60 Parsecs! is Now Available on Steam and is 10% off!*

60 Parsecs! is an Atomic Space Age adventure of scavenge and survival. Keep your crew alive and ready for action. Make difficult choices, face soup shortages and other horrors of outer space. And maybe reach your destination. Or not.

*Offer ends September 25 at 10AM Pacific Time

This week at Bungie, Power is enabled.

Lord Saladin has returned once more to host the Iron Banner. Power matters, and players are feeling it. Some who conquered the “Last Wish” raid are taking their newly earned rewards out for a spin, while others are completing their weekly challenges in search of powerful rewards.

Across the pond, we’ve deployed our away team to EGX! If you happen to be in Birmingham, UK, make sure to stop by. We have opportunities to meet the developers, and a panel that goes deeper on the creation of the Dreaming City. If you’re unable to make it, the discussion panel will also be streamed.

Developer Meet and Greets

Virgin Media, Destiny 2: Forsaken Stand

Friday, September 21, 5:15 PM BST

Saturday, September 22, 11 AM BST

Discussion Panel—Building the Dreaming City

Friday, September 21, 4 PM BST (8 AM PDT)

That’s not all that we have going on this week. We’re still in the midst of celebrating many players throughout the community who’ve taken on one of the most challenging activities in the Destiny universe to date.

Toppling a Giant

On September 14, Petra invited Guardians from around the world to launch into the “Last Wish” raid. The race for World First was exciting as always, and Clan Redeem once again earned the title. This fireteam truly knows the definition of teamwork, as each member provided the skill and puzzle-solving knowledge to overcome the activity as a whole before anyone else in the world. We have a few words from their fireteam to share with you:

Clan Redeem: “Last Wish” was everything we as a clan could have wanted out of a World First race, and more: a grinding experience with massive ups and downs, incredible challenges, and a true test of mental fortitude. This was the first raid we’ve ever done in which we learned more than just mechanics. We learned about our own resilience, and that we would never give up, no matter how bleak the situation seemed.

Getting to the boss room almost six hours after other teams was demoralizing, and it had us on the verge of collapsing as a team. We knew this was the moment we had to step up or let the race slip away from us. We pushed through the exhaustion and started playing to each member’s strengths. We want to thank all teams that attempted the raid on day one; without your fierce competition, it wouldn’t have been as intense. A big thank-you as well to anyone who came out and supported us during this nearly 19-hour marathon. It means more than you could ever imagine.

Many throughout the studio were glued to their screens for the entirety of the raid, eagerly waiting for the first players to crack puzzles and beat the final boss. Some of us even stuck around in the Bungie Theater for 18 hours to track progress. Senior Designer Joe Blackburn was on site to verify the first completion alongside our analytics team. With the raid conquered, he’d like to say thank you on behalf of all who worked to bring this experience to Destiny 2:

Joe: Last Friday, we were excited to reveal the latest chapter in Destiny raids: “Last Wish” was released into the wild. After a monumental 18+ hour adventure, six Guardians slew Riven and changed the Dreaming City forever. To everyone who ventured into the heart of the Dreaming City, thank you. It was a privilege to get to watch players tackle the Taken scourge.

Whether you finish as World First or simply World’s Most Recent, we can’t wait for you and your fireteam to topple the last known Ahamkara. It takes a small army of very passionate developers to create content like this, and getting to see it in your hands puts a huge smile on all of our faces.

Until next time.

If you have yet to visit the Dreaming City since the Raid was beaten, these six Guardians have unlocked some new areas for you to explore. You can find a new strike, ”The Corrupted,” and the new Gambit map, “Cathedral of Scars,” available in their respective activity playlists.

Break On Through

Starting Tuesday, September 25, the new Crucible game mode Breakthrough will become available to all players of Destiny 2. There will also be new maps that were crafted to complement this game type. Here’s a quick overview of how Breakthrough works:

At the beginning of each round, players will fight to capture a central zone. Once the zone is captured, your team will deploy the Breaker. As players work to deploy the Breaker, the zone can be contested, resulting in an epic tug-of-war between the two teams. Once the Breaker is captured, it will be used to assault and hack the enemy team’s Vault.

If you hack the enemy team’s Vault, you win the round. If you fail to hack the enemy team’s Vault within the round time limit, you lose. If you are in the process of hacking the enemy team’s Vault when time runs out, you will enter Sudden Death until you either hack the Vault, or the enemy removes all your progress.

First team to win three rounds takes the match.

Breakthrough will first be available as the Weekly Featured Playlist for the week of September 25. Then, it will be added to the Competitive playlist starting October 2. Owners of Destiny 2: Forsaken may begin to play Breakthrough in Private Matches on September 25 as well.

As for maps, here are some sneak peeks at what every player looking to deploy some Breakers might expect next Tuesday:

Equinox

Firebase Echo

The Citadel

For those who have yet to play since Iron Banner went live, Convergence will also be available as a Breakthrough map.

Players on PlayStation 4 will also have access to the map Gambler’s Ruin.

Weekend Programming

If you’re looking for something to do this weekend in Destiny 2, we have two offerings that may appeal to your interests.

Gambit Free Trial

Start: 10 AM PDT on September 21

End: 10 AM PDT on September 23

If you’re looking for some pure PvP action without having to bank motes for the Drifter, Lord Shaxx is your man.

Double Valor will be available in all Crucible Playlists, including Iron Banner! Get out there and make Shaxx proud.

Nuts and Bolts

Over the last few weeks, we’ve shipped a few updates and hotfixes to address various known issues in Destiny 2. Just today, we released Hotfix 2.0.3.1 to address a few issues impacting rewards and Gambit matchmaking. Destiny Player Support is with you each step of the way, from the first report of an issue to the deployment of a fix. Read on for the status of current investigations, and more!

Destiny 2 Hotfixes 2.0.3 and 2.0.3.1

This week, we deployed Destiny 2 Hotfixes 2.0.3 and 2.0.3.1 to players. These hotfixes resolved a number of newly discovered issues that directly affected the player experience and game economy.

Some of these fixes include:

The Good, the Bad, and the Ahamkara

How long do you need to wait after something’s been released to talk about spoilers? I guess it depends on what you’re talking about. If it’s a movie, you should probably wait a week or two. What about a Destiny 2 raid—“Last Wish” in particular? I’m thinking seven days is long enough. In any case, if you’re looking to go into the raid unspoiled, don’t watch the amazing videos below.

Movie of the Week: Four-Player Riven Defeat

Honorable Mention: Solo Kalli Defeat

Before we go, we do want to take a moment to thank our test and services teams here at Bungie. We don’t usually like to give ourselves a pat on the back, but we wanted to thank everyone for coming in and kicking ass to get four updates out in the last 10 days. Without them, weekly challenges would still be in danger of Saturday resets, among other issues that snuck through the cracks at launch.

Dmg04

Today’s post was written by Gaurav Sareen, Corporate Vice President for Microsoft.

We are excited to bring Skype calling to Alexa devices, so users can easily communicate with their friends and family from their Echo devices, simply using voice.

Users can make outgoing Skype voice and video calls, accept incoming Skype calls, and even make SkypeOut calls to most phone numbers around the world. For example, simply say, “Alexa, call Jimmy on Skype,” or if Jimmy is calling you on Skype, say, “Alexa, answer.”

Alexa users will soon be able to take advantage of the high-quality Skype network across the globe to easily connect with others from any device type such as PC, mobile phone, and Xbox.

This is the next step in the collaboration between Microsoft and Amazon to deliver delightful customer experiences through voice, which began with joining Cortana and Alexa. Since then, we’ve added Alexa integration on Xbox and are continuing to work together to bring the best of Skype and Alexa together to enable intelligent communications for our users.

We’re excited to continue bringing the best of Microsoft and Amazon together.

Skype calling on Alexa will begin rolling out later this year. Feel free to share your feedback and get the latest news and tips by following us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Also, please join us in the Skype Community.

At Node+JS Interactive, attendees collaborate face to face, network, and learn how to improve their skills with JS in serverless, IoT, and more. Stephanie Evans, Content Manager for Back-end Web Development at LinkedIn Learning, will be speaking at the upcoming conference about building a secure ecosystem for Node.js. Here she answers a few questions about teaching and learning basic security practices.

Linux.com: Your background is in tech education, can you provide more details on how you would define this and how you got into this area of expertise?

Stephanie Evans: It sounds cliché, but I’ve always been passionate about education and helping others. After college, I started out as an instructor of a thoroughly analog skill: reading. I worked my way up to hiring and training reading teachers and discovered my passion for helping people share their knowledge and refine their teaching craft. Later, I went to work for McGraw Hill Education, publishing self-study certification books on popular IT certs like CompTIA’s Network+ and Security+, ISAAP’s CISSP, etc. My job was to figure out who the biggest audiences in IT were; what they needed to know to succeed professionally; hire the right book author; and help develop the manuscript with them.

I moved into online learning/e-learning 4 years ago and shifted to video training courses geared towards developers. I enjoy working with people who spend their time building and solving complex problems. I now manage the video training library for back-end web developers at LinkedIn Learning/Lynda.com and figure out what developers need to know; hire instructors to create that content; and work together to figure out how best to teach it to them. And, then update those courses when they inevitably become out of date.

Linux.com: What initially drove you to use your skill set in education to help with security practices?

Evans: I attend a lot of conferences, watch a lot of talks, and chat to a lot of developers as part of my job. I distinctly remember attending a security best practices talk at a very large, enterprise-tech focused conference and was surprised by the rudimentary content being covered. Poor guy, I’d thought…he’s going to get panned by this audience. But then I looked around and most everyone was engaged. They were learning something new and compelling. And it hit me: I had been in a security echo chamber of my own making. Just like the mainstream developer isn’t working with the cutting-edge technology people are raving about on Twitter, they aren’t necessarily as fluent in basic security practices as I’d assumed.  A mix of unawareness, intense time pressure, and perhaps some misplaced trust can lead to a “security later” mentality. But with the global cost of cybercrime up to 600 billion a year from 500 billion in 2014 as well as the exploding amount of data on the web. We can’t afford to be working around security or assuming everyone knows the basics.

Linux.com: What do you think are some common misconceptions about security with Node.js and in general with developers?

Evans: I think one of the biggest misconceptions is that security awareness and practices should come “later” in a developer’s career (and later in the development cycle). Yes, your first priority is to learn that Java and JavaScript are not the same thing—that’s obviously most important. And you do have to understand how to create a form before you can understand how to prevent cross-site -scripting attacks. But helping developers understand—at all stages of their career and learning journey—what the potential vulnerabilities are and how they can be exploited needs to be a much higher priority and come earlier than we may intuitively think.

I joke with my instructors that we have to sneak in the ‘eat your vegetables’ content to our courses. Security is an exciting, complex and challenging topic, but it can feel like you’re having to eat your vegetables as a developer when you dig into it. Often ‘security’ is a separate department (that can be perceived as ‘slowing things down’ or getting in the way of deploying code) and it can further distance developers from their role in securing their applications.  

I also think that those who truly understand security can feel that it’s overwhelmingly complex to teach—but we have to start somewhere. I attended an introductory npm talk last year that talked about how to work with dependencies and packages…but never once mentioned the possibility of malicious code making it into your application through these packages. I’m all about teaching just enough at the right time and not throwing the kitchen sink of knowledge at new developers. We should stop thinking of security—or even just security awareness—as an intermediate or advanced skill and start bringing it up early and often.

Linux.com: How can we infuse tech education into our security practices? Where does this begin?

Evans: It definitely goes both ways. Clear documentation and practical resources right alongside security recommendations go a long way towards ensuring understanding and adoption. You have to make things as easy as possible if you want people to actually do it. And you have to make those best practices accessible enough to understand.

The 2018 Node User Survey Report from the Node.js Foundation showed that while learning resources around Node.js and JavaScript development improved, the availability and quality of learning resources for Node.js Security received the lowest scores across the board.

After documentation and Stack Overflow, many developers rely on online videos and tutorials—we need to push security education to the forefront, rather than expecting developers to seek it out. OWASP, the nodegoat project, and the Node.js Security Working Group are doing great work here to move the needle. I think tech education can do even more to bring security in earlier in the learning journey and create awareness about common exploits and important resources.

Learn more at Node+JS Interactive, coming up October 10-12, 2018 in Vancouver, Canada.