Month: June 2017

Enlarge / Every so often, you get a flash of what the game was going for—and it could have been interesting!

Valkyria Revolution, despite its name and approximately similar art style, isn’t really a sequel to 2008’s incredible Valkyria Chronicles (or its slightly less incredible PSP sequels). In tone and gameplay, the differences between the two series are night and day, and Revolution looks considerably poorer for the comparison.

The new game, like its predecessors, takes place on the continent of "Europa"—shaped just like real-world Europe, but divided into fictional fantasy countries like Jutland and the Ruzi Empire. If you don’t recognize those two nations from Chronicles, that’s because Revolution takes place in an entirely new continuity.

That the sister series just happens to have nearly identical settings—as well as reuse terms like Valkyria and “ragnite”—is confusing and poorly justified. Taking control for the first time and meeting the game’s gang of barely introduced misfits didn’t do much to clear up why Valkyria Revolution needs to share so much DNA with its “predecessor.” My best, most cynical guess is that Valkyria Revolution was made to siphon off some of Chronicles’ cult status—not to mention the attention of fans still fiending for a true follow-up.

Enlarge (credit: A. Bohn et al.)

Now that we can detect gravitational waves, a new generation of stargazers is turning its attention to the Universe and using observatories that can be disrupted by a passing rabbit. Gravitational-wave detectors are going to give us an entirely new view of our place in the cosmos.

As with all new techniques, we are still in the age of crude and not-very-sensitive. That means we can only search for the biggest and baddest of events: black-hole mergers. So far, LIGO has detected three and a half mergers—the third merger is right on the edge of the detection limit, so it is provisional. But those black holes have been larger than expected, which raises an intriguing question: is that their first merger, or have they grown through previous mergers?

Now (arXiv version) scientists have determined how to figure out if black holes are first-time cannibals or recidivist cannibals.

Enlarge / The new security analytics dashboard. (credit: Microsoft)

The Windows 10 Fall Creators Update will include EMET-like capabilities managed through a new feature called Windows Defender Exploit Guard.

Microsoft's EMET, the Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit, was a useful tool for hardening Windows systems. It used a range of techniques—some built in to Windows, some part of EMET itself—to make exploitable security flaws harder to reliably exploit. The idea being that, even if coding bugs should occur, turning those bugs into actual security issues should be made as difficult as possible.

With Windows 10, however, EMET's development was essentially cancelled. Although Microsoft made sure the program ran on Windows 10, the company said that EMET was superfluous on its latest operating system. Some protections formerly provided by EMET had been built into the core operating system itself, and Windows 10 offered additional protections far beyond the scope of what EMET could do.

Enlarge / Ow. (credit: Getty | Paul Bradbury)

Chronic, aching pain after an injury or operation may be all in your head. Researchers now think they’ve figured out exactly how brain wiring goes haywire to cause persistent pain—and how to fix it.

In mice with peripheral nerve damage and chronic pain from a leg surgery, a broken circuit in a pain-processing region of mammalian brains caused hyperactive pain signals that persisted for more than a month. Specifically, the peripheral nerve damage seemed to deactivate a type of interconnected brain cells, called somatostatin (SOM) interneurons, which normally dampen pain signals. Without the restraints, neurons that fire off pain signals—cortical pyramidal neurons—went wild, researchers report in Nature Neuroscience.

But the circuitry could be repaired, the researchers found. Just by manually activating those pain-stifling SOM interneurons, the researchers could shut down the rodents’ chronic pain and keep the system working properly—preventing centralized, chronic pain from ever developing.

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The official website of Ohio Governor John Kasich and the site of Ohio First Lady Karen Kasich were defaced on June 25 by a group calling itself Team System DZ. The group is a known pro-Islamic State "hacktivist" group that has repeatedly had its social media accounts suspended for posting IS propaganda videos and other activity. Kasich's site was but one of a number of state and local government websites that were hijacked by Team System DZ early this week, all of which had one thing in common: they were running on an outdated version of the DotNetNuke (DNN) content management platform.

DNN Platform is a popular content management system (particularly with state and local governments) based on Windows Server and the ASP.NET framework for Microsoft Internet Information Server. DNN Platform is open source and available for free—making it attractive to government agencies looking for something low cost that fits into their existing Windows Server-heavy organizations. A review of the HTML source of each of the sites attacked by Team System DZ showed that they were running a vulnerable version of the content management system DNN Platform—version 7.0, which was released in 2015.

A critical security update issued by DNN in May of 2016 warned that an attacker could exploit vulnerabilities to create new "superuser" accounts through the content management system, giving them unfettered remote access to modify websites. DNN urged customers to upgrade to the latest version of the software at the time. A May 2015 alert also warned that an attacker could use the software's Installation Wizard page for some server configurations to create new user accounts on the Windows Server host.

Enlarge (credit: Mike Mozart / Flickr)

There has been a lot of media coverage about Uber driver misdeeds—drunk driving, drivers stealing from their passengers, and even cases of drivers murdering and raping customers. But Uber drivers can also be victims of their passengers.

The family of an Uber driver murdered on the job in Illinois is taking Walmart to court. In a Cook County lawsuit, (PDF) the family of driver Grant T. Nelson alleges that the retail giant was negligent when it allowed the murder suspect to steal a machete and a knife before walking past security personnel without being stopped. That was right before she hailed an Uber outside the Skokie store at 3am on May 30.

Moments after picking up the alleged thief—a 16-year-old girl named Eliza Wasni—police say the 37-year-old Nelson was stabbed to death by Wasni after exiting the Walmart parking lot.

Matthew Keys, seen here in 2016, before he was ordered to prison. (credit: Cyrus Farivar)

A federal appeals court has upheld the conviction and sentence of the California journalist who was found guilty under a federal anti-hacking law last year.

On Monday, the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that it was not persuaded by arguments made by Matthew Keys’ defense attorneys. In a hearing earlier this month, his lawyers said that while their client may have handed over a username and password that resulted in a brief defacement of one Los Angeles Times article, this did not constitute actual "damage" as described in the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

As Ars reported earlier, Keys was accused of giving out a username and password for his former employer KTXL Fox 40's content management system (CMS) to members of Anonymous and instructing people there to "fuck some shit up." Ultimately, that December 2010 incident resulted in someone else using those credentials to alter a headline and sub-headline on a Los Angeles Times article. (Both Fox 40 and the Times are owned by the Tribune Media Company.) The changes lasted for 40 minutes before editors reversed them.