Ubisoft has announced its highly-anticipated upcoming game Assassin’s Creed Shadows has been delayed until next year.

Instead of releasing it on 12 November as previously planned, it has been pushed back to 14 February 2025.

It follows the disappointing performance of another of the firm’s major titles, Star Wars Outlaws, and concerns from some about how Ubisoft is being run.

The game’s executive producer Marc-Alexis Cote said the developers “need more time to polish and refine the experience”.

“We understand this decision will come as disappointing news,” he said.

“But we sincerely believe this is in the best interest of the game.”

In a trading update sent to Ubisoft’s investors, seen by the BBC, the firm – which is headquartered in France – said despite the game being “feature complete” it needed more time.

“The learnings from the Star Wars Outlaws release led us to provide additional time to further polish the title,” it reads.

Star Wars Outlaws was released in August to strong reviews, but early players complained of bugs and glitches.

In its trading update, Ubisoft notes sales of the game were “softer than expected”, which it seemed to be putting down to a lack of polish.

Mr Cote said the firm would refund fans who had pre-ordered the game, and promised a free expansion to anyone who placed a new pre-order for the revised launch.

When it finally arrives, Assassin’s Creed Shadows will be the first game in the series to be set in Japan – a setting fans have been clamouring for since the series began in 2007.

The decision to push the game back beyond Christmas – usually a lucrative time for game sales – will not have been made lightly.

But the sales performance of Star Wars Outlaws caused Ubisoft’s shares to take a serious hit, when the firm would have been hoping the game would set it back on course.

They have fallen to a price of 11.32 euros a share at the time of writing – the lowest in a decade.

A minority investor wrote a letter to the board earlier this month calling for the company to either be taken private or sold to an investor.

Ubisoft co-founder and boss Yves Guillemot said the move to push back Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ launch was a result of the firm’s second quarter performance – which “fell sort of our expectations”.

“We remain committed to creating games for fans and players that everyone can enjoy,” he said.

At a decommissioned coal mine in Scotland, a stark backdrop for the world’s first hydrogen-powered off-road racing car, testing is underway ahead of next year’s hydrogen racing series, Extreme H.

The series is an evolution of the current all-electric series, Extreme E, with the organisers using it to develop hydrogen as a future car technology and showcase its green potential. “We’re using racing to accelerate the adoption, accelerate the innovation around hydrogen,” says Ali Russell, managing director of Extreme E, allowing “you and I to go out and buy our next car as a hydrogen vehicle”.

The Pioneer 25 car uses hydrogen produced using green solar and wind energy sources by Enowa in Saudi Arabia. “In motor racing, we always shoot for gold standards,” says Mark Grain, technical director at Extreme E, who was responsible for developing the car. “We don’t want to compromise and use a lesser form of hydrogen than green hydrogen,” he adds.

However, the racing series is also seen as a technology incubator. While green hydrogen is highly desirable, it is a relatively new technology and scaling to mass adoption may involve less green sources in the interim. “We need to create the right environment for the economics of hydrogen to work, which is about mass adoption,” says Russell. “So whether that’s blue, whether that’s pink, whether that’s grey, whether that’s green,” he says, referring to the various forms of hydrogen production, each of which involves different processes and energy sources, including some that use fossil fuels. “Ultimately, green has got the most important story, but all of those aspects of hydrogen are really important at this moment in time.”

Right now, however, it is all about proving the technology in extreme environments, wrangling performance and getting the car ready to race next season. “We’re not only moving technology, we’re improving the car,” says Russell, “and we’re going to have a much better racing series as a consequence.”  As the car gets put through its paces, it certainly seems to be delivering on that promise. “The Extreme H car is going to be quicker than Extreme E car on track,” says Hedda Hosås, Extreme H’s test driver.

It’s hard to put a cap on how much one should spend on a gaming laptop. And even though we see a lot of excellent gaming PC deals, these resource-heavy machines can still be quite expensive. But you get what you pay for, right? That’s why we’d like to draw your attention to the following Lenovo offer: 

Right now, you can buy the Lenovo Legion 9i Gaming Laptop for $3,500. At full price, this model sells for $3,840. At the same time, it’s not the most considerable markdown in the world; every last penny counts, especially when it comes to this kind of power and performance.

Why you should buy the Lenovo Legion 9i 

We had the opportunity to take the Legion 9i for a test drive not too long ago and were floored by the results. Our reviewer thought this laptop rivaled the performance of many desktop PCs and praised the 9i for its excellent mini-LED lighting and portability. It also made it onto our best gaming laptops roundup. 

This configuration of the Legion 9i comes with a 14th Gen Intel Core i9 that delivers max clock speeds of 5.80GHz, an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 with 12GB of memory, 32GB of RAM, and 1TB of storage. The 16-inch mini-LED screen delivers up to 3200 x 2000 resolution and maintains up to a 165Hz refresh rate. You’ll also get up to 1,200 nits at peak brightness, so expect vibrant and colorful picture quality, along with excellent black levels. 

A solid gaming experience is nothing without good audio, and the Legion 9i contains a brilliant two-channel Harman Super Linear Speaker System. This stereo pairing does a terrific job at filling the average-sized room and leverages a Smart Amp with Nahimic Audio for enhanced PC sound. Other noteworthy features include:

• HDMI and USB connections
• A 1080p webcam
• Three months of Xbox PC Game Pass on the house

We’re not sure how long this sale is going to last, so now could be the best time to save. Take $340 off the Lenovo Legion 9i Gaming Laptop when you order through the manufacturer, and be sure to take a look at some of the other Lenovo laptop deals we found. We also have an entire list of gaming laptop deals featuring brands like Alienware and HP.

For years, Google has been working hard to make Android an increasingly secure OS. Attackers look for any loophole they can exploit, using mundane methods like phishing or more complex ones like memory safety vulnerabilities. Now, Google explains how the Safe Coding approach has managed to significantly reduce memory safety vulnerabilities in Android in recent years.

Google uses Safe Coding approach against memory safety vulnerabilities

Memory safety vulnerabilities are those that take advantage of memory-related bugs, such as buffer overflows, format string issues, or dangling pointers, to interact with or even write over the memory. These types of vulnerabilities are still widely present in software development. Developers try to attack them from various approaches, with mitigations and proactive detections predominating. However, Google is confident that Safe Coding is the ideal approach to minimize memory safety vulnerabilities, as evidenced by its results with Android.

The Safe Coding approach prioritizes the use of memory-safe programming languages from the start. However, there is software that is many years old and has millions of lines of key code developed on “memory-unsafe” languages. So, what is Google’s proposal in these cases? The answer is in the gradual transition to memory-safe languages (like Rust) for new features.

Basically, Google proposes that developers start implementing exclusively memory-safe languages when developing new features. In the meantime, old code based on unsafe languages will remain “unchanged” beyond the classic maintenance and bug fixes. This translates into achieving safe, efficient, and cost-effective interoperability between new and old code.

Android’s memory safety vulnerabilities fell 52% in 6 years

According to Google, the Safe Coding approach resulted in a drop in memory safety vulnerabilities in Android from 76% to 24% in just 6 years. However, the idea of keeping memory-unsafe code can seem counterintuitive. After all, if you’re looking for maximum security, your first thought would be to migrate all your code to a safe language. While this may be true, Google’s approach makes sense, and the company explains why.

In software development, code efficiency and cost-effectiveness are key. There are tools or entire systems with many years of development behind them. This involves millions and millions of fundamental lines of code. While a company could simply start rewriting software from scratch based on memory-safe languages, the investment and effort are probably not worth it. The situation might be different in relatively new developments with not much time behind them, though.

Advantages of Safe Coding and interoperability

Google claims that the Safe Coding approach, which is based on code interoperability, is a cost-effective and practical way to adopt memory-safe code. This, in turn, makes it cost-effective, as it allows companies to leverage previous investments. The cost is significantly lower compared to rewriting software from scratch. It is also efficient because it allows new features to continue to be developed while integrating the new, safe code.

Using inherently memory-safe code also ensures lower costs in the long run. Previous approaches favored an endless cycle of “attack and defend” between developers and attackers. Relying on mitigations and proactive detections necessitated continuous action and investment in response to potential attacks. However, Safe Coding allows developers and companies to forget about this, focusing on maintaining and improving features or fixing bugs.

There is also greater productivity thanks to lower code rollback rates. That is, there are fewer emergency code rollback situations due to unexpected bugs. Google claims that Rust offers code rollback rates of less than half that of C++. Essentially, Safe Coding brings significant savings in time and money for businesses and developers. In today’s industry, which closely monitors profitability, this can be crucial.

Google reveals that it implemented interoperability between “Rust ↔︎ C++ and Rust ↔︎ Kotlin.” The company has also contributed both money and tools to power its approach. For example, Google gave $1,000,000 to the Rust Foundation to boost its evolution. It also provided its own interoperability tools, such as Crubit and autocxx.

This is how the Safe Coding approach makes software more secure

You may still be wondering how an approach that keeps memory-unsafe code can lead to an exponential reduction of memory safety vulnerabilities. Google also explains this in its blog post, in a very technical way, but I’ll try to make it simple for everyone.

Through large-scale studies, USENIX Security and Google itself discovered an intriguing phenomenon. Basically, the research concluded that the vast majority of memory vulnerabilities in software have their origin in new code. A significant portion is also derived from recently modified code. Google also noticed that the density of Android memory safety vulnerabilities decreased progressively in old code.

Given that a significant portion of the issue stems from new code, it makes sense to focus on it, correct? This is the reasoning behind Google’s decision to adopt the Safe Coding approach. But why do more problems and vulnerabilities accumulate in new code? This is because every programming language has a fundamental property: maturation.

While the fundamental structure of a language can make it memory unsafe, successive updates can help mitigate this. So, theoretically, unsafe code used in older parts of the software can become less vulnerable over time. By combining the maturation of older code with new features developed in new, inherently memory-safe code, the result will be an exponential decrease in memory vulnerabilities.

Google recommends Rust as a memory-safe language

Of course, porting parts of older code to languages like Rust can make things even safer. However, this isn’t always possible, at least not in a straightforward way. There are cases where moving a single block can bring down the whole castle. Google is adamant about Rust as a memory-safe programming language. So if you’re interested in learning programming or a new language to be competitive in today’s industry, Rust may be what you’re looking for.

Memory safety vulnerabilities aren’t the only ones out there. Malicious third parties will continue to look for ways to try to bypass the security layers of any software. However, having strong barriers in the “guts” of the software ensures that attackers will have to resort to more mundane and easily neutralized methods. For example, you can avoid being a victim of phishing by simply using common sense.