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Submission + - Slashdot Alum Samzenpus's Fractured Veil Hits Kickstarter

Submitted by CmdrTaco
CmdrTaco writes: Long time Slashdot readers remember Samzenpus,who posted over 17,000 stories here, sadly crushing my record in the process! What you might NOT know is that he was frequently the Dungeon Master for D&D campaigns played by the original Slashdot crew, and for the last few years he has been applying these skills with fellow Slashdot editorial alum Chris DiBona to a Survival game called Fractured Veil. It's set in a post apocalyptic Hawaii with a huge world based on real map data to explore, as well as careful balance between PVP & PVE. I figured a lot of our old friends would love to help them meet their kickstarter goal and then help us build bases and murder monsters! The game is turning into something pretty great and I'm excited to see it in the wild!

Submission + - Hostile Takeover of the Freenode IRC Network and the End of an Era (github.com)

Submitted by Shadyman
Shadyman writes: The Freenode network as we know it may be going dark soon, as its volunteer staff have resigned amid legal threats from the owner of "Freenode Limited". The former staff advise that "Freenode staff have stepped down. The network that runs at freenode.org/net/com should now be assumed to be under control of a malicious party." and have moved to form libera.chat. Further updates and links to (mostly) PGP-signed letters from former staff can be found on joepie91's GitHub: "The Freenode Resignation FAQ".

Comment Someone typoed (Score -1, Redundant) 82

Probably a misconfiguration. My local cable ISP assigns the DoD address block to its cable modems to its internal network and has some kind of abstraction layer to actual internet IPv4. Why? No idea. Some kind of real-time rationing and assignment of IPv4/IPv6? Maybe a bunch of their VoIP equipment doesn't need external IPs and they're trying to save space in their assigned blocks?
Security

Cognizant Expects To Lose Between $50 Million and $70 Million Following Ransomware Attack (zdnet.com) 20

Posted by BeauHD from the negative-impacts dept.
IT services provider Cognizant said in an earnings call this week that a ransomware incident that took place last month in April 2020 will negatively impact its Q2 revenue. ZDNet reports: "While we anticipate that the revenue impact related to this issue will be largely resolved by the middle of the quarter, we do anticipate the revenue and corresponding margin impact to be in the range of $50 million to $70 million for the quarter," said Karen McLoughlin, Cognizant Chief Financial Officer in an earnings call yesterday. McLoughlin also expects the incident to incur additional and unforeseen legal, consulting, and other costs associated with the investigation, service restoration, and remediation of the breach. The Cognizant CFO says the company has now fully recovered from the ransomware infection and restored the majority of its services.

Speaking on the ransomware attack, Cognizant CEO Brian Humphries said the incident only impacted its internal network, but not customer systems. More precisely, Humphries said the ransomware incident impacted (1) Cognizant's select system supporting employees' work from home setups and (2) the provisioning of laptops that Cognizant was using to support its work from home capabilities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Humphries said staff moved quickly to take down all impacted systems, which impacted Cognizant's billing system for a period of time. Some customer services were taken down as a precaution.
Piracy

Don't Use the Word 'Did' Or a Dumb Anti-Piracy Company Will Delete You From Google (torrentfreak.com) 165

Posted by BeauHD from the ridiculous-takedown-requests dept.
In 2018, the owner of Two-Bit History, a site dedicated to computer history, wrote a successful article about mathematician Ada Lovelace, who some credit as being the first computer programmer. Sadly, if you search Google for that article today you won't find it. Some idiotic anti-piracy company had it deleted because it dared to use the word "did." TorrentFreak reports: In 2018, [Sinclair Target, the owner of computing history blog, Two-Bit History] wrote an article about Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron who some credit as being the world's first computer programmer, despite being born in 1815. Unfortunately, however, those who search for that article today using Google won't find it. As the image below shows, the original Tweet announcing the article is still present in Google's indexes but the article itself has been removed, thanks to a copyright infringement complaint that also claimed several other victims.

Sinclair's article was deleted because an anti-piracy company working on behalf of a TV company decided that since its title (What Did Ada Lovelace's Program Actually Do?) contained the word 'DID,' it must be illegal. This monumental screw-up was announced on Twitter by Sinclair himself, who complained that "Computers are stupid folks. Too bad Google has decided they are in charge." At risk of running counter to Sinclair's claim, in this case -- as Lovelace herself would've hopefully agreed -- it is people who are stupid, not computers. The proof for that can be found in the DMCA complaint sent to Google by RightsHero, an anti-piracy company working on behalf of Zee TV, an Indian pay-TV channel that airs Dance India Dance. Now in its seventh season, Dance India Dance is a dance competition reality show that is often referred to as DID. And now, of course, you can see where this is going. Because Target and at least 11 other sites dared to use the word in its original context, RightsHero flagged the pages as infringing and asked Google to deindex them. In the complaint sent to Google, "the notice not only claims Target's article is infringing the copyrights of Dance India Dance (sorry, DID), but also no less than four online dictionaries explaining what the word 'did actually means," adds TorrentFreak. "Perhaps worse still, some of the other allegedly-infringing articles were published by some pretty serious information resources [including the U.S. Department of Education, Nature.com, and USGS Earthquake Hazards Program of the U.S. Geological Survey]."
Google

Google Maps Can Now Predict How Crowded Your Bus Or Trail Will Be (techcrunch.com) 41

Posted by BeauHD from the educated-guessing dept.
Google Maps is getting a pair of updates that will offer live traffic delays for busses in the cities where it didn't already provide real-time updates, and another that will tell you how crowded your bus, train, or subway car will be. TechCrunch reports: The latter is perhaps the more interesting of the two, as it represents a new prediction technique Google has been perfecting for over half a year. Starting in October, the company began to ask Google Maps users to rate their journey if they had traveled during peak commuting hours of 6 am to 10 am. Google asked about how many seats were available or if it was standing room only, in order to identify which lines had the highest number of crowdedness reports. Over time, it was able to model this data into a new prediction capability designed to tell transit riders how packed their bus or train would be. It also used this data to create rankings of the most crowded routes and stops around the world.
Piracy

Google Categorically Refuses To Remove the Pirate Bay's Homepage (torrentfreak.com) 90

Posted by BeauHD from the not-on-my-watch dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: This year alone, at least 15 separate takedown notices ask Google to remove ThePirateBay.org from its index. Most of these are sent by the reporting agency Digimarc, on behalf of book publishers such as Penguin Random House, Kensington Publishing, and Recorded Books. This year alone, at least 15 separate takedown notices ask Google to remove ThePirateBay.org from its index. Most of these are sent by the reporting agency Digimarc, on behalf of book publishers such as Penguin Random House, Kensington Publishing, and Recorded Books. Over the years, The Pirate Bay's homepage has been targeted more than 70 times. While there's no shortage of reports, TPB's homepage is still in Google's index.

Since TPB's homepage is not infringing, Google categorically refuses to remove it from its search results. While the site itself has been downranked, due to the high number of takedown requests Google receives for it, ThePirateBay.org remains listed. Google did remove The Pirate Bay's homepage in the past, by accident, but that was swiftly corrected. "Google received a (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) take-down request that erroneously listed Thepiratebay.org, and as a result, this URL was accidentally removed from the Google search index," Google said at the time. "We are now correcting the removal, and you can expect to see Thepiratebay.org back in Google search results this afternoon," the company added.

Comment Web-Facing Control Panels (Score 1) 118

by Shadyman (#56660446) Attached to: Backdoor Account Found in D-Link DIR-620 Routers
"The only way to protect devices from getting hacked is to avoid having the router expose its admin panel on the WAN interface"

Why would you willingly expose even the most secure login page to the net if you didn't have to? Between bruteforce, backdoor accounts, overflow errors, URL manipulation, and yes, even the dreaded default password,

tl;dr: Why do you have your admin panel WAN-accessible in the first place? -_-

Comment Re:Why Was He Mucking With It In The First Place? (Score 3, Funny) 418

Having production databases that can be reached from developers workstations is always a bad idea. They were lucky, in a way, that the developer deleted the data and didn't just alter it slightly.

You'd also have to pray they did not alter it any further.

Comment Cartridges (Score 2) 81

by Shadyman (#52979955) Attached to: HP To Issue 'Optional Firmware Update' Allowing 3rd-Party Ink
So from what I get from this is that some third party cartridges actually use HP chips (presumably from reels of chips sold to a re-manufacturer of cartridges so HP can track down the re-manufacturer/batch if Joe has a printing quality problem, or whatever) and some just clone whatever chip they found first (I'm picturing thousands of printers all reporting that they have cartridge with SN#2477751135432 installed and it amuses me).

I've seen some pretty convincing fake cartridges in my time that hold themselves out to be genuine, brand new in box units. That said, the firmware had previously said "This cartridge has been previously used or is non-genuine" upon insertion and you could click okay to continue.

I haven't read specifically whether self-refilled, store-refilled or store-bought third-party cartridges were affected, or whether this was just for cartridges bought from the usual suspects (some ebay sellers, amazon vendors, ali*, etc). Working in a big box store, though, I haven't yet had customers complain about it, though, so with my tiny sample size, I'm going to theorize that is the case.

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