Fallout 4’s free next-gen update is finally here, and it’s brought plenty of headaches with it. Patching in a 60fps mode for free on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S is a nice reason to dive back into one of Bethesda’s more controversial and arguably underappreciated post-apocalyptic RPGs, but some notable hang-ups are holding fans back from celebrating just yet.

Why Fallout: New Vegas Is Still Canon After The TV Show

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Out April 25 nine years after the game’s original release and just in time to capitalize on the Fallout TV show, the Fallout 4 upgrade fixes some long-standing bugs, gives away creation club content and weapon bundles, and enhances the visuals on console with a quality mode prioritizing detail and a performance mode prioritizing framerate. Unfortunately, things start to get messy from there.

PC players seem to be getting the worst of it. Some report that the improvements are barely noticeable, while new performance issues, crashes, and busted mods make for a bad trade-off. One thread over on the Steam Discussions page ominously labeled “How bad is the update?” lists many of the problems, including the “weapon debris” setting crashing games when left on and long load times after hitting Concord in the main questline.

Ultra-wide support also appears to be rough, with the game stretching the UI across the screen, making it look thick and distorted. “No discernible difference between the official ultrawide support and the old fashioned edit-the-config method, still need an additional mod for a usable HUD,” wrote one player. Other PC players are frustrated that the update doesn’t include any DLSS support or bumped framerate performance. A few players are having trouble getting the game to launch at all now, and Fallout 4 is in an especially sorry state on Steam Deck at the moment.

Things are much better on console, though even there players are facing some frustrating wrinkles. On Xbox Series X/S, there appears to be a bug that locks the next-gen version to the 60fps mode. “Disabling the performance mode seemingly does nothing,” reported Digital Foundry analyst Thomas Morgan on Twitter. “It stays at 60fps and the res bound stays the same.” Others were confused as to why they couldn’t initially spot any changes between the modes. “I was switching back and forth earlier, and I thought I was tripping because I couldn’t find the difference,” wrote one player on the Xbox subreddit.

On PlayStation 5, everything seems to be in order with the update itself. Instead, the problem is that not everyone can access it. Fallout 4 is included in the PS Plus Extra subscription library, just like it is on Game Pass, but players who had acquired the game that way couldn’t initially download the update for free. Some even went ahead and bought the game manually because they didn’t want to wait.

That issue was cleared up overnight, at least for some players. Anyone on PS5 who owned Fallout 4 through the PS Plus Collection from when the console launched are still being locked out. There’s no update yet on if that’s by design or not, so base-tier PS Plus subscribers are left debating whether to wait, upgrade their membership, or just buy the game at its full $20 price (it was discounted to $5 prior to the next-gen update’s launch).

A much more minor yet still confusing issue on PS5 is related to downloading Fallout 4’s DLCs. To install the next-gen version, all of the existing DLCs need to be first deleted from the console. The versions of the DLC don’t automatically download with the rest of the PS5 version either. And even once players go to retrieve them, the PS5 versions of DLC add-ons Automatron (which is fixed now), Far Harbor, and more will seem hidden until you press X to show the download queue. From there players will still need to cancel the PS4 versions from downloading. That’s a Sony issue rather than a Bethesda one but it’s still annoying.

It might have been easier to look past things like missing textures in the new Makeshift Weapon pack or integral mods being broken until fixes can be rushed out, if not for the critical mass of low-level frustrations around the next-gen update. Hopefully, it all gets squared away soon. After all, there’s unlikely to be another new single-player Fallout until the 2030s.

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Attention Residents: Exciting News!

We’re thrilled to announce that the new municipal app is now available for download! To ensure you don’t miss out on any updates or important community information, please delete the old app and download the new one. Simply search for “Town of Edson” in the App Store or Google Play Store and look for the Blue/Green background app icon. Alternatively, you can download the app directly from the following links:

iOS App Store: https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/town-of-edson/id6479719795

Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ca.looponline.edson 

The new version features a darker background icon, making it easy to distinguish from the old version. Please note that the old app (with a white background icon) will be discontinued on July 2, 2024.

Thank you for staying connected with us through the app!

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At QCon London, Rachael Greaves, chief executive officer at Castle Systems, presented both the obligations and benefits of data minimisation as a mechanism to decrease the impact of data breaches. AI autoclassification and automatic decision-making tools help with the ever-increasing data volumes as long as ethical principles are considered, allowing decisions to be challenged.

Greaves started her presentation by pointing out that cybersecurity focused mainly on reducing the likelihood of a breach through training, firewalls, and encryption. But, risk is a combination of likelihood and impact, i.e. “There could be a small likelihood of penetration but a critical impact”.

Data minimisation is a mechanism to lower the impact of data breaches. She stated that creating an impenetrable system is impossible: “There will always be the zero-day, the trusted inside man or the misconfiguration”. It is a security and privacy principle that requires organisations to limit the amount of information they hold, knowing that they might be breached or the data spilt into the public domain at any moment.

Besides the legal obligations, Greaves pointed towards the benefits of implementing data minimisation:

• Deterrence: Data minimisation reduces the potential harm that can be inflicted when data is spilt but also discourages further attempts to break into the system (minimising the amount of data that ill-willing actors can monetise will discourage further attempts).

• Response and Recovery: If you fully understand your data, this is a secondary benefit of data minimisation. Knowing this ahead of an incident will allow you to know “who’s in the spill” (which customer was affected). In case of a breach, you can swiftly alert the affected parties, minimising the impact.

• Insurability and Risk Transfer: Even if the evaluation process is opaque, the evaluation of cyber insurers has broad parts related to sensitive data. It was also found that organisations containing large amounts of sensitive information tended to have higher insurance costs.

• Organisational Effectiveness: You need to understand all your information holdings, i.e. what has risk and what has value, and importantly what rules apply to that information (retention rules, secrecy rules, regulatory obligations).

Even if many of the actions related to data minimisation can be enforced through governance, Greaves considered this to be an effort for the whole organisation, an effort in which developers play a key role, especially with data inventory (identify sensible or high-value data). She stressed that if done properly

Data Minimisation enables Organisational Maximisation

Data minimisation is not an additional phase in your project, but it’s an ongoing effort throughout the whole data lifecycle from creation or capture to eventual disposal. Three key elements of data minimisation stand out:

• Minimising collection: Don’t collect extraneous personal details, don’t collect the same data twice as part of two different services, don’t keep duplicates, excessive backups or offline copies, and collect only what’s needed.
• Minimising access: Minimise the number of people with access, their privileges and the duration of their access (“seeing who is doing what to data and being alerted to actions on sensitive and high-value data helps identify privilege creep..”).
• Data End-Of-Life Management: Data disposable is more than just hard drive degaussing. Much can be accomplished through policies and governance around records management and retention policies.

Greaves underlined again that even if many of the results come from processes and governance, it is of the utmost importance that developers buy-in and support the “data-minimisation philosophy” as data privacy and governance are shifting left.

Given the complexity and vast amounts of data, technology can shed light on “what’s valuable and what’s sensitive” in a timely and precise manner (Minimising risk and maximising outcomes). Artificial intelligence is very suitable for such tasks, especially autoclassification of data and Automated Decision Making (ADM). Systems need to be able to gather and flag sensitive data across multiple systems, without affecting the source systems but they should still keep humans as the ultimate decision-makers:

With something as risky as data governance it is important not to remove the people completely from the loop.

To avoid AI bias, hallucinations, or the risk of AI systems being used maliciously, some software-assisted obligations (AI-enabled or not) need to be explainable and transparent. This way, they can be challenged to avoid harm being inflicted on the most vulnerable communities.

Greaves ends her example-rich(OPM data breach, Australian University data breach, Windrush scandal, etc ) presentation with checklists that incorporate the best practices presented beforehand. According to her, privacy laws are skewed towards destroying data, records laws are skewed towards preserving it and national security laws tilt the balance back towards disposal of sensitive data. So, regardless of how hard it seems systems need to balance the tension between data risk and data value through system design.

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