ICE Impersonators, USB Extortion, Cisco Zero Day, OpenAI Lockdown

Bungie extended Marathon's free play week after players encountered confusion over a PlayStation Store listing that made the Deluxe Edition appear purchasable for $14 but in practice sold only a cosmetics bundle once a free trial was added to a library. The misunderstanding, driven by PlayStation's pricing display logic, followed earlier server problems that required emergency maintenance.

Nieman Lab found that more than 340 local news sites now block the Internet Archive to prevent AI scraping, including outlets owned by major chains such as USA Today Co., McClatchy and Tribune Publishing; the move risks further eroding public access to local reporting already weakened by consolidation and paywalls.

Stranger Than Heaven will include a digital likeness of the late rapper Tupac alongside protagonist Makoto Daito, a reveal presented by Snoop Dogg and producer Hiroyuki Sakamoto; the game will also feature the likeness of deceased Japanese actor Bunta Sugawara and launches in January 2027. The inclusion echoes earlier controversial digital resurrections of Tupac and has prompted questions about ethics and legacy preservation.

StudioMDHR unveiled Mighty Cuphead Adventure, an 8-bit, fast-action platformer shooter that departs from Cuphead's hand-drawn 1930s aesthetic and was developed with Assembly Language targeting the Sega Master System while also running on modern platforms. The studio confirmed it is simultaneously developing another hand-drawn Cuphead title.

Fumito Ueda's gen Atlas, published by Epic Games, teases piloting a colossal robot head across decaying high-tech environments and will appear on PS5, Xbox Series X/S and PC, with no release date announced. Given Ueda's long development timelines, expectations for a lengthy production cycle remain high.

Capcom announced a 2027 remake titled Resident Evil: Veronica, reworking the 2000 Code Veronica story that follows Claire and Chris Redfield across a gothic, Antarctic prison-island setting and adopting a markedly different visual tone. The remake continues Capcom's recent run of high-profile releases.

Lawmakers remain deadlocked over reforms and reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act ahead of the June 12 deadline; Congress issued a 45-day renewal in April, the Senate recently voted 52–47 against a proposed renewal, and advocates such as Sean Vitka of Demand Progress say reform talks lacked reform-minded participants.

Control Resonant functions as both a sequel to Remedy’s 2019 game Control and a standalone entry point; creative director Mikael Kasurinen says players can play the titles in any order, and a two-plus-hour preview of the opening and a later mission shows how Resonant introduces its story and mechanics.

Alien Isolation 2's first full trailer sets the Xenomorph horror on a colony planet, showing a disordered station, a flamethrower and pre-alpha footage that suggests expanded open environments; the game will release on Steam, PS5, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch 2, but no launch window has been confirmed.

A Nintendo eShop listing appeared to reveal a September 29 release date for Minecraft Dungeons II and confirmed launches on Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and PC, with developer Mojang likely to include cross-platform and co-op features at launch. The listing was spotted ahead of an expected official announcement during Xbox's showcase.

Geoff Keighley’s Summer Game Fest Live 2026 will stream from the Dolby Theatre with new game announcements, trailers and surprise guests; coverage summarizes the show’s biggest reveals and updates from multiple developers.

Mike Masnick and Ben Whitelaw host Ctrl-Alt-Speech, a weekly podcast on online speech and platform governance; this episode covers Meta’s new teen content settings and safety features, a hack using Meta’s AI support bot to seize Instagram accounts, a LEGO legal dispute, and other platform stories.

The piece condemns CBS leadership after Bari Weiss and Nick Bilton fired veteran correspondent Scott Pelley, noting Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker and Jon Wertheim pledged to stay to preserve 60 Minutes and arguing the episode signals broader editorial failures at the network.

ICE has expanded masked, unmarked operations that critics say make officers resemble an occupying force, prompting more confrontations in neighborhoods; criminals have exploited the ambiguity, with Noticias Telemundo documenting at least six cases of impostors posing as ICE agents to rob or harass immigrants.

Google’s Mandiant incident response team (Chad Reams, Tufail Ahmed, Keith Knapp, Ashley Frazer and Tyler McLellan) says an extortion group tracked as UNC3753 has targeted dozens of US banks, law firms and professional-services firms from January through May using fake billing lures and help-desk calls, and when remote social engineering fails attackers have sometimes gone to offices posing as IT staff and used thumb drives to steal files.

OpenAI began rolling out Lockdown Mode, an optional setting that tightens defenses against prompt injection by restricting network requests and disabling features like web image fetching, Deep Research and Agent Mode while still allowing manual file uploads and other configurable workspace settings. OpenAI positions Lockdown Mode for users handling sensitive data as an additional safeguard rather than a universal solution.

Unknown attackers are exploiting a high‑severity zero‑day (CVE‑2026‑20245) in Cisco’s Catalyst SD‑WAN Manager that lets an authenticated local user with netadmin privileges upload a crafted file to escalate to root; Cisco has acknowledged attacks and suggested mitigations for prior flaws but has not yet released a dedicated patch for this vulnerability.

A paid online course teaches Ruby on Rails by guiding learners to build an ozone air-quality monitoring weather app in about two hours; the course is on sale for $20 through the Techdirt Deals Store, powered by StackCommerce.