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Street Fighter V will roll back request for kernel access on Windows [Updated]

Enlarge / No, not really, Capcom. (credit: Aurich Lawson) On Thursday, Street Fighter V ‘s first “season” concluded with a downloadable update that included the game’s 22nd fighting character. (If you’re curious: the new guy is Urien, a tall fellow who first appeared in Street Fighter III wearing only a thong.) But the download updated more than just the game’s roster. It also brought apparent sweeping changes to the PC version—which now demands kernel access from players before every single boot of the game. Windows’ User Account Control (UAC) system warns computer users when an application wants to write or delete sensitive files, and, in the case of PC games, you typically only see these warnings during installations. SFV’s Thursday patch, however, apparently includes “an updated anti-crack solution” that Capcom insists is “not DRM” but rather an anti-cheating protocol. The anti-crack solution is causing a UAC prompt to pop up for the PC version’s users. (Our own Aurich Lawson confirmed the news by booting the latest patched version; his Windows prompt appears above.) Unfortunately, Capcom’s public-facing messages about PC version “hacks” have not been about cheats but about players finding workarounds to unlocking in-game content. In July, Capcom issued a stern warning to any PC player who found alternate ways to unlock  Street Fighter ‘s alternate costumes, which normally require grinding through the game’s lengthy “survival” modes. Capcom producers also condemned PC players who used characters hidden in that game’s version before they were officially released. Thursday’s patch notes mentioned that the new anti-crack solution is particularly targeted at “illicitly obtaining in-game currency and other entitlements” (so it’s, you know, DRM). Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Street Fighter V will roll back request for kernel access on Windows [Updated]

Conspiracy! The Reddit rundown on the man who deleted Clinton e-mails

Bleach those bits away. (credit: Adina Firestone ) A system administrator with Platte River Networks, the company that took over hosting Hillary Clinton’s mail server after it was moved out of her basement in Chappaqua, has been the target of a crowdsourced investigation on Reddit into whether he took part in a conspiracy to cover up Clinton’s e-mails. Paul Combetta, an employee of Platte River Networks who was granted immunity from prosecution by the Justice Department in exchange for cooperation with the FBI’s investigation of Clinton’s e-mails, apparently went to Reddit for help with a sticky problem related to the e-mail investigation by the House Select Committee on Benghazi—scrubbing the e-mails of Clinton’s personal address. While the post doesn’t provide evidence that Clinton herself instructed Combetta to erase her e-mails, it does suggest that his staff wanted to excise her private e-mail address from the archives to be turned over to the State Department—ånd in turn, to the House Select Committee. The later destruction of the e-mails during the continuing investigation was apparently, as Combetta told investigators, an “oh-shit moment.” Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Conspiracy! The Reddit rundown on the man who deleted Clinton e-mails

Gears of War 4 reveals offline LAN, free matchmaking DLC, smooth 4K on PC

Ars visits The Coalition in Vancouver, BC. Video shot by Sam Machkovech, edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link) VANCOUVER, BC—The future of high-end PC gaming is looking good thanks to graphics APIs like DirectX 12 and Vulkan , which let game engines more directly access multi-threaded processes in your hungry gaming computer’s CPU and GPU. As of right now, however, neither API has been heavily tested in the public gaming market. Vulkan’s biggest splashes to date have included noticeable, if incremental, bumps for games like Dota 2 and this year’s Doom reboot, while DX12 has been applied to PC versions of existing Xbox One games—meaning that we’ve seen those games jump up to impressive 4K resolutions, but we haven’t seen similar jumps in geometry or other major effects. This fall, Microsoft is finally taking the DX12 plunge with a deluge of ” Xbox Play Anywhere ” game launches, including this week’s Forza Horizon 3 , but arguably the biggest DX12er of the bunch is October’s Gears of War 4 . I wouldn’t have made that statement before game developer The Coalition unveiled the game’s DirectX 12 version for the first time, but after seeing what the company had to offer, I was amazed. Here, finally, was a Gears of War game that looked as stunning as the original did during its era—you know, so long as you can afford the game’s “recommended” PC build spec. Read 24 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Gears of War 4 reveals offline LAN, free matchmaking DLC, smooth 4K on PC

Police IT staff checked wrong box, deleted 25% of body cam footage

Enlarge (credit: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images News) One quarter of all body-worn camera footage from the Oakland, Calif. police was accidentally deleted in October 2014, according to the head of the relevant unit. As per the San Francisco Chronicle , Sgt. Dave Burke testified on Tuesday at a murder trial that this was, in fact, a mistake. This incident marks yet another setback in the efforts to roll out body-worn cameras to police agencies nationwide. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Police IT staff checked wrong box, deleted 25% of body cam footage

Why Bezos’ rocket is unprecedented—and worth taking seriously

Enlarge / Jeff Bezos, founder and Chief Executive of Amazon.com, in May, (credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images) We can say this much for Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com and Blue Origin—he does not lack ambition. First Bezos founded an online bookstore that became the largest retailer in the western world, and now he plans to self-fund a New Glenn rocket that is nearly as tall as the Saturn V launch vehicle and more than half as powerful. As wild as Bezos’ idea sounds, Blue Origin might be able to get the job done. And if Bezos and Blue Origin can fly their massive orbital rocket in the next three to four years, it would be a remarkable, unprecedented achievement in a number of ways that could radically remake spaceflight. Proof of concept First, a few words about why this might really be viable. It is true that all Blue Origin has flown so far is a propulsion module, powered by a single BE-3 engine, and a capsule on a suborbital flight. The company’s New Shepard spacecraft is designed to carry six passengers on 10- to 15-minute hops up to about 100km before bringing them back down to Earth. This is not dissimilar to the first Mercury flights in the early 1960s, hence the moniker New Shepard, named after pioneering astronaut Alan Shepard. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Why Bezos’ rocket is unprecedented—and worth taking seriously

Stealing login credentials from a locked PC or Mac just got easier

Enlarge Snatching the login credentials of a locked computer just got easier and faster, thanks to a technique that requires only $50 worth of hardware and takes less than 30 seconds to carry out. Rob Fuller, a principal security engineer at R5 Industries, said the hack works reliably on Windows devices and has also succeeded on OS X, although he’s working with others to determine if it’s just his setup that’s vulnerable. The hack works by plugging a flash-sized minicomputer into an unattended computer that’s logged in but currently locked. In about 20 seconds, the USB device will obtain the user name and password hash used to log into the computer. Fuller, who is better known by his hacker handle mubix, said the technique works using both the Hak5 Turtle ($50) and USB Armory ($155) , both of which are USB-mounted computers that run Linux. “First off, this is dead simple and shouldn’t work, but it does,” mubix wrote in a blog post published Tuesday . “Also, there is no possible way that I’m the first one that has identified this, but here it is (trust me, I tested it so many ways to confirm it because I couldn’t believe it was true).” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Stealing login credentials from a locked PC or Mac just got easier

As promised, Aetna is pulling out of Obamacare after DOJ blocked its merger

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Bloomberg ) Aetna announced Monday that due to grave financial losses, it will dramatically slash its participation in public insurance marketplaces set up by the Affordable Care Act. In 2017, Aetna will only offer insurance policies in 242 counties scattered across four states—that’s a nearly 70-percent decrease from its 2016 offerings in 778 counties across 15 states. The deep cuts have largely been seen as a blow to the sustainability of the healthcare law, which has seen other big insurers also pull out, namely UnitedHealth group and Humana. But the explanation that Aetna was forced to scale back due to heavy profit cuts doesn’t square with previous statements by the company. In April, Mark Bertolini, the chairman and chief executive of Aetna, told investors that the insurance giant anticipated losses and could weather them, even calling participation in the marketplaces during the rocky first years “a good investment.” And in a July 5 letter (PDF) to the Department of Justice, obtained by the Huffington Post by a Freedom of Information Act request, Bertolini explicitly threatened that Aetna would back out of the marketplace if the department tried to block its planned $37 billion merger with Humana. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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As promised, Aetna is pulling out of Obamacare after DOJ blocked its merger

Group claims to hack NSA-tied hackers, posts exploits as proof

(credit: Shadow Brokers ) In what security experts say is either a one-of-a-kind breach or an elaborate hoax, an anonymous group has published what it claims are sophisticated software tools belonging to an elite team of hackers tied to the US National Security Agency. In a recently published blog post, the group calling itself Shadow Brokers claims the leaked set of exploits were obtained after members hacked Equation Group (the post has since been removed from Tumblr). Last year, Kaspersky Lab researchers described Equation Group as one of the world’s most advanced hacking groups , with ties to both the Stuxnet and Flame espionage malware platforms. The compressed data accompanying the Shadow Broker post is slightly bigger than 256 megabytes and purports to contain a series of hacking tools dating back to 2010. While it wasn’t immediately possible for outsiders to prove the posted data—mostly batch scripts and poorly coded python scripts—belonged to Equation Group, there was little doubt the data have origins with some advanced hacking group. Not fully fake “These files are not fully fake for sure,” Bencsáth Boldizsár, a researcher with Hungary-based CrySyS who is widely credited with discovering Flame, told Ars in an e-mail. “Most likely they are part of the NSA toolset, judging just by the volume and peeps into the samples. At first glance it is sound that these are important attack related files, and yes, the first guess would be Equation Group.” Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Group claims to hack NSA-tied hackers, posts exploits as proof

Orbital angular momentum states may vastly increase fiber’s bandwidth

(credit: NASA ) We live and die by data these days. Data rates and latencies are everything, with data centers and chips designed to maximize communication speeds. The hero in the world of data is the optical fiber. Thanks to light’s very high base frequency, it is possible to modulate it very quickly without using a huge amount of bandwidth. Optical fiber’s ability to modulate light quickly allows network designers to choose a wavelength band, divide it up into slots, and use each slot to communicate its own data. So a typical fiber will carry several channels, each operating at multi-gigabit-per-second speeds. This approach, already many, many years old, has served us very well. But all good things come to an end. Researchers are always looking for ways to carry more information, and one idea—that one, at the back of the class, ignored by all the other ideas—is to use special states of light to encode information. These orbital angular momentum (OAM) states have the potential to vastly increase bandwidth, but they are difficult to handle. Some recent research, however, suggests that we might well be using OAM states before too long. Read 19 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Orbital angular momentum states may vastly increase fiber’s bandwidth