SAN FRANCISCO—On Wednesday, two months after the Rock Band game franchise sputtered back to life, the staff at music-game developer Harmonix confirmed to Ars Technica that an even bigger release is on its way. Rock Band 4 is coming, and according to Harmonix, it’ll launch on Playstation 4 and Xbox One by the end of 2015.

However, it wasn’t quite the announcement event we were hoping for. Quite frankly, we were bummed to walk into a Harmonix meeting room and not see a single plastic guitar or drum set to muck around with, let alone even a hint of new Rock Band gameplay.

The reason? “We gotta get ahead of a lot of things first,” Harmonix product manager Daniel Sussman told Ars. “We’re out earlier than we have been in games past, talking about a release, to address the questions that everyone will have about their content, their hardware.”

A researcher at OpenDNS Security Labs has developed a new way to automatically detect and block sites used to distribute malware almost instantaneously without having to scan them. The approach, initially developed by researcher Jeremiah O’Connor, uses natural language processing and other analytics to detect malicious domains before they can attack by spotting host names that are designed as camouflage. Called NLPRank, it spots DNS requests for sites that have names similar to legitimate sites, but with IP addresses that are outside the expected address blocks and other related data that hints at sketchiness.

The practice of using look-alike domain names as part of an effort to fool victims into visiting websites or approving downloads is a well-worn approach in computer crime. But recent crafted attacks via “phishing” links in e-mails and social media have gone past the well-worn “typo-squatting” approach by using domain names that appear close to those of trusted sites, registered just in time for attacks to fly under reputation-scoring security tools to make blacklisting them harder. Fake domain names such as update-java.net and adobe-update.net, for example, were used in the recently discovered “Carbanak” attacks on banks that allowed criminals to gain access to financial institutions’ networks starting in January 2013 and steal over $1 billion over the next two years.

Many security services can screen out malicious sites based on techniques such as reputation analysis—checking a centralized database to see if a site name has been associated with any malware attacks. But because attackers are able to rapidly register new domains with scripted systems that look relatively legitimate to the average computer user, they can often bypass reputation checks—especially when using their specially crafted domain names in highly targeted attacks.

Sam Machkovech

The “final” version of the Steam Controller.

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SAN FRANCISCO—Enough press releases, enough GDC teases. On Wednesday, Valve Software finally unveiled a full range of Steam Machines, along with the “final” Steam Controller, the Steam Link streaming box, and even the SteamVR hardware. We’ll soon talk at length about our half-hour demo with SteamVR, composed of six distinct, interactive demos, but for now, we’ll recap our impressions of the rest of Valve’s hardware spread.

Valve Software confirmed that we tested the “final” version of the Steam Controller, which received a November 2015 release window in an announcement yesterday. That final design includes two touchpads (with the left one having a d-pad shape etched onto it), a back panel that can be clicked down with middle fingers on both sides, a single joystick—finally—and an Xbox-style spread of face buttons and shoulder buttons. The above gallery has captions with some thoughts on the controller’s features, including the new GameCube-like triggers.

SteamOS includes a few Steam Controller tweaking pages.

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We demoed three games, all of which launched with WASD-and-mouse control schemes on PC: The Talos Principle, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and the new, in-development version of Unreal Tournament. In all three, Kyle and I still struggled to feel competent with the right-hand touchpad as a mouse replacement. We played against easiest-difficulty bots in the latter two games and could barely line up solid gunshots most of the time. It’s one thing to say we’ll “get used to it” after more time with the controller—the increased speed and “momentum roll” of swiping the touchpad seem like features that will really pay off for people who get used to the Steam Controller—but the bots we faced practically stood still most of the time, and we’re not that bad at first-person shooters.