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Software

EA Shuts Down Visceral Games, Shifting Development On Its Star Wars Game (kotaku.com) 75

Posted by BeauHD from the no-longer-available dept.
Visceral Games, the studio behind games like Battlefield Hardline and Dead Space, is being shut down by EA. The Star Wars game in development at Visceral will be revamped and moved to a different studio. Kotaku reports: "Our Visceral studio has been developing an action-adventure title set in the Star Wars universe," EA's Patrick Soderlund said in a blog post. "In its current form, it was shaping up to be a story-based, linear adventure game. Throughout the development process, we have been testing the game concept with players, listening to the feedback about what and how they want to play, and closely tracking fundamental shifts in the marketplace. It has become clear that to deliver an experience that players will want to come back to and enjoy for a long time to come, we needed to pivot the design." Soderlund added that Visceral will be "ramping down and closing" and that "we're in the midst of shifting as many of the team as possible to other projects and teams at EA." "Lastly," he said, "while we had originally expected this game to launch late in our fiscal year 2019, we're now looking at a new timeframe that we will announce in the future."

Submission + - In a Post-Password Era, Getting Rid of Passwords is the Problem (securityledger.com)

Submitted by chicksdaddy
chicksdaddy writes: Large, tech savvy corporations recognize that the static password is dead. Still, they can't seem to stop using and relying on them. That's the conclusion of a panel discussion at the Akamai EDGE (https://edge.akamai.com) event in Las Vegas last week, where executives at some of the U.S.’s leading corporations, agreed that the much maligned password won’t be abandoned any time soon, even as data breaches and follow-on attacks like automated “credential stuffing” make passwords more susceptible than ever to abuse, The Security Ledger reports. (https://securityledger.com/2017/10/in-post-password-era-passwords-are-the-problem/)

“We reached the end of needing passwords maybe seven years ago, but we still use them,” said Steve Winterfeld, Director of Cybersecurity, at clothing retailer Nordstrom. “They’re still the primary layer of defense.” “It’s hard to kill them,” noted Shalini Mayor, who is a Senior Director at Visa Inc. “The question is what to replace them with.”

This, even though the cost of using passwords is high and getting higher, as sophisticated attacks attempt to compromise legitimate accounts using so-called “credential stuffing” techniques, which use automated password guessing attacks against web-based applications.

Large retailers and other vendors often perceive what Patrick Sullivan, the Director of Security Technology and Strategy at Akamai likened to a “disruption in the force” well before major breaches are disclosed as stolen credentials from those hacks are used to try to break into their own system. However, the sheer number of breaches make spotting the source of a particular leaked credential all but impossible.

Stronger and more reliable alternatives to passwords already exist, but the obstacles to using them are often prohibitive. Shalani said Visa is “looking at” biometric technologies like Apple’s TouchID as a tool for making payments securely. Such technologies – from fingerprint scans to facial and retinal scans – promise more secure and reliable factors than alphanumeric passwords, the executives agreed. But customers often resist the technologies or find them error prone or too difficult to use.
Businesses

Apple is Investing $1 Billion In SoftBank (yahoo.com) 20

Posted by msmash from the $$$ dept.
Apple said Wednesday it plans to invest $1 billion in SoftBank's new technology fund to help finance technologies it could use in the future. From a report: SoftBank has said it is investing at least $25 billion in the fund and has been in talks with Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund for an investment that could go up to $45 billion. "We believe their new fund will speed the development of technologies which may be strategically important to Apple," company spokesman Josh Rosenstock told Reuters. SoftBank has also said that it plans to make future large-scale investments via the tech fund, rather than on its own.

Submission + - Trump Names Two Opponents of Net Neutrality To Oversee FCC Transition Team (gizmodo.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: President-elect Donald Trump has appointed two new advisers to his transition team that will oversee his FCC and telecommunications policy agenda. Both of the new advisers are staunch opponents of net neutrality regulations. Jeff Eisenach, one of the two newly appointed advisers, is an economist who has previously worked as a consultant for Verizon and its trade association. In September 2014, Eisenach testified before a Senate Judiciary Committee and said, “Net neutrality would not improve consumer welfare or protect the public interest.” He has also worked for the conservative think-tank American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and in a blog post wrote, “Net neutrality is crony capitalism pure and simple.” Mark Jamison, the other newly appointed adviser, also has a long history of battling against net neutrality oversight. Jamison formerly worked on Sprint’s lobbying team and now leads the University of Florida’s Public Utility Research Center. Both Eisenach and Jamison are considered leading adversaries of net neutrality who worked hard to prevent the rules from being passed last year. For the uninitiated, the rules passed last year prevent companies internet providers from discriminating against any online content or services. For example, without net neutrality rules, internet providers like Comcast and Verizon could charge internet subscribers more for using sites like Netflix. The FCC’s net neutrality rules would protect consumers from paying exorbitant fees for internet use.

Submission + - U.S. sets plan to build two exascale supercomputers (computerworld.com)

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: The U.S believes it will be ready to seek vendor proposals to build two exascale supercomputers — costing roughly $200 to $300 million each — by 2019. The two systems will be built at the same time and be ready for use by 2023, although it's possible one of the systems could be ready a year earlier, according to U.S. Department of Energy officials. The U.S. will award the exascale contracts to vendors with two different architectures. But the scientists and vendors developing exascale systems do not yet know whether President-Elect Donald Trump's administration will change directions. The incoming administration is a wild card. Supercomputing wasn't a topic during the campaign, and Trump's dismissal of climate change as a hoax, in particular, has researchers nervous that science funding may suffer. At the annual supercomputing conference SC16 last week in Salt Lake City, a panel of government scientists outlined the exascale strategy developed by President Barack Obama's administration. When the session was opened to questions, the first two were about Trump. One attendee quipped that "pointed-head geeks are not going to be well appreciated."

Submission + - Panasonic Invests $60 Million In World's First Laundry-Folding Robot (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Panasonic has invested tens of millions of dollars in a robot that can reduce the time it takes to wash clothes by sorting clean items and folding them into neat piles. The electronics giant will pour $60 million into the startup behind the folding robot called Laundroid, which was first unveiled in October last year. The domestic robot has been a decade in the making and is expected to finally be available to buy next year. Created by Japanese company Seven Dreamers, the Laundroid can fold a shirt in ten minutes and sort clothing into types.
Seven Dreamers is yet to say how much the robot, which is around the same size as a fridge-freezer, will cost, but Panasonic is reportedly funding just 10pc of the project. Consumers place clothes in a drawer at the bottom of the Laundroid, which it then identifies, sorts and folds using a combination of image recognition software, advanced robotics and machine learning. It can fold a range of clothing items, including shirts, skirts, shorts and trousers, according to Seven Dreamers. The company plans to release the Laundroid in March 2017, and will unveil more details at the Consumer Electronics Show in January.

Submission + - All New 'Starship Troopers' Reboot in the Works 1

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Hollywood Reporter reports that Columbia Pictures is rebooting Starship Troopers, the 1997 sci-fi film directed by Paul Verhoeven. The studio is not remaking the film but is said to be going back to the original Heinlein novel for an all-new take and no personnel from the 1997 film are involved. Verhoeven’s film, which starred Casper van Dien and Denise Richards, received critical acclaim for its surprising satire but was a disappointment at the box office, making just $121m worldwide from a $105m budget. The original movie, considered a mixed success at the time of its release went on to achieve a cult following and during the DVD boom of the 2000s, it became a mini-franchise for the studio, which produced three additional direct-to-DVD movies. The newly announced reboot is said to be more faithful to Robert A. Heinlein's original book, but is that a good idea? "Starship Troopers has been decried as promoting fascism and being racist in its creation of a society where democracy has been severely restricted and warfare against the alien "bugs" comes with its own coded terminology that hews too closely to real-world racism for many," says Graeme McMillan. "The question then becomes: in updating Starship Troopers to make it more acceptable to today's audience, can it still manage to remain faithful enough to Heinlein's original to please the existing fan base?"

Submission + - Mythbuntu Linux Distribution Has Been Discontinued

Submitted by prisoninmate
prisoninmate writes: The team behind the Mythbuntu GNU/Linux distribution sadly announced this morning that the project has been discontinued, effective immediately, and no new releases will be made. Mythbuntu was an operating system based on the widely-used Ubuntu Linux distro and built around the MythTV free and open source digital video recorder (DVR) project. The first release of the OS was back when Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) was announced, and the last one was Mythbuntu 16.04.1 LTS (Xenial Xerus). From this point, no new releases of the Mythbuntu Linux operating system will be created, which means that there will be no new ISO images anymore. Also, the mythbuntu-desktop and Mythbuntu-Control-Centre packages are now discontinued and won't be available from the Ubuntu repositories anymore. However, users will still be able to install the MythTV software and configure it as they see fit. The Mythbuntu team recommends users who want to use "Mythbuntu" to install the latest release of the Xubuntu Linux operating system and then add the Mythbuntu PPA (Personal Package Archive), which will continue to provide the latest MythTV releases and other related packages.
Apple

Submission + - Real reason Apple Is suing Samsung (businessinsider.com) 1

Submitted by doperative
doperative writes: A lawsuit from a big company, even if doomed, still takes a lot of time, energy and money to fight off .. And now OEMs have to factor that cost into the decision to choose Android. And all of a sudden, Android has a price.
Movies

Submission + - Stop being duped by the 3D scam (techrepublic.com)

Submitted by
Phoghat
Phoghat writes: "The entertainment and electronics industries keep trying to push 3D on consumers, even though a lot of smart people have caught on to the fact that it is a scam and not innovation as the industry would like you to believe."

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