Month: July 2016

Long time readers may recall that we used to pay close attention to the monthly drops of US game and console sales information provided by the industry analysts at the NPD Group. We've stopped covering those reports as closely in recent years for a couple of reasons. The first is that NPD has taken steps to drastically limit the amount of information that it provides to the public, making these monthly reports less and less useful.

The more important reason, though, is that NPD data only includes estimates of retail, packaged game sales. In a gaming world that's dominated more and more by revenue from digital downloads, the retail-only NPD reports have become misleading at best and useless at worst.

Today, NPD announced an important step towards improving its data. Starting with its June report (to be released on July 21), NPD data will include digital sales reported directly from some of the industry's biggest publishers. Activison Blizzard, Bandai Namco, Capcom, Electronic Arts, Square Enix, Take-Two Interactive, and Warner Bros. Interactive will now tell NPD how many games they're selling on Xbox Live, PSN, and Steam every month.

(credit: Getty Images)

Want a job in infosec? Your first task: hacking your way through what many call the "HR firewall" by adding a CISSP certification to your resume.

Job listings for security roles often list the CISSP (Certified Information Systems Security Professional) or other cybersecurity certifications, such as those offered by SANS, CompTIA, and Cisco, as a requirement. This is especially true in the enterprise space, including banks, insurance companies, and FTSE 100 corporations. But at a time when the demand for good infosec people sees companies outbidding each other to hire top talent, and ominous studies warn of a looming cybersecurity skills shortage, experts are questioning whether certifications based on multiple choice tests are really the best way to recruit the right people.

"I give that bit of advice to listeners who ask me for career advice to get their foot in the door," Jerry Bell, who runs the Defensive Security podcast and leads the internal security strategy team for a large global IT services company, told Ars. "Indeed [I do] describe it as getting through the 'HR firewall.' So, I suspect this is common advice given and used by many people."

Artist's approximation of the O'Fallon, Missouri muggings in question. (credit: Charlie / Sam Machkovech)

Pokémon Go's Wednesday launch on iOS and Android has proven a rousing success for franchise creator Nintendo and app developer Niantic, with the app rocketing (Team Rocketing?) up every major download and top-grossing chart. With arguably the biggest augmented-reality gaming audience ever in the West, the game is attracting a lot of attention, including good stock-related news for Nintendo—but it has also already proven ripe for exploitation of its players.

In particular, one major social aspect of the game—its "beacon" function—has already been taken advantage of in the city of O'Fallon, Missouri. That city's police department made a statement on Sunday morning confirming that a group of four armed men had used the app to lure victims to a specific place, at which point they mugged the unknowing Pokémon Go players.

The statement mentioned similar robberies taking place in neighboring St. Louis and St. Charles counties. A Gizmodo report received a statement from O'Fallon's police department, stating that "about eight or nine people" were targeted by these muggings in all.

Huawei's showcase at a mall in Nanjing Xinjiekou, China. (credit: VCG / Getty Images)

The Eastern District of Texas was once just a place where American companies went to get fast justice when they wanted to sue a foreign competitor over patents. But US intellectual property laws cuts both ways. An expanding set of lawsuits between Huawei and its competitors is the clearest sign yet that Chinese companies are quickly learning to use IP law to gain an edge over their competitors.

Shenzhen-based Huawei sued (PDF) T-Mobile last week, asking for a judicial ruling that it's following the right rules for using "standard essential" patents, which require patents to be licensed on a "fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory" (or "FRAND") basis. The new lawsuit is a kind of follow-on lawsuit for four patent infringement lawsuits that Huawei filed against T-Mobile in January, all based in the Eastern District of Texas. (Here's one complaint (PDF) from the four January cases.)

Huawei and T-Mobile have been in legal conflict since 2014, when T-Mobile alleged that Huawei stole trade secrets related to cellphone-testing robots. That case is set to go to trial in October. Huawei denies any wrongdoing.