Month: February 2016

Join the fight—for less. (And, well, get quite a bit less.) (credit: Activision)

If you've ever dreamt of a world in which you could buy a Call of Duty game without any of the campaign nonsense—no "press B to pay respects," no forced airport massacres—Activision has finally heard your prayers. Somewhat.

On Tuesday, the company snuck a special multiplayer-only variant of Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 onto Steam's Windows store at the reduced price of $15. The Multiplayer Starter Pack has quite a few restrictions, the most peculiar of which is a limited-time-only sale window. Think of it like Activision's take on those old clamshell Disney VHS releases—meaning, on February 29, the MSP goes back into the vault, limited only to those who already bought it.

As expected, this reduced-price variant has axed the game's entire campaign mode, but it also removes the game's popular, multiplayer-friendly Zombies mode. MSP buyers can access public ranked multiplayer battles "with a level cap of 55," along with the "arena" ranking variant, the parkour-tastic "freerun" mode, the "cryptokey" exchange system for new online-combat loot, and weapon editing options in the "paintshop" and "gunsmith" menus.

(credit: Kārlis Dambrāns)

On Tuesday, a federal judge in Riverside, California ordered Apple to help the government unlock and decrypt the iPhone 5C used by Syed Rizwan Farook, who shot up an office party in a terrorist attack in nearby San Bernardino in December 2015.

Specifically, United States Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym mandated that Apple provide the FBI a custom firmware file, known as an IPSW file, that would likely enable investigators to brute force the passcode lockout currently on the phone, which is running iOS 9.

As Judge Pym wrote:

(credit: Aurich Lawson)

The Stuxnet computer worm that destroyed centrifuges inside Iran's Natanz uranium enrichment site was only one element of a much larger US-prepared cyberattack plan that targeted Iran's air defenses, communications systems, and key parts of its power grid, according to articles published Tuesday.

The contingency plan, known internally as Nitro Zeus, was intended to be carried out in the event that diplomatic efforts to curb Iran's nuclear development program failed and the US was pulled into a war between Iran and Israel, according to an article published by The New York Times. At its height, planning for the program involved thousands of US military and intelligence personnel, tens of millions of dollars in expenditures, and the placing of electronic implants in Iranian computer networks to ensure the operation targeting critical infrastructure would work at a moment's notice.

Another piece of the plan involved using a computer worm to destroy computer systems at the Fordo nuclear enrichment site, which was built deep inside a mountain near the Iranian city of Qom. It had long been considered one of the hardest Iranian targets to disable and was intended to be a follow-up to "Olympic Games," the code name of the plan Stuxnet fell under.

Shrinking of lymphoma after CAR T-cell therapy. Positron emission tomography (PET) images showing large tumor mass in the kidney (red arrow) prior to CAR-T cell therapy that completely regressed on a repeat PET scan performed 2 months after CAR-T cells. (credit: Fred Hutch News Service)

WASHINGTON—Militarizing the body’s natural immune responses so that it can fight off cancerous uprisings has been seen as a promising strategy for years. Now, a sneak peek of data from a small clinical trial suggests that the method may in fact be as useful as doctors hope—but there’s still some serious kinks to work out.

In a trial of 29 people with a deadly form of leukemia—acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL)—and no other treatment options, 27 went into remission after scientists plucked some of their immune cells, engineering them to fight cancer, then replaced them. The method was also successful at treating handfuls of patients with Non-Hodgkin lymphoma and chronic lymphocytic leukemia. The preliminary, unpublished findings were reported at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington.

Stained bone marrow from a patient with precursor B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). (credit: VashiDonsk )

While the early result suggests the treatment can be effective for these types of cancer, there were severe problems during the trials: several patients suffered extreme, full-body inflammation (cytokine release syndrome) in response to the treatment and needed to be placed in intensive care. Two patients died.

(credit: IBM)

On Tuesday IBM announced that it’s been working to make blockchain technology—which was refined and popularized by Bitcoin—easier for businesses to use for financial and non-financial purposes. Specifically, the company is launching what it’s calling “blockchain-as-a-service,” or a set of tools for "creating, deploying, running, and monitoring blockchain applications on the IBM Cloud.”

The idea of applying blockchain technology outside of the realm of Bitcoin has gained a lot of interest from forward-thinking companies in the past year or so. Blockchain applications are also called “distributed ledger technology” because they remove the need for a centralized database and, like Bitcoin, give every transaction in a particular system a cryptographic hash that can be checked by any member of the group.

Traditional financial institutions as well as startups hoping to serve those banks and stock exchanges have been among the first to glom onto the idea that a decentralized ledger could be used to make money transfer more reliable and more secure. If all parties can double check money transfers (even if they don’t know what was exchanged in the transfer), then theoretically, errors caused by mistake or malice could be reduced. Recently nine banking institutions including JP Morgan, BBVA, and Credit Suisse partnered with a company called R3 to work on decentralizing some databases. At the World Economic Forum in Davos this January, MasterCard officials said that the credit card network was carefully studying how to best apply blockchain concepts.

(credit: iflyfsx)

After sustaining a 27 percent drop in its stock price following a lawsuit filed against it by American Airlines, Gogo issued a short filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday.

The statement refers to the fact that late last week, the largest airline in the United States sued Gogo, its provider of on-board Internet, over failure to allow the airline giant to end the two companies’ contract.

According to American’s civil complaint, filed late last week in state court in Tarrant County, Texas, American Airlines is free to choose another provider, but has to give Gogo six months to make a counter offer. If Gogo declines to do so, then American is free to terminate the contract.

Video shot/edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

NEW YORK—There exists a place in the world where toys rule, wall to wall, and that place is the annual New York Toy Fair. It's where all the biggest names in fun (think Lego, Mattel, and similar companies) gather to announce the next big things hitting toy store shelves. Much to the dismay of kids everywhere, the Toy Fair is an industry-only event, so we wanted to give you an inside look at the newest toys that may make it into your living room.

The toys shown off at the fair ran the gamut from educational and interesting to fun and lighthearted. Of course there was a new Barbie Dreamhouse that's bigger than many dog houses, and new Star Wars Lego sets featuring Stormtroopers, Rey, and Kylo Ren. Mattel took a break from Barbie hype to also announce the $300 ThingMaker 3D printing toy machine, which lets kids make their own toys by using a simplified 3D printing app with designs that can be sent to the ThingMaker for creation.

(credit: Alpha six)

Cloud backup provider Backblaze has published more of its hard drive reliability data, giving a look at the company's experiences with its 56,224 hard disks in 2015.

In 2014, HGST was the standout performer, with all its models showing extremely good reliability. Some Seagate models, on the other hand, showed alarming unreliability and extremely high failure rates.

For 2015, HGST maintained its strong performance. Across all the HGST models that Backblaze used (one 2TB, two 3TB, three 4TB, and one 8TB), failure rates were low across the board. The HGST drives are some of the oldest in Backblaze's collection, with the 2TB units being almost five years old on average. Over the last two and a half years, only 1.55 percent of them have failed.