Month: February 2019

We've been on tenterhooks for months, waiting for news of when the long-awaited TV adaptation of Good Omens would air. And now the wait is over.

In conjunction with an announcement at the Television Critics Association regarding an airdate of May 31, Amazon Prime dropped a charming animated teaser trailer. Huzzah!

(Mild spoilers for the novel below.)

Enlarge / Then 23-year-old security researcher Marcus Hutchins in his bedroom in Ilfracombe, UK, in July 2017, just weeks before his arrest on malware charges. (credit: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Marcus Hutchins, the widely acclaimed security researcher charged with creating malware that sold for thousands of dollars on the Internet, has lost his bid to suppress self-incriminating statements he made following days of heavy partying at the 2017 Defcon hacker convention in Las Vegas.

Hutchins—who, under the moniker MalwareTech, unwittingly helped neutralize the virulent WannaCry ransomware worm—was charged with developing the Kronos banking trojan and an advanced spyware program known as the UPAS Kit. The then-23-year-old UK citizen was arrested in August 2017 at McCarran International Airport as he was about to fly home. He had spent the previous week attending the Black Hat and Defcon conferences. Hutchins has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

According to court documents, federal agents questioned Hutchins in an airport interview room shortly after he was arrested. When asked about his involvement in developing malware, the court records show, Hutchins grew visibly confused about the purpose of the interrogation. Eventually, prosecutors said, Hutchins acknowledged that, when he was younger, he wrote code that ended up in malware, but he denied that he had developed the malware itself. After reviewing some source code produced by the agents, Hutchins asked if the investigators were looking for the developer of Kronos. Hutchins then told the interrogators he didn't develop Kronos and had "gotten out" of writing code for malware before he turned 18.

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  Super Mario Maker 2 seeks to earn that sequel designation via a ton of new features. [credit: Nintendo ]

The latest "Nintendo Direct" announcement video came packed with surprises, and none shattered more earth than the big Mario and Zelda games at the video's beginning and end.

As seen in the above gallery, Super Mario Maker 2 is heading to Nintendo Switch in June 2019, and it appears to include enough new tools and systems to rank as a bona fide sequel, if not at least a serious "deluxe" edition. The revealed footage sticks primarily to the four games that the original build-your-own-platformer game supported (SMB1, SMB3, SMW, NSMB), but it adds tools like auto-scrolling paths, clear tubes, piranha plant pathing, more platforms, and the cat-suit power-up.

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  Beady-eyed Link matches the "hand-sculpted" look that pervades this Link's Awakening remake footage.

Though Nintendo issued only a vague release window of "2019," the company had a lot to showcase for its upcoming, surprise-announced remake of The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening. This apparently faithful remake retains the 1993 Game Boy game's top-down perspective (along with its occasional drops into underground side-scrolling), but it otherwise remakes the entire game as a fully 3D adventure.

Enlarge (credit: Andrew / Flickr)

The Securities and Exchange Commission has brought suit against Gene Daniel Levoff, who was Apple's senior director of corporate law until September 2018. Levoff is accused of using his position to make illegal trades of Apple shares.

Levoff was part of Apple's Disclosure Committee—one of the people who could review the company's quarterly financial reports ahead of their publication. The SEC maintains that he used nonpublic information obtained as part of the committee to inform trades he made of Apple shares. For example, in July 2015 he learned that Apple was going to miss analyst estimates for iPhone unit sales. Between July 17 and July 21, when Apple published its quarterly earnings report, he sold nearly his entire holding of Apple stock, totaling nearly $10 million. When the news became public, Apple's share price dropped by more than 4 percent—selling early avoided losses of approximately $345,000.

The SEC alleges that, between 2011 and 2012, Levoff reportedly made $245,000 in profit and, in 2015 and 2016, avoided losses totaling $382,000.