Tag: video-games

Apple and Facebook helped bust the world’s biggest torrent site

When you’re the owner of the world’s biggest torrent-sharing site, the last thing you’d expect to land you in trouble would be a totally legitimate (and legal) purchase via iTunes. But that’s what happened to 30-year-old Ukrainian Artem Vaulin a.k.a “tirm, ” owner and operator of KickassTorrents (KAT), who was yesterday arrested and charged in Poland for criminal copyright infringement and money laundering. He’s been accused of illegally reproducing and distributing hundreds of millions of copies of movies, video games, TV shows and music albums totalling more than $1 billion. The US is now waiting to extradite him. Founded in 2008, the site has slowly grown to become the biggest torrent-sharing website in the world. It finally took the mantle in 2015 after The Pirate Bay experienced multiple raids , battled lengthy spells of downtime and its three founders were arrested . KAT counts more than 50 million unique monthly visitors and is estimated to be the 68th most frequently visited website on the internet — according to Alexa. In a 48-page criminal complaint (PDF) filed with the U.S. District Court in Chicago, the U.S. Attorney’s Office reveals how it was able to track Vaulin. Jared Der-Yeghiayan, a special agent with the US Department of Homeland Security, was tasked with tracking the man behind KAT and it’s his report that attempts to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that Vaulin should be brought to justice. This is how it played out. The fake ad From November 2015, an undercover IRS Special Agent spoke with a KAT representative about hosting an advertisement that would direct visitors to an undercover site. An agreement was made and the ad, which purportedly advertised a program to study in the United States, would be placed on individual torrent listings for $300 per day. When it finally went live on March 14th 2016, a link appeared underneath the torrent download buttons for five days. It was a short campaign, but it was enough to link KAT to a Latvian bank account, one that received €28 million ($31 million) in deposits — mainly from advertising payments — between August 2015 and March 2016. This back-and-forth also enabled investigators to identify an important point of contact: the email address pr@kat.cr . Not only was it linked to website enquiries, it was the email associated with KAT’s social media presences such as Facebook. Agents were able to obtain records from Facebook that showed the “official.KAT.fanclub.” page was almost certainly associated with KAT. Apple’s involvement Using basic website-tracking services, Der-Yeghiayan was able to uncover (via a reverse DNS search) the hosts of seven apparent KAT website domains: kickasstorrents.com, kat.cr, kickass.to, kat.ph, kastatic.com, thekat.tv and kickass.cr . This dug up two Chicago IP addresses, which were used as KAT name servers for more than four years. Agents were then able to legally gain a copy of the server’s access logs (explaining why it was federal authorities in Chicago that eventually charged Vaulin with his alleged crimes). Using similar tools, Homeland Security investigators also performed something called a WHOIS lookup on a domain that redirected people to the main KAT site. A WHOIS search can provide the name, address, email and phone number of a website registrant. In the case of kickasstorrents.biz, that was Artem Vaulin from Kharkiv, Ukraine. Der-Yeghiayan was able to link the email address found in the WHOIS lookup to an Apple email address that Vaulin purportedly used to operate KAT. It’s this Apple account that appears to tie all of pieces of Vaulin’s alleged involvement together. On July 31st 2015, records provided by Apple show that the me.com account was used to purchase something on iTunes. The logs show that the same IP address was used on the same day to access the KAT Facebook page. After KAT began accepting Bitcoin donations in 2012, $72, 767 was moved into a Coinbase account in Vaulin’s name. That Bitcoin wallet was registered with the same me.com email address. What happens now? Homeland Security has already asked that the seven KAT domains named in the complaint are forfeited for their role in facilitating piracy. Verisign is expected to seize the .com and .tv domains, while Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT) requests will be sent to registrars in Costa Rica, Tonga and the Philippines. Homeland Security then expects those sites to be redirected to a server of its choosing. Right now, KickassTorrents appears to still be up, at least via the numerous proxy services that support it. However, it’s probably only a matter of time until it becomes a lot harder to find. While investigators already had a lot of evidence before they added the iTunes transaction to the mix, the idea that a legal media purchase could be the undoing of a piracy king kinda breaks the irony meter. Via: TechCrunch Source: Justice.gov , Criminal Complaint (PDF)

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Apple and Facebook helped bust the world’s biggest torrent site

The World’s First Electric Ferrari Ditches The V8 For Tire-Crushing Electric Motors

A San Diego-based EV conversion company salvaged a charred Ferrari ( they had many to choose from ) by turning it into what the company claims is the first fully electric Ferrari, a 415-horsepower electric tire-crusher. It’s glorious, if a little blasphemous. Read more…

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The World’s First Electric Ferrari Ditches The V8 For Tire-Crushing Electric Motors

Citra Emulates 3DS Games In Higher Definition

Windows/Mac/Linux: The Nintendo 3DS is a great little system , but with a maximum resolution of 400 x 240, it’s not exactly a looker. Citra is an emulator that’s still very early in development, but features a way to upscale 3DS games to 1600 x 960. Read more…

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Citra Emulates 3DS Games In Higher Definition

Windows 95 on the Apple Watch features the world’s most twee Start button

 Big, complex things running on tiny things is a common theme this week. Earlier we had a hack that put Counter-Strike on Android Wear, and today some maniac has installed Windows 95 on his Apple Watch. At last it’ll do something worthwhile! That is, of course, if you can find the Start button. Read More

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Windows 95 on the Apple Watch features the world’s most twee Start button

Everything You Need to Tweak To Get Raspberry Pi Emulators Working on a Portable Display

Turning a Raspberry Pi into a retro game station is easily one of the most popular Raspberry Pi projects around. If you want to make that project portable, you’ll need a screen but the most common one, the Adafruit PiTFT, requires a little effort to get it working for more advanced games. Read more…

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Everything You Need to Tweak To Get Raspberry Pi Emulators Working on a Portable Display

Add a Working Cartridge to Your Raspberry Pi Powered Game Boy Console

Modding a Game Boy to add a retro game console is nothing new . However, one modder took it to the next level with a working cartridge and removable battery pack. Read more…

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Add a Working Cartridge to Your Raspberry Pi Powered Game Boy Console

Here’s an early taste of the ‘System Shock’ remake

Two decades after its original release, System Shock is being remade . Night Dive Studios, the developer in charge of the project, released some pre-alpha footage, and it looks great. If you’ve never played the original, it’s a hugely influential atmospheric first-person RPG in a sci-fi horror setting. A great game in its own right, it spawned a more successful (and arguably better) sequel, System Shock 2 . Some of the minds behind the originals went on to create games you’ve almost certainly heard of. Ken Levine made BioShock , considered by many to be a spiritual successor, while Warren Spector made Deus Ex , which also leans heavily on the System Shock 2 formula. Night Dive’s video describes the game as System Shock 1 Remastered , but it’s clear that this is more remake than remaster. The original artist is on board to help upgrade the original assets, and with that some of the level layout is changing. Speaking with Polygon , the developer explained that many people’s only exposure to the series is through BioShock , so it’s making some tweaks to cater to modern gamers’ tastes. That means the tone of the narrative is also set to shift, as is some of the gameplay. but the overall plot will remain. System Shock is due for release in 2017. A bonafide sequel, System Shock 3, is also in the early stages of development, with Spector at the helm . Source: Night Dive (YouTube)

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Here’s an early taste of the ‘System Shock’ remake

These SteamVR games will make or break virtual reality

In one month, the HTC Vive will be available for pre-order , giving consumers a chance to buy the first room-scale virtual reality system with full head and hand motion tracking. It sounds great, but what are you going to play with it? Valve knew you were going to ask that — which is why it hosted the SteamVR Developer Showcase in Seattle this week. In all, the company showcased twelve games that stood out as some of the best VR experiences Vive owners can have in 2016. Better still? There’s not a bad egg in the bunch — I’ve played all of them, and I already want to play all of them again. Believe or not, the fact that I can say that about Valve’s showcase is huge. Oculus’ Palmer Luckey once told me that the only thing that could kill virtual reality is bad virtual reality — and he’s right. The sense of presence one feels in consumer VR is so hard to articulate that the challenge of explaining it to new users has become something of an inside joke to the industry. Every developer I asked at the event told me the same thing: If you want a newbie to understand why VR matters you have to make them try it . If they do, and the experience is bad, they’ll write it off as a gimmick. That’s why events like the SteamVR developer showcase are so important: These are the first, best experiences consumers will have. These are the games that will make or break the virtual reality industry. Thank goodness they don’t suck. Part of what makes most of these SteamVR launch titles work is that there’s no learning curve . Thanks to Valve’s lighthouse laser tracking tech and the HTC Vive’s motion controller, interacting in VR is pretty much like living your normal life. If you want to go somewhere, you walk there. If you want to pick something up, you reach out and grab it — albeit by pulling a trigger on a controller rather than physically closing your hand. This makes everything feel easy and natural. When attack drones assault you with lasers in Space Pirate Trainer, you can avoid them by dodging and ducking. When Zombies charge you in Arizona Sunshine, defending yourself is just a matter of raising your arm (and the virtual gun it holds) and shooting. For the first time ever, you don’t need to learn how to manage swing-power meters to play a golf video game — in Cloudlands VR Minigolf you simply swing a club. If you’re a human alive today, you know how to play games in virtual reality. That said, there are still rules to learn. Yes, you can walk around in a real world space, which translates to in-game movement, but that space is limited by reality. How do you walk down a virtual hallway if your real-world couch is in the way? Games like Budget Cuts and The Gallery answer that with teleportation mechanics — moving the player’s physical walking space to a new point in the virtual world. For Budget Cuts , this manifests as an in-game portal gun, where The Gallery uses a simpler (and less narratively explained) fade-cut to the new location. There were abstract experiences too, like the omnipresent canvas of Tilt Brush . This painting program that lets you draw directly on the virtual air around you — but it’s still built upon the rules of a reality the player already understands. It’s not just the visual illusion of the HTC Vive’s headset that made these experiences feel real, it was the act moving, interacting and existing in a virtual world as you do a physical one. For now, that’s an HTC Vive exclusive experience. The Oculus Rift is launching with a focus on a seated experience, although most of the developers at SteamVR’s Developer Showcase did say they planned to port their games to the Rift after Oculus Touch launches later this year. We don’t even know how much the HTC Vive is going to cost , and it’s too early to say which consumer VR headset will reign supreme at the end of the year — but if you do go all in with SteamVR, at least you’ll know that there are a dozen top-tier experiences you can have. Hopefully, this is just the beginning.

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These SteamVR games will make or break virtual reality

‘Plants Vs. Zombies’ is becoming a theme park attraction

If it’s not Mario or Shepherd and the Mass Effect crew , it’s… plants and zombies. Cedar Fair Entertainment , which runs 14 park attractions across the US, is working with EA on two attractions for Great America in California, and Carowinds in North Carolina. Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare will be adapted into what the theme park is terming a “digital attraction”. This means that it’ll be able to substitute in and reprogram the ride later for sequel content — which sounds a whole lot like its namesake. Carowinds will get the PvZ attraction, which will open next year. Source: Journal Now

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‘Plants Vs. Zombies’ is becoming a theme park attraction

Pop-up sensor would give robot surgeons a sense of touch

Robotic surgery is no longer the stuff of science fiction. However, these robots can’t really feel their way around — the need for super-small mechanisms rules out existing approaches to touch. That’s where Harvard researchers might come to save the day. They’ve developed a pop-up sensor whose four layers collapse to a tiny footprint (just a tenth of an inch) when necessary, but expand into a 3D sensor thanks to a built-in spring. The design is extremely sensitive, too, with a light intensity sensor that can detected mere millinewtons of force. Source: Harvard University , IEEE Sensors Journal

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Pop-up sensor would give robot surgeons a sense of touch