Now that HTC is all-in on Vive headsets and letting Google deal with its Pixel smartphone business, it has to deal with another reality: The public still isn’t exactly sold on VR. To keep sales momentum going, it has announced a promotion aimed at attracting Vive app developers and keeping existing ones happy. Rather than taking its usual 30 percent cut, HTC will give 100 percent of app revenue to developers for the entire fourth quarter of 2017, starting in October. The developer promotion will end on December 31st, HTC says. It’s hard to say how much revenue apps could generate during that time, as HTC keeps such info under wraps. It’s no doubt hoping that developers will lower their prices a bit, in turn driving hardware sales. “The holiday is the most important time for developers, and we want to show our appreciation for them, ” HTC Viveport VR’s Rikard Steiber told Venture Beat . The Vive VR headset was one of HTC’s lone financial bright spots last year, and the company recently said sales are still going just fine. Nevertheless, it’s reportedly being outsold by the PlayStation VR, probably because Sony’s PS4 brand is much better known by the gaming public. As such, Sony has arguably the best VR games for its platforms as developers go where the money is. HTC is banking on the social experience of VR Arcades (credit: ©HLenie) HTC will also share more hourly revenue with VR arcade operators , giving them 70 percent instead of 50 percent as before. The company’s Viveport Arcade system, its licensing platform enabling titles to be played in public spaces, is in trial with 700 titles and 50 operators around the globe. The Taiwanese firm also unveiled the Viveport Scene SDK that lets developers create new effects to entice potential buyers to try out apps or games. Developers can also build “VR Previews, ” or movies that run on Vive headsets to show customers what a game is like to play. HTC recently launched a monthly $6.99 subscription service, and unveiled a new standalone headset that works via the cloud rather than a PC (in China only for now). Now that it has an extra billion in the bank, it’s trying a lot of things to push the Vive platform out to more consumers, and the next year or two will crucial for the Vive and VR in general. Source: Venture Beat
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HTC gives Vive developers all app revenue for the rest of 2017
sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: The Equifax breach is reason for concern, of course, but if a hacker wants to access your online data by simply guessing your password, you’re probably toast in less than an hour. Now, there’s more bad news: Scientists have harnessed the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to create a program that, combined with existing tools, figured more than a quarter of the passwords from a set of more than 43 million LinkedIn profiles. Researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, started with a so-called generative adversarial network, or GAN, which comprises two artificial neural networks. A “generator” attempts to produce artificial outputs (like images) that resemble real examples (actual photos), while a “discriminator” tries to detect real from fake. They help refine each other until the generator becomes a skilled counterfeiter. The Stevens team created a GAN it called PassGAN and compared it with two versions of hashCat and one version of John the Ripper. The scientists fed each tool tens of millions of leaked passwords from a gaming site called RockYou, and asked them to generate hundreds of millions of new passwords on their own. Then they counted how many of these new passwords matched a set of leaked passwords from LinkedIn, as a measure of how successful they’d be at cracking them. On its own, PassGAN generated 12% of the passwords in the LinkedIn set, whereas its three competitors generated between 6% and 23%. But the best performance came from combining PassGAN and hashCat. Together, they were able to crack 27% of passwords in the LinkedIn set, the researchers reported this month in a draft paper posted on arXiv. Even failed passwords from PassGAN seemed pretty realistic: saddracula, santazone, coolarse18. Read more of this story at Slashdot.