Month: March 2017

SAN FRANCISCO—Before its retail launch in two days, Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild received the spotlight treatment in a Wednesday panel at the annual Game Developers Conference. While explaining the high-level concepts driving new ideas in the highly anticipated sequel, Nintendo developers also revealed a unique prototyping system: a fully playable 8-bit Zelda game.

Three key developers on the game (Hidemaro Fujibayashi, Satoru Takizawa, Takuhiro Dohta) kicked off the presentation by showing an apparent alternate version of the original Legend of Zelda game and asked the crowd to "study" the image, which they said would explain the various elements of its session, dubbed "Change and Constant: Breaking Conventions with Breath of the Wild." It included slight sprite tweaks to the original game, with a thinner, lighter-looking tree, a log on a river's shore, and a clear bottle-shaped icon.

(credit: Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock)

The Federal Communications Commission recently gave mobile carriers the green light to expand zero-rating, a method of favoring online content by exempting it from data caps.

At the same time, carriers have been competing to offer the best unlimited data plans—and without data caps, there’s no need for zero-rating. But that doesn’t mean zero-rating and similar free data offers are over and done with, because many customers are still going to buy cheaper, limited data plans.

AT&T and Verizon seemed reluctant to make unlimited data plans widely available until they faced competitive pressure to do so. Those two carriers have created new sources of revenue by seeking payments from companies that want to bypass data caps in order to reach more customers.

Enlarge (credit: BSIP/UIG via Getty Images)

An unnamed student from a high school roughly 32 miles northeast of San Francisco has been accused of secretly taking naked photos and recording a video of one of his school's top administrators, David Linzey, in an off-campus fitness center locker room.

According to the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Department, the student posted the videos to Snapchat. Local media reported that the images were shared among some students at Clayton Valley Charter High School in Concord, California. Some of the students were suspended.

In a Tuesday Facebook statement, the county sheriff said that the 17-year-old suspect was arrested and then released to his parents for his alleged involvement in the February 20 incident.

An IBM software engineer sketches out a pending patent. IBM has acquired more US patents than any other company for 23 years in a row. (Jared Lazarus/Feature Photo Service for IBM) (credit: IBM)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is bringing light to what it calls a "stupefyingly mundane" patent on e-mail technology, given not to a patent troll hiding in a small office but to one of the world's largest technology corporations.

IBM lawyers wrangled with the US Patent and Trademark Office for years over their bizarre and alarming alternative history, in which IBM invented out-of-office e-mail—in 2010. US Patent No. 9,547,842, "Out-of-office electronic mail messaging system" was filed in 2010 and granted about six weeks ago.

The "invention" represented in the '842 patent is starkly at odds with the real history of technology, accessible in this case via a basic Google search. EFF lawyer Daniel Nazer, who wrote about the '842 patent in this month's "Stupid Patent of the Month" blog post, points to an article on a Microsoft publicity page that talks about quirky out-of-office e-mail culture dating back to the 1980s, when Microsoft marketed its Xenix e-mail system (the predecessor to today's Exchange.)

SAN FRANCISCO—The entry price for Oculus' high-end VR hardware just came down significantly. In a presentation at the Epic Games keynote at the Game Developers Conference this morning (and in an accompanying blog post), Oculus announced that its Rift headset is now available bundled with its hand-tracking Touch controllers for $598, down from the previous $798 MSRP.

Oculus also lowered the price of both pieces of hardware individually. The Rift headset is down from $599 to $499, while the price for a set of two Touch controllers as a standalone accessory is down from $199 to $99. While the bundle comes with two tracking sensors to keep track of the headset and controllers, extra sensors that can help enable room-scale tracking now cost $59, down from $79.

On stage at GDC, Oculus co-founder and PC VR head Brendan Iribe said that the price drop comes thanks to "great volume" for the hardware and work by the operations team to drive down the cost of components. "From the beginning, our goal has been to get the best VR into as many hands as possible," Iribe said. "Lowering the barrier of entry and making it more affordable for everyone to enter the world of VR" is part of that goal. Iribe also noted that there are now more than 100 Touch-enabled games available on Oculus' online storefront and over 350 Rift-enabled games in total.

Enlarge (credit: Palo Alto Networks)

It's a mystery that left researchers scratching their heads: 132 Android apps in the official Google Play market attempted to infect users with... Windows malware.

The apps, which were spawned by seven different developers, mostly contained carefully concealed HTML-based iframe tags that connected to two heavily obfuscated malicious domains. In one case, an app didn't use iframes but instead used Microsoft's Visual Basic language to inject an entire obfuscated Windows executable into the HTML. The apps were equipped with two capabilities. One was to load interstitial ads, and the other was to load the main app. The main apps loaded WebView components that were configured to allow loaded JavaScript code to access the app's native functionality.

An example of one infected app's user interface and underlying code. (credit: Palo Alto Networks)

That was a lot of work considering that the Windows-based malware was incapable of executing on an Android device. On top of that, the two malicious domains in the iframes—brenz.pl and chura.pl—were taken over by Polish security authorities in 2013. So what, precisely, was going on?