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Report: Blizzard will reveal HD remaster of StarCraft in September

It’d be cool to see this in a resolution higher than 640×480. (credit: Blizzard Entertainment) Are you one of the thousands of diehard real-time strategy gamers who has yet to abandon the 1998 version of StarCraft ? Would you rather not deal with the sequel’s altered soldiers and upgrade trees, yet also pine for a version of the original that runs at a higher resolution than 640×480 pixels? The game’s creators at Blizzard Software might have a treat in store for you: a remastered version of the original StarCraft . According to Korean news outlet iNews24— spotted by Kotaku on Friday—multiple sources are confident that Blizzard plans to announce StarCraft HD in September. The announcement would be followed by a deeper reveal at BlizzCon’s November event in Anaheim. The Korean report hints at “improved graphics resolution and user interface,” but it doesn’t confirm whether fans should expect redrawn 2D assets or a complete 3D overhaul of the game’s Terran, Protoss, and Zerg races. The report doesn’t mention whether or not the remaster will include single-player content, and it doesn’t mention whether the multiplayer mode will hinge on the Brood War expansion pack (though, based on that version’s dominance in international competitive play, we assume it will). Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Report: Blizzard will reveal HD remaster of StarCraft in September

Luxury Liner SS United States Cannot Be Put Back In Service

tomhath writes: Once the fastest ocean liner ever built, the SS United States has been mothballed for almost 50 years. An ambitious project to refurbish the SS United States as a luxury liner has been abandoned due to insurmountable technical and commercial obstacles. Plan B, to turn it into a floating hotel/convention center, might go forward. Miami Herald provides some history of the SS United States in its report: “The iconic 1950s vessel, which was bigger than the Titanic and once carried celebrities across the Atlantic Ocean, was set for a $700 million overhaul by the Los Angeles-based luxury line, which also has offices in Miami. The SS United States was decommissioned in 1969 and has been gutted and docked in Philadelphia for two decades on the Delaware River. On its maiden voyage in 1952, the ship traversed the Atlantic in three days, 10 hours and 42 minutes — a record it held until 1990.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Luxury Liner SS United States Cannot Be Put Back In Service

Mercedes will reportedly challenge Tesla with four new EVs (confirmed)

Executives from Mercedes-Benz haven’t been coy about the company’s EV plans — it wants to go head-to-head with Tesla . As part of this strategy, Bloomberg reports that Mercedes is getting ready to introduce four electric vehicles, including two sedan models and two SUVs. The new fleet is said to be the starting point of a new sub-brand for Mercedes , although the German automaker still hasn’t decided what that will be called. Last month, Mercedes’ David McCarthy revealed that a concept electric would be shown sometime in September . In other words, it won’t be long before we see what Mercedes has up its sleeve. Update: Daimler AG, Mercedes-Benz’s parent company provided the following statement to Engadget: We can confirm that we are working on a large EV with a range between 400 and 500km (250-310 miles) based on a completely new architecture. Of course, we will have more cars to follow. Via: TechCrunch Source: Bloomberg

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Mercedes will reportedly challenge Tesla with four new EVs (confirmed)

Six Flags adds a gaming twist to its VR roller coasters

Six Flags first announced that it was teaming up with Samsung to outfit roller coaster riders with Gear VR headsets back in the spring. The theme park company is taking its virtual reality project to another level though, adding a gaming component to the immersive visuals. Before now, the addition of VR to rides just added a different visual experience to the ride itself. With the new “Rage of the Gargoyles, ” riders take flight in an Apache-style helicopter to battle “blood-thirsty” beasts. How do you control the game? Well, the Gear VR headset does all of the work so you can keep your hands tightly wrapped around whatever handle the ride offers. As Six Flags explains it, riders aim at the gargoyles by looking in their direction to aim the helicopter’s Gatling guns. Once a target is locked on, the weapon fires automatically. Based on the details the company offered, it sounds like there’s a HMD (Head Mounting Display) UI to guide you through the whole thing. There’s no word on if you’ll be able to keep score and compete against fellow riders. If you’re planning to take a road trip before summer officially comes to a close, “Rage of the Gargoyles” will be available on nine VR-equipped coasters at Six Flags parks in the US and Canada. Those locations and rides include Demon at Six Flags Great America, Skull Mountain at Six Flags Great Adventure, Shock Wave at Six Flags Over Texas, Kong at Six Flags Discovery Kingdom, Dare Devil Dive at Six Flags Over Georgia, Goliath at La Ronde, Ninja at Six Flags St. Louis and Steamin’ Demon at The Great Escape. What’s more, there are sure to be new VR adventures at the parks in the future as Six Flags touts the setup’s versatility. “One of the most exciting things about this technology is that we have the ability to change the storylines to offer our guests new thrills and new reasons to visit our parks, ” said Six Flags president and CEO John Duffey. Rage of the Gargoyles virtual reality comes to the Demon https://t.co/xrpg9JzIYH — SF Great America (@SFGreat_America) August 5, 2016 Source: Six Flags (Business Wire)

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Six Flags adds a gaming twist to its VR roller coasters

Microsoft has two big Windows 10 updates slated for 2017

While announcing the gradual rollout of its Anniversary update for Windows 10, Microsoft confirmed that there would be two feature updates coming in 2017. This means moving to a twice-a-year schedule the company had previously set up for its ” Threshold ” updates for Windows 8, which used the codename for that operating system. According to Windows Central , the first update for 10, called “Redstone 2” after this operating system’s nickname, will come in early 2017, followed by “Redstone 3” four to six months later in late summer or early fall. The latest internal builds are around the 14900 range, the site said, meaning testers should soon receive bits of Redstone 2 to try out and give feedback. Source: Windows Central

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Microsoft has two big Windows 10 updates slated for 2017

Torrentz.eu quietly shuts down its torrent search engine

Popular Poland-based torrent meta-search site Torrentz.eu has removed its key functionality, effectively shutting down a major portal for finding pirated material on the web. According to a message on the site, which refers to itself in the past tense: “Torrentz was a free, fast and powerful meta-search engine combining results from dozens of search engines. Torrentz will always love you. Farewell.” A click on the search box currently re-directs to a pop-up ad from Alibaba. The end of Torrentz comes after the world’s biggest torrent site KickAssTorrents was shut down by the feds in July. The proprietor of KickAssTorrents, 30-year-old Ukrainian Artem Vaulin was arrested in Poland and charged with criminal copyright infringement and money laundering. Vaulin is accused of illegally reproducing and distributing more than $1 billion worth of pirated media. In 2014, the founders of the popular Pirate Bay torrent site were also rounded up and the site struggled to stay online as it was raided several times . As for Torrentz.eu, the site managed to stay in the game a little longer because it didn’t host torrent links directly — only made it easier to find them elsewhere. As Variety notes , the site was moved to the .eu top-level domain after its .com was seized by the US Department of Homeland Security. The domain is also blocked in the several countries, including the UK. Torrenting as a means of pirating material may generally be in decline, however. A study by a UK-based antipiracy firm found that most online piracy activity has shifted to streaming sites . And BitTorrent itself has already gone legit.

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Torrentz.eu quietly shuts down its torrent search engine

Latest Apple TV rumor points to a TV guide for video apps

At the WWDC 2016 event , Apple revealed a number of improvements on the way for the Apple TV, including a new feature called single sign-on . That would let cable TV subscribers log in once, and immediately have all their supported apps authorized without needing to log in (often repeatedly) within each individual app. Now Recode cites industry sources saying that Apple is working on “digital TV guide” for the Apple TV and its other devices that would display content from sources like Netflix and HBO all in one place. The plan is described as growing from Apple’s previously rumored plan to offer a TV package of its own. In this iteration, Apple wouldn’t sell content, just create a showcase for others, and it has reportedly requested metadata from the providers to fill out its guide. The Xbox OneGuide at launch in 2013. If the plan comes to fruition, then Apple will be retreading ground covered by others. Microsoft may have the most ambitious attempt with the Xbox One’s OneGuide that blends live TV and apps while relying on an HDMI passthrough and IR blasters to pull in content from the cable box, but the UI and universal search on devices like Amazon’s Fire TV and the Roku platform serve similar functions. Apple already set up its move by bringing the Siri remote and voice search with its new Apple TV box, and when it announced single sign-on in June it mentioned the feature would work on iOS as well. The major remaining questions are if customers will be able to use the feature, and if they can, will they want to? On Xbox, Microsoft had limited success working with the cable TV guard. It did manage to get Comcast to allow logging in with HBO Go and other apps, but Comcast killed its Xbox 360 app after a while, and Verizon’s FiOS TV app for Xbox One suffered a similar fate earlier this year . The revamped OneGuide that launched last year. Apple’s challenge could be to build a guide that’s easier to access than simply diving into apps like Netflix or Hulu and poking around there. On Xbox, app channels do a good job of highlighting what’s best inside each app, but they’re not especially personal or deep. The OneGuide got a lot of attention during the Xbox One’s initial introduction a few years ago and is a big part of the new experience rolled out at the end of 2015 , but it didn’t merit a mention in details of the latest mid-year update . I don’t even see an app channel for Netflix on my Xbox One, and securing support from such a major provider would be key for Apple to launch any kind of guide. The only problem is getting all of those different providers to accept sharing space in a UI that none of them control — good luck doing that. Source: Recode

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Latest Apple TV rumor points to a TV guide for video apps

X-ray technique unveils mystery second figure in Degas painting

Painted around 1876, Edgar Degas’ Portrait of a Woman seemed just that — an otherwise ordinary female depiction in the artist’s moody style. But as it aged in the 1920s, people started noticing a mysterious second figure emerging from beneath the first. Curious but wishing to avoid damaging the painting, conservators used a new X-ray technique to peer beyond the top layer of paint, detailed in a new paper in Scientific Reports . This unveiled a never-before-seen portrait of a woman they believe to be frequent Degas model Emma Dobigny. Traditional X-ray scans require a heavy element like lead to absorb the radiation and provide image contrast, and provide “minimal quantitative or specific elemental identification information” the paper’s co-author Daryl Howard of Australian Syncotrain told Gizmodo . So imprecise are the results that the interpretation of X-radiography images is a highly subjective process, according to the team’s paper. Instead, they used X-ray Fluorescence (XRF) in a non-invasive method they call the Maia technique to scan Portrait of a Woman with the sensitivity to enable reconstruction of concealed paint layers. Advancements have shaved pigment analysis time down to milliseconds while dramatically improving data collection rates, meaning XRF can measure swaths of a painting at spatial resolutions the size of a single paintbrush bristle. Such sensitivity doesn’t just unearth the hidden second figure — it unveiled the painting at various stages. For instance, Degas had originally given the Dobigny figure pointed elfin ears before replacing them with ones more like the model’s own. While we don’t know why the artist had painted over one woman in favor of the other, these non-invasive techniques allow art historians to pry the creative stages apart and forensically peer below the finished work on the hunt for answers. Via: Gizmodo Source: Scientific Reports

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X-ray technique unveils mystery second figure in Degas painting

New Attack Steals SSNs, E-mail Addresses, and More From HTTPS Pages

Security researchers at KU Leuven have discovered an attack technique, dubbed HEIST (HTTP Encrypted Information can be Stolen Through TCP-Windows), which can exploit an encrypted website using only a JavaScript file hidden in a maliciously crafted ad or page. ArsTechnica reports: Once attackers know the size of an encrypted response, they are free to use one of two previously devised exploits to ferret out the plaintext contained inside it. Both the BREACH and the CRIME exploits are able to decrypt payloads by manipulating the file compression that sites use to make pages load more quickly. HEIST will be demonstrated for the first time on Wednesday at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas. “HEIST makes a number of attacks much easier to execute, ” Tom Van Goethem, one of the researchers who devised the technique, told Ars. “Before, the attacker needed to be in a Man-in-the-Middle position to perform attacks such as CRIME and BREACH. Now, by simply visiting a website owned by a malicious party, you are placing your online security at risk.” Using HEIST in combination with BREACH allows attackers to pluck out and decrypt e-mail addresses, social security numbers, and other small pieces of data included in an encrypted response. BREACH achieves this feat by including intelligent guesses — say, @gmail.com, in the case of an e-mail address — in an HTTPS request that gets echoed in the response. Because the compression used by just about every website works by eliminating repetitions of text strings, correct guesses result in no appreciable increase in data size while incorrect guesses cause the response to grow larger. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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New Attack Steals SSNs, E-mail Addresses, and More From HTTPS Pages

Bitcoin value falls off cliff after $77M stolen in Hong Kong exchange hack

The value of bitcoins plummeted 20 percent after almost 120,000 units of the digital currency were stolen from Bitfinex, a major Bitcoin exchange. The Hong Kong-based exchange said it had discovered a security breach late Tuesday, and has suspended all transactions. “We are investigating the breach to determine what happened, but we know that some of our users have had their Bitcoins stolen. We are undertaking a review to determine which users have been affected by the breach. While we conduct this initial investigation and secure our environment, bitfinex.com will be taken down and the maintenance page will be left up,” said the company on its website . Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Bitcoin value falls off cliff after $77M stolen in Hong Kong exchange hack