ars – Page 4 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Help save 17 years of PC game modding history

The FileFront logo, as it existed before the 2010 renaming to GameFront. One of the Web’s oldest and largest repositories for classic and current PC gaming mods will be shutting down for good later this month. GameFront announced today that its servers will be going offline on April 30 and that “any files not downloaded by that time will no longer be accessible.” “Since our founding as FileLeech almost 20 years ago, we have always strived to offer the best file hosting alongside quality gaming content,” former GameFront staffer Ron Whitaker wrote. “To all of our fans who have supported us throughout the years, we thank you for making us your destination for gaming files. Despite name changes, ownership changes, and staff changes, you have always made our jobs rewarding and fun.” The shutdown is a blow to those who rely on GameFront for access to tens of thousands of mods, demos, patches, tools, maps, skins, and add-ons for PC games dating back to the mid-’90s. It’s especially significant to those looking for mods and patches for older games with smaller communities or defunct publishers, which can be hard or impossible to find elsewhere. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Help save 17 years of PC game modding history

Ancient shopping lists point to widespread Bible-era literacy

The fortress in Arad. Around 2,600 years ago, in a military fortress in Southern Judah, a man called Eliashib sent and received messages written in ink on fragments of pottery. The contents were mundane, mainly concerning food supplies, but they provide evidence of literacy that could inform the debate about when major Biblical texts were written. Eliashib’s correspondence happened on the cusp of the fall of the Kingdom of Judah, which took place during 588-87 BCE. The date plays an important role in an ongoing debate among Biblical scholars: were the first Biblical texts produced before the fall of Jerusalem—as events were unfolding—or afterwards? One part of the debate hinges on the literacy levels at the time: if the pre-demolition population wasn’t generally literate, it wouldn’t have been likely that important historical texts were created in this era. But Eliashib and his colleagues in the Arad military fortress provide some evidence that literacy in this era may have been more widespread than previously thought. A multidisciplinary group of researchers from Tel Aviv University have combined their expertise in applied math, Jewish history, and archaeology to assess communications from the fortress, trying to establish how many people, and of what rank, were writing messages. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Ancient shopping lists point to widespread Bible-era literacy

Homebrew patch makes many Oculus VR games perfectly playable on HTC Vive [Updated]

What’re those SteamVR “chaperone” grid lines doing in an Oculus-exclusive game? Find out yourself if you own an HTC Vive and use the new Revive patch on many “exclusive” Oculus games. (credit: Sam Machkovech) In the race to the top of virtual reality, Oculus and HTC have kicked off a hardware showdown the likes of which we haven’t seen since the “Nintendon’t” days. However, the war includes a curious compatibility issue: HTC’s current software hub, SteamVR, can be accessible by Oculus headset wearers, but Oculus Home doesn’t currently support the HTC Vive. Oculus founder Palmer Luckey has publicly stated that “we can only extend our SDK to work with other headsets if the manufacturer allows us to do so,” seemingly passing the buck to HTC and Valve in regard to why its Oculus Store games don’t natively support the other leading PC headset. Valve has denied this assertion . Either way, we no longer have to wait for the companies to settle their legal and licensing differences, thanks to the efforts of the LibreVR plugin, dubbed Revive . Short version: it works, as proven by the above screenshot we snapped of pack-in Oculus game Lucky’s Tale running within the SteamVR interface (complete with its “chaperone” boundary lines). The author’s test system, which includes a 4.2 GHz i7 processor and a GTX 980Ti, ran all test games without hitches in performance, while other users have reported similarly smooth performance on “VR-ready” Windows 10 PCs. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Homebrew patch makes many Oculus VR games perfectly playable on HTC Vive [Updated]

Researchers help shut down spam botnet that enslaved 4,000 Linux machines

A botnet that enslaved about 4,000 Linux computers and caused them to blast the Internet with spam for more than a year has finally been shut down. Known as Mumblehard, the botnet was the product of highly skilled developers . It used a custom “packer” to conceal the Perl-based source code that made it run, a backdoor that gave attackers persistent access, and a mail daemon that was able to send large volumes of spam. Command servers that coordinated the compromised machines’ operations could also send messages to Spamhaus requesting the delisting of any Mumblehard-based IP addresses that sneaked into the real-time composite blocking list , or CBL, maintained by the anti-spam service. “There was a script automatically monitoring the CBL for the IP addresses of all the spam-bots,” researchers from security firm Eset wrote in a blog post published Thursday . “If one was found to be blacklisted, this script requested the delisting of the IP address. Such requests are protected with a CAPTCHA to avoid automation, but OCR (or an external service if OCR didn’t work) was used to break the protection.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Amazon cloud has 1 million users and is near $10 billion in annual sales

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. (credit: Dan Farber ) Amazon Web Services (AWS) will become a $10 billion business this year, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said in a letter to shareholders this week. While Amazon as a whole “became the fastest company ever to reach $100 billion in annual sales” in 2015, Amazon Web Services will hit the $10 billion mark “at a pace even faster than Amazon achieved that milestone,” Bezos wrote. AWS is used by more than 1 million people from “organizations of every size across nearly every industry,” he wrote. AWS launched in March 2006 with the Simple Storage Service (S3). It expanded with the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) a few months later, letting customers rent virtual machines over the Internet. The service allowed developers to obtain computing capacity on demand without having to operate their own servers, and over the years, many startups have built online businesses with Amazon’s data centers and services providing the back-end infrastructure. It’s not just small companies relying on Amazon, though, as big names like Adobe, Capital One, GE, MLB Advanced Media, Netflix , and Pinterest use the online platform. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

All-bacterial battery makes a nutrient when charged, eats it to discharge

Diagram of a microbial fuel cell that runs on acetate, one half of the bacterial battery described here. (credit: Oak Ridge National Lab ) The chemical that powers most of our cellular processes is produced through something called the electron transport chain. As its name suggests, this system shuffles electrons through a series of chemicals that leaves them at a lower energy, all while harvesting some of the energy difference to produce ATP. But the ultimate destination of this electron transport chain doesn’t have to be a chemical. There are a variety of bacteria that ultimately send the electrons off into the environment instead. And researchers have figured out how to turn these into a fuel cell, harvesting the electrons to do something useful. While some of these designs were closer to a battery than others, all of them consumed some sort of material in harvesting the electrons. A team of researchers in the Netherlands figured out how to close the loop and create an actual bacterial battery. One half of the battery behaves like a bacterial fuel cell. But the second half takes the electrons and uses them to synthesize a small organic molecule that the first can eat. Its charging cycle is painfully slow and its energy density is atrocious, but the fact that it works at all seems rather noteworthy. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Why Microsoft needed to make Windows run Linux software

It’s bash, it’s Windows, it’s not a virtual machine. Perhaps the biggest surprise to come from Microsoft’s Build developer conference last week was the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). The system will ship as part of this summer’s Anniversary Update for Windows 10. WSL has two parts; there’s the core subsystem, which is already included in Insider Preview builds of the operating system , and then a package of software that Canonical will provide. The core subsystem is what provides the Linux API on Windows, including the ability to natively load Linux executables and libraries. Canonical will provide bash and all the other command-line tools that are expected in a Linux environment. Microsoft is positioning WSL strictly as a tool for developers, with a particular view to supporting Web developers and the open source software stacks that they depend on. Many developers are very familiar with the bash shell, with building software using make and gcc , and editing text in vi or emacs . WSL will give these developers versions of these tools that are equal in just about every regard to the ones you get on Linux, because they’ll be the ones you get on Linux running unmodified on Windows. Read 22 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Why Microsoft needed to make Windows run Linux software

Rare example of lost language found on stone hidden 2500 years ago

Mugello Valley Project The ancient Etruscan stele was recycled 2500 years ago for use inside the foundation of a temple, which suggests that it is quite old. The stone is about 4 feet tall, and would once have stood as part of a sacred display. 3 more images in gallery The ancient Etruscan civilization, whose great cities dotted the west coast of Italy between 2800 and 2400 years ago, was in many ways the model for ancient Greece and Rome. Etruscans lived in city states with sumptuous palaces, beautiful art, and a complicated social structure. But we know almost nothing about their daily lives, in part because most of their writing was recorded on perishable objects like cloth or wax tablets. For that reason, a new discovery made by the Mugello Valley Archaeological Project could be revolutionary. At a dig outside Florence, a group of researchers have unearthed a massive stone tablet, known as a stele, covered in Etruscan writing. The 500-pound stone is 4 feet high and was once part of a sacred temple display. But 2500 years ago it was torn down and used as a foundation stone in a much larger temple. Hidden away for thousands of years, the sandstone stab has been preserved remarkably well. Though it’s chipped, and possibly burned on one side, the stele contains 70 legible letters and punctuation marks. That makes it one of the longest examples of Etruscan writing known in the modern world. Scientists believe it will be full of words and concepts they’ve never encountered before. Almost all the writing we have from Etruscan civilization is from necropolises, massive tombs that the wealthy elites used to bury their dynastic families for generations. So a lot of the vocabulary we’ve gleaned comes from what are essentially gravestones, covered in rote phrases and praise for the dead. This new stele could reveal a lot about Etruscan religion, and possibly the names of the god or goddesses worshipped at the city. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Rare example of lost language found on stone hidden 2500 years ago

Texas cops joke on Facebook about Ebola-tainted meth and net one arrest

A Central Texas police department issued a “breaking news alert” on Facebook, cautioning residents that meth and heroin in the Granite Shoals area “could be contaminated with the life-threatening disease Ebola .” Last week’s fake Facebook alert urged the public “NOT” to ingest those illicit drugs “until it has been properly checked for possible Ebola contamination” by the police department. The ploy netted one arrest, the Granite Shoals Police Department (GSPD) reported on Facebook. A woman allegedly brought in her meth so the police department could analyze it for Ebola: This morning, we had our first concerned citizen notify the Granite Shoals Police Department (GSPD) that they believed their methamphetamine may be tainted. Our officers gladly took the item for further testing. Results and booking photos are pending. Please continue to report any possibly tainted methamphetamine or other narcotics to the Granite Shoals Police Department. Public health and safety continue to remain our #1 priority. ‪#‎notkidding‬ For the uninitiated, there are no Ebola-contaminated drugs. The alert was a hoax played on the citizens of Granite Shoals, a town of about 5,000 northwest of Austin. But the arrest of 29-year-old Chastity Eugina Hopson is not a joke. She was accused of possessing under a gram of a controlled substance. The police department described Hopson’s arrest as “the winner of the Facebook post challenge.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Texas cops joke on Facebook about Ebola-tainted meth and net one arrest

After Verizon breach, 1.5 million customer records put up for sale

Verizon Enterprise offers security services, but it is dealing with a breach of its own this week. (credit: Verizon ) After a data breach at Verizon Enterprise Solutions, a customer database and information about Verizon security flaws were reportedly put up for sale by criminals this week. According to KrebsOnSecurity , “a prominent member of a closely guarded underground cybercrime forum posted a new thread advertising the sale of a database containing the contact information on some 1.5 million customers of Verizon Enterprise.” The entire database was priced at $100,000, or $10,000 for each set of 100,000 customer records. “Buyers also were offered the option to purchase information about security vulnerabilities in Verizon’s Web site,” security journalist Brian Krebs reported. Verizon Enterprise is itself a seller of security products and services , often helping Fortune 500 businesses clean up after data breaches. Verizon Enterprise also sells Internet service to large businesses, along with a variety of other networking products. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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After Verizon breach, 1.5 million customer records put up for sale