Alan Wake 2 pushes forward its predecessor's menacing atmosphere by venturing deep into survival horror's terrifying depths, offering players an exhilarating, yet terrifying, journey through its macabre landscapes. Alan Wake 2 is a survival horror game that ranks best at storytelling and atmospheric horror, taking players beyond mere creepiness into its depths of horror! By far, Alan Wake 2 is one of the scariest horror games available now!

FMV and In-Game Mastery in Concert: An Artful Symbiosis

Alan Wake 2 achieves an unprecedented balance by artfully merging Full Motion Video (FMV) and in-game content into an artful symbiosis. more than simply a random juxtaposition, this dance includes live-action sequences and interactive gameplay combined into an exquisite visual feast. Alan Wake 2 was designed to survive time, I'll say an iconic video game made for players who buy PS5 horror games more than anything. The symbiosis between the narrative power and FMV is complete, and the result is a realistic experience (I don't even know how to name it, but you get the gist - it feels alive).

FMV breathes life into characters by giving an uncanny realism that blurs virtual and tangible realities - this is why it feels alive/realistic (and I know, it sounds odd to use "realistic" in a game with supernatural beings). When you buy cheap PS5 games, you do not get the kind of FMV and storytelling Alan Wake 2 offers (nor gameplay, characters, or atmosphere for that matter). Alan Wake 2, more than anything, creates an unforgettable emotional experience (in the sense that it immerses you and convinces you) through haunting imagery combined with interactive elements coexisting in perfect harmony evoking emotions long after the controller has been put down!

Alan Wake 2 vs. Resident Evil 7: Biohazard: Crafting Horror from Different Dimensions

I would like to compare Alan Wake 2 with Resident Evil 7: Biohazard to detect their distinct approaches to horror because they seem similar but there are nuances. Resident Evil 7, with its immersive first-person horror and atmospheric tension, finds an unlikely partner in Alan Wake 2, which features third-person survival horror gameplay. This aspect elevates the horror experience to another level.

Resident Evil 7 immerses players in an oppressively-confined mansion while Alan Wake 2 offers expansive environments requiring careful navigation and strategic thought. If I had to choose, I would buy Alan Wake 2. Both games excel in inducing fear, but Alan Wake 2 stands apart with its distinctive take on survival horror coupled with its outstanding presentation - making an indelible mark on the horror gaming landscape.

Unconventional Mind Bender

Alan Wake 2, in a way, a detective sim video game, deviates from convention (of action survival horror games) with its puzzle-solving mechanics forging new paths in intellectual challenge. Some puzzles are not that good and many would not be into puzzle-kind of gaming, however, Alan Wake 2 finds a way to provoke players and keep them engaged. It seems a cerebral dance where puzzles become part of Alan Wake's dark ballet; these challenges require not just strategic thought, but force players to immersion into its unique universe! Puzzle-solving becomes art and serves a purpose in Alan Wake 2, offering players a tantalizing taste of something unconventional amidst horror!

Conclusion: Alan Wake 2 - A Haunting Experience

Alan Wake 2 turns survival horror into an art form: an alluring dance of shadows and narrative intricacies that captures players' attention with its dark embrace. Boasting an unparalleled blend of FMV/in-game mastery, spectacular environments, innovative puzzle-solving mechanics, and storytelling mish-mash, Alan Wake 2 stands as an outstanding title in today's ever-evolving landscape of horror gaming - it offers up something truly original while appealing to braver souls looking into its depths of darkness! It's more than a sequel; Alan Wake 2 offers up something truly unforgettable: it beckons players deeper into its darkness!

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two other Al Qaeda members behind the 9/11 attacks pleaded guilty to 2,976 counts of murder, U.S. military prosecutors revealed in a letter to 9/11 victim families on Wednesday. In exchange, the 9/11 plotters will escape the death penalty. The letter called the plea deal "the best path to finality and justice in this case."

Mohammed and his accomplices were first taken into U.S. custody in 2003. There was little doubt of their guilt; Mohammed admitted to plotting the attacks to a TV reporter a year before his capture. So why was a plea deal in a shadowy military court more than twenty years later the best that the U.S. government could do?

It was a self-inflicted problem. Rather than letting law enforcement handle a massacre on American soil, President George W. Bush had the suspects rounded up into secretive torture prisons, forever tainting the evidence. No court would admit torture-derived confessions—and any statement made after the torture could also be challenged by lawyers. After all, several known innocents have also confessed under torture.  

When the Obama administration tried to put Mohammed on trial in New York, the scene of his crime, politicians from both parties helped stir up public outrage. Congress passed a bipartisan law preventing Al Qaeda suspects from being moved to the U.S. mainland. Instead, Mohammed and other defendants were tried by a Guantanamo Bay military tribunal that delivered neither fairness and transparency nor swift justice. It was the worst of all worlds.

The relatives of many victims felt blindsided by the plea deal.

"There's a sense of betrayal amongst the 9/11 family members right now," Brett Eagleson, president of the nonprofit 9/11 Justice, told SpyTalk, a Substack focused on national security. "We weren't consulted in any way on what was going to be happening down in Guantanamo."

The 9/11 plotters' guilty plea was one of many missed opportunities for closure on the War on Terror. After killing Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, the Obama administration could have declared victory and begun the process of moving on. Instead, he promised endless war.

"His death does not mark the end of our effort," President Barack Obama said in his announcement of bin Laden's death. "There is no doubt that Al Qaeda will continue to pursue attacks against us. We must—and we will—remain vigilant at home and abroad."

This "vigilance abroad" meant war against an ever-shifting alphabet soup of Islamist rebels, most of whom had nothing to do with 9/11 and some of whom didn't exist when the War on Terror began. The American public was left confused about what they were even fighting for or against. As Rep. Sara Jacobs (D–Calif.) pointed out at a hearing last year, even the list of groups that the U.S. government considers to be "Al Qaeda affiliates" is classified.

Meanwhile, the constant feeling of siege corroded American domestic politics. Counterterrorism became an excuse to militarize the police. Obama-era defenses of drone strikes were recycled into anti-immigrant conspiracy theories. Concerns about "radicalization" and "extremism" were used to push for online censorship.

"The same tools that destabilized foreign countries were bound to destabilize America," wrote journalist Spencer Ackerman in his 2020 book, Reign of Terror. "Experiencing neither peace nor victory for such a sustained period was a volatile condition for millions of people."

All the while, it was easy to forget that the people who sparked all this fear to begin with—the perpetrators of 9/11—were either dead or behind bars.

Perhaps Bush and Obama's decisions are understandable, if not excusable, because the trauma of 9/11 was still so raw. But those decisions prevented this wound from ever healing. Two decades on, the closest thing to "finality and justice" is a sad, quiet compromise.

The post The 9/11 Plotters Should Have Been Found Guilty in a Real Court appeared first on Reason.com.

This week has been especially chaotic for the Middle East. On Saturday, a Lebanese rocket killed 12 children and youth at a soccer game in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights. (The victims were Syrian citizens with Israeli residency.) On Tuesday night, Israel took revenge for the rocket by killing Fuad Shukr, a commander in the pro-Iranian militia Hezbollah, along with two children.

A few hours later, a bomb killed Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas' political bureau and the lead negotiator with Israel, while he was visiting Tehran for the Iranian president's inauguration. Israel is widely believed to be the culprit. Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah have both promised to take revenge.

The same night that Shukr and Haniyeh were killed, U.S. warplanes rained down fire on an Iraqi militia base, killing four pro-Iranian fighters. An anonymous U.S. official told reporters that the militiamen were launching an attack drone that "posed a threat" to U.S. and allied forces. It was not clear whether the Iraqi drone was really aimed at U.S. troops—or Israel.

Soon it may not matter. The Biden administration affirmed again on Wednesday that it will help defend Israel in case of a conflict with Lebanon or Iran, as it did during clashes this April. And the administration has hinted before that it will get involved directly if Israel faces military setbacks in Lebanon. Israeli leaders may have been betting on exactly that outcome.

Unnamed "sources in the security establishment" told The Jerusalem Post that they could have assassinated Haniyeh in Qatar, where he usually lives. Instead, those sources explained, "the choice to carry out the assassination in the heart of Tehran was precisely because Haniyeh was under Iranian security responsibility, which placed Iran at the heart of the world's focus as a host, director, and supplier of terrorism."

In other words, killing Haniyeh was possibly meant to turn the Israel-Hamas war into an international crisis involving Iran and Israel's allies.

Months before the October 2023 attacks, Israeli policy makers had gamed out an Israeli strike leading to a U.S.-Iranian war. The Institute for National Security Studies, a think tank close to the Israeli government, ran a simulation in July 2023 that was eerily similar to the current escalation. The scenario began with an Israeli assassination campaign in Tehran, which provoked Hezbollah and Iraqi militias into attacking Israel and ended with direct U.S. attacks on Iran.

"Former top political and military leaders from Israel, the United States and a number of European countries took part in the simulation," reported the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

For years before that, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders had been demanding U.S. support for an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. It's not hard to understand why. Khamenei has called Israel a cancerous tumor that needs to be excised, and Israeli leaders have in turn said that Iran is the head of an evil octopus, which must be cut off.

The attacks on October 7, 2023, by Hamas seemed to confirm the Israeli perception. Whatever role Iran did or didn't have in planning the attacks—the U.S. government believes that Iranian leaders were just as surprised as everyone else—Iran's allies immediately jumped into the fray, attacking Israel in the name of the Palestinian cause.

And plenty of American politicians want conflict for their own reasons. Immediately after the October 7 attacks, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.) had called for bombing Iran whether or not there was evidence that Iran was behind the attacks. On Wednesday, he claimed to have intelligence that "Iran will, in the coming weeks or months, possess a nuclear weapon" and introduced a bill calling for war with Iran.

A conflict with Iran also helps Netanyahu alleviate some of the domestic political pressure on him. Before the October 7 attacks, he was facing protests over his proposal to defang the Israeli Supreme Court. And instead of rallying Israelis around Netanyahu, the attacks galvanized opposition, as many Israelis blamed Netanyahu for the security lapse and the failure to rescue hostages.

This week, those tensions exploded into an outright mutiny. After months of international pressure regarding the treatment of inmates at the Sde Teiman prison, Israeli military police began a probe into one of the most egregious cases. Nine soldiers had allegedly raped a Palestinian prisoner so hard that he was sent to the hospital with a ruptured bowel, a severe injury to his anus, lung damage, and broken ribs.

Police detained some of the accused soldiers, and Israeli nationalists accused the government of betraying its troops. Nationalist rioters, including members of parliament, stormed both Sde Teiman and the Beit Lid military courts in support of the accused rapists. The army was forced to pull three battalions away from the Palestinian territories to guard the courthouse.

Killing Shukr and Haniyeh, then, was a good political bet for Netanyahu. At the very least, Netanyahu got to drown out headlines about the Sde Teiman riot with a dashing military victory. And if Iran hits back hard enough, then Israel may be able to get the world's superpower to fight Israel's greatest enemy.

But a full-on U.S.-Iran war would be a disaster for the region and for Americans. Gen. Kenneth McKenzie warned The New Yorker in December 2021 that Iran has missile "overmatch in the theatre—the ability to overwhelm" U.S. air defenses. American troops would face attacks in Iran, Iraq, and Syria, and a few well-placed Iranian strikes on Tel Aviv or Abu Dhabi could do serious damage to the world economy.

It would be a disaster of the Biden administration's own making. Soon after the October 7 attacks, President Joe Biden embraced the "bear hug" theory of diplomacy. By giving Israel public reassurances and unlimited military support, the theory went, Biden would earn enough goodwill from Israelis to keep their war contained and eventually broker an Israeli-Palestinian ceasefire.

Instead, the bear hug has turned out to be a sleepwalk. Netanyahu has taken U.S. support as a license to continue expanding the conflict. And the Biden administration seems to be at a loss for words about the latest escalation. Asked what impact the assassination of one side's chief negotiator would have on ceasefire negotiations, Secretary of State Antony Blinken played dumb.

"Well, I've seen the reports, and what I can tell you is this: First, this is something we were not aware of or involved in," Blinken told Channel News Asia. "It's very hard to speculate, and I've learned never to speculate, on the impact one event may have on something else. So I can't tell you what this means."

The post Will Biden Sleepwalk Into a War With Iran? appeared first on Reason.com.

A technical paper titled “Using Formal Verification to Evaluate Single Event Upsets in a RISC-V Core” was published by researchers at University of Southampton.

Abstract:

“Reliability has been a major concern in embedded systems. Higher transistor density and lower voltage supply increase the vulnerability of embedded systems to soft errors. A Single Event Upset (SEU), which is also called a soft error, can reverse a bit in a sequential element, resulting in a system failure. Simulation-based fault injection has been widely used to evaluate reliability, as suggested by ISO26262. However, it is practically impossible to test all faults for a complex design. Random fault injection is a compromise that reduces accuracy and fault coverage. Formal verification is an alternative approach. In this paper, we use formal verification, in the form of model checking, to evaluate the hardware reliability of a RISC-V Ibex Core in the presence of soft errors. Backward tracing is performed to identify and categorize faults according to their effects (no effect, Silent Data Corruption, crashes, and hangs). By using formal verification, the entire state space and fault list can be exhaustively explored. It is found that misaligned instructions can amplify fault effects. It is also found that some bits are more vulnerable to SEUs than others. In general, most of the bits in the Ibex Core are vulnerable to Silent Data Corruption, and the second pipeline stage is more vulnerable to Silent Data Corruption than the first.”

Find the technical paper here. Published May 2024 (preprint).

Xue, Bing, and Mark Zwolinski. “Using Formal Verification to Evaluate Single Event Upsets in a RISC-V Core.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.12089 (2024).

Related Reading
Formal Verification’s Usefulness Widens
Demand for IC reliability pushes formal into new applications, where complex interactions and security risks are difficult to solve with other tools.
RISC-V Micro-Architectural Verification
Verifying a processor is much more than making sure the instructions work, but the industry is building from a limited knowledge base and few dedicated tools.

The post Using Formal Verification To Evaluate The HW Reliability Of A RISC-V Ibex Core In The Presence Of Soft Errors appeared first on Semiconductor Engineering.

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Reporter and podcaster Eli Lake and author Jeremy Hammond debated the resolution, "The root cause of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the Palestinians' rejection of Israel's right to exist."

Taking the affirmative is Lake, the former senior national security correspondent for The Daily Beast and Newsweek. He is currently a reporter at The Free Press and host of The Re-Education podcast. He has also contributed to CNN, Fox News, C-SPAN, Charlie Rose, the I Am Rapaport: Stereo Podcast, and Bloggingheads.tv.

Hammond, an independent journalist and author, takes the negative. He is the author of several books, including Obstacle to Peace: The US Role in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.

• Video and Audio Editing: John Osterhoudt

The post What's the Root Cause of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict? appeared first on Reason.com.

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© Illustration: Lex Villena