Creepshots: Microsoft discovers an on-campus peeping tom

Microsoft’s lush RedWest campus. Microsoft On July 24, 2013, a Microsoft vendor employee working at the company’s RedWest campus in Redmond had a piece of good fortune—he found a Muvi USB video camera just lying in the footpath between buildings. He picked up the camera, only later taking a look at the footage on the device, which revealed that his good fortune was actually evidence of a crime. The Muvi camera contained “upskirt” video footage of women climbing stairs or escalators—or sometimes just standing in checkout lines—and some of it had been shot on Microsoft’s campus. The vendor employee reported the incident to Microsoft Global Security, who took possession of the camera on July 26. To find the camera’s owner, two Global Security investigators pulled up Microsoft’s internal security camera footage covering the RedWest footpath. They began by locating the moment when the vendor employee walked into the frame, paused, and bent down to retrieve the camera off the ground. Investigators then rewound the footage to see who had dropped it. At the 11:24am mark, they saw a man in a collared shirt and reddish pants walk out of a RedWest building and walk along the footpath. Then, at 11:25am, the vendor employee appeared and picked up the camera. At 11:26am, the man in the reddish pants suddenly returned to the picture. According to a later report from the Redmond Police Department, he was “rushing” back to the RedWest building he had just left and appeared “nervous, frantically looking around.” He eventually used a keycard to re-enter the RedWest building. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Creepshots: Microsoft discovers an on-campus peeping tom

Your Quarterly Jailbreak Roundup, April 2014

We’re well into the lifecycle of the iOS 7 jailbreak, and that means jailbreakers are treated with a ton of more advanced tweaks and apps. We’ve already covered the first and second waves of apps, but here are a bunch more of our favorites. Read more…        

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Your Quarterly Jailbreak Roundup, April 2014

Gamespy’s multiplayer servers are going dark, be prepared

Even if you’ve only played a handful games with online multiplayer in the past dozen years, chances are that at least a few of your sessions have been powered by Gamespy’s back-end tech . On May 31st, the company is shutting down its servers for good, and as a result, a bunch of games are losing their online capabilities. For console games, that largely amounts to multiplayer. For certain PC titles though, that also includes authentication servers for CD keys — losing those means losing access to the game itself. You probably weren’t playing most of what Gamespy’s listed anymore ( WWE SmackDown vs Raw 2009 on PS3, anyone?), though, and a good deal of what’s there are somewhat obscure Wii, DS and PC titles. There are, however, high-profile stand-outs: most anything from Rockstar Games and Activision, or the PS3 version of Borderlands and the hardcore military-sim (and basis for DayZ ) ARMA series, for instance. What about those? Well, according to IGN ‘s sources , GameSpy’s parent company has been working with some developers and publishers, including Rockstar, to migrate to different platforms for around two years. Activision said that its players won’t be affected, and ARMA- developer Bohemia Interactive is “very near” to finding a solution , but couldn’t share many details. Gearbox Software, the studio responsible for Borderlands, passed the buck to its publisher 2K Games, which declined to comment. As gaming moves further into a future that’s ever-more reliant on the internet, these types of things will likely (perhaps inevitably) continue to happen. After all, justifying the cost involved for keeping servers active for a relatively small number of people can be hard to justify. We’ve reached out to 2K ourselves, and will update this post should we hear back. [Image credit: Paul Cross / Flickr ] Filed under: Gaming , Home Entertainment , Networking , Internet , HD Comments Via: Gamasutra Source: GameSpy (1) , (2)

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Gamespy’s multiplayer servers are going dark, be prepared

NYU Group Says Its Scheme Makes Cracking Individual Passwords Impossible

An anonymous reader writes “Researchers at New York University have devised a new scheme called PolyPassHash for storing password hash data so that passwords cannot be individually cracked by an attacker. Instead of a password hash being stored directly in the database, the information is used to encode a share in a Shamir Secret Store (technical details PDF). This means that a password cannot be validated without recovering a threshold of shares, thus an attacker must crack groups of passwords together. The solution is fast, easy to implement (with C and Python implementations available), requires no changes to clients, and makes a huge difference in practice. To put the security difference into perspective, three random 6 character passwords that are stored using standard salted secure hashes can be cracked by a laptop in an hour. With a PolyPassHash store, it would take every computer on the planet longer to crack these passwords than the universe is estimated to exist. With this new technique, HoneyWords, and hardware solutions all available, does an organization have any excuse if their password database is disclosed and user passwords are cracked?.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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NYU Group Says Its Scheme Makes Cracking Individual Passwords Impossible

How a Chinese Company 3D-Printed Ten Houses In a Single Day

This month, architects in Amsterdam started work on the world’s first completely 3D-printed house. It’ll take three years and quite a bit of money to finish. Meanwhile, in Shanghai, a company claims to have printed ten houses with inexpensive industrial scraps in less than a day. What’s the difference? Read more…        

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How a Chinese Company 3D-Printed Ten Houses In a Single Day

ATM Hackers Have Figured Out How to Withdraw Unlimited Amounts of Cash

Federal regulators just alerted banks across the country of a very dangerous new skill ATM hackers have picked up. They can trick ATMs into spitting out unlimited amounts of cash, regardless of the customer’s balance. Not only that, but also schedule the illicit withdrawals for holidays and weekends, when the ATMs are extra flush. Read more…        

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ATM Hackers Have Figured Out How to Withdraw Unlimited Amounts of Cash

Cassini points to a hidden ocean on Saturn’s icy moon

I carry an ocean in my womb. NASA/JPL/SSI/J Major Finding liquid water on a body within the Solar System is exciting. The only thing that is probably more exciting is finding an ocean full of it. Today such news comes via Cassini, which has made measurements that show that Saturn’s moon Enceladus has a hidden ocean beneath its icy surface. While orbiting Saturn in 2005, Cassini found jets of salty water spewing from the south polar region of Enceladus. According to Luciano Iess of Sapienza University of Rome, lead author of the new study published in Science , “The discovery of the jets was unexpected.” Geysers require liquid water, and we wouldn’t expect Enceladus to have any. It is too far from the Sun to absorb much energy and too small (just 500km in diameter) to have trapped enough internal energy to keep its core molten. The answer to how the water got there might lie in the details of the moon’s internal structure. Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Cassini points to a hidden ocean on Saturn’s icy moon

Google Wireless: Google Fiber cities could get mobile service, but to what end?

Through Google Fiber, Google is already an Internet service provider, piping Gigabit Internet to homes and businesses in a handful of cities across the US. According to a report from The Information (paywall)  Google has been considering supplementing Google Fiber’s home Internet access with a wireless cellular service. Google’s plan wasn’t to build towers, but to become a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO)—basically a middle man who buys service from one of the “big four” carriers at wholesale prices and resells that to consumers under its own brand. According to the report, Google spoke to Sprint and then Verizon about reselling their networks to customers, with the Verizon talks happening earlier this year. The service would be available to users in Google Fiber cities, and it would be supplemented with free Wi-Fi hotspots. What would Google hope to  accomplish  with a move like this?  Google built Google Fiber from the ground up by putting fiber on poles, running connections to each house, and providing self-built hardware. Complete control over every part of the network allows Google to differentiate Google Fiber in several ways, like service location, speed, and pricing. Google’s plan for its wireless service appears to be much less ambitious, though. A s an MVNO, Google would be using someone else’s network, so the only thing Google would really have control over is the resale price. The whole point of Google Fiber is to “shame” other ISPs into increasing their speeds and lowering their prices. Google doesn’t plan on covering the entire country in fiber, but one look at Google’s 1,000Mbps service for $70 and the traditional ISP plan of 5 to 15Mbps for about the same price looks like a huge ripoff. This ” halo effect ” puts pressure on ISPs to speed up their service, and that makes Google products like search and YouTube run faster. The strategy seems to be working, with companies like AT&T rolling out fiber in response . As an MVNO, Google can’t do anything like the Google Fiber strategy, since it isn’t running the network. It won’t have control over speed or reception, meaning the best it can do to stand out is resell the service very cheaply. Unfairly competing with wireless carriers by pricing to only break even doesn’t seem like it would put much pressure on other carriers, because they would realize Google isn’t trying to turn a profit. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google Wireless: Google Fiber cities could get mobile service, but to what end?

Hasenkopf’s ‘Frescata’ Material-Processing Technology Yields Beautiful and Unique Surfaces

One of the cooler materials we saw at Holz-Handwerk wasn’t really a material at all, but a process. German industrial manufacturer Hasenkopf’s booth drew a steady stream of visitors all reaching out to touch the weird-looking totems, like the one above, that they had on display; I eagerly checked the product tag to find it was nothing more than Corian. So what gives? Hasenkopf was showing off their bag of new material-processing tricks called Frescata , whereby they hit Corian, Parapan, and even wood with four different bits in a five-axis CNC mill to create the intricate patterns you see here. (more…)

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Hasenkopf’s ‘Frescata’ Material-Processing Technology Yields Beautiful and Unique Surfaces

One Ring To Rule It All… By Bluetooth

Get ready for the Internet of Rings . Today’s the last day to jump on the earlybird bandwagon for Ring, which has completely cleaned house over on Kickstarter . In case you missed the digital memo, Ring is a wearable device that allows you to “control anything” and “shortcut everything” (or so its creators at Logbar claim). Enticingly vague promises, backed up by tight tech design and a pretty intense bank of R&D. The innovation at the heart of the device is fine gesture recognition—put it on your finger, tap the side to activate and your finger’s moves are registered and transmitted to the device of choice. From there, you get a lot of functionality: control appliances, send texts, make payments through Ring’s gateway, and get vibration or LED notifications. If you can sync it, you can rule it with Ring. To futz with your Bluetoothed lamp, draw a lamp in the air. To draft a letter, draw a letter and then start spelling. The instant payment feature is a little surprising, but an interesting take on the common interaction. In addition to the “built in” symbols and controls, you can add your own personalized finger-commands. They’re opening the API for app developers who want to get in on the Ring game, and have a store to make Ring-related apps easy to find. The charging dock is pretty boss, and they estimate it can perform about 1, 000 gestures per charge. They’re also offering it in a range of sizes, so you apes and dainty types aren’t out of luck. Onward, to the future! (more…)

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One Ring To Rule It All… By Bluetooth