According to a new study from online game development platform School XYZ, the exodus of major international video game publishers from Russia led to a sharp rise in the number of video gamers playing pirates games. TorrentFreak reports: Almost seven out of ten video gamers (69%) said they’d played at least one pirated copy in 2022, and more than half (51%) said that they’re now pirating more than they did in 2021. As first reported by the Russian news outlet Vedomosti (paywall), the study was conducted across all regions of Russia and took into account all unlicensed game formats, in most cases downloaded from torrent sites. While over a quarter of respondents (27%) said they’d pirated three PC games in 2022, and 20% confessed to pirating more than 10, other figures from the study are more positive. Of the 31% of gamers who reported pirating nothing in 2022, all said that they were opposed to piracy. Just 7% of gamers admitted to buying no games at all in 2022, meaning that 93% bought at least one piece of legitimate content.

According to Alexander Kuzmenko, the former editor of Russian videogame magazine and gaming website Igromania (Game Mania), it’s not just the departure of publishers including Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo causing problem for gamers. When platforms like Steam and GOG, known for their ease of access, stopped supporting Russian bank cards, barriers appeared in a previously frictionless system. Yegor Tomsky, CEO at Watt Studio, agrees that buying content has become much more difficult. “Players are used to buying games on Steam in one click, and now, to buy a game, you need to perform the same actions as when downloading a pirated version, so everyone chooses to save money,” Tomsky says.

As the Russian economy faces huge difficulties directly linked to the invasion of Ukraine, some fear that game piracy rates are heading towards the 90%+ mark last seen around two decades ago. People everywhere are trying to save money and according to Konstantin Sakhnov, co-founder of Vengeance Games, overseas game publishers may see lost profits reach $200-$300 million. A report from Kommersant published today indicates that local companies are also feeling the pain. According to data published by job search platform HH.ru, during the first half of 2023 the number of vacancies for video game developers in Russia plummeted 38%.

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Source: Slashdot – 70% of Russian Gamers Are Pirates Following Western Publisher Exodus

Astronomers have discovered a two-faced star and are baffled by its bizarre appearance. The Guardian reports: The white dwarf appears to have one side composed almost entirely of hydrogen and the other side made up of helium. It is the first time that astronomers have discovered a lone star that appears to have spontaneously developed two contrasting faces. The object, which is more than 1,000 light years away in the Cygnus constellation, has been nicknamed Janus, after the two-faced Roman god of transition, although its formal scientific name is ZTF J203349.8+322901.1. It was initially discovered by the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), an instrument that scans the skies every night from Caltech’s Palomar Observatory near San Diego.

“The surface of the white dwarf completely changes from one side to the other,” said Dr Ilaria Caiazzo, an astrophysicist at Caltech who led the work. “When I show the observations to people, they are blown away.” Caiazzo was searching for white dwarfs and one candidate star stood out due to its rapid changes in brightness. Further observations revealed that Janus was rotating on its axis every 15 minutes. Spectrometry measurements, which give the chemical fingerprints of a star, showed that one side of the object contained almost entirely hydrogen and the other almost entirely helium. If seen up close, both sides of the star would be bluish in colour and have a similar brightness, but the helium side would have a grainy, patchwork appearance like that of our own sun, while the hydrogen side would appear smooth. The findings are published in the journal Nature.

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Source: Slashdot – Two-Faced Star With Helium and Hydrogen Sides Baffles Astronomers

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: A study published Monday in the Lancet found that the use of hearing aids can reduce the risk of cognitive decline by about half — 48 percent — for adults with more risk factors for dementia, such as elevated blood pressure, higher rates of diabetes, lower education and income, and those living alone. The study was presented at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference in Amsterdam. […] Over a three-year period, the randomized controlled trial studied nearly 1,000 older adults, ages 70 to 84, in four sites in the United States. The participants included older adults in an ongoing study of cardiovascular health — Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) — and others who were healthier than the ARIC adults; both groups were from the same communities at each site.

When the two groups were combined, use of hearing aids was shown to have no significant effect on slowing cognitive changes. When the group at higher risk of dementia, the ARIC group, was analyzed separately, however, researchers found that hearing intervention — counseling with an audiologist and use of hearing aids — had a significant impact on reducing cognitive decline. Those considered at high risk for dementia were older and had lower cognitive scores, among other factors. When the groups were combined, the slower rate of cognitive decline experienced by the healthier participants may have limited any effect of hearing aids, the researchers suggested. Whether hearing treatment reduces the risk of developing dementia in the long term is still unknown. “That’s the next big question — and something we can’t answer yet,” said Lin, who is also director of the Cochlear Center for Hearing and Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. He said he and his colleagues are planning a long-term follow-up study to attempt to answer that question.

There have many studies over the past decade to try to determine why people with hearing loss tend to have worse cognition, said Justin S. Golub, an associate professor of otolaryngology at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. One theory is that it requires a lot of effort for people with hearing loss to understand what others are saying — and that necessary brainpower leaves fewer cognitive resources to process the meaning of what was heard, he said. Another theory relates to brain structure. Research has shown that the temporal lobe of people with hearing loss tends to shrink quicker because it is not receiving as much auditory input from the inner ear. The temporal lobe is connected to other parts of the brain, and “that could have cascading influences on brain structure and function,” said Golub, who was not part of the Lancet study. A third theory is that people with hearing loss tend to be less social and, as a result, have less cognitive stimulation, he said.

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Source: Slashdot – Hearing Aids May Cut Risk of Cognitive Decline By Nearly Half

The Cyber Police Department of the National Police of Ukraine dismantled another massive bot farm, seizing computer equipment, mobile phones, and roughly 150,000 SIM cards of multiple mobile operators. BleepingComputer reports: The bots were used to push Russian propaganda justifying Russia’s war in Ukraine, to disseminate illegal content and personal information, and in various other fraudulent activities. In a joint operation, the cyber police and units of the Ukrainian National Police executed 21 search operations in Vinnytsia, Zaporizhzhia, and Lvivand.

“The cyber police established that the attackers used special equipment and software to register thousands of bot accounts in various social networks and subsequently launch advertisements that violated the norms and legislation of Ukraine,” a cyber police press release reads [machine translation]. “In addition to spreading hostile propaganda, the accounts were also used for unauthorized distribution of personal data of Ukrainian citizens on the Internet, in Internet fraud schemes, and for sending known false messages about threats to citizens’ safety, destruction or damage to property.” Cyber police in Ukraine have busted several pro-Russian bot farms in the last year, including one last month called “Botoferma” and another one late last year that was working for the Russian secret services. Ukraine also traced a Russian propaganda operation to a bot farm that was secretly operating in the country’s own capital of Kyiv last August. “The farm operated more than 1 million bot accounts, which helped the propaganda operation build an audience of over 400,000 users on social media,” reports PCMag.

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Source: Slashdot – Ukraine Takes Down Massive Bot Farm, Seizes 150,000 SIM Cards

Researchers have warned that leaked information from a ransomware attack on hardware-maker Gigabyte two years ago may contain critical zero-day vulnerabilities that pose a significant risk to the computing world. The vulnerabilities were found in firmware made by AMI for BMCs (baseboard management controllers), which are small computers integrated into server motherboards allowing remote management of multiple computers. These vulnerabilities, which can be exploited by local or remote attackers with access to Redfish remote management interfaces, could lead to unauthorized access, remote code execution, and potential physical damage to servers. Ars Technica reports: Until the vulnerabilities are patched using an update AMI published on Thursday, they provide a means for malicious hackers — both financially motivated or nation-state sponsored — to gain superuser status inside some of the most sensitive cloud environments in the world. From there, the attackers could install ransomware and espionage malware that runs at some of the lowest levels inside infected machines. Successful attackers could also cause physical damage to servers or indefinite reboot loops that a victim organization can’t interrupt. Eclypsium warned such events could lead to “lights out forever” scenarios.

The researchers went on to note that if they could locate the vulnerabilities and write exploits after analyzing the publicly available source code, there’s nothing stopping malicious actors from doing the same. And even without access to the source code, the vulnerabilities could still be identified by decompiling BMC firmware images. There’s no indication malicious parties have done so, but there’s also no way to know they haven’t. The researchers privately notified AMI of the vulnerabilities, and the company created firmware patches, which are available to customers through a restricted support page. AMI has also published an advisory here.

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Source: Slashdot – Firmware Vulnerabilities In Millions of Computers Could Give Hackers Superuser Status