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Comment Re:Understanding Deus Ex (Score 1) 157

by Harlequin (#25277171) Attached to: First <em>Deus Ex 3</em> Details Emerge

I think it's really because sometimes the goals of management can be different than those of game designers. If you're running a game company you don't really care if the games the company makes are "good" as long as they sell well. Game designers understand that and may have to bow to pressure from above to make a game more marketable (which often doesn't mean better). Now, you'll cry, 'but wait, good games will sell better'! But, that isn't necessarily the case... and that's how we end up with tons of cookie cutter "safe" games.

I'm not saying it's right, I'm just trying to respond to the "I don't understand WTF they're thinking" thing.
Security

All Your Coffee Are Belong To Us 354

Posted by kdawson from the pouring-over-it dept.
Wolf nipple chips writes "Craig Wright discovered that the Jura F90 Coffee maker, with its honest-to-God Jura Internet Connection Kit, can be taken over by a remote attacker, who can cause the coffee to be weaker or stronger; change the amount of water per cup; or cause the machine to require service (call this one a DDoC). 'Best yet, the software allows a remote attacker to gain access to the Windows XP system it is running on at the level of the user.' An Internet-enabled, remote-controlled coffee-machine and XP backdoor — what more could a hacker ask for?"
Windows

Mass Effect DRM Still Causing Issues 593

Posted by kdawson from the three-strikes-and-you're-out dept.
An anonymous reader writes "There was some discussion last month about the proposed DRM for Mass Effect and Spore that required the game to phone home every ten days. They backed down from that, but have left in that a user is only allowed 3 activations per license key. A license key is burned up when the O/S is reinstalled, when certain hardware is upgraded (EA refuses to disclose specifics of what), and possibly when a new user is set up in Windows. Only in its first month, some users are already locked out of their games from trying troubleshooting techniques to get the game running."
Government

FCC Revises Broadband Penetration Metrics 149

Posted by kdawson from the end-of-a-long-running-joke dept.
joelt49 writes "Ars Technica reports that the FCC has revised its broadband penetration metric. Previously, if only one subscriber in a zip code received connectivity at 200 Kbps, then the entire zip code was considered to have broadband access. Now, the FCC will count the number of subscribers in census tracts. The FCC has also revised its definition of broadband; previously, it was anything over 200 Kbps. Now, speeds between 200 and 768 Kbps are considered 'First-Generation' broadband, and speeds up to 1.5 Mbps are considered 'Basic' broadband." Unfortunately, the FCC has decided to keep all this new data to themselves.
Privacy

FBI Wants Authority To Filter Net Backbone 413

Posted by kdawson from the say-please dept.
Dionysius, God of Wine and Leaf, writes "There are places where criminal activity is centralized: the backbone hubs located in hosting facilities across the country. All of the Internet's activity, legal and illegal, flows through these 'choke points,' and the feds, of course, are already tapping those points and siphoning off data. What Mueller wants is the legal authority to comb through the backbone data, which is already being siphoned off by the NSA, in order to look for illegal activity."
Security

500 Thousand MS Web Servers Hacked 332

Posted by kdawson from the scream-and-shout dept.
andrewd18 writes "According to F-Secure, over 500,000 webservers across the world, including some from the United Nations and UK government, have been victims of a SQL injection. The attack uses an SQL injection to reroute clients to a malicious javascript at nmidahena.com, aspder.com or nihaorr1.com, which use another set of exploits to install a Trojan on the client's computer. As per usual, Firefox users with NoScript should be safe from the client exploit, but server admins should be alert for the server-side injection. Brian Krebs has a decent writeup on his Washington Post Security Blog, Dynamoo has a list of some of the high-profile sites that have been hacked, and for fun you can watch some of the IIS admins run around in circles at one of the many IIS forums on the 'net."
United States

Diebold Admits ATMs Are More Robust Than Voting Machines 230

Posted by Soulskill from the votes-on-the-cheap dept.
An anonymous reader points out a story in the Huffington Post about the status of funding for election voting systems. It contains an interesting section in which Chris Riggall, a spokesman for Premier (formerly Diebold) acknowledged that less money is spent making an electronic voting machine than on a typical ATM. The ironically named Riggall also notes that security could indeed be improved, but at a higher price than most election administrators would care to pay. Also quoted in the article is Ed Felten, who has recently found some inconsistencies in New Jersey voting machines. From the Post: "'An ATM is significantly a more expensive device than a voting terminal...' said Riggall. 'Were you to develop something that was as robust as an ATM, both in terms of the physical engineering of it and all aspects, clearly that would be something that the average jurisdiction cannot afford.' Perhaps cost has something to do with the fact that a couple of years ago, every single Diebold AccuVote TS could be opened with a standard key also used for some cabinets and mini-bars and available for purchase over the Internet."
NASA

NASA To Develop Small Satellites 85

Posted by Soulskill from the not-necessarily-bigger-than-a-breadbox dept.
coondoggie brings news that NASA has announced it will team with Machine-to-Machine Intelligence Corp. to produce small satellites, called 'nanosats,' weighing between 11 and 110 pounds. The satellites will work together in 'constellations' and facilitate networking in space. According to NASA's press release, it will 'develop a fifth generation telecommunications and networking system for Internet protocol-based and related services.' We've discussed miniature satellites in the past.
Earth

Humans Nearly Went Extinct 70,000 Years Ago 777

Posted by Soulskill from the come-from-behind-victory dept.
Josh Fink brings us a CNN story discussing evidence found by researchers which indicates that humans came close to extinction roughly 70,000 years ago. A similar study by Stanford scientists suggests that droughts reduced the population to as few as 2,000 humans, who were scattered in small, isolated groups. Quoting: "'This study illustrates the extraordinary power of genetics to reveal insights into some of the key events in our species' history,' said Spencer Wells, National Geographic Society explorer in residence. 'Tiny bands of early humans, forced apart by harsh environmental conditions, coming back from the brink to reunite and populate the world. Truly an epic drama, written in our DNA.'"
Media (Apple)

Apple Prepares For the Coming iPod Slump 340

Posted by timothy from the mighty-shall-fall dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Companies like AOL have stagnated along with the products that made them successful as a mature market and downward pressure on prices led to a nasty death spiral, but Saul Hansell writes in the NY Times that Apple has used its amazing six-year run with the iPod to nurture other business lines. Even though the number of iPods sold this quarter grew only 1 percent from the same quarter a year ago, Apple should be able to sustain itself with three business lines that will help it withstand a collapse in the MP3-player market: a continuing revenue stream from the iPods that have already been sold because of the iTunes Store, product upgrades to the iPhone and iPod Touch that are so different that they may well appeal to a significant number of iPod users, and perhaps most significantly, sales of the Macintosh which showed an increase of 51 percent by units and 54 percent by dollars."
Security

Researchers Infiltrate and 'Pollute' Storm Botnet 261

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i'm-infiltrating-see-yeah dept.
ancientribe writes "Dark Reading reports that a group of European researchers has found a way to disrupt the massive Storm botnet by infiltrating it and injecting "polluted" content into it to disrupt communication among the bots and their controlling hosts. Other researchers have historically shied way from this controversial method because they don't "want to mess with other peoples' PCs by injecting commands," said one botnet expert quoted in the article.
Microsoft

Bill Gates On the GPL — "We Disagree" 778

Posted by timothy from the doesn't-that-mean-disagreeing-with-copyright dept.
Dionysius, God of Wine, writes with a link to an Ars Technica story, quoting Bill Gates: "'There's free software and then there's open source' he suggested, noting that Microsoft gives away its software in developing countries. With open source software, on the other hand, 'there is this thing called the GPL, which we disagree with.' Open source, he said, creates a license 'so that nobody can ever improve the software,' he claimed, bemoaning the squandered opportunity for jobs and business. (Yes, Linux fans, we're aware of how distorted this definition is.) He went back to the analogy of pharmaceuticals: 'I think if you invent drugs, you should be able to charge for them,' he said, adding with a shrug: 'That may seem radical."
Security

Best Way To Avoid Keyloggers On Public Terminals? 701

Posted by Soulskill from the it's-not-paranoia-if-they're-actually-out-to-get-you dept.
goombah99 writes "While on vacation, I occasionally need to check my e-mail on a public terminal. What are some good techniques for avoiding keyloggers? Most of my ideas seem to have major drawbacks. Linux LiveCD can probably avoid software keyloggers, but it requires an invasive takeover of the public terminal, and is generally not possible. Kyps.net offers a free reverse proxy that will decode your password from a one-time pad you carry around, then enter it remotely. But, of course, you are giving them your passwords when you do this. You can run Firefox off a USB stick with various plugins (e.g. RoboForm) that will automatically fill the page in some manner they claim to be invulnerable to keyloggers. If that's true, (and I can't evaluate its security) it's getting close to a solution. Unfortunately, keeping the password file up-to-date is a mild nuisance. Moreover, since it will need to be a Windows executable, it's not possible for people without a Windows machine available to fill in their passwords ahead of time. For my business, I have SecureID, which makes one-time passwords. It's a good solution for businesses, but not for personal accounts on things like Gmail, etc. So, what solutions do you use, or how do you mitigate the defects of the above processes? In particular, how do people with Mac or Linux home computers deal with this?"

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