Month: July 2019

Enlarge (credit: Penn State / Flickr)

Router and webcam maker D-Link has agreed to implement a new security program to settle charges it failed to safeguard its hardware against well-known and preventable hacks and misrepresented its existing security regimen.

Tuesday’s agreement settles a 2017 complaint by the US Federal Trade Commission that alleged D-Link left thousands of customers open to potentially costly hack attacks. The hardware maker, the FTC said, failed to test its gear against security flaws ranked among the most critical and widespread by the Open Web Application Security Project. The 2017 suit also said that, despite the lack of testing and hardening of its products, D-Link misrepresented its security regimen as reasonable.

Specific shortcomings cited by the FTC included:

Enlarge / Windows got the '80s treatment, but we're not sure what's actually being promoted. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Either Microsoft is gearing up for a very odd promotional effort or somebody on the Windows team has hijacked a functioning time machine.

Yesterday, the company posted a video boasting an "all-new Windows 1.0" to its social channels. It even went so far as to completely wipe all its previous posts from the Windows Instagram account, so all you'll find is the clip of its logos over the years. The video scrolls from the simplicity of Windows 10 through the pixellated rainbow flag of Windows XP and Windows 95.

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  Possibly the most tubular exchange of compliments on Twitter. [credit: @ghostsarespooky ]

Whatever the situation is, the stunt is giving Windows' social media managers a chance to load their replies to confused tweets with throwbacks, from Back to the Future gifs to all the jargon that was once the epitome of cool.

Enlarge / A bunch of white guys fighting with medieval weaponry in Mordhau. (credit: Triternion)

Since its launch in April, medieval combat sim Mordhau has been a surprise hit for freshman development studio Triternion, selling over a million copies as of last month. But the online multiplayer game's use of exclusively white male avatars has troubled some players looking for a more diverse set of character customization options.

Triternion has said that it plans to add more avatar variety in the future, but the studio created additional questions around those plans in a recent interview with PC Gamer. In that piece, the magazine quoted Mordhau developers as saying they were considering giving players the ability to turn off the pending customization options on the client side, effectively re-homogenizing the look of the characters on their own displays.

In response to a question about "adding female playable characters and changing character's skin tones," PC Gamer quoted Triternion's Mike Desrosiers as saying, "Whatever stance we take officially, some group of people are going to be upset with us. And so, ideally we'd put the power in the players' hands and give them the option to enable and disable different things."

Enlarge / Will coffee-flavored milk save the dairy industry? (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

Amid decades-long souring of milk sales in the United States, big dairy groups have now turned to sponsoring coffee bars in high schools to help skim profits from the trendy—and milk-heavy—latte drinks popular with teens, according to a report by the Associated Press.

A $5,000 dairy grant to a high school in North Dakota helped buy an espresso machine that makes 150-calorie latte drinks containing 8 ounces of milk, for instance. The school went through 530 gallons of milk just for the lattes this school year, according to the food-service director for the school district.

Likewise, a Florida dairy group offers schools grants worth $6,000 to outfit their coffee bars. The campaign is called “moo-lah for schools,” which refers to lattes as “moo brew.” The group says the coffee bars are an opportunity to “serve 8 oz. of milk with 2 oz. of coffee and added flavorings that fit into your school wellness policy.” One of the explicit goals of the grant program is to get students who “might not normally select milk with their school meals to consume milk.”