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Atari Online News, Etc. Volume 17 Issue 24
Volume 17, Issue 24 Atari Online News, Etc. July 3, 2015
Published and Copyright (c) 1999 - 2015
All Rights Reserved
Atari Online News, Etc.
A-ONE Online Magazine
Dana P. Jacobson, Publisher/Managing Editor
Joseph Mirando, Managing Editor
Rob Mahlert, Associate Editor
Atari Online News, Etc. Staff
Dana P. Jacobson -- Editor
Joe Mirando -- "People Are Talking"
Michael Burkley -- "Unabashed Atariophile"
Albert Dayes -- "CC: Classic Chips"
Rob Mahlert -- Web site
Thomas J. Andrews -- "Keeper of the Flame"
With Contributions by:
Fred Horvat
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=~=~=~=
A-ONE #1724 07/03/15
~ ISPs Slowing Traffic! ~ People Are Talking! ~ Remembering Nuon!
~ Who Gets Free Win 10? ~ Last of Landfill Games ~ Internet Is Too Big!
~ Dark Web Booby Traps! ~ NetBSD/Atari 7.0_RC1 ~ Twins Plead Guilty!
~ PS4 Dominating Europe! ~ Planet Coaster Readies ~ Xbox Gamescom!
-* OPM Chief Rebuffs Lawmakers! *-
-* US, Brit Spies Targeted AV Companies *-
-* China Denounces Hacking Accusation, Absurd *-
=~=~=~=
->From the Editor's Keyboard "Saying it like it is!"
""""""""""""""""""""""""""
Happy Independence Day, America! Yes, the 4th of July holiday weekend
is upon us already! While we remember this date for independence, most
of us will be celebrating with cookouts and fireworks. One of my dogs
will likely be hunkered down in the closet soon after dusk - he hates the
sound of fireworks!
For us personally, we're going to go the seafood route on Saturday: lobster,
steamers and shrimp. However, I'll be sure to have a nice steak ready for
the grill on Sunday! And yes, the beer is chilling in the fridge!
Oh, before I forget, apologies for yet another "missed" issue last week.
There just wasn't enough material to put together a full issue, so I
opted to hold off and make sure we had plenty for the next issue. You
won't be disappointed, other than having one less issue to pore over.
Enjoy the 4th, and be safe!
Until next time...
=~=~=~=
NetBSD/Atari 7.0_RC1 Available
Hi,
It looks the official announcement is not yet, but
NetBSD 7.0_RC1 binaries are already available on ftp:
ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-7.0_RC1/atari/
If someone can try it on the real machine, it would be great :-)
(I have too many other machines to be tested
which have less users than atari..)
Posting dmesg to NYC*BUG dmesgd page is also interesting:
http://dmesgd.nycbug.org/index.cgi
---
Izumi Tsutsui
=~=~=~=
->In This Week's Gaming Section - Xbox Gamescom Briefing Next Month!
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" PS4 Is Dominating Europe!
Remembering Nuon!
And much more!
=~=~=~=
->A-ONE's Game Console Industry News - The Latest Gaming News!
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
Xbox Gamescom Briefing Includes Exclusives Missing from E3
With E3 now over, Microsoft is looking ahead to the summer's next big
industry event, Gamescom, which is open to the public and runs from
August 5-9 in Cologne, Germany.
The company has officially announced plans for the show, confirming that
its briefing will take place on August 4 at 7 a.m. PDT / 10 a.m. EDT /
4 p.m. CET.
Microsoft says it will use the briefing to highlight the "greatest games
lineup in Xbox history," including Xbox One exclusives like Scalebound,
Quantum Break, and Crackdown.
These games were nowhere to be seen at E3 earlier this month.
For its part, Microsoft said previously that it was purposefully holding
back some games and announcements from its E3 showing to use for Gamescom.
Microsoft has major plans for the event, as the company will have as much
new content to show there as they did at E3.
Microsoft's Gamescom briefing will be streamed live. GameSpot will have
all the news for you as it's announced.
If you're attending the show itself--which is open to the public--you can
visit the Xbox booth to play upcoming Xbox games like Halo 5: Guardians,
Forza Motorsport 6, and Rise of the Tomb Raider. Microsoft is also
holding an "Xbox FanFest" this year at Gamescom, with more details about
this promotion scheduled to be announced later.
Sony is not holding a Gamescom briefing this year, instead choosing to
make announcements at Paris Games Week in October.
Sony: PS4 Is Dominating Europe, No Plans for Price Cut
The PlayStation 4 is far and away the leading current-generation console
in Europe, Sony Europe president Jim Ryan has revealed in a new interview.
Speaking with VG247, Ryan claimed the PS4 is currently enjoying nothing
less than 70 percent marketshare in every European country.
"We have a very significant market leadership," the executive explained.
"We have market leadership in every country in Europe, and have very
significant market leadership in continental Europe. Extremely
significant. I don't think marketshare's any less than 70 percent, and
frequently greater than 90 percent in continental Europe."
Also in the interview, Ryan explained that the PS4 is still seeing "very
considerable" momentum at its current price point. As such, he said Sony
has no immediate plans to cut the price of the console.
"We're happy with the price and we're happy with the value proposition,"
Ryan said. "We'll leave it where it is for now."
Globally, the PS4 has sold more than 22.3 million units as of March 31.
Planet Coaster Is Getting Ready for A Big Ride
Frontier Developments announced Planet Coaster at E3 last week. Apart
from a trailer screened at the PC Gaming Show, very little detail about
the game was announced.
Polygon caught up with David Braben at E3 to talk about the new game,
which he described as an attempt to revive a "long-dead genre."
"We're revisiting every aspect of that genre from scratch and doing it
properly," he said. "We've got so many fans of these coaster park
simulation games. We know what works very well and what doesn't."
Frontier developed RollerCoaster Tycoon 3, released back in 2004 by Atari.
Braben said that game has sold "more than 10 million copies," partly
because it was built to anticipate advances in PC gaming technology.
"When we did RollerCoaster Tycoon 3, all those years ago, we worked really
hard to make it the best game. It stood out from others at the time. We
were even criticized for some of the things we did on the graphics. We
pushed those out. We supported pixel shaders. We supported reflective
water.
"For that reason, the game continued to sell well. It hit number one on
the charts nearly 10 years after it was released. It's still the de facto
'coaster game, all those years later, despite a lot of people trying to
do them."
The new game is being built on the company's Cobra engine, which was used
on RollerCoaster Tycoon 3. "We can do so much more now and we can do it
so much better," said Braben. "We've learned a lot since then. Cobra now
is so much more advanced than it was when shipped Tycoon 3 in 2004."
Given Braben's history of embracing technology and the fact that
Frontier's space-trading game Elite: Dangerous is on Oculus Rift, it
seems likely that Planet Coaster will feature VR rollercoaster rides,
though Frontier won't talk details yet.
"You're building a theme park," said Braben. "You're keeping people happy.
When you're setting all the rules of that, we'll make it work in a way
that is as intuitive as possible. It will feel like something new,
something fresh. We're looking at how we can add all these features and
make them adorable, how to make them lovely. Hopefully you'll see from
the trailer for Planet Coaster that there's a lot love there. There's a
lot of beauty, a lot of emotion."
Planet Coaster is coming out for PC in 2016.
=~=~=~=
->A-ONE Gaming Online - Online Users Growl & Purr!
"""""""""""""""""""
Last of Atari Games To Go Up for Auction on eBay
The last batch of Atari game cartridges dug up in an Alamogordo landfill
will be going up for auction.
The Alamogordo Daily News reports that 150 remaining games and they will
be put on eBay in 30-40 increments until the last one is sold.
The games up for bid include Warlords, Asteroids and Super Breakout.
Joe Lewandowski, a consultant for the film companies that documented the
dig, says some E.T. The Extra Terrestrial cartridges and other titles
will be kept off until the very end.
More than 700 games have been sold around the U.S. and abroad, bringing in
thousands of dollars to Alamogordo.
One of the E.T. game cartridges was added to the Smithsonians video
game history collection.
Remembering Nuon, The Gaming Chip That Nearly Changed The World But Didnt
Behold, a chip that almost changed everything.
In the Wild West of Silicon Valley startups of the late 1990s, one little
company looked like it might accomplish something incredible. VM Labs had
some of the best engineering talent in the world, an explosive mix of
bright young minds with burning ambition and experienced old hands who
once held key positions in companies such as Atari, Sony, and Sega. Their
business revolved around a little chunk of silicon codenamed "Project X.
Later, they officially named their dream chip the Nuon. VM Labs believed
it might change the world.
The Nuon was so much more than a chipit was a complete multimedia
platform with an operating system and a Web browser. It would turn any
DVD player in the world into a game console. And at a time when DVD
looked like it would soon be everywhere, the Nuon could be right there
with it.
VM Labs' goal for the Nuon was huge but straightforward: total market
penetration. The company wanted a Nuon chip inside every DVD player. For
a time, it actually seemed attainable.
Yet Nuon failed spectacularly. After quietly gathering hype for years at
consumer electronics shows and in magazines such as Wired and Next
Generation, the Nuon launched more than a year behind schedule in the
middle of 2000the same year that Sony's much-hyped DVD-compatible
PlayStation 2 game console debuted. The Nuon was included in only two of
the dozens of DVD player models released that year.
Nuon reviews were positive, but a raft of factorspoor timing and
diminishing finances chief among themcombined to sideline the platform,
sending its creator into bankruptcy before it could gather much steam. The
chip that nearly changed the world didn't, and the company that made it
disappeared. But Nuon came so very close to transforming home
entertainment.
Cast your mind back to November 1994. Games were mostly sold on cartridges,
while movies came on VHS tapes. Somewhere in America, a Boyz II Men slow
jam played on the radio as the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG)
announced what would become the de facto standard in digital video
compression: MPEG-2. MPEG-2 hardly sparked fireworks, but, in the years
that followed, it quietly achieved what its predecessor MPEG-1 could
notmaking analog video obsolete and finally killing off VHS. MPEG-2 did
this in large part because of a delivery technology under development at
the same time: DVD.
VM Labs founder Richard Miller, a British ex-pat, was working at Atari
Corporation when he heard the news about MPEG-2. Miller had been heavily
involved in the creation of Atari's 64-bit Jaguar game console, which was
already petering out after just a year on the market. "We were very proud
of it," he said in a recent interview. "But it did not succeed because of
the lack of content and a chicken and egg issue of getting mainstream
developers to support it and having to discount the hardware and all
these kinds of things."
"I was thinking there must be a better way," he continued. "I saw DVD
happening and thought DVD could be a really good vehicle for launching a
new game console."
Miller quit Atari and sold his house, and he then started VM Labs in a
spare bedroom at the beginning of 1995. It was his second company. His
first built the world's first parallel-processing graphics workstation,
which was licensed to Atari but failed commercially. Miller had also,
earlier in his career, been instrumental in developing an early, A4-sized
laptop computer called the Z88.
Miller knew how to design systems and build platforms. He realized that it
wouldn't cost much to install a smarter, more powerful processor in place
of a DVD player's basic video decoder. The idea was a processor that could
handle games, perhaps things beyond games. "I kind of hoped that it would
be a real computing platform, much as the Atari ST had been a platform
that was used for games as well," Miller said.
Five people invested $200,000 in the company (the first of whom was
Miller's landlord), which was enough for Miller to rent office space and
hire a few people in April 1995. He also brought in lawyer Nicholas
Lefevre, whose biggest claim to fame is being the first to file an
antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft (back in 1983). Lefevre had briefly
worked with Miller at Atari before leaving to form his own private
practice.
Lefevre helped round out the business plan. VM Labs would leverage the
analog to digital shift by building a platform around its chip and
establishing a two-tiered licensing model. The chip would be licensed to
manufacturers, while the software technology would be licensed to content
creators and publishers. First the team needed to build everythingchip
and toolsfrom scratch.
Miller used his business plan to chase down more funding. "Atari had built
relationships at Motorola," Miller said. "So I got those guys in very
early on and they jumped in with both feet and said, 'Hey, we'll make your
chips for you.'"
The next step was to find an electronics company that would put the chips
in their products. Miller's first thought was of DVD's principal creators,
Toshiba engineers Hisashi Yamada and Koji Hase. "I actually just picked
up the phone, called Toshiba in Tokyo, and asked for those guys by name,"
Miller said. "I [eventually] got through to someone who worked directly
for these two guys, and we had a couple more calls. He said, 'Why don't
you come out to Japan?'"
Miller flew over to Tokyo and built a friendship with the engineers.
Still, even with this promising start, he needed help. He had limited
business experience and knew little of Japanese culture. Luckily, one of
his engineers knew somebody who dida guy called Bharath Ram, who had
just moved on from a successful business development stint in the
encryption market with RSA Security.
"Bharath came in and really cultivated that relationship [with Toshiba]
because he speaks fluent Japanese," said Miller. "You wouldn't be able to
tell he wasn't Japanese."
Ram bridged the divide between American and Japanese business cultures,
which was important because Nuon's success depended on support from the
"tier one" Japanese electronics companiesprincipally, Matsushita (now
known globally as Panasonic), Toshiba, and Sony.
Early meetings with Toshiba went well. The multi-core Nuon processor that
VM Labs was developing packed a big punch in terms of graphics and
performance, and the Toshiba representatives were impressed. As early as
1996, the in-development chip could already demonstrate basic ray tracing,
and it had a Mandelbrot set (a complex kind of fractal) browser that could
produce several frames per second in real time. "Nothing else would do
that at the time," former VM Labs Senior Software Engineer Ken Rose said.
Ahead of its time in architecture as well as concept, Nuon featured four
fully programmable, very long instruction word (VLIW) processor cores or
"Media Processor Elements"running at 108 MHz each. It was a parallel
processor not unlike the PlayStation 3 that came several years later.
Nuon's design suited its function. The MPEs were fast at exactly the kinds
of calculations needed for interactive video and games, and they could
also be generalized to other media-rich applications such as Web browsing,
interactive audio, and the sorts of reference and educational multimedia
that was all the rage in the 1990s. Being a programmable processor, Nuon
could gain support for new media codecs from a simple firmware update. And
being a specialized VLIW solution, Nuon hardware engineer John Mathieson
explained, the chip could be dramatically more efficient than software
solutions built with the general purpose processors found in personal
computers.
It took almost a year of alcohol- and sushi-filled meetings for VM Labs and
Toshiba to hammer out an agreement, with Miller flying tirelessly back and
forth to work with both his engineers and Toshiba management.
"Now, when we're doing this, here is where the kabuki starts," recalls Ram.
DVD players in the US needed to be in Circuit City or they would struggle
to sell in significant volumes. But Circuit City had just partnered with
Thomson on the Digital Video Express format, known as DIVX for short (this
is not to be confused with the completely different, unrelated video
codec, DivX, which came later and is still in use). DIVX was basically DVD
with some tweaks that allowed discs to have time limitations; you had to
pay an additional fee to get another two days of viewing or to get an
unlimited number of viewings.
Circuit City still stocked DVD players, but it tried to push customers to
DIVX. "At that point Thomson had put a gun at our head and said, 'Hey,
would you guys support DIVX?'" Ram said. "Here was a startup with barely
30 people having to make a momentous decisionwhich way do you want to
go? There was no way in hell our company would have been able to support
two competing formats, not with the kind of funding and resourcing that
we were at."
VM Labs chose to stick it out with Toshiba. By the end of 1999, DIVX was
deadkilled in part because its performance was inferior to DVD and in
part because Hollywood was weary of a Betamax versus VHS-style war and
chose a side early.
The kabuki didn't end there. Matsushita remained reluctant to adopt the
VM Labs chip, so Sony wouldn't budge. And without Thomson US, which pulled
out after the DIVX snub, Matsushita wouldn't need to worry about being the
odd duck out in Circuit City. The company could continue to play hardball.
"We were trying to convince these guys that we're not a chip company,"
Ram said. "We're really a platform. What we're going to do is turn your
DVD machine into something that's far more strategic. We were trying to
sell a vision that the Japanese did not appreciate or share."
They got the vision later, when Blu-ray and HD DVD came around in the
mid-2000s. "But it was after I think they read the tea leaves in the
market," Ram said. "Unfortunately this was in 1998, when the DVD format
had just come out. The fact that we were able to stretch our imagination
and say this is where the markets will go at some point in the future was
something that their incremental minds could not appreciate. Not every
company has a Steve Jobs at its helm who's able to sway its audience.
Here was a guya self-deprecating Brit engineertrying to convince the
hardened Japanese businessmen that they ought to place their bets on this
product."
The Japanese manufacturers were not comfortable with firmware updates.
"They didn't want the computer experience to be transferred to consumer
electronics," Ram said. And that extended not just to updates but also to
error handling"If something goes wrong there's got to be a way to flash
the firmware quickly and restore it to the last best-known state" and
startup times. Toshiba expected things to just work.
"I think for the Japanese it was really kind of welcome to the new world,"
Ram said. "Software changes the way you need to think, so that was the
other big revelation for them. And I was right there sitting between these
two cultures.
"You would have these conversations where the Japanese guy would be
basically swearing at us and I'd have to figure out a way to translate
that to my team. But then when they switch to English they would say it in
a very polite way. They'd say, 'Please, Mr. Miller, would you please
ensure that you're doing ABC?' It would be with a please and a very polite
English expression. Then they'd turn to me in Japanese and say, 'Isn't
this guy an idiot for not having done this to the platform? Is this what
you'd expect in Japan? If I had a supplier I'd be basically throwing him
down the next biggest bridge of Shinjuku [a busy business hub area in
Tokyo].'"
Ram had better luck with Samsung. The Korean electronics giant bought in
aggressively, demanding that it be first to market with a Nuon-enhanced DVD
player. "One of the concerns that Toshiba had that they kept hammering on
me," Ram said, "was, 'Look, if you guys launch with Samsung, you're going
to spoil the image on this platform because these guys are not known for
the quality or vision that we are planning to deliver on it.'"
Meanwhile, Sony made a strategic shift. "Ken Kuturagi [PlayStation's chief
architect] looked at what Toshiba was going to do," Ram said. "He looked
at what Samsung had announced. And I think there was a big fear within
Sony that Nuon would basically pull the rug out from under Sony."
Kuturagi decreed that the PlayStation 2 would have DVD playback
functionality. Sony's home entertainment division was furious and fought
to stop the move for fear that it could cannibalize sales of Sony-branded
DVD players, but they were powerless to stop Kuturagi and his growing
computer entertainment division.
"There was also a bit of panic within the Toshiba camp because they wanted
to make sure that the launch Toshiba [Nuon] DVD player would have at least
a few titles, both game as well as movie titles," Ram said. "Here's a very
classic Japanese responsethis is a culture where you don't want to take
your competitor head on. It's like basically let's all figure out a way to
survive in the marketplace." Sony could have its hardcore games,
essentially, and Nuonat least from Toshiba's perspectivecould push more
for a casual audience.
The original Nuon vision didn't extend to interactive movie features such
as zooming and panning or highlighting an object in a scene to trigger
bonus content. But these sorts of features nevertheless became key to the
platform strategy. To help woo Hollywood studios, Miller hired Sony
Pictures veteran Paul Culberg and another of his former Atari
colleagues James Grunke in 1999.
"They had a tough time," Miller said. VM Labs was small, maybe 50 people
by then, and almost completely unknown. Culberg had the contacts and pull
to get meetings and form relationships between VM Labs and the big
studios. But while Hollywood liked the technology, it was hesitant to
produce Nuon content. "The studios were pretty clear," Ram said. "'We want
more manufacturers. We want to see more units. We need to see a lot more
in the retail [chains].'"
Miller recalled the Hollywood outreach efforts as an expensive mistake on
his part.
"I think in hindsight the interactive movie features were weak," he said.
"I mean, from a consumer perspective I wouldn't buy a player for that."
Nuon's strength lay elsewhere, and as exciting as the interactive movies
tech was to everyone at the company, Miller now believes that the
initiative stretched his company too thin and strained finances.
Good decision or not, VM Labs did manage to get multiple studios on board.
CBS released a Nuon-enhanced edition of comedy flick Bedazzled, MGM put
out its sci-fi oddity The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai, and 20th Century
Fox sold Dr. Dolittle 2 and Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes remake in
Nuon special editions.
But other efforts to build partnerships for entertainment software
faltered. Atari veteran Bill Rehbock spearheaded efforts to broker
agreements with big-name game companies. Like Hollywood, the big software
publishers held back from significant commitments. VM Labs senior account
manager for third-party development and director of licensing Scott
Hunter recalls that publishers were reluctant "to hook their horse to
'potential.'" A few ports were announced for games such as Myst and
Madden NFL, but no big hitters made it to market.
"It was really the smaller developers who jumped on board early and
started playing with the development system," Hunter said. The caveats
with these smaller developers were two-fold: VM Labs would have to
self-publish the games, which incurred yet more expense for the startup,
and the titles had little name recognition to sell the system to gamers.
Nuon's biggest game became Jeff Minter's Tempest 3000, which followed up
Minter's cult hit Jaguar (and later PC, Saturn, and PlayStation) remake of
1981 arcade classic Tempest with even more insane real-time graphics
effects.
Tony Takoushi, a former games journalist and development/publishing
veteran (he worked at Sega from 1988 to '94), was itching to do something
totally new and original. Minter, a friend, suggested he pitch the idea
to VM Labs, which greenlit development on Takoushi's Freefall 3050 AD. It
was a strange and disorienting action game about a cop in a world where
people lived in the sky.
Takoushi recalls that development was something of a nightmare because his
team started making Freefall before VM Labs finished writing the software
tools. "We had to switch the 'lead' CPU in the last few weeks from one of
the four [MPE] processors to processor 'zero,'" he said. "This wasn't too
bad for us... however, for Jeff's Tempest it was massive change as he
wrote the game in assembly language and it entailed what I believe was a
massive rework."
More concerning for game developers was that as launch day neared,
marketing plans disappeared. Without big marketing or hype behind them,
Takoushi and other Nuon developers struggled to get attention from the
press (though those who did try Freefall praised its originality). Sales
were distinctly lowfewer than 10,000 units for Freefall.
Kevin Manne, creator of the Nuon-Dome website, remembers this time well.
He was one of the Nuon's super fans, a Jaguar diehard who followed Miller
and company from Atari and eagerly bought a Nuon for Tempest and Merlin
Racing (a sequel to a Diddy Kong Racing-like Jaguar game called Atari
Karts). "Over time it became that if you wanted to buy a Nuon game you
had to go digging through the DVDs to try and find it," he said. "It just
got shoved in there because some employee didn't realize that it was a
video game and not a regular DVD."
From a gamer's perspective, Nuon was a tough sell. Its games lineup
numbered just eight titles a year after launch. As former VM Labs engineer
Scott Cartier pointed out, "It also didn't help that our graphics
capabilities were comparable with PS1 and N64 when the console market had
moved on to Dreamcast."
Mass production took a while to get rolling. Samsung's first Nuon-enhanced
DVD player started trickling out around the end of May 2000, soon followed
by Toshiba's model and a full retail release at a price of around $300 to
$350. Set-top boxes with Nuon inside started to proliferate more widely at
the same time.
Again, Nuon was well received, though it was hardly the revelation it
should have been. The hype had moved to other things, the launch titles
were running late, and VM Labs was almost out of money.
"The launch experience was like riding a Mach 5 aircraft with all kinds of
twists and rolls," said Ram. "And imagine you're not the guy piloting the
plane; you're sitting in the back with your helmet on and wondering if
you're going to make it through."
"By 2001, I was spending literally 100 percent of my time on funding,"
said Miller. The company needed cash to stay afloat until the Nuon
revenues started to come in, which would take a while because of the
licensing model used.
VM Labs was "close" to profitability. Toshiba and Samsung had entered mass
production and around a dozen software titles were out. A few more months
and the company might have been able to turn a corner. But close wasn't
good enough. "We were just out of cash," Miller said. "We couldn't pay
people and it wasn't right to have people in the building." Many VM Labs
employees continued showing up to work, still believing in the vision.
"We had to kind of push people away because nobody wanted to accept it,"
Miller said.
There was no lifeline because the financial markets had flatlined. The
dot-com bust was compounded by the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
VM Labs had been trying to close a new funding round and was in talks to
be acquired when the tragic incident happened. "After 9/11, the investors
literally didn't pick up the phone," Miller said.
To save the company from being picked apart by "vultures," Lefevre soon
resigned and got together the money and paperwork to put VM Labs into
Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Some of the technology was sold to Pixelworks,
where Miller now works, while the rest went to Genesis Microchip. The 50
or so employees that VM Labs still had followed to Genesis.
Genesis Microchip briefly kept the Nuon rolling along as before. Efforts
to get emerging low-cost Chinese manufacturers on board failed, and a
deal fell through with Disney in 2003 to have Nuon incorporated into a
DVD player for tween and teen audiences. Genesis then cut its losses and
dropped the platform part of Nuon.
Nuon stands today as one of the greatest might-have-been computing and
entertainment platforms. The Nuon team members interviewed for this story
all pointed to fundingthey really needed $60 million, not $30 million
over the life of VM Labsand launch delays as the biggest culprits in
Nuon's failure. The basic business model works, but it needs big money
or positive cashflow to get rolling.
"It took a company like Sony to do it with the PlayStation," Miller said.
"You look at how much money went into the PlayStation, numbers bandied
around of a billion dollars that they were in the red before they started
to get positive."
But VM Labs had more going against it than the size of its bankroll. "The
reviews saying someday all DVD players will rock this hard were all well
and good," said Lefevre. "But when consumers were walking into Best Buy
and all they saw was a wall of DVD players and pricesnobody willing or
able to demonstrate the featuresthe price point was not competitive."
More trouble was just around the corner too, as prices dropped rapidly on
DVD players when the Chinese manufacturers took over the market from
around 2003 onward.
An earlier release (say, late 1998) would have put Nuon in a much stronger
position, clear of more powerful game consoles such as the Dreamcast and
PlayStation 2 and well positioned to ride the DVD and video on demand
waves. "Digital video was I think an ideal Trojan Horse," said Lefevre.
"Ours was one of the great potential times to get something that would be
really pervasive in homes."
Like many technologies that fail, Nuon was a victim of its time. Hunter
succinctly describes what was perhaps its biggest problem, saying, "At
that time, a game machine was a game machine and a DVD player was a DVD
player." Nuon's vision was somehow too big, too grand for its era in home
entertainment.
Now, as Mathieson points out, "There are too many entrenched players with
too much to lose by letting any one entity get too powerful." But for a
brief moment, a few years around the turn of the millennium, a company
that for most of its life had fewer than 30 people very nearly changed
the world with a simple idea and a clever bit of technology.
=~=~=~=
A-ONE's Headline News
The Latest in Computer Technology News
Compiled by: Dana P. Jacobson
OPM Chief Rebuffs Lawmakers on Scope of Cyber Breach
The director of the Office of Personnel Management refused on Wednesday to
estimate how many millions of Americans were affected by recent attacks on
her agency's computers and rejected as premature reports 18 million were
compromised.
Under blistering attack from lawmakers exasperated by unanswered questions
about the massive cybersecurity breach, OPM Director Katherine Archuleta
conceded the number of people whose data was hacked could increase from
initial reports.
OPM said this month it was victim of a cyber attack involving personnel
data on 4.2 million current and former federal employees. Another attack
targeted information of millions more Americans who applied for security
clearances. Some media reports said 18 million were affected in that
attack.
"It is my understanding that the 18 million refers to a preliminary,
unverified and approximate number of unique Social Security numbers in the
background investigations data," Archuleta said at a House of
Representatives hearing.
"It is a number that I am not comfortable with at this time."
In her second appearance in as many weeks before the Oversight and
Government Reform Committee, Archuleta defended her agency's response to
the intrusions. The hearing, which lasted four hours, was the second of
at least three this week on the OPM breaches.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell criticized her Tuesday testimony as
"world-class buck-passing" and said there was a "management problem" at
the agency.
Lawmakers have criticized the OPM response to questions about the hacking
sluggish and incomplete. Some called on the director, who has been in her
job less than two years, to resign or at least take the blame for the
sweeping breaches, which U.S. authorities suspect are the work of Chinese
hackers.
U.S. Representative Jason Chaffetz, the Republican committee chairman,
exasperated by Archuleta's refusal to provide numbers, asked whether all
32 million current and former federal workers in its database could have
been compromised.
But Archuleta steadfastly refused to give an estimate.
"As much as I want to have all the answers today, I do not want to be in
a position of providing you and the affected individuals with potentially
inaccurate data," she said.
Archuleta said the second breach is still being investigated and that the
number of people affected by that data intrusion "may well increase from
these initial reports."
Lawmakers also criticized agency contractors, whose practices have been
cited as a factor in the successful hacks.
Representative Elijah Cummings, the senior Democrat on the panel, singled
out contractor KeyPoint Government Solutions for being the weak link that
allowed hackers into the OPM system. Lawmakers said they were frustrated
with a lack of information from that company's chief executive, Eric
Hess.
"I find myself utterly dissatisfied with the explanations we've heard
today," said panel Democrat Matt Cartwright.
China Denounces US Hacking Accusation As 'Absurd'
Beijing on Friday denounced as "absurd logic" accusations by the head of
US intelligence that China was the main suspect in a massive hack of
government data files in Washington.
James Clapper, US director of national intelligence, said China was "the
leading suspect" behind the breach affecting personal data of millions of
US government employees, which was revealed earlier this month.
Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang responded: "We have noticed
that the US is still investigating, but feels that China is responsible.
This is absurd logic.
"We understand this as showing the US has adopted the presumption of guilt
rather than the presumption of innocence," he added at a regular briefing.
The US has in recent years blamed several hacks on Beijing, including some
it says were carried out by members of the Chinese military.
Cybersecurity specialists said the breach of data on at least four million
current and former federal employees appeared to be part of an effort to
build a database for espionage.
Soon after the breach was made public, US officials told media they
believed China was involved. Beijing rebuffed the claims as
"unscientific".
The US Office of Personnel Management said that employees, retirees,
contractors and job applicants may have had their personal information
compromised in the breach.
Some reports have said the number affected may be 14 million or higher,
after officials said the total was still being determined.
Facing an outcry from employees and lawmakers, the US administration has
announced new steps to boost the security of its online records, including
in some parts that still use decades-old technology.
US and British Spies Targeted Antivirus Companies
When the Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab disclosed recently that it
had been hacked, it noted that the attackers, believed to be from Israel,
had been in its network since sometime last year.
The company also said the attackers seemed intent on studying its
antivirus software to find ways to subvert the software on customer
machines and avoid detection.
Now newly published documents released by Edward Snowden show that the NSA
and its British counterpart, GCHQ, were years ahead of Israel and had
engaged in a systematic campaign to target not only Kaspersky software but
the software of other antivirus and security firms as far back as 2008.
The documents, published today by The Intercept, dont describe actual
computer breaches against the security firms, but instead depict a
systematic campaign to reverse-engineer their software in order to
uncover vulnerabilities that could help the spy agencies subvert it. The
British spy agency regarded the Kaspersky software in particular as a
hindrance to its hacking operations and sought a way to neutralize it.
Personal security products such as the Russian anti-virus software
Kaspersky continue to pose a challenge to GCHQs CNE [Computer Network
Exploitation] capability, reads one of the documents, and SRE [software
reverse-engineering] is essential in order to be able to exploit such
software and to prevent detection of our activities.
An NSA slide describing Project CAMBERDADA lists at least 23 antivirus
and security firms that were in that spy agencys sights. They include the
Finnish antivirus firm F-Secure, the Slovakian firm Eset, Avast software
from the Czech Republic. and Bit-Defender from Romania. Notably missing
from the list are the American anti-virus firms Symantec and McAfee as
well as the UK-based firm Sophos.
But antivirus wasnt the only target of the two spy agencies. They also
targeted their reverse-engineering skills against CheckPoint, an Israeli
maker of firewall software, as well as commercial encryption programs
and software underpinning the online bulletin boards of numerous
companies. GCHQ, for example, reverse-engineered both the CrypticDisk
program made by Exlade and the eDataSecurity system from Acer. The spy
agency also targeted web forum systems like vBulletin and Invision Power
Boardused by Sony Pictures, Electronic Arts, NBC Universal and othersas
well as CPanel, a software used by GoDaddy for configuring its servers,
and PostfixAdmin, for managing the Postfix email server software But
thats not all. GCHQ reverse-engineerred Cisco routers, too, which
allowed the agencys spies to access almost any user of the internet
inside Pakistan and to re-route selective traffic straight into the
mouth of GCHQs collection systems.
To obtain legal cover for all this activity, the GCHQ sought and obtained
warrants granting permission to reverse-engineer the software. The
warrants, issued by the UK Foreign Secretary under the UKs Intelligence
Services Act 1994 Section 5, gave the spy agency permission to modify
commercially available software to enable intercept, decryption and
other related tasks. One of the warrants, used to reverse-engineer
Kaspersky software, was valid for six months from July 7, 2008 to
January 7, 2009, after which the agency sought to renew it.
Without a warrant, the agency feared it would be in breach of Kasperskys
customer licensing agreement or violate its copyright. Software makers
often embed protection mechanisms in their programs to thwart
reverse-engineering and copying of their programs and include language in
their licensing agreements prohibiting such activity.
Reverse engineering of commercial products needs to be warranted in order
to be lawful, one GCHQ agency memo noted. There is a risk that in the
unlikely event of a challenge by the copyright owner or licensor, the
courts would, in the absence of a legal authorisation, hold that such
activity was unlawful[
]
But, according to The Intercept, the warrant itself was on shaky legal
grounds since the Intelligence Services Act, Section 5, references
interference with property and wireless telegraphy by intelligence
agencies but does not mention intellectual property. Its use to authorize
copyright infringement is novel, to say the least.
Earlier this month, Kaspersky disclosed that it had been hacked last year
by members of the infamous Stuxnet and Duqu gangs. The intruders remained
entrenched in the security firms networks for months siphoning
intelligence about nation-state attacks the company is investigating and
studying how Kasperskys detection software works so they could devise
ways to subvert it on customer machines. Kaspersky claims to have more
than 400 million users worldwide.
The attackers were also interested in the Kaspersky Security Network, an
opt-in system that gathers data from customer machines about new threats
infecting them. Any time Kasperskys antivirus and other security software
detects a new infection on the machine of a customer who has opted-in to
the program, or encounters a suspicious file, data gets sent automatically
to Kasperskys servers so the companys algorithms and analysts can study
and track emerging and existing threats. The company uses KSN to create
maps outlining the geographical reach of various threats and is an
important tool for tracking nation-state attacks from agencies like the
NSA and GCHQ.
The newly published NSA documents describe a different method for gaining
intelligence about Kaspersky and its customers. The spy agencies
apparently monitored email traffic coming to Kaspersky and other antivirus
companies from their customers in order to uncover reports about new
malware attacks. The spy agencies would then examine the malware sent by
these customers and determine if it had use to them. A 2010 presentation
indicates that the NSAs signals intelligence would pick out for analysis
about ten new potentially malicious files per day out of the hundreds
of thousands that came into Kasperskys network each day. NSA analysts
would then check the malicious files against Kasperskys antivirus
software to make sure they werent being detected by the software yet,
then the NSAs hackers would repurpose the malware for their own use,
checking periodically to determine when Kaspersky had added detection for
the malware to its anti-virus software.
The Internet Is Officially Too Big
The Internet has (sort of) run out of space.
The regional organization tasked with assigning IP addresses in North
America, the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), is now
wait-listing all applicants because it has almost exhausted its supply of
IP addresses under the current protocol.
IP addresses are the numerical labels that identify any device connected
to the Internet. These addresses enable smartphones, tablets, PCs and
servers to find and communicate with one another. Each IP address is a
unique label that provides a destination for information as it travels
through the Internet.
Under the current protocol, Internet protocol version 4 (IPv4), addresses
are designated by four series of numbers ranging from 0 to 255, like
69.171.224.0. But this protocol has been in use since the early days of
the Internet, and almost all of the 4.3 billion possible labels of IPv4
are already in use meaning the Internet has essentially run out of real
estate.
"Within three to four weeks, we will hit the point where there is no
inventory," said John Curran, president and CEO of ARIN. The group
announced the wait-list policy on Wednesday.
But this is more of a milestone for the Internet than a death sentence.
The imminent exhaustion of available of addresses under IPv4 was
announced last year by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and
Numbers (ICANN), the international organization that allocates addresses
to regional registry groups like ARIN. And a new protocol that was
developed in the 1990s, Internet protocol version 6 (IPv6), has already
been deployed in response.
While the current protocol consists of only four groups of numbers, IPv6
consists of eight groups of both letters and numbers like
2a03:2880:f022:6:face:b00c:0:2 (the IPv6 address for Facebook's servers).
It provides roughly 340 trillion trillion trillion (or 340-undecillion)
unique combinations, an almost limitless number of addresses.
"Realistically, IPv4 cannot provide the Internet that we need and that
everyone wants to have," said Curran, who points to the fact that IPv4
could not even support a world where all 7 billion people had just one
device. "We are currently engaged in an extremely large tech conversion
effort on a global scale for the largest technological system on the
planet."
The deployment of IPv6 means that almost anything on the planet could
connect to the Internet, paving the way for smart appliances, fabrics and
bigger smart grids. And according to Curran, the new protocol is not only
faster and more direct, but consumers will barely notice the transition.
IPv6 is already installed in most devices, and most websites have made
themselves accessible through IPv6, but service providers have been slow
to adopt the new protocol. According to Google, which collects statistics
about IPv6 adoption, only 21% of all Internet traffic in the U.S. uses
IPv6 and the numbers are even lower worldwide.
According to Curran, the Internet is undergoing a necessary evolution,
and Internet service providers need to be prepared or the exponential
growth of the information super highway will screech to a halt.
Major Internet Providers Slowing Traffic Speeds for Thousands Across US
Major internet providers, including AT&T, Time Warner and Verizon, are
slowing data from popular websites to thousands of US businesses and
residential customers in dozens of cities across the country, according
to a study released on Monday.
The study, conducted by internet activists BattlefortheNet, looked at the
results from 300,000 internet users and found significant degradations on
the networks of the five largest internet service providers (ISPs),
representing 75% of all wireline households across the US.
The findings come weeks after the Federal Communications Commission
introduced new rules meant to protect net neutrality the principle
that all data is equal online and keep ISPs from holding traffic speeds
for ransom.
Tim Karr of Free Press, one of the groups that makes up BattlefortheNet,
said the finding show ISPs are not providing content to users at the
speeds theyre paying for.
For too long, internet access providers and their lobbyists have
characterized net neutrality protections as a solution in search of a
problem, said Karr. Data compiled using the Internet Health Test show
us otherwise that there is widespread and systemic abuse across the
network. The irony is that this trove of evidence is becoming public just
as many in Congress are trying to strip away the open internet
protections that would prevent such bad behavior.
The study, supported by the technologists at Open Technology Institutes
M-Lab, examines the comparative speeds of Content Delivery Networks
(CDNs), which shoulder some of the data load for popular websites. Any
site that becomes popular enough has to pay a CDN to carry its content
on a network of servers around the country (or the world) so that the
material is close to the people who want to access it.
In Atlanta, for example, Comcast provided hourly median download speeds
over a CDN called GTT of 21.4 megabits per second at 7pm throughout the
month of May. AT&T provided speeds over the same network of of a megabit
per second. When a network sends more than twice the traffic it receives,
that network is required by AT&T to pay for the privilege. When quizzed
about slow speeds on GTT, AT&T told Ars Technica earlier this year that
it wouldnt upgrade capacity to a CDN that saw that much outgoing
traffic until it saw some money from that network (as distinct from the
money it sees from consumers).
AT&T has strongly opposed regulation of its agreements with the companies
that directly provide connectivity between high-traffic internet users
and their customers. Cogent, Level3 and others have petitioned the FCC to
make free interconnection to CDNs a part of the conditions for the
proposed merger between AT&T and DirecTV.
It would be unprecedented and unjustified to force AT&T to provide free
backbone services to other backbone carriers and edge providers, as
Cogent et al seek, said the company in a filing replying to the CDNs
suggestion, part of a brief opposing the merger. Nor is there any basis
for requiring AT&T to augment network capacity for free and without any
limits. Opponents proposals would shift the costs of their services
onto all AT&T subscribers, many of whom do not use Opponents services,
and would harm consumers.
FCC chairman Tom Wheeler has taken an aggressive regulatory tack when it
comes to mergers in the telecommunications sector. History proves that
absent competition a predominant position in the market such as yours
creates economic incentives to use that market power to protect your
traditional business in a way that is ultimately harmful to consumers,
he told industry leaders at the Internet and Television Expo last month.
The dispute over traffic speeds comes as the telecoms and cable industry
readies legal challenges to the net neutrality rules. Most telecoms are
content letting their lobbyists, notably trade associations Cellular
Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA) and USTelecom, sue the FCC
over net neutrality rules, but AT&T has been one of the few companies to
sue the FCC directly.
Twin Prodigies-turned-hackers Face Long Jail Yerms After Pleading Guilty
Twin brothers - one of whom set himself up for a visit from Homeland
Security by boasting to a colleague at his new security job about jacking
up the value of gift cards - have pleaded guilty to a series of schemes
that involved stealing credit card information, breaking into State
Department computers and filching data from a private company.
Muneeb and Sohaib Akhter, 23, of Springfield, Virginia, pleaded guilty on
Friday in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia.
The brothers were once lauded as budding computer prodigies who, at the
age of only 19, became the youngest graduates from George Mason
University in 2011.
They went on to be rewarded a $200,000 research grant from the Defense
Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA).
Much was expected from them. Much was forthcoming.
But what came forth wasn't good.
According to the US Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of
Virginia, the brothers have pleaded guilty to charges including conspiracy
to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to access a protected computer without
authorization, and conspiracy to access a government computer without
authorization.
As well, Muneeb pleaded guilty to additional charges of accessing a
protected computer without authorization, making a false statement, and
obstructing justice.
According to the US Attorney's Office, the defendants' statements of facts
detail one scheme that began around March 2014, when Muneeb broke into the
website of a cosmetics company and stole thousands of customers' credit
card details and personal information.
The brothers used those details to buy flights and hotel reservations and
to attend professional conferences.
Muneeb also passed the stolen information on to somebody he met on the Dark
Net: a portion of the web that can only be accessed by tools like Tor or
I2P. It uses encryption to preserve the anonymity and hide the location of
the people who use it and the sites and services they use.
Because of that, it is a haven for thieves, child abuse imagery offenders,
human traffickers, forgers and assassins, making it a fitting place for
Muneeb to sell the stolen information to somebody who then cut him in on
the profit.
Another scheme involved the brothers, along with co-conspirators,
intruding into the US Department of State to get at passport and visa
information.
Around February 2015, Sohaib Akhter used his contract position at the
State Department to gain access to sensitive systems containing personally
identifiable information (PII) of dozens of co-workers, acquaintances, one
former employee, and a federal law enforcement agent who was investigating
Sohaib's crimes.
Later, Sohaib came up with a plan to make sure he could always get access
to the State Department systems: with Muneeb's and unnamed
co-conspirators' help, he attempted to plug in an unspecified "electronic
collection device" to enable them all to remotely access and collect data.
But it wasn't to be: Sohaib muffed up the device installation, breaking it
while trying to install the hardware behind a wall at a State Department
building in Washington, D.C.
Another racket: around November 2013, Muneeb was working as a contractor
for a private data aggregation company located in Rockville, Maryland.
He broke into the company's database of federal contract information so
that he and his brother could glean information to tailor successful bids
in order to win contracts and clients for their own technology company.
Muneeb also inserted codes onto the company's servers to rig an online
contest, and to send more than 10,000 mass emails to students at George
Mason University, also in the pursuit of contest votes.
Around October 2014, Muneeb lied about his computer-related crime history,
as well as his employment history, on a government background
nvestigation form.
His lies led to him successfully landing a job with a defense contractor.
Then, around March 2015, after his arrest and release pending trial,
Muneeb obstructed justice by trying to whisk away a key co-conspirator so
that investigators looking into their crimes couldn't get at him.
That included driving the co-conspirator to the airport and purchasing a
boarding pass to get him out of the country, to the Republic of Malta.
When the co-conspirator returned to the US, Muneeb encouraged him to lay
low to avoid investigators.
The twins were indicted by a federal grand jury on 30 April 2015.
Muneeb faces a maximum penalty of 50 years in prison, and Sohaib is
looking at a maximum of 30 years, though maximum sentences are rarely
handed out.
Talent = squandered.
Hundreds of Dark Web Sites Cloned and "Booby Trapped"
The founder of one of the Dark Web's fledgling search engines is warning
Tor users about the presence of hundreds of fake and booby trapped .onion
websites.
Sites with addresses that end in .onion are anonymous, Dark Web websites
(properly called hidden services) that can only be accessed using the Tor
browser.
The fake sites were discovered by Juha Nurmi, a founding member of the
ahmia.fi project, an open source search engine that aims to search, index
and catalogue all the content present on the Tor network.
Nurmi first noticed a fake of his own site before discovering that there
are multiple clones of hundreds of other Dark Web sites, including a fake
of the .onion version of the popular DuckDuckGo search engine.
Nurmi raised his concerns on Monday, on the Tor-Talk mailing list and
published a full list of fake or booby trapped sites to Pastebin.
I noticed a while ago that there is a clone onion site for Ahmia. Now I
realized that someone is actually generated similar onion domains to all
popular onion sites and is re-writing some of the content.
In his post to the mailing list he claims that there are multiple copies
of each target site with similar-looking addresses.
Tor sites are often found through directories rather than search engines
and they have addresses that are quite difficult to read, which probably
makes it easier to plant fakes than on the regular World Wide Web.
For example, the real and fake addresses for DuckDuckGo are the equally
immemorable:
http://3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion/ (real)?http://3g2up5afx6n5miu4.onion/ (fake)
Nurmi also claims that the fake sites aren't just duplicates of the real
sites but proxies for them (he could presumably verify this for his own
site but he doesn't state how or if he tested it for the others).
If he's correct then the proxies would allow the attacker to launch
so-called Man-in-the-Middle attacks, stealing or modifying data as it
passes through the fake site.
These sites are actually working as a transparent proxy to real sites.
However, the attacker works as MITM [Man-in-the-Middle] and rewrites some
content. It is possible that the attacker is gathering information,
including user names and passwords.
In another sinister twist user 'garpamp', who claims that such activity has
been "going on for years", states that he's seen pages that list .onion
addresses being modified by malicious Tor exit nodes.
This is a completely different attack from the one identified by Nurmi and
it occurs on the regular web, not the Dark Web, but it's aimed at achieving
the same thing - getting you to visit a fake Dark Web service instead of a
real one.
It works like this:
The Tor browser can be used to browse hidden services on the so-called Dark
Web, where both the browser and the site are completely anonymous, or the
regular World Wide Web, where only the user with a Tor browser is anonymous.
When it's used on the regular web, Tor encrypts your traffic and sends it
on an eccentric journey between a number of Tor nodes before it's
decrypted again before making the final hop to its destination like any
other internet traffic.
This decryption (and the encryption of responses) is performed by a
special Tor node called an exit node. Anyone can set up an exit node and
because they deal with unencrypted information they are an excellent
place to spy on traffic, or even to modify it on-the-wire (you can read
more about exit nodes in my recent article Can you trust Tor's exit
nodes?).
What garpamp claims to have seen is malicious exit nodes being used to
rewrite regular web pages.
In other words, if you looked at this page through Tor and you happened to
get a malicious exit node in your circuit you might not see the legitimate
DuckDuckGo address at the top of this page, you might see two fake ones
instead.
During the course of the discussion, garpamp noticed that a bad exit node
was actually rewriting the addresses on the pastebin page posted by Nurmi!
...I've also seen exits [1] rewriting onion addresses found on clearnet.
[1] Like the ****** behind this piece of **** is doing to that pastebin
url... Arag0n 185.77.129.189 dc914d754b27e1a0f196330bec599bc9d640f30c
The thread closed with Roger Dingledine, one of the original Tor
developers, reporting that the bad exit node discovered by garpamp has now
been given the BadExit flag which should prevent it from acting as an exit
node.
The battle to shut down bad exit nodes is ongoing.
We don't know who is behind the fake sites, who is behind the exit nodes
rewriting real addresses for fake ones or why they're doing it, but there
are no shortage of suspects.
The Dark Web is an online safe haven for dissidents, journalists and
champions of free speech but it is also a small and highly concentrated
den of the very worst criminality.
So, not only is there is an abundance of thieves on the Dark Web, and no
honour amongst them, there is no shortage of government hackers or
undercover agents either.
One Man Emailed 97,931 People To Tell Them Their Passwords Had Been Stolen
If you found a wallet lying in the street that contained thirty dollars
and the owner's address would you return it?
'Atechdad' would.
Atechdad is the creator of the hacked site gallery urhack.com and he's
more familiar than most with the bits of the web where personally
identifiable detritus washes up from so many internet break-ins.
He is, in his own words, somebody who runs "across lots of passwords on
the webs".
What if someone returned your wallet, but cloned your credit card? You
probably
wouldn't know anything was amiss. Losing a password is a bit like
having your credit card cloned. Unlike losing your wallet, there isn't a
particular moment when it's no longer in your possession, only the moment
where it's no longer exclusively yours.
Which makes learning that your password has been stolen an unpleasant but
necessary step in re-establishing the integrity of your privacy and
security.
The web is, as Atechdad attests, littered with cloned passwords and yours
might be among them.
To find out if they are, you'll either have to conduct an exhaustive,
never-ending search of the web's grubby corners or pay somebody else to
do it for you.
Assuming you even realise that such a service exists, and most of us
probably don't, you'll have to decide if you trust it.
Atechdad had another idea:
I run across lots of passwords on the webs. Passwords to bank accounts,
Netflix accounts, email accounts - you name it ... I wondered what would
happen if I just emailed this information to the people who owned it.
So he set out searching Pastebin for credentials and after three days
amassed a trove of nearly 98,000 email and password combinations.
And then he contacted all of them to tell them the bad news.
From: <canary urhack.com>
To: REDACTED
Cc:
Date: Tue. 19 May 2015 06:12:41 -0400
Subject: Your account may have been compromise&
To Whom It May Concern: An account associated with this email address may
have been compromised. This email has been sent as a warning.
If these credentials match any you are familiar with. we recommend that
you change your password as soon as possible. Otherwise. please disregard
this message.
REDACTED
Why?
The scripts that urhack.com is powered by routinely come across sensitive
information which has been published publically. This is usually the
result of a hack. social engineering attack or phishing campaign. Many
people may not know their accounts have been compromised. We send these
emails as a service to let people know so they can take action.
About Canary
-urhack Canary
If you do not wish to receive these notifications in the future. please
unsubscribe. We will not bug you again. Promise.
Those of you itching to know if this good Samaritan gesture was met with
altruism in kind should prepare yourselves for disappointment; the
internet did not thank Atechdad.
It could have been the slightly spammy, lightly phishy nature of his
communiqué (note the typo in the subject line).
Or maybe, after years of disingenuous emails from rich Nigerian princes
and beautiful Russian girls, we've lost faith in the claims of strangers.
Whatever the reason, Atechdad's 97,931 good intentions were just no match
for the yawning, black hole of apathy and cynicism that our inboxes
create.
Just 50 of the near-one hundred thousand recipients registered receipt of
their email in any way whatsoever. Of those, 41 did so by unsubscribing
themselves, leaving just nine (0.009% of people emailed) who felt his
efforts warranted a thank you.
The evangelical are not easily dissuaded from their path by apathy or
abuse though. Buoyed by what he describes as the success of his first
trial, Atechdad has given his experiment a name, Robin, and vowed to do
it again.
Microsoft Once Again Confuses Everyone About Who Gets Windows 10 for Free
Microsofts Windows 10 OS might be one of the companys most important
software releases yet. Not only is the Redmond-based giant looking to
unify mobile, desktop and consoles with the help of new software, but
Microsoft is also giving it away free of charge to many people who are
using older versions of Windows
only the company isnt always exactly
sure who qualifies.
Whats abundantly clear is that Windows 7 and Windows 8 home users will
all get Windows 10 free of charge this summer when the OS launches. But
on Friday, Microsoft made it sound like Windows XP and Vista users who
registered for Windows 10 Insider access the companys beta program for
Windows will be guaranteed free access to Windows 10 in the future.
Things quickly and silently changed over the weekend, Ars Technica points
out. The companys blog post describing the Windows Insider preview
program has been updated to reflect certain changes that Windows XP and
Vista users will not appreciate.
The company initially said that members of the Insider program running a
preview version of the operating system would receive the Windows 10
final release build and remain activated but then changed it to receive
the Windows 10 final release build, which is practically the latest beta
version that Insiders will get to use before the OS is launched.
Its important to note that only people running Genuine Windows 7 or
Windows 8.1 can upgrade to Windows 10 as part of the free upgrade offer,
Microsoft also added to the post. The mention contradicts Microsofts Gabe
Aul tweet on Friday. The exec said that the upgraded preview copies would
be genuine, implying that Windows pirates would also be able to take
advantage of this loophole.
So what does this all mean?
Ars suggests that the shift is more aimed at corporations and
organizations that are going to be charged for getting their machines
upgraded to Windows 10 en masse and not to individuals who have pirated
versions of old Windows versions. In other words, if you have a pirated
copy of Windows, dont worry about Microsoft denying you access to free
Windows 10 just yet.
=~=~=~=
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