portfolio-cond – Page 17

Descent Underground Kickstarter crosses $600,000 finish line

It’s no doubt been a long day for Eric “Wingman” Peterson and the other folks at Descendent Studios , but their crowdfunded reboot of the six-degrees-of-freedom shooter Descent is now over the $600,000 mark and will receive its funding, which will allow Peterson and team to buckle down and get to work on the title—once the post-Kickstarter partying is over, of course. Though the funding campaign got off to a good start, pledges slowed over the last week of the campaign. However, backers donated more than $200,000 of the $600,000 goal in the past four days, with $70,000 of donations coming in today, on the campaign’s final day. With about two hours left on the clock, the donation mark stands at just a bit over $602,000. Descent Underground engine demo running on an Oculus Rift DK2. Our stomachs lurch in anticipation! Peterson and his team (which includes several former members of the Austin branch of Cloud Imperium, which is currently focusing on building Star Citizen’s persistent universe) have set their sights on resurrecting the Decent series of games, which reached the height of their popularity in the late 1990s and cast players as the pilot of a fast, maneuverable spaceship blasting killer robots in underground mines. The game’s hook was that unlike other FPS titles, Descent allowed full movement along all axes—you could move up, down, left right, forward, backward, and rotate in any direction. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Quitting + failures + a microscope in the living room = Nobel Prize

Murray Hill, NJ—When the Nobel Prizes were handed out last year, there was clearly an interesting story behind Eric Betzig, who won in chemistry for his work in developing a microscope that could image well beyond the diffraction limit. Betzig, it was noted, took time out of his scientific career to work in his father’s machine tool business for a number of years. That break occurred after he left Bell Labs in New Jersey. Yesterday, his former home had him back in order to honor him, along with its seven other Nobel winners. Betzig got a prime speaking slot, and he used it to fill in the details of his long odyssey. Although his time at Bell Labs ended with him quitting science, it was clear that his time there was essential to his career’s eventual resurrection. Betzig started at Bell Labs after finishing his PhD at Cornell (the person who hired him, Hosrt Störmer, went on to win a Nobel as well). At the time, he was working on what’s termed “near field” microscopy, where, as he described it, a lens with a tiny aperture is jabbed right up against a sample; images are built by scanning the imaging tip across the sample. To make these tips, he’d been coating glass pipettes with aluminum; once at Bell Labs, he switched to something that was in easy supply there: optical fibers. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Quitting + failures + a microscope in the living room = Nobel Prize

US, European police take down highly elusive botnet known as Beebone

US and European police have shut down a botnet that provided a captive audience of backdoored PCs to criminals who were looking for an easy way to quickly install malware on large numbers of computers. The takedown of the Beebone botnet is something of a coup because the underlying malware was so resistant to detection. Polymorphic downloader software at the heart of the malicious program updated itself as many as 19 times a day. Beebone also relied on a pair of programs that re-downloaded each other, acting as an insurance policy should one of them be removed, authorities told the Associated Press . “From a techie’s perspective, they made it as difficult as they possibly could for us,” a Europol advisory told the news organization. The takedown was a joint operation that involved the US FBI, Europol’s European Cybercrime Center, and private security groups including Kaspersky Lab, Shadowserver, and McAfee. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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US, European police take down highly elusive botnet known as Beebone

Price of WoW gold plummets in first day of “official” trading

Just over a day after Blizzard introduced the first official method for converting dollars into World of Warcraft gold, the real-world price for the in-game currency has already plummeted 27 percent from the initial position set by Blizzard. For most of World of Warcraft ‘s history, the only way to buy in-game gold with real currency was to go through one of many gray market third-party services (which technically goes against Blizzard’s terms of service for the game). That was true until yesterday, when Blizzard introduced a $20 game time token that can be sold for gold at the in-game auction house on North American servers (European servers will get the feature at a later date). While the real world price of those tokens is fixed at $20, the gold price is “determined dynamically based on supply and demand,” as Blizzard puts it. To start the market off, Blizzard set the price of a $20 token at 30,000 gold. That gold price increased incrementally for a few hours before plummeting precipitously starting yesterday evening in the US. As of this writing, just over 24 hours after the markets opened, that initial price has fallen over 27 percent to 21,739 gold, according to an API-based tracking site . Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Price of WoW gold plummets in first day of “official” trading

Next Windows Server offer new even smaller “Nano Server” footprint

Microsoft is adding even more features to Windows Server to diversify and strengthen its support for virtualization and containerization on its platform. The next Windows Server will include an even more stripped down, lightweight install mode called Nano Server. Windows Server already has a shrunk install option, Server Core, that omits various features to reduce the memory and disk footprint, and to shrink its exposure to security flaws. Nano Server strips back the operating system further still, dropping things like the GUI stack, 32-bit Win32 support, local logins, and remote desktop support. Nano Server is designed for two kinds of workload; cloud apps built on runtimes such as .NET, Java, Node.js, or Python, and cloud infrastructure, such as hosting Hyper-V virtual machines. Compared to the full Server install, Microsoft claims that Nano Server shrinks the disk footprint by 93 percent, the number of critical security bulletins by 92 percent, and the number of reboots by 80 percent. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Next Windows Server offer new even smaller “Nano Server” footprint

YouTube planning subscription service for ad-free videos

According to an e-mail sent to YouTube content creators, the video platform is looking to launch a subscription-based service that will permit viewers to bypass pre-roll ads on videos. It’s unclear how much the subscription will cost per month, but Bloomberg reports that revenue from the feature will be shared with content creators, as a supplement to advertising revenue from viewers who choose not to pay for the subscription service. An anonymous source told Bloomberg that the service could launch as early as this year. Venture Beat noted that an update to the terms of service for YouTube program partners said that the company would share 55 percent of its revenue with creators. What an individual creator gets back from that pool would be based on “a percentage of the monthly views or watchtime of all or a subset of participating content in the relevant subscription offering (as determined by YouTube).” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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YouTube planning subscription service for ad-free videos

Server shutdown disables single-player saves in NBA2K14

Anyone that plays online games has to accept the fact that the servers for those games will probably eventually be shut down by the centralized publisher that operates them (games with player-controlled server support notwithstanding). What most players probably don’t expect is for their single-player game saves to become permanently unusable because an online server somewhere goes down. That’s what has been happening to players of NBA2K14 this past week, though. As Polygon reports , since a planned online server shutdown for the game on March 31, previously created save files in the MyCareer and MyGM modes can no longer pass a built-in server check on the PS4 and Xbox One versions of the game. That means those files are simply unusable, and all that single player progress has effectively been lost. “This means that if you had created a MyCareer or a MyGM online save file that was once connected to our servers it too sadly has retired and is no longer available for use and it would be necessary to re-create these files as offline saves,” 2K Support writes in a message to affected users, obtained by Polygon. “Sadly this may come as an inconvenience to some of you and if so we truly do understand and can feel for how upsetting this may seem as there always is a special bond that occurs between a player and their MyCareer save but all good things must come to an end and rest assured your MyCareer or MyGM went out while on top!” Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Server shutdown disables single-player saves in NBA2K14

Dell support software gets flagged by antivirus program

Diagnostic software preinstalled on many Dell computers is now being flagged as a potentially unwanted program by antivirus program Malwarebytes following the discovery of a vulnerability that allows attackers to remotely execute malicious code on older versions. The application known as Dell System Detect failed to validate code before downloading and running it, according to a report published last month by researcher Tom Forbes. Because the program starts itself automatically, a malicious hacker could use it to infect vulnerable machines by luring users to a booby-trapped website. According to researchers with AV provider F-Secure , the malicious website need only have contained the string “dell” somewhere in its domain name to exploit the weakness. www.notreallydell.com was just one example of a site that would have worked. Dell released an update in response to Forbes’s report, but even then, users remained vulnerable. That’s because the updated program still accepted downloads from malicious sites that had a subdomain with “dell” in it, for instance, a.dell.fakesite.ownedbythebadguys.com. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Large Hadron Collider restarts after 2 years of maintenance

After being shut down for two years, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is back online, CERN announced Sunday. “Today at 10:41am [local time], a proton beam was back in the 27-kilometer ring, followed at 12:27pm by a second beam rotating in the opposite direction,” the European Organization for Nuclear Research reported in a statement . “These beams circulated at their injection energy of 450 GeV. Over the coming days, operators will check all systems before increasing energy of the beams.” Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Large Hadron Collider restarts after 2 years of maintenance

How a $3.85 latte paid for with a fake $100 bill led to counterfeit kingpin’s downfall

Four men were indicted Wednesday on federal charges as part of an international online conspiracy to make and distribute “high-quality” counterfeits of over $1.4 million sold via Tor-enabled Dark Web sites. The new criminal charges expand on a previous case filed back in December 2014 against Ryan Andrew Gustafson , a man who went by the online monikers “Jack Farrel” and “Willy Clock”—he is also named as one of the four defendants. According to court records, Gustafson was previously positively identified via facial recognition against his Texas driver’s license. Prosecutors say the 27-year-old is an American living in Kampala, Uganda, and that he is currently on trial in the East African nation on counterfeiting charges. The United States does not have an extradition treaty nor a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT) with Uganda, so his return home is not a sure thing. Read 23 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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How a $3.85 latte paid for with a fake $100 bill led to counterfeit kingpin’s downfall

Ken May

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