Malvertising Campaign Infected Thousands of Users Per Day For More Than a Year

An anonymous reader writes from a report via Softpedia: Since the summer of 2015, users that surfed 113 major, legitimate websites were subjected to one of the most advanced malvertising campaigns ever discovered, with signs that this might have actually been happening since 2013. Infecting a whopping 22 advertising platforms, the criminal gang behind this campaign used complicated traffic filtering systems to select users ripe for infection, usually with banking trojans. The campaign constantly pulled between 1 and 5 million users per day, infecting thousands, and netting the crooks millions each month. The malicious ads, according to this list, were shown on sites like The New York Times, Le Figaro, The Verge, PCMag, IBTimes, Ars Technica, Daily Mail, Telegraaf, La Gazetta dello Sport, CBS Sports, Top Gear, Urban Dictionary, Playboy, Answers.com, Sky.com, and more.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – Malvertising Campaign Infected Thousands of Users Per Day For More Than a Year

No Man’s Sky is in one man’s hands, thanks to leaked copy

The opening screen. It’s real. (credit: Hello Games)

Some people cannot wait another minute to play No Man’s Sky, the upcoming PS4/PC space-exploration game whose gargantuan, open-ended galaxy contains 18 quintillion planets. (That’s 18 followed by 18 zeros.) One lucky man managed to get his hands on a copy on Friday, a week and a half ahead of its official August 9 launch. Whether his brag about paying $1,300 for an advance copy on eBay is true, his stream of the game’s opening sequence, which has since been taken offline, is wholly legitimate.

Reddit user “Daymeeuhn” posted videos to DailyMotion on Friday containing the PS4 version’s opening sequence and a full 24 minutes of first-planet gameplay. If you’re the kind of No Man’s Sky enthusiast who wants zero spoilers, you should tune out right now.

Spoilers ahead

“Sean Murray, if you’re watching, I’m an asshole, I’m sorry,” Daymeeuhn says as he begins his stream of the full, retail game. After a brief star-screensaver visual sequence, overlaid with the No Man’s Sky text logo, the player wakes on a planet named “Fljodal Nientv.” This isn’t the game’s “default” planet; instead, every player’s game starts on a unique rock in Sky’s massive galaxy, and it’s highly likely no other player on Earth will ever discover Fljodal Nientv. No opening sequence or explainer plays out, beyond a robotic voice alerting players that they have crash landed.

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Source: Ars Technica – No Man’s Sky is in one man’s hands, thanks to leaked copy

Snowden Questions WikiLeaks' Methods of Releasing Leaks

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PCWorld: Former U.S. National Security Agency contractor, Edward Snowden, has censured WikiLeaks’ release of information without proper curation. On Thursday, Snowden, who has embarrassed the U.S. government with revelations of widespread NSA surveillance, said that WikiLeaks was mistaken in not at least modestly curating the information it releases. “Democratizing information has never been more vital, and @Wikileaks has helped. But their hostility to even modest curation is a mistake,” Snowden said in a tweet. WikiLeaks shot back at Snowden that “opportunism won’t earn you a pardon from Clinton [and] curation is not censorship of ruling party cash flows.” The whistleblowing site appeared to defend itself earlier on Thursday while referring to its “accuracy policy.” In a Twitter message it said that it does “not tamper with the evidentiary value of important historical archives.” WikiLeaks released nearly 20,000 previously unseen DNC emails last week, which suggest that committee officials had favored Clinton over her rival Senator Bernie Sanders. The most recent leak consists of 29 voicemails from DNC officials.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – Snowden Questions WikiLeaks’ Methods of Releasing Leaks

Today’s selection of articles from Kotaku’s reader-run community: Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE: The TAY

Today’s selection of articles from Kotaku’s reader-run community: Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE: The TAY Review Cultural Memories, Mischief, and Yokai Watch Spacemon – A Pokemon TRPG: Blueshift: Chapter 3
and Chapter 4
Overwatch’s Newest Hero Is A Jack Of All Trades And A Master Of None

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Source: Kotaku – Today’s selection of articles from Kotaku’s reader-run community: Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE: The TAY

Nash Turns 100 Today: Here's Six Reasons Why It May Be The Most Influential Car Company Ever

Nash Motors would have been a century old today, and while I suspect that most modern gearheads probably don’t give Nash much thought, they really should. For a defunct car company, we still feel Nash’s influence a surprising amount, in ways that are pretty basic and fundamental to how cars are today. Let’s pretend we’re all old dudes in bad shirts at a car show and take a bit to appreciate the crap out of Nash, in six huge ways.

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Source: Gizmodo – Nash Turns 100 Today: Here’s Six Reasons Why It May Be The Most Influential Car Company Ever

Clinton Campaign Breached By Hackers

An anonymous reader writes: Hillary Clinton’s campaign network was breached by hackers targeting several large Democratic organizations, Reuters reports. Clinton’s campaign spokesperson Nick Merrill confirmed the hack in a statement. ‘An analytics data program maintained by the DNC, and used by our campaign and a number of other entities, was accessed as part of the DNC hack. Our campaign computer system has been under review by outside security experts. To date, they have found no evidence that our internal systems have been compromised,’ he said.

The hack follows on the heels of breaches at the Democratic National Committee and at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee earlier this year. More than 19,000 emails from DNC officials were published on WikiLeaks just prior to the Democratic National Convention, casting a shadow over the proceedings. Some security experts and U.S. officials have attributed the breaches to Russian operatives, although the origin of the email leak is less certain.

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Source: Slashdot – Clinton Campaign Breached By Hackers

Court Ruling Shows The Internet Does Have Borders After All

itwbennett writes: Microsoft’s recent victory in court, when it was ruled that the physical location of the company’s servers in Ireland were out of reach of the U.S. government, was described on Slashdot as being “perceived as a major victory for privacy.” But J. Trevor Hughes, president and CEO of the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) has a different view of the implications of the ruling that speaks to John Perry Barlow’s vision of an independent cyberspace: “By recognizing the jurisdictional boundaries of Ireland, it is possible that the Second Circuit Court created an incentive for other jurisdictions to require data to be held within their national boundaries. We have seen similar laws emerge in Russia — they fall under a policy trend towards ‘data localization’ that has many cloud service and global organizations deeply concerned. Which leads to a tough question: what happens if every country tries to assert jurisdictional control over the web? Might we end up with a fractured web, a ‘splinternet,’ of lessening utility?”

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Source: Slashdot – Court Ruling Shows The Internet Does Have Borders After All

The Next Avengers Movie Is Called Infinity War, But We Don't Know About the One After That

In May 2018, the Avengers are going to have an Infinity War. A year after that though, we now have no idea what they’ll be doing. Marvel just clarified a rumor that had been circling for several months
: its previously announced two-part Infinity War movie is no more.

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Source: io9 – The Next Avengers Movie Is Called Infinity War, But We Don’t Know About the One After That

Guy Starts Leaking No Man's Sky Videos, Changes His Mind Because He Doesn't Want To Spoil People

Daymeeuhn wanted to enjoy procedural universe game No Man’s Sky on his own. No secrets revealed, nothing to be Googled, not a single spoiler in sight. He spent more than $1,300 to make it happen. And then he nearly spoiled it for everyone else.

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Source: Kotaku – Guy Starts Leaking No Man’s Sky Videos, Changes His Mind Because He Doesn’t Want To Spoil People

Apple begins wrapping up Swift 3 and lays out plans for Swift 4

Enlarge (credit: Apple)

The final version of Swift 3.0 will be released alongside iOS 10 and macOS Sierra in the fall, but the fact that Apple develops Swift out in the open now means that we know more about its progress than we do about Apple’s operating systems. Chris Lattner, a senior director of the Developer Tools Department at Apple, today posted a lengthy note to the Swift mailing list that looks back at the development of Swift 3.0 and sets some expectations for Swift 4.0 next year.

The note is worth reading in its entirety for those interested in programming in Swift and in contributing to the language itself—the Swift 3.0 retrospective focuses mostly on the benefits and drawbacks to going open source. Lattner describes the “vibrant community” as “fantastic,” though he does note that open-source development “is slower and less predictable than ‘closed design.'” Lattner says “the end result is significantly better, and therefore the tradeoff is worth it,” even if “it is impossible to make everyone happy.” The latter sentiment should ring true to anyone who has ever worked on any open source project.

Apple plans to release two major Swift updates between now and fall of 2017—Swift 3.1 in the spring and Swift 4.0 in the fall, along with whatever other minor bugfix releases are necessary. For Swift 4.0, Apple would like to focus on source and ABI stability first, and move on to other features once work on those two things is complete. After that, Lattner outlines a number of goals that the team would like to accomplish if time permits:

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Source: Ars Technica – Apple begins wrapping up Swift 3 and lays out plans for Swift 4

SwiftKey Bug Leaked Email Addresses, Phone Numbers To Strangers

An anonymous reader writes: After many users reported receiving predictions meant for other users, such as email addresses and phone numbers, SwiftKey has suspended part of its service. The service responsible for the bug was SwiftKey’s cloud sync service. The Verge reports that one user, an English speaker, was getting someone else’s German suggestions, while someone received NSFW porn search suggestions. The Telegraph also reports, “One SwiftKey user, who works in the legal profession and ask to remain anonymous, found out their details had been compromised when a stranger emailed them to say that a brand new phone had suggested their email address when logging into an account online. ‘A few days ago, I received an email from a complete stranger asking if I had recently purchased and returned a particular model of mobile phone, adding that not one but two of my email addresses (one personal and one work address) were saved on the phone she had just bought as brand-new,’ said the user.” SwiftKey released an official statement today about the issue but said that it “did not pose a security issue.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – SwiftKey Bug Leaked Email Addresses, Phone Numbers To Strangers

DOOM Update #2, Unto the Evil, PartyPlay, & Double XP Weekend

Ahead of the August 5th launch of DOOM’s first DLC, Bethesda has released Update #2 for DOOM that, in addition to fixes and optimizations, features two new multiplayer modes, Sector and Exodus. For those of you interested, DOOM Update #2 release notes can be found here.


The free update kicks off with two new multiplayer modes, Sector and Exodus. Sector is a capture and hold mode while Exodus brings capture the flag to DOOM. We’re also adding Hell modules and environments to DOOM SnapMap, plus new objects like Launch Pads, and last but not least, the campaign weapon wheel comes to SnapMap! And of course, the update will include tons of optimizations and improvements. Look for full release notes when the patch goes live tomorrow. Unto the Evil, DOOM’s first DLC, launches August 5! We’re thrilled to announce that our first premium multiplayer DLC will launch on August 5.

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Source: [H]ardOCP – DOOM Update #2, Unto the Evil, PartyPlay, & Double XP Weekend

Four-Year Investigation Into 38 Studios Results in No Criminal Charges

Not only are the taxpayers on the hook for the $75 million loan to 38 Studios that was never repaid, they also paid for a four year investigation into the incident that resulted in no charges against anyone.

“It is our collective duty and responsibility to uncover the facts and let the facts take us where they will take us,” he said. “In order to prosecute any individual for a violation of any Rhode Island criminal statute, we have to establish probable cause that laws were broken. In this particular matter … we have found no probable cause to establish that a crime was committed. It is the investigative opinion of the Rhode Island State Police and the Department of the Attorney General that a bad deal does not always equate to an indictment.”

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Source: [H]ardOCP – Four-Year Investigation Into 38 Studios Results in No Criminal Charges