Month: July 2016

(credit: Eduardo Woo)

We've read about all kinds of weird things happening to people playing Pokémon Go on their mobile phones—including players being the victims of muggings, participants being accused of trespassing or getting lost, and even app-related divorce.

(credit: Hancock County Sheriff's Office)

The story of an Indiana man, however, takes the cake. The case of 42-year-old Randy Zuick comes in as our top vote for Dumbest Criminal of the Month, and it also gets our top vote for the Strangest Pokémon Go Story we've heard following the mobile app's debut last week.

Zuick is a registered child sex offender. In April he pleaded guilty to a felony charge of fondling a child under 14 and was placed on sex-offender probation for four years. The terms include him not interacting with children, local media reported.

This is the only controller you'll need for PlayStation VR.

If you're thinking about buying Sony's PlayStation VR when it launches this October, you should know that you don't absolutely need a pair of hand-tracking PlayStation Move controllers to go with the headset. Sony recently confirmed to Eurogamer that "all PlayStation VR titles will support DualShock 4 controllers. However, some game experiences will be enhanced with the use of peripherals such as Move or the recently announced Aim controller."

On the one hand, this makes PlayStation VR that much more accessible to the existing PlayStation 4 audience, which is already guaranteed to have a DualShock 4 controller to use with the $399 headset. VR users will still need to add a $50 PlayStation Camera accessory to enable positional head-tracking (provided they don't already own one), but they won't have to invest in the full $500 bundle that includes two Move controllers.

On the other hand, the DualShock support requirement means PSVR games like Job Simulator and Fantastic Contraption, which were originally designed for the HTC Vive's hand-tracking controllers, will likely have to be redesigned to support a standard handheld controller as well. That could lead to some awkward, button-and-joystick control schemes being grafted on to games that were made with true hand-tracking in mind.

(credit: John Palmer)

As if people didn't already have cause to distrust the security of Juniper products, the networking gear maker just disclosed a vulnerability that allowed attackers to eavesdrop on sensitive communications traveling through customers' virtual private networks.

In an advisory posted Wednesday, Juniper officials said they just fixed a bug in the company's Junos operating system that allowed adversaries to masquerade as trusted parties. The impersonation could be carried out by presenting a forged cryptographic certificate that was signed by the attacker rather than by a trusted certificate authority that normally vets the identity of the credential holder.

"When a peer device presents a self-signed certificate as its end entity certificate with its issuer name matching one of the valid CA certificates enrolled in Junos, the peer certificate validation is skipped and the peer certificate is treated as valid," Wednesday's advisory stated. "This may allow an attacker to generate a specially crafted self-signed certificate and bypass certificate validation."

(credit: Getty Images | Yuri_Arcurs)

Two votes taken by the Federal Communications Commission today could have big implications for the transition to faster mobile networks and the discontinuance of old landline networks.

The two votes aren't directly related, but they each prepare for a future that could rely more on wireless technologies for voice and Internet service. In one item, the FCC voted to open up high-frequency spectrum to help carriers create 5G networks that would be faster than existing 4G ones.

The second vote will make it easier for carriers to turn off old landline phone networks as long as they replace them with either wired or wireless equivalents. Copper landlines can be replaced with fiber or wireless technology if they offer the same performance, reliability, coverage, access to 911, and compatibility with systems including medical monitoring devices.

(credit: various brennemans)

Kids who got teased for sucking their thumbs or biting their nails may, after all, get the last laugh.

It turns out that repeatedly sticking grimy digits into your pie-hole as a youngster may help strengthen your immune system and prevent the development of allergies later in life, researchers report in the August issue of Pediatrics. The finding is certainly a score for the underdogs of the schoolyard, but it also lends more support to the “hygiene hypothesis.” This decades-old hypothesis generally suggests that exposure to germs and harmless microbes in childhood can help develop a healthy, tolerant immune system—that is, one not prone to autoimmune diseases and hypersensitive responses such as allergies.

“Although we do not suggest that children should be encouraged to take up these oral habits, the findings suggest that thumb-sucking and nail-biting reduce the risk for developing sensitization to common aeroallergens,” the study authors conclude.

The site Exposed.su published the birthday, address, phone number and Social Security number of dozens of celebrities and public officials, including the heads of the FBI and CIA. (credit: krebonsecurity.com)

A 22-year-old hacker has been handed a two-year prison sentence for his role in doxing and swatting politicians, celebrities, prosecutors, the first lady, and security journalist Brian Krebs.

While cooperating with the FBI after his 2012 arrest on unrelated charges, Mir Islam doxed and swatted as many as 50 people, authorities said. Those who were doxed had their information appear on a website Islam ran called "Exposed." Victims included First Lady Michelle Obama and Vice President Joe Biden. Those who were swatted include Stephen P. Heymann, the Massachusetts federal prosecutor who handled the Aaron Swartz prosecution; security journalist Brian Krebs; Wayne LaPierre, the CEO of the National Rifle Association; and Mike Rogers, a former GOP representative from Michigan and a key supporter of the Stop Online Piracy Act.

Islam also orchestrated a phony threat of an active shooter at the University of Arizona.

Enlarge / The new additions enable all kinds of different occupations for emoji women of many colors. (credit: Google)

The Unicode Consortium announced plans (PDF) to support new emoji aimed at promoting gender equality—11 new "professional" emoji will depict both men and women performing different jobs, and there will be both male and female versions of 33 existing emoji that currently depict either a man or a woman but not both. The plan is based largely on a proposal from Google, a prominent member of the Unicode Consortium, back in May (PDF).

The new professions include, in the Unicode Consortium's words: a farmer, welder, mechanic, health worker, scientist, coder, business worker, chef, student, teacher, and rockstar.

To avoid the normally lengthy wait time associated with new emoji—Unicode 9.0 was just finalized in June, and version 10.0 won't be finalized until June of 2017—Unicode is using combinations of existing emoji to create the new ones. The process is similar to, though not exactly the same as, the system for changing skin tones. A special character called a "zero-width joiner" (ZWJ) can be placed between two or more emoji, and operating systems that support it know to put out a different composite emoji rather than a series of separate emoji.