Tag: portfolio-cond

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

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

A $6 commute with Wi-Fi, USB ports, and coconut water

SAN FRANCISCO—In a city replete with not only local buses, and the famously-hated tech company buses that shuttle hundreds of workers daily 40 miles south, a new startup is set to debut a private luxury commuter bus line, charging $6 for a roughly three-mile ride. At its Wednesday launch, Leap will only operate four buses (with one more in reserve) during commuting hours, focusing on giving rides from the Marina neighborhood in the city’s north, going southeast to downtown in the morning, and the reverse in the evening. There’s no fixed schedule—the buses are just constantly rolling at 10 to 15 minute intervals, and passengers can check the iOS or Web apps to see when they will arrive. (Ars first profiled Leap in March 2014.) Leap is betting that riders are willing to pay nearly three times what a ride on a local Muni bus costs, and a fair bit less than what a taxi (or its newer cousins, Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar) would charge for a similar journey. What makes it worth that price? Free Wi-Fi, comfortable seats (limited to just 27, no standing passengers), USB ports, plus food and drinks. Read 24 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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A $6 commute with Wi-Fi, USB ports, and coconut water

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

Indian ISP’s routing hiccup briefly takes Google down worldwide

For a short time today, people all over the world trying to access Google services were cut off because of what Dyn Research Director of Internet Analysis Doug Madory identified as a “routing leak ” from an Indian broadband Internet provider. The leak is similar to a 2012 incident caused by an Indonesian ISP , which took Google offline for 30 minutes worldwide. Routing leaks occur when a network provider broadcasts all or part of its internal routing table to one or more peered networks via the Border Gateway Protocol, causing network traffic to be routed incorrectly. In this case, the Indian ISP Hathway’s boundary router incorrectly announced routing data for over 300 network prefixes belonging to Google to the Internet backbone via its provider Bharti Airtel. “Bharti in turn announced these routes to the rest of the world,” Madory wrote in a Dyn Research blog entry posted this morning, “and a number of ISPs accepted these routes.” In the US, Cogent and Level 3 accepted the routes; a number of overseas carriers, including Orange, were also affected. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Indian ISP’s routing hiccup briefly takes Google down worldwide