Tag: newsletters

Valve hits a Linux landmark—1,500 games available on Steam

A few months after Valve officially launched Steam for Linux in 2013, Gabe Newell gave his LinuxCon keynote crowd a bit of music for their ears. “It feels a little bit funny coming here and telling you guys that Linux and open source are the future of gaming,” the Valve head-man said. “It’s sort of like going to Rome and teaching Catholicism to the pope.”  Linux gaming was by no means a new endeavor, but 2013 stands as a major year for the open-source platform’s gaming prospects with Valve announcing Linux-based Steam Machines and the arrival of SteamOS . When we looked at the state of Linux gaming after its 12-month Valve anniversary, we found  nearly 1,000 professional, commercially distributed games  available as of February 2015. But this weekend there’s an even bigger numeric milestone to celebrate according to the Linux site  Phoronix —1,500 Linux titles are currently available through Steam. Phoronix notes Steam has been adding roughly 100 Linux titles per month throughout the summer. And while the total number of Steam Linux offerings still pales in comparison to competing platforms—Phoronix cites Windows at 6,464 games and OS X at 2,323—the statistical growth in such a short period of time is undeniable. Anecdotal evidence supporting Steam’s Linux gaming growth looks rosy as well. The five most popular Linux titles for Steam include major developer offerings like  Counter-Strike: Global Offensive  and  Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordo r (the rest of the top five according to Phoronix includes ARK: Survival Evolved , Team Fortress 2 , and Dota 2).  And this summer, a small indie game called Don’t Be Patchman   even became the first Linux-exclusive launch on Steam. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Valve hits a Linux landmark—1,500 games available on Steam

Computer systems outage grounds American Airlines at major hubs

American Airlines’ information systems outage is affecting its website as well as flights. An information systems outage at Chicago’s O’Hare International has grounded many American Airlines flights today. As the company tries to restore service, flights from at least three major hub airports—O’Hare, Dallas-Fort Worth, and Miami—are on a “ground stop” because of the problem. At 1:32pm Eastern Time, the Federal Aviation Administration announced that American had requested a ground stop for flights out of the three airports: FAA Air Traffic Alert: @AmericanAir requested a ground stop for all of their traffic in and out of DFW/ORD/MIA due to their computer issue. — The FAA (@FAANews) September 17, 2015 During the issue, American’s Twitter feed was filling up with responses to customers: “We’re working to resolve technical issues and apologize for the inconvenience.” Some of the complaints had nothing to do specifically with the grounded flights, however—it appears the outage has also affected parts of American’s website, blocking access to frequent flyer accounts and other customer data. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Computer systems outage grounds American Airlines at major hubs

Google Glass now “Project Aura,” ex-Amazon Fire Phone employees hired

Some men wearing Google Glass. Glass Collective The Google Glass team is  still  alive inside of Google. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the group has a new name, “Project Aura,” and has recently picked up a few engineers from Amazon. That’s “Project Aura,” not to be confused with ” Project Ara ,” another struggling group inside Google that’s trying to build a modular smartphone. “Project Aura” seems to still have all of the previous Google Glass management in place. Ivy Ross, former chief marketing officer of Art.com, is still leading the project. She still reports to Tony Fadell, the CEO of Nest. This group is all part of Google Glass’ “reboot” team. They’re charged with taking the original version of Google’s face-mounted computer and turning it into something appealing; we’ve yet to see a product from this revamped group. According to the report, the group has been hiring engineers, software developers, and project managers from Amazon’s Lab126, a hardware division that was most recently responsible for the Amazon Fire Phone. After the Fire Phone flopped, Amazon fired “dozens” from the Lab126 group, and Google swooped in to pick up some new employees. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google Glass now “Project Aura,” ex-Amazon Fire Phone employees hired

Google sues SEO company over harassing calls selling “Front Page Domination”

Getting companies’ names to show up higher in search engine results is the field of the lucrative business known as search engine optimization, or SEO. There’s a range of SEO practices, from “white hat” ones that are endorsed by search engines, to “black hat” practices that, while they may not be illegal, violate search engine rules. Now Google is taking a rare legal action against one Southern California SEO company it says went too far and broke the law. In its complaint (PDF) , Google says that Tustin, California-based Local Lighthouse has bombarded consumers with “incessant, unsolicited automated telephone calls” since mid-2014, making “false guarantees of first-page placement in Google search results.” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google sues SEO company over harassing calls selling “Front Page Domination”

Malicious Cisco router backdoor found on 79 more devices, 25 in the US

ZMap.io The highly clandestine attacks hitting Cisco Systems routers are much more active than previously reported. Infections have hit at least 79 devices in 19 countries, including an ISP in the US that’s hosting 25 boxes running the malicious backdoor. That discovery comes from a team of computer scientists who probed the entire IPv4 address space for infected devices. As Ars reported Tuesday, the so-called SYNful Knock router implant is activated after receiving an unusual series of non-compliant network packets followed by a hardcoded password. By sending only the out-of-sequence TCP packets but not the password to every Internet address and then monitoring the response, the researchers were able to detect which ones were infected by the backdoor. Security firm FireEye surprised the security world on Tuesday when it first reported the active outbreak of SYNful Knock. The implant is precisely the same size as the legitimate Cisco router image, and it’s loaded each time the router is restarted. It supports up to 100 modules that attackers can tailor to the specific target. FireEye found it on 14 servers in India, Mexico, the Philippines, and Ukraine. The finding was significant, because it showed an attack that had long been theorized was in fact being actively used. The new research shows it’s being used much more widely, and it’s been found in countries including the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, and China. The researchers wrote: Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Malicious Cisco router backdoor found on 79 more devices, 25 in the US

New Android lockscreen hack gives attackers full access to locked devices

Software bugs that allow attackers to bypass smartphone lockscreens are common enough for both Android and iOS devices, but like a fender bender on the highway, many of us can’t resist the urge to gawk anyway. There’s a  newly disclosed way  for someone who has a few uninterrupted moments with a handset running most versions of Android 5.x to gain complete control of the device and all the data stored on it. The hack involves dumping an extremely long string into the password field after swiping open the camera from a locked phone. Unless updated in the past few days, devices running 5.0 to 5.1.1 will choke on the unwieldy number of characters and unlock, even though the password is incorrect. From there, the attacker can do anything with the phone the rightful owner can do. The following video demonstrates the attack in action. The technique begins by adding a large number of characters to the emergency call window and then copying them to the Android clipboard. (Presumably, there are other ways besides the emergency number screen to buffer a sufficiently large number of characters.) The hacker then swipes open the camera from the locked phone, accesses the options menu, and pastes the characters into the resulting password prompt. Instead of returning an error message, vulnerable handsets unlock. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New Android lockscreen hack gives attackers full access to locked devices

Here’s why you can’t delete native iOS apps from your iPhone

Megan Geuss If you’re an iOS user, you may have a junk folder on your device full of rarely used, native apps from Apple. Banishing them to their own cluster is just about the only course of action since these apps cannot be deleted. Now, we know more about why that’s the case: in an interview with Buzzfeed, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that deleting native apps would essentially cause a domino effect in other programs on the device, possibly breaking things elsewhere in iOS. “There are some apps that are linked to something else on the iPhone,” Cook told Buzzfeed . “If they were to be removed, they might cause issues elsewhere on the phone.” While Cook didn’t detail which preinstalled apps were linked to other functions, he went on to say that not every app is connected in this way. Eventually, Apple may allow some native apps to be deleted. “Over time, I think with the ones that aren’t like that, we’ll figure out a way [for you to remove them]. … It’s not that we want to suck up your real estate.” Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Here’s why you can’t delete native iOS apps from your iPhone

Office 2016 confirmed for September 22 release, February for business

Microsoft today confirmed a previous leak that Office 2016 would be released on September 22nd. But the release of Office 365 ProPlus—the version of the desktop suite that comes with some Office 365 subscriptions—is a little more complex. Office 365 ProPlus, unlike the perpetually licensed, non-Office 365 version of Office, currently receives a steady trickle of monthly feature updates in addition to the security updates that all desktop Office products receive. This will continue with Office 2016—but only for one branch, the “Current Branch.” A new second branch is being created, the “Current Branch for Business” (CBB). The CBB won’t receive these monthly feature updates. Instead, those will happen three times a year—February, June, and October—and these features will lag the Current Branch by four months. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Office 2016 confirmed for September 22 release, February for business

Norwegian Pirate Party provides DNS server to bypass new Pirate Bay blockade

Following a court-ordered block of The Pirate Bay and a number of other file-sharing websites in Norway, the Norwegian Pirate Party (Piratpartiet Norge) has now set up free, uncensored DNS servers that anyone can use to bypass the block. While the DNS servers are based in Norway, anyone can use them: if your ISP is blocking access to certain sites via DNS blackholing/blocking, using the Piratpartiet’s DNS servers should enable access. A few days ago, TorrentFreak reported that the Oslo District Court had sided with several Hollywood studios and domestic Norwegian rights holders in a case that sought to block a number of sites, including The Pirate Bay, Viooz, and ExtraTorrent. The court ordered that the country’s major ISPs, including Telia, TeliaSonera, NextGenTel, and Altibox, must block the sites. The Norwegian Pirate Party, as you can probably imagine, isn’t happy with the court-ordered block. In response, it has set up an unblocked DNS server—dns.piratpartiet.no—and a website that shows you how to change your DNS server settings on Windows, Mac, or Linux. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Norwegian Pirate Party provides DNS server to bypass new Pirate Bay blockade

Ex-Tesla engineer accused of illegally accessing former boss’s e-mail

A former Tesla mechanical engineer is facing two counts of felony computer intrusion, according to a Thursday press release from the FBI . Nima Kalbasi, a 28-year-old Canadian citizen, is accused of illegally accessing his former boss’s e-mail account nearly 300 times during a period of about 30 days in late 2014 and early 2015. The 28-year-old Canadian citizen appeared before a federal judge in San Jose, California late last month. He was arrested days earlier while crossing the border from Canada into Vermont. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Ex-Tesla engineer accused of illegally accessing former boss’s e-mail