Is it time to change that “III” into a “IV”? (credit: Blizzard) Just because Blizzard finally got a wholly new franchise out the door this year doesn’t mean the game maker isn’t keen on milking its older franchises for everything they’re worth. But one of those series, Diablo , has seen a bit of a content freeze since its 2014 expansion launched. While the company loves refreshing a game launch with expansion packs, Diablo III has been sitting idly. Now we might know why. A brand-new “unannounced” entry in the Diablo world was, er, announced on Friday by way of an official job posting for—get this—the next entry’s director . It’s the game-news equivalent of New Line Cinema saying a new Lord of the Rings film is coming but, whoops, Peter Jackson’s not involved, and they could really use a new person to get this thing up and running. The post seeks someone to “lead the Diablo series into the future.” While such a public push for a series director might read like an attempt to bring more diversity into the hiring pool, we’d frankly be shocked to see anybody other than the industry’s old-guard vets fulfilling application requirements such as five years of game-directing experience and shipping “multiple AAA products as a game director or creative director.” The job posting mentions nothing about virtual reality or other experimental hardware. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Stan Schroeder, writing for Mashable:An anonymous hacker managed to obtain an enormous number of user credentials in June 2013 from fallen social networking giant MySpace — some 427 million passwords, belonging to approx. 360 million users. In May 2016, a person started selling that database of passwords on the dark web. Now, the entire database is available online for free. Thomas White, security researcher also known by the moniker “Cthulhu, ” put the database up for download as a torrent file on his website, here. “The following contains the alleged data breach from Myspace dating back a few years. As always, I do not provide any guarantees with the file and I leave it down to you to use responsibly and for a productive purpose, ” he wrote. The file is 14.2 GB in size; downloading it might take some time. It is password-protected, but White made the password available on Twitter and his site. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
Kristen V. Brown, reporting for Fusion:It is well-trod territory at this point that biases against women’s technological abilities hold women in technology back. Study after study has shown bias persists at every point of the employment process. So the start-up interviewing.io decided to try and do something about it. It masked women’s voices to sound like men’s and vice versa during online interviews to see if interviewers would like them better. It was inspired to do the experiment because it was seeing some alarming data. Interviewing.io is a platform that allows people to practice technical interviewing anonymously and, hopefully, get a job in the process. After amassing data from thousands of technical interviews, the company noticed a troubling trend, writes founder Aline Lerner in a blog post: “Men were getting advanced to the next round 1.4 times more often than women. Interviewee technical score wasn’t faring that well either — men on the platform had an average technical score of 3 out of 4, as compared to a 2.5 out of 4 for women.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
An anonymous reader writes: Github’s transparency report for 2015 shows that the site received many DMCA notices that removed more than 8, 200 projects. “In 2015, we received significantly more takedown notices, and took down significantly more content, than we did in 2014, ” Github reports. For comparison, the company received only 258 DMCA notices in 2014, 17 of which responded with a counter-notice or retraction. In 2015, they received 505 takedown notices, 62 of which were the subject of counters or withdrawals. TorrentFreak reports: “Copyright holders are not limited to reporting one URL or location per DMCA notice. In fact, each notice filed can target tens, hundreds, or even thousands of allegedly infringing locations.” September was a particularly active month as it took down nearly 5, 834 projects. “Usually, the DMCA reports we receive are from people or organizations reporting a single potentially infringing repository. However, every now and then we receive a single notice asking us to take down many repositories, ” Github explains. They are called ‘Mass Removals’ when more than 100 repositories are asked to be removed. “In all, fewer than twenty individual notice senders requested removal of over 90% of the content GitHub took down in 2015.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.