Month: January 2021

Enlarge / The Days of Thunder NES prototype source code on these disks sat in his basement for 30 years before being uncovered upon his death. (credit: VGHF)

When most people think of preserving video game history, they probably imagine a museum full of boxed consoles and cartridges, or maybe a massive, digital database of emulatable ROM files ripped from the original physical media. The Video Game History Foundation's latest project is looking past those kinds of basic archival projects, though, and toward collecting and preserving the source code behind many classic games.

"For a video game historian, an archaeological dig through source material is the next best thing to time travel,' VGHF's Frank Cifaldi said. "A really good source repo is the closest you're ever going to get to being a fly on the wall during a game's development."

Digging through a game's source code repository can help archivists discover previously unknown content and information. Back in 2017, for instance, a VGHF analysis found unused Disney character art and animation in the source code for 1993's Genesis Aladdin game ("Some of that was in a folder called trash," Cifaldi told Ars). More recently, the VGHF team discovered the source code for Nuclear Rush—a game prototype for the unreleased Sega Genesis virtual reality headset—and remade it to work on modern VR hardware.

Enlarge (credit: Olivier Le Moal | Getty Images)

Before this century is over, we're almost certainly going to need to pull massive amounts of carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere. While we already know how to do carbon capture and storage, it takes a fair amount of energy and equipment, and someone has to pay for all that. It would be far more economical to pull CO₂ out of the air if we could convert it to a useful product, like jet fuel. But processes like that also take a lot of energy, plus raw materials like hydrogen that take energy to create.

Plants and a huge range of microbes successfully pull carbon dioxide out of the air and use it to produce all sorts of complicated (and valuable!) chemicals. But the pathways they use to incorporate CO₂ aren't very efficient, so they can't fix enough of the greenhouse gas or incorporate it into enough product to be especially useful. That has led a lot of people to look into re-engineering an enzyme that's central to photosynthesis. But a team of European researchers has taken a radically different approach: engineering an entirely new biochemical pathway that incorporates the carbon of CO₂ into molecules critical for the cell's basic metabolism.

Sounds good in theory

On the rare occasions that most biologists think about biochemical pathways, energy is an afterthought. Most cells have enough of it to spare that they can afford to burn through their own energy supplies to force rather improbable pathways forward to get the chemicals they want. But grabbing carbon out of the atmosphere represents a very different sort of problem. You want it to happen as a central part of the cell's metabolism rather than a pathway out on the periphery so that you grab a lot of carbon. And you want it to happen in a way that's more efficient than the options the cells already have.

Enlarge (credit: George / Getty Images)

Soaring cryptocurrency valuations have broken record after record over the past few years, turning people with once-modest holdings into overnight millionaires. One determined ring of criminals has tried to join the party using a wide-ranging operation that for the past 12 months has used a full-fledged marketing campaign to push custom-made malware written from scratch for Windows, macOS, and Linux devices.

The operation, which has been active since at least January 2020, has spared no effort in stealing the wallet addresses of unwitting cryptocurrency holders, according to a report published by security firm Intezer. The scheme includes three separate trojanized apps, each of which runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux. It also relies on a network of fake companies, websites, and social media profiles to win the confidence of potential victims.

Uncommonly stealthy

The apps pose as benign software that’s useful to cryptocurrency holders. Hidden inside is a remote access trojan that was written from scratch. Once an app is installed, ElectroRAT—as Intezer has dubbed the backdoor—then allows the crooks behind the operation to log keystrokes, take screenshots, upload, download, and install files, and execute commands on infected machines. In a testament to their stealth, the fake cryptocurrency apps went undetected by all major antivirus products.