digest – Page 58

Game over for Zynga? Firm loses 25 percent of daily active users in one quarter

It’s been a rough year for Zynga, which ousted founder Mark Pincus earlier this month. Fortune Live Media In its latest earnings statement filed Thursday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Zynga reported the number of daily average users (DAU) dropped to 39 million in the second quarter of 2013—the lowest ever since the company began keeping track. Last quarter, the DAU fell to the then-lowest record, 52 million users . The fall to 39 million means that 25 percent of its daily user base stopped using Zynga products in just one quarter. Not surprisingly, Zynga’s bottom line fell too. The company sustained a net loss of $15.8 million in Q2 2013. (Last quarter, the gaming firm profited just $4.1 million.) The market wasn’t too thrilled with these numbers: in after-hours trading, Zynga’s stock price plummeted by nearly 15 percent. The once top-dog has gone through a bit of a rough patch during the last year. In the summer of 2012, the company quickly lost a bunch of executives and managers. That October, the company announced that it had overpaid for OMGPOP (maker of Draw Something ). More recently, Mark Pincus, the company’s founder, was ousted as CEO in early July 2013. Then Zynga suddenly shut down OMGPOP last month as well. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Game over for Zynga? Firm loses 25 percent of daily active users in one quarter

Congress nearly shuts down NSA dragnet, in sudden 217-205 vote

Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI) sponsored the amendment that led to today’s close vote. Gage Skidmore / flickr A critical vote for intelligence funding today showed that Congress is sharply divided on the issue of NSA domestic surveillance. This afternoon, the House of Representatives narrowly shot down an amendment that would have stopped the NSA from engaging in any warrantless collection of telephone data on a 217-205 vote. The amendment was sponsored by Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI) and co-sponsored by John Conyers (D-MI). The summary of the amendment read: Ends authority for the blanket collection of records under the Patriot Act. Bars the NSA and other agencies from using Section 215 of the Patriot Act to collect records, including telephone call records, that pertain to persons who are not subject to an investigation under Section 215. Amash and Conyers sponsored a similar bill several weeks ago, but there’s been little movement on it. Their strategy this week was to propose the change as an amendment to a $600 billion defense spending bill being considered this week. That strategy quickly pushed the surveillance issue to the House floor. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Texas man raised over $4.5M in Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, feds allege

If you don’t follow the often-shady world of Bitcoin , you may not be familiar with Bitcoin Savings and Trust (BTCST), a virtual bitcoin-based hedge fund that many suspected of being a scam. BTCST shut down in August 2012, and on Wednesday the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) formally charged its founder, Trendon Shavers, with running a Ponzi scheme. In a statement , the SEC said Shavers “raised at least 700, 000 Bitcoin in BTCST investments, which amounted to more than $4.5 million based on the average price of Bitcoin in 2011 and 2012 when the investments were offered and sold.” The government’s financial regulator alleges that Shavers violated a number of federal financial regulations. In court documents , the SEC wrote: Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Texas man raised over $4.5M in Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, feds allege

NSA says it can’t search its own e-mails

The National Security Agency (NSA) is a ” supercomputing powerhouse ” with machines so powerful their speed is measured in thousands of trillions of operations per second. The agency turns its giant machine brains to the task of sifting through unimaginably large troves of data its surveillance programs capture. But ask the NSA as part of a freedom of information request to do a seemingly simple search of its own employees’ e-mail? The agency says it doesn’t have the technology. “There’s no central method to search an e-mail at this time with the way our records are set up, unfortunately, ” NSA Freedom of Information Act officer Cindy Blacker told me last week. The system is “a little antiquated and archaic, ” she added. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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NSA says it can’t search its own e-mails

ISS spacewalk aborted when water begins to fill astronaut’s suit

American Chris Cassidy and Italian Luca Parmitano were forced to call off this morning’s planned spacewalk outside the International Space Station when Parmitano suddenly reported that there was water inside of his suit helmet. “My head is really wet and I have a feeling it’s increasing, ” he radioed about an hour into the spacewalk. Video of the aborted EVA, starting with the discovery of the water. The call to terminate EVA comes at 12:45. Station airlock opens at 44:48. The EVA, designated EVA-23, was one of the ones that Ars watched astronauts Cassidy and Parmitano train for late last year. That was during our visit to NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory , the giant swimming pool where NASA simulates spacewalks in microgravity. According to NASASpaceFlight’s recounting of events , Parmitano was in the process of running data cabling to connect the as-yet-unlaunched Russian Nauka module when the water began to make itself apparent. The quantity of liquid in Parmitano’s helmet rapidly increased, with Parmitano noting that it had begun to enter his eyes, nose, and mouth. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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ISS spacewalk aborted when water begins to fill astronaut’s suit

USB 3.0 continues to steal Thunderbolt’s thunder

PCs that use Thunderbolt are rare, and they’re getting rarer. Chris Foresman For Thunderbolt fans hoping that the high-speed interface will catch on, we’ve got more bad news: an Acer representative talking to CNET has said that the company has no plans to support Thunderbolt in its PCs this year. Acer’s Aspire S5 Ultrabook was one of the few Windows laptops to include Thunderbolt support when it was introduced in early 2012. “We’re really focusing on USB 3.0—it’s an excellent alternative to Thunderbolt, ” said the Acer spokesperson. “It’s less expensive, offers comparable bandwidth, charging for devices such as mobile phones, and has a large installed base of accessories and peripherals.” By itself, the news of one company distancing itself from Thunderbolt might not be a big deal, but this is just another example of the trouble that Thunderbolt faces two-and-a-half years after its public introduction in the 2011 MacBook Pro. A Newegg search reveals a handful of high-end desktop motherboards that support it (five boards, all above $150), but the complete list of non-Apple prebuilt systems that have ever supported the interface is pretty short . Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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USB 3.0 continues to steal Thunderbolt’s thunder

Female scammer who taunted US authorities online finally caught in Mexico

A Southern California woman who mocked American authorities via Twitter—after having fled the country—was finally arraigned on Monday in a San Diego courtroom. Wanda Lee Ann Podgurski, 60, was arrested in Rosarito, Mexico on July 4, 2013. This was a month after she tweeted “ Catch me if you can , ” seemingly directed at San Diego District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis , apparently the only person Podgurski followed on Twitter at the time. A superior court judge sentenced Podgurski in absentia on June 21, 2013 to 20 years and four months in state prison. She was convicted (PDF) of 29 felony counts stemming from an insurance fraud scam. Podgurski worked as a clerk for Amtrak and held health insurance policies with six different companies, then she filed claims with all of them after she declared that she was disabled from supposed fall in her home in August 2006. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Female scammer who taunted US authorities online finally caught in Mexico

Optical transistor switches states by trapping a single photon

NIST Optical connections are slowly replacing wires as a means of shuffling bits in between systems—there are already plans afoot to have different components within a single system communicate via an optical connection. But, so far at least, all the processing of those bits is taking place using electrons. Yesterday’s edition of Science includes a demonstration of an all-optical transistor that can be switched between its on and off states using a single photon. Although it’s an impressive demonstration of physics, the work also indicates that we’re likely to stick with electrons for a while, given that the transistor required two lasers and a cloud of a cold atomic gas. The work relied on a cold gas of cesium atoms. These atoms have an extremely convenient property: two closely separated ground states, each with a corresponding excited state. All of these states are separated by an energy that corresponds to a specific wavelength of light, so using a laser of that wavelength allows you to shift the system into a different state. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Verizon would end “century of regulation” by killing wireline phone, says NY AG

Hurricane Sandy caused widespread damage in Fire Island, New York. Fireisland.com New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman this week accused Verizon of trying to “depart from a century of telephone service regulation” by ending wireline telephone service in a part of Fire Island devastated by Hurricane Sandy in October, 2012. In addition, Schneiderman has accused Verizon of violating a state order by telling customers outside of Fire Island that they should accept wireless phone service instead of repairs to their landline service. He says Verizon should be fined $100, 000 per customer, per day. Verizon says it has not violated the state order, and that its offer of wireless service outside Fire Island is strictly optional. Verizon is, however, trying to gain state approval to end wireline service entirely in western Fire Island. Read 19 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Verizon would end “century of regulation” by killing wireline phone, says NY AG

Mass-login attack on Nintendo fan site hijacks 24,000 accounts

Almost 24, 000 user accounts on Nintendo’s main fan site have been hijacked in a sustained mass-login attack that began early last month, the company said. The wave of attacks on Club Nintendo exposed personal information associated with 23, 926 compromised accounts, including users’ real names, addresses, phone numbers and e-mail addresses, according to a press release Nintendo issued over the weekend. The campaign began on June 9 and attempted more than 15.5 million logins over the following month. Attackers likely relied on a list of login credentials taken from a site unrelated to Nintendo. Club Nintendo offers rewards to Nintendo customers in exchange for having them register their products, answer surveys, and provide personal data. The site operates internationally and has about four million users in Japan, the primary region of most affected users. Things came to a head on July 2, when the wave of logins crested. By Friday, July 5, Nintendo had reset passwords on the site. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Mass-login attack on Nintendo fan site hijacks 24,000 accounts

Ken May

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