Shared posts

05 Mar 15:56

Self-Isolate

Turns out I've been "practicing social distancing" for years without even realizing it was a thing!
14 Nov 09:45

Machine Learning Captcha

More likely: Click on all the pictures of people who appear disloyal to [name of company or government]
08 Nov 21:49

Goldeneye 007’s lost remaster emerges again via massive, polished video leak

by Sam Machkovech
  • This gallery consists entirely of "after-and-before" shots of Goldeneye 007, as revealed in this week's newly leaked video. Each image of the updated version is followed by a graphics-toggle to show the game's original textures in nearly identical environs to see how they differ. Let's start with classic split-screen combat. [credit: Rare ]

Goldeneye 007 is arguably the biggest example of a late-'90s gaming sensation that has remained trapped in its era. Unlike other hits from the same period, which have received remasters and digital-download options ad nauseum, this 1997 Rare game has laid dormant on the N64, likely due to a tangled web of licenses and company-ownership issues.

Three years ago, however, we finally saw hard proof of what many had suspected: that original developers at Rare worked on, and nearly re-released, an Xbox 360 remaster of the 1997 original. (Don't get that confused with the ho-hum Goldeneye "reimagining" on the Wii in 2010.) We took a hard look at a 2016 leak, which confirmed the Xbox 360 project's existence. At the time, we had ourselves a hard cry and moved on.

But this week, a massive video leak has reopened the wound of wondering what could have been—and it comes during arguably the most amicable period that license holders Microsoft and Nintendo have ever shared.

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27 Jun 08:01

Security firms demonstrate subdomain hijack exploit vs. EA/Origin

by Jim Salter

Israeli security firms Check Point and CyberInt partnered up this week to find, exploit, and demonstrate a nasty security flaw that allows attackers to hijack player accounts in EA/Origin's online games. The exploit chains together several classic types of attacks—phishing, session hijacking, and cross-site scripting—but the key flaw that makes the entire attack work is poorly maintained DNS.

This short video clip walks you through the entire process: phish a victim, steal their account token, access their account, and even buy in-game stuff with their saved credit card. (You might want to mute before you press play—the background music is loud and obnoxious.)

If you have a reasonably good eye for infosec, most of the video speaks for itself. The attacker phishes a victim over WhatsApp into clicking a dodgy link, the victim clicks the shiny and gets owned, and the stolen credentials are used to wreak havoc on the victim's account.

What makes this attack different—and considerably more dangerous—is the attacker's possession of a site hosted at a valid, working subdomain of ea.com. Without a real subdomain in their possession, the attack would have required the victim to log in to a fake EA portal to allow the attacker to harvest a password. This would have immensely increased the likelihood of the victim becoming alert to a scam. With the working subdomain, the attacker was able to harvest the authentication token from an existing active EA session before exploiting it directly and in real time.

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17 May 23:05

Landowners are earning millions for carbon cuts that may not occur

A new analysis finds California’s cap-and-trade program may vastly overestimate emissions reductions.
13 Sep 11:36

John McCain's farewell to America

by Gina Loukareas

Senator John McCain, who died on Saturday at age 81 from an aggressive form of brain cancer, wrote a farewell letter to America. The letter was read by family spokesman Rick Davis this afternoon. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNTe_G-Xc0s?start=1019&w=560&h=315] Full text:
My fellow Americans, whom I have gratefully served for sixty years, and especially my fellow Arizonans, Thank you for the privilege of serving you and for the rewarding life that service in uniform and in public office has allowed me to lead. I have tried to serve our country honorably. I have made mistakes, but I hope my love for America will be weighed favorably against them. I have often observed that I am the luckiest person on earth. I feel that way even now as I prepare for the end of my life. I have loved my life, all of it. I have had experiences, adventures and friendships enough for ten satisfying lives, and I am so thankful. Like most people, I have regrets. But I would not trade a day of my life, in good or bad times, for the best day of anyone else’s. I owe that satisfaction to the love of my family. No man ever had a more loving wife or children he was prouder of than I am of mine. And I owe it to America. To be connected to America’s causes — liberty, equal justice, respect for the dignity of all people — brings happiness more sublime than life’s fleeting pleasures. Our identities and sense of worth are not circumscribed but enlarged by serving good causes bigger than ourselves. 'Fellow Americans' — that association has meant more to me than any other. I lived and died a proud American. We are citizens of the world’s greatest republic, a nation of ideals, not blood and soil. We are blessed and are a blessing to humanity when we uphold and advance those ideals at home and in the world. We have helped liberate more people from tyranny and poverty than ever before in history. We have acquired great wealth and power in the process. We weaken our greatness when we confuse our patriotism with tribal rivalries that have sown resentment and hatred and violence in all the corners of the globe. We weaken it when we hide behind walls, rather than tear them down, when we doubt the power of our ideals, rather than trust them to be the great force for change they have always been. We are three-hundred-and-twenty-five million opinionated, vociferous individuals. We argue and compete and sometimes even vilify each other in our raucous public debates. But we have always had so much more in common with each other than in disagreement. If only we remember that and give each other the benefit of the presumption that we all love our country we will get through these challenging times. We will come through them stronger than before. We always do. Ten years ago, I had the privilege to concede defeat in the election for president. I want to end my farewell to you with the heartfelt faith in Americans that I felt so powerfully that evening. I feel it powerfully still. Do not despair of our present difficulties but believe always in the promise and greatness of America, because nothing is inevitable here. Americans never quit. We never surrender. We never hide from history. We make history. Farewell, fellow Americans. God bless you, and God bless America.
It was also announced that President Trump will not be attending McCain's funeral at Washington National Cathedral on Saturday. John McCain's farewell statement -Politico [Photo: Staff Sgt. Jim Greenhill/U.S. Army]
12 Aug 13:13

Google fires engineer who “crossed the line” with diversity memo

by Timothy B. Lee

Google CEO Sundar Pichai. (credit: Sam Churchill)

Google has fired James Damore, an engineer who wrote a controversial essay arguing that the company has gone overboard in its attempts to promote diversity. Damore confirmed the firing in an e-mail to Bloomberg.

“At Google, we’re regularly told that implicit (unconscious) and explicit biases are holding women back in tech and leadership,” Damore wrote in an internal posting that went viral within the company over the weekend. The posting was subsequently leaked to Gizmodo. However, he argued, that’s “far from the whole story.”

Biology is partly responsible for differences between men and women, Damore wrote, and “these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.”

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21 Jun 18:32

From the NFL to MIT: The Double Life of John Urschel

Whether he’s blocking a 300-pound defensive lineman or hitting the math books, this doctoral candidate just won’t quit.
07 Apr 15:48

Hailing a Different Ride in Austin

Following a bruising political battle, Uber and Lyft pulled out of Austin, Texas, making room for new forms of ride-sharing.
11 Aug 18:42

New Time magazine cover: Trump's meltdown

by Rob Beschizza

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Striking and to the point, but also funny. The story behind it writes itself, given the stunning abundance of hot material from the last few weeks provided by the Republican millionaire and candidate for president. But this quote, from a Clinton advisor, sums things up very nicely:

At Clinton headquarters in Brooklyn, aides still nursing scars from skirmishes with Bernie Sanders marveled at their good fortune. As in all campaigns, researchers watch every public event, read every interview, archive every tweet. “On other campaigns, we would have to scrounge for crumbs,” says a senior Clinton adviser. “Here, it’s a fire hose. He can set himself on fire at breakfast, kill a nun at lunch and waterboard a puppy in the afternoon. And that doesn’t even get us to prime time.”

06 Aug 11:50

Incredible discovery reveals the truth behind an ancient Chinese legend

by Annalee Newitz
  • A photo of Jishi Gorge upstream of the landslide dam caused by an earthquake. The deposits of gray silt dozens of meters above the water level are sediments from the dammed lake that burst, causing a catastrophic "outburst flood."
    Wu Qinglong

Ancient Chinese legends tell of a catastrophic flood along the Yellow River that led to the founding of the Xia dynasty, roughly 4,000 years ago. A legendary hero named Yu is said to have established the Xia dynasty after figuring out how to stop the flood waters by dredging, thus marking the dawn of Chinese civilization with a feat of landscape engineering. Now, a group of geoscientists and archaeologists in China has discovered that this flood actually happened.

The group's recently published findings in Science magazine explain how they found traces of this historic deluge. For more than a century, archaeologists have looked for evidence that could shed light on historical accounts of early Chinese civilization, such as those in first century BCE book Shiji (史記, traditionally translated as Records of the Grand Historian). Many accounts in the Shiji have turned out to be fairly accurate, especially when it came to the Shang dynasty that followed the Xia. Because the Shang dynasty civilization had writing, scientists have been able to verify the Shiji's accuracy from written records as well as material remains.

Reconstructing a flood

Much about the Xia dynasty, however, remains mysterious. Although this Bronze Age civilization was highly sophisticated, it did not use writing, and the only accounts we have of it come from stories of the great flood that Yu controlled. Now, scientists are certain there was a megaflood on the Yellow River in roughly 1900 BCE. Ancient Chinese historiographers placed the rise of the Xia dynasty during the 2200s BCE, so their dates were about 300 years off. But whenever it happened, the flood was so devastating and enormous that the archaeologists who discovered it have no doubt that it would have left a lasting impression on any civilization that experienced it.

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05 Dec 16:04

Dream of being a bird? Flight simulator can bring you close

With a few flaps of his arms, Kip Fenton soared into the New York City skyline, veering around a sea of skyscrapers as the wind whistled in his ears.
13 Jul 04:51

Comic for July 12, 2015

Dilbert readers - Please visit Dilbert.com to read this feature. Due to changes with our feeds, we are now making this RSS feed a link to Dilbert.com.
09 Jul 11:05

Settled

Well, we've really only settled the question of ghosts that emit or reflect visible light. Or move objects around. Or make any kind of sound. But that covers all the ones that appear in Ghostbusters, so I think we're good.