Tag: windows

StarCraft Is Now Free, Nearly 20 Years After Its Release

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Nearly two decades after its 1998 release, StarCraft is now free. Legally! Blizzard has just released the original game — plus the Brood War expansion — for free for both PC and Mac. You can find it here. Up until a few weeks ago, getting the game with its expansion would’ve cost $10-15 bucks. The company says they’ve also used this opportunity to improve the game’s anti-cheat system, add “improved compatibility” with Windows 7, 8.1, and 10, and fix a few long lasting bugs. So why now? The company is about to release a remastered version of the game in just a few months, its graphics/audio overhauled for modern systems. Once that version hits, the original will probably look a bit ancient by comparison — so they might as well use it to win over a few new fans, right? Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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StarCraft Is Now Free, Nearly 20 Years After Its Release

NSA-Leaking Shadow Brokers Just Dumped Its Most Damaging Release Yet

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Shadow Brokers — the mysterious person or group that over the past eight months has leaked a gigabyte worth of the National Security Agency’s weaponized software exploits — just published its most significant release yet. Friday’s dump contains potent exploits and hacking tools that target most versions of Microsoft Windows and evidence of sophisticated hacks on the SWIFT banking system of several banks across the world. Friday’s release — which came as much of the computing world was planning a long weekend to observe the Easter holiday — contains close to 300 megabytes of materials the leakers said were stolen from the NSA. The contents (a convenient overview is here) included compiled binaries for exploits that targeted vulnerabilities in a long line of Windows operating systems, including Windows 8 and Windows 2012. It also included a framework dubbed Fuzzbunch, a tool that resembles the Metasploit hacking framework that loads the binaries into targeted networks. Independent security experts who reviewed the contents said it was without question the most damaging Shadow Brokers release to date. One of the Windows zero-days flagged by Hickey is dubbed Eternalblue. It exploits a remote code-execution bug in the latest version of Windows 2008 R2 using the server message block and NetBT protocols. Another hacking tool known as Eternalromance contains an easy-to-use interface and “slick” code. Hickey said it exploits Windows systems over TCP ports 445 and 139. The exact cause of the bug is still being identified. Friday’s release contains several tools with the word “eternal” in their name that exploit previously unknown flaws in Windows desktops and servers. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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NSA-Leaking Shadow Brokers Just Dumped Its Most Damaging Release Yet

Former Sysadmin Accused of Planting ‘Time Bomb’ In Company’s Database

An anonymous reader writes: Allegro MicroSystems LLC is suing a former IT employee for sabotaging its database using a “time bomb” that deleted crucial financial data in the first week of the new fiscal year. According to court documents, after resigning from his job, a former sysadmin kept one of two laptops. On January 31, Patel entered the grounds of the Allegro headquarters in Worcester, Massachusetts, just enough to be in range of the factory’s Wi-Fi network. Allegro says that Patel used the second business-use laptop to connect to the company’s network using the credentials of another employee. While connected to the factory’s network on January 31, Allegro claims Patel, who was one of the two people in charge of Oracle programming, uploaded a “time bomb” to the company’s Oracle finance module. The code was designed to execute a few months later, on April 1, 2016, the first week of the new fiscal year, and was meant to “copy certain headers or pointers to data into a separate database table and then to purge those headers from the finance module, thereby rendering the data in the module worthless.” The company says that “defendant Patel knew that his sabotage of the finance module on the first week of the new fiscal year had the maximum potential to cause Allegro to suffer damages because it would prevent Allegro from completing the prior year’s fiscal year-end accounting reconciliation and financial reports.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Former Sysadmin Accused of Planting ‘Time Bomb’ In Company’s Database

Pirate Bay Founder: ‘I Have Given Up’

The future of illegal torrent websites doesn’t look good. As torrent websites continue to disappear, the founder of The Pirate Bay believes the trend is the just the beginning. From an article: While it might look like torrenters are are still fighting this battle, Sunde claims that the reality is more definitive: “We have already lost.” Take the net neutrality law in Europe. It’s terrible, but people are happy and go like “it could be worse.” That is absolutely not the right attitude. Facebook brings the internet to Africa and poor countries, but they’re only giving limited access to their own services and make money off of poor people. Well, I have given up the idea that we can win this fight for the internet. The situation is not going to be any different, because apparently that is something people are not interested in fixing. Or we can’t get people to care enough. Maybe it’s a mixture, but this is kind of the situation we are in, so its useless to do anything about it. We have become somehow the Black Knight from Monty Python’s Holy Grail. We have maybe half of our head left and we are still fighting, we still think we have a chance of winning this battle. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Pirate Bay Founder: ‘I Have Given Up’

Ubuntu 17.04 ‘Zesty Zapus’, Featuring Unity, Now Available To Download

Brian Fagioli, writing for BetaNews: Ubuntu 17.04 “Zesty Zapus” is available for download. No, this is not an Alpha or Beta, but an official stable version of the Linux-based operating system. Unfortunately, the release is a bit tainted — it uses Unity as the official desktop environment, which Canonical has announced will be killed. Not to mention, there has been some controversy regarding some comments by Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth. Just yesterday, the CEO of Canonical announced she is leaving the position. With all of the aforementioned controversy and chaos, it is understandably hard to get too excited for “Zesty Zapus, ” especially as this is not a long term support version. With that said, if you are an existing Ubuntu user that likes Unity, this is certainly a worthwhile upgrade if you are OK with the shorter support. Unity may no longer have a future, but version 7 will continue to be supported — for a while, at least. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Ubuntu 17.04 ‘Zesty Zapus’, Featuring Unity, Now Available To Download

YouTube Launches ‘YouTube TV’ In Select Markets

In late February, YouTube unveiled its live TV service called YouTube TV, which offers live TV streaming over the internet for $35 per month with no long-term contract required. The company has officially launched the service today in five select markets: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco Bay Area, Chicago, and Philadelphia. YouTube says that more markets are coming soon, however, details on when/where are scarce. PhoneDog reports: A membership to YouTube TV costs $35 per month and includes live streaming of channels like ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, ESPN, and others. Subscribers also get an unlimited cloud DVR for recording shows that’ll last up to nine months, and six accounts that each get their own recommendations and cloud DVRs. YouTube is offering a free one-month trial of YouTube TV so that everyone can give it a try. After your first paid month, YouTube will give you a Google Chromecast to thank you for sticking with the service. Source: YouTube Official Blog Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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YouTube Launches ‘YouTube TV’ In Select Markets

The Windows 10 Creators Update is now available for manual upgrading

Enlarge / This option is the best way of transitioning out of the Insider Program. (credit: Microsoft) The “official” release of the Windows 10 Creators Update , version 1703, won’t come until Patch Tuesday on April 11, but if you want to upgrade now—and don’t want to enroll your system in the potentially unstable Windows Insider Program—you can now do so. The Windows 10 Update Assistant will upgrade any Windows 10 Home or Pro system to the Creators Update; you’ll need to grab the latest version of the Assistant and then run it, but it should be straightforward enough. If you’re upgrading more than one machine or want to perform a clean install, the Media Creation Tool, available from the same link, is the better bet; the Media Creation Tool can fetch an ISO to burn a DVD or create a bootable USB drive, and that can be used for bare metal installs. The Creators Update itself is build 15063.0, but there will be a small Cumulative Update delivered on April 11. Previews of this patch have been rolled out to insiders, with the fast ring Insiders on 15063.14 and slow ring Insiders on 15063.13. Using the Update Assistant or Media Creation Tool appears to also update to 15063.13. This situation may well change by the actual release day next week. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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The Windows 10 Creators Update is now available for manual upgrading

Gigabyte Firmware Bugs Allow the Installation of BIOS/UEFI Ransomware

An anonymous reader writes from a report via BleepingComputer: Last week, at the BlackHat Asia 2017 security conference, researchers from cyber-security firm Cylance disclosed two vulnerabilities in the firmware of Gigabyte BRIX small computing devices, which allow an attacker to write malicious content to the UEFI firmware. During their presentation, researchers installed a proof-of-concept UEFI ransomware, preventing the BRIX devices from booting, but researchers say the same flaws can be used to plant rootkits that allow attackers to persist malware for years. The two vulnerabilities discovered are CVE-2017-3197 and CVE-2017-3198. The first is a failure on Gigabyte’s part to implement write protection for its UEFI firmware. The second vulnerability is another lapse on Gigabyte’s side, who forgot to implement a system that cryptographically signs UEFI firmware files. Add to this the fact that Gigabyte uses an insecure firmware update process, which doesn’t check the validity of downloaded files using a checksum and uses HTTP instead of HTTPS. A CERT vulnerability note was published to warn users of the impending danger and the bugs’ ease of exploitation. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Gigabyte Firmware Bugs Allow the Installation of BIOS/UEFI Ransomware

USB Canary Sends An SMS When Someone Tinkers With Your USB Ports

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: A new tool released on GitHub last week can help paranoid sysadmins keep track of whenever someone plugs in or disconnects an USB-based device from high-value workstations. Called USB Canary, this tool is coded in Python and currently, works only on Linux (versions for Windows and Mac are in the works). The tool works by watching USB ports for any activity while the computer is locked, which generally means the owner has left his desk. If an USB device is plugged in or unplugged, USB Canary can perform one of two actions, or both. It can alert the owner by sending an SMS message via the Twilio API, or it can post a message in a Slack channel, which can be monitored by other co-workers. USB Canary can prove to be a very useful tool for large organizations that feature strict PC policies. For example, if you really want to enforce a “No USB drives” at work, this could be the tool for the job. Further, with modifications, it could be used for logging USB activity on air-gapped systems. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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USB Canary Sends An SMS When Someone Tinkers With Your USB Ports

A 21st-Century Version Of OS/2 Warp May Be Released Soon

dryriver writes: A company named Arca Noae is working on a new release of the X86 OS/2 operating system code named “Blue Lion” and likely called ArcaOS 5 in its final release. Blue Lion wants to be a modern 21st Century OS/2 Warp, with support for the latest hardware and networking standards, a modern accelerated graphics driver, support for new cryptographic security standards, full backward compatibility with legacy OS/2, DOS and Windows 3.1 applications, suitability for use in mission-critical applications, and also, it appears, the ability to run “ported Linux applications”. Blue Lion, which appears to be in closed beta with March 31st 2017 cited as the target release date, will come with up to date Firefox browser and Thunderbird mail client, Apache OpenOffice, other productivity tools, a new package manager, and software update and support subscription to ensure system stability. It is unclear from the information provided whether Blue Lion will be able to run modern Windows applications. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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A 21st-Century Version Of OS/2 Warp May Be Released Soon