Month: January 2021

Enlarge / A closed GameStop store in Frankfurt, Germany, on Friday, Jan. 29, 2021. (credit: Alex Kraus/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

You've probably seen stories about GameStop, the struggling video game retailer that has improbably seen its stock quintuple since the start of the week. The stock isn't up because GameStop announced strong financial results or a new turnaround strategy. Instead, it was the focus of a coordinated buying campaign by members of the WallStreetBets subreddit.

The effort has been so effective in part because its architects have convinced people that it's not just a pump and dump scheme. Instead, they've painted a seductive story in which retail investors found a loophole that allows them to make money at the expense of hedge funds and other wealthy investors who had shorted the stock.

In reality, most of the gains captured by early GameStop investors will come at the expense of later investors who will be left holding the bag when the stock falls.

Enlarge / This is an artist's concept of Wind, a NASA spacecraft which spent twenty years gathering data on the solar wind (no relation). (credit: US Department of State)

When security firm Malwarebytes announced last week that it had been targeted by the same attacker that compromised SolarWinds' Orion software, it noted that the attack did not use SolarWinds itself. According to Malwarebytes, the attacker had used "another intrusion vector" to gain access to a limited subset of company emails.

Brandon Wales, acting director of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA), said nearly a third of the organizations attacked had no direct connection to SolarWinds.

[The attackers] gained access to their targets in a variety of ways. This adversary has been creative... it is absolutely correct that this campaign should not be thought of as the SolarWinds campaign.

Many of the attacks gained initial footholds by password spraying to compromise individual email accounts at targeted organizations. Once the attackers had that initial foothold, they used a variety of complex privilege escalation and authentication attacks to exploit flaws in Microsoft's cloud services. Another of the Advanced Persistent Threat (APT)'s targets, security firm CrowdStrike, said the attacker tried unsuccessfully to read its email by leveraging a compromised account of a Microsoft reseller the firm had worked with.

Enlarge / Ready, take aim, and let fly... (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

As the price of heavily shorted stocks like GameStop has shot up in recent days, so, too, has interest in retail trading apps like Robinhood. That app, launched in 2013 with a promise to "democratize finance for all," offers so-called retail investors simple, zero-fee trades as an easy way to gamble on quick movement of individual stocks.

But that smooth path to playing the market hit a bump Thursday morning, when Robinhood announced that it was suspending the ability to purchase 13 extremely volatile stocks, including GameStop.

In the hours following the announcement, GameStop's stock price first shot up to a high of nearly $470, then cratered to a low of about $126 by 11:20am. The price then turned back upward and has currently stabilized around $310 as of this writing.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | SOPA Images)

Johnson & Johnson’s experimental COVID-19 vaccine was 72 percent effective at preventing moderate and severe disease in the United States and 85 percent effective at preventing severe disease globally. But the one-shot vaccine struggled to fight off emerging virus variants in other countries, lowering its overall efficacy to 66 percent.

The topline results from Johnson & Johnson’s Phase III ENSEMBLE trial, announced Friday, suggest the vaccine will be yet another much-needed weapon against the pandemic virus, which has now infected over 100 million worldwide and killed nearly 2.2 million.

“Changing the trajectory of the pandemic will require mass vaccination to create herd immunity, and a single-dose regimen with fast onset of protection and ease of delivery and storage provides a potential solution to reaching as many people as possible,” said Mathai Mammen, global head of research and development at Janssen Pharmaceutical (owned by J&J). “The ability to avoid hospitalizations and deaths would change the game in combating the pandemic.”

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  The new clip button. [credit: Ron Amadeo ]

YouTube is testing a feature popular from livestream platforms like Twitch: the ability for viewers and creators to make clips of longer videos, allowing for the sharing of short, bit-sized clips of a video. The feature is currently "in testing" with a small group of channels while YouTube gathers feedback.

Clips have a max of 60 seconds and can be created by pressing a new "Share Clip" button. From there, users will get a draggable timeline editor to make a clip, name it, and share it via a new URL. This video has clips enabled if you want to try it yourself. For now, the feature only works on a desktop browser, but Android and iOS support is coming "soon."

Unlike Twitch, which creates a new video from a clip, a YouTube clip link will load the original video with a start and end point on the seek bar, and the ~60-second clip will loop between these two points. It seems somewhat similar to the ability to link to a timestamp in a video, just 60 seconds long and on a loop. A big, blue "Watch Full Video" button to the right of the video will start the full video, and since you're already on the page with the video already loaded, your browser doesn't actually go anywhere.

Enlarge / Play ball... finally. (credit: Video Game History Foundation)

By the end of the 1990s, you couldn't throw a quarter in most malls without hitting an NBA Jam or NFL Blitz cabinet. "Arcade sports" became a full-blown sensation, and hockey, soccer, and tennis received their own high-speed arcade conversions. But that list of American sports sure seems to be missing its slice of arcade apple pie, doesn't it?

You may have wondered for years why baseball never got an "MLB Jam" equivalent during that golden arcade era. Turns out, the sport got close. Thanks to the Video Game History Foundation, a new ROM has been unearthed for 1996's lost Midway arcade game, Power-Up Baseball, and some of its former devs have explained what exactly happened with its development and cancellation.

A rare pair of trackballs

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  Power-Up Baseball came out only one year before NFL Blitz, but back then, even a single year could be a lifetime in terms of technology. [credit: Midway ]

The story begins with VGHF, which we've talked about at Ars, continuing its dive into a massive pile of unearthed code fragments stored by the family of late games developer Chris Oberth. Today's VGHF blog post points to how this collection mostly focuses on Oberth's personal code contributions to various game projects, as opposed to compiling entire teams' collective code. One project proved an exception to that rule: a single CD-ROM with the word "baseball" handwritten in marker.