Month: November 2018

Enlarge (credit: Blizzard Entertainment)

Announcements of a brand-new, smartphone-only Diablo and a remastered WarCraft 3 headlined a news-filled BlizzCon keynote presentation on Friday. The talk focused on games across Blizzard Entertainment's portfolio—along with a huge freebie from its corporate siblings at Bungie.

Starting today, that developer’s Destiny 2 is now free to claim on Windows 10 PCs. Anyone who logs into Battle.net on or before November 18 can claim the game's vanilla version at this site and keep it for free. (Should you create an entirely new Battle.net account on or after November 2, you'll need to attach SMS authentication to your account to claim that copy—presumably to prevent a slew of spam accounts claiming free Destiny 2 accounts.) That version includes quite a bit of content that can be played with all other owners of the PC version, though at this point, it's effectively an elaborate demo for the game's more recent expansion packs.

Diablo Immortal's control scheme on smartphone.

Blizzard's previous promises of "multiple Diablo projects" bore fruit during the keynote with the announcement of Diablo Immortal, a "full-fledged action-RPG you can play everywhere with everyone." This game, set between the events of Diablo II and Diablo III, is credited to developer NetEase Games, a company that primarily handles online game management of Blizzard's classic series in China on top of also making its own titles. Reveal footage of the game confirmed a pretty busy interface of touchscreen buttons that mobile players will use to manage abilities and items. That interface, seen above, may look bonkers to Diablo's PC faithful, but it looks somewhat reserved compared to mega-popular mobile games like PUBG and Fortnite.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Ed Bock)

A US senator has proposed a privacy law that could issue steep fines to companies and send their top executives to prison for up to 20 years if they violate Americans' privacy.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. announced a discussion draft of his Consumer Data Protection Act yesterday. The bill would establish new privacy rules that major companies must follow and establish fines and prison sentences big enough to make even the largest companies take notice.

Consumers would have the right to opt out of systems that share their data with third parties. Companies that don't follow the proposed law could be fined up to 4 percent of annual revenue on their first offense. The FTC currently is unable to fine first-time corporate offenders, and "fines for subsequent violations of the law are tiny, and not a credible deterrent," Wyden's bill summary says.

Enlarge / HBO is none too pleased about President Trump's Friday tweet. (credit: HBO)

Friday morning, President Trump used Twitter to issue a rare kind of foreign-policy announcement: a slogan lifted from a pop-culture meme, repurposed to vaguely suggest future political action. And it drew criticism from one significant party: HBO, who cited its "trademark" in disapproving of the president's choice of message delivery.

That response came as a result of Trump using both a Game of Thrones-styled typeface (including its crossed-O design) and a co-opting of that series' popular "Winter is coming" motto. Trump's version twists the phrase to announce, "sanctions are coming," which is an apparent call to reinstate economic sanctions against Iran that had been lifted in a landmark 2015 deal made by an international coalition.

When we asked HBO for comment, the company offered a one-sentence statement: "We were not aware of this messaging and would prefer our trademark not be misappropriated for political purposes."

Enlarge (credit: Randy Adams)

Venerable photo sharing site Flickr has announced that from January 8, 2019, free accounts will be limited to 1,000 photos or videos. Any content above that limit will be deleted, starting February 5, 2019, beginning with the oldest images first. To go beyond the 1,000 item limit, you'll have to pay $50/year for Flickr Pro.

Created in 2004, Flickr was bought by Yahoo in 2005. The original model was that free accounts were limited to 200 pictures, with payment required to go beyond this limit. During Yahoo's ownership, free Flickr accounts were made more and more capable, with the biggest change coming in 2013, when free accounts were given 1TB of total space. Yahoo was bought by Verizon in 2017, and in April of this year, Flickr was sold to SmugMug, another photo hosting site.

Flickr's new owners say that the change is being made to better concentrate on what Flickr should be: a community for photographers to store, showcase, and talk about their work. Expanding storage to 1TB for free accounts brought in the wrong kind of users—not people who loved photography, but rather people attracted by a large bitbucket they could dump files into.

Enlarge / When he left the CIA in 2011 to become secretary of defense, Leon Panetta (right) was leaving in the midst of a huge crisis for the CIA, according to a Yahoo News report: a breach in communications had exposed dozens of CIA assets in Iran and China. (credit: Central Intelligence Agency)

A covert "transitional" channel used for communicating with sources that Central Intelligence Agency handlers couldn't reach directly was exposed and infiltrated by Iranian intelligence in 2009. The breakdown in operational security—which apparently relied heavily on security through obscurity—was the result of Iranian intelligence officials simply using Google to locate the websites used as the communications channel after a double-agent exposed the method used by the CIA, according to a report from Yahoo News' Zach Dorfman and Jenna McLaughlin.

Once a double agent presented information about a website the agent had been directed to in order to communicate with the CIA, Iranian intelligence apparently used aspects of the URL to search for other, similar websites. Iranian officials were reportedly able to rapidly identify a number of other such sites, which were set up as temporary communications systems for new, unvetted sources by the CIA. As a result, Iran's intelligence was able to quickly identify the Iranians communicating through those sites. The breach led to the roundup in 2011 of 30 people identified by Iran as CIA spies.

Further digging into these compromised sites may have exposed the identity of CIA personnel as well. During the same timeframe, Iranian intelligence officials were also directly approaching US CIA officers, trying to recruit them to be double agents.