Tag: portfolio-cond

Sierra Games returns with new King’s Quest and Geometry Wars titles

If you’re a PC gamer of a certain age, the name Sierra On-Line (or Sierra Entertainment) revives memories of some of the most classic point-and-click adventures of the late 20th century. New corporate owner Activision is set to reactivate those memories today, reviving the brand as “Sierra Games” and promising new games in the King’s Quest and Geometry Wars franchises. The new Sierra name will apparently serve as an umbrella for a number of independent studios to reinterpret some classic gaming franchises. The newest King’s Quest entry is being developed for 2015 by The Odd Gentlemen, best known for esoteric puzzle platform game The Misadventures of PB Winterbottom . Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions , meanwhile, is being worked on by mobile/portable developer Lucid Games for this holiday season. No platforms have been announced for either title. “Sierra’s goal is to find and work with gifted up-and-coming indie developers working on their own amazing projects or who are passionate about working on great Sierra IP,” a Sierra representative told GamesBeat . “We’re in talks with a large number of other indie devs, and we can’t wait to share more details with fans in the near future.” Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Sierra Games returns with new King’s Quest and Geometry Wars titles

Xbox One to get far better at playing pirated TV shows

The Xbox One Digital TV Tuner. Microsoft The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 aren’t just games consoles; a succession of software updates has made them into rich media boxes, capable of playing all manner of video and audio on your TV. The Xbox One and PlayStation 4, by contrast, have thus far offered a rather sad and limited media experience. On the Xbox One, at least, that experience is about to get a whole lot better, as Microsoft revealed today at Gamescom in Germany. A new media player app for the console is being released with support for playback from USB devices and, later in the year, DLNA streaming from other devices on the home network, including Windows PCs. This is in addition to its existing ability to have content pushed by network devices. On its own, this would merely bring the Xbox One’s media capabilities up to the same level as those found in the older Xbox 360, but Microsoft is going a step further with substantially wider format support. The company has published a full list  of supported codecs, but one stands out: support for MKV containers. While MKV is a rarity in the world of explicitly authorized video, it’s quite abundant in the murky world of pirated TV shows. Native MKV support will make watching this content substantially easier on the Xbox One. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Xbox One to get far better at playing pirated TV shows

Meet WordHound, the tool that puts a personal touch on password cracking

Dan Goodin, Ars Technica In the vexing pursuit of passwords that are both easy to remember and hard to crack, many people embed clues into their login credentials, choosing for instance, “playstationplaystationdec2014” to safeguard a recently created gaming account or “L0an@ w0rk!” for an IT administrative account at a financial services company. Now, a whitehat hacker is capitalizing on the habit with a tool that automates the process of launching highly targeted cracking attacks. Dubbed WordHound, the freely available tool scours press releases, white papers, and Twitter accounts belonging to companies or sites that have recently suffered security breaches. The software then generates a list of commonly found words or phrases that attackers can use when trying to convert cryptographic hashes from compromised password databases into the corresponding plaintext passcodes. The tool, devised by security consultant Matthew Marx, was unveiled Wednesday at Passwords 14 conference in Las Vegas. “People are influenced greatly by their environment when choosing a password,” Marx, who works for consultancy MWR Info Security , told Ars. “It could be a work environment, their personal life, or the sport teams they like. I wanted to create a tool that leveraged this human vulnerability.” Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Meet WordHound, the tool that puts a personal touch on password cracking

J. Michael Straczynski wants to reboot Babylon 5 as a big-budget movie

Warner Bros. According to a report from TV Wise , Babylon 5 showrunner J. Michael Straczynski will shortly begin work on a rebooted big-screen version of his 1990s sci-fi TV series. Straczynski made the announcement at San Diego Comic-Con last week. Babylon 5’s pilot episode originally aired in 1993, with the series beginning its regular run almost a year later as a foundational component of the now-defunct Prime Time Entertainment Network . The show lacked the production budget of its contemporary rival Star Trek: Deep Space 9 (which allegedly lifted some or all of its core concepts directly from Straczynski’s original—and rejected— Babylon 5 pitch meeting with Paramount). Still, it attracted enough of an audience to accomplish a noteworthy feat: Babylon 5 became the only non- Star Trek science fiction show on American television to reach its series completion without being cancelled. Not until 2004’s Battlestar Galactica reboot would another non- Star Trek show earn the same distinction. After Babylon 5 ended in 1998, Straczynski (usually referred to simply by his initials, “JMS”) tried multiple times to bring a B5 movie to theaters. The most recent attempt in 2004 came the closest, with a completed script and some preproduction work underway, but without financial backing from Warner Bros. the project had to be abandoned . Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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J. Michael Straczynski wants to reboot Babylon 5 as a big-budget movie

Netflix surpasses HBO in subscriber revenue

Reed Hastings’ Facebook update boasting about Netflix’s (possibly temporary) victory over its unwilling adversary. Netflix has surpassed HBO in subscriber revenue, according to a status update from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings on Wednesday. The company is now pulling in $1.146 billion compared to HBO’s $1.141 billion, and it boasts  50.05 million subscribers , according to its second-quarter earnings reported in July. Netflix has long seen HBO as a competitor in terms of audience and, more recently, in produced content. While HBO has slowly started to come down from the ivory cable tower and be more flexible about how it offers its subscriptions, Netflix has been making gains. Hastings acknowledged that HBO still surpasses Netflix “in profits and Emmy’s [sic], but we are making progress.” Hastings has said many times before that he considers HBO to be a media company that is well-positioned in the changing distribution landscape, where power is shifting away from cable providers and toward Internet streaming. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Netflix surpasses HBO in subscriber revenue

In major shift, Google boosts search rankings of HTTPS-protected sites

In a shift aimed at fostering wider use of encryption on the Web, Google is tweaking its search engine to favor sites that use HTTPS to protect end users’ privacy and security. Sites that properly implement the transport layer security (TLS) protocol may be ranked higher in search results than those that transmit in plaintext, company officials said in a blog post published Wednesday . The move is designed to motivate sites to use HTTPS protections across a wider swath of pages rather than only on login pages or not at all. Sites that continue to deliver pages over unprotected HTTP could see their search ranking usurped by competitors that offer HTTPS. Facebook is also getting more serious about encryption, with plans to acquire PrivateCore , a company that develops encryption software to protect and validate data stored on servers. In Wednesday’s post, Google Webmaster Trends Analysts Zineb Ait Bahajji and Gary Illyes noted that Google was among the first sites to offer end-to-end HTTPS protection by default across virtually all of its properties. It has also offered a variety of tools to help sites detect and recover from security breaches. They went on to write: Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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In major shift, Google boosts search rankings of HTTPS-protected sites

Internet Explorer to start blocking old Java plugins

This month’s Patch Tuesday update for Internet Explorer will include a new feature: it will block out-of-date ActiveX controls. More specifically, it will block out-of-date versions of the Java plugin. Although Microsoft is describing the feature as an ActiveX block, the list of prohibited plugins is currently Java-centric. Stale versions of Flash and Silverlight will be able to stick around, at least for now, though Microsoft says that other out-of-date ActiveX controls will be added to the block list later. Old, buggy versions of the Java plugin have long been used as an exploit vector, with Microsoft’s own security report fingering Java in 84.6 to 98.5 percent of detected exploit kits (bundles of malware sold commercially). Blocking obsolete Java plugins should therefore go a long way toward securing end-user systems. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Internet Explorer to start blocking old Java plugins

What you should expect from Apple’s “iPhone 6”

It hardly seems like it’s been a year since the iPhone 5S was released, but word on the street is that Apple is planning to reveal its next-generation iPhone on September 9. That’s just over a month from now, and the rumor mill has been in full swing all summer, churning out speculation about what Apple will introduce. Since 2008’s iPhone 3G, iPhones released in even numbered years get a new design while phones in odd numbered years are just and sped up and tweaked. Since this is a redesign year, people are especially interested in seeing how Apple moves the platform forward. This close to a new iPhone’s launch, rumors firm up a little and begin to agree on specific aspects of the new hardware. Apple has a big supply chain and sells tens of millions of phones a quarter—given the sheer scale of the operation, it’s inevitable that details will leak. We knew most of the particulars about the iPhone 5S and 5C well before they were officially announced, and there’s no reason to believe that this year will be any different. Now that we have a probable date for the announcement, we’ve rounded up the most credible and plausible rumors (combined with a few educated guesses) to make a rough sketch of what the next-generation iPhone will probably look like. We tried to stick to sources that have been relatively reliable in the past—some of the better reporting from rumor sites and prominent Apple watchers, assertions from major publications like the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg , and clear, not-obviously-faked pictures of individual components form the basis of our information here. In aggregate, everything we’ve heard so far gives us a pretty good idea of what we can expect next month. Read 26 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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What you should expect from Apple’s “iPhone 6”

Re/code: Apple’s next iPhone event happens on September 9

This iPhone 5S is likely to be superseded in September. Andrew Cunningham After a summer full of rumors and part leaks, Re/code reports that Apple is planning to hold its next iPhone event on Tuesday, September 9. Re/code co-founder Walt Mossberg has a long history with Apple and his prior publication AllThingsD correctly predicted the dates Apple’s iPhone and iPad events last year, so there’s a good chance this is the real thing. This year Apple is widely expected to release a redesigned “iPhone 6” with a larger screen. Reports have varied, but anonymous sources have told multiple publications that the company is planning a 4.7-inch phone to rival “normal” handsets from competitors, as well as a 5.5-inch version intended to compete with so-called “phablet” phones like Samsung’s Galaxy Note series. Last year’s top-end iPhone 5S and midrange iPhone 5C were both refinements of the iPhone 5 design introduced in 2012 . Apple also uses its iPhone events to announce final release dates for new iOS versions, which have for the past two years have come out on the second Wednesday after the iPhone unveiling. This means a final release of iOS 8 is likely on or near September 17, assuming Apple doesn’t change its plans. iOS 8 will refine the new design introduced in iOS 7 , allow iOS devices to work more closely with Macs running OS X Yosemite, and introduce a number of under-the-hood improvements including Extensions. Third-generation Apple TVs will receive an updated UI, as well. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Re/code: Apple’s next iPhone event happens on September 9

Bio-high-tech treatment for Ebola may have saved two US citizens

The Ebola virus consists of small but lethal filament of RNA containing only seven genes. CDC Today, CNN is reporting that the two US citizens who were flown back to the states after contracting Ebola virus were given an extremely experimental treatment, one that’s still undergoing animal testing. While the treatment involves antibodies, it’s not a vaccine and can work effectively even after an infection has started. The process that produced it is a testament to the impressive capabilities developed in the field of biotechnology. The Ebola virus, known for its horrific symptoms and high fatality rate, currently has no established treatment. Which means that health care workers who are fighting the disease, and thus at high risk for becoming infected themselves, can do little more than put themselves in isolation and try to compensate for the damage the virus causes. That was apparently the case for two Americans who contracted the virus while working in Liberia. In this case, however, both were apparently given an experimental treatment developed in part by a company called Mapp Biopharmaceutical. Complicating matters, Mapp licenses its developments to a company called LeafBio for production and distribution. But LeafBio has also licensed an Ebola treatment from a second company, called Defyrus, and plans on combining the two. It’s unclear whether the Americans received the original or combined therapy. In either case, both therapies were based on the same developmental process outlined below. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Bio-high-tech treatment for Ebola may have saved two US citizens