Tag: style-details

Report: Troubled Doom 4 being retargeted for next-generation systems

Nearly five years after it was officially announced and nine years after the release of Doom 3 , we’ve heard precious little about the development of Id Software’s Doom 4 . It seems that silence has masked a troubled development cycle that has been restarted at least once and is currently not all that close to being finished. Kotaku talked to a number of unnamed sources “with connections to the Id Software-developed game” and lays out a tale of mismanaged resources and distractions. Chief among these distractions was Rage , the 2011 release that developer Id thought would put it back on top of the first-person shooter heap. When that game was  savaged by harsh reviews and low sales, Id reportedly halted plans for DLC and a sequel and refocused the entire company on Doom 4 , which had largely languished during the work on Rage . “I kinda think maybe the studio heads were so distracted on shipping Rage that they were blind to the happenings of Doom , and the black hole of mediocrity [the team] was swirling around,” one source told Kotaku. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Report: Troubled Doom 4 being retargeted for next-generation systems

Bitcoin value triples in a month to all-time high of more than $100

At the end of February, bitcoins hit an all-time trading high of just over $33 . That suddenly looks like chump change, with the value of bitcoins today moving past $100. You can see nearly real-time changes in the value of bitcoins at Coinlab  and track the currency’s steady rise over the past month at Blockchain . We’ve seen the value go up and down today, fluctuating between $99 and $105. The new high is remarkable given that bitcoins were only worth about $13.50 at the beginning of this year. The total value of the nearly 11 million bitcoins in circulation (its ” market cap “) has also soared past $1 billion, after being at less than $50 million one year ago: Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Bitcoin value triples in a month to all-time high of more than $100

A flood of prank iMessage texts shows the app can be crashed easily

Human can’t be blamed for thinking this show of affection comes off as a little clingy. Adam Bell/The Next Web On Friday, The Next Web reported that a group of iOS developers were experiencing rapid-fire texts over iMessage, causing bothersome and repetitious messages and notifications. While the prank wasn’t serious on the level of, say, a full-scale DDoS of a bank website , and concern over spam via iMessage is not new either, the unwanted messages were fresh proof of some problems with the iMessage app, specifically in the lack of good spam-detection in iMessage, and in the lack of a way for users to block a message sender. One of the recipients of the spam, an iOS jailbreak tool and app developer who goes by the moniker iH8sn0w , informed The Next Web of the prank when it happened. iH8sn0w told Ars over Twitter that he simply disabled the handle that was getting flooded. “It’s just a bunch of kids bored playing with AppleScript,” he said. Another app and extension developer for iOS devices, Grant Paul, reported on Twitter that he was getting spammed on iMessage with very large messages, causing his iMessage app to crash. “The iMessage spammer has now completely locked me out of my iOS Messages app, by sending long strings of Unicode chars. Definitely a DoS,” Paul wrote on his Twitter account . Ars reached out to Paul but has not yet heard back from him. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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A flood of prank iMessage texts shows the app can be crashed easily

Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up en masse

Aurich Lawson Apple’s iCloud is marketed to us end users as a convenient and centralized way to manage data on all of our Macs and iOS devices: sync contacts and bookmarks, re-download music and apps, back up iOS devices, and sync documents and data for third-party apps as MobileMe did. The last item, syncing of documents and data, is one of the least glossy features of iCloud, but it is one of the most important, and it should be among the most straightforward. Right? Perhaps not. Almost a year after Apple shut down MobileMe for good in favor of iCloud , third-party developers have begun to speak out about the difficulty involved in working with Apple’s cloud service. A piece published at The Verge this week highlights many of those complaints, with quotes coming from well-known developers and anonymous sources alike about the challenges faced by the developer community. From data loss and corruption to unexpected Apple ID use cases, developers have seen it all—but are stymied by the persistence of problems that prevent them from shipping products with working iCloud support. What’s the big problem, exactly? According to Bare Bones Software’s Rich Siegel, there are a number of moving parts to iCloud that all affect how things come out on the other end. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up en masse

One day after iOS 6.1.3, a new iPhone lock screen bug emerges

Just a day after Apple released iOS 6.1.3 , a new lock screen bug has been discovered that could give an attacker access to private information. The vulnerability is different from the passcode bug(s) addressed by Tuesday’s iOS update, but the end result is similar: access to iPhone’s contact list and photos. The new lock screen bug was first documented by YouTube user videosdebarraquito , who posted a video demoing the procedure. The basic gist, seen in the video below, is to eject the iPhone’s SIM card while using the built-in voice controls to make a phone call. Bypassing the iPhone passcode lock on iOS 6.1.3. There are a couple important things to keep in mind, though. For one, it seems  like this bug applies to most modern iPhones, though apparently the procedure isn’t as easy as it looks. The YouTube video above shows the hack being executed on an iPhone 4, and iphoneincanada was able to replicate it on an iPhone 4. TheNextWeb was able to replicate it on an iPhone 4S but not an iPhone 5. But the iPhone 5 didn’t get away scot free, as German language site iPhoneblog.de appears to have been able to replicate the bug on that version of the phone. We have not yet seen a confirmed case of the bug existing on the iPhone 3GS, though it’s probably safe to assume that it does. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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One day after iOS 6.1.3, a new iPhone lock screen bug emerges

Guerilla researcher created epic botnet to scan billions of IP addresses

Aurich Lawson (after Aliens) In one of the more audacious and ethically questionable research projects in recent memory, an anonymous hacker built a botnet of more than 420,000 Internet-connected devices and used it to perform one of the most comprehensive surveys ever to measure the insecurity of the global network. In all, the nine-month scanning project found 420 million IPv4 addresses that responded to probes and 36 million more addresses that had one or more ports open. A large percentage of the unsecured devices bore the hallmarks of broadband modems, network routers, and other devices with embedded operating systems that typically aren’t intended to be exposed to the outside world. The researcher found a total of 1.3 billion addresses in use, including 141 million that were behind a firewall and 729 million that returned reverse domain name system records. There were no signs of life from the remaining 2.3 billion IPv4 addresses. Continually scanning almost 4 billion addresses for nine months is a big job. In true guerilla research fashion, the unknown hacker developed a small scanning program that scoured the Internet for devices that could be logged into using no account credentials at all or the usernames and passwords of either “root” or “admin.” When the program encountered unsecured devices, it installed itself on them and used them to conduct additional scans. The viral growth of the botnet allowed it to infect about 100,000 devices within a day of the program’s release. The critical mass allowed the hacker to scan the Internet quickly and cheaply. With about 4,000 clients, it could scan one port on all 3.6 billion addresses in a single day. Because the project ran 1,000 unique probes on 742 separate ports, and possibly because the binary was uninstalled each time an infected device was restarted, the hacker commandeered a total of 420,000 devices to perform the survey. Read 16 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Guerilla researcher created epic botnet to scan billions of IP addresses

Chameleon botnet steals millions from advertisers with fake mouseclicks

Security researchers have discovered a botnet that is stealing millions of dollars per month from advertisers. The botnet does so by simulating click-throughs on display ads hosted on at least 202 websites. Revealed and dubbed “Chameleon” by the Web analytics firm spider.io because of its ability to fool advertisers’ behavior-tracking algorithms, the botnet is the first found to use display advertisements to generate fraudulent income for its masters. In a blog post today, spider.io reported that the company had been tracking Chameleon since December of 2012. Simulating multiple concurrent browser sessions with websites, each bot is able to interact with Flash and JavaScript based ads. So far, more than 120,000 Windows PCs have been identified—95 percent of them with IP addresses associated with US residential Internet services. The company has issued a blacklist of the 5,000 worst-offending IP addresses for advertisers to use to protect themselves from fraud. While in many respects the botnet simulates human activity on webpages to fool countermeasures to clickfraud, it generates random mouse clicks and mouse pointer traces across pages. This makes it relatively easy for bot-infected systems to be identified over time. The bot is also unstable because of the heavy load it puts on the infected machine, and its frequent crashes can also be used as a signature to identify infected systems. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Chameleon botnet steals millions from advertisers with fake mouseclicks

Most PC security problems come from unpatched third-party Windows apps

If you’ve got 99 security problems, odds are Microsoft’s not one—or at least it’s just a minority of them. In its annual review of software vulnerabilities , security software firm Secunia found that 86 percent of vulnerabilities discovered on systems scanned by its software in the 50 most popular Windows software packages in 2012 were attributable to third-party developers and not to Microsoft’s Windows operating system or applications. And for most of these vulnerabilities, a patch was already available at the time they were discovered. Of the top 50 most used Windows packages—including the Windows 7 operating system itself, 18 were found to have end-point security vulnerabilities, a 98 percent increase over five years ago. Of those 18 packages, Google’s Chrome and the Mozilla Firefox browser were the biggest culprits, with 291 and 257 detected vulnerabilities respectively. Apple iTunes came in third, with 243 detected vulnerabilities. The remainder of the top ten offenders were: Adobe Flash Player: 67 Oracle Java JRE SE: 66 Adobe AIR: 56 Microsoft Windows 7: 50 Adobe Reader: 43 Microsoft Internet Explorer: 41 Apple Quicktime: 29 Of the vulnerabilities documented in Secunia’s database, 84 percent had already been patched by vendors when they were discovered on systems. “This means that it is possible to remediate the majority of vulnerabilities,” said Secunia Director of Product Management Morten R. Stengaard. “There is no excuse for not patching.” Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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Most PC security problems come from unpatched third-party Windows apps

Dating site Zoosk resets some user accounts following password dump (Updated)

A screenshot from Jeremi Gosney showing passwords cracked by the ocl-Hashcat-plus program. Jeremi Gosney Zoosk.com, an online dating service with about 15 million unique visitors each month, is requiring some users to reset their passwords. The move comes after someone published a list cryptographically protected passcodes that may have been used by subscribers to the website. In the past, the San Francisco-based company has said it has more than 50 million users . With this dump, a small but statistically significant percentage of the 29-million-strong password list contained the word “zoosk,” an indication that at least some of the credentials may have originated with the dating site. Jeremi Gosney, a password expert at Stricture Consulting Group , said he cracked more than 90 percent of the passwords and found almost 3,000 had links to Zoosk. The cracked passcodes included phrases such as “logmein2zoosk,” “zoosk password,” “myzooskpass,” “@zoosk,” “zoosk4me,” “ilovezoosk,” “flirtzoosk,” “zooskmail.” Other passwords contained strings such as “flirt,” “lookingforlove,” “lookingforguys,” and “lookingforsex,” another indication that they were used to access accounts at one or more dating websites. Many users choose passwords containing names, phrases, or topics related to the specific website or generic type of service they’re used to access. In December, Ars profiled a 25-GPU cluster system Gosney built that’s capable of trying every possible Windows passcode in the typical enterprise in less than six hours. . Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Dating site Zoosk resets some user accounts following password dump (Updated)

Bill would force cops to get a warrant before reading your e-mail

Last fall we wrote about how easy it probably was for the FBI to get the e-mails it needed to bring down CIA chief David Petraeus over allegations of infidelity. Under the ancient Electronic Communications Privacy Act, passed in 1986, the police can often obtain the contents of private e-mails without getting a warrant from a judge. A bipartisan group of legislators has introduced a bill to the House of Representatives to change that. The bill would require the police to get warrants before reading users’ e-mails in most circumstances and would also repudiate the view, advanced by the Obama administration last year, that the police can obtain information about the historical location of your cell phone without a warrant. The new legislation , proposed by Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) and supported by Reps. Ted Poe (R-TX) and Suzan DelBene (D-WA), would extend privacy protections for both e-mail and location privacy. “Fourth Amendment protections don’t stop at the Internet,” Lofgren said in an e-mailed statement. “Establishing a warrant standard for government access to cloud and geolocation provides Americans with the privacy protections they expect, and would enable service providers to foster greater trust with their users and international trading partners.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Bill would force cops to get a warrant before reading your e-mail