QA strike has ended,” Activision Blizzard worker advocacy group ABetterABK said on Saturday in a tweet spotted by Eurogamer. “Unused strike funds are being stored for future organizing [and] strike efforts.”

The strike began in December when 60 employees and contractors with Raven Software’s quality assurance department walked off the job to protest the studio’s decision to lay off 12 of their co-workers. Raven is one of the developers that supports Activision’s Call of Duty franchise, and its QA team is specifically responsible for bugs and other technical issues in Warzone. When the action began, it had no planned end date, a first for the walkouts at Activision Blizzard. The publisher had reportedly declined to meet with the striking workers, despite mounting pressure from Warzone’s community over the game’s current state.

On Friday, the 34 workers who said they plan to unionize with the Communication Workers of America (CWA) asked Activision Blizzard to recognize their group, the Game Workers Alliance, voluntarily. The company has until January 25th to respond to the workers. “Activision Blizzard is carefully reviewing the request for voluntary recognition from the CWA, which seeks to organize around three dozen of the company’s nearly 10,000 employees,” the company said on Friday.

If the company fails to respond to the group, it will file for a union election through the National Relations Broad. Since the collective has a supermajority of votes, with 78 percent of the 34-person unit supporting the action, they can form a union without voluntary recognition from Activision Blizzard.

News of the union drive at Raven comes in the same week that Microsoft announced its intent to buy Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion. Pending regulatory approval, the company expects the deal, which could have far-reaching ramifications for the gaming industry, to close in June 2023.

You might not want to play a Dark Souls game online for a while — not that you necessarily can. As Dexerto and The Verge report, attackers have discovered a security exploit in Dark Souls 3 (and potentially Elden Ring) for Windows that lets attackers remotely execute control and effectively hijack your PC. Streamers like The_Grim_Sleeper have learned about the potential damage first-hand — in his case, the intruder launched Microsoft PowerShell and ran a text-to-speech script blasting him for his gameplay.

The exploiter might not have malicious intent. A post on the SpeedSouls Discord claimed the hacker was trying to warn developer FromSoftware about the Dark Souls 3 vulnerability, but turned to compromising streamers to highlight the problem. Few people beyond the perpetrator are aware of how to use it, but there’s already a patch for the unofficial Blue Sentinel anti-cheat tool.

FromSoftware and its publisher Bandai Namco have since responded to the exploit. They’ve temporarily shut down the player-versus-player servers for Dark Souls 3 and its predecessors while the security team investigates the flaws. It’s not certain when the servers will go back online, but From and Bandai clearly won’t restore service until they’re reasonably confident players are safe. More sinister attackers could use the flaw to steal sensitive information, ruin gamers’ systems and otherwise do serious damage.

Last-minute guests are no longer a reason to panic.

Omicron may make COVID an endemic disease. But “endemic” and “back to normal” are two very different things.