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Businesses

Facebook Buying Oculus VR For $2 Billion 535

Posted by Soulskill from the what-on-earth dept.
Several readers sent word that Facebook will acquire Oculus VR for $2 billion. Mark Zuckerberg says the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset is the beginning of something big: "This is really a new communication platform. By feeling truly present, you can share unbounded spaces and experiences with the people in your life. Imagine sharing not just moments with your friends online, but entire experiences and adventures." The obvious question is: why Facebook would buy a company focused on VR gaming? The Oculus team says, "But when you consider it more carefully, we're culturally aligned with a focus on innovating and hiring the best and brightest; we believe communication drives new platforms; we want to contribute to a more open, connected world; and we both see virtual reality as the next step. ... It opens doors to new opportunities and partnerships, reduces risk on the manufacturing and work capital side, allows us to publish more made-for-VR content, and lets us focus on what we do best: solving hard engineering challenges and delivering the future of VR." Put more simply: money and connections.
Android

One Billion Android Devices Open To Privilege Escalation 117

Posted by timothy from the that's-beeeeeellion dept.
msm1267 (2804139) writes "The first deep look into the security of the Android patch installation process, specifically its Package Management Service (PMS), has revealed a weakness that puts potentially every Android device at risk for privilege escalation attacks. Researchers from Indiana University and Microsoft published a paper that describes a new set of Android vulnerabilities they call Pileup flaws, and also introduces a new scanner called SecUP that detects malicious apps already on a device lying in wait for elevated privileges. The vulnerability occurs in the way PMS handles updates to the myriad flavors of Android in circulation today. The researchers say PMS improperly vets apps on lower versions of Android that request OS or app privileges that may not exist on the older Android version, but are granted automatically once the system is updated.

The researchers said they found a half-dozen different Pileup flaws within Android's Package Management Service, and confirmed those vulnerabilities are present in all Android Open Source Project versions and more than 3,500 customized versions of Android developed by handset makers and carriers; more than one billion Android devices are likely impacted, they said." Handily enough, the original paper is not paywalled.
Open Source

Neovim: Rebuilding Vim For the 21st Century 248

Posted by timothy from the vigor-next-to-be-upgraded dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Neovim is a major overhaul of the vim editor to provide better scripting, cleaner support for plugins and integration with modern graphical interfaces. Modernising the large and complex codebase of Vim is a formidable task, but the developer has a clear plan, and has already begun work. There's a Bountysource fundraiser running to support the effort. If Vim is your editor of choice, check it out." (The crowd-funding effort has only one more day to go, but has well exceeded already the initial goal of $10,000.)

Comment Re:wrong (Score 1) 241

by SkunkPussy (#46481381) Attached to: Ubuntu's Mir Gets Delayed Again

> People moved in hordes to RDP as a protocol because X sucks so bad on a LAN

That doesn't add up - VNC has been around since forever so people would have moved to that for the same reasons that they might move to RDP. (RDP is a bit better than VNC but that's not really relevant).

My experience of X on a lan is quite good - I use remote gvim all the time. X over the internet isn't so good. I have occasionally ran remote gvim sessions over the internet in the past but forgoing a GUI and running vim over SSH is preferable in that case.
Ubuntu

Ubuntu's Mir Gets Delayed Again 241

Posted by samzenpus from the just-a-little-longer dept.
jones_supa writes "Delays keep piling up for the Mir display server on the Ubuntu desktop. After already being postponed multiple times, Mir might not be enabled by default on the Ubuntu Linux desktop until the 16.04 LTS release — in two years time! This was the estimate by Mark Shuttleworth in a virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit. Using Mir, Mark says, will lead to supporting more hardware, obtaining better performance, and 'do some great things' with the technology. He expects some users will start using Mir on the desktop over the next year. Mir is already packaged as an experimental option, along with an experimental Unity 8 desktop session."

Comment sensational (Score 1) 373

by SkunkPussy (#46268837) Attached to: Report: Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC) Scans Your DNS History

Some guy has decompiled (what he claims to be) a VAC (Valve Anti Cheat) module that seems to be downloaded and executed when you connect to a game server. He has found code that scans the dns cache, hashes the domain name and adds it to an array.

Its not clear what is done with the data - whether it is compared against a blacklist sent by the server, whether it is used as an anti-proxy measure to verify that the VAC module was downloaded from the correct server, or whether this data is indeed sent to Valve. Tellingly, the guy who found the code where Valve scans the dns cache, has not found any code where this data gets sent to Valve.

So until someone actually finds code that sends this data off to Valve, I'm leaving the pitchfork party early.

See also: http://www.reddit.com/r/Global...

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