elegant-bride – Page 11

“Copyright troll” Perfect 10 hit with $5.6M in fees after failed Usenet assault

One of the original “copyright trolls,” a porn company called Perfect 10, has been slapped with a massive $5.6 million fee award that could finally shut down the decade-old lawsuit factory. Perfect 10’s model has been to sue third-party providers for carrying images of its porn. It hasn’t been afraid to go after big targets, either—Perfect 10 even sued Google over its image search, resulting in an appeals court case that made crystal clear that such searches are fair use . Despite that ruling, Perfect 10 went ahead and sued Microsoft on similar grounds three months later. The company also sued Giganews, a Usenet provider, in April 2011. Perfect 10 pursued claims for both indirect and direct copyright infringement, stating that Giganews employees directly uploaded infringing images onto its network. Giganews ultimately prevailed on all grounds; now, Perfect 10 has been required to pay its substantial legal bill as well. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Lone modder’s Half-Life 2: Update brings modern graphics to a classic

As amazing as Half-Life 2 was when it was first released in 2004, time has not been kind to the original release’s graphics, which can look a bit flat and dated compared to modern PC games. Enter Romanian modder Filip Victor , who’s ready to release the final version of a massive, Source engine-powered graphical update for the game on Steam for free tomorrow. As shown in a slick comparison trailer and detailed in a PDF brochure , Half-Life 2: Update offers graphical improvements like high dynamic range lighting, improved fog and particle effects, world reflections, more detailed water rendering, improved background models, and other effects that just weren’t feasible back in 2004. The update also fixes a number of animation and cut-scene-activation bugs that have persisted in the original release and adds optional fan commentary from a number of high-profile YouTube personalities. Despite all the graphical changes, the update leaves the original gameplay, level design, character models, textures, and animations intact. “The goal of Half-Life 2: Update is to fix up, polish, and visually enhance Half-Life 2 , without ever changing the 2004 original’s core gameplay, or time-tested style,” Victor wrote in the update’s brochure. “I wanted to ensure that the update was something that would be enduring, and worth the time it takes to play it. I hope that both newcomers and veterans of the Half-Life series will enjoy seeing the work that went into its creation.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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

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

New DNA construct can set off a “mutagenic chain reaction”

A technique for editing genes while they reside in intact chromosomes has been a real breakthrough. Literally . In 2013, Science magazine named it the runner-up for breakthrough-of-the-year, and its developers won the 2015 Breakthrough Prize . The system being honored is called CRISPR/Cas9, and it evolved as a way for bacteria to destroy viruses using RNA that matched the virus’ DNA sequence. But it’s turned out to be remarkably flexible, and the technique can be retargeted to any gene simply by modifying the RNA. Researchers are still figuring out new uses for the system, which means there are papers coming out nearly every week, many of them difficult to distinguish. That may be precisely why the significance of a paper published last week wasn’t immediately obvious. In it, the authors described a way of ensuring that if one copy of a gene was modified by CRISPR/Cas9, the second copy would be—useful, but not revolutionary. What may have been missed was that this process doesn’t stop once those two copies are modified. Instead, it happens in the next generation as well, and then the generation after that. In fact, the modified genes could spread throughout an entire species in a chain reaction, a fact that has raised ethical and safety concerns about the work. Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New DNA construct can set off a “mutagenic chain reaction”

Islamic State doxes US soldiers, airmen, calls on supporters to kill them

Middle East terrorist organization Islamic State (ISIS) has called on its followers take the fight to 100 members of the United States military residing in the US. A group calling itself the “Islamic State Hacking Division” has posted names, addresses, and photographs of soldiers, sailors, and airmen online, asking its “brothers residing in America” to murder them, according to Reuters . Although the posting purports to come from the “Hacking Division,” US Department of Defense officials say that none of their systems appear to have been breached by the group. Instead, the personal data was almost certainly culled from publicly available sources, a DoD official told the New York Times on the condition of anonymity. Those appearing on the list include crew members from the 2d Bomb Wing at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana and the 5th Bomb Wing at Minot AFB in North Dakota, even though they have played no part in the US air campaign against ISIS. Other military members doxed have either been identified in media reports on the campaign or were cited by name in official DoD reports, officials told the Times. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Islamic State doxes US soldiers, airmen, calls on supporters to kill them

All four major browsers take a stomping at Pwn2Own hacking competition

The annual Pwn2Own hacking competition wrapped up its 2015 event in Vancouver with another banner year, paying $442,000 for 21 critical bugs in all four major browsers, as well as Windows, Adobe Flash, and Adobe Reader. The crowning achievement came Thursday as contestant Jung Hoon Lee, aka lokihardt, demonstrated an exploit that felled both the stable and beta versions of Chrome, the Google-developed browser that’s famously hard to compromise . His hack started with a buffer overflow race condition in Chrome. To allow that attack to break past anti-exploit mechanisms such as the sandbox and address space layout randomization, it also targeted an information leak and a race condition in two Windows kernel drivers, an impressive feat that allowed the exploit to achieve full System access. “With all of this, lokihardt managed to get the single biggest payout of the competition, not to mention the single biggest payout in Pwn2Own history: $75,000 USD for the Chrome bug, an extra $25,000 for the privilege escalation to SYSTEM, and another $10,000 from Google for hitting the beta version for a grand total of $110,000,” Pwn2Own organizers wrote in a blog post published Thursday . “To put it another way, lokihardt earned roughly $916 a second for his two-minute demonstration.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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All four major browsers take a stomping at Pwn2Own hacking competition

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

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

Ken May

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