October 2017 – Page 42 – news.buyenne.com

More Denuvo Protected Games Broken Within 24 Hours

Denuvo’s usefulness is under question again as not one, but two new games featuring the infamous copy protection system was cracked within 24 hours this week.A pirated version of ‘Middle-earth: Shadow of War’ with the Denuvo protection disabled was mad…

Denuvo's usefulness is under question again as not one, but two new games featuring the infamous copy protection system was cracked within 24 hours this week.

A pirated version of 'Middle-earth: Shadow of War' with the Denuvo protection disabled was made available online only 24 hours after the game's official release, while a few days later, 'South Park: The Fractured But Whole' was also cracked in about the same time frame.

And only two weeks ago, the game 'Total War: Warhammer 2' was cracked in only a few hours. This contrasts greatly with when Denuvo first made a name for itself, when games took weeks and even months to be cracked.

Denuvo copy protection differs from other traditional forms of DRM (Digital Rights Management), in that instead of protecting the game directly from being pirated, Denuvo protects tampering of the game's code, which is often required to break traditional DRM. In many cases, games employ a traditional DRM (which is normally easily cracked), but uses Denuvo to prevent the DRM from being tampered with, thus adding a new layer of protection.

While the exact mechanism for Denuvo is a trade secret, most believe it works on the principle of adding specific code, called "triggers", into the game's main code. Denuvo then checks for the presence of these "triggers" to ensure the game hasn't been tampered with. Each "trigger" requires manual removal, and with potentially thousands of "triggers" being present in each game, the process is extremely time consuming.

But in recent months, hackers have found more success with removing Denuvo, and in record time, suggesting some kind of flaw or weakness in the protection has been found, or that hackers have found a way to automate the process of removing "triggers" more efficiently.

These latest cracking incidents may force Denuvo to bring out a new version of their protection ahead of schedule, assuming they can identify the weakness in their current version and plug any holes that may be present.

[via Polygon]

Report: Twitter CEO took a Russian impostor’s bait in 2016

The retweets were for innocent, “positive” stories. And that was the point.

As the public learns more about confirmed Russian troll accounts on social media platforms over the past few years, reporters have begun digging into any ties they may have with major political or tech voices. The Daily Beast found a pretty big one on Friday, when it confirmed via Internet archives that Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey unwittingly retweeted posts from a phony Black Lives Matter advocate.

In fact, the example Daily Beast reporter Ben Collins found was a single account, @crystal1johnson, getting two juicy retweets from Twitter's very own "@jack." The discovered posts (which are now archive-only, thanks to the account being deleted in August) date back to March 2016. Both revolve around black identity in the United States.

The first congratulated musician and actor Rihanna for winning a Humanitarian of the Year award from Harvard (dead link here, proof of its content here). The second shared a now-dead image of what may have been children of different races having fun together, with the description reading, "Nobody is born a racist. This picture is so sweet! Teach your children to judge others by the kind of person they are inside." (Archived link of Dorsey's retweet [RT], found by Collins, is here.)

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Elon Musk’s Boring Company is digging a 10-mile tunnel in Maryland

The venture follows Musk’s recent obsession with tunneling equipment.

On Thursday, Maryland officials gave Elon Musk’s Boring Company permission to dig a 10.1-mile tunnel “beneath the state-owned portion of the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, between the Baltimore city line and Maryland 175 in Hanover,” according to the Baltimore Sun.

According to Maryland Transportation Secretary Pete Rahn, The Boring Company (which Tesla and SpaceX CEO Musk founded to advance tunneling technology) wants to build two 35-mile tunnels between Baltimore and Washington, DC. The federal government owns about two-thirds of the land that Musk’s company would need to dig underneath. As of Friday, it was unclear whether that permission had been granted. (A Department of Transportation spokeswoman told Ars that the land in question was owned by the National Park Service, which did not immediately respond to request for comment.)

But the 10 miles that have been approved by the state of Maryland will for the first leg of an underground system that could contain a Hyperloop system. Musk first floated the idea of a Hyperloop—which would ferry passengers through a low-pressure tube in levitating pods floating above a track using air-bearings—in 2013. But the CEO determined that he didn’t have time to see his idea through to fruition, so he issued a white paper and challenged startups and students alike to make headway on the concept.

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Archaeologists are mystified by ancient “gates” in Saudi lava fields

Google Earth reveals hundreds of geoglyphs in the desert, possibly 9,000 years old.

Google Earth

For almost a century, aerial photographers have been documenting mysterious, millennia-old structures built from low walls of stone in the rocky lava fields, known as harrat, in Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. This desert region, blistered with volcanic mounds, is nearly devoid of life. But seen from above, the barren ground is covered with massive, interlocking geoglyphs that take the form of abstract arrow shapes called "kites" and rough rectangles called "gates."

University of Western Australia archaeologist David Kennedy became interested in the structures after discovering how easy they were to track using Google Earth. He'd seen some of the kites while doing fieldwork in Jordan and realized that the structures continued into Saudi Arabia. "We would have loved to fly across into Saudi Arabia to take images. But you never get the permission,” he told The New York Times. “And then along comes Google Earth.” Now Kennedy has a paper about the rectangular gate structures in a forthcoming issue of Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy.

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Pixel 2’s Active Edge squeeze controls can do more than just launch Assistant (unofficially)

The Google Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL have a feature called Active Edge that Google borrowed from the HTC U11. Squeeze the sides of the phone and you can launch Google Assistant. Or squeeze when a call is incoming and you can silence the phone. And… …

Pixel 2’s Active Edge squeeze controls can do more than just launch Assistant (unofficially) is a post from: Liliputing

Windows 10: Fall Creators Update macht Ryzen schneller

Berichten in Foren und bei Reddit zufolge soll das Windows 10 Fall Creators Update mehr Geschwindigkeit aus den Ryzen-Prozessoren herausholen. Das stimmt aber nur dann, wenn der Nutzer zuvor die AMD-Software nicht aktualisiert hat. (AMD Zen, Prozessor)

50-year-old research issue still biting biologists

Once upon a time, researchers paid attention to the problems with their field.

Normally, news involves something that is, as the name implies, new. But this week, attention was given to a problem in biology that is anything but new. There have been decades of warnings that researchers sometimes perform studies using cells that have been misidentified—presented as liver cells when in fact they're derived from the spleen, for example. As cell lines are shared and studies build on earlier work, this misidentification has the potential to cause wider problems in the scientific record.

Despite decades of warnings and the existence of a database of problematic cell lines, the problem isn't going away, as emphasized by a study released last week. The new analysis estimates that as much as 10 percent of the papers in the biological sciences may be influenced by cases of mistaken cellular identity. And it's hard to ascribe this to anything other than carelessness and overconfidence on the part of biologists.

Mistaken identity

How do you end up with the wrong cells? There are a variety of ways. Often, new cell lines are made from tumor or tissue samples. If the sample is not 100-percent pure, there's a chance that something other than what you expect could grow out. In addition, some tumors can be misidentified—assumed to be lung if they're found there, but the tumor may actually represent a metastasis of a cancer that started in some other tissue. While there are ways of identifying a cell's source (typically, checking the battery of genes active in the cells will indicate its origin), this hasn't been done as consistently as it should be.

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Samsung launches Galaxy Tab Active2 ruggedized tablet

Samsung’s latest Android tablet is a ruggedized model designed for business users, although I suppose the Galaxy Tab Active2 could also appeal to accident-prone home users or folks who want a tablet to take hiking or camping. Like the company’s Galaxy Active smartphones, the tablet is MIL-STD-810 certified for pressure, temperature, vibration, and drop protection. […]

Samsung launches Galaxy Tab Active2 ruggedized tablet is a post from: Liliputing

Cloudflare Counters MPAA and RIAA’s ‘Rehashed’ Piracy Complaints

Cloudflare has responded to the repeated criticism of entertainment industry groups, which accuse the company of helping pirate sites. The CDN provider informs the U.S. Government that it operates in accordance with the law and that the complaints bring nothing new to the table.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

A few weeks ago several copyright holder groups sent their annual “Notorious Markets” complaints to the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR).

While the recommendations usually include well-known piracy sites such as The Pirate Bay, third-party services are increasingly mentioned. MPAA and RIAA, for example, wrote that Cloudflare frustrates enforcement efforts by helping pirate sites to “hide”.

The CDN provider is not happy with these characterizations and this week submitted a rebuttal. Cloudflare’s General Counsel Doug Kramer says that the company was surprised to see these mentions. Not only because they “distort” reality, but also because they are pretty much identical to those leveled last year.

“Most surprising is that their comments were basically the same complaints they filed in 2016 and contain the same mistakes and distortions that we pointed out in our rebuttal comments from October, 2016.”

“Simply repeating the same mischaracterizations for a second year in a row does not convert them into facts, so we are compelled to reiterate our objections,” Kramer adds (pdf).

There is indeed quite a bit of overlap between the submissions from both years. In fact, several sections are copied word for word, such as the RIAA’s allegation below.

“In addition, more sites are now employing services of Cloudflare, a content delivery network and distributed domain name server service. BitTorrent sites, like many other pirate sites, are increasing [sic] turning to Cloudflare because routing their site through Cloudflare obfuscates the IP address of the actual hosting provider, masking the location of the site.”

The same can be said about the MPAA’s submission, which includes a lot of the same comments and sentences as last year. That wouldn’t be much of a problem if the information was correct, but according to Cloudflare, that’s not the case.

The two industry groups claim that the CDN provider makes it more difficult to track where pirate sites are hosted. However, Cloudflare argues the opposite.

Both RIAA and MPAA are part of the “Trusted Reporter” program and use it frequently, Cloudflare points out. This program allows rightsholders to easily obtain the actual IP-addresses of Cloudflare-hosted websites that engage in widespread copyright infringement.

Most importantly, according to Cloudflare, is that the company follows the letter of the law.

“Cloudflare does not make the process of enforcing intellectual property rights online any harder — or any easier. We follow all applicable laws and regulations,” Cloudflare explained in its submission last year.

In its 2017 rebuttal, the company reiterates this position once again. Kramer also points to a recent blog post from CEO Matthew Prince, which discusses free speech and censorship issues. The message is that vigilante justice is not the answer to piracy, and all relevant stakeholders should get together to discuss how to handle these issues going forward.

For now, however, the USTR should disregard the comments regarding Cloudflare as irrelevant and inaccurate, the company argues.

“We trust that USTR will once again agree with Cloudflare that complaints implying that Cloudflare is aiding illegal activities have no place whatsoever in USTR’s Notorious Markets inquiry. It would seem to distract from and dilute the message of that report to focus on companies that are working to make the internet more cybersecure,” Kramer concludes.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Uber, Intel, and other tech firms will urge Congress to let “Dreamers” stay

Uber: “We plan to support Dreamers as long as they need help.”

A slew of major companies—including tech giants Uber, Intel, Facebook, and Google—are forming a bloc to seek Congressional immigration reform.

According to Reuters, which first reported the news late Thursday evening, the companies will band together under the name "Coalition for the American Dream" and seek support to extend Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).

This Obama-era executive action allowed "Dreamers," undocumented immigrants who arrived as minors, to register with the government and legally study or work without fear of deportation. The newly organized Coalition appears to be unrelated to an Oklahoma-based group founded in 2006 that shares the same name: Coalition for the American Dream. (The Oklahoma group also "advocate[s] for and protect[s] the rights of disenfranchised immigrants and new Americans from all nations.")

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