Month: April 2017

Enlarge (credit: Seth Anderson)

Mirai, the botnet that threatened the Internet as we knew it last year with record-setting denial-of-service attacks, is facing an existential threat of its own: A competing botnet known as Hajime has infected at least 10,000 home routers, network-connected cameras, and other so-called Internet of Things devices.

Hajime uses a decentralized peer-to-peer network to issue commands and updates to infected devices. This design makes it more resistant to takedowns by ISPs and Internet backbone providers. Hajime uses the same list of user name and password combinations Mirai uses, with the addition of two more. It also takes steps to conceal its running processes and files, a feature that makes detecting infected systems more difficult. Most interesting of all: Hajime appears to be the brainchild of a grayhat hacker, as evidenced by a cryptographically signed message it displays every 10 minutes or so on terminals. The message reads:

Just a white hat, securing some systems.

Important messages will be signed like this!

Hajime Author.

Contact CLOSED

Stay sharp!

Another sign Hajime is a vigilante-style project intended to disrupt Mirai and similar IoT botnets: It blocks access to four ports known to be vectors used to attack many IoT device. Hajime also lacks distributed denial-of-service capabilities or any other attacking code except for the propagation code that allows one infected device to seek out and infect other vulnerable devices.

Forget the box! It's free now! Finally! (credit: Blizzard Entertainment)

Last month, the game makers at Blizzard announced a remastered, 4K-friendly version of the original StarCraft, set to launch this summer. That announcement also teased a much sooner release of the original StarCraft that would be completely free. After a delay, that free version is finally available to download worldwide. Blizzard has posted links to Mac and Windows builds here.

The late-March remaster announcement included the promise of the game's original, lower-res version, complete with all Brood War expansion content. The low-res version would be made entirely free to download (technically, "free as in beer"—you can grab the compiled game and play it to your heart's content, but you are not formally allowed to pick the files apart and use, say, the game's source code as you please). However, a beta launch of this new version, numbered 1.18, resulted in crashes and issues for testers, so Blizzard held it back for testing and tweaking until Tuesday.

It makes sense that the patch's beta launch was a little rocky, considering the game hadn't been updated since 2009 and had to pass muster on modern Windows and Mac operating systems. This version may very well receive further patches as well, since it will contain identical gameplay to the summer remaster version. The newer StarCraft will only receive a superficial update in the form of completely redrawn assets; all other parts and mechanics of the game will be so identical that remaster players will be able to compete online against original-version players.

Enlarge (credit: kris krüg)

One of the things that Microsoft does with its Insider Preview builds of Windows is run experiments. A couple of experiments that were briefly available during the development of the Creators Update are back, as Microsoft develops new power management capabilities.

The new feature is called Power Throttling, although this name is just temporary. Power Throttling was originally trialed in the Creators Update preview build 15002. When used in conjunction with an Intel Skylake or Kaby Lake processor—and only those processors, for the moment—the system will classify certain applications as being "background work." If a background task demands processor time, Windows will avoid kicking up the processor into a high performance mode, instead keeping it in its low power state. Only when a foreground application—or certain classes of important background task, such as music apps—needs processor time will the processor have its speed increased.

The slider is back. (credit: Microsoft)

Power Throttling is controlled by new settings in the Settings app—you can set them so that Windows will never treat certain apps as being background apps if you prefer—and by a second Creators Update-era experiment that has been resurrected. Build 15014 included a power management slider that appeared when you clicked the battery icon in the system notification area.