Tag: digest

New WoW item will allow players to trade gold for game time

Blizzard will soon allow World of Warcraft players to trade purchased game time for in-game gold, and vice versa, effectively putting an official, floating real-world value on the in-game currency. With yesterday’s rollout of WoW patch 6.12, Blizzard says it’s ready to introduce the ” WoW token,” a new in-game item that can be traded for 30 days of play time in the subscription-based MMO. Blizzard says the new feature will be launched in the Americas “once Patch 6.1.2 has been live for a while [to] help us ensure the foundation for the feature is solid.” Other regions will get tokens further down the line. WoW tokens will be available for purchase from the in-game shop for $20 or “the rough equivalent” in other regions. That’s somewhat more than the $14.99 maximum usually charged for a single month’s subscription fee, but the tokens differ from regular subscription game time because they can be exchanged for in-game gold through an in-game auction house. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New WoW item will allow players to trade gold for game time

Big solar plants produced 5% of California’s electricity last year

Today, the US Energy Information Agency announced that California had passed a key milestone, becoming the first state to produce five percent of its annual electricity using utility-scale solar power. This represents more than a doubling from the 2013 level, when 1.9 percent of the state’s power came from utility-scale solar, and means that California produces more electricity from this approach than all of the remaining states combined. The growth in California was largely fueled by the opening of two 550MW capacity photovoltaic plants, along with two large solar-thermal plants. In total, the state added nearly two GigaWatts of capacity last year alone. The growth is driven in part by a renewable energy standard that will see the state generate 33 percent of its electricity from non-hydro renewables by 2020; it was at 22 percent in 2014. Other states with renewable standards—Nevada, Arizona, New Jersey, and North Carolina—rounded out the top five. Both Nevada and Arizona obtained 2.8 percent of their electricity from solar; all other states were at one percent or less. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Big solar plants produced 5% of California’s electricity last year

We know where you’ve been: Ars acquires 4.6M license plate scans from the cops

OAKLAND, Calif.—If you have driven in Oakland any time in the last few years, chances are good that the cops know where you’ve been, thanks to their 33 automated license plate readers (LPRs). Now Ars knows too. In response to a public records request, we obtained the entire LPR dataset of the Oakland Police Department (OPD), including more than 4.6 million reads of over 1.1 million unique plates between December 23, 2010 and May 31, 2014. The dataset is likely the largest ever publicly released in the United States—perhaps in the world. Read 59 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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We know where you’ve been: Ars acquires 4.6M license plate scans from the cops

Google warns of unauthorized TLS certificates trusted by almost all OSes

In the latest security lapse involving the Internet’s widely used encryption system, Google said unauthorized digital certificates have been issued for several of its domains and warned misissued credentials may be impersonating other unnamed sites as well. The bogus transport layer security certificates are trusted by all major operating systems and browsers, although a fall-back mechanism known as public key pinning prevented the Chrome and Firefox browsers from accepting those that vouched for the authenticity of Google properties, Google security engineer Adam Langley wrote in a blog post published Monday . The certificates were issued by Egypt-based MCS Holdings , an intermediate certificate authority that operates under the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC). The Chinese domain registrar and certificate authority, in turn, is included in root stores for virtually all OSes and browsers. The issuance of the unauthorized certificates represents a major breach of rules established by certificate authorities and browser makers. Under no conditions are CAs allowed to issue certificates for domains other than those legitimately held by the customer requesting the credential. In early 2012, critics blasted US-based CA Trustwave for doing much the same thing and Langley noted an example of a France-based CA that has also run afoul of the policy. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google warns of unauthorized TLS certificates trusted by almost all OSes

Classic FPS Descent to be rebooted by Star Citizen alums

The last time we checked in with Eric “Wingman” Peterson was August of 2014, where he was running Cloud Imperium Games’ Austin office and overseeing development on Star Citizen’s persistent universe. However, just a few months after that, Peterson left Cloud Imperium to develop his own game: a reboot of the mid-’90s first-person shooter game  Descent. Peterson has formed Descendent Studios , hired a development staff, and is currently overseeing a Kickstarter to pull together a minimum of $600,000 to finance development of the game, which is titled Descent Underground . Critically, Descent Underground has something that previous attempts to resurrect the Descent franchise have lacked: a licensing agreement with IP-holder Interplay. Kickstarter teaser for Descent Underground , formerly code-named “Ships That Fight Underground.” Old name, new presentation Descent was published by Interplay more than 20 years ago, in 1994. The first-person shooter developed by Parallax Software had players zipping around underground in a series of cavernous (and sometimes claustrophobic) mines filled with mad killer robots. Players navigated the underground environment in a Pyro GX spacecraft, which led to the game’s main selling point: it wasn’t just a regular FPS, but one which offered “six degrees of freedom.” In other words, you could move in any direction (X, Y, and Z) and turn in any direction (roll, pitch, yaw). Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Classic FPS Descent to be rebooted by Star Citizen alums

Cops are freaked out that Congress may impose license plate reader limits

Despite the fact that no federal license plate legislation has been proposed, the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) has sent a pre-emptive letter to top Congressional lawmakers, warning them against any future restrictions of automated license plate readers. The IACP claims to be the “world’s   oldest and largest association of law enforcement executives.” As the letter, which was published  last week, states: We are deeply concerned about efforts to portray automated license plate recognition (ALPR) technology as a national real-time tracking capability for law enforcement. The fact is that this technology and the data it generates is not used to track people in real time. ALPR is used every day to generate investigative leads that help law enforcement solve murders, rapes, and serial property crimes, recover abducted children, detect drug and human trafficking rings, find stolen vehicles, apprehend violent criminal alien fugitives, and support terrorism investigations. Sarah Guy, a spokeswoman for the IACP, told Ars that current state and local restrictions have made the police lobby group concerned at the federal level. Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Cops are freaked out that Congress may impose license plate reader limits

Epic Google snafu leaks hidden whois data for 280,000 domains

Google leaked the complete hidden whois data attached to more than 282,000 domains registered through the company’s Google Apps for Work service, a breach that could bite good and bad guys alike. The 282,867 domains counted by Cisco Systems’ researchers account for 94 percent of the addresses Google Apps has registered through a partnership with registrar eNom. Among the services is one to shield from public view all personal information included in domain name whois records. Starting in mid 2013, a software defect in Google Apps started leaking the data, including names, phone numbers, physical addresses, e-mail addresses. The bug caused the data to become public once a registration was renewed. Cisco’s Talos Security Intelligence and Research Group discovered on February 19 and five days later the leak was plugged, slightly shy of two years after it first sprung. Whois data is notoriously unreliable, as is clear from all the obviously fake names, addresses and other data that’s contained in public whois records. Still, it’s reasonable to assume that some people might be more forthcoming when signing up using a privacy-enhancing service that promises to hide such data. Even in cases where people falsified records, the records might provide important clues about the identities of the people who made them. Often when data isn’t pseudo-randomized, it follows patterns that can link a person to a particular group or other Internet record. As Cisco researchers Nick Biasini, Alex Chiu, Jaeson Schultz, Craig Williams, and William McVey wrote: Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Epic Google snafu leaks hidden whois data for 280,000 domains

Consumer SSDs benchmarked to death—and last far longer than rated

We last checked in with TechReport’s grand SSD torture test back in June , when the first drives in the six-drive roundup had failed. The drives to first fall victim to the unending barrage of data writes were the Intel 335, one of two Kingston HyperX 3Ks (the one tasked with an non-compressible workload to stymie its compression-happy Sandforce controller), and the Samsung 840. All three failed short of 1PB of writes, but it’s also important to note that all of them—even the TLC-equipped Samsung 840—far exceeded their manufacturers’ stated write lifetimes. But now the experiment has come to its grand conclusion : all the drives have finally gone silent, their controllers unresponsive, their NAND cells heavy with extra electrons . The TechReport’s post-mortem is glorious in its depth and detail, with tons of data points and charts describing the course of the experiment and the fate of each of the drives. Tech-savvy buyers who might be worried about SSD lifetime decreasing even as SSD capacity skyrockets should have their fears assuaged by the ridiculous number of writes the tested drives endured; the drive that survived the longest survived more than 2.4 petabytes worth of sustained writes. That’s probably about 240x as much writing as a typical consumer SSD would need to endure over its lifetime. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Consumer SSDs benchmarked to death—and last far longer than rated

Microsoft to step up the pace of delivering Windows 10 builds

Though the plan was to give Windows 10 preview a series of regular updates, there hasn’t been a new build since January. Windows 10 has two public release channels. The fast channel is meant to get more regular updates, and so get new features sooner, while the slow channel is meant to be more thoroughly tested and a little more stable. Both channels have been quiet lately. While there’s no immediate change on that front—a new public candidate build is in testing but it’s not done yet—testers of the new operating system should take note: the fast channel is due to get faster. Gabe Aul, a General Manager in Microsoft’s Operating Systems Group tweeted today the fast channel is going to go faster , and if you want a more stable situation, you should switch to the slow channel . Further, Aul says that the company may introduce additional channels, perhaps to offer even more cutting edge builds. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Microsoft to step up the pace of delivering Windows 10 builds

CryptoLocker look-alike searches for and encrypts PC game files

Crypto-based “ransomware” has become a lucrative business for cybercriminals. Since the arrival of CryptoLocker on the scene last year, a number of copycat malware packages have appeared to compete in the cyber-extortion market, encrypting victims’ photos and other personal files with a key that will be destroyed if they don’t contact the malware’s operators and pay up. Recently, a new variant has emerged that seeks to raise the stakes with a particular class of victim by specifically seeking out files related to a number of popular PC games, as well as Valve’s Steam gaming platform. The malware, which is a variant of the crypt-ransomware called TeslaCrypt, superficially looks like CryptoLocker. But according to a number of security researchers who have analyzed the malware, it shares little code with CryptoLocker or its more well-known successor CryptoWall. And while it will also will target photos and documents, as well as iTunes-related files, as Bromium security researcher Vadim Kotov noted in an analysis on Bromium Labs’ blog , TeslaCrypt also includes code that specifically looks for files related to more than 40 specific PC games, gaming platforms, and game developer tools. The games include both single player and multiplayer games, though it isn’t clear how targeting some of the multiplayer games would affect users other than requiring a re-install. The games targeted include a mix of older and newer titles— for example, Blizzard’s StarCraft II and WarCraft III real-time strategy games and its World of Warcraft online game are targeted. Also on TeslaCrypt’s hit list: Bioshock 2, Call of Duty, DayZ, Diablo, Fallout 3, League of Legends, F.E.A.R, S.T.A.L.K.E.R, Minecraft, Metro 2033, Half-Life 2, Dragon Age: Origins, Resident Evil 4, World of Tanks, Metin 2, and The Elder Scrolls (specifically, Skyrim-related files), as well as Star Wars: The Knights Of The Old Republic. There’s also code that searches for files associated with games from specific companies that affect a wide range of titles, including a variety of games from EA Sports, Valve, and Bethesda, and Valve’s Steam gaming platform. And the game development tools RPG Maker, Unity3D and Unreal Engine are targeted as well. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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CryptoLocker look-alike searches for and encrypts PC game files