Month: January 2020

Enlarge / Pictured: a hotrod gaming device.

We have a wild report from Android Police this morning, as the site claims that Google is working to bring official Steam support to Chrome OS. Yes, Valve's Steam. The gaming platform. On Chromebooks.

The story apparently comes from a direct source: Kan Liu, the director of product management for Chrome OS. During an interview with Liu at CES, the site says Liu "implied, though would not directly confirm, that Google was working in direct cooperation with Valve on this project." The idea is that, according the Liu, "gaming is the single most popular category of downloads for Play Store content on Chromebooks," and Steam would mean even more games.

Anyone can put Steam on Chrome OS now. Chrome OS supports Linux apps. Steam has a Linux client and sells Linux games. You can install Steam and use it as a Chrome OS game store right now. You wouldn't get the entire Windows collection of Steam games, but there is a modest-and-growing collection of games that support Linux. No one does this because Chromebooks are not gaming hardware. They usually have just enough GPU power to run YouTube, scroll a webpage, and that's about it—3D graphics are not really going to happen. To make matters worse, Chrome OS' hardware acceleration for the Linux sandbox is actually pretty bad, and nearly identical hardware can run games at a higher FPS using Windows or a real distribution of Linux.

Enlarge / The seizure notice for WeLeakInfo even included the site's logo. Fancy.

On Wednesday, police in the Netherlands and Northern Ireland arrested two 22-year old men believed to be connected to WeLeakInfo, a site offering usernames and passwords from multiple data breaches for sale. At the same time, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in coordination with the UK's National Crime Agency, the Netherlands National Police Corps, the German Bundeskriminalamt, and the Police Service of Northern Ireland, took down the domain for the site, redirecting it to a seizure notice (shown above).

At first, some thought the takedown was simply a breach of the site itself—mostly because the FBI took the time to add the site's logo to the takedown notice.

There's a mess happening over at We Leak Info since yesterday. It looks like they got hacked, and someone threw up an FBI seizure page. The seizure notice doesn't look legit.

... Not a good look for them...https://t.co/XGGIRaJKQk #WeLeakInfo #WLI pic.twitter.com/SUzaAQD8Pd

— Cypher (@CryptoCypher) January 16, 2020

But on Thursday afternoon, the Justice Department announced the takedown and put out a call for further information on WeLeakInfo and its operators. WeLeakInfo claimed to have over 12 billion usernames and passwords from a collection of over 10 thousand data breaches. Originally hosted at a Canadian hosting company's data center when set up in 2016, the domain was moved behind Cloudflare a day later. The site, originally advertised as "the most extensive private database search engine," purported to be a legitimate tool for companies to perform security research—even claiming to offer an application interface for performing bulk checks for breaches of company accounts.

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  Lexus Lunar, by Yung Presciutti, is described thus: "Lexus Lunar is a massive transport vehicle designed to explore and discover the moon safely. The vehicle is divided into two parts: the bottom consists of a platform with 6 rugged wheels to give the freedom to go wherever you want. The upper part holds the living area. The two components of the vehicle can be also divided, with the upper portion detaching to create the start of a lunar colony." [credit: Lexus ]

I love a good concept car. And I'm pretty keen on space—Charlie Brown bears responsibility for getting me interested at a very early age. So obviously my interest was going to be piqued by an email from Lexus containing a bunch of design sketches from ED², its European Advanced Design Studio thinking about what we might drive on the moon.

The designs—seven in total—were created by the design studio for an art and fashion publication called Document Journal, which invited a range of designers to imagine what life might be like on the moon. In Lexus' case, the inspiration was the company's recent LF-30 concept car; you may remember if from our coverage of last year's LA Auto Show.

"When Document Journal approached us about the Lunar Design Portfolio, our team was working on the LF-30 Concept, which represents the "Lexus Electrified" futuristic vision for Lexus. The design team was already looking beyond near-term production and ahead to how advanced technology will change the way we interact with vehicles," said Ian Cartabiano, President of ED². "The lunar project came at the right time, half way through the LF-30 development. It gave the team a chance to dream further out, and then apply some of the design language from the LF- 30 interior to their lunar proposals."