Month: June 2018

Following in the footsteps of our last "Unsolved Mysteries of Gaming" video with (now former) Hearthstone Game Director Ben Brode, we've switched our focus to an entirely different game from an entirely different studio: Digital Extremes' popular third-person shooter Warframe.

We packed our gear and caught a flight to London—that's London, Ontario—and spent an afternoon slinging questions at Community Producer Rebecca Ford and Game Director Steve Sinclair. The focus was on breaking open some of the deeper lore and plot mysteries of the game, which turned five years old this past March (the PC version, at least). Warframe consistently ranks as one of the most-played titles on Steam, in no small part because of Digital Extremes' ongoing commitment to keeping the game under active development.

Over the course of a few hours—lovingly distilled down to a few short minutes thanks to the magic of video editing—we peppered Steve and Rebecca with a whole mess of questions about the game's plot, structure, and player experience. Though they wouldn't answer all of our questions, we got some interesting info on a wide range of subjects, ranging from easter eggs and cool user builds all the way into deep lore questions about the Orokin, the Ayatans, and what the hell is going on with Clem. (Special thanks to Digital Extremes for lending us the voice talents of Mike Leatham—the man behind the voice of Ordis—to read off our questions!)

Enlarge / Gov. Eric Greitens (center), seen here in August 2017. (credit: CAFNR)

On Wednesday morning at 9am local time, a county judge in Missouri is set to hold a court hearing by phone in what is believed to be the first state-level lawsuit involving the use of an ephemeral messaging app. Lawyers in an ongoing lawsuit are battling out whether now-former Governor Eric Greitens’ use of Confide ran afoul of state transparency laws.

Confide, like Signal and other popular encrypted-messaging apps, auto-deletes messages after a certain period of time, making automated record-keeping of those messages very difficult, if not impossible.

Two days ago, Mark Pedroli filed a new motion, asking Cole County Circuit Judge Jon Beetem to force the governor’s office and the custodian of records to formally comply with his own order to disclose numerous details, including how many of the then-governor’s staff used the Confide app.

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Two weeks ago, officials in the private and public sectors warned that hackers working for the Russian government infected more than 500,000 consumer-grade routers in 54 countries with malware that could be used for a range of nefarious purposes. Now, researchers from Cisco’s Talos security team say additional analysis shows that the malware is more powerful than originally thought and runs on a much broader base of models, many from previously unaffected manufacturers.

The most notable new capabilities found in VPNFilter, as the malware is known, come in a newly discovered module that performs an active man-in-the-middle attack on incoming Web traffic. Attackers can use this ssler module to inject malicious payloads into traffic as it passes through an infected router. The payloads can be tailored to exploit specific devices connected to the infected network. Pronounced “essler,” the module can also be used to surreptitiously modify content delivered by websites.

Besides covertly manipulating traffic delivered to endpoints inside an infected network, ssler is also designed to steal sensitive data passed between connected end-points and the outside Internet. It actively inspects Web URLs for signs they transmit passwords and other sensitive data so they can be copied and sent to servers that attackers continue to control even now, two weeks after the botnet was publicly disclosed.

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SAN JOSE—Monday, thousands of people watched Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) keynote, in which the company described its plans for the next versions of its key operating systems—iOS 12 and macOS Mojave. It was more than two hours long, and it covered a lot of new features and tweaks. But in the hours since the keynote, additional information has emerged that wasn't mentioned in the keynote but is also relevant.

For one thing, Apple held a session at WWDC shortly after the keynote called "Platforms State of the Union" that went into a little more detail on certain features. The company also spoke with press to answer questions and clarify concepts. Finally, the company has released the first beta releases of iOS 12 and macOS Mojave, along with various pieces of support documentation. Developers, press, and users have discovered a number of new changes and features this way.

More info will emerge as Apple hosts dedicated talks on subjects like ARKit and Metal, but here's the most interesting stuff we've learned at WWDC so far that wasn't brought up in the keynote. We don't touch on everything here, of course, but we'll be digging more deeply into certain topics from WWDC—some mentioned here, some not—in the coming days.