Fifth Edition Dungeons and Dragons Player’s Handbook Released

New submitter GammaKitsune writes: “The Player’s Handbook for the fifth edition of Dungeons and Dragons, formerly known as “D&D Next, ” released today to major bookstores and online retailers across the U.S. The Player’s Handbook, which contains core rules for gameplay and character creation, is one of thee core rulebooks that developer Wizards of the Coast plans to release in 2014. The Monster Manual is scheduled to release in late September, and the Dungeon Master’s Guide will release in mid November. Also out today is the first of two adventure modules in which players team up to battle against the dragon goddess Tiamat. Fifth edition has a lot to prove following the highly-controversial fourth edition, the rise of competing roleplaying game Pathfinder, and two years of public playtesting. Initial reviews posted on Amazon appear overwhelmingly positive at the time of writing, but more skeptical gamers may wish to take a look at the free “Basic Rules” posted on the official D&D website. The basic rules contain all the bare essentials needed to create a character or run your own adventure, and will serve both as a free introduction for new players and as a holdover for long time players until the remaining two rulebooks are released. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Fifth Edition Dungeons and Dragons Player’s Handbook Released

PayPal Just Made In-App Impulse Buying Way, Way Easier

You know how hard it is to buy anything from your smartphone. You need to look up your card details, tap them out precisely on the tiny screens and pray for the best. PayPal wants to make that process a snap. Read more…

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PayPal Just Made In-App Impulse Buying Way, Way Easier

Your Phone Can Now Identify You Based On How You Type

No two humans type alike. Some of us jab our fingers precisely into the right spots on a screen, while others are slightly less accurate. Now, a Swedish security startup is using this behavior to add an extra layer of security to our cellphones. Read more…

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Your Phone Can Now Identify You Based On How You Type

AMD Launches Radeon R7 Series Solid State Drives With OCZ

MojoKid (1002251) writes AMD is launching a new family of products today, but unless you follow the rumor mill closely, it’s probably not something you’d expect. It’s not a new CPU, APU, or GPU. Today, AMD is launching its first line of solid state drives (SSDs), targeted squarely at AMD enthusiasts. AMD is calling the new family of drives, the Radeon R7 Series SSD, similar to its popular mid-range line of graphics cards. The new Radeon R7 Series SSDs feature OCZ and Toshiba technology, but with a proprietary firmware geared towards write performance and high endurance. Open up one of AMD’s new SSDs and you’ll see OCZ’s Indilinx Barefoot 3 M00 controller on board—the same controller used in the OCZ Vector 150, though it is clocked higher in these drives. That controller is paired to A19nm Toshiba MLC (Multi-Level Cell) NAND flash memory and a DDR3-1333MHz DRAM cache. The 120GB and 240GB drives sport 512MB of cache memory, while the 480GB model will be outfitted with 1GB. Interestingly enough, AMD Radeon R7 Series SSDs are some of the all-around, highest-performing SATA SSDs tested to date. IOPS performance is among the best seen in a consumer-class SSD, write throughput and access times are highly-competitive across the board, and the drive offered consistent performance regardless of the data type being transferred. Read performance is also strong, though not quite as stand-out as write performance. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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AMD Launches Radeon R7 Series Solid State Drives With OCZ

Daimler’s Solution For Annoying Out-of-office Email: Delete It

AmiMoJo writes Sure, you can set an out-of-office auto-reply to let others know they shouldn’t email you, but that doesn’t usually stop the messages; you may still have to handle those urgent-but-not-really requests while you’re on vacation. That’s not a problem if you work at Daimler, though. The German automaker recently installed software that not only auto-replies to email sent while staff is away, but deletes it outright. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Daimler’s Solution For Annoying Out-of-office Email: Delete It

Watch How "Electronic Makeup" Completely Transforms This Model’s Face

Nobumichi Asai has used projection mapping to put CGI onto cars, docks, building and more. His latest canvas? A real, live human face. Read more…

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Watch How "Electronic Makeup" Completely Transforms This Model’s Face

New Cridex Malware Copies Tactics From GameOver Zeus

Trailrunner7 writes The GameOver Zeus malware had a nice run for itself, making untold millions of dollars for its creators. But it was a run that ended with a multi-continent operation from law enforcement and security researchers to disassemble the infrastructure. Now researchers have identified a new variant of the Cridex malware that has adopted some of the techniques that made GOZ so successful in its day. Researchers at IBM’s X-Force research team have seen a new version of Cridex, which is also known as Bugat and Feodo, using some of the same techniques that GOZ used to such good effect. Specifically, the new strain of malware has adopted GOZ’s penchant for using HTML injections, and the researchers say the technique is nearly identical to the way that GOZ handled it. “There are two possible explanations for this. First, someone from the GOZ group could have moved to the Bugat team. This would not be the first time something like this has happened, which we’ve witnessed in other cases involving Zeus and Citadel; however, it is not very likely in this case since Bugat and GOZ are essentially competitors, while Zeus and Citadel are closely related. The second and more likely explanation is that the Bugat team could have analyzed and perhaps reversed the GOZ malware before copying the HTML injections that made GOZ so highly profitable for its operators, ” Etay Maor, a senior fraud prevention strategist at IBM, wrote in an analysis of the new malware. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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New Cridex Malware Copies Tactics From GameOver Zeus

Apple Admits It’s Storing Users’ Data on Servers Based in China

Apple has begun keeping some of its Chinese users’ personal data in China, Reuters revealed yesterday . That’s significant because it is the first tech company to store information in the notoriously snoop-happy country, thus raising concerns that the data might be looked at by authorities. Read more…

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Apple Admits It’s Storing Users’ Data on Servers Based in China

This DIY Internet Speedometer Visualizes Network Speed in Real Time

There are plenty of ways you can go about monitoring your network performance, but this setup using a BeagleBone Black is always running and visualizes your speed in a fun, colorful way. Read more…

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This DIY Internet Speedometer Visualizes Network Speed in Real Time

Watch a Cat Video, Get Hacked: the Death of Clear-Text

New submitter onproton writes: Citizen Lab released new research today on a targeted exploitation technique used by state actors involving “network injection appliances” installed at ISPs. These devices can target and intercept unencrypted YouTube traffic and replace it with malicious code that gives the operator control over the system or installs a surveillance backdoor. One of the researchers writes, “many otherwise well-informed people think they have to do something wrong, or stupid, or insecure to get hacked—like clicking on the wrong attachments, or browsing malicious websites…many of these commonly held beliefs are not necessarily true.” This technique is largely designed for targeted attacks, so it’s likely most of us will be safe for now — but just one more reminder to use https. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Watch a Cat Video, Get Hacked: the Death of Clear-Text