Ford is making new Broncos; mockumentary John Bronco has its ideal pitchman

The trailer for Hulu's John Bronco.

John Bronco—Hulu's new sub-40-minute mockumentary about a "lost" "Ford pitchman"—is a good idea, well-executed. What if you took the competent-idiot Southern charm of Justified's Boyd Crowder, but, instead of an Appalachian criminal, made the character the unlikely pitchman for a beloved classic SUV, who oozes over-the-top marketable machismo a la the Marlboro Man? And... what if you can get Walton Goggins himself to play the S.O.B? To call that comedic premise excellent, well, "It'd be like saying, 'I Can't Believe It's Not Butter is just margarine...' which I guess it is," as one interviewee describes Bronco.

In case the title alone doesn't explain the premise: sometime around the 1960s, Ford had a rugged SUV, called the Bronco, lined up for the masses. But it needed a way to sell this new contraption. The company decided it would enter a prototype of the vehicle in the Baja 1000, a famed off-road race. It needed someone tough enough to handle this beast of a vehicle and course, so it sought out whoever seemed to be the most rugged guy in the region—a rodeo champ named John Bronco. John Bronco chronicles the (to be clear, fictional) man's rise, fall, and disappearance before trying to figure out where the legendary ad icon is now.

The team behind John Bronco—Director Jake Szymanski (HBO's Tour de Pharmacy) and producer Marc Gilbar—started on the idea in 2019 but ultimately timed the project for maximum impact when they learned Ford had real-life plans to relaunch the iconic Bronco late this summer. According to The Ringer, the team met directly with Ford and earned access to the company's marketing archives, which get mined thoroughly for aesthetic and pseudo-accuracy in the film. For instance: if you, too, were also born after the mid-1980s, maybe it'd be surprising to learn Doug Flutie had enough of a Q score to actually hawk cars for Ford in 1985 (though the original ad does not seem to end in tragedy).

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Lamborghini’s Huracán Evo RWD is made for maximum fun, not lap times

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  The all-wheel-drive Lamborghini Huracán Evo was determined to be too drama-free, so now Lamborghini has made a $214,366 rear-wheel-drive version. Which is a lot, but it's a massive $50,000 cheaper than the all-wheel-drive version we tested in 2019. [credit: Lamborghini ]

"Hang back for a second so I can show you the course," Dean DiGiacomo says over the radio as we approach the skid pad in a pair of 610hp (455kW), Skittle-colored Huracáns.

A professional racer and the chief instructor for Lamborghini's various performance schools—which range from customer track days to an intensive training program for the automaker's Super Trofeo wheel-to-wheel racing series—DiGiacomo takes a moment to explain the vehicle settings I'll need to select before he sets off on a demonstration pass.

The matte-purple machine arcs gracefully from one cone of the figure eight to the next, V10 wailing as it turns rubber into smoke. Before I know it, DiGiacomo is already back in the pit area and it's my turn to give it a go. "Now, do it just like that," a photographer says to me with a knowing grin. We share a laugh. But how hard can it be, right?

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The new adaptation of The Witches is almost too much fun

The trailer for The Witches

Roald Dahl's 1983 children's fantasy novel The Witches begins with a simple declaration: "This is not a fairy tale." Witches, the unnamed boy narrator claims, are real. They live among us, demons indistinguishable from real women, hell-bent on murdering children. The boy is matter-of-fact about this frightening reality, but also urgent—he is relaying the immediate threat of a global network of bloodthirsty child predators. It's an intimate, conspiratorial opener, drawing readers in by whispering the secret truths grown-ups usually don't want them to know: not only is the world not safe for the young, it's unfair, treacherous, and cruel.

As the story progresses, the narrator recounts his fateful encounter with the wicked Grand High Witch—the big, bad boss of all the witches around the world—along with every witch in England, a run-in that shapes his life. While on vacation with his grandmother at a seaside resort, he stumbles into a hush-hush witch conference, where the Grand High Witch explains a plot to turn all the world's children into mice. (The witches disguise themselves as a society against cruelty towards children.) In classic Dahl fashion, there's a surfeit of jokes about bodily functions, an unkind depiction of a fat kid as a greedy idiot, and vividly drawn villains who speak in rhyme. The boy and his grandmother ultimately foil the witches' scheme, but the ending is more melancholic than happily-ever-after: the narrator is transformed into a mouse by the witches; even after outwitting them, he cannot change back. He takes his predicament in stride, comforted by the knowledge that he won't outlive the only person in the world who loves him, but still—it's a children's story where the hero is doomed to premature death. Dark! It's a macabre, gripping tale, one which has remained a perennial favorite for kids since its debut more than 35 years ago. The Witches, like Dahl's best work, taps into a wavelength that acknowledges the dark edges of childhood in a way that so much young adult literature does not: puerile and mean and honest. People who hate children think they smell like shit. Strangers with candy have bad intentions. Parents die. And sometimes kids do too.

The new adaptation of The Witches, out on HBO Max this week, doesn't totally carry this brutal worldview forward. It begins with a monologue modeled after the book's opener. It's narrated over a slide show that even includes snippets of Dahl's original text (including "Witches are REAL!"). But even though many of the words are the same, the tone is quite different. The narrator begins by sputtering out a cough, then says, "Alright, where were we?" as though he's a substitute teacher trying to figure out which slide of the presentation he's on. He also sounds unmistakably like Chris Rock. Because he is voiced by Chris Rock. No knock to Rock, who has an excellent voice—his "Lil' Penny" commercials should be playing on a loop in the Louvre—but his jocular, bemused timbre here conjures a much different atmosphere than the book's prologue. Instead of tugging viewers aside to offer a warning, it opens like a classroom lecture about something that happened long ago. It's the first of many signs that this version of The Witches, directed by Robert Zemeckis, is a substantial departure in sensibility from its source material.

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Hulu brings back that irreverent magic with trailer for Animaniacs reboot

Yakko, Wakko, and Dot are back in Hulu’s reboot of the classic Animaniacs cartoon.

Readers of a certain age will have fond childhood memories of weekday afternoons spent in the company of the Warner siblings, Yakko, Wakko, and Dot, the central figures of the hugely popular, Emmy-award winning animated series, Animaniacs. Now a whole new generation can appreciate their comic genius with Hulu's revival of the show, slated to debut next month.

The premise of the original Animaniacs was that Yakko, Wakko, and Dot were characters from the 1930s who were locked way in a water tower on the Warner Bros. lot until they escaped in the 1990s. Now they exist to wreak havoc and have fun. The format borrowed heavily from sketch comedy, with each episode typically featuring three short mini-episodes centered on different characters, connected by bridging segments. Other regular characters included two genetically altered lab mice, Pinky and the Brain, who are always trying to take over the world; Ralph the Security Guard; Slappy Squirrel and her nephew, Skippy; Chicken Boo; Flavio and Marita, aka the Hip Hippos; studio psychiatrist Dr. Otto Scratchansniff and Hello Nurse (also a common catchphrase); and a trio of pigeons known as The Goodfeathers.

As appealing to adults as to kids, the show was smart, funny, irreverent, and even educational, especially with its playful songs listing the nations of the world, for instance, or all the US states and their capitals—set to the tune of "Turkey in the Straw"—or all the presidents set to the "William Tell Overture." (My personal favorite was "The Solar System Song," complete with the obligatory joke about Uranus.) The writers were masters of parody, so much so that it became something of a badge of honor to be so featured. Honorees included A Hard Day's Night, Seinfeld, Friends, Bambi, Power Rangers, Rugrats, and The Lion King, as well as the Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas Pirates of Penzance and H.M.S. Pinafore. And of course, the Goodfeathers segments invariably parodied characters from both The Godfather and Goodfellas.

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Trickbot—the for-hire botnet Microsoft attacked—is scrambling to stay alive

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Ars Technica)

Operators of Trickbot—a for-hire botnet that has infected more than 1 million devices since 2016—are looking for new ways to stay afloat after Microsoft and a host of industry partners took coordinated action to disrupt it last week.

In an update published on Tuesday, Microsoft Corporate VP for Security & Trust Tom Burt said the operation initially managed to take down 62 of the 69 servers Trickbot was known to be using to control its vast network of infected devices. Trickbot operators responded by quickly spinning up 59 new servers, and Microsoft was able to eliminate all of them except for one.

In all, the industrywide operation has taken down 120 of 128 servers identified as belonging to Trickbot. Now, Trickbot is responding by using a competing criminal group to distribute the Trickbot malware.

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If recycling plastics isn’t making sense, remake the plastics

Enlarge / Workers sort plastic waste as a forklift transports plastic waste at Yongin Recycling Center in Yongin, South Korea. (credit: Bloomberg/Getty Images)

A few years back, it looked like plastic recycling was set to become a key part of a sustainable future. Then, the price of fossil fuels plunged, making it cheaper to manufacture new plastics. Then China essentially stopped importing recycled plastics for use in manufacturing. With that, the bottom dropped out of plastic recycling, and the best thing you could say for most plastics is that they sequestered the carbon they were made of.

The absence of a market for recycled plastics, however, has also inspired researchers to look at other ways of using them. Two papers this week have looked into processes that enable "upcycling," or converting the plastics into materials that can be more valuable than the freshly made plastics themselves.

Make me some nanotubes

The first paper, done by an international collaboration, actually obtained the plastics it tested from a supermarket chain, so we know it works on relevant materials. The upcycling it describes also has the advantage of working with very cheap, iron-based catalysts. Normally, to break down plastics, catalysts and the plastics are heated together. But in this case, the researchers simply mixed the catalyst and ground up plastics and heated the iron using microwaves.

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The preexisting conditions of the coronavirus pandemic

Enlarge (credit: Nancybelle Gonzaga Villarroya)

A massive new accounting of the health of humans on Earth, collating and inferring stats on hundreds of diseases and injuries across 204 nations, has mostly good news. People are healthier, and they stay that way for longer. The bad news: That’s not true if those people are poor, are people of color, live in the United States, and there’s a pandemic.

Then they’re screwed.

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YouTube cracks down on QAnon conspiracists

Enlarge / Conspiracy theorist QAnon demonstrators protest child trafficking on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles, California, August 22, 2020. (credit: Kyle Grillot | Getty Images)

Google-owned YouTube has become the latest social media platform to crack down on the pro-Trump conspiracy theory QAnon ahead of November’s US election, but stopped short of a full ban on the rapidly spreading movement.

In a blog post on Thursday, the video platform said that it would “prohibit content that targets an individual or group with conspiracy theories that have been used to justify real-world violence,” citing QAnon and related conspiracy theory Pizzagate.

The social media group also said that it had removed “tens of thousands” of videos and “hundreds of channels” related to QAnon, whose members believe US president Donald Trump is under threat from a Satanic “deep state” cabal of Democrats and Hollywood celebrities involved in child trafficking.

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DiRT 5 and our first Xbox Series X “enhanced” tests: 120Hz saves the uneven ride

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  Microsoft provided the following three images of DiRT 5 running on Xbox Series X, which line up with how the game can look in its sweetened "photo" mode. But how does it look in action? Read on to find out. [credit: Codemasters ]

While I have been testing a pre-release Xbox Series X console for nearly a month, ahead of its November 10 launch, I have had very few new games to test on it. Most of my effort has revolved around its massive backwards-compatible feature set—as seen in a very long feature about how older games benefit from newer hardware.

Today, for the first time, I'm allowed to lift the curtain on a game made for Xbox Series consoles: DiRT 5, the latest drift-heavy racing game from Codemasters. What's more, it is the first game I've ever tested for a bespoke game console with frame rates up to 120fps. That's a substantial increase from the 60fps max of past console generations (and a big rally-car leap above the 30fps cap you typically see on current-gen games).

I want to be clear: DiRT 5 is not the best foot forward for Xbox Series X, and I'm not entirely sure it's representative of the console's next-gen promise. I urge you to keep an eye out for more next-gen game impressions before loading ammunition into your preferred "console war" cannon. But DiRT 5's first taste of 120Hz racing on a console, and what it takes to get there, is fascinating enough to merit an asterisk-covered preview.

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FBI/DHS: Government election systems face threat from active Zerologon exploits

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

The FBI and the cybersecurity arm of the Department of Homeland Security said they have detected hackers exploiting a critical Windows vulnerability against state and local governments and that in some cases the attacks are being used to breach networks used to support elections.

Members of unspecific APTs—the abbreviation for advanced persistent threats—are exploiting the Windows vulnerability dubbed Zerologon. It gives attackers who already have a toehold on a vulnerable network access to the all-powerful domain controllers that administrators use to allocate new accounts and manage existing ones.

To gain initial access, the attackers are exploiting separate vulnerabilities in firewalls, VPNs, and other products from companies including Juniper, Pulse Secure, Citrix NetScaler, and Palo Alto Networks. All of the vulnerabilities—Zerologon included—have received patches, but as evidenced by Friday’s warning from the DHS and FBI, not everyone has installed them. The inaction is putting governments and elections systems at all levels at risk.

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RIP to Crucible, Amazon Games’ first PC shooter: 2020-2020

Enlarge / We've previously put these Amazon Games mascots behind prison bars; now, they're in flames. RIP, Crucible. We hardly knew ye. (credit: Amazon Games / Aurich Lawson)

As it turns out, Amazon's idea of a Crucible couldn't handle the intense heat and pressure of the games industry.

After launching in May of this year, Crucible, Amazon Games' first large-scale shooter title for PC, will stop receiving updates and matchmaking support on November 9, the studio announced on Friday (at the exact end-of-week hour that bad game-news stories are typically sent to pasture). The company is taking the extreme measure of offering a "full refund" for any purchases made during the free-to-play game's lifespan, and it's directing customers to make refund requests through either Steam Support or Amazon's own contact form, depending on where purchases were originally made.

This followed the game's formal delisting from Steam in July, which followed painfully low concurrent player counts (as low as 200) that made it difficult for players to successfully matchmake with each other. Though the game launched with considerable attention, including a promotional blitz on the Amazon-owned game-streaming platform Twitch, it only briefly maintained a player population exceeding 10,000 users.

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