Code used to encrypt sensitive radio communications around the world for years had major flaws that could be exploited by attackers, according to new research. A group of researchers from the Netherlands discovered multiple vulnerabilities in encryption algorithms used in the European radio standard TETRA, which is used in radio communications by police, critical infrastructure workers, mass transit and freight trains, and major government bodies. While the TETRA standard is public, the ciphers used to encrypt the communications were kept secret. One of the algorithms, known as TEA1, had a feature that reduces its 80-bit encryption down to just 32 bits--a backdoor, the researchers say, that made it vulnerable to eavesdropping and potentially other attacks. The body that develops and maintains TETRA--the European Telecommunications Standards Institute--rejects the "backdoor" label, saying that the weakened encryption was implemented to abide by encryption export controls in place when it was released in the 1990s. Regardless of what you call it, ETSI has released a replacement for the TEA1 algorithm and fixed another major flaw that made communications vulnerable to interception.

The beta received a lot of criticism from high-skill players used to a game that catered directly to a fast-and-aggressive playstyle, but the more realistic mechanics seem just fine to me, and should benefit the swath of average players who comprise the majority of Call of Duty players. In a game that bills itself as tactical, you shouldn't be rewarded for bullrushing a room full of enemies just because you have twitchier muscles and can move like a mongoose that spent the past hour mainlining a cocktail of G-Fuel, Red Bull and Mountain Dew. Real people do not leap out of a slide and hit headshots. Faster players are always going to have better reflexes than your average 40-year-old playing Call of Duty; they don't need to be aided by unrealistic movement mechanics too.

In 2013, Russia's parliament unanimously passed a law forbidding "propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations", essentially making it illegal to distribute any material on gay relationships or gay rights via the internet or any other kind of media, or to hold gay pride marches or rallies. The move led to an immediate rise in homophobic hate crime. So far, targets have included Ikea (for the crime of including gay couples in its catalogue), sports events run by LGBT-friendly organisations, and perhaps most famously, the Sochi Olympics. This week, Russian MPs took aim at what might seem like an unlikely target: EA Sports' Fifa 17, the latest entry in an annual series of football games that routinely sells over 20m copies year. What's so gay about Fifa, you might ask?

Behavioral game analytics has predominantly been confined to work on single games, which means that the cross-game applicability of current knowledge remains largely unknown. Here four experiments are presented focusing on the relationship between game ownership, time invested in playing games, and the players themselves, across more than 3000 games distributed by the Steam platform and over 6 million players, covering a total playtime of over 5 billion hours. Experiments are targeted at uncovering high-level patterns in the behavior of players focusing on playtime, using frequent itemset mining on game ownership, cluster analysis to develop playtime-dependent player profiles, correlation between user game rankings and, review scores, playtime and game ownership, as well as cluster analysis on Steam games. Within the context of playtime, the analyses presented provide unique insights into the behavior of game players as they occur across games, for example in how players distribute their time across games.