Month: August 2016

It took roughly two years for crackers to put the first dents in Denuvo's surprisingly robust anti-piracy protection for PC games. Now, a Denuvo-protected game has been cracked just six weeks after its release, seemingly presaging an increased pace of efforts against the DRM scheme.

TorrentFreak reports on the new crack for indie critical darling Inside, which hit the scene earlier this week. The crack comes courtesy of CONSPIR4CY (aka CPY), the same group responsible for a crack of Denuvo-protected Rise of the Tomb Raider earlier this month.

While CPY's ROTTR crack came nearly seven months after the game was released, Inside's protection was broken about six weeks after it launched on the PC. This is an important distinction, since the bulk of a game's legitimate sales tend to come in the first few months after release (or during sales much later in their lifecycle). If crackers can manage to get the wait time for a Denuvo crack down to a matter of days, the protection's value to developers and publishers could wither.

(credit: Andrew Cunningham)

WhatsApp will do what it once said would never happen: let businesses use the messaging app to serve ads to users.

In a move that was inevitable once it was acquired by Facebook for $22 billion in 2014, WhatsApp has put its users on notice that it will soon begin sharing their phone numbers, and selected other data, with its parent company.

This information will then be used to offer customers "more relevant" Facebook ads, new "ways for people to communicate with businesses" via the app, and new friend suggestions, the blurb reads.

Samsung is back with the Galaxy Note 7, the sixth version of its flagship Galaxy Note handset. Wait—did Samsung forget how to count? The Note series skipped a number this year, apparently so that the Note 7 would look more like a sibling to the already-released Galaxy S7. The unified branding feels appropriate since—despite five months of development time between them—the Note 7 is more like the Galaxy S line than ever. You're getting the same Snapdragon 820 SoC, the same 4GB of RAM, and the same camera.

So what do you get in the Note 7 after five additional months of waiting? Beyond the usual 5.7-inch, 1440p display and the S-Pen, the Note 7 series brings an upgrade to USB Type-C, adds another biometric ID system in the form of an iris scanner, and comes with a really, really fat price tag. You're going to pay at least $850 for the 64GB version, the only version for sale in the US.

Design and build quality

Seen a Samsung phone in the last few years? If so, you know what to expect here. The Note 7 has a metal frame with a glass back and highly reflective metallic coloring underneath.

Enlarge (credit: nereocystis)

OAKLAND, Calif.—According to new government affidavits filed earlier this week, the Oakland Police Department (OPD) used its stingray without a warrant in 2013 for several hours overnight as a way to locate a man accused of being involved in shooting a local police officer. When that effort was unsuccessful, the OPD called in the FBI, which was somehow able to locate the suspect in under an hour, and he surrendered to OPD officers.

That suspect, Purvis Ellis, is the lead defendant in the case of United States v. Ellis et al. The case involves four men who are charged with the January 21, 2013 attempted murder of local police officer Eric Karsseboom in the parking area in front of a Seminary Avenue apartment complex in East Oakland. The men are also charged with running an alleged local gang, centered around Seminary Avenue (known as "SemCity").

While these new filings fill out the timeline a bit more, they also raise new questions in Ellis, which has provided a rare insight into how this surveillance device, also known as a cell-site simulator, is used in practice to find suspects, and the seeming lengths the government is willing to go to keep it quiet. The tool has come under increasing scrutiny by lawmakers and activists in recent years. Since this case began, the Department of Justice, which oversees the FBI, and the State of California now require a warrant when a stingray is used in most circumstances.