vanity-fair – Page 28

PlayStation Plus not required to play Elder Scrolls Online on PS4

You will need to pay $15/month to see vistas like this in The Elder Scrolls Online . Bethesda Softworks parent company Zenimax Media has confirmed that its upcoming MMO The Elder Scrolls Online won’t require a PlayStation Plus subscription to be played on the PS4. Xbox One players, on the other hand, will have to pay for an Xbox Live Gold subscription in order to play the game. All versions of The Elder Scrolls Online , including PC and Mac editions due for release on April 4, will require a $15 monthly fee, in addition to a purchase of the $60 base game. But Xbox One owners will also be required to purchase the $60-per-year Xbox Live Gold subscription that is generally required for all online games on the system. That subscription is also required to use entertainment apps like Netflix and Hulu Plus on the Xbox One, as well as services like Skype and Internet Explorer. Sony doesn’t require PlayStation Plus to use similar entertainment apps on the PS4. In a change from its policy with its previous consoles, Sony generally requires a $50-per-year PlayStation Plus subscription to play most online games on the PS4, though free-to-play MMOs such as Warframe and DC Universe Online have been specifically exempted from this requirement. Sony has also confirmed that the upcoming PS4 release of Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn also won’t require a PlayStation Plus subscription on top of that game’s $13+ monthly fee (that title is not coming to any Microsoft consoles). Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Lavabit goes head to head with feds in contempt-of-court case

In oral arguments heard on Tuesday, Lavabit and federal prosecutors each presented their cases in front of three judges from the 4 th US Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia. This particular case is an appeal of contempt-of-court charges against Lavabit, a now-defunct e-mail hosting service that once offered secure communication. In the summer of 2013, Lavabit was ordered to provide real-time e-mail monitoring of one of its users, widely believed to be Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor-turned-leaker. When Lavabit told the feds that the only way it could hand over communications was through an internal process that would deliver results 60 days after anycommunication was sent, the authorities returned with a search warrant for Lavabit’s SSL keys , which could decrypt the traffic of all of Lavabit’s users. Ladar Levinson, the CEO of Lavabit, handed over the SSL keys but then shut down his 10-year-old business rather than expose all of Lavabit’s users. Levinson now faces charges of contempt-of-court. The case is proving to be difficult for both parties, as well as presiding judges Roger Gregory, Paul Niemeyer, and Steven Agee, to parse. As PC World reports : “Attorneys from both Lavabit and the US government agreed that the legal issues between them could have been resolved before heading to court, though neither party seemed to have an adequate technical answer of how Lavabit could have successfully passed unencrypted data to a law enforcement agency in order to meet the government’s demands.” Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Original post:
Lavabit goes head to head with feds in contempt-of-court case

FBI: US court websites went down due to “technical problems,” not DDOS

Flickr user TexasGOPVote.com While the rest of us were fretting about the Gmail outage on Friday , lawyers and those involved in the United States judicial system were concerned that uscourts.gov and other federal courts’ sites had been hit by a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack. Also suffering an outage was pacer.gov , the “Public Access to Court Electronic Records” (PACER), a common way for lawyers and journalists to access court documents online. (That site, which normally charges $0.10 per page for documents, also has a free online mirror , known as RECAP.) Initially, a spokesperson for the Administrative Office of the US Courts told Politico on Friday that it was indeed a denial-of-service attack. A group calling itself the “European Cyber Army” initially also claimed responsibility on Twitter . Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read the article:
FBI: US court websites went down due to “technical problems,” not DDOS

Tivo lays off 5 hardware engineers but says it won’t abandon its boxes

The TiVo box itself got a slight aesthetic makeover… Something’s afoot at Tivo, and it started today with five lay-offs. Wired reporter Roberto Baldwin had the initial report , claiming that five layoffs from the company’s hardware division left “a skeleton crew of two engineers,” indicating an official exit from the hardware business. Baldwin’s sources within Tivo may have been overstating the situation, though. Subsequent reports feature comments from Tivo’s Vice President of Corporate Communication Steve Wymer, where he emphatically denies that Tivo is abandoning hardware. What Wymer doesn’t do, however, is deny the layoffs. An update to the original Wired piece indicates that Tivo will work with third-party designers for subsequent hardware. Tivo hardware has been a saga of gradual iterations, with each successive generation adding features and capabilities. Ars’ Nathan Matisse reviewed the company’s latest hardware, the Tivo Roamio, and had heaps of praise—after he went through the hellish setup process. At CES this year, Tivo didn’t have new consumer hardware, but instead met with network operators to discuss its new NDVR hardware, which moves the Tivo experience entirely to the cloud. Moving content recording, discovery, and delivery into the cloud has a lot of appeal for operators who want more control over viewers’ content. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

See the original post:
Tivo lays off 5 hardware engineers but says it won’t abandon its boxes

Developer screenshots may show off Apple’s “iOS in the Car” progress

Steve Troughton-Smith One of the features Apple talked about when it unveiled iOS 7 at its Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) back in June was “iOS in the Car,” a vehicle integration feature that would let drivers with supported vehicles talk to Siri, listen to and respond to text messages, use Maps, and perform other tasks without removing their hands from the wheel. That feature was absent from the original iOS 7 release, but rumors suggest it will be supported in the iOS 7.1 update that’s currently in beta testing. While Apple’s promotional page for iOS 7 shows some early screenshots of what iOS in the Car might look like, new screenshots pulled from developer Steve Troughton-Smith’s Twitter feed and published by 9to5Mac purport to show off a refined version of the interface. Apple Maps is the only usable app as of this writing, suggesting that the screenshots were taken in the iOS Simulator that shipped with the XCode developer tools rather than on actual hardware, but we can still see the basic UI changes that Apple has made since the original demo. There’s a left-aligned bar with the time, connection status, and a software Home button that appears to be persistent across all of the screenshots, and the rest of the interface’s graphics, fonts, and buttons closely mirror those used throughout iOS 7. A safety warning screen like the one used in most GPSs. Steve Troughton-Smith The list of apps should grow once the feature is actually released. Steve Troughton-Smith For most people, iOS in the Car’s biggest drawback will be that it requires a new car to support all of its features. Though Apple says a number of automakers (including Acura, Chevy, Ferrari, Honda, Hyundai, Infiniti, Jaguar, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, and Opel) are interested in bringing the feature to some of their 2014 models, replacing a car to use a new feature is a bit more onerous than buying new cables or other accessories. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read the original post:
Developer screenshots may show off Apple’s “iOS in the Car” progress

Supreme Court will hear case on police search of cell phones

On Friday, the Supreme Court said that it would weigh in on whether it is legal for police officers to search the contents of a suspect’s cell phone when they are arrested. Specifically, the high court will take up two cases from California and Massachusetts, both arising from criminal prosecutions, that have brought to question the admissibility of evidence obtained through a search of the suspect’s phone after arrest. The legal decision will come down to whether searching cell phones without a warrant is a violation of the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable search and seizure. Earlier court precedent has allowed police officers to search all the items that a person has on them at the time of arrest. But as phones have grown to include e-mail, bank history, and location data, the potential problems with the old standards have become more apparent. A Supreme Court ruling, at least, would give some clarity as to how such situations should be handled. Reuters notes that 91 percent of Americans now have cellphones, and over half of those can connect to the Internet. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Sleeping spacecraft Rosetta nearly ready to wake up for comet landing

ESA The Rosetta spacecraft is due to wake up on the morning of January 20 after an 18-month hibernation in deep space. For the past ten years, the three-ton spacecraft has been on a one-way trip to a 4 km-wide comet. When it arrives, it will set about performing a maneuver that has never been done before: landing on a comet’s surface. The spacecraft has already achieved some success on its long journey through the solar system. It has passed by two asteroids—Steins in 2008 and Lutetia in 2010—and it tried out some of its instruments on them. Because Rosetta’s journey is so protracted, however, preserving energy has been of the utmost importance, which is why it was put into hibernation in June 2011. The journey has taken so long because the spacecraft needed to be “gravity-assisted” by many planets in order to reach the necessary velocity to match the comet’s orbit. Rosetta’s path through the inner Solar System. When it wakes up, Rosetta is expected to take a few hours to establish contact with Earth, 673 million km (396 million mi) away. The scientists involved will wait with bated breath. Dan Andrews, part of a team at the Open University who built one of Rosetta’s on-board instruments, said, “If there isn’t sufficient power, Rosetta will go back to sleep and try again later. The wake-up process is driven by software commands already on the spacecraft. It will wake itself up autonomously and spend some time warming up and orienting its antenna toward Earth to ‘phone home.’” Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

View original post here:
Sleeping spacecraft Rosetta nearly ready to wake up for comet landing

Point-of-sale malware infecting Target found hiding in plain sight

Cyberslayer Independent security journalist Brian Krebs has uncovered important new details about the hack that compromised as many as 110 million Target customers, including the malware that appears to have infected point-of-sale systems and the way attackers first broke in. According to a post published Wednesday to KrebsOnSecurity, point-of-sale (POS) malware was uploaded to Symantec-owned ThreatExpert.com on December 18, the same day that Krebs broke the news of the massive Target breach . An unidentified source told Krebs that the Windows share point name “ttcopscli3acs” analyzed by the malware scanning website matches the sample analyzed by the malware scanning website . The thieves used the user name “Best1_user” to log in and download stolen card data. Their password was “BackupU$r”. KrebsonSecurity The class of malware identified by Krebs is often referred to as a memory scraper, because it monitors the computer memory of POS terminals used by retailers. The malware searches for credit card data before it has been encrypted and sent to remote payment processors. The malware then “scrapes” the plain-text entries and dumps them into a database. Krebs continued: Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Continue reading here:
Point-of-sale malware infecting Target found hiding in plain sight

New DoS attacks taking down game sites deliver crippling 100Gbps floods

Online gamers such as these ones often stream their play in real time. Twitch Recent denial-of-service attacks taking down League of Legends and other popular gaming services are doing more than just wielding a never-before-seen technique to vastly amplify the amount of junk traffic directed at targets. In at least some cases, their devastating effects can deprive celebrity game players of huge amounts of money. As Ars reported last week, the attacks are abusing the Internet’s Network Time Protocol (NTP), which is used to synchronize computers to within a few milliseconds of Coordinated Universal Time . A command of just 234 bytes is enough to cause some NTP servers to return a list of up to 600 machines that have previously used its time-syncing service. The dynamic creates an ideal condition for DoS attacks. Attackers send a modest-sized request to NTP servers and manipulate the commands to make them appear as if they came from one of the targeted gaming services. The NTP servers, which may be located in dozens or even hundreds of locations all over the world, in turn send the targets responses that could be tens or hundreds of times bigger than the spoofed request. The technique floods gaming servers with as much as 100Gbps, all but guaranteeing that they’ll be taken down unless operators take specific precautions ahead of time. Among the targets of this new type of attack are game servers used by celebrity players who broadcast live video streams of their gaming prowess that are viewed as many as 50,000 times. In some cases, the massive audiences translate into tens of thousands of dollars per month, as ads are displayed beside video feeds of the players blowing away opponents in Dota 2 and other games. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Excerpt from:
New DoS attacks taking down game sites deliver crippling 100Gbps floods

DoS attacks that took down big game sites abused Web’s time-sync protocol

69 percent of all DDoS attack traffic by bit volume in the first week of January was the result of NTP reflection. Black Lotus Miscreants who earlier this week took down servers for League of Legends, EA.com, and other online game services used a never-before-seen technique that vastly amplified the amount of junk traffic directed at denial-of-service targets. Rather than directly flooding the targeted services with torrents of data, an attack group calling itself DERP Trolling sent much smaller-sized data requests to time-synchronization servers running the Network Time Protocol (NTP). By manipulating the requests to make them appear as if they originated from one of the gaming sites, the attackers were able to vastly amplify the firepower at their disposal. A spoofed request containing eight bytes will typically result in a 468-byte response to victim, an increase of more than 58 fold. “Prior to December, an NTP attack was almost unheard of because if there was one it wasn’t worth talking about,” Shawn Marck, CEO of DoS-mitigation service Black Lotus , told Ars. “It was so tiny it never showed up in the major reports. What we’re witnessing is a shift in methodology.” Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

More:
DoS attacks that took down big game sites abused Web’s time-sync protocol

Ken May

Tag: vanity-fair